Lightning strikes the Eiffel Tower, June 3, 1902, 9:20 P.M. Photo from Thunder and Lightning by Camille Flammarion, trans. Walter Mostyn, published 1906.

Vitali Skvorkin, Cat in the engraving of Flammarion, signed original, linocut printed on Canson paper, 50 × 47 cm.

Camille Flammarion – Scientist of the Day

Camille Flammarion, a French astronomer and popular science writer, was born Feb. 26, 1842. 

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Camille Flammarion - L'inconnu: The Unknown, Imprint: New York : Harper & Bros., 1900

Color the Universe: Wouldn't it be fun to color in the universe? If you think so, please accept this famous astronomical illustration as a preliminary substitute. You, your friends, your parents or children, can print it out or even color it digitally. While coloring, you might be interested to know that even though this illustration has appeared in numerous places over the past 100 years, the actual artist remains unknown. Furthermore, the work has no accepted name—can you think of a good one? The illustration, first appearing in a book by Camille Flammarion in 1888, is frequently used to show that humanity's present concepts are susceptible to being supplanted by greater truths.

Image Credit: Unknown, possibly C. Flammarion

[Robert Scott Horton]

ASTRONOMIE POPULAIRE (aka POPULAR ASTRONOMY) by Camille Flammarion (France, 1890)

Odds and Ends:

L'ATMOSPHERE WIND

In 1871, Camille Flammarion, renowned French scientist and collector of coincidences, was working in his Parisian home on his book, L'Atmosphere, when a powerful gust of wind blew open the window by his desk. The ensuing whirlwind swept the manuscript out onto the street and carried it through the rain to his publisher's office half a mile away. Not a single page was lost. The chapter was about the force of the wind. Flammarion writes about the event:

“My study in Paris is lighted by three windows. The first window was open, looking on the chestnut-trees of the avenue. The sky was clouded; the wind rose, and suddenly the third window, which must have been badly fastened, was violently blown open by a gale from the southwest, which disarranged all my papers, and lifting the loose pages I had just written…

“To go down and hunt for my pages would seem to me to be time lost, and I was very sorry to lose them. What was my surprise to receive, a few days later, from Lahure's printing-office, in the Rude de Fleurus, about half a mile away from where I lived, that very chapter printed without one page missing. Remember, it was a chapter on the strange doings of the wind. What had happened? A very simple thing.

“The porter of the printing-office noticed on the ground, sodden by the rain, the leaves of my manuscript. He thought he must have dropped them himself, and he hastened to pick them up, and having arranged them with great care, he took them to the printing-office, telling no one of the affair. A little more, and some credulous person might have asserted that it was the wind that had brought them to the printing office.”

Text from: Almanac of the Infamous, the Incredible, and the Ignored by Juanita Rose Violins, published by Weiser Books, 2009

Of Fact, Fiction, and Flammarions

This post will lap around the edges of carnival, though nothing really connects its constituent parts beyond a name. February 26 was the birthday of the intriguing French figure Camille Flammarion (1842-1925), a man of that innocent time when science and pseudo-science could pleasantly live side by side in the human breast without clash or contradiction. On the one hand, Flammarion was the…

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Aredhel Ar-Feiniel

'Aredhel the White was younger in the years of the Eldar [...]; and when she was grown to full stature and beauty she was tall and strong, and loved much to ride and hunt in the forests.'

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Silmarillion

Illustration by Paul Renaud: Contemplation - published in: Camille Flammarion: Astronomy for Amateurs. New York 1904, edited by me.

The Flammarion Engraving. Only in reverse. The discovery of Earth by the Celestials.

Daniel Mirante, Flammarion (Through the Veil)

Happy Spring!