Blank and Missing Things #31: Missing Earth

JF Ptak Science Books LLC     Post 504

In 1830 when Amos Eaton, filling up his chair and burning the  midnight oils in his home in Albany New York, was figuring out the insides of the earth  He had but little direct evidence to go on, and the publications on the topic of the center of the earth were left to speculation not much better then than science fiction (a term which had not been invented yet; neither for that matter had the word "scientist").   A  very careful  observer, Eaton applied what he knew about the strata of the earth to a theory of how the landforms of the upper/outer mantle were formed. (Eaton (1776-1842) was as influential a teacher as he was a theorist and observer:  some of his students include the following Big Names (for which many buildings on university grounds are named for ):  James Dwight Dana   (geologist, zoologist), James Eights  (Antarctic explorer), Asa Gray ( greatest 19^th c American botanist), James Hall  (first New York State Geologist), Joseph Henry (developed electromagnetism, all-around smart guy who communicated with everyone, secretary of the Smithsonian and so on.)

He applied the discoveries of stratum of William Smith (1759-1839, the "father of English Geology") drawing on a number of maps of his, such as “Strata Identified by Organized Fossils. : Containing Prints on Coloured Paper of the Most Characteristic Specimens in each Stratum” of 1815  and “Geological section from London to Snowdon; showing the varieties of the strata, and the correct altitude of the hills” of 1815 (pictured below), plus much else.  

These two images (left) of cross-sections of the earth appeared in Eaton's Geological Textbook, (1830). The top shows the earth in perfect harmony and in cross-section, depicting the strata in six layers beneath a calm and palcid ocean.  There was trouble though located inside the six bulbous bulbs on the interior of the innermost strata:  as we see in the second image, the six bulbs, filled with
"combustible material", combusted, forming volcanoes and such, thereby parting the waters and forming the continents. It was some pretty  good thinking for the time.  But what attracted me to these images was the labeling of the interior of the newly-exploded earth, "interior probably undisturbed", and blank beyond that point.  a dark, blackish mass, unknown and from where Eaton sat, unknowable.  But Eaton did do an extraordinary job in trying to imagine this stuff, piecing things together from the geological record in those pre-Darwin, pre-Lyell days.  The woodcut at right appeared in the same publication as that above--this incredible rendering depicts the entirety of  North America  in profile, which was a vast leap of faith, an image so severe in its accomplishment that it is difficult today to realize how shocking it must've seemed to the readers of 1830.  I believe this was the first time a true geological cross-section like this was attempted--again to see an X-ray (pre-dating that discovery by 65 years by the way) of the earth and to have it be not so terribly bad (compared to today) was just a phenomenal achievement

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Just for the record, Smith's map of the London area--which presages the Eaton map somewhat--appears below:

Comments

[Jeff]

My sense of intellectual history is distorted (what did they know and when did they know it), but I'm a little surprised by the idea of chambers of combustible material. I guess that served in the absence of other evidence, but it must have seemed a weak idea even then. How would it burn, etc. But they did have to face the fact that hot things came out of the earth. And the image was published in 1830, when the modern science of thermodynamics was just taking off. The picture is very fine. Eaton had a strong intuition about what was going on.

[John Ptak]

It had been a problem for some long time, the issue of where the hot stuff was coming from. Athanasius Kircher, our old brilliant and problematic friend, sort of noodled out a similar resposne to hot in his Mundus back in the mid-17th century. But it was much easier to measure the heights of mountains on the Moon in this year than it was to figure out the depths of the oceans....let alone figure out what was inside the earth.