The Discoverers ← We Can Solve This

Had it been possible to calculate the year, the round of seasons, simply by multiplying the cycles of the moon, mankind would have been saved a lot of trouble. But we might also have lacked the incentive to study the heavens and to become mathematicians

As with many other crucial human achievements, we know the what, but remain puzzled still about the why, the how, and even the when.

the very purpose of a calendar—a time scheme to hold people together, to ease the making of common plans, such as agreements on the planting of crops and the delivery of goods

By the third century the seven-day week had become common in private life throughout the Roman Empire. Each day was dedicated to one of the seven planets. Those seven, according to the current astronomy, included the sun and the moon, but not the earth. The order in which planets governed the days of the week was: sun, moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn

When Christianity first took root in the Roman Empire, pious Church Fathers worried over the survival of the pagan gods in the names of the planets that governed the Christian week. The Eastern Church had some success in exterminating this pagan influence: the names of the days in both modern Greek and Russian ceased to be planetary.

Every conceivable human activity or experience—from the knotting of strings to the interpretation of dreams—has become an oracle, witnessing man’s desperate eagerness for clues to his future

In ancient Rome, astrology attained an influence seldom equaled in later centuries. Astrologers—called Chaldaei after the Chaldean or Babylonian origins of the science, or Mathematici from their astronomical calculations —were a recognized profession whose repute varied with the turbulent times. Under the Roman Republic they became so powerful and so unpopular that in 139 B.C. they were expelled not only from Rome but from all Italy.

While the ancients measured the year and the month, and set the pattern for our week, the shorter units of time remained vague and played little part in the common human experience until the last few centuries.

It would have been much simpler to make a water clock measure off a fixed, unchanging unit. But centuries passed before abstracted time was captured by a machine that measured something other than a fragment of daylight or darkness

the water clock as an everyday timer. Their picturesque name, klepsydra, meaning water-thief, would designate the device for centuries to come

They used their water clock to limit the times for pleading in Athenian courts. The surviving court clocks flow for about six minutes. Demosthenes in his legal speeches, referring to the time running out in the water clock, often asked that the flow of the water be stopped while he read from laws or depositions so that his speaking time would not be used up.

Even at the end of the fourth century B.C. they formally divided their day into only two parts: before midday (ante meridiem, A.M.) and after midday (post meridiem, P.M.).

Since no one in Rome could know the exact hour, promptness was an uncertain, and uncelebrated, virtue.

A lawyer might ask the judge to grant him an additional “six clepsydrae,” or about two of our modern hours, to make his case. A particularly long-winded advocate was once actually granted sixteen water clocks—five hours!

While the Romans doubtless shared our view that “time is money,” they often equated time with water. In Rome the phrase aquam dare, “to grant water,” meant to allot time to a lawyer, while aquam perdere, “to lose water,” meant to waste time.

, was measuring a ship’s speed. Knots were tied at seven-fathom intervals on a line tied to a log chip that would float astern. A sailor dropped the log chip off the end of the speeding ship and counted off the number of knots paid out while a small sandglass measured a half-minute. If five knots passed in the interval, the ship was making five nautical miles an hour

equal-hour clocks became common in the towns of Europe. Now serving the whole community, they were a new kind of public utility, offering a service each citizen could not afford to provide himself.

Even after the arrival of the mechanical clock the sun left its mark on the measuring of the hours. The “double-twelve” system, by which Americans count the hours, is such a relic. When the daylight hours were measured off and subdivided, in contrast to the hours of night, the hours of each of the two parts were numbered separately. And so it remained, even after a machine required that time be measured continuously

The tiny circle we now use to designate a degree is probably a hieroglyph for the sun

Our “minute,” from the medieval Latin pars minuta prima (first minute or small part

Until cheaper marine clocks were produced, captains continued to use the lunar method. But in the long run it would be easier to provide cheap clocks than to turn out mathematically educated sailors.

Heavenly Clockwork

The gaudy watches of indifferent workmanship, fabricated purposely for the China market and once in universal demand, are now scarcely asked for

A small clock obviously could not be hammered together or forged by a blacksmith. To assemble it without knocking it apart, screws were needed. Smallness required screws, and then screws made possible a host of other portable machines

To understand a machine it has to be divined. This is the reason why talent for mechanics is so rare, and can so easily go astray, and this is why it is hardly ever manifested without that boldness and the errors which, in the infancy of science, characterize genius.

the growing number of native English clock-makers complained of “the manie straingers invadinge this Realme

Despite their scorn for those who cast the Creator of the Universe in man’s image, the theologians never ceased to scrutinize man’s own handiwork as their clues to God. Now man was a proud clockmaker, a maker of self-moving machines. Once set in motion, the mechanical clock seemed to tick with a life of its own. Might not the universe itself be a vast clock made and set in motion by the Creator Himself? This interesting possibility, not conceivable until the mechanical clock was on the scene, would be a main way station toward modern physics.

The Newtonian universe soon elevated God from a clockmaker to a master engineer and mathematician

No self-respecting European town would be without its public clock, which tolled all citizens together to defend, to celebrate, or to mourn. A community that could focus its resources in a dazzling public clock was that much more a community. The bell tolled for all and each, as the poet John Donne noted in 1623, and the tolling of the community’s bells was a reminder that “I am involved in mankind

circumstances conspired to prevent publicity. The first spectacular mechanical clockworks in China, as we have seen, were made not to mark the hour but to mark the calendar. And the science of the calendar—both of its making and of its meaning—was hedged in by government secrecy.

To find clues to why the mother of machines proved so unfertile there, we must recall some of the large features of life in ancient China. One of the first, most remarkable of Chinese achievements was a well-organized centralized government

From earliest times in China an astronomical observatory was an essential part of the cosmological temple, the ruler’s ritual headquarters. As the central government became stronger and better organized, Chinese astronomy, by contrast with astronomy in ancient Greece or medieval Europe, became more and more officiai and governmental. This meant, of course, that Chinese astronomy became increasingly bureaucratic and esoteric.

these state astrologers produced the most remarkable continuous record of celestial phenomena before the rise of modern astronomy. The Chinese record of an eclipse in 1361 B.C. is probably the earliest verifiable eclipse reported by any people. Other Chinese records cover long periods for which we have no other accurate chronicle of celestial events. Twentieth-century radio-astronomers still use these records in their study of novae and supernovae

While these state records survive, most of the ancient Chinese literature on astronomy has disappeared. Because astronomy was so state-oriented, so security-bound, and so secret, the old astronomy books have left few traces. By contrast, the early books on mathematics, which were used by merchants, directors of public works, and military commanders, have survived in considerable numbers.

The famous Heavenly Clockwork of Su Sung could not have been constructed if Su Sung had not been a high imperial official authorized to help the Emperor view the astrological destinies. This explains, too, why, within a few years, Su Sung’s spectacular achievement had become only a dim legend. If Su Sung had built his clockwork not for the private garden of a Chinese emperor but for a European town hall, he would have been hailed as a heroic public benefactor. His work would have become a monument to civic pride—the object of widespread emulation.

Where there were no natural mountains, people built artificial mountains.

THE great obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the ocean was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge

The heavenly bodies were conspicuous examples of disappearance and rebirth. The sun died every night and was newborn every morning, while the moon was newborn every month. Was this moon the same heavenly body that reappeared at each “rebirth”? Were the stars that were newly lit at each sunset actually the same as those extinguished every dawn? Perhaps, like them, each of us could be extinguished and yet be reborn. It is not surprising that the heavenly bodies, and especially the moon, were widely associated with the resurrection of the dead

Everyone was born under either a lucky or an unlucky star. The Latin astrosus (ill-starred) meant unlucky, and today we still thank our “lucky stars.”

Was the earth large enough to contain a Tartarus for all those since the beginning of time who had ever deserved its punishments? Perhaps the infernal regions should be found not under the earth but on the lower half of the terrestrial globe, in the southern hemisphere. Virgil followed the traditional geography of the Nether World when he related the descent of Aeneas into Hades. But enlightened Romans like Cicero and Seneca and Plutarch probably had ceased to believe the mythic chart of Hades. The hardheaded Pliny, for example, noted how strange it was that miners who dig deep pits and broad galleries underground had never come upon the infernal regions.

The power of his Divine Comedy was multiplied because, unlike most of the polite literature of Europe in its day, it was written not in Latin or another scholars’ language, but in Italian, a language “lowly and humble, because it is the vulgar tongue, in which even housewives hold converse.” The dominant emotional experience of his life was the death in 1290 of his beloved Beatrice when he was only twenty-five, which induced him to spend most of his active life writing an epic of the afterworld where she had gone.

He began writing it about 1307 and was still working on it on the day he died. The last thirteen cantos of his completed work would have been lost if after his death Dante had not appeared in a dream to his son Jacopo to explain where they were hidden.

MORE appealing than knowledge itself is the feeling of knowing.

No ancient Greek maps have survived, but Greek literature describes a search for symmetry. Long before the Greeks began to believe that the earth was a sphere, they were debating what other simple form the earth might have taken.

Herodotus ridiculed the Homeric notion that the earth was a circular disk surrounded by the river Oceanus. It seemed obvious to him that the earth must be surrounded by a great desert. Belief in some kind of “equator”—a division of the earth into two equal parts—came even before the general belief that the earth was a sphere.

One of the most appealing and most universal of these protomaps of the universe was the World-Tree. The Vedic poet explained that if a little tree could lift a rock as it grew, surely a great enough tree could support the heavens.

Very early, by the fifth century B.C., Greek scholars saw that the earth was a globe

It is easier to recount what happened than to explain satisfactorily how it happened or why.

In the days before the printing press, each of these, and the thousands of others that must have been lost, attest the willingness of individual craftsmen and patrons to invest in their special version of the world. What is most remarkable is that when all such maps were only imaginary there was so little variation in plans of the earth.

reports of the missionary Apostle Saint Thomas, whose body lying in India had wrought more miracles than any other saint, and who, though dead for eleven centuries, came back to preach in his Indian church every year

It is doubtful if anyone else over so long a period has ever influenced geography “so profoundly or so mischievously

When the principle of the rectangular grid is properly applied, then the straight and the curved, the near and the far, can conceal nothing of their form from us.”

The more copious this peripheral literature became, the more difficult it became to retreat to fundamentals. If the central scheme was not correct, surely so many learned men would not have bothered to offer their many subtle corrections.

While, according to Copernicus, the Ptolemaic system fitted well enough with observed appearances, it did not adequately provide for the required uniformity and circularity. A “true” system by Copernicus’ standards would not merely satisfy the eye (apparentias salvare) but it would also have to please the mind.

The Catholic Church took a more sophisticated and more tolerant view of speculations in secular science. After the fourteenth century the Church had not officially proclaimed any orthodox cosmology. Perhaps the follies and frustrations of Christian geography and the stirring secular revelations of the new seafaring age had something to do with this.

Church had survived many a secular novelty. Wiser heads continued to hope that the eternal truths of revelation and divine reason could be kept safely isolated from the shifting explanations of the practical world. It was decades after Copernicus’ death before this separation had ceased to be possible

Over the centuries, the accumulation of this error, like that of a clock that runs too slow, had produced a noticeable dislocation of the calendar. As a result, when Copernicus lived, the vernal equinox, which traditionally marks the beginning of spring in the northern hemisphere, had moved back from March 21 to March 11. Farmers could no longer rely on their calendar for the planting and the gathering of their crops, merchants could not depend on the calendar in signing contracts for the delivery of seasonal products.

In the 1540’s, when printing had made textbooks inexpensive enough to come into general use in universities

Tycho had not yet reached his fourteenth birthday he was astonished and delighted that a predicted solar eclipse actually took place on the scheduled day. It seemed to him “something divine that men could know the motions of the stars so accurately that they could long before foretell their places and relative positions

nobody set out to invent a telescope. One of the deepest and most widespread of human prejudices was faith in the unaided, unmediated human senses

can suspect that the inventor was not an academic, for professors delight in boasting of their inventions, and before the thirteenth century we have no record by any such self-styled inventor

Theology was reinforced by folklore and common sense. Why had eyes been given to men if not to know the true shape, size, and color of objects in the external world? Then were not mirrors, prisms, and lenses devices for making visual lies? And man-made instruments for multiplying, deflecting, enlarging or reducing, and doubling or inverting visual images were means for distorting the truth. Devout Christians and honest philosophers would have nothing to do with such trickery.

In Venice, by 1300, the making of eyeglasses was so common that a law had to be passed against eyeglass-makers who deceived customers by pretending that they were giving real crystal when they were only giving them glass

Zacharias Jansen (1588–1631?), another spectacle-maker of Middelburg. He had prospered by counterfeiting Spanish copper coins in order to harass the enemy, and then used his skills at home to counterfeit gold and silver coins. For this he was convicted and sentenced to be boiled in oil.

Galileo himself would look at an object through his telescope, then go up to the object to be sure he had not been deceived.

When a stranger arrived in Venice to sell the Senate a telescope, the matter was referred to Sarpi. Though convinced that a telescope could be useful to a rising maritime power, he was confident that their own Galileo could make a better one, and so advised the Senate to refuse the stranger’s offer.

Galileo’s instrument was christened. The name was announced by the noble host, Federico Cesi, hereditary marquis of Monticelli and Duke of Acquasparta, but the word “telescope” was actually devised by a Greek poet-theologian who happened to be present, and so began the custom of giving to instruments of modern science names borrowed from ancient Greece

The Copernican doctrine had lain semidormant for a half-century after Copernicus. Without the telescope the heliocentric theory might long have remained an interesting but unpersuasive hypothesis. Now the telescope made all the difference. What he saw persuaded Galileo of the truth of what he had read. And he was not alone. Until the telescope, the defenders of Christian orthodoxy felt no need to ban Copernican ideas. But this new device, which spoke directly to the senses, short-circuited the priests’ appellate jurisdiction over the heavens. Astronomy was transformed from a preserve of arcane theories in learned language into a public experience.

the Chinese had mastered the techniques of making mirrors as early as the seventh century B.C.

The Chinese, perhaps because they were not confused by belief in a “soul,” were not blocked by notions of optical emissions from the eye. Instead they studied the activity of light rays coming from the object.

recalled that one of the guests had refused to look through Galileo’s telescope, lest he be forced to believe some unwelcome facts

the Copernican ideas reached Japan late, when they did arrive they met less obstinate resistance than they had in Europe, for in the early nineteenth century the prestige of Western science gave the doctrine special appeal.

Oldenburg was dazzled by his glimpse of the new science. “I have begun to enter into companionship with some few men who bend their minds to the more solid studies, rather than to others, and are disgusted with Scholastic Theology and Nominalist Philosophy. They are followers of nature itself, and of truth, and moreover they judge that the world has not grown so old, nor our age so feeble, that nothing memorable can again be brought forth.”

In Oldenburg’s day most English Fellows of the Royal Society still read Latin. Newton wrote Latin as well as English, but few were at home in any vernacular except their own. Robert Hooke was said not to believe anything that was written in French. And French scientists were generally ignorant of English

In retrospect it is easy to forget that the Royal Society was a company of pioneers

His motto was “What seems a wonder is not really a wonder

When Galileo saw the connection between the period and the length of a pendulum, he opened the way to use time as a basis for a uniform measure of space. When Christiaan Huygens, as we have seen, invented the pendulum clock, he began to accomplish this. In the long run the search for a common measure of time would advance the quest for other universal units, and in this sense, too, the clock would be the mother of machines.

Gabriel Mouton (1618–1694), a priest in Lyons who never left his native city, became obsessed by the quest. Studying the period of a pendulum, he found, to his astonishment, that the length of a pendulum with a frequency of one beat per second would vary with the latitude.

Talleyrand (1754–1838) called on the National Assembly of the French Revolution to devise a national (he hoped it would become international) system of weights and measures based on the precise length of a pendulum that beat one second at 45 degrees latitude in the very middle of France

Soon this unit would be christened a “meter,” from the Greek word for measure, and from it all other metric units would be derived. A cube one meter on each side would be the measure of capacity, and the cube filled with water would be the unit of mass.

Newton was swimming with the scientific currents of his time. He probably exercised greater influence over scientific thought than any secular figure since Aristotle. There would not be another such hero until Einstein

Newton was not being merely sententious. “I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me

Against the pitfalls of common sense, d’Alembert warned that “the most abstract notions, those that ordinary men regard as most inaccessible, are often those that shed the brightest light:”

he seemed aware of the truth, noted by Roger Fry, that “mysticism is the attempt to get rid of mystery

the printing press made it harder than ever to keep a secret. More than that, the press changed radically, and even reversed, what it meant to “own” an idea. Now the act of publishing could put a personal brand on a newly discovered fact or a novel idea

for five years, from 1685 to 1690, declared that in all that time he had heard Newton laugh only once—when someone rashly asked him what benefit there might be in studying Euclid

Newton had made and coated the mirrors and the tools for making the mirrors for his telescope with his own hands. “If I had staid for other people to make my tools & things for me,” he exclaimed, “I had never made anything of it

Alfred Nobel (1833–1896) tried to atone for his fortune earned from manufacturing dynamite for warmakers by establishing the prizes first awarded in 1901 for peacemakers and for the great innovators of technoscience.

Dioscorides had studied Nature, but Dioscorides’ disciples studied Dioscorides.

Like other classic authors, he produced few disciples and many exegetes. These treasured his words but forgot his example. He ceased to be a teacher as he became a text.

Many “translations” were in verse, because bad verse was more memoriz-able than good prose.

Myths, unlike facts, were uncorrectable. Who could persuade us to abandon Narcissus, the Phoenix, or the Sirens?

Our “volume” (from Latin volvere, to roll) was first a name for manuscripts in rolls. In early Egypt sheets to write on were made from the papyrus reed that grew in the Nile Delta. The reed was called byblos, from the port of Byblos, where it was first found, and whence comes our “Bible” for The Book.

Venice accounted for one in seven of all the books known to have been printed in Europe until that time, amounting to about twenty books per capita for the city.

The dyspeptic Thomas Carlyle consigned the publishers of any indexless book “to be damned ten miles beyond Hell, where the Devil could not get for stinging nettles.” The cause of indexing enlisted the enthusiasm of the great law reformer Lord Campbell (1779–1861), who half seriously proposed that any author who published a book without an index should pay a fine and be deprived of the benefits of the Copyright Act.

At Bologna and elsewhere every professor was required to provide the university “stationer” with a copy of his lectures so they could be transcribed and rented or sold. He was called a stationer simply because, unlike the itinerant book peddlers, he stayed in one place.

In the heyday of the medieval libraries books had been so valuable that they were chained to their shelf or to a horizontal bar above the desk where they were to be consulted.

Thomas Carlyle

Despite urging by his most respectable patrons, he refused to second-guess the future by collecting only “worthwhile” books on “important” subjects.

Within orthodox Sunnite Islam, too, the imamate successfully forbade the use of printing both for the Koran and for other Islamic books. Since all science was nothing but a commentary on the Koran, fear of blasphemy and heterodoxy kept the printing press out of the Muslim world for centuries.

Columbus took along on his first voyage a man who could speak Arabic, and so, he hoped, could communicate with the Chinese emperor.

Imagine how provincial we would be if our reading had to be confined to works originally written in our own vernacular! We cannot begin to measure the meaning of translation for civilization

The only scholarly rival to Estienne’s work even now is the Thesaurus undertaken in 1894 jointly by five German academies, but after eighty years they had still only reached the letter “O.”

“Standard” English was established empirically and by individuals, by contrast with the product elsewhere of state-supported academies. Since the early English Protestants wanted to help ordinary readers understand the Bible in English, the mainstream of English lexicography, as Allen Walker Read explains, flowed from the lists of words collected to help the devout. One of the first such lists was appended to William Tyndale’s English translation of the Pentateuch in 1530.

Estienne’s use of the “best authors” provided the means by which lexicographers set up their standards of correctness for the new national languages. The first comprehensive standard dictionary in a single language, a product of twenty years of work by the Accademia della Crusca, appeared in Venice in 1612 and offered the pattern for other authoritative monolingual European dictionaries. The leader in this project, Leonardo Salviati (1540–1589), used the power of the press to legislate the Tuscan dialect into the standard Italian language. He drew from the great writers of Florence, canonized Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio, and so made theirs the language for an Italian nation still three centuries in the future. Some say it was the Italian language that created the nation.

Before Dr. Johnson the best authors had believed that provided the meaning to the reader was clear, it made no difference how the writer spelled his words.

The basic problem of establishing a uniform English spelling came from the fact that the alphabet of our language was borrowed from another language. The Roman alphabet was never designed for English sounds.

President Andrew Jackson was reputed to have said that he had no respect for a man who knew only one way to spell a word

On the Peloponnesus, Greeks might look upon the ways of “barbarians” (i.e., foreigners) with amusement or contempt, but Herodotus, born under barbarian rule, hoped to learn from them.

A profitable but uncelebrated by-product of the grandeur of ancient Rome was the medieval trade in building materials. For at least ten centuries Roman marble cutters made a business of excavating ruins, dismantling ancient buildings, and digging up old pavements to find models for their own work and materials for new construction.

Marble relics, statues and the remains of public buildings, were still there to be seen and touched. They could make history visible to the “unlettered” populace,

In eighteenth-century England the word “classical,” which originally meant simply “first class” or of the highest quality, came to mean specifically a product of ancient Greece or Rome.

pious Christians still found the Biblical chronology by which Archbishop Ussher had fixed the creation at 4004 B.C. too comforting to abandon. For them the whole course of early history seemed to run from Eden through Jerusalem, and was amply chronicled in the Bible. The ancient events that concerned Christians had occurred exclusively in and around the Mediterranean, and the human heritage was the heritage of Greece and Rome.

Some private collections, like the Vatican museums, were voluntarily opened to the public. Others, like the Louvre, were seized by revolutionaries for the whole citizenry.

The constant current in his thought was faith in his own evolving theory of history and his ironic belief that ideas and political movements really could not change the course of history.

marx

The constant current in his thought was faith in his own evolving theory of history and his ironic belief that ideas and political movements really could not change the course of history.

marx

“Monstrous” races were so called from the Latin monstrum (from monere, to warn), meaning a divine portent.

Florence Nightingale