Bomb, Book and Compass

by Simon Winchester

  Needham did tell Dr Zhu that he planned to write a history of Chinese contributions to world civilization, but that was all. Needham’s diaries note that he was actually much more captivated by researchers at Zhejiang who were doing work on the mechanics of silk, colour-pattern inheritance in ladybirds, the presence of flavonoids in jujubes, and the high levels of ascorbic acid in the local Chinese rose-hip.

  He had no inkling of the enormous impression he made on Dr Zhu – who seemed, as he later recalled, a rather taciturn and distant man. Zhu, however, had thought deeply about Needham’s plan to write a book and realized that he could be in a unique position to help.

  So as soon as Needham had returned to England, and by the time the Japanese had scurried home and the political and military situation in China became somewhat more stable,35 Dr Zhu started collecting books and papers for him, packing them securely, and sending them to Cambridge by ship.

  One particular item Zhu sent turned out to be of extraordinary value, in terms of both money and of usefulness. It was a complete copy of an edition of 1888 of what was then and remains today perhaps the largest book in the world: the imperial Chinese encyclopedia, Kuchin Tu-shu Chi-cheng (Gujin tushu jicheng, in pinyin), or The Complete Collection of Illustrations and Writings of Ancient and Modern Times. This was a distillation – or rather a conflation, since nothing seems to have been left out – of everything that was known to the greatest minds of the capital city of the Celestial Empire. It was the sum, in other words, of all Chinese knowledge.

  The book36 had been commissioned in 1700 by the Kangxi emperor – one of the earliest of the Qing emperors, and, with his reign of sixty-one years, the longest-serving in all Chinese history. It took its authors twenty-six years to complete, and when first published, having been printed with movable bronze type at the Peking Imperial Printing House, it reputedly contained 10,000 volumes and 170 million characters.

  The definition of volume was then somewhat different from our own – the word section or fascicle might be more appropriate. The edition Needham received, which was created a century and a half after the first (and which, because of its fragility, is now packed away in boxes in Needham’s archive), comprised very nearly 2,000 books: the edition currently at the Library of Congress in Washington sports almost 6,000. Also, the word anthology might describe the work most accurately – it is not alphabetical but topical, and it is essentially a collection of everything important that had ever been written down in Chinese. Its usefulness to Needham was paramount. His debt to Dr Zhu turned out, as he later readily admitted, to be incalculable.

  Once the books were in place and the rooms more or less in shape, a routine was soon established, as well as a commute. Joseph and Dorothy owned a house a little more than a mile away from the college, at No. 1 Owlstone Road. When Lu Gwei-djen returned from Paris in 1957 she would live a few yards away from them on the same street, at No. 28, conveniently for all purposes. The walk between home and college – or the drive; Needham loved driving, and at irrationally high speeds – was fantastically pretty: in springtime and in summer the half hour it took to cross the lawns of King’s College, to stroll under the chestnuts beside the Backs, to pass down along the Cam by way of Newnham Road, and, finally, to cut through the rabbit warren of Edwardian houses to Owlstone Road, presented as perfect a cross-section of Cambridge’s loveliness as any tourist might desire.

  Although Needham kept a vast amount of Chinese paraphernalia at home, most of the work on the great project was accomplished in his rooms at Caius. Day after day he and Dorothy left early each morning – if the weather was dry, going by one of several footpaths across Coe Fen; if it was drizzling, keeping to the streets and crossing the Cam by the Silver Street Bridge – then walking together first to Dorothy’s biochemistry department on Tennis Court Road. Then Joseph would finally press on alone along King’s Parade and to the porters’ lodge of Caius. If he was for some reason on his own, and the weather was fine, he rode his bicycle.

  He cut an impressive figure, at least in part because he was so tall and broad, built like a bear. He invariably wore a dark suit, pinstriped, double-breasted, rumpled. The collar of his shirt, freshly laundered, was nevertheless always disarranged; his tie was askew; and his shoes, though clean, were scuffed, the laces frequently broken and retied. He kept his brown tortoiseshell glasses well polished, however. He parted his thick hair on the right, and was careful always to have it well brushed, though it was usually just a little too long.

  There was a dusting of ash on his lap, but during the composing of the book he set a firm rule: he would take no cheroot or cigarette before noon. He was fiercely disciplined in this: as the morning wore on he would peer anxiously at the college clock – with one cylinder of tobacco already out on the desk, and his box of Swan Vestas at the ready – and the moment it struck twelve he would light up, and then smoke like industrial Pittsburgh for the rest of the day. He kept the cigarette in his mouth all the while, his head wreathed in ribbons of curling blue.

  Once in K-1 he sank into a brown study, and remained there, stolid and undisturbable, for hour upon Chinese hour. Only Wang Ling could interrupt his reverie, to pass him a paper, look up a reference, or translate one of the finer points that no dictionary or encyclopedia could settle. Once started each morning, Needham worked non-stop, often until long after dark.

  He employed neither a typist nor a secretary. He typed everything himself on one of his Royal typewriters – either a black portable, which he carried in its venerable case, covered with airline stickers; or a large Royal desk machine37 with an extra-wide carriage. He used only two fingers, and yet managed to type at a fantastic speed (as many two-finger typists mysteriously do). His typing was very accurate; his first script was always his final draft, and it was from these drafts that the Cambridge University Press prepared its galleys (these, by contrast, usually required many changes – edits that he often performed in his head, while lying awake in bed).

  He did not take kindly to interruption, and, though generally a polite and thoughtful man, could be crashingly rude if disturbed. Once when his old friend Julian Huxley, who had been the first director-general of UNESCO, telephoned from the porters’ lodge to announce that he had arrived for a visit, Needham said, with glacial courtesy, ‘I am frightfully busy. You come without an appointment, so I am afraid I cannot see you.’ Huxley promptly returned to London, his day entirely wasted.

  On another occasion Sir Ronald Fisher, an eminent geneticist, knocked on the door of K-1, opened it without waiting for a response, and was halfway in when Needham barked out ‘I’m frightfully busy’ and went on hammering away at the machine. Fisher tried to explain that he had come simply to say that yes, as Needham had asked at breakfast that morning, a pair of visitors from China could indeed make use of Fisher’s college rooms for the coming weekend. He raised his voice. No response. Then he shouted to Needham over the clattering din of the typewriter, ‘You asked me, and I say “Yes”.’ And then he left abruptly. Needham, despite having been granted a favour, never even bothered to look up.

  Needham working in K-1, the room in Caius College, Cambridge, that he occupied for almost seventy years. Later he also took the room next door, now occupied by the cosmologist Stephen Hawking.

  On one occasion he relented, and happily so, since the interruption proved of great benefit. A stranger telephoned, explaining that he had just arrived from France, and badly needed a reprint of a paper he had seen mentioned in Needham’s trilogy Chemical Embryology. Needham barked at him politely, telling him he had no such reprint and would he kindly not disturb him any further.

  But the man persisted, inviting Needham to lunch, pleading once again that he had come all the way from France. And so Needham, who was something of a trencherman, agreed. The man then described how making use of an obscure embryological point mentioned in the trilogy had completely transformed his egg-producing business in France. And then he did what he had really come to Cambridge for – he h
anded Needham a cheque for an enormous sum of money.

  Needham seldom dined in the college, preferring to work through the dinner hour and then go home late. Christopher Brooke, a prominent medievalist who was a junior don when Needham was beginning his work on China, recalls that on those few occasions when Needham did turn up in Hall he would forcefully quiz his dinnertime colleagues on matters that seemed relevant to his book, and would carefully jot the answers down on the backs of menu cards and on paper napkins. The younger men liked talking to him: they found him rum, not dangerous. And they knew how he worked, really worked, and that he was often exhausted as a result. Once he flopped down into one of the chairs at the high table right beside the young, nervous Brooke, declaring simply: ‘Make amusing conversation to me: I’m really very tired.’

  Wang Ling recounted a story about how preoccupied his boss became when he was in the middle of working non-stop:

  The Chinese have a proverb to describe a hard-working scholar reading books all the time, even reading while travelling on horseback. Needham travels by train, always buying a first-class ticket, not because of any snob value but because only the first class has empty compartments where he can spread his books and manuscripts around, jotting down notes… Even while travelling by car, while driving he always discussed some topic of his book. However, there was one occasion when he did not discuss the book. He was driving at top speed on our return journey from a meeting in Oxford. He was engrossed… [when] suddenly he noticed the passenger seat beside him was empty. As one would expect, a Chinese was too polite to ask him to stop the car in order to secure the latch on the door, which was not properly closed, so I had fallen out of the fast-moving car. Fortunately I landed on a pile of snow or else I would not live to tell the story. Joseph turned back to look for me and I got back in. He was upset beyond description – but I have survived to tell the tale. And the offending car-door was thereafter secured with a dog-chain.

  Despite Needham’s occasional air of autocratic disdain, people were eternally eager to help him, support him, and surround him with care. He employed a woman whom he called Auntie Violet to make him breakfast and tea: she worked for him, buttering the crumpets he liked to toast on his electric fire, until she was well over ninety. And once it was realized that even a Stakhanovite like Needham could be tempted to join others for afternoon tea, a variety of distinguished men and women, crumpet lovers and tea drinkers all, would stop by to dine informally with him, often memorably.

  One professor stopped in to talk about rain gauges – whereupon Needham discovered for him, quite accidentally, a reference to what turned out to be the first rain gauge ever made, in a book on mathematics in the Yuan dynasty. During a teatime conversation about sternpost rudders with a team of acknowledged experts on shipbuilding from London, Needham turned out to know far more about the subject than any of the specialists. They returned to the Maritime Museum in Greenwich chastened, rubbing their eyes in astonishment at both the marvels of ancient China and, in comparison with Needham, their own newly revealed ignorance. And a Russian scientist arrived for tea, and asked, just in passing, if Needham knew who had translated one of the Russian’s own books, published in Moscow, into English – whereupon Needham reached around and fished the very book out of his shelves. He looked at it and nodded, remarking that, yes, the title did sound familiar. Yes, he said again, after thinking for a few more moments – he himself had actually been the translator, when he was an undergraduate. But he doubted that he could repeat the feat: his Russian was not so good today – though his German, Greek, French, and Italian, and of course his Chinese, were still well-nigh impeccable.

  ∗

  But aside from such meetings as these, what exactly was Joseph Needham doing in his rooms? Just what was he trying to sift out from all the material he had gathered, and from all his memories? And, once he had it all, how exactly would he go about assembling all the building blocks into this massive, multivolume work?

  He decided initially to make a great historical list, a list of every mechanical invention and abstract idea – the building blocks of modern world civilization – that had been first conceived and made in China. If he could manage to establish a flawless catalogue of just what the Chinese had created first, of exactly which of the world’s ideas and concepts had actually originated in the Middle Kingdom, he would be on to something. If he could delve behind the unforgettable remark that Emperor Qianlong had made to the visiting Lord Macartney in 1792 – ‘We possess all things… I have no use for your country’s manufactures’ – if he could determine what exactly prompted Qianlong to make such a claim, then he would perhaps have the basis of a truly original and world-changing work of scholarship. But he needed evidence, and a great deal of it.

  Accordingly, he and Wang Ling spent the remaining months of 1946, and most of the next five years, searching for every invention and original idea that was mentioned in the ancient Chinese literature.

  Needham proceeded in a patient, methodical, ruthlessly efficient way. He was an extraordinarily well-organized man. He was, for a start, a copious and fanatically driven note taker and file maker. In the piles of boxes that remain today in his archives in Cambridge are dozens of green steel card indexes, most of them filled nearly to bursting, not with index cards bought by the quire from stationers but with menu cards from teahouses that he was forever cutting up in a process he called ‘knitting’ – snipping, slicing, and folding – which would drive mad those uninitiated few who might accompany him to the café for a cup of Typhoo and a toasted tea cake. He would sit there cutting, cutting, smoking, and cutting – and a day later the cards would all be stacked in their boxes, each one covered with details, in his almost perfect copperplate, about arcane creations from China’s distant past. On the reverse side would be a half-legible copy of Today’s Special Lunch or Today’s Fare for After noon Tea.

  And one by one, he and Wang began to find things. True, he had made discoveries while he was in China – the antiquity of the abacus, for example, and techniques of grafting plums. But buried among the papers and the documents he had assembled in Cambridge there was much more. He was able to note excitedly:

  What a cave of glittering treasures was opened up! My friends among the older generations of sinologists had thought that we should find nothing – but how wrong they were. One after another, extraordinary inventions and discoveries clearly appeared in Chinese literature, archaeological evidence or pictorial witness, often, indeed generally, long preceding the parallel, or adopted, inventions and discoveries of Europe. Whether it was the array of binomial coefficients, or the standard method of interconversion of rotary and longitudinal motion, or the first of all clockwork escapements, or the ploughshare of malleable cast iron, or the beginning of geo-botany and soil science, or cutaneous-visceral reflexes, or the finding of smallpox inoculation – wherever one looked, there was ‘first’ after ‘first’.

  Needham first found a geographer of the Song dynasty named Shen Gua, for instance, who, in a document firmly dated at AD 1088, described the technique of using a magnetized needle suspended from a length of silk to determine the direction of south – a full century before the first reference (in AD 1188) to the use of a magnetic compass anywhere else in the world. ‘I shall never forget the excitement which I experienced when I first read these words,’ Needham wrote later. ‘If any one text stimulated the writing of this book more than any other, this was it.’

  He then found that Chinese ironworkers experimenting in the sixth century BC had managed to make iron that was malleable and not brittle, and that farmers had fashioned a plough from this metal, and added a mould-board to it, thus making a plough that was a vast advance on the primitive scratching device known as an ard, which was used in Europe at the time.

  He uncovered old writings and drawings showing that the Chinese had invented breast-strap harnesses for horses in the third century bc, when Europeans still had their horses and oxen drag ploughs by the cruel and ineffi
cient means of a rope looped around their necks. The Europeans would continue to use neck ropes for at least a thousand years more.

  He found that Chinese emperors, goading their subjects with the familiar valediction ‘Do this, tremble, and obey!’, had built immense dams, irrigation projects, and canals (like the Grand Canal, which was started in the fifth century bc) hundreds of years before people in the waterlogged rest of the world (Mesopotamia excepted) thought they might be able to control their own rivers. Needham found documents showing that the Chinese created a tradition of subduing nature’s excesses while people in the West were simply lying back and cursing the inevitability of fate.

  The Chinese learned how to cast iron, for example, and to smelt it with coal. From the fourth century BC on, they were able to make long-lasting pots and pans, axes, chisels, saws, and awls – and a number of tall pagodas, some still standing today. In the seventh century after Christ an ironworker made a palace tower 300 feet high and weighing 1,300 tons, topped with a massive iron phoenix and covered with gold leaf. In the tenth century, when Chinese iron-making was unequalled, foundrymen working for the emperor in Hubei province in central China made him an enormous commemorative cast-iron lion, twenty feet high and weighing forty tons, which still stands as a memorial to a defeat of Tartar invaders.

  But the founding of cast iron marked only the start of China’s remarkable metallurgical progress. By the second century BC foundry workers were managing to produce a much more malleable and less brittle version of the metal, which today is called wrought iron, doing so by way of a process to which they gave the culinary term chao, since it involved ‘stir-frying’ the molten mass very slowly for hours at a time, to remove the excess carbon. Contemporary ironworkers would call the technique puddling. To further strengthen the puddled iron – which could be used by a blacksmith to make such things as stirrups and swords – some Chinese engineers of 2,000 years ago reintroduced a very carefully calibrated amount of carbon by hammering particles of it into the metal surface, producing a kind of crude steel.