Gnomons and Sausage Fingers

I like to experiment with photography. And I've always enjoyed doing daft things with the panorama function on my phone. When I was visiting the Outer Hebrides, just before Covid, I tried to spell out 'YMCA' using multiple exposures of myself running behind the person panning the camera. All went well until I tripped over on the 'A'.

(Click on the images to see a larger version) 

I was inspired to try the idea in remembrance of old school photographs I've seen where some inventive kid on the far left ran behind the class and reappeared duplicated on the right. Those old motorised cameras worked just like the panorama function in modern phones in that they panned from left to right. Here's a good example:

   

I then discovered that you can make the end of your finger grow by keeping it just in shot as you pan right. Thus was the 'sausage finger' born.

However, on a slightly more serious note, this idea of panning from left to right got me thinking ... 

Why is 'left to right' the norm? Why not right to left?

Why does marching start with the left foot and then left-right-left?

Why do we write from left to right? Some will tell you it's because the majority of us are right-handed and that the first written languages were carved into stone when the right hand held the hammer. But that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The oldest version of English we have is a runic script called futhark and its earliest inscriptions run right to left. I suspect the change of direction came when, via Latin and the church, we adopted the Roman alphabet (which in turn was based on Greek) which ran left to right. 

 

But this isn't universal. Some written scripts run right to left (Chinese books start at the back and the spine is on the right), some top to bottom and some - like ancient boustrophedon - had lines that ran alternately from right to left and left to right (the name of the language translates as 'ox-turning' as the lines mimicked the way fields are ploughed). Meanwhile, the reason why many East Asian languages were written top to bottom and right to left may be because they were recorded on bamboo scrolls and it was easier for the right handed writer to control the paper with their left. But no one is really sure.

Left-handedness was, as I'm sure you know, once seen as a 'defect' and children were forced to learn to use their right. Being a Leftie was viewed as abnormal or strange. Even the word sinister comes to us from the Latin for 'left'. The opposite was dexter from which we have derived words like 'dextrous' and 'dexterity'. Even in English the word for the direction "right" also means 'correct' or 'proper'. 

This book was written in 1935 when left-handedness was a 'disease' that needed to be recognised and treated as seriously as rickets, pneumonia and colic. Apparently it would 'disable' you in the workplace and ruin your chances to be successful. 

Oh really? It didn't seem to 'disable' the careers of Albert Einstein, Paul McCartney,  Julia Roberts, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Napoleon, Plato, Leonardo da Vinci, Marie Curie, Barack Obama, Rembrandt, Angelina Jolie, Van Gogh, Neil Armstrong, David Bowie or Lady Gaga. Not to mention SpongeBob Squarepants, Peter Griffin and Bart Simpson.

Oh, and a belated Happy Left-Handers Day to you all for yesterday (August 13th).

But none of this is enough to explain the dominance of left to right. We count left to right too. And we lay out our alphabet the same way. And why do the hands of a clock go clockwise? That's another form of left to right - the hands are always travelling right. 

I assume it's because it mirrors the passage of the Sun across the sky in the northern hemisphere. Some of our earliest timepieces were sundials, developed in ancient Egypt, and the shadow of the gnomon (the sticky-up bit that casts a shadow) travels clockwise as the sun moves through the sky. Therefore when mechanical clocks were being developed in mediaeval times, their hands were engineered to turn in the same direction. 

But if that's the case ... would the hands go anti-clockwise if clocks had been invented in the douthern hemisphere, ? After all, sundials work the opposite way down there - the gnomon points south and the shadow crosses the hour lines in an anti-clockwise direction.

Sadly, we'll never know as most timekeeping devices invented in the southern hemisphere worked on non-astronomical principles, such as burning candles or water clocks. Even hourglasses weren't used in places like China and India before the mid-16th century because they hadn't discovered how to make clear glass. Although China was, in many ways, a more advanced civilisation than a lot of its contemporaries (inventing gunpowder, paper, kites, printing, the compass etc.) glass blowing didn't appear there around the 6th century CE. Consequently, they never had glass clear enough for optical use and they soon began to lag behind the northern hemisphere in the fields of chemistry, astronomy, microscopy and more. 

As thought experiments go, it's interesting to imagine what the world would have been like if the south had led the way rather than the north. With clear glass, China would have surged ahead much faster than the countries in the northern hemisphere and they might well have become the dominant culture of the world. And if they'd invented the clock, our timepieces might all be running backwards. They'd be anti-clocks.

Perhaps too, with southern dominance, our globes and maps would be re-oriented. After all, we only show the North Pole at the top because cartography was invented in the north. There's no scientific reason for north to be 'up' or south to be 'down' (and, indeed, the poles have switched many times during Earth's long history and we're overdue another). Australia is only 'down under' from our northern perspective. In space there's no up or down and you can approach our planet from any direction. 

So, the image we have of the world is actually an artificial construct that we learn to accept from a young age here in the north. Similarly, I expect that the idea of 'left to right' is a similar construct that gets drummed into us as we learn the language. 

Many years ago when I first started to study human behavioural science, I was told that when most people enter a shop - particularly supermarkets - they walk to the right and gradually work their way over the left. It was suggested that it was because the vast majority of the population is right-handed. The 'invariant right' principle, as it became known, was taught as gospel truth in ergonomics and shop design.

However, I quickly came to realise that this simply wasn't true. And l suspected that the reported behaviour was probably due more to human social conditioning than to some inherent natural urge. You see, most big supermarket chains are owned by countries, like America, where people drive on the right. Consequently, my local ASDA - part of the US mega-brand Walmart chain - herds you round to the right and the tills are on the left. 

But here in the UK we drive on the left. And, in my local British-owned Coop store, everyone turns left and the tills are on the right of the store. My nearest Waterstones bookshop has the tills on the right. So does my bakery, my chip shop, my Post Office, my bank, my butcher, my card shop, my hardware store and even my charity shop. So if a shop follows a British plan, it'll probably be laid out differently to a plan brought in from another country. And the design of your store layout will guide shoppers in the direction you want them to go. 

People don't decide which way to go on instinct it seems. We probably write the way we do because of the materials we had at our disposal. We mark the passage of time by the left to right movement of the sun across the sky. And what nudges a shopper to turn left or right (or indeed straight ahead) is more dependent on visual cues and how the store is laid out than any natural behaviour coded into our DNA. 

It's extraordinary where a chain of thought, and silly use of a camera app, can take you isn't it?

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Afterword: A few years ago I wrote two books that took the reader on a series of connected trains of thought, just like this blogpost. Though both are technically now out of print, both Joined-Up Thinking and Colgan's Connectoscope are still available through sites like Amazon, Word of Books, Hive etc. If you have a few spare pennies (the books are quite cheap these days) and you enjoy trivia, give them a go. I was once one of the 'elves' that research and write the TV show QI you know ...