She was given as a dowry
There was one mirror;
The mirror property had:
It speaks skillfully.
A. S. Pushkin. The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Heroes (1833)
Perhaps an ordinary mirror, familiar and familiar to us from childhood, is the first magical object created by man. The ability to show the world around us and, above all, what we cannot see - our own face, isn't it a miracle? The natives of Africa, Australia and Oceania gave everything they had to the colonialists for these small fragments of glass.
But there are mirrors that have properties that are hard to believe until you see them with your own eyes. And they appeared long before Alexander Sergeevich Pushkin invented a mirror capable of both seeing what is very far away and talking about it.
The mirror, which you will learn about in this article, does not know how to talk, but it can show what is inaccessible to the eye. Agree, this is not a small thing for a subject that they knew how to do tens of centuries before the writing of "The Tale of the Dead Princess and the Seven Heroes."
Promotional video:
Several years ago I accidentally heard that in China, ancient temples keep mirrors that can show where Buddha lives. Then I wrote a letter about this to my friend, a puzzle lover, a professor at a university in Nanjing, to China, but he replied that he had not heard anything about such things. Years passed, and suddenly my old Chinese friend, whose name is San Yanzi and who is now 70 years old, said that he wanted to send me a Chinese bronze mirror, which I asked about once, as a gift. If this mirror is directed at the sun, and the reflected "bunny" is directed at a white wall or a sheet of paper, then an image will appear on them, which is not on the polished face of the mirror.
Soon, a package arrived with a round bronze plate 7 cm in diameter, polished on the front side so that it could be used like a mirror (see photo). The front side of the mirror was slightly convex, and the back side was decorated with a bas-relief with hieroglyphs, covered with patina - green oxides that appear on old bronze objects.
You can understand my excitement when I pointed the mirror at the sun and put a sheet of paper under the "sunbeam". On paper I saw an image … Not a Buddha, but only hieroglyphs, but I saw it! The image was!
What does science say about magic mirrors from China? It turned out that dozens of articles and books have been written on this topic. The first report was published in the British Journal of Philosophy in 1832, and the last article on unusual mirrors can be read on the Internet today. And almost every author believed that he had found a solution to the mystery. Then a scientific work appeared with a new version, and therefore, for most scientists, magic mirrors remain a mystery to this day.
In the homeland of these mirrors, in China, they are covered with the glory of ancient legends. One of them says: once the emperor's wife was sitting in the garden on a sunny day and doing her usual thing - admiring herself in a bronze mirror. Then she knelt him down. A ray of the sun reflected from the mirror onto the white wall of the palace, and an image of a dragon appeared in a bright circle on the wall. The drawing of the dragon exactly repeated the relief of the reverse side of the mirror! This is how the magical property of Chinese mirrors was first discovered.
Since then, magic mirrors in China are called "transparent bronze mirrors", and the origin of the Chinese proverb "In the sun, the truth always comes out" is explained by them.
Bronze (an alloy of copper, lead and tin) was invented in China around 2000 BC, but the oldest magical mirrors found dates back to 500 AD. It was discovered during excavations of the tomb of a noble nobleman in southern China. The next mirror was in the tomb of a Tang emperor who died around 950 AD. With him in the same grave there were 26 of his wives, aged 13 to 26, who had no right to live after the death of her husband-emperor. And all wives have only one magic mirror. That's how few of them were then.
But after 500 years, during the reign of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644), magic mirrors have ceased to be a great rarity for the rulers of China, and mirrors of this particular era can now be seen in the largest museums in the world.
Perhaps the secret of the appearance of the image on the mirror was not known to the Chinese masters themselves. The fact is that, on average, only one in a hundred mirrors made showed magical abilities. The first attempts to explain their cause were made back in the XI century by the Chinese scientist Shen Kua. He believed that when casting, the thinner part of the mirror cools faster than the thicker one, which leads to small, imperceptible surface curvatures. Ancient Chinese poets gave their own, poetic explanations for the "transparency" of metal mirrors. These explanations to the poet Kin Ma, for example, were enough for a whole poem.
The Englishman John Swinton is the first European known to us who saw a magic mirror. He bought it in 1831-1832 in India in Calcutta, where it came from China, and immediately sent the mirror to England to David Brewster. Sir David Brewster (1781-1868) was a Scottish physicist known for his discoveries in the field of light polarization. By the way, he invented the kaleidoscope toy we loved since childhood and was the author of several more optical toys. Sir David examined the received mirror and published the report in the Philosophical Journal. The report began with the message that this mirror "… surprised amateurs and bewildered the philosophers of Calcutta." And then Sir David revealed the secret. In his opinion, the image generated by the mirror is not associated with the pattern on the reverse side, but is applied with a weak acid solution to the front surface, after which it is polished. Finally, he recommended organizing the production and sale of such mirrors in England, which would be very profitable. But instead of mirrors according to his recipe, other scientific reports with different recipes appeared in Europe.
In 1844, the famous French astronomer Arago, one of the founders of the photographic process, spoke about magic mirrors at a meeting of the French Academy of Sciences. In Paris, apart from Arago, the famous French mathematician Marquis de Lagrange already had such a mirror.
A sensational article, as they would say now (and possibly as true as the current sensations), was published in the popular German magazine "Garden Gazebo" in 1877 by the then famous writer Carus Stern. He found in the Roman writer Aulus Gellius, who lived in the II-III centuries AD, the phrase about "mirrors, some of which reflect their reverse side, and some do not." Stern also unearthed the records of the Italian historian Muratori that a magic mirror was found under the pillow of a certain Bishop from Verona, who was later condemned to death. And finally, in the same article, it was reported that in an ancient Chinese book dating back to the 9th century AD, there is a mention of a magic mirror.
But near China, in Japan, events developed in a different way. In Japanese sources from ancient times to the second half of the 19th century, no mention of magic mirrors was found. But already in the middle of that century, mirrors made in Japan were brought to Europe. Apparently, Japanese craftsmen managed to get a manufacturing method from China or learned how to make them themselves. In 1877 a whole exhibition of magic mirrors from Japan was organized in London.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, most scientists from both the West and the East believed that a magic mirror was made in the following way. After casting, the master first processed the back of the mirror with a steel tool, making the relief drawing of higher quality. Then he placed the mirror on the table with the back side down and began to sand the front side, pressing hard on it. At the same time, the thinner parts of the mirror, located above the relief depressions, sagged slightly and were less exposed to the abrasive effect. After polishing, they straightened and protruded slightly above the middle level of the mirror. As a result, figures of convex micromirrors appeared on the front surface, corresponding to the relief of the image on the reverse side of the product. These micromirrors were supposed, according to scientists, to form an image inside the "sunbeam". The explanation sounded authoritativebut no one could show even one mirror made in Europe or America in this or any other way.
And in China, they have already found a magic mirror with a diameter of 52 cm, weighing more than 12 kg and a thickness of 1.3 cm. With such a layer of bronze, the explanation of European scientists looked unconvincing.
But it was not this gigantic mirror that caused confusion among specialists, but the fact that mirrors were found in which the pattern in the "sunbeam" did not match the relief on the reverse side of the mirror! For example, in one Buddhist temple a mirror was kept, on the back of which the moon was shown shining over the sea, and in the reflected sunbeam on the wall of the temple there was a figure of Buddha in a lotus flower.
The magic mirror, as it were, laughed at the entire Western scientific world. New unusual finds could cause a new wave of interest in the mirror, but this did not happen, as first the First and then the Second World Wars broke out. Apart from an article published in 1932 by the English crystallographer Sir William Bragg in the twentieth century, there were no reports of magic mirrors until 1958. But the worst thing is that both in China and in Japan, mirrors ceased to be produced, since those few masters who knew how to make them died or were killed.
In 1961, the Prime Minister of Communist China, Zhou Enlai, visited the Shanghai Museum, became interested in magic mirrors, and gave instructions to restore their production. Several universities and technical institutes have been entrusted with this work. For two years, publications appeared in the press about their work, in which they presented mainly negative results of experiments. Chinese scientists from different institutions conducted research independently, each trying to find his own method and criticizing colleagues. Two years later, publications stopped and new Chinese mirrors appeared, which were in no way inferior to the ancients. The image reflected by them may or may not correspond to the relief on the back of the mirror. Where and how the new mirrors were made and the whole history of their reconstruction were shrouded in the strictest mystery. From the correspondence with my Chinese colleague, I learned that now they are made in the city of Yangzhou.
So, over the past century and a half, dozens of scientists have been solving the magic mirror. Many of them were convinced that they had solved the secret. But it was only in China that they learned to make mirrors equal to the ancients. The method found in modern China remains inaccessible to world science, and therefore today it is only possible to list the manufacturing methods proposed for a century and a half, especially since each of them claims to be authentic.
So, the possible ways to produce magic mirrors.
1. When casting, thinner parts of the mirror cool faster than thicker parts, which leads to surface deformation. Since this process depends on many factors, only one or two out of a hundred mirrors seem to become "magic" by themselves.
2. A drawing is engraved on the front side of the mirror, which is then filled with another grade of bronze and polished.
3. A pattern is cut out on the front side of the mirror, then the surface is covered with mercury amalgam and polished.
4. The pattern on the face of the mirror is etched with acid or other chemicals and then polished.
5. The pattern is cut on the back of the mirror, which causes irregularities when polishing the front surface.
6. The pattern is stamped on the face of the mirror, and then the surface is polished.
Now many are inclined to believe that magic mirrors can be made in different, almost all of the above ways. Only for some reason no one can prove this by making a mirror that demonstrates something new, for example, the Eiffel Tower.
Continuing scientific research raises new doubts. In 1999, two scientists: Doctor of Sciences M. G. Tomilin from the State Optical Institute. SI Vavilova and J. Science of the University of California cut a magic mirror to check if there are metal irregularities in the places that project the image. We used the latest method for revealing the structural inhomogeneity of the material using thin layers of nematic (I do not know what it is) liquid crystals by observing them in a polarizing microscope. Results: it was not possible to reveal structural inhomogeneities of the surface of the mirror section, and, as it should be in science, another publication on magic mirrors appeared. It begins like this: “In the history of optics it is hardly possible to find such a fascinating mystery,which can be compared with the riddle of the magic mirrors of the East, although mankind has been struggling for almost four millennia to explain their amazing properties. This was written on the eve of the XXI century.
And what about Russia? On the territory of our homeland there is a place that few people know about, but which keeps many mysteries, including those related to mirrors. This place is called the Minusinsk Basin. It is located in Siberia, 300 km south of Krasnoyarsk, upstream of the Yenisei. Surprisingly, in these harsh places, archaeologists have found traces of cultures created by our ancestors, starting from the XIV century BC.
The production of bronze, according to historians, was there in the III millennium BC, that is, earlier than in China. There is a hypothesis that the Huns, who destroyed Ancient Rome, came from these places. For us, the most interesting thing is that more than 360 ancient bronze mirrors dating back to different eras have been found in the Minusinsk Basin. Either there was some kind of cult of mirrors here for millennia, or the women of the people who lived there were unusually flirtatious? Unknown …
When studying the mirrors of the Minusinsk Basin, historians, naturally, did not pay attention to their front side, covered with a layer of oxides, but were busy with drawings and inscriptions on the back side. And in museums, these mirrors lie face down. It never occurs to anyone that there may be some mystery hidden under the patina.
Museum employees try to keep things in the form in which they came to them, and the proposal to polish the face of the mirror, which is a thousand years old, sounds blasphemous to them. But if among 190 ancient bronze mirrors stored in the Minusinsk Museum of Local Lore, there are those whose front side is slightly convex, then there is a high probability that these are “magic mirrors”. And polishing can reveal their secret.
It is possible that among the readers there will be those who would like to penetrate into the secret of magic mirrors themselves. One of the ways of research is to try to make a magic mirror from … a coin or a medal. Indeed, according to the predictions of scientists, a stamped and then polished drawing can be seen in reflected light. And if you polish the coin until the picture disappears, then maybe it will again become visible in the "sunbeam"? You can grind the front side of the coin until the pattern on the back begins to show itself, and get a "magic transparent coin" in which the coat of arms of Russia or the USSR will be "visible" through a layer of metal. In both cases, the surface of the coin should be slightly convex, just as all magic mirrors are slightly convex. When polishing the top design, do not use much force. And if you try to make a "transparent coin", then when sanding you need to press harder on the surface to be treated, especially at the end of the work. The coin should be checked with a sunbeam, and the screen should be placed at different distances from it. Here are all the tips you can give. The rest is up to you. We wish you success and look forward to hearing about them.
A. KALININ