antedating of "clock wise" (1882)

[Chris Waigl]

Mullins, Bill wrote:

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>Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
>Poster:       "Mullins, Bill" <Bill.Mullins at US.ARMY.MIL>
>Subject:      Re: antedating of "clock wise" (1882)
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>Sugars are the chemicals most commonly brought up, when discussing how
>chemicals may rotate polarized light.
>
>Jean-Baptiste Biot did the early work on this in the 1830s.  From a
>physics text online:
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>
For the dates of the discovery of birefringence, polarization etc, here
another excerpt:

> In 1808, Malus held a piece of Iceland spar up to some sunlight
> reflecting off a window of the Luxemburg Palace. To his surprise, he
> noticed how the intensity varied when he rotated the crystal (the
> image of the sun is partially polarized upon reflection), and the
> light beam emanating from the crystal was single, not double. Malus
> followed this observation with further experiments showing that the
> ability to polarize light was not restricted to very special crystals
> but could be present in reflections from any ordinary substance,
> transparent or opaque, except for polished metals. He later described
> the light as being "polarized" in his works on polarized light by
> reflection published in 1809. From these observations, he derived
> Malus's law that predicts how the intensity of the light transmitted
> through a polarizer changes when the angle of the transmission is
> varied (square law). Several years later in 1811, Francois Arago
> discovers that some quartz crystals will continuously rotate the
> electric vector of light (i.e. circular polarization). In 1812,
> Jean-Baptiste Biot presented a comprehensive theory showing how
> anisotropic crystalline solids and samples containing an excess of one
> enantiomer of a chiral molecule rotate the orientation of
> plane-polarized light (Biot's law). In 1815, he demonstrated that
> polarized light, when passing through an organic substance, could be
> rotated clockwise or counterclockwise, dependent upon the optical axis
> of the material.

The French National Library site (http://gallica.bnf.fr) has several
texts by Biot, the earliest I've seen being a 1860 volume of Annales de
Physique et de Chimie, which is actually about the _application_ of
polarized light to study substances (not the discovery itself). But
that's 142 pages of muddy pdf, so I haven't even skimmed it. In several
places, though, he describes the movement of his (pivoting) experimental
probe as "(from the left) to the right" and "(from the right) to the
left". I haven't seen any references to "dans le sens des aiguilles d'un
montre" (lit. "in the sense of the hands of a watch"), which is the
French expression used today. TLF has a quote of 1982 (!) for that, but
then, it's bad on scientific terminology anyway.

Chris Waigl

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