“The Forgotten Kaleidoscope Craze in Victorian England”
“the kaleidoscope of the early-and mid-1800s wasn’t just a child’s toy. In fact, it wouldn’t become child’s toy for at least several decades. Instead, this new mobile device was in the hands of everyone from children to the elderly; from professors to pastors and was seen on nearly every public street in the UK where it was first invented. How this beloved device went from adult obsession to throwaway juvenilia turns out to be a long, strange journey, one that has profound implications for the mobile devices you are carrying right now…
As other scientists began working with the kaleidoscope, some found it useful as a tool to visualize massive numbers; the possible variations produced by a single kaleidoscope were unprecedented…Many people of the era argued that giving attention to the patterns built from such scraps was a waste of time. This was especially pronounced, they argued, when true beauty was all around. All a kaleidoscope viewer had to do was put down the instrument of false beauty and look up at real beauty in nature. Such admonitions could have easily been lifted directly from recent op-eds on our society’s use of cell phones…
Within a couple of decades, near the beginning of the Victorian era, there were no “penny for a peek” signs to be seen on city streets and the kaleidoscope was now sold with a stand, meant to be placed on a table in the Victorian parlor. It was a conversation piece in the home. It was less mobile than it was portable within the owner’s house. Essentially, the kaleidoscope had been “domesticated.””
This made me think a lot about “spheres”, public and private and social and work. And it’s interesting, there aren’t that many objects that we carry between them; we dress differently for each, use different tools, even have different personalities sometimes. But now we have smartphones, and we use them to create a private sphere in non-private places and to push our private sphere moments into the public.
Like, my phone is full of articles and podcasts and games that I consume privately and that pull my focus away from my setting and the pose — earbuds in, phone in hand, head bent towards the screen — creates a tiny bubble around me wherever I am. Those of us in this pose can politely ignore each other, we are less available for public perusal, and other people practically have to knock to get in.
And then, of course, when we are alone in our truly private spheres, we can use these same tools to enter public spheres online and share pictures of our breakfast and broadcast our inner thoughts.
And I think that’s important to be able to do, I think that work is intruding on time and space that used to be private, and that a lot of us in our 20s have these fuzzy borders between spheres and that smartphones are important tools for navigating that.
