“The Effect of Size on the Equipment of the Queen’s Dolls’ House”, 1924 ():
[cf. Galileo, Haldane, Hanson’s Age of Em ch6 “Scale § Bodies”; Claire L. Evans summary:
…But not even the most gifted among them would have been good enough for The Queen’s Doll’s House. This 8 foot-tall mansion, presented to Queen Mary of England “by her loyal subjects” in 1924, is almost certainly the most intricate dollhouse ever built. It has electricity, working elevators, and a basement livery full of royal limousines. Its silver taps run hot and cold water. The wine cellar contains real champagne, sherry, and kegs of beer. The paintings hanging throughout the house were produced by famous English painters of the day, and authors like Rudyard Kipling, G. K. Chesterton, and Joseph Conrad each contributed tiny leather-bound, hand-written books to the dollhouse’s 200-volume library. Every major firm in England produced 1⁄12th-scale versions of their products for the occasion. The entire inventory of the dollhouse spans two large volumes.
One of these volumes, The Book of the Queen’s Doll’s House, contains a fascinatingly weird essay by the engineer Mervyn O’Gorman on the “effect of size” on the dollhouse’s world. It’s a known bugbear in miniature-making that certain materials don’t perform well at scale: an inch-wide cotton coverlet sits on the dollhouse bed like a piece of cardboard, for example. But Mr. O’Gorman must have been the first writer to seriously consider the physics of the miniature.
According to his calculations, the little people living in the dollhouse—he called them “Dollomites”—would have the strength of 10 men. They’d eat 6 meals a day, leap staircases in a single bound, and have hearts like hummingbirds. Their voices would be inaudible to us; the gramophone and working pianos in their house would cause more pain than pleasure to their tiny ears. To the Dollomites, the paint on the walls would be a half-inch thick, and a single drop of water from the tap the size of a pear. Every glass of wine would be so viscous they’d have to suck it down. And forget about soup. “Cream or thick soup”, O’Gorman warns, “would be so sticky that the soup spoon would be found to lift the plate with it from the table.”
Of course, I find all this wonderful—I love it when someone takes an absurd premise seriously. But there’s something about this attempt in particular that I think gets at the fundamental appeal of miniatures, that is, the impossibility of ever inhabiting them.
In attempting a rational scientific study of the Queen’s dollhouse, O’Gorman accidentally created something utterly monstrous: a dollhouse world populated by whispering, ravenous, cream-sucking, super-strong freaks. It’s unholy, and that’s because dollhouses are not made to be lived in; they’re barely fun to play with. Dollhouses are for looking.]