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17th Century Microscope Book Is Now Freely Readable
menno_h writes "In January 1665, Samuel Pepys wrote in his diary that he stayed up till two in the morning reading a best-selling page-turner, a work that he called 'the most ingenious book I read in my life.' It was not a rousing history of English battles or a proto-bodice ripper. It was filled with images: of fleas, of bark, of the edges of razors. The book was called Micrographia. It provided the reading public with its first look at the world beyond the naked eye. Its author, Robert Hooke, belonged to a brilliant circle of natural philosophers who — among many other things — were the first in England to make serious use of microscopes as scientific instruments. They were great believers in looking at the natural world for themselves rather than relying on what ancient Greek scholars had claimed. Looking under a microscope at the thousands of facets on an insect's compound eye, they saw things at the nanoscale that Aristotle could not have dreamed of. A razor's edge became a mountain range. In the chambers of a piece of bark, Hooke saw the first evidence of cells. Micrographia is is available on Google Books now."
I've been waiting for this.
Did the copyright finally expire?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Surely that's been on Project Gutenberg for years and years?
pix or it didnt happen!
Wow! I knew copyright lasted a long time in the US, but 347 years to enter the public domain just seems like too long!
Looks like it
The link in parent post from Google Dutch.
http://books.google.com.pk/books?id=SgFMAAAAcAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Micrographia&source=bl&ots=RHRy548O-h&sig=7rlnMA8KsyCj7h7-TfHBuxDoAd4&hl=en&sa=X&ei=wk6GUM23C6iu0QW4_YCQBA&ved=0CCkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false
Also, ugh, back scan all over! Can't read the bloody thing due to the back page image being scanned in. (courtesy of a flatbed, back-lit scanner?)
I think it should have been scanned with one of those front book scanner (like the ones they make here[1]) I dare presume that would have eliminated the problem?
[1]: http://www.diybookscanner.org/
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
If it was on gutenberg, it would have been a transcription. This is a full scan of the original pages, including illustrations. It's looking pretty good.
For example, now we know Robert Hooke fpoke with a weird lifp, a fact that was not apparent in the PG tranfcription!
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Looking under a microscope at the thousands of facets on an insect's compound eye, they saw things at the nanoscale that Aristotle could not have dreamed of.
I know it's fun to put edgy and trendy words in phrases at random, but the scale at which you observe things under a standard optical microscope is (unsurprisingly) the microscale, not the nanoscale. "Nanoscale" is not a generic word for small... it actually refers to a specific range of sizes (different from the ranges of sizes addressed by terms such as "microscale" and "femtoscale").
Words... we have them. Learn how to use them.
The "Frost piss" title has never been so appropriate here: you will certainly like the chapter "Several Observable in the fix branched Figures form'd on the surface of Urine by freezing", page 88 (Google Books index). Hey, that frozen urine crystal looks marvelous !
In Soviet Russia, our new overlords are belong to all your base.
Why dot-nl instead of dot-com for the link?
And is Google planning on using OCR to truly digitize it so it's easier to read?
I just finished reading the preface and that was probably one of the most pleasant and understandable English manuscript I've read the entire week(or month). I usually don't read "ancient" unedited texts, but in my very limited experience the older the text the harder to read. Texts from 19th century or earlier can be quite frustrating. Other than the use of the integral symbol as the 's' character, it was a smooth read and it felt like the text was written very recently. I'm not even a native English speaker. It makes me wonder, did someone "translated" it into modern English?
It waf apparently typefet by fomeone with a lifp.
Great.
Now if someone could actually do a half-decent job of removing the other-side of the page that leaks through on EVERY page, it might be readable without giving me a headache.
Seriously, would it be that hard to do some kind of light-trick or image-editing afterwards (especially as you have an image of the reverse page which could be tweaked and pulled to provide a lined-up mask to dial down those parts of the page), or hell even just a bit of contrast adjustment etc. so that the presumably very thin paper doesn't leak everything through?
If you want to immerse yourself in the world of Hooke, Pepys, Newton et al., you should read "The Baroque Cycle".
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Biographies of Isaac Newton do not show Robert Hooke in a good light. He was a pretender to genius and laid claim to ideas that Newton developed in full, whereas Hooke had the most rudimentary sense of them. He was in science what we'd call a patent troll in the field of business. Just because he has a name one might have heard before is no reason to accord to him the profound dignity of scholarship this article purports to bestow. He looked through a microscope. Wow! Newton invented the theory of optics. (And many other things that Hooke very presumptuously claimed to be his own discoveries.)
What you are calling back-scan is print-through, partially related to the book being 350 years old, and the ink bleeding through the paper over the centuries.
You can be sure that they have done everything they could to reduce it, but that is what the pages look like now.
What annoys me, however, is that they have not opened up and scanned all the folded-over plates. The signature image, that of the flea, is only visible in the shadow of that print-through!
Unless I am missing something in the google books interface!
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Apart from hand-editing every page, or or just normalizing the life out of them, there is no way. If you had the paper before you, it would look like that. No amount of lighting will remove what is on the page.
And you can't simply subtract the back of the page from the front. The amount of soak-through is dependant on the fibres of the paper!
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Wow. That whole "to the king" section was at least as interesting to me as the rest of the book...
When I was a student in Manchester, UK I took an optional "history of science & technology" module. This included a trip to Chethams Library, where I was lucky enough to handle a first edition Micrographia and a first edition of something called Principia Mathematica by a bloke called Newton.
It's great to see it on line, but the physical artifacts really are something special. To this ex physicist anyway.
I wonder what he might have thought if he could see a modern microprocessor under the microscope.
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
And these strange words that say 'You do not have license to view this work, upon penalty of death.'
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Good thing it wasn't in film form, or it wouldn't be freely watchable for about infinity years.
Well at least the quality isn't as shockingly bad as Google Books are usually. And they event remembered to scan the images, not get the pages folded in the scanner, not scan a hand, not blur the page AND not have the images compressed into nothing, or omitted entirely. This is a rare find indeed.
Damm New Zealand copyright
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Hooke gets credit for popularizing the technology but the optical science of Van Leeuwenhoek has always been where the real scientific innovation was. H. Clifton Sorby, the "Father of all metallurgists" refined the use of the optical microscope for geological materials and then metals and began the process of specialized etchants, which directly gave us the ability to refine and understand the structure of steels in different quenchants and temperatures through direct study of the resulting microstructures. Sorby doesn't get anywhere near the credit he deserves nowadays and ever time I run into a poorly trained metallurgist I am reminded of the exacting science of men like E.C. Baine, M.A. Grossman and H. Clifton Sorby. Though the Hooke college of microscopy in Chicago should never be overlooked.
What would Richard Feynman do, if he were here right now? He'd do some math and he'd follow through!
It looks like some of the pages unfold to show larger drawings, unfortunately there weren't unfolded. :-(
... And what happens when you rip one?
Jonathan Swift (1667–1745):
So, naturalists observe, a flea
Has smaller fleas that on him prey;
And these have smaller still to bite ’em;
And so proceed ad infinitum.
Very kewl! I love this old stuff. Some more old books to enjoy:
The Harmonia Macrocosmica
The Voynich Manuscript/a. aka, the most mysterious book in the world.
If this keeps up... why any old commoner could read about almost anything!
Pages 111-113 are not part of this book preview.
They should have scanned with a black sheet backside to reduce the view of print on the opposite page side.
Not only did Google provide us with the aforementioned book about microscopes, they also made the young mans book of amusements public to the adventurous reader.
http://books.google.de/books?id=X2FLAAAAYAAJ
Je me souviens.
Is it just me, or is this one a cheap fake?:
http://ctchew.com/School/micrographia5.html
Table-ized A.I.
I am a native English speaker, and I often have trouble reading archaic English texts.
Shakespeare (around 1600) and the King James Version of the Bible (1611) come to mind. I have seen current-English editions of Shakespeare (shown in parallel with the original text) and there are many other English Bible translations - is that the kind of thing you were thinking of?
Micrographia is a few decades later at 1665. The Google Books scan has that long s, and the Project Gutenberg version has excessive italics. The original language otherwise seems quite readable.
That's with printed text - old handwriting is a whole other issue.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.