The Faber Book of Science (12 page)
Read The Faber Book of Science Online
Authors: John Carey
Equally appalling was Lyell's assurance that:
Amidst the vicissitudes of the earth's surface, species cannot be immortal, but must perish, one after the other, like the individuals which compose them. There is no possibility of escaping from this conclusion.
This wrung an anguished cry from Tennyson:
Are God and Nature then at strife
        That Nature lends such evil dreams?
        So careful of the type she seems,
So careless of the single life â¦
âSo careful of the type?' but no
        From scarped cliff and quarried stone
        She cries, âA thousand types are gone:
I care for nothing, all shall go.'
Lyell's own response was calmer and more chilling. He foresaw not merely the extinction of the human race, but the gradual obliteration of every single trace of its existence.
We may anticipate with confidence that many edifices and implements of human workmanship, and the skeletons of men, and casts of the human form, will continue to exist when the great part of the present mountains, continents, and seas have disappeared. Assuming the future duration of the planet to be indefinitely protracted, we can foresee no limit to the perpetuation of some of the memorials of man, which are continually entombed in the bowels of the earth or in the bed of the ocean, unless we carry forward our views to a period sufficient to allow the various causes of change, both igneous and aqueous, to remodel more than once the entire crust of the earth.
One
complete revolution will be inadequate to efface every monument of
our existence ⦠Yet it is no less true that none of the works of a mortal can be eternal ⦠Even when they have been included in rocky strata, when they have been made to enter as it were into the solid framework of the globe itself, they must nevertheless eventually perish; for every year some portion of the earth's crust is shattered by earthquakes or melted by volcanic fire, or ground to dust by the moving waters on the surface.
Source: Charles Lyell,
Principles
of
Geology,
London, John Murray, 1830â3.
Changes in early nineteenth-century mentality, related to the progress of science, may help to explain a linguistic development noted by Adam Phillips in his book
On
Kissing,
Tickling
and
Being
Bored
(1993). Phillips is Principal Child Psychotherapist at Charing Cross Hospital.
The history of the word
worrying
is itself revealing. Deriving from the Old English
wyrgan,
meaning ‘to kill by strangulation’, it was originally a hunting term, describing what dogs did to their prey as they caught it. The
Oxford
English
Dictionary
has, among several meanings from the fourteenth to the early nineteenth century: ‘To swallow greedily or to devour … to choke a person or animal with a mouthful of food … to seize by the throat with the teeth and tear or lacerate; to kill or injure by biting or shaking. Said, e.g., of dogs or wolves attacking sheep, or of hounds when they seize their prey.’ Johnson’s
Dictionary
of 1755 has for
worry
:
‘To tear or mangle as a beast tears its prey. To harass or persecute brutally.’ A worrier for Johnson is someone who persecutes others, ‘one who worries or torments them’. Two things are immediately striking in all of this. First there is the original violence of the term, the way it signifies the vicious but successful outcome of pursuing an object of desire. This sense of brutal foreplay is picked up in Dryden’s wonderful lines in
All
for
Love
:
‘And then he grew familiar with her hand / Squeezed it, and worry’d it with ravenous kisses.’ Worrying, then, is devouring, a peculiarly intense, ravenous form of eating. The second striking thing is that worrying, until the nineteenth century, is something one does to somebody or something else. In other words, at a certain point in history worrying became something that people could do to
themselves
. Using, appropriately enough, an analogy from hunting, worrying becomes a consuming, or rather self-consuming, passion. What was once thought of as animal becomes human, indeed all too human. What was once done by the mouths of the rapacious, the
desirous, is now done, often with a relentless weariness, by the minds of the troubled.
It is not until the early nineteenth century, a time of significant social transformation, that we get the psychological sense of worrying as something that goes on inside someone, what the
Oxford
English
Dictionary
calls ‘denoting a state of mind’, giving as illustration a quotation from Hazlitt’s
Table
Talk
:
‘Small pains are … more within our reach: we can fret and worry ourselves about them.’ Domestic agitation replaces any sense of quest in Hazlitt’s essay ‘On Great and Little Things’. By the 1850s we find many of Dickens’s characters worrying or ‘worriting’. Where once wild or not-so-wild animals had worried their prey, we find Dickens’s people worrying their lives away about love and money and social status. From, perhaps, the middle of the nineteenth century people began to prey on themselves in a new kind of way. Worry begins to catch on as a description of a new state of mind. It is now impossible to imagine a life without worry. In little more than a century worrying has become what we call a fact of life, as integral to our lives, as apparently ahistorical, as any of our most familar feelings. So in Philip Roth’s recent fictional autobiography,
The
Facts,
it is surprising to find the word made interesting again in the narrator’s description of his hardworking Jewish father: ‘Despite a raw emotional nature that makes him prey to intractable worry, his life has been distinguished by the power of resurgence.’ The pun on
prey
suggests the devotion of that generation of American Jews to a new God. But the narrator also implies that his father’s nature and history make him subject to his own persecution in the form of relentless worrying, and also that something about his life is reflected in the quality of his worry, its intractability, its obstinate persistence. A new kind of heroic resilience is required to deal with the worries of everyday life.
Source: Adam Phillips,
On
Kissing,
Tickling
and
Being
Bored,
London, Faber and Faber, 1993.
The camera obscura (or ‘dark room’) began to be used as a drawing-aid by Italian artists in the Renaissance. They found that light entering a room through a pinhole in a window-shutter formed an inverted image, on the opposite wall, of the scene outside. In 1568 a professor at Padua, Daniel Barbaro, substituted a lens for the pinhole, explaining that it produced a more brilliant image.
Close all the shutters and doors until no light enters the room except through the lens, and opposite hold a sheet of paper, which you move forward and backward until the scene appears in sharper detail. There on the paper you will see the whole view as it really is, with its distances, its colours and shadows and motion, the clouds, the waters twinkling, the birds flying. By holding the paper steady you can trace the whole perspective with a pen, shade it, and delicately colour it from nature.
The camera obscura was made portable by fitting the lens into one side of a closed box and covering the opposite side with frosted glass. By the eighteenth century portable camera obscuras were standard artists’ equipment. All that is necessary to make a camera obscura into a camera is to put a sheet of light-sensitive material at the back of the box, which will fix the image. Owing to ignorance of chemistry, however, this step took nearly three centuries.
Around 1817 a French inventor Nicéphore Niepce found that he could fix the camera image using a plate coated in bitumen that hardened on exposure to light. After taking the plate from the camera he washed off the unhardened bitumen in oil of lavender, so developing the picture. A murky view of a farmyard, photographed (with an eight-hour exposure) from his upstairs window, still survives (now in Austin, Texas).
In Paris Niepce met the theatrical scene-painter Louis Daguerre, who shared his interest in the potential of photography. They became partners, and Daguerre continued to experiment independently after Niepce’s death in 1829. To fix the camera image, he found that he could use a sheet of
silver-plated
copper, which he put over a box containing iodine. The iodine fumes reacted with the silver, forming light-sensitive silver iodide. When Daguerre exposed this in his camera, the light reduced the silver-oxide to silver, in proportion to its intensity. He then put the exposed plate over a box containing heated mercury, which gave off fumes that amalgamated with the silver, so that the image became visible. Finally he washed the plate in a strong solution of common salt, rendering the unexposed silver iodide insensitive to further light.
The earliest surviving ‘daguerrotype’ – a still-life of plaster casts and a wicker bottle – dates from 1837. The English country gentleman William Henry Fox Talbot had developed a similar process independently, and may have anticipated Daguerre. A photograph of a latticed window at his house, Lacock Abbey, dates from August 1835. ‘This I believe to be the first instance on record of a house having painted its own portrait,’ he claimed. However, he then laid aside photography to pursue classical studies.
Daguerre kept his process secret, but exhibited examples of his
photographs
. They caused a sensation. Samuel F. B. Morse, the American painter and inventor, who was in Paris at the time invited Daguerre to a demonstration of his electric telegraph, and was invited, in return, to see some daguerrotypes. His reactions were published in the New York
Observer.
The exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it. For example: in a view up the street, a distant sign would be perceived, and the eye could just discern that there were lines of letters upon it, but so minute as not to be read with the naked eye. By the assistance of a powerful lens, which magnified 50 times, applied to the delineation, every letter was clearly and distinctly legible, and so also were the minutest breaks and lines in the walls of the buildings, and the pavements of the streets. The effect of the lens upon the picture was in a great degree like that of the telescope in nature.
Objects moving are not impressed. The Boulevard, so constantly filled with the moving throng of pedestrians and carriages, was perfectly solitary, except for an individual who was having his boots brushed. His feet were compelled, of course, to be stationary for some time, one being on the box of the boot black, and the other on the ground. Consequently his boots and legs were well defined, but he is without body or head, because these were in motion.
Daguerre proposed to sell his secret to the highest bidder. In the event it was bought by the French state. The agreement was signed by Louis Philippe on 7 August 1839, granting Daguerre 6,000 francs a year for life. Twelve days later, at a special joint meeting of the Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Fine Arts, the technical details were made public. An eyewitness, Marc Antonine Gaudin, has left this account.
The Palace of the Institute was stormed by a swarm of the curious at the memorable sitting on August 19, 1839, when the process was at long last divulged. Although I came two hours beforehand, like many others I was barred from the hall. I was on the watch with the crowd for everything that happened outside. At one moment an excited man comes out; he is surrounded, he is questioned, and he answers with a know-it-all air that bitumen of Judea and lavender oil is the secret. Questions are multiplied, but as he knows nothing more, we are reduced to talking about bitumen of Judea and lavender oil. Soon the crowd surrounds a newcomer, more startled than the last. He tells us with no further comment that it is iodine and mercury… Finally the sitting is over, the secret is divulged.
A few days later, opticians’ shops were crowded with amateurs panting for daguerrotype apparatus, and everywhere cameras were trained on buildings. Everyone wanted to record the view from his window, and he was lucky who at first trial got a silhouette of roof tops against the sky. He went into ecstasies over chimneys, counted over and over roof tiles and chimney bricks – in a word the technique was so new that even the poorest plate gave him indescribable joy.
Technical improvements followed, and portrait studios opened up all over the western world. By 1853 New York alone had 86 studios. The enormous demand for family pictures was due partly to the high nineteenth-century mortality rates, especially among children.
Secure the shadow ere the substance fade,
Let Nature imitate what Nature made
ran the advertising slogan. An important advance came in the late 1870s with the introduction of highly light-sensitive gelatin emulsion, which allowed fraction-of-a-second exposures and made action photographs possible. The pioneer was the Surrey-born American immigrant Eadward Muybridge (a name adopted in the belief that it was the Anglo-Saxon original of his real name, Edward James Muggeridge). He invented one of the first high-speed
shutters, and took a series of photos of a galloping horse by arranging a row of cameras beside the race track, operated by tapes which the horse ran through. This series, published in England and America in 1879, caused consternation, since it showed that all previous ideas of how a horse moves were incorrect. Muybridge’s photos proved that the horse’s feet are all off the ground at once at one stage in the gallop, but only when they are bunched together under the belly. None of the photos showed the ‘hobbyhorse attitude’, with front legs stretched forwards and hind legs stretched back, traditional in painting. In 1880, using a device he named the zoogyroscope or zoopraxiscope, Muybridge projected his horse pictures in quick succession on to a screen at the California School of Fine Arts, thus inaugurating motion pictures.
In the 1880s hand-held box cameras became common, the best-known being the Kodak, invented by George Eastman, a New York photographic-plate maker. The name, he explained, was quite new, not derived from any existing word. He had chosen it because it was short, memorable and ‘incapable of being misspelled so as to destroy its identity’. This consideration, vital in New York’s polyglot immigrant population, points towards the twentieth-century transition from verbal languages to the universal language of pictures. The cheap, ready-loaded Kodak brought photography, said Eastman:
within the reach of every human being who desires to preserve a record of what he sees. Such a photographic notebook is an enduring record of many things seen only once in a lifetime, and enables the fortunate possessor to go back, by the light of his own fireside, to scenes which would otherwise fade from memory and be lost.
Source:
The
History
of
Photography:
From
1839
to
the
Present,
completely revised and enlarged, by Beaumont Newhall, London, Secker & Warburg, 1982. The Barbaro, Gaudin and Eastman quotes are from Newhall, the Barbaro and Gaudin being (presumably) translated by him. The Morse is also quoted by Newhall, but is from the New York
Observer
for 1839.