The Man Who Saw With His Ears

Joseph Plateau took his doctorate at Liège in 1829 and, that summer, decided to find out how long the retina holds an image. He stared at the noonday sun for twenty-five seconds. He was blind for several days, recovered partially, and by 1843, at forty-two, was totally blind for life.

The University of Ghent promoted him to full professor the next year.

He kept working. He had invented the phenakistiscope, the spinning disc of slits and pictures that taught the world how to fake motion, and he never saw a moving image. He turned instead to soap films. He had formulated a soap-and-glycerin solution that held a film for up to eighteen hours, and he wanted to know what shapes a film took on a wire frame at equilibrium. So his son Felix, his son-in-law Van der Mensbrugghe, and his colleagues dipped the frames. They held them up and called out every angle and curve they saw. What it sounded like in that room is not recorded. He listened. He dictated. Out of it came Plateau's Laws.

In 1873, thirty years after losing his sight, he published a two-volume treatise on the whole business.

A century later a mathematician named Jean Taylor proved every word of it correct.