Amazingly, the notion of a black hole was first posited in 1783, by the English natural philosopher John Michell. In a paper read before the Royal Society that November, he wrote:

Let us now suppose the particles of light to be attracted in the same manner as all other bodies with which we are acquainted; that is, by forces bearing the same proportion to their vis inertiae (or mass), of which there can be no reasonable doubt, gravitation being, as far as we know, or having any reason to believe, an universal law of nature. … [I]f the semi-diameter of a sphere of the same density as the Sun were to exceed that of the Sun in the proportion of 500 to 1, a body falling from an infinite height towards it, would have acquired at its surface greater velocity than that of light, and consequently supposing light to be attracted by the same force in proportion to its vis inertiae, with other bodies, all light emitted from such a body would be made to return towards it by its own proper gravity.

“From these quotations it is clear that Michell in 1783 understood many of the basic principles of black hole physics which are in daily use almost 200 years later,” writes Cambridge physicist Gary Gibbons. Indeed, Michell’s talent doomed him to obscurity: His breakthroughs were lost on his contemporaries and forgotten by the time the world could appreciate them. His notion of a “dark star” was rediscovered only in the 1970s. The American Physical Society says, “[H]e remains virtually unknown today, in part because he did little to develop and promote his own path-breaking ideas.”

(Gary Gibbons, “The Man Who Invented Black Holes,” New Scientist, June 28, 1979.) (Thanks, Alejandro.)

Biologist and mathematician D’Arcy Thompson advanced a strange new idea in his 1917 book On Growth and Form: He found that if you draw the outline of an animal or plant on an ordinary Cartesian grid, and then you put the grid through some mathematical transformation (stretching it, for example, so that its squares become rhombuses), very often the resulting shape is that of a related real creature.

What can that mean? Thompson doesn’t really say. He thought that the biologists of his day overemphasized evolution in explaining the form and structure of living things; he preferred to look for physical and especially mathematical laws. But he didn’t present his ideas as principles that might be tested, so his book has (so far) remained only a notable curiosity.

“This theory cries out for causal explanation, which is something the great man eschewed,” writes zoologist Wallace Arthur. “Perhaps the time is close when comparative developmental genetics will be able to provide such an explanation.”

(Wallace Arthur, “D’Arcy Thompson and the Theory of Transformations,” Nature Reviews Genetics, May 2006, 401-406.)

In 1880 Charles Hinton (inventor of the baseball gun) turned his attention to the fourth dimension, that unseen world whose behavior seems so baffling to ordinary thinkers.

In his 1888 book A New Era of Thought, he announced a unique way to think about it, a set of 81 colored cubes that correspond to the 81 parts of a 3 × 3 × 3 × 3 hypercube. By creating a set of wooden cubes, painting them according to Hinton’s instructions, and working through the prescribed exercises, the reader could learn to visualize the fourth dimension as intuitively as the third:

The square, in moving in the unknown direction, traces out a succession of squares, the assemblage of which makes the cube in layers. So also the cube, moving in the unknown direction, will at any point of its motion, still be a cube; and the assemblage of cubes thus placed constitutes the tessaract in layers. We suppose the cube to change its colour directly it begins to move. Its colour between 1 and 2 we can easily determine by finding what colours its different parts assume, as they move in the unknown direction.

Hinton’s method drew few adherents, but he was sure that it worked — he had proved it for himself. “The particular problem,” he wrote, “at which I have worked for more than ten years, has been completely solved. It is possible for the mind to acquire a conception of higher space as adequate as that of our three-dimensional space, and to use it in the same manner.”

He moved on to other things, but he’s left us one permanent calling card — Hinton coined the word tesseract.

Here’s a striking sign of the pervasive influence of the Industrial Revolution: It darkened England’s moths. Before 1811, the peppered moth, Biston betularia, had a white body. But as soot darkened trees, lighter-bodied insects became more visible to birds and other predators. By 1848 the frequency of dark-bodied moths in industrial regions had increased dramatically, one of the first documented instances of Darwin’s principle of natural selection. American geneticist Sewall Wright called it “the clearest case in which a conspicuous evolutionary process has actually been observed.”

Somewhat related: A curious wartime observation by Gertrude Stein, in Alsace, from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas:

Another thing that interested us enormously was how different the camouflage of the french looked from the camouflage of the germans, and then once we came across some very neat camouflage and it was american. The idea was the same but as after all it was different nationalities who did it the difference was inevitable. The colour schemes were different, the designs were different, the way of placing them was different, it made plain the whole theory of art and its inevitability.