Moving on the Wall: Performing Organisms with the Solar Microscope

Unlike the classical microscope, the solar microscope produces its image not in the eye of an individual beholder, but on the wall of a curtained room. Surrounded by darkness, the sun’s light illuminates the greatly magnified image of tiny objects or objects invisible to the naked eye. During the Enlightenment, solar microscopes were enormously popular, and fulfilled the ideal of a useful pastime and a gentlemen’s science. For a long time, the history of science largely disregarded eighteenth-century microscopy, and the solar microscope appeared scientifically marginal—at most a kind of toy. In my paper, I address an aspect of solar microscopy that has attracted virtually no attention in the history of biology: the experience of a world in motion. Scholarship on the image-world of solar microscopy has hitherto focused almost entirely on the copper plates accompanying the microscopy books of the eighteenth century. Instead, I will argue that the experience of motion is the specific sensory experience of the microscopic world that only the solar microscope could offer and that lies at the very heart of the instrument’s performance.