17th Century Microscope Book Is Now Freely Readable

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17th Century Microscope Book Is Now Freely Readable

Posted by Unknown on Monday October 22, 2012 @07:17PM from the creating-the-first-germaphobes dept.

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."

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17th Century? by Black+Parrot · 2012-10-22 19:25 · Score: 5, Funny

Did the copyright finally expire?

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1. Re:17th Century? by hairyfeet · 2012-10-22 21:15 · Score: 2
  
  Sadly it was made before Jack Valenti could get his "forever minus a single day" copyright laws passed. Won't someone think of the corporations? Why people are actually READING without writing them a check!
  
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2. Re:17th Century? by Kirth · 2012-10-22 23:09 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  Yep, I don't understand why this is news, and why that book hasn't been available electronically for a long time.
  Probably some jerk-publisher fraudulently claimed "coypright" on its print of it, and it took google several years until they noticed that indeed, the publisher did NOT have a copyright, and indeed, they COULD post it in its entirety. Which is, by the way, why around 80% of all public domain books google has digitized are not available in its entirety.
  I wrote about it a few years ago http://seegras.discordia.ch/Blog/stealing-from-the-public-domain/ The situation hasn't changed. Google Books is still the biggest repository of public domain books with fraudulently claimed copyright.
  If you're doing historical research, it's absolutely maddening how most books from the 19th century and earlier "is not available if full" because of fraudulent copyright claims -- and google reacting very slowly.
  
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3. Re:17th Century? by Whiteox · 2012-10-23 00:26 · Score: 2
  
  But although Google should be congratulated, it is a poor scan. Whoever did this didn't bother unfolding the leaf of the pictures which were obviously folded to preserve the book format. Some pages were not aligned properly also.
  This is typical of the care that I've found with google and their incredibly poor paywall selections.
  
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4. Re:17th Century? by JasterBobaMereel · 2012-10-23 04:14 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  Google's version is in images of the pages, most of the illustrations (which are the whole point of the book) are fold outs and are not folded out in Google's copy, the ones that are visible are smudgy poor quality versions of the originals...
  Project Gutenburg has a much better copy - HTML,epub,kindle etc ... transcribed text and detailed images
  "http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15491/15491-h/15491-h.htm"
  Why is the a story ....?
  
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Just saying... by J.J.+Dane · 2012-10-22 19:26 · Score: 3, Informative

Surely that's been on Project Gutenberg for years and years?
1. Re:Just saying... by vurian · 2012-10-22 19:32 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  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.
2. Re:Just saying... by docmordin · 2012-10-22 19:44 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  [...] This is a full scan of the original pages, including illustrations. It's looking pretty good.
  Some of the pages are garbled, or, at the very least, a tad difficult to parse, due to the ensuing or previous page(s) bleeding through to the others during the scanning process. (Granted, this phenomena gave me an excellent idea for an IEEE CVPR/TPAMI paper about a variational, non-local image inpainting scheme for fixing such things in scanned, double-sided documents.)
3. Re:Just saying... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-22 22:38 · Score: 2, Insightful
  
  That's far more readable, yes.
  Loved this part, it really puts the work into context:
  
  A Second thing (which was hinted to me, by the consideration of the included fluids globular form, caused by the protrusion of the ambient heterogeneous fluid) was, whether the Phænomena of gravity might not by this means be explained, by supposing the Globe of Earth, Water, and Air to be included with a fluid, heterogeneous to all and each of them, so subtil, as not only to be every where interspersed through the Air, (or rather the air through it) but to pervade the bodies of Glass, and even the closest Metals, by which means it may endeavour to detrude all earthly bodies as far from it as it can; and partly thereby, and partly by other of its properties may move them towards the Center of the Earth. Now that there is some such fluid, I could produce many Experiments and Reasons, that do seem to prove it: But because it would ask some time and room to set them down and explain them, and to consider and answer all the Objections (many whereof I foresee) that may be alledged against it; I shall at present proceed to other Queries, contenting my self to have here only given a hint of what I may say more elswhere.
  People were fumbling around without a lot of the knowledge that we take for granted today, which make their advancements all the more impressive, IMO.
4. Re:Just saying... by AHuxley · 2012-10-22 23:47 · Score: 3, Informative
  
  You would think with all the cash, tech, skill and as a pure PR stunt...
  Place some black card behind the pages and get on scan per page, not a semi transparent mess.
  
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5. Re:Just saying... by Rogue+Haggis+Landing · 2012-10-23 00:19 · Score: 4, Interesting
  
  It's been available for years in other places; my partner wrote her dissertation on 17th century science, and used scans of Hooke from a couple of online sources. The National Library of Medicine has a beautiful flash version of it. There is a decent version at the University of Wisconsin. It's at archive.org in a nice scan. The PG edition is very good, an original spelling transcription with scans of the original plates. IIRC there's also a scanned edition in the (pay access) database Early English Books Online. So this is not news at all.
  
  But it's always a good time to look at Hooke. His illustrations really are astonishingly beautiful, and weren't bested for a century or more, and the text conveys something of the wonder to be the first person to *ever* see these things. It's pretty astonishing to imagine what that might have felt like. Hooke not only first saw cells, he coined the word in its biological sense, because he thought the cells in cork bark looked like the cells that monks live in. Hooke was a polymath, a successful mathematician, an architect and inventor, and by all accounts a very good musician. He was also apparently a bit unpleasant and a little crazed, but genius is allowed these things (at least when it's no longer around to annoy you)
6. Re:Just saying... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-23 00:28 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Well, there's an epub version too. Why do people have to always make these things so difficult?
  Here's the real Project Gutenberg link.
Re:Copyright is just too long in this country by nedlohs · 2012-10-22 19:46 · Score: 3, Funny

How do you expect an author to provide for his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand children? You selfish bastard!
English link by ryzvonusef · 2012-10-22 20:07 · Score: 2

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/

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Re:Copyright is just too long in this country by drkim · 2012-10-22 20:13 · Score: 2

How do you expect an author to provide for his great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grand children? You selfish bastard!
Unfortunately for the Hooke estate, the great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great offspring of the original microbes are demanding 347 years of royalties for the use of their ancestors likeness.
More info here than in PG by srussia · 2012-10-22 20:14 · Score: 5, Funny

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!

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1. Re:More info here than in PG by Fallingcow · 2012-10-23 03:42 · Score: 2
  
  Jesus Christ, another one?
  Long S
2. Re:More info here than in PG by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-23 03:54 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  you're an affhat...
Small correction... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-22 20:14 · Score: 5, Informative

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.
Frost piss! Pretty bizarre experiments in the book by o'reor · 2012-10-22 20:17 · Score: 2

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 !

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Re:Pix by drkim · 2012-10-22 20:25 · Score: 4, Funny

pix or it didnt happen!
Steel-plate, micrographic engravings or it didn't happen!
FTFY
Re:WoW! by Lord+Lode · 2012-10-22 20:48 · Score: 2

I skimmed through it, and this book is quite amazing! Almost 400 years old and still you can learn from it. I didn't know books like this were around back then. It looks almost modern.
Re:Lisp by ryzvonusef · 2012-10-22 21:07 · Score: 2

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_s

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Re:Hooke the pretender by wisty · 2012-10-22 21:29 · Score: 2

Isaac Newton hates Hooke's guts, and the feeling was mutual. Hooke was actually pretty good, but not as good as Newton at math (who was?). Actually, Newton hated *everyone's* guts, and everyone hated him back (though most respected his genius).
Fun fact - when Newton said "I was standing on the shoulders of giants", he was pointing out that his work was based on Des-Cartes wave theory, not Hooke's particle theory (though both were later found to be true - the particles were waves). This was doubly insulting, because Hooke was not a tall man.
Not everyone loved Hooke either, because he spent far too much time drinking and whoring, but he would have been a fun guy to meet (unlike Newton).
It's called print-through! by robbak · 2012-10-22 21:36 · Score: 3, Interesting

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!

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Comment removed by account_deleted · 2012-10-22 22:05 · Score: 5, Informative

Comment removed based on user account deletion
Re:Lisp by bruce_the_loon · 2012-10-22 22:26 · Score: 4, Funny

Whoofh

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Leeuwenhoek and Sorby by phrackwulf · 2012-10-23 00:38 · Score: 3, Informative

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.

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Re:Hooke the pretender by pehrs · 2012-10-23 02:57 · Score: 3, Insightful

Isaac Newton was a very good scientist, and an even better politician. Actually, "ruthless" would probably be the best term to describe the man. He spent years discrediting anybody who had crossed him, frequently postmortem. You see, Isaac lived for a long time, and took the liberty to spend the last few years of his life smearing people like Hooke and Halley.

There is a reason he was chosen to head the royal mint, where he ensured that some 30 coiners ended up hung, drawn and quartered in less than a year.
Re:To the usual crap Google digitization standards by kevink707 · 2012-10-23 03:13 · Score: 2

It looks like some of the pages unfold to show larger drawings, unfortunately there weren't unfolded. :-(
Re:WoW! by Fallingcow · 2012-10-23 03:39 · Score: 4, Informative

Terrible typesetting notwithstanding (seriously, are they using an f in place of an s?
Are you trolling, or are you seriously not aware of the Long S?
It was used when a lower-case S occurred anywhere but the end of a word, much like the two lower case forms of the greek letter sigma.
Re:WoW! by Spugglefink · 2012-10-23 05:56 · Score: 2

Why would I be aware of that? I was born in the 1900s.
Uhh, you'd be aware of that because you were, uhhh, well educated? Just going out on a limb here.