Month: November 2011

A Map of a 19th c. Woman’s Heart

Modern(ish), Museums

I’m afraid it’s not terribly flattering. Coquetry, Selfishness, Love of Admiration, Love of Display and Love of Dress take up more than three quarters of the treacherous terrain that is a woman’s heart. Even in the Country of Solid Worth, encircled by the intimidating barrier of the Ego Mountains, the more serene territories of Hope, Enthusiasm and Platonic Affection are transected by the River of Lasciviousness.

It was published by D.W. Kellogg & Co. of Hartford, Connecticut, between 1833 and 1842. “The Open Country of Woman’s Heart” lithograph, subtitled “Exhibiting its internal communications, and the facilities and dangers to Travellers therein,” claims to have been created by “A Lady” but I don’t know if that’s true because I don’t see the Gigantic Sinkhole of Self-Loathing anywhere on the map. On the other hand, then as is now, there were plenty of women who held a low opinion of their gender’s innate failings so who knows?

The map is part of a fascinating online exhibit by the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Massachusetts, called “Beauty, Virtue and Vice: Images of Women in Nineteenth-Century American Prints.” Using their extensive collection of images from the colonial period through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the AAS give us a glimpse into the iconography of the 19th century and what it tells us about popular views of women in society, particularly the views of middle-to-upper class New England from whence many of the sources spring.

The exhibit connects this map to the Cult of True Womanhood, aka the Cult of Domesticity, as described in “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” (pdf) an influential 1966 paper by historian Barbara Welter. The “True Woman” of the 19th century was characterized by the four cardinal virtues of piety, purity, submissiveness, and domesticity. These were the divinely ordained provinces of the woman. Anything outside of that, from political activism to just having a job, could only lead women to a life of restlessness and unhappiness. Without her cardinal virtues to protect her, the woman is too easily debauched by the predations of ever-lustful men.

I’m not sure if the connection between map and True Womanhood is clear, however. The idea that women are inherently pure (albeit weak and temptation-prone, of course) and thus fulfilled only as mothers, wives, paragons of domesticity, doesn’t quite jibe with the vain, narcissistic, gold-digger depicted in the map. It reads more like the work of a penniless artist who got dumped for a rich dude to me.

Nonetheless, the exhibit is very much worth a read, as is the rest of the AAS website. I always appreciate when a museum or library makes an effort to give Internet viewers access to their collections, complete with nice big scans. That they’ve used their primary sources to create online exhibitions around a coherent theme makes it all the more readable and enjoyable. Next on my perusal list are Architectural Resources at the American Antiquarian Society and An Invitation to Dance: A History of Social Dance in America.

William Hogarth’s house reopens after 3 years

Modern(ish), Museums

Eighteenth century painter, engraver and social satirist William Hogarth’s house in Chiswick, West London, has reopened after an extensive three-year restoration. It’s been a longer voyage than originally planned.

Hogarth, famous for his satirical prints condemning social ills of the era like the cheap gin that drove the poor to unemployment, dissolution, suicide, and the dangers of moral laxity among the moneyed classes, purchase the 1715 house as a country home in 1749. Chiswick was a small village surrounded by fields back then. Now it’s a suburb of London, dwarfed by sprawl and the A9 highway.

The house was closed to the public for renovation in September 2008. The construction work was finished by July of 2009 with only the museum’s new installations left to do before the scheduled reopening. Then a fire broke out in the electrical closet under the staircase. Firemen put out the blaze promptly but the damage was sufficient to require an additional two years of renovation. Thankfully the large collection of Hogarth’s prints owned by the museum trust was still in storage at the time of the fire.

The fire ended up being more blessing than curse in some ways. It revealed the original wood flooring of the house, and engendered major grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund, the John & Ruth Howard Charitable Trust, the Old Chiswick Protection Society and the William Hogarth Trust for a more complete renovation, the first full refurbishment of the house in 60 years. Along with the floors, the wall paneling was restored and fireplaces reopened. Also, experts in historical paint colors performed a detailed analysis of the original wall colors and recreated them exactly, so the current interior palette of grays and pinks is authentic to the house when Hogarth lived there.

The contents of the house are also true to the period, many of them artifacts original to the home that had long since been scattered. There are replicas of furniture depicted in Hogarth’s prints, his eye glasses, a Chinese porcelain punchbowl that the Hogarths must have loved because it was broken and mended several times, the stand for his pug’s food bowl, Hogarth’s painting chest, original engraved plates, even his palette — later used by J.M.W. Turner — which was loaned to the museum by the Royal Academy.

There are also portraits of Hogarth’s sisters (copies of originals now owned by Yale University) and his servants, a mourning ring for William’s wife Jane, and a number of other personal artifacts that belonged to his family members who remained in the house until 1808. The idea is to give a sense of how people lived in the house, not just to present a viewing gallery of Hogarth’s prints, which is why the curators have collected information about the various characters who lived there before and after the Hogarths as well.

The ground floor and first floor are open to the public. The ground floor includes a really smart feature that should be included in every museum of a historical house: computer displays that allow people who can’t climb the stairs to the second floor to take a virtual tour of the upstairs living quarters.

Another brilliant idea implemented by the museum is to offer replica 18th century suits for children to wear and compare themselves to the period portraits while they visit the house. I can’t even tell you how ecstatic I would have been to get to roam a museum in full costume.

The Hogarth’s House museum opened to the public on Tuesday, November 9th, the day before Hogarth’s 314th birthday. It’s open from noon to 5 PM, Tuesday through Sunday and admission is free. You can take a virtual tour of your own and learn more about Hogarth’s work with this audio slideshow from the BBC, narrated by Antiques Roadshow expert Lars Tharp.

Hubble cleared of censoring rival Lemaître

Modern(ish)

American astronomer Edwin P. Hubble has traditionally been credited with the discovery that of the expanding universe. In 1929 he published a paper which described how the more distant a galaxy is from earth, the faster it appears to move away from us, a principle now known as Hubble’s Law. Using the speed of recession as deduced from redshift data (measured by astronomer Vesto Slipher) and the distance from earth to those galaxies (measured by Hubble himself), Hubble was able to calculate the cosmic expansion rate, a constant now known as the Hubble Constant. That discovery made him a luminary in the field and resulted in the coolest telescope ever being named after him in 1983.

The only problem is he wasn’t the first to discover it. Belgian priest and astronomer Georges Lemaître published his own findings about the velocity-distance relationship, including a nearly identical cosmic expansion constant deduced from recently published redshift data, in a French-language paper in the Annales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles in 1927. The journal was fairly obscure and the article only translated into English for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society in 1931. The 1931 version, however, was missing key paragraphs about the expansion constant.

The spotty translation has long been known to historians and astronomers, but earlier this year controversy erupted over whether Hubble might have had something to do with muzzling his competition. Astronomer Sidney van den Bergh suggested (pdf) that the translator had intentionally dropped the cosmic expansion paragraphs, and mathematician David Block built on that (pdf), speculating that the “fiercely territorial” Hubble, concerned that he and the Mount Wilson Observatory in Pasadena, California, receive all the credit for the expanding universe, influenced the English publication to censor the paragraphs that showed that Lemaître had gotten there first.

There was no evidence of this but neither was their evidence exonerating Hubble from the charge, until now. Mario Livio, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, has found definitive proof that Hubble had nothing at all to do with the missing paragraphs. The culprit, as it happens, was none other than Georges Lemaître.

After going through hundreds of pieces of correspondence of the Royal Astronomical Society, as well as minutes of the RAS meetings, and material from the Lemaître Archive, Livio has discovered that Lemaître omitted the passages himself when he translated the paper into English!

In one of two “smoking-gun letters” uncovered by Livio, Lemaître wrote to the editors: “I did not find advisable to reprint the provisional discussion of radial velocities which is clearly of no actual interest, and also the geometrical note, which could be replaced by a small bibliography of ancient and new papers on the subject.”

As for why Lemaître chose to censor his earlier discovery of the expanding universe, the letters don’t provide his motivation. Livio thinks that Lemaître just didn’t particularly care to claim the find. The data he had used to calculate the expansion constant had been improved on since 1927, so his old work might have looked out of date. He also might not have thought there was much of a point to including his earlier but more tentative findings since Hubble’s had already been published two years before.

Viking sailors found the sun using Iceland feldspar?

Medieval

Vikings were known to have traveled extensively in the unfriendly waters of the North Atlantic, perhaps reaching as far as North America. How was it possible, in a time before the invention of the magnetic compass (in Europe, at any rate; they had magnetic compasses in Han Dynasty China (2nd c. B.C. – 1st c. A.D.), for sailors to navigate even under consistently overcast conditions when you can’t see the sun during the day nor the stars at night?

According to medieval Icelandic sagas, Vikings navigated using a sunstone, a mineral that polarizes light and thus allows the sun to be found even through heavy cloud cover. A passage in the 12th-13th century Rauðúlfs þáttr (pdf) saga describes its use:

The weather was overcast, and snow was falling, as Sigurður had predicted. The King then summoned Sigurður and Dagur into his presence. He sent a man out to observe the weather, and there was not a patch of clear sky to be seen. The King then asked Sigurður to determine how far the sun had travelled. He gave a precise answer. So the King had the sun-stone held aloft, and observed where it cast out a beam; the altitude it showed was exactly as Sigurður had said.

The sólarsteinn is mentioned in other sagas as well, described as a great treasure, and appears in several inventories of church property during the 14th and 15th centuries. None of the sources specify what mineral the sunstones were, however. There have been various likely candidates (cordierite, iolite, feldspar) since 1969 when Danish archaeologist Thorkild Ramskou first proposed that sunstones were real minerals with polarizing properties rather than legendary talismans with supernatural powers.

A new study led by University of Rennes physicist Guy Ropars found that a transparent calcite crystal known as Iceland feldspar, aka Iceland spar, can indeed find the sun through the clouds and with a remarkable degree of accuracy. They used a piece of spar that was recently recovered from a British shipwreck from 1592.

In the laboratory, Ropars and his team struck the piece of Iceland spar with a beam of partly polarized laser light and measured how the crystal separates polarized from unpolarized light.

By rotating the crystal, the team found that there’s only one point on the stone where those two beams were equally strong—an angle that depends on the beam’s location.

That would enable a navigator to test a crystal on a sunny day and mark the sun’s location on the crystal for reference on cloudy days. On cloudy days, a navigator would only be able to use the relative brightness of the two beams.

The team then recruited 20 volunteers to take turns looking at the crystal outside on a cloudy day and measure how accurately they could estimate the position of the hidden sun.

Navigators subdivide the horizon by 360 degrees, and the team found that the volunteers could locate the sun’s position to within 1 degree.

Even after the magnetic compass was invented in Europe in the 1300s, the feldspar was still an important navigational tool, hence its presence on an Elizabethan ship a full four centuries after the end of the Viking era. The study found that even a single cannon from the shipwreck interfered with the compass by as much as 90 degrees. Therefore they couldn’t rely on the compass data alone. If the sun was obscured, a sunstone was crucial to avoid drastic navigation errors from a magnetic compass on a ship laden with cannon.

You can see the neat double refraction effect of Iceland spar in this video:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yv5kkBCz78k&w=430]

$1,000 reward offered for stolen 1795 Spanish cannon

Modern(ish), Treasures

On the night of November 2, a Spanish bronze cannon from 1795 was stolen from a suburban Detroit business and its owner is offering a $1,000 reward for any information leading to its recovery. Matt Switlik, cannon collector and expert on historic field artillery, had brought the cannon to the Edston Plastic Company in Romulus, Michigan, to have a plastic replica made for a museum to use as a donation container.

The thieves were looking for a far more pedestrian haul of easily sold power tools and scrap metal. They made off with 20 of the former and several 200-pound boxes of aluminum. The cannon was hidden in the back under some racks and a coffin blanket. The thieves stumbled on it entirely by accident when they rolled out a coil of wire.

The cannon was cast in Seville in 1795. The crest of King Charles IV of Spain is engraved on it, as is the date, a serial number of 3610 and markings indicating it was made from copper from Mexico and from the Rio Tinto government mines in southwestern Spain. The 2.6 inch caliber weapon is 42 inches long, weighs 225 pounds.

Matt Switlik purchased it as part of a matched pair in 1974 from Inez Bandholtz, the widow of Maj. Gen. Harry Hill Bandholtz who acquired the cannons in the Philippines during the Spanish-American War and brought them back to Michigan when he retired from the Army after World War I.

The cannon is far too identifiable to be sold to collectors, so if the thieves do anything, they’ll try to sell it for scrap. The $1000 reward is double what they would get for the scrap value of the copper alone.

Switlik, a historian who collects cannons, paid $1,000 for it nearly four decades ago and now values it at about $12,000. He’s getting word out that his cannon was stolen to collectors across the country and sent an e-mail to 600 people Tuesday.

“As a stolen piece, it’s not worth anything,” said Forrest Taylor, owner of www.cannonsonline.com based in Maryland. Taylor buys, sells and reproduces cannons and said collectors will know Switlik’s cannon was stolen if they come across it.

Taylor also said he believes that the cannon’s actual value may be closer to $20,000.[…]

“I’d sure like my cannon back,” Switlik said. “The other one is lonesome.”

The Romulus police are investigating leads from the crime scene and looking for surveillance video any neighboring business might have. Anyone with information about the cannon should contact the Romulus Police Department at (734) 941-8400.