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17th Century Microscope Book Is Now Freely Readable

Posted by Unknown on 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."

5 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. 17th Century? by Black+Parrot · · Score: 5, Funny

    Did the copyright finally expire?

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    Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
    1. Re:17th Century? by Kirth · · 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.

      --
      "The more prohibitions there are, The poorer the people will be" -- Lao Tse
  2. More info here than in PG by srussia · · 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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    Set your phasers on "funky"!
  3. Small correction... by Anonymous Coward · · 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.

  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Informative

    Comment removed based on user account deletion