Thursday, September 16, 2010

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!


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.

All images from Ioco-Seriorum Naturae et Artis courtesy of David Brass.

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