Impressed by Flamsteed’s arguments, King Charles II founded the Royal Observatory at Greenwich in 1675 and named Flamsteed the first Astronomer Royal. In the official warrant of appointment, the king charged the twenty-nine-year-old Flamsteed with the task of “rectifying the tables of the motions of the heavens, and the places of the fixed stars, so as to find the so-much-desired longitude of places for perfecting the art of navigation.”
Given a building, a small house, a large title, and an insufficient income, Flamsteed set to work. His first problem was the inadequate instruments available for observation. Flamsteed had already learned to grind lenses and calibrate telescopes for his own use. He now turned his attention to creating accurate instruments for the new observatory. After several false starts, in the fall of 1689 Flamsteed unveiled the device that would allow him to create an accurate map of the stars: the seventeenth-century equivalent of the Hubble Space Telescope. He called it the “mural arc”: a finely calibrated instrument with a 140-degree arc that spanned the sky from the horizon to the polestar, and a seven-foot telescopic sight with convex lenses that bent the light and magnified the appearance of the stars. Flamsteed’s device was fifteen times more accurate than those of his predecessors and forty times more accurate than the naked eye. It was so powerful that it could measure the diameter of a coin the size of a quarter from more than a mile away.
For the next forty years, Flamsteed quarreled viciously with his scientific contemporaries and plotted the positions of the stars with unprecedented accuracy, taking 28,000 measurements and mapping 2,935 stars. He then created a star catalog that tripled the number of known stars.
Today, sailors still use nautical charts based on Flamsteed’s work. But Flamsteed did more than transform navigation; he set new standards for accuracy that shaped the course of astronomy. His star catalog was the standard reference for astronomers for decades; stars are still known by their “Flamsteed numbers.” NASA scientists used tools and techniques pioneered by Flamsteed to build the computer programs that guided the first spaceships to the moon.
A ship pilot calculates his position using a star chart.
PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA. 1750. Irritated by the widespread view that an angry God caused such wholly natural phenomena as thunder and lightning, citizen-scientist Benjamin Franklin published a proposal for an experiment to prove once and for all that lightning had nothing to do with God. Franklin had been experimenting with electricity for several years now and was convinced that lightning, one of nature’s most mysterious and deadly forces, was just a flash of electricity discharged from the clouds. He had every intention of proving it as soon as he had the opportunity.
Unfortunately, as a self-made businessman, statesman, inventor, author, and newspaper publisher, Franklin was a very busy man. He just couldn’t seem to find himself in the right place at the right time to conduct an experiment. . . .
STARS
Each night, stars, distant as they are, appear to rise and move in an arc across the sky above us as our planet spins on its axis. For thousands of years we have studied the stars and the planets, hoping that knowledge of the heavens will guide both our ships and our destiny. We have used the stars to navigate across seas and deserts. We have built monumental structures to track their movements through the skies, from Stonehenge to the giant astronomical instruments built in the eighteenth century by Maharaja Jai Singh of Jaipur. Ancient Chinese astronomers kept records of eclipses, novas, comets, and sunspots, which could be portents of a failure of the cosmic order. Arab astronomers created accurate star charts to allow Muslims to determine the direction of Mecca.
Today we know the stars are impossibly distant and unimaginably huge: infernos of hydrogen and helium, one hundred times bigger than the Earth. There are more than 200 billion stars in our galaxy alone. After the sun, the nearest star to Earth is more than 4.2 light-years away—24 trillion miles. The light from some of the most distant stars in our galaxy has taken more than 95,000 years to reach Earth.
STEALING GOD’S THUNDER
JUNE 15, 1752. PEOPLE STILL BELIEVE THUNDER and lightning are the acts of an angry God. Regrettably, Franklin still hasn’t found the time to conduct an experiment proving them wrong. Now he’s received a letter saying that a French man has beaten him to it by holding a forty-foot-tall iron rod in the path of a lightning strike.
“Tarnation!” he says, a deep frown creasing his forehead. “The fool is going to get himself killed.”
“Father,” says his son William, “a storm is approaching. Why don’t we do our experiment anyway, right now? The sky is growing darker. And a strong wind has come up.”
“All right, then, William,” Franklin says, dropping the letter and pulling his rotund torso up quickly from the chair. “This just may be our chance.”
Father and son quickly gather the materials they will need for the experiment: a silk kite with a metal wire attached to the top, a ball of twine, an iron key, and a ribbon. Then they hurry outside to the Franklin farm.
With thunder rumbling in the distance, Franklin and his son lay a piece of canvas on the ground and unpack their equipment. Working quickly, glancing alternately at the sky and then back at his work, Franklin attaches the key to the kite, ties an insulating silk ribbon to the kite string to protect his hand, and steps several yards away from his son.
Franklin’s lightning rod
With William holding the ball of twine at a distance, Franklin launches the kite into the air. The storm rumbles closer. Franklin scurries to where his son still stands beneath the ominous clouds.
“Come, quick! There’s going to be quite a deluge,” Franklin says, pulling William with him into the doorway of a cow shed. As they huddle close and wait, William looks down at his father’s hand holding the kite string and key.
“Are you sure you won’t be burned if the lightning comes down that string?” he asks, a worried look on his face.
“I am almost certain, son,” Franklin answers, smiling to reassure William.
“But then, how will we know there’s electricity in the sky?”
“If the storm clouds have an electrical charge, the kite string will draw it from the sky down to this key. And I think we’ll know it—somehow.”
Father and son raise their eyes to the sky again as the storm clouds open, dumping a heavy rain. The dirt beneath their feet quickly turns into a sea of mud.
William jumps involuntarily as a bolt of lightning streaks across the sky, followed by the loudest thunderclap yet. “Look!” he yells, pointing at a flash of light dangerously close to his father’s kite.
Franklin arches his neck, straining to see through the deluge.
Just then, lightning meets the wire at the top of the kite. Two pairs of eyes follow the invisible trail of the electrical charge down the kite string.
Sensing a change in the string’s temperature, Franklin touches his free hand to the key at its end. Instantly, electrical sparks arc across the back of his hand.
William gasps. Franklin lets out a hoot. “It is proven!” he says with a broad grin.
SCURVY
Navigation wasn’t the only problem for long-distance voyages in the Age of Sail.
Scurvy was a bigger bane of the sea than pirates, storms, or shipwreck. More than two million sailors died from scurvy between Columbus’s first voyage and the development of steamships in the nineteenth century. An oceangoing ship could lose half its crew or more to the disease known as the “gray killer”—and many did. With larger ships and longer voyages, the problem was getting worse.
Caused by a lack of vitamin C, scurvy attacks the body’s connective tissues. Symptoms included aches and pains, exhaustion, dark blotches and bruises, pale skin, loose teeth, bleeding gums, and breath that smelled like rotting meat. Left untreated, it led to a slow, agonizing death.
Working at a hospital for British sailors, Scottish surgeon James Lind was able to observe thousands of cases of scurvy and the conditions aboard ship that cau
sed it. In an early example of a clinical trial, he treated sailors with popular remedies, including vinegar, cider, seawater, and mercury paste. In 1753, he published a paper proving that drinking orange and lemon juice could cure scurvy. Citrus fruits, such as limes, became so common aboard British vessels that the sailors were referred to as “limeys.” Without knowing it, Lind had put vitamin C to work to bind the body together like glue—providing the key to long-distance sea travel in the Age of Sail.
The existence of the chemical compounds known as vitamins and their role in good health wasn’t discovered until 1912. Vitamin C was first identified in 1928.
Franklin was fascinated by unexplained natural phenomena: whirlwinds, waterspouts, storms, the Gulf Stream, and especially lightning and electricity. In his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, Franklin included reports of what he called the “mischief of thunder-gusts” and the devastation caused by lightning.
A galleon crew reaching for scurvy-fighting fruits
Electrical experiments were all the rage among educated Europeans in the 1740s. Introduced to electrical experiments at a friend’s house in 1747, Franklin began a series of groundbreaking experiments that would lead to his revolutionary, and dangerous, kite experiment. His proof that thunder and lightning were simply a variation of the static electricity experiments performed as parlor tricks, rather than the wrath of God, was not just a major scientific breakthrough. It was as great a shock to devout Christians as Darwin’s theory of evolution would be one hundred years later, and was greeted with equal resistance.
Franklin’s successful experiment was written up in 1767 as History and Present Status of Electricity. The author cited evidence that Franklin was insulated from the direct current and not in a conducting path, where he would have been in danger of electrocution as others had been when attempting the same feat.
Franklin himself wrote, “When rain has wet the kite twine so that it can conduct the electric fire freely, you will find it streams out plentifully from the key at the approach of your knuckle, and with this key a phial, or Leiden jar, may be charged . . . and therefore the sameness of the electrical matter with that of lightning completely demonstrated.”
Not content with a theoretical finding, Franklin found a practical application for the discovery that lightning was static electricity on an enormous scale: the lightning rod. Lightning rods use the same principle that allowed electricity to flow through the wet string of the kite: a sharp iron pole attached to the top of the building draws lightning to it and then diverts it to the ground through an attached wire. With the design virtually unchanged, the 260-year-old invention still protects buildings all over the world.
EBENEZER MUDGETT WASN’T THE only colonist to grow rich on New England’s abundant timber. The colonists used wood to build houses, boats, barrels, and carts; to fence in fields; and to burn as fuel. But it wasn’t the colonists’ need for wood that made men like Mudgett rich. All across New England, axmen, lumber merchants, and shipbuilders made their living by selling “green gold”—timber—to wood-starved England.
LIGHTNING
Beautiful, dramatic and dangerous, lightning strikes the earth about one hundred times every second. It kills approximately two thousand people each year and ignites wildfires that destroy hundreds of acres of forest and grassland.
When lightning strikes, its electrical energy turns into heat—five times hotter than the surface of the sun. This intense heat makes the air alongside the lightning channel expand explosively and contract as it cools, creating the sound waves we call thunder.
Dangerous as it is, some scientists think lightning provided the sparks of energy that made life on Earth possible.
AMERICANS PUSH BACK
APRIL 13, 1772. SOUTH WEARE, NEW HAMPSHIRE. It’s a busy day in Ebenezer Mudgett’s lumberyard. But then, every day’s a busy day in the lumberyard. Mudgett is a powerful timber magnate—one of the largest suppliers of timber to the British shipbuilding industry and a leader among the local mill owners.
County sheriff Benjamin Whiting rides into the lumberyard, accompanied by his deputy, John Quigly. One by one, Mudgett’s men stop working and watch the sheriff dismount. There’s a sense of menace in the way they hold their tools. The way they shift their weight. They know why he’s here. No one looks at the secluded corner of the lumberyard where a pile of logs marked with a plain white arrow lies hidden under a piece of canvas.
Whiting reads a warrant for Mudgett’s arrest for stealing Crown property: white pine trees claimed for the Royal Navy. Mudgett argues, to no avail. The two officers arrest him and take him away.
Later that day, Whiting releases Mudgett on his own undertaking, agreeing that the mill owner can bring his bail in the morning.
As the news of his arrest spreads, supporters flock to his house. Some offer to help pay his bail, but Mudgett isn’t worried about the bail. He wants revenge.
Shortly before dawn, Mudgett and his supporters meet outside the Pine Tree Inn, where Sheriff Whiting and his deputy have spent the night. The lumbermen’s faces are blackened with soot and dirt, and they carry freshly cut canes of wood. Mudgett bangs on the door of Whiting’s room, saying he has come with his bail. Before the angry Whiting can get dressed, the men burst into his room. The sheriff dives for his pistol, but he’s too slow. The mob grabs him and lashes him with their canes: one stroke for every tree the mill owners have been fined for.
Mudgett and his men have taken the first step to separating the American colonies from the burdens of British law. Others will soon follow their lead.
The white pines of New Hampshire and Maine were especially valuable because they grew large enough that a single trunk could make a ship’s mast, unlike European trees, which were smaller and had to be spliced together. Britain was anxious to control a resource that contributed to its naval supremacy. By the end of the seventeenth century, it was a crime to cut any white pine tree with a diameter of twenty-four inches or more without a royal license. Royal surveyors went through the forests, marking the trees as Crown property to be used for masts for the Royal Navy. Anyone who cut down marked trees would be fined five pounds per tree. The best wood in the American colonies was now off-limits to the men who lived there.
Detail of New Hampshire timber areas set aside for the use of the Royal Navy 1772.
For many years, the white pine laws were an irritant. In the years after the end of the French and Indian War, they became one more point of conflict in the growing resentment between the British and the colonists. Anti-British activists began to cut down the trees and use them for floorboards. In response, the British began to crack down on illegal use of Crown timber. In 1771, the deputy surveyor in New Hampshire ordered a search of the sawmills. His men found hundreds of large white pine trees marked with the Crown arrow in six sawmills and began criminal proceedings against the mill owners. Some paid the fines. Sheriff Whiting was ordered to arrest Ebenezer Mudgett, the leader of the recalcitrant mill owners, triggering what became known as the Pine Tree Riot.
The first, often forgotten act of active rebellion against Great Britain’s authority over the North American colonies, the Pine Tree Riot was the Boston Tea Party of the forests. Twenty months later, rebels in Boston would lash out against one of the hated new laws and destroy one million dollars’ worth of British tea, moving one step closer to a revolution that would inspire the spread of democracy throughout the world.
Throughout history, humans have fought one another ferociously for the rights to consume and control the world’s limited natural resources: furs, salt, gold, fishing grounds, grazing fields, and oil fields. Many believe the next large-scale conflicts may be fought over basic human necessities, such as drinkable water and farmable soil. In the meantime, mankind races to synthesize that which we can no longer find in the wild. In addition to creating energy from the wind, the sun, and the warmth of the earth, scientists are experimenting with projects as large as skyscraper farming and as small as providing sust
ainable access to clean water in African villages. If we can’t hunt it, fish it, unearth it, or grow it, we will make it.
Or die fighting for what remains.
In both the Pine Tree Riot and the Boston Tea Party, American colonists fought against what they perceived to be oppressive laws.
10
REVOLUTION
Colonial protests against the so-called “Intolerable Acts”, taxing tea, paper and other imports, were often violent.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY HAS COME AND GONE, AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY IS IN FULL SWING. THE 1700S HAVE ALREADY BROUGHT UNFORESEEN CHANGE: MANkIND HAS UNLEASHED TWO GREAT REVOLUTIONS THAT WILL TRANSFORM THE WORLD.
In North America, British colonists have risen up against tyranny, creating a powerful vision of liberty and democracy. In Britain, a handful of inspired inventors are using machines and newly harnessed sources of power to enable a few to do the work previously done by many.
Neither revolution is perfect. The American Revolution will be incomplete. Its creators will offer freedom to some, but not to all. In less than a century, unfinished business from America’s founding will plunge the new country into its bloodiest war. And the Industrial Revolution is, for now, bringing more suffering than freedom, destroying one way of life to create another. Over the next two centuries, humans will fight again and again to win the liberties promised by the twin revolutions: on the streets of Paris and in the tropical heat of Haiti, on picket lines and in protest marches, with the sword and with the ballot.
But ultimately, democracy and industrialization will prevail—and together they will shape the character not only of the newly created United States but of the modern world.
Mankind Page 28
