17th Century Microscope Book Is Now Freely Readable 116
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."
Just saying... (Score:4, Informative)
Surely that's been on Project Gutenberg for years and years?
Re:Just saying... (Score:3, Informative)
Small correction... (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.
Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just saying... (Score:4, Informative)
Place some black card behind the pages and get on scan per page, not a semi transparent mess.
Re:Just saying... (Score:2, Informative)
Well, there's an epub version too. Why do people have to always make these things so difficult?
Here's [gutenberg.org] the real Project Gutenberg link.
Leeuwenhoek and Sorby (Score:4, Informative)
Hooke gets credit for popularizing the technology but the optical science of Van Leeuwenhoek has always been where the real scientific innovation was. H. Clifton Sorby, the "Father of all metallurgists" refined the use of the optical microscope for geological materials and then metals and began the process of specialized etchants, which directly gave us the ability to refine and understand the structure of steels in different quenchants and temperatures through direct study of the resulting microstructures. Sorby doesn't get anywhere near the credit he deserves nowadays and ever time I run into a poorly trained metallurgist I am reminded of the exacting science of men like E.C. Baine, M.A. Grossman and H. Clifton Sorby. Though the Hooke college of microscopy in Chicago should never be overlooked.
Re:WoW! (Score:5, Informative)
Are you trolling, or are you seriously not aware of the Long S [wikipedia.org]?
It was used when a lower-case S occurred anywhere but the end of a word, much like the two lower case forms of the greek letter sigma [wikipedia.org].
Re:17th Century? (Score:5, Informative)
Google's version is in images of the pages, most of the illustrations (which are the whole point of the book) are fold outs and are not folded out in Google's copy, the ones that are visible are smudgy poor quality versions of the originals...
Project Gutenburg has a much better copy - HTML,epub,kindle etc ... transcribed text and detailed images
"http://www.gutenberg.org/files/15491/15491-h/15491-h.htm"
Why is the a story ....?