Here we come to a milestone: the halfway point in the
Life Millennium series!
Before we move ahead any further, I should pause and point out
why I'm covering each development in detail rather than just doing a simple list.
The simplest way to put a ranking like this together would have been to organize them chronologically, but the biggest problem with chronological order is that it implies an endpoint (or, more cynically, that the world and its people are on a downward slide). Another problem with this method is that it's just too broad: many things could have happened in a given year or decade, but nothing in the next year or decade!
Ranking the top one hundred developments from minor-impact to major-impact forces a historian to use his or her imagination and state a more convincing case as to
why they are listing one thing but not another. Also, it implies that a story is unfolding across several different cultures, which gets you out of the Western world of development and into a much broader perspective.
The idea of a story unfolding is something I will get to once I review that other
Millennium book, which is much more in-depth than this volume and contains some
very surprising things.
Anyway....
59. "The First Newspaper, 1609."
Ah, the newspaper: Once a staple of Sunday morning, it has largely gone the way of digital media.
Digital or otherwise, the newspaper's story begins in Strassburg, Germany, where the
Relation was first published in 1609. Its first headline read, "Signor Gallileo [sic]...found a rule and visual measure, by which one can...look at places 30 miles away, as if they were close by." (The description sounds like a telescope.)
I say "headline," but the
Relation, which was printed on the earliest presses (this will come up much later), didn't have them. In fact, it didn't have advertisements or illustrations, for that matter. Really, it didn't look anything like what we think of when we see the word "newspaper." That would develop in fits and starts throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, and wouldn't reach its final form until 1833, when the "penny press" could print massive amounts of papers. Still, everything had to have started somewhere.
58. "Rubber Baron, 1839."
In 1839, Charles Goodyear developed vulcanized rubber. Before his "vulcanization" process, natural rubber was a really unreliable material: It hardened in the winter and practically melted into a sticky goop in the summer. Anything made of rubber simply did not hold its shape!
You see the Goodyear name on tires everywhere, but the brand's namesake repeatedly drove himself into debt in his quest for a more stable form of rubber: "While in debtor's prison, he began combining raw rubber with everything from witch hazel to cream cheese...He accidentally spilled a drop of rubber mixed with sulfur on his hot stove."
From vulcanized rubber comes the boom of the car industry (rubber tires), and from that comes...well, most of modern life, really. What to do with all those old tires, though...?
57. "A Woman's Choice, 1914."
Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, published in 1914 a pamphlet called The Woman Rebel, which marked the beginning of the birth-control movement. Obviously, it wasn't exactly greeted with open arms at the time: The pamphlet ended up hitting her with an obscenity charge--brought upon her by male judges--and she left America for Europe for two years, but came back more determined than ever to make a serious impact.
Sanger opened up a birth-control clinic in Brooklyn, but within nine days the police raided it.
Then, in 1923, she set up the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau, "the first doctor-staffed birth control clinic in the United States, where diaphragms and advice were dispensed."
She died in 1966, but her work lives on: Dr. Gregory Pincus dedicated his research, which led to the contraceptive Pill, to Sanger's legacy.
56. "The First Restaurant, 1120."
Taking us out of the real world, just for context...You know how, in The Lord of the Rings and other fantasy works, the heroes stop at an inn to rest for a night and convene in secret, where their enemies weren't looking? Those places had some basis in real life, but they also offered a place to bed down for a night, and I would put those in the "lodging" category first. The first actual restaurant, without an inn attached, can be traced back to 12th-century China. "The journal of 12th century Chinese bureaucrat Meng Yuanlao--arguably the first restaurant reviewer--offers a meticulous account of an emerging restaurant culture in Kaifeng, the capital during the Northern Song dynasty (960-1126)."
Besides offering good food, the restaurant served as a place where people could gather in a setting that was on one hand much more formal than the "inn" setting I mentioned, and on the other still fairly casual.
55. "Childhood Found, 1633."
Three centuries before Dr. Benjamin Spock published
Baby and Child Care, a Moravian bishop named Johan Amos Comenius published
The School of Infancy.
For context: In 1633, much of Europe was in the middle of the
Thirty Years' War. I won't go into too much detail about it, but it devastated most of the continent. Besides the casualties of battle, famine and disease made life a short, miserable affair. "...Children worked hard and died young. But Comenius was a utopian who believed the pathway to an earthly Eden was education. If children were not loved, [and] not educated early and well, their souls could be lost."
Most of Comenius' writings were lost and forgotten when he died, but he planted a seed all the same. Much later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau echoed Comenius' sentiments, as did "Swiss reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi," who opened "the first infants' school."
I myself remember reading somewhere that the drive for compulsory education in England and in America came about when reformers saw children who worked in factories, and were unnerved at how they had already adopted all the bad traits of their adult counterparts...especially the jaded, "I-don't-care-anymore" attitude. Remember that, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, factory employees worked long hours in conditions that would either 1) gruesomely injure them; 2) kill them fast; or 3) kill them long-term from breathing in soot and other chemicals. That's bad enough for an adult, but imagine a child of nine or ten working in this way. Worse yet, imagine that they've made a new friend or two at work...and then had to watch their new friend get pulled into the machine, never to come out.
If there's one thing a child should never have to experience, it's that kind of indifferent despair. There's plenty of time for that in adulthood.
54. "Tobacco Catches Fire, 1535."
From the diary of French Explorer Jacques Cartier, who traveled among the Iroquois Indians in the early parts of the 16th Century: "When we tried to use the smoke, we found it bit our tongues like pepper." I can only assume that they had offered him a peace-pipe, but, in any case, Cartier described his first encounter with tobacco, which he took back to Europe with him. Initially, it was sold as a "cure-all" for various ailments, but it
really found a foothold when it became the Jamestown settlement's first major cash crop. And then, mass-produced, pre-rolled cigarettes were introduced in the 1800s, and tobacco became a major industry.
Now, on the other hand, we're starting to shy away from cigarettes. The risks of cancer and emphysema are so well-known that to even
start smoking is all but pointless!
53. "The Coolest Invention, 1834."
A long, long,
long time ago, the human race developed agriculture. In this way, the first farms came into being, and successful farms made their owners wealthy enough that they could hire people to work the land for them. Those first homesteaders now had enough spare time to say to themselves, "Remember how dreadful it was to work in that summer heat? Now that we've got it made, why don't we try keeping ourselves cool when it gets too hot?"
Rich people imported snow and ice, and packed it tightly between the walls of their homes. It worked well enough for centuries, but, when snow and ice melt, restoring them from a liquid back into a solid is next to impossible.
Or at least it
was until 1834, when an inventor named Jacob Perkins built and patented an early refrigerator. His invention used compressed liquid ether, which produced a cooling effect when evaporated; the ether was then re-condensed back into a liquid. Seventeen years later, his invention saw its first commercial use at an Australian brewery, and shortly after that, major shipping companies began to refrigerate, especially if their cargo could easily spoil.
"In 1902, Willis Carrier installed the first air conditioner in a Brooklyn printing plant--it not only cooled but also controlled humidity--and before long his machines were showing up in department stores and movie theaters. The first safe and quiet kitchen refrigerators appeared in the early 1930s. Fewer than 1 percent of the homes in America are now without one, and most contain frozen foods--thanks to a process developed in 1925 by Clarence Birdseye--another marvel of the Cool Age."
"52. Tick, Tock, 1656."
In 1656, a Dutch astronomer named Christiaan Huygens invented the pendulum clock. Before Huygens, we relied first on sundials and water clocks, and then on mechanical deadweight-clocks. All of these were good enough for their time, but even the best mechanical clock regularly lost track of time.
Huygens' clock was the most precise timepiece of its day, and it saw widespread use in just about all quarters. Chemists and physicists could now keep better records for their experiment logs; shopkeepers could keep fixed hours; and workers could keep track of how long they worked.
"51. Liberty for All, 1865."
In 1865, the Civil War came to an end after four years of bloody combat. Millions of slaves found themselves liberated, and the South's plantation economy crumbled.
With that said, the end of the war was just the end of the fighting. The major turning point happened on New Year's Day, 1863, when Abraham Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation. (
I very nearly said "delivered the Emancipation Proclamation," but that would have been confusing it with the Gettysburg Address.)
...So, you may ask, how did the Proclamation ensure a Union victory at the end of the war?
I'll tell you: It changed the premise of the war from a political imperative (rebuild the union) to a moral imperative (end slavery as a legitimate economic practice). As far as morale goes, restoring the Union is good for the first few rousing speeches, but it's an abstract goal, and the realities of war--the carnage, the death, the disease--conspire to dull an already fairly-weak mission statement.
"End slavery," on the other hand, is a moral goal. "For the nation's 3.5 million slaves, for its abolitionists and for some of its politicians, the crucible of civil war would allow the U.S. to live up to its best traditions, expressed in the Declaration of Independence, as a land of liberty and equality for all."
"50. A University Education, 1088."
In 1088, a group of law students from Bologna, Italy, founded the first university. They collected and researched Roman law, and then drew their own conclusions about how to apply it to the present day. It might not seem like much now, but their work built the legal foundations of European society.
Not only that, but those same scholars established the university as protected ground: "When Bolognese landlords threatened to raise scholars' rents, student protests led Emperor Frederick Barbarossa to award them protection from exploitation in 1158."
"Students also made professors sign contracts to deliver lectures on particular subjects--and promise to remain at the school until the end of the term. Soon professors needed a license to teach (the earliest academic degree), and a real university took shape."
Not bad for the 11th Century, huh?
