1: Pierce the Veil
The question I’m most often asked by people seeing Troposcope for the first time is “How does somebody invent something like this?”
Today’s image, the “Flammarion Engraving” (ca. 1888), was first published in French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion’s L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology") with the following caption: “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch.”
The answer I most often want to give is that it’s something which happened to me - that, really, I got lucky - that I followed a tiny hint of something magical - and that at the end of my explorations, after I dedicated myself to the process, Troposcope was waiting for me.
Yet beyond the device itself was a worldview and the realization that not only had I invented a truly novel mechanism, but had also identified a process of invention. I‘d like to share that process here in the pages of this blog.
Today’s image, the “Flammarion Engraving” (ca. 1888), was first published in French astronomer and writer Camille Flammarion’s L'atmosphère : météorologie populaire ("The Atmosphere: Popular Meteorology") with the following caption: “A missionary of the Middle Ages tells that he had found the point where the sky and the Earth touch.”
This is very like what I felt when I made Troposcope work for the first time. It was as if I had pierced a veil, or as if something had been revealed to me. The presence in this image of the wheel within a wheel hints at the archetypal power of the form.
Because of persistence of vision - that phenomenon which causes us to see an afterimage when an object traverses our field of view - this is also the form of a two-pendulum Troposcope in operation.
Troposcope has become far more for me than a juggling prop or skill toy. For me, as it’s discoverer, it is a window into human creativity and potential, and through it and this blog I want to guide Troposcope users who wish it toward exploring the process of discovery and invention, focusing on their own unique fascinations and life experiences, to a universal source of creativity accessible to all, yet purely personal in its results. I think each of us has access to this process.
Together we’ll explore psychology, simple principals of physics, and even cosmologies old an new, all with the aim of awakening the creativity which is every human’s birthright.
This will be best done and truly only make sense with Troposcope in hand, so please, after taking a look around, head to the shop and pick one up here.
I hope you’ll join us.