Wednesday, November 19, 2008
Argylls at Ypres 1915
They were among the first troops to experience a poison gas attack in April 1915
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Tuesday, November 11, 2008
Gratitude bestows reverence
Gratitude bestows reverence, allowing us to encounter everyday epiphanies, those transcendent moments of awe that change forever how we experience life and the world.
~ John Milton ~
(1608-1674, English poet)
~ John Milton ~
(1608-1674, English poet)
Pangur Ban a little Irish Gaelic masterpiece
"The Scholar and the Cat"
"From the Irish of Pangur Ban"
by Frank O'Connor
Each of us pursues his trade,
I and Pangur my comrade,
His whole fancy on the hunt,
And mine for learning ardent.
More than fame I love to be
Among my books and study,
Pangur does not grudge me it,
Content with his own merit.
When a heavenly time! we are
In our small room together
Each of us has his own sport
And asks no greater comfort.
While he sets his round sharp eye
On the wall of my study
I turn mine, though lost its edge,
On the great wall of knowledge.
Now a mouse drops in his net
After some mighty onset
While into my bag I cram
Some difficult darksome problem.
When a mouse comes to the kill
Pangur exults, a marvel!
I have when some secret's won
My hour of exultation.
Though we work for days and years
Neither the other hinders;
Each is competent and hence
Enjoys his skill in silence.
Master of the death of mice,
He keeps in daily practice,
I too, making dark things clear,
Am of my trade a master.
The original Old Irish plus a more literal translation….
Pangur Bán The Scholar and his Cat
(Murphy's title)
Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindan:
bíth a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu memna céin im saincheirdd.
I and white Felix,
each of us two (keeps) at his specialty:
his mind is set on hunting,
my mind on my special subject.
Caraimse fos (ferr cach clu)
oc mu lebran, leir ingnu;
ni foirmtech frimm Pangur Bán:
caraid cesin a maccdán.
I love (it is better than all fame)
to be quiet beside my book, with persistent inquiry.
Not envious of me White Felix;
_he_ loves his childish art.
O ru biam (scél cen scís)
innar tegdais, ar n-oendís,
taithiunn, dichrichide clius,
ni fris tarddam ar n-áthius.
When we two are (tale without boredom)
alone in our house,
we have something to which we may apply our skill,
an endless sport.
Gnáth, huaraib, ar gressaib gal
glenaid luch inna línsam;
os mé, du-fuit im lín chéin
dliged ndoraid cu ndronchéill.
It is customary at times for a mouse to stick in his net,
as a result of warlike struggles (feats of valor).
For my part, into _my_ net falls
some difficult crux of hard meaning.
Fuachaidsem fri frega fál
a rosc, a nglése comlán;
fuachimm chein fri fegi fis
mu rosc reil, cesu imdis.
He directs his bright perfect eye
against an enclosing wall.
Though my (once) clear eye is very weak
I direct it against acuteness of knowledge.
Faelidsem cu ndene dul
hi nglen luch inna gerchrub;
hi tucu cheist ndoraid ndil
os me chene am faelid.
He is joyful with swift movement
when a mouse sticks in his sharp claw.
I too am joyful
when I understand a dearly loved difficult question.
Cia beimmi a-min nach ré
ni derban cách a chele:
maith la cechtar nár a dán;
subaigthius a óenurán.
Though we are always like this,
neither of us bothers the other:
each of us likes his craft,
rejoicing alone each in his.
He fesin as choimsid dáu
in muid du-ngni cach oenláu;
du thabairt doraid du glé
for mu mud cein am messe.
He it is who is master for himself
of the work which he does every day.
I can perform my own task,
directed toward understanding clearly that which is difficult
"From the Irish of Pangur Ban"
by Frank O'Connor
Each of us pursues his trade,
I and Pangur my comrade,
His whole fancy on the hunt,
And mine for learning ardent.
More than fame I love to be
Among my books and study,
Pangur does not grudge me it,
Content with his own merit.
When a heavenly time! we are
In our small room together
Each of us has his own sport
And asks no greater comfort.
While he sets his round sharp eye
On the wall of my study
I turn mine, though lost its edge,
On the great wall of knowledge.
Now a mouse drops in his net
After some mighty onset
While into my bag I cram
Some difficult darksome problem.
When a mouse comes to the kill
Pangur exults, a marvel!
I have when some secret's won
My hour of exultation.
Though we work for days and years
Neither the other hinders;
Each is competent and hence
Enjoys his skill in silence.
Master of the death of mice,
He keeps in daily practice,
I too, making dark things clear,
Am of my trade a master.
The original Old Irish plus a more literal translation….
Pangur Bán The Scholar and his Cat
(Murphy's title)
Messe ocus Pangur Bán,
cechtar nathar fria saindan:
bíth a menmasam fri seilgg,
mu memna céin im saincheirdd.
I and white Felix,
each of us two (keeps) at his specialty:
his mind is set on hunting,
my mind on my special subject.
Caraimse fos (ferr cach clu)
oc mu lebran, leir ingnu;
ni foirmtech frimm Pangur Bán:
caraid cesin a maccdán.
I love (it is better than all fame)
to be quiet beside my book, with persistent inquiry.
Not envious of me White Felix;
_he_ loves his childish art.
O ru biam (scél cen scís)
innar tegdais, ar n-oendís,
taithiunn, dichrichide clius,
ni fris tarddam ar n-áthius.
When we two are (tale without boredom)
alone in our house,
we have something to which we may apply our skill,
an endless sport.
Gnáth, huaraib, ar gressaib gal
glenaid luch inna línsam;
os mé, du-fuit im lín chéin
dliged ndoraid cu ndronchéill.
It is customary at times for a mouse to stick in his net,
as a result of warlike struggles (feats of valor).
For my part, into _my_ net falls
some difficult crux of hard meaning.
Fuachaidsem fri frega fál
a rosc, a nglése comlán;
fuachimm chein fri fegi fis
mu rosc reil, cesu imdis.
He directs his bright perfect eye
against an enclosing wall.
Though my (once) clear eye is very weak
I direct it against acuteness of knowledge.
Faelidsem cu ndene dul
hi nglen luch inna gerchrub;
hi tucu cheist ndoraid ndil
os me chene am faelid.
He is joyful with swift movement
when a mouse sticks in his sharp claw.
I too am joyful
when I understand a dearly loved difficult question.
Cia beimmi a-min nach ré
ni derban cách a chele:
maith la cechtar nár a dán;
subaigthius a óenurán.
Though we are always like this,
neither of us bothers the other:
each of us likes his craft,
rejoicing alone each in his.
He fesin as choimsid dáu
in muid du-ngni cach oenláu;
du thabairt doraid du glé
for mu mud cein am messe.
He it is who is master for himself
of the work which he does every day.
I can perform my own task,
directed toward understanding clearly that which is difficult
THE ROAD SIDE FIRE...the fine song for singing, the rare song to hear that only I remember, that only you admire
A charming pearl set to music by Ralph Vaughn Williams; it has long been one of my favorite art songs.
I have heard it performed by William Tabbert, Kenneth McKellar and Robert Merrill and of course we sang it at home as well….We sang the last verse together many many times on long car rides from Up State New York after having exhausted our repertoire of folk songs mostly Scottish and some Irish some French some Italian and some American
THE ROADSIDE FIRE
(I will make you brooches and toys for your delight)
I will make you brooches and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night,
I will make a palace fit for you and me
Of green days in forests, and blue days at sea.
I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room,
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom;
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.
And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.
Also from the SONGS OF TRAVEL is
In the Highlands by R L Stevenson
In the Highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens quiet eyes;
Where essential silence cheers and blesses,
And forever in the hill recesses
Her more lovely music broods and dies -
O to mount again where erst I haunted;
Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted,
And the low green meadows bright with sward;
And when even dies, the million-tinted,
And the night has come, and planets glinted,
Lo, the valley hollow lamp bestarr'd!
O to dream, O to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render,
Through the trance of silence, quiet breath!
Lo! for there, among the flow'rs and grasses,
Only the mightier movements sounds and passes, -
Only winds and rivers, life and death.
These are the limits of art and part of our splendid ancient heritage of music and verse…
I at least will love these things till I die…
I have heard it performed by William Tabbert, Kenneth McKellar and Robert Merrill and of course we sang it at home as well….We sang the last verse together many many times on long car rides from Up State New York after having exhausted our repertoire of folk songs mostly Scottish and some Irish some French some Italian and some American
THE ROADSIDE FIRE
(I will make you brooches and toys for your delight)
I will make you brooches and toys for your delight
Of bird-song at morning and star-shine at night,
I will make a palace fit for you and me
Of green days in forests, and blue days at sea.
I will make my kitchen, and you shall keep your room,
Where white flows the river and bright blows the broom;
And you shall wash your linen and keep your body white
In rainfall at morning and dewfall at night.
And this shall be for music when no one else is near,
The fine song for singing, the rare song to hear!
That only I remember, that only you admire,
Of the broad road that stretches and the roadside fire.
Also from the SONGS OF TRAVEL is
In the Highlands by R L Stevenson
In the Highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens quiet eyes;
Where essential silence cheers and blesses,
And forever in the hill recesses
Her more lovely music broods and dies -
O to mount again where erst I haunted;
Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted,
And the low green meadows bright with sward;
And when even dies, the million-tinted,
And the night has come, and planets glinted,
Lo, the valley hollow lamp bestarr'd!
O to dream, O to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render,
Through the trance of silence, quiet breath!
Lo! for there, among the flow'rs and grasses,
Only the mightier movements sounds and passes, -
Only winds and rivers, life and death.
These are the limits of art and part of our splendid ancient heritage of music and verse…
I at least will love these things till I die…
CAPTAIN DICK DONALD PORTEOUS NE OBLIVISCARIS
http://porteous.org.uk/casualties.html
The Argyll monument at YPRES has an inscription La a’bhlair, ‘s math na cairdean ON THE DAY OF BATTLE ‘TIS GOOD TO HAVE FRIENDS.AYE, ‘S truth
Captain Dick Donald Porteous ASH Killed May 10, 1915 (Ypres Salient)
He was my Auld Pop’s company commander from December 1914 until his death. I believe it was he who broke Johnny Robertson to the ranks but It may have been an English higher up...just one of the legends we grew up with...
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles11/canada-worldwar1-11.shtml
IT WAS 1915 in the YPRES SALIENT…..
On the evening of the 25th the 3rd Brigade was relieved by British troops, but the 3rd Battalion was ordered to remain until other troops came up. This it did until dusk of the 26th, when it was relieved by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
Ordinarily the name of the unit that relieves your own is one of the details of campaigning that dims in the memory with the lapse of days. But the survivors of the 3rd remember the advent of the Argyll and Sutherlands as the most beautiful of actual war-pictures. For without preparation they attacked towards St. Julien Wood and staged the attack with superb and punctilious regularity. The expression " as if on parade," sometimes applied to well performed manoeuvres, is no more adequate to convey the picture than would the word " pretty " be good enough for Juno the Queen of Heaven. It was marvellous to see these splendid Highlanders spring forward and simultaneously drop, fire, spring up again, and go forward to the whistle of an officer wearing a monocle. Up and up they went, with casualties falling here and there under the fire of the German machine guns, until they had covered half the distance to the wood. Thence, the attack having failed, they retired, leaving more casualties, but not abating one whit of the snap and regularity of their movements. The 3rd stood in their trenches and ad-mired. Yes, because the deed was admirable and even in a cynical world not without a sort of usefulness. For the Germans looking on must have felt the shabbiness of their own new warfare and wondered at the force that could make men die so splendidly.
The Argyll monument has an inscription La a’bhlair, ‘s math na cairdean ON THE DAY OF BATTLE ‘TIS GOOD TO HAVE FRIENDS.
MUNRO ( The new kind of warfare was POISON GAS; the officer with the monocle would have been Captain Porteus later KIA…ne obliviscaris; he was a well beloved leader and the Argylls would have
followed him into hell as they indeed did)
NOVEMBER 11 2008
ARGYLL AND SUTHERLAND HIGHLANDERS Ne obliviscaris
EPECIALLY the ANTS (Company A –the volunteers of August 1914 3rd Battalion ASH –drafted into the 1st Battalion Dec 12 , 1914 and thence to that grim gap of death called the YPRES SALIENT
Corporal John Robertson (American Johnny), MM killed in the Clydeside Blitz 1941 his inseparable friend in Scotland and America:; he had worked with THOMAS EDISON before the war. My father knew him well. He returned to Scotland in 1938. I own some of his books and personal effects he gave to my father. In March 1915 he and a band of Dins saved my grandfather and a few other ANTS from death or capture. My grandfather was listed as missing in action when my father was born; but by the time he was baptized March 17, 1915 the telegram had come that he was alive. That must have been a happy day for Mary Munro and Father Collins. My father, naturally, had no memory of the day!
Thomas Munro, Sr. MM “Shalako Tommy : Changa Dost –the Good Comrade) father of Mbuti Teniente Thomas Munro jr The Good Lieutenant USAR WWI 1942-146. and Sergeant Jos Munro USAC 1942-1945, graduate of Glasgow University 1942.
Danny McQueen , Sr. KIA his son was killed at Guadalcanal along with DOUGLAS MUNRO who were serving in the American forces.
Tommy Craig, Sr. KIA
Jimmy Quiqley KIA
Andrew Muir KIA
Captain Porteous KIA
Major MacKenzie KIA
Sergeant O’Neill KIA
The Argylls suffered 400% casualties; over 7131 killed and over 25,000 casualties.
Their comrades of the Highland Light Infantry (Captain Colin Campbell Mitchell MC battlefield commission from the ranks
And the Black Watch
And all the rest whose names are lost in the mists of time.
http://macinnes.org/war_info/macaonghais.html
McINNES, T
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
19th May 1915
19th
May
1915
McINNESS, D
Lance Corporal
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
25th Sep 1915
25th
Sep
1915
McINNES, A
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
13th Nov 1916
13th
Nov
1916
McINNES, J L
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
16th Jan 1916
16th
Jan
1916
McNEISH, J
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
14th Jul 1916
14th
Jul
1916
McAINSH, J
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
20th Jan 1917
20th
Jan
1917
McINNES, D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
20th Nov 1917
20th
Nov
1917
McINNES, D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
23rd Apr 1917
23rd
Apr
1917
McINNES, D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
23rd Apr 1917
23rd
Apr
1917
McINNES, M
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
24th Apr 1917
24th
Apr
1917
McINNES, W
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
25th Apr 1917
25th
Apr
1917
McANSH, H
Piper
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
26th Jul 1918
26th
Jul
1918
McGINNES, J
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
24th Aug 1918
24th
Aug
1918
McINNES, A
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
14th Dec 1918
14th
Dec
1918
McINNES, A
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
18th Apr 1918
18th
Apr
1918
McINNES, D
Lance Corporal
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
30th Jul 1918
30th
Jul
1918
McINNES, D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
22nd Oct 1918
22nd
Oct
1918
McINNES, P
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
14th Oct 1918
14th
Oct
1918
NEISH, A M
Second Lieutenant
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
24th Mar 1918
24th
Mar
1918
MacINNES, A
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
31st Mar 1942
31st
Mar
1942
MACINNES, J
Second Lieutenant
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
1st Jan 1942
1st
Jan
1942
MACINNES, N
Warrant Officer Class I
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
10th Jan 1942
10th
Jan
1942
McINNES, W T H
Serjeant
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
24th Oct 1942
24th
Oct
1942
McNEISH, M D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
13th Jan 1942
13th
Jan
1942
McINNES, D
Serjeant
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
17th Apr 1943
17th
Apr
1943
The Argyll monument at YPRES has an inscription La a’bhlair, ‘s math na cairdean ON THE DAY OF BATTLE ‘TIS GOOD TO HAVE FRIENDS.AYE, ‘S truth
Captain Dick Donald Porteous ASH Killed May 10, 1915 (Ypres Salient)
He was my Auld Pop’s company commander from December 1914 until his death. I believe it was he who broke Johnny Robertson to the ranks but It may have been an English higher up...just one of the legends we grew up with...
http://www.oldandsold.com/articles11/canada-worldwar1-11.shtml
IT WAS 1915 in the YPRES SALIENT…..
On the evening of the 25th the 3rd Brigade was relieved by British troops, but the 3rd Battalion was ordered to remain until other troops came up. This it did until dusk of the 26th, when it was relieved by the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders.
Ordinarily the name of the unit that relieves your own is one of the details of campaigning that dims in the memory with the lapse of days. But the survivors of the 3rd remember the advent of the Argyll and Sutherlands as the most beautiful of actual war-pictures. For without preparation they attacked towards St. Julien Wood and staged the attack with superb and punctilious regularity. The expression " as if on parade," sometimes applied to well performed manoeuvres, is no more adequate to convey the picture than would the word " pretty " be good enough for Juno the Queen of Heaven. It was marvellous to see these splendid Highlanders spring forward and simultaneously drop, fire, spring up again, and go forward to the whistle of an officer wearing a monocle. Up and up they went, with casualties falling here and there under the fire of the German machine guns, until they had covered half the distance to the wood. Thence, the attack having failed, they retired, leaving more casualties, but not abating one whit of the snap and regularity of their movements. The 3rd stood in their trenches and ad-mired. Yes, because the deed was admirable and even in a cynical world not without a sort of usefulness. For the Germans looking on must have felt the shabbiness of their own new warfare and wondered at the force that could make men die so splendidly.
The Argyll monument has an inscription La a’bhlair, ‘s math na cairdean ON THE DAY OF BATTLE ‘TIS GOOD TO HAVE FRIENDS.
MUNRO ( The new kind of warfare was POISON GAS; the officer with the monocle would have been Captain Porteus later KIA…ne obliviscaris; he was a well beloved leader and the Argylls would have
followed him into hell as they indeed did)
NOVEMBER 11 2008
ARGYLL AND SUTHERLAND HIGHLANDERS Ne obliviscaris
EPECIALLY the ANTS (Company A –the volunteers of August 1914 3rd Battalion ASH –drafted into the 1st Battalion Dec 12 , 1914 and thence to that grim gap of death called the YPRES SALIENT
Corporal John Robertson (American Johnny), MM killed in the Clydeside Blitz 1941 his inseparable friend in Scotland and America:; he had worked with THOMAS EDISON before the war. My father knew him well. He returned to Scotland in 1938. I own some of his books and personal effects he gave to my father. In March 1915 he and a band of Dins saved my grandfather and a few other ANTS from death or capture. My grandfather was listed as missing in action when my father was born; but by the time he was baptized March 17, 1915 the telegram had come that he was alive. That must have been a happy day for Mary Munro and Father Collins. My father, naturally, had no memory of the day!
Thomas Munro, Sr. MM “Shalako Tommy : Changa Dost –the Good Comrade) father of Mbuti Teniente Thomas Munro jr The Good Lieutenant USAR WWI 1942-146. and Sergeant Jos Munro USAC 1942-1945, graduate of Glasgow University 1942.
Danny McQueen , Sr. KIA his son was killed at Guadalcanal along with DOUGLAS MUNRO who were serving in the American forces.
Tommy Craig, Sr. KIA
Jimmy Quiqley KIA
Andrew Muir KIA
Captain Porteous KIA
Major MacKenzie KIA
Sergeant O’Neill KIA
The Argylls suffered 400% casualties; over 7131 killed and over 25,000 casualties.
Their comrades of the Highland Light Infantry (Captain Colin Campbell Mitchell MC battlefield commission from the ranks
And the Black Watch
And all the rest whose names are lost in the mists of time.
http://macinnes.org/war_info/macaonghais.html
McINNES, T
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
19th May 1915
19th
May
1915
McINNESS, D
Lance Corporal
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
25th Sep 1915
25th
Sep
1915
McINNES, A
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
13th Nov 1916
13th
Nov
1916
McINNES, J L
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
16th Jan 1916
16th
Jan
1916
McNEISH, J
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
14th Jul 1916
14th
Jul
1916
McAINSH, J
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
20th Jan 1917
20th
Jan
1917
McINNES, D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
20th Nov 1917
20th
Nov
1917
McINNES, D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
23rd Apr 1917
23rd
Apr
1917
McINNES, D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
23rd Apr 1917
23rd
Apr
1917
McINNES, M
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
24th Apr 1917
24th
Apr
1917
McINNES, W
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
25th Apr 1917
25th
Apr
1917
McANSH, H
Piper
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
26th Jul 1918
26th
Jul
1918
McGINNES, J
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
24th Aug 1918
24th
Aug
1918
McINNES, A
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
14th Dec 1918
14th
Dec
1918
McINNES, A
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
18th Apr 1918
18th
Apr
1918
McINNES, D
Lance Corporal
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
30th Jul 1918
30th
Jul
1918
McINNES, D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
22nd Oct 1918
22nd
Oct
1918
McINNES, P
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
14th Oct 1918
14th
Oct
1918
NEISH, A M
Second Lieutenant
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
24th Mar 1918
24th
Mar
1918
MacINNES, A
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
31st Mar 1942
31st
Mar
1942
MACINNES, J
Second Lieutenant
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
1st Jan 1942
1st
Jan
1942
MACINNES, N
Warrant Officer Class I
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
10th Jan 1942
10th
Jan
1942
McINNES, W T H
Serjeant
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
24th Oct 1942
24th
Oct
1942
McNEISH, M D
Private
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
13th Jan 1942
13th
Jan
1942
McINNES, D
Serjeant
Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders
17th Apr 1943
17th
Apr
1943
Sacrifice of Arthur Conan Doyle's Family
Yes, we should have enormous gratitude for the people who bestowed upon us a free and prosperous life but especially a free life. That is the motto on my blog BYDAN FREE forever free.
My family came to American with only two things:
A strong faith and a strong desire to be free. We value that heritage.
We no longer are Gaelic speaking –I will be the last of my family to have a knowledge of Gaelic- but as my father said in a long journey some things have to be left behind. My grandfather left the Gaeltacht in 1894 never to return.
He spoke Gaelic –and Punjabi- quite frequently during his military service but after that it dwindled and he never again lived in a Gaelic speaking community. The only Gaelic he heard was from recordings or the names of pipe tunes. He couldn’t read it either. What little education he had was in English. His best Englsih dialect was the braid Scots. He always said THOCHT for though for example and used many Scottisms in his speech. Burns was easy for him. He had read a lot of Burns and the King James Bible when he was young at sea with a Scottish sea captain. He was a boy apprentice in a tall ship from 1894-1902. I wish I remembered the name of the ship and the captain –I remember him telling me stories about ti but I was crazy to hear about Clan Munro and the Argylls so I paid more attention to his military career. But looking back his Odyssey was very interesting as a boy and later as a WWI vet working around America and boarding with his friends of the HLI and Argylls who were his bosom friends. They worked in construction and ship building in Baltimore , New York and Galveston Texas. I don’t believe they travelled by train very often but by sea.
Richard MUNRO
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Munro [mailto:michaelmunro84@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2008 8:43 AM
To: R K MUNRO
Subject: RE: The sacrifice of the Doyle family of Edinburgh 1914-1919
Hey those images make me feel grateful!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amen to that…will send other things…always a big day in my family we used to call it Armistice Day and now it is Remembrance Day in Britain and most Commonwealth countries.
We lost over 30 family members and friends in the Ypres Salient 1914-1918 including two of my grandfather’s brothers and one brother in law.
My father’s cousin’s fiancé was killed at Ypres and so was the father of my godmother’s fiancé ; her fiancé was killed serving in the American Forces (US Marine Corps) in Guadalcanal 1942 in the defense of Henderson Field.
Douglas Munro –our kinsman –he was the descendant of Scottish immigrants to Canada –he was born in Vancouver BC- was killed in action Sept 27 1942 which is ironically the same day my sister in law was born and my father died September 27,2003.
So I knew my father’s date of death all my life. (he was awarded, posthumously the Medal of Honor by Franklin D. Roosevelt for his heroism in covering the evacuation of several Marine companies –saving the lives of hundreds of Marines; his ancestors served in the 93rd Highlanders at Balaklava the Thin Red Line of Heroes)
Arthur Conan Doyle (Scottish author of Sherlock Holmes stories) lost many close relatives –six- in the Great War as it was known.
His son Kingsley, his brother Innes
His two brother in laws, his two nephews
Kingsley survived the Somme but was severely wounded and died of pneumonia October 28, 1918 so he never saw Armistice Day. Talk about supreme sacrifice.
74,000 Scots were killed in WWI and they suffered 250,000 casualties (in a country of four million); it was the highest per capita causality rate of any country even Russia.
In WWII 25,000 Scots were killed so the toll was much greater in WWI.
The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders –my Auld Pop’s Regiment suffered 7,131 killed and over 25,000 casualties. The 1st Battalion ASH –which saw some of the heaviest fighting in the war 2ndYpres, Gallipoli, the Struma Valley suffered over 400% causalities.
NE OBLIVISCARIS…do not forget
Let us hope and pray there is no disrespect ON REMEMBRANCE DAY
MUNRO
My family came to American with only two things:
A strong faith and a strong desire to be free. We value that heritage.
We no longer are Gaelic speaking –I will be the last of my family to have a knowledge of Gaelic- but as my father said in a long journey some things have to be left behind. My grandfather left the Gaeltacht in 1894 never to return.
He spoke Gaelic –and Punjabi- quite frequently during his military service but after that it dwindled and he never again lived in a Gaelic speaking community. The only Gaelic he heard was from recordings or the names of pipe tunes. He couldn’t read it either. What little education he had was in English. His best Englsih dialect was the braid Scots. He always said THOCHT for though for example and used many Scottisms in his speech. Burns was easy for him. He had read a lot of Burns and the King James Bible when he was young at sea with a Scottish sea captain. He was a boy apprentice in a tall ship from 1894-1902. I wish I remembered the name of the ship and the captain –I remember him telling me stories about ti but I was crazy to hear about Clan Munro and the Argylls so I paid more attention to his military career. But looking back his Odyssey was very interesting as a boy and later as a WWI vet working around America and boarding with his friends of the HLI and Argylls who were his bosom friends. They worked in construction and ship building in Baltimore , New York and Galveston Texas. I don’t believe they travelled by train very often but by sea.
Richard MUNRO
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
From: Michael Munro [mailto:michaelmunro84@hotmail.com]
Sent: Sunday, November 09, 2008 8:43 AM
To: R K MUNRO
Subject: RE: The sacrifice of the Doyle family of Edinburgh 1914-1919
Hey those images make me feel grateful!
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Amen to that…will send other things…always a big day in my family we used to call it Armistice Day and now it is Remembrance Day in Britain and most Commonwealth countries.
We lost over 30 family members and friends in the Ypres Salient 1914-1918 including two of my grandfather’s brothers and one brother in law.
My father’s cousin’s fiancé was killed at Ypres and so was the father of my godmother’s fiancé ; her fiancé was killed serving in the American Forces (US Marine Corps) in Guadalcanal 1942 in the defense of Henderson Field.
Douglas Munro –our kinsman –he was the descendant of Scottish immigrants to Canada –he was born in Vancouver BC- was killed in action Sept 27 1942 which is ironically the same day my sister in law was born and my father died September 27,2003.
So I knew my father’s date of death all my life. (he was awarded, posthumously the Medal of Honor by Franklin D. Roosevelt for his heroism in covering the evacuation of several Marine companies –saving the lives of hundreds of Marines; his ancestors served in the 93rd Highlanders at Balaklava the Thin Red Line of Heroes)
Arthur Conan Doyle (Scottish author of Sherlock Holmes stories) lost many close relatives –six- in the Great War as it was known.
His son Kingsley, his brother Innes
His two brother in laws, his two nephews
Kingsley survived the Somme but was severely wounded and died of pneumonia October 28, 1918 so he never saw Armistice Day. Talk about supreme sacrifice.
74,000 Scots were killed in WWI and they suffered 250,000 casualties (in a country of four million); it was the highest per capita causality rate of any country even Russia.
In WWII 25,000 Scots were killed so the toll was much greater in WWI.
The Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders –my Auld Pop’s Regiment suffered 7,131 killed and over 25,000 casualties. The 1st Battalion ASH –which saw some of the heaviest fighting in the war 2ndYpres, Gallipoli, the Struma Valley suffered over 400% causalities.
NE OBLIVISCARIS…do not forget
Let us hope and pray there is no disrespect ON REMEMBRANCE DAY
MUNRO
REMEMBRANCE DAY/VETERAN'S DAY 2008
Band of Brothers (Choral version)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7arzkjoV-U
You never lived to see
What you gave to me
One shining dream of hope and love
Life and liberty
With a host of brave unknown soldiers
For your company, you will live forever
Here in our memory
In fields of sacrifice
Heroes paid the price
Young men who died for old men's wars
Gone to paradise
We are all one great band of brothers
And one day you'll see we can live together
When all the world is free
I wish you'd lived to see
All you gave to me
Your shining dream of hope and love
Life and liberty
We are all one great band of brothers
And one day you'll see - we can live together
When all the world is free
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i7arzkjoV-U
You never lived to see
What you gave to me
One shining dream of hope and love
Life and liberty
With a host of brave unknown soldiers
For your company, you will live forever
Here in our memory
In fields of sacrifice
Heroes paid the price
Young men who died for old men's wars
Gone to paradise
We are all one great band of brothers
And one day you'll see we can live together
When all the world is free
I wish you'd lived to see
All you gave to me
Your shining dream of hope and love
Life and liberty
We are all one great band of brothers
And one day you'll see - we can live together
When all the world is free
LITTLE TO SHOW FOR INTRUSION OF FEDERAL GOVERMENT IN LOCAL EDUCATION
Diane RAVITCH says:
Never before has the heavy hand of the federal government reached so intrusively into every classroom in the nation. And there is little to show for this intrusion.
The Obama administration can get off to a good start by revising NCLB.
First, it should eliminate the goal of universal proficiency by 2014, because it is unattainable. Period. No state or nation has ever achieved 100% proficiency.
Second, it should recognize that the federal government is best at providing accurate information, such as what children in each grade need to know to be abreast of international standards (that is known as the curriculum) and whether our children are meeting those standards (that is, testing); third, the administration should expect states and districts to fashion appropriate reforms and remedies in their schools.
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/11/09/obama-education-president-oped-cx_dr_1109ravitch.html
I hope Mr. Obama has enough sense to listen to Ms. Ravitch; we who are about to die –in the trenches- salute you.
Regardless of impending disasters we will do our duty as in the Ypres Salient to the very end to the best of our ability.
Americans may not be accustomed to humiliation and disaster but we Munroes are so we carry on no matter what the situation.
“Burned our home , exile and death, scattered the loyal men…. But while there are leaves on the forest and foam on the river the Clan of the Halo River (Na Rothaich) will flourish bydan free, forever unconquered.
“Castles are sacked in war, chieftains are scattered far but Truth is a fix-ed star,
Never before has the heavy hand of the federal government reached so intrusively into every classroom in the nation. And there is little to show for this intrusion.
The Obama administration can get off to a good start by revising NCLB.
First, it should eliminate the goal of universal proficiency by 2014, because it is unattainable. Period. No state or nation has ever achieved 100% proficiency.
Second, it should recognize that the federal government is best at providing accurate information, such as what children in each grade need to know to be abreast of international standards (that is known as the curriculum) and whether our children are meeting those standards (that is, testing); third, the administration should expect states and districts to fashion appropriate reforms and remedies in their schools.
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/11/09/obama-education-president-oped-cx_dr_1109ravitch.html
I hope Mr. Obama has enough sense to listen to Ms. Ravitch; we who are about to die –in the trenches- salute you.
Regardless of impending disasters we will do our duty as in the Ypres Salient to the very end to the best of our ability.
Americans may not be accustomed to humiliation and disaster but we Munroes are so we carry on no matter what the situation.
“Burned our home , exile and death, scattered the loyal men…. But while there are leaves on the forest and foam on the river the Clan of the Halo River (Na Rothaich) will flourish bydan free, forever unconquered.
“Castles are sacked in war, chieftains are scattered far but Truth is a fix-ed star,
Friday, October 31, 2008
Robert Burns: "Ode to Washington" (Our First President)
"Ode for General Washington’s Birthday"
BY ROBERT BURNS
No Spartan tube, no Attic shell,
No lyre Aeolian I awake;
'Tis liberty's bold note I swell,
Thy harp, Columbia, let me take!
See gathering thousands, while I sing,
A broken chain exulting bring,
And dash it in a tyrant's face,
And dare him to his very beard,
And tell him he no more is feared-
No more the despot of Columbia's race!
A tyrant's proudest insults brav'd,
They shout-a People freed! They hail an Empire saved.
Where is man's god-like form?
Where is that brow erect and bold-
That eye that can unmov'd behold
The wildest rage, the loudest storm
That e'er created fury dared to raise?
Avaunt! thou caitiff, servile, base,
That tremblest at a despot's nod,
Yet, crouching under the iron rod,
Canst laud the hand that struck th' insulting blow!
Art thou of man's Imperial line?
Dost boast that countenance divine?
Each skulking feature answers, No!
But come, ye sons of Liberty,
Columbia's offspring, brave as free,
In danger's hour still flaming in the van,
Ye know, and dare maintain, the Royalty of Man!
Alfred! on thy starry throne,
Surrounded by the tuneful choir,
The bards that erst have struck the patriot lyre,
And rous'd the freeborn Briton's soul of fire,
No more thy England own!
Dare injured nations form the great design,
To make detested tyrants bleed?
Thy England execrates the glorious deed!
Beneath her hostile banners waving,
Every pang of honour braving,
England in thunder calls, "The tyrant's cause is mine!"
That hour accurst how did the fiends rejoice
And hell, thro' all her confines, raise the exulting voice,
That hour which saw the generous English name
Linkt with such damned deeds of everlasting shame!
Thee, Caledonia! thy wild heaths among,
Fam'd for the martial deed, the heaven-taught song,
To thee I turn with swimming eyes;
Where is that soul of Freedom fled?
Immingled with the mighty dead,
Beneath that hallow'd turf where Wallace lies
Hear it not, Wallace! in thy bed of death.
Ye babbling winds! in silence sweep,
Disturb not ye the hero's sleep,
Nor give the coward secret breath!
Is this the ancient Caledonian form,
Firm as the rock, resistless as the storm?
Show me that eye which shot immortal hate,
Blasting the despot's proudest bearing;
Show me that arm which, nerv'd with thundering fate,
Crush'd Usurpation's boldest daring!-
Dark-quench'd as yonder sinking star,
No more that glance lightens afar;
That palsied arm no more whirls on the waste of war.
Robert Burns: "Song of Death"
"The Song of Death"
by Robert Burns (1759-1796)
Farewell, thou fair day, thou green earth, and ye skies,
Now gay with the broad setting sun;
Farewell, loves and friendships, ye dear tender ties,
Our race of existence is run!
Thou grim King of Terrors; thou Life's gloomy foe!
Go, frighten the coward and slave;
Go, teach them to tremble, fell tyrant! but know
No terrors hast thou to the brave!
Thou strik'st the dull peasant-he sinks in the dark,
Nor saves e'en the wreck of a name;
Thou strik'st the young hero-a glorious mark;
He falls in the blaze of his fame!
In the field of proud honour-our swords in our hands,
Our King and our country to save;
While victory shines on Life's last ebbing sands, -
O! who would not die with the brave!
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
KAHIL GIBRAN : LOVER'S CALL
(THIS HAS BEEN SET TO MUSIC BY WILIAM JACKSON)
Lover's Call (FROM THE ARABIC)
By Kahil Gibran
Where are you, my beloved? Are you in that little
Paradise, watering the flowers who look upon you
As infants look upon the breast of their mothers?
Or are you in your chamber where the shrine of
Virtue has been placed in your honor, and upon
Which you offer my heart and soul as sacrifice?
Or amongst the books, seeking human knowledge,
While you are replete with heavenly wisdom?
Oh companion of my soul, where are you? Are you
Praying in the temple? Or calling Nature in the
Field, haven of your dreams?
Are you in the huts of the poor, consoling the
Broken-hearted with the sweetness of your soul, and
Filling their hands with your bounty?
You are God's spirit everywhere;
You are stronger than the ages.
Do you have memory of the day we met, when the
halo of
Your spirit surrounded us, and the Angels of Love
Floated about, singing the praise of the soul's deed?
Do you recollect our sitting in the shade of the
Branches, sheltering ourselves from Humanity, as
the ribs
Protect the divine secret of the heart from injury?
Remember you the trails and forest we walked, with
hands
Joined, and our heads leaning against each other,
as if
We were hiding ourselves within ourselves?
Recall you the hour I bade you farewell,
And the Maritime kiss you placed on my lips?
That kiss taught me that joining of lips in Love
Reveals heavenly secrets which the tongue cannot
utter!
That kiss was introduction to a great sigh,
Like the Almighty's breath that turned earth into
man.
That sigh led my way into the spiritual world,
Announcing the glory of my soul; and there
It shall perpetuate until again we meet.
I remember when you kissed me and kissed me,
With tears coursing your cheeks, and you said,
"Earthly bodies must often separate for earthly purpose,
And must live apart impelled by worldly intent.
"But the spirit remains joined safely in the hands of
Love, until death arrives and takes joined souls to God.
"Go, my beloved; Love has chosen you her delegate;
Over her, for she is Beauty who offers to her follower
The cup of the sweetness of life.
As for my own empty arms, your love shall remain my
Comforting groom; your memory, my Eternal wedding."
Where are you now, my other self? Are you awake in
The silence of the night? Let the clean breeze convey
To you my heart's every beat and affection.
Are you fondling my face in your memory? That image
Is no longer my own, for Sorrow has dropped his
Shadow on my happy countenance of the past.
Sobs have withered my eyes which reflected your beauty
And dried my lips which you sweetened with kisses.
Where are you, my beloved? Do you hear my weeping
From beyond the ocean? Do you understand my need?
Do you know the greatness of my patience?
Is there any spirit in the air capable of conveying
To you the breath of this dying youth? Is there any
Secret communication between angels that will carry to
You my complaint?
Where are you, my beautiful star? The obscurity of life
Has cast me upon its bosom; sorrow has conquered me.
Sail your smile into the air; it will reach and enliven me!
Breathe your fragrance into the air; it will sustain me!
Where are you, me beloved?
Oh, how great is Love!
And how little am I!
Lover's Call (FROM THE ARABIC)
By Kahil Gibran
Where are you, my beloved? Are you in that little
Paradise, watering the flowers who look upon you
As infants look upon the breast of their mothers?
Or are you in your chamber where the shrine of
Virtue has been placed in your honor, and upon
Which you offer my heart and soul as sacrifice?
Or amongst the books, seeking human knowledge,
While you are replete with heavenly wisdom?
Oh companion of my soul, where are you? Are you
Praying in the temple? Or calling Nature in the
Field, haven of your dreams?
Are you in the huts of the poor, consoling the
Broken-hearted with the sweetness of your soul, and
Filling their hands with your bounty?
You are God's spirit everywhere;
You are stronger than the ages.
Do you have memory of the day we met, when the
halo of
Your spirit surrounded us, and the Angels of Love
Floated about, singing the praise of the soul's deed?
Do you recollect our sitting in the shade of the
Branches, sheltering ourselves from Humanity, as
the ribs
Protect the divine secret of the heart from injury?
Remember you the trails and forest we walked, with
hands
Joined, and our heads leaning against each other,
as if
We were hiding ourselves within ourselves?
Recall you the hour I bade you farewell,
And the Maritime kiss you placed on my lips?
That kiss taught me that joining of lips in Love
Reveals heavenly secrets which the tongue cannot
utter!
That kiss was introduction to a great sigh,
Like the Almighty's breath that turned earth into
man.
That sigh led my way into the spiritual world,
Announcing the glory of my soul; and there
It shall perpetuate until again we meet.
I remember when you kissed me and kissed me,
With tears coursing your cheeks, and you said,
"Earthly bodies must often separate for earthly purpose,
And must live apart impelled by worldly intent.
"But the spirit remains joined safely in the hands of
Love, until death arrives and takes joined souls to God.
"Go, my beloved; Love has chosen you her delegate;
Over her, for she is Beauty who offers to her follower
The cup of the sweetness of life.
As for my own empty arms, your love shall remain my
Comforting groom; your memory, my Eternal wedding."
Where are you now, my other self? Are you awake in
The silence of the night? Let the clean breeze convey
To you my heart's every beat and affection.
Are you fondling my face in your memory? That image
Is no longer my own, for Sorrow has dropped his
Shadow on my happy countenance of the past.
Sobs have withered my eyes which reflected your beauty
And dried my lips which you sweetened with kisses.
Where are you, my beloved? Do you hear my weeping
From beyond the ocean? Do you understand my need?
Do you know the greatness of my patience?
Is there any spirit in the air capable of conveying
To you the breath of this dying youth? Is there any
Secret communication between angels that will carry to
You my complaint?
Where are you, my beautiful star? The obscurity of life
Has cast me upon its bosom; sorrow has conquered me.
Sail your smile into the air; it will reach and enliven me!
Breathe your fragrance into the air; it will sustain me!
Where are you, me beloved?
Oh, how great is Love!
And how little am I!
PUCCINNI'S NESSUM DORMA AND THE LOVE OF MUSIC
Puccinni’s Nessum Dorma and the love of music
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
(For your pleasure the recent video of the singing salesman below).
http://www.maniacworld.com/Phone-Salesman-Amazes-Crowd.html
Dear Seanin (and beloved friends):
""Here, at this point, Giacomo Puccini broke off his work. Death on this occasion was stronger than art." Another report has him saying: At this point, the maestro laid down his pen." TOSCANINI April 26, 1926
For some Saturdays evokes great sports contests but in my youth there is no question Saturdays meant the smell of Corona Corona cigars and music, particularly opera. My father, Thomas Munro, jr. , had a deep and abiding love for music particularly opera and great singers. I add as well that he was of one mind with John McCormack, Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser, Frank Paterson, James McCracken , Anne Lorne Gillies and Kenneth McKellar that the BIG SONGS of the Gaeltacht of Ireland and Scotland were great songs worthy to be included in the pantheon of the great songs of the world. The matchless melody of "Eileen Aroon" which dates back to the early Irish Renaissance (circa 1290? ) during a great period of Gaelic minstrelsy in the Gaeltachts of Ireland and Scotland. It is curious to think that this song may well have been contemporaneous with Sir William Wallace. Handel is said to have declared, after hearing it sung in Gaelic, that he would have preferred to have been its composer over all the music he had written which is great praise indeed since Handel himself was one of the greatest composers of the last five hundred years. But of course what he was saying is that there were great men –and women – composers before Agamemnon (and Mozart). I always admired my father for the reason that he, unlike so many classical devotees was not a snob about music. He derived as much joy from "Ma Ain Folk", "Rothsay Bay" "Oft in the Stilly Night" as he did from "E Lucevan le Stelle", "Questa o Quella" or "Recondita Armonia". Of course, it goes without saying that he introduced me to the Spanish language and Spanish art songs as well through Shirley Verrett and Victoria de Los Angeles (whom we saw live) and Teresa Berganza. My father's best languages I think were French and German but he and my Uncle Andy Muir Tracey –who had worked in Argentina and Chile and spoke Spanish quite well- encouraged me to study Spanish from an early age as well as picking up pieces of course –through song-of Italian etc. I never sang German songs however, though I heard a lot of them. I have to admit I could never understand why my father would listen to GERMAN songs. As a small boy all the villains of Two World Wars were Germans. Listening to German songs I always had a feeling that the ghost of Adolph Hitler was near and could influence me somehow; even to this day the POWER OF THE WILL and Nazi regalia give me an uncomfortable feeling that I am in the presence of evil so if I listen to Wagner it is always the overtures only. I still think German is a horrible guttural language though I have to admit I have tried to overcome this great prejudice for all things German all my life not completely successfully. I knew a few Germans –some quite shapely- in college and one thing we had in common was a love of classical music. But inevitably the Germans I met were avant guarde, irreligious and to the left PLUS they were Germans so there was no hope in this case for a Scottish-American-German Bund.
My father had many recordings of NESSUM DORMA, naturally , Tito Schipa, Beniamino GIGLI, Enrico Caruso, McCormack, Domingo, Pavarotti, Carerras, just to name a few. I was blessed to hear some great live performances of Turandot in my travels as a young man in New York, Rome and Milan. But the first NESSSUM DORMA I really remember was not a famous recording at all but part of a Ceilidh session we had at the Munro household circa 1961. My mother used to lead us while she played the piano in song sessions –with children's songs, hymns naturally –she loved CHILD IN A MANGER (Leanaibh an Aigh) and HOW GREAT THOU ART and of course Scottish songs and some of her favorite musicals such as the SOUND OF MUSIC and CAMELOT which she (but not me I was too young) had seen and heard on Broadway. One of our dinner guests in those days, now far far gone who sang at the piano was the lyric tenor WILLIAM TABBERT who originated the role of Lieutenant Cable (South Pacific on Broadway playing over 1900 performances) with his great friend EZIO PINZA. http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?id=61759
"Younger than Springtime" was his signature song and I heard him sing it in concerts and at our home. Bill Tabbert was our next door neighbor in Livingston, New Jersey and though he traveled a lot on tours (his career was really on the down spin since he never got the movie role) he was a sometime visitor at our house. Tabbert was thus a lesser Laurence Tibbet or a lesser Robert Goulet but he was a great talent and I remember him as a very humble and kind man. Thinking back, he was very fond of the drink and that and his sensitive temperament probably set back his career. My wife always says "people drink to drown their sorrows but the problem is sorrows know how to swim." (La gente beben para ahogar sus penas pero el problema es las penas saben nadar) I still have a couple of his autographed LP's he gave my father including some of his last songs he had recorded in Rome. He used to hawk them at his concerts and night club acts. One night –in those days before U-TUBE and the Internet- my father encouraged him to sing a few Italian songs such as "Torna Sorrento" and "O Sole Mio." But the highlight of the evening was when he sang NESSUM DORMA. My father gave us the context of the song and my mother played the music in a subdued fashion –because it stretched the very limits of her musical talent-but she has a great ear for music and a talent for improvisation so she played all the appropriate chords. I suppose I always liked singing and music –I don't think there was any period of my life in which I was not exposed to good singing and fine music both traditional and classical- but I fell in love with Nessum Dorma that night and wanted to hear it again and again. I was delighted a few years later when my favorite Scottish singer , Kenneth McKellar, made a crossover classical recording of NESSUM DORMA (circa 1965) and this was the version I probably listened to the most as a young child. I must admit I was always fascinated with the barbaric theme of Turandot and the heroism exemplified by the Prince for if he failed in his quest he would be executed as all the previous suitors had been.
Turandot by PUCCINI.
There are many beautiful art songs and arias but NESSUM DORMA is one of the greatest as it marries great romantic lyric poetry with soaring musical expression.
The aria ends with a sustained high B-"Vincero!" ("I shall win!").
The prince is confident that at dawn his name will remain unknown.
After that aria, Puccini wrote just a small amount of music perhaps 10 or 15 minutes. He was very sick when he composed Turando and on November 29, 1924, he succumbed to cancer, aged 66, leaving Turandot unfinished.
His devoted pupil Alfano following his master's notes completed the opera. But it is interesting –and moving to note that at the premiere at La Scala, Milan, on April 25, 1926, the performance ended on the last note which Puccini committed to the score. The conductor, Toscanini, then turned and addressed the audience. Accounts differ as to his exact words. According to one report they were: "Here, at this point, Giacomo Puccini broke off his work. Death on this occasion was stronger than art." Another report has him saying: At this point, the maestro laid down his pen." See http://home.earthlink.net/~jw3/Home.htm
And http://www.toscaninionline.com/
The aria "Nessun dorma" is near the beginning of Act 3.
At the end of Act 2 Turandot still is mystified by the Prince and cold to this approach by means of romantic poetry. A real despot Turandot believes -Medusa-like- all she has to do is to induce someone to tell the Prince's name so that she can wreak her savage frenzy and have the Prince's head chopped off like so many before him. Thereby she declares an imperial order that no one in Peking is can to sleep until the name of the Prince is revealed.
Act 3 opens with a dark and drear night; the orchestra sounds lugubrious chords. Heralds call out from afar "Tonight no one in Peking sleeps" ("Questa notte nessun dorma in Pekino"), and the chorus disconsolately drones ("nessun dorma")"no one sleeps".
In the first words of this most famous and beloved aria, the Prince repeats the words of the chorus. One might expect a suicidal dirge but instead there is a great song of courage and hope.
Charles Mangan has written
"Whenever authentic hope is recognized in another, the observer comes away greatly edified, fortified in his own difficulties and strengthened in his personal pursuit of an increase in supernatural hope." Saint John Bosco (1815-1888), whom the Church liturgically commemorates on January 31, is a model of hope for all brothers and sisters of Jesus. Riddled by scorn heaped upon him by the anti-clerics of his day and acknowledging the horrendous obstacles which plagued the young men under his charge, Don Bosco responded with warmth, courage and charity. His eyes were fixed firmly on the Savior. This indefatigable apostle of the youth — hailed by Pope John Paul II as the "teacher and father to the young" — endured all trials which confronted him. Instead of lashing out in anger, he realized that God would preserve Him and give the success to his hands which the Lord Himself desired".
One of the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila wrote (this is the translation from the Spanish,
"Hope, O my soul, hope. You know neither the day nor the hour. Watch carefully, for everything passes quickly, even though your impatience makes doubtful what is certain, and turns a very short time into a long one. Dream that the more you struggle, the more you prove the love that you bear your God, and the more you will rejoice one day with your Beloved, in a happiness and rapture that can never end"
The translation of NESSUN DORMA, (R. MUNRO, 2007)
. ..> The Prince
Nessun dorma, nessun dorma ...
Tu pure, o Principessa,
Nella tua fredda stanza,
Guardi le stelle
Che tremano d'amore
E di speranza.
Sleeps none! Sleeps none...
Thou ,too, o Princess,
In your cold room,
Look upward toward the stars,
That quiver with love
And with hope.
Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me,
Il nome mio nessun saprà, no, no,
Sulla tua bocca lo dirò
Quando la luce splenderà,
Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio
Che ti fa mia.
But my secret is locked up within me;
Mine name "nane sall ken", no, no,
Upon thy mouth I shall speak it
When the light beams brightly,
And mine kiss will melt the silence
That makes thee mine.
Chorus
Il nome suo nessun saprà
E noi dovrem, ahimè, morir.
"Nane sall ken his name"
And we have to, (woe is me!), die.
The Prince
&NBSP;< o:p>
Dilegua, o notte!
Tramontate, stelle!
All'alba vincerò!
Disappear, o night!
Set, stars!
At first light, I will win the gree! (prize)!
..>
· "Dire sulla bocca", literally "to say on the mouth", is a poetic Latin way of saying "to kiss." There is no question that kissing –for friendship and affection- as much or more than for erotic love- is one of the great pleasures of humanity.
· Bésame (is Spanish for kiss me); I understand this is a Celticism from the Celtic speaking parts of Spain and Northern Italy (Basium in Latin; used only by Catullus, Martial –and later Juvenal the way Burns would use "tassie" for cup.) The classical republican Romans, like the Japanese, did not kiss. My father somewhat jocularly theorized that Roman's Gallic slaves taught the fashion to their Roman masters. In modern Gaelic one says "POG MI" (Kiss me; from the Latin Pax) or "Thoir pog" ; but seem to remember hearing BEUL for kiss or mouth or BUS (or PUSS)….but I really can't tell if THOIR BUS would mean KISS ME ON THE CHEEK(I never kissed my Auld Pop on the mouth) or just kiss. Perhaps Anne Lorne Gillies would know!
· Fredda stanza…means cold room but of course has a double meaning as a stanza is a stanza in poetry…until now all her love songs left her cold!!! La stanza del trono means THRONE ROOM
· Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, il mio nessun saprà; I chose to use Scots idiom to translate this is in the great song THE NEW SLAIN KNIGHT or the TWA CORBIES (TWO CROWS) which by the way Kathleen MacInnes has recorded recently in Gaelic. Gree of course is Scots; Burns uses it several times at least. There is a old Gaelic proverb I recall just now
FAR NACH BI AM BEAG CHA BHI AM MOR (Where there is not a wee will there will never be a big one either
FAR AM BI TOIL BIDH GNIOMH (Where there be a will there be a 'gree' (a prize or deed)
Of course this is 'where there is a will there is a way' but it has a little more to it I think. Will must be developed bit by bit (beag is beag)
This is a piece of traditional wisdom I often share with my students though not as much as "It is not good to marry without a ring; no ring no ding" (Ni math posadh gan fainne…)
· Scraggy, black feathered, mean beaked carrion crows tearing at the tender flesh of a dead helpless abandoned Scottish knight fallen in battle for a lost cause. It is a very strong image of impermanence and mortality and perhaps the futility of and tragedy of war. I also know this from my oldest anthology of Scots poems and have a moving recording of it by Kenneth McKellar. It is a very cynical variation of the Three Ravens (Child Ballad 26) whose "derry down, derry down" chorus suggests a Welsh (or Breton) original which may be lost. I have heard it said that the versions that are song are based on a Manx or Breton melody. It seems that the two folk poems are similar but I have always had the feeling they were both translations –different ones- of an earlier song though of course I have no evidence whatsoever for this belief except for the fact that both songs though similar are different. The Scots version is much darker –even skeptical and seems to question the existence of the afterlife.
http://www.contemplator.com/child/twacorbies.html
As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t'other say,
'Where sall we gang and dine to-day,
Where sall we gang and dine to-day?'
'In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his honnd, and lady fair,
His hawk, his honnd, and lady fair.
'His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady 'a ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet,
We may mak our dinner sweet.
'Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare,
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.'
'Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken where he is gane; {NONE SHALL KNOW WHERE HE IS GONE}
Oer his white banes, when they are bare, {OVER HIS WHITE BONES WHEN THEY ARE BARE
The wind sail blaw for evermair, THE WIND SHALL BLOW FOREVER MORE!
The wind sail blaw for evermair.'
Thus I spend a pleasant Friday evening, reading and translating and listening to music as I sip my tea. All the lassies and 'dugs' and the wee pussy-cat are sleeping.
GOOD NIGHT...OIDHICHE MHATH A TH'ANN!
BUENAS NOCHES..BUENA NOTTE and to show my open mindedness GUTE NACHT....
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
(For your pleasure the recent video of the singing salesman below).
http://www.maniacworld.com/Phone-Salesman-Amazes-Crowd.html
Dear Seanin (and beloved friends):
""Here, at this point, Giacomo Puccini broke off his work. Death on this occasion was stronger than art." Another report has him saying: At this point, the maestro laid down his pen." TOSCANINI April 26, 1926
For some Saturdays evokes great sports contests but in my youth there is no question Saturdays meant the smell of Corona Corona cigars and music, particularly opera. My father, Thomas Munro, jr. , had a deep and abiding love for music particularly opera and great singers. I add as well that he was of one mind with John McCormack, Marjorie Kennedy-Fraser, Frank Paterson, James McCracken , Anne Lorne Gillies and Kenneth McKellar that the BIG SONGS of the Gaeltacht of Ireland and Scotland were great songs worthy to be included in the pantheon of the great songs of the world. The matchless melody of "Eileen Aroon" which dates back to the early Irish Renaissance (circa 1290? ) during a great period of Gaelic minstrelsy in the Gaeltachts of Ireland and Scotland. It is curious to think that this song may well have been contemporaneous with Sir William Wallace. Handel is said to have declared, after hearing it sung in Gaelic, that he would have preferred to have been its composer over all the music he had written which is great praise indeed since Handel himself was one of the greatest composers of the last five hundred years. But of course what he was saying is that there were great men –and women – composers before Agamemnon (and Mozart). I always admired my father for the reason that he, unlike so many classical devotees was not a snob about music. He derived as much joy from "Ma Ain Folk", "Rothsay Bay" "Oft in the Stilly Night" as he did from "E Lucevan le Stelle", "Questa o Quella" or "Recondita Armonia". Of course, it goes without saying that he introduced me to the Spanish language and Spanish art songs as well through Shirley Verrett and Victoria de Los Angeles (whom we saw live) and Teresa Berganza. My father's best languages I think were French and German but he and my Uncle Andy Muir Tracey –who had worked in Argentina and Chile and spoke Spanish quite well- encouraged me to study Spanish from an early age as well as picking up pieces of course –through song-of Italian etc. I never sang German songs however, though I heard a lot of them. I have to admit I could never understand why my father would listen to GERMAN songs. As a small boy all the villains of Two World Wars were Germans. Listening to German songs I always had a feeling that the ghost of Adolph Hitler was near and could influence me somehow; even to this day the POWER OF THE WILL and Nazi regalia give me an uncomfortable feeling that I am in the presence of evil so if I listen to Wagner it is always the overtures only. I still think German is a horrible guttural language though I have to admit I have tried to overcome this great prejudice for all things German all my life not completely successfully. I knew a few Germans –some quite shapely- in college and one thing we had in common was a love of classical music. But inevitably the Germans I met were avant guarde, irreligious and to the left PLUS they were Germans so there was no hope in this case for a Scottish-American-German Bund.
My father had many recordings of NESSUM DORMA, naturally , Tito Schipa, Beniamino GIGLI, Enrico Caruso, McCormack, Domingo, Pavarotti, Carerras, just to name a few. I was blessed to hear some great live performances of Turandot in my travels as a young man in New York, Rome and Milan. But the first NESSSUM DORMA I really remember was not a famous recording at all but part of a Ceilidh session we had at the Munro household circa 1961. My mother used to lead us while she played the piano in song sessions –with children's songs, hymns naturally –she loved CHILD IN A MANGER (Leanaibh an Aigh) and HOW GREAT THOU ART and of course Scottish songs and some of her favorite musicals such as the SOUND OF MUSIC and CAMELOT which she (but not me I was too young) had seen and heard on Broadway. One of our dinner guests in those days, now far far gone who sang at the piano was the lyric tenor WILLIAM TABBERT who originated the role of Lieutenant Cable (South Pacific on Broadway playing over 1900 performances) with his great friend EZIO PINZA. http://www.ibdb.com/person.asp?id=61759
"Younger than Springtime" was his signature song and I heard him sing it in concerts and at our home. Bill Tabbert was our next door neighbor in Livingston, New Jersey and though he traveled a lot on tours (his career was really on the down spin since he never got the movie role) he was a sometime visitor at our house. Tabbert was thus a lesser Laurence Tibbet or a lesser Robert Goulet but he was a great talent and I remember him as a very humble and kind man. Thinking back, he was very fond of the drink and that and his sensitive temperament probably set back his career. My wife always says "people drink to drown their sorrows but the problem is sorrows know how to swim." (La gente beben para ahogar sus penas pero el problema es las penas saben nadar) I still have a couple of his autographed LP's he gave my father including some of his last songs he had recorded in Rome. He used to hawk them at his concerts and night club acts. One night –in those days before U-TUBE and the Internet- my father encouraged him to sing a few Italian songs such as "Torna Sorrento" and "O Sole Mio." But the highlight of the evening was when he sang NESSUM DORMA. My father gave us the context of the song and my mother played the music in a subdued fashion –because it stretched the very limits of her musical talent-but she has a great ear for music and a talent for improvisation so she played all the appropriate chords. I suppose I always liked singing and music –I don't think there was any period of my life in which I was not exposed to good singing and fine music both traditional and classical- but I fell in love with Nessum Dorma that night and wanted to hear it again and again. I was delighted a few years later when my favorite Scottish singer , Kenneth McKellar, made a crossover classical recording of NESSUM DORMA (circa 1965) and this was the version I probably listened to the most as a young child. I must admit I was always fascinated with the barbaric theme of Turandot and the heroism exemplified by the Prince for if he failed in his quest he would be executed as all the previous suitors had been.
Turandot by PUCCINI.
There are many beautiful art songs and arias but NESSUM DORMA is one of the greatest as it marries great romantic lyric poetry with soaring musical expression.
The aria ends with a sustained high B-"Vincero!" ("I shall win!").
The prince is confident that at dawn his name will remain unknown.
After that aria, Puccini wrote just a small amount of music perhaps 10 or 15 minutes. He was very sick when he composed Turando and on November 29, 1924, he succumbed to cancer, aged 66, leaving Turandot unfinished.
His devoted pupil Alfano following his master's notes completed the opera. But it is interesting –and moving to note that at the premiere at La Scala, Milan, on April 25, 1926, the performance ended on the last note which Puccini committed to the score. The conductor, Toscanini, then turned and addressed the audience. Accounts differ as to his exact words. According to one report they were: "Here, at this point, Giacomo Puccini broke off his work. Death on this occasion was stronger than art." Another report has him saying: At this point, the maestro laid down his pen." See http://home.earthlink.net/~jw3/Home.htm
And http://www.toscaninionline.com/
The aria "Nessun dorma" is near the beginning of Act 3.
At the end of Act 2 Turandot still is mystified by the Prince and cold to this approach by means of romantic poetry. A real despot Turandot believes -Medusa-like- all she has to do is to induce someone to tell the Prince's name so that she can wreak her savage frenzy and have the Prince's head chopped off like so many before him. Thereby she declares an imperial order that no one in Peking is can to sleep until the name of the Prince is revealed.
Act 3 opens with a dark and drear night; the orchestra sounds lugubrious chords. Heralds call out from afar "Tonight no one in Peking sleeps" ("Questa notte nessun dorma in Pekino"), and the chorus disconsolately drones ("nessun dorma")"no one sleeps".
In the first words of this most famous and beloved aria, the Prince repeats the words of the chorus. One might expect a suicidal dirge but instead there is a great song of courage and hope.
Charles Mangan has written
"Whenever authentic hope is recognized in another, the observer comes away greatly edified, fortified in his own difficulties and strengthened in his personal pursuit of an increase in supernatural hope." Saint John Bosco (1815-1888), whom the Church liturgically commemorates on January 31, is a model of hope for all brothers and sisters of Jesus. Riddled by scorn heaped upon him by the anti-clerics of his day and acknowledging the horrendous obstacles which plagued the young men under his charge, Don Bosco responded with warmth, courage and charity. His eyes were fixed firmly on the Savior. This indefatigable apostle of the youth — hailed by Pope John Paul II as the "teacher and father to the young" — endured all trials which confronted him. Instead of lashing out in anger, he realized that God would preserve Him and give the success to his hands which the Lord Himself desired".
One of the writings of Saint Teresa of Avila wrote (this is the translation from the Spanish,
"Hope, O my soul, hope. You know neither the day nor the hour. Watch carefully, for everything passes quickly, even though your impatience makes doubtful what is certain, and turns a very short time into a long one. Dream that the more you struggle, the more you prove the love that you bear your God, and the more you will rejoice one day with your Beloved, in a happiness and rapture that can never end"
The translation of NESSUN DORMA, (R. MUNRO, 2007)
. ..> The Prince
Nessun dorma, nessun dorma ...
Tu pure, o Principessa,
Nella tua fredda stanza,
Guardi le stelle
Che tremano d'amore
E di speranza.
Sleeps none! Sleeps none...
Thou ,too, o Princess,
In your cold room,
Look upward toward the stars,
That quiver with love
And with hope.
Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me,
Il nome mio nessun saprà, no, no,
Sulla tua bocca lo dirò
Quando la luce splenderà,
Ed il mio bacio scioglierà il silenzio
Che ti fa mia.
But my secret is locked up within me;
Mine name "nane sall ken", no, no,
Upon thy mouth I shall speak it
When the light beams brightly,
And mine kiss will melt the silence
That makes thee mine.
Chorus
Il nome suo nessun saprà
E noi dovrem, ahimè, morir.
"Nane sall ken his name"
And we have to, (woe is me!), die.
The Prince
&NBSP;< o:p>
Dilegua, o notte!
Tramontate, stelle!
All'alba vincerò!
Disappear, o night!
Set, stars!
At first light, I will win the gree! (prize)!
..>
· "Dire sulla bocca", literally "to say on the mouth", is a poetic Latin way of saying "to kiss." There is no question that kissing –for friendship and affection- as much or more than for erotic love- is one of the great pleasures of humanity.
· Bésame (is Spanish for kiss me); I understand this is a Celticism from the Celtic speaking parts of Spain and Northern Italy (Basium in Latin; used only by Catullus, Martial –and later Juvenal the way Burns would use "tassie" for cup.) The classical republican Romans, like the Japanese, did not kiss. My father somewhat jocularly theorized that Roman's Gallic slaves taught the fashion to their Roman masters. In modern Gaelic one says "POG MI" (Kiss me; from the Latin Pax) or "Thoir pog" ; but seem to remember hearing BEUL for kiss or mouth or BUS (or PUSS)….but I really can't tell if THOIR BUS would mean KISS ME ON THE CHEEK(I never kissed my Auld Pop on the mouth) or just kiss. Perhaps Anne Lorne Gillies would know!
· Fredda stanza…means cold room but of course has a double meaning as a stanza is a stanza in poetry…until now all her love songs left her cold!!! La stanza del trono means THRONE ROOM
· Ma il mio mistero è chiuso in me, il mio nessun saprà; I chose to use Scots idiom to translate this is in the great song THE NEW SLAIN KNIGHT or the TWA CORBIES (TWO CROWS) which by the way Kathleen MacInnes has recorded recently in Gaelic. Gree of course is Scots; Burns uses it several times at least. There is a old Gaelic proverb I recall just now
FAR NACH BI AM BEAG CHA BHI AM MOR (Where there is not a wee will there will never be a big one either
FAR AM BI TOIL BIDH GNIOMH (Where there be a will there be a 'gree' (a prize or deed)
Of course this is 'where there is a will there is a way' but it has a little more to it I think. Will must be developed bit by bit (beag is beag)
This is a piece of traditional wisdom I often share with my students though not as much as "It is not good to marry without a ring; no ring no ding" (Ni math posadh gan fainne…)
· Scraggy, black feathered, mean beaked carrion crows tearing at the tender flesh of a dead helpless abandoned Scottish knight fallen in battle for a lost cause. It is a very strong image of impermanence and mortality and perhaps the futility of and tragedy of war. I also know this from my oldest anthology of Scots poems and have a moving recording of it by Kenneth McKellar. It is a very cynical variation of the Three Ravens (Child Ballad 26) whose "derry down, derry down" chorus suggests a Welsh (or Breton) original which may be lost. I have heard it said that the versions that are song are based on a Manx or Breton melody. It seems that the two folk poems are similar but I have always had the feeling they were both translations –different ones- of an earlier song though of course I have no evidence whatsoever for this belief except for the fact that both songs though similar are different. The Scots version is much darker –even skeptical and seems to question the existence of the afterlife.
http://www.contemplator.com/child/twacorbies.html
As I was walking all alane,
I heard twa corbies making a mane;
The tane unto the t'other say,
'Where sall we gang and dine to-day,
Where sall we gang and dine to-day?'
'In behint yon auld fail dyke,
I wot there lies a new slain knight;
And naebody kens that he lies there,
But his hawk, his honnd, and lady fair,
His hawk, his honnd, and lady fair.
'His hound is to the hunting gane,
His hawk to fetch the wild-fowl hame,
His lady 'a ta'en another mate,
So we may mak our dinner sweet,
We may mak our dinner sweet.
'Ye'll sit on his white hause-bane,
And I'll pike out his bonny blue een;
Wi ae lock o his gowden hair
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare,
We'll theek our nest when it grows bare.'
'Mony a one for him makes mane,
But nane sall ken where he is gane; {NONE SHALL KNOW WHERE HE IS GONE}
Oer his white banes, when they are bare, {OVER HIS WHITE BONES WHEN THEY ARE BARE
The wind sail blaw for evermair, THE WIND SHALL BLOW FOREVER MORE!
The wind sail blaw for evermair.'
Thus I spend a pleasant Friday evening, reading and translating and listening to music as I sip my tea. All the lassies and 'dugs' and the wee pussy-cat are sleeping.
GOOD NIGHT...OIDHICHE MHATH A TH'ANN!
BUENAS NOCHES..BUENA NOTTE and to show my open mindedness GUTE NACHT....
HOMAGE TO IAN MUNRO , THE SOLDIER POET, KILLED IN ACTION OCTOBER 30 1918
Homage to Ian Munro (MC 1918) the SOLDIER POET
Category: Writing and Poetry
(GAELIC POETRY CORNER)
Ian Munro, (Military Cross for bravery) was killed in action, October 30, 1918. He volunteered for service in August 1914 and saw action in some of the war's fiercest battles. At the time of his death the young officer was 28 years old.. Munro was born in Swordale, Isle of Lewis and, writing in his native Gaelic as "Iain Rothach", came to be ranked by critics alongside the major war poets. Derick Thomson - the venerable poet and Professor of Celtic Studies at Glasgow - hailed Munro's work in his Companion to Gaelic Scotland as being: "the first strong voice of the new Gaelic verse of the 20th century".
NE OBLIVISCARIS …DO NOT FORGET
..> Ar Tir
Our Land (translation R. Munro)
Brat Shneachda air mullach nam beann,
currachd ceòtha mar liath-fhalt m'an ceann,
feadain is sruthain mòintich
a' leum 's a' dòrtadh,
a' sporgail air ùrlar nan glean,
aig còsan 's mu shàilean nam mò-bheann;
fèid ruadh', fir na cròice,
air sliosaidbh fraoich ruadh-dhonn -
si Tìr nan Gaisgeach a th' ann,
Tìr nam Beann, nan Gaisgeach, 's nan Gleann,
si Tìr nan Gaisgeach a th' ann.
Cloak of snow on the peaks of the bens,
TRANSLATION:
Misty-capped like gray hair about their heads,
Moorland burns and streams
a-rushing –a-gushing-a shooting
a-dashing through the wilds of the glens,
a-rustling onto the floors of the glens,
Interleaved into the "sleeves" rounding the foot of the great bens,
Red deer, big fellows with antlers,
Upon red-brown slopes of heather,
Such is the Land of the Heroes,
And aye, the Land of the Bens, aye, of the Heroes, and of the Glens,
Such is our land, the land of the Heroes, aye!
Iain Rothach (1889 - 1918)
Ian Munro, The Soldier Poet
MC Seaforth Highlanders
..>
See An Tuil - Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse.
Category: Writing and Poetry
(GAELIC POETRY CORNER)
Ian Munro, (Military Cross for bravery) was killed in action, October 30, 1918. He volunteered for service in August 1914 and saw action in some of the war's fiercest battles. At the time of his death the young officer was 28 years old.. Munro was born in Swordale, Isle of Lewis and, writing in his native Gaelic as "Iain Rothach", came to be ranked by critics alongside the major war poets. Derick Thomson - the venerable poet and Professor of Celtic Studies at Glasgow - hailed Munro's work in his Companion to Gaelic Scotland as being: "the first strong voice of the new Gaelic verse of the 20th century".
NE OBLIVISCARIS …DO NOT FORGET
..> Ar Tir
Our Land (translation R. Munro)
Brat Shneachda air mullach nam beann,
currachd ceòtha mar liath-fhalt m'an ceann,
feadain is sruthain mòintich
a' leum 's a' dòrtadh,
a' sporgail air ùrlar nan glean,
aig còsan 's mu shàilean nam mò-bheann;
fèid ruadh', fir na cròice,
air sliosaidbh fraoich ruadh-dhonn -
si Tìr nan Gaisgeach a th' ann,
Tìr nam Beann, nan Gaisgeach, 's nan Gleann,
si Tìr nan Gaisgeach a th' ann.
Cloak of snow on the peaks of the bens,
TRANSLATION:
Misty-capped like gray hair about their heads,
Moorland burns and streams
a-rushing –a-gushing-a shooting
a-dashing through the wilds of the glens,
a-rustling onto the floors of the glens,
Interleaved into the "sleeves" rounding the foot of the great bens,
Red deer, big fellows with antlers,
Upon red-brown slopes of heather,
Such is the Land of the Heroes,
And aye, the Land of the Bens, aye, of the Heroes, and of the Glens,
Such is our land, the land of the Heroes, aye!
Iain Rothach (1889 - 1918)
Ian Munro, The Soldier Poet
MC Seaforth Highlanders
..>
See An Tuil - Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse.
The PATHS OF GLORY
Paths of Glory (fragment) in Spanish and English
Category: Writing and Poetry
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; 30
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:— 35
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
No permitáis que la ambición se burle de las tareas útiles de ellos
De sus sencillas alegrías y oscuro destino;
Ni que la grandeza escuche, con sonrisa desdeñosa
las breves y sencillas crónicas de los pobres.
El alarde de la heráldica, la pompa del poder
y todo el esplendor, toda la abundancia que da,
espera igualmente la hora inevitable.
Los senderos de la gloria no conducen sino a la tumba.
(Traducción; translation R. K. Munro)
http://www.bartleby.com/40/285.html
LINCOLN had the shortest autobiography of all time; he merely quoted Gray "the short and simple annals of the Poor
Category: Writing and Poetry
Let not Ambition mock their useful toil,
Their homely joys, and destiny obscure; 30
Nor Grandeur hear with a disdainful smile
The short and simple annals of the Poor.
The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e'er gave
Awaits alike th' inevitable hour:— 35
The paths of glory lead but to the grave.
No permitáis que la ambición se burle de las tareas útiles de ellos
De sus sencillas alegrías y oscuro destino;
Ni que la grandeza escuche, con sonrisa desdeñosa
las breves y sencillas crónicas de los pobres.
El alarde de la heráldica, la pompa del poder
y todo el esplendor, toda la abundancia que da,
espera igualmente la hora inevitable.
Los senderos de la gloria no conducen sino a la tumba.
(Traducción; translation R. K. Munro)
http://www.bartleby.com/40/285.html
LINCOLN had the shortest autobiography of all time; he merely quoted Gray "the short and simple annals of the Poor
Saturday, October 25, 2008
FROM STONE TO SILICON BY LAWRENCE A. Husick
[Richard Munro] HERE IS A QUOTE
From fascinating article it really underlines my basic educational belief that the raising for children must be a coordinated effort of the home what the Spanish call educación, a community of faith (ekklesia), and the school. It starts in the home and it ends in the home. This is why ideas of spending even more on schools and early education are all a waste of money as far as I am concerned MUNRO
However, I reserve the right to add an Innovation #0 (since
I work with computers, and programmers start counting from
zero, not 1). Innovation #0 in my view is one that outshines
and underlies every other innovation we have discussed. That
is the concept of intentional pedagogy. This is perhaps the
last thing in that great long list of what separates us from
the "lower animals," a phrase Darwin rejected. It's the idea
that humans can intentionally transmit culture and
generalize knowledge from the specific instance to that
which is teachable, and then intentionally give that
knowledge to another person across time and space. From
telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it
to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most
important innovation of all time.
"The systematic use of teaching to ensure the learning of
skills and acquisition of knowledge by others is evidently a
peculiarity of the human species."[1] "Humans are remarkable
among animals for the way in which they teach their
young."[2] S.A. Barnett suggested that homo sapiens, the
understanding man, is perhaps not the right taxonomy for our
species, that really what we should be called is homo
docens, teaching man.
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Over 50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation www.fpri.org
Footnotes
The Newsletter of FPRI's Wachman Center
FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION by Lawrence A. Husick
Vol. 13, No. 25
October 2008
Lawrence Husick is a Senior Fellow at FPRI, where he co- directs its Wachman Center program on Teaching the History of Innovation. This essay is based on his presentation at "Teaching the History of Innovation," a two-day history institute for teachers held October 18-19. The Institute was hosted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO and webcast worldwide. See
http://www.fpri.org/education/innovation/
for videocasts and texts of lectures.
The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall. Core support is provided by the Annenberg Foundation and Mr. H.F. Lenfest; funding for the innovation program is provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The next history weekend is Teaching the Nuclear Age, March 28-29, 2009, at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.
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Webcast for Students and Teachers on Innovation and
Entrepreneurship
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
11:00 AM ET
2:00 PM ET
As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, FPRI will present two 45-minute webcast on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Secondary schools/classes may sign up to view the webcasts live online and participate in the Q&A periods.
The founders of Yahoo!, Google, and FaceBook are famous and very wealthy. They are our modern heroes. In part, each owes his success to the work and success of many other innovators and entrepreneurs in an unbroken line stretching back hundreds of years. As Isaac Newton famously repeated, "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
On whose shoulders do Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg
(Facebook) stand? What innovations form the foundations of these companies’ products, and how can we understand how history can give each of us a better chance to create great products and achieve great success?
Lawrence Husick, co-director of FPRI's Wachman Center
Program on the History of Innovation will present a fast- paced webcast that traces these modern systems' roots from from an early form of telegraph, through Napoleon's France, to Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, “Ma” Bell, Bell Labs, and then finally to BitNet, ARPANet, the Internet and World Wide Web.
MUNRO: This was so fascinating and original I had to post the entire thing. I might make commentary on it later.
To register for either or both webcasts go to:
http://www.fpri.org/education/innovationwebcast/
For additional information, contact Alan Luxenberg at
lux@fpri.org or telephone (215) 732-3774 x105.
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FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION
by Lawrence A. Husick
"Innovation" is not just inventions; it is a process of making changes by introducing valuable new methods, ideas, or products. "Innovations" are the things themselves--the ideas, methods, and processes. It's not simply that better mousetrap; it's different ways of thinking and doing.
Innovations may of course be inventions, but they may also be beliefs, organizational methods, and discoveries. An innovation is a value-creation mechanism. It is the way we humans manage to extract more value, generate more economic surplus and therefore more leisure time, and manage to get away from just hunting and gathering.
We can approach this topic through a "tough question." Not "what is the most important innovation in the history of man"--that one's easy. People can and do differ, but most come up with just one. No, the tough question is, "What are the 25 most important innovations, in rank order?" Rank order here means the absolute value of the impact of an innovation, be it for good or ill, on human life, times the total number of lives affected. There is no requirement that the lives impacted have any idea about the innovation or how it works. Most of us have no idea how those little people get inside our television sets to entertain and inform us, and yet we watch television. Innovations are made and affect us, and we in turn affect the course of innovation, even without deep understandings of the mechanisms.
In my list below, there may appear to be a bias toward newer innovations. That's simply a result of the ranking formula.
Looking at world population in the common era, since the year one (because in the year zero, no one had yet invented the concept of zero--that came around 600 or so), most of the people who have ever lived have lived in the last 200 years. Thus, even small innovations have tremendous impact when multiplied by the population experiencing them.
The ranking is constructed from the considered opinion of many people, too many to name. It's neither right nor wrong- -the purpose of this discourse is to provoke argument. What is included wrongly? What is left off in error? How is the order dreadfully, woefully messed up?
And now, a brief tour through the history of innovation, working backward from #25:
Innovation #25 is relativity and quantum mechanics, invented in 1912. We are a scant 103 years since special relativity, since Einstein's miraculous year of 1905, and everything we touch in industrialized society owes a debt to Einstein and his colleagues. Our entire way of looking at matter and the universe changed in the seven years from 1905-12. In fact, you would not be reading this paper on a screen, talking on the telephone, watching television, driving a car, or using any other modern marvel without the solid-state electronics that were made possible by this revolutionary innovation in how we think about the structure of the universe, from the largest galaxies down to the smallest subatomic particles that allow us to make microelectronics and nanotechnology.
In fact, one of the more troublesome and problematic challenges of the twenty-first century--how to get rid of the atom bombs we created in the twentieth century--also owes its existence to relativity and quantum mechanics.
Innovation #24 is electromagnetism. Again, the idea that we can harness electricity to do work that used to take back- breaking labor by people and animals is a revolution. Hans Christian Orsted first noticed the effect in 1820; in 1821, Michael Faraday came up with an electric motor. Most of the motive force in modern society, and all the electricity that T. Boone Pickens advertises as being created by burning fossil fuels--all the things that let us ride up in elevators and escalators, turn on our cars, have electric motors do work for us, and have electric lights--all of it comes from theories of electromagnetism. How important is electricity? Five years after Edison installed the first electric light bulb in Manhattan, the first generating plant, the Edison Electric Company, wished to celebrate its anniversary by turning off the lights for five minutes at midnight on New Year's Eve. The mayor of New York pronounced that this would be a hazard to public safety and prevented Edison turning off the power. Think about going to the grocery store in the absence of the electricity that runs the freezer and refrigerator cases. Think about our food distribution system, our communication and transportation systems. Nothing we do in an industrialized society is possible without electricity. Indeed, a critical measure of our success in Iraq and Afghanistan is our ability to build infrastructure and keep the lights on in.
Innovation #23 is evolution and natural selection. Darwin first posited this theory in On the Origins of Species in 1859. The theory was 25 years in the making, but Darwin, for reasons we now understand, was dreadfully afraid to publish it. It changed the way we view our place in the natural order. Some would say it forever debased humankind, because Darwin made it clear that we are just animals--animals of a special sort, but animals nonetheless. Our understanding of evolution and natural selection has since informed all of
our understandings of biology, ecology, healthcare,
population dynamics, and the many consequences of human actions in the natural world.
Innovation #22: Before electric power, there was steam power. The first steam engine was the French Papin engine of 1690. From 1690 through the early part of the 18th century, through Savory to Newcomb in 1712 and finally to Watt, the steam engine made a huge difference because it multiplied man's ability to do work. Before the steam engine, you needed draft animals to do anything substantial. The mining of coal was incidental and small-scale. The steam engine, which was used to drive the pumps that could drain the mines, made mining coal practical. You could finally go deep enough to get coal, which in turn was a primary fuel for the steam engine. This is an example of an innovation fueling and making available another innovation that in turn fed back on the first innovation. One of the things we learn in studying history is that there is no straight line of ascent--we always zigzag. The steam engine was truly a step forward, although it took over 100 years for it to come to final form and end up driving locomotives and steamboats and
changing transportation forever, which also changed
economies and nations.
Innovation #21: Before the steam engine, if you wanted to do serious hard work, you did it with water power. Water power was first exploited in 240 BCE, in the Fertile Crescent area in the Middle East and in Asia Minor. It is a tremendously efficient innovation, because it drives heavy millstones without draft animals. It changes the motion of falling water into useful work. Water power remained an important part of society and the economy well into the developments that sparked the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In fact, some would argue that the abundant rainfall and number of rivers in Europe created an economy based on water power
that permitted Europe to develop technologies that
outstripped the rest of the world beginning in the late Renaissance. The same is true of the factory system of New England, where mills were built to harness the rivers of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
As to efficiency, a car's gasoline engine can reach an efficiency level of only about 30 percent in terms of conversion of fuel to effort. An "undershot" water wheel, where the water flows beneath the wheel, invented more than two millennia ago, is over 25 percent efficient. And if you build a sluice and make the water an overshot water wheel, so the water falls on top of the wheel, the efficiency rockets to 75 percent. If we could build cars like that, a 100 mpg car would be no problem at all. The problem is just building a big enough water tank.
Innovation #20 is more of a world view. It is the concept of science itself, which until well past the time of Thomas Jefferson was called natural philosophy. There was no differentiation between the study of philosophy and the study of man's place in the world and his relation to God.
Newton himself said that he was trying to understand the world and the universe so that he could understand God's plan. Einstein echoed this in saying that he studied physics because he tried to understand the "mind of God."
The use of the scientific method and of objective systems of understanding and codifying the world originated in the sixth century BCE in Greece, when we went from observation to theory. Observation had long preceded theory; it was what you did if you wanted to understand the calendar or astronomy, when to plant and when to reap. But that was purely empirical. It was the Greeks who gave us this idea that there was some objective theory that knit things together that was outside of but understandable by man's experience. They also gave us formal systems--mathematics, logic, statistics. Later thinkers gave us concepts like place value (think about trying to write big numbers in Roman numerals) and, as discussed earlier, the very concept of zero.
Innovation #19, which appears at the top of many lists of innovations, is moveable type. Most Westerners would credit moveable type to the Gutenberg press of 1436. But in fact moveable type goes back to imperial China in 1040. There the type pieces were ceramic; Koreans took this invention forward about 200 years later using some metals. But the difficulty is that in pictographic languages, such as Chinese and Korean, which have 5,000 characters, the time required to find and remove one piece of type from a box system of 5,000 made it impractical and inefficient to set type. The Koreans and Chinese also had social institutions that limited printing to a bureaucratic and governmental system. There was no private market for printed materials, and eventually those cultures went back to one-off woodblock printing. Fortunately for us, Gutenberg came up with the idea of moveable type, special inks, and an efficient press, and understood the advances in what are called the type metals--tin, lead, and antimony. His innovation found a ready market because by that time, every educated person in Europe wanted the Vulgate Bible. The desire to have a Bible of one's own drove the market.
This is also an example of failures of protection of inventions. Gutenberg made all of his apprentices and
everyone who worked in his shop sign a draconian
nondisclosure agreement. And yet, within five years of Gutenberg's first use of moveable type, the technology had spread all over as his apprentices left and formed their own shops, and thus has it ever been.
Innovation #18 is fossil fuels. Today, when we hear fossil fuels, we tend to think that maybe we've gotten into trouble with this one. But fossil fuels have been critically important in the last hundred years. The first recorded uses of coal were around 1,000 BCE, in the Middle East, when it was said that there were rocks that burned like charcoal.
These were exposed coal scenes where people could simply chip away at the surface to collect them, but they also produced very hot, sustainable fires. Coal and charcoal contributed to many other important technologies. Getting beyond coal, however, had to wait a long time. The first use of natural gas drilled for its own purpose and not, for instance, for a flame (which became known as the Oracle of
Delphi) was in 1859, when we drilled our first well in Ohio.
In the same year in western Pennsylvania the first oil well was drilled and the first oil refined. In the century and a half since then, we have come to understand that our addiction to fossil fuels is perhaps irreversible.
Fossil fuels changed the way in which economies operated.
For the first time, the density of energy and fuel made it possible to make things portable. That meant changes in transportation. At the Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, there are some steam engines that stand 80' high. Today we can build engines small enough to power weed-whackers, barely the size of a softball. And it's all because of the energy density of fossil fuels. We will not replace fossil fuels completely in our lifetimes, but we are beginning to understand that petroleum and natural gas may be too valuable to burn to get from point A to point B. That is because these hydrocarbons are also the stuff of which we make miracle drugs and plastics and thousands of other things we consider indispensable.
Innovation #17 is the specialization of labor, or some would say tribal and clan organization. The idea that some people do some things better than others has been with us since well before the dawn of recorded history. Perhaps the first instance of that was the recognition that some people are well suited for hunting and others for gathering, that some people are better out there in the field and others make food that's tasty. Sexual dimorphism also gave us the
ability to separate roles. We continue to push the
boundaries of that today in society. Traditional societies have those roles relatively well set, and one of the great sources of friction in the world is the clash between societies that are overcoming those roles and those that choose not to. But the specialization of labor went far beyond to the specialization of roles in society, so that some people could knap flint and make tools, and others could use those tools. Some could make arrows and bows and spears and others could hunt with them. Some were good at making fire, and others not so good. The idea that you can build a society by specializing those roles freed a lot of people and a lot of time, improved efficiency, and created value.
Innovation #16, paper, ia a relatively recent innovation.
Paper was first mentioned by the Chinese in the year 105, and yet the Chinese continued to use other materials because paper was thought of as too fragile, writing too expensive.
Paper continued to develop until finally, by the sixteenth century, wood pulp paper became more widely used than rag paper, which created an explosion in publishing and the growth of knowledge. It can really be said that wood pulp paper created the modern educational system. Before that, the cost to create a book and disseminate it created bottlenecks in the economy. With wood pulp paper, publishing began to bloom, and with it, modern scholarship.
Innovation #15 is also at the top of most people's
innovation lists: the wheel. The first wheel was probably a millstone transported for its own use (as a stonecutter makes millstone in the quarry and then must somehow get it to the mill.) One theory of how the wheel might have developed is the idea of rollers and sledges. These systems were instrumental in building the Egyptian pyramids and before that the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and perhaps the megaliths of Stonehenge. The wheel changed how we move things, how far we could go in a day, and how far we could
farm from a village. Thus the wheel heralded the
domestication of draft animals, because once you decide you're tired of pulling the thing along, you look for something else that's going to pull better.
Innovation #14 is formal law codes. Certainly there were formal law codes before the Code of Hammurabi, who was
codifying oral or fragmented law. But by 1,780 BCE,
Hammurabi had laid down a formal code of laws, most of which did not deal with criminal law but rather with civil and commercial law. That trend continued through the Egyptian Book of the Dead, even to the Ten Commandments and the
Twelve Tables of Rome. The great works of law and
literature, including one of the greatest, the Book of Leviticus, show that we have come up with an awful lot of civil law, a lot of ways of saying how people should relate to one another commercially. In effect, we have been simply writing down our politics for thousands of years. But law is a way of reducing the cost of dispute resolution to a society, and thereby increasing the efficiency of its economy. It's much better if you know what you're supposed to do and what happens if you don't. That predictability increases efficiency.
Closely allied with law is Innovation #13, the concept of money. Money also has a long and storied history. Humankind started out with barter. What do you have that I need? It
went with specialization of labor. If someone makes
arrowheads all day, how are you going to get the arrowhead from him? You're probably going to trade something you've just hunted with an arrowhead he made. Money comes into the picture as a way of solidifying the power of the state.
That's why the Sumerians, the first agricultural urban society, were the first to adopt a concept of money. In other words, I've got a lot of stuff stored, I'll give you something that says you now own it. In effect, it's a form of deed.
We come forward from coins to paper money and finally the thing that enables all modern economies, the concept of fiat and credit currency, which was developed in late medieval Europe, in which letters of credit and letters of mark allowed us for the first time to bank on the power of the state itself rather than on the value of the coinage.
Innovation #12 is gods and religions as social institutions.
Religion creates social cohesion by creating in and out groups. It gives a priestly class super-authority (authority that doesn't come from who you are, but rather who you
represent) and shapes behavior in both prescriptive and
motivational ways, all in a tremendously economically
efficient mode. If you are a priest-king living in a palace in ancient Sumer, you have a prescriptive authority of saying, "This is the God speaking and not the man," and you have the ability to promise rewards in the afterlife at no particular cost to yourself or the ruling class. It's a debt
you'll never have to pay off. Economically and
organizationally, religious organization has to be ranked right up there at the top with almost any other economic advance.
Dostoevsky probably put it best in The Brothers Karamazov, when Fyodor Pavlovich said, "Damn it all, what wouldn't I do
to the man who first invented God!" To which Ivan
Fyodorovich replies that there would have been no
civilization if they hadn't invented God, and no brandy, either.
Innovation #11, systems of writing, went from pictographs, whether cuneiform or Chinese in their evolution, with thousands of individual symbols to be learned, to an
alphabetic system which evolved from the Phoenicians,
through a long period of evolution that we can trace all the way down to our use of Roman script today. The idea that characters can be combined in grammars to represent ideas made possible written records of tremendous complexity and efficiency, calculations as place value was developed, and Gutenberg's printing press. Our alphabet derives directly from something 2,900 years old. One of the only advances thereafter was the development of a separate numbering system, what we call the Arabic numbering system.
Innovation #10, food preservation, arguably first developed around 10,000 BCE in the Neolithic revolution, meant that you didn't have to eat what you killed right away, but could save it for lean times. Portable food sources that are
dried, freeze-dried, salted, spiced, pickled, cooked,
smoked, or fermented allows travel over longer distances and more efficient migration with animals, changes society, and generates tremendous value. We understand all of these
methods and techniques, but many of them have been
supplanted by electric refrigeration. It would now be very hard to find salted cod, which was a staple of the northern European diet for 2,000 years. Instead we buy fresh cod or go to Costco, where they routinely fly in a 600-pound tuna caught two days ago in the Solomon Islands in the middle of the Pacific. (I shudder at the carbon footprint.)
Innovation #9 is metallurgy. Ancient people built fires that burned hot. They looked in the bottom of the fire pit after a while and noticed there were some things there that were harder than the kinds of stones they were used to dealing with. What were they? What could be done with them? The progression was from copper, silver, and gold to soft metals first mined and smelted in about 4,400 BCE; to the idea of alloying certain metals, for instance copper with tin, to get bronze, which is a harder and more durable metal; to the Iron Age to finally steel. In fact, Damascus steel is probably the first instance of the use of nanotechnology, as carbon nanotubes from the furnaces were incorporated that made the steel remarkably hard yet not brittle. Metalworking became both a science and an art. In Jared Diamond's theory of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), steel is the third leg of the dominance tripod of the West.
Innovation #8: Ceramics and pottery. Some of the other things the ancients found in the bottom of a fire pit were pieces of clay that through repeated firings had gotten hard and had their porosity reduced. So you have the ability to make clay vessels, first to store dry things like grains, then fired clay in which you can store liquids, and finally earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain, which eventually in the hands of Chinese became high art. From a simple clay pot unearthed in Syria, 6,600 BCE we come all the way forward to our finest toilets today, which are vitreous china, made by
the same processes of molding and firing clay. Our
microelectronics also owe a debt to pottery and ceramics.
Computer chips are built on a ceramic substrate that conducts the heat away from them. No ceramics, and the chips would burn themselves up and your cell phone would quit working.
Innovation #7, farming, is really a chain of innovation over a long period of time. The first animal to be domesticated is generally thought to be the dog, around 15,000 BCE. (The horse was domesticated on the steppes of Central Asia in about 5,000 BCE, but the horse collar, which would make the horse so useful in farming, would have to wait another 4,000
years.) The domestication of plants began with the bottle gourd, something you could dry out and carry as a canteen.
Imagine what it would be like if you couldn't carry water with you when you go hunting. You would have to stay pretty close to sources of water. With a bottle gourd, you could go farther and have greater access to more crops and herds.
Wheat was arguably the most important crop in the world until rice--the most efficient crop for converting the nutrients in sunlight into edible material--came along about 5,000 years later.
From the domestication of animals and plants to hydraulic agriculture--the idea of artificial irrigation of crops that was developed in the Fertile Crescent--to the plow and the concept of crop rotation, chemical fertilizers (which didn't occur to us until the seventeenth century), artificial nitrate fertilizers (which didn't occur until we could synthesize them at the beginning of the twentieth century), and finally the Green Revolution in the early 1960s, farming has given us the ability to create unprecedented economic surplus, which many would say gave us the rest of the innovations listed here.
Innovation #6: Clothing. Without clothing, people have to stay where it's warm and dry. It took a long time to go from draping ourselves in tanned animal skins to figuring out how to use a needle to sew them into some sort of a shape, and a longer time still to the weaving of cloth and the making of tailored, layered clothes. In the stone age, not only did you eat what you killed, you also wore it. We've been able to reconstruct the clothes of Utze, a Copper Age hunter, found when a glacier in the Austrian Alps receded. He wore snow shoes lined with grass for insulation. He had a cape made out of woven grass, carried sophisticated animal skin bags for his gear, and he was truly a happy wanderer until someone shot him with an arrow and he died and got frozen in that glacier.
Innovation #5: Symbolic communication. Starting with cave painting, human beings began to communicate with each other across time and space, not simply face to face. The idea that one could communicate with people through symbols made externalization of information and language possible. It gave us a storehouse of information that didn't need to be transmitted just by showing someone how it worked, whether you were drawing on the walls in a cave in Lascaux or coming up with counters in Aswan that indicate that some dates were brought by camel from a far-away place. At the same time, symbolic communication in Sumer developed into cuneiform, pressing reeds into soft clay and baking them. (We know a tremendous amount about cuneiform because it's really hard to get rid of clay tablets.)
Innovation #4: Lever simple machine. There are a number of classes of simple machines, of which the lever is perhaps one of the oldest. It allows people to amplify their mechanical effort. Hammers and plows mean that instead of the effort of one person digging with hands or tools, now there is mechanical advantage. Farmers can plow deeper and throw farther and with more force. Archimedes is famously said to have stated, "Give me a place to stand with a lever and I will move the whole world." In fact, the concept of a lever has moved the whole world since its invention.
Innovation #3: Inclined plane simple machine. Don't just think ramp, think blades, wedges, chutes, slides, and screws. Chopper cores unearthed at the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa that are 1.9 million years old show a clear effort to manufacture. They were used for chopping and scraping hides as well as for hunting. That technology was brought forward to the high art of the Clovis arrow point and the higher still art of Archimedes' screw water pump, which permitted hydraulic irrigation by pumping water up out of canals and rivers and into irrigation ditches with a simple turn of the screw.
Innovation #2 is the taming of fire. Fire has been around a long time, often caused by lightning strikes. But being able to make fire on demand, or first being able to capture it from the wild and preserve and use it as you wish, permitted humans to live in colder places, work after dark, inhabit places that were dark and perhaps dangerous, scare off animals at night, and cook food in order to preserve it.
Fire-starting technologies are tremendously tough to master, which probably also meant more specialization of labor as humans began to use simple technologies like the fire plow, the fire drill, and the smudge bundle, otherwise known as the cigar.
Innovation #1 in spoken language--true semantic, syntactic, phonetic language. This idea allowed humans to transmit information about the world from one person to another. It
underlies all cooperation, the economy, and clan
relationships. Spoken language is the most important
innovation we have ever come up with.
However, I reserve the right to add an Innovation #0 (since I work with computers, and programmers start counting from zero, not 1). Innovation #0 in my view is one that outshines and underlies every other innovation we have discussed. That is the concept of intentional pedagogy. This is perhaps the last thing in that great long list of what separates us from the "lower animals," a phrase Darwin rejected. It's the idea
that humans can intentionally transmit culture and
generalize knowledge from the specific instance to that
which is teachable, and then intentionally give that
knowledge to another person across time and space. From telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most important innovation of all time.
"The systematic use of teaching to ensure the learning of skills and acquisition of knowledge by others is evidently a peculiarity of the human species."[1] "Humans are remarkable among animals for the way in which they teach their young."[2] S.A. Barnett suggested that homo sapiens, the understanding man, is perhaps not the right taxonomy for our species, that really what we should be called is homo docens, teaching man.
So what didn't make the list? Lots of things, for reasons that I hope you will understand and then vehemently disagree with. Everything from theories of disease, inoculations, and antibiotics to guns and gunpowder, and plastics to democracy to even the idea that there is such a thing as an idea, in my estimation couldn't make the cut of the metric I set forth earlier: impact on lives times number of lives. Others have had different concepts of what innovation means and what innovations are truly important. My hope is not that I have it right, but that readers will help me get it more right with your comments, questions, emails, or simply throwing it wrapped around a rock through the transom.
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Notes
[1] Barnett, S.A., Teaching Considered as Behavior, in Comparative Psychology: A Handbook, in Greenberg, G. and M.
Haraway, Taylor & Francis, 1998, p. 203.
[2] Marton, F. et al., Learning and Awareness, Erlbaum Assoc., Mahwah, NJ, 1997, p. 166.
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Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 6:57 PM
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Subject: The Top 25 Innovations in World History
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Footnotes
The Newsletter of FPRI's Wachman Center
FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION
by Lawrence A. Husick
Vol. 13, No. 25
October 2008
Lawrence Husick is a Senior Fellow at FPRI, where he co-
directs its Wachman Center program on Teaching the History
of Innovation. This essay is based on his presentation at
"Teaching the History of Innovation," a two-day history
institute for teachers held October 18-19. The Institute was
hosted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas
City, MO and webcast worldwide. See
http://www.fpri.org/education/innovation/
for videocasts and texts of lectures.
The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David
Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall. Core support is provided
by the Annenberg Foundation and Mr. H.F. Lenfest; funding
for the innovation program is provided by the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation. The next history weekend is Teaching
the Nuclear Age, March 28-29, 2009, at the Atomic Testing
Museum in Las Vegas.
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Webcast for Students and Teachers on Innovation and
Entrepreneurship
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
11:00 AM ET
2:00 PM ET
As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, FPRI will present
two 45-minute webcast on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Secondary schools/classes may sign up to view the webcasts
live online and participate in the Q&A periods.
The founders of Yahoo!, Google, and FaceBook are famous and
very wealthy. They are our modern heroes. In part, each owes
his success to the work and success of many other innovators
and entrepreneurs in an unbroken line stretching back
hundreds of years. As Isaac Newton famously repeated, "If I
have seen a little further, it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants."
On whose shoulders do Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!),
Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg
(Facebook) stand? What innovations form the foundations of
these companies’ products, and how can we understand how
history can give each of us a better chance to create great
products and achieve great success?
Lawrence Husick, co-director of FPRI's Wachman Center
Program on the History of Innovation will present a fast-
paced webcast that traces these modern systems' roots from
from an early form of telegraph, through Napoleon's France,
to Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, “Ma” Bell, Bell
Labs, and then finally to BitNet, ARPANet, the Internet and
World Wide Web.
To register for either or both webcasts go to:
http://www.fpri.org/education/innovationwebcast/
For additional information, contact Alan Luxenberg at
lux@fpri.org or telephone (215) 732-3774 x105.
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FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION
by Lawrence A. Husick
"Innovation" is not just inventions; it is a process of
making changes by introducing valuable new methods, ideas,
or products. "Innovations" are the things themselves--the
ideas, methods, and processes. It's not simply that better
mousetrap; it's different ways of thinking and doing.
Innovations may of course be inventions, but they may also
be beliefs, organizational methods, and discoveries. An
innovation is a value-creation mechanism. It is the way we
humans manage to extract more value, generate more economic
surplus and therefore more leisure time, and manage to get
away from just hunting and gathering.
We can approach this topic through a "tough question." Not
"what is the most important innovation in the history of
man"--that one's easy. People can and do differ, but most
come up with just one. No, the tough question is, "What are
the 25 most important innovations, in rank order?" Rank
order here means the absolute value of the impact of an
innovation, be it for good or ill, on human life, times the
total number of lives affected. There is no requirement that
the lives impacted have any idea about the innovation or how
it works. Most of us have no idea how those little people
get inside our television sets to entertain and inform us,
and yet we watch television. Innovations are made and affect
us, and we in turn affect the course of innovation, even
without deep understandings of the mechanisms.
In my list below, there may appear to be a bias toward newer
innovations. That's simply a result of the ranking formula.
Looking at world population in the common era, since the
year one (because in the year zero, no one had yet invented
the concept of zero--that came around 600 or so), most of
the people who have ever lived have lived in the last 200
years. Thus, even small innovations have tremendous impact
when multiplied by the population experiencing them.
The ranking is constructed from the considered opinion of
many people, too many to name. It's neither right nor wrong-
-the purpose of this discourse is to provoke argument. What
is included wrongly? What is left off in error? How is the
order dreadfully, woefully messed up?
And now, a brief tour through the history of innovation,
working backward from #25:
Innovation #25 is relativity and quantum mechanics, invented
in 1912. We are a scant 103 years since special relativity,
since Einstein's miraculous year of 1905, and everything we
touch in industrialized society owes a debt to Einstein and
his colleagues. Our entire way of looking at matter and the
universe changed in the seven years from 1905-12. In fact,
you would not be reading this paper on a screen, talking on
the telephone, watching television, driving a car, or using
any other modern marvel without the solid-state electronics
that were made possible by this revolutionary innovation in
how we think about the structure of the universe, from the
largest galaxies down to the smallest subatomic particles
that allow us to make microelectronics and nanotechnology.
In fact, one of the more troublesome and problematic
challenges of the twenty-first century--how to get rid of
the atom bombs we created in the twentieth century--also
owes its existence to relativity and quantum mechanics.
Innovation #24 is electromagnetism. Again, the idea that we
can harness electricity to do work that used to take back-
breaking labor by people and animals is a revolution. Hans
Christian Orsted first noticed the effect in 1820; in 1821,
Michael Faraday came up with an electric motor. Most of the
motive force in modern society, and all the electricity that
T. Boone Pickens advertises as being created by burning
fossil fuels--all the things that let us ride up in
elevators and escalators, turn on our cars, have electric
motors do work for us, and have electric lights--all of it
comes from theories of electromagnetism. How important is
electricity? Five years after Edison installed the first
electric light bulb in Manhattan, the first generating
plant, the Edison Electric Company, wished to celebrate its
anniversary by turning off the lights for five minutes at
midnight on New Year's Eve. The mayor of New York pronounced
that this would be a hazard to public safety and prevented
Edison turning off the power. Think about going to the
grocery store in the absence of the electricity that runs
the freezer and refrigerator cases. Think about our food
distribution system, our communication and transportation
systems. Nothing we do in an industrialized society is
possible without electricity. Indeed, a critical measure of
our success in Iraq and Afghanistan is our ability to build
infrastructure and keep the lights on in.
Innovation #23 is evolution and natural selection. Darwin
first posited this theory in On the Origins of Species in
1859. The theory was 25 years in the making, but Darwin, for
reasons we now understand, was dreadfully afraid to publish
it. It changed the way we view our place in the natural
order. Some would say it forever debased humankind, because
Darwin made it clear that we are just animals--animals of a
special sort, but animals nonetheless. Our understanding of
evolution and natural selection has since informed all of
our understandings of biology, ecology, healthcare,
population dynamics, and the many consequences of human
actions in the natural world.
Innovation #22: Before electric power, there was steam
power. The first steam engine was the French Papin engine of
1690. From 1690 through the early part of the 18th century,
through Savory to Newcomb in 1712 and finally to Watt, the
steam engine made a huge difference because it multiplied
man's ability to do work. Before the steam engine, you
needed draft animals to do anything substantial. The mining
of coal was incidental and small-scale. The steam engine,
which was used to drive the pumps that could drain the
mines, made mining coal practical. You could finally go deep
enough to get coal, which in turn was a primary fuel for the
steam engine. This is an example of an innovation fueling
and making available another innovation that in turn fed
back on the first innovation. One of the things we learn in
studying history is that there is no straight line of
ascent--we always zigzag. The steam engine was truly a step
forward, although it took over 100 years for it to come to
final form and end up driving locomotives and steamboats and
changing transportation forever, which also changed
economies and nations.
Innovation #21: Before the steam engine, if you wanted to do
serious hard work, you did it with water power. Water power
was first exploited in 240 BCE, in the Fertile Crescent area
in the Middle East and in Asia Minor. It is a tremendously
efficient innovation, because it drives heavy millstones
without draft animals. It changes the motion of falling
water into useful work. Water power remained an important
part of society and the economy well into the developments
that sparked the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In fact,
some would argue that the abundant rainfall and number of
rivers in Europe created an economy based on water power
that permitted Europe to develop technologies that
outstripped the rest of the world beginning in the late
Renaissance. The same is true of the factory system of New
England, where mills were built to harness the rivers of
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
As to efficiency, a car's gasoline engine can reach an
efficiency level of only about 30 percent in terms of
conversion of fuel to effort. An "undershot" water wheel,
where the water flows beneath the wheel, invented more than
two millennia ago, is over 25 percent efficient. And if you
build a sluice and make the water an overshot water wheel,
so the water falls on top of the wheel, the efficiency
rockets to 75 percent. If we could build cars like that, a
100 mpg car would be no problem at all. The problem is just
building a big enough water tank.
Innovation #20 is more of a world view. It is the concept of
science itself, which until well past the time of Thomas
Jefferson was called natural philosophy. There was no
differentiation between the study of philosophy and the
study of man's place in the world and his relation to God.
Newton himself said that he was trying to understand the
world and the universe so that he could understand God's
plan. Einstein echoed this in saying that he studied physics
because he tried to understand the "mind of God."
The use of the scientific method and of objective systems of
understanding and codifying the world originated in the
sixth century BCE in Greece, when we went from observation
to theory. Observation had long preceded theory; it was what
you did if you wanted to understand the calendar or
astronomy, when to plant and when to reap. But that was
purely empirical. It was the Greeks who gave us this idea
that there was some objective theory that knit things
together that was outside of but understandable by man's
experience. They also gave us formal systems--mathematics,
logic, statistics. Later thinkers gave us concepts like
place value (think about trying to write big numbers in
Roman numerals) and, as discussed earlier, the very concept
of zero.
Innovation #19, which appears at the top of many lists of
innovations, is moveable type. Most Westerners would credit
moveable type to the Gutenberg press of 1436. But in fact
moveable type goes back to imperial China in 1040. There the
type pieces were ceramic; Koreans took this invention
forward about 200 years later using some metals. But the
difficulty is that in pictographic languages, such as
Chinese and Korean, which have 5,000 characters, the time
required to find and remove one piece of type from a box
system of 5,000 made it impractical and inefficient to set
type. The Koreans and Chinese also had social institutions
that limited printing to a bureaucratic and governmental
system. There was no private market for printed materials,
and eventually those cultures went back to one-off woodblock
printing. Fortunately for us, Gutenberg came up with the
idea of moveable type, special inks, and an efficient press,
and understood the advances in what are called the type
metals--tin, lead, and antimony. His innovation found a
ready market because by that time, every educated person in
Europe wanted the Vulgate Bible. The desire to have a Bible
of one's own drove the market.
This is also an example of failures of protection of
inventions. Gutenberg made all of his apprentices and
everyone who worked in his shop sign a draconian
nondisclosure agreement. And yet, within five years of
Gutenberg's first use of moveable type, the technology had
spread all over as his apprentices left and formed their own
shops, and thus has it ever been.
Innovation #18 is fossil fuels. Today, when we hear fossil
fuels, we tend to think that maybe we've gotten into trouble
with this one. But fossil fuels have been critically
important in the last hundred years. The first recorded uses
of coal were around 1,000 BCE, in the Middle East, when it
was said that there were rocks that burned like charcoal.
These were exposed coal scenes where people could simply
chip away at the surface to collect them, but they also
produced very hot, sustainable fires. Coal and charcoal
contributed to many other important technologies. Getting
beyond coal, however, had to wait a long time. The first use
of natural gas drilled for its own purpose and not, for
instance, for a flame (which became known as the Oracle of
Delphi) was in 1859, when we drilled our first well in Ohio.
In the same year in western Pennsylvania the first oil well
was drilled and the first oil refined. In the century and a
half since then, we have come to understand that our
addiction to fossil fuels is perhaps irreversible.
Fossil fuels changed the way in which economies operated.
For the first time, the density of energy and fuel made it
possible to make things portable. That meant changes in
transportation. At the Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, there
are some steam engines that stand 80' high. Today we can
build engines small enough to power weed-whackers, barely
the size of a softball. And it's all because of the energy
density of fossil fuels. We will not replace fossil fuels
completely in our lifetimes, but we are beginning to
understand that petroleum and natural gas may be too
valuable to burn to get from point A to point B. That is
because these hydrocarbons are also the stuff of which we
make miracle drugs and plastics and thousands of other
things we consider indispensable.
Innovation #17 is the specialization of labor, or some would
say tribal and clan organization. The idea that some people
do some things better than others has been with us since
well before the dawn of recorded history. Perhaps the first
instance of that was the recognition that some people are
well suited for hunting and others for gathering, that some
people are better out there in the field and others make
food that's tasty. Sexual dimorphism also gave us the
ability to separate roles. We continue to push the
boundaries of that today in society. Traditional societies
have those roles relatively well set, and one of the great
sources of friction in the world is the clash between
societies that are overcoming those roles and those that
choose not to. But the specialization of labor went far
beyond to the specialization of roles in society, so that
some people could knap flint and make tools, and others
could use those tools. Some could make arrows and bows and
spears and others could hunt with them. Some were good at
making fire, and others not so good. The idea that you can
build a society by specializing those roles freed a lot of
people and a lot of time, improved efficiency, and created
value.
Innovation #16, paper, ia a relatively recent innovation.
Paper was first mentioned by the Chinese in the year 105,
and yet the Chinese continued to use other materials because
paper was thought of as too fragile, writing too expensive.
Paper continued to develop until finally, by the sixteenth
century, wood pulp paper became more widely used than rag
paper, which created an explosion in publishing and the
growth of knowledge. It can really be said that wood pulp
paper created the modern educational system. Before that,
the cost to create a book and disseminate it created
bottlenecks in the economy. With wood pulp paper, publishing
began to bloom, and with it, modern scholarship.
Innovation #15 is also at the top of most people's
innovation lists: the wheel. The first wheel was probably a
millstone transported for its own use (as a stonecutter
makes millstone in the quarry and then must somehow get it
to the mill.) One theory of how the wheel might have
developed is the idea of rollers and sledges. These systems
were instrumental in building the Egyptian pyramids and
before that the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and perhaps the
megaliths of Stonehenge. The wheel changed how we move
things, how far we could go in a day, and how far we could
farm from a village. Thus the wheel heralded the
domestication of draft animals, because once you decide
you're tired of pulling the thing along, you look for
something else that's going to pull better.
Innovation #14 is formal law codes. Certainly there were
formal law codes before the Code of Hammurabi, who was
codifying oral or fragmented law. But by 1,780 BCE,
Hammurabi had laid down a formal code of laws, most of which
did not deal with criminal law but rather with civil and
commercial law. That trend continued through the Egyptian
Book of the Dead, even to the Ten Commandments and the
Twelve Tables of Rome. The great works of law and
literature, including one of the greatest, the Book of
Leviticus, show that we have come up with an awful lot of
civil law, a lot of ways of saying how people should relate
to one another commercially. In effect, we have been simply
writing down our politics for thousands of years. But law is
a way of reducing the cost of dispute resolution to a
society, and thereby increasing the efficiency of its
economy. It's much better if you know what you're supposed
to do and what happens if you don't. That predictability
increases efficiency.
Closely allied with law is Innovation #13, the concept of
money. Money also has a long and storied history. Humankind
started out with barter. What do you have that I need? It
went with specialization of labor. If someone makes
arrowheads all day, how are you going to get the arrowhead
from him? You're probably going to trade something you've
just hunted with an arrowhead he made. Money comes into the
picture as a way of solidifying the power of the state.
That's why the Sumerians, the first agricultural urban
society, were the first to adopt a concept of money. In
other words, I've got a lot of stuff stored, I'll give you
something that says you now own it. In effect, it's a form
of deed.
We come forward from coins to paper money and finally the
thing that enables all modern economies, the concept of fiat
and credit currency, which was developed in late medieval
Europe, in which letters of credit and letters of mark
allowed us for the first time to bank on the power of the
state itself rather than on the value of the coinage.
Innovation #12 is gods and religions as social institutions.
Religion creates social cohesion by creating in and out
groups. It gives a priestly class super-authority (authority
that doesn't come from who you are, but rather who you
represent) and shapes behavior in both prescriptive and
motivational ways, all in a tremendously economically
efficient mode. If you are a priest-king living in a palace
in ancient Sumer, you have a prescriptive authority of
saying, "This is the God speaking and not the man," and you
have the ability to promise rewards in the afterlife at no
particular cost to yourself or the ruling class. It's a debt
you'll never have to pay off. Economically and
organizationally, religious organization has to be ranked
right up there at the top with almost any other economic
advance.
Dostoevsky probably put it best in The Brothers Karamazov,
when Fyodor Pavlovich said, "Damn it all, what wouldn't I do
to the man who first invented God!" To which Ivan
Fyodorovich replies that there would have been no
civilization if they hadn't invented God, and no brandy,
either.
Innovation #11, systems of writing, went from pictographs,
whether cuneiform or Chinese in their evolution, with
thousands of individual symbols to be learned, to an
alphabetic system which evolved from the Phoenicians,
through a long period of evolution that we can trace all the
way down to our use of Roman script today. The idea that
characters can be combined in grammars to represent ideas
made possible written records of tremendous complexity and
efficiency, calculations as place value was developed, and
Gutenberg's printing press. Our alphabet derives directly
from something 2,900 years old. One of the only advances
thereafter was the development of a separate numbering
system, what we call the Arabic numbering system.
Innovation #10, food preservation, arguably first developed
around 10,000 BCE in the Neolithic revolution, meant that
you didn't have to eat what you killed right away, but could
save it for lean times. Portable food sources that are
dried, freeze-dried, salted, spiced, pickled, cooked,
smoked, or fermented allows travel over longer distances and
more efficient migration with animals, changes society, and
generates tremendous value. We understand all of these
methods and techniques, but many of them have been
supplanted by electric refrigeration. It would now be very
hard to find salted cod, which was a staple of the northern
European diet for 2,000 years. Instead we buy fresh cod or
go to Costco, where they routinely fly in a 600-pound tuna
caught two days ago in the Solomon Islands in the middle of
the Pacific. (I shudder at the carbon footprint.)
Innovation #9 is metallurgy. Ancient people built fires that
burned hot. They looked in the bottom of the fire pit after
a while and noticed there were some things there that were
harder than the kinds of stones they were used to dealing
with. What were they? What could be done with them? The
progression was from copper, silver, and gold to soft metals
first mined and smelted in about 4,400 BCE; to the idea of
alloying certain metals, for instance copper with tin, to
get bronze, which is a harder and more durable metal; to the
Iron Age to finally steel. In fact, Damascus steel is
probably the first instance of the use of nanotechnology, as
carbon nanotubes from the furnaces were incorporated that
made the steel remarkably hard yet not brittle. Metalworking
became both a science and an art. In Jared Diamond's theory
of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(1997), steel is the third leg of the dominance tripod of
the West.
Innovation #8: Ceramics and pottery. Some of the other
things the ancients found in the bottom of a fire pit were
pieces of clay that through repeated firings had gotten hard
and had their porosity reduced. So you have the ability to
make clay vessels, first to store dry things like grains,
then fired clay in which you can store liquids, and finally
earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain, which eventually in
the hands of Chinese became high art. From a simple clay pot
unearthed in Syria, 6,600 BCE we come all the way forward to
our finest toilets today, which are vitreous china, made by
the same processes of molding and firing clay. Our
microelectronics also owe a debt to pottery and ceramics.
Computer chips are built on a ceramic substrate that
conducts the heat away from them. No ceramics, and the chips
would burn themselves up and your cell phone would quit
working.
Innovation #7, farming, is really a chain of innovation over
a long period of time. The first animal to be domesticated
is generally thought to be the dog, around 15,000 BCE. (The
horse was domesticated on the steppes of Central Asia in
about 5,000 BCE, but the horse collar, which would make the
horse so useful in farming, would have to wait another 4,000
years.) The domestication of plants began with the bottle
gourd, something you could dry out and carry as a canteen.
Imagine what it would be like if you couldn't carry water
with you when you go hunting. You would have to stay pretty
close to sources of water. With a bottle gourd, you could go
farther and have greater access to more crops and herds.
Wheat was arguably the most important crop in the world
until rice--the most efficient crop for converting the
nutrients in sunlight into edible material--came along about
5,000 years later.
From the domestication of animals and plants to hydraulic
agriculture--the idea of artificial irrigation of crops that
was developed in the Fertile Crescent--to the plow and the
concept of crop rotation, chemical fertilizers (which didn't
occur to us until the seventeenth century), artificial
nitrate fertilizers (which didn't occur until we could
synthesize them at the beginning of the twentieth century),
and finally the Green Revolution in the early 1960s, farming
has given us the ability to create unprecedented economic
surplus, which many would say gave us the rest of the
innovations listed here.
Innovation #6: Clothing. Without clothing, people have to
stay where it's warm and dry. It took a long time to go from
draping ourselves in tanned animal skins to figuring out how
to use a needle to sew them into some sort of a shape, and a
longer time still to the weaving of cloth and the making of
tailored, layered clothes. In the stone age, not only did
you eat what you killed, you also wore it. We've been able
to reconstruct the clothes of Utze, a Copper Age hunter,
found when a glacier in the Austrian Alps receded. He wore
snow shoes lined with grass for insulation. He had a cape
made out of woven grass, carried sophisticated animal skin
bags for his gear, and he was truly a happy wanderer until
someone shot him with an arrow and he died and got frozen in
that glacier.
Innovation #5: Symbolic communication. Starting with cave
painting, human beings began to communicate with each other
across time and space, not simply face to face. The idea
that one could communicate with people through symbols made
externalization of information and language possible. It
gave us a storehouse of information that didn't need to be
transmitted just by showing someone how it worked, whether
you were drawing on the walls in a cave in Lascaux or coming
up with counters in Aswan that indicate that some dates were
brought by camel from a far-away place. At the same time,
symbolic communication in Sumer developed into cuneiform,
pressing reeds into soft clay and baking them. (We know a
tremendous amount about cuneiform because it's really hard
to get rid of clay tablets.)
Innovation #4: Lever simple machine. There are a number of
classes of simple machines, of which the lever is perhaps
one of the oldest. It allows people to amplify their
mechanical effort. Hammers and plows mean that instead of
the effort of one person digging with hands or tools, now
there is mechanical advantage. Farmers can plow deeper and
throw farther and with more force. Archimedes is famously
said to have stated, "Give me a place to stand with a lever
and I will move the whole world." In fact, the concept of a
lever has moved the whole world since its invention.
Innovation #3: Inclined plane simple machine. Don't just
think ramp, think blades, wedges, chutes, slides, and
screws. Chopper cores unearthed at the Olduvai Gorge in East
Africa that are 1.9 million years old show a clear effort to
manufacture. They were used for chopping and scraping hides
as well as for hunting. That technology was brought forward
to the high art of the Clovis arrow point and the higher
still art of Archimedes' screw water pump, which permitted
hydraulic irrigation by pumping water up out of canals and
rivers and into irrigation ditches with a simple turn of the
screw.
Innovation #2 is the taming of fire. Fire has been around a
long time, often caused by lightning strikes. But being able
to make fire on demand, or first being able to capture it
from the wild and preserve and use it as you wish, permitted
humans to live in colder places, work after dark, inhabit
places that were dark and perhaps dangerous, scare off
animals at night, and cook food in order to preserve it.
Fire-starting technologies are tremendously tough to master,
which probably also meant more specialization of labor as
humans began to use simple technologies like the fire plow,
the fire drill, and the smudge bundle, otherwise known as
the cigar.
Innovation #1 in spoken language--true semantic, syntactic,
phonetic language. This idea allowed humans to transmit
information about the world from one person to another. It
underlies all cooperation, the economy, and clan
relationships. Spoken language is the most important
innovation we have ever come up with.
However, I reserve the right to add an Innovation #0 (since
I work with computers, and programmers start counting from
zero, not 1). Innovation #0 in my view is one that outshines
and underlies every other innovation we have discussed. That
is the concept of intentional pedagogy. This is perhaps the
last thing in that great long list of what separates us from
the "lower animals," a phrase Darwin rejected. It's the idea
that humans can intentionally transmit culture and
generalize knowledge from the specific instance to that
which is teachable, and then intentionally give that
knowledge to another person across time and space. From
telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it
to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most
important innovation of all time.
"The systematic use of teaching to ensure the learning of
skills and acquisition of knowledge by others is evidently a
peculiarity of the human species."[1] "Humans are remarkable
among animals for the way in which they teach their
young."[2] S.A. Barnett suggested that homo sapiens, the
understanding man, is perhaps not the right taxonomy for our
species, that really what we should be called is homo
docens, teaching man.
So what didn't make the list? Lots of things, for reasons
that I hope you will understand and then vehemently disagree
with. Everything from theories of disease, inoculations, and
antibiotics to guns and gunpowder, and plastics to democracy
to even the idea that there is such a thing as an idea, in
my estimation couldn't make the cut of the metric I set
forth earlier: impact on lives times number of lives. Others
have had different concepts of what innovation means and
what innovations are truly important. My hope is not that I
have it right, but that readers will help me get it more
right with your comments, questions, emails, or simply
throwing it wrapped around a rock through the transom.
----------------------------------------------------------
Notes
[1] Barnett, S.A., Teaching Considered as Behavior, in
Comparative Psychology: A Handbook, in Greenberg, G. and M.
Haraway, Taylor & Francis, 1998, p. 203.
[2] Marton, F. et al., Learning and Awareness, Erlbaum
Assoc., Mahwah, NJ, 1997, p. 166.
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From fascinating article it really underlines my basic educational belief that the raising for children must be a coordinated effort of the home what the Spanish call educación, a community of faith (ekklesia), and the school. It starts in the home and it ends in the home. This is why ideas of spending even more on schools and early education are all a waste of money as far as I am concerned MUNRO
However, I reserve the right to add an Innovation #0 (since
I work with computers, and programmers start counting from
zero, not 1). Innovation #0 in my view is one that outshines
and underlies every other innovation we have discussed. That
is the concept of intentional pedagogy. This is perhaps the
last thing in that great long list of what separates us from
the "lower animals," a phrase Darwin rejected. It's the idea
that humans can intentionally transmit culture and
generalize knowledge from the specific instance to that
which is teachable, and then intentionally give that
knowledge to another person across time and space. From
telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it
to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most
important innovation of all time.
"The systematic use of teaching to ensure the learning of
skills and acquisition of knowledge by others is evidently a
peculiarity of the human species."[1] "Humans are remarkable
among animals for the way in which they teach their
young."[2] S.A. Barnett suggested that homo sapiens, the
understanding man, is perhaps not the right taxonomy for our
species, that really what we should be called is homo
docens, teaching man.
Foreign Policy Research Institute
Over 50 Years of Ideas in Service to Our Nation www.fpri.org
Footnotes
The Newsletter of FPRI's Wachman Center
FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION by Lawrence A. Husick
Vol. 13, No. 25
October 2008
Lawrence Husick is a Senior Fellow at FPRI, where he co- directs its Wachman Center program on Teaching the History of Innovation. This essay is based on his presentation at "Teaching the History of Innovation," a two-day history institute for teachers held October 18-19. The Institute was hosted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City, MO and webcast worldwide. See
http://www.fpri.org/education/innovation/
for videocasts and texts of lectures.
The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall. Core support is provided by the Annenberg Foundation and Mr. H.F. Lenfest; funding for the innovation program is provided by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. The next history weekend is Teaching the Nuclear Age, March 28-29, 2009, at the Atomic Testing Museum in Las Vegas.
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Webcast for Students and Teachers on Innovation and
Entrepreneurship
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
11:00 AM ET
2:00 PM ET
As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, FPRI will present two 45-minute webcast on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Secondary schools/classes may sign up to view the webcasts live online and participate in the Q&A periods.
The founders of Yahoo!, Google, and FaceBook are famous and very wealthy. They are our modern heroes. In part, each owes his success to the work and success of many other innovators and entrepreneurs in an unbroken line stretching back hundreds of years. As Isaac Newton famously repeated, "If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."
On whose shoulders do Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!), Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg
(Facebook) stand? What innovations form the foundations of these companies’ products, and how can we understand how history can give each of us a better chance to create great products and achieve great success?
Lawrence Husick, co-director of FPRI's Wachman Center
Program on the History of Innovation will present a fast- paced webcast that traces these modern systems' roots from from an early form of telegraph, through Napoleon's France, to Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, “Ma” Bell, Bell Labs, and then finally to BitNet, ARPANet, the Internet and World Wide Web.
MUNRO: This was so fascinating and original I had to post the entire thing. I might make commentary on it later.
To register for either or both webcasts go to:
http://www.fpri.org/education/innovationwebcast/
For additional information, contact Alan Luxenberg at
lux@fpri.org or telephone (215) 732-3774 x105.
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FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION
by Lawrence A. Husick
"Innovation" is not just inventions; it is a process of making changes by introducing valuable new methods, ideas, or products. "Innovations" are the things themselves--the ideas, methods, and processes. It's not simply that better mousetrap; it's different ways of thinking and doing.
Innovations may of course be inventions, but they may also be beliefs, organizational methods, and discoveries. An innovation is a value-creation mechanism. It is the way we humans manage to extract more value, generate more economic surplus and therefore more leisure time, and manage to get away from just hunting and gathering.
We can approach this topic through a "tough question." Not "what is the most important innovation in the history of man"--that one's easy. People can and do differ, but most come up with just one. No, the tough question is, "What are the 25 most important innovations, in rank order?" Rank order here means the absolute value of the impact of an innovation, be it for good or ill, on human life, times the total number of lives affected. There is no requirement that the lives impacted have any idea about the innovation or how it works. Most of us have no idea how those little people get inside our television sets to entertain and inform us, and yet we watch television. Innovations are made and affect us, and we in turn affect the course of innovation, even without deep understandings of the mechanisms.
In my list below, there may appear to be a bias toward newer innovations. That's simply a result of the ranking formula.
Looking at world population in the common era, since the year one (because in the year zero, no one had yet invented the concept of zero--that came around 600 or so), most of the people who have ever lived have lived in the last 200 years. Thus, even small innovations have tremendous impact when multiplied by the population experiencing them.
The ranking is constructed from the considered opinion of many people, too many to name. It's neither right nor wrong- -the purpose of this discourse is to provoke argument. What is included wrongly? What is left off in error? How is the order dreadfully, woefully messed up?
And now, a brief tour through the history of innovation, working backward from #25:
Innovation #25 is relativity and quantum mechanics, invented in 1912. We are a scant 103 years since special relativity, since Einstein's miraculous year of 1905, and everything we touch in industrialized society owes a debt to Einstein and his colleagues. Our entire way of looking at matter and the universe changed in the seven years from 1905-12. In fact, you would not be reading this paper on a screen, talking on the telephone, watching television, driving a car, or using any other modern marvel without the solid-state electronics that were made possible by this revolutionary innovation in how we think about the structure of the universe, from the largest galaxies down to the smallest subatomic particles that allow us to make microelectronics and nanotechnology.
In fact, one of the more troublesome and problematic challenges of the twenty-first century--how to get rid of the atom bombs we created in the twentieth century--also owes its existence to relativity and quantum mechanics.
Innovation #24 is electromagnetism. Again, the idea that we can harness electricity to do work that used to take back- breaking labor by people and animals is a revolution. Hans Christian Orsted first noticed the effect in 1820; in 1821, Michael Faraday came up with an electric motor. Most of the motive force in modern society, and all the electricity that T. Boone Pickens advertises as being created by burning fossil fuels--all the things that let us ride up in elevators and escalators, turn on our cars, have electric motors do work for us, and have electric lights--all of it comes from theories of electromagnetism. How important is electricity? Five years after Edison installed the first electric light bulb in Manhattan, the first generating plant, the Edison Electric Company, wished to celebrate its anniversary by turning off the lights for five minutes at midnight on New Year's Eve. The mayor of New York pronounced that this would be a hazard to public safety and prevented Edison turning off the power. Think about going to the grocery store in the absence of the electricity that runs the freezer and refrigerator cases. Think about our food distribution system, our communication and transportation systems. Nothing we do in an industrialized society is possible without electricity. Indeed, a critical measure of our success in Iraq and Afghanistan is our ability to build infrastructure and keep the lights on in.
Innovation #23 is evolution and natural selection. Darwin first posited this theory in On the Origins of Species in 1859. The theory was 25 years in the making, but Darwin, for reasons we now understand, was dreadfully afraid to publish it. It changed the way we view our place in the natural order. Some would say it forever debased humankind, because Darwin made it clear that we are just animals--animals of a special sort, but animals nonetheless. Our understanding of evolution and natural selection has since informed all of
our understandings of biology, ecology, healthcare,
population dynamics, and the many consequences of human actions in the natural world.
Innovation #22: Before electric power, there was steam power. The first steam engine was the French Papin engine of 1690. From 1690 through the early part of the 18th century, through Savory to Newcomb in 1712 and finally to Watt, the steam engine made a huge difference because it multiplied man's ability to do work. Before the steam engine, you needed draft animals to do anything substantial. The mining of coal was incidental and small-scale. The steam engine, which was used to drive the pumps that could drain the mines, made mining coal practical. You could finally go deep enough to get coal, which in turn was a primary fuel for the steam engine. This is an example of an innovation fueling and making available another innovation that in turn fed back on the first innovation. One of the things we learn in studying history is that there is no straight line of ascent--we always zigzag. The steam engine was truly a step forward, although it took over 100 years for it to come to final form and end up driving locomotives and steamboats and
changing transportation forever, which also changed
economies and nations.
Innovation #21: Before the steam engine, if you wanted to do serious hard work, you did it with water power. Water power was first exploited in 240 BCE, in the Fertile Crescent area in the Middle East and in Asia Minor. It is a tremendously efficient innovation, because it drives heavy millstones without draft animals. It changes the motion of falling water into useful work. Water power remained an important part of society and the economy well into the developments that sparked the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In fact, some would argue that the abundant rainfall and number of rivers in Europe created an economy based on water power
that permitted Europe to develop technologies that
outstripped the rest of the world beginning in the late Renaissance. The same is true of the factory system of New England, where mills were built to harness the rivers of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
As to efficiency, a car's gasoline engine can reach an efficiency level of only about 30 percent in terms of conversion of fuel to effort. An "undershot" water wheel, where the water flows beneath the wheel, invented more than two millennia ago, is over 25 percent efficient. And if you build a sluice and make the water an overshot water wheel, so the water falls on top of the wheel, the efficiency rockets to 75 percent. If we could build cars like that, a 100 mpg car would be no problem at all. The problem is just building a big enough water tank.
Innovation #20 is more of a world view. It is the concept of science itself, which until well past the time of Thomas Jefferson was called natural philosophy. There was no differentiation between the study of philosophy and the study of man's place in the world and his relation to God.
Newton himself said that he was trying to understand the world and the universe so that he could understand God's plan. Einstein echoed this in saying that he studied physics because he tried to understand the "mind of God."
The use of the scientific method and of objective systems of understanding and codifying the world originated in the sixth century BCE in Greece, when we went from observation to theory. Observation had long preceded theory; it was what you did if you wanted to understand the calendar or astronomy, when to plant and when to reap. But that was purely empirical. It was the Greeks who gave us this idea that there was some objective theory that knit things together that was outside of but understandable by man's experience. They also gave us formal systems--mathematics, logic, statistics. Later thinkers gave us concepts like place value (think about trying to write big numbers in Roman numerals) and, as discussed earlier, the very concept of zero.
Innovation #19, which appears at the top of many lists of innovations, is moveable type. Most Westerners would credit moveable type to the Gutenberg press of 1436. But in fact moveable type goes back to imperial China in 1040. There the type pieces were ceramic; Koreans took this invention forward about 200 years later using some metals. But the difficulty is that in pictographic languages, such as Chinese and Korean, which have 5,000 characters, the time required to find and remove one piece of type from a box system of 5,000 made it impractical and inefficient to set type. The Koreans and Chinese also had social institutions that limited printing to a bureaucratic and governmental system. There was no private market for printed materials, and eventually those cultures went back to one-off woodblock printing. Fortunately for us, Gutenberg came up with the idea of moveable type, special inks, and an efficient press, and understood the advances in what are called the type metals--tin, lead, and antimony. His innovation found a ready market because by that time, every educated person in Europe wanted the Vulgate Bible. The desire to have a Bible of one's own drove the market.
This is also an example of failures of protection of inventions. Gutenberg made all of his apprentices and
everyone who worked in his shop sign a draconian
nondisclosure agreement. And yet, within five years of Gutenberg's first use of moveable type, the technology had spread all over as his apprentices left and formed their own shops, and thus has it ever been.
Innovation #18 is fossil fuels. Today, when we hear fossil fuels, we tend to think that maybe we've gotten into trouble with this one. But fossil fuels have been critically important in the last hundred years. The first recorded uses of coal were around 1,000 BCE, in the Middle East, when it was said that there were rocks that burned like charcoal.
These were exposed coal scenes where people could simply chip away at the surface to collect them, but they also produced very hot, sustainable fires. Coal and charcoal contributed to many other important technologies. Getting beyond coal, however, had to wait a long time. The first use of natural gas drilled for its own purpose and not, for instance, for a flame (which became known as the Oracle of
Delphi) was in 1859, when we drilled our first well in Ohio.
In the same year in western Pennsylvania the first oil well was drilled and the first oil refined. In the century and a half since then, we have come to understand that our addiction to fossil fuels is perhaps irreversible.
Fossil fuels changed the way in which economies operated.
For the first time, the density of energy and fuel made it possible to make things portable. That meant changes in transportation. At the Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, there are some steam engines that stand 80' high. Today we can build engines small enough to power weed-whackers, barely the size of a softball. And it's all because of the energy density of fossil fuels. We will not replace fossil fuels completely in our lifetimes, but we are beginning to understand that petroleum and natural gas may be too valuable to burn to get from point A to point B. That is because these hydrocarbons are also the stuff of which we make miracle drugs and plastics and thousands of other things we consider indispensable.
Innovation #17 is the specialization of labor, or some would say tribal and clan organization. The idea that some people do some things better than others has been with us since well before the dawn of recorded history. Perhaps the first instance of that was the recognition that some people are well suited for hunting and others for gathering, that some people are better out there in the field and others make food that's tasty. Sexual dimorphism also gave us the
ability to separate roles. We continue to push the
boundaries of that today in society. Traditional societies have those roles relatively well set, and one of the great sources of friction in the world is the clash between societies that are overcoming those roles and those that choose not to. But the specialization of labor went far beyond to the specialization of roles in society, so that some people could knap flint and make tools, and others could use those tools. Some could make arrows and bows and spears and others could hunt with them. Some were good at making fire, and others not so good. The idea that you can build a society by specializing those roles freed a lot of people and a lot of time, improved efficiency, and created value.
Innovation #16, paper, ia a relatively recent innovation.
Paper was first mentioned by the Chinese in the year 105, and yet the Chinese continued to use other materials because paper was thought of as too fragile, writing too expensive.
Paper continued to develop until finally, by the sixteenth century, wood pulp paper became more widely used than rag paper, which created an explosion in publishing and the growth of knowledge. It can really be said that wood pulp paper created the modern educational system. Before that, the cost to create a book and disseminate it created bottlenecks in the economy. With wood pulp paper, publishing began to bloom, and with it, modern scholarship.
Innovation #15 is also at the top of most people's
innovation lists: the wheel. The first wheel was probably a millstone transported for its own use (as a stonecutter makes millstone in the quarry and then must somehow get it to the mill.) One theory of how the wheel might have developed is the idea of rollers and sledges. These systems were instrumental in building the Egyptian pyramids and before that the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and perhaps the megaliths of Stonehenge. The wheel changed how we move things, how far we could go in a day, and how far we could
farm from a village. Thus the wheel heralded the
domestication of draft animals, because once you decide you're tired of pulling the thing along, you look for something else that's going to pull better.
Innovation #14 is formal law codes. Certainly there were formal law codes before the Code of Hammurabi, who was
codifying oral or fragmented law. But by 1,780 BCE,
Hammurabi had laid down a formal code of laws, most of which did not deal with criminal law but rather with civil and commercial law. That trend continued through the Egyptian Book of the Dead, even to the Ten Commandments and the
Twelve Tables of Rome. The great works of law and
literature, including one of the greatest, the Book of Leviticus, show that we have come up with an awful lot of civil law, a lot of ways of saying how people should relate to one another commercially. In effect, we have been simply writing down our politics for thousands of years. But law is a way of reducing the cost of dispute resolution to a society, and thereby increasing the efficiency of its economy. It's much better if you know what you're supposed to do and what happens if you don't. That predictability increases efficiency.
Closely allied with law is Innovation #13, the concept of money. Money also has a long and storied history. Humankind started out with barter. What do you have that I need? It
went with specialization of labor. If someone makes
arrowheads all day, how are you going to get the arrowhead from him? You're probably going to trade something you've just hunted with an arrowhead he made. Money comes into the picture as a way of solidifying the power of the state.
That's why the Sumerians, the first agricultural urban society, were the first to adopt a concept of money. In other words, I've got a lot of stuff stored, I'll give you something that says you now own it. In effect, it's a form of deed.
We come forward from coins to paper money and finally the thing that enables all modern economies, the concept of fiat and credit currency, which was developed in late medieval Europe, in which letters of credit and letters of mark allowed us for the first time to bank on the power of the state itself rather than on the value of the coinage.
Innovation #12 is gods and religions as social institutions.
Religion creates social cohesion by creating in and out groups. It gives a priestly class super-authority (authority that doesn't come from who you are, but rather who you
represent) and shapes behavior in both prescriptive and
motivational ways, all in a tremendously economically
efficient mode. If you are a priest-king living in a palace in ancient Sumer, you have a prescriptive authority of saying, "This is the God speaking and not the man," and you have the ability to promise rewards in the afterlife at no particular cost to yourself or the ruling class. It's a debt
you'll never have to pay off. Economically and
organizationally, religious organization has to be ranked right up there at the top with almost any other economic advance.
Dostoevsky probably put it best in The Brothers Karamazov, when Fyodor Pavlovich said, "Damn it all, what wouldn't I do
to the man who first invented God!" To which Ivan
Fyodorovich replies that there would have been no
civilization if they hadn't invented God, and no brandy, either.
Innovation #11, systems of writing, went from pictographs, whether cuneiform or Chinese in their evolution, with thousands of individual symbols to be learned, to an
alphabetic system which evolved from the Phoenicians,
through a long period of evolution that we can trace all the way down to our use of Roman script today. The idea that characters can be combined in grammars to represent ideas made possible written records of tremendous complexity and efficiency, calculations as place value was developed, and Gutenberg's printing press. Our alphabet derives directly from something 2,900 years old. One of the only advances thereafter was the development of a separate numbering system, what we call the Arabic numbering system.
Innovation #10, food preservation, arguably first developed around 10,000 BCE in the Neolithic revolution, meant that you didn't have to eat what you killed right away, but could save it for lean times. Portable food sources that are
dried, freeze-dried, salted, spiced, pickled, cooked,
smoked, or fermented allows travel over longer distances and more efficient migration with animals, changes society, and generates tremendous value. We understand all of these
methods and techniques, but many of them have been
supplanted by electric refrigeration. It would now be very hard to find salted cod, which was a staple of the northern European diet for 2,000 years. Instead we buy fresh cod or go to Costco, where they routinely fly in a 600-pound tuna caught two days ago in the Solomon Islands in the middle of the Pacific. (I shudder at the carbon footprint.)
Innovation #9 is metallurgy. Ancient people built fires that burned hot. They looked in the bottom of the fire pit after a while and noticed there were some things there that were harder than the kinds of stones they were used to dealing with. What were they? What could be done with them? The progression was from copper, silver, and gold to soft metals first mined and smelted in about 4,400 BCE; to the idea of alloying certain metals, for instance copper with tin, to get bronze, which is a harder and more durable metal; to the Iron Age to finally steel. In fact, Damascus steel is probably the first instance of the use of nanotechnology, as carbon nanotubes from the furnaces were incorporated that made the steel remarkably hard yet not brittle. Metalworking became both a science and an art. In Jared Diamond's theory of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), steel is the third leg of the dominance tripod of the West.
Innovation #8: Ceramics and pottery. Some of the other things the ancients found in the bottom of a fire pit were pieces of clay that through repeated firings had gotten hard and had their porosity reduced. So you have the ability to make clay vessels, first to store dry things like grains, then fired clay in which you can store liquids, and finally earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain, which eventually in the hands of Chinese became high art. From a simple clay pot unearthed in Syria, 6,600 BCE we come all the way forward to our finest toilets today, which are vitreous china, made by
the same processes of molding and firing clay. Our
microelectronics also owe a debt to pottery and ceramics.
Computer chips are built on a ceramic substrate that conducts the heat away from them. No ceramics, and the chips would burn themselves up and your cell phone would quit working.
Innovation #7, farming, is really a chain of innovation over a long period of time. The first animal to be domesticated is generally thought to be the dog, around 15,000 BCE. (The horse was domesticated on the steppes of Central Asia in about 5,000 BCE, but the horse collar, which would make the horse so useful in farming, would have to wait another 4,000
years.) The domestication of plants began with the bottle gourd, something you could dry out and carry as a canteen.
Imagine what it would be like if you couldn't carry water with you when you go hunting. You would have to stay pretty close to sources of water. With a bottle gourd, you could go farther and have greater access to more crops and herds.
Wheat was arguably the most important crop in the world until rice--the most efficient crop for converting the nutrients in sunlight into edible material--came along about 5,000 years later.
From the domestication of animals and plants to hydraulic agriculture--the idea of artificial irrigation of crops that was developed in the Fertile Crescent--to the plow and the concept of crop rotation, chemical fertilizers (which didn't occur to us until the seventeenth century), artificial nitrate fertilizers (which didn't occur until we could synthesize them at the beginning of the twentieth century), and finally the Green Revolution in the early 1960s, farming has given us the ability to create unprecedented economic surplus, which many would say gave us the rest of the innovations listed here.
Innovation #6: Clothing. Without clothing, people have to stay where it's warm and dry. It took a long time to go from draping ourselves in tanned animal skins to figuring out how to use a needle to sew them into some sort of a shape, and a longer time still to the weaving of cloth and the making of tailored, layered clothes. In the stone age, not only did you eat what you killed, you also wore it. We've been able to reconstruct the clothes of Utze, a Copper Age hunter, found when a glacier in the Austrian Alps receded. He wore snow shoes lined with grass for insulation. He had a cape made out of woven grass, carried sophisticated animal skin bags for his gear, and he was truly a happy wanderer until someone shot him with an arrow and he died and got frozen in that glacier.
Innovation #5: Symbolic communication. Starting with cave painting, human beings began to communicate with each other across time and space, not simply face to face. The idea that one could communicate with people through symbols made externalization of information and language possible. It gave us a storehouse of information that didn't need to be transmitted just by showing someone how it worked, whether you were drawing on the walls in a cave in Lascaux or coming up with counters in Aswan that indicate that some dates were brought by camel from a far-away place. At the same time, symbolic communication in Sumer developed into cuneiform, pressing reeds into soft clay and baking them. (We know a tremendous amount about cuneiform because it's really hard to get rid of clay tablets.)
Innovation #4: Lever simple machine. There are a number of classes of simple machines, of which the lever is perhaps one of the oldest. It allows people to amplify their mechanical effort. Hammers and plows mean that instead of the effort of one person digging with hands or tools, now there is mechanical advantage. Farmers can plow deeper and throw farther and with more force. Archimedes is famously said to have stated, "Give me a place to stand with a lever and I will move the whole world." In fact, the concept of a lever has moved the whole world since its invention.
Innovation #3: Inclined plane simple machine. Don't just think ramp, think blades, wedges, chutes, slides, and screws. Chopper cores unearthed at the Olduvai Gorge in East Africa that are 1.9 million years old show a clear effort to manufacture. They were used for chopping and scraping hides as well as for hunting. That technology was brought forward to the high art of the Clovis arrow point and the higher still art of Archimedes' screw water pump, which permitted hydraulic irrigation by pumping water up out of canals and rivers and into irrigation ditches with a simple turn of the screw.
Innovation #2 is the taming of fire. Fire has been around a long time, often caused by lightning strikes. But being able to make fire on demand, or first being able to capture it from the wild and preserve and use it as you wish, permitted humans to live in colder places, work after dark, inhabit places that were dark and perhaps dangerous, scare off animals at night, and cook food in order to preserve it.
Fire-starting technologies are tremendously tough to master, which probably also meant more specialization of labor as humans began to use simple technologies like the fire plow, the fire drill, and the smudge bundle, otherwise known as the cigar.
Innovation #1 in spoken language--true semantic, syntactic, phonetic language. This idea allowed humans to transmit information about the world from one person to another. It
underlies all cooperation, the economy, and clan
relationships. Spoken language is the most important
innovation we have ever come up with.
However, I reserve the right to add an Innovation #0 (since I work with computers, and programmers start counting from zero, not 1). Innovation #0 in my view is one that outshines and underlies every other innovation we have discussed. That is the concept of intentional pedagogy. This is perhaps the last thing in that great long list of what separates us from the "lower animals," a phrase Darwin rejected. It's the idea
that humans can intentionally transmit culture and
generalize knowledge from the specific instance to that
which is teachable, and then intentionally give that
knowledge to another person across time and space. From telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most important innovation of all time.
"The systematic use of teaching to ensure the learning of skills and acquisition of knowledge by others is evidently a peculiarity of the human species."[1] "Humans are remarkable among animals for the way in which they teach their young."[2] S.A. Barnett suggested that homo sapiens, the understanding man, is perhaps not the right taxonomy for our species, that really what we should be called is homo docens, teaching man.
So what didn't make the list? Lots of things, for reasons that I hope you will understand and then vehemently disagree with. Everything from theories of disease, inoculations, and antibiotics to guns and gunpowder, and plastics to democracy to even the idea that there is such a thing as an idea, in my estimation couldn't make the cut of the metric I set forth earlier: impact on lives times number of lives. Others have had different concepts of what innovation means and what innovations are truly important. My hope is not that I have it right, but that readers will help me get it more right with your comments, questions, emails, or simply throwing it wrapped around a rock through the transom.
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Notes
[1] Barnett, S.A., Teaching Considered as Behavior, in Comparative Psychology: A Handbook, in Greenberg, G. and M.
Haraway, Taylor & Francis, 1998, p. 203.
[2] Marton, F. et al., Learning and Awareness, Erlbaum Assoc., Mahwah, NJ, 1997, p. 166.
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Sent: Saturday, October 25, 2008 6:57 PM
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Subject: The Top 25 Innovations in World History
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Footnotes
The Newsletter of FPRI's Wachman Center
FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION
by Lawrence A. Husick
Vol. 13, No. 25
October 2008
Lawrence Husick is a Senior Fellow at FPRI, where he co-
directs its Wachman Center program on Teaching the History
of Innovation. This essay is based on his presentation at
"Teaching the History of Innovation," a two-day history
institute for teachers held October 18-19. The Institute was
hosted by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in Kansas
City, MO and webcast worldwide. See
http://www.fpri.org/education/innovation/
for videocasts and texts of lectures.
The History Institute for Teachers is co-chaired by David
Eisenhower and Walter A. McDougall. Core support is provided
by the Annenberg Foundation and Mr. H.F. Lenfest; funding
for the innovation program is provided by the Ewing Marion
Kauffman Foundation. The next history weekend is Teaching
the Nuclear Age, March 28-29, 2009, at the Atomic Testing
Museum in Las Vegas.
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Webcast for Students and Teachers on Innovation and
Entrepreneurship
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
11:00 AM ET
2:00 PM ET
As part of Global Entrepreneurship Week, FPRI will present
two 45-minute webcast on Innovation and Entrepreneurship.
Secondary schools/classes may sign up to view the webcasts
live online and participate in the Q&A periods.
The founders of Yahoo!, Google, and FaceBook are famous and
very wealthy. They are our modern heroes. In part, each owes
his success to the work and success of many other innovators
and entrepreneurs in an unbroken line stretching back
hundreds of years. As Isaac Newton famously repeated, "If I
have seen a little further, it is by standing on the
shoulders of giants."
On whose shoulders do Jerry Yang and David Filo (Yahoo!),
Sergey Brin and Larry Page (Google), and Mark Zuckerberg
(Facebook) stand? What innovations form the foundations of
these companies’ products, and how can we understand how
history can give each of us a better chance to create great
products and achieve great success?
Lawrence Husick, co-director of FPRI's Wachman Center
Program on the History of Innovation will present a fast-
paced webcast that traces these modern systems' roots from
from an early form of telegraph, through Napoleon's France,
to Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, “Ma” Bell, Bell
Labs, and then finally to BitNet, ARPANet, the Internet and
World Wide Web.
To register for either or both webcasts go to:
http://www.fpri.org/education/innovationwebcast/
For additional information, contact Alan Luxenberg at
lux@fpri.org or telephone (215) 732-3774 x105.
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FROM STONE TO SILICON: A BRIEF SURVEY OF INNOVATION
by Lawrence A. Husick
"Innovation" is not just inventions; it is a process of
making changes by introducing valuable new methods, ideas,
or products. "Innovations" are the things themselves--the
ideas, methods, and processes. It's not simply that better
mousetrap; it's different ways of thinking and doing.
Innovations may of course be inventions, but they may also
be beliefs, organizational methods, and discoveries. An
innovation is a value-creation mechanism. It is the way we
humans manage to extract more value, generate more economic
surplus and therefore more leisure time, and manage to get
away from just hunting and gathering.
We can approach this topic through a "tough question." Not
"what is the most important innovation in the history of
man"--that one's easy. People can and do differ, but most
come up with just one. No, the tough question is, "What are
the 25 most important innovations, in rank order?" Rank
order here means the absolute value of the impact of an
innovation, be it for good or ill, on human life, times the
total number of lives affected. There is no requirement that
the lives impacted have any idea about the innovation or how
it works. Most of us have no idea how those little people
get inside our television sets to entertain and inform us,
and yet we watch television. Innovations are made and affect
us, and we in turn affect the course of innovation, even
without deep understandings of the mechanisms.
In my list below, there may appear to be a bias toward newer
innovations. That's simply a result of the ranking formula.
Looking at world population in the common era, since the
year one (because in the year zero, no one had yet invented
the concept of zero--that came around 600 or so), most of
the people who have ever lived have lived in the last 200
years. Thus, even small innovations have tremendous impact
when multiplied by the population experiencing them.
The ranking is constructed from the considered opinion of
many people, too many to name. It's neither right nor wrong-
-the purpose of this discourse is to provoke argument. What
is included wrongly? What is left off in error? How is the
order dreadfully, woefully messed up?
And now, a brief tour through the history of innovation,
working backward from #25:
Innovation #25 is relativity and quantum mechanics, invented
in 1912. We are a scant 103 years since special relativity,
since Einstein's miraculous year of 1905, and everything we
touch in industrialized society owes a debt to Einstein and
his colleagues. Our entire way of looking at matter and the
universe changed in the seven years from 1905-12. In fact,
you would not be reading this paper on a screen, talking on
the telephone, watching television, driving a car, or using
any other modern marvel without the solid-state electronics
that were made possible by this revolutionary innovation in
how we think about the structure of the universe, from the
largest galaxies down to the smallest subatomic particles
that allow us to make microelectronics and nanotechnology.
In fact, one of the more troublesome and problematic
challenges of the twenty-first century--how to get rid of
the atom bombs we created in the twentieth century--also
owes its existence to relativity and quantum mechanics.
Innovation #24 is electromagnetism. Again, the idea that we
can harness electricity to do work that used to take back-
breaking labor by people and animals is a revolution. Hans
Christian Orsted first noticed the effect in 1820; in 1821,
Michael Faraday came up with an electric motor. Most of the
motive force in modern society, and all the electricity that
T. Boone Pickens advertises as being created by burning
fossil fuels--all the things that let us ride up in
elevators and escalators, turn on our cars, have electric
motors do work for us, and have electric lights--all of it
comes from theories of electromagnetism. How important is
electricity? Five years after Edison installed the first
electric light bulb in Manhattan, the first generating
plant, the Edison Electric Company, wished to celebrate its
anniversary by turning off the lights for five minutes at
midnight on New Year's Eve. The mayor of New York pronounced
that this would be a hazard to public safety and prevented
Edison turning off the power. Think about going to the
grocery store in the absence of the electricity that runs
the freezer and refrigerator cases. Think about our food
distribution system, our communication and transportation
systems. Nothing we do in an industrialized society is
possible without electricity. Indeed, a critical measure of
our success in Iraq and Afghanistan is our ability to build
infrastructure and keep the lights on in.
Innovation #23 is evolution and natural selection. Darwin
first posited this theory in On the Origins of Species in
1859. The theory was 25 years in the making, but Darwin, for
reasons we now understand, was dreadfully afraid to publish
it. It changed the way we view our place in the natural
order. Some would say it forever debased humankind, because
Darwin made it clear that we are just animals--animals of a
special sort, but animals nonetheless. Our understanding of
evolution and natural selection has since informed all of
our understandings of biology, ecology, healthcare,
population dynamics, and the many consequences of human
actions in the natural world.
Innovation #22: Before electric power, there was steam
power. The first steam engine was the French Papin engine of
1690. From 1690 through the early part of the 18th century,
through Savory to Newcomb in 1712 and finally to Watt, the
steam engine made a huge difference because it multiplied
man's ability to do work. Before the steam engine, you
needed draft animals to do anything substantial. The mining
of coal was incidental and small-scale. The steam engine,
which was used to drive the pumps that could drain the
mines, made mining coal practical. You could finally go deep
enough to get coal, which in turn was a primary fuel for the
steam engine. This is an example of an innovation fueling
and making available another innovation that in turn fed
back on the first innovation. One of the things we learn in
studying history is that there is no straight line of
ascent--we always zigzag. The steam engine was truly a step
forward, although it took over 100 years for it to come to
final form and end up driving locomotives and steamboats and
changing transportation forever, which also changed
economies and nations.
Innovation #21: Before the steam engine, if you wanted to do
serious hard work, you did it with water power. Water power
was first exploited in 240 BCE, in the Fertile Crescent area
in the Middle East and in Asia Minor. It is a tremendously
efficient innovation, because it drives heavy millstones
without draft animals. It changes the motion of falling
water into useful work. Water power remained an important
part of society and the economy well into the developments
that sparked the Industrial Revolution in Europe. In fact,
some would argue that the abundant rainfall and number of
rivers in Europe created an economy based on water power
that permitted Europe to develop technologies that
outstripped the rest of the world beginning in the late
Renaissance. The same is true of the factory system of New
England, where mills were built to harness the rivers of
Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.
As to efficiency, a car's gasoline engine can reach an
efficiency level of only about 30 percent in terms of
conversion of fuel to effort. An "undershot" water wheel,
where the water flows beneath the wheel, invented more than
two millennia ago, is over 25 percent efficient. And if you
build a sluice and make the water an overshot water wheel,
so the water falls on top of the wheel, the efficiency
rockets to 75 percent. If we could build cars like that, a
100 mpg car would be no problem at all. The problem is just
building a big enough water tank.
Innovation #20 is more of a world view. It is the concept of
science itself, which until well past the time of Thomas
Jefferson was called natural philosophy. There was no
differentiation between the study of philosophy and the
study of man's place in the world and his relation to God.
Newton himself said that he was trying to understand the
world and the universe so that he could understand God's
plan. Einstein echoed this in saying that he studied physics
because he tried to understand the "mind of God."
The use of the scientific method and of objective systems of
understanding and codifying the world originated in the
sixth century BCE in Greece, when we went from observation
to theory. Observation had long preceded theory; it was what
you did if you wanted to understand the calendar or
astronomy, when to plant and when to reap. But that was
purely empirical. It was the Greeks who gave us this idea
that there was some objective theory that knit things
together that was outside of but understandable by man's
experience. They also gave us formal systems--mathematics,
logic, statistics. Later thinkers gave us concepts like
place value (think about trying to write big numbers in
Roman numerals) and, as discussed earlier, the very concept
of zero.
Innovation #19, which appears at the top of many lists of
innovations, is moveable type. Most Westerners would credit
moveable type to the Gutenberg press of 1436. But in fact
moveable type goes back to imperial China in 1040. There the
type pieces were ceramic; Koreans took this invention
forward about 200 years later using some metals. But the
difficulty is that in pictographic languages, such as
Chinese and Korean, which have 5,000 characters, the time
required to find and remove one piece of type from a box
system of 5,000 made it impractical and inefficient to set
type. The Koreans and Chinese also had social institutions
that limited printing to a bureaucratic and governmental
system. There was no private market for printed materials,
and eventually those cultures went back to one-off woodblock
printing. Fortunately for us, Gutenberg came up with the
idea of moveable type, special inks, and an efficient press,
and understood the advances in what are called the type
metals--tin, lead, and antimony. His innovation found a
ready market because by that time, every educated person in
Europe wanted the Vulgate Bible. The desire to have a Bible
of one's own drove the market.
This is also an example of failures of protection of
inventions. Gutenberg made all of his apprentices and
everyone who worked in his shop sign a draconian
nondisclosure agreement. And yet, within five years of
Gutenberg's first use of moveable type, the technology had
spread all over as his apprentices left and formed their own
shops, and thus has it ever been.
Innovation #18 is fossil fuels. Today, when we hear fossil
fuels, we tend to think that maybe we've gotten into trouble
with this one. But fossil fuels have been critically
important in the last hundred years. The first recorded uses
of coal were around 1,000 BCE, in the Middle East, when it
was said that there were rocks that burned like charcoal.
These were exposed coal scenes where people could simply
chip away at the surface to collect them, but they also
produced very hot, sustainable fires. Coal and charcoal
contributed to many other important technologies. Getting
beyond coal, however, had to wait a long time. The first use
of natural gas drilled for its own purpose and not, for
instance, for a flame (which became known as the Oracle of
Delphi) was in 1859, when we drilled our first well in Ohio.
In the same year in western Pennsylvania the first oil well
was drilled and the first oil refined. In the century and a
half since then, we have come to understand that our
addiction to fossil fuels is perhaps irreversible.
Fossil fuels changed the way in which economies operated.
For the first time, the density of energy and fuel made it
possible to make things portable. That meant changes in
transportation. At the Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, there
are some steam engines that stand 80' high. Today we can
build engines small enough to power weed-whackers, barely
the size of a softball. And it's all because of the energy
density of fossil fuels. We will not replace fossil fuels
completely in our lifetimes, but we are beginning to
understand that petroleum and natural gas may be too
valuable to burn to get from point A to point B. That is
because these hydrocarbons are also the stuff of which we
make miracle drugs and plastics and thousands of other
things we consider indispensable.
Innovation #17 is the specialization of labor, or some would
say tribal and clan organization. The idea that some people
do some things better than others has been with us since
well before the dawn of recorded history. Perhaps the first
instance of that was the recognition that some people are
well suited for hunting and others for gathering, that some
people are better out there in the field and others make
food that's tasty. Sexual dimorphism also gave us the
ability to separate roles. We continue to push the
boundaries of that today in society. Traditional societies
have those roles relatively well set, and one of the great
sources of friction in the world is the clash between
societies that are overcoming those roles and those that
choose not to. But the specialization of labor went far
beyond to the specialization of roles in society, so that
some people could knap flint and make tools, and others
could use those tools. Some could make arrows and bows and
spears and others could hunt with them. Some were good at
making fire, and others not so good. The idea that you can
build a society by specializing those roles freed a lot of
people and a lot of time, improved efficiency, and created
value.
Innovation #16, paper, ia a relatively recent innovation.
Paper was first mentioned by the Chinese in the year 105,
and yet the Chinese continued to use other materials because
paper was thought of as too fragile, writing too expensive.
Paper continued to develop until finally, by the sixteenth
century, wood pulp paper became more widely used than rag
paper, which created an explosion in publishing and the
growth of knowledge. It can really be said that wood pulp
paper created the modern educational system. Before that,
the cost to create a book and disseminate it created
bottlenecks in the economy. With wood pulp paper, publishing
began to bloom, and with it, modern scholarship.
Innovation #15 is also at the top of most people's
innovation lists: the wheel. The first wheel was probably a
millstone transported for its own use (as a stonecutter
makes millstone in the quarry and then must somehow get it
to the mill.) One theory of how the wheel might have
developed is the idea of rollers and sledges. These systems
were instrumental in building the Egyptian pyramids and
before that the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, and perhaps the
megaliths of Stonehenge. The wheel changed how we move
things, how far we could go in a day, and how far we could
farm from a village. Thus the wheel heralded the
domestication of draft animals, because once you decide
you're tired of pulling the thing along, you look for
something else that's going to pull better.
Innovation #14 is formal law codes. Certainly there were
formal law codes before the Code of Hammurabi, who was
codifying oral or fragmented law. But by 1,780 BCE,
Hammurabi had laid down a formal code of laws, most of which
did not deal with criminal law but rather with civil and
commercial law. That trend continued through the Egyptian
Book of the Dead, even to the Ten Commandments and the
Twelve Tables of Rome. The great works of law and
literature, including one of the greatest, the Book of
Leviticus, show that we have come up with an awful lot of
civil law, a lot of ways of saying how people should relate
to one another commercially. In effect, we have been simply
writing down our politics for thousands of years. But law is
a way of reducing the cost of dispute resolution to a
society, and thereby increasing the efficiency of its
economy. It's much better if you know what you're supposed
to do and what happens if you don't. That predictability
increases efficiency.
Closely allied with law is Innovation #13, the concept of
money. Money also has a long and storied history. Humankind
started out with barter. What do you have that I need? It
went with specialization of labor. If someone makes
arrowheads all day, how are you going to get the arrowhead
from him? You're probably going to trade something you've
just hunted with an arrowhead he made. Money comes into the
picture as a way of solidifying the power of the state.
That's why the Sumerians, the first agricultural urban
society, were the first to adopt a concept of money. In
other words, I've got a lot of stuff stored, I'll give you
something that says you now own it. In effect, it's a form
of deed.
We come forward from coins to paper money and finally the
thing that enables all modern economies, the concept of fiat
and credit currency, which was developed in late medieval
Europe, in which letters of credit and letters of mark
allowed us for the first time to bank on the power of the
state itself rather than on the value of the coinage.
Innovation #12 is gods and religions as social institutions.
Religion creates social cohesion by creating in and out
groups. It gives a priestly class super-authority (authority
that doesn't come from who you are, but rather who you
represent) and shapes behavior in both prescriptive and
motivational ways, all in a tremendously economically
efficient mode. If you are a priest-king living in a palace
in ancient Sumer, you have a prescriptive authority of
saying, "This is the God speaking and not the man," and you
have the ability to promise rewards in the afterlife at no
particular cost to yourself or the ruling class. It's a debt
you'll never have to pay off. Economically and
organizationally, religious organization has to be ranked
right up there at the top with almost any other economic
advance.
Dostoevsky probably put it best in The Brothers Karamazov,
when Fyodor Pavlovich said, "Damn it all, what wouldn't I do
to the man who first invented God!" To which Ivan
Fyodorovich replies that there would have been no
civilization if they hadn't invented God, and no brandy,
either.
Innovation #11, systems of writing, went from pictographs,
whether cuneiform or Chinese in their evolution, with
thousands of individual symbols to be learned, to an
alphabetic system which evolved from the Phoenicians,
through a long period of evolution that we can trace all the
way down to our use of Roman script today. The idea that
characters can be combined in grammars to represent ideas
made possible written records of tremendous complexity and
efficiency, calculations as place value was developed, and
Gutenberg's printing press. Our alphabet derives directly
from something 2,900 years old. One of the only advances
thereafter was the development of a separate numbering
system, what we call the Arabic numbering system.
Innovation #10, food preservation, arguably first developed
around 10,000 BCE in the Neolithic revolution, meant that
you didn't have to eat what you killed right away, but could
save it for lean times. Portable food sources that are
dried, freeze-dried, salted, spiced, pickled, cooked,
smoked, or fermented allows travel over longer distances and
more efficient migration with animals, changes society, and
generates tremendous value. We understand all of these
methods and techniques, but many of them have been
supplanted by electric refrigeration. It would now be very
hard to find salted cod, which was a staple of the northern
European diet for 2,000 years. Instead we buy fresh cod or
go to Costco, where they routinely fly in a 600-pound tuna
caught two days ago in the Solomon Islands in the middle of
the Pacific. (I shudder at the carbon footprint.)
Innovation #9 is metallurgy. Ancient people built fires that
burned hot. They looked in the bottom of the fire pit after
a while and noticed there were some things there that were
harder than the kinds of stones they were used to dealing
with. What were they? What could be done with them? The
progression was from copper, silver, and gold to soft metals
first mined and smelted in about 4,400 BCE; to the idea of
alloying certain metals, for instance copper with tin, to
get bronze, which is a harder and more durable metal; to the
Iron Age to finally steel. In fact, Damascus steel is
probably the first instance of the use of nanotechnology, as
carbon nanotubes from the furnaces were incorporated that
made the steel remarkably hard yet not brittle. Metalworking
became both a science and an art. In Jared Diamond's theory
of Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
(1997), steel is the third leg of the dominance tripod of
the West.
Innovation #8: Ceramics and pottery. Some of the other
things the ancients found in the bottom of a fire pit were
pieces of clay that through repeated firings had gotten hard
and had their porosity reduced. So you have the ability to
make clay vessels, first to store dry things like grains,
then fired clay in which you can store liquids, and finally
earthenware, stoneware, and porcelain, which eventually in
the hands of Chinese became high art. From a simple clay pot
unearthed in Syria, 6,600 BCE we come all the way forward to
our finest toilets today, which are vitreous china, made by
the same processes of molding and firing clay. Our
microelectronics also owe a debt to pottery and ceramics.
Computer chips are built on a ceramic substrate that
conducts the heat away from them. No ceramics, and the chips
would burn themselves up and your cell phone would quit
working.
Innovation #7, farming, is really a chain of innovation over
a long period of time. The first animal to be domesticated
is generally thought to be the dog, around 15,000 BCE. (The
horse was domesticated on the steppes of Central Asia in
about 5,000 BCE, but the horse collar, which would make the
horse so useful in farming, would have to wait another 4,000
years.) The domestication of plants began with the bottle
gourd, something you could dry out and carry as a canteen.
Imagine what it would be like if you couldn't carry water
with you when you go hunting. You would have to stay pretty
close to sources of water. With a bottle gourd, you could go
farther and have greater access to more crops and herds.
Wheat was arguably the most important crop in the world
until rice--the most efficient crop for converting the
nutrients in sunlight into edible material--came along about
5,000 years later.
From the domestication of animals and plants to hydraulic
agriculture--the idea of artificial irrigation of crops that
was developed in the Fertile Crescent--to the plow and the
concept of crop rotation, chemical fertilizers (which didn't
occur to us until the seventeenth century), artificial
nitrate fertilizers (which didn't occur until we could
synthesize them at the beginning of the twentieth century),
and finally the Green Revolution in the early 1960s, farming
has given us the ability to create unprecedented economic
surplus, which many would say gave us the rest of the
innovations listed here.
Innovation #6: Clothing. Without clothing, people have to
stay where it's warm and dry. It took a long time to go from
draping ourselves in tanned animal skins to figuring out how
to use a needle to sew them into some sort of a shape, and a
longer time still to the weaving of cloth and the making of
tailored, layered clothes. In the stone age, not only did
you eat what you killed, you also wore it. We've been able
to reconstruct the clothes of Utze, a Copper Age hunter,
found when a glacier in the Austrian Alps receded. He wore
snow shoes lined with grass for insulation. He had a cape
made out of woven grass, carried sophisticated animal skin
bags for his gear, and he was truly a happy wanderer until
someone shot him with an arrow and he died and got frozen in
that glacier.
Innovation #5: Symbolic communication. Starting with cave
painting, human beings began to communicate with each other
across time and space, not simply face to face. The idea
that one could communicate with people through symbols made
externalization of information and language possible. It
gave us a storehouse of information that didn't need to be
transmitted just by showing someone how it worked, whether
you were drawing on the walls in a cave in Lascaux or coming
up with counters in Aswan that indicate that some dates were
brought by camel from a far-away place. At the same time,
symbolic communication in Sumer developed into cuneiform,
pressing reeds into soft clay and baking them. (We know a
tremendous amount about cuneiform because it's really hard
to get rid of clay tablets.)
Innovation #4: Lever simple machine. There are a number of
classes of simple machines, of which the lever is perhaps
one of the oldest. It allows people to amplify their
mechanical effort. Hammers and plows mean that instead of
the effort of one person digging with hands or tools, now
there is mechanical advantage. Farmers can plow deeper and
throw farther and with more force. Archimedes is famously
said to have stated, "Give me a place to stand with a lever
and I will move the whole world." In fact, the concept of a
lever has moved the whole world since its invention.
Innovation #3: Inclined plane simple machine. Don't just
think ramp, think blades, wedges, chutes, slides, and
screws. Chopper cores unearthed at the Olduvai Gorge in East
Africa that are 1.9 million years old show a clear effort to
manufacture. They were used for chopping and scraping hides
as well as for hunting. That technology was brought forward
to the high art of the Clovis arrow point and the higher
still art of Archimedes' screw water pump, which permitted
hydraulic irrigation by pumping water up out of canals and
rivers and into irrigation ditches with a simple turn of the
screw.
Innovation #2 is the taming of fire. Fire has been around a
long time, often caused by lightning strikes. But being able
to make fire on demand, or first being able to capture it
from the wild and preserve and use it as you wish, permitted
humans to live in colder places, work after dark, inhabit
places that were dark and perhaps dangerous, scare off
animals at night, and cook food in order to preserve it.
Fire-starting technologies are tremendously tough to master,
which probably also meant more specialization of labor as
humans began to use simple technologies like the fire plow,
the fire drill, and the smudge bundle, otherwise known as
the cigar.
Innovation #1 in spoken language--true semantic, syntactic,
phonetic language. This idea allowed humans to transmit
information about the world from one person to another. It
underlies all cooperation, the economy, and clan
relationships. Spoken language is the most important
innovation we have ever come up with.
However, I reserve the right to add an Innovation #0 (since
I work with computers, and programmers start counting from
zero, not 1). Innovation #0 in my view is one that outshines
and underlies every other innovation we have discussed. That
is the concept of intentional pedagogy. This is perhaps the
last thing in that great long list of what separates us from
the "lower animals," a phrase Darwin rejected. It's the idea
that humans can intentionally transmit culture and
generalize knowledge from the specific instance to that
which is teachable, and then intentionally give that
knowledge to another person across time and space. From
telling your child that the fire is hot and not to touch it
to the internet itself, intentional teaching is the most
important innovation of all time.
"The systematic use of teaching to ensure the learning of
skills and acquisition of knowledge by others is evidently a
peculiarity of the human species."[1] "Humans are remarkable
among animals for the way in which they teach their
young."[2] S.A. Barnett suggested that homo sapiens, the
understanding man, is perhaps not the right taxonomy for our
species, that really what we should be called is homo
docens, teaching man.
So what didn't make the list? Lots of things, for reasons
that I hope you will understand and then vehemently disagree
with. Everything from theories of disease, inoculations, and
antibiotics to guns and gunpowder, and plastics to democracy
to even the idea that there is such a thing as an idea, in
my estimation couldn't make the cut of the metric I set
forth earlier: impact on lives times number of lives. Others
have had different concepts of what innovation means and
what innovations are truly important. My hope is not that I
have it right, but that readers will help me get it more
right with your comments, questions, emails, or simply
throwing it wrapped around a rock through the transom.
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Notes
[1] Barnett, S.A., Teaching Considered as Behavior, in
Comparative Psychology: A Handbook, in Greenberg, G. and M.
Haraway, Taylor & Francis, 1998, p. 203.
[2] Marton, F. et al., Learning and Awareness, Erlbaum
Assoc., Mahwah, NJ, 1997, p. 166.
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