Today, thoughts on books and learning. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this series
about the machines that make our civilization run, and
the people whose ingenuity created them.
As I haunt old bookstores, I see
more and more of an almost secret nineteenth-century
literature. That century began with the invention of the
new fast presses and new
means for making cheap
paper. The result was the creation of a whole array
of inexpensive textbooks. These books were not
particularly durable, and they were heavily used. Copies
that survive are usually in poor condition. High-end
booksellers won't touch them, and few libraries want
textbooks in any case. They are the Ishmaels of
the book world.
Yet this literature, more than any other of the period,
redirected civilization. Any energetic young person could
gain book-learning, and so many did! Here in America this
new wave of inexpensive books was followed by a second
major step toward creating an educated public. That was
the creation of a system of free state universities under
the Morrill Act of 1862.
But the books came first; America was built on cheap
textbooks. Here are two, one British, one American, that
underscore the situation. Both deal with what we call
physics. The British one, Theoretical Mechanics,
was in its fourth edition by 1894. It'd served a
generation of students preparing for a national
examination in mechanics. The American book on Natural
Philosophy first appeared in 1871. It's a remarkably
complete, accurate, and clear discussion of essential
physical processes, aimed at high-school-level readers.
The illustrations are lush and inviting.
The timeframe of the American book is disconcerting. A
covered wagon lurching on a dirt road illustrates centers
of gravity. A pioneer, bending to drink water from a
lake, illustrates optical distortion. This book was still
being reissued at the end of the nineteenth century, and
we wonder when this one was printed. It explains the
new telephones and
with Watt's engines. It
reflects a country that is finding and defining itself.
The British book stands in marked contrast. It's written
for students who've already been to college. One quarter
of the book is devoted to example questions. The author
finds matters of dimensions and units to be confusing,
and he shares his confusion with his readers. The joy
seems to've gone out of the subject. This, after all, is
really about examinations, not about physics.
The author of the American book, Le Roy Cooley, was a
product of the New York Normal School and Union College.
He wrote this book while he taught at various normal
schools and seminaries. Then, in 1874, the new Vassar
College for women called 41-year-old Cooley to be chair
of its physics and chemistry department. For now a full
college education was opening to women as well.
We were a glorious tabula rasa in those days, and
learning was a wide-open enterprise. Do you want to know
who we were in the nineteenth century? Then seek out
these old books. For America was a learned country
long before it was an educated country.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston, where
we're interested in the way inventive minds work.
Cooley, L. R. C., Natural Philosophy for Common and High
Schools. New York: Scribner's Sons, 1871. (Subsequent
editions of this book were issued in 1874, 1881, and 1899.
Owing to some of the technology in the book, it must be a
later edition despite the fact that it bears the date of
Pinkerton, R. H., Theoretical Mechanics: Including
hydrostatics and Pneumatics. Fourth Edition, London:
Blackie & Son, Ltd., 1894. (This book has left no
tracks. No library has previously catalogued any edition
of it, and I cannot determine just when it was first
Cooley's image of a covered wagon. The wagon is still
stable, even though it is badly-tilted and its load is
off-center. That is because the line through its center
of gravity is still inside the left-hand wheel.
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is Copyright
© 1988-2001 by John H. Lienhard.