In the 1840s, the main body of education in China was still traditional feudal education, and the content of education was centered on Confucian classics.
The doctrine of righteousness, the study of evidence, and the study of lexicography are regarded as academic orthodoxy, while the others are deposed as heretics.
Even if a scholar reads the Bible assiduously and is admitted to the priesthood, he still has no real talent or practical learning.
In such a big environment, studying the Eight Strands of Literature well and obtaining the meritorious name Guangzong Yaozu is the choice of the vast majority of people.
If you want to talk to these Confucians about ideas and science, it is inevitable that some idiots will dream.
But there are exceptions to everything, and in the late Qing Dynasty, there was indeed a "fool" who made outstanding scientific research results.
So much so that the "Draft History of the Qing Dynasty" commented on him in this way: he can gather Theories of The Chinese and western and penetrate them, and he is quiet and bright, and has many divine understandings.
When Liang Qichao summarized the academic history of China in the past three hundred years, he also called him a "man of great talent".
Liang Qichao, a representative of the modern Chinese Restoration School
Mathematically, he authored The Technique of Multiplication and designed and built logarithmic tables and engraving boards;
In astronomy, he produced a series of instruments such as celestial globes and solar system performance instruments, and also drew two huge maps of the north and south stars of the equator;
Celestial Globe
In geography, he took the lead in drawing a map of the whole country using the longitude and latitude method, and set a meridian passing through Beijing as the prime meridian;
In physics, he found a way to solve various irregular shapes of weight and center, and also built China's first camera, which reached the world's leading level in photography technology.
It is not an easy task for ordinary people to achieve results in any of these fields.
At that time, when most people did not know what scientific thinking was, it was a miracle that a generalist who crossed many fields appeared.
He was the Qing Dynasty scientist, Zou Boqi.
Zou Boqi
In 1819, Zou Boqi was born in Nanhai, Guangdong Province, to a family of private school teachers.
Thanks to his father's mathematical enlightenment education, Zou Boqi did not read the Four Books and Five Classics like most children in his childhood.
At the age of 10, Zou Boqi had already shown outstanding intelligence.
So his grandfather, who was also a scholar, took him to his home and began to teach him the Zhou Yi and the Nine Chapters of Arithmetic.
This sparked Zou Boqi's keen interest in ancient mathematics.
Nine Chapters of Arithmetic
At the age of 11, he began to study with Jinshi Liang.
During his studies, Zou Boqi read rare books such as "The Three Unification Techniques" and "Arc Angle Setting", which were rare at that time, and thus acquired a large amount of mathematical knowledge, laying a solid foundation for future interdisciplinary research.
Although he was familiar with ancient texts from an early age, Zou Boqi did not stick to it.
The old saying goes, "A thousand funonos are not as good as a soldier.".
Zou Boqi changed the words "YiChen" and "Tefu" for himself, showing a unique determination.
While actively engaging with various Western scientific theories, he used ancient Chinese books as a comparison to explore internal connections.
"The art of Western instrument making has long existed in China."
Never set foot in the country, he insisted that Western studies originated in "Mozi" and was somewhat paranoid.
Zou Boqi really became interested in the principles of lens imaging, which stemmed from the Northern Song Dynasty scientific work "Mengxi Pen Talk" that he read at the age of 17.
In the book, the author Shen Kuo made a detailed discussion of the Yang Flint.
Yang flint, a concave copper mirror used in ancient times to gather daylight to ignite objects
Yang flint face depression, with one finger forced to illuminate the rule;
Drifting away, there is nothing to see; after that, it falls.
When the finger approaches the mirror, an upright object can be seen;
Fingers move back, move to a certain position, the object will suddenly disappear;
The finger moves back again, and the vanished object reappears, but it is already an inverted figure.
In this experiment, Shen Kuo demonstrated the important law of imaging objects in the focus, on and outside the concave mirror.
After careful study of "Mengxi Pen Talk" and repeated experiments, Zou Boqi came up with his own results.
Later, in his book "Grid Complement", he used mathematical methods to describe the laws of imaging such as planar mirrors and lenses, and explained the working principle of optical instruments such as telescopes and microscopes in plain language.
Carl Zeiss microscope, 1911
In 1844, Zou Boqi was inspired by the lens to make a camera, and he was only 26 years old.
In his manuscript, he details the process of making the camera.
Wood as a box, with a sheet of white paper or white glass in the middle;
The front hole is installed in the tube, and the cylinder mouth is installed in the mirror;
Open the peephole in the back, and transfer it at will, which is called the camera device.
This camera is equivalent to the original camera.
As long as there is a suitable photosensitive material as a negative, you can take pictures.
On this basis, Zou Boqi quickly manufactured China's first camera.
This camera was originally stored in Shimen Middle School in Nanhai, but unfortunately it is no longer known.
In fact, as early as the 17th century, Europeans made similar cameras with convex lenses.
It was not until 1800 that Thomas Wedgwood of England attempted to fix the camera obscura image on white paper coated with a solution of silver nitrate.
Wedgwood makes use of the characteristics of silver nitrate in the presence of organic matter, which will be reduced to gray-black when exposed to light.
However, due to the lack of mastery of the sensitivity time, the photo becomes pitch black in the sun.
Niepps
In 1816, Niepps attempted to ingest images from silver chloride photosensitive paper, but failed during the operation.
After 10 years, he improved his approach and decided to use a white ash board coated with a thin layer of asphalt; after 8 hours of exposure, Niepps finally took the world's first photo.
However, due to the long exposure time, this photographic method is only suitable for shooting still life.
"Out of the Window," by Niepps, 1826
In 1837, the French physicist Heydar invented the silver plate photography method.
This method takes advantage of the photosensitive properties of silver iodide, the exposure time is only 30 minutes, and the photo is uniform and not easy to fade.
A Corner of the Studio, daguerre, 1837
After the success of Daguerre plate photography, it was not until 1847 that glass plate photography was introduced.
Glass plate photography is cheaper than the former, and glass as a negative is more transparent than paper, which can be described as having many advantages.
But it also failed to solve the process of taking portraits of people, so people generally used it to make glass slides.
Zou Boqi solved this problem in his own way.
At that time, the difficulty of photography was to make suitable photosensitive materials.
Zou Boqi wrote about his unique medicinal formula in a one-page essay.
The ingredient list includes dozens of ingredients such as egg white, salt, rosin charcoal, fire wine, deer antler juice, silver powder, and some plants endemic to Lingnan.
Among them, egg white is an extremely important material in glass plate photography.
We can reconstruct the rough production process from the manuscript.
Mix egg whites, a small amount of table salt and purified water with chopsticks;
Scrape off the foam, beat it again, beat the silk strands, and pour them into the basin to clear them;
After clearing, pour into a porcelain or glass dish and set aside.
When using, carefully place one side of the glass plate into the porcelain dish so that it is evenly coated with egg whites;
It is then placed in a silver salt solution so that it evenly adheres to the silver salt solution, so that a positive sheet of the silver positive plate is made.
Metal plate box for storing glass photosensitive plates
According to the research of the scholar Mr. Dai Nianzu, Zou Boqi should have independently invented glass plate photography between 1846 and 1850.
This is almost on par with the progress of the invention of European photography.
Unfortunately, Zou Boqi did not record in detail the amount of each material used.
Zou Boqi also left five glass plate negatives, which are still very clear after a hundred years.
A negative of one of the busts is now in the Guangzhou Museum.
In 1973, this negative was also used to print extremely clear photographs.
Zou Boqi bust glass plate negative
The remaining four negatives, according to the late Professor Liang Hengxin of South China Institute of Technology:
One of them is a small portrait of Zou Boqi, with the stone steps of the ancestral hall in the background, and he himself is wearing a white robe, sitting on a stool, holding a white tuan fan.
The glass edges are not neat, not foreign goods, and with the stone level as the background, nor is it the set of the photo studio, it may be that Zou Boqi himself asked someone to shoot by pressing the shutter.
Although there is not enough evidence to prove that Zou Boqi completely independently invented glass plate photography, he was indeed the first person in China to use this technique to shoot portraits.
Glass plate negatives
Not only did he take the lead in photographic technology, Zou Boqi also used the camera to promote the advancement of China's mapping technology.
At that time, the drawing of longitude and latitude lines was a difficult problem of map mapping.
Although Magellan had proved the earth circle theory through circumnavigation of the world in the early 16th century, the theory of the earth circle at that time still suffered overwhelming opposition in the Qing Dynasty.
Magellan's circumnavigational expedition ship Victoria
Mainstream doctrine did not affect Zou Boqi's judgment, and he began to study the theory of the circle of the earth.
Soon he figured out how to use curves to represent longitude and latitude lines, and pioneered the use of his own photographic instruments for mapping and plane measurements.
At the same time, Zou Boqi's research results have also received attention from the government.
Guo Songtao
In the third year of Tongzhi (1864), Zou Boqi was hired by Guo Songtao, the governor of Guangdong, to survey and map the coastal areas of Guangdong.
Later, Zou Boqi also instructed his disciples to draw the "Xungang Zhou Map" and the "Sangyuanwei Full Map", and successively repaid the most authoritative national map at that time, the "Imperial Public Opinion Comprehensive Map".
The Imperial Survey was published in 1737 after it entered Europe
Zou Boqi's practice of theory is far more than this, and he has also spent a lot of energy on the development of various scientific instruments.
At that time, Copernicus's heliocentric theory was only introduced to China.
As a pioneer of science, Zou Boqi created a solar system performance instrument in order to illustrate the relationship between the major planets orbiting the sun.
The show also includes Neptune, which was discovered in 1846.
In addition, he also manufactured a variety of exquisite instruments such as mercury overflow detectors and wind and rain needles (barometers).
When designing and building a sundial, Zou Boqi even deliberately considered the magnetic declination problem in Guangzhou.
In the words of his friend Chen Li, he "studied the system of famous things, explored day and night, and ensured that it was accurate."
It is this enthusiasm for inquiry that has guided Zou Boqi to test the theory with practice.
Sundial, a chronograph instrument that uses the projection of the sun to determine the time
Although many instruments were made, he did not leave many written books until his death due to illness in 1869.
Most of the manuscripts are memorized for memos, which is very unsystematic.
One reason for this is that Zou Boqi did not have enough financial ability to write books for himself during his lifetime.
It was not until after his death that some of his manuscripts were printed and published with the patronage of a number of scholars.
The scholar Chen Li selected a part of his posthumous manuscript and published it at the same time as Zou Zhengjun's Testament with the title of "Zou Zhengjun's Manuscript".
These books rose to fame behind him.
One of the most important geometric optical works, "Geshu Supplement", has become recognized as one of the masterpieces of Chinese science and technology in the late Qing Dynasty.
In ancient and modern times, scientific experiments require capital investment.
In modern times, if you can obtain a practical patent, at least the funds have landed.
But at that time, Zou Boqi had no outside support, so all the expenses had to be borne by himself.
The Zou family, who originally had a rich life with a house and land, could not meet his continuous experimental expenses.
After the children of rich families are addicted to scientific research, their lives are becoming more and more difficult.
Statue of Zou Boqi, author of Pan Bolin
In fact, he is not without Bole appreciation.
At that time, Dai Xu, the guangdong scholar and politician, saw that Zou Boqi was proficient in the study of exegesis, and promoted him to the official school.
But Zou Boqi was not interested in the title of Xiucai, and was still immersed in scientific experiments every day, and did not continue to step into the field.
Shanghai machine weaving layout gate
Due to Guo Songtao's strong recommendation, the Qing court also summoned him twice to serve in the Jingshi Tongwenguan.
When Zeng Guofan inspected Liangjiang, he also hoped to invite Zou Boqi to teach at the academy set up next to the Shanghai machine weaving layout.
But Zou Birch resigned the invitation one by one.
Kyoshi Tongwenguan
Perhaps many people at that time would think that Zou Boqi did not know how to be flexible and missed a good opportunity.
But it is also difficult for them to understand that for Zou Boqi, the process of seeking truth is the greatest joy.
If you have the energy to spend on the official field, why not do more experiments.
Zou Boqi's academic research is entirely based on his own practice.
Before and after the Opium War, Chinese was still able to make world-leading scientific and technological achievements, and if he was born in an era of more emphasis on scientific research, would he have achieved greater achievements?
What is certain is that without this spirit of inquiry, the development of civilization will inevitably stand still.