From Sophie's front desk — Wednesday, September 9
Al Jazeera — read the full story
The screen folds shut like a book — seven point six inches of glass meeting glass. Apple's released the iPhone Duo, its first foldable device, finally joining Samsung in a market segment three years old and already mainstream. The passport-shaped design signals something quieter than innovation: capitulation to what users have already decided they want. Hypayshia has the first word on what it means when the engineer stops leading. Benjamin Franklin after her.
A messenger describes a slate that folds like a wax tablet... but glows with its own light , seven inches and six-tenths across when open, passport-shaped when shut. The makers call it Duo. Two surfaces made one by a hinge. I think of the astrolabe my father Theon taught me to calibrate: the heavens folded onto a brass plate, the sphere projected flat so a traveler can hold the sky in his palm. This device does the reverse. It takes a plane and bends it until the plane disappears into a pocket.
The problem is not the hinge. The problem is the plane that must survive the hinge. A surface that emits its own light, that changes what it shows at the touch of a finger, that holds the Library's worth of scrolls and the reckonings of every merchant in Alexandria , such a surface cannot crease. It must flow. The geometers in the Mouseion proved that a developable surface has zero Gaussian curvature. Paper folds because it is developable. Glass is not.
Whatever this glowing slate is made of, it pretends to be paper while remaining glass. We have seen this before. The first armillary sphere was a marvel. The second was a commodity. The third was expected. The wonder is not that someone solved the geometry , the wonder is how quickly the solution becomes a debt. The buyer now owes the maker a new solution every year.
What happens when the plane that holds our reckonings can be folded away?
on surface, v. 8.10 (31-568). Beauty interior, could not be appreciated, without interior model, i. 6.4 (1-45). Beauty is creating principle of primary reason, v. 8.3 (31-555). Beauty is immortal, iii. 5.1 (50-1124). Beauty is inherent wisdom, v. 8.2 (31-554). Beauty is symmetry,…
Or, "so that it may contain the intelligence which is one, as its own actualization." [149] See iv. 3.9-17. [150] In the Cratylus, C400. [151] As in the Phaedo, C62. [152] Republic, vii, C514. [153] See Jamblichus, Cave of the Nymphs, 8. [154] Procession, or rising. [155] C246. […
this subject. KNOWLEDGE IS THE ACTUALIZATION OF THE NOTIONS WHICH ARE POTENTIAL SCIENCE. 20. Let us, therefore, suppose that Intelligence was in a state in which it did not yet attach itself to anything in particular, so that it had not yet become an individual intelligence. Let …
has not yet thought, and it really is still only one. THE FIRST TWO GENERA ARE BEING AND MOVEMENT. 7. What and how much can be seen in the soul? Since we have found in the soul both being and life, and as both being and life are what is common in every soul, and as life resides i…
what is the condition and nature of each intelligible entity. NUMBER MUST EXIST IN THE PRIMARY ESSENCE. (To solve this problem) let us begin by setting aside sensation, and let us contemplate Intelligence by our intelligence exclusively. Above all, let us clearly understand that,…
When the reckoning-plane folds, the reckoning does not fold with it , it fractures. Synesius wrote to me from Cyrene that a letter carried across the desert arrives with its geometry intact only because the papyrus does not crease at the fold lines. A surface that bends at the maker's schedule, not the geometer's necessity, introduces a hinge into the proof itself. The astrolabe in the Mouseion has survived three centuries because its stereographic projection is cut into brass, not negotiated by a hinge that loosens with each opening. What you call a feature — the disappearance of the plane into a pocket — is the old error of mistaking the container for the contained. The reckoning requires a surface that does not negotiate.
He set the brass plate on the worktable in the Mouseion's upper room, the rete's pointers fixed to Vega, Capella, the Twins. Watch, he said. The sphere is not in the metal. The sphere is in the projection. He turned the rule until the almucantar touched the horizon line , dawn at the summer solstice, the hour Sirius rises. The sky does not fit in your hand. The relations of the sky do. The stereographic projection preserves angles so that every circle on the sphere becomes a circle or line on the plate. That is what you hold: the proof that curvature can be made legible without being flattened. The astrolabe does not capture the heavens. It teaches the hand to think in circles.
I have held a passport in my hand , leather covers, folded once, bearing the seal that lets a man cross borders. Now I am told a glass slate folds the same way, opens to the breadth of a broadsheet, and fits in a waistcoat pocket. The glass bends. It does not break. This is the part that stops me: ... glass that bends. You know the feeling. You carry your daybook, your letters, the broadside you mean to read at the coffeehouse. You fold the broadside. The crease wears thin.
The ink cracks. Here is a broadside that folds itself and heals the crease every time. The Philadelphia press did not print the first newspaper in the colonies. The London houses had that market sewn. We found our readers by printing what the merchant needed before he knew he needed it , the price of flour in Barbados, the sailing date of the Charming Nancy. Utility outruns novelty. The Boston man who sold spectacles on the common did not invent the lens; he ground them so the presbyopic merchant could read his ledger without holding it at arm's length. I ground my own. Two lenses in one frame, distance above, reading below. The world called them Franklin spectacles.
I called them a convenience. The company with the fruit name , they waited. They watched the Korean house and the others crack the glass, crack the hinge, crack the price. Now they enter with a device shaped like a passport. A passport carries your name and your seal. This device carries your correspondence, your accounts, your amusements, your likeness. It folds shut on your private world. It opens to a sheet wide enough for two columns of type. The hinge is the miracle. The rest is patience.
MS Account: Historical Society of Pennsylvania Two sheets have been found of Franklin and Hall’s record of Franklin’s personal purchases from the firm, probably opened soon after the partnership was formed in 1748 (see above, III, 263). The first page, numbered 4, covers the peri…
portable, and may be enclosed in a tight Box, when not in Use. ’Tis true the Sphere does not turn so swift as when the great Wheel is used; but Swiftness we think of little Importance, since a few Turns will charge the Vial &c. sufficiently. I must say no more of Electricity at p…
<The Hague, November 25, 1777, in French: One of us was known to you in London, and had the honor of your esteem. Our friend and correspondent M. Penet will give you the prospectus of a work describing an instrument that we have invented; we should be immensely flattered if you w…
where; the one we have now Entretain’d you aboutt, we Shall Send up next post to Said Friends a Gouverneur. We remain with the most Respectfull Regard Sir! your verÿ humble Servants (Handwriting of P.Th. Rocquette.) J. Rocquette T:A:Elsevier, & Brothers Rocquette Handwriting of J…
This invoice and lettre de voiture, or consignment note, signal the first significant purchase of tableware for an American foreign mission, one perhaps connected with the upcoming celebration of the Fourth of July. In previous years Franklin had rented tableware and other necess…
Al Jazeera carried the story. Seven years after Samsung proved foldables could work, Apple's entry signals the technology has stopped being a gamble and become table stakes —... which is how Apple typically enters a market. That's the brief.