Whewell’s Gazette: Year 2, Vol. #12

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

Year 2, Volume #12

Monday 05 October 2015

EDITORIAL:

Another week, another edition of Whewell’s Gazette your weekly #histSTM links list, bringing you all of the histories of science, technology and medicine that could be scooped up from the distant reaches of cyberspace during the last seven days.

The week saw NASA announce that they had discovered mineral deposits on the surface of Mars that might have been made by flowing water. This announcement kicked off the expected hysteria of where there is water there will be life, as we know it. These reports set off alarm bells in my brain about Giovanni Schiaparelli, Percy Lowell and the canals of Mars.

1877 map of Mars by Giovanni Schiaparelli.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Humanity has been obsessed with Mars and the possibility of there being Martians for a long time now and the NASA announcement didn’t just trigger memories in my brain and a number of people throughout the Internet wrote about the history of that obsession. So this edition of Whewell’s Gazette is dedicated to David Bowie’s famous musical question “Is there life on Mars?”

Martian channels depicted by Percival Lowell
Source: Wikimedia Commons

“This week in science: scientists broke the secret pact & talked about water on Mars, making the moon turn red. Now the great doom befalls us” – Ed Yong (@edyong209)

History Today: Roger Hennessy tells of a hundred years of investigation, imagination and speculation about live on Mars

Ptak Science Books: The Positively Enormous Skyscraper Plant Eyeballs of Mars, 1912

Source: via Chronicles of America series at the Library of Congress, here, and first seen via the interesting Pinterest collection of Trevor Owens, here.
Ptak Science Books

The Conversation: NASA: streaks of salt on Mars mean flowing water, and raises new hopes of finding life

BibliOdyssey: Channelling Martian Maps

Source: BilbliOdyssey

Scientific American: How Our View of Mars Has Changed from Lush Oasis to Arid Desert

News.com.au: My favourite Martian: behind the science is the story of why we love Mars

Not just little green men … a scene from the Mars film John Carter.

“Water, water everywhere

Nor any drop to drink

‘Cause it was all saturated with perchlorate salts” – Rime of the Ancient Rover – Matthew R. Francis (@DrMRFrancis)

Quotes of the week:

“People say history is written by the winners, but actually history is written by historians, and most of them are losers”. – @The TweetOfGod

“’The ohm is where the art is’ is a brilliant title for an article” – Steven Gray (@Sjgray86)

“Everything’s connected, but some things are more connected than others”. – Liam Heneghan (@DublinSoil)

“We need to figure out if Jonas Salk was on the spectrum. Only then can we definitely say whether autism cause vaccines” – @WardQNormal h/t @stevesilberman

“If you don’t feel guilty about using maps and satnavs, don’t feel guilty about using introductory philosophy books and study guides” – Nigel Warburton (@philosophybites)

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” – Albert Einstein

“Almost all really new ideas have a certain aspect of foolishness when they are first produced”. – A. N. Whitehead h/t @PeterSjostedtH

BEAUTY TIP: Read a book

EMPATHY TIP: Read a book

EDUCATION TIP: Read a book

LOVE TIP: Read a book

HEALTH TIP: Read a book – Matt Haig (@matthaig1)

Birth of the Week:

The Space Race Began 4 October 1957

Leaping Robot: Apprehending the Artifact

Yovisto: The Sputnik Shock

Princeton University Press: Keep Watching the Skies!: The Story of Operation Moonwatch and the Dawn of the Space Age

NASA: NASA’s First 5o Years Historical Perspectives

Youtube: Omnicron & the Sputnik

PHYSICS, ASTRONOMY & SPACE SCIENCE:

Agenda.ge: Ancient astronomy manuscripts published in Georgia

Physics Today: Information: From Maxwell’s demon to Landauer’s eraser

Fermi.lib.uchicago.edu: Letter from Fermi to Szilard re: use of carbon to slow chain reaction

NASA: Alouette 1

The Alouette 1 satellite
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Outside Prague: The Astronomical Clock

AIP: Nobels of the Past

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 1 – NASA

Science News: The amateur who helped Einstein see the light

With some help from Science News Letter (the precursor to Science News), a restaurant dishwasher named Rudi Mandl persuaded Einstein to explore the phenomenon of gravitational lensing.

Radio Ne Zealand News: Rare telescope’s crucial lens survives quake

AIP: Otto Frisch

NASA: Dr. Robert H. Goddard, American Rocketry Pioneer

NASA: NASA “Hacks”: The Real Stories

El País: Un cura dio la “más bella explicación de la Creación”, según Einstein

The Atlantic: Standing the Test of Time (and Space)

WGBH News: Meet America’s First Woman Astronomer: Maria Mitchell

Maria Mitchell’s telescope, at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.
Credit Dpbsmith / WGBH News

Voices of the Manhattan Project: Mary Rockwell’s Interview

flickr: Project Apollo Archive

Sky & Telescope: Beyond the Printed Page: Soviet Stamps and Astronomy

Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings: Niels Henrik David Bohr

Museum Victoria Collections: Astrographic Catalogue

AIP: Happy Birthday Enrico Fermi

EXPLORATION and CARTOGRAPHY:

Atlas Obscura: The Maps That Helped The Citizens of a ‘Locked Country’ See The World

Half of “Screens of the Four Continents and People in 48 Countries in the World,” by an unknown Edo-era Japanese painter. (All images: Kobe City Museum/Google Cultural Institute)

D News: 1500-Year-Old Mosaic Map Found

Slate: A Bizarrely Complicated Late-19^th-Century Flat-Earth Map

The Hakluyt Society Blog: Australia Circumnavigated: The Story of the HMS Investigator

The Shakespeare Blog: Mapping Shakespeare’s world

The Sheldon tapestry map of Worcestershire

Halley’s Log: Back in the Thames

Halley’s Log: Halley’s third logbook

MEDICINE & HEALTH:

History Today: Elizabeth Garrett Anderson passed her medical exams on September 18^th 1865

Thomas Morris: Speaking in tongues

From the Hands of Quacks: Can Vitamin B Cure Deafness

Smithsonian.com: The Nose Job Dates Back to the 6^th Century B.C.

Wellcome Trust: A Brief History of Childbirth: Exploring the National Childbirth Trust Archives

Remedia: The Window Operation: Hope through Surgery

Cross-section of the inner ear, showing the ossicles–mallelus, incus, and stapes. Illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter for Henry Gray, “Anatomy of the Human Body ” (Philadelphia & New York: Lea & Febiger, 1918), plate 919.

Medium: Scurvy Dogs

Embryo Project: The Pasteur Institute (1887– )

Public Domain Review: Kaishi Hen, an 18^th Century Japanese anatomical atlas

Early Modern Medicine: Dog Danger

Thomas Morris: The child with Bonaparte in his eyes

Wellcome Collection: Hysteria

Gross Science: The Horrors of Ancient Cataract Surgery

Countway Library of Medicine: The Archives for Women in Medicine

Concocting History: Strong as a mountain

Forbes: Ancient Pompeiians Had Good Dental Health But Were Not Necessarily Vegetarians

This Intrepid Band: More Misdeeds of Military Nurses

Embryo Project: The Effects of Thalidomide on Embryonic Development

John Rylands Library Special Collections Blog: History of Midwifery

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 2 – Baruj Benacerraf

Science Museum: Brought to Life: Seishu Hanaoka (1760–1835)

Perspectives: The art of medicine: Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Body Snatcher

MBL History Project: “By living we learn.” Happy Birthday Sir Patrick Geddes!

Embryo Project: Marie Charlotte Stopes (1880–1958)

Marie Stopes in her laboratory, 1904
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Morris: Electrical anaesthesia

Bustle: The Average Age Women Got Their First Period, Throughout History

Mosaic: How to mend a broken heart

Thomas Morris: The petrol cocktail: a cure for cholera

TECHNOLOGY:

Medievalists.net: Rapid Invention, Slow Industrialization, and the Absent Entrepreneur in Medieval China

Open Culture: The World’s Oldest Surviving Pair of Glasses (circa 1475)

Yale Books: Dirty Old London: 30 Days of Filth: Day 13 Deodorising and Flushing

Thomas Morris: Top Gear (steam edition)

Atlas Obscura: The Rise and Fall of the Cash Railway

Inside the Lamson ball, from a 1912 Lamson catalogue. (Image: Tony Wolf)

Science Notes: Today in Science History – September 29 – Rudolf Diesel Mystery

Airminded: The oscillation of R33

Conciatore: The Art of Metals

Conciatore: The Blue Tower

Medium: Backchannel: How Steve Jobs Fleeced Carly Fiorina

Quartz: Not Enough for Goodenough: The man who brought us the lithium-ion battery at the age of 57 has an idea for a new one at 92

Yovisto: Tōkaidō Shinkansen – the Bullet Train

Tōkaidō Shinkansen passing tea fields between Shizuoka and Kakegawa

Yovisto: The Unfortunate Inventions of Charles Cros

IEEE Spectrum: When Engineers Had the Stars in Their Eyes

News Works: Sound it out: the (sometimes creepy) history of the talking machine

Slate: What Could Go Wrong?

Collectors Weekly: Rise of the Synthesizer: How an Electronics Whiz Kid Gave the 1980s Its Signature Sound

Paleofuture: Drunk Driving and The Pre-History of Breathalysers

BBC News: Drawings reveal Germans’ World War Two boobytrap bombs

One of Fish’s drawings shows an Army mess tin adapted for nefarious purposes
Picture: Anthony Thompson TWN

BBC News: Dorman Long: The Teesside firm that bridged the world

Science Notes: Today in Science History – October 31 – Joseph Wilson Swan

United States Patent and Trademark Office: A. C. Reid Handset Telephone

BBC News: The lost rivers that lie beneath London

Ian Visits: Unbuilt London: Straightening the River Thames

EARTH & LIFE SCIENCES:

Making Science Public: The pause

Ptak Science Books: Charting the Winds: a Superb Anemographic Chart from 1598

ChoM News: New Acquisitions: Rose E. Frisch Papers

Slate: The Great September Gale of 1815

TrowelBlazers: Lucy Allen: Curator and Librarian

Lucy Allen Smart, 1955. This photo is reproduced here under the Central Library Consortium’s fair use policy; may not be used for commercial purposes without contacting copyright holder.

NYAM: Censoring Leonhart Fuchs: Examples from the New York Academy of Medicine

Notches: “A promiscuous class of females. All huddled together in a mass”: Sex and Food in the Nineteenth-Century American Metropolis

University of Cambridge Museums: The Next Big Leap at the Whipple

io9: Which Animals Did Nuclear Scientists Pick to Represent the Entire World?

Science League of America: Did Darwin Know “Acres of Diamonds”?

Circulating Now: A German Botanical Renaissance

Perspectives on History: An Environmental History of the Real Thing

The Guardian: Calling all palaeo bloggers! Do you ant to write for the Guardian science blog network

Forbes: How Geologists Determined The Way That Mountains Formed