The Faber Book of Science

by John Carey

  Source: Charles Lyell, Principles of Geology, London, John Murray, 1830–3.

  The Discovery of Worrying

  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.

  Pictures for the Million

  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 cours
e, 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.

  The Battle of the Ants

  On 4 July 1845, the American poet and essayist Henry David Thoreau (1817–62) moved to a cabin he had built himself beside Walden Pond near Concord, Massachusetts. He lived alone there for two years, thinking, observing nature, and growing his own food (beans). His masterpiece Walden; or Life in the Woods (1854) from which this extract is taken, records his solitary happiness. The Battle of Concord (1775), to which he refers, naming some of the combatants, was one of the opening actions of the American War of Independence.

  One day when I went to my wood-pile, or rather my pile of stumps, I observed two large ants, the one red, the other much larger, nearly half an inch long, and black, fiercely contending with one another. Having once got hold they never let go, but struggled and wrestled and rolled on the chips incessantly. Looking farther, I was surprised to find that the chips were covered with such combatants, that it was not a duellum, but a bellum, a war between two races of ants, the red always pitted against the black, and frequently two red ones to one black. The legions of these Myrmidons covered all the hills and vales in my wood-yard, and the ground was already strewn with the dead and dying, both red and black. It was the only battle which I have ever witnessed, the only battle-field I ever trod while the battle was raging; internecine war; the red republicans on the one hand, and the black imperialists on the other. On every side they were engaged in deadly combat, yet without any noise that I could hear, and human soldiers never fought so resolutely. I watched a couple that were fast locked in each other’s embraces, in a little sunny valley amid the chips, now at noon-day prepared to fight till the sun went down, or life went out. The smaller red champion had fastened himself like a vice to his adversary’s front, and through all the tumblings on that field never for an instant ceased to gnaw at one of his feelers near the root, having already caused the other to go by the board; while the stronger black one dashed him from side to side, and as I saw on looking nearer, had already divested him of several of his members. They fought with more pertinacity than bull-dogs. Neither manifested the least disposition to retreat. It was evident that their battle-cry was Conquer or die. In the meanwhile there came along a single red ant on the hill-side of this valley, evidently full of excitement, who either had despatched his foe, or had not yet taken part in the battle; probably the latter, for he had lost none of his limbs; whose mother had charged him to return with his shield or upon it. Or perchance he was some Achilles, who had nourished his wrath apart, and had now come to avenge or rescue his Patroclus. He saw this unequal combat from afar – for the blacks were nearly twice the size of the red – he drew near with rapid pace till he stood on his guard within half an inch of the combatants; then, watching his opportunity, he sprang upon the black warrior‚ and commenced his operations near the root of his right fore-leg, leaving the foe to select among his own members; and so there were three united for life, as if a new kind of attraction had been invented which put all other locks and cements to shame. I should not have wondered by this time to find that they had their respective musical bands stationed on some eminent chip, and playing their national airs the while, to excite the slow and cheer the dying combatants. I was myself excited somewhat even as if they had been men. The more you think of it, the less the difference. And certainly there is not a fight recorded in Concord history, at least, if in the history of America, that will bear a moment’s comparison with this, whether for the numbers engaged in it, or for the patriotism and heroism displayed. For numbers and for carnage it was an Austerlitz or Dresden. Concord Fight! Two killed on th
e patriots’ side, and Luther Blanchard wounded! Why here every ant was a Buttrick, – ‘Fire! for God’s sake, fire!’ – and thousands shared the fate of Davis and Hosmer. There was not one hireling there. I have no doubt that it was a principle they fought for, as much as our ancestors, and not to avoid a threepenny tax on their tea; and the results of this battle will be as important and memorable to those whom it concerns as those of the battle of Bunker Hill, at least.

  I took up the chip on which the three I have particularly described were struggling, carried it into my house, and placed it under a tumbler on my window-sill, in order to see the issue. Holding a microscope to the first-mentioned red ant, I saw that, though he was assiduously gnawing at the near fore-leg of his enemy, having severed his remaining feeler, his own breast was all torn away, exposing what vitals he had there to the jaws of the black warrior, whose breast-plate was apparently too thick for him to pierce; and the dark carbuncles of the sufferer’s eyes shone with ferocity such as war only could excite. They struggled half-an-hour longer under the tumbler, and when I looked again the black soldier had severed the heads of his foes from their bodies, and the still living heads were hanging on either side of him like ghastly trophies at his saddle-bow, still apparently as firmly fastened as ever, and he was endeavouring with feeble struggles, being without feelers and with only the remnant of a leg, and I know not how many other wounds, to divest himself of them; which at length, after half-an-hour more, he accomplished. I raised the glass, and he went off over the window-sill in that crippled state. Whether he finally survived that combat, and spent the remainder of his days in some Hotel des Invalides, I do not know; but I thought that his industry would not be worth much thereafter. I never learned which party was victorious, nor the cause of the war: but I felt for the rest of that day as if I had had my feelings excited and harrowed by witnessing the struggle, the ferocity and carnage, of a human battle before my door.