Wonder: Something new to discover. - Page 9

Editor’s note

Wonder

For the pleasure of learning something you did not know, from an unfamiliar artist to a surprising discovery.

WonderTechnology

Charles Babbage's Difference Engine, first shown as a small model in 1822, was a mechanical calculator for producing mathematical tables without human error. His Analytical Engine, designed from the mid-1830s, went further: a machine that could be programmed with punched cards to carry out any calculation.

Around 1821 Babbage and his friend, the astronomer John Herschel, were checking tables worked out by hand for the Astronomical Society of London and found so many errors that Babbage exclaimed, 'I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.' The British government funded a full-sized Difference Engine, but work stopped in 1833 and the project was abandoned in 1842 after more than £17,000 had been spent. The Analytical Engine separated a 'store', where numbers were kept, from a 'mill', where calculations were done, much like a modern computer's memory and processor. Neither machine was finished in his lifetime. In 1991 London's Science Museum completed a Difference Engine No. 2 from his drawings, and it worked.

Charles Babbage, 1820sRead card

WonderTechnology

In an internal combustion engine, fuel burns inside the engine itself. The hot gases expand and push pistons, and the pistons turn a crankshaft that drives the wheels, so the fuel's chemical energy becomes motion.

'Internal' means the fuel burns inside the cylinders, unlike a steam engine, which burns its fuel outside to boil water. Most petrol engines work in four strokes: the piston moves down to draw in fuel and air, moves up to squeeze the mixture, is driven down when a spark from the spark plug ignites it, and rises again to push out the exhaust. Connecting rods turn this up-and-down movement into the turning of the crankshaft. The Belgian-born engineer Étienne Lenoir built a working gas engine in 1860, and Nicolaus Otto developed the first practical four-stroke engine in 1876. In 1886 Karl Benz patented his Motorwagen, widely regarded as the first practical car, which ran on a four-stroke engine. Even today, most of the energy in the fuel is lost as heat rather than turned into motion.

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WonderTechnology

The Liverpool and Manchester Railway, opened on 15 September 1830, was the world's first inter-city railway. It was the first to use only steam locomotives, with no horse-drawn traffic, and the first to run entirely to a timetable. It cut the journey between the two cities to about two hours.

Merchants in Liverpool's port and Manchester's cotton mills wanted a cheaper, faster link than the canals, whose owners they felt were overcharging for carrying cotton. To choose their locomotives, the directors held the Rainhill Trials in October 1829, won by George and Robert Stephenson's Rocket. The line was also the first to be double-tracked all the way, to have a signalling system, run by policemen with flags, and to carry mail. Its passenger service was a great success, and most stagecoach companies on the route soon closed. The opening day was overshadowed when William Huskisson, the Member of Parliament for Liverpool, was struck by Rocket and died. The line's success helped set off the 'railway mania' of the 1840s, a boom in railway building across Britain.

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StillnessLiterature

Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.

Einstein said this to the American journalist George Sylvester Viereck, whose interview 'What Life Means to Einstein' appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on 26 October 1929. By then he was world famous: measurements made during the 1919 solar eclipse had confirmed his general theory of relativity, and he had won the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. The line follows his remark that he was 'enough of an artist' to draw freely on his imagination. A similar passage appeared in his book Cosmic Religion in 1931.

Albert Einstein, The Saturday Evening Post interview (1929)Read card

StillnessHistory

The phrase ‘the pen is mightier than the sword’ was coined by the English writer Edward Bulwer-Lytton for his 1839 play Richelieu, where the French cardinal says it. The idea that words beat weapons is far older, but this wording is his, and within a few years it had become a stock saying.

Richelieu; Or the Conspiracy opened at the Covent Garden Theatre in London on 7 March 1839, with the famous actor William Charles Macready as Cardinal Richelieu, chief minister to King Louis XIII of France. In Act 2 the cardinal says that under the rule of truly great men the pen is mightier than the sword: in a master's hand it can stop emperors in their tracks, and a state can be saved without any sword at all. Others had said something similar long before. A copy of the teachings of the Assyrian sage Ahiqar from about 500 BC says that the word is mightier than the sword, and a line in Shakespeare's Hamlet says that many who wear swords are afraid of goose-quill pens. Bulwer-Lytton (1803–1873) also gave English ‘the great unwashed’, a sneering name for the masses, and the novel opening ‘It was a dark and stormy night’.

Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Richelieu (1839)Read card

StillnessHistory

‘Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty’ is often credited to Thomas Jefferson, but it has never been found in his writings. The saying goes back to the Irish lawyer John Philpot Curran, who said in a 1790 speech in Dublin that liberty is given to people on condition of eternal vigilance.

Curran spoke in 1790 in a dispute over the right to elect the Lord Mayor of Dublin. He warned that the idle usually see their rights taken by the active, and that God gives liberty on condition of eternal vigilance: break that condition, and servitude follows as both result and punishment. The short modern form was used by the American anti-slavery campaigner Wendell Phillips in a speech in Boston on 28 January 1852. In 1879 Phillips himself wrote that the line had been credited to Jefferson but that no one had found it in his works, and the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, which runs his home at Monticello, lists it as spurious. Curran (1750–1817) was an Irish barrister and member of the Irish Parliament, famous for defending people accused of rebellion against the Crown.

Widely attributed to Thomas Jefferson and John Philpot Curran; popularised in 19th centuryRead card

WonderHistory

The Great Wall of China is not one wall built at once. Rival states began building walls in the 7th century BC, China's first emperor linked several of them after 221 BC, and later dynasties kept rebuilding. Most of what visitors see today dates from the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

The first walls were built by the rival states of ancient China to guard their borders. After Qin Shi Huang united China in 221 BC, he had the walls between the old states torn down and linked those facing the nomadic peoples of the northern steppe. The Han and later dynasties repaired and extended the system. Early walls were mostly rammed earth, soil pounded hard between wooden boards, with stone in the mountains; the Ming used brick and stone and added thousands of watchtowers against Mongol raids. A Chinese government survey in 2012 put the combined length of all its surviving walls and trenches at about 21,196 km, some 8,850 km of it from the Ming. The Great Wall became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987.

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WonderHistory

Julius Caesar was never Roman emperor. He ruled as dictator, and soon after being named dictator for life he was assassinated, on 15 March 44 BC. The first emperor was his adopted heir Octavian, who took the name Augustus in 27 BC.

In Caesar's time Rome was still a republic, run by elected magistrates and the Senate. A dictator was an emergency office, normally held for six months; Caesar held it again and again, and early in 44 BC he was named dictator for life. Fearing that he meant to make himself king, a group of senators killed him on 15 March, the Ides of March. In his will Caesar adopted his great-nephew Octavian, who won the civil wars that followed. In 27 BC the Senate gave Octavian the name Augustus. He avoided the title of king and called himself princeps, ‘first citizen’, but he ruled alone until AD 14. Caesar's family name later became a title for rulers: Kaiser in German, tsar in Russian, and Kayser-i Rûm, ‘Caesar of Rome’, used by Mehmed II after he took Constantinople in 1453.

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WonderHistory

After William of Normandy won the Battle of Hastings in 1066, French became the language of England's kings and nobles for about three centuries. Thousands of French words entered English, which is why it often has two words for one thing, such as ‘begin’ and ‘commence’ or ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’.

After the Norman Conquest, England used three languages: French at court and among the nobility, Latin in the Church and in official records, and English among ordinary people. Every king after the Conquest spoke French as his first language until Henry IV, who took the throne in 1399 and was the first whose mother tongue was English. French borrowing peaked between 1250 and 1400, and about a third of English vocabulary is now estimated to come from French, including crown, justice, parliament and marriage. The famous story that English peasants kept ‘cows’ and ‘pigs’ while Norman lords ate ‘beef’ and ‘pork’ is largely a myth, popularised by Walter Scott's novel Ivanhoe in 1819: for centuries the French words were used for the live animals as well as the meat.

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WonderHistory

Christopher Columbus never set foot on the mainland of what is now the United States. On four voyages between 1492 and 1504 he reached the Bahamas, Cuba, Hispaniola and other Caribbean islands, the coast of Venezuela in South America, and Central America from Honduras to Panama.

Columbus, a sailor from Genoa, sailed for the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, hoping to reach Asia by going west. He made landfall on 12 October 1492 on an island in the Bahamas that its people called Guanahani. On his second voyage, in November 1493, his fleet stopped at St Croix and Puerto Rico, both now US territories but not states. In 1498 his men landed on the Paria Peninsula in Venezuela, the first recorded European landing on the South American mainland. Even so, he never clearly gave up the belief that he had reached the edge of Asia, and he called the people he met ‘Indians’. He died in Valladolid, Spain, in 1506. Florida was reached in 1513 by Juan Ponce de León, who had sailed on Columbus's second voyage.

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WonderHistory

The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914 set off the chain of events that led to World War I.

Franz Ferdinand was the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, which had annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908. On 28 June 1914 he and his wife Sophie were shot in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, a 19-year-old Bosnian Serb student. Princip belonged to a group of young conspirators, helped by a secret Serbian nationalist society called the Black Hand, who wanted to free Bosnia from Austro-Hungarian rule and unite the South Slavs in one state. Austria-Hungary blamed Serbia and declared war on it on 28 July. Because the great powers were bound by alliances, the war spread within days: Germany declared war on Russia and France, and Britain entered on 4 August after Germany invaded Belgium. The Ottoman Empire joined that autumn on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary.

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WonderHistory

In August 1947 British rule in India ended and the land was divided along religious lines into two countries: India, with a Hindu majority, and Pakistan, with a Muslim majority. Between 12 and 20 million people had to leave their homes, in one of the largest migrations in history.

Pakistan became independent on 14 August 1947 and India on 15 August. Pakistan was made of two separate parts with India in between; the eastern part broke away in 1971 and became Bangladesh. Two large provinces with mixed populations, Punjab in the west and Bengal in the east, were split between the new states. The border was drawn by Cyril Radcliffe, a British lawyer who had never been to India and was given about five weeks for the task. It was published only on 17 August, two days after independence, so on independence day many people in the border districts did not know which country they were in. Hindus and Sikhs moved towards India and Muslims towards Pakistan, many on foot or in packed trains. There was terrible violence on both sides; estimates of the dead range from 200,000 to two million.

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WonderHistory

On 10 December 1948 the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: 30 articles setting out the rights and freedoms that belong to every person. It has since been translated into more than 500 languages, and Guinness World Records lists it as the most translated document in the world.

The declaration was written just after the Second World War, when the new United Nations wanted a common standard of rights for all peoples and nations. A commission chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of the American president Franklin D. Roosevelt, prepared it. The Canadian legal scholar John Humphrey drew up the first draft, and the French jurist René Cassin, the Chinese diplomat P. C. Chang and the Lebanese philosopher Charles Malik helped shape the final text. The UN General Assembly adopted it at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris: 48 countries voted in favour, Turkey among them, none voted against and eight abstained. It is not a treaty, so it does not bind countries by law, but many later treaties and national constitutions build on it. The UN's collection of translations passed 500 in 2016, and 10 December is marked every year as Human Rights Day.

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WonderHistory

In October 1962 American spy planes photographed Soviet nuclear missile sites being built in Cuba, whose coast lies about 150 kilometres from Florida. For 13 days the United States and the Soviet Union stood on the brink of nuclear war, until Moscow agreed to take the missiles away.

A U-2 spy plane photographed the first site on 14 October, and President John F. Kennedy was shown the pictures on 16 October, the first of the thirteen days. Instead of bombing the sites, he ordered a naval 'quarantine', a blockade to stop Soviet ships bringing more weapons. Tension peaked on 27 October, when an American U-2 was shot down over Cuba and its pilot, Major Rudolf Anderson, was killed. The next day the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev announced that the missiles would be removed. In public the United States promised not to invade Cuba; in secret it also agreed to withdraw its Jupiter nuclear missiles from five sites near Izmir in Turkey, which were gone by April 1963. In August 1963 the two powers opened a direct Moscow–Washington hotline, a teleprinter link rather than the red telephone of legend.

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WonderHistory

In April 2003 the Human Genome Project, an international effort begun in 1990, announced that it had read the human genome, the full set of genetic instructions in our cells. About 8% was still missing, in long repetitive stretches. The Telomere-to-Telomere Consortium filled the last gaps in 2022 and 2023.

The genome is written in four chemical letters, A, C, G and T, about 3.1 billion of them, and sequencing means reading them in order. The project was led by the United States with the United Kingdom, Japan, France, Germany and China, and cost about 2.7 billion dollars; Bill Clinton and Tony Blair announced a rough draft in June 2000. The machines of the time read DNA in short pieces, which were then fitted together like a jigsaw. Where the same letters repeat over and over, the pieces could not be placed, so those regions stayed blank. A telomere is the tip of a chromosome, and the consortium's name means 'from one end to the other'. Using newer machines that read much longer pieces, it published a gapless sequence of every chromosome except the Y in the journal Science in 2022; the Y followed in 2023.

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WonderHistory

The Black Death, the plague that killed an estimated third or more of Europe's people in the late 1340s and early 1350s, most likely began in Central Asia. It travelled west along trade routes and reached Sicily on Genoese ships in October 1347.

The strongest evidence comes from a 2022 study in the journal Nature. Researchers examined two medieval cemeteries in the Chüy Valley near Lake Issyk-Kul, in today's Kyrgyzstan, where gravestones dated 1338 and 1339 record deaths from 'pestilence'. DNA from the teeth of people buried there contained Yersinia pestis, the bacterium that causes plague, and the strain proved to be the direct ancestor of those that later swept Europe. Plague usually spreads through the bites of fleas carried by rats and other animals. By 1346 it had struck the Mongol army besieging Caffa, a Genoese trading port in Crimea on the Black Sea, and merchant ships carried it on into the Mediterranean. Estimates of Europe's losses range from a quarter to about 60 per cent of the population.

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WonderHistory

Around 1455 in Mainz, Germany, Johannes Gutenberg's workshop finished printing a Latin Bible with movable metal type: single letters cast in metal that could be arranged into pages, printed and reused. It was Europe's first major printed book, and within 50 years presses were at work across the continent.

Printing of the Bible began around 1452. It was a huge undertaking: each copy ran to nearly 1,300 pages, usually bound in two large volumes, and between 160 and 185 copies were printed. At least some sold for 30 florins, about three years' wages for a clerk. Gutenberg had borrowed 1,600 guilders for his press and the Bible from Johann Fust, a wealthy Mainz financier. In 1455 Fust took him to court to recover the money; the ruling apparently went Fust's way, and he took over the Bible workshop, leaving Gutenberg in heavy debt. Fust and his partner Peter Schöffer carried on printing, and their Mainz Psalter of 1457 was the first book to give its printers' names and a printed date. It did not mention Gutenberg. No complete Gutenberg Bible has been sold since 1978, when one fetched 2.2 million dollars.

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WonderLanguage

'Disaster' comes through French from Italian disastro, made of dis-, 'bad', and astro, 'star'. It originally referred to an unlucky position of a star or planet, which astrologers blamed for misfortune, and soon came to mean any sudden catastrophe.

The word reached English in the 1590s, when many people still believed that the planets shaped human lives, and Shakespeare played on that link. In King Lear, written around 1606, the scheming Edmund mocks people who, when life goes badly, 'make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars' instead of blaming their own behaviour. Medieval Latin had a similar phrase, astrum sinistrum, 'unlucky star', and English still calls a doomed plan or couple 'ill-starred'. Another everyday word keeps the same belief: 'influenza' is Italian for 'influence', the power once thought to stream down from the stars. Italians were using it for epidemics by the early 1500s, and English borrowed it in 1743, during an outbreak that began in Italy.

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WonderLanguage

'Clue' comes from 'clew', an old word for a ball of thread. It took on the meaning of a hint because of the Greek myth in which Ariadne gives Theseus a ball of thread to find his way out of the Labyrinth.

In the myth, King Minos of Crete kept the Minotaur, a monster that was half man and half bull, in a maze built by the craftsman Daedalus. Theseus, a prince of Athens, came to kill it. Minos's daughter Ariadne gave him a ball of thread, which he tied at the entrance and unwound as he went in, so he could follow it back out. English writers came to speak of the 'clew' that guides a person through any maze or puzzle, and by the 1620s the word meant anything that points the way. The spelling 'clue' had appeared in the 1400s. Sailors still keep the old spelling: the clew is the lower corner of a sail. Turkish tells the same story in one word: ipucu literally means 'the end of the thread'.

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WonderLanguage

English 'salary' comes from Latin salarium, a word built on sal, 'salt'. The popular story that Roman soldiers were paid in salt has no good evidence behind it: they received a regular wage in coin.

The only ancient writer to connect the two words is Pliny the Elder. In his Natural History, from the AD 70s, he says that salt played a part in public offices and military service and that this is where salarium comes from; he never says soldiers were paid in salt. Roman soldiers received a regular wage in coin, the stipendium, and the Greek historian Polybius records a foot soldier's daily pay in the 2nd century BC. Salt mattered to Rome, as the name of the ancient Via Salaria, the 'salt road', shows, but it was cheap. The 'paid in salt' story seems to have grown out of Latin dictionaries of the 1700s and 1800s, which guessed at a 'salt money' allowance that no ancient text mentions. Nor is 'worth one's salt' Roman: the phrase is first recorded in English in 1830.

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WonderLanguage

'Quarantine' comes from the Venetian quarantena, 'forty days'. In the late Middle Ages Venice made ships arriving from plague-hit ports wait forty days before anyone could come ashore, to see whether the disease broke out on board.

The practice began a little earlier, with a shorter wait. In 1377 the Republic of Ragusa, today's Dubrovnik in Croatia, ordered newcomers from plague areas to spend 30 days in isolation, a trentino. Venice opened a permanent isolation hospital, a lazaretto, on an island in its lagoon in 1423, and the forty-day wait became the rule there; the Venetian Senate is usually said to have fixed it in 1448. No one knows for certain why forty was chosen. It may come from the Greek physician Hippocrates's ideas about acute illnesses, those that strike suddenly, or from the forty days Jesus spent in the desert. The word reached Ottoman Turkish from Venetian: karantina already appears in 1721, in the embassy report of Yirmisekiz Mehmed Çelebi, the Ottoman envoy to Paris.

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WonderLanguage

The Latin verb scire, 'to know', sits behind a surprising family of English words: science, conscience, omniscient, prescient. The odd relative is nice. It comes from nescius, 'not knowing', and when it entered English in the late 1200s it meant foolish or ignorant.

Science first meant simply knowledge of any kind, from Latin scientia. The narrower sense, the study of nature by observation and experiment, came later, and the word 'scientist' was coined only in 1833, by the English scholar William Whewell. Conscience comes from conscientia, 'knowing with', which could mean knowledge shared with others or knowledge held within oneself. Omniscient adds omnis, 'all', and prescient adds prae, 'before'. Nescius is simply ne-, 'not', joined to the same verb, so 'nice' began life as the opposite of 'science'. Turkish has a similar family built on its own verb for knowing, bil-: bilgi (knowledge) and bilge (wise) are old words, while bilim (science) and bilinç (consciousness) were coined during the language reform of the 1930s.

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StillnessLanguage

'Nice' comes, through French, from Latin nescius, 'not knowing'. When it entered English around 1300 it meant foolish or ignorant, and it passed through senses such as timid, fussy and precise before 'pleasant' became established in the 18th century.

Dictionaries date the steps roughly like this: foolish and timid by about 1300, fussy in the late 1300s, delicate around 1400, precise in the 1500s (still heard in 'a nice distinction'), agreeable from 1769 and kind from about 1830. Old senses lingered beside new ones, and the Oxford English Dictionary notes that in many 16th- and 17th-century texts it is hard to tell which one a writer meant. Linguists call a rise from a bad meaning to a good one amelioration; the reverse, pejoration, happened to 'silly', which in Old English meant happy or blessed. Jane Austen caught the new 'nice' spreading. In Northanger Abbey, published in 1817, Henry Tilney teases Catherine Morland for calling a Gothic novel 'the nicest book in the world', remarking that the word now 'does for everything'.

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WonderScience

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched by NASA in 1977, have both crossed into interstellar space, the space between the stars, beyond the bubble of particles blown out by the Sun. They are the only spacecraft known to have got there, and both still send data to Earth.

The Sun constantly blows out a stream of electrically charged particles, the solar wind. It carves a vast bubble in space called the heliosphere, whose outer edge, the heliopause, is where the solar wind meets the thin gas between the stars. Voyager 1 crossed it on 25 August 2012 and Voyager 2 on 5 November 2018, both about 120 times farther from the Sun than Earth is. By August 2026 Voyager 1 was some 25.6 billion kilometres from the Sun, and its radio signals were taking more than 23 hours to reach us. It was expected to pass a full light-day from Earth, the distance light travels in 24 hours, in November 2026. Both probes run on electricity made from the heat of decaying plutonium. That supply shrinks every year, so engineers have been switching instruments off one by one to keep them going.

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