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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."
Did the copyright finally expire?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Surely that's been on Project Gutenberg for years and years?
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!
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.
pix or it didnt happen!
Steel-plate, micrographic engravings or it didn't happen!
FTFY
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
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Whoofh
Trying to become famous by taking photos. Visit my homepage please.
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!
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.
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.