How a 19th Century Scientist Created Incredibly Realistic 3D Models of the Moon (1874)

At the moment, there’s no bet­ter way to see any­thing in space than through the lens of the James Webb Space Tele­scope. Pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, that ten-bil­lion-dol­lar suc­ces­sor to the Hub­ble Space Tele­scope can see unprece­dent­ed­ly far out into space, which, in effect, means it can see unprece­dent­ed­ly far back in time: some 13.5 bil­lion years, in fact, to the state of the ear­ly uni­verse. We post­ed the first pho­tos tak­en by the James Webb Space Tele­scope in 2022, which showed us dis­tant galax­ies and neb­u­lae at a lev­el of detail in which they’d nev­er been seen before.

Such images would scarce­ly have been imag­in­able to James Nas­myth, though he might have fore­seen that they would one day be a real­i­ty. A man of many inter­ests, he seems to have pur­sued them all dur­ing the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry through which he lived in its near-entire­ty.

His inven­tion of the steam ham­mer, which turned out to be a great boon to the ship­build­ing indus­try, did its part to make pos­si­ble his ear­ly retire­ment. At that point, he was freed to pur­sue such pas­sions as astron­o­my and pho­tog­ra­phy, and in 1874, he pub­lished with co-author James Car­pen­ter a book that occu­pied the inter­sec­tion of those fields.

The Moon: Con­sid­ered as a Plan­et, a World, and a Satel­lite con­tains what still look like strik­ing­ly detailed pho­tos of the sur­face of that famil­iar but then-still-mys­te­ri­ous heav­en­ly body: quite a coup at the time, con­sid­er­ing that the tech­nol­o­gy for tak­ing pic­tures through a tele­scope had yet to be invent­ed. Nas­myth did use a tele­scope — one he made him­self — but only as a ref­er­ence in order to sketch “the moon’s scarred, cratered and moun­tain­ous sur­face,” writes Ned Pen­nant-Rea at the Pub­lic Domain Review. “He then built plas­ter mod­els based on the draw­ings, and pho­tographed these against black back­grounds in the full glare of the sun.”

In the book’s text, Nas­myth and Car­pen­ter showed a cer­tain sci­en­tif­ic pre­science with their obser­va­tions on such phe­nom­e­na as the “stu­pen­dous reser­voir of pow­er that the tidal waters con­sti­tute.” You can read the first edi­tion at the Inter­net Archive, and you can see more of its pho­tographs at the Pub­lic Domain Review. Com­pare them to pic­tures of the actu­al moon, and you’ll notice that he got a good deal right about the look of its sur­face, espe­cial­ly giv­en the tools he had to work with at the time. There’s even a sense in which Nas­myth’s pho­tos look more real than the 100 per­cent faith­ful images we have now, that they vivid­ly rep­re­sent some­thing of the moon’s essence. As mil­lions of dis­ap­point­ed view­ers of CGI-sat­u­rat­ed mod­ern sci-fi movies under­stand, some­times only mod­els feel right.

via Pub­lic Domain Review

Relat­ed con­tent:

The First Sur­viv­ing Pho­to­graph of the Moon (1840)

The Very First Pic­ture of the Far Side of the Moon, Tak­en 60 Years Ago

The Full Rota­tion of the Moon: A Beau­ti­ful, High Res­o­lu­tion Time Lapse Film

The Evo­lu­tion of the Moon: 4.5 Bil­lions Years in 2.6 Min­utes

The Ulti­mate Full Moon Shot

A Trip to the Moon (1902): The First Great Sci-Fi Film

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.