JF Ptak Science Books

Found Poetry in Lost Plankton (1930)

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Over on my blog I've made a number of posts on "Found Poetry"--phrases and constructions of interesting structural images that when removed from a narrative form and subjected to a different display find a sort of light art form in themselves. The phrases and sentence are in their original order—spacing and delineation have changed a bit to focus their attractiveness. There have been posts on "Found Poetry" in the (sometimes very extended) titles of Renaissance books, recipes and instructions on cooking dainty sardines, a disintegrating machine from 1877, descriptions of clouds from 1726, and well, you get the picture. "Found art is where you don't find it", as M. Duchamp didn't say—sometimes the found poetry is pretty obvious, sometimes not. Today's entry has a terrific title, though the text lets us down a little, but then closes up very strong in the last paragraph. And so, from Nature, 4 January 1930, volume 125, no. 3140, the last sentences of the last paragraph:

"Do Ocean Plankton Animals Lose Themselves?

Have they moved out of their normal light,

and reached layers at which the intensity

is below

the threshold, thus to be doomed

to everlasting night until perchance by random movements

one bright day

they may swim once more

into the threshold intensity zone

and attracted upwards

to their optimum intensity?"

            --F.S. Russell, Marine Biological Association, Plymouth

Charles Babbage Obituary in "Nature", November 1871.

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This is a fine and understanding obituary of Charles Babbage--it appeared in Nature on 9 November 1871, just two weeks after 
the death of the Great Man on 20 October, and I include the article in full below. You'll see that a lot of attention is paid to the 
Difference and Analytical Engines, and how much attention they received from Babbage and how much money the
government spent on it. It was a failure as a working/practical/applicable enterprise, the writer states (which was true) , but the
thinking that went into the machines were not.  That Babbage didn't see the completion of the computer projects wasn't necessarily 
his fault, and to me seems to say that time will out.  The obit writer (Lockyer, the founding editor of the journal?) was positively 
convinced of the clarity and precision of Babbage's thinking and writing, and convinced of his genius. 

"THERE is no fear that the worth of the late Charles Babbage will be over-estimated by this or any generation. To the majority of 
people he was little known except as an irritable and eccentric person, possessed by  a strange idea of a calculating machine, which
 he failed  to carry to completion. Only those who have carefully studied a number of his writings can adequately conceive  
the nobility of his nature and the depth of his genius."
"Mr. Babbage, relinquishing all notions of completing the Difference machine, bestowed all his energies upon the designs of the 
wonderful Analytical Engine. This great object of his aspirations was to be little less than the mind of a mathematician embodied 
in metallic wheels and levers...Nothing but a careful study of the published accounts can give an adequate notion of the vast 
mechanical ingenuity lavished by Mr. Babbage upon this fascinating design. Although we are often without detailed explanations
of the means, there can be little doubt that everything which Mr. Babbage asserted to be possible would have been theoretically
possible."


"The engine was to possess a kind of power of prevision, and was to be so constructed that intentional disturbance of all the loose
 parts would give no error in the final result."

"Although for many years Mr. Babbage entertained the intention of constructing this machine, and made many preparations, we
can hardly suppose it capable of practical realisation. Before 1851 he appears to have despaired of Its completion, but his
workshops were never wholly closed. It was his pleasure to lead any friend or visitor though these rooms and explain their contents. 
No more strange or melancholy sight could well be seen. Around these rooms in Dorset Street were the ruins of a life time of the
most severe and ingenious mental labours perhaps ever exerted by man. The drawings of the machine were alone a wonderful result
of skill and industry; cabinets full of tools, pieces of mechanism, and various contrivances for facilitating exact workmanship,
were on every side, now lying useless."

Read the rest of the obituary:

Gliding Flight and The Seventh Seal (1897)

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Science heavyweight and Nature editor and founder J. Norman Lockyer wrote in 1897¹ a three-page summary of the recent experimental work of aviation pioneer Percy Pilcher. Mr. Pilcher (1866-1899) was rather more than a "pioneer"--he was an inventor and perhaps Great Britain's premier experimentalist and visionary in flight at the end of the century—and made significant contributions towards understanding flight dynamics, though he would not live out the century, fatally crashing in a glider flight that was leading towards the launching of a powered glider of his own design.

The article was accompanied by a seven-part rapid-photo series of Pilcher in flight, and what caught my eye in this series were the small figures on the rolling hill under the glider. Enlarging the image quite a bit (the originals in Nature shows figures only 3mm tall) brings proto-post-Swedish-noir to mind, especially the very animated figure on the right and  particularly for a famous scene from Bergman's Seventh Seal (1957):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Notes:

Sir J. Norman Lockyer (1836-1920), long-time experimentalist/instrumentalist/theoretician who worked in astronomy and spectroscopy and was co-discoverer of helium (found in the atmosphere of the Sun).

1. (PILCHER, Percy.) Lockyer, William J. "Soaring Flight", in Nature, a Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science, 12 August 1897, vol 56 no. 1450, pp 344-346 in the issue of pp 337-360.

And the full series of photos: