Superpositions: Ludwig Mach and Étienne-Jules Marey’s studies in streamline photography

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Abstract

In the 1890s Ludwig Mach (the first-born son of Ernst Mach) employed photography for visualizing streamlines in the emerging field of aerodynamic research. Étienne-Jules Marey developed a similar approach at the turn of the century. The two projects can be related to a number of current discussions on the history of scientific photography. (1) The case of Ludwig Mach demonstrates how the collection of numerical data became both the subject and the challenge of a line of research intimately linked to the capacities of photography. (2) At the end of the nineteenth century, the particular potential of scientific photography is very often defined by comparison with the limited power of the human eye. In contrast, the example of streamline photography underlines that the requirements of the research context are critical for successfully employing photography. (3) Marey’s studies point to a tension between his characterization of chronophotography as a method for analyzing the elementary units of processes in nature on the one hand and the necessary summation of single moments in time in his recordings of streamlines on the other. What Marey usually qualified as a cumbersome confusion was here the prerequisite of observation. (4) The ’philosophy in machines’ (Peter Galison) ultimately limited the success of streamline photography; it aided in debates about qualitative matters, but could hardly provide what most interested scientists and engineers: reliable numbers.

Highlights

► The potential of photography in scientific observation depends on the research context. ► The problem of quantification limits the usage of photography in the context of scientific research. ► Streamline photography proved to be a secondary and only supplementary tool in early aerodynamic research.

Section snippets

Scientific photography at the end of the nineteenth century

From the start, the promise of scientific photography was closely related to the capacities of the human eye. When François Arago reported on Daguerre’s pictures to the Académie des sciences in January 1839, his colleague and old rival, Jean-Baptiste Biot, summarized his enthusiasm by claiming that physicists were being given nothing less than “an artificial retina” (Anonymous, 1839, p. 7). Almost everyone who discussed the scientific merits of the new technique in the subsequent decades

The image as display of data

The name of Ludwig Mach (1868–1951) has never really made its way into the annals of science. The rare references in the literature routinely present him as the first-born son of his father, the well-known physicist Ernst Mach (1838–1916). On the one occasion when Ludwig Mach himself attracted interest, his personality was unfortunately cast in a dubious light; for as Gereon Wolters (1986, ch.7) argued, it was probably the son who authored the notorious lines directed against Einstein’s theory

Research as design

When Ludwig Mach presented his photographic representations of streamlines to the public in the summer of 1896, he directly linked his work to problems in the design of flying machines. He modestly remarked in the first sentence of his paper: “The precise knowledge of the air currents and the productions of vortexes, which are caused by the movement of a body in this medium, might not be entirely worthless for many questions of aeronautics” (L. Mach 1896a, p. 129). The application of

Superpositions

In recent terms, what Ludwig Mach presented to the public in the summer of 1896 was a small-scale wind tunnel for model testing. Indeed, it was one of the first devices of this kind and like most later systems used a suction fan for producing air currents (Randers-Pehrson, 1935, p. 19). When the turbine T on the left hand side of the drawing (Fig. 3) was started, air was sucked through the wooden tube R from right to left. In R, two lenses inserted into the tube’s walls projected a picture from

Confusion

In July 1900, Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) presented to the Academy of Science in Paris his latest scientific applications of chronophotography. Under the title “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes forms,” he reported a new method for representing and recording the streamlines of air currents directed at a test body (Marey, 1900). The principle of these studies was already developed in a footnote to his publication on the movements of liquids in 1893 (cf.

The uses of streamline photography

If measured against Mach’s and Marey’s respective aims, the subsequent history of streamline photography must have been disappointing for them. When wind tunnels and model testing became regular tools in aerodynamic research and in the development of flying machines during the first decade of the twentieth century, apparatuses for visualizing streamlines had no place among the standard equipment for such installations. Two of the most prominent facilities then, Ludwig Prandtl’s

Acknowledgements

Most of the research related to this paper was carried out at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin, Department III. I am very grateful to David Bloor for his close reading of an earlier version of this paper. Two anonymous referees provided valuable suggestions for the reworking process. Quotations from French and German sources were partly translated by Alexandre Métraux, partly by myself. Daniel Bowles edited for language use.

Source material (3)

  • Ernst Mach Papers, Archiv des Deutschen Museums, Munich,...
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