Mary Anning and the Monster in the Cliff
A carpenter's daughter in Lyme Regis found the first complete ichthyosaur at twelve and spent her life selling fossils to men who published them. Dalia traces what she found and what she was denied.
Ibn al-Haytham and the Darkened Room
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Show notes
The man who tested light
For a thousand years the educated view was that eyes sent out rays. Ibn al-Haytham, confined in Cairo after a failed engineering promise to the caliph, built darkened rooms and pinholes to show the opposite. Dalia reads from the Book of Optics, separates the legend from the documented life, and explains why his insistence on repeatable experiment makes him a hinge in the history of science.
- The Nile project that got him confined
- The extramission theory he set out to break
- The camera obscura experiments described in his own words
- How the Book of Optics reached Europe
- A physicist on reading al-Haytham today
Next episode, a girl on a Dorset beach finds a monster in the rock.
Transcript
Welcome to Before the Microscope. I am Dalia Fouad, I am a historian of science in Alexandria, and this is a show about how people found things out before they had the tools we take for granted. We begin in Cairo around the year 1011, with a brilliant engineer who promised the caliph he could control the Nile, could not, and spent years confined to his house as a result. In that house, Ibn al-Haytham darkened a room, made a small hole in the shutter, and proved that light comes into the eye rather than shooting out of it. I will read his own description of the experiment, tell you which parts of his story are legend, and talk with a physicist about why his method still matters. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts. Close the shutters.
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