Category: Blank and Empty Things; A History of

The History of Missing and Blank Things #35: The Disappeared Solids of Johannes Kepler

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 548

(Continuing the thread on a History of Blank and Empty Things…)

The great Joahnnes Kepler, conceived at 4:27 on the morning
of his parents’ holy joining, was raised a disagreeable boy by disagreeable parents,
and that in spite of being supremely gifted, mutually dependent on his
hypochondria, intellect, and astrology.
He was perhaps one of the dozen most influential scientists of the last
500 years, and had an over-assuming and awful disposition.

The man who brought about the final loosening of religion’s grasp
on astronomy and the development of cosmology had a difficult time in his childhood,
sounding lonely and exiled. His father was
irritable and irritating, but his mother, described by some as garrulous and quarrelsome
and of a “vile disposition”, seems to have been in a class by herself, and left
an indelible mark in her son. The full
truth of Kepler’s mother was that if you described her as being like a ”witch”, you may have been correct: the old woman, at 74, after years of being
suspected of being a witch, was arrested, finally, and hauled away under this
suspicion. In a posthumously-published
work called Somnulum, Kepler himself writes of his mother as being in contact
with devils from the Moon (among many other things). His childhood left a long shadow on his
social life.

It is remarkable to note his nearly alphabetical diatribe on
his schoolday associates; I’m not o sure how you leave behind ideas and feeling
like this later in life, and I suppose that you don’t. It has nothing to do with his development as
a scientific icon, but I

He rattles off his chums as follows:

“Holp openly detested me and on two occasions we got into
fist fights….

Molitor dislike me because I betrayed him…

Kollin didn’t hate me, but I hated him…

Braunbaum turned from friend to foe because of my
boisterousness…

Huldenbach became hostile because of my rash accusations…

Seifer disliked because everyone disliked him…

Kleber detested me because he thought I was a rival…

Redstock was ticked off whenever someone praised my
abilities…

Husel tried to block my progress…

Between Dauber and myself there was quite a jealousy…

Lorhard would have nothing to do with me….

After Jaeger had lied to me I was insulted for two years…

The rector became my enemy because I did not accord him
sufficient honor…

Murr became my enemy because I reprimanded him…”

And on and on. Kind
of incredible if you ask me, but from this did greatness come.

On the way to restructuring the universe with his Harmonicae mundi and Epitome astronomiae, Kepler made a first
abbreviated stop in his Mysterium Cosmographicum—it was an interesting work, but
as substantial as it was it had as many flaws.
Galileo received a copy, and wrote politely back, but was very guarded
in his opinion of the work. Part of the
problem was Kepler’s sustained interest in his astrological callings; another
part came with his great reverence. He
thought that god was perfect, and that the universe he created as perfect, and
so it all could be explained perfectly with a perfect method, which in this
case was geometrical. Explaining the proportions
between the sun and its planets, Kepler devised a system in which spheres and
squares and other objects were described within one another, separating the planets
via distances determined by their points of contact. It wasn’t a winning system, but it did abide
the Copernican system, even as his forms disappeared into nothingness.. Kepler went on to
bigger and greater things.

Einstein, who much admired Kepler, said of the man: “[He]
was one of the few who are simply incapable of doing anything but stand up
openly for their convictions in every field.”

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Astronomy — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Bizarre & Naive Surreal Maps and Views: the North Pole

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 545

[Read last year’s post, 12 March 2008: Dr. Seuss and the 236 Words...]

These two maps were printed within a few weeks of one another in LIFE magazine in October/November 1943, which is unusual to my experience, as I haven’t seen too much in the way of unusual 20th century North Pole maps (especially as advertisements). The first is a placement for Winchester Arms, concentrating on the dependability of its ammunition, and assuring the readers of the magazine that if “your soldier” was carrying a Winchester carbine, or a Garand, or whatever Winchester product it was, “that you can be sure his ammunition is okay”. The map is pretty odd and completed in a projection unknown to me: it centers itself at the North Pole and includes cities in both the northern and southern hemispheres, which is an unusual thing to do on a single-hemispheric projection.

I know that Winchester was just trying to graphically present the notion that the ammo was suited to “global climates”, and did so using an impossible image; but, since it was wartime…

The second image could also slide into the History of the Future category, Seagram’s Whisky somehow aligning itself with trans-polar future flight. The airport in the ad’s image was at the North Pole, and was the layover/refueling point for the Chicago-Moscow run at some point in tomorrow. Those little horizontal yellow rectangles are actually windows, and in my original you can see dozens of heads in there, making this one big stinking plane. By my calculations, the plane was something like 1500′ wide, giving it a surface area of something like two square acres. In comparison, the Boeing 777 has a wingspan of about 200′ and a 4,600 square-foot wing surface, which means that five 777’s could be placed wing-tip-to-wing-tip along the visible part of this Seagram’s monster. (And I’m being generous.)

Then there’s the problem of the runway, which looks about 15,000 feet long–way more than enough for a 777, but nowhere near enough for this beast, unless of course there was some hidden sumpin’ sumpin’ that I don’t know about. Lastly, there are eleven aircraft on the ground at this North Pole airport, which more than filled it up. The terminal looks possibly more (relatively speaking) mammoth than the planes, and could undoubtedly provide rooms if not houses for everyone traveling around in these Big Berthas. Judging the building against the aircraft, it looks like it is 800 feet tall by 4500 feet by 6500 feet. I’m not sure how many Malls of America you could fold into this thing, but it would be a lot.

Now I’m not saying that something like this structure wouldn’t ever be built, because “ever” and “never” are big words; as a matter of fact, I would say that it was probable that something like this would come into existence so long as we here on Earth lasted long enough.

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JF Ptak

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Future, History of the
Blank and Empty Things: Disembodied Celestial Hands and Arms, Part 3.

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 538

This wonderful and dimly provocative image from Johann Siebacher’s Wasserstein der Weisen, oder chymisches Tractaetlein…. *, a curious alchemy book of obscured pubom Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher’lishing heritage, printed around 1660, is a sort of standard celestially-disembodied standard, though in this case the torch-holding hand may be coming through a trinitarian window/hole in the sky, straight from the body of the Der Herr Gott. Or perhaps not: perhaps this is an illustration of alchemical genius emerging from a Biblical interruption in the sky, igniting a heart-held philosopher’s stone fixed to a well-rooted sepulchre, the very tree of life. The religiously-robed folks are retreating into the deeper shadow without the sight of the gloriously-enlightened lump, plainly visible to the plain observer.

Or not. Siebacher uses an epigram at the end of his book calling the whole chymical art into question: “It is an easy matter to prepare gold in the furnace out of metals:
at times there is found a man to whom the secret is revealed. Why is not
every alchemist rich? The reason is that one thing is wanting which many
seek with anxious care. Common gold is not fixed, and, when brought to
the test of fire, quickly disappears and perishes. But he who knows the
tired gold, which at all times remains the same, and from which nothing
is lost, he is the possessor of the true Art, and may be called a good
and practical Sage and Chemist.” Rich in vision, and in spirit, with holes in the pockets.

*Johann Ambrosius Siebmacher.
Wasserstein
der Weysen, das ist, ein chymisch Tractätlein, darin der Weg gezeiget,
die Materia genennet, und der Process beschrieben wird, zu dem hohen geheymnuss
der Universal Tinctur zukommen, vor diesem niemalen gesehen. Darbey auch
zwey sehr nutzliche andere Büchlein der Gleichformigkeit und Concordantz
wegen angehenckt, nemlich, 1. Iohan von Mesung. 2. Via veritatis der einigen
Warheit…, Frankfurt, 1619, 1661, 1703, 1704, 1709, 1710, 1743, 1762.

Or,

The Sophic Hydrolith; or Water Stone of the Wise, That is, a chymical work, in which the way is shewn, the matter named, and the process described;
namely, the method of obtaining the
universal tincture. Chapter
One: A BRIEF EXPOSITION OF THE WONDERFUL WATER STONE OF THE WISE, COMMONLY
CALLED THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Chemistry, history of — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
Blank and Missing Things: Missing Horizons, Giant Women and Edouard Manet

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 536

The Nine Foot Woman and the Nine Inch Man

Manipulating perspective in the post-re-discovery of
perspective world infrequently happened on purpose (except to accentuate
another aspect of perspective), and was usually the result of artist or artisan failure or naivety. A famous example is in Rene Descartes La Dioptrique (1673), in which this image of his compound
microscope was somehow confused with a telescope—probably the result of the
illustrator’s misunderstanding of the concept and a mistake in the proofing
period. This does sort of look like a
telescope, if viewed with your squinty-eye specs, at least in the hands of the illustrator—if the
microscope-and-man was pictured in this scale was really this large and
collecting THAT much light it would’ve fried the retina of the viewer and
whatever specimen was being looked at. If
the scope was that big then the man using it would’ve been about 9 inches tall. In any event, it was an accident (and one of
fairly high order)—the nine-foot-tall woman in Edouard Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur
l’Erbe (1863) was an entirely conscious decision, and one that helped initiate
the birth of Impressionism. Of course
there was a lot of other stuff going on in Manet’s mind beyond the giant woman—he
abandoned entirely the very accomplished and polite work that he had been doing
(trained by Thomas Coutre) celebrating his independence on his 27^th
birthday by burning all of his old work.

Le Dejeuner was a scandal when it was exhibited in 1863—Manet
painted what he wanted to, unbound by perspective, by color, by composition,
and on and on. The folks in the painting were not connected to anything,
really, and were unconnected to each other, no one paying any of the others any
mind, even when the women were naked.
Nothing seems to be going on—the people are just simply there. This is in itself was a disconnect from
previous practices, the vision in painting was about something, and was directed. Light seems to be coming from a number of
different places, and the shadows from the trees reflect this, simultaneously stretched
towards and away from the light sources.
The bathing woman in the background, or what used to be background, had
she been drawn using proper perspective, would’ve been about nine feet
tall. But what happens here is that
there is no foreground or background in this painting, just middle. It was this collection of abandonments, starting here in the Le Dejeuner in 1863, that ushered in the modern in art.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Perception — Perspective
Blank & Empty Things 36: Sold Shadows and Fat Chairs (Peter Schlemiehl and Joseph Bueys)

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 535

On the heels of my last post on the usefulness of constructing
geologies of wrongness and on the extraction by Creationists of something from
nothing comes today’s bit, where something really does come from nothing, and
where (again) nothing of something is extracted from nothing.

1) Something from
Nothing

How old are shadows?
Or, really, how old is the depiction of the shadow in the history of
western art? The shadow predates the
modern re-discovery of classical perspective by a thousand years—little bits of
shadows pop up here and there in deep antiquity, certainly way before Uccello
and Alberti and the rest came along. On
the other hand shadows do escape notice of many painters in the 15^th
century (and during the period of being very comfortable with the century-old realignment
of perspective), which is odd, unless all of those works were depicting scenes
at high noon or thereabouts.

The something-from-nothing part with shadows comes from the
odd and somewhat creepy story of Peter Schlemihl (Peter Schlemihls wundersame
Geschichte, “Peter Schlemihl’s Remarkable Story”) written in 1814 by
the semi-ruined Franco/German aristocrat Adelbert von Chamisso. In one adventure, Peter,
unfortunately poor in a land of the wealthy, makes an agreement with a
mysterious grey man (who is probably the devil) to sell his shadow for a
bottomless purse of gold. In an 1861
British edition of this work, the great George Cruikshank portrays the very
moment when the shadow is being literally lifted from the ground by the
mysterious grey man—the point of contact between his hand and the shadow just
gives me the willies. The grey man’s own
shadow, arching behind him, is also very threatening and terribly offputting to
me. Perhaps it is just a great wrongness, making the shadow something
from its vast nothingness. (And the
story goes that the gold is never-ending, but people are so repulsed by Peter
not having a shadow that it makes his life supremely difficult—so much so that
the grey man returns with a new deal, offering to Peter his shadow and the
endless purse if only he would relinquish his soul when he died. Peter begs off, throws away the purse, and
lives without his shadow and without money.)

Hans Christian Andersen also provides a scary fairy tale in
1847 called “The Shadow”, in which a man’s shadow slips away and is replaced by
another shadow which slips back (slowly) into the old shadow’s place—but it is
not what it seems: “I have gone through the most terrible affair that
could possibly happen; only imagine, my shadow has gone mad; I suppose such a
poor, shallow brain, could not bear much; he fancies that he has become a real
man, and that I am his shadow.”

2) Nothing from
Something from Nothing.

Yes, this is terribly convoluted, but the title fits the
subject, and the subject is Josef Beuys (1921-1986), a German artist (or
perhaps he was a performer in art) who broadly dabbled in conceptual art. He came to prominence in the 1960’s, when the
acceptance of these art performances was as much a work of art as the art piece
itself, and, I guess, he has remained, his appreciations now gaining an antique
patina.

I wanted to address his work, Fat Chair. The title doesn’t quite describe the work,
which is a chair with a wedge of fat on it.
Many a critic’s eyebrow has been plucked trying in deep intellectual
desperation to see something in this work. Under the weight of these artistic
appraisals of this work, I’ve just got to say, really, sometimes fat on a chair
is just that. I can appreciate Beuys as an artist and performer of his
times, but the deep thought that has gone into Fat Chair is a bit much for my
taste, praising observers biting off much more than can be chewed. For example, from one website we see:

“ ‘Fat Chair’ (1964) is much more about the
physicality of the human body. To Beuys, fat as a material could be considered
before form was considered… Fat…appealed to Beuys b

ecause it was a composite
with no internal structure…Beuys placed fat with its “chaotic organic
energy”, symbolising warmth, in the cold, rigid,
man-made form of a right-angle. This form, which represented the coexistence of
instinct and intellect was placed in the right-angle of a chair between seat
and back. The fat also occupies space on the chair that would be filled with
our digestive and excretive organs if we were sitting on it.”

Another website states “Fat…was an ideal material for Beuys
to use to sign

chaos and the potential for spiritual transcendence. Fat has
the ability to exist as a physical example of two extremes: a flowing liquid
when warm and a defined solid when cold. Beuys also believed that fat was
psychologically effective, in that “people instinctively feel it relates
to inner processes and feelings.”

I’m
sorry to not include the references for these opinions—it is just to painful,
too embarrassing to ascribe them blame.
And they are hardly alone in this hagiographic myopia, pulling these
strands of something from nothing about nothing.

I’d
prefer to leave it all at nothing in regard to the Beuys (or to Andres Serrano
or Damien Hirst and so on), thinking
about lovely Ludwig’s self-abandoned seventh proposition (“Where (or of what)
one cannot speak, one must pass over in silence”). Better yet, better to apply the one of the
last lines of the great classic “The Street of Laredo” (the Johnny Cash version
of course)—when the young dying cowboy is asked about who shot and killed him,
he simply says, in the best cowboy fashion, “speak not his name, and his name
will pass on.”.

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Blank and Empty Things: the Case of pre-Biblical “Missing” Eclipses, Refuting Darwin, and the Geology of Wrongness

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 533

A History of Blank and Empty Things #35.

Mr. R.R. Menke, the author The Challenge from the Skies, Planetary Motion and its Solemn Witness Against Evolution and Higher Criticism, self-published his biblico-religico-astronomical diatribe against Charles Darwin in Huntington Park, California, in 1925. What he launches in 51 labored pages against one of the most elegant ideas in the history of science is simply, well, shocking; shockingly eyebrows-catching-on-fire bad, so-bad-it-isn’t-even-bad bad. Without reading the whole, um, thing, I do get the piercing whiff of a notion having to do with eclipses and the true date of seven (?) days of creation. He uses some sort of chrono-alchemy layered in spreadable butter, the words made of microscopic asparagus, to prove his point that “as a consequence of the verified truth of these cycles of time, we are bound to believe that there were no eclipses before the prime date (5923 years ago)”. No eclipses before creation. AND no precession of the equinoxes, “no seasons before the prime date, no cycles of 360 years before the prime date”. Oh my.

His conclusion, by virtue of this magnificently weighty evidence (and which he doesn’t even relegate to its own paragraph), is “Therefore Darwin’s theory of evolution has no place in the domain of astronomical science…” And this is so not so much, evidently, that there were no eclipses, and no seasons, and no 360-year cycles (?!), but rather, at the base of it all, there was nothing. No earth. And since the earth is only 60 centuries or whatever old Darwin just doesn’t work. I have no idea why the eclipse business was necessary if Mr. Menke was going to argue that there was no “there” there for anything to happen, what with the impracticable nature of having something in nothing.

There you have it. There’s more, much more, but frankly it just isn’t worth the 20 minutes to dig out more. I rarely read anything in Creation Sc__nc_ as there is nothing redeeming at all in it–I’m posting this today because it strikes me that this present work isn’t necessarily singularly bad, but rather representationally bad. Since the entire belief/hope/prayer system or whatever the Creationists claim as the intellectual/moral basis to their Principa in explaining the stuff of the universe is painfully wrong, and bad, and potentially harmful, I wonder why we should distinguish the levels of badness and wrongness? It isn’t as though establishing a geology of wrongness will somehow categorize it all in such a way that something worthwhile could be discovered, like a miraculous toe-hold at the top of the Sisyphusian hill they’re trying to slide up. And so perhaps Mr. Menke’s work is just wrong, along with the rest of the others; perhaps the other side needs to deal with him as being one of their own more so than anyone else. Certainly there are more elegant refutations than this unfortunate attempt, but that only makes the wrongness prettier: a pig in a (white) wedding gown is still, after all, a pig.

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Outsider Logic
The Discovery of Nothing: Things out of Place Deparment #4 AND a History of Blank and Empty Things #32

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 513

This is really just another bit of fun–the four objects in the sky weren’t unrelated to the scene, not at all, though if you wanted you could certainly create a fantastically rigorous and bizarre story for them; they certainly did define the concept of “nothing” for the Blank & Empty Things thread of this blog. here is no doubt that the image has a very quiet, possibly Dadist origin. In fact, this is one illustration from one of the greatest experimental physics books of the 17th century, coming as it does from Otto von Guericke’s Experiemnta nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de vacuo spatio (Amsterdam, 1672). In another minute department, this one is also I guess the greatest book ever written by a Mayor of anywhere (as von Guericke (1602-1886) was mayor of

Magedeburg for 33 years). The image shows the greatest of von
Guericke’s efforts, and one of the greatest (or most important)
experiments in experimental science–the dramatic demonstration of the
vacuum, showing here that teams of horses could not pull apart two
halves of an evacuated sphere, and of course the efficacy of air
pressure operating against it (um, the vacuum). The “floating” bits in the sky were an exploded view of the sphere that was the subject of the experiment.

What was more important though, and what the general reader today might easily miss, was that von Guericke created something that many scientists and philosophers said didn’t, and couldn’t, exist: the vacuum. In modern times, Copernicus depicted the universe as a vast void; Descartes came in the back door (following the ancient and interesting though incorrect theory of Aristotle*), not liking the idea very much, and claiming that such empty space couldn’t exist. Von Guericke provided the proof that the vacuum, that nothing, did exist.

_______

*Aristotle (384-322 BCE) theorized that as air became thinner objects moving through it would move faster, which is true; he further speculated that if there was no air at all, that if vacuums did exist, then objects would move infinitely fast, which he correctly assumed was not possible, and thus the vacuum could not exist.

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at — Technology, History of
Things out of Place Department: a Cloud of Magnetism in the Sky Poked by the Needle of God

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 508

“And even though I’m sitting waiting for Mars

I don’t believe there’s any future in cause

Hole in the sky, gate way to heaven

Window in time, through it I fly…”

Black Sabbath, “Hole in the Sky”, 1975

Well, there were many liberties taken with this title, though on the face of it, the title is correct (sort of). This image comes from a relatively obscure (or at least quite rare) copy of Joachim Dalance’s work Traite de l’Aiman, divise en deux parties, la premiere continent les Experiences et la seconde les raisons que l’on en peut rendre... which was printed by Henry Weinstein in Amsterdam in 1687 (just across the waters in London Isaac Newton’s fantabulous Prinmcipa Mathemtica was being printed in the same year). This important work on magnetism featured a number of good and useful observations on magnetism, interspersed with some semi-useless bits: the magnetically floated coffin of Mohamets is mentioned and disproved, the origin of magnetism is asserted by hypothesis and is not pretty, along with some “fanciful conception(s) of the magnet’s potential”*; on the other hand, there is a mention of the invention of the compass, the real use of magnets, a mention of declination, and the orientation of a compass needle in a magnetic field is shown. All pretty good stuff, considering the time. (The magnum opus on the magnet was published in 1600m by William Gilbert and was called De Magnete, Magneticisque Corporibus, et de Magno Magnete Tellure (On the Magnet and Magnetic Bodies, and on the Great Magnet the Earth), though folks have been writing on magnetism since Aristotle and Thales)

M. Hofer, the author of the quote above, mentions that the pamphlet’s images “are particularly good scientific illustrations”, though doesn’t mention this, figure 2, as being anything significant. Trying to dissect the phenomenal imagery, which purports to depict the origins of the sources of magnetism, we see something like a “magnetic cloud” in the sky, about to be pricked by a needle held by the primum mobile. That, or it is a missing piece of sky, a gapping hole, though not in the sense of what we’re getting now in the ozone layer, or in the fantastic billion-light-year wide swath of nothingness in the foamy universe. Perhaps it is more like the Black Sabbath lyrics after all, a hole in the sky, pricked by the creator, to loosen the fabric of magnetism and getting a glimpse of heaven. Or something.

[I should point out that Dalance was an out-and-about guy, with high-level correspondence, and who seemed to be at the right places at the right time. Among many contributions to the sciences, Dalance–who was a friend of Henry Oldenbourg, helped introduce Huygens to the Royal Society as well as to the French Academy of Sciences, acting as an intermediary for the most part. He seems to be an interesting guy.]

*–Ph. Hofer, Baroque Book Illustration, page 42

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Bad Ideas — Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at
A History of Blank & Empty Dots: the Discovery of (Smooth) Muscle, 1700

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In a rare confluence of odd bits, today’s post joins the categories of Blank and Missing Things with A History of Dots to form a probably-not-to-be-used-very-often category of A History of Blank and Missing Things: Dots. These text illustrations come from (page 10) of the great Girogio Baglivi’s De Fabra Motrice et morbosa..., a 58-page section found in Alessandro Pascoli’s Il Corpo-Umano o Breve storia…., all published in Venice in 1700. Baglivi (1668-1707) was an ethnic Armenian raised in Italy who rose to the rank of physician to Pope Innocent XII, and who was also a distinguished author and professor of anatomy at the Sacred College at Rome.

In spite of living only 39 years (dying, probably, from the consequences of a severe malarial attack) Baglivi had a long list of accomplishments, primary among these was his description and distinction of the smooth and striped muscle, the subject of the engraving at left. This is one of the giant milestones in the history of physiology in general, also making crucial contributions to medical/clinical education. It is the illustration of these muscle types that display the “empty dots”, not so much empty, of course, but just devoid of detail for the sake of illustration–but for my purposes, these simple empty spheres signify so much with so little. Nothing, really.

Some sort of interesting and perhaps overall numbing quotes of Baglivi:

Let the young know
they will never find a more interesting, more instructive book than the patient
himself. …

The doctor is the
servant and the interpreter of nature. Whatever he thinks or does, if he
follows not in nature’s footsteps he will never be able to control her.
De
Praxi Medica (1696).

The origin and the causes
of disease are far too recondite for the human mind to unravel them. — Giorgio Baglivi Praxi Medica (1696).

The two fulcra of medicine
are reason and observation. Observation is the clue to guide the physician in
his thinking. — Giorgio Baglivi Praxi
Medica (1696)

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of
Blank and Missing Things #31: Missing Earth

JF Ptak Science Books LLC Post 504

In 1830 when Amos Eaton, filling up his chair and burning
the midnight oils in his home in Albany New York, was figuring out the
insides of the earth He had but little direct evidence to go on, and the publications on the topic of the center of the earth were left to speculation not much better then than science fiction (a term which had not been invented yet; neither for that matter had the word “scientist”).
A very careful observer, Eaton applied what he knew about the strata
of the earth to a theory of how the landforms of the upper/outer mantle
were formed. (Eaton (1776-1842) was as influential a teacher as he was a
theorist and observer: some of his
students include the following Big Names (for which many buildings on university
grounds are named for ): James Dwight
Dana (geologist, zoologist), James Eights
(Antarctic
explorer), Asa Gray
( greatest 19^th c American botanist), James Hall
(first New York State Geologist), Joseph Henry
(developed electromagnetism, all-around smart guy who
communicated with everyone, secretary of the Smithsonian and so on.)

He applied the discoveries of stratum of William Smith (1759-1839, the “father of English Geology”) drawing on a number of maps of his, such as “Strata
Identified by Organized Fossils. : Containing Prints on Coloured Paper of the
Most Characteristic Specimens in each Stratum” of 1815 and “Geological section from London to Snowdon; showing the varieties of the
strata, and the correct altitude of the hills” of 1815 (pictured below), plus much else.

These two images (left) of cross-sections of the earth appeared in Eaton’s Geological Textbook, (1830). The top shows the earth in perfect harmony and in cross-section, depicting the strata in six layers beneath a calm and palcid ocean. There was trouble though located inside the six bulbous bulbs on the interior of the innermost strata: as we see in the second image, the six bulbs, filled with

“combustible material”, combusted, forming volcanoes and such, thereby parting the waters and forming the continents. It was some pretty good thinking for the time. But what attracted me to these images was the labeling of the interior of the newly-exploded earth, “interior probably undisturbed”, and blank beyond that point. a dark, blackish mass, unknown and from where Eaton sat, unknowable. But Eaton did do an extraordinary job in trying to imagine this stuff, piecing things together from the geological record in those pre-Darwin, pre-Lyell days. The woodcut at right appeared in the same publication as that above–this incredible rendering depicts the entirety of North America in profile, which was a vast leap of faith, an image so severe in its accomplishment that it is difficult today to realize how shocking it must’ve seemed to the readers of 1830. I believe this was the first time a true geological cross-section like this was attempted–again to see an X-ray (pre-dating that discovery by 65 years by the way) of the earth and to have it be not so terribly bad (compared to today) was just a phenomenal achievement

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Just for the record, Smith’s map of the London area–which presages the Eaton map somewhat–appears below:

·Posted by :

JF Ptak

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Blank and Empty Things; A History of — Maps, Cartography, History of Mapmaking — Prints–looking HARD/deeply at