Ernst Mach drew a self-portrait showing only what his left eye could see

odditiesThe Public Domain Review1886 · Prague

Ernst Mach drew a self-portrait showing only what his left eye could see

the gist

Austrian physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach drew a remarkable self-portrait for his 1886 book The Analysis of Sensations. Lying on a sofa with one eye closed, he drew what the other eye saw: part of his own face framed by his eyebrow, nose and moustache, with the rest of his body and his coffee cup visible beyond. The image illustrates his idea that the self is never seen in full, since the body appears only piecemeal and without a head. Mach had sketched the idea around 1870 as a joke about a philosophical claim that the ego could inspect itself. The drawing became one of the most famous visual puzzles about perception and the self.

so what

It turns a philosophical question about consciousness into a concrete image that anyone can understand. Mach's work also connects to physics, where he is known for the Mach number.

fun fact

The Mach number, which compares an object's speed to the speed of sound, is named after Ernst Mach.

D. W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909)

the gist

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.

how it works

To corner a market, a trader buys up most of the available supply and the futures contracts that promise more. Anyone who has to deliver the commodity must then buy from the cornerer at whatever price is demanded. The trader profits until the stock is released or the scheme collapses.

so what

A century on, it still shows how markets can be rigged by someone who controls supply, and how the people at either end, farmers and eaters, pay for it. It also helped establish editing as a way to argue a point, not just tell a story.

the bigger pattern

Corners have recurred whenever supply could be locked up, from the Hunt brothers' attempt on silver in 1979 to 1980 to the 'Black Friday' gold panic of 1869. Many such schemes end by collapsing, and the response is often new rules on speculation.

fun fact

In the film the Wheat King dies by falling into a grain elevator and being buried in the wheat he hoarded, an ending borrowed from Norris's novel The Octopus.

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