The World's Greatest Idea The World's Greatest Idea - John Farndon - E-Book

The World's Greatest Idea The World's Greatest Idea E-Book

John Farndon

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Beschreibung

Where would humanity be now without fire, vaccinations, farming … or wine? A great idea is one that has changed the path of human civilisation. But which is the greatest of them all? John Farndon, author of the bestselling Do You Think You're Clever?, has set out to find the answer. A distinguished panel of experts agreed on a list of 50 ideas, and each chapter of The World's Greatest Idea sees Farndon explore the argument for a different one. The candidates are intriguingly varied: Electricity grids enable us to power our cities, but then sewers allowed those cities to grow. Without the wheel, modern civilisation would be pretty much impossible, but take away Logic and we'd lose the essential structures for rational thought ... But then what would be the point of all of this without the idea of romance? The World's Greatest Idea is an enthralling voyage of discovery through the most powerful intellectual, social, scientific and creative brainwaves humans have ever had. They are ranked in the book determined by a public vote on www.theworldsgreatestidea.com But will you agree with the verdict?

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John Farndon is the author of many books on contemporary issues, including China Rises and India Booms (Virgin), and Bird Flu and Iran in the Everything You Need to Know series (Icon). He also writes widely for children, including the best-selling Do Not Open (Dorling Kindersley), and has been shortlisted four times for the Junior Science Book Prize.

He is also the author of Do You Think You’re Clever? The Oxford and Cambridge Questions, also published by Icon Books.

www.john-farndon-books.co.uk

Published in the UK in 2010 by

Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre,

39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP

email: [email protected]

www.iconbooks.co.uk

This electronic edition published in 2010 by Icon Books

ISBN: 978-1-84831-248-7 (ePub format)

ISBN: 978-1-84831-249-4 (Adobe ebook format)

Printed edition (ISBN: 978-1-84831-196-1)

sold in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House,

74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA

or their agents

Printed edition distributed in the UK, Europe, South Africa and Asia

by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road,

Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Printed edition published in Australia in 2010

by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd,

PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street,

Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Printed edition distributed in Canada by

Penguin Books Canada,

90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700,

Toronto, Ontario M4P 2YE

Text copyright © 2010 John Farndon

The author has asserted his moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any

means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset by Marie Doherty

Contents

Cover

About the author

Title page

Copyright information

Introduction

The ideas

#50

#49

#48

#47

#46

#45

#44

#43

#42

#41

#40

#39

#38

#37

#36

#35

#34

#33

#32

#31

#30

#29

#28

#27

#26

#25

#24

#23

#22

#21

#20

#19

#18

#17

#16

#15

#14

#13

#12

#11

#10

#9

#8

#7

#6

#5

#4

#3

#2

#1

The panel

Introduction

When the notion of writing a book entitled The World’s Greatest Idea was first suggested to me, my first reaction was that it was absurd. How can ideas as profound and complex as justice or logic or Marxism be reduced to a simple popularity contest? And what’s meant by greatest, anyway? Is the greatest idea the one that brought humanity the most benefit or the one that had the most impact? How can you say which is better – coffee or capitalism, marriage or monotheism? The whole concept is of course nonsensical – and so fatally flawed with contradictions that it is doomed to failure. And yet …

There’s something rather beguiling about the notion of The World’s Greatest Idea, something that slyly seduces you into thinking about it before you can stop yourself and say, ‘Hold on; this is ridiculous!’ So this book is about yielding to that temptation. And if you do yield, I hope you will find, as I did, that it is actually a thoroughly fascinating game.

Ideas matter. They shape our experience of the world. They bring us good things and bad. They alter our lives for better or worse. They change our beliefs and our hopes for the future. Ideas such as fire, metals and pottery dramatically changed how we live. Democracy and capitalism established fundamental principles underpinning the way society is run. Ideas such as the abolition of slavery and feminism are vital attempts to right a wrong. Each one of these ideas is important and has had a huge impact on humanity, whether good or ill.

That makes them worth thinking about, and that’s at the heart of my aim in writing this book – to provoke thought. In writing each of the entries, I haven’t simply argued the case for it being a great idea. Indeed, it won’t always be obvious whether I personally think it’s a great idea or not. Instead, what I’ve done, I hope, is provide food for thought, with some of the background to the idea and its impact on the world as well as some of the arguments for and against.

There are lots of footnotes (some quite long), not because this an academic treatise in which every statement needs careful qualification or reference, but because often it can be a little aside, an extra snippet of information, that actually triggers ideas. This is not a book full of answers, nor even opinions; it is simply intended to spark ideas and give readers enough material to get them thinking about what really matters – which ideas we really need and which we can do without.

There is another purpose, too, which is to simply revel in humanity’s ingenuity – to appreciate the wealth of brilliant ideas that people have had through the ages. There are so many things we take for granted – from tea and refrigeration to logic and romance – that someone, somewhere actually introduced to the world. And it’s worth raising a glass to them – and therein lies another great idea.

For similar reasons, the range of ideas in this book is entirely arbitrary. There is no attempt to rigidly define what is meant by a ‘great’ idea or even an ‘idea’. It was compiled entirely on the basis of a straw poll among a panel of experts, each of whom had their own reasons for their choice. The result is extraordinarily eclectic, and we have ideas both as basic as sewerage and as high-flown as quantum theory.

My own initial view when writing this book was that a great idea would be one that changed the world for the better. But as I came to explore the ideas, I realised that very few ideas are unmixed blessings, and even ideas I think are damaging are often worth giving some time to.

After the list compiled by the panel and myself was finalised, we set up a website and invited visitors to the site to vote for which idea they thought was greatest. The entries in this book are ordered to reflect the results of that poll. The online voters put the Internet top which is quite extraordinary. The Internet is indeed an amazing an idea, and has had a huge impact on the way we communicate in the brief time it’s been around. But is it really the greatest idea ever? Is it really greater than logic or democracy or the abolition of slavery? Or does it rather reflect the demographic of the voters who put contraception third and marriage bottom?

What do you think?

To get you thinking, here’s a selection of comments from contributors to the website:

‘To pick an easy target, monotheism is listed as one of the top fifty. For all their noble beliefs and ideals, it is easy to argue that different monotheistic beliefs’ inability to accept one another have caused more grief and suffering than any other single thing in history and, quite possibly, still do. Somehow we would like to feel a great idea should be positive, but quite a number are very double-edged. Ironically, however much suffering it has caused, it would be hard to find an idea that has had a greater impact than monotheism, so if impact is a measure of greatness then it deserves a far better vote, even though many could argue that the impact has far greater negative value than positive.’ David Macdonald

‘Just because an idea hasn’t yet become reality, it doesn’t mean it can’t be great. Time travel and teleportation seem great ideas – which if ever realized would seem sensational. And how about ideas for a better world? Thomas More’s Utopia, Einstein’s vision of a world government, Martin Luther King’s dream? And maybe even Marxism, since it has never been realized in the way Marx envisaged. No, they’ve never happened, and may never do, but they remind us that great ideas can give us a vision of a better world, better things, and give us goals to aim for, whether it’s how to make a self-cleaning house or how to bring world peace.’ John

‘Surely the invention of anaesthetic would have to be one of the greatest ideas ever? Can you imagine life beforehand, when even the most minor surgery or dental procedure could be agonising?’ Susan

‘It’s so obvious to me what the world’s greatest idea was. It’s amazing that nobody has put it forward yet. If you’re looking at ideas that completely changed the world and that we couldn’t live without and which everyone uses every day, then it’s got to be…..Mathematics.’ Geoff H

‘Psychoanalysis should definitely be on the list. Think of how much it’s changed the way we perceive ourselves!’ Helena H

‘Hope isn’t remotely wishy-washy. You could argue that it’s not exactly an idea, but the conceptualisation of it is. And where would we be without aspiration and vision? None of these other things would be possible if we didn’t have the possibility of imagining change. We’d still be fighting each other for the best cave.’ Sarah W

‘I think the greatest idea was time telling, or time measurement. Humans evolved a “time consciousness” that is far superior to that of other mammals. We have superior memories, and we also have superior foresight. Somewhere along the line, a human must have decided that dividing time into intervals, and measuring or marking these intervals in some way, would be useful. Indeed, if you combine time measurement with foresight (which is influenced by memory), you get planning.’ Anon.

‘Most definitely the Holodeck. Depending upon your relationship with the space/time continuum, it may be that the Holodeck has yet to BE invented. However so, placing this virtual technicality aside I’d say this magnificent potentiality is by far the greatest idea. In fact, I had tea with Philip Ball on the Holodeck just this morning!’ Amy

‘As much as it pains me to say this, my vote went to mass production. It completely changed the shape of society and how we function in our day to day lives. I wouldn’t say it’s been entirely positive idea, but does the greatest idea of all time have to be?’ Currie

‘Mass production? But surely the greatest idea has to be something that has facilitated humanity’s progression? Mass production is responsible for making and continuing to keep over half the world’s population below the poverty line. Also why did monotheism make it, but Hinduism didn’t? Surely it should just be religion?’ NK

The Ideas

Abolition of Slavery

The Aerofoil

Arable Farming

Banking

Bread

Calculus

Capitalism

Coffee and Tea

Computer Programming

Contraception

Copper and Iron

Democracy

Electricity Grids

Epic Poetry

Evolution by Natural Selection

Feminism

Government

Honour

Hope

The Internet

Laws of Motion

Logic

Marriage

Marxism

Mass-production

Monotheism

Music

Pottery

Printing

Qi

Quantum Theory

Refrigeration

Romance

The Sail

The Scientific Method

The Self

Sewerage

Simplified Chinese

The Steam Engine

The Stirrup

The Telephone

Universities

Use of Fire

Vaccination

Weaving and Spinning

Welfare State

The Wheel

Wine

Writing

Zero

#50 Marriage

‘Marriage is a great institution,’ said Groucho Marx, ‘But who wants to live in an institution?’ Groucho was wrong, of course. Nearly 100 million people around the world volunteer to be incarcerated into the marital asylum every year. In some countries, the popularity of marriage is dropping slightly. In the UK, for instance, the number of single adults exceeded the number of married adults for the first time in 2007, but more than a third of singles had been married previously (divorcees and widows). But for most people, everywhere in the world, marriage is still the normal experience.

A hundred years or so ago, many anthropologists believed that marriage was quite a new thing. They believed that in prehistoric times sexual relations were a free-for-all, and some even argued that this was the ‘natural’ way for men and women to behave. Who knows if this was some kind of wish-fulfilment, but there is actually no evidence to suggest that this was so at all. Marriage is the norm in all recorded history, and so it seems to be in most ‘primitive’ tribes around the world. Of course, marriage takes different forms, but it always involves a publicly recognised union between a couple who undertake to live together for life.

Anthropologists have various explanations as to why people would marry even in the simplest of societies, but there are several powerful benefits. First of all, it’s good for the stability of society if people get married. If people remain unattached, there’s potential for at least a lot of stress, if not conflict, as people continually compete for sexual partners. Once two people are married, it’s clear they have made their choice and other single people must look elsewhere. That doesn’t prevent married couples ‘having a fling’, of course, but at least it sends a clear message. It also makes it clear who is responsible for looking after any children and, in theory, assures women that the burden is going to be shared.

Then there are also powerful personal reasons. People want to make a choice and demonstrate their commitment to one person. Lifelong pair bonding is common in many animal species and it seems that this is how we humans like it, too. We want to have the kind of emotional bond that marriage provides and also the close companionship through life. Of course we can survive by ourselves, but the boon of a constant partner to share both troubles and joys is something few people would want to miss out on. The statistics in modern society are telling. Single people suffer far more from illness, far more from depression, and die younger than married people. Marriage is not a guarantee against loneliness but it certainly helps.

Of course, our perception of what marriage means has been hugely coloured by history. As soon as people began to live in settled societies, it became entangled in legalities. To avoid disputes over property ownership, for instance, it was vital that it was clear who the legitimate offspring were. Marriage provided a simple framework for legitimacy. For the same reason, adultery, especially by a woman, became deeply problematic, and often criminalised. Gradually, as society became more and more complex, marriage gathered an increasing burden of problems, tied mostly to the protection of property. Among the upper classes in particular, the high stakes involved in property meant that in many cases couples couldn’t be free to make their own romantic choice, but marriages had to be arranged for them, along with very elaborate financial agreements. The result is that marriage, for many people, became a business deal rather than a personal and emotional choice.[1]

People used to modern Western attitudes to marriage as, essentially, a romantic union would be surprised by how pragmatic couples were about this. For a woman, marriage provided security and the reassurance that she and her children were going to be recognised and provided for. For a man, it was a reassurance that any children were his own, and also offered the comfort of a companion and helpmeet to look after the house. It didn’t necessarily matter that your spouse wasn’t the target of your romantic dreams. Countless men had mistresses and concubines to satisfy that side of their nature, without necessarily leading to the divorce courts. It was more of a problem for women, of course, because extra-marital relations could muddy the inheritance waters. Women became increasingly disadvantaged as the need to preserve legitimacy placed more and more control in the man’s hands, eventually often making even the woman herself his property.

All of this, though, was essentially a problem for the moneyed classes. Among poorer people in the West, property wasn’t such an issue. Men and women married, or had their marriages arranged for them, and generally lived well together. The husband husbanded the land and their meagre resources outside the house; the housewife looked after things in the house, and brought up the children. It was, on the whole, companionable and practical.[2] There were surely many problems and times of stress, but people rarely divorced over romantic difficulties; couples were too dependent on each other and the stakes were far too high.

The Enlightenment, however, saw attitudes and circumstances beginning to change. Among the upper classes in England, for instance, young people began to want to make their own choices in marriage and to look at it more as a romantic attachment than a business partnership. This, ironically, was what made the actual wedding a far more formal, legalistic event. In former times, a word and exchange of hands before witnesses was enough to make a marriage. But in 1753, Lord Hardwicke was persuaded to bring in a marriage law because increasing numbers of couples were running off by themselves to get married without their families knowing. Hardwicke’s law meant that for the first time, people were obliged to get married in church.[3] If they were old enough, they did not need parental consent – but the announcement of banns and all the arrangements for the wedding meant that the parents had plenty of time to intervene. So the romantic church wedding is actually something quite new.

The romantic idea of marriage now so dominates the Western mindset that it is hard to think of it in any other way. Contact with other cultures is making people more aware of arranged marriages and even forced marriages, but for most people in the West it is all about love. Amazingly, the majority of people do manage to find ‘the one’ and make their own choice freely and lovingly.[4] The downside of this, of course, is that when love goes, most people feel that the marriage must go, with distressing consequences not just for the couple but for any children involved.

Most romantic marriages are actually successful. Considering how easy it is to get divorced, it is remarkable how many not just survive but thrive. Banner headlines may alarm you with the statistic that 45 per cent of marriages in the UK end in divorce. That means, of course, that 55 per cent last a lifetime. For 1 in 10, marriage lasts for more than 60 years. Couples who stay together a lifetime mostly confirm that their spouse is the best and most important thing in their life by far. Most of those marriages that fail, fail quite quickly, but the failure does not put the divorcees off marriage. In the USA, three out of every four divorcees remarry within four years, and one in three within a year.

So marriage brings immense happiness to many millions of people, even though it has been the butt of countless jokes.[5] Yet it has come in for a great deal of criticism beyond the jokes, which are essentially affectionate and almost always come from men who love to make a meal out of how hen-pecked they are. Feminists have been particularly strident in their condemnation of marriage. ‘The institution of marriage is the chief vehicle for the perpetuation of the oppression of women,’ Marlene Dixon wrote. ‘It is through the role of wife that the subjugation of women is maintained.’

It wasn’t just that many wives were made to suffer a life of drudgery and isolation by their husbands; they were legally at a disadvantage in many ways. In the UK, for instance, a wife used not to be allowed to own property; any property she had at the wedding immediately became not jointly held but solely her husband’s. This finally changed with the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882. Much more distressingly, it was a husband’s legal right to rape his wife until shockingly recently. Indeed, Andrea Dworkin scathingly asserted that: ‘Marriage as an institution developed from rape as a practice.’ In most countries, spousal rape, as it is called, wasn’t made illegal until the 1980s and 1990s; and in many countries, such as Pakistan and Sudan, it is still permitted.

Fortunately, the weight of the law in Western countries has been gradually putting right some of these wrongs, and the pressure of feminist arguments has dramatically changed the way many husbands behave in the home.[6] Since the middle of the last century, though, the stigma of ‘living in sin’ has gradually weakened, and numerous couples are choosing to cohabit rather than get married. As a result, the number of marriages has declined steadily. Yet it has not declined nearly as dramatically as some people predicted in the 1970s, when it seemed that all young couples were simply living together. In fact, the number of marriages in the UK is little more than 20 per cent down on its highpoint in the 1960s.

It seems that for all its drawbacks, for all the ease of simply living together, most people still want the bigger commitment of a formal marriage. Just how important it remains is borne out by the expenditure on the wedding itself. A survey in 2007 showed that the average cost of a wedding in the UK has soared to £25,000 and although many people try unusual ceremonies and locations, such as scuba diving weddings and camel-mounted weddings, millions still opt for a full-blown ‘traditional’ wedding. The Victorian novelist, George Eliot, explains it all very simply in Silas Marner: ‘That quiet mutual gaze of a trusting husband and wife is like the first moment of rest or refuge from a great weariness or a great danger.’

[1] In Christian society, the whole pattern of marriage is very particular. In the early Christian era, marriage was of surprisingly little interest to the Church. St Paul’s writings show that it was all thought rather pointless anyway, since the end of the world was nigh and it was better to spend the time preparing for the end than bringing children into the world. That changed in the Middle Ages when the Church began to become legally involved in the marriage process. In the thirteenth century, too, marriage became a sacrament, a holy bond equivalent to committing yourself to Christ. Instead of just agreeing to live with your spouse and raise a family together, you were committing your souls. This dovetailed very neatly into the romantic ideal of marriage, which is perhaps why many people today, whether they are believers or not, still choose a Church wedding.

[2] Just how ‘pragmatic’ this could be is indicated by the surprisingly common practice in some countries of leasing out or selling your spouse. The very idea seems shocking today, but wife sales, such as that portrayed in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, were not that uncommon. It was a simple way of moving on, since marriages were often business arrangements. But by Hardy’s time, the practice was rare.

[3] From 1836, civic marriages were permitted as an alternative.

[4] Perhaps one of the most touchingly humane arguments for marriage was put by Robert Louis Stevenson in Virginibus Puerisque: ‘A man expects an angel for a wife; [yet] he knows that she is like himself – erring, thoughtless and untrue; but like himself also, filled with a struggling radiancy of better things … You may safely go to school with hope; but ere you marry, should have learned the mingled lesson of the world: that hope and love address themselves to a perfection never realized, and yet, firmly held, become the salt and staff of life; that you yourself are compacted of infirmities … and yet you have a something in you lovable and worth preserving; and that, while the mass of mankind lies under this scurvy condemnation, you will scarce find one but, by some generous reading, will become to you a lesson, a model and a noble spouse through life. So thinking, you will constantly support your own unworthiness and easily forgive the failings of your friend. Nay, you will be wisely glad that you retain the ... blemishes; for the faults of married people continually spur up each of them, hour by hour, to do better and to meet and love upon a higher ground.’

[5] ‘Bigamy is having one husband or wife too many. Monogamy is the same.’ – Oscar Wilde

‘I have great hopes that we shall love each other all our lives as much as if we had never married at all.’ – Lord Byron

‘God created sex. Priests created marriage.’ – Voltaire

‘Courtship to marriage is as a very witty prologue to a very dull play.’ – William Congreve, The Old Bachelor (1693)

‘Marriage is the only war in which you sleep with the enemy.’ – François, Duc de La Rochefoucauld

‘The Wedding March always reminds me of the music played when soldiers go into battle.’ – Heinrich Heine

‘Marriage is the chief cause of divorce.’ – Groucho Marx

[6] This has opened up another area of contention, though. In divorce settlements, the court usually awards custody of children to the mother, often along with the family home, and the husband is obliged to pay maintenance. It’s not easy to see a solution to this, since most children prefer to stay with their mothers and they need a home and support. But the ex-husband may be left with no home, no access to his children and crippling debts. So there has been a lot of media coverage about men who are going on ‘marriage strike’ – refusing to get married because the cost of a failed marriage would be too high.

#49 Weaving and Spinning

There is not a task more humble, yet more lastingly valuable than making cloth through spinning and weaving. For tens of thousands of years, this time-consuming labour absorbed almost every waking moment of the lives of countless women and girls.[1] Women spun while they walked to market. They spun as they fetched water. They spun as they watched the flocks. They spun as they tended the cooking or looked after the children. And when they had finished the spinning, they started weaving. Indeed, spinning and weaving took up more time than all other activities put together. This stopped only when the business of making cloth was automated with coming of the Industrial Revolution, with its power looms and spinning jennies. Today, cloth-making is bigger than ever, a gigantic global industry worth over a quarter of a trillion pounds.

We naked apes cannot really survive without clothes, except in the very warmest climates. Although a few primitive tribes in remote tropical areas go pretty much naked, most of us have to dress for warmth and protection from the elements, not to mention social reasons. Furs and leathers just aren’t practical or comfortable to wear for long either. A few remote peoples in the cold parts of the world were prepared until quite recently to put up with the discomfort of furs for their warmth, such as the Inuit with their caribou skin clothes and the Chukchi with their reindeer and seal skins. But they were the exception. For most people, through most of history, woven clothes have been essential.

The idea of spinning and weaving is incredibly ancient. Indeed, it may be almost as old as humanity itself. Recently, German anthropologists Ralf Kittler, Manfred Kayser and Mark Stoneking used molecular dating to establish that human body lice, lice that live in clothing, first appeared at least 107,000 years ago, not so long after the emergence of Homo sapiens. Archaeologists have found objects that may be sewing needles dating back 40,000 years ago and, in a cave in Georgia, dyed fibres dating back 36,000 years. Imprints of woven cloth have been found on clay figurines dating back up to 27,000 years ago at Dolní Ve˘stonice in the Czech Republic.

The oldest actual cloth is a fragment from Çayönü in southern Turkey. Here a 9,000-year-old piece of linen was found in 1988 wrapped around the handle of a tool made from antler bone. To make the linen, the people of Çayönü would have had to strip fibres from the flax plant and soak them in a river or pond, leaving them supple and golden blonde (the origin of the poetic ‘flaxen’ for a girl’s blonde hair). Then the fibres can be spun and woven into cloth, but it is a long and elaborate process.

Natural fibres, either from plants such as cotton or flax, or from animals such as sheep and goats, tend to be far too thin, weak and short for using to make clothes. But they can be twisted together to make much longer, stronger threads. When twisted like this, the fibres are bound together by friction. The fibres can be twisted in the hand or rubbed together on the thighs. But someone in the forgotten past had the simple but brilliant idea of ‘spinning’ them. That meant rather than twisting them by hand, you let a stick called a spindle and a weight called a whorl do the work. You just wrap the fibres around the spindle, drop it and start it spinning like a top, or rather a yoyo with the momentum of the whorl. Then you keep feeding in fibres to build up the growing thread which gradually wraps around the spindle.[2]

It’s a task that requires considerable skill. You can’t afford a lapse in concentration. You have to keep stretching the fibres, for instance, to keep the thread an even thickness – the origin, maybe, of the phrase ‘spinning a yarn’ to describe someone who was stretching the truth a little in a story. Yet despite the problems, countless women became adept enough at it to carry on spinning while doing other activities. It was too time-consuming not to, but it certainly confirms women’s reputation for multi-tasking.[3]

However marvellous, though, by itself a spun thread is of only limited use. Where it really comes into its own is when it is woven into cloth. Nobody can be sure how it was first done, but Ancient Egyptian tomb models and Ancient Greek vase painting show a loom in use many thousands of years ago. The loom’s not the only way to weave, but it is an invention of genius. Remarkably, it was in use both in the Americas and Eurasia at least 3,000 years ago, so its invention may just possibly date back far enough to be carried to the Americas by the first migrants from Asia.

Whatever the truth, there are always two sets of thread at right angles to each other in woven cloth, the warp and the weft (or woof). The warp threads are the threads that are held in place during weaving; the weft, which may be one long thread, is woven over and underneath them alternately to bind them together. In a loom, a series of parallel warp threads is stretched between two pieces of wood. Alternate threads are separated, so that first all the odd threads can be lifted or warped together, then all the evens can be.

As one section of warp is lifted one way, the weft (‘woven’) thread can be fed through the space or ‘shed’ between them, so that it passes with all the odd warp threads on one side and the evens on the other. When it reaches the other end, the lifted section is dropped, and the other section is pulled up, so that when the warp is fed back through it passes with the odds and evens on the opposite sides to the first pass. In this simple way, the weft is woven under and over the warp so that it alternates in both directions.

There are many different varieties of loom, of course, and various technical improvements were made, even early in its history. One was the heddle, which is a simple bar that allows the weaver to lift selected warps into the shed. This enabled the weaver to create complex patterns. Another innovation was the treadle loom, which allowed the weaver to lift the warps with a foot bar, freeing the hands to work better.

A third ancient innovation is very intriguing indeed. This is the warp-weighted loom, which uses weights hung from the warps to stretch them, rather than a fixed frame. What makes it intriguing is that not only is there archaeological evidence for it right across Europe dating from around 6,000 BC, but an astonishingly similar loom was also used by the native people of the coast of north-west America long before any Europeans apparently crossed the Atlantic.

For tens of thousands of years, hand-spun thread and hand-woven clothes provided people around the world with all their clothes. Whether the threads were vegetable fibres such as cotton and flax, or animal fibres such as sheep and goat’s wool and silk, they were all made in essentially the same way. Poor people had neither the time nor the resources to make anything but simple, coarse clothes. But the rich could have the best spinners and weavers make them incredibly elaborate clothes from the most delicate silk and the softest wool. Fine clothes were not only functional as well as valuable status symbols, but could also be things of extraordinary beauty. Indeed, the very finest hand-made clothes are among the most beautiful of all human creations.

Beyond clothes, though, woven cloth found a host of other uses, from tents to curtains – and perhaps most importantly in sails. Sails can be made from other materials. But there is none that has the lightness and strength of woven material – and in particular canvas, made from the spun and woven fibres of hemp.

The automation of spinning and weaving in the Industrial Revolution took away the livelihood of many skilled hand weavers and spinners, but it also saved many women from a labour they did not necessarily relish, however much we may romanticise it now. Automated weaving and spinning were the industries that kick-started the Industrial Revolution, the first global manufacturing industries, and in some ways they are what gave us our modern world. The manufacture of textiles was a key factor in the growth of the first big industrial cities – and of course, it provided the cheap clothes that all the rapidly growing population needed.

Weaving and spinning has none of the technological wizardry of a computer, nor the intellectual weight of logic, nor the magic of aerofoils. Yet this incredibly simple yet absolutely ingenious idea has endured almost as long as humanity and continues to bring us more comfort from day to day than all of them put together. Mahatma Ghandi regarded hand-spinning as the most wonderful and worthwhile of all activities: ‘If there is one activity in which it is all gain and no loss, it is hand spinning.’ Maybe he was right.

[1] It wasn’t always women, of course, but it generally was. In 1381 the preacher John Ball famously opened his sermon to the Kentish peasant rebels with the words, ‘When Adam delved and Eve span’, as if the man digging and the woman spinning was the most ancient arrangement for honest toil. Spinning, though, was so time-consuming that quite often only young girls and unmarried women had the time to do it properly – hence the term ‘spinster’ for an unmarried woman.

[2] The unspun thread was usually stored on a stick called the distaff. In the past, the female side of a family was often referred to as the distaff side, maybe because of the way women were ever there supplying the family with its basic needs, or maybe because holding the distaff was women’s work. The term is still sometimes used in horse-breeding.

[3] Of course the classic image of home spinning is with the spinning wheel, not the simple spindle. Spinning wheels were known in both China and Baghdad, as well as in Europe, in the thirteenth century, and it’s likely they were invented in China some time earlier. The first spinning wheels were hand-turned, but in the sixteenth century a treadle was added so the spinner had both hands free to spin.

#48 The Stirrup

The stirrup is included in this book not because it is a great idea, though it may be that, but because of the power of a good story, and a bit of provocation.

Just under half a century ago, Stanford medieval history professor Lynn Townsend White wrote a groundbreaking book entitled Medieval Technology and Social Change. In it, he contended that technology played a key role in medieval society, and ever since then, no one seriously seeking to understand the Middle Ages has been able to ignore its technology.

The most attention-grabbing bit of White’s book, though, was the idea that it was the introduction of the stirrup that led to the development of the feudal system. Never one to understate his case, White asserted that: ‘Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history. The requirements of the new mode of warfare which it made possible found expression in a new form of western European society dominated by an aristocracy of warriors endowed with land so that they might fight in a new and highly specialized way.’

About a century ago, historians such as Heinrich Brunner had asserted that the key to the success of Frankish and Gothic invaders over the fading power of Rome in the fourth and fifth centuries was its individualism. While the once legendary discipline and cohesion of the Roman infantry was breaking down, the individualism of the Franks and Goths spurred them on to become heroes, and what better way to become a hero than mounted on a horse? The hero horsemen of the Franks and Goths, the theory goes, developed into the famous knights of the Middle Ages. It was these horsemen that gave the Carolingian kingdom of the Franks in France – the kingdom of Charles Martel and Charlemagne – its strength and stability.

The Franks, it seemed, weren’t able to put great ranks of disciplined infantry into the field like the Romans. But what they could do was send out elite cavalry. Cavalry had been used on the battlefield for thousands of years before the Carolingian knights. But their role was fairly minor; simply harrying and chasing, while the victory centred on the ranks of infantry. There was something so new and so frightening about the new breed of Carolingian horsemen that they had the power to turn battles. These powerful horsemen were so firmly mounted on their big steeds that they could wear heavy armour and ride full tilt at the enemy with lances and swords in shock assaults so overwhelming that ranks of infantry crumbled before them. Heavy cavalry became like the tanks of the world wars.

White’s contention was that it was only the introduction of the stirrup that gave horsemen the firm platform to fight this way. Stirrups, he argued, gave horsemen the stability to fight from horseback with swords. They gave the support the rider needed to wear heavy armour. Above all, stirrups allowed the rider to channel the power of the horse into a lance thrust out in front like a deadly missile. Shock assault by heavy cavalry introduced a third phase for the horse in warfare, after chariots and then mounted horsemen.

Training knights, equipping them with horses and armour, swords, lances and shields and giving them a proper support team must have been an expensive business, however. Each one was a costly, specialist unit. This is why, White contends, the Carolingians in the eighth century and subsequently other Western European countries adopted the feudal system. The kings seized land and gave it to overlords who would have serfs to work it. Only such a system, in which serfs were obliged to provide the support for their lord, would provide the financial support for such elite fighters. The deal was that while the peasants were obliged to labour, the knight was obliged to provide protection. So, White contends, we owe class society, the aristocracy and the working class, to the stirrup.

It’s a fascinating thesis, and one so potent that it’s sunk into popular consciousness. Unfortunately, the evidence is not on White’s side, as many scholars have since pointed out. One of the problems is that White dates the arrival of the stirrup in France to about 700 AD. Yet there is plenty of evidence that heavy cavalry were in use without stirrups in other places long before this time. Indeed, heavy cavalry called cataphracts[1] were seen in battles against the Romans 1,000 years earlier. It’s the shape of the saddle that is the key to stability, it seems, and not the stirrup.

Another problem is that there is no evidence that the Carolingian kings won any of their key battles with shock assaults by heavy cavalry. A third is that stirrups aren’t mentioned in any of the documents or military manuals of the time, nor do they turn up in any eighth-century warriors’ graves. Finally, it seems the evolution of the feudal system and the seizure of land was far more complex and gradual than White’s theory implies.

The Great Stirrup Controversy as it became known has now been laid to rest by most scholars. So what is the history of stirrups? It seems that horsemen in India may have had a leather loop for the big toe of the barefoot rider as long ago as 500 BC. And Buddhist carvings from the first or second centuries BC show riders with their feet tucked into the saddle girth. Recognisable pairs of stirrups, though, seem to have first appeared in China as late as the fourth century AD. From there they spread east into Japan by the fifth century and west to Europe by the seventh century, particularly with horse-riding invaders from Central Asia such as the Avars. Over a hundred seventh-century cast-iron Avar stirrups have been found at various sites in Hungary.

There is no doubt that stirrups greatly aid a rider’s stability, and they have been almost universally adopted for leisure riding long after the days of the knights. They make riding much, much easier, not only helping the rider stay in the saddle, but increasing control. Indeed, they make riding so much easier that most people can learn to ride in a fairly short time. Without them, the balance required is beyond all but the most agile and dedicated.

So the greatness of the stirrup as an idea lies not in something as grand and world-changing as the creation of the knight and feudal society, but something far more down-to-earth. It was the stirrup, perhaps, that turned the horse from the mount of the soldier or specialist to everyday personal transport for millions of ordinary (well-enough off) people down through the ages until the coming of the automobile.

The impact of the horse as personal transport was huge, and is the reason why the horse looms so large in personal and social histories. It not only gave countless people the kind of personal freedom that we often associate with the coming of the car – but it did so many, many centuries earlier. It also gave many a personal relationship with an animal that is quite unique, special and thrilling. Listen to the Dauphin in Shakespeare’s Henry V:

When I sit astride him, I soar, I am a hawk. He trots on air. The earth sings when he touches it. The lowest part of his hoof is more musical than Pan’s pipe.

And many riders through the ages, most of who would never have ridden without the stirrup, would echo his words. Even today, it gives to many people a magical, transcendental experience. ‘A man on a horse,’ wrote John Steinbeck, ‘is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot.’ That’s, of course, a tribute to the horse but maybe, without the stirrup, very few would ever have got to know.

[1] The cataphracts of Eurasia predate the medieval knights by a thousand years, yet they too were heavily armoured warriors on horseback. Like the knights, they rode big horses, with both horse and rider draped from head to foot in heavy scale and chain armour. Like the knights too, they rode into battle bearing a lance. Indeed, when the Roman general and historian Ammianus Marcellinus describes cataphracts riding against them in the fourth century, he could have been describing knights: ‘But no sooner had the first light of day appeared, than the glittering coats of mail, girt with bands of steel, and the gleaming cuirasses, seen from afar, showed that the king’s forces were at hand.’ Their origins lie in Persia, in the time of the Medes, perhaps 2,500 years ago, but they reached their apogee with the Parthians in the third century BC and the Sassanid Persians in the third and fourth centuries AD. They managed entirely without stirrups, though.

#47 The Aerofoil

There is perhaps no simpler nor more elegant idea in our list than the aerofoil. And what an idea! Just a little gentle curvature, a curvature that makes a wing – and on those wings we can soar into the sky far above the ground, we can glide over high mountains, we can cross the world’s widest oceans in hours. Even for those used to flying, the moment when your accelerating plane finally gains the speed to lift off with a kick beneath you is still exhilarating. How can such a vast weight, something so heavy that it would take a crane to lift, suddenly become so feather-light, so fantastically defiant of gravity that it can bear not only its own weight but yours and your fellow passengers’ rapidly up into the air? It seems like magic.

The magic, of course, is in the physical interaction between the wings and the air. If the shape of the wing – the aerofoil – is right and the plane is moving fast enough, the wing is pushed into the air as it slices through it. It seems like magic because our all-too-literal brains tell us that because air is invisible it must be insubstantial too. But air is not nothing; air is a substance, chock-full of gas. Think of a wing slicing through water rather than air and you can begin to imagine how air might provide the upward push that aeronautical scientists call ‘lift’.

The key to the aerofoil’s lift is the flow of air around it. Of course, still air is neither moving nor flowing; air flows around an aerofoil because the aerofoil is moving, just as the bow of a boat creates a flow in still water. What matters is the way the curved shape of the aerofoil diverts the flow around it. To really see why, it’s worth playing about with knives and spoons under a running tap.

Hold a knife flat under the stream and the water flows straight and undisturbed past the blade. Twist the blade slightly at an angle to the stream and you can see how it begins to block and split the flow, breaking it into turbulent eddies – and you may see the turbulence increase as you increase the angle of the knife. Hold a spoon under the stream instead, however, and something different happens. Unlike the flat knife, the spoon diverts the water, but does not disrupt it. You have to twist the spoon at a much steeper angle before it disrupts the flow. Like the curvature of the spoon, the curvature of the aerofoil ensures the flow of the air around it is diverted but not broken up.

It is the way that the flow is made to curve like the aerofoil that is crucial. Far above or below the aerofoil, the airflow is undisturbed, but the closer it is to the aerofoil the more its flow is bent to follow the aerofoil’s shape. As the flow changes direction it begins to push in a different direction too, and the more it bends the greater the change. Right on top and underneath the aerofoil the pressure of the airflow turns effectively at right angles, pushing the aerofoil upwards and creating lift.

Since it is the way that the airflow is distorted that creates lift, it is clear that the pattern of the airflow distortion is important. This depends on the angle that the aerofoil moves through the air – its ‘angle of attack’. The steeper the angle of attack, the greater the lift, up to the ‘stall’ point where the angle is so steep that the airflow is broken up altogether and all lift is lost.

The shape of the aerofoil is also crucial. A gentle, thin, flat curve provides the best lift, and this is the shape of bird wings and the shape that the flexible wings of hang-gliders and microlights bow into. But it is hard to make a large wing strong enough in this shape. So the wings of most large aircraft are a narrow teardrop shape in profile. This doesn’t give us much lift, which is why the wings have to be huge, but is easier to make strong, and the hollow inside the wing provides room for fuel storage. Elevator flaps on the rear of the wings swing up or down to alter the aerofoil curvature and its effective angle of attack and so allow the pilot to vary the lift to climb or descend.

Of course, the wings of birds were the original inspiration for the aerofoil. Countless thinkers in the distant past must have marvelled at birds gliding through the sky and guessed that they were held aloft by their outstretched wings. And maybe some even guessed it was the shape of the wings that mattered, such as the fifth-century Greek philosopher Archytas who is said to have built a mechanical bird that flew. Brave pioneers like the ninth-century Cordoban, Abbas ibn-Firnas, were bold (or foolish) enough to strap artificial wings to their arms and leap from high places. Ibn-Firnas was successful (or lucky) enough to glide through the air for ten minutes before crash-landing and almost breaking his neck.

Yet the first person who really began to explore the shape of wings methodically was the British engineer Sir George Cayley (1773–1857), and it is to Cayley that we owe the idea of the curved aerofoil. Yorkshire-born Cayley was an extraordinary and inventive man, and he is credited with developing self-righting lifeboats, wire-spoked wheels, seatbelts and even an internal combustion engine. But it is mostly as the ‘father of aviation’ that he is remembered, and it is he who pioneered much of the theory of flight. He carried out many experiments with wings on whirling arms to discover the forces acting on them, and what shapes and angles produced the greatest lift. In his analyses, he developed the names for the four key forces involved in flight – weight, lift, drag and thrust – still used by scientists today. Flight itself involves a balance between these four forces.

Cayley wasn’t just a theorist, though. In the early 1800s, he began to build model gliders to try out his ideas. Then in 1849, he built a miniature biplane in which a ten-year-old boy is said to have flown a short distance, using ‘flappers’ to propel himself along. Most famously, however, in 1853 the by then 80-year-old Cayley built a full-size glider in which his terrified coachman or butler is said to have been launched out across Brompton Dale near Scarborough on Cayley’s estate. The butler survived and thus made the world’s first aeroplane flight. Cayley had clearly mastered lift, but for a successful aeroplane you need both power and control, which is why it took another half-century before the Wright brothers made their historic flight at Kittyhawk on 17 December 1903.

The development of air travel since that pioneering day has been astonishing. According to the travel organisation IATA, 2.3 billion people flew on 35 million flights in 2009 alone. It is a remarkably safe way to travel. Of those 35 million flights, only nineteen came to grief in accidents, and fewer than 700 of those 2.3 billion passengers were killed in air accidents – in other words 1 in 30 million.

Flight has transformed the way we experience the world. It seems a smaller, more connected place and many of us now frequently visit on brief holidays and business trips places that before air travel we may have travelled to only once in a lifetime. Millions of Britons, for instance, hop on a plane for weekend breaks in European cities, or travel right the way around the world for a short holiday in Thailand. Many ordinary people know about many foreign places and cultures not just because they have looked them up on the internet or watched a TV documentary, but because they have actually travelled there by plane.

Air travel is not essential. Indeed, there are plenty of critics who argue that it is a wasteful luxury, and the global warming debate has focused attention on just how much we should be flying. The high energy cost of getting a plane into the air means that air travel is a major contributor to the greenhouse gases that are triggering global warming. Aeroplanes are very noisy, too, as anyone who lives under the flight-path near an airport will no doubt testify.

Yet whatever level of flying ultimately proves sustainable, there is no doubt that the simple shape of the aerofoil has introduced something remarkable into our lives. It has given us all the chance of a magical experience. According to Plato, writing long before the aerofoil became a reality: ‘The natural function of the wing is to soar upwards and carry that which is heavy up to the place where dwells the race of gods. More than any other thing that pertains to the body it partakes of the nature of the divine.’

For the pioneering aviator Charles Lindbergh, that divine quality was perhaps even too much: ‘Sometimes, flying feels too godlike to be attained by man. Sometimes, the world from above seems too beautiful, too wonderful, too distant for human eyes to see.’ (Spirit of St Louis, 1953)

#46 Monotheism

Back in 2005, conservative American Supreme Court Justice Antonio Scalia ruffled quite a few feathers when he said that monotheistic religions were the only ones the US government could endorse under the Constitution. The remarks certainly stirred up debate, but whatever the American legal position, Scalia certainly had numbers on his side.

Well over 3.5 billion people around the world belong to the three great Abrahamic religions that are essentially monotheistic – Christianity (about 2 billion), Islam (1.5 billion) and Judaism (14 million) – and a further billion belong to the Hindu (950 million) and Sikh (23.8 million) faiths, which some people consider to be monotheistic at heart. So in purely democratic terms, monotheism gets the world’s vote as the best way to look at the world, with pretty much 75 per cent of the vote.