In the winter of 1876, a Norfolk clergyman named William Firth sat at his desk, adjusting the sub-stage condenser of his brass microscope. On the slide before him lay forty-seven specimens of Arachnoidiscus ehrenbergii, each cleaned in fuming nitric acid and positioned with a single badger hair into a perfect rosette. The work had taken him eleven weeks.
A Discipline of Negative Space
The arrangement of diatoms was never a popular craft. At its peak in the 1880s, perhaps two hundred people worldwide practiced it with any seriousness, and of those, fewer than thirty produced slides worthy of exhibition. They exchanged techniques by post, debated mounting media at the Quekett Microscopical Club in London, and guarded their formulas for sealant as fiercely as any Venetian glassmaker guarded a colour recipe.
“The finest arrangements are not merely technical achievements. They are arguments — about symmetry, about proportion, about the relationship between the part and the whole.” — Journal of the Royal Microscopical Society, 1883