But what Boys lacked in teaching ability he made up for in his gift for experimental physics, designing and building scientific instruments. In 1887, as part of his physics experiments, Boys wanted to create a very fine shard of glass to measure the effects of delicate physical forces on objects. He had an idea that he could use a thin fiber of glass as a balance arm. But first he had to make one.
Hummingbird effects sometimes happen when an innovation in one field exposes a flaw in some other technology (or in the case of the printed book, in our own anatomy) that can be corrected only by another discipline altogether. But sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to measure something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making. Such was the case with Boys’s balance arm. But what made Boys such an unusual figure in the annals of innovation is the decidedly unorthodox tool he used in pursuit of this new measuring device. To create his thin string of glass, Boys built a special crossbow in his laboratory, and created lightweight arrows (or bolts) for it. To one bolt he attached the end of a glass rod with sealing wax. Then he heated glass until it softened, and he fired the bolt. As the bolt hurtled toward its target, it pulled a tail of fiber from the molten glass clinging to the crossbow. In one of his shots, Boys produced a thread of glass that stretched almost ninety feet long.
Charles Vernon Boys standing in a laboratory, 1917
“If I had been promised by a good fairy for anything I desired, I would have asked for one thing with so many valuable properties as these fibres,” Boys would later write. Most astonishing, though, was how strong the fiber was: as durable, if not more so, than an equivalently sized strand of steel. For thousands of years, humans had employed glass for its beauty and transparency, and tolerated its chronic fragility. But Boys’s crossbow experiment suggested that there was one more twist in the story of this amazingly versatile material: using glass for its strength.
By the middle of the next century, glass fibers, now wound together in a miraculous new material called fiberglass, were everywhere: in home insulation, clothes, surfboards, megayachts, helmets, and the circuit boards that connected the chips of a modern computer. The fuselage of Airbus’s flagship jet, the A380—the largest commercial aircraft in the skies—is built with a composite of aluminum and fiberglass, making it much more resistant to fatigue and damage than traditional aluminum shells. Ironically, most of these applications ignored silicon dioxide’s strange capacity to transmit light waves: most objects made of fiberglass do not look to the untutored eye to be made of glass at all. During the first decades of innovation with glass fibers, this emphasis on nontransparency made sense. It was useful to allow light to pass through a windowpane or a lens, but why would you need to pass light through a fiber not much bigger than a human hair?
The transparency of glass fibers became an asset only once we began thinking of light as a way to encode digital information. In 1970, researchers at Corning Glassworks—the Murano of modern times—developed a type of glass that was so extraordinarily clear that if you created a block of it the length of a bus, it would be just as transparent as looking through a normal windowpane. (Today, after further refinements, the block could be a half-mile long with the same clarity.) Scientists at Bell Labs then took fibers of this super-clear glass and shot laser beams down the length of them, fluctuating optical signals that corresponded to the zeroes and ones of binary code. This hybrid of two seemingly unrelated inventions—the concentrated, orderly light of lasers, and the hyper-clear glass fibers—came to be known as fiber optics. Using fiber-optic cables was vastly more efficient than sending electrical signals over copper cables, particularly for long distances: light allows much more bandwidth and is far less susceptible to noise and interference than is electrical energy. Today, the backbone of the global Internet is built out of fiber-optic cables. Roughly ten distinct cables traverse the Atlantic Ocean, carrying almost all the voice and data communications between the continents. Each of those cables contains a collection of separate fibers, surrounded by layers of steel and insulation to keep them watertight and protected from fishing trawlers, anchors, and even sharks. Each individual fiber is thinner than a piece of straw. It seems impossible, but the fact is that you can hold the entire collection of all the voice and data traffic traveling between North America and Europe in the palm of one hand. A thousand innovations came together to make that miracle possible: we had to invent the idea of digital data itself, and laser beams, and computers at both ends that could transmit and receive those beams of information—not to mention the ships that lay and repair the cables. But those strange bonds of silicon dioxide, once again, turn out to be central to the story. The World Wide Web is woven together out of threads of glass.
Think of that iconic, early-twenty-first-century act: snapping a selfie on your phone as you stand in some exotic spot on vacation, and then uploading the image to Instagram or Twitter, where it circulates to other people’s phones and computers all around the world. We’re accustomed to celebrating the innovations that have made this act almost second nature to us now: the miniaturization of digital computers into handheld devices, the creation of the Internet and the Web, the interfaces of social-networking software. What we rarely do is recognize the way glass supports this entire network: we take pictures through glass lenses, store and manipulate them on circuit boards made of fiberglass, transmit them around the world via glass cables, and enjoy them on screens made of glass. It’s silicon dioxide all the way down the chain.
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IT’S EASY TO MAKE FUN of our penchant for taking selfies, but in fact there is a long and storied tradition behind that form of self-expression. Some of the most revered works of art from the Renaissance and early modernism are self-portraits; from Dürer to Leonardo, to Rembrandt, all the way to van Gogh with his bandaged ear, painters have been obsessed with capturing detailed and varied images of themselves on the canvas. Rembrandt, for instance, painted around forty self-portraits over the course of his life. But the interesting thing about self-portraiture is that it effectively doesn’t exist as an artistic convention in Europe before 1400. People painted landscapes and royalty and religious scenes and a thousand other subjects. But they didn’t paint themselves.
The explosion of interest in self-portraiture was the direct result of yet another technological breakthrough in our ability to manipulate glass. Back in Murano, the glassmakers had figured out a way to combine their crystal-clear glass with a new innovation in metallurgy, coating the back of the glass with an amalgam of tin and mercury to create a shiny and highly reflective surface. For the first time, mirrors became part of the fabric of everyday life. This was a revelation on the most intimate of levels: before mirrors came along, the average person went through life without ever seeing a truly accurate representation of his or her face, just fragmentary, distorted glances in pools of water or polished metals.
Mirrors appeared so magical that they were quickly integrated into somewhat bizarre sacred rituals: During holy pilgrimages, it became common practice for well-off pilgrims to take a mirror with them. When visiting sacred relics, they would position themselves so that they could catch sight of the bones in the mirror’s reflection. Back home, they would then show off these mirrors to friends and relatives, boasting that they had brought back physical evidence of the relic by capturing the reflection of the sacred scene. Before turning to the printing press, Gutenberg had the start-up idea of manufacturing and selling small mirrors for departing pilgrims.
Las Meninas by Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez
But the mirror’s most significant impact would be secular, not sacred. Filippo Brunelleschi employed a mirror to invent linear perspective in painting, by drawing a reflection of the Florence Baptistry instead of his direct perception of it. The art of the late Renaissance is heavily populated by mirrors lurking inside paintings, most famously in Diego Velá
zquez’s inverted masterpiece, Las Meninas, which shows the artist (and the extended royal family) in the middle of painting King Philip IV and Queen Mariana of Spain. The entire image is captured from the point of view of two royal subjects sitting for their portrait; it is, in a very literal sense, a painting about the act of painting. The king and queen are visible only in one small fragment of the canvas, just to the right of Velázquez himself: two small, blurry images reflected back in a mirror.
As a tool, the mirror became an invaluable asset to painters who could now capture the world around them in a far more realistic fashion, including the detailed features of their own faces. Leonardo da Vinci observed the following in his notebooks (using mirrors, naturally, to write in his legendary backward script):
When you wish to see whether the general effect of your picture corresponds with that of the object represented after nature, take a mirror and set it so that it reflects the actual thing, and then compare the reflection with your picture, and consider carefully whether the subject of the two images is in conformity with both, studying especially the mirror. The mirror ought to be taken as a guide.
The historian Alan MacFarlane writes of the role of glass in shaping artistic vision, “It is as if all humans had some kind of systematic myopia, but one which made it impossible to see, and particularly to represent, the natural world with precision and clarity. Humans normally saw nature symbolically, as a set of signs… . What glass ironically did was to take away or compensate for the dark glass of human sight and the distortions of the mind, and hence to let in more light.”
At the exact moment that the glass lens was allowing us to extend our vision to the stars or microscopic cells, glass mirrors were allowing us to see ourselves for the first time. It set in motion a reorientation of society that was more subtle, but no less transformative, than the reorientation of our place in the universe that the telescope engendered. “The most powerful prince in the world created a vast hall of mirrors, and the mirror spread from one room to another in the bourgeois household,” Lewis Mumford writes in his Technics and Civilization. “Self-consciousness, introspection, mirror-conversation developed with the new object itself.” Social conventions as well as property rights and other legal customs began to revolve around the individual rather than the older, more collective units: the family, the tribe, the city, the kingdom. People began writing about their interior lives with far more scrutiny. Hamlet ruminated onstage; the novel emerged as a dominant form of storytelling, probing the inner mental lives of its characters with an unrivaled depth. Entering a novel, particularly a first-person narrative, was a kind of conceptual parlor trick: it let you swim through the consciousness, the thoughts and emotions, of other people more effectively than any aesthetic form yet invented. The psychological novel, in a sense, is the kind of story you start wanting to hear once you begin spending meaningful hours of your life staring at yourself in the mirror.
How much does this transformation owe to glass? Two things are undeniable: the mirror played a direct role in allowing artists to paint themselves and invent perspective as a formal device; and shortly thereafter a fundamental shift occurred in the consciousness of Europeans that oriented them around the self in a new way, a shift that would ripple across the world (and that is still rippling). No doubt many forces converged to make this shift possible: the self-centered world played well with the early forms of modern capitalism that were thriving in places like Venice and Holland (home to those masters of painterly introspection, Dürer and Rembrandt). Likely, these various forces complemented each other: glass mirrors were among the first high-tech furnishings for the home, and once we began gazing into those mirrors, we began to see ourselves differently, in ways that encouraged the market systems that would then happily sell us more mirrors. It’s not that the mirror made the Renaissance, exactly, but that it got caught up in a positive feedback loop with other social forces, and its unusual capacity to reflect light strengthened those forces. This is what the robot historian’s perspective allows us to see: the technology is not a single cause of a cultural transformation like the Renaissance, but it is, in many ways, just as important to the story as the human visionaries that we conventionally celebrate.
McFarlane has an artful way of describing this kind of causal relationship. The mirror doesn’t “force” the Renaissance to happen; it “allows” it to happen. The elaborate reproductive strategy of the pollinators didn’t force the hummingbird to evolve its spectacular aerodynamics; it created the conditions that allowed the hummingbird to take advantage of flower’s free sugars by evolving such a distinctive trait. The fact that the hummingbird is so unique in the avian kingdom suggests that, had the flowers not evolved their symbiotic dance with the insects, the hummingbird’s hovering skills would have never come into being. It’s easy to imagine a world with flowers but without hummingbirds. But it’s much harder to imagine a world without flowers but with hummingbirds.
The same holds true for technological advances like the mirror. Without a technology that enabled humans to see a clear reflection of reality, including their own faces, the particular constellation of ideas in art and philosophy and politics that we call the Renaissance would have had a much more difficult time coming into being. (Japanese culture had highly prized steel mirrors during roughly the same period, but never adopted them for the same introspective use that flourished in Europe—perhaps in part because steel reflected much less light than glass mirrors, and added unnatural coloring to the image.) Yet the mirror was not exclusively dictating the terms of the European revolution in the sense of self. A different culture, inventing the fine glass mirror at a different point in its historical development, might not have experienced the same intellectual revolution, because the rest of its social order differed from that of fifteenth-century Italian hill-towns. The Renaissance also benefited from a patronage system that enabled its artists and scientists to spend their days playing with mirrors instead of, say, foraging for nuts and berries. A Renaissance without the Medici—not the individual family, of course, but the economic class they represent—is as hard to imagine as the Renaissance without the mirror.
It should probably be said that the virtues of the society of the self are entirely debatable. Orienting laws around individuals led directly to an entire tradition of human rights and the prominence of individual liberty in legal codes. That has to count as progress. But reasonable people disagree about whether we have now tipped the scales too far in the direction of individualism, away from those collective organizations: the union, the community, the state. Resolving those disagreements requires a different set of arguments—and values—than the ones we need to explain where those disagreements came from. The mirror helped invent the modern self, in some real but unquantifiable way. That much we should agree on. Whether that was a good thing in the end is a separate question, one that may never be settled conclusively.
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THE DORMANT VOLCANO of Mauna Kea on Hawaii’s Big Island rises almost fourteen thousand feet above sea level, though the mountain extends almost another twenty thousand feet down to the ocean floor below, making it significantly larger than Mount Everest in terms of base-to-peak height. It is one of the few places in the world where you can drive from sea level to fourteen thousand feet in a matter of hours. At the summit, the landscape is barren, almost Martian, in its rocky, lifeless expanse. An inversion layer generally keeps clouds several thousand feet below the volcano’s peak; the air is as dry as it is thin. Standing on the summit, you are as far from the continents of earth as you can be while standing on land, which means the atmosphere around Hawaii—undisturbed by the turbulence of the sun’s energy bouncing off or being absorbed by large, varied landmasses—is as stable as just about anywhere on the planet. All of these properties make the peak of Mauna Kea one of the most otherworldly places you can visit. Appropriately enough, they also make it a sublime location for stargazing.
Today, the summit of Mauna Kea is crowne
d by thirteen distinct observatories, massive white domes scattered across the red rocks like some gleaming outpost on a distant planet. Included in this group are the twin telescopes of the W. M. Keck Observatory, the most powerful optical telescopes on earth. The Keck telescopes would seem to be a direct descendant of Hans Lippershey’s creation, only they do not rely on lenses to do their magic. To capture light from distant corners of the universe, you would need lenses the size of a pickup truck; at that size, glass becomes difficult to physically support and introduces inevitable distortions into the image. And so, the scientists and engineers behind Keck employed another technique to capture extremely faint traces of light: the mirror.
Keck Observatory
Each telescope has thirty-six hexagonal mirrors that together become a twenty-foot-wide reflective canvas. That light is reflected up to a second mirror and then down to a set of instruments, where the images can then be processed and visualized on a computer screen. (There is no vantage point at Keck where one can gaze directly through the telescope the way Galileo and countless astronomers since have done.) But even in the thin, ultra-stable atmosphere above Mauna Kea, small disturbances can blur the images captured by Keck. And so the observatories employ an ingenious system called “adaptive optics” to correct the vision of the telescopes. Lasers are beamed into the night sky above Keck, effectively creating an artificial star in the heavens. That false star becomes a kind of reference point; because the scientists know exactly what the laser should look like in the heavens were there no atmospheric distortion, they are able to get a measurement of the existing distortion by comparing the “ideal” laser image and what the telescopes actually register. Guided by that map of atmospheric noise, computers instruct the mirrors of the telescope to flex slightly based on the exact distortions in the skies above Mauna Kea that night. The effect is almost exactly like putting spectacles on a nearsighted person: distant objects suddenly become significantly clearer.
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World Page 3
