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."

Comments

17th Century?

[Black Parrot]

Did the copyright finally expire?

Re:17th Century?

[Kirth]

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.

Re:17th Century?

[JasterBobaMereel]

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 ....?

Re:Just saying...

[docmordin]

[...] 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.)

More info here than in PG

[srussia]

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!

Small correction...

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Pix

[drkim]

pix or it didnt happen!

Steel-plate, micrographic engravings or it didn't happen!

FTFY

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Lisp

[bruce_the_loon]

Whoofh

Re:Just saying...

[Rogue Haggis Landing]

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)

Re:WoW!

[Fallingcow]

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.