A Note on the History of Backwards (1878)

JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is a tiny note on the idea of seeing/listening/thinking backwards--I'm not even sure what that means, except for teh obvious cases, especially when you throw technology into the mix to spice up the possibilities of investigation of a backwards form. First of all, the words "backward" and "backwards" go all the way back in the history of English, as we can see in these two pretty examples from the OED:

• 1398   J. Trevisa tr. Bartholomew de Glanville De Proprietatibus Rerum (1495) xiii. xxvi. 456   "By vyolente puttynge of ayre bakward the body of the byrde meuyth forwarde."

•  1697  Dryden tr. Virgil Georgics iii, in tr. Virgil Wks. 101   "Clouds of Sand arise; Spurn'd, and cast backward on the Follower's Eyes"

• 1953 "When I go backwards I'm generally backing up"--Not Yogi Berra

With technology I'm referring to the more subtle ways of exhibiting something/someone in backwards motion rather than the reserve of raising an obelisk--it would be more like seeing a fire burn a house in reverse or rain falling up or a locomotive recovering itself from a head-on collision with a tree via motion picture recordings, things can can't be reproduced backwards simply by reversing the motion. 

As long as I'm at it, I think this sense of "backwards" is differentiated from a reverse chronology.  Citizen Kane starts at the end and works it long and angled-dark ways from the beginning to the opening shot; the movies Momento and Eternal Sunshine... are fuller in their reverse chronology, as is the occasional episode of Seinfeld and the book (and movie) Benjamin Button, to name a few examples. 

What brought me to this place was an article  by Fleeming Jenkin and J.A. Ewing on the new invention, "The Phonograph" in Nature (1878), where their entire interest in the short note was the use of the machine in playing recorded speech backwards. This would be among the first uses of the new technology in a way that displayed info in a new way from all other previous human experience. This leads me to think about the next step in the development of the motion picture, where people could "unwatch" a developed motion of something and have it reconstitute itself right before their eyes. No doubt that was an extraordinary experience. So far as the motion picture goes, it would be almost another twenty years before a motion picture would be exhibited popularly that showed an action in reverse--and that honor goes yet again to Louis Lumiere and his "Demolition of a Wall" in 1896, still in the first decade-ish of the invention of what we would think of as a motion picture film.  

In any event, these are just some loose thoughts on the subject of "Backwards". 

Here's the short article by Jenkin and  Ewing: 

The Phonograph

“WE shall be much obliged if you will allow us to draw the

attention of your readers to a curious fact which the phonograph
has allowed us to prove, and which we announced last Monday at
a meeting of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. We have seen no
mention of the fact elsewhere.

Not only are vowels unaltered by being spoken backwards,
but the same fact is true of consonants. Whether the pulsations
of air be made in a given order or in the reverse order the ear
accepts the sound as indicating the same letter. This is true of
all the simple vowel sounds and of all the simple consonant
sounds, including of course several combinations which in English
are spelt with two letters, as th or ng, but which are really
simple consonants.

We tried the experiment on single pairs of syllables separated
by a single consonant, as ada, ała, aſa, etc. A person coming
from outside and ignorant of what consonant had been spoken
was able to identify the consonants quite as well backwards as
forwards. The chief difficulty was found in distinguishing affa
from assa.

We find that this peculiarity is not limited to consonants
between vowels, but that ab said backwards becomes &a. We
have here a standard as to what does really constitute a single
letter or element of articulate speech; it is any one reversible
part. Your readers who possess a phonograph may most easily
verify this observation by saying a word backwards, and
hearing the phonograph say it intelligibly for wards; for instance,
noshdeesossa produces association beautifully.

We shall be glad to learn whether this fact has been already
published, and also whether it was foreseen as a possibility by
any writer. “

Notes

1. Fleeming Jenkin and J.A. Ewing. "The Phonograph", a letter to the editor of Nature, March 28, 1878, p 423, in the weekly issue for volume 17, no. 439, March 28, 1878, pp 417-440.