Microscopic Writing: Eight Bibles to the Square Inch

1895

MICROSCOPIC WRITING

The Wonders That May Be Accomplished In a Square Inch of Space

Among the collection of microscopic objects in the United States Army Medical museum at Washington is a specimen of microscopic writing on glass which contains the Lord's Prayer, written in characters so small that the entire 227 letters of that petition are engraved within an area measuring 1-294 by 1-441 of an inch.

So far this statement does not trouble us. If, however, we go a little further, we easily find that the area having the above dimensions would be only the 1-129,654 of a square inch, and consequently that an inch square covered with writing of the same size, or counting 227 letters to each such fraction, would contain 29,431,458 letters.

Let us put this figure into a concrete form by seeing how much of a book this number of letters would represent. The Bible is a book of which we may safely assume that every one has an approximate idea as regards its general size or extent. Some one has actually determined the number of letters contained in the entire Old and New Testaments and finds this to be 3,566,480. Hence the number of letters which a square inch of glass would accommodate, written out like the text of the Lord's Prayer on this strip of glass, is more than eight times this last number, or, in other words, a square inch of glass would accommodate the entire text of the Bible eight times over written out as is the Lord's Prayer on this strip of glass.

I am free to confess that, though this fact has been known to me since 1873, and I have had in my possession photographs taken with the microscope of this writing, I cannot say that I fully apprehend or mentally grasp the fact just stated. I can form no mental picture of a square inch of glass with the entire text of eight Bibles engraved upon it, and yet when I have verified the measurements and calculations leading up to this conclusion I feel absolutely certain as to its truth, not as the result of intuition, but as a deduction from experience which has not yet developed into an intuitive consciousness. — Dr. Henry Morton in Cassier's Magazine.