S. Denham Wade - As Far as the Eye Can See: A History of Seeing

AS FAR
AS THE
EYE
CAN SEE

For Rob, Charlie, Stella,
Rosie and Hattie Boo

First published 2019

The History Press

97 St Georges Place, Cheltenham,

Gloucestershire, GL50 3QB

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

S. Denham Wade, 2019

The right of S. Denham Wade to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 8703 5

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

Part One:
Becoming: How We See

Part Two:
Transforming: The Visual Technologies that Begat History

Part Three:
Believing: When We Didnt See

Part Four:
Observing: The Optical Tools that Made the Modern World

Part Five:
Showing: Mass Media and the Conquest of Seeing

No history of anything, a wise man once said, will ever include more than it leaves out. It is difficult to imagine a better exemplar of this insight than the history explored in this book. Seeing in some form or other has been around for hundreds of millions of years. It is a near universal but highly subjective experience among humans and across the animal kingdom. It is a complex neuro-physiological process that natural philosophers have struggled to understand for centuries, and its deeper workings are only just beginning to be unravelled. Whats more, there are dozens of fascinating ways seeing can go wrong.

The definitive history of seeing may one day be written, but that day has not yet come.

In researching and writing this book I have picked a course through the millions of words written about the many different aspects of seeing. One path, forged through a dense forest that traverses dozens of different fields of expertise. There is a logic to my path but others would inevitably have made different choices along the way. One way or another, a lot of territory remains unexplored. Despite my best efforts there are, no doubt, twists and turns and views Ive failed to spot along the way, and also the odd misstep. I apologise in advance for these, and welcome correction.

S. Denham Wade

Early in 2015, Grace McGregor was looking forward to her wedding on the tiny island of Colonsay, two and a half hours by boat from the Scottish mainland. As the bride-to-be was making her plans, 300 miles away in Blackpool her mother, Cecilia, was shopping for her own mother-of-the-bride outfit. Cecilia sent Grace pictures of several dresses she was thinking of buying, taken in a store on her partners phone, then called her from the store to see what she thought.

Grace asked her mother which one she liked best.

The third one, said Cecilia.

Oh you mean the white and gold one? said Grace.

No. Its blue and black, said Cecilia.

Mum, thats white and gold, said Grace. When Cecilia insisted the dress was blue and black, Grace showed the picture to her fianc, Keir. He agreed with Cecilia that the dress was blue and black. Keirs father was called in from next door to give an opinion. He thought it was white and gold.

The debate continued and spread to the couples friends and family. Some people saw the dress in Cecilias picture as blue and black, some saw white and gold. After a few weeks of local arguments, a friend of the couple called Caitlin McNeill put the photo on the social media website Tumblr and asked her followers to please help me is the dress white and gold, or blue and black? Me and my friends cant agree

Within half an hour the picture found its way onto Twitter and with that became a hashtag: #thedress. It spread around the web like wildfire. Buzzfeed picked it up and asked its users to vote for white and gold, or blue and black. Now the Twittersphere erupted. At its peak, the hashtag was tweeted more than 11,000 times per minute. Eleven million tweets in total were posted overnight. Comments came from reality TV star Kim Kardashian (white and gold), who disagreed with her husband, Kanye West (blue and black). Pop stars Justin Bieber and Taylor Swift also saw blue and black, the latter tweeting that she felt confused and scared by the phenomenon.

The next morning the picture featured on television news reports around the world, with newscasters arguing on air about the colours of the dress. Not only could no one agree, they couldnt comprehend how anyone else could see it differently from themselves. Even when they were told the dress was blue and black people couldnt change the way they saw the image.

As the debate continued, the media tracked down the family behind the original photograph. The weekend before #thedress went viral Grace and Kier had had their wedding as planned and gone off on honeymoon. The Ellen Degeneres chat show persuaded them to cut their holiday short and flew the whole party to the US to tell their story live on air. At the opening of the show Ellen showed the studio audience the original image with which they were clearly already familiar and asked them to indicate whether they saw blue and black, or white and gold. Sure enough, they were split. Later in the show she brought on Grace and Kier and their friend, Caitlin. They told their story on air, and the couple were rewarded with another honeymoon, this time in the Caribbean, and $10,000 cash to start their new lives.

The climax of the interview was when Ellen called Graces mother, Cecilia, onto the set. She walked on stage to cheers and applause, wearing the worlds most famous dress. It was, unmistakably, blue and black.

Every man takes the limits of his own field
of vision for the limits of the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism, 1851

Had I been born 500 years earlier I would be blind. In their natural state my eyes see a world with no lines. Shapes are smudges and faces are blank. Colours merge into a murky brown and distances collapse to a single plane a few feet away. Everything is a complete blur.

But I was lucky enough to be born in the twentieth century. From the age of 8 I wore glasses and from 14 contact lenses life-changing medical interventions so familiar theyre hardly even thought of as technology and my extreme myopia was corrected. As long as I had my specs on or my contacts in, I could live the same life as someone with 20/20 vision.

A few years ago I started fretting about my poor eyesight. What if there was a fire in the night and I had to leave the house without grabbing my specs? What if I got stuck somewhere for days with no glasses or spare contacts? I would be utterly helpless. It was a silly fear perhaps, but real; the universe of possible disasters expands as we get older, Ive noticed. In any case, after more than thirty years I was tired of wearing glasses and fiddling around with contact lenses. Every week, it seemed, someone else regaled me with their successful laser surgery story. The time seemed right to take the plunge myself.