[Taxacom] Macroscope - history of the term

[Tony Rees]

Hi all,

In these times of Covid, how about a little detective work?

When I was working with OBIS/Census of Marine Life in the early 2000s, I
would hear Jesse Ausubel on occasion use the term "macroscope" to describe
an all-encompassing view, e.g. of life in the oceans, or for the Barcode of
Life project, or the Encyclopedia of Life, and I liked the term - I believe
he was stimulated either by reading Joël de Rosnay's 1975 French book of
the same name, or Howard Odum's work on ecology from 1971 - some ecologists
still use the term "the view through Odum's macroscope" or similar, when
talking about analysis of large scale ecological patterns.

A few months back (or perhaps more by now) I decided that this term needed
its own article in Wikipedia since one was lacking, since I occasionally
encountered the term again in more recent reading. Creating the
Wikipedia article (cited below) involved researching the history of the
term, and I came up with three prior uses to Odum's 1971 book (courtesy of
Google Scholar - not to be confused with the Wild/Leica instrument of the
same name, designed for macro photography of specimens in a laboratory) -
going backwards, by psychiatrists W.H. Hargreaves and K.H. Blacker who
wrote in 1966: "The advent of the electronic digital computer is causing a
revolution in the behavioral sciences comparable to the impact the
microscope had on biology. Like the microscope, the computer provides a
view that is beyond the capability of the naked eye. The computer is being
used as a "macroscope," which enables us to perceive relationships based on
larger patterns of information than we are otherwise able to integrate."

Then by historian Philip Bagby in 1959: "[Someone should] invent a
'macroscope', an instrument which would ensure that the historian see only
the larger aspects of history and blind him to the individual details."

And finally by geographers Lawrence M. Sommers and Clarence L. Vinge who
wrote in 1957: "What do we see? What are the inter-relationships that exist
among the observed features? The near-views can, by means of mapping, be
resolved with over-the-horizon views, and the map becomes a "macroscope" to
help us understand the spatial organization of the Earth's phenomena."

So my question is, can anyone come up with any earlier use/s of the term,
in the context as discussed, suitable for inclusion in the Wikipedia
article, which is at
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macroscope_(science_concept)...

PS a search of BHL gives the following intriguing snippet in a magazine
article from 1895(!!) issue of "Forest and Stream": "The microscope has
opened up the world of little things as the macroscope has opened up the
world of great things, and, though both go an infinite distance beyond the
scope of man's vision, instead of bringing him nearer the end, they but
immensely enlarge the beginning." (found at
https://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/page/43344450) - so maybe there is
something out there...

Regards to all - Tony Rees, Australia - compiler of my own "macroscope",
www.irmng.org

Tony Rees, New South Wales, Australia
https://about.me/TonyRees