Tag: Science

Spectacle on Other Worlds

On By invertingvisionIn History, History of Exploration, History of Technology, Space ExplorationLeave a comment

The first spacecraft from Earth to touch another world carried no people, but it did carry a unique sort of flag. Early on the morning of September 14, 1959, the Soviet space probe Luna 2 impacted the surface of the Moon. Engineers had placed stainless steel spheres aboard the spacecraft, designed to send tiny pentagonal banners across the lunar landscape. The little flags were emblazoned with the hammer and sickle, and Russian script reading: “CCCP, September, 1959.”1

A replica of the Luna 2 pennant on display in the Kansas Cosmosphere. Source: Patrick Pelletier via Wikimedia.

The spheres were made at OKB-1, the Experimental Design Bureau where engineers worked under the leadership of Sergei Korolev to create some of the first space rockets. 2 They were commonly referred to as pennants,3 and you can find more pictures of these pennants on Don P. Mitchell’s excellent website.4 Mitchell speculates that the Luna 2 pennants probably vaporized on impact. On the other hand, the New York Times reported at the time that “[the Soviet Government] said steps had been taken to prevent the destruction of the pennants by the impact.” Regardless of their survival, the pennants accomplished an important objective.

“The day after the historic impact,” historian Asif Siddiqi writes, “[Nikita] Khrushchev triumphantly gave a replica of the ball of pendants to Eisenhower. It was a potent display of the power of politics in the emerging Soviet space programme.”5 This was the point: a spectacle designed to send a message to the United States about the Soviet lead in missile development. There was some (faint) hope on the Soviet side that this spectacle would actually end the Cold War altogether.6

Luna 2’s pennants were just one in a series of such spectacles that constituted the Space Race. From Sputnik to Apollo, visible demonstrations of power replaced nuclear war. In the competition for geopolitical influence that was the Cold War, these projects signaled the strength of competing economic ideologies to worldwide spectators.7 In the 1950s and 1960s, this political impetus for spectacle led humans to explore the solar system up close for the first time. We sent robots to other worlds, and people to the Moon, because of a geopolitical competition. But is that the only reason we went?

I have been fascinated by the reasons people participated in the Space Race–especially the engineers and scientists who worked directly on missions to other celestial bodies. Certainly many of them were Cold Warriors, eager and willing to be recruited to a geopolitical signalling war. But not all of them were, and even those who happily went to nationalistic battle often had priorities that ranked higher in their own minds. In fact, these other motivations may have played a strong role in making the Space Race happen in the first place.

Luna 2 itself may be an example. Siddiqi explains that “contrary to conventional wisdom, it was not the Soviet Party leadership which advocated or called for Soviet pre-eminence in space at this early stage, but Korolev himself who was actualising his intense thirst to claim ‘firsts’ in the new arena of space exploration.” He goes on to say that Korolev was in partly motivated by competition with Wernher von Braun. “One wonders if there would indeed have been a programme at the time if it had not been for Korolev,” Siddiqi writes. The engineers had to convince the Cold Warriors that lunar flights were worth doing.8

Engineering ambitions and personal rivalry were not the only motivations for early space explorers. One of the most interesting examples I have seen comes from Oran Nicks, who was NASA’s director of Lunar and Planetary Programs in the early 1960s. Nicks was an engineer in a department of scientists, and that put him in a unique position. He was also not a Cold Warrior, at least not to the extent of many of his colleagues.

This isn’t to say the political pressures of the Space Race weren’t on his mind. In the early 60s, Nicks was working on the Ranger impact probes to the Moon, which were plagued by a series of early failures. In his book Far Travelers, Nicks recalls that Luna’s successes had made these failures particularly difficult. “Khrushchev had chided us publicly,” Nicks writes, “by quipping that their pennant had gotten lonesome waiting for an American companion.”

But when it came to making an overtly nationalistic response, Nicks took a different attitude. He recounts a disagreement that came up during work on a Mariner probe to Mars. Mariner project manager Jack James had suggested that the spacecraft should have the seal of the United States embossed on a panel, and went to the trouble of mocking it up.9 Nicks was vehemently opposed. Here’s what he wrote (emphasis mine):

His view was understandable; we were competing with the Russians in the race to the planets, and Americans could be proud that our “trademark” would be exhibited for current and future generations to see. My concern was that we might be accused of exhibitionism, something distasteful to me, for I was deadly serious about doing the mission for other reasons. The Russians had bragged about landing a pendant on the Moon, and I wanted no part in that disgusting game.

Oran Nicks, Far Travelers, p 37

Nicks and James compromised, and the seal made it onto the spacecraft. Nicks explains that he “insisted on a low-profile, no-publicity approach,” and was happy that “even after the successful flight there was very little publicity about the seal, and none at all negative.”10

Nicks doesn’t specify which Mariner, but it was likely Mariner IV (1964), shown here. Images comes from Wikimedia, but the original source link is broken. A black-and-white version of this image can be found in NASA Technical Report 32-957 on the temperature control subsystem.

So what were the “other reasons” that Nicks was deadly serious about? To Nicks, the American space program was a project of exploration, pure and simple. He had an expansive definition of the word “explorer” that was rooted in his view of history:

Exploration seems to be in our genes. As they developed the means to do it, men explored the perimeter of the Mediterranean, past the pillars of Hercules, to the sentinel islands off the continent…We tend now to think of exploration in a restricted sense-as a scientific, often geographic, expedition, an athletic activity pursued by specialists dressed in fur parkas like Shackleton’s or in solar topees like Livingston’s. The connotations are overly restrictive if they fail to allow for great tidal movements like the waves of people from Asia that periodically flowed west and south, or for the Scandanavians who crossed the Atlantic in numbers centuries before Columbus. These waves of venturesome people were of a higher order than the random movement of nomads seeking fresh forage…We must conclude that for some of the species, long and perilous passages were no real deterrent to the exploring imperative.

Oran Nicks, Far Travelers, pp 6-7

Nicks is conflating a series of explorations that all occurred for different reasons ranging from survival, to geopolitics, to science. To him, they are part of an innate impulse that all humans have in common. He is situating himself, the United States, and the Soviet Union in a grand tradition that encompasses all of human history.

He was not the only person to do this sort of thing. The space explorers of the 1960s often invoked historical analogy–in the US, this was often the narrative of the American frontier. But these analogies were often related to more specific impulses: colonization, adventure, competition, scientific investigation. Nicks’ framing of exploration as an “instinct” is somewhat distinct. He believes that exploration is something done for its own sake, out of sheer curiosity. The scientific investigations on the missions he managed were an expression of this curiosity, rather than a means to some other end.11

Chertok, in his reflections on the Soviet space program, also remembers people thinking beyond the geopolitics:

Cosmonautics did not arise simply from militarization, and its aims were more than purely propagandistic. During the first post-Sputnik year, the foundations were laid for truly scientific research in space, serving the interests of all humankind…I am not writing about this out of nostalgia for the ‘good old days,’ but because I remember well how people from the most diverse social strata felt about our space successes.

Chertok, Rockets and People, Volume II, pp 435-436

The space programs in both nations were collaborations between people with widely varying motivations. They convinced their governments that pursuing certain objectives in space also served the ends of the state. They competed with each other for funding and for influence over the long-term direction of their programs. In this context, geopolitical competition seems like less of a direct motivation for space exploration, and more of an enabling factor that unlocked resources for would-be explorers.

  1. Siddiqi, Asif A. “First to the Moon,” Journal of the British Interplanetary Society, Vol 51, pp 231-238, 1998, PDF: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5ef8124031cfcf448b11db32/t/5f1c476085d7250b810190c1/1595688803275/Siddiqi+First+to+the+Moon+1998.pdf ↩︎
  2. Chertok, Boris, ed. Asif Siddiqi, Rockets and People, Volume II: Creating a Rocket Industry, NASA, 2006, pp 446-448 PDF: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/635963main_rocketspeoplevolume2-ebook.pdf?emrc=5bed7c ↩︎
  3. Are they called “pennants” or “pendants”? Contemporary newspapers, Mitchell and most other sources say pennants. Siddiqi and Chertok say pendant. Seems to come from a comparison made to ship’s pennant displays (Chertok, in unsourced quote from 447). Wikipedia says pendant is an obsolete spelling of pennant, citing the Dictionary of Vexillology. ↩︎
  4. I’m probably going to link to Mitchell and Sven Grahn a lot on this blog. They have both done amazing work on early Soviet robotics, among other topics, and their work has led me to important sources. You should check out their websites and their books. ↩︎
  5. Siddiqi, p 235-236 The image at the top of this post shows an additional replica, now sitting in the Kansas Cosmosphere. The original replica is held by the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. ↩︎
  6. Chertok, p 447 Certainly it seems like Chertok may have believed this, or believed that Soviet leaders held that hope. “Alas,” he writes, “this did not happen. It was not in our power.” ↩︎
  7. See MacDonald, Alexander, The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War, 2017, Yale University Press. Especially Chapter 4. https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1n2tvkx.8 ↩︎
  8. Siddiqi, pp 231-232 ↩︎
  9. Nicks, Oran, Far Travelers: The Exploring Machines, NASA, 1985, https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19850024813 ↩︎
  10. Nicks, p 37 ↩︎
  11. Werner Von Braun, for example, was certainly motivated by colonization and also religious notions. Historian Catherine Newell writes about religious aspects of the American space program in her book Destined for the Stars. Historian Michael Robinson has talked about “true believers” among other types of space explorers. Russian cosmism was a big influence on early Soviet engineers. I plan to do a taxonomy of space explorers at some point, going through various motivations and the historical analogies used to justify and explain them. I see Nicks’ expansive definition of exploration as human instinct most reflected in Carl Sagan’s writings. ↩︎

Updates

On By invertingvisionIn writingLeave a comment

It’s been a while since my last post, so I wanted to get back to the blog with an update on what I’ve been working on, and what’s next in 2025.

The USS Nautilus resurfacing. From U.S. Navy/Wikimedia.

This summer I was lucky enough to start working with JSTOR Daily as a regular contributor. JSTOR is a large digital repository of academic journals, and a valuable research tool. I was fortunate to have high school teachers who taught us how to use JSTOR and similar resources, and I used them extensively in college.

It was always exciting for me. These journals contain an ongoing conversation between the brightest minds in nearly every academic field. In some cases, those conversations stretch back centuries. On JSTOR, historical documents live side-by-side with cutting edge research.

Generally you get access to JSTOR through affiliation with an educational institution–college students usually get access with their university email. But there are also subscription options for independent scholars and individuals.

JSTOR Daily is an effort to both show off and share the treasures contained in their repositories. Every day, they post very short summaries of fascinating articles. They strive to make these relevant to current events, or to provide essential context to help understand the significance of the research. Each summary contains a link that provides free access to that article.

I’ve been covering a history of science and technology “beat” for JSTOR Daily. So far, it has been an incredibly fulfilling and instructive experience. Summarizing and contextualizing detailed academic articles in 500 words or less is an intriguing writing puzzle. Every time I sit down to write one, I remember a particular conversation with my dad about writing. He shared a famous remark that stuck with me: “I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time.” (From Mark Twain? Now that I’m googling –  Blaise Pascal? Seems like a lot of writers have shared the same feeling.)

It’s helping me accomplish one of my main goals: to highlight and share the incredible work being doing by historians all the time.

You can find my author page here. I’m going to try to start posting on my Bluesky when a new post goes up, but I will also include links in future History Highlights. Here are a few of my favorites so far:

Additional update 2/13/2025:

Since this post, I have been primarily focused on my teaching, JSTOR writing, and other articles, including a new one in Aeon Magazine. However, I have also been doing research for some planned 2025 blog posts. If you’re interested in learning more about early lunar robotics (and musings on the history of scientific exploration and technology), let me know by subscribing to Inverting Vision below:

The First Time NASA Photographed a Lunar Lander

On By invertingvisionIn UncategorizedLeave a comment

The Odysseus lunar lander built by Intuitive Machines (IM) recently became the first U.S. robot on the Moon’s surface since the Surveyor landers in the 1960s. Earlier this week, IM worked with NASA to get pictures of the lander from orbit. The resulting image is impressive, showing the lander as a tiny speck in the vast grey landscape near the Moon’s south pole. The image is also an echo of the first time NASA managed this feat, 57 years ago. In 1967, NASA’s third Lunar Orbiter spacecraft snagged a photograph of Surveyor I. The story of how engineers acquired that photograph (and it is a literal analog photograph) is fascinating, and the image itself played an important role in getting Apollo astronauts to the Moon. First, here’s the image of Odysseus along with the historic photograph of Surveyor:

Odysseus in the South Polar region of the Moon. Taken with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Credit: NASA/Goddard/Arizona State University
Surveyor I in Oceanus Procellarum on the Moon. Taken with Lunar Orbiter III in 1967. Credit: NASA

It’s a bit easier to see Odysseus in the new image than it is to see Surveyor in the Lunar Orbiter (LO) photograph. But both of them are pretty difficult to spot, beyond the telltale shadow. And making out any detail is impossible. So what’s the point? For NASA in the 1960s, it was all about safety.

At the time, the push toward the Apollo landings was quickly accelerating. One of the top priorities was to find suitable landing sites. Telescopic imagery of the Moon was fairly comprehensive, but had some serious limitations, so NASA initiated the Lunar Orbiter program. Engineers put robots into orbit around the Moon, equipped with Kodak cameras and film, and took high-resolution images of potential Apollo landing sites.1 Meanwhile, they Surveyor robots soft-landed on the surface, took pictures, and used scoops to dig into the soil. Knowledge about the nature of the lunar surface grew rapidly. It began to quell doubts that some scientists held about the potential of landing people on the Moon.2 The imaging of Surveyor landing sites was an important part of this process.

For scientists in the 1960s, seeing the lander wasn’t as important as seeing the area around the it. Images from the ground could help scientists understand what they were seeing from above. At the time, orbital imagery was pretty difficult to interpret. Shadows were used to figure out the height or depth of some features, but other patterns in the orbital imagery were harder to make sense of. Scientists used aerial imagery of Earth to get started, since you could easily compare pictures of mountains and canyons taken from airplanes to the real thing.3 But the forces that shaped features on Earth weren’t necessarily the same as those that shaped features on the Moon, so the Earth-analog method was not always a reliable guide. What they really wanted were images from the lunar surface. That’s what Surveyor landers were able to provide.

If scientists could compare orbital images with ground-based images of the real lunar surface, they could be more confident in their interpretations. This could make it easier to select Apollo landing sites with confidence. And that’s exactly what they did using a combination Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter imaging. The story of Surveyor III gives us a great example of this.

Surveyor III. Credit: NASA/Lunar and Planetary Institute

In the same mission that took the photograph of Surveyor I, engineers also took photos of the planned landing area for Surveyor III (which launched while LOIII was still in orbit around the Moon). They hoped that a successful Surveyor III mission would then provide images from the ground that scientists could compare to orbital imagery. The plan was a complete success. Using pictures from Surveyor III, they were able to isolate the exact position of Surveyor III in the orbital imagery.4

An image from Boeing’s contractor report on Lunar Orbiter III photography. The final Surveyor landing site is shown, along with features that later seen in Surveyor pictures, included below. Credit: NASA/Boeing
A mosaic of images taken by Surveyor III, with features labeled A, B, C, D, which correspond to labels on orbital images.
Mosaic images of the area to the north of Surveyor III, including one with labels that correlate to those on the Lunar Orbiter photograph above. Credit: NASA/LPI
An image taken by the Surveyor lunar lander, showing two boulders that were labeled "C" on orbital images.
A close-up of boulders, labeled “C” on the orbital image above. Taken by Surveyor III in April 1967. Credit: NASA/LPI

Scientists got a lot of great data from the robots. Apollo planners analyzed the images and data, and used the information to plan Apollo landing sites. They were able to find places that were both safe for landing, and scientifically interesting. For scientists, that generally meant trying to land Apollo astronauts in places that were geologically distinct.

This wasn’t really something that many of the astronauts were particularly interested in, at least at first. They were something of soldiers in the Cold War, and neither they nor the government officials directing the program thought that science was the main priority. The priority was getting a man to the Moon before the Soviet Union.5 The selection of later Apollo sites based on scientific interest was, at least in part, a concession to the scientists who were integral to the safety and success of the mission’s primary objective. But this isn’t to say that these groups saw no use for science within Apollo. Science itself could also serve Cold War goals, as it became a source of prestige–a pattern in scientific exploration going back centuries.

With Apollo 12, the story of Surveyor III came full circle and we got one of the coolest pictures ever taken from the lunar surface. Out of scientific and engineering interest, Apollo 12 landed in the same site as Surveyor III. Al Bean and Pete Conrad got to see the robot up close, which is how we have the image from earlier showing Surveyor sitting on the Moon. They took pictures, and even grabbed pieces of the robot to bring back home for analysis. Right now, the TV camera of Surveyor III sit in the Smithsonian, where you can visit and see actual hardware returned from the Moon. The Apollo astronauts also took what I think are some of the most incredible photographs from the history of exploration–human space explorers interacting directly with their robot counterparts.

Apollo astronaut Pete Conrad “jiggles” the spacecraft to see how firmly it’s rooted to the ground. Credit: NASA

CORRECTION 11/21/2024: The original version of this post identified the astronaut in the last picture as Alan Bean. It’s actually Pete Conrad, and Alan Bean is the one taking the photograph.

Footnotes:

  1. If you want to know more about this, Lunar Orbiter photography was the topic of my master’s thesis, which can be found in the about section. ↩︎
  2. There’s a famous story of how scientists feared the landing vehicle would sink into the soil, an idea that did come from a fairly well-known scientist. But many geologists at the time were pretty dismissive of his claims. There were other potential issues though, including ignorance of the electrostatic properties of the lunar material, which could have led to severe dust build-up on equipment. Bottom line: not a lot was known for sure about the nature of the surface. This was an issue if you wanted to land there. ↩︎
  3. For a description of lunar mapping efforts around this time, see Kopal and Carder, Mapping of the Moon. The difficulty of interpreting the photographs can be seen in a variety of scientific papers from the time. Examples can be found in Interpretation of Lunar Probe Data, ed. Jack Green, 1966. ↩︎
  4. Boeing was the primary contractor on Lunar Orbiter. Images and methods can be found in their contractor reports for NASA. ↩︎
  5. Detailed comments the relative priority of science on the Apollo Mission can be seen in A Review of Space Research, the document that came out of the 1962 Iowa Summer Study. ↩︎

History Highlights 4: Darwin’s Wild Ride, Losing Lenses, Finding Lunar Landers

On By invertingvisionIn antarctica, Biology, History Highlights, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Photography, Physics, Space Exploration, UncategorizedLeave a comment

My schedule has become highly variable due to grad school and freelance work. I’m currently working on a series of posts about scientific photography on the British Antarctic Expedition–so far you can read a short introduction, and a post about Herbert Ponting’s early photographs of animals and ice. I’m still working on the next post in that series, which will focus more on the scientists of the Terra Nova expedition and their work, as seen through Ponting’s lens. Until then, here’s a new History Highlights–a periodic collection of new work and other interesting things in the history of science, exploration, and technology.

Recent History

News and new work in science, exploration, and technology.
Newly Digitized Antarctic Photography

Speaking of photography in Antarctica, the National Archives of Australia recently uploaded a number of photographs from Antarctic expeditions to their online system. Their records are a little difficult to navigate, but here’s a link to the site. I’m planning to look through these images for my research, and to see if there’s anything useful for the Herbert Ponting series I’m working on.

Raymond Priestly was a geologist who participated in both the Nimrod and Terra Nova expeditions to Antarctica under Shackleton and Scott. Here he is on the Nimrod expedition in 1908. He would go on to co-found the Scott Polar Research Institute. From NAA A14518 H7622.
Reconceptualizing the History of Science

Eric Moses Gurevitch shares an excellent article he wrote covering books by James Poskett and Pamela H. Smith. These works are part of an effort to broaden the history of science beyond the conventional narratives that have roots in nineteenth century chauvinisms. This re-conceptualization opens up new research possibilities in the history of science, and draws attention to the myriad ways humans have produced and shared knowledge about nature.

https://twitter.com/EMGurevitch/status/1628399174734446592

Miscellanea

Various highlights from my research, readings, and internet rabbit holes
Mr. Darwin’s Wild Ride

While Charles Darwin was in the Galapagos studying the rocks, plants, and animals, he used a wide variety of observational techniques. One of these apparently involved riding the tortoises:

I was always amused, when overtaking one of these great monsters as it was quietly pacing along, to see how suddenly, the instant I passed, it would draw in its head and legs, and uttering a deep hiss fall to the ground with a heavy sound, as if struck dead. I frequently got on their backs, and then, upon giving a few raps on the hinder part of the shell, they would rise up and walk away; but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.

Charles Darwin, Voyage of the Beagle
Sunken Treasure at the Bottom of McMurdo Sound

There is apparently a small treasure waiting to be recovered from the sea floor near Antarctica. As he was trying to photograph orcas from the deck of the Terra Nova, Herbert Ponting lost his favorite camera lens:

I leant over the poop rail…waiting for the whales to draw nearer, when, as I was about to release the shutter, the view disappeared from the finder, and light flooded the camera; at the same moment I heard something splash in the water. On examining the camera, what was my consternation to find that the lens-board had dropped into the sea, carrying with the the finest lens of my collection–a nine-inch Zeiss double protar, worth about £25, which had been presented to me some years ago by the Bausch and Lomb Optical Company of Rochester, U.S.A.

Herbert Ponting, The great white South; being an account of experiences with Captain Scott’s South pole expedition and of the nature life of the Antarctic

He sent a letter to Bausch and Lomb, and they sent him a new lens. But the old lens must still be there, two hundred fathoms (as Ponting claimed) under the surface of McMurdo Sound. I tried to find the lens he used, and came across a catalog from 1904 with a listing of Bausch and Lomb lenses. From Ponting’s description of the lens and his uses for it–both whales and scenic views–I think the lens below is probably the closest. I would love it if anyone with more expertise in historical photographic equipment would be able to provide some more insight.

This probably isn’t the same exact lens Ponting dropped into McMurdo Sound, but it may be similar. Catalog found in the reference library of Pacific Rim Camera.
First Lunar Rover found through “Space Archaeology”

Lunokhod was a Soviet spacecraft that became the first rover on another planetary body in 1970. The rover’s solar cells deployed using a unique clamshell design, and used cameras on each side of the vehicle for navigation.

Lunokhod mission outline. From Wikimedia.
Model of the rover in the Museum of Cosmonautics. From Wikimedia.

In 2010, Lunokhod 1 was found, and was even capable of being used again for scientific experiments. The rover was equipped with retroreflectors like the one left by Apollo astronauts. This is actually how its final resting site was accidentally identified, when astrophysicist Tom Murphy was using a pulsed laser to study the lunar surface. The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter was able to use those coordinates to take new images of the Lunokhod landing site and lander forty years after its original mission.

Luna 17 lander, from NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University.
Discourse on Things that Float

Galileo apparently got into a debate with a contemporary over dinner about why things float in water. This turned into an entire treatise on how things float, in which Galileo drew from preceding work by Archimedes. He also talks about some of his astronomical work. Here are a few quotes, with an example of the type of principles he discusses in the treatise:

This sufficeth me, for my present occasion, to have, by the above declared Examples, discovered and demonstrated, without extending such matters farther, and, as I might have done, into a long Treatise: yea, but that there was a necessity of resolving the above proposed doubt, I should have contented my self with that only, which is demonstrated by Archimedes, in his first Book De Insidentibus humido: where in generall termes he infers and confirms the same Of Natation (a) Lib. 1, Prop. 4. (b) Id. Lib. 1. Prop. 3. (c) Id. Lib. 1. Prop. 3. Conclusions, namely, that Solids (a) less grave than water, swim or float upon it, the (b) more grave go to the Bottom, and the (c) equally grave rest indifferently in all places, yea, though they should be wholly under water.

But, because that this Doctrine of Archimedes, perused, transcribed and examined by Signor Francesco Buonamico, in his fifth Book of Motion, Chap. 29, and afterwards by him confuted, might by the Authority of so renowned, and famous a Philosopher, be rendered dubious, and suspected of falsity; I have judged it necessary to defend it, if I am able so to do, and to clear Archimedes, from those censures, with which he appeareth to be charged….

…The diversity of Figures given to this or that Solid, cannot any way be a Cause of its absolute Sinking or Swimming.

So that if a Solid being formed, for example, into a Sphericall Figure, doth sink or swim in the water, I say, that being formed into any other Figure, the same figure in the same water, shall sink or swim: nor can such its Motion by the Expansion or by other mutation of Figure, be impeded or taken away.

Galileo Galilei, Discourse on Floating Bodies

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Photography and Science in Antarctica – Orcas and Ice

On By invertingvisionIn antarctica, Biology, History of Exploration, History of Science, History of Technology, Photography1 Comment

This is part two of a series of posts about photography and science on the Terra Nova expedition of 1910-193. You can read the introduction here. This week we find Ponting arriving in Antarctica, and beginning to get acquainted with the environment.

The Terra Nova. Ponting was a fan of icicles, and tried to include them in his shots whenever possible. From the Scott Polar Research Institute (SPRI).

Scientific curiosity drew photographer Herbert Ponting to Antarctica. Before his journey with the British Antarctic Expedition in 1910, the great southern continent was already a place of growing scientific interest. Early encounters in the late 18th and early 19th centuries had revealed ice shelves, animals, and mountains that encouraged dedicated missions to chart and understand the continent. James Weddel, Jules Dumont d’Urville, Charles Wilkes, and James Clark Ross revealed the contours of Antarctica, and returned to Europe and the United States with tantalizing information for biologists and geologists. 

Herbert Ponting was particularly interested in the animals of the Antarctic. Several years before Ponting climbed aboard the Terra Nova, his crew mates Robert Falcon Scott and Edward Wilson had made a landing on Ross Island during the Discovery expedition. In his diaries, Wilson vividly described the smells and sounds that greeted them when they made landfall at Cape Crozier–they had found one of the largest colonies of Adelie penguins. Ponting fantasized about being able to make camp at Cape Crozier and photograph the penguins there, but Scott chose Cape Evans on the other side of the island for their base of operations. 

Once they arrived, the crew used their tracked motor sledges to unload shelter materials and supplies. Ponting still had plenty of opportunity to observe and photograph wildlife. There was a colony of Adelie penguins near their camp, and the birds were not shy about greeting the visitors. “They strolled about,” Ponting wrote, “for all the world like a party of tourists taking in the sights.”1 This delighted the photographer, and he took photographs of their interactions with the crew, who liked to play games with the penguins.

An Adelie penguin pecks Ponting. From SPRI.
Henry Rennick and Francis Drake meet the penguins. From SPRI.

Later in the expedition, the scientific team would learn more about the life cycle and behaviors of the penguins. In the meantime, the crew at Cape Evans spent time studying other examples of marine life. The biologist Denis Lillie collected as many samples as possible with nets. These included an example of cephalodiscus, which are wormlike animals that live in colonies. They also caught “crustacea, star-fish, sea-urchins, great worms, anemones, molluscs,” and large glass sponges.

Denis Lille and his net. From SPRI.
Denis Lille and a glass sponge. From SPRI.

But Ponting was more interested in the animal that had accompanied their ship on the way to their temporary home: the orca. Ponting was keen to capture animal behaviors with his camera, in an effort to make his own contributions to the scientific work of the expedition. The orca and the blue whales were his first opportunity, but he found them exceedingly difficult to capture on film. It was difficult to predict when they would surface, so setting up a camera to capture things like their ‘spout’ was almost impossible. But he managed to capture some of their surfacing and hunting behavior with the cinematograph.

The top two images show orcas surfacing. The bottom pictures supposedly shows them hunting. From SPRI.

Ponting even tried to use his equipment to document and understand whale behavior, to the extent that he could. He used the frame rate of his camera (sixteen frames a second) to measure the duration of the orca’s spout. He tried to capture their grouping and hunting patterns, but was frustrated by the challenges of catching them at the right time. He never did get a film of the blue whales spouting. He also never got a film of whales breaching, despite sitting for nine hours at a spot where he saw one of the  “sportive monsters” perform the spectacular maneuver. 

The intelligence of the whales impressed both Ponting and the crew, and they were amazed by the hunting ability of the orcas. Ponting himself claimed to have been hunted while trying to get just the right shot of an orca, and included a fantastical illustration of the encounter. 

Ponting claimed that this was a very accurate portrayal of the attack. From his book.

The illustration demonstrates some of Ponting’s editorial inclinations. Ponting was an excellent photographer but he was an equally good salesman who was constantly searching for the spectacular and the picturesque. This made him well-suited to his role on the expedition. Photographs and books were a way to make some money from exploration, and they would be in high demand back home.2 Ponting’s photographs have to be viewed with this fact in mind–he was interested in science, but the picturesque held priority. 

Especially early on in the expedition, Ponting’s shots of crew members were often very carefully posed, and his shots of scientific subjects were as controlled as he could make them. His photographs of the whales are interesting in part because of the relative lack of control he had over his subjects.

Ponting found some degree of control in the ice, along with some of the most picturesque scenery he would encounter. The icebergs and ice floes of Antarctic waters captivated and frightened European explorers from the earliest days of Antarctic exploration. Edmond Halley (of comet fame) described encounters with Antarctic ice on his voyage to map magnetic variation in 1699. At first he first thought they were white mountains, and he compared them to white cliffs found in Great Britain. Later expeditions grappled with the ice, and some fell prey to it.

For mariners the ice represented unpredictability, but for the photographer they were relatively static (although still temporary) pieces of natural beauty. Ponting relished the long periods of daylight that he could use to capture the ice in different light conditions. He didn’t want to lose this opportunity, and slept very little for four days on end, working as long as “human endurance would permit.”

His most famous photograph captures the Terra Nova from within a grotto of ice. In his book, he described taking the picture:

A fringe of long icicles hung at the entrance of the grotto, and passing under these I was in the most wonderful place imaginable. From outside, the interior appeared quite white and colourless, but, once inside, it was a lovely symphony of blue and green. I made many photographs in this remarkable place–than which I secured none more beautiful the entire time I was in the South…I found that the colouring of the grotto changed with the position of the sun; this, sometimes green would predominate, then blue, and then again it was a delicate lilac. When the sun passed round to the west–opposite the entrance to the cavern–the beams that streamed in were reflected by myriads of crystals, which decomposed the rays into lovely prismatic hues, so that the walls appeared to be studded with gems.

Herbert Ponting, The Great White South: being an account of experiences with Captain Scott’s South pole expedition and of the nature life of the Antarctic
Grotto in an Iceberg, by Ponting. From Wikimedia.

The elegant formations of icebergs had often been described by explorers in architectural terms, and Ponting’s photographs are some of the most successful at capturing this perspective.3 One of his most frequent subjects was the “Castle berg.”

Caslte Berg, with a dog team in the foreground. From SPRI.

Ponting also documented the formation of “pancake ice,” describing how small crystals coalesced into larger discs of ice. These discs grew very quickly into large sheets of ice that became ice floes. He managed to take a series of photographs showing the formation of these ice features.

The various stages of pancake ice. From SPRI.

The ice, the whales, seals, and penguins took up most of Ponting’s attention in the early days of the expedition. Teams of scientists had been dispatched in various directions, while Ponting stayed behind with the rest of the crew. In the next post, we will catch up with these teams, who investigated emperor penguin colonies and Antarctic geology. 

Footnotes

  1. Quotes and information on Herbert Ponting comes primarily from his book The Great White South: being an account of experiences with Captain Scott’s South pole expedition and of the nature life of the Antarctic
  2. For more, see James R. Ryan, Photography and Exploration
  3. Kirsten Hastrup, “The Ice as Argument: Topographical Mementos in the High Arctic,” The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, Vol 31, No 1 (2013), pp. 51-67

Photography and Science in Antarctica – Introduction – Herbert Ponting

On By invertingvisionIn antarctica, Biology, Geology, History of Exploration, History of Science, Photography2 Comments

This is a short introduction to a planned series of posts about photography and science on the British Antarctic Expedition. It includes another story about photographing orcas and ice. 

In 1910, the British Antarctic Expedition set out on the Terra Nova with the goal of being the first people to reach the geographic south pole. Captain Robert Falcon Scott organized and led the expedition–the second Antarctic voyage in his career. The Terra Nova expedition is now famous for being beaten to the pole by Roald Amundsen, and for the tragic deaths of Scott and the polar team on their return journey. But the story of the Terra Nova is also a story of scientific research. Captain Scott recruited a team of scientists and made their work a top priority, which may have been one factor in their second-place finish at the pole. Scott also personally recruited the man that would capture everything on film: Herbert Ponting.

Herbert George Ponting and cinematograph, Antarctica. Kinsey, Joseph James (Sir), 1852-1936 :Photographs relating to Antarctica and mountaineering. Ref: PA1-f-067-067-2. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/23244038

Ponting was already a rather accomplished photographer when Scott approached him in 1909. He was on the verge of publishing a travel book about his experiences in Japan, but Scott convinced Ponting to go to the frigid wastes of Antarctica within a year of their first meeting. Scott’s emphasis on science was a major draw for the photographer. The expedition was, in Ponting’s words: “a chance, such as never would come to me again, to turn the experience I had gained to some permanent benefit to Science.” Over the course of the expedition, Ponting used his extensive experience to document animal life and monumental ice formations, and to immortalize on film the mountains and the men of Antarctica.

In his photographs, Ponting distilled the notion of the heroic male explorer. This archetype defined exploration the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Travel narratives and photographs from these men were major commercial successes, and Ponting’s photographs even used the archetype to advertise beans. The idea of polar exploration as an act of masculine heroics has haunted Antarctic science into the 21st century. The Antarctic science community has struggled to move away from this old paradigm and create a safe and welcoming environment for scientists to do work that many dream of for their entire lives.

Captain Scott, from the Scott Polar Research Institute
An advertisement for Heinz, from the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Ponting very carefully arranged his photographs of the crew in ways that were specifically designed to conjure these “heroic” notions of the explorer and the scientist. But the images also give us insight into the scientific work done by the crew of the Terra Nova expedition. The scientific team was led by Dr. Edward Adrian Wilson, who the crew affectionately called ‘Uncle Bill.’ He was a capable zoologist, and both Ponting and Scott write about him with effusive admiration. Scott and Wilson also recruited a meteorologist, a physicist, and several geologists (one of whom was Raymond Priestly, a veteran of an early Shackleton expedition).

The scientists brought with them a wide variety of supplies and scientific instruments. These included a number of thermometers, telescopes, chemical glassware, and even balloons. Once in Antarctica, the expedition set up several laboratories, including a dark room. Ponting also took photographs on the Terra Nova, and had a photographic lab integrated into the ship. It was roomier than his assigned bunk, and the photographer ended up sleeping there under the light cast from the ruby-glass porthole.

Dr. Atkinson in the lab. From the Scott Polar Research Institute.

Ponting brought with him “an incredible quantity of gear.” This included tin cases full of film and photographic plates, which were hermetically sealed in tins to prevent damage. There were also color filters and telephoto lenses. The crew brought several small cameras, and Ponting gave some lessons on how to use the equipment. Ponting himself primarily used a pair of cinematographs to take films, and folding cameras for stills.

Herbert George Ponting and telephoto apparatus, Antarctica. Kinsey, Joseph James (Sir), 1852-1936 :Photographs relating to Antarctica and mountaineering. Ref: PA1-f-067-067-3. Alexander Turnbull Library, Wellington, New Zealand. /records/22514241

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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.

For more History Highlights from past weeks, click here. Follow the Inverting Vision Twitter account for updates on posts and other history of exploration and science content. Subscribe to get update in your inbox:

I strive to make my writing as accurate as possible. If you have a correction or a suggestion for a post, please leave a comment or email me at invertingvision@gmail.com. If you liked this post, please share it!

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