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Micromegas Introducing W. Watson-Baker’s 1935 book, World Beneath the Microscope, the English artist and critic William Gaunt wrote: We are no longer so excited as formerly by the account of trips on the surface … The mind is stretched, uncomfortably sometimes, but with a new fascination, to speed and profundity, to the thought of worlds that lie a million light-years away from us, to the worlds that recede in evolutionary time beneath the lens, to the thought even that they merge or that by some extraordinary trick of relativity the smaller may contain the large. There is an affinity between the telescope and the microscope, between the discovery of stellar space and the discovery of the atom.1 Watson-Baker’s book on microphotography appeared as the second of two volumes inaugurating a new series launched by The Studio publishing house under the rubric of “The New Vision.” Like its companion volume, Le Corbusier’s Aircraft, it was very much a meditation on seeing from above, a reflection on the affective and epistemic dimensions of looking downward. Gaunt’s announcement of cultural boredom with the horizontal, and the corresponding re-orientation of attention onto the vertical, invoked the notion that the view from above—together with its associated technologies—formed a peculiarly modern visual form. His richly articulated introduction certainly looked back to earlier arguments regarding elevated vision, but at the same time it presciently anticipated future expressions of the new adventure on the vertical, perhaps the most striking of which would be Charles and Ray Eames’s short film Powers of Ten. ...