Robert Cringely’s documentary from the mid-nineties is still worth watching, if only for the portions of his interview with Steve Jobs that are in there. Remember, it’s Jobs in exile, between early Apple and later Apple. Jobs at Next.
All posts tagged history
I do not yet trust Google Books’ “bookshelves” enough to consign the books in which I am interested to them. Here’s a link to a book in which Braudel’s essay appears.
As I continue to work on Genius Loci, I thought I would share some of my notes. Below is something of a summary I wrote after reading Jean Gimpel’s The Medieval Machine (Henry Holt, 1975), but I am also thinking it might be useful as the beginning of a section of the book later on:
In The Medieval Machine, Jean Gimpel chronicles the brief flowering of technological and scientific expertise that occurred in what is now known as the High Middle Ages, a period that most historians frame as occurring from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries. It was a period during which the great works of antiquity first achieved wide-spread interest, but, instead of the later focus by the Renaissance on the arts, the focus during this period was on philosophy and technology. It would be the interest in philosophy that would, in part, herald their downfall.
The high Middle Ages were the period when iron really came into its own as a technological system, producing cannon by its end but also cladding first the feet of horses and then the edges of plows, bolstering the agricultural revolution taking place thanks, in part, to the medieval climate optimum. Bartholomeus Anglicus in his nineteen volume De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things) noted that:
Use of iron is more needful to men in many things than use of gold. Though covetous men have more gold than iron, without iron the commonality be not sure against enemies, without dread of iron the common right is not governed; with iron innocent men are defended; and foolhardiness of wicked men is chastened with dread of iron. And well nigh no handiwork is wrought without iron, neither tilling craft used nor building builded without iron. (quoted in Gimpel 63)
Increased agricultural output, a result not only of newly-improved tools but also of new practices like three-field crop rotation, meant a larger population and one enjoying a higher standard of living. The economic rising tide helped create not only demands for individual goods but also for communal goods, like cathedrals, and the masons building them were now carrying iron chisels strengthened with steel edges.
Better agricultural tools meant more land could be cleared, but much of the land was already clear thanks to the aggressive deforestation of many areas in an effort to feed the iron mills that were cropping up everywhere there was ore to supply them. As forests dwindled, alternative energy sources became more important, which led to the exploitation of coal resources, something England possessed in abundance, and which would later give it an advantage in the second industrial revolution. (Coal was so popular, and its quality so varied, that it even makes an appearance in Shakespeare.) More importantly, as productivity rose, so did the kind of ornate hierarchies and the omnipresent march of machines to replace human labor that we find to be the focus of our own reflections over the past two hundred years.
This wide-spread application of technology encouraged a kind of faith in the things of the world that also led to a rise in what we might call experimental science. It may not look much like institutionalized science as we know it now, but leafing through the pages of illustrations of imagined machines and their descriptions found in the notebooks of Villard de Honnecourt or Richard of Wallingford, one cannot be reminded of some fanciful devices of our own time, e.g. the Segway. Many of their drawings would be copied again and again, much as Leonardo da Vinci did in his own time and his own notebook was copied in turn, until the moment when either the world they imagined could be realized, had passed, or had never come to be. Villard, for example, drew a water-powered saw, perhaps the first ever to be imagined. In the drawing, a stream turns a water wheel. The wheel does two things simultaneously: by means of widely-spaced teeth on its edge it operates an escapement that moves a saw blade up and down and by means of a gear attached to its axle it moves a piece of lumber past the blade. It’s a simple device by our standards, really, but it is one of one hundreds, including a machine that would keep an angel pointing its finger towards the sun, all of which poured out of Villard’s imagination.
In his time, Villard could be comfortable with his status as a man of the mechanical arts, in a way a few hundred years later, Leonardo could not. Da Vinci was stung by his repudiation at the hands of Renaissance humanists, who considered him a manual laborer, a technician. Da Vince noted: “They go about puffed up and pompous, dressed and decorated with the fruits not of their own labors but those of others, And they will not allow me my own.”*
The split between intellectuals and technologists has, it seems, been with us for a very long time. C. P. Snow imagined the divide as being between two cultures.
Jean Gimpel noted that “the men of the Middle Ages were so mechanically minded they could believe that angels were in charge of the mechanisms of the universe” and used as proof a fourteenth-century Provencal manuscript that shows “two winged angels operating the revolving machine of the sky” (147). In addition to a mechanistic understanding of the relationship between physical and metaphysical realms, the medieval imagination of the high period also believed in progress, a belief buoyed up by the significant strides that had been achieved in production of cloth, of iron, and of agricultural goods.
In this moment, then, natural philosophers cum scientists were expected to possess manual skill. In August of 1269, Peter of Maricourt wrote Epistolae de Magnete (Letters on the Magnet), and in it noted:
You must realize, dearest friend, that while the investigator in this subject must understand nature and not be ignorant of celestial motions, he must also be very diligent in the use of his own hands, so that through the operation of this stone he may show wonderful effects. For by his industry he will then in a short time be able to correct an error which he would never do in eternity by his knowledge of natural philosophy and mathematics alone if he lacked carefulness with his hands. (Gimpel 194-5)
Thanks to a notion of progress, thinkers, and workers, like Peter of Maricourt produced magnetic compasses with a high degree of precision, which led the way for the great explorations in the centuries to come.
A long, long time ago I noted — in a post so ancient that I think it actually exists in a database long ago archived — that Patrick O’Brian’s fiction was something for contemporary historians and ethnographers to emulate, to take as an example of fiction that was both enormously popular and capable of delivering vast amounts of historical/ethnographic data to a readership that simply wanted more. Indeed, as Jo Walton points out in her terrific re-reading of the entire series on Tor.com: O’Brian himself realized his readers loved the technology and the characters so much that he gave up history in order to keep the machine going. I suppose it is the boon of the science fiction writer and the bane of the historical fiction writer that time is not as bounded in the former as it is in the latter — though Walton’s playful picking at the boundaries, and her promise of writing a novel realizing her play, is to be admired.
A lovely history of IBM by Errol Morris with music by Philip Glass. Worth it for the archival film footage alone:
In the most recent issue of Museum Anthropology Review, there is a review of Chris Caple’s Objects: Reluctant Witnesses to the Past. (Please note the link is to the HTML version of the review, but a PDF version is also available.) The reviewer, Jeb Card, does a good job of laying out the strengths and structure of the book, which strikes me as being somewhat divergent from my own interests in material culture. That noted, it did send me to Amazon.com to see what a search on history of the world in objects would turn up. It’s an interesting mix:
First up there is Neil MacGregor’s History of the World in 100 Objects, which he describes as follows in the introduction:
In this book, we travel back in time and across the globe, to see how we humans have shaped our world and been shaped by it over the past two million years. The story is told exclusively through the things that humans have made — all sorts of things, carefully designed and then either admired and preserved or used, broken and thrown away. I’ve chosen just a hundred objects from different points on our journey — from a cooking pot to a golden galleon, from a Stone Age tool to a credit card, and each object comes from the collection of the British Museum.
The next book, and I’m only going to sketch out the top three because the focus of the search results rapidly deteriorates past the first six hits, is Ian Morris’ Why the West Rules–for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future. Gilbert Taylor, of Booklist, describes the book thus:
Only the supremely self-confident put forth all-encompassing theories of world history, and Morris is one such daredevil. An archaeologist by academic specialty, he advances a quasi-deterministic construct that is suitable for nonacademics. From a repeatedly enunciated premise that humans by nature are indolent, avaricious, and fearful, Morris holds that such traits, when combined with sociology and geography, explain history right from the beginning, when humanity trudged out of Africa, through the contemporary rivalry between China and America. Such temporal range leaves scant room for individual human agency: Morris names the names of world history, but in his narrative, leaders and tyrants, at best, muddle through patterns of history that are beyond their power to shape. And those patterns, he claims, can be numerically measured by a “social development index” that he applies to every epochal change from agriculture to the industrial revolution. However, the reading is not as heavy as it may sound. His breezy style and what-if imagination for alternative scenarios should maintain audience interest; whether his sweeping perspective convinces is another matter altogether.
Finally in the top three is Obsolete: An Encyclopedia of Once-Common Things Passing Us By, by Anna Jane Grossman and James Gulliver Hancock. The title gives away the fact that the book is breezily nostalgic, as the product description notes: “Obsolete contains essays and entries on more than 100 alphabetized fading subjects, including Blind Dates, Mix Tapes, Getting Lost, Porn Magazines, Looking Old, Operators, Camera Film, Hitchhiking, Body Hair, Writing Letters, Basketball Players in Short Shorts, Privacy, Cash, and, yes, Books.”
An interesting collection. It moves in short order from the serious to the silly rather quickly, with a trip through the future along the way. All three books have been published in the past year: the first two in 2010, and Obsolete in 2009. Clearly, along with making, there is a rise in interest in objects. Given this search result, it’s just not clear that we know what to do with objects, or, conversely, objects can do just about anything.
I generally stay out of politics, and here I am only passing on news that reveals that putting yourself in the wrong place can only lead to unwanted results. In this case, American soldiers killed two children, two Reuters photographers, and a number of Iraqi civilians in addition to one or two Iraqis who may, or may not, have been armed. The killing happened at a great distance as the young soldiers circled around the scene in Apache helicopters and evaluated the situation through telescopic lens. The entire scene was captured in black and white by the gun cameras and includes their audio. At such a distance, within the confines of a context in which little they do leads to successes they can celebrate, young men become cynical killers, eager to shoot and have something decided. The result is that as one of the reporters attempts to crawl to safety, the gunners urge him to pick up a gun so that they can shoot him again. A few minutes later, a van arrives, and two men attempt to pick up the reporter, apparently in an effort to, I don’t know, help a wounded man. They don’t stand a chance. The gunners ask for, and receive, permission to shoot. The event was made more tragic by the fact that two children, a boy and a girl, were sitting in the front seat of the van. When ground forces arrived, they immediately sought to rush the children to medical care, in a scene somewhat reminiscent of Apocalypse Now, but were told to drop them off with the Iraqi Police.
I came across a link to Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848
