Ptak Science Books

History of Dis-Inventing Sex, 1: 1930's American Radio

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 775 Blog Bookstore

(Also part of the Blank and Missing Things series: Sex)

The classes in the Western world for the most part enjoyed their own social amusements:  the rich had opera, theater, concert halls; the working poor and associated classes had burlesque, minstrel and variety shows.  The invention of the motion picture began to draw a common thread between these two classes, a place where anyone from anywhere could enjoy themselves for a nickel (or whatever).  Commercial radio came into being in the late 1920’s, growing enormously in the 1930’s and ‘40’s before encountering its mortal enemy of television in the early 1950’s.  Since radio was free (minus the cost of brain rot from listening to the underwriters who commercials were interrupted by the stuff people wanted to listen to) it became for those decades a superb democratizer of American entertainment and (to some degree) culture. 

Opera, vaudeville, minstrel shows, theater and so on enjoyed their own segments of saucy visions and rakish stories, with sex certainly not being necessarily prohibited.  This was absolutely not the case with radio, which in the 1930’s and ‘40’s held strict standards against suggestive behavior that might hint of sexual meanings.  There was plenty of sotto voce sexual innuendo to be found, but you really had to look for it and pay attention.  The feeling among the broadcasters was that since radio was being invited into the very homes of its listeners that there was a deeper responsibility to keep the shows clean and relatively wholesome. And so sex took a holiday.

Its not that movies and television in the 1950’s were rampant Decameron (with all of its semi-comic/tragic half eroticism)  or Caligula spas, but they certainly "showed" more skin than radio from that period ever talked about or alluded to, even if the first TV married couples beds weren’t pushed together until  the Munsters shared a big double in the 1960’s.

(No, the Ricardo’s never did push their twin beds together; it really was  the mores-bending Munsters, who are  pictured below. Perhaps the great "first" of a couple sharing the same bed needed to remove the human aspect of the reaching act, placing the responsibility in the attached-hands of a Frankenstein's monster-like character and his bride.  This happened too with tv's first interracial kiss--between Capt. Kirk and his communications officer, can't remember her name--making the encounter between humans of incredible accomplishment and remove, and of course set centuries in the future.)

Be that as it may, Lee DeForest (1873-1961), the inventor of the audion which made the whole industry possible (after Hertz and Marconi) complained in 1947 of the enormous silliness and suggestive nature of the new medium.  He loftily wrote about what could've been "a potent instrumentality for culture, fine music, and the uplifting of American mass inteliigence" but instead was a 'laughing stock", the medium addressed to what he thought was the average national intelligence of a thirteen year old.  Maybe he was right, and the man simply couldn’t stand it.  61 additional years would've made the De Forest explode--but then again, he was already close to that hearing saxophone players; who knows what the man would've thought of cable television.  But the one thing he really couldn't compalin about with radio was eroticism or sexual conduct, because that really wasn't there. 

The Loneliness of Being Wright(s): not Reporting the First Flight.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 774  Blog Bookstore

Reading through the 1903/04 volumes of the NYC-based Popular Science Monthly I was struck, again*, by the lack of reporting (and the oddness of reporting when done) on the Wright Brothers’ first powered flight in December 1903.  The editors gave a page of coverage to the Samuel P. Langley failed aerodrome flight of November in the December issue. 

Langley at the time was the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, and one of America’s leading scientists who had a strong side interest in aerodynamics if not aviation.  Swimming in private funds, some money from the Smithsonian and $50k from the War Department, Langley set out trying to produce a flyer which—in its two attempts at flight from a raft in the Potomac in November—wound up broken and soggy in the river, following a “flight” straight from its launcher into the water.  The article actually took Langley to task on two fronts:  first, it made absolutely certain that readers understood that his powered plane didn’t fly; and second, that he might well prove to be a damaging embarrassment to the Smithsonian and American science by proceeding with his experiments. (The Langley aerodrome is pictured just below.)

The Wright’s first powered flight took place at Kill Devil Hills along the North Carolina coast in December, 1903, just weeks after the appearance of the Langley article.  They were somewhat reticent and droll in reporting their accomplishment; more so, people seemed simply not to believe them (see below for some further reading).  Still, though, there was no real mention of the Wright’s flight in Popular Science Monthly through April.  Oddly, the Smithsonian’s website reports that one of the first mentions of the flight was in the March (1904) issue of this journal, but they are mostly mistaken.  There is an article in that number by the Octave Chanute, a great figure in the history of early aviation, who writes in general about the progress of flight.  In the section on ‘flying machines” Chanute devotes one paragraph of his eight page article to the Wrights, and the main emphasis here is that other aviators should follow the Wrights’ example of careful preparation before actually hoping aboard a plane to fly:  its was the training that was emphasized. There isn’t actually any mention whatsoever regarding their powered flight, although engines and propellers are discussed somewhat. Of the 480 pages remaining in the journal after the December issue, this one paragraph was the only room that could be found for talking about the Wrights, and then not talking about their great achievement.

 

Of course there were many people who didn’t believe the Wright story—there was scant photographic evidence and only five eyewitnesses, and for years afterwards the Wright had a problem with officially authenticating their flight as the great First Flight.  But I’m a little puzzled by the Chanute coverage, as he was a pretty diplomatic and sharing person, and proved to be particularly supportive of the Wrights in general (visiting them at Kill Devil at certain points in 1901,1902 and 1903).  The brothers understood intellectual propriety and credited Chanute when credit was due (particularly in the cases of truss design and stacked wings).  So it is puzzling to me when it seems as though Chanute may have gone out of his way to not mention the flight.  This is especially true if you read between the lines of the next paragraph. Chanute writes: “Now that an initial success has been achieved with a flying machine, we can discern the use of such an apparatus, and also some of its limitations”.  To me, after having written seven pages on flying history, to refer to a singular “initial success” makes sense only if he was referring to the Wrights’ December flight. (I don’t think that he could’ve been referring to the Langley test, as the aerodrome simply fell into the Potomac, the structure of the plane overwhelmed by the thrust, the power of the engine, and movement in general—the plane just broke up and was flung into the water.)  To me, the invisibility of the unmentioned flight is glaringly visible.  But this was pretty much in the realm of standard reception for the Wrights for most of the rest of the decade—I am still struck though with the rush away from announcing the flight that almost everyone seemed to take in 1904. 

 

(It is interesting to note Chanute’s vision for the airplane in his closing paragraph, where he envisions military uses for aircraft, though these were limited to scouting and observation with not a whiff of tactical employment.  Also there is the possibility of mail delivery (“in some cases”) and the rescue of people in trouble in restricted-access areas.  On the other hand, the just-failed Langley had a much broader and deeper appreciation for what he saw as the impending future of the airplane, saying ‘the great universal highway overhead is soon to be opened”, which was directly contrary to Chanute, who couldn’t see aircraft being used for simple transportation.  Actually Langley’s vision was taken to task in that earlier article in the Popular Science Monthly, the editor writing that “Dr. Langley seems to claim too much” in regards to the future of flight, and that “he should be careful not to do anything that could lend itself to an interpretation that will bring injury to the scientific work of the government or country”.  It is certain that with at least this one (very popular, widely circulated) science magazine, one couldn’t be too stinking careful about what one did or thought or said regarding flight—and in the case of the Wrights, one could say hardly anything at all. 

 

* For three other of my posts on this issue of publicity and the Wrights, see:

--The Unbearable Wrightness of Being:  the Wright Brothers Introduce Europe to FlyingThe Casual Treatment of the Wright Brothers

--The Department of Great Understatement:  the Wright Brothers, 1903.

--The Casual Treatment of the Wright Brothers in the Scientific American

 

For the interesting conclusion (and summary) of Chanute’s Progress in Flying Machines of see here.

A Stone-Cold Masterpiece of Naive Art: Teresa Ottalo, ca. 1860

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 773  Blog Bookstore

As a collector of naive art--particularly produced with letters or numbers--and as a person generally interested in naive and outsider (and art brut and letterist and found )art, I was astonished to find this spectacular work by Terea Ottalo (ca. 1800-1870).  First of all, I make this to be about 200 lines long, and about 50 inches tall.  The words are, well, minute.

Secondly:  this magnificnet thing was EMBROIDERED.  Breathtaking, really.

I haven't yet found out anything about Ms. Ottalo, except some basic references of her affiliated "school" of art.

I do know that this, whatever it is, is a masterpiece. 

And an unfortunately smudgy detail, such as it is--I cannot offhandedly find a good, clear, high resolution image of anything at all by Ms. Ottalo.  This will have to do for now, but I think it gives a reasonable idea of the fineness of this work (found in Michek Thevoz's Art Brut, Skira, 1976)--this sample detail represents less than 10% of the overall image:                                                                                                                                        

What Things are and what things Aren’t Department, #3: Things that Aren’t 'Bridges" or “Floating Land”.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 772  Blog Bookstore

My friend Jeff Donlan sent me a link to a site in which librarians-on-coffee-breaks were busily renaming classic book titles as they might be re-titled today. For example, we have:

Old: Richard III ; New: R3: Judgment Day

Old: Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus; New: Frankenstein: Wrath of the Supercorpse

Old: Das Kapital; New: Labor Value: How Today's Companies Get the Most out of Their Workforce.

 

You get the picture. And so it was with this in mind that I came across this unusual woodcut in the delightful publication called The Mirrour of Literature, Amusement and Instruction, published in London on 25 January, 1840.  There are all manner of fringe-interesting and ephemeral materials here—necessarily unexpected, as in this short article about “The Steam Floating Bridge” (of Torpoint, Cornwall to Devonport, Devonshire crossing the Hamoaze).

At first glance this looked like a remarkable modernized way of reformulating the word and concept for “boat” or “ferry”. (What audacity!—though perhaps it was someone trying to evade patent protection by calling a boat “a bridge”, leading an entirely new wave of renamed inventions into a shadow industrial revolution…)  But luck on this was only half-full—on closer inspection (and of course before actually reading the article, set aside like so many instructional manuals) you can see the “bridge” part of the steam-driven barge:  two chains leading from the land, then under water, then up again on the bow/stern of the business end of the barge, then down again, and then on to the other shore.  This all does sound quite like an old common ferry to me, but if the good Cornish people felt it to be a bridge, then a bridge it is.

Loosely connected to this floating “bridge” is the so-called floating “land” used by associates of the mystical Noah to help in the last-moment construction of the great ark.  The activity on board is a little confusing to me, as is the room-enough-for-three bit of floating “land”, which I would hazard to call a “raft”. 

 I should point out that the guy with the hammer-like tool is working on the roof and not the head of the person in the flattened foreground, though this would make for a better story, taking a step towards an ancient Murder on the Orient Express.  

I wonder also about the guy collecting water with the jar, as it seems that if he waited for just a little bit longer the water would be coming to him. (This image is a 19th-century republication of the scene from the 1493 Nuremberg Chronicle.)

**A longer and fuller description of the “bridge” is found in the Saturday Magazine for 1842, here. 

The Kennedy-Nixon Debate that Never Happened: Mrs. vs. Mrs.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 770  Blog Bookstore

Television made a grand, sweeping entrance into the presidential political arena, becoming a tertiary, occasionally  biased and highly visible invisible determinant in the contest, 49 years ago yesterday. Nearly half of the country tuned in to watch the first debate on 26 September 1960--which would actually be considerably more than half of the voting population—for a first-ever nationally visual spectacular of seeing two presidential aspirants face each other.  Nixon turned from being an aspirant into a perspirent:  deciding not to use makeup and sweating badly under the heat of the studio lighting, Nixon looked dark and foreboding compared to the just-returned–from-California Kennedy, tanned and nicely tailored  Also of course Kennedy had that charisma bit going on, and spoke very well, was charming, and funny—most of which Nixon was not, though he did have his (version off the) facts under command, had a certain presence because of being Vice President for eight years, and was a formidable debater. 

But things did not go well for Nixon in the debates, and probably cost him the election which was determined by a squeaky-small margin of  49.7% to 49.6%  (34,220,984 to 34,108,157) of the popular vote.  But as we have seen recently the popular vote doesn’t mean anything if you have the electoral college, which Kennedy had reasonably wrapped up 303 to 226.  Too bad the Kleig lamps didn’t do their magic in 1968.

What I’d like to address here was the (very little known?) second-tier, non-existent but evidently proposed debates between the candidate’s wives. 

I own a small archive of Jacqueline Kennedy-iana that came to me via her first, pre-White House press secretary, Gladys Uhl.  Among these 50-odd pieces is this fantastic response from Mrs. Kennedy’s office regarding the proposed wives’ debate.

The edited typed-carbon response reads:  “I agree with Mrs. Nixon that a debate between the candidates’ wives would serve no purpose and I also agree that clothes should not be an issue in this campaign.”

The penciled note at top reads:  “Clear with Mrs. Kennedy and I will phone to AP – G”  (The “G” being Gladys Uhl, the press secretary.)  The note at bottom, from Mrs. Kennedy, reads: "In answer to your request for comment."

And so ended a truly bad idea, cut to the quick by Mrs. Kennedy and Mrs. Nixon, thankfully sharing the belief that the wives of candidates needn't get officially involved in the presidential contest. 

The Stillness of High-Victorian Action (Blank & Empty Things Series #55)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 770   Blog Bookstore

It seems to me that even when the Victorians¹ were busy doing something, nothing seemed to be happening--true too for me with this later period in Germany, under the command and control, for good and for ill, of Kaiser Wilhelm, German Emperor and King of Prussia from 1888 to the end of the Great War.  There's a certain something to illustration at this time, creating wooden humans manikins, watching other wooden figures doing something at elevated speeds that made them seem motionless.  I'm not sure what it is--perhaps propriety, perhaps the need to be visibly invisible, the sine qua non of behaving correctly. 

I'm not sure what sort of special, invisible addition needs to be applied to Victorian/Wilhelmian Nothingness to add up to Something. There's a certain unexplained emptiness, motionlessness, nothingness to illustration in this period, and I'm always at a loss to save good examples of it--though today I have two good examples, found in the 7 April and 28 January 1904 issues of the Illustrirte Zeitung (Leipzig).  For all of the excitement and action and crowds given in these daredevil bicycle demonstrations there seems to be not a breathe being breathed, or perhaps it was breathe breathed slowly.  In any event, the situations seemed suspended in action and belief. Ironically this was also the age when the concept of "speed" was at the beginning of being completely re-written with the introduction of the car, airplane, internal combustion engine, widespread electrical networks, motion pictures, and so on--but none of this mattered in images like these, outstanding as they are for being scenes of action presented in a mosaic of stillness and quiet.

1. Yes, the Queen expired in January 1901, but the influence didn't necessarily die with her.

Blank and Empty Things Post 54: The Cowboy Race of 1893

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 769   Blog Bookstore

Some other posts on the Cowboy and the West:  The Advancing Frontier and the Increase in Bloody Names of Literary Heroes;   Where is the West?  How to Find Nowhere;   Lines that Closed the West:  Wires, Rails and Words

I’ve not seen this picture of the nine cowboys who starred and started the Great Cowboy Race of 1893¹.  They gathered with a frenzy on the little town of Chadron, Nebraska (population 2,000, which doubled in size as the event’s opening grew near) determined to announce the “best “ cowboy, the first to cross the finish line near the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 and shake the hand of Buffalo Bill Cody (well on his way to becoming a shell of what used-to-be).  The contest was supposed to take two weeks and average 50-75 miles a day, which is a lot to ask of a team of horses (and the riders).  So there was the expected shenanigans, and the man who "won” evidently helped plan the secret route, and someone else rode a trains with his horses for a bit, and so on. 

The result doesn’t matter--it seems an overall sad story, these guys winging their way to the windy City, a race to oblivion. (Some of the cowboy contestants were already about half-faded away into Limbo judging from the photo touch up that had to be done of their faces.)  

Ironically these cowboys were racing to the cosmopolitan host of the World’s Fair in which the historian Frederick Jackson Turner read his paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," —a significant theoretical piece announcing why Americans are so different from Europeans, and also that the American frontier had clearly, absolutely, been broken and installed in the gauzy national psyche.  The fate of the Cowboy had already been determined 20 years before with the introduction of refrigerator cars, railroad expansion and barbed wire--all of which cut the West into smaller and smaller parcels, until they restricted the Cowboy to its own Reservation. A crooked race to Chicago seemed to crystalize the Cowboy's tenuous grasp on  existence, depicted finally by the new(ish) half-tone photo process of Stephen Henry Horgan, making a half-portrait of empty circles, the image disappearing more and more the closer we look at it..

 It was just a sorry show for the cowboy all the way around, and a story that doesn’t need to be told here.  I did just want to publish this picture.  There’s a long and good story here http://www.thelongridersguild.com/chadron2.htm about the entire affair. 

 

I include the list of the riders, mainly for the names of their horses:

Emmett Abbott riding Outlaw and Joe Bush.

Joe Campbell riding his one horse, Boom-de-aye.

Davy Douglas riding Wide Awake and Monte Cristo.

Old Joe Gillespie riding Billy Mack and Billy Schafer.

George Jones riding Romeo and George.

Charlie Smith riding Dynamite and Red Wing.

Rattlesnake Pete Stephens riding General Grant and Nick.

Doc Middleton riding Geronimo and Bay Jimmie.

John Berry riding Poison and Sandy

.

Racing Houses and Lost Cemeteries: Ochiltree, Texas, 1920

JF Ptak Science Books LLC   Post 768  Blog Bookstore

Dateline:  Ochiltree, Texas, 20 October 1920.  Mr. Ralphsted Winston has been racing houses for the 30 years.  "Yep.  House racing is older'n auTOWmobiles by a large space; we've had tractors for a good time longer than cars, and more powerful, too.  It was just natural to do something with them more than find black soil".  And so evidently came house racing.  A reporter wondered if there was one particular house that was best to race with.  "Sure" replied Mr. Winston, "houses with porches.  Let's the breeze to let the breeze come out to show them" he explained, somewhat. 

For the last ten years Mr. Winston has been racing a different sort of house.  "God's house" he said firmly.  "Churches.  Round here, in North Texas, they're small-built with wood and such, and aren't too heavy, makes for nice tight turns and a solid straightaway". 

"And chapels?" came a question.

"Not allowed.  Got to be a church" came Mr. Winston's reply, his jawline cracking.

"The only problem with churches", he continued, "is that not one of them has ever won a race.  Ever. Even in the best conditions, we get bested by porches, schoolhouses, even soddies".  "Yup", and then came a long, ponderous spit, "not a one, won", extended a chuckling Mr. Winston.

A reporter asked, "Why don't you have a race with nothing but churches. Then at least you'll have a winner."

"There will be a whole LOT of losers.  Maybe ever one" replied an eyebrow-raised Winston. "I do guess that someone would have to win, even if they were from Oklahoma, they'd be a winner too.  Not everybody has to wind up in a drown ditch.  But in the land of the blind , you don't have to be a happy one-eyed king."

Well, this really isn't a race of houses, though I'd much rather think of this picture in these terms.  (The church is passed on the left, on the right! There'll be hell to pay for those maneuvers!") What is happening here is that the town of Ochiltree is being moved closer to the railroad that passed the town by, by 15 miles or so. It was the North Texas and Santa Fe RR (Shattuck, Oklahoma to Spearman, Texas) that left Ochiltree behind; and just after that, a new town called Perryton appeared, established there on the railway line, taking all of the interest (and the county seat) away from Ochiltree.  So what happened was that Ochiltree decided to move to Perryton, to become part of that town, evidently leaving nothing but space wherer the town used to be. (The Handbook of Texas said that the town "disappered completely".) I wonder though if there weren't a few people who decided to stay, who just wouldn't move; who in 1921 found vast new distances between them and whoever else was left, all of the other buildings gone, pulled up out of the ground, lock, stock and barrel.  And what about the cemeteries for the two churches that were moved? According to the good folks at the Perryton Memorial Library, the cemeteries were left, and still there, in a town that isn't.  (On the other hand I can't imagine how a small town would've moved a cemetery--there may have been 500 people in Ochiltree at the point of departure, and perhaps another250 or so who were over the years already departed...that means that every able-bodied person would have had to dis-and-re-inter one fallen town member, which may have been way to much to ask of anybody given that they were already moving the entire town.)

Things Not Meant to Fly: Big, Heavy, Underpowered Planes

JF Ptak Science books LLC  Post 767  Blog Bookstore

"The tallest airplane ever built" is the title to this picture which appeared in the "Chronicle of the Car" section of the  Illustrated London News for 22 February 1908.  The plane is the work and vision of J.W. Roshon, a photographer from Harrisburg Pa.  Somehow, Mr. Roshon designed this thing to fly--that it could roll, and perhaps even taxi, is one thing, but flying really doesn't seem to be part of its performable agenda.  The plane was made of "aluminum and steel tubing, bamboo, and steel wire... and measured 24 feet wide, 8 feet deep, and 17 feet high", and held 900 square feet of canvas.  This all sounds very heavy to me, especially when you consider that the engine weighed 50 pounds and generated seven horsepower. By contrast, the Wright I Flyer (the famous first-flight airplane of 1903) had a wingspan of 40 feet, weighed 625 pounds and sported a 12 horsepower, 170 pound  engine (and which by the way was all produced for about a thousand dollars).

Its hard to see, but the pilot is prone, and laying left-to-right, and the plane really does seem to be 8 feet long, stem to stern. I cannot find out what happened to the canvas and tubing and pilot after the test flight (where "flight" means "roll").

The Story Behind the Iconic Image: Robert Hooke's Flea, 1665

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 766  Blog Bookstore

…"it is my hope, as well as belief, that these my Labours will be no more comparable to the Productions of many other Natural Philosophers, who are now every where busie about greater things; then my little Objects are to be compar'd to the greater and more beautiful Works of Nature, A Flea, a Mite, a Gnat, to an Horse, an Elephant, or a Lyon.”—Robert Hooke at the end of his 28-page preface to Micrographia¹ (1665)

I’ve written elsewhere in this blog about Robert Hooke, and how, if there had somehow and impossibly been no Newton, he might’ve taken Sir Isaac’s place in the popular mind.  He was a tireless, relentless observer and experimenter, who lost little effort in a stranded idea and pursued interesting and problematic questions relentlessly.  More than others too he chased his won glory—minor but long and insistent—the years of which wore thin on many people in the scientific community.  But there were many characteristics of the man that made him not quite so lovable and endearing—not that Newton was any of those things, as he was not, but if you are going to be a secondary luminary to a super nova you’ve got to have something else going for you that the other man doesn’t have—sharing, helpful, greatly generous—to get you into the long pre-dusty pages of history. Also it would’ve helped if Hooke chose his battles with a little more aplomb and ingenuity—the war which began in 1672 with Newton went very badly for Hooke and followed him to the grave (and far beyond). 

 

What I’d like to talk about right now, though, of the many things to talk about concerning Robert Hooke, is the most iconographic image he ever produced, and perhaps one of the most famous scientific images of the 17^th century—the flea. 

 

The 28-year old Hooke published the results in a gorgeous and revolutionary book, Micrographia (a lovely e-text edition appears at Gutenberg, here) in 1665, which became an instant best seller and highly praised and valued. (Samuel Pepys, perhaps among the shiniest stars whose imprimatur was like a royal blessing, said the book (was) "the most ingenious book that I ever read in my life.") There is no telling what the people of the mid-17^th century thought of seeing such incredible discoveries in the little semi-invisible stuff that made up their normal, daily lives.  The only thing that somewhat equates to this would be if the first images of the Hubble were those of Earth-bound objects whose detail had previously been unknown.  Hooke’s observations and drawings of things like the common flea were just an astonishment—that such a creature of “low order” could have such intricate detail and design was a complete revelation.  The drawings of the fly's eye, too, was an inescapable wonder, an incredible object to consider as having any detail pre-microscope, and then revealed to have unimaginable design and elegance. 

 

It turns out that the flea was not the most important object that Hooke had in mind with the Micrographic—it was part of an overall attempt at making sense of all creation, the bug part of the book occupying only a part of the (only) one-fifth of the book’s 246 pages devoted to living creatures.  The book actually starts with inanimate objects (the needle, followed by a razor, linen, silk, glass canes, flint, and so on), and then works it way through living stuff, ending up talking about light and the Moon and the cosmos. 

The opening images of the book are actually of the edge of a razor and the head of a needle—under magnification they showed a bitter, ragged edge and a nubby, pitted point (respectively)—which would have been almost as unimaginable and shocking as the flea….except that the flea of course opened possibilities of entire worlds of things alive in our semi-invisible environment.  Things really weren’t as they seemed to be.

 

Hooke’s flea, as spectacular and revolutionary as it was, was only a part of the story—the rest of the behind-the-picture narrative lies in a much wider and more complex view of all things, living and not,

in which Hooke tells us we should employ the microscope/macroscope to solve disputes in our “wandring senses”. Not bad advice at all.

 

 

In the preface to the Micrographia Hooke states:

Thus all the uncertainty, and mistakes of humane actions, proceed either from the narrowness and wandring of our Senses, from the slipperiness or delusion of our Memory, from the confinement or rashness of our Understanding, so that 'tis no wonder, that our power over natural causes and effects is so slowly improv'd, seeing we are not only to contend with the obscurity and difficulty of the things whereon we work and think, but even the forces of our own minds conspire to betray us.

These being the dangers in the process of humane Reason, the remedies of them all can only proceed from the real, the mechanical, the experimental Philosophy, which has this advantage over the Philosophy of discourse and disputation, that whereas that chiefly aims at the subtilty of its Deductions and Conclusions, without much regard to the first ground-work, which ought to be well laid on the Sense and Memory; so this intends the right ordering of them all, and the making them serviceable to each other…

He continues with a short outline of how to accomplish this:

The first thing to be undertaken in this weighty work, is a watchfulness over the failings and an inlargement of the dominion, of the Senses.

To which end it is requisite, first, That there should be a scrupulous choice, and a strict examination, of the reality, constancy, and certainty of the Particulars that we admit: This is the first rise whereon truth is to begin, and here the most severe, and most impartial diligence, must be imployed; the storing up of all, without any regard to evidence or use, will only tend to darkness and confusion. We must not therefore esteem the riches of our Philosophical treasure by the number only, but chiefly by the weight; the most vulgar Instances are not to be neglected, but above all, the most instructive are to be entertain'd; the footsteps of Nature are to be trac'd, not only in her ordinary course, but when she seems to be put to her shifts, to make many doublings and turnings, and to use some kind of art in indeavouring to avoid our discovery.

The next care to be taken, in respect of the Senses, is a supplying of their infirmities with Instruments, and, as it were, the adding of artificial Organs to the natural; this in one of them has been of late years accomplisht with prodigious benefit to all sorts of useful knowledge, by the invention of Optical Glasses. By the means of Telescopes, there is nothing so far distant but may be represented to our view; and by the help of Microscopes, there is nothing so small, as to escape our inquiry; hence there is a new visible World discovered to the understanding. By this means the Heavens are open'd, and a vast number of new Stars, and new Motions, and new Productions appear in them, to which all the ancient Astronomers were utterly Strangers. By this the Earth it self, which lyes so neer us, under our feet, shews quite a new thing to us, and in every little particle of its matter; we now behold almost as great a variety of Creatures, as we were able before to reckon up in the whole Universe it self.

1. The full title of the book: MICROGRAPHIA, OR, SOME Physiological Descriptions OF MINUTE BODIES, MADE BY MAGNIFYING.