Donald F. McLean: Restoring Baird’s Image (2000)
Filed under book | Tags: · electricity, engineering, history of technology, image, phonograph, sound, technology, television, video, vision
Betty Bolton recorded in c1932 by engineer John Logie Baird in an early television experiment (GIF via Continuo Docs)
John Logie Baird, Britain’s foremost television pioneer, experimented with video recording onto gramophone discs in the late 1920s. Though unsuccessful at the time, his experiments resulted in several videodiscs, some 25 years before the videotape recorder became practical. These videodiscs – called Phonovision – remained neglected over the decades, considered by experts as unplayable.
In the early 1980s, the author sought out and restored the surviving Phonovision discs. Using computer-based techniques in an investigation reminiscent of an archaeological dig, the author has not only revealed the images on the discs but also uncovered details of how the recordings were made. The Phonovision discs have now become recognised as one of Baird’s most important legacies.
In 1996 and 1998, amateur ‘off-air’ recordings of the BBC’s 30-line Television Service (1932–35) were found, giving us our first view of what viewers were then watching. The author’s restoration overturns established views on mechanically scanned television, providing us today with a true measure of Britain’s heritage of television programme-making before electronic television.
As well as helping to explain a poorly understood and complex period in television’s history, this unique book, heavily illustrated with previously unpublished or rarely-seen historic photographs restored by the author, sheds light on the achievements of Baird, the development of video recording and the definition and invention of television itself.
Publisher Institution of Electrical Engineers, 2000
Volume 27 of History of Technology series
ISBN 0852967950, 9780852967959
295 pages
Michel Meulders: Helmholtz: From Enlightenment to Neuroscience (2001/2010)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1800s, biography, empiricism, enlightenment, history of science, music, neurophysiology, neuroscience, physiology, psychology, science, vision
“Although Hermann von Helmholtz was one of most remarkable figures of nineteenth-century science, he is little known outside his native Germany. Helmholtz (1821-1894) made significant contributions to the study of vision and perception and was also influential in the painting, music, and literature of the time; one of his major works analyzed tone in music. This book, the first in English to describe Helmholtz’s life and work in detail, describes his scientific studies, analyzes them in the context of the science and philosophy of the period—in particular the German Naturphilosophie—and gauges his influence on today’s neuroscience.
Helmholtz, trained by Johannes Müller, one of the best physiologists of his time, used a resolutely materialistic and empirical scientific method in his research. This puts him in the tradition of Kant and the English empirical philosophers and directly opposed to the idealists and naturalists who interpreted nature based on metaphysical presuppositions. Helmholtz’s research on color vision put him at odds with Goethe’s more romantic theorizing on the subject; but at the end of his life, Helmholtz honored Goethe’s contributions, acknowledging that artistic intuition could reveal truths about the human mind that are inaccessible to science.
Helmholtz’s work, eclipsed at the beginning of the twentieth century by new ideas in neurophysiology, has recently been rediscovered. We can now recognize in Helmholtz’s methods–which were based on his belief in the interconnectedness of physiology and psychology–the origins of neuroscience.”
Originally published as Helmholtz: Des lumières aux neurosciences, Odile Jacob, Paris, 2001
Translated and edited by Laurence Garey
Publisher MIT Press, 2010
ISBN 0262014483, 9780262014489
235 pages
PDF, PDF (updated on 2018-8-5)
Comments (2)Renzo Dubbini: Geography of the Gaze: Urban and Rural Vision in Early Modern Europe (1994/2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1600s, 1700s, 1800s, architecture, art history, cartography, diorama, image, landscape, mapping, panorama, topography, vision
Geography of the Gaze offers a new history and theory of how the way we look at things influences what we see. Focusing on Western Europe from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, Renzo Dubbini shows how developments in science, art, mapping, and visual epistemology affected the ways natural and artificial landscapes were perceived and portrayed.
He begins with the idea of the “view,” explaining its role in the invention of landscape painting and in the definition of landscape as a cultural space. Among other topics, Dubbini explores how the descriptive and pictorial techniques used in mariners’ charts, view-oriented atlases, military cartography, and garden design were linked to the proliferation of highly realistic paintings of landscapes and city scenes; how the “picturesque” system for defining and composing landscapes affected not just art but also archaeology and engineering; and how the everchanging modern cityscapes inspired new ways of seeing and representing the urban scene in Impressionist painting, photography, and stereoscopy. A marvelous history of viewing, Geography of the Gaze will interest everyone from scientists to artists.
Originally published as Geografie dello sguardo: Visione e paesaggio in età moderna, Giulio Einaudi, Torino, 1994
Translated by Lydia G. Cochrane
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2002
ISBN 0226167372, 9780226167374
251 pages