This Exhibition Shows How Miniaturization Maximized Human Potential Long Before The Microchip

When Robert Hooke sought to depict the anatomy of an ant, he put one under a microscope and started to sketch. The ant did not wait for him to finish. Hooke captured another and glued down its feet, but the struggling creature wasn’t any easier to see. Finally, Hooke – who happened to be one of the greatest experimentalists of the 17^th century – experimentally dunked ants in brandy until they got drunk.

Hooke’s efforts were rewarded with fulsome praise when he published his portraits of ants and fleas and other minuscule subjects in 1665. Micrographia became one of the first major works of popular science. The diarist Samuel Pepys praised it as “the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life”. The pictures prompted a mania for microscopes and a fixation on an invisible realm that could be apprehended only with powerful lenses, providing an early glimpse of how optics would advance science.

But recognition of the invisible world was not the only way in which small things were having a big impact on Enlightenment thinking. Tiny Treasures, a new exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston provides good grounds for appreciating how science benefited simultaneously from miniaturization.

Around the same time that Hooke was publishing Micrographia, artisans in the French commune of Dieppe were carving ivory globes small enough to fit in a gentleman’s palm. An example on view at the MFA Boston conceals a compass, exposed when the orb is unscrewed at the equator.

The ivory globe exemplifies the luxurious taste of the age. (Made of turned wood and gold-embossed leather, Hooke’s microscope was equally fancy.) Scientific and philosophical instruments were status symbols. And status could be effectively conveyed by making symbols portable.

However the small scale of a world held in a palm also had the advantage of providing an encompassing view. The geographic compression facilitated comprehension of a subject too expansive to be seen all at once in reality. Miniaturizing the globe served a purpose equivalent to magnifying the ant or flea.

When Pepys bought his own microscope, he found that the view through the eyepiece bore scant resemblance to the plates of Micrographia. Even if he got his ants drunk – a trick that Hooke revealed in the text of his book – he saw only the particulars. By Pepys’ own account, resolving any image at all was difficult. What he didn’t realize – and Hooke was not keen to explain – was that Hooke’s images were composite views derived from many imperfect observations of imperfect specimens. More than mere cunning, the ability to synthesize so much information is a testament to Hooke’s scientific brilliance.

Again, there is a significant parallel to microscopy in miniaturization. In past centuries, miniatures were often collected by natural philosophers and organized in cabinets of curiosities. Within these cabinets, handheld models of things in the world could be manipulated to make meaning through grouping and juxtaposition. In a curiosity cabinet, knowledge was a composite made of exemplary objects. The synthesis of meaning was made possible by rescaling the world to human dimensions. And like the images derived from Hooke’s microscope, the representation of reality existed only in the overlap of materiality and ingenuity.

In the 21^st century, the power of miniaturization is taken for granted. Technology is driven by Moore’s Law. Microchips are so minuscule that the etched circuits could not be discerned with Hooke’s old-fashioned microscope. Yet, as the MFA Boston exhibit shows, miniaturization predates the transistor. It’s pervasive across cultures. And smaller is not necessarily better.

Cabinets of curiosities were highly effective as computers in their era: thinking machines par excellence. There is every reason to believe that they could be equally effective today, arguably more effective than nanoscale processors with which we can scarcely interact.

Hooke and Dieppe both recognized the power of reproportioning the world to a scale that our eyes and hands can naturally access. In the MFA exhibition we find dozens of examples from all time periods. They are ready to make meaning. All that is required is the visitor’s ingenuity.