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Enquire Within Upon Everything

Aidan

Aidan

master brummie
December 2010 will mark the 20th Anniversary of the World Wide Web, the system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet, now just known as the web or the internet.

English engineer and computer scientist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee had been involved much earlier - ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web.

The name was inspired by a book entitled "Enquire Within Upon Everything" first published in 1856 by Houlston and Sons of Paternoster Square in London, and then continuously reprinted in many new and updated editions as additional information and articles were added. The book was created with the intention of providing encyclopedic information on a topics as diverse as etiquette, parlour games, cake recipes, laundry tips, holiday preparation and first aid:

"Whether You Wish to Model a Flower in Wax;
to Study the Rules of Etiquette;
to Serve a Relish for Breakfast or Supper;
to Plan a Dinner for a Large Party or a Small One;
to Cure a Headache;
to Make a Will;
to Get Married;
to Bury a Relative;
Whatever You May Wish to Do, Make, or to Enjoy,
Provided Your Desire has Relation to the Necessities of Domestic Life,
I Hope You will not Fail to 'Enquire Within.'

You can read a version of it at https://books.google.com/books?id=M...ource=gbs_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false or, if you prefer at https://www.archive.org/stream/enquirewithinupo00philuoft#page/n3/mode/thumb

A great name for a book, the internet and this wonderful forum.....
 
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oh, one more thing....

Conway Berners-Lee (born 10 September 1921) is a British mathematician and computer scientist who worked in the team that developed the Ferranti Mark 1, the world's first commercial stored program electronic computer. He was born in Birmingham in 1921 and is the father of Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web.
 
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Tim's Mother, Mary Lee Woods, now Mrs C M Berners-Lee (born 12 March 1924, also in Birmingham) is a British mathematician and computer programmer who worked in a team that developed programs for the Manchester University Mark 1, Ferranti Mark 1 and Mark 1 Star computers. She is married to Conway Berners-Lee, also in the team. Their eldest son, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, invented the World Wide Web.

In 1942-1944 Mrs Berners-Lee took a wartime compressed two-year degree course in mathematics at the University of Birmingham. She then worked for the Telecommunications Research Establishment at Malvern until 1946 when she returned to take the third year of her degree. She worked at the Mount Stromlo Observatory in Canberra, Australia from 1947 to 1951 when she joined Ferranti in Manchester as a computer programmer.

What a family!
 
Although "Enquire Within Upon Everything" was published into the 1930s I believe, the advice may need to be taken with a pinch of salt:

1285 Mad Animals, Bite of -…..Tie a string tightly over the part cut out the bite and cauterize the wound with a red hot poker, lunar caustic, or Sir Wm Burnett's Disinfecting Fluid. Then apply a piece of “spongio piline”, give a purgative and plenty of warm drink. Whenever chloroform can be procured sprinkle a few drops upon a handkerchief and apply to the nose and mouth of the patient before cauterizing the wound. When breathing appears difficult cease application of the chloroform(!). A physician writing in the Times urges this course and states that there is no danger with ordinary care in application of the chloroform while cauterization may be more effectively performed.

As the inimitable Slim Pickens as Major T. J. "King" Kong said in "Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb": "Shoot, a fella' could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff"
 
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Thanks for this interesting thread, Aidan, and for adding to my knowledge of Birmingham mathematicians.

As you say, Conway Berners-Lee and Mary Lee Woods were computer scientists who worked together on the ground-breaking Ferranti Mark 1 computer at Manchester in the early 1950s. Of course their greatest collaborative project was their son Timothy John Berners-Lee (born in 1955 and later known as TimBL), who came up with the original proposal for the Internet in 1989. Though the Internet was the work of many minds, TimBL's design contained all the now familiar features, including HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language), HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) and URL (Uniform Resource Locator). It is hard to believe that the Internet is not yet 20 years old! TimBL is now the driving force in the creation of the "Semantic Web", which promises to be a significant advance on the Internet.

TimBL's mother Mary Lee Woods was one of a very small group indeed of female mathematicians of her generation. There are, however, quite a number of female computer pioneers, starting with the remarkable Augusta Ada King née Byron, Countess of Lovelace (1815-1852), the world's first computer programmer.

There appears to be some doubt as to Mary Lee Woods's birthplace, though she was certainly educated in Birmingham. Her parents were Bertie John Woods and Ida Frances Lee Burrows. Perhaps the helpful BHF genealogists can confirm her birthplace and give us other details of her early life. And can anyone find a picture of Mary Lee Woods?
 
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Getting back to the Internet of the 1850s, it is a remarkable fact that the book Enquire Within by Robert Kemp Philp (1819-1882) is available on the latter day Internet in multiple e-text versions. The earliest I have been able to discover is an American edition: Inquire Within For Anything You Want To Know (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1859), in which my eye was caught by the following article:
Advice to Young Ladies.

If you have blue eyes, you need not languish. If black eyes, you need not stare. If you have pretty feet there is no occasion to wear short petticoats. If you are doubtful as to that point, there can be no harm in letting them be long. If you have good teeth, do not laugh for the purpose of showing them. If you have bad ones, do no laugh less than the occasion may justify. If you have pretty hands and arms, there can be no objection to your playing on the harp if you play well. If they are disposed to be clumsy, work tapestry. If you have a bad voice rather speak in a low tone. If you have the finest voice in the world, never speak in a high tone. If you dance well, dance but seldom. If you dance ill, never dance at all. If you sing well, make no previous excuses. If you sing indifferently, hesitate not a moment when you are asked, for very few people are judges of singing, but everyone is sensible of a desire to please. If you would preserve beauty, rise early. If you would preserve esteem, be gentle. If you would obtain power, be condescending. If you would live happy, endeavour to promote the happiness of others.​
I don't think modern knowledge can add much to this advice, except perhaps to extend it equally to young gentlemen. ;)
 
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There is a birth registration for a Mary L Woods 2nd quarter 1924 Kings Norton vol 6d page 196. Not conclusive I know, but there are a few Mary Woods entries for about then.

Her father Bertie John Woods is in the 1911 census as a single 30 year old elementary school teacher at 5 Farley Street Leamington, with father John Henry Woods, 56, a Great Western engine driver (there's the steam element!) born Trowbridge, Wiltshire; mother Fanny Eliza Woods (nee Jenkins,52) born Chippenham, Wilts., they married 2nd q.1878 Highworth [district], Wilts.

There are a few siblings as well, Mabel Elizabeth (28), a domestic nurse born (as was Bertie) Swindon, Wilts; Arthur Thomas (26), an Ironmonger born Oxford; and Harold Albert Edward (14), a scholar born Birmingham.

There is also John Henry's grandson Ernest Jack Woods, born 1910, but the children listed are all single. The original 1911 document says that 7 children were still living of 8 born to John and Fanny, though, so he could be the son of an absent child.

The marriage of Conway M Berners-Lee and Mary L Woods is registered at Hampstead, Middlesex 3rd quarter 1954 vol 5c page 1925, and birth of son Timothy J Berners-Lee 2nd q.1955, Pancras (London) vol 5d page 521.
 
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Thanks for that research, Lloyd. Wikipedia gives Mary Lee Woods's date of birth as 12 March 1924, which is close to "2nd quarter 1924".
 
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In the 1901 census the Woods family are at 78 Whitmore Road, (right of the Ivy growth!) which runs between Coventry Rd and Glovers Rd, so it is likely that father John worked from Tyseley Loco Depot at the time. (Steam AND a Birmingham connection now, as all 7 children are with them.)
 
Who was Robert Kemp Philp, the compiler of Enquire Within? The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography tells the story:
Philp, Robert Kemp (1819–1882), Chartist and compiler of reference works, was born in Falmouth on 14 June 1819, the son of Henry Philp (1793–1836). His grandfather, Robert Kemp Philp (1769–1850), was the Unitarian minister of Falmouth and one of the earliest supporters of ragged schools.

Philp was apprenticed in 1835 to a printer in Bristol, and afterwards settled as a newsvendor in Bath, where he was once fined for selling a Sunday newspaper; on refusing to pay, he was condemned to the stocks for two hours. He became a well-known Chartist, regularly contributing to the movement's journals and editing, with Henry Vincent, the National Vindicator, a Bath weekly newspaper, which appeared in 1841–1842. Prominently involved in the campaign on behalf of the leader of the Newport rising, John Frost, he was arrested in early 1840, but charges were dropped. Philp's prominence was confirmed by his election in mid-1841 to the executive committee of the National Charter Association. A supporter of a cross-class alliance, in the spring of 1842 he signed the declaration drawn up by Joseph Sturge and was appointed a delegate to the conference called by Sturge in Birmingham in December 1842. Philp did not believe he was abandoning his Chartist principles. He was a member of the National Convention which sat in London in April 1842, and is credited with having drawn up the second Chartist petition, signed by 3,317,752 persons. His support for Sturge's complete suffrage union, however, resulted in a bitter row with Feargus O'Connor and his removal from the Chartist executive.

No longer a Chartist, Philp moved to Fetter Lane in London in 1845 and began a career as a publisher of popular literature. He was sub-editor of the People's Journal from 1846 to 1848 and then launched the Family Friend, successively a monthly, fortnightly, and weekly periodical; he was its editor from 1849 to 1852. It had an enormous sale. Similar serials followed: the Family Tutor (1851–1853), the Home Companion (1852–1856), and the Family Treasury (1853–1854). Philp then began to compile cheap practical handbooks; in many cases these were issued in monthly numbers at 2d. The most popular, Enquire Within Upon Everything, appeared in 1856; a sixty-fifth edition followed in 1882, and by 1888 over a million copies had been sold. Another best-seller from 1856 was The Reason Why, which sought to answer common queries. This compilation heralded a "Reason Why" series of volumes dealing with such topics as domestic science (1857), the Bible (1859), natural history (1860), Christian denominations (1860), the garden and the farm (1860), and physical geography and geology (1863). His dictionaries of daily wants (1859), of useful knowledge (1858–1862; issued in monthly parts), and of medical and surgical knowledge (1862–1864; issued in monthly parts), and The Lady's Every-day Book (1873) were also popular.

In addition to Philp's various dictionaries, he also compiled travel guides, notably a series in the 1870s for the various railway companies. Finally, at least five songs by him were set to music, and he wrote poetry and a comedy in two acts, The Successful Candidate (1852). Philp died at 21 Claremont Square, Islington, on 30 November 1882, aged sixty-three, and was buried at Highgate. He left an only son.​
R K Philp's connection with the prominent Birmingham Quaker abolitionist and social reformer Joseph Sturge (1793-1859) is an unexpected discovery!

Mr Philp published a companion volume to Enquire Within, entitled The Interview (London: Houlston and Stoneman, [1856]), containing similar words of wisdom in longer articles. Pictured below is an example from the section warning the reader about fraudulent advertisements.
 
Thanks for all that information Aiden it is very reassuring to know that not only did Birmingham lead the Industrial Revolution of the 18th/19th centrey but we had a Brummie leading the software revolution of the 20th/21st centrey too.
paul
 
Many thanks Aidan et all. I think I'll read this fascinating Thread instead of the Times this morning...I have an extra hour to peruse too. Cheers gents.
 
I have a book CONSULT ME for all you want to know by the author of ENQUIRE WITHIN published in 1883
it was given as a christmas present in 1889 to my great aunt from my great grandfather its full of remedies
recepies card games and all sorts of things very interesting reading
astwood
 
"8. Lobsters - recently caught have always some remains of muscular action in the claws which may be excited by pressing the eyes with the finger. When this cannot be produced the lobster must have been too long kept...."

The Wholesale Fish Market in Bell Street (1869-1958) was a wonder of logistics considering the distance to the coast, but I wonder if the Costermongers allowed the poking of eyes?
 
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Thylacine said:
Thanks for that research, Lloyd. Wikipedia gives Mary Lee Woods's date of birth as 12 March 1924, which is close to "2nd quarter 1924".
Click to expand...

As Lloyd has shown, FreeBMD gives

Births Jun 1924
Woods Mary L Burrows King'sN 6d 196

I think the parents had up to 6 weeks to register their child so 12th Mar is well within the Apr-Jun registration
 
Aidan said:
December 2010 will mark the 20th Anniversary of the World Wide Web, the system of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet, now just known as the web or the internet.

English engineer and computer scientist, Sir Tim Berners-Lee had been involved much earlier - ENQUIRE, a database and software project he had built in 1980, was a simple hypertext program that had some of the same ideas as the Web and the Semantic Web.
Click to expand...

Berners-Lee didn't do it all on his own he had some help from a Belgian friend, Robert Cailliau, who also designed the WWW logo. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Cailliau
 
astwood said:
I have a book CONSULT ME for all you want to know by the author of ENQUIRE WITHIN published in 1883
it was given as a christmas present in 1889 to my great aunt from my great grandfather its full of remedies
recepies card games and all sorts of things very interesting reading
astwood
Click to expand...

I think these old advice books are most interesting. They contain a host of sociological information that is important to understand the lives of our relatives in the past, if not a little amusing or amazing in comparison with our own lives. These days if we want to know how to pick lobsters for example, we look on the internet and hope we find an authoritative source (thanks to Berners-Lee, Calliau, etc) out of the 1000s of search returns.

I think it would be interesting to review some of the historical info from Enquire/Inquire within, Consult me, People's Journal, Family Friend, Family Tutor, Home Companion, Family Treasury, Reason why, dictionary of daily wants/useful knowledge/medical and surgical knowledge, Lady's Every-day Book , etc....... So apart from what to do if bitten by a mad animal and how to buy a fresh lobster - is there any other gems contained wthin?
 
i remember the first computer installed in the Medical Physics Department of the then New Maternity hospital in 1968. It was a DEC I think. Big jobby. Blinking lights everywhere. Two big thick silver disks. Had the computing power of a modern wristwatch I think. Cost £12000. Those were the days. Lessons in BASIC. Then MUMPS. Then the Atari and the BBC and the Apple II. Those were the days...seemple.
 
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thanks for the link Aiden.:thumbsup:.brilliant ..trouble is there are loads of books for me on there;):) so i am gonna be very busy reading them
 
Glad you liked.

I think Black Hog Pudding would excite the Umami taste receptors, only recently recognized in the West (had to go to the modern Enquire Within About Everything for that word....)
 
Dennis Williams said:
i remember the first computer installed in the Medical Physics Department of the then New Maternity hospital in 1968. It was a DEC I think. Big jobby. Blinking lights everywhere. Two big thick silver disks. Had the computing power of a modern wristwatch I think. Cost £12000. Those were the days. Lessons in BASIC. Then MUMPS. Then the Atari and the BBC and the Apple II. Those were the days...seemple.
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MUMPS - I remember that. And floppy disks as big as your arm, they've got it soft these days with iPhone and memory sticks...

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas J Watson, President of IBM, 1943

“Computers in the future will weigh no more than 1.5 tons.”
Popular Mechanics, 1949

“It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it’s possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in five years.”
John von Neumann, 1949

“Transmission of documents via telephone wires is possible in principle, but the apparatus required is so expensive that it will never become a practical proposition.”
Dennis Gabor, 1962 (Nobel prize winner for Holography)

“There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home.”
Ken Olsen, co-founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977

“640kB should be enough for anyone.”
Bill Gates, 1981

etc......
 
#1750. Love's Telegraph - If a gentleman wants a wife he wears a ring on the first finger of the left hand, if he be engaged he wears it on the second finger, if married on the third and on the fourth if he never intends to be married. When a lady is not engaged she wears a hoop or diamond on her first finger, if engaged on the second, if married on the third and on the fourth if she intends to die unmarried. When a gentleman presents a fan, flower or trinket to a lady with the left hand, this on his part is an overture of regard should she receive it with the left hand it is considered as an acceptance of his esteem but if with the right hand it is a refusal of the offer. Thus by a few simple tokens explained by rule, the passion of love is expressed and through the medium of the telegraph the most timid and diffident man may without difficulty communicate his sentiments of regard to a lady and in case his offer should be refused avoid experiencing the mortification of an explicit refusal.

Wish I'd known that as it would have saved many a mortification. I just wear the ring through me nose it's easier - does anybody else recognise these symbols? It would be interesting to know when they started to die out (I'm guessing before WWII, possibly 20s?).
 
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Aidan said:
MUMPS -

“I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.”
Thomas J Watson, President of IBM, 1943.............
Click to expand...

Six very good reasons for keeping your mouth shut when the urge to pontificate about something becomes very strong. Even the Great and the Good can open their mouths wide enough to get both feet inside.:blush:
 
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Arkrite said:
Six very good reasons for keeping your mouth shut when the urge to pontificate about something becomes very strong. Even the Great and the Good can open their mouths wide enough to get both feet inside.:blush:
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When will we learn and who knows what the future will bring? I am sure in 50 years time the mobile phone and iPad will seem amusingly quaint whatever the replacement technology.

Personally I lose track once the technology evolves beyond moving parts. Babbage's difference engine and Tommy Flowers "Heath Robinson" (predecessor to the code breaking Colossus that he developed for von Neumann at Bletchley Park), which basically was built out of the spare parts tray of a Strowger Telephone Exchange", may have been complex but one could at least have some chance of understanding its operation without bumbling into relativity and fundamental particles.
 
Floppies...We bought our first computer from Santa Monica, LA in 1979 from Radio Shack (24k I think) it cost a $1000.00 and programs were loaded from cassette tapes. The first thing my husband did when we got it back to Brum was take it apart - I remember squirming on the sofa as I watched (or couldn't watch) thinking we just paid 1000 bucks for this thing and now he's going to break it (but, he didn't). My husband wrote a disassembly for the TRS-80. It took about a week to print out, with the teleprinter chugging away in our garage.
Aidan said:
MUMPS - I remember that. And floppy disks as big as your arm...
Click to expand...
 
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My website 'The Fashion Page' was the first fashion related site on the web, first published August 1994. It was made possible by the browser 'Mosaic' this made it possible to publish photos and videos. Before that I had a moderated mailing list. The web was a much friendlier place then.
 
Thylacine said:
Of course their greatest collaborative project was their son Timothy John Berners-Lee, who came up with the original proposal for the Internet in 1989. Though the Internet was the work of many minds, TimBL's design contained all the now familiar features, including HTML (Hyper Text Mark-up Language), HTTP (Hyper Text Transfer Protocol) and URL (Uniform Resource Locator). It is hard to believe that the Internet is not yet 20 years old!
Click to expand...

Sorry, but this is not true. Tim Berners Lee did NOT come up with the idea of the internet in 1989.

He came up with the idea of the Word Wide Web in 1989, the internet had been around for decades before that, probably from about the 1950s onwards, growing and developing.

When talking about who did what it is important to separate the Internet from the World Wide Web.

The internet is a collection of computers that communicate via tcp/ip and technolgies like ftp and email existed long before Tim Berners Lee came up with the World Wide Web.

In fact if you read the History of the Internet here you can see a lot went on before Tim Berners Lee's name is mentioned, and that is right at the end.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet#History

The World Wide Web and technologies like browsers, HTML, hyperlinks, web servers etc was what Tim Berners Lee invented, and all this sits ON TOP of the existing internet.

I guess the best way of thinking about it is that the interent can exist without the World Wide Web, but the World Wide Web cannot exist without the internet.

There is no doubt though that Tim Berners Lee's inventions (working with others I am sure) made the whole internet easier to use and accessable to many more people. We would not be sitting here looking at this forum without Tim Berners Lee (along with the thousands of others who helped create the internet).
 
Hi Guilbert - As I said in post-1 and you say yourself, the WWW or web is synonymous with the internet now. If you mentioned ARPANET outside, people would think you were talking about SKYNET, the internet that becomes sentient in the Terminator movie.

Fashionz - you had amazing experience pre-WWW and you are dead right that it was a smaller and happier place then but as I sure you will testify a much different one, slower and needing knowledge of where to browse. I used to have a punched-tape roll that would print an "artistic" sketch of a lady on the teleprinter over some hours, wonder where that went...
 
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