Thursday, November 09, 2006

Hinton's Cubes Redux

Hinton's Cubes Redux




- Hinton's Tesseract



One of the few entries on this weblog that I get regular email about is the one concerning Charles Hinton's cubes (Apparently it comes up high on Google searches for seekers of this particular information.) The entry gives a short overview of the cubes, which Hinton designed as an aid to visualizing the fourth dimension, as well as some compelling information.

Unfortunately, the actual instructions for constructing and using the cubes is only in Hinton's 1906 book The Fourth Dimension which, despite being now in the public domain, is not available online.

Fortunately, I own a copy of the book, a 1912 edition I obtained years ago online from a London bookshop. I've wanted to make my copy somehow publicly available but didn't know how to do so.

Well, a few weeks ago, I got an unexpected offer of help from a man who works at the Internet Archive which is based here in San Francisco, in the Presidio. He took my book, scanned the various hundred pages and the result is --- Hinton's book is now completely available online!

Enjoy, cube-lovers! But, I take no responsibility for anyone going insane....