The Invention of Small Things and the Coming of the Internet--Back to the Flea

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"A network of such [computers], connected to one another by wide-band communication lines [which provided] the functions of present-day libraries together with anticipated advances in informationstorage and retrieval and [other] symbiotic functions." —J.C.R. Licklider,  his epochal “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, 1960

There is a famous and most likely apocryphal story made famous in Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time where a famous “scientist” (I‘ve heard him described as James Jeans, for one and the nicest fit, others say Bertrand Russell though it matters not) is confronted by a member of his audience during a lecture on astronomy/cosmology.  A woman rises and confronts the speaker, determining that what has come to pass as fact regarding the universe is all rubbish, and that the Earth was in fact a flat object resting on the back of a turtle.  The speaker then asks her what the turtle is standing on; she replies immediately of course that it is another turtle, and that it is “turtles all the way down”.  It’s a nice story, and bears some resemblance to Native American stories of the Earth born on the back of a turtle, of the Hindu legend of the Earth being borne by an elephant standing on the back of a tortoise, and so on, all the way down.  Even Dr. Seuss’ Yertle the Turtle can make an appearance in this one.

This came to mind thinking about the contribution of (the not-entirely forgotten) John Benjamin Dancer (1812-1887) to photography and its relation to the history of the Internet.  Dancer was in the immediate second wave of the greats of photography following the short first wave of Niepce and Talbot and Daguerre, and did come up with a number of very good ideas at the birth of photography—one of them in theory is an early foundation stone for the technical distribution of data and information.(These two slides are  examples of Dancer's work and are reproduced from the Whipple Museum of the History of Science, Cambridge.)

Dancer evidently went to work immediately after reading of Daguerre’s 1839 process.  The technical aspects of the Daguerre effort were les daunting than they were messy—he found the descriptions “crude and obscure”, and proceeded with his own series of experiments, producing a camera some six weeks later.  It is interesting too that he seemed to have based the camera on a camera obscura:  “being a practical optician the camera was one of my own construction, such as I had frequently supplied to artists for tracing the outline of views in the camera….”

He lectured later in that same year (1839), showing lantern slides of his accomplishments to crowds of up to 1500 people.  His great accomplishment was in the field of microphotography—I should say rather that he invented the field.  And it is of great interest that the first images that he made using the brand new invention of the camera coupled with a microscope was that of a flea.  In yesterday’s post I wrote about Robert Hooke’s Micrographia and his spectacular discovery of the fineness and detail of biological specks like the flea, showing audiences—the world—for the first time that these insignificant creatures represented an entirely new, just-discovered world, and that they were as tremendously well-developed as any other large living thing.  Back to the flea, as it were, went Dancer—I have no idea whether he knew he was calling on Hooke’s iconic image or not.  But it is at least a lovely coincidence.

Dancer also displayed images of documents that he reduced by a scale of 1/160, printing a fully-legible copy of a printed document that was only 3mm tall.  The significance of this invention seems to have been lost until it was picked up again in 1853 by the great John Herschel, who recognized the process as a way to archive significant documents.

 I like it more for its possible impact, perhaps, on some of the thinking on the construction of a world-wide distribution of knowledge, as a necessary step to get to the stage where Vannevar Bush—who was widely acknowledged as being the grandfather of the internet at a MIT Conference about a 20 years ago—could theorize about his own precursor to the internet--the Memex, describing it for the popular audience in the Atlantic Monthly in June*, 1945.    Among many other things, Bush—who was also, probably, one of the great figures of WWII for his heroic role in leading the U.S. scientific and technical war effort and seeming to make the correct decisions all of the time—foresaw a means of distributing data, more or less instantly, calling on the delivery of microfilmed information. Bush, who was also a great engineer and father of one of the countries best analog computers (in 1931/33), had the notion for a world wide technical distribution of knowledge, but, as he wrote this in 1945 (!), could not see far enough into the future development of the digital computer (the ENIAC just being born at that time, though it must be pointed out that Bush was open to the idea of magnetic storage).  His ideas were very far reaching, touching on microminiaturization and artificial intelligence, and his ideas even now aren’t so much coyly science fiction as they are, well, implemented.  There’s a lot of Bush’s memex that are in place today

So, the turtles and wondering about Dancer’s influence in the string of inventions and discoveries that gave birth to the www: how far down do these influences go?  The touchstone for the creation of the internet is usually seen as being with JCR Licklider (see quote above) in 1960, or with Paul Baran or Leonard Kleinrock a year later; but perhaps it is earlier still with the implementation of ARPA (set into place immediately after the launch of Sputnik).  Of course none of this is possible without computers, so you could work your way back through time to the transistor, to Bush, to the Stibitz (Bell)Relay Computer, to Johnny von Neumann, to the thermionic tube (Bush), and then all of the support discoveries and inventions that rolled into these, and so on.  Back to photography, back to Babbage’s plans for his analytical engine, back to the invention of moveable type, to the invention of paper, to the creation of libraries, to the general idea of the popular distribution of knowledge.  All the way down.  But I do think it worthwhile to think of Dancer’s contribution in so far as it allowed people to think of easier, quicker ways of moving around vast amounts of data and information.  And that I think is worth remembering. 

*I’ve also got to say that at the same time Bush was writing about the future of intelligence he was also at work developing the U.S.  response to the upcoming race in atomic weapons.  He and his team were busy crafting responses and policies and the reaction of the Soviets and the sharing of the atomic bomb data and all of that, and all before the test at Alamogordo. Really, the guy was spectacular.

 

 

Comments

[Jeff]

Here's a very wonderful small thing: http://www.rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/

No format issues. Just size.

[John Ptak]

Very cool--never heard of the Rosetta Project before. Thanks. The concept of looking at a disk that holds eye-legible down to nano images is fascinating.