Ikigai Daily
Menu
WonderArt fact

Chinese porcelain was prized in Europe for centuries before anyone there could make it, which is why English still calls fine tableware 'china'. The secret was cracked in Saxony in 1708 by Johann Friedrich Böttger, a young alchemist held captive to make gold, working with the scientist Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus.

History of ceramics (porcelain)

ArtHistoryTechnology

The story behind the card

Böttger had boasted that he could turn base metal into gold, so Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland, kept him under guard from 1701 and set him to work. The breakthrough was shared. Tschirnhaus had long experimented with local clays and minerals, including kaolin, the white clay that is the key to true hard porcelain, but he died suddenly in October 1708. Böttger, apparently working from his notes, told the king within a week that he could make porcelain. Production began at the Albrechtsburg castle in Meissen in 1710, where the secret of this 'white gold' could be guarded from rival courts.

Türkçe oku
Çin porseleni, Avrupa'da kimse yapamadığı için yüzyıllarca çok değerliydi; İngilizcede kaliteli sofra takımına hâlâ “china” denmesi bundandır. Sır 1708'de Saksonya'da çözüldü: Altın yapsın diye tutsak edilen simyacı Johann Friedrich Böttger, bilgin Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus'la birlikte Avrupa'nın ilk porselenini yaptı.

Böttger, sıradan metali altına çevirebileceğini iddia etmişti; bu yüzden Saksonya Prensi ve Lehistan Kralı Güçlü August onu 1701'den itibaren gözetim altında tutup çalıştırdı. Buluş ortak bir emeğin ürünüydü. Tschirnhaus uzun süredir yerel kil ve minerallerle, bu arada gerçek sert porselenin temel maddesi olan beyaz kil, yani kaolinle deneyler yapıyordu; ama Ekim 1708'de ansızın öldü. Onun notlarından yararlandığı anlaşılan Böttger, bir hafta içinde krala porselen yapabileceğini bildirdi. Üretim 1710'da, “beyaz altın” denen bu malzemenin sırrını rakip saraylardan saklamak için Meissen'deki Albrechtsburg Şatosu'nda başladı.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Porcelain
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

WonderArt

The Statue of Liberty was the shiny reddish-brown of new copper when it was unveiled in 1886. Its famous green is a patina, a thin crust that formed over about thirty years as the copper reacted with air and moisture.

The statue was designed by the French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi as a gift from the people of France to the United States, and it stands on an iron framework designed by Gustave Eiffel. Its skin is made of copper sheets only about 2.4 millimetres thick, roughly two pennies placed together, hammered into shape by hand. As the copper reacted with rain, sea air and city smoke, it grew a green layer of copper salts. According to the US National Park Service, it took about thirty years for the whole statue to turn green. The patina is not damage: it seals the surface and protects the copper beneath from further corrosion.

Metallurgy (Statue of Liberty)Read card
WonderArt

The oldest surviving photograph taken with a camera is a blurry view of rooftops from an upstairs window at Le Gras, Nicéphore Niépce's country house in France. It was made in 1826 or 1827, and the exposure lasted many hours, perhaps days.

Niépce called his process heliography, 'sun writing'. He coated a pewter plate with bitumen of Judea, a natural asphalt that hardens in light, and placed it in a camera obscura, a simple box camera, pointed out of the window. Where light fell, the bitumen hardened; the rest was washed away with a mixture of lavender oil and white petroleum, leaving the image. Sunlight falls on both sides of the buildings, so the exposure was long: traditionally put at about eight hours, though a modern researcher who recreated the process concluded it must have lasted several days. The plate is kept at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas, in a sealed, oxygen-free case.

History of photography (Niépce)Read card
WonderHistory

Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) filled his notebooks with inventions: flying machines, a parachute, an armoured vehicle, a vast stone bridge. Very few were built in his lifetime, and many could not have worked with the materials of his day.

Leonardo kept notes almost daily, and thousands of his pages survive, mixing anatomy, rivers and bird flight with grocery lists. In the short Codex on the Flight of Birds, written around 1505 and now in Turin, he studied how birds use the air and sketched machines to copy them. Some of his ideas have since been tested. In 2000 the British skydiver Adrian Nicholas made a safe descent under a parachute built to Leonardo's pyramid-shaped design. In 1502 Leonardo offered the Ottoman sultan Bayezid II a single stone arch 240 metres long across the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It was never built, but in 2001 a smaller wooden version opened as a footbridge in Ås, Norway, and in 2019 engineers at MIT built a scale model and found that the design would have stood.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

When Neil Armstrong radioed “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed” on 20 July 1969, his words reached Earth about 1.3 seconds later. Radio waves travel at the speed of light, and the Moon is about 384,000 km (239,000 miles) away.

Eagle was the lunar module that carried Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down to the surface. Light, and so radio, travels at almost 300,000 km per second. At the Moon's average distance of about 384,400 km, a signal takes roughly 1.28 seconds each way, so every exchange with Mission Control in Houston had a built-in pause of about 2.6 seconds before an answer could arrive. Large dish antennas at Goldstone in California and at Honeysuckle Creek and Parkes in Australia picked up the signals; the clearest pictures of the first steps came through Australia and were watched live by an estimated 600 million people. Before leaving, the crew set up a panel of reflectors on the surface. Scientists still fire lasers at it and time the light's return, which is how we know the Moon is drifting away from Earth by about 3.8 cm a year.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderHistory

Magna Carta, Latin for “Great Charter”, was sealed by King John of England at Runnymede, beside the Thames, on 15 June 1215 to make peace with rebel barons. It promised swift justice and protection from unlawful imprisonment, and put limits on the king's power in writing.

The peace did not last. Neither side kept its promises, Pope Innocent III annulled the charter in August 1215, and the First Barons' War broke out. After John died in 1216, the advisers ruling for his nine-year-old son, Henry III, reissued a shortened version. It was issued again in 1217 and 1225, and in 1297 Edward I made it part of English statute law. Its most famous clause, number 39 in the 1215 text, promised that no free man would be imprisoned or stripped of his rights except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. Four copies of the 1215 charter survive: two at the British Library, one at Lincoln Castle and one at Salisbury Cathedral. Three of its clauses, as reissued in 1297, are still law in England and Wales.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next card in the archiveThe Winged Victory of Samothrace, a Greek marble statue carved around 190 BC, shows Nike, the goddess of victory, alighting on the prow of a warship. It has lost its head and both arms, yet it is one of the Louvre's most admired works.Read next →