Leon Battista Alberti made several references to miracoli della pittura (miracles of painting) in two of his early works, Vita (Life) and De Pictura (On Painting). After extensive research, author Jim Egan has concluded that these "miracles of painting" were the amazing full-detail and full-color images seen in a camera obscura. In Latin, camera obscura means "dark room." In a dark room with one small hole, the image of what's outside appears projected on the interior wall upside-down and reversed left-to-right. The room can be a people-sized room or a small box, like a pinhole camera. Nowadays, with slide shows, movies, TV, and computers, we're quite accustomed to seeing projected images. But over 575 years ago, back in the 1430s, a camera obscura image would have blown the socks off people. However, there was a down side: this was risky business. Creating full-color, full-motion, magical images inside a dark room might be considered heretical. You might find yourself on the wrong side of a barbecue. If you're so excited that you must share your knowledge, there's a solution: write about it cryptically. Only those "in-the-know" will catch your gist. That's what Egan thinks Alberti did. Alberti, whose books On Painting and On Architecture revolutionized these two fields, has been explored extensively by art historians for years. Surely they saw that Alberti was talking about a camera obscura. But no. Dozens of the top art historians of the 20th century write that Alberti's description of his "small box" was definitely not a reference to a camera obscura. Instead, they think it was a "show box," a small dark box with a small hole through which you viewed a picture, which was painted on glass and backlit to make it luminous, like a photographic slide. Who is Jim Egan to challenge great art historians like Kenneth Clark, Helmut Gernsheim, Samuel Edgerton, Anthony Grafton, and Robert Tavernor? For 40 years, Egan has been an in-the-trenches guy: a professional photographer, spending hours viewing upside-down images under the dark cloth of 4x5 and 8x10 view cameras. He has built dozens of pinhole cameras, camera obscura rooms, and even a camera obscura building. Plus, he's written ten books involving Renaissance optics, mathematics and architecture. How did the art historians get it wrong? The short answer is: "lost in translation" and "follow the leader." Egan thinks Alberti not only had a camera, but that he also had a lens to sharpen the image. And that Alberti had another camera obscura, which was a "Lucy" machine, used to enlarge and reduce artwork. And that Alberti hid clues expressing his understanding that "the eye is a camera obscura" in the design of his "Winged Eye" symbol and his bronze self-portrait plaque (both shown on the front cover).

Clues in the historical record and a close study of the design of the Newport Tower in Touro Park, Newport, R.I. have led me to conclude it was built to be the city-center of the first Elizabethan colony in the New World in 1583. The colonizing effort ultimately failed, but the solidly-built structure remained. The architect of the Tower, the polymath John Dee, even provided an "Owner's Manual" containing cryptic clues about how the Tower functioned, as well as a "hidden blueprint" of its dimensions. The Elizabethan State Papers reveal that in 1583, Narragansett Bay was called the Dee River, so-named this by Dee himself. It was the destination of Sir Humphrey Gilbert's expedition with 5 ships and 280 men John Dee was the legal, navigational and cartographical mastermind behind the the mastermind of the colonization effort. And it was John Dee who coined the term, "The British Empire," which later grew to be the largest empire the world has ever known.

Modernizations of his Main Mathematical Masterpieces 1558 (and 1568) Propaedeumata Aphoristica (in Latin) Propaedeumata Aphoristica (translated into English) 1564 Monas Hieroglyphica (in Latin) Monas Hieroglyphica (translated into English) 1570 Preface to Euclid (in Elizabethan English) Preface to Euclid (in Modern English) 1573 A Certain Essence of Parallax 1577 General and Rare Memorials pertaining to the Art of Navigation 1580 Map of North America 1583 Calendar Treatise Calendar Treatise (in Modern English) 1592 Compendious Rehearsal 1594 Discourse Apologetical Discourse Apologetical (in Modern English)