All these diseases can now be prevented by vaccination:
Anthrax; Diphtheria; Haemophilus Influenzae Type B (Hib); Hepatitis A; Hepatitis B; Human Papillomavirus (HPV); Influenza; Japanese Encephalitis; Lyme Disease; Measles; Meningococcal Disease; Mumps; Pertussis (Whooping Cough); Pneumococcal Disease; Polio; Rabies; Rotavirus; Rubella; Shingles (Herpes Zoster); Smallpox; Tetanus; Tuberculosis; Typhoid Fever; Varicella (Chickenpox)
[1] Inoculation means deliberate exposure to the disease. Vaccination means deliberate exposure to a harmless version of the disease. Immunisation is when this process is applied to a group.
[2] The word ‘vaccination’ comes from the Latin word for cow, vacca.
[3] Herd immunity only works for diseases that are contagious. For diseases like tetanus, which is typically contracted when a wound comes into contact with contaminated soil, herd immunity offers no protection.
#16 The Telephone
In 1876, the Western Union Telegraph Company were deliberating on whether or not to take up Alexander Graham Bell’s brand new invention. They were not very optimistic. ‘This “telephone” has too many shortcomings,’ an internal memo said, ‘to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us.’ US President Rutherford B. Hayes was only a little more enthusiastic after making the first phone call from the White House, commenting drily: ‘An amazing invention – but who would ever want to use one?’
Of course, it’s incredibly easy to laugh at their lack of foresight now, with the number of users of mobile phones alone hitting 5 billion in 2010. But back in the 1870s it wasn’t so easy to see just why many people would want to use a telephone. By that time, the world was very up-to-speed, or so they thought, with instant communication. Telegraph wires were buzzing continuously with messages that seemed to deal instantly with every need from a business communication to a bit of personal news. Telegrams were brief, to the point and what’s more provided a complete record of the message. The telegraph was reliable, professional and discreet. What could anyone want with a few snatched words, unrecorded chatter? The real demand in the 1870s was for a way of getting extra bandwidth, a way of sending multiple wires along the same cable so that telegraph traffic could be increased without laying thousands of miles of duplicate cables.[1]
This was the problem American electrical engineer Elisha Gray was working on when he came up with an idea for transmitting speech via electric cables. His idea was to use the effect of speech’s varying sound vibrations on a liquid to vary electrical resistance and so create an electrical signal that reflected the pattern of the speech. The variations of that electrical signal could then be used to recreate the speech at the other end of the line.
Gray wasn’t the first to think of the idea of electrical speech transmission. A young German inventor, John Philipp Reis, had created just such a device in 1860, which he called a ‘telephon’. Thomas Edison, who had an axe to grind, later acknowledged that Reis had invented the first telephone, but claimed that it only transmitted music, not the fine detail of speech.[2] Of course, as with so many groundbreaking inventions, Reis could not get anyone in Germany interested, and only a few when his professor demonstrated it in New York in 1872. Maybe Gray, or maybe Alexander Graham Bell, the young Scotsman who arrived in Boston in 1871, both heard of, or even caught sight of, Reis’s device. Maybe Bell also caught sight of Gray’s patent application in the patent office, as author Seth Shulman claims. Whatever the truth – and there were powerful legal and financial reasons for bending the truth – Bell is generally credited with the invention of the phone.
Recorded in Bell’s notebook is a now-famous entry for 10 March 1876, the day when Bell made the world’s first phone call, to Thomas Watson, the electrical engineer helping him with his experiments. Watson was in another room in Bell’s Boston house, and the call was brief, with Bell saying merely: ‘Mr Watson, come here. I want to see you.’ A modest but historic start.
Judging from the Western Union’s first response, Bell’s telephone might have been forgotten just as quickly as Reis’s. But Bell had wealthier connections, and he was also joined in the promotion of the new device by Edison, who made the telephone much more practical by replacing the liquid transmitter of Gray and Bell with a solid carbon transmitter.
Despite the gloomy predictions, people were instantly excited by the magic of the telephone. The idea of talking directly to someone across the city, or even in another city, seemed miraculous. Of course there were teething problems; the cumbersome first telephones were not like the neat little devices of today, and the sound quality was a little strained. But that didn’t kill the thrill of hearing someone’s voice from afar, and knowing that whatever you said could be heard instantaneously many miles away.
Within a couple of years, there were well over 100,000 phone users in the USA alone, and over 3 million by the turn of the century. Since then, the phone has gone from strength to strength. By 1950, by far the majority of people in developed countries had a phone, and half a century later, with the development of mobile phones, which obviated the need for extensive cabling and even a fixed address, telephone communication had swelled to include pretty much everybody in the world.
At first, the thrill of the phone was just a novelty. Yet it was quite some novelty. The coming of the train half a century earlier had astonished and frightened people in almost equal measure as it whisked passengers in a few hours between cities which for all of history had been a week or more’s hard riding apart. Yet it was still physical and visible. You could see trains. You could touch them and examine the mighty pistons and cylinders that gave the locomotive its vast horsepower. But the telephone took you into the realm of the invisible. And communication by phone wasn’t just fast; it was instant. The fact that your voice was recreated far away even as you spoke must have, for those experiencing it for the first time, created the same amazement that we’d experience now were someone to suddenly teleport us to another planet. That invisibility, that instantaneousness and that spreading of your personality across the world, must have made people feel that they really were entering a new age, an age of marvels like none before. In retrospect, the invention of the telephone does indeed mark the dawn of the modern age, the age of telecommunications.
Very soon, though, the telephone proved to be much more than just a marvellous new toy. Surprisingly quickly, it became a familiar and indispensable part of everyday life. It changed living patterns, too, forever. The impact was dramatic in once-isolated rural areas. Farmers and their families living on remote farms were no longer cut off from the world as they had been since time immemorial. They could call and chat to neighbours, order things without a long trip into town, call the vet or doctor in an emergency. The world must have seemed a friendlier, more secure place.
In town, too, though they no longer wrote the wonderfully crafted letters of the Victorian age, people could chat easily, briefly and in a more relaxed fashion. They could communicate with their friends, relatives and even lovers as never before. And, just as in the country, the phone must have made cities seem friendlier, more relaxed, more cohesive places. Migrants to the city, students off to university were no longer out of touch altogether, but could ring home to stave off homesickness or reassure worried mothers. And those waiting at home for someone late back from work or a trip no longer had to worry themselves sick, but receive a quick call.
There is no doubt that the telephone has shrunk the world, and made it a more comfortable, secure place (even if the news on the telephone is bad). People are no longer restricted to talking to people in their own close neighbourhood or in their place of work – but can conduct business, chat with friends, arrange meetings and so much more, with people across the city, across the country, across the world. The advent of the mobile phone has taken it one step further. It is so easy to be in touch with people, so easy to know where they are, what they are doing, and for humans who are essentially social animals this is
immensely important – it may be the one thing which has made the move from small communities to vast cities not just bearable but even exciting and fruitful.
It is possible that the advent of the phone has hastened the break-up of traditional communities. It’s so easy to chat to your friends; why talk to your neighbours? And maybe it has ghettoised social groups and made them less mixed. The sitcom cliché of the teenage daughter speaking on the phone[3] symbolised some of these new divisions. And of course there are the misanthropes like Ambrose Bierce, who defined a telephone so:
Telephone, n. An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.
Or those like Mark Twain who resent the phone’s power to invade one’s privacy, as the punch line to this Christmas greeting from 1890, just fourteen years after the phone’s invention, makes so bitingly clear:
It is my heart-warmed and world-embracing Christmas hope and aspiration that all of us, the high, the low, the rich, the poor, the admired, the despised, the loved, the hated, the civilized, the savage (every man and brother of us all throughout the whole earth), may eventually be gathered together in a heaven of everlasting rest and peace and bliss, except the inventor of the telephone.
But for all the Twains who want to cut us off, there are millions if not billions who cherish the miracle of being able to make contact with friends and family instantly, for a good laugh, sound advice or a word of comfort in times of trouble; the convenience of arranging a holiday, booking theatre tickets, complaining about poor service; and the absolute necessity of getting instant help when there’s been a terrible accident or crime, or a child is sick in the night. And I suspect that those tragic victims of the 9/11 attacks who called their loved ones, so poignantly, in their final moments would have no doubt of the phone’s huge worth.
[1] The astonishing take-up of emails when they launched in the 1990s shows that this assessment wasn’t actually so wide of the mark.
[2] Apparently, documents in London’s Science Museum show that engineers from the Standard Telephones and Cables (STC) company conducted tests based on Reis’s design in 1947, and found it could actually transmit speech quite well. They kept their findings quiet to avoid upsetting STC’s negotiations at the time with the Bell Telephone Company created by Alexander Graham Bell, who is usually credited with inventing the telephone.
[3] ‘Many a man wishes he were strong enough to tear a telephone book in half – especially if he has a teenage daughter.’ – Canadian violinist Guy Lombardo
#15 Zero
Until quite recently, zero was not much thought of in the history of ideas. It is quite literally nothing and so doesn’t draw attention to itself. It’s almost asking to be ignored. ‘Nothing will come of nothing’, Shakespeare’s King Lear warns his taciturn daughter, Cordelia. Moreover, zero seems to be so self-evident, as obvious as 1, 2, 3 and any other number, that it hardly qualifies as an idea. In fact, it’s very far from obvious. Its discovery was slow and painful and science historians have just begun to acknowledge what a crucial breakthrough the finding of zero was.
When numbers were first developed in the ancient world, there was no need for zero. People needed numbers to know how many cattle they had, or how many bags of grain they owed to the tax collector. They didn’t need a number to know they hadn’t got any cattle and that they didn’t have to pay any tax. And yet there is a problem with a number system that doesn’t have zero.
Nowadays, we use zero in two ways. One is as the number zero: the number nothing or nought, the number exactly half way between –1 and +1. The other is as a ‘place-holder’. It’s the zero we put on the end of a number to indicate whether it’s a ten, a hundred, a thousand or so on; it’s how you tell the difference between 10, 100 and 1,000. Our system is called a base ten system, since the steps are marked in multiples of ten, and the number of zeros marks the number of multiples of ten in the absence of other digits. It was as a place-holder that zero made its first tentative appearance.
The Egyptians and Greeks didn’t have a place holder. The Egyptians had different symbols for single digits (a vertical line), multiples of ten (an inverted U sign) and multiples of one hundred (a spiral). This was cumbersome even for quite small numbers. 999, for instance, would need 27 symbols – 9 spirals, 9 Us and 9 lines. The Greeks were marginally slicker, since they used different letters for each multiple, rather than simply repeating them. But this was still quite cumbersome and there was a limit to the biggest number they could have.[1] Moreover, it was hard doing arithmetic with them.
The Babylonians used a number system that worked, in some ways, like an abacus, making calculations easier. But instead of being based on ten like our numbers, their system was based on 60, which means the numbers went in multiples of 60. Initially, they could only tell which multiple it was – whether it was, say, 1, 60, or 3,600 – by the context, since they were all indicated by the same single mark. Then they started adding little snicks to indicate which it was – in other words, place-holders.
It seems strange then that the Greeks, with all their mathematical skills, didn’t adopt the zero. In his book Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea, Charles Seife argues that the whole idea of zero was anathema to the Greeks because it indicated both the void and the infinite – which contradicted their world view in which the Earth, the planets and the stars are held together in near concentric circles, like the layers of an onion. ‘The infinite and the void had powers that frightened the Greeks’, claims Seife. ‘The infinite threatened to make all motion impossible, while the void threatened to smash the nutshell universe into a thousand flinders.’ Yet there was a more basic problem with zero. It would have upset the arithmetic logic which the Greek mathematicians were so brilliantly constructing.[2]
Add any number to itself enough times, Archimedes reasoned, for instance, and it will exceed any other number. That’s not so with zero. Similarly, if you multiply one number by another, you only have to reverse the process to get back to the originals. So 6 times 3 = 18 and 18 divided by 3 = 6. But zero throws this out too. 6 times 0 = 0, yet 0 divided by 6 is not 6, it is 0. And that’s just the beginning of the problems with zero. It seems to imply that the whole logic of arithmetic is flawed. No wonder the Greeks chose to ignore it.
In India, however, they had no such problems, because, after working with the Greek numbering system, they switched to a system that was like that of the Babylonians, only based on the Greek 10 not the Babylonian 60. It’s not clear exactly when it first appeared, but by the seventh century, if not earlier, the Indians were using a dot as a place holder, so 10 would be written ‘1.’ and 100, ‘1..’. What was good about this system was that it allowed the Indians to make calculations very rapidly, in the same way in which we are taught to multiply and divide things at school.
It also freed the Indians to see numbers in abstract arithmetic terms rather than the geometric terms which the Greeks did. The Greeks would have had trouble taking 3 acres from a 2-acre field because that made no sense; but the Indian mathematicians were comfortable taking 3 from 2 and getting –1. With negative numbers in place, zero as a number was a logical arrival, slotting in between –1 and +1. Its earliest known appearance is in the astronomical treatise the Brahmasphutasiddhanta (The Opening of the Universe), written in the year 628 AD by one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the ancient world, Brahmagupta,[3] and it is he who is sometimes known as the Father of Zero. Brahmagupta noted some key properties of zero, such as: ‘When zero is added to a number or subtracted from a number, the number remains unchanged; and a number multiplied by zero becomes zero.’
The Indian numbers, with their base ten and their zero place-holder, were so supple and effective for calculations that they were adopted across the Islamic empire after they were championed in Baghdad by al-Khwarizmi and al-Kindi in the ninth century. Fibonacci, also known as Leonardo of Pisa, promoted the system in Europe in his book Liber Abaci (the Book of the A
bacus or Calculation), but it didn’t come into widespread use here until the invention of printing in the fifteenth century.
It now seems so simple and obvious that we cannot imagine counting or calculating any other way, yet it was a remarkable step forward. The great eighteenth-century French mathematician Pierre Laplace wrote:
It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by the means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position, as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit, but its very simplicity, the great ease which it has lent to all computations, puts our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions, and we shall appreciate the grandeur of this achievement when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest minds produced by antiquity.
By Laplace’s time both 0 the number and 0 the place-holder were absolutely central to mathematics. None of the great achievements of mathematics would have been possible without it. And yet the logical problems of zero the number had not yet been resolved. It still embodied contradictions which threatened the amazing new mathematics of calculus, contradictions such as dividing by zero which mathematicians had to ignore, seeing only that calculus worked even if it was at heart illogical.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 21
