Guericke's Got Plenty O' Nothin', and Nothin's Plenty For Him (1672)

by Stephen J. Gertz

One day in 1656, the citizens of Magdeburg, Germany were startled by the appearance of strange unidentified flying objects hovering over their town. Documented by a now-famous contemporary engraving, it should have led to panic in the streets. The town's mayor, however, Otto von Guericke (1602-1686), calmed the crowd with confidence empty of any reassurance whatsoever: Nothing to worry about, it's nothing at all. Nothing's happening. You are seeing nothing in action.

It was a great day for nihilism.

What the good folks of Magdeburg actually saw were two teams of eight horses try to pull apart two 20-inch diameter copper hemispheres that were greased at their mating rims and sealed when all the air was pumped out. It couldn't be done. Guericke had dramatically demonstrated the existence of a vacuum, of nothingness within the sealed hemispheres. In short, he proved that nothing could exist within something.

This was major. It was also controversial. The results are found in Guericks's Experimenta nova (1672), one of the great classics of science.

The subject of a vacuum or void, that is, nothingness, vexed natural philosophers and theologians. Ecclesiastic Jacques du Bois and Jesuit scholars Athanasius Kircher and his assistant and protégé, Gaspar Schott were in the middle of it along with Guericke, a scientist and inventor as well as politician.

"Schott first published what had originally been intended as a brief guide to the hydraulic and pneumatic  instruments in Kircher's Roman museum, expanding it into the first version of his Mechanica  hydraulico-pneumatica [1658]. But he added as an appendix [pp. 441-488] a detailed account of Guericke's experiments on vacuums, the earliest published report of this work. This supplement contributed greatly to the  success of Schott's compendium; and as a result he  became the center of a network of correspondence  as other Jesuits, as well as lay experimenters and  mechanicians, wrote to inform him of their inventions  and discoveries. Schott exchanged several letters  with Guericke, seeking to draw him out by  suggesting new problems, and published his later investigations" (DSB).


Schott, who Guericke cites in the subtitle to Experimenta nova, was a supporter of Guericke. His mentor, Kircher was not; a vacuum is impossible: God fills everything. 
This is one of the few examples of Kircher and Schott in disagreement.



Engraved titlepage.

 "Is it God's immensity or is it independent of God…Guericke's position on this matter emerges in the course of a summary account [in Experimenta nova] of the opinions of the ecclesiastics Jacques de Bois of Leyden and Athanasius Kircher, the eminent Jesuit scholar. In his Dialogus Theologicus-Astronomicus, published in 1653 and directed against Galileo and all his defenders of the heliocentric cosmology, Jacques du Bois had proclaimed the infinite omnipresence of God in an infinite void beyond the world. Du Bois should not have placed the divine essence in an infinite void, complained Guericke, but ought rather to to have declared that ' there is a place or space not in which the divine essence is, but which is itself the divine essence..."

"…[Guericke's] criticism of Kircher differed somewhat…Kircher believed that even if a void culled exist without a body, which he denied, it could not exist without God. In the passage cited by Guericke, Kircher explained that 'when you imagine this imaginary space beyond the world, do not imagine it as nothing, but conceive it as a fullness of the Divine Substance extended into infinity.'  In Guericke's judgment, Kircher was wrong to say that 'God fills all imaginary space, vacuum or emptiness by His substance and presence' and simultaneously deny the existence of empty space. 'For how can God fill what is not' [Experimenta nova, p. 64]. Rather, Kircher ought to have concluded with Lessius that 'imaginary space, vacuum, or the Nothing beyond the world, is God himself,' as he finally does when he announces that the space beyond the world is not Nothing, but is the fullness of Divine Substance.'

"But if space is God's immensity, or even God Himself, Guericke insisted that we must nevertheless understand that 'the infinite essence of God is not contained in space, or vacuum, but is in Himself for Himself" (Grant, Much Ado Abut Nothing: Theories of Space and Vacuum from the Middle Ages to the Scientific Revolution, p. 218-19).

Presuming that your brain, as mine, dissolved into mush during the preceding theologico-philisophico disquisition about nothing, allow me to sum things up: Guericke made something out of nothing, Kircher thought nothing of it, but nothing is divine so let's move on. Don't tell the Know-Nothings, they don't know anything much less nothing.

Someone who, like Guericke, knew something about nothing and possessed it, too, sang about it in 1963, courtesy Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller.

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[KIRCHER, Athanasius. SCHOTT, Gaspar]. GUERICKE, Otto von. Experimenta Nova (ut vocantur) Magdeburgica de Vacuo Spatio Primùm à R.P. Gaspare Schotto . . . nunc verò ab ipso Auctore Perfectiùs edita, variisque aliis Experimentis aucta. Quibus accesserunt simul certa quaedam De Aeris Pon Amstelodami [Amsterdam]: Johannes Jansson zu Waesberge, 1672. 

First edition. Folio. 8 ff. (including the engraved title), 244, (4) pp., errata leaf. Engraved title, engraved portrait of the author, two double-page engraved plates ((including that of the famous Magdeburg experiment and twenty engravings, many full-page. 

Dibner, Heralds of Science, 55 (pp. 30 & 67). Dibner, Founding Fathers of Electrical Science, pp. 13-14. D.S.B., V, pp. 574-76. Evans, Exhibition of First Editions of Epochal Achievements in the History of Science (1934), 30. Horblit 44. Sparrow, Milestones of Science, p. 16.

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Images courtesy of Martayan Lan, with our thanks.
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Another existential brain-twister:

The Story of Nobody, By Somebody, Illustrated By Someone.
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Politics and the Weather (A Weird Rare Book Adventure)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Action in the sky = Politics on the ground.
Frontispiece to Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica.

It was either sunny and warm or cold and rainy on Election Day last week, depending on your political perspective. 

Climate change was in the air in the aftermath of the election, though no one seemed to know whether it was man-made or a natural phenomenon. Politicos and the Commentariat have moistened fingers in the air and still no one knows which way the wind is really blowing. About the only thing everyone can agree upon is that a high-pressure system is stuck over Washington with no relief in sight.

In these troubled times, our obvious need is for a guide to politics based upon the weather, right? But where to find one?

Hop in my  Time Machine, zip into the future, take a look at the lissome Eloi, recoil from the troglodyte Morlocks, and gnash gears as we tear into reverse,  wave to Washington D.C. 2010, and  wind up in Ausburg, Bavaria 1698.
 

Say hello to Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica, a remarkable, delightfully bizarre, unique, and fantastical natural science emblem book by Francisco Reinzer (1661-1708), a Jesuit priest and professor of philosophy, rhetoric, and theology, who took the science out of poli-sci by tying it to atmospheric conditions, astrology, and Western Hermetic tradition.

Within, he posits that political wisdom can be derived from meteorological phenomena and that  appropriate political policy and behavior can be revealed by them, the weather as oujia board, sort of like predicting political action by examining the entrails of  a TV meteorologist. (Watch out, Willard Scott). Reinzer liberally references his Jesuit brothers of the prior generation, Fathers Athanasius Kircher (d. 1680) and Gaspar Schott (d. 1666) and their works throughout, including Mundus Subterraneus (1664), Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae (1665), Physica Curiosa (1662), etc.

Scoff if you will but the results of last week's election were foreseen by Reinzer long ago.

Dawn on the Potomac, Nov. 2, 2010.

Citing the writings of Julius Caesar, Cicero, and Pliiny, amongst other ancient politician-scribes, Reinzer proffers advice, like Machiavelli to Lorenzo de'Medici, to his patron, Joseph I, eldest son of Holy Roman Emperor Leopold I, and King of the Romans/Emperor-designate, on political action within the context of, well, just about everything in the atmosphere and on the ground as it was then understood.

Divided into twelve Dissertations of eighty-three questions and answers with marvelous copperplate engravings to illustrate each, Reinzer (1661-1708) covers, with typical Jesuit thoroughness, every aspect of the atmosphere and its manifestations. Among the associated subjects discussed and illustrated are mining, metal working, diving for corals, fossils, ice and freezing landscapes, volcanos, pharmacy and hot springs. What those things have to do with politics is a mystery to me. And unless you’ve had a classical education it will be all prehistoric Greek to you, too.

It’s written in Latin.

7PM EDT, Nov. 2, 2010, Washington D.C.

But for the sake of this discussion, let’s say, for instance, that a vote is up in the legislature to pass a major, landmark health care bill. All of a sudden, a tornado rips down the Mall right up to the Capitol building. Coincidence? Not to Reinzer! Hunker down, wait for it to blow over, then vote your health care bill; no one can think straight when the House is carried away. Best to wait until the tornado stops and the home of Congress finally rests atop the Wicked Witch of the East. Welcome to Oz.

High humidity? Moisture in the air means tears in Congress. We know from empirical knowledge that this is true; Washington D.C. is a steam bath during the summer months; it’s no accident that Congress recesses from August to mid-September. When Congress sits, don't want to shvitz. Sweat the big issues when it's cold outside.

"A dark and stormy night"? Let Bulwer-Lytton’s opening line in purple to Paul Clifford be your watchword: War is in the air. Button up your trench coat; before the military starts shooting, legislators will be lobbing mortar shells across the aisle in mortal trench combat.

Message to Sharron Angle from The Big Man, up.

You can only raise taxes when the earth shifts its axis.

If a hurricane should hit get your ass on the scene, don't sit.

If lightning should strike tell Congress, "Take a hike."

If an earthquake rocks town welcome back Jerry Brown.

This book was published during a fascinating time in the sciences. By 1698, Isaac Newton and the Rationalists had begun to move science away from the Hermetic blend of naturalism and metaphysics into a strictly fact-based, tested by replicable experiment endeavor; the transition of the Renaissance  to the Age of Enlightenment. Men like Kircher and his disciple, Schott, stood at the nexus of the old way and new. Even though Kircher was roundly criticized for his many blunders in thinking by the new generation of scientists, he was still the most influential investigator of nature of his time, whether you agreed with him or not. In 1698, he’d been dead for eighteen years; we tend to think that Hermeticism in the sciences died with him. It did not. It lingered as a legitimate, if somewhat dubious, way to look at the world for another generation. Reinzer and Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica provide the evidence.

The Democratic Caucus, 11PM EDT, Nov. 2, 2010.

With fifty states each with their own typical climate and weather patterns, as well as micro-climates, trying to gauge political action by atmospheric conditions is tough. As anyone living in Florida can tell you, it can be raining on one side of the street and sunny on the other; clear skies one minute, a downpour the next. We know how wacked-out politics in Florida can often be. Perhaps Reinzer was on to something.

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REINZER, Francisco. Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica, in duodecim Dissertationes per Quaestiones Meteorologicas & conclusiones Politicas divisa, appositisque Symbolis illustrata... Ausburg: J. Wolfus, 1698.

First edition, second printing, rarer than the first printing (of 1697), and subsequent 1709 and 1712 editions, with no copies at auction within  the last thirty-five years.  Folio (12 1/4 x 7 3/4 in; 311 x 197 mm). [6], 297, [5 index], [2 blank] pp. With engraved frontispiece by A.M.Wolffgang after W.J.Kadariza, and eighty-three in-text copperplate emblem engravings  by J.Müller, J.Stridbeck, & J.S.Krauss after W.J. Kadariza.

Praz p. 463. De Backer-Sommervogel IV, 1640.3. Landwehr 494.
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Images courtesy of David Brass.

Political wonks and the curious can read the full text of Meteorologia Philosophico-Politica here. A Latin to English dictionary and grammar will help. A lot.

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Seventeenth Century Television's Mr. Wizard

CARAMUELIUS, Aspasius [Gaspar Schott]. Ioco-Seriorum Naturae et Artis sive Magiae Naturalis Centuriaetres. Neapoli. N.p. [Würzburg], n.d. [1666].

From 1951 through 1965, a television show appeared that changed the course of science. In my house.

HERBERT, Don. Mr. Wizard's Science Secrets.
New York: Popular Mechanics Press, 1952.

Watch Mr. Wizard, starring Don Herbert, a general science and English major in college and an aspiring actor, was a staple in Casa Gertz when I had control of the horizontal and vertical (yes, my son, there was a time when you could  - and had to - manually control how the TV behaved). 

Though the family survived  my first science experiment, at age four (Q: What happens if you stick a paper napkin into a lit stove burner and throw the flaming thing into the wastebasket? A: Four fire  trucks and FEMA magically appear!) and may have been dubious about my prospects for safely making it to age five, the folks still provided chemistry sets and Remco Thinking Boy's Toys. What they were thinking, I have no idea. Nor, what I was thinking, if I was thinking at all.

Mr. Wizard helped set me on the right path. His stock and trade was creating  tricks based upon scientific principles. It was magic! Just as Bill Nye the Science Guy served a later generation anxious to make  magical things happen with their own hands, Mr. Wizard served the Boomers.

Mr. Wizard's early forerunner was Gaspar Schott, a Jesuit priest and protege of the great seventeenth century polymath, Athanasius Kircher.

A popularizer of science rather than an original researcher, in Ioco-Seriorum Naturae et Artis (1666), the last book published in his lifetime, Schott illustrates how fascinating and amusing science can be through a series of three hundred magic tricks/experiments based upon natural phenomena, geometry and trigonometry. 

This was a very exciting time in science, at the crossroads of the casual, irrational thinking of the past and the rigorous, experiment-based scientific method then beginning to emerge. The public was fascinated by what was going on and much of the credit for that keen interest is due to Schott and this book, which has become quite rare in general and positively scarce in better than very good condition. Only two copies have come to auction within the last thirty-five years.

Amongst the described tricks and devices are a water-clock, optical illusions, a perpetual motion machine, a dark chamber, cryptography, and more. Some chapters treat subjects of medical interest, i.e. healing toothache, syphilis, poison antidotes; others are of a more fanciful nature, i.e. how to walk on water, and how to catch fish with your bare hands. This book was Schott's most popular and was reprinted several times. Schott's interest in linguistics and polygraphy is expressed in homage to his mentor, Kircher, who Schott heralds a pioneer in the field.

Gaspar Schott (1608-66) was a Jesuit, student and long time assistant of Kircher. "Schott is most widely known for his works on hydraulic and mechanical instruments. His treatise on 'chronometric marvels' contains the first description of a universal joint and the classification of gear teeth. He was the author of a number of works on mathematics, physics, and magic [the present volume]." He devoted the remainder of his career to editing and defending Kircher's works" (Findlen and Huisman, p. 34).

We were fortunate to discover an ancient Kinetoscope of Schott demonstrating a few science tricks to a young, contemporary maiden. The first thing to amaze is the quality of the picture; television reception in the seventeenth century was notoriously poor to non-existent. You will also be startled by the modern dress. It's as if it was filmed in early 1960-something. It's magic!

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CARAMUELIUS, Aspasius [Gaspar Schott]. Ioco-Seriorum Naturae et Artis sive Magiae Naturalis Centuriaetres Neapoli. N.p. [Würzburg], n.d. [1666].

First edition, variant B (catchword "autem" to page one). Small quarto. [2], 363, [1, blank], [8, Index] pp. Engraved title page. Twenty-two engraved plates, including one foldout. Head- tailpieces. 

Merrill 16n. DSB XII, pp.201-211. De Backer - Sommervogel IV, 1059.18. Thorndike VII, 591. Caillet 5545.
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All images from Ioco-Seriorum Naturae et Artis courtesy of David Brass.
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What Did Noah's Ark Really Look Like?

When I have trouble falling asleep, I count animals marching into Noah’s ark. After three hours, I still have beasts to account for, long after sheep have schelepped into the cargo hold.

I have no idea what Athanasius Kircher, the 17th century polymath, did when he needed to inspire the sandman; it appears that he was kept up all night speculating about everything concerning Noah.

The procession of life into the Ark.

He published the results of his obsession with Noah in 1675. Arca Noe was and remains the most detailed account of Noah and his ark from that period in scientific inquiry, an era when rationalism was struggling to assert itself over superstition, the illogical, and incredible.

Men like Kircher, a Jesuit who was the webmaster for Europe’s network of scientific scholars, collecting and disseminating their work, endeavored to bring order, clarity and discipline to the study of the natural world. But they remained tied to the world they were born into and, particularly if you were a Jesuit priest, tried vainly to square religious belief with what they were observing in the natural world.

Steerage accommodations on the Deluge Hotel for the four-legged set.

The story of Noah and the ark provided Kircher with a huge framework within which he could study nature, its creatures and flora, as well as engineering. The pursuit of science in this manner endowed it with “sacred purpose.” The ark had been designed by God; a perfect, then, design. Kircher was also an obsessive collector of natural world curiosities, establishing a celebrated museum for such in Rome; Noah’s ark held the ultimate collection, and Kircher made it his mission to recover the lost “divine” science of Noah and display it in his museum.

Birds and humans travel First-Class.

“For Kircher the authority of the Ark as a blueprint derives from its divine origin: unlike other memorable creations of the ancient world... the Ark was designed by God. Since God was the architect, the design embodies the divine laws of symmetry and proportion, qualities the Ark shares with the Tabernacle of Moses and the Temple of Solomon. But God also made man, and in his own image. Thus the proportions of man are reflected in the Ark. The length of 300 cubits to the width of 50, for example, is in the same proportion as the height of a well-proportioned man to his width...

Fowl play in the dormitories.

“Kircher comes into his own when enumerating, describing and illustrating the animals. Just as Noah had learnt the science of geometrical proportion from God, so had he also learnt the divine science of animals. Organization and taxonomy were critical to the management of a successful Ark, which had to be divided up into quarters proper for all the animals and their provisions. This Kircher does with obsessive thoroughness and loving detail. Birds and humans were on the top story, quadrupeds on the bottom, and food and water stored in the middle. Serpents were left to languish in the bilge, while there was no need to provide space for creatures that generated spontaneously, such as the insects and frogs” (Bennett and Mandelbrote).

The beginning of the Flood.

Note that scientific inquiry at this time still embraced spontaneous generation as a viable theory of reproduction, as well as other strange (to the modern mind) ideas. Kircher, trying so hard to be precise in his observations and rational in his conclusions, still thought certain stones held power.

The drowning of all life in the Great Deluge, everything underwater, including mortgages.

For those who don’t read Latin, or don’t read it fluently enough to be able to fully comprehend Kircher’s text, the enduring fascination of Arca Noe lies with its elaborate and detailed engraved plates depicting the design of the ark, and the consequences of the flood. They are magnificent.
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References:

BENNETT, Jim and Scott Mandelbrote. The Garden, The Ark, The Tower, The Temple. Bodleian Library, 1998.

FINDLEN, Paula. The Last Man Who Knew Everything (Routledge, 2004).

MERRILL, Brian L. Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680), Jesuit Scholar. Brigham Young University Library, 1989.

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KIRCHER, Athanasius. Arca Noë, In Tres Libros Digesta, Quorum I. De rebus quae ante Diluvium, II. De iis, quae ipso Diluvio eiusque duratione, III. De iis, quae post Diluvium a Noemo gesta sunt, Quae omnia nova Methodo, Nec Non Summa Argumentorum varietate, explicantur, & demonstrantur. Amsterdam: Johannes Janssonius van Waesberge, 1675.

First and only edition. Folio (14 x 9 1/8 in; 355 x 232 mm). *, **, A4 - Z4, Aa4 - Gg4, Hh4 - Ii4 (Index + list of Kircher's Works); [16], 240, [14]. [2]pp. Engraved title-page, engraved portrait of the dedicatee Charles ll, 2 maps (1 double-page), topographic plan (double-page), large folding plate of the ark, 10 double-page plates, 4 full-page plates, 2 small plates, 9 engraved text cuts, & 102 text woodcuts. 5 tables, tailpieces, decorated initials. Complete.


STCN 167502. Dunnhaupt 2346:29. Merrill 26. Adelung III, 379. Caillet, ll, 360.5768. Graesse IV,20. Nissen, Z 2195. De Backer I, 430.26. Sommervogel, IV, 1068-69.33. BMCC CXXIII,711. Bennett /Mandelbrote 37. Mustain/Hinman 157. Brunet, lll, 666.

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Images courtesy of David Brass.