JF Ptak Science Books Post 2766
It is difficult sometimes to be appreciative of the smaller things when we are so used to the bigger ones--like in the writing life life, complaining of occasional slow bits in connectivity that will allow you to
In the old days if it used to be necessary to go to the library, use reference tools, locate the journal, locate the article, put in a request to see the volume, wait for the deliveries, and then perhaps one of them will actually be what you're looking for--and this is just the first step after you've done the initial reading and research, the digging through footnotes and etc. for what led or inspired people in their thinking had just begun. Then there's the driving to the library, and finding a spot of park (in my case that was for the LC and parking was no easy matter), and then came the distraction of the greasy spoon on PA Ave and the drive home, all of which could take part or most of the day. That was all fine, because in my case, one of the world's greatest libraries was a half-hour away--much less depending upon traffic. In the older days, well, if you weren't in a large city you would not have had access to what you needed, which meant correspondence to acquire the materials and so on, turning the process I experienced in a day into weeks, or longer. IT all gets more complicated the further back you go, and once you get to the point preceding a general postal system, stuff gets hard. Also, someone like I would be out pulling potatoes out of the ground instead of researching who-cares-about-THAT stuff in the library.
I try to remember that when I complain that my connectivity is slower than it usually is.
All of this came to mind seeing these paragraphs (literally and figuratively!) by the one of my favorite figures of the 19th century, the polymathic W. Stanley Jevons1 (1835-1882), who wrote on how to use graph paper.
The creation of graph paper came decades after the creation of the bar graph (William Playfair in 1786), monuments in the history of the visual display of information. It was a great and very highly useful creation--or creations, I should say, for the idea of the graph and for the paper. Jevons did not invent graph paper, though he may be the first to write about it as a tool. He give credit to an earlier writer for using graph paper for the first time: J. Perkins' "On the Progressive Compression of Water by High Degrees of Force, with Some Trials of Its Effects on Other Fluids" in the Philosophical Transactions for 1826, (p 544, see below for one of the images from the paper).
Source: William Stanley Jevons, The Principles of Science, a Treatise on Logic and Scientific Method, 1874, the chapter "Graphical Methods". See: https://archive.org/details/theprinciplesof00jevoiala/page/492
J. Perkins (above), 1826.
Notes:
1. Here's another thing. I've already outlived Jevons by 15 years. Like so many impossibly accomplished people (like Dickens and Shakespeare) he died very young in relation to what was accomplished. They all lived to about the average life expectancy, somehow fitting many lifetimes of work and creativity into one. How they did all that they did, I really don't know.
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