JF Ptak Science Books

Big Science, 1882--Hauling (Really Big) Ships Overland and up a Mountain

In 1982 Werner Herzog, in what may have been the culmination of a weirdly fashioned and irresistible death-wish effort, released a film that he wrote and directed:  Fitzcarraldo.  It is a spill-over big, magnificent film about a would-be ice-making rubber baron bringing an opera house into the trans-Andes, trying to make his way into the dense forest in a huge (320 tons) steamboat on the Amazon to stake a claim in exploiting previously un-leased lands filled with rubber trees  The problem faced by Fitzcarraldo (played by the probably-slightly-insane Klaus Kinski¹--just see Herzog's 1972 Aguirre, Wrath of God and you'll know what I mean) is that his path is blocked by unnavigable rapids--he can however reach his destination by hauling his very large ship up and over a mountain to get to a more pliant river and then to his goal.  Herzog actually does this for the film--no digital anything here^2,3--in what is one of the most glorious things I've ever seen in the movies.  He really does have native people clear a path up the side of a mountain, and they DO haul this ship up and over.  It is truly magnificent, especially seeing the boat moving slowly up a mountain as background to a sweating Fitz.  

The story is partially based upon the adventure of Carlos Fermín Fitzcarrald, who in 1890 attempted a similar feat, though with a much smaller vessel, and who also dismantled the craft to haul it overland. (Its not a bad idea, necessarily, to do this dismantling thing, especially if it has to be done and there's no other way to do it. The North Vietnamese famously did the impossible by hauling artillery up through the jungle and up mountains to shockingly surround the French at Dien Bien Phu.) 

   The bigger and deeper back-story though is the effort--mainly by Elmer Corthell and James Eads--to build a combination railroad ship canal across the Tehuantepec isthmus in Nicaragua.  The idea of moving across Central America rather than taking the enormously long route around the tip of South America and up again is hundreds of years old.  The Corthell/Eads plan, begun in 1870's and alive in the early '80's, was really the first feasible (and workable) initiative.

 

It would have been a gigantic undertaking, and even though it was much longer (130 miles or so)  than the more-favored Panama location for the canal, it seemed more workable as there would be less digging and no need for a lock/canal system as required at Panama. 

The French began a doomed attempt at conquering Panama shortly before this.  Ferdinand de Lesseps tried to build a canal in 1880, but the organization and general construction plan was truly inferior; also, the sanitary and medical conditions were terrible, with the French losing perhaps 22 thousand men in the failed process to disease (mainly malaria).  (The United States would lose 5,609 workers while building the Panama canal, on land granted as a payback for "helping" Panama release themselves from Columbia.)

The Corthell/Eads (who by the way was a master builder perhaps best known for his inspired masterpiece of a bridge at St. Louis) plan called for hauling the ships up and out of the water in a short canal and placing them on an enormous floating roundabout; the roundabout would then be raised, and the ship place on huge cradles borne upon vastly augmented railway lines.  Once on the cradle, the ship would be pulled and pushed by a team of four large locomotive teams which were in turn composed of two large engines.  Happily aboard, the ship would then be taken on the extended, expanded wide and augmented rail 130 miles overland and dumped into the Pacific.

It was evidently not a workable deal all the way around, though, as the U.S. decided on the new Panama to works its engineering miracle.

There is something pleasing though about the Ship Railway, though, something that appeals to the little bit of Mr. Herzog in me.  Perhaps it was the appraisal of the very stiff-lipped Sir Edward Reed--who was the former master engineer for the British navy and consultant to Eads—that makes it all so irresistible.  “It would be best to avoid a very high rate of speed” when hauling the massive ocean-going and heavily laden cargo ships.  Indeed.

Notes

1. The original actor in the Fitzcarraldo role was Jason Robards, who had to give the film up after about a third or so the way through as he came down with dysentery. Kinski came into the role after that, and the film was re-shot. 

2. There is a scene showing the steamboat being unmoored and sent down the rapids on its own--that is done with a model. So far as I know, that is the only bit of post production trickery for the film. 

3. There's an interesting documentary of the film also released in 1982, Burden of Dreams.

Making Things Disappear--Kandinsky (and Nature) and Penzias (and Alpher)

It's odd that at just the moment in time that time is freezing in moments, that things are becoming more visible and definable, that the world of art, in its way, became less so. Etienne Marey and Ed Muybridge displayed the acts of motion in slivers of itself, captured and presented for study, images that had never been seen before, while shortly after this William S. Hart transformed their intellectual heritage and wrestled it into train robbers and kissing thieves at 16 frames per second.  And just as the segmentation of motion had reached it highest modern heights, Marcel Duchamp, the great artist-like chess master and comedian, presented the world, in 1912, with his Nude Descending. This painting continued on the steady track laid down in the 1860's by the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, building on their sense images, their descending denial of "detail", and made the human figure almost disappear.

It was Wassily Kandinsky in the next year who actually made everything disappear--everything that is but color and disparate forms.  In his painting Improvisations there were no human or natural forms--it was the first non-representational painting in history, with nothing at all being recognizable in his epochal work, showing people for the first time the "other" side of the mirror.   Making things disappear, en plein air, performing an emparquementage, if you will, is truly quite a work of art.

Kandinsky tried to relate the philosophy of his approach in an inner-secretive, mysterious, occulty work called Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912). It is a lovely book, with thick paper, very wide margins, beautifully printed, sumptuous even (in the original)--but it makes the innovation of his art ever more unreachable, more wispy--smoke without color, at least for me. The great Kasimir Malevich made a similar attempt with similar results--at least, again, to me--trying to explain how he eliminated natural forms and replaced them with rectangles, squares and circles. Later, Malevich would begin to replace color, working in white. He was sublime.

Disappearance is not necessarily sublime. Ralph Alpher and Bob Herman got disappeared. With George Gamow they hypothesized the Big Bang and predicted where the remnant of the heat of the explosion (the so-called background radiation) would, could, be found. Alpher and Herman were basically correct in thei research (over the period of 1939-1949 figuring it would be about 5-degrees Kelvin), but were basically a little sleepy over their results, or at least until the numbers proved out to be good, when the background radiation was “discovered” in 1964 by Penzias and Wilson with the Big Ear at Bell Labs in Holmdel, NJ. It all bore out, except, of course, their contribution—Penzias and Wilson got the Nobel for their work, and Alpher and Herman got, well, nothing. (For a long, lovely article about Alpher see fellow Asheville resident Joe D'Agnese's article in Discover.)

Penzias and Wilson did arrive at their findings independently of A+H, but that’s another story—that they were “Gone”, even when their contributions were made known in the thrill of the more modern discovery, was just not right. I met Alpher and Herman together in the late ‘80’s, coming into my store for a visit with books. Herman was pleasant and chuckly; Alpher, not. His pissed-offedness at the sleight of the background radiation work shone right through when discussing Penzias and Wilson. Herman was philosophical in discussing the great oversight:  “Yes, this is true, but we’ve been given plenty of honors since then”, he smiled, content. “Um. Yes. But not the Big One”, garumped Alpher.

Einstein too slipped away a bit in what could have been a moment of monumental insight. Max Wertheimer, a colleague of Einstein’s who had a background in physics and was one of the founders of German gestalt psychology, had a chapter in a book of his called “Einstein: the Thinking that Went into General Relativity”. The chapter is coercively bland; basically nothing. Too bad, since Wertheimer was present at the creation, was friends with Einstein, had some sort of background and grasp for the material, and was a trained observer.  The great historian Arthur I. Miller in his book Insights                   of Genius: Imagery and Creativity               in Science and Art (Copernicus, Springer-Verlag, 1996) thought the *promise* of the chapter heading to be phenomenal—he was deeply disappointed with the very little that was offered, which was basically a gestalt interpretation of E’s being at the time. (And psychology happened to be a “science” that Einstein would not admit into the scientific field—he had little use for the discipline.) The creativity, the intuition, the explanation, of some of the most creative thinking of the century, which was most probably on display for Wertheimer, was lost. Disappeared.

            

Sometimes when things disappear they illuminate, as in the case of Kandinsky and Malevich and Duchamp and company.  Sometimes when they disappear we see the forms of the missing, making them further suggestive and capable of initiating inquiry. (A very bald example being The Enigma of Isidore Ducasse, a work by south-Philly-born-Emmanuel Radnitzky, otherwise known as Man Ray, the great Dadist, photographer and Rayographer, and 40 years before the work of Christo. He made Ducasse disappear and become mysterious by wrapping up a singer sewing machine, creating art and inquisition.) 

And sometimes when things disappear, they just, well, disappear. 

_________________________

I can heartily recommend the following books by Arthur Miller, who has a very deep knowledge of numerous fields, and who brings them beautifully to bear in his books, as follows:

Empire of the Stars: Friendship, Obsession and Betrayal in the Quest for Black Holes (Little Brown, UK edition; Houghton Mifflin, USA edition, 2005).
Shortlisted for the Aventis Prize

Einstein and Picasso: Space, Time and the Beauty that Causes Havoc (Perseus Books, 2001). Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Insights of Genius: Imagery and Creativity in Science and Art (Springer-Verlag, 1996 cloth; MIT Press, 2000 paperback).

Albert Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity: Emergence (1905) and Early Interpretation (1905-1911) (Addison Wesley, 1981: new edition SpringerVerlag, 1998)

Imagery in Scientific Thought: Creating 20th-Century Physics (Birkhäuser, 1984; MIT Press, 1986; reprinted 2003, Dover Publications)

Frontiers of Physics: 1900-1911 (Birkhäuser, 1986)

Early Quantum Electrodynamics: A Source Book (Cambridge University Press, 1994)

Editor, Sixty-Two Years of Uncertainty: Historical, Philosophical and Physical Inquiries into the Foundations of Quantum Mechanics (Plenum Press, 1990)

Transient Statues: Naming Clouds and Snowflakes

It is odd to think among the great classifiers of nature, including even the lofty-namer Aristotle, that clouds were not scientifically classified until the early 19th century.   Here they are, just about the biggest thing we have as earthlings that are gigantic and close to us, and nobody offered a good classifications scheme until 200-odd years ago—a pretty slim margin of time  in the terms of recorded human history. 

Clouds are of course problematic, what with floating around and all—but if you didn’t already know the relative newness of their recognizable names isn’t it shocking to learn this bit of history? For the most part I think clouds must have been thought as being too transient, changeable, whimsical, wispy, to be given proper names.   The great scientist and classifier Lamarck tried to do so in his  Annuaire Méteorologique of 1802, and really is the first to try this, but his ideas weren’t terribly good (especially compared to the rest of his work), and it seems as though he left his best thinking effort on clouds at home.  For example, he gave us Hazy, dappled, massed, broom-like and grouped clouds as classifications (in French, respectively, en forme de voile, pommelés, attroupés,  en balayeurs and groupés).  They seem quite “French” to me, but largely outside the scope of being useful. 

It was the English pharmacist and chemist Luke Howard who in 1803 gave a greater bit of thought to structuring cloud names, classifying them according to size and shape and giving them Latin names—and this forms the basis of our naming clouds to this day.  Howard was perhaps the first, greatest, meteorologist, producing On the Modification of Clouds, (in which he describes his naming system, the “modification” part actually meaning classifying rather than changing),  The Climate of London, and the first textbook on weather,  Seven Lectures on Meteorology.  Howard’s system was expanded in 1887 by Abercromby and Hildebrandsson, who further classified clouds by height above ground as well as by appearance (and utilizing Howard’s naming system). 

Howard began his system by identifying three basic shapes to clouds: heaps, layers, and curls.  Heaps of separated cloud  masses with flat bottoms and bulbous, splayed, tops, which he called cumulus, which is Latin for heap; the Latin stratus was applied to clouds in layers which were much wider than they were thick; and again to Latin for cirrus, which called out the wispy curls of clouds.  (Rain clouds were given the Latin nimbus, for rain, and so on.) 

It is interesting and romantic to think of Howard being moved in his love of clouds as many Brits and Europeans were in the Volcanic Year of 1783 by the enormous eruptions of the Eldeyjar (Iceland) and Asama Yama (Japan) volcanoes—the force of their eruptions caused enormous changes in the skies (especially in Europe), creating vast sky-borne tapestries (the “Great Fogg” in England) and for such extended periods of time that it would have been impossible for the scientifically-minded Howard not to see them. 

Similar, in a way, to clouds is the snow crystal (snowflake)—they change forms in their lives from sky to ground, and may well disappear on contact with a warm surface.  Of course unlike clouds they may fall and be captured, kept even, though the ability to actually perform some sort of scientific something with them didn’t occur until 400 years ago, which means that snowflakes passed in and out of human existence being very simply named (in most languages) as a mass group, and not classified at all.

Johannes Kepler thought very deeply in In 1611 publishing a short treatise called On the Six-Cornered Snowflake, thinking that perhaps their (mistaken) six-cornered symmetry revealed something much deeper about the basis of nature and the universe. The 26-year-old  Robert Hooke seems to be recognized as the first to throw the snowflake under a microscope, publishing drawings of them and just about everything else that he saw in his monumental (and tall, being 13-inches tall) Micrographia (1665)--the first truly scientific book of modern times.  The largest of the large images was saved for the flea, showing the unsuspecting public the great and beautiful nature of what seemed like a fantastical beast (under magnification).  Snowflakes appeared in the book, revealed in their intricate and seemingly-symmetrical nature.  Fantastic, unimagined images. This aside, he seems to have, um, borrowed these images from an earlier work, Thomas Bartholin's  De Nivus usu Medico Observationes Varieae, 1661.  But so it goes. 
 

The Galileo of the snowflake was Wilson Bentley (1865-1931), an autodidact Vermont farmer, seen by fellow hamlet-dwellers as odd and off, who figured out how to photographically and beautifully record the intricacies of the snow crystal world—no one had ever done this so dramatically, with such gorgeous results.  It really was as though he was able to record the heights of the mountains of the moon with a slender telescope in Pisa, 350 years earlier. The results of his decades of experience were published  in 1931 his book Snow Crystals, containing more than 2400 snow crystal images.  On the heals of Bentley’s accomplishments came the classically trained nuclear physicist Ukichiro Nakaya, who was truly the first person to apply a scientific classification to snowflakes, and who published his intrepidly-beautiful work in a 1954 book entitled Snow Crystals: Natural and Artificial.  His classification system of the various types of snowflakes would prove vastly more useful, interesting and appealing than that published by the 1951 the International Commission on Snow and Ice, and forms the basis of the discussion of snow crystals today—a classification system of a massively-occurring phenomenon that is younger than me. 

Original Reflections: unique experiences with mirrors: Van Eyck & Brunellesci

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

I was thinking about writing a short post on van Eyck and settled on his painting of this newly married couple--The Arnolfini Marriage, painted in 1434, depicting the union of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami, who married in Bruges in that year--and the very unusual image of the scene as reflected in the convex mirror directly behind the couple. It is a wonderful painting of course, lusciously and richly colored--the observer, though, is brought instantly to the mirror. And in that reflection is what is seen from behind the couple as well as what the couple is seeing--in a sense, a 180-degree view of the room (if we considered the painter's perspective towards the couple as 90-degrees). It is one of the first times that a mirror is used in this fashion and is also offers a great instruction on the newly-rediscovered perspective. (The inscription above the mirror, which is surrounded by ten scenes from the life of Christ, reads “Jan van Eyck was present"--and probably was literal, as we see the painter himself reflected in a tiny portrait...along with another man, who may also have been involved with the wedding).

As a matter of fact, it is just 30 years earlier that Filippo di  Ser Brunellesci (1377-1446) used mirrors as a tool in "creating" the first paintings in linear perspective in modern times--and he uses the mirrors in such a way as to compare what he was seeing in front of him, rather than using them to gain a sight-line for things that he couldn't see. But they did in a way do just that. Brunellesci set his position inside the unfinished Santa Maria del Fiore (Florence), and used the apparatus (pictured here from the linked website) to record the facade of San Giovanni de Firenze (better known by its subsequent name, the Florentine Baptitstry, as all Florentine Catholics
 were Baptized there well into the 19th century) which was opposite his position across the Piazza del Duomo. He effort was a panel which was finished between 1407 and 1410, and which is now lost to time and space.

It should be noted that the Baptistry, an 8-sided figure (with another, triangular, form added later; and 8-sided to represent the octava dies, the "eighth day," the day of the risen Christ, which would be outside the scope of time and measurement) was decorated with colossal, fantastically beautiful doors, some of which were created by none other than Ghiberti, another (slightly later) master of linear perspective.

(The image above is taken from the very useful site which goes into good detail about the Brunellesci pin/peephole experiment.)

 

 

The First Shadow of a Color “Photograph”—Jan van Eyck, 1436

Was it really Jan van Eyck and not J.C. Maxwell who produced the first color photograph?  Van Eyck’s after all is hanging up in Bruges in the Groeninge Museum, and Maxwell’s, well, Maxwell’s dissipated in about half an hour, leaving only an historical trace.  The problem of course is that Van Eyck’s oil (Virgin of the Canon  van der Paele) was done 403 years before the Daguerre invention (building of course on the work of others, notably Niepce), so it really doesn’t count because it really doesn’t exist.  His work though *does* exist, but not as a photo—it was, is, a painting, finished in 1436, and it stands in my mind as looking so much like a perfect capturing of a moment that it seems a (luscious) snapshot. 

In her book Color and Meaning, Practice and Theory in Renaissance Painting (1992), Marcia Hall makes the point (on page 69) that it is the lighting in this painting that makes it so extraordinary—and differentiates it entirely from the predictable light or “stage illumination of the Italians”.  Its an excellent point.  The light source in the painting is emanates as though it were a half-hour before sunset in Santa Fe; or here, in Asheville, when there is a very low and nearly complete cloud ceiling and the sun just manages just before sunset to peek through between the mountains and the cloud layers to blaze its extraordinary, horizontal-like brilliance making everything and anything that reflects that light into a work of private art. The figures in this painting by Van Eyck reflect a softer version of that light in such a manner—they are sharply illuminated, luminous, in all of their very human glory and frailty.  We have sharp relief, great detail, deep shadow—and much of that is missing in Italy at this time.

The photo parts come in here:  the characters are caught in the middle of some very small, obscure action, and the smallness of their movements are captured perfectly

Even though they are emotive of course the faces of the great Masaccio are relatively plain; Gozzoli, Fra Lippi, the magnificent Fra Angelico, Pisanello, Ghirlandaio, della Francesca, Veneziano, di Credi,. Perugino, and even the emotive and colorful Rafael, all working in about the same decades as van Eyck, simply do not give this anatomical expressiveness to the faces of their subjects.

So the extreme light and the detail in the faces gives the van Eyck this fantastical quality—on the other hand the perspective and the proportions of the characters in relation to the objects in the room and the room itself are off, secondary, not important—this too in sharp contrast to the great inventors, re0-discovers, innovators of the scientific perspective.  (This homage belongs to a slightly earlier time, to Giotto and Uccello, but their work is just a bit to early for discussion with van Eyck.)  Marcia Hall goes on in her appraisal about the way in which van Eyck applied his color (“binding his pigments in a drying oil”) to give his subjects their incredible color depth, and this of course is a major element in understanding the picture (coming as it does from a stone-cold expert). 

What I’m thinking now, the aspect that is giving this painting its “photographic” quality, its supra-realistic event, is this new use o flight, new angle, with the immersion of anatomical detail and the “different”, Northern, perspective. 

This is a very, overly, simple observation and simplification, but I think in general that it is true.

Durer's Beautiful Monsters. The Geometrical Man Takes Control, 1525.

Albrecht Durer's (1471-1528) drawing of a geometrical man was an amazing--startling, even--object to the early 16th century consciousness. His …Symmetria partium…humanorum corporum (1537) was a masterpiece, and a key piece of visionary thinking.

His Underwysung der Messung ("Treatise on Measuring") written nearly 500 years ago (in 1525) set the stage for this next work--it is here that we find some of the most recognizable of
Durer's illustrations of the instruments that he employed to do his perspective work.  Durer--so far as I can tell--created an orthographically rotating human figures in three-dimensional trapezoids, creating incredibly human-like non-human forms.  To the modern eye they look  like supra- or proto- or post-human, perhaps; mechanized, calculated, structural. His use of stereometry, the science of measuring volume, was adapted to this study of human form and the relationship between that and movement. 

They were in a sense a CAT scan.  And in this way the person in 1525, seeing this for the first time, could have been  experiencing something like the sensation of seeing an X-Ray for the first time in 1895 or a magnified flea in 1626, only the image wasn't magnified nor was it an internal view--it did help in understanding perspective and motion. 

This was a new way of thinking about the body, challenging the god-grace and ubiquitous church-inspired revelation of how it worked.  This was not a necessarily easy time in which to picture humans in such a scientific way.  (In 1553 the physician and theological scholar Michael Severtus would be burned at the stake for his views on the Trinity, Nicean Creed and other related things, though his undeniably revolutionary idea of cardiopulmonary circulation was in itself a direct challenge to church teachings).

Durer’s innovation accommodated empirical observation and allowed for proportional change.  Its importance in relational drawing, anatomical and  technical, cannot be understated, which I think trumped it as a subversive agent to orthodoxy.

Erhard Schoen  (1491-1542)  who was one of the most prolific woodcut illustrators in Europe during this period with more than 116 books to his credit, produced Unnderweissung der proportzion unnd stellung der possen, liegent und stehent..., Norenberg 1542 followed Durer showing that the human form was reducible to connected but discrete Euclidean solids, and thereby was a knowable entity. (It is interesting to footnote here that this work came after a period of a dozen or so years in which Schoen produced many heavily anti-Catholic cartoons, broadsides and illustrations.) 

Close on the heels of Durer was the work of Georg Bauer  (also known as Agricola, 1494-1555) whose De re metallica Liber XII (“12 Books on the Subject of Metals”) in 1556.  This work by Agricola (recognized as one of the founding fathers of a number of disciplines--mining geology and metallurgy, mineralogy, structural geology, and paleontology) was actually more concerned with mining and minerals than the title implies.  It was here, again, that the illustrations were crucial and revolutionary—his book was a chief resource in mining for hundreds of years, due chiefly for its clear and precise how-to illustrations. 

Bombing Britain, 1940--a View of the Battle of Britain from Germany

JF Ptak Science Books  (an earlier post edited and expanded)

It is essential to look at objects from alternative angles, especially in science, in order to determine the correctness, or fitness, of a finding, or opinion.  Even when consolidating data or evidence regarding the confirmation of an established bit,  you may very well find other strands of loose data that could help illuminate even a well established or iconic societal “given”.

That the war was not going well for the Allies in September 1940 is an understatement—and the chief allies at this point excluded the United States, happily now recovering from the Depression, and still a full 14 months away from entering the war. 

What is very weird to me is that after having looked at every issue of LIFE magazine at least three times  from the start to the end of World War II, that there are more advertisements using war images than there are images of the war itself.  This actually continues into the spring of 1942, when LIFE got really busy, the war got really messy, and people started really dying.  And frankly even the coverage of Pearl Harbor in no way lived up to what I thought the coverage of a photo-magazine like LIFE would be. This is not a scientific study.  It just strikes me as odd, or propagandizing, that there should be such relatively scant, or undervalued, coverage of the fighting when sanitized images of that same fighting were being used to sell socks and shaving cream and cigarettes and such.  I understand the power of hearts-and-minds campaigns, but this seemed so amateurish, boorish even, that it just didn’t approach the level of a psychological ploy to pacify an American public that had virtually no interest in attending the European Theatre. 

Liserl and Mileva--Einstein's Disposable Women

Looks like a Chuck Close of Albert Einstein, yes?  Well, its not--its just a heavily pixilated enlargement of Einstein's son, Hans Albert Einstein, who at age 3 or 4 looks pretty much like his father, very much so, actually. 

The Mona Lisa smile is another missing--discarded--piece of Einstein's life.  It belongs to his first wife, Mileva Maric.  She was by most accounts an accomplished mathematician, exceptionally intelligent, and a person of her own.  She nearly succeeded in the males' world of mathematics, but didn't .Few women did at that time in history--or at least few succeeded under their own name.  There's a lively debate among some that Mileva was instrumental in the development of the special theory of relativity (among other things) developed by Albert in 1904/5 and published in the Annalen der Physik in the annus mirabilis of 1905.  Personally I doubt that she contributed significantly to the theoretical composition of the theory; I haven't much of a doubt that she contributed materially to its development, being an intelligent and capable foil/sounding board/conversant with her husband.  As anyone who is a partner in a relationship of two intelligent people realizes, there is a lot of back and forth going on in the development and creation of ideas.  I don't have any doubt that something like that went on here.

But Albert was done with her by 1914 or so, living basically apart until their official divorce in 1919..  He had minimal relations with Hans Albert.  Eduard developed schizophrenia in his 20's and that was about it so far as his father was concerned--he was cared for by Mileva until her death in 1948 and then died in an institution in 1965.) And he was particularly done with his daughter Liserl, a baby that he made with Mileva. a girl who simply disappears.  She was born in 1901, and born in "secret"--though it was not a secret to her, or her mother.  She's gone by 1902.  Then her parents manage to marry in 1903.  The next year Albert tries again at fatherhood witrh Hans Albert, but I think his attention span for children has a relatively short event horizon.  Eduard is born in 1910, but the development of his mental disorder divorces him from hi sfather for good.  It is simply not a pretty story. 

Einstein went on his personal life full of what I see as complications, abandonments, deceptions; living with all sorts of shadows, with a hollowness, there, somewhere. 

I don’t really care to think about Albert's personal story, and I don't read his flea-combed biographies I'm perfectly happy to just deal with the intellectual history of his life and be satisfied with that.  But there are days like today, when I think about people celebrating his personal life--as in his birthday--that I sense the emptiness, and wonder about Hans Albert, and Mileva, and Eduard, and the Lost Girl, Liserl.  I think that rather than celebrating Einstein's personal milestones that we take a moment to remember the countable but countless lives like Mileva who are simply discarded, and that their lives meant as much to them as Einstein's life meant to him. 

At least Mileva derves a gravestone.

Michele Zackheim wrote an interesting book on Lieserl, Einstein's Daughter, if you're interested. 

The Solids in Uccello

JF Ptak Science Books

My ueber-brilliant wife, Patti Digh, has for decades been fascinated by the monstrous-great William Gaddis, and in particular, by his novel The Recognitions.  It is a difficult book to feel at home in—it took me four tries to feel comfortable in this complex wristbender, but once in, the water was fine, and I finished it during a boring and largely vacant astronomy meeting in Pittsburgh years ago.  It is perhaps one of the best books written by an American in the 20th century, and among the many threads that wind their way through the 950 pages, one involves
the gorgeous 15th century painter, Paolo Uccello.   Uccello, in short, was one of the first Renaissance painters to (re)discover and paint using perspective, and did so magnificently.  Gaddis refers cryptically, however, to the “solids in Uccello”. 

Books on perspective are some of the most beautifully illustrated works ever printed. They are full of insight and detail—a detail, the seeing of which, is a mystery (and to Uccello, mystical) beauty, a submerged, geological magnificence that is also an extraordinarily powerful tool.

I wrote two posts or so ago about the importance of Leonardo’s illustrations to Pacioli’s work on perspective, and how this was really about the first time that geometrical figures were illustrated , published, for the first time, in perspective.  And of course the images were drop-dead gorgeous. 

Vredeman de Vries (Perspectiva) was a 17th century Dutchman who is perhaps one of my favorites—shown here is his projection for an open loggia in which an illusionary ceiling could be painted (in the manner of Andrea Pozzo’s The Transmisson of the Divine Spirit (1688-1694) , an extraordinary painting of tremendous depth on the curved vault of S. Ignazzio in Rome).   (Another example of de Vries at bottom is a simple perspective of diverse architectural forms.) 

Wenzel Jamnitzer's Perspectiva corporum regularium (1568) is a somewhat earlier work of great depth and beauty—this image is again just a “simple” arrangement of geometrical objects, but there’s really nothing very “simple” about it.  The forms are difficult and arranged in a difficult presentation, and rendering them in perspective was a great achievement, and I think a wonder for the mid-16thc mind to see. 

Brook Taylor’s simple, clean lines and presentation of these architectural forms from his New Principles of Linear Perspective (2nd edition, London, 1719) is another perspective miracle of the 18th century.  To me the lines of perspective showing the view of the objections connected to the spare presentation of the objects themselves look completely modern to me rather than being a technical treatise from 289 years ago. ,

Uccello understood all of this, and painted using these techniques with enormous power.  The “solids’ recognized by Gaddis (and not really discussed) are incredible to me.  Looking at his painting Battle of San Romano  (1457) we see Perspective in her place; when we look at, say, the rumps of the horses, we see almost no detail, just a mass of color, a solid, with spectacular plainness. What in the world was he thinking?  He could certainly have painted the horse and the other solids with texture and detail, but he didn’t, and to me it seems antithetical to the painting.  What in the name of all motherly things was he thinking?  And who else on earth was using such huge amounts of plain solids in their paintings?  I’m not aware that anyone else was, and I am relatively clueless as to why he did it, abandoning as it were the potentials of the beauty of excruciating detail that we see in these other works. 

I would love to know what Uccello was thinking when he decided to create that mass of color, that solid, when there was no one else doing exactly that.  But my major thanks go to Patti Digh for loving that, and to Mr. Gaddis for creating the question.

 

The First Photograph of a Smell

JF Ptak Science Books LLC 

It leaves me with such a cozy feeling to not find what I think is an obvious-but-odd phrase in Google.

 And that's what happened with "the first photograph of a smell" (or "photograph of a smell" or odor, for that matter),  as shocking to the senses as it might be.

There are long and interesting lists of firsts in photography: the first color photograph (Maxwell, 1867, but impermanent), the first photograph of a human face, the first photograph of the moon, the first photo of a planet, and so on, tirelessly, until we see how many derivations of "firsts" there are. (We can go from first photo of human to first photo of a human face to first photo of a human in motion to the first photo showing human hands to the old human recorded by photography tot eh first photo of a couple to the first photo of a human with a tool and on and on.) There is a shorter list of "first photographic non-photograph of a photograph" (?!) that I wrote about in an earlier (illustrated) post, but we won't go there today.

Here is a "first" though that I think hasn't been dealt with too terribly much: the first photograph of an odor.

These beautiful images appeared in the 10 September 1938 issue of The Illustrated London News and were exhibited at the 83rd Annual International Exhibition of the Royal Photographic Society, and were made by H. Devaux (who evidently, according to the snippet of an obituary that I can see from Science magazine, was a plant physiologist and "pioneer of surface physics"
who died in 1956). The note accompanying the photographs read: "The emission of an odor involves volatillisation of material. If an odiferous material is enclosed in a cell a few millimeters above a clean mercury surface, it is possible to collect on the surface of the mercury a monomolecular layer of the volatillising or odoriferous substance. If the mercury surface initially is covered with talc powder, the gradual formation of the monomolecules layer may be observed as the talc is gradually pushed away from the point immediately below the specimen of material."

The photos are that of the odors of a lily and of camphor. I don't know which is which, and a good story could be made up for either photo belonging to either item. Needless to say, these images are as gorgeous as they are unexpected, especially considering that they were made in 1938.

FOOTNOTE:

I'd just like to add here the first photograph of a human being--well, actually, it is the first photograph that just happens to capture a human in the emulsion (discussed very nicely on the Doug's Darkworld  blogsite.  Since the  exposure time was so terribly long for this image to be made, the moving people and horses and carriages on the street, all of the city-life bits, were necessarily spectral, invisible, to the photograph.  Only the stationary items were captured, and the only people captured here were two figures in the foreground, doing something or other that made them still for at least five minutes--long enough for their anonymous but famous photonic impressions to be captured.   Mr. Doug and others seem to think this is a man getting his boots shined--I agree.

Dr. Seuss and the 236 Words that Changed Reading Forever

JF Ptak Science Books

I think that it is difficult to overstate the importance and long-term significance of Dr. Seuss' (Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991, son and grandson of brewmasters) contribution to childhood.  I think that it is impossible to calculate the overall impact of his bringing young people to the joy of reading, and to the familiarization  with the bare mechanics of how to read.  Of course he told a great story, but his books were literally page-tuners—they were simply written with words useful to children, with few words per page, thereby allowing the child to see the pictures, read all of the words, and turn the page, giving them a sense of accomplishment along with enjoying  a fine story.   Perhaps it is the getting-the-kids-used –to-reading that was his most fantastic accomplishment—and something that few others have achieved, measuring by just pure numbers. 

And the way in which he did this was to artistically use an extremely limited budget of words—Dr. Seuss used precisely 236 different words to write The Cat in the Hat.

It is certainly true that there have been many sparse, relatively wispy papers in the history of science form which enormous change has sprung..   Pound-for-pound though The Cat in the Hat holds its own. 

I’ll give the entire list of words below—just have a peek, and try to imagine writing something interesting with just this palette. 

It isn’t fair at all to compare this masterpiece with others in different genres, but just to give you an idea of its relative simplicity I’ll quote some numbers taken from an incredible study conducted by Zachary Booth Simpson (“Vocabulary Analysis of Project Gutenberg”).  Simpson’s interpretation is more complex than the story I’ll tell here, but basically he looks at the numbers of words in a piece of literature (for example) and then convenes the number of different words, deducing the actual and then relative density of word usage, which is pretty interesting (and verifies that pit-of-the-stomach feeling about which authors use more words in smaller space). 

Gibbon’s Decline and Fall seems to lead the way in the absolute number of different words used (43,113!!, which is astonishing), in the 1.5 million word text, while old Uncle Bill uses 4,842 words in the 32,000-word Hamlet—meaning that Measure for Measure (sorry) Mr. Gibbon out-Bills Bill, which I thought was very hard to do.  Other interesting bits are Hugh Lofting’s Doctor Doolittle, who tells the story with 2759 words; Moby Dick, told with a spectrum of 17,227 words; and Les Miserables is painted with 23,334 different words.  The only work that comes close to Seuss in Mr. Simpson’s very considerable list is the New McGuffey Reader, which is really, actually, a tough go, and uses 630 words.

Unfortunately I do not know about the Dick and Jane readers But they’re no match whatsoever for the Good Doctor.

So my hat is off and off and off to Theodor Geisel, aka Dr.Seuss—on the anniversary of his anniversary in Seussland, where it is Seussqunetennial every day.

The X-Ray of the Imagination 2: Phrenology, Chinese Hell Scrolls, and the Beauty of the Thought Balloon

The X-Ray of the Imagination:  Internal Dialog, Demons, Humors, and Picturing the Stuff of Thought--On the outer shapes of the inner container

In an earlier post I wrote about what I thought was the first graphic representation of  the process of forming and imaging a complex thought (found in Francis Galton’s Visualizing Numeracy). It is interesting how people tried—over a long period of time—to get at exactly that, the inner process, via some sort of external means, which is almost entirely left in the not-so-exclusive world of the science-like.

Perhaps the greatest early effort (and certainly the most beautiful yet) to ascribe physical locations and attributes to the mind was the work and drawings of Robert Fludd.  That would be Dr. Robert Fludd (1574-1637), occultist/philosopher, randy logician and hermticist astrologer pseudo-scientist; and maybe the best of his work is found in his fabulously titled work Utriusque Cosmi, Maioris scilicet et Minoris, metaphysica, physica, atque technica Historia (The metaphysical, physical, and technical history of the two worlds, namely the greater and the lesser…), published in Germany between 1617 and 1621.  Things get very deep and complex and confusing, even in the illustrations; so as far as being a key to human knowledge, Fludd probably relaxed the confusion boundaries more than he strengthened insight—but maybe that was supposed to be his job, what with supposedly being a Grandmaster of the Priory of Sion

Another great effort in the attempt to physically determine what might be going on inside someone’s brain and mind were the physiognomists. Physiognomy (does it really matter how it is spelled?  I should think that if I was to try and determine how I should spell the word using the very methods its practioners employed that the spelling might change daily…) from the Greek, basically meaning “nature” and “interpret”, claimed an ability to judge the scope of a brain by the shape of its container—the skull.  If a skull was sunken or distended or high or pretty or what have you then this shape in some way related to the development of that area of the brain.  So a high forehead could mean great insight or knowledge or intellectual ability; a low, sloping forehead meant, well, not, and to steer clear of such people with your hand firmly on your purse.  An early practioner was the very formidable Thomas Browne (1605-1682) (in the Religio Medici), but the powerhouse thinker (as it were) was Lavater (1741-1801), who caused and challenged all manner of mischief. The democratic nicety of this pseudo-science is that you didn’t really need to be associated with any extended scientific thought to engage in its application—a nice silhouette-maker would do, along with a series of interpretive and a decent personality was about all you needed.  A nice clear forehead would help.

Nipping at the heels of Johann Caspar Lavater and company was Franz Gall (1758-1828) and the Phrenologists (from the Greek again, “mind knowledge”), who made a slight step beyond simple head shape by “reading” the bumps and indentations of the skull.  Their educated fingers were in this way were supposed to have the capacity to feel the special elements of that part of the brain manifesting itself via cranial nodules or something.

Pathognomy was yet another step in the stairs to the flooded basement, where passions and emotions resident in the voice, or gesture, or facial expression, would somehow reveal the structure of the mind.  I found this one pretty curious because it concentrated on the motions of the physical ramifications of the brain, which somehow seemed very elegant in a ghost-like, narcotized way.

But this is just the attempts to ascertain thought—actually picturing it, literally, was not all that common.  Dreams, fears, thoughts, pain, interpretative inner dialog—seems to have occupied artists far less than love or creed or ambition or devotion.  Being able to “see” someone’s pain, or nightmares, was really quite special.

Thomas Cruikshank made this a sub-specialty for himself, depicting people suffering extreme anguish as a result of gout, or delirium tremens, or fear, and anthropomorphizing them, giving these concerns/fears/pains a human-like quality.  So instead of seeing  a badly inflamed gouty ankle and imaging its pain, we see anti-cherubs, demons, spikey creatures at work on the ankle, pricking it, setting it on fire.

Bosch of course performed miracles in setting out the fear of the Lake of Fire in very explicit, basic, understandable ways.  In my opinion though the Chinese Hell Screens (as a genre) have Mr. Bosch beat by a long mile, as they were terminally specific in elucidating even what might seem to be trivial transgression for the casual viewer.  (For example, a person who wasted paper would, according to one scroll, spend eternity in a lake of flaming feces, bobbing to the surface occasionally to be stuck in the face by a flaming spear.  Now THAT’S Hell!)

We have certainly seen people in the throes of nightmare in art, but the relative subtlety of the visions of Henry Fueli (The Nightmare, 1782) and William Blake (“Jeruslaem”, 1820, for example) and of course Fransico de Goya’s "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters" (from Los Caprichos) really do wane in comparison to some of the highly explicit horrors of Cruikshank and James Gillray and Thomas Rowlandson.  Perhaps this is so because the later group seems to address the masses and making the nightmare more universal, visiting the ample-butted poor as it would the couch-bound Faintress of the Upper Classes. (I guess I should really remove Goya from the former class, as he really did intend to reach the working poor as much as anyone else.)

I’ve wondered about the artist Arcimbaldo—the genius portrait painter whose artistic palette was fruits and vegetables—and whether his use of various types and shapes of foods were supposed to correspond to any internal dialogs in the person sitting for him but, well, I think not.  Nice thought, though.

Most effective though in graphically revealing the inner workings of someone’s mind is, yes, the word balloon, which takes a second seat to its younger sibling, the glorious thought balloon.

What a fantastic creation!

The word balloon, or the idea for it, exists for quite some time in Mesoamerica, incised in sculptures from 1000 years ago.  (See Hull, Kerry Michael (2003). "Verbal Art and Performance in Ch’orti’ and Maya Hieroglyphic Writing").    Something that we begin to recognize in a more modern form comes up in the 12 th century with word scrolls—elegant, flowing, appealing bits of fabric upon which the words of the person in the painting are written.

Word balloons really come into their own in political art in the 18th century (and do have a very curious, artistic affect in their longish, elongated appearance with tiny 3-point type inside).  Sometimes the word balloons look like smoke with words in it—these might be my favorite, as they give the clear impression of the immediate and dissipating nature of most speech.

The Yellow Kid, generally acknowledged as the first “cartoon character”, at first had his speech written directly on his flanged shirt.  It was around 1896 (I think!) that the words moved from his apparel and into a balloon over his head.

The most beautiful innovation though came a little later (exactly when I’m not sure, I’m sorry to say) with the invention of the thought balloon.   What a magnificent idea!  Why hadn’t this concept been employed earlier, anyway?  How come it took until that unparalled period of time—1895-1915, when virtually everthing became “modern”, when just about everything (save politics, unless you include the creation of the concentration camp) experienced a paradigm shift—and not earlier?  Certainly it is common and debased, and runs amok with the very idea of art and its attempt to show the viewer the inner machinations/beauty of its subject; but wouldn’t it be interesting to have the thought balloon for Lisa Gheradini (the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, “Mona”)?

Well, probably not.

But the thought balloon--bubbly, cloud-like apparitions above its thinker’s head—certainly has it place, and is absolutely a more elegant invention discerning thought than Lavater or even the lovely Mr. Fludd could ever dream.

The Sovietesque Disappearance of Pacioli’s Rhombicuboctahedron

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 23

What?

I’m lodging a complaint, 16 years after the fact (though new to me), about the Italian commemorative stamp honoring the great Fra Luca Pacioli—a great mathematician, inventor of modern bookkeeping, and friend and dispersal-agent of/for Leonardo da Vinci—it also seems to be the first representation of a living mathematician.  The stamp is based upon and freely rearranges (to the point of obsidian abstraction) elements of the famous painting by (perhaps) Jacopo Barbari (and painted in 1495), which now hangs in the Museo di Capodimonte (Naples). 

The painting has been reproduced in mathematics books and such many times over—with good reason, as it is a gorgeous work and is filled with lots of mathematical bits and pieces. 

The stamp, however, is a curious and annoying work if you are at all familiar with the original.  The most glaring but not most important change is the Soviet-like loss of the figure to the right of Pacioli—although not positively identified, some believe it is Guidobaldo, and others believe it to be the very pretty Albrecht Durer.  He’s gone, replaced by some sort of out-of-century bookcase.  I'm not saying that whoever this happened to be needed Stalinist disappearing  for political reasons, but it upsets the entire composition of the painting, and leads to other more foul errors. 

The closed red book on the table is moved and an hour glass is placed on top of it, taking up the slate that was there in its place in the original, which is now hanging on the wall.  It is highly unlikely that Pacioli would provide a demonstration in this matter. 

Also the mathematical notes here are slightly different from the (correct) references to Euclid's Elements Book XIII, proposition 12 (If an equilateral triangle is inscribed in a circle, then the square on the side of the triangle is triple the square on the radius of the circle.)

An armillary sphere makes a curious appearance, and a few of the mathematical tools on the table top make disappearances.  The sphere may be the artist's attempt to make up for the loss of other symbols, as the sphere represents the Platonic music of the spheres, successive levels of forms being built one on the other and so representing the universe.  (Plato's Republic, where, in the Myth of Er he wrote,". . . Upon each of its circles stood a siren who was carried round with its movements, uttering the concords of a single scale." [Republic p.  354])

The important item that is kept on the stamp from the original (though moved) is the polyhedra form, the dodechahedron, one of the great Platonic solids, and a figure composed of 12 pentagons.  It is a highly symbolic link between ancient thought and the rise of the new mathematics and even newer art. 

The most important missing item, though, is the glass object hanging at the left of the painting—it is the rhombicuboctahedron.  This object is one of the thirteen semi-regular (or Archimedean) solids, and has 26 faces made of 18 squares and 8 equilateral triangles, with 24 vertices and 48 edges.  It is constructed of glass and hangs by a string, and is half-filled with water.  It is spectacularly shown in the painting by Barbari—it is simply a glorious achievement of perspective and light and shadow.

And, as it turns out, reflection.   In a superb 90-page article by Nick Mackinnon: ("The portrait of Fra Luca Pacioli", The Mathematical Gazette, 77 (1993) pp. 130 – 219).  Mackinnon combs through the painting with microscopic precision, and in this case reveals that there is an exterior reflection (of s house) on one of the bottom panels of the figure. (Good work!  He even goes on to try and figure out what it is we are looking at in the reflection.) 
It is annoying for this figure (or a shadow or hint of this figure) not to be on the stamp because of its beauty and symbolism.  It is none other than Pacioli’s friend, Leonardo, who illustrates his book Divina proportione—a masterpiece of thinking and illustrating, introducing the concept of the divine proportion (phi) and its importance in design and in nature in general. Perhaps of greatest significance though are the illustrations of some of the figures in the book, which I believe are the first time that people are able to see geometrical drawings in perspective, which is a very big deal. 

Unfortunately this link is pretty much missing without the Rhombicuboctahedron—you don’t have to know how to say it to appreciate it.  (Or as Bernard Malamud writes in the Natural, when discussing a spaghetti dinner “I don’t know how to spell it, but it sure eats good”.)

All I'm saying is that the designer for the stamp shouldn't been consulted, and the Italian government should just have used the original as the basis for the stamp.  After all, they didn't remove the backgrounds of the Mona Lisa or the Last Super because they were too-conflicty with their subjects in those commemorative issue stamps, did they?

Oh, I forgot--they did. 

Here are a few good books to consult if you’re interested in polyhedra:

H.S.M. Coxeter, Regular Polytopes.  Coxeter was perhaps the most impressive geometer of the 20th century.
Peter R. Cromwell, Polyhedra.
H. Martyn Cundy and A.P. Rollett, Mathematical Models
Alan Holden, Shapes, Spaces and Symmetry. (Very pretty!)
Peter Pearce, Structure in Nature is a Strategy for Design.
Magnus Wenninger, Polyhedron Models.  (Paper construction!)

Underground Horses, 1875

JF Ptak Science Books   Post 22

Unusual cross sections have always fascinated me--they are an X-ray of the techy-inards of the physical world , showing you a slice (literally) of the Unseen and Unapproachable. 

The first engraving here is of an (unidentified) Western-U.S. mine, printed 1869, and shows the comparative depth of an un-effacing mining operation in terms of height, nestling it in against Trinity Church (NYC).  The "21 stories" depth  of this mine would have been astonishing to the 1869 mind thinking of it in terms of height. Few office buildings in NYC for example exceeded 5 or 6 stories at that time. [It was in 1872 that the tall buildings' fortune turned, as C.W. Baldwin (working for the Otis Company) invented the geared hydraulic elevator, meaning that buildings could now be taller than the strength and endurance of its occupants' legs.  (Actually, to my mind it is the invention of the elevator safety brake that clinched the deal, making it safe to enter an elevator and expect to survive the experience.  There's a lot of other stuff that comes into play, not the least of which is steel framing, lightening the buildings weight and displacing the weight from its' normal receptacle of the foundation, but I digress.) ] So trying to imagine something that was 15 time the height of the spire of Trinity Church was doing some pretty large-scale imagining. 

A corollary the the height of the mine is, perhaps, a cross section of the depths of waters. Here we see an 1877 illustration from an article on new methods of determining the depths of ocean waters, giving a very clear indication of the enormous "height" of the ocean even in its most measurable (and not-so-deep) section.

 

I simply could not resist this 1875 engineer's drawing ("Plan of Ten-Stall Stable....for W.D. Wight's Paper on Underground Horses")--and yes indeed these were horses kept underground, used for hauling the heavier wagons (on tracks) of whatever, brought out to these larger chambers by men doing the same work with lighter loads in smaller areas.  (For perhaps the best description ever of men at work in a coal mine, see the gorgeous George Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London)

This is one of those images I think that will elicit a pretty light-hearted reaction until your brain catches up to the reality of what the print is really depicting.

 

This  image is actually much rarer than a mining cross section--it is a plan (looking from the top and down) of a mine showing the mode and direction of ventilating the whole bit, printed in 1818.  (As it turns out it is rarer still to see a plan depicting a mine's numerous layers--I've honestly not seen another one of these done before 1900.)  What an incredible image this must have been to the early 18th-century eye, seeing such a novel, and rare, depiction of (important!) data.

In the Victorian panoply, the technological temple ma have had an entryway mosaic constructed from the idea of the mine cross section or plan--it is a structural, semi-architectural bit after all, made to withstand advanced weight and pressure.  Or how about a mine cross section template for a stained glass window?  I can imagine the Temple of Technology boasting a design schema of nothing but elements like these--those people trusted, perhaps even worshiped, the small and great mechanical machines and contrivances of their era.  All you have to do is look at the housings for even some of the simplest objects and you'll find a metallic skin of awe and beauty, a symbol of admiration and respect for analog creativity.

 

An Analog(ous) Victorian youtube: the Eccentric vs. the Insane in Victorian England

JF Ptak Science Books LLC  Post 21

The "eccentric" versus the "insane" in Victorian England may well have been identified by the amount of available disposable income--if you could afford your whimsy and misery, then you were "eccentric"; if not, then you  were "insane", which also meant that you were culpable of being scooped up by The Authorities and interned if you turned out to be a larger/smellier/more obnoxious nuisance than a simple dot of the street.   That or you may have wound up as an electrically-prodded subject in an experiment by Charles Darwin (Expression of Emotions....).   In this way the past telescopes nicely into the present, less the electrical stimulation bit. 

The image shown here is that of Mr. James Lucas, "the Hermit of Red-Coat's Green, (near Hitchens)", living his life in a most uncommon hermit-like fashion, even for a hermit.  Seems to me that a hermit would be removed from society and be away from people; Mr. Lucas may be of a singular caste of that genre, living his life alone in the very midst of society--he lived in the kitchen of his townhouse, in a single room with a window to the street.  There he lived out his life in full and constant view of the passersby on the busy sidewalk.  Crowds would come by and stare, and Mr. Lucas would stare back--he would rarely, if ever, communicate, though he would ("he was not miserly") give out "farthings and gin" to "swarms of tramps", no to mention sweetmeats to children.   He'd watch people watching him.

He also didn't write (except we are told "upon a check"), and made no physical effort to retain anything that he thought about; nor was the reason for his uncommon lifestyle made known.

He was one son of "an opulent London merchant", and in time proved to be an incorrigible and strong-willed non-conformist (with the funds to do so in some comfort).  He evidently went completely over the edge when his mother died, and after a year of keeping her body in the house removed to the kitchen, where he spent the rest of his days (living there from 1850 to 1874).

After he died and his room cleaned out for the sale of the family's property, it was discovered that the floor was covered in two feet of ashes and soot from the kitchen fireplace.  Without the family money Mr. Lucas surely would've wound up on a cadaver table long before his seventieth year, suffering real social Dickensian travail rather than that which existed just in his mind.