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img src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/1_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy San Francisco Museum of Modern ArtpWhat are the social consequences when science allows us
to see things that had previously been invisible?/pp Scientists have revealed microscopic life,
nanoscale molecules and galaxies billions of light-years away. These images have revolutionized the
disciplines in which they were made, but they also transformed the public's imagination, giving
common people new things to think and dream about. /pp The intertwined social, scientific and
artistic impacts of 19th century photography is the subject of a new exhibit, Brought to Light
Photography and the Invisible, 1840-1900, at San Francisco's Museum of Modern Art. /pp This gallery
looks at some of the more astounding images and stories from the exhibit. /p pstrongLeft: br /
Hermann Schnauss, Electrograph of a brass wire gauge, 1900/strong As the men of industry attempted
to harness electricity for profit, the public — which knew electricity
primarily as lightning — had to be persuaded that this powerful, invisible
force was something to invite into their homes. Electrographs like this one, produced by exposing a
photographic negative with electricity, helped the public visualize and understand the mysterious
electromagnetic waves that scientists were discovered populating the air. /pp "This is a moment
where [scientists] are trying to harness electricity for practical purposes, but the general public
was kind of skeptical," said Corey Keller, curator of the Brought to Light exhibit. "Their
experiences with electricity were generally through lighting, which they knew could burn things
down and kill you, if you weren't careful. So a great deal of time and money was spent trying to
make electricity understandable and approachable." /p img
src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/3_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy SFMOMApIn the early history of photography, capturing motion was out of the question. The
photographic negatives of the time were not sensitive enough to light to be exposed over the short
time periods required to capture fast action. /pp "If you look at 19th century cityscapes, you
would think that Armageddon had taken place. You don't see any people," Keller said. "It's not that
they aren't there, it's just that they don't show up because they walked through too quickly." /pp
But by the end of the 1870s, more sensitive negatives brought motion within reach. Edward Muybridge
was one of the first photographers to take advantage of the new abilities. /pp In this photo, we
see one of Muybridge's motion studies: two men boxing in jock straps. Historians note that despite
the scientific trappings, Muybridge's work was just art; it did not produce good scientific
evidence about bodies' movements. /p img
src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/4_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy SFMOMApThe ability to capture motion in photography opened up a previously invisible
source of scientific data. Etienne-Jules Marey was a scientist trying to understand biomechanics,
or the motion of the body, and he used photography to acquire information he couldn't get any other
way, as in this photograph of a man on a stationary bicycle. /pp "What happens in this picture is
that each split second exposure is layered on top of each other, so you get the sense of the full
arc of the motion," Keller said. "And he's put a piece of tape down the arm and torso and the leg
where the joints articulated, so as the leg went around and around the whole pedal stroke is
outlined." /pp This wasn't just to create beautiful pictures; Marey was on a committee in France to
improve the ergonomics of the newly popular bicycle. /pp "So by studying the motion of the leg, he
would have been able to improve the engineering of the bicycle," Keller concluded. /p img
src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/5_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy SFMOMApWhile forward-looking scientists like Marey were using photography to understand,
for example, how animals moved, as in this photo, others were less enthused about this new
technology. /pp In particular, photographers' ability to capture images beyond what the human eye
could perceive called into question an important tenet of 19th century science. /pp "What's amazing
is that this is a moment where empirical observation in science is the most important thing, that
idea of objective observation. And this kind of photography proved how completely useless a human
observer was," said Keller. "So you end up with this photographic data that cant' be corroborated
in any other way. It exists independently of any kind of perceptual experience." /pp Technology's
ability to capture detail and motion more accurately than our eyes has only accelerated, of course,
as anyone who has seen a
href="http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/04/water-falling-a.html"incredible ultra-slow-motion
YouTube videos can attest/a. /p img
src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/6_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy SFMOMApWhen William Roentgen announced his discovery of X-rays, a photo of his wife's hand
accompanied his paper as it made its way into the scientific community. /pp Over the next few
years, images like this one of a skeletal hand with the ring came to symbolize X-rays. Practically,
the hand is relatively flat and therefore easy to X-ray, but it was the aesthetics and grim-reaper
symbolism that Keller said hit a nerve with the upper classes. /pp "It became fashionable to have
an X-ray portrait taken of your hand," she said, calling attention to x-ray hand portraits of the
last tsar of Russia and his wife. /p img
src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/7_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy SFMOMApThe discovery of X-rays also touched off a lower-brow commercial craze. Within
three months, DIY X-ray kits were available on the market. Photographers, who had access to most of
the tools needed to make the images, began to train this new form of light on just about anything
that might be beautiful. /pp "They were X-raying everything just to see what it looked like,"
Keller said. /pp One stunning example is this X-ray of a foot in a shoe from 1897. In fact, the
connection between X-rays and extremities has remained strong. Even into the 1960s, shoe stores
kept X-ray machines in their lobbies, both as marketing tools and to help their salesmen fit their
patrons' feet correctly. /p img
src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/8_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy SFMOMApThroughout the second-half of the 19th century, photographers strived to unite the
camera with the telescope. The moon, in particular, held a lasting fascination for astronomers and
artists alike. /pp Imaging the moon, after all, was an immensely difficult task. The Earth rotates
and the moon is actually a relatively faint object. It wasn't until John Adams Whipple and George
Phillips Bond figured out how to rotate their camera ever so slightly to cancel out Earth's
movement that simple images of our only satellite became possible. /pp What's interesting is that
despite the fascination with creating pictures of the moon, like this striking image created in
Spain, the images didn't add much for science beyond what detailed drawings could already do. /p
img src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/9_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy SFMOMApIf you wanted close-up photos of the moon any time before the Apollo missions, you
were pretty much out of luck. Unless, of course, you built incredibly detailed plaster models of
lunar craters and then snapped carefully lit pictures of them. And that's exactly what an engineer
and astronomer did in 1874 to tremendous acclaim. /pp James Nasmyth, the inventor of the steam
hammer, and James Carpenter, then at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, England, released a hugely
successful book, The Moon: Considered as a Planet, a World, and a Satellite, illustrated by their
incredible moon mock-ups. The august journal Nature gave the book a rapturous review. /pp "No more
truthful or striking representations of natural objects than those here presented have ever been
laid before his readers by any student of Science," the reviewer wrote. /pp But what's really
appealing about the images isn't their "truthfulness" but their "truthiness." /pp "Astronomers were
perfectly aware of what they were looking at," Keller said. "But they felt that because they were
photographed, it added a layer of authenticity to the undertaking that simple drawings didn't
have." /p img
src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/10_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy SFMOMApAt the other end of the scale of size from the moon, other photographers were
pushing their discipline into the microscopic realm. They had to devise new emulsion chemistries
and types of equipment to capture clear images of tiny things. /pp Leading the charge was
Auguste-Adolphe Bertsch, who worked to overcome any challenge that scientists threw at him.
Unfortunately, he died during social unrest in France in 1871, and his images lay in a photographic
archive until Keller brought them to the US for the exhibition. /p img
src='http://www.wired.com/images/slideshow/2008/11/gallery_earlyscience/11_t.jpg'/img: Photo
courtesy SFMOMApEven as they solved technical challenges, the photomicrographers faced social
resistance. The idea of representing a specific living thing instead of a generalized abstraction
of an organism forced scientists to let go of long-held notions about their discipline. /pp "Prior
to the 19th century, the scientific illustrations tend to represent a type, an ideal. So if you
were going to do a picture of a flower, for example, the illustrator would look at 20 flowers and
then take the common features and make an ideal flower," said Keller. "So, if that particular one
happens to have a defective petal or something peculiar to it, you never really know: Does that
photograph substitute then for that type of flower in general, or does it only represent that one
specimen?" /pp While it may have posed a challenge for scientists of the 19th century, it's the
unique nature of each photograph taken during this early period that wows us, even now. /pbr
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