Of course, with the Keck telescopes, those distant objects are galaxies and supernovas that are, in some cases, billions of light-years away. When we look through the mirrors of Keck, we are looking into the distant past. Once again, glass has extended our vision: not just down to the invisible world of cells and microbes, or the global connectivity of the cameraphone, but all the way back to the early days of the universe. Glass started out as trinkets and empty vessels. A few thousand years later, perched above the clouds at the top of Mauna Kea, it has become a time machine.
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THE STORY OF GLASS reminds us how our ingenuity is both confined and empowered by the physical properties of the elements around us. When we think of the entities that made the modern world, we usually talk about the great visionaries of science and politics, or breakthrough inventions, or large collective movements. But there is a material element to our history as well: not the dialectical materialism that Marxism practiced, where “material” meant the class struggle and the ultimate primacy of economic explanations. Material history, instead, in the sense of history as shaped by the basic building blocks of matter, which are then connected to things like social movements or economic systems. Imagine you could rewrite the Big Bang (or play God, depending on your metaphor) and create a universe that was exactly like ours, with only one tiny change: those electrons on the silicon atom don’t behave quite the same way. In this alternate universe, the electrons absorb light like most materials, instead of letting the photons pass through them. Such a small adjustment might well have made no difference at all for the entire evolution of Homo sapiens until a few thousand years ago. But then, amazingly, everything changed. Humans began exploiting the quantum behavior of those silicon electrons in countless different ways. On some fundamental level, it is impossible to imagine the last millennium without transparent glass. We can now manipulate carbon (in the form of that defining twentieth-century compound, plastic) into durable transparent materials that can do the job of glass, but that expertise is less than a century old. Tweak those silicon electrons, and you rob the last thousand years of windows, spectacles, lenses, test tubes, lightbulbs. (High-quality mirrors might have been independently invented using other reflective materials, though it would likely have taken a few centuries longer.) A world without glass would not just transform the edifices of civilization, by removing all the stained-glass windows of the great cathedrals and the sleek, reflective surfaces of the modern cityscape. A world without glass would strike at the foundation of modern progress: the extended life spans that come from understanding the cell, the virus, and the bacterium; the genetic knowledge of what makes us human; the astronomer’s knowledge of our place in the universe. No material on Earth mattered more to those conceptual breakthroughs than glass.
In a letter to a friend about the book of natural history that he never got around to writing, René Descartes described how he had wanted to tell the story of glass: “How from these ashes, by the mere intensity of [heat’s] action, it formed glass: for as this transmutation of ashes into glass appeared to me as wonderful as any other nature, I took a special pleasure in describing it.” Descartes was close enough to the original glass revolution to perceive its magnitude. Today, we are too many steps away from the material’s original influence to appreciate just how important it was, and continues to be, to everyday existence.
This is one of those places where the long-zoom approach illuminates, allowing us to see things that we would have otherwise missed had we focused on the usual suspects of historical storytelling. Invoking the physical elements in discussing historical change is not unheard of, of course. Most of us accept the idea that carbon has played an essential role in human activity since the industrial revolution. But in a way, this is not really news: carbon has been essential to just about everything living organisms have done since the primordial soup. But humans didn’t have much use for silicon dioxide until the glassmakers began to tinker with its curious properties a thousand years ago. Today, if you look around the room you’re currently occupying, there might easily be a hundred objects within reach that depend on silicon dioxide for their existence, and even more that rely on the element silicon itself: the panes of glass in your windows or skylights, the lens in your cameraphone, the screen of your computer, everything with a microchip or a digital clock. If you were casting starring roles for the chemistry of daily life ten thousand years ago, the top billing would be the same as it is today: we’re heavy users of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen. But silicon wouldn’t likely have even received a credit. While silicon is abundant on Earth—more than 90 percent of the crust is made up of the element—it plays almost no role in the natural metabolisms of life-forms on the planet. Our bodies are dependent on carbon, and many of our technologies (fossil fuels and plastics) display the same dependence. But the need for silicon is a modern craving.
The question is: Why did it take so long? Why were the extraordinary properties of this substance effectively ignored by nature, and why did those properties suddenly become essential to human society starting roughly a thousand years ago? In trying to address these questions, of course, we can only speculate. But surely one answer has to do with another technology: the furnace. One reason that evolution didn’t find much use for silicon dioxide is that most of the really interesting things about the substance don’t appear until you get over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Liquid water and carbon do wonderfully inventive things at the earth’s atmospheric temperature, but it’s hard to see the promise of silicon dioxide until you can melt it, and the earth’s environment—at least on the surface of the planet—simply doesn’t get that hot. This was the hummingbird effect that the furnace unleashed: by learning how to generate extreme heat in a controlled environment, we unlocked the molecular potential of silicon dioxide, which soon transformed the way we see the world, and ourselves.
In a strange way, glass was trying to extend our vision of the universe from the very beginning, way before we were smart enough to notice. Those glass fragments from the Libyan Desert that made it into King Tut’s tomb had puzzled archeologists, geologists, and astrophysicists alike for decades. The semiliquid molecules of silicon dioxide suggested that they had formed at temperatures that could only have been created by a direct meteor strike, and yet there was no evidence of an impact crater anywhere in the vicinity. So where had those extraordinary temperatures come from? Lightning can strike a small patch of silica with glassmaking heat, but it can’t strike acres of sand in a single blast. And so scientists began to explore the idea that the Libyan glass arose from a comet colliding with the earth’s atmosphere and exploding over the desert sands. In 2013, a South African geochemist named Jan Kramers analyzed a mysterious pebble from the site and determined that it had originated in the nucleus of a comet, the first such object to be discovered on Earth. Scientists and space agencies have spent billions of dollars searching for particles of comets because they offer such profound insight into the formation of solar systems. The pebble from the Libyan Desert now gives them direct access to the geochemistry of comets. And all the while, glass was pointing the way.
2. Cold
In the early summer months of 1834, a three-masted bark vessel named the Madagascar sailed into the port of Rio de Janeiro, its hull filled with the most implausible of cargo: a frozen New England lake. The Madagascar and her crew were in the service of an enterprising and dogged Boston businessman named Frederic Tudor. History now knows him as “the Ice King,” but for most of his early adulthood he was an abject failure, albeit one with remarkable tenacity.
“Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation,” Thoreau wrote in Walden, gazing out at the “beautifully blue” frozen expanse of his Massachusetts pond. Tudor had grown up contemplating the same scenery. As a well-to-do young Bostonian, his family had long enjoyed the frozen water from the pond on their country estate, Rockwood—not just for its aesthetics, but also for its enduring capacity to keep things cold. Like many wealthy fam
ilies in northern climes, the Tudors stored blocks of frozen lake water in icehouses, two-hundred-pound ice cubes that would remain marvelously unmelted until the hot summer months arrived, and a new ritual began: chipping off slices from the blocks to freshen drinks, make ice cream, cool down a bath during a heat wave.
The idea of a block of ice surviving intact for months without the benefit of artificial refrigeration sounds unlikely to the modern ear. We are used to ice preserved indefinitely thanks to the many deep-freeze technologies of today’s world. But ice in the wild is another matter—other than the occasional glacier, we assume that a block of ice can’t survive longer than an hour in summer heat, much less months.
But Tudor knew from personal experience that a large block of ice could last well into the depths of summer if it was kept out of the sun—or at least it would last through the late spring of New England. And that knowledge would plant the seed of an idea in his mind, an idea that would ultimately cost him his sanity, his fortune, and his freedom—before it made him an immensely wealthy man.
At the age of seventeen, Tudor’s father sent him on a voyage to the Caribbean, accompanying his older brother John, who suffered from a knee ailment that had effectively rendered him an invalid. The idea was that the warm climates would improve John’s health, but in fact they had the opposite effect: arriving in Havana, the Tudor brothers were quickly overwhelmed by the muggy weather. They soon sailed north back to the mainland, stopping in Savannah and Charleston, but the early summer heat followed them, and John fell ill with what may have been tuberculosis. Six months later, he was dead at the age of twenty.
Frederic Tudor
As a medical intervention, the Tudor brothers’ Caribbean adventure was a complete disaster. But suffering through the inescapable humidity of the tropics in the full regalia of a nineteenth-century gentleman suggested a radical—some would say preposterous—idea to young Frederic Tudor: if he could somehow transport ice from the frozen north to the West Indies, there would be an immense market for it. The history of global trade had clearly demonstrated that vast fortunes could be made by transporting a commodity that was ubiquitous in one environment to a place where it was scarce. To the young Tudor, ice seemed to fit the equation perfectly: nearly worthless in Boston, ice would be priceless in Havana.
The ice trade was nothing more than a hunch, but for some reason Tudor kept it alive in his mind, through the grieving after his brother’s demise, through the aimless years of a young man of means in Boston society. Sometime during this period, two years after his brother’s death, he shared his implausible scheme with his brother William, and his future brother-in-law, the even wealthier Robert Gardiner. A few months after his sister’s wedding, Tudor began taking notes in a journal. As a frontispiece, he drew a sketch of the Rockwood building that had long enabled his family to escape the warmth of the summer sun. He called it the “Ice House Diary.” The first entry read: “Plan etc for transporting Ice to Tropical Climates. Boston Augst 1st 1805 William and myself have this day determined to get together what property we have and embark in the undertaking of carrying ice to the West Indies the ensuing winter.”
The entry was typical of Tudor’s whole demeanor: brisk, confident, almost comically ambitious. (Brother William was apparently less convinced of the scheme’s promise.) Tudor’s confidence in his scheme derived from the ultimate value of the ice once it made its way to the tropics: “In a country where at some seasons of the year the heat is almost unsupportable,” he wrote in a subsequent entry, “where at times the common necessary of life, water, cannot be had but in a tepid state—Ice must be considered as out doing most other luxuries.” The ice trade was destined to endow the Tudor brothers with “fortunes larger than we shall know what to do with.” He seems to have given less thought to the challenges of transporting the ice. In correspondence from the period, Tudor relays thirdhand stories—almost certainly apocryphal—of ice cream being shipped intact from England to Trinidad as prima facie evidence that his plan would work. Reading the “Ice House Diary” now, you can hear the voice of a young man in the full fever of conviction, closing the cognitive blinds against doubt and counterargument.
However deluded Frederic might have seemed, he had one thing in his favor: he had the means to put the broad strokes of his plan in motion. He had enough money to hire a ship, and an endless supply of ice, manufactured by Mother Nature each winter. And so, in November 1805, Tudor dispatched his brother and cousin off to Martinique as an advance guard, with instructions to negotiate exclusive rights to the ice that would follow several months later. While waiting for word from his envoys, Tudor bought a brig called the Favorite for $4,750 and began harvesting ice in preparation for the journey. In February, Tudor set sail from Boston Harbor, the Favorite loaded with a full cargo of Rockwood ice, bound for the West Indies. Tudor’s scheme was bold enough to attract the attentions of the press, though the tone left something to be desired. “No joke,” the Boston Gazette reported. “A vessel with a cargo of 80 tons of Ice has cleared out from this port for Martinique. We hope this will not prove to be a slippery speculation.”
The Gazette’s derision would turn out to be well founded, though not for the reasons one might expect. Despite a number of weather-related delays, the ice survived the journey in remarkably good shape. The problem proved to be one that Tudor had never contemplated. The residents of Martinique had no interest in his exotic frozen bounty. They simply had no idea what to do with it.
We take it for granted in the modern world that an ordinary day will involve exposure to a wide range of temperatures. We enjoy piping hot coffee in the morning and ice cream for dessert at the end of the day. Those of us who live in climates with hot summers expect to bounce back and forth between air-conditioned offices and brutal humidity; where winter rules, we bundle up and venture out into the frigid streets, and turn up the thermostat when we return home. But the overwhelming majority of humans living in equatorial climes in 1800 would have literally never once experienced anything cold. The idea of frozen water would have been as fanciful to the residents of Martinique as an iPhone.
The mysterious, almost magical, properties of ice would eventually appear in one of the great opening lines of twentieth-century literature, in Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” Buendía recalls a series of fairs put on by roving gypsies during his childhood, each showcasing some extraordinary new technology. The gypsies display magnetic ingots, telescopes, and microscopes; but none of these engineering achievements impress the residents of the imaginary South American town of Macondo as much as a simple block of ice.
But sometimes the sheer novelty of an object can make its utility hard to discern. This was Tudor’s first mistake. He assumed the absolute novelty of ice would be a point in his favor. He figured his blocks of ice would “out-do” all the other luxuries. Instead, they just received blank stares.
The indifference to ice’s magical powers had prevented Tudor’s brother William from lining up an exclusive buyer for the cargo. Even worse, William had failed to establish a suitable location to store the ice. Tudor had made it all the way to Martinique but found himself with no demand for a product that was melting in the tropical heat at an alarming rate. He posted handbills around town that included specific instructions on how to carry and preserve the ice, but found few takers. He did manage to make some ice cream, thereby impressing a few locals who believed the delicacy couldn’t be created so close to the equator. But the trip was ultimately a complete failure. In his diary, he estimated that he had lost nearly $4,000 with his tropical misadventure.
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THE BLEAK PATTERN of the Martinique voyage would repeat itself in the years to come, with ever more catastrophic results. Tudor sent a series of ice ships to the Caribbean, with only a modest increase in demand for his product.
In the meantime, his family fortunes collapsed, and the Tudors retreated to their Rockwood farm, which like most New England land had very poor agricultural prospects. Harvesting the ice was the family’s last best hope. But it was a hope that most of Boston openly ridiculed, and a series of shipwrecks and embargoes made that ridicule seem increasingly appropriate. In 1813, Tudor was thrown in debtor’s prison. He penned the following entry in his diary several days later:
On Monday the 9th instant I was arrested … and locked up as a debtor in Boston jail… . On this memorable day in my little annals I am 28 years 6 months and 5 days old. It is an event which I think I could not have avoided: but it is a climax which I did hope to have escaped as my affairs are looking well at last after a fearful struggle with adverse circumstances for seven years—but it has taken place and I have endeavoured to meet it as I would the tempest of heaven which should serve to strengthen rather than reduce the spirit of a true man.
Tudor’s fledgling business suffered from two primary liabilities. He had a demand problem, in that most of his potential customers didn’t understand why his product might be useful. And he had a storage problem: he was losing too much of his product to the heat, particularly once it arrived in the tropics. But his New England base gave him one crucial advantage, beyond the ice itself. Unlike the U.S. South, with its sugar plantations and cotton fields, the northeastern states were largely devoid of natural resources that could be sold elsewhere. This meant that ships tended to leave Boston harbor empty, heading off for the West Indies to fill their hulls with valuable cargo before returning to the wealthy markets of the eastern seaboard. Paying a crew to sail a ship with no cargo was effectively burning money. Any cargo was better than nothing, which meant that Tudor could negotiate cheaper rates for himself by loading his ice onto what would have otherwise been an empty ship, and thereby avoiding the need to buy and maintain his own vessels.
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World Page 4
