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."
Re:Just saying... (Score:5, Interesting)
[...] This is a full scan of the original pages, including illustrations. It's looking pretty good.
Some of the pages are garbled, or, at the very least, a tad difficult to parse, due to the ensuing or previous page(s) bleeding through to the others during the scanning process. (Granted, this phenomena gave me an excellent idea for an IEEE CVPR/TPAMI paper about a variational, non-local image inpainting scheme for fixing such things in scanned, double-sided documents.)
Great (Score:2, Interesting)
Great.
Now if someone could actually do a half-decent job of removing the other-side of the page that leaks through on EVERY page, it might be readable without giving me a headache.
Seriously, would it be that hard to do some kind of light-trick or image-editing afterwards (especially as you have an image of the reverse page which could be tweaked and pulled to provide a lined-up mask to dial down those parts of the page), or hell even just a bit of contrast adjustment etc. so that the presumably very thin paper doesn't leak everything through?
It's called print-through! (Score:4, Interesting)
What you are calling back-scan is print-through, partially related to the book being 350 years old, and the ink bleeding through the paper over the centuries.
You can be sure that they have done everything they could to reduce it, but that is what the pages look like now.
What annoys me, however, is that they have not opened up and scanned all the folded-over plates. The signature image, that of the flea, is only visible in the shadow of that print-through!
Unless I am missing something in the google books interface!
Re:Just saying... (Score:5, Interesting)
But it's always a good time to look at Hooke. His illustrations really are astonishingly beautiful, and weren't bested for a century or more, and the text conveys something of the wonder to be the first person to *ever* see these things. It's pretty astonishing to imagine what that might have felt like. Hooke not only first saw cells, he coined the word in its biological sense, because he thought the cells in cork bark looked like the cells that monks live in. Hooke was a polymath, a successful mathematician, an architect and inventor, and by all accounts a very good musician. He was also apparently a bit unpleasant and a little crazed, but genius is allowed these things (at least when it's no longer around to annoy you)