This book reconstructs the emergence of the phenomenon of "lost time" by engaging with two of the most significant time experts of the nineteenth century: the German physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz and the French writer Marcel Proust. Its starting point is the archival discovery of curve images that Helmholtz produced in the context of pathbreaking experiments on the temporality of the nervous system in 1851. With a "frog drawing machine," Helmholtz established the temporal gap between stimulus and response that has remained a core issue in debates between neuroscientists and philosophers. When naming the recorded phenomena, Helmholtz introduced the term temps perdu, or lost time. Proust had excellent contacts with the biomedical world of late-nineteenth-century Paris, and he was familiar with this term and physiological tracing technologies behind it. Drawing on the machine philosophy of Deleuze, Schmidgen highlights the resemblance between the machinic assemblages and rhizomatic networks within which Helmholtz and Proust pursued their respective projects.
"The distinguished German scientist, Hermann von Helmholtz, and the superb French writer, Marcel Proust, never met. However, Henning Schmidgen's fascinating study of nineteenth century graphic machines, tracings, and early photography reveals how their shared preoccupation with the physiology and mechanics of muscles and nerves, however disparate, led them to remarkably similar discoveries about t
Princeton University, author of The Human Motor
"The Helmholtz Curves presents an archival discovery of the greatest importance not just to historians of science but to every scientist who studies the nervous system."
Emory University
"Henning Schmidgen's exciting book is about laboratory practices and reaction time measurements, but it is as much a beautifully written map of visual culture of scientific experiments, the measured body, and the emergence of a modern sense of time. Schmidgen offers us an excellent piece of scholarship on scientific and technological culture that also demonstrates the importance of a Deleuzian his
University of Southampton, author of What is Media Archaeology?
