Quote: “The total solar eclipse of 18 July 1860 was probably the most thoroughly observed eclipse up to that time. The drawings are a sample of those produced at the time which include depictions of a peculiar feature in the SW (lower right) portion of the corona. Based on comparison with modern coronal observations, it is quite likely that these represent the first record of a Coronal Mass Ejection in progress. Today coronal mass ejections are known to represent one of the more energetic -and geoeffective- manifestation of solar activity, with up to 10 billion tons of material being ejected into interplanetary space at speeds reaching up to 1000 kilometer per second.”

(All from the page Great Moments in Solar Physics.)

I’m fascinated by the prevalence of “interpretation” in scientific observation prior to the 20th century. Today we are very comfortable with the exactitude of our images, be they from massive telescopes, electron microscopes, or super high speed / high resolution cameras, but for much of the history of science we depended on what amounts in no small degree to the artistic abilities (and fancies) of our scientists.

A great example of this is offered by Dr. David Malin, photographic scientist-astronomer and Adjunct Professor of Scientific Photography at RMIT University in Melbourne, in his introductory essay for RIT’s Images from Science exhibition of 2002-

Image at left: John Herschel’s drawing of the Orion nebula, made with an 18-inch telescope during his period in Cape Town, South Africa, in the 1830s.

Image at right: In Ireland in the 1840s, William Parsons (Lord Rosse) constructed the world’s largest telescope, which he used in making this drawing of the Orion nebula.

Quote: “I reproduce Herschel’s and Parsons’s drawings… and the differences between them are obvious. They result not from changes in the nebula or in telescopic power, but from subjective differences in the way their creators saw, remembered, and sketched what was essentially the same subject.”

I think that my composite image of the 1860 eclipse illustrates the point in a different way. Separately each man captured an aspect of the reality. When you combine their observations the result is unmistakable and seems to capture something more… elemental.

It fascinates me that for so very long our picture of the universe was, as Dr. Malin points out, so very subjective. From a visual standpoint, the idea of subjectivity in astronomy seems pretty foreign to us today. We know, without any doubt, just what the surface of mars looks like, what the horsehead nebula looks like, what the sun, churning in its insane power looks like. The room for artistic interpretation in representation of the universe has narrowed considerably. The truth is that photography and science are utterly perfect bedfellows; meant for each other really. There are without question massive amounts of subjective “interpretation” happening in science still, but the interpretation involved is in the data.

I mentioned earlier that when these drawings of the eclipse of 1860 were made photography was already in swing. It so happens that 6 years earlier photographs of an eclipse were in fact taken-

The daguerreotypes above are in the collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art. They have this to say about them-

Quote: “In 1841–42, William and Frederick Langenheim opened a daguerreotype studio in Philadelphia. Known for their technical innovations, the former journalists were not the city’s first but were certainly its most celebrated photographers. On May 26, 1854, the Langenheim brothers made eight sequential photographs of the first total eclipse of the sun visible in North America since the invention of photography. Although six other daguerreotypists and one calotypist are known to have documented the event, only these seven daguerreotypes survive.”

Good thing astronomers were still handy with pencils huh?

Anyhow, expect more on this subject as examples come to me.

Hope you enjoyed.

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It dawned on me only recently that in the vaults and safes and state of the art library humidors which house the priceless historical paper trail of the American ascent, there are legal documents, many still binding, which, beside the paragraphs of legalese, the caveats, the statutes, the declarations, and the protocol, feature, of all things, small enigmatic drawings of woodland creatures.

Beside heavy wax seals you’ll find the beaver, the wolf, the turtle, and the deer, in a loose free-hand application of ink. The eagle, which eventually became a symbol of the American State, and seems ever present in the form of impossibly intricate etchings, might conceivably have made its first appearance in the annals of American documents⊕ as an Indian Chief’s totemic signature.

Quote: “Not much is understood about the exact function of totem symbols, or indeed what totems meant to the individuals who made their mark on documents. The following quote from Benjamin Slight (1844), offers a fairly typical explanation of what Europeans of the time believed these symbols to mean: When their signature is required to any document of any kind, in connexion with their names, they affix what is called their tootams, having the same juxtaposition as the seal of an English transaction. The tootam is a rude sketch of some fish, fowl or animal, which is designative of the tribe to which the individual belongs, or expressive of the name, he as an individual, bears.

Totem symbols may well have reflected band or family affiliation, and may also have suggested territorial or community ancestry, but they may have also referred to personal names or descriptive characteristics of the individual who adopted the symbol. Generally, these symbols remain a mystery, and perhaps rightly so, given the sometimes quite private and personal importance they had for the individual.” -Neal Ferris, Preface to Deeds/Nations by Greg Curnoe.

Quote: “A totem could be used to represent an individual or a group. Original documents signed by Native Americans using their totem are extremely rare. Most researchers who look at printed versions of documents signed by Native Americans, such as peace treaties, are familiar with the phrase “made his mark,” followed by an “X.” The impression left by these printed documents are that Native Americans were devoid of a written means of expression and that even tribal leaders were reduced to signing critical documents such as treaties with a crude mark. Actually the Native American’s totem, or signature, was often a fine drawing that reflected a characteristic of the individual’s name or a central event in their life. Because printers had difficulty inexpensively reproducing these art-like totems, the practice arose of simply stating that the signer had “made his mark” and placing an “X” in the appropriate location on the printed document.” -Clarke Historical Library at CMU.

Of course animal totems were by no means only used as signatures-

Were it not for the grim circumstances of their creation the very thought of our weighty and hallowed American historical documents being peppered here and there with naive drawings of indigenous animals would make me smile, surprising and counterintuitive as it feels. In context, however, the little creatures take on a mournful aspect which force you instead to visualize anxious and uncertain hands hovering just above dubious pieces of paper. Naive as they may appear, these animal drawings may actually have more import and consequence for the hands that created them than any ever made.

The materials for this post were adapted from the following:

A History of the Art of Writing
Collectionscanada.ca
Deeds/Nations
Earlytreaties.unl.edu
Clarke Historical Library
American Historical and Literary Antiquities
College of William and Mary, Swem Library
The Canadian Encyclopedia
The Empire State: A Compendious History of the Commonwealth of New York.

The image which began this post was adapted from Clarke Library’s page The Native American Treaty Signers in the Great Lakes Region.

Hope you found this of interest.

There are many beautiful examples to be seen and more info to be had at the following:

Early Visual Media
World of Stereo Views
La Collection D’appareils
The Laughing Bone
ookami_dou’s Vintage Flickr set

Hope you enjoyed.

This image cracks me up. More so in context (because it’s not a piece of Nihilist propaganda or some allegorical face smack from a Jack Chick tract.) You might notice that little scribbly “song” written up in the corner…  this is in fact a cover illustration for a piece of sheet music published in 1909. I can’t help but think of it as the equivalent of a “megadeth cover” for its time, except you just know the music inside is all jaunty and “23 skidoo” and “tennis, anyone?”

(all images adapted from the scientific paper The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday.)

“A hornbook consists of a piece of parchment or paper lesson pasted onto a paddle-shaped piece of wood. The name derives from the leaf of horn, made from sheep and goat horn that was softened and then boiled in water to produce true horn that could be pressed and cut into sheets, that was attached to the board by a brass or latten border by minute tacks. Hornbooks generally presented the alphabet above arabic numerals and the Lord’s Prayer. This evidence of rudimentary letter-learning and the hardiness of the hornbook itself speaks to the very young audience the hornbook aimed to please and more importantly indicates a tradition of reading material for the very young that dates back to the Middle Ages.” -The Victorian Web.

“To protect it from grubby fingers the sheet was mounted on a frame and was protected by a thin sheet of transparent cow’s horn – hence the name. The frame was usually made from wood, often oak, but occasionally more costly materials, such as silver or even ivory, were used. Wooden hornbooks were often covered in leather. Although the text itself was not illustrated, a picture was often engraved or embossed on the back of the frame. For the sake of utility, hornbooks often had a handle with a hole in the end, allowing them to be hung from a child’s belt or girdle.” -Andrew W. Tuer History of the horn-book.

“Hornbooks were particularly personal and often formed part of a child’s wardrobe, being attached by a string or thong to a belt. The hornbook’s physical intimacy both mirrors and promotes the child’s internalization of the alphabet.” -Patricia Crain The Story of A.

“In its early manifestations, the pedagogical alphabet is headed not by the letter A but by the “Christ Cross.” From at least the fifteenth until well into the nineteenth century, the alphabet’s English nickname was the “Christ-Cross Row,” shortened to “criss-cross row” and “crossrow.” Because the alphabet is associated with Catholic iconography, as if the two sets of signs were really part of one semiological system, one of the struggles of the Reformation would be to wrest the alphabet away from the Church.” -Patricia Crain The Story of A.

“Originally the letters of the alphabet had been laid out in a cross but that later, when the letters were arranged in lines, a cross was placed at the beginning to remind the pupil that “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” -Brewer’s dictionary of phrase and fable.

“There are records of hornbooks being in use until the mid-nineteenth century but their heyday was over. By the end of the nineteenth century the hornbook had not only gone out of fashion but surviving examples were extremely rare, as most had either been destroyed or lost. The few that did survive were mainly in the hands of collectors. The word hornbook survived as a term for an elementary treatise on a subject.” -King’s College London, book of the month page for May 07.

“The humble hornbook was treated with the full measure of contempt lavished on a thing which has served its purpose. ‘Destroy and forget,’ said everybody, and alas! Everybody did. That a tool which was used by so many generations of children over hundreds of years could be forgotten so easily seems almost impossible, yet it was.” -Andrew W. Tuer History of the horn-book.

Forgotten? Yes, indeed it was. I’d never even heard the word “hornbook” until this morning. But as is said, “you learn something new everyday,” even without having your ass paddled by a wooden alphabet primer.

The images were all adapted, and the quotes were all taken, from the following sources:

Read and Be Wise, Library of Congress.
Abracadabra: Language, Memory, Representation.
History of the horn-book, King’s College London.
Wikimedia Commons.
The Victorian Web.
The Hornbook and It’s Use in America, by George A. Plimpton.
IUPUI, The Hornbook.

Hope you enjoyed.

We see it again and again, the panning shot over a shelf cluttered with family photos. It’s short-hand. It appears early in the film and is meant to quickly offer context, fill in back story, hint at motives, and clarify character relationships. They are images of fishing trips and days in the park and summers in front of monuments. They bring depth to the desperate cop, the grieving widow, the bad seed, the divorced father, the orphaned child. They are important as emotional ballast for our underdeveloped characters and yet… they always seem to look ridiculous.

I wonder why? Is it because-

a) The filmmakers blew the FX budget on other things, like say… texture mapping some charisma onto the leads, building an animatronic Xenu-bot to help motivate the cast, or late fees on the rented smoke machines, strobes, and industrial sized turd-polisher?

b) The job was farmed out to the children of a congenitally near-sighted tribe in Papa New Guinea who, being unfamiliar with technology, still believe photographs represent stolen souls, and in as much would handle them only with their elbows and toes?

c) The actors involved were all uncommonly humble and so lacking in the narcissism which would seem part and parcel to the job that there were practically no photos of them in existence at all, and thus the FX team had insufficient source material to draw from?

d) Along with de-lousing used merkins, pre-testing the viscosity of all fake vomit, and fastening the motion capture thingys to the lead actor’s taint… the family photo composite is the onus of an intern?

e) We have much more first hand experience with snapshots than with 40 foot tall laser-eyed alien death-bringers who do battle with heroic unicorns made of pure energy, and so are more apt to notice inconsistencies in one than the other?

f) They just suck at it?

You tell me, internet.