69. "The Anatomy Lesson, 1543."
"As a boy, Andreas Vesalius dissected cadavers of stray dogs and cats he found on the streets of Brussels." So begins the entry on the man who wrote a massive work of seven books, entitled On the Structure of the Human Body. As Vesalius grew from childhood to adulthood, he refused to "put away childish things," and carried his hobby and passion with him. In this way, he shaped anatomy, physiology, and medicine as we know it today. What's more, he disproved several old-fashioned theories, some of which dated back to Ancient Greece. For example, it was once thought that the human jaw was composed of two bones, but Vesalius proved that it was just one bone. (I can't quite wrap my head around that one: Where would the second bone be? Unless the Greeks thought it split at the chin or something...)
Today, our doctors take Vesalius' work for granted, but his work was downright controversial at the time. The work of Galen, a prominent physician of ancient Greece, was then considered sacrosanct in much of academia, and the Catholic Church probably thought he was robbing graves for his dissections. (The Church was not entirely wrong: I remember seeing Vesalius' name in one of my history books. It said that, while Vesalius did his work above-board, there were a few unscrupulous dealers who sold cadavers that they had taken from graves. Vesalius likely bought one not knowing where it came from, and while he was innocent, he got lumped in with the bad ones.)
Though newer volumes with more modern findings have superseded Vesalius' work, his findings were the trendsetter: Without him, the more modern stuff might not exist.
68. "Pentecostalism, 1906."
Pentecostalism's origins date back to 1901, "when Charles Fox Parham declared...that speaking in tongues was a sign of baptism in the Holy Spirit."
A young black preacher from Houston named William Joseph Seymour kept Parham's message alive when, in 1906, he left Houston for Los Angeles and set up a mission, and "within two years his multicultural ministry had sent missionaries to 25 countries."
To this day, Pentecostalism, "a religion of the heart," is still very much alive, perhaps because it can adapt to and be combined with other religions by virtue of placing as much emphasis on one's own experience of God as it does on the church's particular doctrine.
"Today about half a billion people call themselves Pentecostal or Charismatic, and Pentecostals alone outnumber Anglicans, Baptists, Lutherans and Presbyterians combined. The Yoido Full Gospel Church in Seoul, South Korea, is now, at 700,000 strong, the largest Christian congregation on earth."
67. "A Stitch in Half the Time, 1851."
The idea that automation will make seasoned, well-practiced professionals obsolete has been around for quite a long time. In fact, French tailors found cause for alarm back in 1830, when a young man named Barthélemy Thimonnier invented and patented a prototype sewing machine. Eleven years later, "they ransacked Thimonnier's Paris shop."
This is why, ten years later, two others put their names in the book: Elias Howe, who invented a slightly-better version of Thimonnier's prototype; and Isaac Merritt Singer, who further improved upon Howe's design and introduced the "layaway plan" so that more people could buy his machines: "For five bucks down, one could take home a $125 machine and pay off the rest in monthly installments with interest."
In fact, far from making tailors' work obsolete, it improved their work: They could replicate the same stitch twice, and they could complete a job in less time than doing it completely by hand might take.
The sewing machine also made ready-to-wear clothing (and, by extension, the modern department store) a reality. No longer did you have to visit a tailor if you needed a new shirt--now, you could just buy a new, pre-made and -sized shirt!
All of that being said, there were some downsides. Like Eli Whitney's cotton gin, the sewing machine also opened the door to some unintended consequences: "...it enslaved immigrant women and children in sweatshops. Despite the formation in 1900 of the International Ladies' Garment Workers Union, clothing today is available thanks not only to Singer but to people around the world operating his machines for little pay." If you ask me, that's just people, not the sewing machine itself.
66. "The Splendor of Tenochtitlán, 1325."
The people that we now call "Aztecs" had been nomads for many, many years, but in 1325, they found themselves stuck "on a marshy island in Mexico's Lake Texcoco."
Less than a hundred years later, that apparently undesirable piece of real estate had become the wondrous city of Tenochtitlán, which housed more than 250,000 people at its height. "Built without the help of beasts of burden or the wheel, it boasted palaces, pyramids, grand plazas and a superb network of canals, dikes, and bridges."
Hernan Cortés wrote in 1519 of "the strange and marvelous things of this great city," when chronicling his account of arriving in Mexico. In his eyes, however, the city proved a stark contrast to the Aztecs' religion, which featured blood sacrifice as a major component. (The implication is that the conquistadors likely thought, "Surely these savages would not know how to engineer and build such a beautiful city!")
Today, Tenochtitlán is now known as Mexico City.
65. "A Fresh Point of View, 1413."
The visual arts have already been featured on this list, but that discussion emphasized a specific movement. This entry concerns the development of an artistic tool: perspective.
Medieval artwork did use perspective of a sort, but it lacked the sense of depth which characterizes perspective. This changed when Filippo Brunelleschi completed a painting in 1413 of the Baptistery in Florence. What he did sounds incredibly simple, but it's complex in practice: He rendered onto his canvas the way in which objects seem to get smaller as they get farther away.
In this way, the canvas ceases to be just a canvas; it becomes a window into another reality altogether. A highly-skilled artist can employ perspective to startling effect: A few street-artists around the world have done chalk-paintings on city streets in which, to give one example, a "hole" in the concrete appears to go down for miles. Granted, it only works from one angle in particular, but even then, the illusion requires considerable technical and artistic skill to pull off.
64. "The Long March, 1934."
"Fleeing the Kuomintang's forces in southern China in 1934, a young communist leader named Mao Zedong took 100,000 soldiers and headed north." Within the space of a year, they had marched for over six thousand miles, through mountain ranges and rivers. Along the way, the ever-dwindling troop stopped in small villages and "drew lessons in the dirt with twigs, exhorting peasants to organize against landlords." When all was said and done, Mao's charges had gone from 100,000 to 8,000, but those who survived remained at his side in 1949, when he became chairman of the People's Republic of China. "The triumph of peasants over centuries of imperial rule touched millions around the globe."
63. "Dynamite!, 1867."
In 1867, Alfred Nobel mixed "nitroglycerin...with an absorbent sand and [molded] it into sticks," and called the result "dynamite." Before the invention of dynamite, explosives more powerful than gunpowder were not widely used. Certainly, nitroglycerin existed (twenty years prior to dynamite, in fact), but it was a liquid, and an unstable one at that. Drop a flask of the stuff, and BOOM!
The liquid's volatility made shipping it impractical, but packing it into that absorbent sand stabilized it. Manufacturers could easily make, ship, and store it, but there was a caveat: Dynamite "sweats" with age and exposure to the elements (that is, the nitroglycerin separates from the sand), and becomes more and more unstable. For example, if a group of miners from the 1800s left a few sticks in whatever mine they were working in, those few sticks would pose a significant hazard two or three years down the line.
Some time later, Alfred Nobel realized that he didn't want to be known for creating dynamite, so he founded the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize, and that's what he's better known for today. "Too late for comfort, though: He died sad and alone, taking nitroglycerin for an ailing heart."
62. "Bessemer's Blast, 1854."
Steel had been around for quite a while--Arabs and Swedes alike had been melting iron ore into gleaming steel for centuries. However, an English inventor named Henry Bessemer gets credited with "inventing" steel for three reasons. First, his process "used a blast of oxygen to burn off excess carbon in molten iron ore," thereby improving the steel's purity and strength. Second, his process could be scaled according to a project's particular needs. Third, he patented it first: "American William Kelly made the same discovery at roughly the same time but didn't hurry fast enough to the patent office."
Bessemer's steel, many times stronger than iron, opened the doors for the Transcontinental Railroad (steel rails that can withstand the weight and impact of huge trains), and allowed for the construction of ever-taller skyscrapers. Simply put, the modern world as we know it today would not have been possible without the invention of steel.
61. "Shadows Inside Us, 1895."
In 1895, Wilhelm Rontgen stumbled upon a phenomenon which he called "X-rays." "He placed a vacuum tube with a wire attached to either end inside a black box, switched off the lights in his lab and turned on the electrical current. A mysterious fluorescence began emanating--not from the tube in the box but from a cardboard screen nearby that had been treated with barium." Further tests showed him that these rays could penetrate blocks of wood, heavy books, and, eventually, his own hand.
His discovery proved a big step forward for medicine. Doctors used X-rays to see things like broken bones and, later, cancers. Early on, though, the rays were something of a "new toy," as they were used for measuring peoples' feet for shoes and other novelties. Soon, though, the dangers of too much X-ray exposure--hair loss, minor burns, and, in the worst cases, cancers--became apparent, requiring further research and newer, better equipment.
60. "A Royal Flush, 1596."
In 1596, a Briton named John Harington invented a prototype flush toilet, which was installed and proved a success at Richmond Palace. It took a little over 250 years for sewage systems to catch up to Harington's invention; by then, a gentleman named Thomas Crapper (I kid you not--that really is his name) had perfected the mass-market flush system.
The flush toilet did a lot for sanitation and public health: Less waste on the streets means the less chance of catching diseases like cholera and typhoid!
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