JF Ptak Science Books  Quick Post

This is a tiny note on the idea of seeing/listening/thinking backwards–I’m not even sure what that means, except for teh obvious cases, especially when you throw technology into the mix to spice up the possibilities of investigation of a backwards form. First of all, the words “backward” and “backwards” go all the way back in the history of English, as we can see in these two pretty examples from the OED:

• 1398   J. Trevisa tr. Bartholomew de Glanville De Proprietatibus Rerum (1495) xiii. xxvi. 456   “By vyolente puttynge of ayre bakward the body of the byrde meuyth forwarde.”

•  1697  Dryden tr. Virgil Georgics iii, in tr. Virgil Wks. 101   “Clouds of Sand arise; Spurn’d, and cast backward on the Follower’s Eyes”

• 1953 “When I go backwards I’m generally backing up”–Not Yogi Berra

With technology I’m referring to the more subtle ways of exhibiting something/someone in backwards motion rather than the reserve of raising an obelisk–it would be more like seeing a fire burn a house in reverse or rain falling up or a locomotive recovering itself from a head-on collision with a tree via motion picture recordings, things can can’t be reproduced backwards simply by reversing the motion. 

As long as I’m at it, I think this sense of “backwards” is differentiated from a reverse chronology.  Citizen Kane starts at the end and works it long and angled-dark ways from the beginning to the opening shot; the movies Momento and Eternal Sunshine… are fuller in their reverse chronology, as is the occasional episode of Seinfeld and the book (and movie) Benjamin Button, to name a few examples. 

What brought me to this place was an article  by Fleeming Jenkin and J.A. Ewing on the new invention, “The Phonograph” in Nature (1878), where their entire interest in the short note was the use of the machine in playing recorded speech backwards. This would be among the first uses of the new technology in a way that displayed info in a new way from all other previous human experience. This leads me to think about the next step in the development of the motion picture, where people could “unwatch” a developed motion of something and have it reconstitute itself right before their eyes. No doubt that was an extraordinary experience. So far as the motion picture goes, it would be almost another twenty years before a motion picture would be exhibited popularly that showed an action in reverse–and that honor goes yet again to Louis Lumiere and his “Demolition of a Wall” in 1896, still in the first decade-ish of the invention of what we would think of as a motion picture film.  

In any event, these are just some loose thoughts on the subject of “Backwards”. 

Here’s the short article by Jenkin and  Ewing: