Good afternoon, fellow readers, and welcome to the first entry in The Life Millennium series. For this series, I'm going to stick pretty close to the information in the book
Starting with...
100. "Fixing the Calendar, 1582."
In the beginning, most of the world's peoples, such as the Mayans and the Egyptians, had their own particular methods of calculating days (Earth's rotation), months (lunar cycles), and years (Earth completes one trip around the Sun). For the most part, it worked well enough, but every calendar was different, and a more uniform calendar would soon be needed.
Enter Roman emperor Julius Caesar. In 46 BCE, he took inspiration from Egyptian and Jewish calendars to create a standardized Roman calendar not unlike the one that we're familiar with. It had twelve months of thirty days, a leap year every four years, and five leftover days that he didn't know quite what to do with.
His calendar matched up to a solar year pretty well give or take eleven minutes, and it stayed in use for centuries. Come the 16th Century, however, that eleven minutes had turned the five leftover days into ten leftover days!
Pope Gregory XIII overhauled the calendar once more in 1582. Where the new year was once celebrated in March, he declared January 1st the beginning of the new year. Years that marked the beginning of a new century did not get a leap year unless that year divided by 400; for example, 1900 did not get a leap year, but 2000 did. He also did away with those ten leftover days, and the end result was a much more precise version of the original Julian calendar.
99. "Rocking the World, 1954."
This one's about Elvis Presley, whose 1954 debut opened the door for Bill Haley and the Comets; Buddy Holly and the Crickets; Chuck Berry; Little Richard; Jackie Wilson; the Beatles; the Rolling Stones...he opened the floodgates, and rock'n'roll found a foothold.
98. "The Rosetta Stone, 1799."
At the end of the 18th Century, a group of Napoleon's soldiers were in Egypt when they found a large stone slab, upon which was inscribed a wall of text in Egyptian hieroglyphics, "demotic" script (a kind of Egyptian cursive), and Greek. The book says: "It wasn't until 1822 that Jean-Francois Champollion discovered that hieroglyphics mixed phonetic and symbolic meanings; that some texts should be read right to left, others left to right or top to bottom; and that some symbols had two different meanings."
The takeaway here is that scholars of the time found within some of the phonetic syllables a degree of overlap among the three different languages--in short, even if the language is different, it'll say the same thing. That's a fairly glib summary of it, but remember: Everything we know about Egyptian culture--hieroglyphics and all--owes a significant debt to the Rosetta stone. It opened the doors to the Egyptology movement of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries; without it, King Tutankhamen's tomb would likely have gone undiscovered.
97. "The Olympic Flame, 1896."
The original Olympic Games began around 776 BCE, but Emperor Theodosius I banned them in 393 CE, by which point they "had devolved into a crude carnival rife with pro athletes, betting, bribery, and all manner of cheating." (More cynical readers might think to themselves, "Not unlike the Olympic Games of today.")
The games all but faded into relative obscurity until 1896, when French aristocrat Pierre de Coubertin revived them as a way of connecting the many nations of the world for a while. To this day, the Games are still held every four years.
96. "Man of la Mancha, 1605."
In 1605, Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes published the first part of a novel called Don Quixote de la Mancha. Not only is it the first modern novel of the Western world*, it's likely also the first modern parody: Its hero, Don Quixote, is a middle-aged nobleman whose obsession with romantic stories about knights and chivalry has unhinged him somewhat. Having consumed so many books and stories, he decides one day that chivalry is dead, and that it's his mission to restore it.
The gag, of course, lies in the collision between his fantasy and the real world around him. He's a knight on a horse, but his armor is dented and rusting in places, and his horse is a tired old thing. What's more, everyone around him calls him crazy; even his own family members regard his antics with growing unease. None of this deters him, however, and he still carries on fighting his good fight regardless.
That the story has been adapted countless times, most notably as the musical Man of la Mancha, is proof of its unending appeal and universality from generation to generation.
(*This lofty status will be important much later on. Stay tuned...)
95. "The First Museum, 1683."
This paragraph's title refers to the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford University.
"...The museum as we know it got its start in England in 1659, when John Tradescant, a gardener to royalty, deeded his family's treasures--fish, weapons, birds, even a stuffed dodo--to fellow collector Elias Ashmole." When Ashmole donated the collection to Oxford University, he stipulated that a separate building be constructed for it."
Apparently, before the Ashmolean, collectors of artifacts would usually display their collections in a largish room or a cabinet of some kind. It was perfectly valid in its time, but today it has an uncomfortably tawdry, carnival-sideshow sensibility. It's kind of like that song by Emerson, Lake, and Palmer--"Karn Evil 9 (2nd Impression)": "There behind a glass is a real blade of grass/Be careful as you pass/Move along, move along1."
Ashmole's request ushered in a new era for historical collections: Devoting an entire building to them not only requires a better system of organization, but also lends them a scholarly aura that they would otherwise lack in a "cabinet of wonders."
94. "Sinking the Armada, 1588."
In 1588, a massive fleet of ships called the Spanish Armada sailed into the English Channel at the behest of King Philip II. These were big ships, too, and it looked like a team of gigantic football players going up against a seemingly smaller and weaker team.
But...The battle wasn't as one-sided as King Philip II had expected. The British Navy had ships that looked puny compared to the Armada, but this was by design: A smaller, lighter ship can move through the water more swiftly than a heavier ship can. Also, the British had an unexpected trick up their sleeves: naval strategy.
Normally, the accepted tactic was to board the enemy's ships and duke it out (as do Pirates of the Caribbean and a lot of other movies). This time, the battle was fought at long range, and the Armada's big, heavy ships couldn't dodge British cannon fire. Defeated, the Spanish invaders returned home.
The victory had a profound impact on Britain's naval supremacy and its history. I like to think that it led to the Pilgrims (and, later, the Puritans) setting out for a new land to call their own...but that's for another day.
93. "Painless Surgery, 1846."
In 1846, a dentist named William Morton removed a tumor from a young man's jaw. Before making the first incision, however, he rendered his patient unconscious with a dose of ether. It must be said that he wasn't the first to use the stuff--it was widely used since the 1600s--but he was the first to publish his findings, in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. From then on, physicians and surgeons everywhere could reliably use it and other anesthetics.
92. "The Ottoman Empire, 1453."
I'll probably cover the rise of the Ottoman Empire when we get to that Millennium book I mentioned last week or so, but the most important thing to know is that this empire lasted for centuries.
In 1453, Mehmed II Khan Gazi defeated an army of Christians at Constantinople, and under his reign, the city "transformed...from a decrepit city into a whirling hub of trade and creativity. It became a magnet for Islam's most ambitious and talented scholars, poets, artists, and architects, who wrote some of the era's finest literature and built spectacular mosques."
From Constantinople, the empire spread into Morocco, Hungary, Damascus, and several other countries. "The empire eventually collapsed after World War I, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the modern republic of Turkey and renamed the old imperial capital Istanbul."
...Which reminds me of a good old jazz standard, "Istanbul--Not Constantinople2."
91. "Haiti's Freedom, 1804."
If whatever I write for this entry is to make any sense, remember these facts: France owned Haiti in the 1700s; cane sugar 1) could make you very rich very quickly and 2) was readily available in Haiti; and, most importantly, France imported slaves from Africa to harvest the sugar.
This status quo remained in place until the first Haitian Revolution of 1791. France regained some control, but in 1802 a former slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture got an army together and resisted any attempts to regain further control. L'Ouverture eventually surrendered, but not before inflicting heavy damage against Napoleon's army. The damage was so bad that Napoleon had to sell the Louisiana Territory to the United States in exchange for some badly-needed cash...and yes, that's the Louisiana Purchase!
Finally, on January 1st, 1804, Haiti was declared a "free black republic," the first of its kind in the world.
90. "As if on Cue: Plastic, 1907."
Ivory was one of the most widely-used natural materials at the end of the 19th Century. It's fairly easy to see why: The stuff is hard and durable enough to withstand many years of regular use, yet soft enough to be readily carved and sculpted.
The only downside was its most common source--an elephant's tusks. Once an elephant is killed for its tusks, it's gone for good, and if too many are killed for their ivory, there's no way to replenish the supply.
In fact, there was an ivory shortage in the 1880s, right at a sudden uptick in the popularity of billiards; billiard-balls were once made of ivory. A company called Phelan and Collender, which was then the largest billiards supply company, recognized that they would need something new.
In 1907, they got their wish: Belgian inventor Leo Baekeland, who had recently made his name with "quick-action photographic paper," created a substance that he called "Bakelite." It was the world's first wholly synthetic material, and Phelan and Collender soon switched to the Bakelite standard.
(The downside to Bakelite, which later plastics don't have, is that it gradually turns chocolate brown with time and exposure to light no matter what color it comes in.)
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1. Emerson, Lake, & Palmer. "Karn Evil 9 (2nd Impression)." Brain Salad Surgery, 1973, LP.
SOURCE: Time, Inc. The Life Millennium: The 100 Most Important People and Events of the Last 1,000 Years. New York: 1998, Time, Inc., Book.
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