Showing posts sorted by relevance for query telegraph. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query telegraph. Sort by date Show all posts
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Friday, April 23, 2021
The Apparitionist by Peter Manseau
Photography was introduced to the United States at around the same time that a new religion was born in the nation. Spiritualism promised a connection to the dead in their realm through human mediums, and some thought photography might capture physical manifestations of spirits. Peter Manseau tells the story of the first spirit photographer in The Apparitionist.
The man who
captured the first supposed spirit photograph was an amateur at the time. William Mumler thought he had made in error in
cleaning the glass on which the photonegative was captured when a faint image
appeared in a self-portrait he shot in 1862. He was using the photo studio owned by Hannah Stuart. The married photographer, soon to be
widowed and soon after that to be Mrs. Mumler, was a Spiritualist, and she
convinced him that the image was not an error, but an apparition. The photos
caught the attention of the Spiritualist press, first in the New York-based Herald of Progress, then in Mumler’s hometown of Boston in the Beacon
of Light, which
published the address of the Stuart studio.
Soon the
studio was producing many spirit photographs; they even took orders by mail
from across the country. Bostonian Spiritualists compared photos and found
evidence that Mumler was faking the images. Discredited, the Mumler’s moved to
New York to quietly offer spirit photographs again. Their practice there let to
criminal prosecution in 1869. Photographers knew of ways to produce such images, but no
investigators could figure out what Mumler was doing. Though the judge gave did
not suggest the photos actually captured images of spirits, he rejected the
prosecution’s case because it did not adequately support the charges of fraud and similar crimes.
Even with
such tepid vindication, the atmosphere in New York was too hot for the Mumlers,
so they returned to Boston. Though Mumler continued to take spirit photos, he
had developed a much deeper understanding of the art and science of photography. He developed a
process that allowed for the direct reproduction of photos on newsprint;
founded the Photo-Electrotype Company of Boston and licensed his process to
companies in other cities. This allowed newspapers and magazines to less expensively reproduce images
without preparing an engraving first.
Manseau also
discussed the development of photography in the United States after the art was
introduced here. This includes American pioneers of photography such as Samuel Morse, also inventor of the telegraph, and Civil War battlefield photographers Matthew Brady and Alexander Gardner.
If you’re interested in this book, you
may also be interested in
The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg
Arthur & George by Julian
Barnes
Billion Dollar Whale by Tom
Wright and Bradley Hope
Chief Engineer by Erica Wagner
Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes
Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer
Chiaverini
The Explorer King by Robert Wilson
The Man Who Loved Books too Much by Allison
Hoover Bartlett
The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter
Costello
Scan Artist by Marcia Biederman
Super Attractor by Gabrielle Bernstein
Manseau,
Peter. The Apparitionists: A Tale of
Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln’s Ghost. New
York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
Tuesday, March 31, 2020
Enchantress of Numbers by Jennifer Chiaverini
I usually don’t write
reviews of fiction books, but occasionally I find a
novel so enjoyable, or its subject so interesting or important that I want to
write about it. That is the case with Enchantress
of Numbers, a novel by Jennifer Chiaverini.
The subject is Ada Lovelace, who I think is interesting and
important. She is credited as the author of the first published computer program in 1843. The only thing resembling a computer at the time was in
the drawings and notes of mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage, a friend of Lovelace. He called the
device, which was never built, an analytical engine.
Lovelace’s contribution
has been debated, but it seems likely that she saw more capability in the
analytical engine than even its inventor. As she described in her notes on her
translation of a scientific paper on Babbage’s invention, originally printed in
French and shorter than her notes were, she
imagined the device being able to handle all manner of symbolic and logical
functions in addition to solving mathematical equations. Even Babbage himself
seemed mainly to see it as an improvement on his difference engine, a
programmable calculating machine that was partly built, but never finished.
If she had been a man,
her accomplishment would very likely have received much more accolades than it
did at the time, or even for more than a century afterward. It was unusual for
a woman to be even permitted to study math or science in those days. Her mother encouraged
her to take on these fields to discourage her from following in the footsteps
of her father, the poet Lord Byron.
Lovelace lived in a
period of great change in society and science. She was a contemporary of Charles Darwin. She was a friend of Charles Dickens and Michael Faraday. When Queen Victoria was coronated, her husband was
elevated to an earl and the new monarch called her forward to take her hand as
the couple, newly made Count and Countess Lovelace, were took their bows. She
attended the Great Exhibition of 1851, housed in the Crystal Palace, where the exhibits included the
still relatively new telegraph.
I wasn’t sure I would
care for a novelization of Lovelace’s life. I was not especially impressed with
Arthur
and George, Julian Barnes’ novel based on events from the life
of Arthur Conan Doyle; I thought I would have preferred a
straight nonfiction book on the subject. I found
Chiaverini’s novel more compelling, perhaps because it is written as if by Ada
Lovelace herself. As with any such fictionalization, there are parts that
Chiaverini made up, though she draws on sources I enjoyed such as Benjamin Woolley’s excellent biography Bride
of Science and James Essinger’s defense of the countess, Ada’s
Algorithm. I
realize that there are people who will pick up a novel who would not be
attracted to a biography, and if it takes that to get more
people to now about Ada Lovelace an her contributions, then Chiaverini’s effort
was worthy.
If you’re interested in
this book, you may also be interested in
Sunday, September 20, 2015
Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite
Alexander
Graham Bell is obviously known for his invention of
the telephone.
He started his career teaching
the deaf to
speak using a set of tools developed by his father.
This career lead the Scotch-Canadian teacher
(Bell became an American
citizen in 1882)
to meet an American girl, Mabel
Hubbard, who he would marry.
Helen
Elmira Waite tells the story of their life together in Make a Joyful Noise.
Mabel Hubbard lost her hearing at the
age of five after being ill with scarlet fever. Her parents were determined
that she would continue to speak and understand speech. They were encouraged by
news from Germany
that schools there were teaching the deaf to speak, but there was little
support for it in the United States.
Even so, they arranged for a teacher who had the courage to try and Mabel
learned to speak and read lips.
Gardiner
Hubbard, Mabel’s father, was a businessman and politician in Massachusetts.
He became an advocate for the education
of the deaf, especially oral education (speech and lip reading). As a child,
Mabel testified to a committee of the Massachusetts legislature to demonstrate
what a deaf child could learn.
Bell set us a school for the deaf in Boston. Here he
was introduced to Mabel, whose family hoped his techniques could help her
achieve a more natural speech. He began experimenting with the idea of pushing
more signals down telegraph
wires, which lead to his invention of the telephone. Gardiner Hubbard became
one of Bells backers in these efforts. Even though Bell grew to spend more time
developing his telephone, and later testing designs for aviation, he
always remained active in education for the deaf.
The Bell family authorized Waite’s biography.
The advantage of this is that she had access to family records and the
recollections of the Bells’ children and grandchildren. The possible downside
is that Waite may have been inclined to present the Bells in the best light.
Waite may have been inclined to do this anyway. In his preface, Bell’s
son-in-law, Gilbert
Grosvenor, mentioned that he and his wife Elsie,
Bell’s oldest daughter, had read Waits biography of Helen Keller
and her teacher Anne Sullivan
(the Bells knew these ladies and Bell himself encouraged Keller’s parents that
she could be educated and connect to the wider world).
Waite does admit to Bell’s stubbornness and sometimes-excessive sense
of propriety. If the Hubbards, particularly Mabel, had not pushed, persuaded,
coerced, and even tricked Bell into promoting, protecting, and commercializing his
invention, he may have tinkered in his shop making a better telephone that no
one would use.
Waite’s style is almost conversational; she’s telling a story. I think Make a Joyful Noise is accessible to
many younger readers. It is also interesting in that the book is as much about
Bell’s private life, particularly his romance and marriage with Mabel, as it is
about his invention. In addition, she demonstrates that Mabel was a remarkable
and capable person on her own.
If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in
Waite, Helen Elmira. Make a
Joyful Sound: The Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell. Philadelphia:
MacRae Smith
Company, 1961.
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