Next> | <Prev | ^ToC | /Search/ | !Warn! | ?Help?


Charles H. Hinton

(1853-1907)

invented a gun used in baseball batting practice. [Harper's Weekly, Mar. 20, 1897, 301-2.] He is also known for his speculations on the fourth dimension. He married a daughter of logican George Boole, but was forced to leave England after a bigamy conviction. An instructor of mathematics at Princeton (fired) and assistant professor at Minnesota, he served at the Naval Observatory and as patent examiner in Washington. There he died suddenly when asked to give a toast to "female philosophers" at the Society of Philanthropic Inquiry meeting.

Fourth Dimension Writings

  1. What Is the Fourth Dimension? (1884) [59KB]
  2. A Plane World (1884) [39KB]
  3. A Picture of Our Universe (1884) [39KB]
  4. Many Dimensions (1885) [36KB]
  5. An Unfinished Communication (1885) [74KB]
  6. A New Era of Thought (1888) [37KB]
  7. The Fourth Dimension (1904) [50KB]
  8. The Recognition of the Fourth Dimension (1902) [54KB]
  9. An Episode of Flatland (1907) [116KB]

Selections are from our copy-text, Speculations on the Fourth Dimension, Selected Writings of Charles H. Hinton, Copyright 1980 by Dover Publications, Inc., ISBN 0-486-23916-0, LC 79-54399. Newton Free Library, Newton, Mass., 530.11, H59S, 1980. We omit the copyrighted introduction and footnotes, and the essay, "Casting Out the Self," about his colored cube memory aids. Please consult this book and its bibliography for further reading, as Hinton's original books are hard to find. Rudy Rucker's copyrighted introduction and notes to this book are particularly valuable. We are grateful that Professor Rucker has granted us permission to use Hinton's texts for this derivative work, and we emphasize that Rucker's own work is not to be published without his permission.

You might also be interested in our online illustrated text of Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland, 1884.

For your convenience in making links internal to these pages we have made anchors of the second word in each paragraph. (If you select the link, your browser should redisplay the window with that line at the top, and in the Location: bar you will see the text for that anchor; you may copy the entire line into the A HREF= attribute of your own HTML code.)




URL: http://eldred.ne.mediaone.net/chh/hinton.html
Eric Eldred - eldred@mediaone.net - 1996-11-08 ; 1999-08-08