"The Invention of the Telescope" update...

OK, so it's not exactly Wikileaks: but following on from my very recent review of Albert van Helden's monograph, a (how shall I put it?) well-placed insider has dropped me a line...

Apparently, the American Philosophical Society is planning to republish "The Invention of the Telescope" in an "augmented edition" next year (2009, the International Year of the Telescope), for which van Helden has been asked to put together a new introduction. My guess is that this will come out at about the same time as the book on Galileo's sunspots which Eileen Reeves and van Helden have been working on (which itself was delayed by Reeves' "Galileo's Glassworks", according to her acknowledgments section).

However, I should flag that a big problem with long publishing pipelines like this is that it only takes one really interesting piece of work to come out to make everything in it seem instantly outdated: and with the 400th anniversary of Galileo's telescopic breakthroughs imminently upon us, right now there are doubtless several (2? 5? 10?) historians out there finishing up their shocking alt.history revisionist accounts of the telescope's genesis.

For me, the most surprising aspect of this whole story is that van Helden's work has lasted 31 years without being significantly overturned (as far as I can see): but in the field of ideas, things can change (and they often do, rapidly). We shall see what happens next...

Incidentally, I wish I knew of a book like the first half of "Galileo's Glassworks" that covered the literary prehistory of the microscope, and/or an equivalent of van Helden's monograph covering the microscope's birth. Was the romantic lure of seeing tiny things ever as great as that of seeing afar?

All of a sudden, I'm transported Proust-like to the Trigan Empire comic strip in the "Look & Learn"s of my childhood, where one storyline revealed whole subatomic galaxies to explore (might Oli Frey have drawn that?)...

Review of "The Invention of the Telescope"...

It may seem a little odd to be reviewing a 31-year-old monograph, but stick with it, you'll see where I'm going soon enough...

The whole sequence starts with the review I posted here of Eileen Reeves' brand new "Galileo's Glassworks: The Telescope and the Mirror" (2008, Harvard University Press). Though overall very fascinating, one aspect of this book confused me: why it should be structured in two so radically different (dare I say almost schizophrenic?) halves. You see, while the first 50% covers the amorphous literary pre-history of the telescope, the second 50% deals with the textual minutiae of who told Galileo what and when, and what Galileo probably believed in 1608-9: so the book swings sharply from a super-broad cultural reading to an ultra-close textual reading. An uncomfortable mixture.

Now, the first half particularly intrigued me, so it made sense for me to move on to Reeves' major source for it: Albert van Helden's (1977) brief (but magisterial) "The Invention of the Telescope". If you want your own copy, there are still a couple under £25 available on BookFinder.com (though be quick, the rest are over £50).

Van Helden (for whom Dutch is his first language) had started out by translating Cornelis de Waard's relatively little-known book "De uitvinding der verrekijkers" (The Hague, 1906), which laid out a lot of new evidence on the genesis of the telescope as we know it in the Netherlands: much of the story revolved around the town of Middelburg (which held one of the largest glassworks in Europe), with nearly all key documents written in Dutch.

But de Waard's conclusions - that the telescope had probably been invented in Italy circa 1590, that Raffael Gualterrotti had built such a device in 1598, and that one of which had surfaced in Holland circa 1604, before being replicated by various spectacle-makers and inventors in 1608, leading to an unseemly patent rush - seemed to van Helden not quite to be supported by the evidence. And so he decided to take a fresh look at the documents: and his 1977 monograph was the result.

Having said that, van Helden's final conclusions are practically the same as de Waard's, though not quite as specific: that Giovanbaptista della Porta's claim to have built a telescope (to which his "Magia naturalis libri XX" (Naples, 1589), Book XVII, Chapter 10, p.269 circumspectly alludes) probably does hold up, as does Gualterrotti's claim (perhaps more weakly), though given that the best magnification possible pre-1600 would (argues van Helden) have been only around 2x, the resulting device would have been unspectacular - a telescopic amuse-bouche, rather than the Galilean feast that was to come. And so van Helden concludes that Italians (specifically della Porta) probably did invent the telescope, though they didn't realise it at the time.

Thirty years on, and I think van Helden's monograph stands as a great piece of writing: clear, lean, thoughtful, honest. Best of all, the majority of it (pp.28-64) consists of transcriptions (and English translations) of the important sections of all the relevant documents; so if you don't like his conclusions, feel free to go right to the primary sources (they're pretty much all there), knock yourself out. Perfect.

It should now be clear what I think happened with "Galileo's Glassworks". The elephant in the room (who was not mentioend, but around whom all the furniture was carefully arranged) was van Helden's monograph: this forms a bridge between Reeves' two distinct sections. And so if you add the two books together, you get what amounts to a single coherent work, going from medieval and early modern notions and claims of vision-at-a-distance and burning mirrors (Reeves), through to the myriad claims and counterclaims of the Dutch "inventors" (van Helden), through to Galileo's reception of the new device (Reeves again). At only 231 pages (with endnotes starting on p.167), Reeves' book originally felt to me to be about 60-70 pages short: how curious to find that van Helden's monograph exactly fits the dimensions of that lacuna.

In her acknowledgments, Reeves says that she "benefited most of all... from the intellectual guidance and constant friendship of Albert van Helden, whose own work... is the basis of and inspiration for my own" (p.220). I'd say that while Reeves' book gives context and consequence to van Helden's monograph, reading the former without the latter doesn't really make sense. In fact, I would strongly recommend to Harvard University Press (who publish "Galileo's Glassworks") that they negotiate with the American Philosophical Society to reprint Reeves' book with van Helden's excellent (but scarce) work as an appendix. Now that would be a book truly worthy of the International Year Of The Telescope.

Corrections and updates...

A few errata and notes on the virtual pinboard, tacks don't have to be taxing...

(1) Warburg librarian Francois Quiviger kindly points out that my description of the layout of the Warburg Institute (in the Day Two blog entry) wasn't totally precise: though the overall layout matches Warburg's arbitrary Mnemosyne plan, books within a section are arranged chronologically (or rather, by date of author's death). Hmmm... hopefully it'll be 60+ years before his successors will be able to place my book in its final order... :-o

Re-reading my blog entry with Francois' other comments in mind, I think its emphasis (on madness) somewhat diverged from what I originally planned to say. In computer programming, you can "over-optimize" your solution by tailoring it too exactly to the problem: and this is how I felt about the Warburg. One tiny architectural detail at the Institute tells this story: the oddly hinged doors in the men's toilets, that appeared to have been mathematically designed to yield the most effective use of floor space. For me, this is no different to the filing cabinets full of deities, all laid out in alphabetical order: and so the Institute is like a iconological Swiss Army Knife, optimally hand-crafted for Aby Warburg and the keepers of his meme. But the cost of keeping it functioning in broadly the same way goes up each year: programming managers would call it a "brittle" or "fragile" solution, one with a high hidden cost of maintenance.

But am I still a fan of the Warburg? Yes, definitely: it's a fabulous treasure-house that only a particularly hard-hearted historian could even dream of bracketing. And in those terms, I think I'm actually a bit of a softy.

Finally, Francois very kindly offered to put in a reference for me (thank you very much indeed!!): so there should be a happy ending to the whole rollercoaster story after all. I will, of course, post updates and developments here as they happen. :-)

(2) Thanks to a flood of HASTRO-L subscribers dropping by to read my review of Eileen Reeves' "Galileo's Glassworks", Voynich News has just broken through the 1000 visitor mark (and well past the 2000 page-view mark). Admittedly, it's not a huge milestone... but it's a start, right? And though Google seems to like it, only Elias Schwerdtfeger and Early Modern Notes link to it: and nobody has yet rated it on Technorati etc, bah!

(3) Though in the end I was unable to get to the recent CRASSH mini-conference on books of secrets (which was a huge shame), I'm still up for the Treadwell's evening on Magic Circles at 7.15pm on 19th March 2008 (which I mentioned here about ten Internet years ago). Should be fascinating, perhaps see you there! ;-)

Voynich news-bites...

Some tasty bite-sized morsels for you: don't eat them all at once, though...

The April 2008 edition of sci-fi monthly Analog has a 10,000-word Voynich-based story, "Guaranteed Not to Turn Pink in the Can" by Thomas R. Dulski. When super-bright billionaire's daughter Pamela Roderick writes an academic book on the idea of UFOs, people are surprisingly OK: but when her second book claims that the Voynich Manuscript describes 15th century humans being taken on a journey into space, the people around her become more tense... Hey, any novelistic take on the VMs without a papal conspiracy or evil Jesuit priests is fine by me. :-)

Incidentally, a key part of Eileen Reeves' "Galileo's Glassworks" surprisingly revolves around anti-Jesuit propaganda, most notably Johannes Cambilhom's "Discoverie of the Most Secret and Subtile Practises of the Iesuites", which claimed to dish the dirt on the Jesuits' buried treasure, sadistic treatment of novices, sexual misadventures, and mad politicking. And the Jesuits had only been going 70 years at the time! Anyway...

Change of direction: here's a cool picture called "Arizona" by ~HinoNeko / A. Brenner, depicting a young guy with a Voynich-themed T-shirt (basically, the centre of the 'sun-face' on f68v1). Yet more VMs things edging into the mainstream consciousness, one meme at a time...

Finally: I don't know how I managed to miss the decade-old story of the Swedish parents who were fined for wanting to name their son "Brfxxccxxmnpcccclllmmnprxvclmnckssqlbb11116", in a kind of pataphysical protest at Sweden's child naming law. Amazing: a name that makes Voynichese look sane. ;-)

Review of "Galileo's Glassworks"...

Back to the non-fiction grindstone, and next up on my list to read was the very promising-looking "Galileo's Glassworks", by Eileen Reeves: though this has as its main focus the issue of what Galileo knew (and when) about the Dutch telescope, I was told (by Peter Abrahams on HASTRO-L) that it also covers the pre-history of the telescope, which I was more interested in. I was intrigued to see how it would blend these two topics together: it sounded quite ambitious.

And indeed, just as promised, the book turned out to be a game of two very distinct halves. The first half was a kind of wide-roaming literature review of the classical, medieval and early modern texts that promised some kind of proto-telescopes or burning mirrors to their readers: that this was built on broadly the same foundations as Albert van Helden's 1977 monograph "The Invention of the Telescope" is made completely clear in the acknowledgements at the end. Let's be clear: the primary sources for this form a fragmentary, piecemeal soup, whose components interlock and separate eternally - despite all Reeves' hard work, there is no emergent narrative, no thread, no causal proof to be had here. Yet she gives the impression of needing to draw out a story based on the 16th century reception of travellers accounts of the Pharos, in order to give a structural punchline to this section: but unfortunately this never quite hits the spot.

The second half is very much more focused, and reads quite differently: it focuses on the minutiae of correspondence of Galileo and his circle circa 1608-9, as they received (possibly unreliable) reports of mirrors and telescopes coming from France and Holland (often embedded in pro- or anti-Jesuit propaganda), and tried to make up their minds what to make of them - was the new Dutch telescope truly something amazing, or based on the mirror, or was it yet another tall tale?

In the end, Reeves' central point (which hinges on whether Galileo thought the new telescope was built with a mirror or purely with lenses) is well argued, but extremely marginal: and it fails to mesh comfortably with the first half of her text. I came away feeling like I had read two 90-page monographs in quick succession: I desperately wanted her to find a way to knit the two together, to redeem her choice of structure - but this never really happened.

Look: "Galileo's Glassworks" is a lovely, compact, readable book, and pleasantly affordable too (a snip at £14.20 for the hardback). But Reeves can't really reconcile the broad generalities of the pre-history of the telescope with her ultra-close reading of Galileo's "Starry Messenger" and his letters. Ultimately, what's going on is some kind of mismatch in epistemological tone: the first half raises many open-ended issues, while the second half answers a single (quite different) question.

I suspect that somewhere along the way, Reeves lost track of whom she was talking to, and about what: the book ended up being just as much about Sarpi (or even about the ghost of della Porta!) as about Galileo himself, which is surely a sign that her aim drifted off true. Perhaps in the end she simply didn't have enough to say about Galileo in the second half that hadn't been amply said before: which would be a shame, as I would say the first half of her book is really very good, well worth the cover price on its own.

Books, books, books...

My copies of Eileen Reeves "Galileo's Glassworks" and Matt Rubinstein's "Vellum" have both arrived in the post: and so the inevitable book triage process sets in, whereby I work out which of the books I'm currently reading to put to one side to make time/space for the new arrivals.

Unfortunately, I'm so utterly captivated by Lynn Thorndike's "History of Magic & Experimental Science" Vol III (covering the 14th century), I'll probably have to finish that one first. Only a few hundred pages to go, then...

A Latin aside: I've been programming with a code library from 3Dlabs with a function that normally appears as "des.init()". However, desinit is a proper Latin word meaning "it ceases", and refers (as anyone who has read Thorndike will know) to the words at the end of manuscripts, just as incipit refers to the words at their start. What I didn't know until this week was that there is also a nice saying from Horace desinit in piscem (or in full "desinit in piscem mulier formosa superne"), which refers to a statue that starts beautiful at the top but ends up as a ugly fish at the bottom (it even gets quoted in Asterix and the Secret Weapon) - a handy metaphor for things which seem to start out well but end up badly. Nothing at all to do with 3Dlabs, then.

On the subject of books, I recently found a reference on WorldCat to a a real (ie non-fiction) Voynich book I'd never heard of, written by VMs mailing list member Jim Comegys in 2001, and with the catchy title "Keys for the voynich scholar : necessary clues for the decipherment and reading of the world's most mysterious manuscript which is a medical text in Nahuatl attributable to Francisco Hernández and his Aztec Ticiti collaborators." I'll see if I can get a copy from Jim (though I suspect he may not have properly published it per se).

New telescope history book...

To mark the four hundredth anniversary next year of Galileo's first astronomical use of the telescope in 1609, the IAU has designated 2009 "The International Year of Astronomy" (IYA2009): which is likely to be the trigger for a glut of telescope history-themed books (probably no bad thing, in my opinion). But what happened before 1609?

I recently mentioned here "the lost 150 years", that awkward pause between the widespread availability of both convex and concave lenses (circa 1450) and the appearance of microscopes (circa 1590) and telescopes (circa 1600). Such compound optical devices could have been invented by anyone during that period, and the best-documented pre-1600 telescopic claim so far seems to be from Thomas Digges (John Gribbin discusses this in one of his books). But could yet other inventors (such as possibly the author of the Voynich Manuscript) have pre-dated Digges, Janssen and co?

There were plenty of alchemical-style claims to that effect, most notably from H. C. Agrippa, who wrote in his "Occult Philosophy" that "And I knew how to make by them wonderful things, in which any one might see whatsoever he pleased at a long distance" (Book II, Chapter 23) . However, there was (in this case) apparently nothing of real substance behind his bluster.

All the same, I asked on the HASTRO-L mailing list if there were any up-to-the-minute books on this far-too-quiet period, and was delighted to learn (via Peter Abrahams) of a book that is just coming out from Harvard University Press: "Galileo's Glassworks, The Telescope and the Mirror" (2008), by Eileen Reeves, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton, who specialises in the study of early modern scientific literature. Though the publisher's blurb seems to make her book sound over-focused on the minutiae of Galileo's rhetoric, I'm assured that its first half does actually take in the wider pre-1609 field of view (which is precisely what I was most interested in).

The release date for Glassworks is either January 2008 or 28th February 2008 (depending on who you ask): there are already some copies for sale in the US, but it's only pre-ordering in the UK at the moment. I'll review it here when my copy arrives (counting the days)...