Mankind
Page 32
Suddenly, the plane rises into the air, soaring over Wilbur’s head! Their first flight!
It lasts only twelve seconds and covers just 120 feet. But the persistent Wrights will fly four more times today—eventually covering 852 feet in fifty-nine seconds before a gust of wind catches the engine- propelled glider and sends it rolling, damaging the small craft.
Their airplane may be damaged, but the Wright brothers’ sense of elation is not. After years of effort they’ve succeeded at something no one has done before: heavier-than-air flight. Suddenly, the sky is the limit.
Leonardo da Vinci made the first systematic study of flight in the 1480s. He left 160 pages of sketches of flying machines and wing mechanisms.
HUMAN BEINGS HAVE ALWAYS yearned for flight. Early on, we studied the earth’s winged creatures, effortlessly riding the wind, for clues on how to realize our dream.
In 400 BCE the Chinese applied their understanding of wind and aerodynamics to invent the kite. Its design was a forerunner to manned balloons and gliders.
In the ninth century, Islamic scientist Abbas Ibn Firnas applied his observations of birds in the first known hang-glider flight.
Leonardo da Vinci made a serious study of flight in the 1480s. In his notebooks, da Vinci left insights and hundreds of scaled drawings that led to the modern helicopter.
In 1783, as the French court and a crowd of thousands looked on, Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier demonstrated their hot-air balloon. Filled with smoke from a blazing fire, the silk balloon sailed into the skies above Paris. It carried its passengers—a sheep, a rooster, and a duck—almost two miles before coming safely to earth.
The race to fly in a machine weighing more than air came to an end with the Wright brothers’ public experiments of 1908 and 1909. In their early experiments, Orville and Wilbur retraced the history of manned flight—studying the aerodynamics of kites, balloons, and gliders—before christening their 605-pound craft the Flyer and launching it in Kitty Hawk.
The Wright brothers’ success inspired a generation of experimentation in Europe and America. The French flew airplanes designed by Louis Blériot, the Farman brothers, and Léon Levavas-seur that would soon place them at the forefront of aviation. In fact, French airplane design advanced so quickly that planes built in 1913 had more in common with those that would be produced thirty and forty years later than they did with the plane the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk.
In the years between the two world wars, airplanes became increasingly visible. Charles Lindbergh’s Atlantic flight from New York to Paris in 1927 and the round of record flights that followed his in the 1930s caught the world’s imagination. Races, records, and stunts gave flight an air of glamour.
The number of commercial passengers on airlines more than doubled between 1932 and 1937
During World War II, aviators dropped both bombs and propaganda over enemy territory.
Airplanes added new horror to warfare and created a new breed of war hero. Sophisticated military aircraft flown by the Allied and Axis powers in World War II carried payloads of bombs that brought Europe’s oldest cities to ruin—and wrought devastation beyond mankind’s worst nightmares to two heavily populated industrial centers in Japan.
More than any other invention of the time, the airplane separated the past from the future. Planes overturned existing expectations about the speed and cost of long-distance transportation, rapidly bypassing the train and the steamship for commercial uses and successfully competing with the car well into the 1930s. The Wright brothers’ basic one-man aircraft design eventually gave birth to jumbo jets with seating for hundreds.
Just forty-four years after the Wright brothers’ first flight, Chuck Yeager flew faster than the speed of sound. Following Yeager’s feat of advanced engineering and physics, we fulfilled one of our oldest dreams: flying to the moon. Today unmanned rockets are on their way to distant planets. Our hope is that these robotic extensions of us will bring back images and artifacts that may reveal clues to our own origins in the Big Bang.
Henry Ford with a Model-T in 1921 •
A replica of Cugnot’s steam-powered gun carriage.
THE FIRST AUTOMOBILES
From the invention of the first wheeled carts in the third millennium BCE to today’s hybrid automobiles, humans have always looked for better ways to travel over land.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, engineers and inventors began playing with the idea of a horseless carriage, inspired by the steam engines of the Industrial Revolution. French engineer Nicholas-Joseph Cugnot created the first successful motorized vehicle in 1769: a three-wheeled gun carriage, powered by a two-cylinder steam engine mounted on the single front wheel. It traveled three miles an hour and could pull up to five tons. It had one major flaw—no braking system. With no brakes it’s not surprising that Cugnot’s car was not only the first automobile, but the first automobile to have an accident.
Cugnot’s car accident didn’t deter inventors. Experiments with steam vehicles continued into the 1830s, when the steam locomotive overtook the steam car.
It would be another fifty years before Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler created the first practical internal combustion engines and put the search for a motorized vehicle back on the road in 1885. The first automobiles were luxury items. Literally only one American in a million could afford one. The economic gap between car-haves and car-have-nots was so enormous that future president Woodrow Wilson claimed, “Nothing has spread socialistic feeling in this country more than the use of automobiles. . . . They are a picture of [the] arrogance of wealth.”
Ford’s first ad campaign was practically a call to revolution: “Even You Can Afford a Ford.”
5th century BCE funerary cart
The second industrial revolution that began in America spread more quickly than the first—and farther. Halfway across the world, Japan moved from the medieval world to the modern world in a single, carefully orchestrated leap.
The Japanese samurais that ruled Japan from the twelfth century through the Meiji Restoration of 1868 were the last survivors of the ancient warrior elites. Often compared to Europe’s medieval knights, the ideal samurai was bound by an unwritten code that combined Confucian beliefs about honor and bravery with the Japanese tradition of absolute loyalty. In fact, the word samurai means “one who serves.”
Under the Tokugawa shogunate, members of the samurai class found themselves in the complicated position of having no more battles to fight, even though they remained under strict government orders to maintain their warrior traditions. Some were actively involved in ruling in the provinces. Others became civil servants or took up trades. Many more, especially in the large cities, were rendered idle, and struggled to live on inadequate stipends.
THE SOUL OF THE SAMURAI
The samurai were the only class of Japanese who were allowed to wear swords in public. The two swords thrust through the belt, the long katana and the short wakizashi, were a samurai’s most treasured possessions. Known as the “soul of the samurai,” the swords were his badge of office and the symbol of his honor.
Forged from steel by master swordsmiths who were revered as artists, the katana was the sharpest weapon on the planet, able to cut through armor without bending or breaking.
Creating a sword was seen as an almost magical process, shrouded in ritual. Before the forging, the swordsmith and his assistant would purify themselves in mind and body through a combination of prayer and abstinence from meat and sexual activity. A Shinto priest would purify the forge. During the actual forging, the smith would further purify himself with Shinto cold-water ablutions.
Samurai swords were made using methods developed in the sixth and seventh centuries CE. Each sword combined two grades of steel: an outer, harder jacket wrapped around a somewhat softer inner core. Both layers were repeatedly folded and hammered before the inner core was inserted into the outer shell. Then the composite metal was heated and hammered out to be sure the
re was no air or dirt trapped between the two layers of steel. Covered with clay, the heated blade was plunged into water. Differing thicknesses of clay allowed the blade’s outer edge to cool more quickly, creating hardened steel that could be ground to razor thinness. The more thickly coated back edge remained relatively pliable. The result was a blade with a hard cutting edge, and a back edge and inner core that were more flexible and able to absorb shocks.
The final step was polishing the blade—a process that took up to three weeks.
YATARO IWASAKI
TOKYO. 1862. TWENTY-SEVEN-YEAR-OLD YATARO Iwasaki, a low-ranking samurai from a poor Japanese village, walks through the bustling city streets. He is about to do the unthinkable.
He is dressed like every other samurai, in the wide, pleated pants and sleeveless jacket required by law for all samurais. Also in keeping with the law, the front of his head is shaved, and the hair at the back is pulled up into the topknot that is the special mark of the samurai. Originally used to hold a helmet steady during battle, it’s the ultimate symbol of samurai authority. Cutting it off is a traditional sign of shameful defeat.
As far as Iwasaki is concerned, the topknot is a chain holding him to the past.
He walks into a barber’s shop. He looks in the mirror one last time, takes a deep breath, then gives a decisive nod. The barber opens a straight-edged razor. Iwasaki’s topknot drops to the floor.
Iwasaki entered the shop a samurai. He exits a pioneer, freed from a tradition rooted in an earlier age.
STEEL
The traditional samurai sword and Mitsubishi’s shipping fleet had one thing in common: high quality steel.
Steel is an alloy of iron and carbon with a very low carbon content. It is cheap, durable, and strong in proportion to its weight. It can be poured into almost any shape, pulled into wire, and rolled flat into sheets.
Before the Industrial Revolution, high-quality steel was expensive because, compared to iron, it required an enormous amount of labor and fuel to create. It was used for small objects that had a high value for their weight, especially razors, surgical tools, and swords. The innovators of the Industrial Revolution developed new processes that enabled manufacturers to make more steel in larger quantities: the crucible method and puddled steel.
The real leap forward in steel manufacturing came in the 1850s, when Henry Bessemer invented a new process for refining iron. Instead of using heat, the Bessemer converter blew air through the molten metal to remove carbon impurities. The naturally occurring heat given off by the process of oxidation kept the iron liquid. The new Bessemer process cut the time needed to purify three to five tons of metal from twenty-four hours to between ten and twenty minutes. The savings in labor and fuel made mass steel production affordable for the first time.
Manufacturing Bessemer Steel, 1914-1918
The ability to make large quantities of steel changed the face of industry and construction. Miles of steel cable supported suspension bridges around the world. Steel sheets were transformed into ocean liners and steam boilers. Steel beams made an entirely new kind of building possible: the skyscraper.
Today we use more than eight hundred million tons of steel each year, from pins that hold broken bones together to the rocket booster that launched the space shuttles. Ntinety-three percent of the metal we use each year is steel.
The samurai were officially abolished as a class under the Meiji Restoration in a series of measures that began in 1871, when all samurais were required to cut off their topknots, and ended with the Haitōrei Edict of March 1876, which took away the samurais’ right to carry swords.
The last gasp of the samurai came with the great Satsuma Rebellion of 1877, which pitted the government’s new conscript army and the latest weapons against traditionally armed samurai. Many of the rebels believed it was better to die using the traditional weapons of the samurai than to live using modern ones. Not surprisingly, the samurai rebels were defeated.
THE OTHER MAKERS OF THE MODERN WORLD
Like the Wright brothers and Henry Ford, some of the inventors and industrialists who helped make the modern world saw their names transformed into trademarked symbols of modernity: brand names so common we’ve almost forgotten that each was once the name of a man with a dream. Birdseye. Goodyear. Singer. Levi Strauss. Westinghouse. Some have achieved hero status: Alexander Graham Bell, Eli Whitney, Thomas Alva Edison, and John Deere.
Other important innovators are now almost forgotten:
•In 1907, Belgian immigrant LEO HENDRIK BAEKELAND developed the first true plastic, which he called Bakelite. Originally used for electrical insulators and billiard balls, easy-to-make Bakelite was as essential to the second industrial revolution as steel. It was inexpensive, would not catch fire or melt, did not conduct electricity, and could be molded into an infinite variety of shapes. Bakelite was used to make everything from toasters and washing machines to subway tracks and automobile ignition systems.
•German immigrant OTTMAR MERGENTHALER invented automatic typesetting in 1886. His Linotype machine was the greatest advance in printing since Gutenberg invented movable type. The new ease in typesetting created an explosion of printed books, magazines, and newspapers, followed by a sharp increase in literacy as the printed word became affordable to the man on the street. Thomas Edison called it the eighth wonder of the world.
•ELISHA OTIS designed the elevator brake in 1853, making practical the tall buildings that completely changed the landscape of the modern city.
•Artist WILLIAM ROSENTHAL and his wife, Ida, invented the modern bra in the early 1920s. Freed from the restrictions of corsetry, women could move and breathe more freely. A simple change in undergarments was almost as important as the vote in terms of giving women more freedom.
•Engineer WILLIAM STANLEY invented the electrical transformer in 1886. The transformer increases the power of an electrical current so it can travel long distances over a wire and then decreases it to the level needed to run household appliances and lights. The Stanley transformer was critical in the development of the modern electrical grid.
BY 1874, YATARO IWASAKI WAS a modern, self-made Japanese man. At twenty-seven, he had gotten a new look—now he had a new investment: thirteen steamships, which he purchased from his government at a cut-rate price.
In 1870, Iwasaki had established a shipping company, called Mitsubishi (from mitsu, meaning “three,” and hishi, meaning “water chestnuts,” or “diamonds”; in Japanese, water chestnuts were often used to represent diamonds, and the Iwasaki family crest was made up of three diamonds—it is no surprise that the Mitsubishi logo also has three diamonds). His company began to grow steadily.
His big break came in 1874, when Iwasaki volunteered his ships to deliver troops and supplies for the Japanese government’s Taiwan Expedition, Japan’s first modern military expedition. Mitsubishi ships made twenty-four round-trips to Taiwan that summer, carrying men, rice, and munitions. In return, the government sold Mitsubishi thirteen steamships at a low price and gave the company the contract for carrying the mail. Under Iwasaki’s leadership, Mitsubishi became the largest shipping company in Japan.
mannequin in an Eva bra ca.1925
Ottmar Mergenthaler
bakelite radio, late 1940s
early model linotype typesetter ca 1915
advertisment for Otis Electric Elevator, 1891
GOODYEAR TRANSFORMS RUBBER
IN A CRAWPED KITCHEN ON THE FOURTH FLOOR OF a filthy New York apartment building, penniless Charles Goodyear experiments with a sticky, almost-black gum derived from the rubber trees of the Amazon rainforest. Goodyear has been experimenting with this substance for ten years, mixing natural rubber with a vast range of chemicals.
The maverick inventor has no training in chemistry, but he does have a clear vision of how rubber could transform peoples’ lives. For years he has pursued his obsession with converting raw rubber to practical use. Never staying in one place for long, sometimes landing in debtor’s pr
ison, Goodyear has been brewing up smelly experiments in the kitchens and attics of small apartments and cottages from Pennsylvania to Connecticut to Massachusetts.
He’s added different chemicals to the raw latex. He’s heated it. He’s cooled it. But every time he thought he had the formula right, summer proved him wrong, melting each year’s crop of rubber-impregnated products.
And yet, Goodyear clearly possesses the two essential qualities of a successful inventor: an unflagging belief in his vision, and an ability to adapt and learn from his mistakes.
Now, in his New York apartment, this self-taught chemist thinks he may have found the magic formula. Marrying intuition with his years of trial and error, he decides to try adding a new combination of chemicals to his latex—with a twist: this time, Goodyear will add sulfur plus magnesium oxide and cook them over intense heat.
At first, Goodyear fears he has failed again. He looks more closely and finds that instead of melting like molasses, the rubber chars, and a dry, springy, brown rim forms around the edge.
Charles Goodyear has just discovered how to transform raw rubber into one of the most valuable commodities of the industrial age.
Goodyear names his newfound process “vulcanization,” after Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and forges. Soon, Goodyear’s “vulcanized rubber”—pliable and heat resistant—will have a myriad of applications in the newly industrialized world.
Before long, under his younger brother Yano-suke’s direction, Mitsubishi began to diversify. Over the years, Mitsubishi bought coal and copper mines, railroads, insurance companies, and more.