Whewell’s Gazette: Vol. 10

Whewell’s Gazette

Your weekly digest of all the best of

Internet history of science, technology and medicine

Editor in Chief: The Ghost of William Whewell

Volume #10

Monday 25 August 2014

EDITORIAL:

We can hardly believe it ourselves but this is the tenth edition of Whewell’s Gazette your weekly digest of the best in the histories of science, technology and medicine, so we are dedicating this edition to Pythagoras and the Pythagoreans. You may ask yourself why we are doing this.

The Pythagoreans who are considered to be one of the founders of Western science were great believers in numerology, who considered the natural numbers to be the building blocks of the cosmos and for them the number ten was the most special number in their metaphysical beliefs.

Ten was known as the Tetraktys (meaning four) by the Pythagorean, being the sum of the first four natural numbers 1+2+3+4 = 10 and displayed as a triangular number.

It had many interpretations. One is a point or zero dimensions, two is two points forming a straight line or one dimension, three is three points forming a triangle or two dimensions and four is four points forming a tetrahedron or three dimensions. For the Pythagoreans there were ten celestial bodies: the fixed stars, the seven planets (Moon, Mercury, Venus, Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), the Earth and Antichthon (the counter-earth). The Earth and Anthichthon revolve around the Central Fire, a theory that led Copernicus to erroneously attribute heliocentricity to the Pythagoreans, which in turn led Copernican being referred to as Pythagoreans in the Early Modern Period.

Following a lively discussion on Twitter the editorial team of Whewell’s Gazette have decided to replace the hash tag tape worm #histsci, #histtech & #histmed with the single hash tag #histSTM and we hope that all historians of science, medicine and technology will follow our example and adopt this space and character saving device in future.

ON THE WEB BLOGS AND WEBSITES:

Birthdays of the Week: H. P. Lovecraft! (20 August 1890)

Letters from Gondwana: Halloween Special: Lovecraft and the Mountains of Madness

The Dynamic Earth: At the Orogen of Madness

Haeckel’s Kunstformen der Natur (1904), plate 90: Cystoidea. From Wikimedia Commons

The Devil’s Exercise Yard: “Don’t mention the war.” – some thoughts on H.P. Lovecraft and race

Georges Cuvier 23 August 1769

The Embryo Project: Georges Cuvier (1769-1832)

Stratotype of Basin of Paris (1808)

PHYSICS & ASTRONOMY:

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Podcast: Glen Seaborg’s Interview

Wiener Zeitung: Wiener Physiker Walter Thirring verstorben

The four Nobel laureates of NBI. Niels Bohr is on the right. Who can name the others? Via @telescoper

Pat’s Blog: Why there are seven colours in the rainbow

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Podcast: Robert Hayes’s Interview

Science Notes: Today in Science History – August 23 – Charles-Augustin de Coulomb

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Halley’s Log: Halley and Longitude

MEDICINE:

The New Yorker: The Real “Knick”

BBC Travel: New York City’s most morbid museum

The Prague Revue: The Plague in Rhyme (Or Not)

Philly.com: Historical antecedents to experimental Ebola treatments

NYAM: The Practical Druggist 1917

New York Academy of Medicine: The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: Object of the Month

Vesalius Fabrica Frontispiece 1543

New York Academy of Medicine: Electrification

Notches: (re)marks on the history of sexuality: ‘A Tempory Member’: ‘Hermaphrodites’ and Sexual Identity in Early Modern Russia

CHEMISTRY:

About.com: Chemistry: Who Invented the Periodic Table?

Yovisto: Jöns Jacob Berzelius – One of the founders of modern chemistry

Conciatore: Neri’s Cabinet #2

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Public Domain Review: The Bestarium of Aloys Zötl (1831–1887)

Public Domain Review: Birds from The Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands (1754)

Public Domain Review: Redressing the Balance: Levinus Vincent’s Wonder Theatre of Nature

Detail from a print featured in the first part of Vincent’s Wondertooneel der Nature

Making Science Public: Fermenting thought: A new look at synthetic biology

History Matters: Old Leaves and New: From Gloucestershire Tobacco to Albanian Pot

Geological Society of London Blog: A new version of Sopwith’s Buckland portrait

Embryo Project: Hwang Woo-suk’s Use of Human Eggs for Research 2002-2005

The Copenhagen Post: Danish museum finds lost Charles Darwin treasure

Houghton Library Blog: The Poet as Naturalist: Thomas Grey’s copy of Linnaeus’ Systema Naturae

History of Geology: Pompeii – a Geological Movie-Review: Introducing the Main Character

TECHNOLOGY:

The Daguerreian Society: The Daguerreian Process: A Description

The Recipes Project: Illuminating the ‘elusive’: reconstructing mediaeval recipes for anthocyanin pigments

The Recipes Project: Old-Fashioned Recipes, New-Fashioned Kitchens: Technology and Women’s Recipe Collecting in the Nineteenth Century

Frontispiece showing two women working in a kitchen. Mrs. E.A. Howland, The American Economical Housekeeper and Family Receipt Book (Cincinnati: H.W. Derby & Co., 1845). Library of Congress.

Computer History Museum: Who Invented the IC?

Yovisto: William Murdock ‘enlights’ the 19^th Century

Atlas Obscura: Horologium Mirabile Lundense

META:- HISTORIOGRAPHY, THEORY, RESOURCES and OTHER:

AEON: Small things: The discovery of a microscopic world shook the foundations of theology and created modern demons

Guardian: Podcast: The science of the invisible

Evolving Thoughts: Some more videos: John Wilkins shorts on philosophy of science

The Public Domain Review: Highlights from Folger Shakespeare Library’s Release of almost 80 000 Images