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A witness account of solar microscope projections: collective acts integrating across personal and historical memory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 March 2008

ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
ELIZABETH CAVICCHI
Affiliation:
Edgerton Center, 4-405, MIT, Cambridge, MA 02139, USA. Email: [email protected].
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Abstract

The paper describes the author's witnessing of images projected from an eighteenth-century solar microscope made by John Dollond, now at the Deutsches Museum in Munich. Peter Heering facilitated this session as part of his research on the solar microscope. A rectangular mirror, the length of a hand, mounted outside a museum window caught the sunlight and directed it indoors into the microscope's optical tube with its specimen. Astonishing detail was displayed in the resulting image projected onto a screen at human height. Crisply delineated scales patterned the image cast by a historical specimen of a butterfly wing. Observers interacted fluidly with these images in the very dark room. In sharing what we noticed, questioned and conjectured, we contributed to a temporary community. These participant interactions relate to Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's notion that, in the seventeenth century, Robert Boyle used witnessing as a ‘collective act’. Here, the ‘collective act’ spanned participation across history. For example, Robert Hooke's 1665 Micrographia inspired Philip and Phylis Morrison's workshop during my college years and their collaboration with the Eames Office on a film depicting travel through ‘powers of ten’, based on Kees Boeke's 1957 picture book. Personal memories were extended and informed by historical experiences, both for Robert Hooke's subsequent interpreters and for Peter Heering's participants.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , September 2008 , pp. 369 - 383
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 British Society for the History of Science

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References

1 English was used in Peter's presentation and in our discussion.

2 Saide, J. D., ‘Identification of a connecting filament protein in insect fibrillar flight muscle’, Journal of Molecular Biology (1981), 153, 661–79CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Saide, J. D. and Ullrick, W. C., ‘Purification and properties of the isolated honeybee Z-disc’, Journal of Molecular Biology (1974), 87, 671–83CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed.

3 In preparing this account I checked for myself the functions of the Dollond microscope's two indoor screws by manipulating their equivalents on a signed Dollond solar microscope (number 1224) in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments at Harvard University.

4 The unsigned Harvard instrument (number 0043 in the Collection of Historical Scientific Instruments) was attributed by I. B. Cohen as probably by Benjamin Martin, on the basis of a 1765 Harvard invoice for a Martin solar microscope. I. B. Cohen, Some Early Tools of American Science, an Account of the Early Scientific Instruments and Mineralogical and Biological Collections in Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1950, 170. The Harvard instrument resembles one illustrated in Fig. XX by Martin in his Optical Essays … Containing Practical Descriptions … Solar Microscope, London, 1765(? undated).

5 J. Cuff, Description of the Solar, or Camera Obscura Microscope as Made and Sold by John Cuff, London, c.1744 (undated, three-page pamphlet).

6 Quotation from my questionnaire completed after the demonstration.

7 Dancers' bodies intercepted projections of water images and cast shadows on the imaged wall in Dawn Davis Loring's composition ‘Bodies of Water’, performed at Green Street Studios in Cambridge, MA on 20 and 21 October 2006. Actress and writer Rebekah Maggor re-creates historical performances of nineteenth-century Shakespearean actresses. Not just the historical words and gestures, but also the historical experience and relationship of performer and audience, came to life in her premiere of ‘An Evening with Shakespeare's Actresses in America’ on 30 January 2006 at the Zero Arrow Theatre, Cambridge, MA.

8 The Martin instrument is identified in note 4 above; in addition to Martin, op. cit. (4), are his other brochures, lacking figures of the solar microscope, including Essay on Visual Glasses, London, 1758; Micrographia Nova: A New Treatise on the Microscope … Solar Microscope, London, 1742.

9 Cuff, op. cit. (5), 3, explains the use of brass: ‘The Brass Slider is to confine any small living object, that it may be viewed, without crushing or destroying it.’

10 Quotation from my questionnaire completed after the demonstration.

11 R. Hooke, Micrographia or some Physiological Descriptions of Minute Bodies made by Magnifying Glasses with Observations and Inquiries thereupon, reprint, New York, 1961 (first published London, 1665), 115, Schem. XI.

12 Quotation from my questionnaire completed after the demonstration.

13 Quotations from my email to P. Heering of 22 September 2004.

14 My class is described in E. Cavicchi, ‘Historical experiments in students' hands: unfragmenting science through action and history’, Science and Education, in press, posted on Online First, 2007.

15 S. Shapin and S. Schaffer, Leviathan and the Air-Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life, Princeton, 1985.

16 Shapin and Schaffer, op. cit. (15), 56, 40, 42–4.

17 Shapin and Schaffer, op. cit. (15), 26, 249–52.

18 Hooke, op. cit. (11), Preface, sig. a.

19 Hooke, op. cit. (11), Preface, sig. b and 242.

20 Shapin and Schaffer, op. cit. (15), 59.

21 A. W. McKinney, ‘Shaping history: five students, three artifacts, and the material, social and economic lives of late nineteenth-century butter-makers’, Ed.D. dissertation, AAT 3134494, Harvard University, 2004.

22 The printed dot is illustrated in Hooke, op. cit. (11), Schem. II and again in The Faithful Eye of Robert Hooke, Elementary Science Study text, Boston, 1965, 3. Hooke's poppy seed appears in Schem. XIX of his book, and also at page 15 of The Faithful Eye.

23 Just arrived from London, For the Entertainment of the Curious and Others, And is now to be SEEN, by Six or more, in a large commodious Room, at the House of Mr. Vidal, in Second-Street; The Solar or Camera Obscura Microscope, Invented by the Ingenious Dr. Liberkhun, anonymous poem, lines 1–4, printed by Benjamin Franklin, Philadelphia, 1744, Early American Imprints, First Series, 5419.

24 K. Boeke, Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps, with introduction by A. Compton, New York, 1957.

25 Hooke's poppy seed drawing is also reproduced in the illustration 10−3 in Philip Morrison, Phylis Morrison and the Office of Charles and Ray Eames, Powers of Ten: About the Relative Size of Things in the Universe, New York, 1982. The Powers of Ten film, with subtitle A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero, was made by the Offices of Charles and Ray Eames in 1977 (now a DVD issued in 2000). A first, black-and-white, version appeared in 1968 with the title A Rough Sketch for a Proposed Film Dealing with the Powers of Ten and the Relative Size of Things in the Universe. Both films were widely distributed in educational settings; see http://www.eamesoffice.com. The Powers of Ten video clip(s) may also be available under Google Video and YouTube, providing online video of the Eames version of Powers of Ten.

26 Hooke, op. cit. (11), Preface, sig. b. Debbie Douglas reflects that in present culture the idea that the smallest things can be seen is now pervasive. She writes: ‘we hardly notice we take for granted that nothing is too small to be seen’. D. Douglas, ‘Singular beauty: a curator's introduction’, in Singular Beauty: Simple Microscopes from the Giordano Collection, Catalogue of an exhibition at the MIT Museum, 1 September 2006–30 June 2007, R. Giordano, 2006.

27 This microscope workshop, titled ‘The microscope in the museum, an essay in the unity of art and science’, conducted by Philip and Phylis Morrison, took place in January 1976 as part of MIT's Independent Activities Period. The activity, involving ‘examining the microscopic world from the joint perspective of visual art and science’, was listed in the ‘MIT Final Guide’, December 1975, 23, no. 286, MIT Archives.

28 Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles and Ray Eames, produced a CD computer optical disc portraying parallel travel across such axes as space, time and design: ‘Powers of Ten interactive’, production of the Eames Office and DATT Japan, Pyramid Media, 1999. This CD does not run on Windows and Macintosh operating systems later than 1999.

29 Anonymous poem, lines 7–10, in Just arrived from London, op. cit. (23).

30 P. Heering, ‘The replication of the torsion balance experiment: the inverse square law and its refutation by early 19th century German physicists’, in Restaging Coulomb: Usages, controverses et réplications autour de la balance de torsion (ed. C. Blondel and M. Dörries), Florence, 1994; T. Settle, Galileo's Experimental Research, Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, 1996; K. Staubermann, ‘Controlling vision: the photometry of Karl Friedrich Zöllner’, Ph.D. dissertation, No. 22598, University of Cambridge, 1998.

31 See articles in ‘Special issue: the replication method in history of science’, Archives des sciences (2005), 58, esp. J. Lacki and Y. Karim, ‘Replication of Guye and Lavanchy's experiment on the velocity dependency of inertia’, 159–69; E. Cavicchi, ‘Sparks, shocks and voltage traces as windows into experience’, 123–36; H. Weber and J. Frercks, ‘Replication of replicability: Schmidt's electrical machine’, 112–22.

32 Belloni, L., ‘The repetition of experiments and observations: its value in studying the history of medicine (and science)’, Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences (1970), 25, 159–67Google Scholar, 163.

33 Zanobio, B., ‘L'Immagine filamentoso-reticolare nell's analtomia microscopica da; XVII al XIX secolo’, Physis (1960), 2, 299–317Google Scholar, 300, 303. For similar examples see Randelli, M., ‘La Anatome Osssium di Domenico Gagliardi’, Physis (1960), 2, 223–31Google Scholar; R. Mazzolini, ‘Experimental appendix’, in idem, The Iris in Eighteenth-Century Physiology, Bern, 1980.

34 Jacyna, L. S., ‘Moral fiber: the negotiation of microscopic facts in Victorian Britain’, Journal of the History of Biology (2003), 36, 39–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 Tweney, R., ‘On replicating Faraday: experiencing historical procedures in science’, Archives des sciences (2005), 58, 137–48Google Scholar.