Maker Info
Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman
Shakespeare scholar and invented a mechanical collator to aid in his landmark study of the Shakespeare First Folio.
Excerpt from the ILAB website:
"Born in 1911, Charlton Joseph Kadio Hinman was well-suited to solving the collation problem. He was practical and analytical, a "tinkerer," but also a Shakespeare scholar whose 1941 doctoral dissertation was entitled "The Printing of the First Quarto of Othello." Hinman continued his studies as a Research Fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library, painstakingly collating by hand the First Folio version of Othello. When America entered World War II, Hinman was trained as a Naval cryptanalyst and assigned to a code-breaking unit in Washington DC. His commanding officer was Fredson Bowers, an eminent Shakespearian scholar from the University of Virginia under whom Hinman had studied. Although his war service interrupted Hinman's examination of the First Folio, it proved to be a vital to the way he approached collation.
"During the war Hinman was exposed to an idea for aerial reconnaissance photography that was to change the world of comparative bibliography. The concept was to take aerial photographs of an area of land at different times, such as before and after a bombing raid. Then the two photographs were to be overlaid on a screen and viewed alternately for fractions of a second, like a repeated loop of a two-frame motion picture. In theory, areas of the photograph that were the same in both would appear as a single, motionless image, while areas that differed, such as troop movements or bombing raid damage, would appear to wobble or flicker if the lighting and timing of the projection was right. Although the military did take and make use of many "pre" and "post-strike" photographs during the war, aerial photography at the time was not sufficiently precise to put the photography collation method into practice. But the theory was sound, and a variation had in fact already been used more successfully in another field - astronomy.
"A working antecedent to Hinman's approach to collation can be found in an optical device known as the blink comparator, invented in 1904 by a German instrument-maker named Carl Pulfrich. The principle is very similar to that described above: an astronomer would take photographs of portions of the night sky on different nights, superimpose them, and view them alternately at a fast speed. Stars that had not moved during that time would appear static, while anything in the night sky that did move would jump out at the viewer as it appeared to shimmer before their eyes. By eliminating known objects from the observations, previously unidentified celestial bodies might be found. Such was the case in 1930, when astronomer Clyde Tombaugh used the blink comparator to discover the planet Pluto.
"Having given the problem of mechanized collation much thought during World War II, Hinman built his first prototype in 1946. His machine cradled two copies of a given book, each opened at the same page. A binocular eyepiece allowed the viewer to focus an eye on each book, and then oscillating lights would alternately illuminate the two copies. Any differences between the two copies were easily seen as flickering. For the rest of the decade and into the 1950s reports of his progress, both in developing a working collator, and in actually collating the First Folio, began to trickle from the Folger, intriguing scholars with what it promised for both Shakespeare studies, and for bibliography in general.
"Interest in his device grew, and in the early 1950s he formed a partnership with Arthur M. Johnson, a retired naval engineer. Hinman held the patent for the collator and drummed up its initial customers, while Johnson built, modified, and sold them. Over the next three decades over forty collators were built and installed by Johnson at various locations around the country and around the world, and used to collate a wide variety of books, texts, and documents. As Matthew Bruccoli, the Emily Brown Jefferies Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of South Carolina, explains, "By the 1960s it wasn't respectable for a major library not to have a Hinman Collator." It is widely believed that even the CIA purchased a Hinman collator for examining forgeries and other purposes although, not surprisingly, the agency refuses to comment on the matter ....
"While Johnson was busy building and installing Hinman Collators for clients far a wide, Charlton Hinman himself continued working his way through the Folger's many copies of the First Folio, noting any and all variants as he found them. The problem was, he simply didn't find that many of textual significance. He found so few of any substance in fact that, according to Steven Escar Smith, an expert on mechanical collation, "at one point he feared all his time and labor would be for naught. But instead he snatched, in the words of Fredson Bowers, victory from the jaws of defeat by using what evidence he did find to answer other questions."
