George Washington Wilson ~ His Photographs a Century and a Half Later

One of my favorite photographers is George Washington Wilson (1823 – 1893) who described himself as an artist and a photographer, always in that order.  Though this post features no fossils, there is geology (eventually) and natural history (broadly speaking).

At the outset, a note about sources is in order.  Various sources are cited throughout this post, but special attention should be directed to Roger Taylor’s richly detailed and accessible biography titled George Washington Wilson:  Artist & Photographer (1823~1893), published in 1981.  I’ve relied on Taylor’s work for details of Wilson’s life and for an understanding of the photographic processes of the time.  Unless otherwise noted, please assume that Taylor is my source.

I know George Washington Wilson from his incredibly broad portfolio of beautiful stereoviews which he published in the latter half of the 19th century from establishments in Aberdeen, Scotland.  Shown below is an example of one of his stereoviews, featuring side-by-side photographs of a rowboat on the Loch of Park, Aberdeenshire, at sunset.  I believe Wilson photographed this scene sometime in the late 1850s.

A stereoview is a card on which are pasted two printed photographs of the same subject taken from very slightly different perspectives.  When the card is viewed through a stereoscope, a three- dimensional image is created.  Stereoviews are discussed in several posts on this blog, including this one.

The card presented above includes images that I find particularly striking both for their artistic composition, as well as for the technical mastery they reflect.  As to the latter, if one considers the photographic processes and equipment in use at the time (more on those later) and the challenge of capturing clear images of objects that cannot be posed, including, in this instance, the water, the clouds, and the rowboat with its occupants, the photographs are even more amazing.  Photographs of objects in motion, labeled “Instantaneous,” were difficult to obtain and highly prized.

Son of a tenant farmer, Wilson trained as a painter and specialized in portrait miniatures, finding success with his paintings in Aberdeen during the late 1840s and early 1850s.  This was also a time of striking technological developments in photography which led to the creation of a new, burgeoning business category in Europe, Great Britain, the United States, and elsewhere – the professional photographer.  In the 1850s, Wilson expanded his business to include photographic portraits.  Shortly, he fully committed to photography, a move certainly fueled by his success in fulfilling a commission from Prince Albert to photograph the construction of Queen Victoria’s Balmoral Castle.  From his ongoing relationship with the Queen and her family, Wilson would identify himself as Photographer to Her Majesty in Scotland.  Seen below is a photograph by Wilson of the Castle; it was not part of his commissioned construction series.

This image and all others appearing below in this post were selected from stereoviews.

Wilson was also an entrepreneur with a keen eye on the bottom line.  He saw the potential for photographs to generate substantial income.  In 1854, the carte de visite had made its appearance, featuring a posed photographic portrait of one or more individuals mounted on a small (2 ½ x 4 inch) card.  Due to its relatively low cost and ease of exchange, the carte de visite offered a much broader swathe of the general public the opportunity to have and share images of loved ones. Wilson lost no time in focusing on this photographic technique and format, a move which proved financially successful.  But, quite quickly, he felt compelled to push beyond the subject matter and technical limits of the carte de visite, taking his cameras into the wider world to capture landscape images, as he clearly had done in creating the photographs for the stereoview of the Loch of Park presented earlier.

To take photography on the road was no mean feat because Wilson was using the wet-collodion technology to capture his images.  When a scene was to be photographed, the photographer first had to create a light sensitive plate.  Roger Taylor describes the process as follows:

The collodion solution was, for the most part, commercially prepared by dissolved gun cotton in ether.  The photographer then used this viscous mass to coat a glass plate which had been carefully cleaned and degreased.  After an even coating had been applied, the ether present in the solution evaporated, leaving a moist absorbent film adhering to the plate.  This was then made sensitive to light by dipping it into a bath of silver salts which were readily taken up by the collodion film.  After the excess solution was drained off, the still moist plate was secured in a light-tight plate holder so that it could be taken into the light and to the camera for exposure.  (p. 194)

This whole process had to be undertaken in near total darkness.

To develop the image that had been taken up by the film on the glass plate, the photographer carefully followed another series of complex and sensitive steps.  This involved submerging the plate with the captured image in pyrogallic and acetic acid, a step requiring the photographer to judge when the image was correctly developed.  The image was then fixed on the plate using a solution of the highly poisonous hypo or potassium cyanide.  Again, the photographer worked in near darkness.

Wilson outfitted a wagon with the requisite hardware and chemicals and, accompanied by an assistant, undertook journeys throughout Britain taking photographs.  The image below, which features a view of the Pass at Ballater (in Aberdeenshire, near the River Dee, Scotland) may include in the left foreground Wilson’s own horse-drawn wagon, his darkroom on wheels.  The wagon is also an example of how Wilson often included something in his photographs to provide a sense of scale.  On occasion he used a wagon, more often it was one or more people.

The degree to which Wilson found financial triumph as a photographer cannot be overestimated.  His firm also printed photographs in larger, single-image formats.  In due course, Wilson became “the world’s largest publisher of photographs,” and, fulfilling the demand for his images, must have taxed his establishment.  (John Jones, Wonders of the Stereoscope, 1976, p. 54.)  In the 1870s, G.W. Wilson & Company had some 45,000 glass negatives from which it produced photographs for sale.  The average daily production of prints was estimated by Wilson’s son Alexander at 3,000; thus, potentially a million prints were produced annually.  (Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography From 1839 to the Present, 1982, p. 105.)

It was no accident that the success of his enterprise coincided with the explosion of tourism.  Presumably rising incomes coupled with the expansion of rail lines in Great Britain turned travelers into sightseers and tourists.  Tourists, of course, sought mementos of the places visited, and photographs quite nicely satisfied that need.

Regardless of the commercial success Wilson enjoyed, it’s the beauty of the photographs that are the heart of his claim to fame.  He brought an inspired artist’s eye to his work, his photographs reflect careful creative intention.  They are typically tightly composed images that, to my mind, merit the label art.

Though landscapes may have been a predominant subject of his photographs, he also created many stunning images of other subjects.  These included, perhaps most prominently, the interiors and exteriors of cathedrals throughout Britain.  Seen below is one example:  the nave of Gloucester Cathedral in England.

He also photographically explored the ruins of abbeys and other religious structures.  Pictured below is a view of Melrose Abbey in Scotland.

Wilson has been called one of the two “giants among British stereographers” and the one “who had no peer in scenic photography.”  (William C. Darrah, The World of Stereographs, 1997, p 104.)

There are among Wilson’s landscape photographs, a small handful to which I am powerfully drawn, not just for the artistry expressed in the image, but, primarily, for the stories of natural history (interpreting that term broadly) that are told in the images.  Here are three of those.

Fingal’s Cave, Staffa

The first shows the entrance to a geological structure known as Fingal’s Cave on the Isle of Staffa, in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides.

It’s a remarkable photograph of a remarkable geological structure, the enormity of which becomes clear when one spots the two (perhaps three) men standing to the right of the mouth of the cave.  The cave, which acquired its name from the hero of an epic poem by the Scottish poet James Macpherson, has walls that stand about 72 feet tall and the opening extends some 269 feet.  These awe-inspiring hexagonal basalt columns are products of a lava flow some 60 million years ago.  Such geometrically symmetrical columns are relatively common features of basalt structures because, as lava solidifies and cools, the stresses from temperature change and pressure can generate vertical fractures, or columnar joints, at the surface of the basalt.  These then spread into the interior of the basalt.  Those at the surface begin as tetragonal joint networks, developing into hexagonal joints as they journey inward.  (Atilla Aydin and James M. DeGraff, Evolution of Polygonal Fracture Patterns in Lava Flows, Science, January 29, 1988.)

That’s a stab at a scientific explanation for these columns.  Folklore would have it that the cave is one end of a bridge that stretches to the geologically similar Giant’s Causeway in Ireland.  Purportedly, an Irish giant created the bridge in order to travel to Scotland to defeat a rival.  The basalt columns on Staffa are indeed geologically linked to the Giant’s Causeway.

It’s not surprising that Wilson’s portfolio included photographs of the basalt columns on Staffa.  The island became a tourist attraction beginning in the late 18th century, attracting such luminaries as Queen Victoria, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Jules Verne, and Sir Walter Scott.  In addition, the cave has inspired musicians from Felix Mendelssohn to Pink Floyd.  (Jeff Wallenfeldt, Fingal’s Cave, Encyclopaedia Britannica.)

Cheesewring

I love this photograph of the “Cheesewring” structure near Liskeard in Cornwall in part because it looks for all the world as though it’s about to fall on the poor person seated at its base.  An example of Wilson’s sense of humor, I suspect.

The Cheesewring (still standing) is a granite tor; a tor is a stack of stone blocks that forms naturally through differential weathering and erosion of rocks.  According to the novelist Wilkie Collins, the name of this tor supposedly comes from its resemblance to a Cornish cheese press, also called a “wring.”  (Rambles Beyond Railways; or Notes in Cornwall, 1851, p. 58.)

The Cheesewring stands amid a landscape punctuated by other standing rock or fallen tors.  Collins described it with some literary flourishes:  “The whole plain appeared like the site of an ancient city of palaces, overthrown and crumbled like atoms by an earthquake.”  (p. 61)  He offered two explanations of the Cheesewring.  Either it was built by Druids or it was the result of geological forces.  He opted for the latter, though his explanation of the way in which those forces conspired to stacks these rocks leaves something to be desired.  (Admittedly, the same criticism applies to the explanation I provided above.  I haven't found a satisfactory one, though, clearly, I, too, opt for one grounded in geology.)

I do really enjoy Collins’ characterization of the Cheesewring itself:  “If a man dreamt of a great pile of stones in a nightmare, he would dream of such a pile as the Cheese-Wring.  All of the heaviest and largest of the seven thick slabs of which it is composed are at the top; all the lightest and smallest at the bottom. . . .  When you first see the Cheese-Wring, you instinctively shrink from walking under it.”  (p. 65)

Stonehenge

There’s a certain logic in moving from Cheesewring to Stonehenge given the association of both in the popular imagination with Druids.  Wilson visited Stonehenge possibly in 1860 and took several pictures of it from different vantage points.  The image below shows the megalithic structure from the East.

Stonehenge was the product of intense labor by neolithic peoples, an effort that stretched over millennia, beginning 5,000 years ago as a circular ditch dug into the dirt.  The area was graced at some later point with wooden posts; said posts were replaced with large stones beginning in roughly 2,600 BCE.  The amount of labor required to quarry the multi-ton stone slabs, move them from the quarry to the site on the Salisbury Plain, and then erect them is almost unfathomable given the technology available at the time.  Current thinking about the purpose of Stonehenge includes two primary hypotheses, one astronomical in nature (functioning as an observatory), the other religious (possibly focused on ancestor worship).  (James Owens, Stonehenge, National Geographic.)

The image above that Wilson took of Stonehenge from the East is curious.  It’s almost as though he wanted to have the viewer first believe that the stones erected on the plain are relatively small.  He took the photograph from such a distance, including a broad expanse of grass, that puts the circle of stones into the deep middle ground.  It’s not until the sheep in the scene, the man leaning against one of the center pillars, and the wagon on the right all come into focus, that the impressive size of the structure comes clear.

I’ll close by observing that, more than 150 years after George Washington Wilson traveled across Great Britain photographing the landscape, his images are still speaking.

Shadows in the Distance

This post has no fossils, but it does have stereoviews, Middlebury, Vermont, and The Dick Van Dyke Show.

[Note:  Stereoviews are paired photographs that can offer a three-dimensional view of a image.  They have been discussed previously in this blog at this link.]

I recently acquired a 19th century stereoview of Middlebury, Vermont, and, as a consequence, I found myself reliving an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show, that wonderful TV series from the early 1960s.  I still revel in the show’s gentle comedic repartee and have never tired of the talented cast who surrounded the lanky, self-deprecating star whose skill at physical humor has been seldom surpassed.  The episode that entrapped me, as I studied my Middlebury stereoview, is a classic titled The Great Petrie Fortune.  First airing on Oct 27, 1965, it is episode 6 of season 5.  (On Amazon Prime, it's listed incorrectly, I think, as episode 6 of that season.)

In this episode, Rob Petrie (Dick Van Dyke) inherits a roll-top desk from his Great Uncle Hezekiah.  In a short movie filmed before his death, centenarian Hezekiah (Dick Van Dyke) tells Rob that the desk contains a fortune but it is wrapped up in a riddle.  He proceeds to dance a wheezy, fumbling soft shoe while singing a verse of Me and My Shadow.  He finally collapses on the desk.

Rob and wife Laura (Mary Tyler Moore) thoroughly explore the desk, revealing a trove of eccentric, mildly funny contents, along with a framed picture of Uncle Hezey as a baby, but no fortune.  In time, the Petries conclude these various, trivial objects were things Hezekiah was sentimentally attached to (for whatever reason) and so had value to the old man.  But they’re wrong.  As Rob more closely examines the baby picture, describing to Laura what he sees (a man standing on a flight of stairs while holding the baby, and, in the background, another man standing alone), he realizes it mirrors the verse from Me and My Shadow.  It’s the shadow, the man at the edge of this photograph taken in 1863 at Hezekiah’s birthplace, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, that sends Rob into mild hysterics.  He peers at the edge of the frame, then frantically removes the picture:

Rob:  Honey, look at the other guy standing all alone on the stair and feeling blue . . . with a stove pipe hat and a beard.
Laura:  Rob that looks like . . . .
Rob:  The real Raymond Massey!!

I still laugh, though, perhaps, this is a punch line that only works for generations that are slowly aging out of the picture.  Raymond Massey (1896-1983) memorably portrayed Abraham Lincoln in the movies.  Rob has inherited a Mathew Brady photograph of Lincoln (sheepishly, I'll admit that the way Rob manhandles the photograph in this scene now causes me to wince).

And then there’s the Middlebury stereoview (the earlier post cited at the outset describes how to view this stereoview to see the three dimensional effect).

Here’s just the right image.

On the reverse side is the stamp of the photographer O.C. Barnes of Middlebury and the handwritten words, “Main St., Middlebury, Vt.”

Here's how I tell the story.  One winter morning, sometime in the 1870s, photographer Oscar Barnes positioned his equipment at the top of Main Street in Middlebury, Vermont.  He stood opposite the Congregational Church at the northeast end of the street, and looked southwest, down Main into the village.  Snow covered the road and frosted the branches of the trees.  (Admittedly, it might have been early spring, it was Vermont, after all.  Morning?  An informed guess based on what I think are shadows he captured in the photographs he took that day.)

Earlier that morning, I see Barnes (in my mind’s eye only) guiding a horse-drawn carriage, with a darkroom built onto it, to the top of Main Street.  But, no, perhaps that’s too rich for a photographer who advertised in the Middlebury Register that his shop was located “in the poorest old building you’ll find on Main St.,” where “the ceiling is low and the floor far from level.”  So, perhaps he’d trudged through the snow, hauling his equipment himself, and then pitched a tent to serve as his darkroom.  (Appropriately enough, the building housing his shop was called “Poverty Hall.”  Later in the decade, his ads included the line:  “Farm produce taken in exchange.”  Barnes was a regular advertiser in the Register; the first ad cited here ran several times in 1873, including the March 25th issue.  The second is from April 18, 1879; it ran in a number of issues.  Digitized copies of the Register can be found at the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America:  Historic American Newspapers.)

No matter how he did it, he had to get a darkroom to the snowy site; the “wet collodion” process that he and other photographers used at the time demanded it.  In the darkroom, Barnes took glass plates coated with a viscous collodion mixture and bathed them in a silver nitrate solution, making them sensitive to light.  He then slipped a wet plate into a light-proof holder and, at that point, he left the darkroom and hurried to his camera.  The plate had to be exposed while still wet.  He slid the holder with the plate into the camera, which he had to have previously focused for the picture.  He then carefully exposed the plate, relying on his experience to tell him how long to leave the camera lens uncovered.  After that, he resealed the light-proof holder, removed the holder with its precious cargo, and dashed back into the darkroom to develop the exposed plate.

On this particular morning, Barnes created two images because he would be printing stereoviews of the scene.  I hope he had a stereoscopic camera and could make the images concurrently.  Otherwise, he had to go through this process twice, the second time with the camera moved two to three inches to the right or left.  The photographer with a shop in Poverty Hall might well have had to resort to the latter method.

As demanding as the wet collodion process could be under ideal conditions (say, in the confines of one’s shop), clearly going into the field compounded the difficulties, but, to top it all for this particular session at the head of Main Street, Barnes had to deal with cold temperatures which could wreak havoc on the procedure.

And, still, despite the challenges of a nascent photographic technology and the weather, Barnes created a work of art.

In these photographs, he captured the stillness that so often accompanies a snowfall, the softening of the edges and the integration of the whole.  There is harmony here, the village sits gently in nature.  The framing is fascinating.  There is a tunnel effect as the center is framed partly with the snowy branches of the trees on the left in the immediate foreground that reach over the viewer, as well as with the several trees deeper into the picture on opposite sides of the street.  The lamp post on the left imparts a balance to the framing and is, perhaps, the single most important element giving the stereoview its three dimensional effect.

In time, though, I came to find his composition puzzling, mysterious even.  Where is the viewer's eye supposed to come to rest?  What was Barnes really focusing on?  The clutch of buildings in the center of the lower third of the photograph?  Perhaps.  But my attention inevitably was drawn to the shadowy profiles of buildings in the far background, buildings on a hill to the southwest overlooking the village.

Here's a closeup in grayscale.

And that same closeup with the shadowy buildings marked.

I studied those distant buildings and suddenly recognized them – the real Raymond Massey!!

I was looking at Old Stone Row, the buildings that constituted the initial, principal core of Middlebury College – Painter Hall (on the right, built in 1815), Old Chapel (center, 1836), and Starr Hall (left, 1860, burned in 1864, and rebuilt in 1865).    As an alumnus of Middlebury College, I hate to admit how long it took me to realize what I was looking at.

They are shown here in a drawing from 1860.

(This image was downloaded from the Digital Collection at Middlebury on the Middlebury College website and is included here with the permission.  Its resource identifier is a12pf.ls.panoramic.1860.)

I'd like to think that Barnes, with a wink, deliberately hid his true focus.  Regardless, he certainly added an unexpected dimension for me.  And I suppose it only appropriate that, as I close this post (March 12, 2014), Middlebury, Vermont, is slated to be walloped with a massive, late winter snowstorm.


Note

In addition to various print resources which explain the wet collodion process in detail, there are a couple of excellent short videos on the web that delineate what photographers like O.C. Barnes went through to take their photographs.  I particularly like the video from the Getty Museum titled The Wet Collodion Process.  Also very informative is one from the George Eastman House titled Untold Stories:  The Collodion Process.

The Very Real, Multidimensional Hadrosaurus foulkii ~ Convoluted History and Rejoinder to a Critic of Natural History Museums

At some point in the 1870s or possibly the very early 1880s, photographer James F. Jarvis set up his camera and array of equipment at the Smithsonian Castle and took photographs of the institution’s mounted skeleton of Hadrosaurus foulkii, a dinosaur from the Cretaceous period (about 146 to 66 million years ago).  From the glass negatives he prepared at the Smithsonian, Jarvis produced a stereoview or stereograph featuring the Hadrosaurus.  (Stereoviews or stereographs – cards whose dual mounted photographs generate a 3-D image when viewed through a stereoscope – have been considered previously on this blog.)

I recently added a copy of this stereoview to my collection.  The full face of this stereoview and a closeup of one of the two pictures are shown below.  The Hadrosaurus is prominent in the foreground, facing into the picture.  In front of it is a large Himmalayan tortoise shell from the Miocene epoch (about 23 to 5 million years ago), and in front of the tortoise is the restoration of an Irish elk, the Pleistocene epoch giant deer that went extinct some 11,000 years ago.

Jarvis was well known for the manufacture of stereoviews of Washington, D.C., and various series of stereoviews from government explorations of the western U.S..  For a period, he ranked among the country’s major producers of this popular photographic medium.

Originally, I thought it would be relatively easy to compose a posting on the subject of this specific stereoview.  Clearly, I had no clue about the richly convoluted the history of this mounted skeleton of Hadrosaurus.  Nor did I recognize that these photographs speak to a contemporary debate about the display of “fake” skeletons by natural history museums.  (Some of the sources I consulted are identified in the text; most are included in the discussion of sources at the end.)

Initially, though, I wanted to place a date on the stereoview, well, actually, the taking of the negative.  The Smithsonian has produced a fascinating webpage on stereoviews of the institution.  According to the information appearing there, beginning in 1874, the Hadrosaurus skeleton was on display in the Main Hall of the Smithsonian Building, a structure usually referred to as the Castle.  Then, in 1882, along with other skeletons and specimens, the Hadrosaurus was moved to the Smithsonian’s National Museum building.  This Jarvis stereoview shows the Castle’s Lower Main Hall looking east, which means it had to have been taken between 1874 and 1882.  Unfortunately, that doesn’t really narrow it down very much.

What was the source of the skeleton?  The fossilized bones of  a giant creature had been discovered in 1858 in Haddonfield, New Jersey, by Philadelphia lawyer and fossil hunter William Parker Foulke.  Foulke called in Joseph Leidy, a professor of anatomy at the University of Pennsylvania and curator at the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia, who identified them as coming from a dinosaur, a term that had been coined by English paleontologist and biologist Richard Owen in the early 1840s.  This was the most complete dinosaur skeleton that had ever been found anywhere.  Leidy named the dinosaur Hadrosaurus foulkii (the genus name means “bulky lizard” and the species name recognizes Foulke).

A decade later, the English anatomist, scientific illustrator, and sculptor Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins came on the scene, having traveled to the U.S. to create a dinosaur display for a new museum in New York City.  After consulting Leidy about the New York display, he undertook the task of mounting the Hadrosaurus skeleton for the Academy of Natural Sciences.  With assistance from Leidy and one of Leidy’s students, Edward Drinker Cope, Hawkins created a mounted dinosaur skeleton using plaster casts of the bones at hand and plaster reconstructions, based on educated guesses, of those that were missing.  This was the first mounted dinosaur skeleton ever produced and, as we all know, this kind of display was destined to become a staple of natural history museums worldwide.

The skeleton went on display at the Academy in late 1868, attracting throngs of visitors, so many that officials of the Academy took steps to reduce the number of visitors, curtailing the days it was open to the public and charging admission.  The success of the display apparently was not lost on other institutions that then sought to obtain their own copies; Hawkins produced several.  According to Richard C. Ryder, the Smithsonian received a copy sometime between March 1874 and mid 1875.

After being displayed in the Smithsonian Castle, the Smithsonian’s Hadrosaurus was moved in 1882 to the National Museum building where it remained until perhaps 1893 or 1894.  Ryder says that it was then sent to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, “only to be discarded when the museum moved to new quarters a decade later.”

Breathtakingly innovative for its time, Hawkins’ Hadrosaurus skeletons got some things right, and missed the boat on some others.  For instance, the posing of the Hadrosaurus in an upright, bipedal position reflected Leidy’s accurate understanding of the dinosaur.  But, the three-pronged supporting position of the hind legs and the tail, giving the creature a kangaroo-like appearance, was ultimately disproven by subsequent research.  The drawing below depicts current understanding of the positioning and use of the tail (the picture comes from the New Jersey Geological Survey).  The Academy’s clutch of Hadrosaurus bones lacked a skull, so Hawkins made one based on the head of an iguana lizard, a creative though erroneous solution to the problem.



One passing comment on Leidy’s student, Edward Drinker Cope.  Cope became one of the country’s foremost paleontologists and engaged in the famous no-holds-barred competition against Othniel Charles Marsh to find dinosaur fossils – the so-called Bone Wars.  This conflict had a Hadrosaurus connection.  Before the battle royal began, the two men spent what paleontologist Michael Novacek describes as “a friendly week together poking around Leidy’s old Haddonfield quarry for hadrosaur bones.”  Hoag Levins, in an article on his great website Finding the World’s First Dinosaur Skeleton:  Hadrosaurus foulkii, asserts that the Cope-Marsh conflict had its roots in this friendly time together.  Cope generously introduced Marsh to the managers of different pits from which dinosaur bones were being collected.  The falling out occurred when Cope learned that, shortly after they left the area, Marsh returned alone, money in hand, to bribe the managers to send him bones and word of what they had found.

Hawkins’ Hadrosaurus skeleton also has some bearing on a debate of sorts that involves natural history museums today.  Earlier this year, “Thomas H. Benton” (the pen name of William Pannapacker), a professor of English at Hope College, published a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education entitled Getting Real at Natural-History Museums (July 1, 2010) in which he takes these museums to task for succumbing to the entertainment bug and for mounting displays that contain “fakes.”  Venturing into the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia with his daughter in search of the real dinosaur skeletons he remembered from his youth, he was dismayed to discover only replicas.  He asserts

Natural-history museums like the [Academy of Natural Sciences] emerged to provide exhibits that were reliably authentic and that could instruct the public and build the credibility of science in a period, like our own, in which pseudoscience had a strong hold on the general imagination.  Of course, the replicas in natural-history museums, unlike [P.T.] Barnum’s humbugs, present authentic science, but, over the last few generation, museums have become more willing to use substitutes in place of real artifacts.  It seemed like a good idea at the time. . . .

You could say that a fake skeleton educates as well as a real one, and it surely looks as good for publicity purposes.  But one of the fundamental attractions of natural-history museums – and museums in general – is the aura of authenticity and the power they have to inspire the imagination, particularly for children, in an era that is increasingly characterized by the virtual and the simulated.  That was not true when fossil replicas were first introduced – the changes were made with the best of intentions – but it is surely the case now.

Frankly, I am always suspicious of people who argue that there was once a “golden age” and that we’ve lost our way.  Too often that “golden age” proves to have been a mirage, the reality being nothing like what was remembered.  Clearly, that's the case in this instance.

A wonderful response to “Benton” was penned by Chris, a museum curator, on his blog Prerogative of Harlots (July 26, 2010).  He observes, “When Benton refers to fakes, he’s actually taking about casts – specifically the cast dinosaur skeletons that many museums exhibit in their galleries.”  Why do they do that?  For one thing, there are very few complete fossil skeletons.  Most are exceedingly incomplete.  So even a skeleton of an individual specimen that includes real bones will include many replicas of bone.  Chris points out that the dinosaur “Benton” remembers from his youth at the Academy was a composite, not the “real” thing.  Chris describes the precision behind the creation of casts, a process producing something that is

as close to the fossil as it’s possible to get without actually owning it.  Casts are heavily used in paleontology because of the scarcity of fossil specimens – they are exchanged between museums and sent out on loan to researchers.  We assign them catalog numbers and treat them in the same way as we would treat any museum specimen.

He argues, persuasively in my mind, that the answer to the question “Is it real?” when standing before a dinosaur skeleton cast is

Absolutely, in the sense that there was once an animal that looked like this, we have the bones to prove it, and this exhibit specimen could not have been made without those bones.

Hawkins’ Hadrosaurus foulkii itself constitutes another strong response to “Benton.”  From the very outset of museums displaying mounted dinosaur skeletons, they were real only in the sense that Chris described, not in the way “Benton” misremembered from his childhood and before.  Then and now, they draw crowds and inspire the imagination, regardless of whether this or that bone is rock or a cast.

One final small note, Hawkins is tied to the Hadrosaurus stereoview in another way; it’s his restoration of an Irish elk appearing in the background.


Sources

The Academy of Natural Science has some useful information on its website for the exhibit about Hadrosaurus foulkii that it mounted in 2009.

Richard C. Ryder wrote a very interesting piece on dinosaurs in stereoviews entitled Dinosaurs Through the Stereoscope, Stereoworld, March/April 1985.

For a great exploration of Hawkins’ work, including the process for creating the mounted Hadrosaurus skeleton, see The Art of Bones:  Nineteenth-century Artist Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins Still Influences How Prehistoric Life is Represented Today, by Robert McCracken Peck, Natural History, December 2008 – January 2009.  This article was adapted from the book All in the Bones: A Biography of Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, by Valerie Bramwell and Robert M. Peck.

Among good sources of background on Hadrosaurus is When Dinosaurs Roamed New Jersey by William B. Gallagher, 1997.

The Cope-Marsh competition is described in many sources.  Time Traveler:  In Search of Dinosaurs and Ancient Mammals From Montana to Mongolia  by Michael Novacek (2002) includes a brief, concise overview of the Bone Wars.

Protosphyraena perniciosa in Stereo

It’s a kind of magic.

One shaft of light
That shows the way.

~ lyrics from Kind of Magic, a song written by
 Roger Taylor and performed by Queen

Gentle Warning:  If you thought that the Magic Eye books of the mid-1990s were the work of the devil, you may have a problem with this posting.

During the Late Cretaceous, the Western Interior Sea occupied a broad swath of the interior of North America, stretching the entire length of the continent.  The map below, created by Ron Blakey, professor emeritus of geology at Northern Arizona University, shows North America and its inland sea about 75 million years ago.  (A rich array of paleogeographic maps is available on Blakey’s website.)

Many fossils from the predators and prey that lived in this marine environment are preserved in the Smoky Hill Chalk of northwestern Kansas, a chalky limestone deposited about 82 to 87 million years ago.  The local landscape in that part of Kansas is startling (to this Easterner), to say the least, offering a western John Ford-like landscape.  Mike Everhart’s Oceans of Kansas website offers a collection of pictures of the Smoky Hill Chalk which capture their badlands flavor.

Among the fierce predators of these waters was Protosphyraena perniciosa, a fish with a mouthful of forward-thrusting dagger-like teeth, a long pointed beak, and dangerous front fins.  Think swordfish starring in a nightmare.  Everhart’s informative overview of the Protosphyraena perniciosa on his website includes a painting recreating this disturbing monster.  The 3 cm. long tooth from a Protosphyraena perniciosa pictured below was collected (not by me) from the Smoky Hill Chalk in Gove County, Kansas.

The technique I’m using here to depict this tooth is appropriate, I think, for this especially horrific fish.  The two images in this picture are of the same tooth but, despite appearances to the contrary, are not identical.  Previously on this blog, I’ve pondered how to capture images of fossils.  Being open to the unbidden means that inspiration can come from anywhere.  So it was that earlier this summer I happened to catch Terry Gross’ interview with Brian May on her NPR show Fresh Air (August 3, 2010).  May was lead guitarist and a composer (e.g., We Will Rock You) with the storied rock group Queen.  But, lest one think he’s a burned out rocker drifting through life living on his royalties, know also that he is an astrophysicist, having earned his Ph.D. in astrophysics from Imperial College, London, in 2007.  Terry Gross’ primary interest in this interview was in May’s role in Queen and how songs were composed and played by the group.  A worthy topic since May brought intellect and science to it.  Almost tangential in this interview (but what I suspect he really wanted to spend much more time discussing) was one of his consuming interests (besides astrophysics) – stereoscopic photographs or stereoviews – which is the subject of a book he recently co-authored with Elena Vidal, entitled A Village Lost and Found:  A complete annotated collection of the original 1850s stereoscopic photograph series – Scenes in Our Village by T.R. William (2009).  This is an amazing work, as fascinating for its exploration of the quiet, small village of Hinton Waldrist in mid-19th Century England, as for its glimpses of the broader world of stereoviews.  What little I know about stereoviews (and share below) I learned from this wonderful book.  It comes with a stereoscope (see picture below).

Stereoviews came into being in the early days of photography at the beginning of the 19th Century.  It was dissatisfying to some that photographs captured only two dimensions, offering a flat representation of reality, so they looked for ways to bring depth, the third dimension, into the images.  They built on the techniques already being used for “stereo” drawings and created stereoscopic pictures which, when properly viewed, offered a view with depth, a view in stereo.

To do this, they took advantage of the fact that we humans have two eyes set a bit apart from each other, giving us binocular vision.  As a consequence, stereoviews hold two pictures of the same scene; these right and left images are shot from slightly different positions, the camera having moved horizontally between each exposure (unless it’s a camera designed specifically to take these dual pictures).  Viewed through a stereoscope or by free-viewing (more on that in a moment), these dual photographs are processed by the brain as a three-dimensional image.

[This ability of the brain] is no accident.  Through the long, leisurely process of our evolution as a species, having two slightly different views of the same scene gave humans (any many other species) a great advantage . . . . [T]his binocular vision gave us the ability to perceive depth, enabling us to instantly recognise how far away each object in our sight was, a vital factor in assessing how close to us a potential danger might be.
                            A Village Lost and Found, p.12

The two images above of the Protosphyraena perniciosa tooth are sequential stereo photographs which, if viewed through a stereoscope (such as the one shown below), depicts the tooth in three dimensions.

But, that’s not the only way to see the stereoscopic image.  There’s free-viewing, a technique that many of us used in the mid 1990s when the various Magic Eye books were populating the New York Times best seller lists.  (As with nearly everything else in life, Magic Eye also made an appearance on Seinfeld.)  Free-viewing works not only on printed images but on images displayed on a computer screen.

May and Vidal offer this guidance for free-viewing stereoscopic pictures:

All we need to do is line our head up squarely with the page, and imagine we are looking through the page to infinity.  Usually what happens is that the two images in front of us both become double, and four images swim about sideways, as we try to make sense of what we are seeing.  If we persevere, though, and keep the eyes relaxed, eventually we will see two of the four images coalesce into one.  This become the central, solid picture, and is flanked by two other pictures, which both appear partly transparent.  All we need to do now is forget about the outside pictures, and concentrate gently on the centre one.  With a little patience, it is possible to keep the convergence of our eyes constant, so the central picture keeps its integrity, but relax the focus of the eyes to make this picture sharp.  At this point, the magic happens, we are suddenly aware that the central picture is no longer flat, but completely three-dimensional . . . the window is open . . . we are free-viewing in stereo.
                        A Village Lost and Found, p. 15

Well, I suspect the process is a bit different with everyone, and, I know, impossible for some.  With the images of the tooth above, the process for me seems to be a bit simpler, perhaps because there’s less information in the photographs for my brain to deal with than there is with the stereoviews of the village of Hinton Waldrist.

Here’s how it works with me on the tooth images.  As I bring my face close, centering my nose between the two pictures, I try to look beyond the pictures.  Up close to the pictures, I see a central, blurry image.  Then, as I slowly move back from the pictures, I keep focused on the convergence image.  Two other images appear on the left and right.  I ignore them and stay focused on the central image.  Not too far removed from the page, the central image comes into focus in three dimensions.

May and Vidal have other good advice – it may not happen the first time or the second . . . .  

As I noted, these techniques work on images on a computer screen.  But, if the dual image of the tooth is printed for stereographic viewing, I find that it works wells for me if the composite picture is about 3 3/8th inches high and some 4 ¼ inches wide.  Clearly a range of sizes will work, so there’s not anything particularly magical about these dimensions.

And to be honest, in many stereoviews, objects all at the same range often seem to have retained a two-dimensional quality.

Each of the images in the Scenes in Our Village series was accompanied by a verse, presumably written by the photographer T. R. Williams.  May and Vidal liken their spirit to that of haikus.  I loved the one in which the poet extols the virtue of stereoscopic viewing as a way of giving the untrained eye a glimpse of deeper beauty.

Lane Leading To The Farm

Seen with the artist’s eye, how many a spot
On nature’s face that seems a simple blot,
Teems with rich images and beauties rare!
Taught to appreciate, the traveller there
Marvels that he so often hath before
Unknowing, unadmiring, passed it o’er:
Thus, what is cultivation to the eye
Of the taught artist – stereoscopes supply.

[Note: I later edited this post by adding in various places the term "stereoview" which is the more common label applied to this two-picture arrangement.]