petri dish

watching the detectives

In introducing classic images of the scientist in popular culture, we've started with the essential prototypes: the heroic scientist and the mad scientist. The heroic image gets a huge boost at what history came to see as the culmination of the scientific revolution in the model of a quasi-divine Isaac Newton (1642-1727). This image is captured in the poetic sentiments of Edmund Halley, in his description of Newton's mind in 1687: "Nearer the gods no mortal may approach" -- and in Alexander Pope's famous couplet: "Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night: God said, Let Newton be! and all was light!" (published in this form in 1735). [Or check out Newton's monument in Westminster Abbey.] A worthy assist to this image was carried forward, for example, in the praises sung of Benjamin Franklin's work on electricity as in Benjamin West's famous rendering from 1816, which shows heavenly light breaking up a raging storm as Franklin draws fire from the sky bare-knuckled, surrounded by cherubic assistants. The flip side of the heroic scientist is the mad scientist, whose power stems from base motives or infernal regions, and is familiar through countless renditions of the Frankenstein image. As the nineteenth century progressed, fresh literary forms such as science fiction offered ample display space for presentations of the compromised scientist, as in H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896) and The Invisible Man (1897) -- examples that would prove to have a long-lived future in films on through the next century.

We'll pick up sf later in the semester, but our next step will to be to take under consideration the appearance of another variation of scientific man that was brought into being in the nineteenth century, in the emergence of stories of the scientific detective. That's shown in the image at the upper left, which features the famous Sherlock Holmes. The caption reads: "Holmes was working hard over a chemical investigation;" it's from a short story titled "The Naval Treaty" from 1893. In the first Holmes story by Arthur Conan Doyle, "A Study in Scarlet," Dr. Watson is told by a mutual acquaintance:

"Holmes is a little too scientific for my tastes -- it approaches to cold-bloodedness. I could imagine his giving a friend a little pinch of the latest vegetable alkaloid, not out of malevolence, you understand, but simply out of a spirit of inquiry in order to have an accurate idea of the effects." (quoted in E.J. Wagner, The Science of Sherlock Holmes, p. 3.)

Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales depend on scientific imagery in a number of different ways. For example: 1) as with the chemical investigation above, he is seen as being a competent scientist himself, applying scientific techniques to crime detection; 2) he is seen as having certain characteristics that call up conventional images of the scientific persona as seen in Romantic era critiques ["a cold-blooded...spirit of inquiry"]; and, 3) his relentlessly logical mind is seen as the literal embodiment of analytic method, as empirical data are cognitively sorted into causal chains of truth, that reveal the ordered reality beneath a surface of disorder, much as a computer program might be portrayed as doing so today. This successful working out of the "calculus of probabilities" [a term first used by Edgar Allen Poe in relation to his scientific detective, C. Auguste Dupin -- see below -- and repeated by A.C. Doyle] is in principle within the reach of anyone willing to reason accurately, but is shown to be beyond the grasp of nearly all within Holmes' orbit -- and that includes us, his readers!

The rise of detective fiction in the nineteenth century -- inaugurated by Poe in 1841, in his introduction of the detective C. Auguste Dupin -- and elaborated by Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes tales --  helps to point us to broader portrayals of the image of science that circulated within popular media, and especially to an emphasis on portraying the scientific mind. As Richard K. Ho notes in a discussion of the rise of the scientific detective,

"The genre of crime fiction had come into its own in the nineteenth century, amidst a time of great intellectual advancement. Thanks to the influences of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution, advances in science, technology, and rational thought began to find their way into contemporary literature. Victorian writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle incorporated these modern ideas into their fictional works, lending the credibility of science to the practical tasks of criminal detection and investigation."

While detectives such as Dupin and Holmes embody scientific characteristics, it is still the case that they occupy a space that is not strictly of the laboratory, and the ways in which they choose to spend their time differs from the normal round of what will come to be seen as the scientific enterprise. They will make an interesting case study for us of how scientific characteristics are mixed together with dimensions that may appear to be at odds with definitions of conventional scientific life, representing perhaps a hybrid creature that integrates scientific values and humanistic values, particularly perhaps in the detective's role as an agent of moral order.

As an opportunity to generate hypotheses of our own, we'll probe the literary creations of Poe and Doyle (Dupin and Holmes) and then compare these nineteenth-century depictions with a more modern-day version of the scientific detective: Lieutenant Columbo of television fame from the 1970s. In looking at the episode "A Stitch in Crime," we'll even get bonus representations of the "evil" scientist and the "good" scientist in addition to our ratiocinating detective as parts of the plot: a three-pack of images of the scientific mind and character, as we start to explore what all this imagery within popular culture may mean, then and now.

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For more: For an intriguing web exhibition about forensic science, see this National Library of Medicine project, "Visible Proofs" -- don't miss the section on "Riding the Forensic Wave," which discusses the circulation of ideas such as the scientific detective in the popular press. For a discussion of how Poe influenced Doyle, see this online article by Drew Thomas. And here's an earlier post on CSI.

Images: Upper left from "Visible Proofs" at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/visibleproofs/galleries/exhibition/wave_image_2.html; Newton, from Westminster Abbey's site [scroll down] at http://www.westminster-abbey.org/history-research/monuments-gravestones/people/12186; and the Invisible Man poster via wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:The-Invisible-Man.jpg

flotsam and jetsam and historical memories

1953: Midnight Fireball Hits Bay -- UFO Near Miss???? No, the image isn't a real historic boardwalk handbill from Antiques Roadshow but one more bit of McMilleniana (as are the ones below and to the right) -- they're actually banners made in 2004 for the Santa Monica Pier in California for a public art project that took its inspiration from "the facts, folklore, myths, and legends of the Pier's early history," with the images "representing historical events that may -- or may not-- have actually occurred." McMillen's banners, along with those of artist Steve Galloway, were printed on vinyl and hung out on light poles on the boardwalk, flickering in and out of view of visitors as they strolled along the Pier entertaining themselves. (There are more than two dozen, and each one of them is really fun and clever... very much in keeping with a characterization that McMillen used in another context about an art project of his: "all part of an open-ended narrative, a carnival for the curious.")

My third take-away lesson from the world of art for myself as an historian of science (there is a first one -- "trying to make the (seemingly) ephemeral visible". . . and a second one -- "of crocodelephants and category confusions") as seen through the envisionings of Los Angeles artists Sam Rodia and Michael C. McMillen is related to the idea of artistic installations: art in the wild, out in the public square. McMillen's banners for the Pier are an exuberant wave of the hand, inviting those who encounter them to take them in -- maybe do a double-take -- and respond as might be, maybe with amusement or bemusement, or in sparking off a train-of-associations, or drifting in and out of a game of detecting how close to historical reality the "commemorative" homages are. 

The artist initiates a conversation, drawing on the representations and forms and idioms of everyday life, and provides an opportunity for engagement in a way that brings the specialist or expert (the artist) into an inviting -- if brief -- relationship with ordinary folk, casual passers-by. The Pier's visitors didn't have to possess the right connections to enter the home of a wealthy collector who owns an artpiece only seen by invitation, or even to venture into a museum gallery that is the art world's home turf: here, installation art, as public art in its most open form, takes up residence within a commonplace that offers the possibility for an interplay between "experts" and "laity" in a way that neither condescends nor intimidates. The third lesson, then, is of how venturing out beyond professional confines has so much potential: of teaching ourselves as we improvise new forms of communication, in ways that offer different kinds of connections and opportunities for imagination and reflection. And that's why I'm here on the web, diving into the area of science and popular culture, trying to figure out how to be a digital historian of science: putting out a few banners to fly in the public square. Its time to learn how to do history of science in the wild, not simply caretake it within the neatly trimmed hedges and rows of academic propriety.

McMillen's banners are also a wonderful nudge in and of themselves to speculate about the flotsam and jetsam of science and popular culture. UFOS streaking down into the sea, giant squid breaking the surface and upending an unwary boater, late-Victorian submarine steamers illuminating the murky depths: they're all wonderful evocations of the idea of mysteries that lurk so often at the heart of popular culture phenomena, with the ocean being a particularly apt emblematic prompt. In fact these three "historical" posters offer more than just apt symbolic representations of recurring popular symbols -- they intersect with real artifacts as well, in which connecting the dots begins to reveal possible patterns of culture. If not a real-world UFO sighting, well there was the 1953 movie, Phantom from Space ("Million Monkey Theater" provides a sharp narrative and commentary) in which an alien being crashes into the ocean off of Santa Monica. Jules Verne, in the 1870 novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, gives us both a Victorian submersible and a giant squid, featured as well in the 1954 film by Disney. Off the coast of Santa Monica you can spy Catalina Island twenty-seven miles away, where (as the locals tell it) the glass-bottom boat was invented in the late-19th century to take advantage of the clear waters and abundant sealife as a novel tourist attraction-- not quite the gothic hulk of McMillen's imagining, but in 1906 you could experience a variant of the Vernian aquatic dreamscape by touring Catalina's "undersea gardens" via glass-bottom boat. Of course, Catalina being a tinsel-town playground, the tourist craft gets its own star treatment in the Doris Day movie from 1966, The Glass Bottom Boat (with Day as a NASA employee and occasional mermaid...there are interesting images of scientists to consider in this comic film). With just this brief tour, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items worthy of study that are historical obscurities for most by now.

It's unlikely that a rampaging squid actually tormented a bay-dweller in 1949 as recorded on the second banner, but Hollywood, just down the road, produced The Lady Takes a Sailor that year with Jane Wyman (directed by Michael Curtiz) where an octopus apparently figures into the narrative, although it's an underwater vehicle that breaks the surface and upends her sailboat -- and, interestingly, just two years post-Roswell, the plot features a government cover-up of secret experiments (extending to messing with civilians' heads and reputations) involving a submarine tractor (bringing together, in a loose but ever more thickly woven web, echoes of ufology, troublesome cephalopods, and novel deepsea machines :-) Of course, nasty squids/octopi received iconic treatment at the movies during the cold war period in Disney's 20,000 Leagues and It Came from Beneath the Sea ("it" being a six-armed octopus that attacked San Francisco, courtesy of Ray Harryhausen) from 1955 and in the 1961 Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, directed by Irwin Allen (I actually saw one of these as a kid -- I think the third one -- at Catalina's movie theater at the Avalon Casino, after having had my first tour in a glass-bottom boat. . . I can still see the vague form of a giant octopus in my mind's-eye today, it scared me that much!). Of course, giant squid are among the most durable popular culture themes and are still a big draw, being that they're so elusive -- they were only recently caught live on video in 2005.

A fascinating late-19th century California seaside connection is a science fiction short story that appeared in a periodical called The Californian in December of 1893. Entitled "A Submarine Christmas" [via Google Books], the fantastic tale by Thomas R. Caldwell shamelessly draws from Verne, but is a surprisingly fresh and up-to-date look for its time at marine zoology. The plot involves an inventor of a submarine research vessel who travels to Avalon Bay at Catalina Island to test it out, and of his intrepid friend from the East Coast who joins him for assorted undersea adventures, including a near-fatal encounter with a "giant cuttle-fish (Architeuthis), a monster at least seventy feet in length. . . Its arms were thrown about the boat: its uncanny black eyes glowing like huge plates in the glare of the search lights" (accompanied by an excellent illustration). Fortunately for the harried explorers, it was all a dream! But the 1906 piscatorial machine of the Santa Monica Pier banner would look remarkably apt as an illustration for the 1893 story; certainly Thomas R. Caldwell would have felt right at home! And, again, we've probably discovered at least a couple of relevant items here that are historical obscurities for most by now, simply by using the 2004 banner imaginings by McMillen as jumping-off points.

Making the (seemingly) ephemeral visible is part of what the art world can teach us humanists, and artists can also inspire ideas about how to visualize a carnival for the curious -- experimenting outside the petri dish -- needed, especially, when humanism becomes tinged with scientism. Not only that, but they can send us off into cultural scavenger hunts that turn flotsam and jetsam into useful things to think with and that point toward historical work that needs doing.

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Images: All from the image gallery at http://www01.smgov.net/smarts/gallery/paintings/PierBanners/index.html