A bit late with this, but I’m not sure there is much if any historical evidence to corroborate this.
A word that appears the same if viewed from a different rotational angle, or in a mirror, or some other perspective change - for instance, “swims” looks pretty much the same upside down - is called an “ambigram.”
This is akin to what happened with the Long Island Railroad. It was built with the idea of getting mail to Boston; mail would get on boats at the end of the main line in Greenport and then be loaded on a ferry to Stonington, CT, to go the rest of the way.
It was thought that the Connecticut woods were too wild to build tracks through. But the built the LIRR as fast as they could, going down the center of LI that was sparsely populated to reduce issues with buying land.
Of course, they built a railroad through the Connecticut woods a few years after the LIRR was complete, leaving a railroad with no purpose and which wasn’t near any towns. (The towns came later).
These are a hoot to look at. A friend is in a group who is constantly slapping different car bits together. He posts the best (most comical) ones on his FB page. I’ll have to share the link. Thanks!
Today I learned that there is a fish called the Sarcastic Fringehead, and I’m not sure I can recover from that.
I thought the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad was pretty early, so I read the Wikipedia article on the LIRR. I had no idea the LIRR was built in the 1830s.
I thought this was fascinating, and decided to track it down.
It was easy to find the source, which was Renée Bergland’s Maria Mitchell and the Sexing of Science: An Astronomer Among the American Romantics.
Bergland writes:
In 1834, the Cambridge don William Whewell wrote a complimentary article about Mary Somerville, a Scottish researcher whose erudite books brought together previously disparate fields of mathematics, astronomy, geology, chemistry, and physics so clearly that the texts became the backbone of Cambridge University’s first science curriculum. He called Somerville a scientist, in part because “man of science” seemed inappropriate for a woman, but more significantly because Somerville’s work was interdisciplinary. She was no mere astronomer, physicist, or chemist, but a visionary thinker who articulated the connections among the various branches of inquiry. According to Somerville’s biographer Kathryn Neeley, Whewell’s coinage of the word “scientist” was not meant to be merely a gender-neutral neutral term. Whewell wanted a word that actively celebrated “the peculiar illumination of the female mind”: the ability to synthesize separate fields into a single discipline.”
One problem. Well, two problems. Neeley didn’t say that, and neither did Whewell.
Whewell first. The footnote goes to Rev. William Whewell. Review of On the Connexion of the Physical Sciences, by Mary Somerville. Quarterly Review 51 (1834): 54-68, available on Hathitrust.
The relevant quote is on p. 59.
{There is a] want of any name by which we can designate the students of the knowledge of the material world collectively. We are informed that this difficulty was felt very oppressively by the members of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, at their meetings at York, Oxford, and Cambridge, in the last three summers There was no general term by which these gentlemen could describe themselves with reference to their pursuits. Philosophers was felt to be too wide and too lofty a term, and was very properly forbidden them by Mr. Coleridge, both in his capacity of philologer and metaphysician; savans was rather assuming, besides being French instead of English; some ingenious gentleman proposed that, by analogy with artist, they might form scientist, and added that there could be no scruple in making free with this termination when we have such words as sciolist,* economist and atheist - but this was not generally palatable…
* One who exhibits only superficial knowledge; a self-proclaimed expert with little real understanding. At last, a word to describe many posters here. /s
The context is a discussion of how, even then, specialists in one particular field, in science and out, tend to look down at those who are not, whether they are specialists in other sciences or subjects or the general public, and that Somerfield’s book is a good starting place to overcome this by pointing out how branches of science “have been united by general principles.”
There’s no question he approves of Somerfield’s work; indeed, his praise for her is extravagant. The question is whether he is calling her a scientist. He doesn’t do so directly; he actually refers to her, repeatedly, as a mathematician, one of the three great women mathematicians in history. His position appears to be more that she, by making connexions, is identifying a general term that can be applied to the specialists at work in many fields. This is far afield from coining a term to label her as a women.
Of course, reading my quote, you might wonder why anybody is saying he is coining a term since it was already proposed, and why he’s dredged up a word in disfavor to apply to Somerfield if he’s supposed to be praising her.
The answer to both questions is supplied by Kathryn Neeley, Mary Somerville: Science, Illumination, and the Female Mind, p 33. “[Welwell] had proposed the term at the 1833 meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science.” No wonder he continues his lonely crusade to tout it. (It didn’t catch on until the end of the 19th century, Neeley says.)
Therefore, the term was coined in 1833, not 1834. It was coined without reference to Somerfield. It was not even directly applied to her. We can infer that Whewell meant his readers to think of Somerfield as a scientist but he doesn’t say that, nor does he says anything remotely similar to wanting to coin a gender-neutral term. To the contrary, he treats women as separate from men and their logic as different.
It would greatly help if we knew what he had said in 1833. Maddeningly, Neeley doesn’t give a footnote. The 1833 proceedings are online at, of all places, the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Whewell gave the opening speech, a summation of the standing of the various sciences, which would seem to be the perfect place to offer up his word. I didn’t find, though, or a passage that would be relevant, and search doesn’t yield a hit for the word “scientist.” There’s 500 pages of text, so nothing, however small, seems to have let left out. (I also checked the previous two meetings, just to play it safe. Nothing there either.) Yet we have him in writing referring back to this. If I missed it, perhaps somebody else can read his speech through and come up with the right page.
You can make a chain of inferences to link “scientist” specifically with Somerfield, but I’m not satisfied. It seems clear to me that Whewell came up with the word earlier, and then saw a chance to use it again and get it to stick. Somerfield’s book was a happy accident, not cause and effect.
Without the original usage in hand, though, I can’t be sure. If others want to go through the material and see what I might have missed, I encourage you to do so. My curiosity is high. But mostly, this is a reminder to go back and check primary sources rather than relying on third-hand interpretations if you absolutely want to nail down a claim.
I was born in 1961 which looks the same upside-down. The last year before that that can make the same claim was 1881. The next will be 6009.
That although there are no fewer that 500 individuals capable of running a Fortune 500 company, there lives only a few dozen craftspersons able to precisely hand-blow the glass bubbles used in ultrasonic flow meters. A major manufacturer is Teledyne, all of whose bubbles are made by a single elderly Japanese gentleman who applies the same lifetime acumen as other of his countrymen bring to paper-making and sword-sharpening.
If the 500 CEOs were to drop like mayflies, humankind would be unaffected; but if the supply of flow meters ceased, modern life would be noticeably more difficult.
I’ve always been intrigued by oddball languages (hence my dabbling in Esperanto).
So as a Swiss-ish-American from the southeastern part of the country, when I draw maps of fictitious cities, I often label them in Romansh.
Believe me, it is NOT easy to find some words and concepts in a language that’s a quirky holdout from the Roman soldiers in the Alps, and the indigenous Rhaetians.
.
I remember 1961. There was much talk about that.
WW2 - during the first month of the “blackout” in London (curtains over windows, car headlights almost completely covered), there were 1,130 road deaths - almost all being pedestrians. Subtle precautions were made to cut down on these numbers - without alerting the enemy. You could be fined for lighting a cigarette outdoors. Life during the blackout | Life and style | The Guardian
And here is a 200-page thesis on the blackout if you have time to kill.
Mad magazine made a point of all of this in their March 1961 issue
https://uedata.amazon.com/Magazine-March-Upside-Excellent-Light/dp/B00ZJHXR4U
(I believe the March issue was the first one published that year)
This reminds me of the early days of affordable calculators, when you punched in a number to make an upside down word.
0.7734
hELL.0
0.04008
B00H0.0
(Although the decimal would be where you normally see an apostrophe)
If you used the seven segment display method of writing numbers, 2 and 5 would work upside down too.
This was a gag in Little Red Walking Hood (Warner Bros., 1937).
And of course 58008
“BOOBS”
Ambigrams are also a plot point in Dan Brown’s Angels & Demons.
There was some kind of equation you could key in the old Casio calculators where the result displayed as 71077351. Turn it upside down, and it shows what I do for a living: I SELL OIL.
As well as Tom Robbins’ “Still Life With Woodpecker”. Specifically, the word CHOICE printed on a pack of unfiltered Camel cigarettes and how it was a gateway to another reality, or something.
That calligraphy of the title to make it an ambigram is a real piece of work!
This makes my head hurt.