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Science,
Technology, and the Amazing Fact That
I Can See Past the End of My Nose
by
Kirsten Berg
One of the loveliest books I've ever seen sits
on a shelf in a locked room in a warehouse, just
one of many beautifully bound books that make
their home with us before continuing on their
journey through this world. The book is l'Exercise
du Microscope by Francois Watkins, published
in 1754.
I sometimes visit this book, as one might visit a favorite relative or childhood
friend, and admire the binding, the thickness of the gilt along every side
of the pages, the inner dentelles. It's just so darn pretty. Recently, however,
I found my mind straying from the bookbinder's art to that of the gentleman
scientists of the past centuries, to the Royal
Society, to converse and convex lenses and the untenable fact that without
eyeglasses the world would be a much different place.
Optics might
not be much of a subject for summer barbeques. Bring it up at the next party
you attend and count how many people want to stick around and talk about it.
Mention Kepler or
Newton or Faraday and
you might find yourself suddenly standing alone. But without Leeuwenhoek and
the microscope we'd
never know what makes us sick when the hamburgers aren't cooked properly,
and without Galileo's
telescope mankind would
have missed out on much of the beauty in the night sky.
Civil engineering is another technical discipline that I often muse over and
admire. At any summer barbeque here in Portland bridges would
be a better received subject than optics, certainly. Most of
us would have to cross one to get to the party. The bridges that
cross the Willamette showcase some of the finest names in engineering history — D.
B. Steinman, Gustav Lindenthal, and J. A. L. Waddell. Without these structures
and the mathematics, iron,
and steel that
made them possible, life for millions of us the world over just wouldn't be
the same. And because of the finely crafted
plastic lenses of my eyeglasses I can see clearly, and appreciate these works
of engineering art.
Where would all of this — the books, the bridges, the summer barbeque — be
without electricity? (in the dark , of course.) The names of those who made great
discoveries in electrical engineering have been absorbed into our language. Volta,
Ampere, Galvini, Tesla,
Westinghouse... The understanding and harnessing of electricity has touched our
lives in so many ways that would have been unfathomable to the gents of Isaac
Newton's Royal Society days. Could they have envisioned the miracle of refrigeration,
of deep freezes that keep our ice cubes from melting until we're ready to put
them in our drink? What might they think of our ability to harness energy, put
it in something called a "battery," and take a photograph with our cellular
phone?
But these are just the musings of a bookseller at the end of the week. I see by the clock that it's time to reshelve l'Exercise du Microscope, turn off the lights in the warehouse, put on my sunglasses and cross the Hawthorne
Bridge on my way home.
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