The Life Millennium, Part 6

After a long, much-needed break, I'm just about ready to bring The Life Millennium back for its second half. Ready?

49. "The Circulation of Blood, 1628."

The secrets of the human circulatory system were one of the "great mysteries" for centuries. Aristotle hypothesized, incorrectly, that blood came from the liver. Most simply left it at that for a long time--little inconveniences like plagues and wars got in the way of scientific progress. Then, in the 16th Century, things started to calm down a little, and curious scholars could go about their discoveries. They learned about amazing new things such as veins, arteries, and the heart itself, and they documented their findings even if it meant going against accepted doctrine.

Most notable among these pioneers was William Harvey, who in 1628 published his magnum opus, An Anatomical Study of the Motion of the Heart and of the Blood in Animals. Twenty years in the making, his book "demonstrated for the first time that the heart controls circulation...His description of how blood flows away from the heart in arteries, then back through veins--still valid nearly 400 years later--remains one of the most significant medical discoveries of the millennium" (91).

48. "Yes, we Can--1812."

A few years ago, I picked up a copy of Sun Tzu's The Art of War, just for the hell of it. Within it, he suggested as one of his strategies that an army should make full use of a defeated enemy's rations, and therefore not need to worry about carrying its own food. "Ah, but," said I, "now that you've written it, what's to stop your enemies from poisoning whatever rations they may leave behind as bait?" The slender volume may have suggested "carry an antidote," but one should think about things like that well ahead of time. Besides, is it possible to have an antidote for every possible poison?

The more practical solution: An army must carry its own rations. This raises another problem: Food eventually spoils. The primary solution to that, one which Revolutionary War-era troops used (and Civil War-era troops may have used), was to carry food that doesn't spoil. Late 18th Century-era soldiers were therefore stuck with salt-pork and "hardtack," a dense biscuit that attracted weevils and threatened to break a soldier's teeth off with every bite.

There had to be something better, and Napoleon issued a bounty to anyone who could find a way.

In 1795, a French brewer named Nicolas Appert hit upon the solution: He sealed and heated food in airtight jars. Fourteen years later, his factory shifted from brewing to canning. Not long after that, a company in London called Donkin, Hall, and Gamble replaced the breakable glass jars with more durable tin cans, and thus was modern canning born.

47. "Striking Oil, 1859."

Millions and millions of years ago, back when the Earth was practically brand new, the dinosaurs were at the top of the heap. Then, a gigantic meteor crashed into the planet. Its impact kicked up enough dust to block out the sun, and the dinosaurs and their young eventually died off. As the eons went by, their bodies sank into the ground. The decaying flesh combined with soggy leaves and rocks and minerals, and the liquefied remains turned into coal and crude petroleum.

The stuff slept underground for millennia, while our ancestors claimed the world above. Civilizations rose and fell, and fledgling empires needed fuel. Certainly, a lucky few people managed to "strike oil" here and there, but they never got more than a trickle at a time. That changed in 1859, when a former railroad conductor named Edwin Drake led a few entrepreneurs out to Titusville, Pennsylvania, and got some oil out of a small well.

Oddly enough, Drake and his friends were after kerosene, not the oil itself. But they set in motion an enormous engine, and, by the time the Civil War ended, oil derricks had sprouted up across the country as countless people tried to cash in. When the bubble burst, as all bubbles do, one man remained: John D. Rockefeller. He bought up his competitors for a song, and merged them all into Standard Oil.

46. "Water Purification, 1829."
Up until 1829, when the Chelsea Waterworks installed a huge "slow-sand" filter on the River Thames, most Londoners had to drink filthy water. Cholera, typhoid fever, and other illnesses ran rampant. Even after 1829, most of the water went unfiltered. "Finally, in 1854, physician John Snow, though he didn't know that bacteria were carried in water, traced an outbreak of cholera to a pump near a sewer."

45. "Red Star Over Russia, 1917."
In order to understand what happened in 1917, we must first go back to 1848 for context.

First, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels published The Communist Manifesto, which detailed class-struggles throughout history and called for a "classless state."

Second, most of Europe's working poor had had enough with the horrifying conditions in which they lived. Artisans found themselves unable to compete with industrialization (the things they made could be made faster and cheaper with machinery), which meant they brought less money home. Harvest failures meant that they could not eat.

January 1848 saw the first of the revolutions take place in Sicily, which split into two kingdoms for sixteen months--Poland supported one; the Kingdom of Spain supported the other. Though this revolution ultimately failed, it started a "domino effect" throughout the rest of the continent.

The second, and perhaps most well-known of the revolutions, occurred in France in February and June of 1848.  These ended when Louis Napoleon took the throne.

Revolutions within Europe and Europe-controlled areas sprung up, but were ultimately put down.

Russia and several other areas remained fairly stable at the time--there were a few mini-revolutions here and there, but they went nowhere until 1917. World War I, "the war to end all wars," finally did Russia in with a series of famines and disastrous military ventures.

The incompetent Czar Nicholas II held the throne until rebels deposed him in February 1917, but the new, socialist government, led by Aleksandr Kerensky, didn't get Russia out of the war.

In October, the Bolsheviks--led by Vladimir Lenin--overthrew Kerensky's government and established the Communist Party in 1920.

"The Soviet Union (as the new nation was known) modernized with terrific speed. They masses got free education and medical care. But the price was staggering: millions dead in economic experiments and purges; a gulag full of political prisoners; a culture shackled by totalitarian ideology. The country's rivalry with the U.S. dominated global politics, triggered wars and threatened nuclear Armageddon. It ended in 1989, when the Soviet bloc collapsed--done in, as Marx had predicted capitalism would be, by its own 'internal contradictions'" (94).

44. "Small World, 1674."

It started out as most inventions do: very small. In fact, it was nothing more than a small disc of clear glass, specially ground until it could make other small things appear larger than they were.

A Dutch linen merchant named Antonie van Leeuwenhoek had heard that he could create such an apparatus, and he successfully put it to the test. It worked, and he built ever more powerful lenses.

In 1674, he examined a drop of lake water with his lens. Within the drop, he saw what he called "animal-cules" (we call them "protozoa" nowadays), and with that, he hit upon the field of microbiology. "Leeuwenhoek's work unlocked doors for Pasteur, Fliming, Darwin, and others. Today, microscopes which can magnify to the millionth power are essential not only to medicine but to fields as diverse as criminology, metallurgy, and archaeology--all because of a curious shopkeeper."

43. "The Well-Tempered Scale, 1722."

Composer Johann Sebastian Bach, who is best-known for Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, composed and published The Well-Tempered Clavier at thirty-seven. This selection of 24 pieces could be played in all of the scales--12 major, 12 minor. In this way, musicians could explore keyboard instruments to their fullest potential, and create a much more diverse range of sounds than they could before Bach's work.

Though he originally wrote it for the clavichord, Bach's work was later adapted for the piano. "The stage was set for the pyrotechnics of Chopin and Liszt, for the crashing fortissimos and feather-soft pianissimos of Tchaikovsky--and for millions of humbler recitals" (97).

42. "The Laws of Heredity, 1866."

Anyone remember Punnett squares from biology classes? Simple pen-and-paper calculators to determine genetic inheritance, these were the invention of geneticist Reginald Punnett, but he could not have gotten anywhere without the earlier work of 19th Century monk Gregor Mendel, who crossbred pea plants in his garden. Sadly, his monastic inclinations far exceeded his scientific passion, and he abandoned his work after he became an abbot, but not before publishing his findings. His work came back into vogue early on in the 20th Century, just as agriculture started to take on a much more scientific approach. For instance, it was discovered that a really strong, healthy plant could come from crossing a pair of weaker seeds, and the result could potentially outperform "purer" plants. (Side note: The original Little Shop of Horrors from 1960 ran with this to outlandish effect: Seymour achieved the malevolent Audrey Jr. by crossbreeding a bloodwort and a Venus flytrap!) 

Mendel's work reached its peak when agronomist Norman Borlaug sparked off the Green Revolution of the 1960s by introducing "dwarf wheat"--a shorter, higher-yielding variety of wheat--to India and Pakistan, then in the middle of a terrible famine. (98)

41. "The Telegraph Goes On Line, 1844."
In 1844, four little words forever changed how people communicate: "What hath God wrought!" This was the message sent out by telegraph inventor Samuel Morse, on America's first telegraph line, which spanned from Washington, D.C. to Baltimore, Maryland. 

My book states that Morse's telegraph wasn't the first: An earlier system, the product of British inventors William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone, debuted first, but Morse's was by far the most user-friendly. Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph relied upon the manipulation of metal needles to spell out words; Morse's was the more familiar dot-dot-dash contrivance. His other invention, Morse code, soon became the standard, but it would evolve and improve over the decades. (100)

40. "Women's Rights, 1848."

In 1848, the first Women's Rights Convention met in Seneca Falls, New York. Elizabeth Cady Stanton wrote the Declaration of Rights and Sentiments; the convention and the declaration can today be seen as the opening salvo of the feminist movement. It wasn't the first such declaration, but it was the most effective: "The 12 resolutions adopted there provided an agenda broad enough to terrify many. Its defenders were pelted with rotten fruit, insulted by the press, ignored....It took until 1920 for American women to win the right to vote."

I remember in history lessons that, if women started to espouse feminist ideals, their husbands would send them to sanitariums (insane asylums) and keep them there until they recanted. I remember a documentary of the imprisonment of feminists and the resulting hunger strike. The memories are hazy and fragmented, but the dreadful, horrifying nature of the conditions therein stuck with me for many years...