Category: Maritime History

History Highlights 3: Mapping the Ocean and the Moon, Living Museums, Ancient Arctic Voyages

On By invertingvisionIn Arctic, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Maritime History, Oceanography, Space ExplorationLeave a comment

Welcome to Inverting Vision, a blog about the history of exploration, science, and technology. From this point forward, I will be publishing posts every Thursday unless fate intervenes. History Highlights will appear occasionally as I work on more substantial posts. Next week I’m hoping to write about the scientific instruments that appear in Herbert Ponting’s photographs of the British Antarctic Expedition. Until next week, here are some highlights from my readings and the wider exploration and science community.

Do we know more about space than the deep sea?

Probably not these days, according to marine scientists Alan Jamieson, Premu Arasu, and Thomas Linley. In a fantastic article in The Conversation, they write that the truth of this notion depends on what comparisons you make. They explain that if you just consider the Moon, it may have been true during a small window in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact this may have been when the impression that we know more about space than the oceans originated. In those decades scientists were mapping the Moon more extensively, especially as NASA prepared for the Apollo landings. The Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter missions played a key role in this process, taking photographs of the lunar surface that were used by scientists and Apollo mission planners.

A photograph of the far side of the Moon from Lunar Orbiter 3. From NASA/LOIRP.

But this same period was very early in the history of fruitful deep sea oceanography. Echo sounding tech had only been in use for a few decades, and scientists were just starting to use echo sounding to map the seafloor (the first truly comprehensive map wasn’t published until Marie Tharp’s map in 1977). The authors of the article argue that since then, more robust exploration of the deep sea has produced a wealth of knowledge that probably surpasses our knowledge of the Moon and especially Mars. Go read their article to learn more.

A painting of Marie Tharp’s map by Heinrich C. Berann. From the Library of Congress.

In my experience, people casually referring to this idea often extend it to saying that we know more about “space” than the ocean. This must be even farther off the mark, even when you just consider objects in our solar system and disregard exoplanets. Europa and Enceladus may contain entire oceans that we know very little about. I’m looking forward to the launch of the Europa Clipper mission in 2024, which will hopefully bring us more information about Europa (although it won’t arrive at Jupiter until 2030).

Alvin and the Recovery of a Broken Arrow

Woods Hole tweets about the role DSV Alvin played in the 1966 recovery of a hydrogen bomb (referred to as a “broken arrow”) from the bottom of the Mediterranean.

Missions for the military were relatively common in the early days of deep-submergence vehicles, and especially for Alvin. The scientists were sometimes able to tack on scientific objectives to these missions, or military missions became a way to test or fund the development of vehicles and scientific projects. The relationship between the military and deep sea exploration will probably be a topic for a future blog post.

The Curious Life of the Vema

The Vema was an oceanographic research vessel that played a crucial role in the early mapping of the ocean floor and exploration of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in the 1950s. Marie Tharp and her research partners used data from the Vema to create the seafloor map mentioned earlier. But that was only one small chapter in the life of the Vema. The sailing vessel was built in the 1920s for a wealthy American financier who used it as a yacht and hosted actors and celebrities. He sold the yacht to a Norwegian buyer who gave it the name Vema. Then the US military acquired the Vema in WWII and used for training. After the war the military discarded it, and eventually it was recovered and sold it to Columbia University, where it was used as a research vessel until the 1980s. Since then, it has been a chartered yacht for vacations in the Caribbean. Last year the yacht company announced they had new plans for the ship formerly known as Vema. They haven’t revealed what the new plans are.

The Vema being used as a training vessel in World War II. From Wikimedia.

Whales as Living Museums

Bathsheba Demuth writes about the role of whales in the history of Beringia in her book Floating Coast. She describes how bowhead whales were hunted by various groups throughout the history of the region. Sometimes the whales escaped these hunts with harpoons still buried in their bodies. Because bowhead whales can live for over 200 years, they sometimes collected a decent number of the tools used against them. Demuth describes a particular whale that carried “a museum of old weapons in his flesh.” These weapons ranged from ivory harpoons to explosive lance tips.

Ancient Voyage to the Arctic

It’s possible that in the 4th century BCE a Greek explorer named Pytheas ventured as far as the Arctic north of Europe, but later classical writers seriously doubted his claims. We know about him from later writers like Strabo and Polybius. In the Histories, Polybius recounts with skepticism Pytheas’ claim that in the far north “there [was] neither unmixed land or sea or air, but a kind of compound of all three (like the jelly-fish or Pulmo Marinus [sea lung]), in which earth and sea and everything else are held in suspense, and which forms a kind of connecting link to the whole, through which one can neither walk nor sail.”(Plb. 34.5) Voyages this far were rare for the Greeks, and Polybius was in part doubtful about how far Pytheas claimed to have sailed.

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Studying Eels and the Ocean on Beer Money: The Dana Expeditions

On By invertingvisionIn Biology, History, History of Exploration, History of Science, Maritime History, Oceanography1 Comment

In the rivers of Great Britain and western Europe lives an eel that was once at the center of a great scientific mystery. The European eel was frequently caught in nets or farmed in fisheries for centuries. Cookbooks featured them in a wide variety of dishes. But the origins of the eel were a mystery since no one had observed an example of a young eel. There are records speculating about their spawning and migration patterns going all the way back to Aristotle, who claimed that they came from earthworms (Aristotle, History of Animals 6.16). The mystery wasn’t solved until the 20th century when Danish researchers put together a series of voyages that ended with a circumnavigation of the world.

Illustration by Felice Supino (1916)

Dr. Johannes Schmidt was a Danish biologist who committed much of his career to studying these eels. Historian Bo Paulsen has written an overview of Schmidt’s career, describing him as “a forerunner of Jacques Cousteau.” Schmidt was a dedicated scientist with a keen awareness of public outreach. And in the early 20th century he established a name for himself in the world of biology and marine science.

Around the time Schmidt was building his career, an international community of scientists was flourishing. This community had been cultivated through international journals and direct communication between scientists around the world, and it was infused a spirit of healthy competition through fairs and exhibitions. But the outbreak of World War I threw the international scientific community into disarray. After the war, there was a desire amongst many scientists to rekindle the collaboration and scientific activity. This included prominent Danish scientists, who sought to resume research and collaboration in the post-war years.

It was in this moment that Johannes Schmidt began working with collaborators on a project to resolve the mystery of the European eel life cycle. Schmidt was a committed nationalist, however. He kept the prestige of Denmark in mind, which may have been part of his motivation for suggesting a circumnavigation project reminiscent of the Challenger expedition fifty years earlier. And so while one of his partners suggested making the project an international endeavor through the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea, it remained primarily a Danish endeavor.

Schmidt and his partners planned their expeditions with backing from the Danish government, the East Asiatic Company, and funding from the Carlsberg Foundation. The founder of the Carlsberg Brewery, J.C. Jacobsen was a prolific patron of science. He established the Carlsberg Research Laboratory with the goal of leveraging science to produce the best beer possible. It was (and continues to be) a dedicated research facility studying chemistry and biology that might have applications to the brewing process. He also founded the Carlsberg Foundation, Denmark’s first commercial foundation, to support the development of science more generally.

Johannes Schmidt had developed deep ties with the Carlsberg scientific network, which proved useful in funding the eel expeditions. With the support of the East Asiatic Company, Schmidt and his team were able to secure a motor schooner, the M/S Dana, equipped with an engine and four masts. The vessel was outfitted with winches and scientific instruments for collecting samples from deep ocean waters. The M/S Dana was used for the first two expeditions in the Atlantic allowing its crew to collect information about the distribution of eels. A second ship, the R/V Dana, was built for a third expedition and specifically designed for scientific research. The vessel was equipped with an electric winch driving a special phosphor-bronze wire rope 10 kilometers long, making it easier to collect samples from deep waters. To make depth measurements the ship with outfitted with echo sounding equipment, which was a relatively new technology at the time.These early Dana missions successfully recovered eel larvae and plotted their positions in the Atlantic–necessary data for solving the age-old puzzle of the European eel.

The M/S Dana, via Wikimedia
The R/V Dana, via Wikimedia

It turned out that the eels spawned deep in an area of the Atlantic Ocean known as the Sargasso Sea. This is an area of the Atlantic with strange properties that were first recorded by Christopher Columbus. The Sargasso Sea is encircled by four different ocean currents, leaving it effectively isolated from the rest of the ocean. Over time it has collected an enormous amount of seaweed (and now trash), which along with its position in the horse latitudes contributed to legends of ships disappearing in its waters. After spawning in the Sargasso, eels migrate to western Europe where they live out most of their lives.

A map from “The Breeding Places of the Eel” by Dr. Johannes Schmidt in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 1923

The Dana expeditions were a massive success for Schmidt and for Denmark, and eventually led to funding for further exploration. As is often the case, the new information led to more questions. The population of eels in other parts of the world could now be studied with a greater understanding of the eel life cycle. In a 1929 summary of the expeditions in Nature, these question were laid out:

“Why are eels plentiful throughout the western Pacific, but absent from all the eastern half of that ocean? Why are they present on both sides of the North Atlantic ocean, but absent from both sides of the South Atlantic? Why are they plentiful on one side of Australia and absent from the other?”

Nature, No. 3087, Vol. 122, Dec 19 1929 “The Dana Expedition”

In 1928 Schmidt’s vision of a circumnavigation became a reality. The final scientific voyage on the R/V Dana collected more information about eel spawning behavior in the Atlantic, bolstering Schmidt’s theory about the Sargasso sea spawning patterns. The expedition traveled through the Panama Canal into the Pacific Ocean, eventually finding eel larvae near Tahiti and providing insight into Pacific spawning patterns. The crew of the Dana then charted the distribution of eel species in the Indian Ocean before returning to Europe. Along their way they took a number other oceanographic measurements, including water temperatures and other oceanic conditions. A write-up in Nature even suggested that the strange spawning patterns of European eels lent support to the theory of continental drift (referred to as “Wegener’s theory of continental shifting”).

The technology used by the Dana reflects a transitional period in the history of oceanography. The sample collection methodology they used was in principle the same as those used in the 19th centuries–nets, cables, and winches. But they were also equipped with echo-sounding machines and short-wave radios for communication. The Dana expeditions had a lasting impact through their contributions to science and their public outreach–they are one part of a rich history of Danish marine science and the broader history of modern scientific research practices.

History Highlights 2: FLIP, Challenger, Demons, and Kepler

On By invertingvisionIn Arctic, Artifical Intelligence, Astronomy, History, History Highlights, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Maritime History, OceanographyLeave a comment

FLIP in vertical orientation for research on waves.

FLIP, Laboratory at Sea

Stefan Helmreich writes about FLIP (FLoating Instrument Platform), a  fascinating vessel designed for oceanographic research. First launched in 1962, it has the unique ability to change orientation, immersing most of its structure into the ocean to become a buoy. This provides a relatively stable platform for research, and the ability to do semi-controlled experiments on waves. It is an example of how the distinction between the laboratory and the field is sometimes blurred, in part due to technology.


You can read more of Helmreich’s analysis in Media+Environment and ISIS.

Looking Back on InSight and Phoenix on Mars

Mars InSIght is gathering dust on Mars, and its days are numbered. The robotic mission has been an enormous success, contributing to our understanding of Martian geology and natural history. NASA has an excellent retrospective on the major scientific achievements of the InSight lander.

Around this time of year in 2008, the last signals were received from the Phoenix lander. Like the InSight mission, Phoenix lasted beyond its mission parameters, and eventually succumbed to the elements. NASA also has a short history of the Phoenix lander. 

Photographs From the HMS Challenger

The HMS Challenger expedition helped kickstart the discipline of oceanography. The voyage is a monumental saga in the history of science and the history of exploration. It also played an important role in the history of photography. Not much is known about the photographers and the equipment they used. I was able to find a letter to the editor in an 1875 issue of Nature, referencing a new type of dry photographic plate. The letter was written by Henry Stuart Wortley, and seems to imply that a collodion process was used, including a combination of wet and dry plates. I want to investigate this further, but for now, here are a few of my favorite photographs from the official narrative of the expedition:

The Place of All the Demons

In the 1940s and 1950s, scholars were starting to think seriously about how to create artificial intelligence. They wrote papers and met regularly to discuss things like neural networks and machine learning. Oliver Selfridge was an important part of this conversation, and contributed to a number of early breakthroughs in thinking about artificial intelligence. One of these was a pattern recognition model that laid the foundations for computer image processing.

He imagined each node in the network as a hierarchical group of “demons” each assigned to recognize certain patterns, and to shout out when they recognize something like their assigned pattern. He wrote that each demon might “be assigned one letter of the alphabet, so that the task of the A-demon is to shout as loud of the amount of ‘A-ness’ that he sees in the image.” Then a demon at the top of the hierarchy listens to all the shouting and picks out the loudest shout as the best interpretation of the image.

He called the model “Pandemonium.”

Additional Links:

The original paper.

The Quest for Artificial Intelligence, by Nils J. Nilsson

“A Waste Land of Famine and Despair”: Kepler’s Tortured Personal Life

I want to do a review of The Sleepwalkers by Arthur Koestler at some point. Until then, here’s a short bit about Kepler. Kepler’s personal life was just so absurdly tragic that it stood out to me.

According to Koestler, we get this stuff from Kepler himself, who wrote an incredibly detailed family history. Koestler dwells on it at length, providing a detailed glimpse into the background and mindset of his subject. Here’s a brief outline of Kepler’s life. All quotes here are from Koestler, and I think some of them reveal his talent for colorful description.

  • “Johannes Kepler’s father was a mercenary adventurer who narrowly escaped the gallows. His mother, Katherine, … was brought up by an aunt who was burnt alive as a witch, and Katherine herself, accused in old age of consorting with the Devil, had as narrow an escape from the stake as the father had from the gallows.”
  • When Kepler was about three years old, his parents both left to fight Protestants in the Netherlands, despite being Protestant themselves. Kepler was left with his grandparents. His father went on two more trips, then disappeared.
  • He had six siblings, “of whom three..died in childhood, and two became normal, law-abiding citizens. But Heinrich, the next in age to Johannes, was an epileptic and a victim of the psychopathic streak running through the family.”
  • “Johannes was a sickly child, with thin limbs and a large, pasty face surrounded by dark curly hair. He was born with defective eyesight…his stomach and gallbladder gave constant trouble; he suffered from boils, rashes, and probably from piles, for he tells us that he could never sit still for any length of time and had to walk up and down.”
  • When he was four, he contracted smallpox and nearly died.
  • He compared himself to a dog constantly, even saying he had an aversion to bathing.
  • “Kepler belonged to the race of bleeders, the victims of emotional haemophilia, to whom every injury means multiplied danger, and who nevertheless must go on exposing himself to stabs and slashes. But one customary feature is conspicuously absent from his writings: the soothing drug of self-pity, which makes the sufferer spiritually impotent, and prevents his suffering from bearing fruit.”
  • Kepler’s first wife “resented her husband’s lowly position as a stargazer and understood nothing of his work.” He describes her in extremely bitter terms after she died at thirty-seven. Three of their five children died very young.
  • He had seven children with his second wife, “of whom three died in infancy.” Koestler presumes that his relationship with her was better than with his first wife, since he doesn’t write about her very much.
  • He was forced into virtual itinerancy in his last years, while trying to get some of his works printed. He spent ten months away from his family, and “was again plagued by rashes and boils; he was afraid that he would die before the printing of the Tables was finished; and the future was a waste land of famine and despair.”
  • After the struggles with publishing, he had difficulty obtaining payment for his work and accessing money owed to him. “He had money-deposits in various places, but he was unable to recover even the interests due to him. When he set out on that last journey across half of war-torn Europe, he took all the cash he had with him, leaving Susanna and the children penniless.”
  • He ended up in Ratisbon to try to get payment from the Emperor, but contracted a fever and died there in 1630.


And then there’s this quote from Kepler’s self-description that I quite identify with:

“In this man there are two opposite tendencies: always to regret any wasted time, and always to waste it willingly.”

Links:

The Sleepwalkers: A History of Man’s Changing Vision of the Universe, by Arthur Koestler

History Highlights 1

On By invertingvisionIn History, History Highlights, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Maritime HistoryLeave a comment

File:SS Sirius (1837).jpg
The SS Sirius, an early steamship

Math and Mining in the Ore Mountains

Deep in the heart of Central Europe, near the border of Saxony and Bohemia, lie the Ore Mountains. Rich in minerals, the Ore Mountains played a central role in the development of European metallurgy. They are home to some of the first European mining operations, and the inhabitants have been mining tin and silver there since the Pre-Classical Era.

For millennia, the region has attracted people looking to make a living. In the 16th century, as truly large-scale mining operations were underway, Georg Agricola arrived in the mining town of Chemnitz. He had just completed his university education, and took on a job as the town physician. He was somewhat out of place–an educated humanist living in a town of people who worked with their hands.

Agricola became deeply involved in the town, eventually becoming the mayor. And during that time, he attempted to apply his university education to the mining industry, writing on geology and mineralogy. He left us with De Re Metallica, a detailed account of metallurgy in the 16th century. It delves into geometry, and the applications of mathematics to planning and executing mining operations.

How much did this mathematical theory influence the actual mining practices of the time? According to historian Thomas Morel, not much. 

I think many people, including myself, have a tendency to think of the Scientific Revolution and the Industrial Revolution as connected. To some extent they were related, but Morel does a fantastic job of disentangling the theoretical from the practical, the scholar from the practitioner. 

It’s a difficult job, because the practitioners unfortunately don’t leave us a lot of direct descriptions of their work. To figure out the real-world practices at the time of Agricola, Morel looks to sources like mining laws and sermons in mining towns. These are indirect evidence, but are much closer to the daily lives and practicalities of mining than the writings of a Humanist physician.

In De Re Metallica, Agricola focuses on theoretical ideas about practices like determining where to dig a vertical shaft so that it intersects with a tunnel. These descriptions are complete with diagrams showing similar triangles.

Morel suggests that the actual topography of the Ore Mountains makes this idealized case impractical. He looks to diagrams from actual surveyors, and eventually to a sermon about why Martin Luther was awesome. 

This is a phenomenal piece of history. Apparently, a sermon by Cyriacus Spangenberg “included a detailed description of this specific surveying procedure that took up four pages.” If you’ve ever been to a Lutheran church, long sermons and extended religious analogies will be familiar. Apparently they have a long tradition, and thankfully for historians, can provide a glimpse into the actual lives of common people.

Morel argues that the practices revealed by these sources differ significantly from those described in De Re Metallica. “Taking Agricola’s words for granted,” Morel writes, “confuses his literary production with the practices of underground surveyors and hinders our understanding of both.” Surveying and mining practices were indeed advancing at this time, but not because the surveyors were reading Humanists and applying their theory.

So to some extent, the intellectual and practical worlds of 16th century mining were advancing along parallel, but non-intersecting paths. To me, this raises the question of how well this case study can be applied to other fields of science and engineering. But this case study was strong enough that I think it helps shift the burden of proof onto claims that scholarship influenced practice. 

Morel suggests that as far as any interaction happened between these two worlds, it was a subtle cross-fertilization. According to him, scholars and practitioners were always most interested in the task right in front of them. For Agricola, that may have been introducing new mathematical ideas to his audience (who were specifically not the miners he was writing about). For the surveyor, that was getting the job done efficiently. 

The extent and nature of this cross-fertilization is still something that is being explored in the History of Science. The perspective of the practitioners is more difficult to source, and has been somewhat neglected until recently. The relationship between these two worlds is a somewhat open question, and I think it’s one of the more interesting areas of research. If you know of other attempts to tackle this topic, let me know in the comments.

Source:

Thomas Morel, “De Re Geometrica: Writing, Drawing, and Preaching Mathematics in Early Modern Mines,” Isis, Volume 111, no. 1 (2020) https://doi.org/10.1086/707640

The Incredible Power of Steamships

I recently read Neptune’s Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea by Antony Adler. In addition to having a fantastic title, it provides a wonderful overview of oceanography as a scientific discipline.

I might do a longer review on this book in the future, but Adler describes the reception of steam ships by 19th century journalists and the public, and I had to share it:

“…it was only upon the arrival of the first commercially viable transatlantic steamship, Sirius, in New York in April of 1838, that newspapers declared the successful ‘annihilation of space and time.’ When soon thereafter some early passenger steamships exploded, at great loss of life, journalists blamed these accidents on ‘a public mind’ that had become ‘completely infatuated with a wish to be borne in the twinkling of an eye’ from place to place.”

I love these glimpses into the perception of new tech throughout time. You see attitudes that seem very persistent across time periods and groups of people.

Source:
Antony Adler, Neptune’s Laboratory: Fantasy, Fear, and Science at Sea

Grey Flag Pirates

Sometimes the history of exploration blends with maritime history. This more general history provides essential context for the history of exploration, so sometimes I might succumb to the temptation to include something not strictly within the confines of the blog’s stated topics. In this case: the pirate officials of the Song Dynasty.

China had problems with piracy along their coast for a good deal of their history. Maritime trade has a tumultuous history in China, partly due to their geography. In The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, David Abulafia describes the interesting and controversial way that the Song Dynasty dealt with pirates, by giving them cushy government jobs:

“As more traffic crossed the sea, the temptation to pirates grew exponentially, and convoy escorts were sometimes provided to protect merchant ships; a navy came into being…the corsair Zhu Cong, defeated in 1135, merged his fleet of fifty ships and 10,000 sailors into the Song navy; he was rewarded with the rank of admiral, and others followed the same course. A brief poem circulated:’if you wish to become an official, kill and burn and accept a pardon.’”

Of course, this sparked debate over whether such a policy actually encouraged more piracy. It reminds me a little about the distinction between white hat, black hat, and grey hat hackers.

Source:
David Abulafia, The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans

Ice Melt Archaeology

A complicating factor in the history of technology is the fact that people don’t always write about the technology they use. This means that a lot of tech is lost to us, unless we actually find physical examples.

An odd side-effect of climate change is that melting ice is revealing archeological treasure troves. One instance, reported in the Smithsonian Magazine, is the Lendbreen route in Norway. Melting ice in the mountain passes has uncovered sleds, skis, clothing and other artifacts from multiple eras.

You can follow the progress of the archeologists at the website Secrets of the Ice, and get updates on Twitter here.