The Grantville Gazette Volumn VI

by Eric Flint

  The trailing or dragging of a dead Cat, or Fox, (and in case of necessity a Red-Herring) three or four miles . . . and then laying the Dogs on the scent.

  Again the joke that "the French have no word for entrepreneur" would be literally true with regards to seventeenth-century France since at that time the root of the word—the verb "entreprendre"—just means to undertake something with all the connotations of risk taking lacking.

  Simple phrases that come about because of a technology are going to be not just incomprehensible but inexplicable. Rocket science and rocket scientists are going to be misunderstood because in seventeenth-century Europe rockets are fireworks, no one has invented the words science or scientist and even once these two concepts have been derived the reason why rocket science is considered so difficult and requiring intellect will not be understood. On the other hand "brain surgery" would be something that a seventeenth-century person might be able to grasp if he were a bright spark but not if he were a few fries short of a Happy Meal.

  The Advertisement Problem

  Newspapers and magazines were not exactly widespread in the 1630's and the publishing model of today—where the basic costs are met through advertising revenue—was utterly lacking. A person who has never seen an advert is likely to be extremely confused when one interrupts the flow of an article. Ads, moreover, tend to deliberately push the bounds of language as well as of taste. If you are a person who is already struggling, having to get your head around adverts is likely to be the last straw. An ad will probably be both incomprehensible in its own right as a stand alone—what do you think a seventeenth-century person is going to get out of an ad for Viagra with Bob Dole for example?—but may also derail the comprehension of the article surrounding it. Flip through Time or Newsweek and you'll see ads taking up parts of a page in the same way that "sidebars" and graphs that relate to the article do. How is a person who is struggling with the language anyway going to be able to determine that the advert is irrelevant—especially when the concept of advertising is so missing?

  A Worked Example of Incomprehension

  What I am doing in this section is subjecting a piece of text to line by line analysis; weblog readers may like to think of this as a seventeenth-century fisking. The text I am using is from the March 22, 1999 issue of Time magazine. I'm only picking this because it is on the Internet so we can all read it—http://www.genome.ou.edu/gatesbook.html

  Let's start with the title and lead in.

  Bill Gates' New Rules

  In Business @ the Speed of Thought, Microsoft's chairman says that only managers who master the digital universe will gain competitive advantage

  BY BILL GATES

  Interestingly @ may be understood almost correctly since its use as an abbreviation for the Latin ad (meaning to or towards) derives from medieval monks and was used to represent individual unit cost or weight (e.g. 6 apples @ $1.10 each ) in 1536 by a Florentine trader named Francesco Lapi.

  On the other hand there are quite a few words where confusion could arise.

  Microsoft is not something that looks like a (company) name to seventeenth-century eyes, thus a "smallsoft" could perhaps be assumed to be some kind of cushion.

  Chairman might be understood as the carrier of a sedan chair (introduced into London in 1634 but known in France and southern Europe for quite some time earlier). This would almost make sense of the small cushion.

  Digital would probably be assumed to be something to do with fingers or toes.

  It is quite possible that business (meaning company or enterprise) and the idea of a manager (as opposed to an owner) would be misunderstood.

  If the 1980's were about quality and the 1990's were about re-engineering, then the 2000's will be about velocity. About how quickly business itself will be transacted. About how information access will alter the lifestyle of consumers and their expectations of business. Quality improvements and business-process improvements will occur far faster. When the increase in velocity is great enough, the very nature of business changes.

  Even ignoring the words such as "re-engineering" and "lifestyle" the first paragraph is so full of management consultant speak that I predict that it would convey very little meaning to a seventeenth-century reader (arguably it conveys very little to a twenty-first-century one either). The fact that consumers might be thought to be consumptives (i.e. tuberculosis sufferers) is just an additional detail.

  To function in the digital age, we have developed a new digital infrastructure. It's like the human nervous system. Companies need to have that same kind of nervous system—the ability to run smoothly and efficiently, to respond quickly to emergencies and opportunities, to quickly get valuable information to the people in the company who need it, the ability to quickly make decisions and interact with customers.

  The noun function is defined by Cawdrey as "calling, or charge, or trade, and place wherein a man liueth." This is an excellent example of a word that has changed meaning—the fact that it has then been turned into a verb is just the frosting on the cake. Develop is likely to be another word which is only partially comprehended and thought to mean something like unfold or unwrap, that is the opposite of envelope. Nerves according to Cawdrey are sinews and humane means "belonging to man, gentle, curteous, bounteous" thus even if system is understood (it may not be) a human nervous system is not going to be something that is understood.

  A company is likely to be understood in terms of a military organization, although, of course, there were also trading companies such as the East India Company or the Muscovy Company. The connection between company and business is likely to be unclear and their relationship with customers, a word which Hakluyt used to mean Customs officials though it may also be used in the twentieth-century sense as well, is almost certain to be misconstrued. Cawdrery defines decision as "cutting away," in the context of soldiers interacting with tax gatherers this makes some sort of sense—in the haakaa päälle sense that is!

  A rough translation of this paragraph might therefore be:

  To trade in the age of fingers we have unfolded a new way to make a finger's internal structure. This is like a bounteous collection of sinews. Groups of soldiers need to have the same collection of sinews. The capability (for soldiers?) to run in a good smooth fashion, to respond to changes good and bad, to quickly get learning about loot to the people in the military group who need to know, the ability to kill revenuers and tax inspectors quickly.

  The successful companies of the next decade will be the ones that use digital tools to reinvent the way they work. To make digital information flow an intrinsic part of your company, here are 12 key steps.

  Again a rough translation should suffice:

  The successful military group of the next ten years will be the ones who use finger tools to reinvent the way they work. To make finger learning liquid an internal part of your regiment here are 12 keys (for feet?)

  One could continue but I think I'll stop here as I believe I have made my point. Examining text word by word is an excellent way to produce meaningless or misleading garbage.

  Exegesis to the Rescue

  So how might exegesis help dispel the vast fog of incomprehension that would face a hypothetical translator of the previous Time article?

  If the article has been ripped from the magazine (or copied from it just on its own) and there are no other accompanying documents then there will be a lot of problems. The clever English and French scholars who deciphered lost Middle Eastern languages were helped because there was a lot of text for them to study. One reason why no one has yet managed to totally decipher Etruscan is that there are only a handful of tombstones written in Etruscan, however down-timers are unlikely to have just a single article to study; either they will have an entire magazine/book or they will have a series of clippings.

  As the various documents are studied some word usage will become clearer. Thus it will become clear that (for example) corporation, company, enterprise and business are frequen
tly synonyms and mean a commercial organization that produces, trades and sells things in a way similar to the aforementioned East India Company. Likewise customers, consumers, decisions, and so on. Even little words such as "key" will be understood as being used in a metaphorical way to mean critical, important etc. so that "key steps," "key points," "key issues" are understood to have nothing to do with locks. On the other hand it is quite possible there will be surprising gaps—the translation of "nerve" as "sinew" may remain because the existence and function of nerves is not known even though derivative expressions such as "nervous" and "getting on someone's nerves" could well be determined from context.

  Another simple thing that exegesis can do is identify titles, acronyms and other simple abbreviations. It only takes a single document to write a phrase like "This is a problem facing many Chief Financial Officers (CFOs)" for the whole range of related acronyms be understood as job titles of the form Chief something Officer. Since both Chief and Officer are understandable to determine that anyone who is a Chief something Officer (CxO) is a senior manager within a company. Similarly, seeing a phrase like "companies such as Microsoft Inc., IBM Inc. are facing . . ." will help derive another rule: that Inc. identifies the previous word or words as a company name. This allows lists of company names to be created and thus when a different article just writes "Microsoft" or "Ford" there is no need to wonder what a "smallsoft" is or what river crossings have to do with motor vehicles.

  However, this is just the first stage—it means that words that had some sort of counterpart in the seventeenth century can be translated and that names can be identified as names and possibly classified. The next stage is to start understanding new technologies and concepts. This is probably the main reason for reading these up-time documents but it is considerably more complex. For example, a word such as digital will cause a lot of trouble. "Digital," as used in the late twentieth century, is strongly entangled with computers and telecommunications and these are not technologies that are easily understood. But exegesis will help to elucidate both the meaning and some of the underlying technological concepts.

  In order to understand "Digital" it will help to understand "Digit" and this latter is likely to be a simple task. Even when other words in the phrase do not make sense, enough exposure to phrases such as "3 digit area code," "7 digit telephone number" or "5 digit ZIP code" will help explain that digit means the numbers 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9. From that it will be possible to determine that "Digital" means "numerical" or "to do with numbers." This will not always help: "Digital Information" could be understood as lists of numbers and "digital communication" the technique of transferring numbers from one place to another. Both are in a strict sense true, but additional exegesis will be needed to determine that this digital includes nonnumeric data encoded as a series of digits. This is a complicated concept and in our universe it was not really developed until the mid to late eighteenth century. However, encryption by substitution is something that is understood so with the right clues the idea of replacing letters with numbers can also be figured out. This may be a case where 1-800 numbers in ads are useful. Quite often the numbers are repeated as both mnemonic text and number such as "1-800-PRODUCT (1-800-776-3828)" and "1-800-BUY THIS (1-800-289-8447)"; enough of these examples will show that that letters A-Z can be mapped to the numbers 2-9 in a consistent manner and this will then lead to the idea that any document can be represented as a stream of digits.

  Bibliography

  Cawdrey's Table Alphabeticall is available on line via Renaissance Electronic Texts at http://www.library.utoronto.ca/www/utel/ret/ret.html. I have created a look up version at http://www.di2.nu/caw1604new.htm.

  The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica is at http://1911encyclopedia.org/

  The story of the @ symbol is at http://www.atsymbol.com/history.htm

  A good place for looking up the origin of phrases is "The Phrase Finder"— http://www.phrases.org.uk/

  The Koran virgins controversy—http://www.iht.com/articles/532570.html

  Bouncing Back:

  Bringing Rubber to Grantville

  by Iver P. Cooper

  Chemistry Professor Joe Schwarcz writes, "It's hard to fight an effective war without rubber. Fan belts, gaskets, gas masks, and tires are critical to the war effort." While he had modern warfare in mind, Grantville's war machines—modified cars and trucks—need rubber to remain functional. In 1633, Quentin Underwood insisted that "developing a rubber industry should be a top priority."

  Rubber has myriad useful properties. Its most unique feature is elasticity, which allows it to be used as a shock absorber. Because of its toughness, articles made of rubber have good abrasion resistance. Rubber is also impermeable to gases and liquids. Finally, it is an electrical insulator. Rubber is used in hundreds of automobile parts; the apt slogan of the B.F. Goodrich Company was, "Everything in Rubber."

  * * *

  In the old timeline, synthetic rubber accounted for about 60% of all rubber consumed. Synthetic rubber is not an option within, say, a decade or two of the Ring of Fire. Even though we know, from the encyclopedias, that the secret is to co-polymerize butadiene and styrene (or acrylonitrile), where exactly are the butadiene and styrene coming from? Well, we can make butadiene from alcohol, or from petroleum ingredients like butane or butylene. To make styrene, we need ethyl benzene.

  Schwarcz comments that the process which the Germans used to make Buna-S rubber (the butadiene-styrene copolymer) "was not a simple business." You need the right catalyst, the right emulsifier, and so on. This detailed process information probably isn't in the Grantville library system.

  Even if we knew exactly what to do, to handle the chemicals, we need steel and glass, both of which are going to be expensive to make. And for the raw materials, we have to appropriately process coal or petroleum. All in all, the obstacles are numerous and formidable. Once they are surmounted, the synthetic rubber industry will still have to compete with other industries for key materials (coal tar, petroleum, etc.) and skilled workers.

  Prospective Natural Rubber Sources

  Our immediate source of rubber will be scrap (see "Rubber Reclaiming," below). However, even with reclaiming, we will eventually run out of rubber. So we need to find natural rubber, and quickly.

  Natural rubber is found in latex, a sticky liquid exuded from wounds by certain plants. It is not sap, although non-botanists may confuse the two. There are several encyclopedias available in Grantville, and from them, one can compile a seemingly impressive list (see Appendix 1) of possible rubber sources. However, we need to know where to look and what kind of plant to look for. The best prospects fall into three categories:

  (1) New World Tropical Rubber Plants: the Para Rubber Tree/Hevea brasiliensis (Amazon and Guianas), the Ceara Rubber Tree/Manihot glaziovii (northeast Brazil), and the Castilla Rubber Tree/Castilla elastica (Mexico to Peru).

  (2) Old World Tropical Rubber Plants: the Lagos Rubber Tree/Funtumia elastica (West Africa), the Assam Rubber Tree/Ficus elastica (Asia), and various rubber vines (Africa and Asia).

  (3) Temperate Latex-Producing Plants included in the Ring of Fire or commonplace in Europe: milkweed and goldenrod in particular.

  For each of those rubber sources, we have both a written description, and some kind of useful illustration (its overall form, its leaves, its flowers (if any), its seeds, and so forth).

  There are also some borderline prospects: the Pernambuco Rubber Tree/Hancornia speciosa, Guayule/Parthenium argentatum and Russian dandelion/Taraxacum kok-saghyz, which are of interest mainly because they can be grown outside a tropical rainforest. In the case of Hancornia and Guayule, the encyclopedias offer only a written description, but there are illustrations and a range map for Guayule in a 1981 National Geographic article. For Russian dandelion, there is just the prayer (which will be answered) that it resembles the common dandelion.

  Knowing Where to Search

  The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica and the Encyclopedia Americana name wh
ere wild rubber occurs, by country (e.g., Mexico) or even just by region (e.g., Africa). Obviously, it is more useful to know that it occurs in a small country like Liberia than in a large country like Brazil.

  Collier's Encyclopedia and the World Book Encyclopedia have maps showing more specifically where wild rubber and plantation rubber are found. There is also useful information in the economic maps of the Hammond Citation Atlas. However, these maps must be used with caution.

  First of all, they show the current range of the rubber trees. The wild rubber may be available, in 1632, from a wider area, and the plantation rubber may be cultivatable in locations other than those shown on the map.

  Secondly, they don't distinguish one kind of wild rubber from another, and the ranges do overlap. A given site in the marked region in Africa could be native to the tree Funtumia elastica, or to one or more of the many rubber vines which Africa possesses. Likewise, Castilla elastica and Hevea guianensis are both found in northern South America. So what this means is that 1632 characters should keep an open mind when they look for latex-producing plants.

  In any event, knowing where to search is not enough. You have to be able to carry out the search successfully. This has two components: being able to identify the rubber plant (see next section), and being able to survive the journey (see "The Geopolitics of Foreign Rubber," below). The latter section also provides more detailed information on where the plants can be found or cultivated.

  Identifying the Rubber Plant

  Once we are in the right area, we can hire native guides, show them pictures (and latex or rubber samples), and ask them to guide us to where the trees are located. Or we can stumble around the rainforests ourselves, if we are nervous about the native attitude to European visitors.