We're getting there! Onward and upward!
39. "This Spud's For Europe," 1537.
I never knew that potatoes had been around since 8000 BC, or that Spanish explorer Gonzalo Jimenez de Quesada brought them into the Western world in 1537. They took a century or two to really catch on, but they became a staple crop in Ireland during the 19th Century. That is, until the Great Potato Famine hit in 1845, sparking a mass emigration out of Ireland and into America. (102)
38. "Marx meets Engels," 1844.
The writings of Charles Dickens--
A Christmas Carol,
Oliver Twist, and many others--tell of the deplorable conditions in post-Industrial Revolution-era Britain. Around this time, a young Karl Marx befriended political theorist Friedrich Engels, and, four years later, they published
The Communist Manifesto.
Cliffs Notes version: The story of history is the story of cycles of class struggle. "The bourgeoisie had superseded the nobility and called the proletariat into existence. Since capitalists exploited workers with ever-increasing ferocity, proletarians would one day realize they had 'nothing to lose but their chains' and overthrow the bourgeoisie." Then the proletariat would take up the means of production, eliminate social classes, and hopefully create a safer, saner world for everyone. Alas, despite Marx's best intentions, "oppression and want persisted; within a few decades most of those [communist] regimes were ousted from power and Marxism was relegated mainly to academic debate." (105)
37. "Fixing an Image," 1826.
From an attic window at a home in Burgundy, Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce took the world's first photograph. Though early pictures are called "daguerreotypes," Louis Daguerre was the
promoter with whom Niépce partnered. (Nothing wrong with one name overshadowing the other--"Niépcetype" just doesn't have the same ring to it.)
Niépce called his early photograph a "heliograph," and his primitive apparatus required an all-day exposure, but it was a remarkable first step. "[His] invention has allowed us to fix our own images of faraway places and familiar faces--and share them with friends, strangers, and future generations." (106)
36. "E=mc²," 1905.
From 1904 to 1905, physicist Albert Einstein had published groundbreaking papers covering topics such as "the special theory of relativity, the quantum theory of light and more [sic]." His paper for September 1905 proved to be The One, and it had serious implications for the world.
Einstein imagined that the speed of an object could alter its size and its mass, and, "if the energy of motion could change mass...mass itself could become energy."
Energy equals mass times the speed of light, squared.
His theory would be put to the ultimate test four years later, with the Manhattan Project and the completion of the atomic bomb. "Einstein, a lifelong pacifist, deplored the destructive use of his ideas and regretted encouraging President Franklin D. Roosevelt to push development of nuclear weapons." Never mind, of course, that Einstein really didn't want the Nazis to develop them first. (108)
35. "To Be, or Not," 1605.
The History of King John. The Tragedy of Richard III. The Merry Wives of Windsor. Those are but three of the many plays written by William Shakespeare, whose works are still being adapted and dramatized to this very day. His masterpiece, though, has to be The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. It started as a Danish epic from long, long ago, a fairly simple revenge story, but Shakespeare gave Prince Hamlet depth. Impulsive yet conflicted, Hamlet saw in his uncle a really deplorable king, yet recognized that killing the man would make him no better.
To be or not to be, indeed.
A few of the most memorable actors to have essayed Hamlet's torment: Edwin Booth, 1864; John Barrymore, 1922; Alec Guinness, 1938; Richard Burton, 1964; Kenneth Branagh, 1996; David Tennant, 2009.
34. "The French Revolution," 1789.
"Do you hear the people sing?" Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette certainly did. It was the Age of Reason, you see, and French philosophers such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, and Voltaire, demanded a new society, one which called for ordinary people to have much more of a voice in their own governance, one "based on law and reason rather than royal privilege." Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette were, judging by their reputations, more keen to wield the power than to engage in the responsible use of it. I recall a passage from an old history book about Louis XVI: "[He] was more interested in hunting and tinkering with locks than with actually ruling the country." (And by "tinkering with locks," the textbook meant "sexing.")
In the end, their heads joined seventeen thousand others, many of whom were revolutionaries from losing factions.
"The ideas of socialism and nationalism were among the insurrection's exports, as were its egalitarian legal system and its Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. Even its tricolor flag became a model--hoisted, in various hues and configurations, by new republics throughout the world." (110)
33. "One Small Step for Man," 1969.
In 1869, Jules Verne wrote the novel
From the Earth to the Moon. One century later, after many successes and false starts, American astronauts set foot upon its surface.
The Space Race began when the Soviet Union launched their satellite,
Sputnik I, on October 4, 1957. When John F. Kennedy took the presidency a few years later, he vowed that America would get a man on the moon within the decade.
The story of the Space Race has been dramatized in movies such as
The Right Stuff,
Apollo 13, and, most recently,
First Man, the tale of Neil Armstrong's career and the moment he stepped on the moon.
The Sixties were ten years fraught with turmoil: the assassinations of JFK and of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.; the tension of the Cold War and the moments where it seemed like the war would heat up; the horrors of the Vietnam War and the ever-growing antiwar movement taking hold; the riots at the 1968 Democratic Party Convention...
For all of that and more, it's said that the moon landings unified the nation and redeemed the entire decade.
32. "The First Picture Show," 1895.
"In the beginning there was nonfiction ("I was chased by a pterodactyl...") and fiction ("...and killed it in one blow")." That opening line made me laugh so hard I spat out my coffee upon reading it.
Storytelling! That's been the one constant running throughout humanity's long lifespan upon this little blue orb. First there were cave drawings; then there were stories passed down through the generations; then there was the written word; then theater, poetry, and prose. This state of affairs remained about the same for centuries.
Then in 1889, George Eastman invented roll film--those little canisters you used to take to Walgreen's in the days before the digital camera--which brought photography to the masses. Suddenly, a possibility opened up: What if this film could convey movement?
Thomas Edison took advantage of this with his Kinetoscope. You put a nickel in the slot of a large machine, looked through the lens, turned a crank handle, and watched a movie about a minute long. Then, in 1895, the Lumiere brothers projected their movie,
The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, to 33 people in a café. The small audience is said to have panicked at the sight of the train moving toward the screen, because they had seen nothing like this before in their lives!
"The nature of film, as opposed to, say, theater, means that the same images are banked in the consciousness of generations past, future, and worldwide...After seeing
Jurassic Park, kids from Beverly Hills to Bombay could suffer the same nightmare that they, too, were being chased by a pterodactyl." (114)
31. "Interpretation of Dreams," 1900.
Sigmund Freud's book,
The Interpretation of Dreams, posited that our dreams could reveal our unconscious--our desires, fears, and such. "He saw the human psyche as a battleground for the primitive, aggressive, sexually driven beast [the id] and the socialized adult self within us [the ego]...Through a 'talking cure,' a patient could be analyzed, gaining insight into and control over his unconscious impulses." (117)
30. "The Transistor Age Begins," 1947.
Anyone remember how old science-fiction comic books and movies used to portray computers as behemoths that took up an entire room? Before 1947, computers had to be that big, because they needed bulky vacuum tubes that took up space and power.
Then, some scientists working at New Jersey's Bell Labs constructed a prototype transistor, which, like the vacuum tubes before it, directed the transmission of electricity, but in a much more compact way. Eventually it moved into consumer goods--hearing aids, telephones, and transistor radios.
From the transistor came the integrated circuit, which debuted in the 50s. From integrated circuits came circuit and processor microchips. Thanks to the transistor, I can simply pick up my netbook and write these articles whenever and wherever I want. Imagine if things hadn't progressed past the days of the old ENIAC computer! I'd have to set up a print magazine!
