So, a mashup of Diderot, he of the
From Asterisk Magazine, Issue 10:
Étienne Fortier-Dubois
When we try and pick out any technology in isolation, we find it hitched, in some way, to every innovation that preceded it. (Except for the Oldowan hand axe. We had to start somewhere.)
What do firearms and cameras have in common? One answer is shared vocabulary: load, aim, shoot. The etymological origins of this relatedness are murky. People likely borrowed language about firearms — which are over 500 years older than photography — to talk about cameras, which are operated in a similar manner. But in the case of the movie camera, the connection is concrete.
The first movie camera is generally considered to be the kinetograph, invented in 1891 by Thomas Edison and William Kennedy Dickson, an inventor at the Edison lab. Two years earlier, Edison had travelled to Paris to the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a world’s fair, to showcase his company’s phonograph. There, he met with Étienne-Jules Marey, a French scientist who had begun his career studying blood circulation, and who had developed an interest in chronophotography partly out of his work on physiology. Chronophotography consists of taking multiple photographs in quick succession to capture movement.
A famous early achievement of the technique is The Horse in Motion, a series of photographs taken by Eadweard Muybridge in 1878 that proved something Marey had asserted years earlier: For a brief moment in gallop, a horse has all four hooves off the ground. Encouraged by Muybridge, Marey developed an improved device to take chronophotographs. The resulting design, the “photographic gun,” featured a long barrel derived from existing firearms. We don’t know what transpired between Marey and Edison, but it seems likely that Marey’s design inspired the kinetograph. Coincidentally (or not), the Online Etymology Dictionary’s entry for “shoot” claims “the meaning ‘to photograph’ (especially a movie) is from 1890” — around the time of the kinetograph’s invention.
Marey himself had been inspired by the invention of another Frenchman, the astronomer Pierre Janssen. In 1874, hoping to capture images of the transit of Venus, Janssen created a device he called the “photographic revolver.” It looked like a large telescope. Inside, it hosted a complex camera that used a revolving apparatus to take several images in quick succession. The resulting eight seconds of the black dot of Venus moving across the sun disk are often recognized as the first motion picture in history. 1
Prior to Jansenn’s invention, revolving components had not been used in photography or astronomy. They came from the Colt Paterson revolver, a handgun popular in the U.S. since its mid-19th century creation by Samuel Colt. Thus, we can reconstruct a genealogical succession of ideas: Colt inspired Janssen, who inspired Marey, who likely inspired Edison (who then inspired the Lumière brothers and further developments in filmmaking).
We can go further back still. Colt improved the revolver and made its mass production commercially viable, but he did not invent it. Nor was it a particularly recent development: Guns with a revolving barrel have existed since the 16th century. A German revolver dates from 1597, but there are even older specimens. The xun lei chong, a Chinese revolving musket, also dates from this period.
It makes sense: The 1500s were a time of great innovation in firing mechanisms for muskets and arquebuses, with developments like the wheellock (which used a spinning metal wheel against pyrite to create sparks), snaplock (which struck flint against steel using a spring-loaded arm), and flintlock (which improved on the snaplock with a combined hammer-flint holder). Volley guns made of multiple cannons existed in England since at least the 1330s. These were descendants, in turn, of simpler cannons that stem from the invention of gunpowder in China in the 800s. It stands to reason that eventually someone in Europe would think of making a spinning mechanism to allow a weapon to fire multiple shots in quick succession.
And yet, if you’re anything like me, most of what you just read was probably surprising. We don’t typically associate revolvers with the 1500s, or, for that matter, with movie cameras.
The reason I learned about this — and dozens of anecdotes around other inventions — is that I have been working on a quixotic project to place all major technological innovations in history on a timeline, together with the connections between them. The goal is to situate stories like that of the revolver and camera in their historical context, notice patterns, and understand the logic of the history of technology. The result is an interactive visualization that I call the historical tech tree....
....MUCH MORE
On Burke:
November 2016 - "James Burke’s New Project Aims to Help us Deal with Change, Think Connectively, and Benefit from Surprise"
November 2013 - When Storylines Intersect: China's Plenum Reforms Not Good For Australian Commodities
The first law of ecology: Everything is connected.*-------*The law made a small fortune for James Burke:Connections explores an Alternative View of Change (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation.
Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own (e.g., profit, curiosity, religious) motivations with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries' actions finally led to. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.
To demonstrate this view, Burke begins each episode with a particular event or innovation in the past (usually Ancient or Medieval times) and traces the path from that event through a series of seemingly unrelated connections to a fundamental and essential aspect of the modern world. For example, The Long Chain episode traces the invention of plastics from the development of the fluyt, a type of Dutch cargo ship.
Watch the full documentary now (30 episodes, each 45 minutes long)1. The Trigger Effect details the world’s present dependence on complex technological networks through a detailed narrative of New York City and the power blackout of 1965.Connections (1978)
2. Death in the Morning examines the standardization of precious metal with the touchstone in the ancient world.
3. Distant Voices suggests that telecommunications exist because Normans had stirrups for horse riding which in turn led them to further advancements in warfare.
4. Faith in Numbers examines the transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance from the perspective of how commercialism, climate change and the Black Death influenced cultural development.
5. The Wheel of Fortune traces astrological knowledge in ancient Greek manuscripts from Baghdad’s founder, Caliph Al-Mansur, via the Muslim monastery/medical school at Gundeshapur, to the medieval Church’s need for alarm clocks (the water horologium and the verge and foliot clock).
6. Thunder in the Skies implicates the Little Ice Age (ca. 1250-1300 AD) in the invention of the chimney, as well as knitting, buttons, wainscoting, wall tapestries, wall plastering, glass windows, and the practice of privacy for sleeping and sex.
7. The Long Chain traces the invention of the Fluyt freighter in Holland in the 1500s. Voyages were insured by Edward Lloyd (Lloyd's of London) if the ships hulls were covered in pitch and tar which came from the colonies until the American Revolution in 1776.
8. Eat, Drink and Be Merry begins with plastic, the plastic credit card and the concept of credit then leaps back in time to to the Dukes of Burgundy, which was the first state to use credit
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...MUCH MORE, although the original links to YouTube have been pulled, a bit of searching (cough*vimeo*cough) shows the vids are still on the web.
And Diderot:
May 2024 - Work And The Encylopédie
March 2019 - Diderot: "The Man Who Questioned Everything"
As noted in "So You Think You're Smart: The Last Person To Know Everything" the publication of Diderot's Encyclopédie probably marks “the end of an era in which a single human being was able to comprehend the totality of knowledge.”
Combined with the "questioning everything" he was either a blast at parties or an insufferable bore....
