Posts Tagged ‘Robert Hooke’
“We say the cows laid out Boston. Well, there are worse surveyors.”*…
On plotting the relationships of things in space…
Written by Leonhard Zubler, a Swiss goldsmith and instrument maker who is credited with popularizing the use of the plane table as a tool for surveying, Novum instrumentum geometricum illuminates the shared history of land-surveying and militaristic range-finding technologies. The text is intercut with elaborate copperplate engravings that showcase the might of trigonometry and triangulation in the immediacy of conflict. Bombardiers pack canons that are aimed with advanced precision at distant towers; the construction of ornate fortifications are planned with ease thanks to geometric instruments; and seemingly insurmountable crags are brought down to earth through the surveyor’s sightline. Readers are promised that they will learn how to measure the width of a moat or the height of wall in order to breach them more efficiently.
Novum instrumentum geometricum mainly features images related to an early modern instrument known as the triquetrum or Dreistab, a three-armed ruler, with two pivot points, used for charting angles in the heavens and on earth. Zubler most often showcases a two-armed variation known as the Zweistab, which includes a “finely divided scale and micrometer slide for exact settings”, writes Uta Lindgren. As if to show the versatility of this technology, the instrument is wielded on the masts of ships, balconies, and by a man perched atop the stump of a felled tree — even comically enlarged to depict its arms stretching out to touch the objects of their reconnaissance. Frequently two instruments are employed in parallel, by a pair of figures a fixed distance apart, which would allow the surveyors to estimate the distance to a faraway point using trigonometry.
Little is known about Leonhard Zubler (b. 1565), aside from his divorce in 1604, and probable death by plague circa 1611. He once created an extensive plan for modernizing the cityscape of Zurich, which was subsequently lost. During his lifetime, Zubler’s instruments were so desired that he was able to open a commercial outlet in Frankfurt am Main in 1608…
More mesmerizing illustrations: “Angles of Reconnaissance: Novum Instrumentum Geometricum (1607)” from @PublicDomainRev.
* Ralph Waldo Emerson
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As we triangulate, we might recall that it was on this date in 1667, about a year after the Great Fire of London, that Robert Hooke, a physicist (“natural philosopher”), astronomer, geologist, meteorologist, and architect was sub-contracted by friend and fellow architect Christopher Wren to conduct a survey of the fire-damaged area to establish ownership and facilitate reconstruction. As Lisa Jardine observed, “in the four weeks from the 4th of October, [Hooke] helped map the fire-damaged area, began compiling a Land Information System for London, and drew up building regulations for an Act of Parliament to govern the rebuilding.” Hooke also designed some of the buildings that made up the “new” London, among them: the Monument to the Great Fire of London (1672), Montagu House in Bloomsbury )1674 and Bethlem Royal Hospital (1674), which became known as “Bedlam.”
In 1670, Hooke was appointed Surveyor of the Royal Works. Together with Scottish cartographer and printer John Ogilby, he made precise and detailed surveys that led to the production in 1677 of a large-scale map of London, the first-known to be of a specific scale (1:1200).
“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”*…
That seminal semanticist Samuel Johnson suggested, “dictionaries are like watches, the worst is better than none and the best cannot be expected to go quite true.” From “unabridged” to “slanguage,” Madeline Kripke’s library of lexicons is a logophile’s heaven (or hell)…
Madeline Kripke’s first dictionary was a copy of Webster’s Collegiate that her parents gave her when she was a fifth grader in Omaha in the early 1950s. By the time of her death in 2020, at age 76, she had amassed a collection of dictionaries that occupied every flat surface of her two-bedroom Manhattan apartment—and overflowed into several warehouse spaces. Many believe that this chaotic, personal library is the world’s largest compendium of words and their usage.
“We don’t really know how many books it is,” says Michael Adams, a lexicographer and chair of the English department at Indiana University Bloomington. More than 1,500 boxes, with vague labels such as “Kripke documents” or “Kripke: 17 books,” arrived at the school’s Lilly Library on two tractor-trailers in late 2021. The delivery was accompanied by a nearly 2,000-page catalog detailing some 6,000 volumes. But that’s only a fraction of the total. In summer 2023, the library hired a group of students to simply open each box and list its contents. By the fall, their count stood at about 9,700. “And they’ve got a long way to go,” says Adams. “20,000 sounds like a pretty good estimate.”
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“This is my favorite wall,” Madeline Kripke told Narratively reporter Daniel Kreiger when he visited her West Village apartment in 2013. She shined a flashlight on glass-fronted shelves jammed with dictionaries full of the slanguage and cryptolect of small and likely overlooked communities. Kreiger listed some of the groups represented at that time, among them cowboys and flappers, mariners and gamblers, soldiers, circus workers, and thieves.
Among the first tomes Adams pulled from the boxes was a well-known example of the slang genre: The Canting Academy. This 17th-century dictionary by Richard Head is a guide to “cant,” the jargon of London’s criminal class or, as the subtitle to the second edition puts it, “The Mysterious and Villainous Practices Of that wicked Crew, commonly known by the Names of Hectors, Treppaners, Gults, &c.” (Adams wonders if a first edition is also hidden in the banker’s boxes.) With The Canting Academy, one can learn to translate the cant of the “priggs” (“all sorts of thieves”) to English: “lour” to “money,” “pannam” to “bread,” “lage” to “water.” Most of the language is indecipherable without this key, but Adams notes some usages that are common today. “To plant” something is, in centuries-old cant or modern-day English, “to lay, place, or hide.”
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Much of what Adams has unpacked has a far less storied (and pricey) past, but, he says, the quirky and unexpected volumes in Kripke’s collection might be the most valuable to future lexicographers and historians. A bright red pamphlet with a doodle of heart on the cover might seem disposable, but it is an artifact of a particular place and time, Adams says. “Dictionaries are made by people, so they’re not just language books,” he says, “they’re culture books.”
Printed in 1962 as a marketing tool for a CBS sitcom, that slim pamphlet featuring a big heart around the faces of two 20-something actors is Dobie Gillis: Teenage Slanguage Dictionary, filled with “teen-age antics and terms.” It’s the type of thing that might have been stuffed into a cereal box or inserted in a teen magazine, says Adams. “I’m pretty sure that most people threw the copy they had away, and so this one is a fairly rare item that says something important about the representation of teen language and culture in the 1950s and 1960s.” Thanks to Kripke’s copy we know that this, at least according to the marketers behind The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, was the era of the “keen teen” (“well-liked person”), the “cream puff” (“conceited person”), the “meatball” (“a dull guy”), and the “mathematician” (“teen who can put two and two together and get SEX”).
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Kripke—“the mistress of slang,” in the words of one colleague—dedicated decades of her life to curating this collection of words, including countless ones we might like to forget. When she passed away without a will, the fate of her overwhelming library, plus a trove of documents on the history of dictionary making, was uncertain. Auctioning it off in lots could have brought the highest bids, but Kripke’s family worked in conjunction with the lexicographic community to preserve what Adams calls “her legacy.” That it was ultimately purchased in total by Indiana University Bloomington, a state university that committed to making the works accessible to the public, seems in keeping with the way Kripke herself viewed the collection, as a resource for the curious.
“You would go to see her in her Village apartment, and it was filled from top to bottom and side to side with books,” Adams says. It would have taken some digging but, “she would have the book that you need to see out for you and always some other specimens, too.”…
“The Low Down on the Greatest Dictionary Collection in the World,” in @atlasobscura.
* Steven Wright
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As we look it up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1660, at Gresham College in London, that twelve men, including Christopher Wren, Robert Boyle, John Wilkins, and Sir Robert Moray decided to found a “Colledge for the Promoting of Physico-Mathematicall Experimentall Learning” to promote “experimental philosophy” (which became science-as-we-know-it). Six months later, Robert Hooke‘s first publication, a pamphlet on capillary action, was read to the group.
The Society subsequently petitioned King Charles II to recognize it and to make a royal grant of incorporation. The Royal Charter, which was passed in July, 1662 created the Royal Society of London.
In 1665, the society introduced the world’s first journal exclusively devoted to science in 1665, Philosophical Transactions (and in so doing originated the peer review process now widespread in scientific journals). Its founding editor was Henry Oldenburg, the society’s first secretary. It remains the oldest and longest-running scientific journal in the world.
“The daily hummingbird assaults existence with improbability”*…
High in the Andes, thousands of meters above sea level, speedy hummingbirds defy near-freezing temperatures. These tiny flyers endure the cold with a counterintuitive trick: They lower their body temperature—sometimes as much as 33°C [over 90°F] —for hours at a time, new research suggests…
Among vertebrates, hummingbirds have the highest metabolism for their size. With a metabolic rate roughly 77 times that of an average human, they need to feed nearly continuously. But when it gets too cold or dark to forage, maintaining a normal body temperature is energetically draining. Instead, the small animals can cool their internal temperature by 10°C to 30°C. This slows their metabolism by as much as 95% and protects them from starvation, says Blair Wolf, a physiological ecologist at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque.
In this state, called torpor, a bird is motionless and unresponsive. “You wouldn’t even know it was alive if you picked it up,” Wolf says. But when the morning comes and it’s time to feed, he says, the birds quickly warm themselves back up again. “It’s like hibernation but regulated on an even tighter schedule.”…
One of Nature’s (many) marvelous tricks: “To survive frigid nights, hummingbirds cool themselves to record-low temperatures.”
* Ursula K. Le Guin, No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters
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As we admire adaptation, we might send closely-observed birthday greetings to Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek; he was born on this date in 1632. A largely self-taught man in science, he is commonly known as “the Father of Microbiology“, and one of the first microscopists and microbiologists (he discovered bacteria, protists, sperm cells, blood cells, and numerous structures in animal and plant tissues). A central figure in the Golden Age of Dutch science and technology, his letters to the Royal Society were widely read and richly influential… which is fair dues, as it’s widely believed that van Leeuwenhoek was inspired by illustrations in Robert Hooke’s earlier book, Micrographia [and here].
“There’s one area though where the world isn’t making much progress, and that’s pandemic preparedness”*…
Soldiers from Fort Riley, Kansas, ill with Spanish flu at a hospital ward at Camp Funston, 1918
As we wonder at the ultimate impacts of the novel coronavirus, we might look to history and the lessons of earlier contagions, as University of Michigan law professor Nicholas Bagley did in 2016…
A couple of weeks ago, my wife (also a law professor) and I wrapped up the final session of a seminar that we co-taught called Contagion. We wanted to offer an introduction to the outbreaks of infectious disease that have reshaped American life and law.
The class was one of Michigan Law’s “at home mini-seminars,” which meant we hosted a dozen students at our home over the course of six evening sessions. Really more of a book club than a formal class, we focused on a different disease each time we met: cholera, Spanish flu, polio, AIDS, SARS, and Ebola.
We also drank beer, which makes death and disease more tolerable.
The class was a hoot. And it had a surprising coherence. Every disease provokes its own unique dread and its own complex public reaction, but themes recurred across outbreaks.
- Governments are typically unprepared, disorganized, and resistant to taking steps necessary to contain infectious diseases, especially in their early phases.
- Local, state, federal, and global governing bodies are apt to point fingers at one another over who’s responsible for taking action. Clear lines of authority are lacking.
- Calibrating the right governmental response is devilishly hard. Do too much and you squander public trust (Swine flu), do too little and people die unnecessarily (AIDS).
- Public officials are reluctant to publicize infections for fear of devastating the economy.
- Doctors rarely have good treatment options. Nursing care is often what’s needed most. Medical professionals of all kinds work themselves to the bone in the face of extraordinary danger.
- In the absence of an effective treatment, the public will reach for unscientific remedies.
- No matter what the route of transmission or the effectiveness of quarantine, there’s a desire to physically separate infected people.
- Victims of the disease are often thought to deserve the affliction, especially when those victims are mainly from marginalized groups.
- We plan, to the extent we plan at all, for the last pandemic. We don’t do enough to plan for the next one.
- Historical memory is short. When diseases fall from the headlines, the public forgets and preparation falters.
Not every one of those themes was present for every disease; the doughboys who died of the Spanish flu, for example, were not thought to deserve their fate. But the themes were persistent enough over time to establish a pattern…
For a list of the books that Bagley and the group considered, visit the post quoted above: “Contagion.”
For a measured (but still deeply concerning) assessment of the potential impact of the coronavirus, see The Economist‘s leader. But lest we leap to the assumption that the stock market is an augur (of either depth or duration of impact) see “How to Think About the Plummeting Stock Market.” For a much deeper dive into the historical antecedents of our current quandary, see “Pandemics and Markets” at Jamie Catherwood‘s Investor Amnesia (“We’ve been here before”).
Finally, there’s been much written about the ways in which Xi’s handling of the crisis in China might provoke a backlash against him and the Party, both within China and around the world. But one might also keep an eye on Iran, where the government’s handling of the coronavirus is leading observers to wonder if this (coming as it does in the midst of severe internal tensions, aggravated by the economic pressure of sanctions) could be a “Chernobyl moment” for the regime; see “How Iran Became a New Epicenter in the Coronavirus Outbreak.” And then, of course, there’s the potential political fallout in the United States. See also the always-insightful Bruce Mehlman‘s “Washington in the Time of Corona.”
* Bill Gates, at a 2018 conference on epidemics hosted by the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine (Here are Gate’s more current– but consistent– thoughts on “How to respond to COVID-19.”
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As we take precautions, we might spare a thought for Robert Hooke; he died on this date in 1703. A natural philosopher and polymath, Hooke was a virtuoso scientist whose scope of research ranged widely, including physics, astronomy, chemistry, biology, geology, architecture, and naval technology. He discovered the law of elasticity, known as Hooke’s law, and invented the balance spring for clocks. He served as the Curator of Experiments at the Royal Society, London; and after the Great Fire of London (1666), he served as Chief Surveyor and helped rebuild the city. He also invented or improved meteorological instruments such as the barometer, anemometer, and hygrometer.
But relevantly to the item above, Hooke was a pioneer in microscopy. His Micrographia, (1665) was a book describing observations made with microscopes (and telescopes), as well as some original work in biology. Indeed, Hooke coined the term cell for describing biological organisms, a term suggested to him by the resemblance of plant cells to cells of a honeycomb.
Hooke’s microscope, from an engraving in Micrographia [source]
“Science is a process”*…
Paul Klee, “The Bounds of the Intellect,” 1927 (detail)
When my grandfather died last fall, it fell to my sisters and me to sort through the books and papers in his home in East Tennessee. My grandfather was a nuclear physicist, my grandmother a mathematician, and among their novels and magazines were reams of scientific publications. In the wood-paneled study, we passed around great sheaves of papers for sorting, filling the air with dust.
My youngest sister put a pile of yellowing papers in front of me, and I started to leaf through the typewritten letters and scholarly articles. Then my eyes fell on the words fundamental breakthrough, spectacular, and revolutionary. Letters from some of the biggest names in physics fell out of the folders, in correspondence going back to 1979.
In this stack, I found, was evidence of a mystery. My grandfather had a theory, one that he believed to be among the most important work of his career. And it had never been published…
The remarkable– and illuminating– story of Veronique (Nikki) Greenwood’s quest to determine whether her grandfather was “a genius or a crackpot”: “My Grandfather Thought He Solved a Cosmic Mystery.”
* T.S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolution
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As we note that the history of science is, effectively, the history of the instruments developed to help us “see” things smaller, larger, smaller, farther, or outside our human sensory range, we might recall that it was on this date in 1664 that natural philosopher, architect and pioneer of the Scientific Revolution Robert Hooke showed an advance copy of his book Micrographia— a chronicle of Hooke’s observations through various lens– to members of the Royal Society. The volume (which coined the word “cell” in a biological context) went on to become the first scientific best-seller, and inspired broad interest in the new science of microscopy.
source: Cal Tech
Note that the image above is of an edition of Micrographia dated 1665. Indeed, while (per the above) the text was previewed to the Royal Society in 1664 (to wit the letter, verso), the book wasn’t published until September, 1665. Note too that Micrographia is in English (while most scientific books of that time were still in Latin)– a fact that no doubt contributed to its best-seller status.
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