This is a survey of modern history from a global perspective. Part One begins with the political and economic revolutions of the late 1700s and tracks the transformation of the world during the 1800s. Part One concludes as these bewildering changes seem to be running beyond the capacity of older institutions to handle them. Throughout the course we try to grasp what is happening and ask: Why? And the answers often turn on very human choices.
Engines, Electricity, Evolution
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The Modern World, Part One: Global History from 1760 to 1910
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The World Transformed (1830-1870)
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Philip ZelikowWhite Burkett Miller Professor of History
Okay. Welcome back.
Make yourself comfortable.
So, this is a presentation where I'm going to
try to take big phrases like Industrial Revolution,
or a word like technology,
and kind of break it down into just some stories
and then to analyze the stories.
So if you break down this period of
dynamic change, that technology I referred to last time,
let's look at three
things: Engines, Electricity, Evolution.
I think everyone would agree that all three of these are pretty significant.
So we can look at three stories, and we're going to go back to
the method we introduced early on, where we talked about what, why, what, why.
But what happened here?
And then we'll dig into why. What did happen?
Alright, steam engines. What happens with steam engines?
Usually, this sounds like a story in which James Watt did this, and then
Matthew Bolton did that, and then comes Arkwright, and then basically a story of..
and then he discovered, and then he discovered, and then he discovered.
Here's one of the key figures in the
early steam engines, a man named Matthew Bolton, and
here is the schematic of the early engine that
he's developing, which generates steam to drive a pump;
the pump creates a vacuum.
The idea of a vacuum was a relatively recent idea.
Why are these people
building steam engines?
Are they just, they just love tinkering with stuff?
In their age this was tough, expensive work to do.
Like, why are they doing this? They're doing it, first off, because
these engines will be water pumps. They want to pump water out of coal mines.
Coal mines, why do they need coal mines?
Because they're cutting down all the trees. They're running into
that ecological constraint I talked about.
So they're digging coal out of mines so that they can
burn coal for heat instead. Meanwhile, the mines fill up with water,
so they need to pump the water out of the mines.
Then having done that, they think, hmm, gee you know, I wonder if
this thing that can turn stuff round and round could also be used
to drive some sort of contraption to help us deal with pulling apart cotton.
Cotton is hard to
work with, but if you can work with it, you
can create yarn, and from cotton yarn you can create clothes.
Pulling apart cotton is hard for people to do.
Machines can do it faster, once they figure out a machine to pull apart cotton.
So by the time you're really in, say, the year
1800, steam engines are beginning to get more and more
developed, in part because they've gotten really good at pumping
out water out of these mines, and that turns out to
be very helpful.
And they've gotten very good at making cotton yarn and making cotton cloths.
By the way, why are they so interested in making cotton clothes?
Because England has passed protectionist
legislation to keep out the imports of clothing, of textiles, from India.
India was the great manufacturer of textiles.
It dominated the world's textile market. Well, this was threatening
the really key interest in England, which were the
people who make clothes out of wool from shearing sheep.
So they passed legislation to help keep out all those good Indian textiles.
The result is, though, it gives a real space for someone in
England who can figure out how to make cotton textiles, in England.
Creates a market for them to encourage people to encourage people to
build steam engines that will help them pull apart cotton.
How do they go about doing this?
It's kind of, what's the process?
I won't go into all the mechanical details, which I barely understand anyway.
How it's being done is basically trial and error.
I mean, these were not people who were formal scientists.
These are mechanics and tinkerers who are really quite
ingenious, and they try a contraption, it doesn't work
so well, they keep improving the contraptions until they
work better and better, encouraged mainly by business opportunities.
Okay, let's try another story: electricity, how does that work?
Well, again, you've got discoverers.
I'm going to introduce you first to this Italian gentlemen, Alessandro Volta.
He lives in northern Italy. You've probably heard of a volt?
Yeah. Same guy.
So Alessandro Volta: he's the first person to figure
out how to create electricity by making a battery
that combines different metals with acids.
And then there's a real contribution from this
man, Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss. Gauss is a German.
Gauss is regarded by some people in science history as having
been perhaps one of the most intelligent men who ever lived.
He's making incredible contributions in six or
seven different fields, especially mathematics and astronomy.
Turns out he dabbled a little bit in figuring out magnetism.
That also turns out to be very important
in the story of working with electricity.
Here's another very famous figure, the Englishman, Michael Faraday,
and a picture of the electrical generator that Faraday develops.
Faraday builds on a lot of prior discoveries,
including by a Danish scientist and many others. He figures
out how to make a generator using electromagnetic
Induction, which I'm not going to try to explain.
Why are these people doing this? They're actually not doing this because
there's an immediate industrial application that they can think of.
These were actually more pure scientists; they're
doing it because they're discovering new things.
They're trying to figure out God's laws for how the world works.
In fact, Faraday was asked at one point by a British
politician: is there any practical use for this electricity stuff you're doing?
To which, Faraday gave the reply: well, I can't think of a practical
use right now, but I'm sure that someday you will be able to tax it.
Well, since they're just working for the
sake of pure science, what's happening here?
You read the story of the development of electricity,
and it's basically a story of one discovery after another.
All of them occurring at different places where
people learn about something else someone has figured out,
and then have an insight as to what the next step might be.
So, it's a layering of understandings.
One on top of another within
a few key breakthroughs here and there.
Alright. Let's try a third story.
The story of the discovery of the theory of evolution.
This story is inextricably intertwined with the name Charles Darwin.
So, here's Darwin:
rich young man, recently graduated from college, Cambridge,
hadn't actually been interested in quote, science, which
wasn't usually the kind of thing upperclass men did.
But, he kind of fell in with a scientifically minded crowd at Cambridge,
and he's able to wangle a situation where he will be brought
on board a navy ship, the HMS Beagle, as the resident naturalist
and good friend and companion to the aristocratic captain, a man named Fitzroy.
He'll take off for a five year voyage on HMS Beagle, collecting scientific
data all along the way: about geology, botany, and some other things.
Here's a wonderful website, from Britain's Natural History Museum, that
allows us to kind of chart the journey of the Beagle
and give a little bit of a visceral sense of the discoveries of the young Darwin.
So he's starting out, end of 1831, from England.
He's making his initial observations of islands off of Africa.
Crossing the equator, stopping in Brazil.
Examining things in Argentina.
More things as he turns from one part of the end of South America to the other.
Finding interesting fossils.
Noticing interesting wildlife, including the gauchos.
Moving into the Pacific, comes to the Galapagos Islands, a
paradise of observation for plants, birds, and other really strange creatures.
Makes his way to Australia,
more islands,
around the Cape of Good Hope,
and home after a voyage of nearly five years crowded with scientific observation.
By the way, notice how Darwin has been able to take
advantage of the Royal Navy's ability to sail around the world,
with friendly ports of call everywhere they want to go.
Along the way, Darwin's letters back home have already given him a nice reputation,
especially because of the contributions he's making to
the understanding of geology, building
on the work of another Englishman named Lyle.
The geology work is very interesting because it's
beginning to show people the immense scales of time
and the sense of very slow development in the way the Earth is formed.
People were hugely interested in geology in the 1840s and 1850s.
But at the end of the 1850s, having thought about it for a long
time, Darwin finally comes out and applies these sorts
of theories of natural development and adaptation to biology,
to the origin of the species, developing a theory of natural selection
to explain long term biological change.
Why is he doing all of this?
He's doing all of it because of
pure scientific interest, encouraged by a group of
science-minded friends in England
who think that these ideas are very important.
How is he doing this?
Through an extraordinary series of observations
that partly come from social connections,
partly come from the friendly disposition of the
Royal Navy to help out with voyages of discovery.
Alright. So we've started with what happened.
That is, important discoveries are made.
Then we looked at why they happened, and I told you some initial stories
about why people worked on steam engines,
why they worked on electricity, more pure science.
Why they were developing a theory of evolution, stemming out of
the work on geology, extending it to biology, and so on.
But now let's take a deeper look.
Why are these people able to do these things?
These are all very different stories.
Matthew Bolton and Charles Darwin are very different kinds of people.
Notice where these discoveries are taking place.
They're not taking place in China. They're not taking place
in the United States of America or in South America, either.
They're not taking place anywhere in Europe.
They're taking place almost exclusively in Western Europe.
Let's ask another question. Who's paying for all this?
How is it that these people are able to do this sort of work?
That's actually a very interesting question.
Look at the different cases.
The people working on the steam engine.
They're mainly being paid for by private enterprise, which finds their work useful.
How about the people working on electricity?
Alessandro Volta. Well, he was working at
a royal society in
Como,
Italy.
He then showed off his work on the battery to Napoleon Bonaparte in Paris in 1801.
Bonaparte was mightily impressed and made Volta, on the
spot, a senator from a French-dominated portion of Northern Italy.
And eventually Volta finds a home at the University in Padua.
Or let's take the case of Gauss: university again.
This one in
G�ttingen.
Or let's take the case of Faraday.
Faraday grew up a poor kid, could barely get enough food to eat on the table.
He finally, in effect, apprentices himself to a chemist, whom he had impressed
with the quality of the notes he had been taking on the chemist's lectures.
The chemist is working at the
royal institution, the royal institution studying
science, and that royal institution provides
Faraday with his means of support.
So think about these sponsorships: royal institutions;
universities; in the case of Darwin, private wealth
supplemented by a peer group of supporters.
Let's notice something else that's going on here:
none of these people are doing it all by themselves.
Case after case, if you read them, it's person
did this, another person did that, a third person
did another thing, and on and on and on. All these stories read the same way:
a sense of cumulative knowledge, each building on the other, collectively
shared so that one person knows what the other person has found,
and they can take it the next step forward.
Think about that. How does that happen?
That cumulative collective knowledge? What's happening, there is a scientific
community, not just in one country but across
a number of countries, especially in Western Europe.
That community is enabled.
Enabled how?
That community can only exist because there is a common
medium of exchange of information in the form of books,
pamphlets, presentation of scientific papers that
someone writes up, in Paris, and then
someone eagerly reads in G�ttingen or in London.
It's enabled because other people have developed scientific
instruments that can be used for highly precise measurements.
In other words,
there is a business in building the tools for science,
partly because of the sponsorships of royal institutions and universities.
And they're creating laboratories in which
they can conduct highly controlled experiments,
which is important
for some of the pure science that you especially
see in the case of electricity, which is so
related to discoveries, say, in the burgeoning field of
chemistry or physics, though it wasn't called physics yet then.
And all of this is happening because
the scientific community thrives on recognition and rewards.
Some of the rewards are financial.
But in many cases, the rewards are not so financial.
What they want above all, is recognition
that they made a contribution to human knowledge.
And they mostly get it from other members in the community.
Though sometimes, the larger society notices them, too.
After all, Faraday was offered a knighthood, which he rejected
because he thought it would seem too presumptuous.
I mentioned how Volta gets honored by Napoleon, and so on.
So, a climate in which their work is recognized and rewarded enables
the creation and nurturing of the scientific community.
So let's put this back into the kind of terms I
introduced a long time ago, when we wanted to explain individual choices.
What are the kinds of choices that people like Faraday or
Darwin are making when they embark on their lives of discovery?
Well, think about the value judgments they're making.
This
is something they care about, these discoveries.
They care about it partly because they're in a culture and in a community
that highly values contributions to this sort
of knowledge, that notices it, that applauds it.
Think, too, about the reality judgments that they can make.
They can look around and have a lot
of information and about what's already been discovered.
That stimulates them to do more and tells them now
what's already been found and what they can build on.
Think about the action judgments.
So you ask what are their options for how to go about doing this work?
They have opportunities to experiment.
Darwin has an opportunity to go on a navy ship that is willing
to take him all over the world to do observations; Matthew Bolton or
others have miners, or other burgeoning industries, that
are willing to pay them, or put money behind investments,
that'll try out new kinds of engines that could produce profit.
Other kinds of institutions will create laboratories with
good instruments, so it's possible to perform these experiments,
not just imagine them. So, this is the situation they live in.
It's very much part of their society that allows them to make the choices that
produce a series of individual discoveries that, collectively, transform the world.
Let's stop there because, when we meet again, I want to
talk about how all these new forces are put to work.
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