A Historyof Optimism

The plague and the trial

A year after that speech, people in the crowded port of Piraeus began to fall sick with a plague. Soon the sick filled the upper city too. Pericles died of it in 429 BC. Thucydides caught it and lived to set down the signs of the disease, so that readers might know it “if it should ever break out again”. He left the question of its cause to others, much as a Hippocratic doctor would.

The Athenians did not welcome every new idea. Anaxagoras, a philosopher and friend of Pericles, taught that the sun was a mass of red-hot metal larger than the Peloponnese. By the later accounts of Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius, his enemies charged him with impiety, and he left Athens for Lampsacus on the Hellespont around 434 BC.¹¹11 Anaxagoras, Wikipedia (citing Plutarch and Diogenes Laertius). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaxagoras

Socrates, a stonemason’s son, owned no school and wrote nothing down. In the marketplace he asked politicians, poets and craftsmen to define justice or courage, then showed them that they could not. Young men of good family followed him around to watch, and some of their fathers resented it.

Thirty-two years after Pericles praised open discussion, Meletus, with Anytus and Lycon, charged Socrates with impiety and with corrupting the young. The Athenians had just lost the war with Sparta and lived through the rule of the Thirty Tyrants in 404 and 403 BC. Critias, a leader of the Thirty, had once been one of the young men around Socrates. A jury of about five hundred citizens heard the case in a single day in 399 BC.

The jurors convicted him, most likely by 280 votes to 221.¹²12 Trial of Socrates, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates In Plato’s account, Socrates told them he was surprised the vote was so close, since thirty more votes the other way would have freed him. Under Athenian law, the prosecution proposed a penalty, the defendant proposed another, and the jury chose between them. Meletus asked for death. Socrates proposed free meals in the town hall, the honour Athens gave Olympic victors. He then offered a fine of one mina, all he could pay. His friends, Plato among them, offered to stand surety for thirty, but he would not propose exile.¹³13 Plato, Apology, trans. Benjamin Jowett, Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/1656

Some one will say: Yes, Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that to do as you say would be a disobedience to the God, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that daily to discourse about virtue, and of those other things about which you hear me examining myself and others, is the greatest good of man, and that the unexamined life is not worth living, you are still less likely to believe me.

The jury chose death. Weeks later, in prison, the seventy-year-old Socrates drank hemlock with his friends around him.

The schools

Plato had watched the trial. Around 387 BC he began to teach in a grove outside the city walls named after the hero Academus. His students argued about geometry, ethics and the laws of a just city. Two mathematicians who worked with the Academy, Theaetetus and Eudoxus of Cnidus, proved results on irrational lengths and on ratios that Euclid later gathered into his Elements. Teachers of one kind or another kept a school called the Academy going in Athens, with breaks, until the emperor Justinian closed it in AD 529.

Aristotle came to the Academy from Stagira, in northern Greece, at seventeen or eighteen and stayed for nearly twenty years. In time he broke with his teacher on central questions. Plato looked for truth in ideas, Aristotle in what he could see for himself. On the island of Lesbos he studied the fish and birds of the lagoon at Pyrrha. In all he recorded some five hundred kinds of animal. He described the insides of more than a hundred of them, dissected about thirty-five and noted that an octopus changes colour when someone disturbs it.¹⁴14 Aristotle’s biology, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle%27s_biology He also wrote the earliest systematic study of logic, listing the forms of argument in which, if the premises are true, the conclusion must be true as well. Logicians in Europe taught his rules, with little change, until the nineteenth century.

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Aristotle returned to Athens in 335 BC and began to teach at the Lyceum, a gymnasium east of the city. He built up a large collection of books. With his students he gathered the laws and histories of Greek cities and wrote up accounts of their constitutions. Scholars found a copy of one of them, the Constitution of the Athenians, on a papyrus roll from Egypt and published it in 1891. His colleague Theophrastus wrote an Enquiry into Plants, the founding book of botany, and took over the Lyceum when Aristotle left Athens.

Philip of Macedon and his son Alexander had made themselves masters of Greece. Philip had razed Stagira in 348 BC, and soon afterwards he hired Aristotle to tutor the teenage Alexander. By Plutarch’s account, Philip paid the fee by rebuilding Aristotle’s home town and bringing its scattered citizens back. When Alexander died in 323 BC, the Athenians rose against Macedon and lost. In 322 BC the general Antipater made them give up their fleet and their democracy, and Aristotle died in exile at Chalcis.

The students carried the habits of the schools with them. Demetrius of Phalerum, who had studied in Aristotle’s circle, governed Athens for Macedon and then fled to Egypt. In Alexandria, by some accounts, he helped a new king plan a library.

Josiah Ober, a historian at Stanford, estimates that between the ninth and fourth centuries BC the Greeks multiplied ten to twenty times over. By the fourth century they lived in houses with three and a half times the floor area of the old ones. The average Greek consumed one and a half to two times as much.¹⁵15 Josiah Ober, Economic development in antiquity: the Greek world, 800–300 BCE, Hoover Institution, table of proxy indicators (population ×10–20, house floor plan ×3.5, per capita consumption ×1.5–2, ninth to fourth century BC). https://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/2023-01/Ober.pdf They also wrote far more. Thales left no writing that copyists kept, but by the end of the period Aristotle and his students had written up 158 constitutions, most likely as research for his Politics.¹⁶16 Constitution of the Athenians (Aristotle), Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constitution_of_the_Athenians_(Aristotle) With them Aristotle could compare how scores of Greek cities chose their officials and ran their courts without travelling to any of them. Within a generation the Ptolemies in Alexandria were paying scholars to gather every book they could find.

No one knows how many scrolls the librarians kept. Ancient writers give figures from 40,000 to 700,000, and modern scholars trust none of them. The poet Callimachus compiled the Pinakes, a catalogue in 120 books that listed authors by subject with their works.³3 Library of Alexandria, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria Zenodotus, the first head of the Library, had already compared copies of Homer line by line to fix a standard text. The librarians who followed him made the editions of Homer that schoolboys read for centuries.

Proofs and machines

Euclid opened Book I of his Elements with a list of definitions, five postulates and five common notions. From them he proved 48 propositions, one at a time, and ended the book with the theorem of Pythagoras and its converse.⁴4 Euclid’s Elements, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euclid%27s_Elements He taught in Alexandria around 300 BC, but historians know almost nothing else about his life. In thirteen books he covered geometry and the theory of numbers and proved each result from those before it. Euclid drew much of it from earlier mathematicians, including Eudoxus and Theaetetus at Plato’s Academy, and put it in an order in which a student could check every step.

Ctesibius, a barber’s son, probably became head of the Museum. Vitruvius tells how, as a young man, he hung a mirror in his father’s shop on a cord with a lead counterweight that slid down a narrow pipe. Ctesibius heard the air forced out of the pipe make a sound.⁵5 Vitruvius, The Ten Books on Architecture, Book IX, trans. Morris Hicky Morgan, 1914, Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20239 He later built a force pump and an organ in which he used water to keep the air pressure steady. For his water clock he regulated the flow, so that its keepers could tell the hours with less error. In those decades the doctors Herophilus and Erasistratus cut open human bodies in Alexandria, one of the few places in the Greek world where the authorities allowed it. Herophilus told nerves from blood vessels and timed the pulse with a water clock. Later writers accused him of cutting open living prisoners as well, a charge that modern historians argue over.⁶6 Herophilos, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herophilos

Hero of Alexandria carried on Ctesibius’s line of work, probably in the first century AD. He described a temple machine from which a worshipper got a measure of holy water by dropping a coin in a slot, and the dioptra, a sighting instrument for surveyors. Nobody in his world put to work the ball he described, which a user could set spinning on its axis by boiling water and letting the steam escape through two bent pipes.

Eratosthenes measures the Earth

Ptolemy III summoned Eratosthenes of Cyrene from Athens around 245 BC to run the Library and tutor the heir to the throne. Eratosthenes wrote on geography and chronology as well as on poetry and number. Some critics nicknamed him Beta, the second letter, because he never came first in any one field. He devised the sieve of Eratosthenes, a way to pick out the prime numbers, and drew a map of the known world with lines of latitude.

Historians disagree about the length of the stade he used. By Pliny’s account, Eratosthenes counted 40 stades to the Egyptian schoenus. On that reading he used a stade of 157.5 metres and got 39,375 kilometres for the circumference. He fell 1.6 per cent short of the 40,008 kilometres round the poles. Paul Tannery, a French historian of science, put the stade at 185 metres. On his figure Eratosthenes overshot, at 46,250 kilometres, by about 16 per cent.⁷7 Roberto Torretti, Eratosthenes, Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, via MacTutor, University of St Andrews. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/BEA/eratosthenes_bea.pdf Either way, Eratosthenes found the size of the Earth with a pointer, a bowl, a theorem of Euclid’s and the distances that royal surveyors had paced out along the Nile.

Archimedes at Syracuse

Archimedes sent his proofs to the scholars of Alexandria as letters from Syracuse, the Greek city in Sicily where he lived. He addressed his Method to Eratosthenes. In it he showed how he found his results before he proved them. Readers know the Method from a single copy, which a scribe in Jerusalem scraped and washed in 1229 to write a prayer book over it. The Danish scholar Johan Heiberg made out the Greek beneath in Constantinople in 1906.⁸8 Archimedes Palimpsest, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archimedes_Palimpsest

Archimedes found the area of a circle. To bound it he drew regular polygons of 96 sides inside and outside the circle and calculated their perimeters. From them he showed that pi lies between 3 10/71 and 3 1/7.⁹9 Measurement of a Circle, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Measurement_of_a_Circle He proved that a sphere has two thirds of the volume of the cylinder that encloses it, and asked for that figure to be carved on his tomb.

In the Sand Reckoner he wrote to Gelon, son of King Hiero, to show that he could express a number larger than the grains of sand needed to fill the universe. The Greeks had no counting words beyond a myriad myriads, a hundred million. Archimedes built a system of orders and periods on top of that. He then reckoned that a person could fill the universe of the astronomer Aristarchus with fewer than ten million units of the eighth order of grains, or ten to the sixty-third power.¹⁰10 Archimedes, The Sand-Reckoner, in The Works of Archimedes, trans. T. L. Heath, 1897. https://archive.org/details/worksofarchimede00arch

Aristarchus of Samos had argued, Archimedes reported, that the sun and the fixed stars stand still and that the Earth goes round the sun in a circle. Few astronomers accepted it. Archimedes himself raised objections to how Aristarchus put it. Copyists did not preserve Aristarchus’s book, and readers know of it mainly because Archimedes needed its size of the universe for a sum about sand.

There are some, king Gelon, who think that the number of the sand is infinite in multitude; and I mean by the sand not only that which exists about Syracuse and the rest of Sicily but also that which is found in every region whether inhabited or uninhabited. Again there are some who, without regarding it as infinite, yet think that no number has been named which is great enough to exceed its multitude.

Archimedes proved the law of the lever, and King Hiero put him to work. Plutarch, writing three centuries later, tells how Archimedes rigged a set of pulleys and, sitting at a distance, pulled a loaded ship out of the king’s dock by himself. When Marcellus attacked Syracuse with a Roman army and fleet in 213 BC, the defenders used Archimedes’s machines to throw stones and timbers on the attackers and lift their ships out of the water.

In the meantime huge poles thrust out from the walls over the ships, sunk some by the great weights which they let down from on high upon them; others they lifted up into the air by an iron hand or beak like a crane’s beak, and, when they had drawn them up by the prow, and set them on end upon the poop, they plunged them to the bottom of the sea; or else the ships, drawn by engines within, and whirled about, were dashed against steep rocks that stood jutting out under the walls, with great destruction of the soldiers that were aboard them.

Marcellus gave up the assault and settled down to starve the city. In 212 BC his troops broke in. Plutarch gives several versions of what happened next. In the best known, a soldier found Archimedes working on a diagram and ordered him to come to Marcellus. Archimedes refused to go before he finished his proof, and the soldier killed him.¹¹11 Plutarch, Life of Marcellus, trans. John Dryden, rev. A. H. Clough, Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/674 Marcellus, by Plutarch’s account, grieved and honoured the dead man’s family. Cicero wrote that Marcellus carried home to Rome two bronze spheres that Archimedes had built to show the motions of the sun, moon and planets. When Cicero served as a junior magistrate in Sicily in 75 BC, he found a neglected tomb near one of the city gates and knew it for Archimedes’s by the sphere and cylinder carved on it.

The mechanism and the stall

Hipparchus of Nicaea, working mostly on Rhodes in the second century BC, drew up tables of chords that later mathematicians built into trigonometry. He compared his star positions with those that Timocharis had recorded at Alexandria about a century and a half earlier. He found the bright star Spica two degrees from where Timocharis had placed it, measured from the point of the autumn equinox. From that he discovered the slow drift that astronomers call the precession of the equinoxes.¹²12 Hipparchus, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus

Sponge divers working a Roman-era wreck off the island of Antikythera in 1900 and 1901 brought up bronze statues, glass and coins from a ship lost in the second quarter of the first century BC. They also hauled up a lump of corroded bronze about the size of a shoebox. In 1902 the politician Spyridon Stais, visiting the National Archaeological Museum in Athens, noticed a gearwheel in it.

Researchers have since used X-rays and, from 2005, computer scans to look inside the 82 fragments. The mechanism’s maker, working in the second or early first century BC, fitted at least 30 bronze gears into a wooden case.¹³13 Antikythera mechanism, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antikythera_mechanism A user turned a handle to move pointers, and read from them the place of the sun and moon in the zodiac, the phase of the moon and the dates of coming eclipses. The maker followed a theory of Hipparchus’s and set a pin in one gear and a slot in the next, so that the moon’s pointer sped up and slowed down as the moon does in the sky. The maker cut teeth about a millimetre and a half apart and wrote an instruction manual in tiny letters on the case. Craftsmen in Europe built nothing so complex again until the astronomical clocks of the fourteenth century.

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Historians offer several reasons why the Alexandrian scholars did not turn their ideas into an industry. Slaves did most of the heavy work, so masters had little reason to buy machines that saved labour. Kings paid for knowledge as a mark of prestige, but a king could withdraw his favour overnight. Scholars of the time often ranked pure proof above practical use. Plutarch, who wrote long afterwards, said that Archimedes himself looked down on his machines.

Ptolemy VIII withdrew that favour when he took Alexandria in 145 BC and purged those who had backed his rivals. The librarian Aristarchus of Samothrace fled to Cyprus and other scholars scattered. Those who stayed never regained their old standing. Julius Caesar’s men, besieged in the city in 48 BC, set fire to ships in the harbour. Seneca, quoting Livy, put the loss at 40,000 scrolls.¹⁴14 Library of Alexandria, Wikipedia (citing Seneca). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_of_Alexandria Scholars kept working afterwards in the Library or its daughter collection in the temple of Serapis. When Cleopatra died in 30 BC, Octavian made Egypt a Roman province.

Byzantine copyists and Arab translators saved many of the books that survived. Claudius Ptolemy wrote his great work of astronomy in Alexandria in the second century AD, and translators in Toledo later turned it from Arabic into Latin. Erhard Ratdolt printed Euclid’s Elements in Venice in 1482. Johann Herwagen printed the works of Archimedes in Greek and Latin at Basel in 1544, and Galileo studied them closely.

Greek astronomers and mathematicians measured with more precision as the period went on. Callippus of Cyzicus, working around 330 BC, took the year as 365¼ days, eleven minutes too long. Hipparchus, in the second century BC, took a three-hundredth of a day off that figure and got a year about six minutes too long.¹⁵15 Hipparchus, Wikipedia (Callippus’s year of 365¼ days, in or before 330 BC; Hipparchus’s 365¼ − 1/300 days, an error of about 6 minutes a year). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hipparchus Archimedes, working in the century between them, pinned pi between two fractions about two thousandths apart. Euclid gathered 465 propositions into his thirteen books, and mathematicians used them for the next two thousand years without proving them again. Isaac Newton followed Euclid’s plan in his Principia of 1687: definitions first, then axioms, then propositions proved from them.¹⁶16 Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica

The emperor Nerva made Sextus Julius Frontinus water commissioner of Rome in AD 97. Frontinus had been consul and governor of Britain, where he fought the Silures of South Wales. He wrote a report on the system for himself and his successors and listed each aqueduct’s source, length and flow. He had the channels mapped, and by measuring the intake against the outflow he found the frauds. Some of the water men, he wrote, had laid secret pipes under the pavements and sold the water to shops along the route, so that people at the public fountains got only a little.⁵5 Frontinus, The Aqueducts of Rome, Book II, trans. Charles E. Bennett, 1925, LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Frontinus/De_Aquis/Bennett/2*.html

The conduit of New Anio measures 58,700 paces, of which 49,300 are in an underground channel, 9,400 paces above ground on masonry; of these, at various points in the upper reaches are 2,300 paces on substructures or arches; while nearer the City, beginning at the seventh milestone, are 609 paces on substructures, 6,491 paces on arches. These are the highest arches, rising at certain points to 109 feet. With such an array of indispensable structures carrying so many waters, compare, if you will, the idle Pyramids or the useless, though famous, works of the Greeks!

Concrete and the dome

King Herod’s builders at Caesarea, on the coast of Judaea, shipped more than 24,000 cubic metres of volcanic ash from Pozzuoli in Italy and sank wooden forms into the sea to cast the breakwaters of a new harbour.⁶6 Caesarea Maritima, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesarea_Maritima Vitruvius described this powder from near Baiae and the towns round Mount Vesuvius. Builders mixed it with lime and rubble to cast piers that hardened even under the sea. Engineers now call it pozzolana, after the town of Pozzuoli. The Romans used it to build harbour walls in the open sea, vaults over their baths and domes over their halls. They cast the wet mix in wooden frames and faced it with brick or stone.

Scientists at MIT reported in 2023 that Roman builders probably mixed in quicklime hot and so left small white lumps of lime through the concrete. When the researchers let water into a crack, some of this lime dissolved and set again as calcium carbonate. They cracked samples made this way and ran water through them, and the cracks closed in two weeks.⁷7 Riddle solved: Why was Roman concrete so durable?, MIT News, 2023. https://news.mit.edu/2023/roman-concrete-durability-lime-casts-0106

There is also a kind of powder which from natural causes produces astonishing results. It is found in the neighbourhood of Baiae and in the country belonging to the towns round about Mt. Vesuvius. This substance, when mixed with lime and rubble, not only lends strength to buildings of other kinds, but even when piers of it are constructed in the sea, they set hard under water.

Hadrian’s builders put up the largest Roman dome of all. Agrippa, Augustus’s general, had built a temple to all the gods in the Campus Martius. After it burned, Hadrian rebuilt it and dedicated the new Pantheon around AD 126, but he had Agrippa’s old dedication carved on the porch instead of his own. His builders gave the dome a span of 43.3 metres, the same as its height from the floor to the opening at the top.⁸8 Pantheon, Rome, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon,_Rome They poured heavy aggregate of travertine near the base, then broken tile, then light volcanic tufa and pumice near the top. They thinned the shell from 6.4 metres at the base to 1.2 metres at the rim of the oculus. That open circle, nine metres (30 Roman feet) across, is the building’s only source of daylight. Nobody in the nineteen centuries since has built a larger dome of unreinforced concrete.

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Books and law

Pliny the Elder, who commanded the imperial fleet at Misenum, worked at night on a Natural History in 37 books. In it he gathered what Greek and Roman writers had said about the stars, the earth, plants, animals, drugs, metals and art. His nephew wrote that he began work at midnight or one in the morning, had books read to him at meals and in the bath, and took notes on all of them. He left 160 volumes of extracts, written on both sides in a tiny hand.⁹9 Pliny the Younger, Letters III.5, trans. William Melmoth, rev. F. C. T. Bosanquet, Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2811 He published the first ten books in AD 77. Two years later he sailed across the bay towards the erupting Vesuvius to rescue people and died on the shore at Stabiae.

Galen of Pergamon, a Greek doctor born in AD 129, served as physician to the gladiators of his home city before moving to Rome. Five gladiators died in his years with them, against sixty under the doctor before him.¹⁰10 Galen, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galen In Rome he cut open apes and pigs. He silenced a living pig’s squeal by cutting a nerve in its neck, and showed that the voice depends on the larynx and on nerves from the brain. He wrote so much that doctors in Europe and the Muslim world took his books as their standard for more than 1,300 years.

Romans took more pride in their law than in almost anything else they made. Around 450 BC the plebeians, the common citizens, forced the patricians to put the laws in writing, and a board of ten men drew up the Twelve Tables. Officials posted them in the Forum. Cicero recalled learning them by heart as a schoolboy. For the next seven centuries praetors, the officials who ran the courts, issued yearly edicts on how they would hear cases, and trained jurists wrote opinions on hard ones. Jurists such as Papinian and Ulpian developed rules on contracts, property, inheritance and wrongs that judges could apply to strangers as well as citizens. Gaius wrote a short textbook, the Institutes, in which he set all of private law in order under persons, things and actions. Ulpian, a jurist from Tyre, drew up a schedule by age that officials used to value a yearly allowance or any other legacy paid out for life when they taxed an inheritance. Historians of insurance read it as the earliest surviving life table.

The emperor Caracalla made every free man in the empire a Roman citizen in AD 212. A merchant in Alexandria and a farmer in Gaul now stood under the same law. The senator Cassius Dio, who lived through it, wrote that Caracalla did it for the money. Non-citizens paid few of the taxes on inheritances and on freeing slaves, and Caracalla had doubled both, from a twentieth to a tenth.¹¹11 Cassius Dio, Roman History 78.9, trans. Earnest Cary, LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Cassius_Dio/78*.html Merchants had traded across the Mediterranean with one coinage and one body of law through the Pax Romana, the long peace that historians date from Augustus in 27 BC to the death of Marcus Aurelius in AD 180.

The Romans built all this on conquest and on slaves. Julius Caesar wrote that he sold 53,000 people of one Gallic town to slave dealers on the spot. Historians estimate that by the end of the first century BC masters kept one to two million slaves in Italy, between a fifth and a third of its people. Many of them worked the great estates and the mines.¹²12 Slavery in ancient Rome, Wikipedia (citing Caesar, Gallic War II.33). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_ancient_Rome Owners freed slaves often, and a slave freed by a citizen became a citizen. Masters kept the rest at work by force.

What fell, and what lasted

The general Odoacer deposed the last western emperor, a boy called Romulus Augustulus, in 476 and sent the imperial regalia to Constantinople. He spared the boy and sent him to live in a fortified villa on the Bay of Naples on a pension of 6,000 gold solidi a year, a rich senator’s income.¹³13 Romulus Augustulus, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romulus_Augustulus

Romans had fought civil wars among themselves while foreign armies pressed on the frontiers. Through the fifth century the emperors who ruled from Italy lost their provinces one by one. Germanic peoples crossed the Rhine in 406, and Goths sacked Rome in 410. Emperors in Constantinople ruled the eastern half for another thousand years.

Italians lost the empire’s works in stages. When the Goths besieged Rome in 537, they cut the aqueducts. The millers on the Janiculum hill, who ground grain with aqueduct water, had to stop. Belisarius, defending the city, had his men set up mills on the Tiber in their place. By the end of the sixth century around 30,000 people lived where a million had lived before. They crowded near the Tiber, where they could draw water. Builders in Italy and the western provinces stopped making concrete. No builder in Europe raised a wider dome until 1436, when Filippo Brunelleschi, who had studied the Pantheon, closed the brick dome of Florence cathedral at 45.5 metres across inside.

Churchmen and lawyers saved much of the rest. The emperor Phocas gave the Pantheon to Pope Boniface IV in 609. The pope consecrated it as a church, and later clergy kept it roofed and in use. Monks copied Vitruvius in dozens of manuscripts. The Florentine scholar Poggio Bracciolini found a fine copy in the abbey library of St Gall around 1416, and a manuscript of Frontinus at Monte Cassino in 1429. Justinian’s lawyers in Constantinople, led by Tribonian, gathered extracts from 39 jurists into the fifty books of the Digest and finished it in 533. Scholars at Bologna began teaching from it in the eleventh century, and lawyers across most of continental Europe based their civil law on those lectures.

The board of ten had written Rome’s laws on twelve tablets around 450 BC. By Justinian’s time the jurists had written about two thousand books of law, more than 3,000,000 lines. Tribonian’s commissioners read them and kept 150,000 lines, one in twenty, in the fifty books of the Digest.¹⁴14 Pandectae, in William Smith, A Dictionary of Greek and Roman Antiquities, 1875, LacusCurtius. https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/secondary/SMIGRA*/Pandectae.html When Florentine troops took Pisa in 1406, they carried off a copy that scribes had made soon after 533, now in the Laurentian Library in Florence.¹⁵15 Pandectarum codex Florentinus, History of Information (written between 533 and 557; taken from Pisa to Florence after the war of 1406; Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana). https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=165 Justinian’s lawyers also issued a short textbook, the Institutes, which they took largely from Gaius and arranged in his order. Napoleon’s lawyers drew the categories of the French Civil Code of 1804 from it.¹⁶16 Napoleonic Code, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Napoleonic_Code

Stone and light

Abbot Suger of Saint-Denis, just north of Paris, rebuilt the east end of his abbey church and dedicated it on 11 June 1144. His masons brought together pointed arches, ribbed vaults and buttresses outside the walls. Because they carried the weight down ribs and piers, they could open the walls into tall windows. Suger wrote that he wanted the church to shine with “the wonderful and uninterrupted light of most luminous windows.”⁶6 Basilica of Saint-Denis, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilica_of_Saint-Denis

Bishops and town councils at Chartres, Reims, Amiens and Beauvais then competed to build higher. The builders at Beauvais began in 1225 and raised the choir vault to 48 metres. They watched part of it fall in 1284 and rebuilt it with extra piers.⁷7 Beauvais Cathedral, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beauvais_Cathedral

Masons learned the trade on site, from master to apprentice, and took it from city to city. Villard de Honnecourt, a draughtsman from northern France, kept a sketchbook between about 1225 and 1235. On its 33 sheets of parchment he made some 250 drawings: a tower at Laon, a chapel at Reims, a trebuchet, lifting gear, a saw driven by water and a perpetual-motion wheel, which could never have worked.⁸8 Villard de Honnecourt, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Villard_de_Honnecourt Scholars argue over whether Villard built anything himself. He recorded in the sketchbook the buildings and machines that caught a draughtsman’s eye in his day.

Books from Toledo

Alfonso VI of Castile took Toledo from its Muslim rulers in 1085. The city’s scholars kept libraries of Arabic books, many of them translations of Greek science with commentaries written in Baghdad, Cairo and Córdoba. Raymond, archbishop from 1126 to 1151, gathered Mozarab Christians, Jewish scholars and monks to put these books into Latin. Sometimes one man read the Arabic aloud in Castilian and another wrote it down in Latin.

Gerard of Cremona came from Italy to read Ptolemy’s Almagest, the great handbook of Greek astronomy. He could not find it in Latin, so he learned Arabic in Toledo and stayed. Before he died there in 1187, he had put 87 books into Latin, among them the Almagest, Euclid’s Elements and al-Khwarizmi’s algebra.⁹9 Gerard of Cremona, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerard_of_Cremona Latin readers met the Indian numerals and the zero in translations of al-Khwarizmi. Leonardo of Pisa, known as Fibonacci, taught them to Italian merchants in his Liber Abaci of 1202.

Students needed somewhere to read these books together. At Bologna students formed a guild and hired and paid their teachers. In 1158 the Emperor Frederick I granted travelling scholars legal protection. At Paris the masters formed the guild, and Pope Gregory IX confirmed its rights in 1231. Masters taught at Oxford by 1096. Students crowded into the town after Henry II barred English students from Paris in 1167.

Romans had used the word universitas for any guild or corporation. Scholars ran theirs like any other trade, with rules of entry, fees, set books and a final test. A student who passed won the licence to teach, the master’s degree.

Lenses and clocks

On 23 February 1306 the Dominican friar Giordano da Pisa told a congregation at Santa Maria Novella in Florence that the craft of making eyeglasses was not yet twenty years old.¹⁰10 Glasses, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glasses He said he had met and talked with the man who first made them. Craftsmen in Pisa or Florence made the earliest known pairs around 1290: two convex lenses set in frames, for people who could no longer read close up. Another Pisan friar, Alessandro della Spina, learned to make them and showed others how.

Scribes, notaries and merchants who wore spectacles could keep doing close work into old age. By 1301 the officials who oversaw the crafts of Venice let any craftsman make glass lenses for reading, so long as he sold them as glass and not as rock crystal.¹¹11 Venice regulates the making of reading glasses, History of Information. https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?id=2217

Monks needed to know the hours for prayer, and for centuries they used sundials and water clocks. During a fire at Bury St Edmunds in 1198, the monks ran to their water clock for water to throw on the flames. Late in the thirteenth century, a clockmaker no one recorded found a way to drive a wheel one tooth at a time with a falling weight. He used two small paddles on a rocking rod, the verge, to catch the teeth and release them in turn. The keeper set the pace by sliding small weights along a crossbar on top, the foliot.

The canons of Dunstable Priory installed a large clock above their rood screen in 1283. Richard of Wallingford, a blacksmith’s son who became abbot of St Albans in 1327, designed an astronomical clock with a great dial. On it the monks could read the phases of the moon and the height of the tide at London Bridge. William of Walsham finished it about twenty years after Richard died in 1336. In Milan, the year Richard died, clockmakers built a tower clock for the Visconti lords and made it strike each of the twenty-four hours. Galvano Fiamma, a friar who wrote for the Visconti, judged it “exceedingly necessary for people of all estates.”¹²12 Galvano Fiamma on the Milan clock, Lapham’s Quarterly. https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/node/591

Keepers reset these clocks against sundials and often found them as much as an hour out in a day.

Town councils bought them anyway. Townspeople began to count the day in equal hours, instead of the church hours that clergy lengthened and shortened with the seasons.

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Roger Bacon, an English Franciscan, sent his Opus Majus to Pope Clement IV in 1267. He argued that scholars should test claims against the evidence of the senses, aided by instruments. In a letter long credited to him, Bacon, or someone writing in his name, listed machines that no one had yet built.

It is possible that great ships and sea-going vessels shall be made which can be guided by one man and will move with greater swiftness than if they were full of oarsmen. It is possible that a car shall be made which will move with inestimable speed, and the motion will be without the help of any living creature. … It is possible that a device for flying shall be made such that a man sitting in the middle of it and turning a crank shall cause artificial wings to beat the air after the manner of a bird’s flight. … I am acquainted with them explicitly, except with the instrument for flying which I have not seen. And I know no one who has seen it. But I know a wise man who has thought out the artifice.

From 1346 to 1353, between 30 and 60 per cent of Europeans died of plague.¹³13 Black Death, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death The survivors kept the mills, ploughs, spectacles, clocks and libraries. Students at the universities carried on reading Ptolemy and Euclid in Gerard’s Latin.

The economic historians Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden estimate that scribes in Latin Europe copied 13,500 manuscripts in the sixth century, when Benedict wrote his Rule, and 2.7 million in the fourteenth, two hundred times as many.¹⁴14 Manuscript production per century, 6th to 15th century, Our World in Data (data from Buringh and van Zanden, 2009). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/manuscript-production-century Papermakers at Fabriano, in central Italy, were at work by 1276.¹⁵15 Fabriano, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fabriano They took the waterwheel from the fulling mill and set it to lift three wooden hammers in each trough and pound old rags into pulp. Italian papermakers had brought paper down to about a sixth of the price of parchment by the end of the century.¹⁶16 History of paper, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_paper When Gutenberg printed his Bible in the 1450s, he put three copies in four on paper.

Millions of books

Archbishop Adolph of Nassau’s troops sacked Mainz in 1462, in a war over who should rule the see. Printers who had learned the trade there fled with their punches and their skills and set up shop in Cologne, Basel, Rome, Paris and beyond. Gutenberg died in Mainz in 1468, three years after the same archbishop gave him a place at his court with a yearly allowance of grain and wine.

By 1500 printers had worked in some 280 towns. Librarians have since catalogued about 30,000 editions printed before 1501, and printers issued many more editions of which no copy survives.⁷7 Incunable, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incunable They usually ran a few hundred copies of each. Historians put the number of copies printed in Europe before 1501 at between 12 million and 20 million,⁸8 The spread of printing before 1500, History of Information. https://historyofinformation.com/detail.php?entryid=36 and the number by 1600 at 150 to 200 million.⁹9 Printing press, Wikipedia (citing Buringh and van Zanden, 2009). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press

Printers needed buyers, so they opened shops where buyers lived and travelled: in university towns, in trading cities and on the routes to the great fairs. Besides Bibles and psalters they printed whatever sold: grammars, law books, calendars, sermons, romances and indulgences, the printed letters the Church sold to remit the punishment due for sins.

Printers cut their prices as they printed longer runs. Students who had once copied textbooks by hand, or rented them a section at a time from a stationer, began to buy them.

Venice

Johann of Speyer, a German, opened the first press in Venice in 1469. He began with 100 copies of Cicero’s letters and, that year, printed the first edition of Pliny’s Natural History. Venetians had ships, money, trade across the Mediterranean and a Senate that granted printers privileges. The senators gave Johann a five-year monopoly on printing in the city, but he died within months. Someone later wrote in the margin of the grant that it was void, since the master had died.¹⁰10 Commentary on the Venetian privilege of 1469, Primary Sources on Copyright. https://copyrighthistory.org/cam/commentary/i_1469/i_1469_com_172007134356.html The Senate did not renew it for his brother Wendelin. Before 1501 Venetian printers issued about one in eight of all the editions printed in Europe, more than the printers of any other city.¹¹11 Incunable, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incunable

Venetians owned books worth printing too. In 1468 Cardinal Bessarion, a Greek churchman who had settled in Italy, gave the city his library: 482 Greek manuscripts and 264 Latin ones.¹²12 Basilios Bessarion, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basilios_Bessarion For decades, humanists across Italy had hunted for lost classics in monastery libraries. Poggio Bracciolini found Lucretius’s poem On the Nature of Things in a German monastery, probably Fulda, in 1417. Monks had copied it centuries earlier and then left it on the shelf.

Once a humanist had found a text, a printer could set it in a thousand identical copies. Scholars in Paris, Oxford and Kraków could cite the same page of the same edition, find each other’s errors and print a better one.

Aldus Manutius, a teacher from near Rome, settled in Venice in 1490 and set up his press in 1494. He printed Aristotle in Greek, in five folio volumes, between 1495 and 1498. By 1505 his shop had issued more than 100 editions, many of them Greek authors no one had printed before.

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Aldus printed Virgil in 1501 in a small octavo, a book a reader could carry in a coat. For it he had the Bolognese punchcutter Francesco Griffo cut the first italic, a slanted type based on the handwriting of Italian scholars. In italic Aldus fitted more words on a line and used less paper. He printed 1,000 copies, where 200 to 500 had been the norm.¹³13 Aldus Manutius, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus_Manutius Printers in Lyon were selling pirated copies by 1503, and others across France and Italy copied his dolphin-and-anchor mark.

The merchant’s books

Amatino Manucci, an Italian partner in the Farolfi company, kept the books of its branch at Salon in Provence in 1299 and 1300. His ledger is the oldest surviving set of accounts in double entry. Under that method a merchant recorded every sum twice, once as a debit in one account and once as a credit in another. When the two sides did not match, he knew he had made a mistake.

Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici founded his bank in Florence in 1397 with 10,000 gold florins. His heirs ran branches in Rome, Venice, Milan, Geneva, Avignon, Bruges and London, each a separate partnership in which the Florence firm owned the largest share. They made most of their money on bills of exchange: a merchant paid a sum in florins at one branch and his agent collected it in pounds or ducats at another, months later, without a cart of coin crossing the Alps. Clerks entered every bill in the books of both branches.

Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan friar from Sansepolcro, wrote the method down for anyone who could read Italian. His Summa de arithmetica, printed in Venice in 1494 by Paganino Paganini, ran to 615 pages of arithmetic, algebra and geometry. In one section, Particularis de computis et scripturis, Pacioli taught bookkeeping in the Venetian style. Paganini printed about a thousand copies, and for decades merchants used the section as a textbook.¹⁴14 Summa de arithmetica, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summa_de_arithmetica

The second thing necessary in business is to be a good bookkeeper and ready mathematician. … The third and last thing is to arrange all the transactions in such a systematic way that one may understand each one of them at a glance, i. e., by the debit (debito—owed to) and credit (credito—owed by) method. This is very essential to merchants, because, without making the entries systematically it would be impossible to conduct their business, for they would have no rest and their minds would always be troubled.

Pacioli moved to Milan in 1497, at the invitation of Duke Ludovico Sforza. There he shared a house with the duke’s painter and engineer and taught him mathematics.

Leonardo’s notebooks

Leonardo da Vinci, the son of a notary, was born near Vinci in Tuscany on 15 April 1452 and trained in Andrea del Verrocchio’s workshop in Florence. He moved to Milan in 1482. In a draft letter to Ludovico, he listed bridges, mortars, catapults and armoured chariots before he mentioned, in one line near the end, that he could also sculpt and paint.

1) I have a sort of extremely light and strong bridges, adapted to be most easily carried, and with them you may pursue, and at any time flee from the enemy; and others, secure and indestructible by fire and battle, easy and convenient to lift and place. … 10) In time of peace I believe I can give perfect satisfaction and to the equal of any other in architecture and the composition of buildings public and private; and in guiding water from one place to another.

Leonardo filled notebooks for the rest of his life, writing from right to left in mirror script. He drew gears, pumps, canal locks, wings, the muscles of the arm and the flow of water past a stone. He wrote that “Experience never errs,” and that men who love practice without science resemble a sailor without a helm or a compass.

He drew the skeleton solids for Pacioli’s next book, On Divine Proportion, which Paganini printed in Venice in 1509. In it Pacioli showed printers and stonecutters how to build each Roman capital letter from a circle and a square.

Leonardo published none of his notes. When he died at Amboise, in France, on 2 May 1519, he left them to his pupil Francesco Melzi. After Melzi died in 1570, his heirs let the pages scatter among collectors. The sculptor Pompeo Leoni cut and pasted many of them into albums.

Editors drew a treatise on painting from the notes and printed it in 1651, but few engineers of the next two centuries saw his machine drawings. Jean Paul Richter printed the first large selection of Leonardo’s writings, with an English translation, in 1883.

Martin Luther sent his Ninety-five Theses against the sale of indulgences to the Archbishop of Mainz on 31 October 1517. Before the year was out, printers in Basel, Leipzig and Nuremberg had them in print. In 1518 Luther wrote a Sermon on Indulgences and Grace in German, and printers ran off twenty editions.

Gutenberg’s compositors set each page of his Bible once, and his pressmen printed it up to 185 times. Printers across Germany worked the same way for Luther on a far larger scale. They issued 291 editions of his 45 original works, and between 1518 and 1520 alone they printed and distributed about 300,000 copies.¹⁵15 Printing press, Wikipedia (citing Pettegree, 2015, and Duchesne, 2006). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Printing_press Seamen used print too. Pilots bound for India in 1497 carried printed tables of the sun’s position. When the economist Jeremiah Dittmar compared European cities that had a press before 1500 with similar cities that had none, he found that the cities with a press grew 60 per cent faster between 1500 and 1600.¹⁶16 Information Technology and Economic Change: The Impact of the Printing Press, Jeremiah Dittmar, Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2011. https://researchonline.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/53580

Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese captain serving Spain, sailed from Sanlúcar de Barrameda on 20 September 1519 with five ships and about 270 men. He planned to reach the Spice Islands by sailing west, around or through South America. Near the southern tip of the continent he found a strait and took four weeks to work his ships through it. They came out into a calm ocean at the end of November 1520, and Magellan gave it the name Mar Pacífico, the peaceful sea.

Wednesday, the twenty-eighth of November, 1520, we came forth out of the said strait, and entered into the Pacific sea, where we remained three months and twenty days without taking in provisions or other refreshments, and we only ate old biscuit reduced to powder, and full of grubs, and stinking from the dirt which the rats had made on it when eating the good biscuit, and we drank water that was yellow and stinking. We also ate the ox hides which were under the main-yard, so that the yard should not break the rigging: they were very hard on account of the sun, rain, and wind, and we left them for four or five days in the sea, and then we put them a little on the embers, and so ate them; also the sawdust of wood, and rats which cost half-a-crown each, moreover enough of them were not to be got.

Magellan reached the Philippines and took sides in a local quarrel. In April 1521 the warriors of Lapulapu, chief of Mactan, killed him on the beach. Juan Sebastián Elcano, a Basque officer, took the Victoria on across the Indian Ocean and round Africa. He brought her into Sanlúcar on 6 September 1522 with 18 of the men who had set out and 26 tons of cloves and cinnamon in the hold. Crown officials had put the cost of the fleet at 8,751,125 maravedís for ships, food and wages.¹²12 Magellan expedition, Wikipedia (citing Bergreen, 2003, and Morison, 1986). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magellan_expedition

Antonio Pigafetta, a gentleman from Vicenza who had joined the fleet as a volunteer, wrote down the date every day. At the Cape Verde Islands the crew found that the Portuguese there said it was Thursday, while by Pigafetta’s journal it was Wednesday. Sailing west with the sun all the way round, the crew had lost a day.

Mercator’s chart

Pedro Nunes, chief cosmographer to the king of Portugal, showed around 1550 that a pilot who kept one compass heading for long sailed a spiral towards the pole, a rhumb line. Pilots wanted to steer one heading from port to port. On the flat charts of the day they could not draw that course as a straight line.

Gerardus Mercator, a Flemish mapmaker, solved the problem on paper. He was born at Rupelmonde in 1512. In 1544 the authorities jailed him for about seven months on suspicion of Lutheran heresy, then let him go for lack of evidence.¹³13 Gerardus Mercator, University of Granada mathematics history pages. https://www.ugr.es/~eaznar/mercator.htm He moved to Duisburg in 1552. There, in August 1569, he published an eighteen-sheet world map two metres wide and described it as adapted for the use of navigators.

Mercator drew the lines of longitude straight and parallel, and so stretched the map from east to west more and more towards the poles. To keep the angles true he spread the lines of latitude apart in the same proportion, and so drew Greenland as large as Africa. On his chart a pilot could rule a straight line between two ports, read its angle and steer by it.

Mercator never published the mathematics. Edward Wright, a Cambridge mathematician who had sailed on a raid to the Azores in 1589, calculated tables for spacing the lines of latitude and printed them in Certaine Errors in Navigation in 1599. Any chartmaker with Wright’s tables could draw a Mercator grid. Sailors were slow to switch, and most did not use such charts until the eighteenth century.

Jan van der Straet, known as Stradanus, was a painter from Bruges who worked in Florence. Around 1600 he designed a set of prints that Philips Galle published in Antwerp as Nova Reperta, new discoveries of modern times. He chose the things that he and his patrons believed the ancients never had: America, the compass, printing, gunpowder, clocks, eyeglasses, silk, sugar refining, stirrups and the water mill.

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Henry’s captains needed fifteen expeditions to get past Cape Bojador. By the second half of the sixteenth century the kings of Portugal were sending five or six ships to India every year, on a voyage of about six months each way. Between 1497 and 1650 captains took 1,033 ships out of Lisbon on the India run.¹⁴14 Portuguese India Armadas, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portuguese_India_Armadas Spanish officials made sure that what one pilot learned reached the rest. From 1508 every pilot who came home to Seville had to report new coasts under oath, and twice a month the pilot major and the king’s cartographers decided what to add to the master chart, the Padrón Real.¹⁵15 Pilot Major of Spain, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_Major_of_Spain Printers sold that kind of knowledge to anyone who could pay. Lucas Waghenaer, a pilot from Enkhuizen, printed his charts of Europe’s coasts as a sea atlas in 1584, and Anthony Ashley, a clerk of England’s Privy Council, put it into English in 1588.¹⁶16 The first sea pilot printed in English, Crouch Rare Books. https://crouchrarebooks.com/?p=15624

Bacon’s plan

Francis Bacon, Lord Chancellor of England, published the Novum Organum in 1620. On the title page his engraver showed a ship passing between the Pillars of Hercules into open ocean, above a Latin line from the Book of Daniel: many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased. Bacon argued that scholars had reasoned from a few old books and too little evidence. He wanted them to collect facts from experiments and from the workshops of craftsmen, and to climb from those facts to general laws one step at a time.

He wanted knowledge for use. In the third aphorism he wrote that “knowledge and human power are synonymous”.⁸8 Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, Book I, Aphorism III, ed. Joseph Devey, 1902. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/45988 Near the end of Book I he pointed to printing, gunpowder and the compass, three inventions the ancients never knew, and argued that no empire, sect or star had wielded more power over human affairs.

Those who have treated of the sciences have been either empirics or dogmatical. The former like ants only heap up and use their store, the latter like spiders spin out their own webs. The bee, a mean between both, extracts matter from the flowers of the garden and the field, but works and fashions it by its own efforts. The true labor of philosophy resembles hers, for it neither relies entirely or principally on the powers of the mind, nor yet lays up in the memory the matter afforded by the experiments of natural history and mechanics in its raw state, but changes and works it in the understanding.

Bacon ran few experiments himself and never accepted Copernicus. By John Aubrey’s account, he stopped his coach at Highgate one cold day in 1626, bought a hen and stuffed it with snow to see whether cold would keep meat. He fell ill and died on 9 April. In his last letter he wrote that the experiment “succeeded excellently well”.⁹9 Francis Bacon, Wikipedia (quoting John Aubrey’s Brief Lives). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Bacon

His English readers acted on his plan a generation later, after the civil war.

Take nobody’s word

Twelve men met at Gresham College in London on 28 November 1660 and agreed to found a college for experimental learning.¹⁰10 Royal Society, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Society Among them were Christopher Wren, then professor of astronomy at Gresham and later the architect of St Paul’s, the chemist Robert Boyle and the clergyman John Wilkins. Charles II gave them a charter in 1662 and, in a second charter the next spring, the title of the Royal Society of London for the Improvement of Natural Knowledge. The fellows took a motto from the poet Horace, Nullius in verba: take nobody’s word for it.

The fellows hired Robert Hooke as curator of experiments in 1662, with the job of showing something new at each meeting. The society had no steady income to pay him. From 1665 he drew £80 a year for life, £30 from the society and £50 from a lectureship that the London grocer John Cutler had endowed.¹¹11 Robert Hooke, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Hooke Hooke built Boyle’s air pump, tested springs and improved the compound microscope. He drew what he saw through it and published the drawings in January 1665 as Micrographia. In a slice of cork he saw rows of tiny boxes and coined the word cell for them.

Londoners bought the book in numbers. Samuel Pepys, a naval official who joined the society a few weeks later, sat up until two in the morning on 21 January 1665 reading it, and wrote in his diary that it was “the most ingenious book that ever I read in my life”.¹²12 The Diary of Samuel Pepys, entry for 21 January 1664/5. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/4200

Henry Oldenburg, the society’s secretary, wrote to scholars across Europe and printed their reports. On 6 March 1665 he put out the first issue of Philosophical Transactions, two months after Parisian scholars had started the Journal des sçavans. He paid the printer himself. Editors have published it ever since, longer than any other science journal.¹³13 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Transactions_of_the_Royal_Society Readers in Paris, Danzig and Delft sent in observations, and Oldenburg printed each one with its author’s name and date, so that anyone could check the claim and see who made it first.

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The system of the world

Hooke, Wren and the young astronomer Edmond Halley argued in London in January 1684 about why planets follow Kepler’s laws. They suspected that the Sun pulled each planet with a force that weakened with the square of the distance. None of them could prove it. Wren offered a book as a prize to whichever of the other two brought him a proof within two months. Hooke said he had one but never produced it. In August Halley went to Cambridge to ask Isaac Newton, the university’s professor of mathematics.

Newton told him he had already calculated that such a force would produce an ellipse, but he could not find his papers. In November he sent Halley a nine-page proof. Halley urged him to go further, and Newton wrote for the next two years. He set down three laws of motion and a law of universal gravitation, and from them he derived all three of Kepler’s laws. He accounted for a falling stone and the Moon’s orbit with one law of gravitation, and used it to explain the tides, the paths of comets and the slow wobble of the Earth’s axis.

Pepys, as president of the Royal Society, licensed the book on 5 July 1686. The fellows had spent the society’s money on an illustrated history of fishes, and they later paid Halley’s salary in unsold copies of it. Halley paid for the printing of about 500 copies himself, corrected the proofs and published the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica in July 1687.¹⁴14 Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophi%C3%A6_Naturalis_Principia_Mathematica

Halley used Newton’s methods to compute the orbit of the comet he had watched in 1682, and in 1705 he predicted that it would return in 1758. He died in 1742. On Christmas night 1758 Johann Palitzsch, a farmer and amateur astronomer near Dresden, spotted the comet on its way back, and astronomers named it after Halley.

When Copernicus died, astronomers knew of one moon, the Earth’s. Galileo added four around Jupiter in 1610. Christiaan Huygens, a Dutch mathematician of 25, spotted Titan circling Saturn in March 1655, through a telescope he had built with his elder brother Constantijn.¹⁵15 Titan (moon), Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(moon) Giovanni Domenico Cassini, director of the new Paris Observatory, found four more moons of Saturn between 1671 and 1684.¹⁶16 Giovanni Domenico Cassini, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giovanni_Domenico_Cassini He named them the Sidera Lodoicea, the stars of Louis, after his patron Louis XIV, as Galileo had named Jupiter’s after the Medici.¹⁷17 Iapetus (moon), Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iapetus_(moon) When Halley published the Principia, astronomers knew of ten moons.

Bank money

The magistrates of Amsterdam opened an exchange bank, the Wisselbank, on 31 January 1609. Merchants handled hundreds of kinds of coin, much of it clipped or worn. Adam Smith, writing in 1776, reckoned that the city’s coin was worth about 9 per cent less than good coin fresh from the mint. The bank’s assayers weighed each deposit and credited its worth in the bank’s books, less a small charge. The city ruled that bills of exchange of 600 guilders or more drawn on Amsterdam be paid through the bank, so every merchant in foreign trade needed an account.⁵5 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book IV, Chapter III, Adam Smith, 1776. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300 A merchant paid a bill by asking the clerks to move a sum from his account to his creditor’s. The bank had 708 accounts in 1611 and 1,202 by 1620.⁶6 Bank of Amsterdam, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_Amsterdam

Bank money, over and above both its intrinsic superiority to currency, and the additional value which this demand necessarily gives it, has likewise some other advantages, It is secure from fire, robbery, and other accidents; the city of Amsterdam is bound for it; it can be paid away by a simple transfer, without the trouble of counting, or the risk of transporting it from one place to another. In consequence of those different advantages, it seems from the beginning to have borne an agio; and it is generally believed that all the money originally deposited in the bank, was allowed to remain there, nobody caring to demand payment of a debt which he could sell for a premium in the market.

Dutch governments borrowed from savers too. Provinces, towns and water boards sold bonds on which they paid interest for ever. On 15 May 1648 the water board of the Lekdijk Bovendams, which kept up the dykes along the Lek, sold Niclaes de Meijer a bond of 1,000 Carolus guilders at 5 per cent a year. Later owners accepted cuts in the rate, down to 2.5 per cent. Yale University bought the bond in 2003, and in 2015 a curator from Yale collected twelve years of interest on it, 136.20 euros.⁷7 A living artifact from the Dutch Golden Age: Yale’s 367-year-old water bond still pays interest, Yale News, 2015. https://news.yale.edu/2015/09/22/living-artifact-dutch-golden-age-yale-s-367-year-old-water-bond-still-pays-interest

Johan de Witt, Grand Pensionary of Holland, priced the province’s debts in 1671, a year before a mob in The Hague killed him and his brother. The States of Holland paid 4 per cent on their perpetual bonds. They also sold life annuities at 14 times the yearly payment, and paid the buyer every year until he died. De Witt reckoned the chance that a young buyer would still be alive to collect each half-yearly payment. He discounted every payment at that rate and added them up. On 30 July he showed the States that a guilder a year on a young, healthy life was worth a little over 16 guilders, against the 14 they charged.⁸8 De Witt, Jan, Dictionary of Scientific Biography, via MacTutor, University of St Andrews. https://mathshistory.st-andrews.ac.uk/DSB/De_Witt.pdf

Coffee and credit in London

Edward Lloyd ran a coffee house in Tower Street by February 1688, the month of its first mention in the London Gazette. Lloyd collected shipping news for the shipowners and captains who drank there, and men with money rented his tables to insure ships and cargoes. A merchant who wanted cover described the ship, the voyage and the goods on a policy. Each man who would bear part of the loss signed beneath the last and wrote down how much he would pay. Londoners called these men underwriters.⁹9 Lloyd’s Subscription Room, Royal Museums Greenwich. https://www.rmg.co.uk/collections/objects/rmgc-object-105516 From 1689 advertisers in the Gazette told readers to bring people who had escaped from slavery back to Lloyd’s coffee house, where underwriters later insured slave ships.

Daniel Defoe, a hose dealer turned merchant in the Spanish trade, wrote marine insurance in these years and lost heavily. His creditors had him arrested in 1692 for debts of £700. Defoe later put his total debts at £17,000, but two modern scholars of his work think he inflated the figure.¹⁰10 Defoe’s £17,000 bankruptcy, P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, Notes and Queries, 2002. https://oro.open.ac.uk/21595 He hid from his creditors in Bristol, where he wrote An Essay upon Projects. In it he noted that an insurer would take the risk of £100 of goods from Jamaica to London for 40 shillings.

It is a compact among merchants. Its beginning being an accident to trade, and arose from the disease of men’s tempers, who, having run larger adventures in a single bottom than afterwards they found convenient, grew fearful and uneasy; and discovering their uneasiness to others, who perhaps had no effects in the same vessel, they offer to bear part of the hazard for part of the profit: convenience made this a custom, and custom brought it into a method, till at last it becomes a trade.

I cannot question the lawfulness of it, since all risk in trade is for gain, and when I am necessitated to have a greater cargo of goods in such or such a bottom than my stock can afford to lose, another may surely offer to go a part with me; and as it is just if I give another part of the gain, he should run part of the risk, so it is as just that if he runs part of my risk, he should have part of the gain.

The French beat an English and Dutch fleet off Beachy Head in 1690. William III’s ministers wanted £1.5 million to rebuild the navy and could find nobody to lend it. William Paterson, a Scottish merchant who had made his fortune in London largely from the slave trade with the West Indies, had proposed a plan in 1691. Investors would lend the government a large sum and leave it there, while Parliament set aside a tax to pay their interest. The lenders would also form a company with the right to do banking. Charles Montagu, member of Parliament for Maldon, carried the scheme through Parliament in the Tonnage Act of 1694. Under it the Exchequer levied duties on shipping to pay the lenders.

The lenders could subscribe up to £1.2 million at 8 per cent, with no one putting in more than £10,000, and the government would pay them another £4,000 a year for managing the loan. In less than a fortnight 1,268 people subscribed the whole sum. William and Mary put in £10,000, as did the governor, John Houblon, but more than two-thirds of the subscribers put in less than £1,000. About one in eight was a woman. On 27 July 1694 the king and queen granted the charter of the Governor and Company of the Bank of England. The directors opened for business on 1 August in Mercers’ Hall, Cheapside, with seventeen clerks and two doorkeepers.¹¹11 Bank of England, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_of_England

Paterson quarrelled with the other directors and left the board in 1695 to promote a Scottish colony at Darien, on the isthmus of Panama, where his wife and child died in 1698.

Michael Godfrey, the first deputy governor, crossed to the Low Countries in 1695 to set up a branch at Antwerp to pay William’s army. On 17 July he dined with the king in his tent at the siege of Namur and then went into the trenches to look. Gunners on the walls killed him with a cannonball as he stood near the king. Narcissus Luttrell recorded that investors in London marked Bank stock down 2 per cent when they heard.¹²12 Michael Godfrey, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Godfrey Ministers kept borrowing this way after Godfrey’s death. In 1752 Henry Pelham merged the government’s redeemable stock into consolidated annuities, the consols, and the Treasury paid off the last of them in 2015.

The South Sea year

John Blunt and the other directors of the South Sea Company offered in January 1720 to take over most of the national debt that the company did not already own. Robert Harley had set up the company in 1711 to take on £9 million of government debt, and in 1713 ministers gave it the asiento, the right to supply enslaved Africans to Spain’s colonies in America. Under the 1720 scheme, owners of government annuities could swap them for South Sea stock. The directors set the swap close to the market price of their shares. The higher they drove the price, the fewer shares they gave for each pound of debt and the more they kept to sell.

They talked up the trade they would open in the New World. Investors bid South Sea stock from £128 in January to £550 at the end of May, and in the summer they were paying about £1,000. At the end of September buyers would pay only £150. Many who had bought on credit went bankrupt.¹³13 South Sea Company, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company

Isaac Newton, Master of the Mint, was worth just over £30,000 and put almost half of it into South Sea stock. He sold all of it in April at a large profit. In mid-June, close to the top, he bought back in with nearly everything he owned. The mathematician Andrew Odlyzko reckons that a year later Newton was worth about £20,000.¹⁴14 Isaac Newton and the perils of the financial South Sea, Andrew Odlyzko, Physics Today, 2020. https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/isaac-newton-and-the-perils-of-the-financial-south-sea

Members of Parliament had passed the Bubble Act in June 1720, before the crash. Under it no one could form a joint-stock company without a royal charter. They used the Act to charter two new companies to write marine insurance, the Royal Exchange Assurance and the London Assurance.¹³13 South Sea Company, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/South_Sea_Company Parliament kept the ban on unchartered companies until 1825.

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The States of Holland paid their lenders the twelfth penny, 8⅓ per cent a year, in the Republic’s early decades. They refinanced the debt at 5 per cent in 1640 and converted it to 4 in 1665.¹⁵15 Financial history of the Dutch Republic, Wikipedia (citing Jan de Vries and Ad van der Woude, The First Modern Economy, 1997). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Financial_history_of_the_Dutch_Republic Ministers in London made such cuts later. Montagu’s lenders took 8 per cent in 1694, but Henry Pelham paid only 3½ on the consols he created in 1752, and from 1757 their owners accepted 3 per cent, a rate the Treasury kept until 1888.¹⁶16 Consol (bond), Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consol_(bond)

A dictionary of the trades

Denis Diderot, the son of a cutler from Langres, took over a plan by Paris booksellers to translate an English encyclopedia and turned it into something far bigger. He and the mathematician Jean le Rond d’Alembert published the first volume of the Encyclopédie in 1751. They promised a reasoned dictionary of the sciences, the arts and the trades, and they gave the trades long articles and whole volumes of pictures.

Diderot went into workshops to learn how weavers, smiths and papermakers did their jobs, and wrote up at night what he had learned. Louis-Jacques Goussier, his chief draughtsman, visited craftsmen across France and drew more than 900 of the plates himself. Masters had long kept the secrets of a trade inside its guild, but Diderot’s booksellers sold them to any subscriber who could pay.

Churchmen and royal officials in Paris disliked the articles on religion and politics. In 1759, after the seventh volume, the French government withdrew the licence to publish, and Pope Clement XIII placed the work on the Index of forbidden books. Diderot kept going in secret. Louis de Jaucourt, a doctor and nobleman, wrote 17,266 articles for him by 1765, about eight a day. That year Diderot’s printers issued the last ten volumes of text together, and by 1772 they had finished all eleven volumes of plates.

The booksellers ran off 4,225 sets of the first edition, about twice the usual run for a French book. They charged 980 livres a set, more than most middle-class families could pay. The four publishers made more than two million livres in profit.²2 Encyclopédie, Wikipedia (citing Robert Darnton). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A9die Diderot drew about 2,800 livres a year as editor, while Jaucourt, a rich man, worked for next to nothing. Printers in Lucca and Livorno reprinted the work in French, and others followed with cheaper editions.

Lightning and air

Benjamin Franklin, a Philadelphia printer, began to experiment with electricity in the 1740s, after the town’s library company received a glass tube for the purpose from London. Franklin had more tubes blown at a local glasshouse and filled his house with people who came to watch. In 1747 he retired from printing and took his foreman, David Hall, into partnership. Hall ran the shop and paid Franklin half its profits for 18 years,³3 Benjamin Franklin, Wikipedia (citing James N. Green, 2002). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Franklin and Franklin spent the free hours on his experiments. He found that with a sharp iron point he could draw the charge silently from a charged body at a distance, but with a blunt one he got a crack and a spark. He guessed that lightning was the same thing as the spark from his tubes, and that with a pointed rod he could draw it from a cloud.

Peter Collinson had sent the tube. He was a Quaker cloth merchant in London who traded with North America and sent plants and books across the Atlantic. Franklin wrote up his trials in letters to him. Collinson had them read at the Royal Society, where some fellows laughed, and then had them printed in 1751 as Experiments and Observations on Electricity. Thomas-François Dalibard, a French naturalist, translated the book at the suggestion of the Comte de Buffon. On 10 May 1752 a retired dragoon at Marly-la-Ville, north of Paris, followed Dalibard’s version of Franklin’s plan. During a storm he brought a wire close to an insulated iron rod some 40 feet tall and drew sparks from it.⁴4 Benjamin Franklin and lightning rods, E. Philip Krider, Physics Today, 2006. https://physicstoday.aip.org/features/benjamin-franklin-and-lightning-rods Franklin, who had not yet heard the news, flew a kite into a storm at Philadelphia that June and drew sparks from a key on its wet string.

Philadelphians put up grounded rods on the Academy of Philadelphia and the State House in 1752. The Royal Society gave Franklin its Copley Medal in November 1753. Franklin never patented the rod, his stove or anything else, and he explained why in his autobiography.

He wrote that “as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours; and this we should do freely and generously.”⁵5 Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Frank Woodworth Pine, 1916. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20203 A London ironmonger copied his stove, patented it and, Franklin heard, made a small fortune.

Antoine Lavoisier, born into a rich Paris family in 1743, weighed everything. He bought a share in the Ferme générale, the private company that collected the king’s taxes, and spent its profits on fine balances, glassware and assistants. From 1784 he had the company build a wall about 24 kilometres long round Paris, so that its agents could tax goods coming into the city. He married Marie-Anne Paulze, the daughter of a fellow tax farmer, in 1771. She was 13 and he was 28. She learned English to translate British chemistry for him and kept his laboratory notebooks. A former pupil of Jacques-Louis David, she drew to scale the thirteen plates of apparatus in his textbook of 1789.

Lavoisier burned metals and sulphur in sealed vessels and weighed them before and after. He found no change in the total weight, and he showed that a burning body took something out of the air. He coined the word oxygen for that part of the air in 1778, and the word hydrogen in 1783. In his Elementary Treatise of Chemistry of 1789 he threw out earth, air, fire and water as elements and listed 33 substances that no one had yet broken down.

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The revolutionaries arrested the tax farmers in November 1793. A tribunal convicted Lavoisier, and the executioner guillotined him in Paris on 8 May 1794, along with his father-in-law. The mathematician Joseph-Louis Lagrange is said to have remarked that it took a moment to cut off that head, and a century might not produce another like it.⁶6 Antoine Lavoisier, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antoine_Lavoisier

Pins and patents

Adam Smith, who had taught moral philosophy at Glasgow, published The Wealth of Nations in London on 9 March 1776 and opened it with a small workshop. He drew on French accounts of pin making, among them the article on pins in the Encyclopédie.

One man draws out the wire; another straights it; a third cuts it; a fourth points it; a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on is a peculiar business; to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands, though in others the same man will sometimes perform two or three of them. I have seen a small manufactory of this kind, where ten men only were employed, and where some of them consequently performed two or three distinct operations.

Smith reckoned that his ten men made more than 48,000 pins a day between them.⁷7 An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Book I, ch. 1, Adam Smith, 1776. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3300 A man working alone, without training, could perhaps not make twenty. Smith argued that a nation’s wealth depended on how finely its people divided their work, and that they could divide it only as far as the market reached. People who built roads, canals and ports widened the market, and so did governments that let goods move freely. He thought the government should keep the peace, enforce contracts and build such works, and otherwise leave buyers and sellers alone.

Americans wrote the reward for invention into their founding law. On 18 August 1787, James Madison and Charles Pinckney proposed to the convention in Philadelphia that Congress should protect authors and inventors. The delegates agreed, and in the Constitution they signed on 17 September they gave Congress the power “To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.”⁸8 Copyright Clause, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Clause

George Washington signed the Patent Act on 10 April 1790. Under it three cabinet members sat as a patent board: Thomas Jefferson, Henry Knox and Edmund Randolph, the Secretaries of State and War and the Attorney General. An inventor paid four or five dollars in all: fifty cents to file, ten cents for every hundred words of description, two dollars for the patent itself and a dollar to fix the Great Seal.⁹9 Patent Act of 1790, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Act_of_1790 The board granted the first patent that July to Samuel Hopkins, for a better way to make potash, which soap makers, glassmakers and gunpowder makers all needed. In all it granted 57 patents before Congress replaced the law in 1793.

The milkmaid’s cowpox

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, wife of the British ambassador at Constantinople, had watched old women in the city inoculate thousands of people against smallpox each autumn. In March 1718 she had the embassy surgeon, Charles Maitland, inoculate her son Edward, then nearly five.

Europeans lost about 400,000 people a year to smallpox in the eighteenth century, and many who lived carried its scars.¹⁰10 Smallpox, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox Doctors in Britain adopted Montagu’s method. They gave a mild case on purpose by rubbing matter from a smallpox sore into a cut, but some of their patients died of it and others spread it.

Edward Jenner, a country doctor at Berkeley in Gloucestershire, heard dairy workers say that a milkmaid who had caught cowpox from the cows would never catch smallpox. He tested the claim on his gardener’s son, a child who could not consent.

The more accurately to observe the progress of the infection, I selected a healthy boy, about eight years old, for the purpose of inoculation for the Cow Pox. The matter was taken from a sore on the hand of a dairymaid, who was infected by her master’s cows, and it was inserted, on the 14th of May, 1796, into the arm of the boy by means of two superficial incisions, barely penetrating the cutis, each about half an inch long.

The boy, James Phipps, felt unwell for a day and recovered. On 1 July Jenner rubbed smallpox matter into his arms, and the boy did not fall ill. The dairymaid, Sarah Nelmes, had caught cowpox from a cow called Blossom. Jenner gathered 23 cases, among them his son Robert, aged 11 months, and in 1798 paid to have his Inquiry printed. He gave cowpox the Latin name variolae vaccinae, from vacca, a cow, and from it his followers soon made the word vaccination.

Doctors across Europe were using the method within three years. In July 1800 the Harvard professor Benjamin Waterhouse vaccinated his son Daniel. Francisco Javier de Balmis, a Spanish army surgeon, sailed from A Coruña on 30 November 1803 with 22 orphan boys and Isabel Zendal, who ran their orphanage.¹¹11 Balmis Expedition, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balmis_Expedition Balmis vaccinated two boys at a time. When their sores ripened he took matter from them for the next two, and in this way he carried live cowpox across the Atlantic. His team vaccinated hundreds of thousands of people in Spanish America, the Philippines and China. Doctors with the World Health Organization finished the work in the 1970s, and the WHO declared smallpox eradicated in May 1980.

Diderot’s booksellers had printed 4,225 sets of the Encyclopédie at 980 livres each. After Charles-Joseph Panckoucke bought the rights in 1775 and issued five volumes of supplements and a two-volume index, other publishers brought out the work in quarto and octavo, at prices that upper-middle-class buyers could meet. By 1789 booksellers had sold some 25,000 sets across Europe, nearly six times the first run.¹²12 Encyclopédie, Wikipedia (citing Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment, 1979). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclop%C3%A9die Jenner paid to have his Inquiry printed in 1798, and by 1800 printers had brought it out in all the major European languages.¹³13 Smallpox vaccine, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smallpox_vaccine

The mill at Cromford

Richard Arkwright, a barber and wigmaker from Bolton, made money from a waterproof dye for wigs and spent it on spinning machines. He patented a spinning frame in 1769. On it a worker with little training could draw cotton out between pairs of rollers turning at different speeds and twist it into a yarn strong enough for the warp of a cloth. Arkwright went into partnership with Jedediah Strutt and Samuel Need, two hosiery makers, and in 1771 they opened a mill on the River Derwent at Cromford in Derbyshire, with a water wheel to drive the frames.

Arkwright hired about 200 people at first, more than the village could house, so he built rows of cottages for them, with a pub, shops and a chapel. From 1772 he ran the mill day and night in two turns of twelve to thirteen hours. His gatekeepers shut the gates at six in the morning and six at night. A worker who came late lost a day’s pay and paid a fine of a second day’s.

Arkwright took on whole families and hired children from the age of seven, later ten. By the end of his life nearly two-thirds of his 1,150 workers at Cromford were children.⁵5 Richard Arkwright, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Arkwright Other mill owners across Lancashire and Derbyshire hired children too, and many of them worked twelve hours or more. In 1832 Michael Sadler, a Tory member of Parliament, chaired a committee that heard witnesses describe long hours, crippled limbs and beatings. A royal commission found the beatings rarer than he claimed but backed limits on hours. The next year Parliament banned work in most textile mills for children under nine, limited those from nine to thirteen to 48 hours a week, and appointed four inspectors with the right to enter any mill.⁶6 The 1833 Factory Act, UK Parliament, Living Heritage. https://www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/livinglearning/19thcentury/overview/factoryact/

After a court threw out Arkwright’s patents in 1785, other spinners copied his frames freely. The king knighted him a year later, and he died in 1792 worth about £500,000. Once they had Boulton and Watt engines to drive their machines, mill owners could build in towns, away from fast rivers. British spinners used 2.6 million pounds of raw cotton in 1760, 52 million in 1800 and 621 million in 1850.⁷7 The Industrial Revolution, ch. 4, Table 1, Gregory Clark, UC Davis. https://faculty.econ.ucdavis.edu/faculty/gclark/ecn110b/readings/chapter4.pdf

Iron roads

George Stephenson grew up at Wylam on the Tyne, the son of a colliery fireman. Neither of his parents could read, and he learned only at 18, when he paid for night school out of his wages. He worked as an engineman at collieries and built his first locomotive in 1814 to haul coal wagons at Killingworth. On 27 September 1825 he drove his Locomotion No. 1 on the opening day of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in County Durham.

Liverpool merchants wanted a quicker way to move cotton to the Manchester mills than the canals, whose owners charged what they liked. They hired Stephenson to build a railway between the two towns. He had to cut two miles through rock at Olive Mount, build a viaduct of nine arches over the Sankey valley and cross Chat Moss, nearly five miles of bog. His men laid the track on a raft of timber and hurdles, sank empty tar barrels sealed with clay along the drains, and tipped in earth until they had a bed firm enough for the line.

The directors had not yet decided whether to haul trains with fixed engines and cables or with locomotives. They offered £500 to the best locomotive and staged a trial at Rainhill in October 1829. Builders entered ten engines but brought only five to the start. Thomas Brandreth drove his Cycloped with a horse walking a treadmill. George’s son Robert built Rocket at the family works in Newcastle. Henry Booth, the railway’s treasurer, may have suggested its boiler. Stephenson gave the boiler 25 copper tubes to carry hot gas from the fire through the water, and fitted a blast pipe to send spent steam up the chimney and draw the fire. Only Rocket’s crew finished the course. They hauled 13 tons at an average of 12 miles an hour and reached 30 at top speed.⁸8 Rainhill trials, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainhill_trials

Fanny Kemble, a 20-year-old actress playing in Liverpool, rode the line with George Stephenson on 25 August 1830, three weeks before it opened. He sat her beside him on the engine’s bench and explained the machine to her as they went. She wrote to a friend the next day.

We then rejoined the rest of the party, and the engine having received its supply of water, the carriage was placed behind it, for it cannot turn, and was set off at its utmost speed, thirty-five miles an hour, swifter than a bird flies (for they tried the experiment with a snipe). You cannot conceive what that sensation of cutting the air was; the motion is as smooth as possible, too. I could either have read or written; and as it was, I stood up, and with my bonnet off “drank the air before me.”

The directors opened the Liverpool and Manchester Railway on 15 September 1830. The Duke of Wellington, the prime minister, rode in the first train. When the trains stopped for water at Parkside, William Huskisson, a member of Parliament for Liverpool, stepped down onto the other track to greet him. Joseph Locke, at the controls of Rocket, could not stop in time. He ran over Huskisson’s leg, and Huskisson died that evening.

The company ran its 31 miles on a timetable, with double track, signalmen and steam locomotives on the main line. Passengers made the trip in about two hours, and most of the stagecoach firms between the towns shut soon after. The directors had built the line mainly for freight, but passengers brought in much of its business. For the 15 years it stayed independent, the company paid shareholders an average dividend of 9.5 per cent a year.⁹9 Liverpool and Manchester Railway, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liverpool_and_Manchester_Railway

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Isambard Kingdom Brunel, son of the French-born engineer Marc Brunel, became engineer of the Great Western Railway in March 1833, a month before his 27th birthday. He surveyed the route from London to Bristol and kept it nearly level so his engines could run fast. When rivals fought his bill in Parliament, the science writer Dionysius Lardner claimed that a train running away down the slope of the Box Tunnel would reach 120 miles an hour and suffocate its passengers. Brunel took the claims apart, and Parliament passed the bill in August 1835. He chose a gauge of just over seven feet for steadier carriages, where Stephenson had used four feet eight and a half inches. The company opened its line from Paddington as far as Maidenhead in June 1838. At the Box Tunnel, almost two miles long, up to 4,000 navvies dug by candlelight and blasted with about a ton of explosives a week. About 100 of them died in the work.¹⁰10 Box Tunnel, Wikipedia (citing Network Rail). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_Tunnel From 30 June 1841 the company ran trains through from London to Bristol in about five and a half hours, a trip of 15 to 20 hours by road.

Brunel wanted passengers to go on from Bristol to New York. The crew of his paddle steamer Great Western reached New York in April 1838, fifteen days out of Bristol. For his Great Britain of 1843 he chose an iron hull and a screw propeller. He designed his last ship, the Great Eastern, to be nearly 700 feet long and carry 4,000 passengers. His men began trying to launch her sideways into the Thames in November 1857 and needed almost three months to get her into the water. He died on 15 September 1859, a week after her crew first took her to sea.

The long rise

Friedrich Engels’s father sent him from Germany to a family cotton mill in Manchester in 1842. There Engels walked the town’s slums with Mary Burns, an Irish factory worker, and described them in a book of 1845. The economic historian Robert Allen reckons that British workers raised their output by 46 per cent between 1780 and 1840 but, after prices, took home only 12 per cent more.¹¹11 Engels’ pause, Robert C. Allen, Explorations in Economic History, 2009. https://www.nuffield.ox.ac.uk/users/allen/engelspause.pdf Mill and mine owners took most of the difference and spent it on more mills and mines.

After 1840 workers began to catch up. Between 1840 and 1900 they raised their output by 90 per cent and their wages, after prices, by 123 per cent. Through all the centuries before, people had lived better for a while after a run of good harvests or a new trade, then slipped back. From the 1840s, British workers took home more decade after decade, and so did their children. Engineers had carried steam to Belgium, France, the German states and the United States by the 1840s.

British miners dug 2 million tonnes of coal in 1700, a few years before Newcomen set up his engine near Dudley, and 71.5 million in 1853.¹²12 Coal production and imports in the United Kingdom, Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/coal-output-uk-tonnes In Cornwall, from 1810, Captain Joel Lean printed a monthly report on the work and coal of the mines’ pumping engines, and their engineers competed to get more work out of each bushel. By 1840 they had raised the duty of their engines, the pounds of water lifted one foot by a bushel of coal, from about 20 million to 90 million.¹³13 Lean’s Engine Reporter, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lean%27s_Engine_Reporter Dutch engineers bought three of these engines from Hayle and with them pumped the Haarlemmermeer, a lake of some 170 square kilometres, dry between 1848 and 1852.¹⁴14 Haarlemmermeer, Wikipedia (citing Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1911). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haarlemmermeer

Under the Atlantic

Cyrus Field, a New York paper merchant, helped form the Atlantic Telegraph Company in 1856 to join Ireland to Newfoundland, and put up a quarter of its capital himself. In the summer of 1858 the crews of HMS Agamemnon and USS Niagara met in mid-ocean, spliced their halves of the cable together and steamed apart. In early August they brought the two ends ashore, at Valentia Island in Ireland and at Trinity Bay in Newfoundland.

On 16 August Queen Victoria sent President James Buchanan a greeting of 98 words, and the operators needed about 16 hours to get it through.⁵5 The Transatlantic Telegraph Cable: Eighth Wonder of the World, Gillian Cookson, History Today, 2000. https://atlantic-cable.com/Article/Cookson-History/index.htm New Yorkers celebrated the cable with gun salutes, church bells and lights, and by accident set fire to the cupola of City Hall. Wildman Whitehouse, the company’s chief electrician, was a doctor who had taught himself electrical work. He tried to force the faint signals along with up to 2,000 volts.⁶6 The first transatlantic telegraph cable was a bold, beautiful failure, IEEE Spectrum. https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/heroic-failures/the-first-transatlantic-telegraph-cable-was-a-bold-beautiful-failure By 18 September the operators had lost the line, after 271 messages, and the directors dismissed Whitehouse. William Thomson, a Glasgow professor of natural philosophy, had argued for gentle currents. In his mirror galvanometer he fixed a tiny mirror to a magnet and bounced a beam of light off it. A clerk watching the spot of light could read a current too weak to show on an ordinary needle.

Field raised money again. The owners of the Great Eastern, Brunel’s giant iron steamship, had lost money running her as a liner. In 1864 a group of their directors bought her at auction and hired her out to Field and the cable makers. Workmen took out her saloons and fitted tanks big enough to take the whole cable. Her crew lost the 1865 cable in August, after paying out 1,062 nautical miles. On 27 July 1866 they brought a new one ashore at Heart’s Content, Newfoundland. Then they went back, grappled the lost 1865 cable off the sea floor, spliced it and finished a second line that September.

Operators sent about eight words a minute over the 1866 cable. The company charged £20 for twenty words. Bankers, shipowners and newspapers paid it, because otherwise they waited about ten days for a steamer to bring the news.⁷7 Wiring the Atlantic, Maritime Foundation, 2023. https://www.maritimefoundation.uk/publications/maritime-2023/wiring-the-atlantic/

Waves and voices

James Clerk Maxwell, a Scottish physicist at King’s College London, put Faraday’s lines of force into mathematics. On 8 December 1864 he read to the Royal Society a paper in which he tied electricity, magnetism and light into one set of equations. From them he calculated the speed of an electromagnetic wave, found it equal to the speed experimenters had measured for light, and concluded that “light is an electromagnetic disturbance propagated through the field according to electromagnetic laws.”⁸8 A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field, Wikipedia (quoting Maxwell, 1865). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Dynamical_Theory_of_the_Electromagnetic_Field Heinrich Hertz made and detected such waves in his laboratory at Karlsruhe in 1888.

Alexander Graham Bell taught deaf pupils in Boston and experimented with ways to send several telegraph messages down one wire. His lawyer filed his telephone patent on 14 February 1876. Elisha Gray filed notice of a rival design that day, and on 7 March the Patent Office granted Bell patent 174,465. Three days later Bell spoke into his transmitter and Thomas Watson, in another room, heard “Mr. Watson—Come here—I want to see you.” Bell and his backers formed the Bell Telephone Company in 1877, and by 1886 more than 150,000 Americans owned telephones.⁹9 Alexander Graham Bell, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Graham_Bell

Pearl Street and Niagara

Thomas Edison ran a laboratory at Menlo Park, New Jersey, and paid machinists, glassblowers and chemists to work in it. His lawyer Grosvenor Lowrey found backers for his work on light among Western Union men, a Vanderbilt son-in-law and a partner of Drexel, Morgan and Company. In October 1878 they incorporated the Edison Electric Light Company, which gave Edison $130,000 for research over the next two and a half years.¹⁰10 Supporting the Work, Thomas A. Edison Papers, Rutgers University. https://edison.rutgers.edu/life-of-edison/biographical-essays/lighting/supporting-the-work Inventors had made electric lamps before him, and Joseph Swan in Newcastle had a working carbon lamp by early 1879. On 22 October 1879 Edison’s team kept a carbon-filament lamp alight for 13 and a half hours. They kept testing, and over the next months carbonised cotton and linen thread, wood splints, cardboard, hemp and palmetto. In 1880 Edison and his assistant Charles Batchelor found that a filament of carbonised bamboo would stay alight for more than 1,200 hours. Edison wanted to sell light, and he and his staff designed everything needed to deliver it: dynamos, cables, sockets, fuses and meters.

He opened his Pearl Street station on 4 September 1882. His engineers drove six 27-ton dynamos with steam engines and sent direct current at 110 volts through copper cables laid under the streets of a quarter square mile of lower Manhattan. He started with fewer than a hundred customers. By the end of the first year he had about 500, and they burned 10,000 lamps.¹¹11 Milestones: Pearl Street Station, 1882, IEEE Engineering and Technology History Wiki. https://ethw.org/Milestones:Pearl_Street_Station,_1882 At 110 volts, though, his engineers struggled to serve anyone more than about a mile from the station.

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George Westinghouse, a Pittsburgh maker of railway air brakes, backed alternating current instead. In March 1886 his engineer William Stanley lit shops and offices in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, with transformers to step 500 volts down to 100 for the lamps. Nikola Tesla, a Serb engineer from the Austrian Empire, had worked for Edison in New York for about six months in 1884. He patented an alternating-current motor in May 1888, and that July Westinghouse licensed his patents for $60,000 in cash and stock plus a royalty of $2.50 a horsepower.¹²12 Nikola Tesla, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikola_Tesla

Edison’s allies tried to frighten the public. In 1888 Harold Brown, an electrician, worked with Edison’s staff to show that alternating current could kill. He killed a dog with it before an audience at Columbia College, and later calves and a horse at Edison’s laboratory. In 1892 financiers merged Edison General Electric with Thomson-Houston to form General Electric, and the new company soon sold alternating current too.

Edward Dean Adams and the investors of the Cataract Construction Company wanted to sell the power of Niagara Falls to factories miles away. Tesla advised them to use alternating current, and they gave Westinghouse the contract in 1893, the year he lit the Chicago world’s fair with it. In August 1895 engineers put the Adams power plant at Niagara into service with 5,000-horsepower generators.

At midnight on 16 November 1896 engineers threw a switch and sent 11,000 volts along about 25 miles of line to Buffalo. The city’s streetcar company took the first 1,000 horsepower.¹³13 Tesla, Master of Lightning: Harnessing Niagara, PBS. https://www.pbs.org/tesla/ll/ll_niagara.html Makers of aluminium and chemicals soon built works beside the falls to use the cheap power. By 1940, 78.7 per cent of occupied American homes had electric lights.¹⁴14 September 2026: Electricity, US Census Bureau, 2026. https://www.census.gov/about/history/stories/monthly/2026/september-2026.html

In the second half of the century Americans used the wires mostly to send words. Western Union’s operators sent 5.9 million messages in 1867 and 63 million in 1900.¹⁵15 Number of Messages Sent, Western Union Telegraph Company for United States, NBER Macrohistory Database, via FRED. https://fred.stlouisfed.org/data/A0319AUSA579NNBR Around 1900 some factory owners began to give each machine its own electric motor in place of driving them all from one engine through shafts and belts. At a meeting in 1901 Professor F. B. Crocker reported that owners who did so often got 20 or 30 per cent more output from the same floor space, machines and workmen. By 1929 American manufacturers drew more than three-quarters of the power for their machines from electric motors.¹⁶16 From Shafts to Wires: Historical Perspective on Electrification, Warren D. Devine Jr., Journal of Economic History, 1983. https://gwern.net/doc/economics/automation/1983-devine.pdf

Many patients still died of infection after an operation. Surgeons could do nothing about it, because they did not know where infection came from.

The Broad Street pump

Doctors of the 1840s blamed cholera on miasma, a poison in foul air. Snow thought patients caught it by swallowing matter from the waste of other patients, and he looked to London’s water. On the night of 31 August 1854 people around Broad Street in Soho began to fall ill with cholera. In ten days more than 500 died within 250 yards of one street corner. Snow got the list of deaths from the General Register Office, walked the streets, and questioned the families of the dead.

On proceeding to the spot, I found that nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump. There were only ten deaths in houses situated decidedly nearer to another street pump. In five of these cases the families of the deceased persons informed me that they always sent to the pump in Broad Street, as they preferred the water to that of the pump which was nearer. In three other cases, the deceased were children who went to school near the pump in Broad Street. Two of them were known to drink the water; and the parents of the third think it probable that it did so.

He found the exceptions just as telling. The workhouse on Poland Street had its own well, and just five of its 535 inmates died. None of the seventy-odd men at the brewery near the pump caught cholera badly. The owner, Mr Huggins, believed they drank only the malt liquor they were given, and he was sure they never used the street pump. Snow put his case to the Board of Guardians of St James’s parish on the evening of 7 September, and the next day they had the pump handle removed.

Snow then tested his idea across south London. Two companies piped water to the same streets, often to neighbouring houses. The Lambeth Company had moved its intake upstream to Thames Ditton in 1852, above the city’s sewage. The Southwark and Vauxhall Company still drew from the Thames at Battersea. Snow, helped by the Registrar-General’s district registrars, traced the water supply of every house where someone died. He wrote that about 300,000 people had been “divided into two groups without their choice.”³3 On the Mode of Communication of Cholera, 2nd edition, John Snow, 1855. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/72894

Members of Parliament did not act on Snow’s findings at once. In the hot summer of 1858, the Great Stink, they sat beside the Thames in such a stench that they passed a law to pay for new drains. Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, began in 1859. His crews laid 82 miles of brick intercepting sewers along the river and joined them to some 1,100 miles of street sewers.⁴4 Joseph Bazalgette, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Bazalgette Bazalgette used them to carry London’s waste downstream, east of the city. His men built the Victoria Embankment over the low-level sewer and laid 318 million bricks in the system.⁵5 London sewer system, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/London_sewer_system

Washing hands

Ignaz Semmelweis worked in the maternity hospital in Vienna, which had two clinics. In the first, where doctors and medical students delivered babies, about one mother in ten died of childbed fever between 1841 and 1846. In the second, run by midwives, fewer than one in twenty-five died. Then his colleague Jakob Kolletschka cut his finger during a post-mortem in 1847 and died of an illness that looked like childbed fever. Semmelweis guessed that the doctors carried something from the dead to the living on their hands.

From the middle of May 1847 he made every doctor wash in a solution of chlorinated lime before examining a patient. In April 18.3 per cent of mothers in the first clinic had died, but in June only 2.2 per cent died, and in July 1.2.⁶6 Ignaz Semmelweis, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ignaz_Semmelweis Senior doctors in Vienna rejected his idea. Semmelweis waited until 1861 to publish his full case and answered his critics with angry open letters. Colleagues committed him to an asylum in July 1865, and he died there on 13 August.

Louis Pasteur, a chemist in Paris, supplied the reason. He boiled broth in flasks whose long necks curved down and up again, and showed that it stayed clear for as long as dust from the air could not reach it. He concluded that the broth rotted only when germs from the dust fell into it. Joseph Lister, professor of surgery at Glasgow, read Pasteur’s papers and decided to kill germs in wounds before they could fester.

Lister tried Condy’s Fluid, zinc chloride, iodine and other compounds and found none of them suitable. He then heard that the town of Carlisle had treated its sewage with creosote. Thomas Anderson, the Glasgow professor of chemistry, got him a sample of a crude carbolic acid sold as German creosote. On 12 August 1865 Lister treated James Greenlees, an eleven-year-old who had broken his leg under a cart so badly that the bone stuck through the skin. He washed out the wound and dressed it with carbolic acid, a chemical distilled from coal tar. The boy walked out six weeks later with both legs.⁷7 Lister Pioneers Antiseptic Surgery in Glasgow, History Today. https://www.historytoday.com/node/53700

Lister described his method in a series of papers in The Lancet in 1867. On 9 August he read a summary to the British Medical Association in Dublin, and the editors of The Lancet printed it in September.

But since the antiseptic treatment has been brought into full operation, and wounds and abscesses no longer poison the atmosphere with putrid exhalations, my wards, though in other respects under precisely the same circumstances as before, have completely changed their character; so that during the last nine months not a single instance of pyæmia, hospital gangrene, or erysipelas has occurred in them. As there appears to be no doubt regarding the cause of this change, the importance of the fact can hardly be exaggerated.

In a later paper Lister compared his amputations: 16 of 35 patients had died before he used carbolic acid, and 6 of 40 after.⁸8 Lister and Germ Theory, JMP Case Study Library (from Lister, The Lancet, 1870). https://www.jmp.com/en/academic/case-study-library/lister-and-germ-theory Many surgeons scoffed. In Philadelphia Samuel Gross, the most famous American surgeon of his day, said that experienced American surgeons put little faith in Lister’s treatment.

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Germs, one by one

Robert Koch, a district doctor at Wollstein in Prussian Posen, set up a laboratory beside his consulting room with a microscope his wife had given him for his birthday. There he showed in 1876 that a rod-shaped bacterium caused anthrax in cattle. In Berlin he and his assistants learned to grow one kind of germ at a time. Walther Hesse borrowed an idea from his wife, Fanny, and suggested agar, a jelly made from seaweed, as a solid surface to grow them on. Julius Petri designed the shallow glass dish with a lid. On 24 March 1882 Koch told the Physiological Society in Berlin that he had found the germ of tuberculosis, then one of the leading causes of death in Europe. In January 1884, in Calcutta, his team grew in pure culture the cholera germ that Snow had argued for but never saw.

Since Jenner’s trial of 1796, doctors had vaccinated people against smallpox with cowpox without knowing how it protected them. In 1840 Parliament made vaccination free for the poor and banned the older, riskier practice of inoculating with smallpox itself, and in 1853 it made vaccination compulsory for infants.

Pasteur and his assistants weakened the germs of chicken cholera and anthrax in the laboratory and used them as vaccines to protect animals. In May 1881 his assistants Émile Roux and Charles Chamberland vaccinated half of a herd of 58 sheep, 2 goats and 10 cattle against anthrax at Pouilly-le-Fort, then gave every animal a deadly dose. On 2 June more than 200 onlookers found the vaccinated sheep alive and the others dead. Pasteur reported that he had used a live vaccine. His notebooks show that Chamberland had secretly killed the germs with potassium dichromate.⁹9 Louis Pasteur, Wikipedia (citing Gerald Geison, 1995). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Pasteur That year Pasteur proposed, in Jenner’s honour, that doctors use the word vaccine for every such protective inoculation. On 6 July 1885 his team gave rabies vaccine to Joseph Meister, a nine-year-old bitten by a rabid dog, and the boy lived.

City engineers did the most with what Koch and Pasteur learned. They filtered their water through beds of sand. A New Jersey court had ordered the Jersey City Water Supply Company to clean up the water it sold the city, and John Leal, its sanitary adviser, proposed chlorine. The engineer George Fuller designed and built a plant at the Boonton Reservoir in 99 days. From 26 September 1908 his operators dosed about 40 million gallons a day with chloride of lime.¹⁰10 John L. Leal, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_L._Leal A judge ruled in 1910 that the treated water was pure and wholesome, and engineers in other American cities soon followed. The economists David Cutler and Grant Miller later studied 13 large American cities between 1900 and 1936. They credited filtering and chlorination with nearly half the fall in deaths there and three-quarters of the fall in infant deaths.¹¹11 The Role of Public Health Improvements in Health Advances: The 20th Century United States, David Cutler and Grant Miller, NBER Working Paper 10511, 2004. https://www.nber.org/papers/w10511

The mould on the plate

Alexander Fleming came back to his laboratory at St Mary’s Hospital in London on 3 September 1928 after a holiday and found a mould growing on a dish of staphylococcus bacteria. Around the mould the bacteria had died. He published a paper on the substance, penicillin, in 1929. He could not purify it, and few scientists paid the paper any attention.

Ernst Chain, a chemist who had fled Germany, came across the paper in the late 1930s. He showed it to Howard Florey, who ran his department at Oxford. Norman Heatley, the team’s biochemist, grew the mould in hospital bedpans. When those ran short in the war, he designed a new vessel and had potters in Staffordshire make it. He also built a machine to pull the drug out of the broth. On 25 May 1940 Florey infected eight mice with streptococcus and gave penicillin to four. By morning the four untreated mice were dead and the treated ones alive.

In February 1941 the team treated Albert Alexander, a police constable dying of infected abscesses on his face. Within a day his doctors saw his fever drop and his sores begin to heal. The team recovered some of the drug from his urine but still ran out after five days. He relapsed and died on 15 March. The Oxford team needed far more penicillin than a university could make.

Florey and Heatley flew to the United States in 1941. At the government laboratory in Peoria, Illinois, Andrew Moyer suggested feeding the mould on corn steep liquor, a waste product of starch mills. He later published the results without Heatley’s name, against their agreement. On 14 March 1942 doctors in New Haven treated Anne Miller, who was dying of an infection after a miscarriage. They gave her 5.5 grams of penicillin, half the supply in the country,¹²12 From penicillin to phages: Yale’s century-long fight against infection, Yale School of Medicine. https://medicine.yale.edu/news-article/from-penicillin-to-phages-yales-century-long-fight-against-infection/ and she recovered and lived to 90. In 1943 Moyer’s colleagues found a better strain on a mouldy cantaloupe from a local market. By 1945 American firms were turning out more than 6.8 trillion units a year. That year Fleming, Florey and Chain shared the Nobel Prize.

People in the richest countries gained a generation of life in a century. A British child born in 1850 could expect to live 43 years, and one born in 1950, 69. Americans went from 39 years in 1880 to 68 in 1950. As poorer countries adopted the medicine and water works of the rich, people across the world more than doubled their life expectancy at birth, from 32 years in 1900 to just over 70 by 2021.¹³13 Life expectancy, Our World in Data. https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy Doctors and engineers won most of those years by keeping small children alive through diarrhoea, measles and fever, and by bringing mothers safely through childbirth.

American chemists and chemical engineers raised output so fast that they brought the price of a dose of penicillin down from $20 in July 1943 to 55 cents by 1946.¹⁴14 Penicillin: Opening the Era of Antibiotics, USDA Agricultural Research Service. https://www.ars.usda.gov/midwest-area/peoria-il/national-center-for-agricultural-utilization-research/docs/penicillin-opening-the-era-of-antibiotics/ On 19 October 1943 Albert Schatz, a PhD student in Selman Waksman’s laboratory at Rutgers, isolated streptomycin from a microbe in New Jersey soil. Doctors used it as the first antibiotic cure for tuberculosis, 61 years after Koch had found the germ.¹⁵15 Streptomycin, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streptomycin British parents in 1950 lost far fewer children than their forebears a century earlier. About one in four children born in the United Kingdom in 1850 died before the age of five, against one in 27 of those born in 1950.¹⁶16 Child mortality rate, United Kingdom, Our World in Data (Gapminder and UN IGME). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality

The brothers took turns and flew four times that day. On the fourth flight Wilbur stayed up for 59 seconds and covered 852 feet. Nine days earlier Samuel Langley, head of the Smithsonian, had seen his own machine fall into the Potomac for the second time, with his engineer Charles Manly aboard. War Department officials had given Langley $50,000. The Wrights had paid for everything themselves. Orville later reckoned that inventing the aeroplane had cost them about $1,000.⁵5 “Wilbur and Orville”, National Park Service, Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. https://nps.gov/daav/learn/kidsyouth/wilburandorville.htm

Most newspaper editors ignored the Wrights for years. The brothers kept working at Huffman Prairie, a cow pasture near Dayton, and on 5 October 1905 Wilbur circled it for 39 minutes and covered 24 miles. In August 1908 Wilbur flew before a crowd at a racecourse near Le Mans in France and turned tight, banked circles that no European pilot could match. The next month Orville flew for the United States Army at Fort Myer, Virginia. On 17 September he crashed with a split propeller and broke his thigh and ribs. His passenger, Lieutenant Thomas Selfridge, became the first person to die in a powered aeroplane.

Highland Park

Early on the morning of 4 June 1896 Henry Ford found that his first car, the Quadricycle, was too wide for the door of the brick shed behind his rented home on Bagley Avenue in Detroit. He took an axe to the wall to get it out. Later he sold the car for $200 to pay for his next one.

Nicolaus Otto had built a practical four-stroke gas engine at Deutz, near Cologne, in 1876, and Karl Benz in Mannheim patented a three-wheeled motor car in 1886. Car makers stayed craftsmen for twenty years after that. Their fitters filed every part by hand to fit a single car. Ford, a farmer’s son from Dearborn, Michigan, wanted to build one plain, tough car that a farmer or a clerk could afford. He put the Model T on sale on 1 October 1908.

Ford moved his works to a new plant at Highland Park, north of Detroit, in 1910. His engineers bought machine tools accurate enough that a worker could fit any part to any car. Then they changed how the men worked. Ford described the trial in his memoir.

Along about April 1, 1913, we first tried the experiment of an assembly line. We tried it on assembling the flywheel magneto. … I believe that this was the first moving line ever installed. The idea came in a general way from the overhead trolley that the Chicago packers use in dressing beef. We had previously assembled the fly-wheel magneto in the usual method. With one workman doing a complete job he could turn out from thirty-five to forty pieces in a nine-hour day, or about twenty minutes to an assembly. What he did alone was then spread into twenty-nine operations; that cut down the assembly time to thirteen minutes, ten seconds.

Next the engineers hauled a car frame down a 250-foot line with a rope and windlass while six men walked beside it and fitted parts from piles along the way. Then they raised the line to waist height and split the work into smaller steps.

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Many men hated the work. They stood in one spot and repeated one motion all day, and thousands quit. Ford later wrote that he had needed to hire about 53,000 people a year to keep a workforce of 14,000.⁶6 Henry Ford with Samuel Crowther, My Life and Work, chapter VIII, 1922. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7213 On 5 January 1914 he announced that he would pay qualifying workers at least five dollars a day, more than twice the going rate, and cut the working day from nine hours to eight. Thousands of men crowded the gates of Highland Park, and on one freezing morning the crowd broke up only when men turned fire hoses on it.⁷7 “Ford’s Five Dollar Day Revolution”, The Henry Ford. https://www.thehenryford.org/collections/explore/articles/fords-five-dollar-day In 1915 Ford needed to hire only 6,508 men, and most of those filled new jobs as the business grew.

Ford attached conditions. Investigators from his Sociological Department visited workers’ homes to check that they kept them clean, stayed sober and saved money. Ford also owned a weekly newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, and from 1920 he used it to print a long series of attacks on Jews.

Ford cut the price of a Model T runabout from $825 in 1909 to $260 in 1925. By 1918 half the cars in the United States were Model Ts, and by 1927 Ford had built 15 million.⁸8 “Ford Model T”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ford_Model_T Lewis Hine, who had photographed children in mills and mines for the National Child Labor Committee, turned his camera on skilled adult workers after the First World War.

Bread from air

The chemist William Crookes took the chair as president of the British Association at Bristol in 1898. In his address he warned that wheat growers would soon run short of nitrogen and called on chemists to make fertiliser from the nitrogen in the air. Farmers then depended on manure, on clover and beans, and on ships full of nitrate dug in the Chilean desert. Air is mostly nitrogen, but no chemist yet knew how to make it combine on a large scale.

Fritz Haber, a chemist at Karlsruhe, and his British assistant Robert Le Rossignol found a way in 1909. On a laboratory bench they pressed nitrogen and hydrogen together over a hot metal catalyst and drew off about 125 millilitres of liquid ammonia an hour. The German chemical firm BASF bought the method and set its engineer Carl Bosch to scale it up. BASF opened a plant at Oppau in 1913, and by 1914 its workers were making 20 tonnes of ammonia a day.⁹9 “Haber process”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haber_process

German generals used the same chemistry for war. After the Royal Navy cut off the nitrate ships from Chile, workers in German factories made explosives from Haber–Bosch nitrate. Haber himself oversaw the first large chlorine gas attack, at Ypres on 22 April 1915. He won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1918, and Bosch won it in 1931. Haber was born a Jew. After the Nazis took power he resigned his posts, left Germany in 1933 and died in Basel the following January.

Fertiliser makers still use Bosch’s method, with much the same iron catalyst. The energy scientist Vaclav Smil reckoned in 1999 that without it almost two-fifths of the people in the world would not exist.

Voices and wings

Guglielmo Marconi, a young Italian working in England, put Hertz’s waves to use. In 1897 he won a British patent for sending signals without wires, and in December 1901 he reported that he had heard the Morse letter S, sent from Poldhu in Cornwall, on a receiver in St John’s, Newfoundland. Frank Conrad, a Westinghouse engineer, ran an experimental station from the top floor of his garage in Wilkinsburg, near Pittsburgh, and played phonograph records for local amateurs. In September 1920 the Joseph Horne department store in Pittsburgh advertised wireless sets for sale and told readers that its staff had heard an “air concert” from Conrad’s station. H. P. Davis, a Westinghouse vice-president, saw the advertisement and at once set his staff to build a station, KDKA, to help the company sell radio sets. On 2 November its announcers read out the presidential election returns to perhaps a thousand listeners. Census takers in 1930 found that two in five American families owned a radio.¹⁰10 “Census Fun Fact #3: Do You Own a Radio Set?”, Open History Hub, US National Archives. https://openhistoryhub.com/t/census-fun-fact-3-do-you-own-a-radio-set/64124

Pilots in the 1920s flew the mail across the country, and some of them wanted to cross the ocean. John Alcock and Arthur Whitten Brown flew a converted Vickers Vimy bomber from Newfoundland to an Irish bog in June 1919. In 1927 the airmail pilot Charles Lindbergh went after a $25,000 prize that Raymond Orteig, a New York hotel owner, had offered for the 3,600-mile flight from New York to Paris. He meant to fly it alone. Frank Mahoney of Ryan Airlines in San Diego offered to build Lindbergh’s single-engine Spirit of St. Louis for $10,580 in 60 days.¹¹11 “Spirit of St. Louis”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit_of_St._Louis Its designer, Donald Hall, put the main fuel tank in front of the cockpit, so that Lindbergh would not end up crushed between tank and engine in a crash. Lindbergh had no windscreen and looked out of the side windows, so a Ryan worker who had served in submarines fitted him a periscope. He took off from Roosevelt Field early on 20 May and came down at Le Bourget at 10:22 the next night, Paris time, after 33 and a half hours in the air. A crowd estimated at 150,000 people stormed the field to reach him.¹²12 “Charles Lindbergh”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Lindbergh

In the next six months Americans sent half as much airmail again, and three times as many of them applied for pilot’s licences. On 28 June 1939 a Pan American crew flew the Dixie Clipper, a Boeing 314 flying boat, out of Port Washington, New York. They carried 22 passengers on the first scheduled passenger service to Europe and reached Lisbon by way of the Azores in just under 24 hours. Pan American had another 500 people on its waiting list.¹³13 “Dixie Clipper”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Clipper

Wilbur Wright later admitted that in 1901 he had told Orville that men would not fly for fifty years.¹⁴14 Wilbur Wright, in The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright, 1953, p. 934, quoted by Today in Science History. https://todayinsci.com/W/Wright_Wilbur/WrightWilbur-Quotations.htm In 1903 Charlie Taylor built the brothers an engine of 12 horsepower. By 1939 Wright Aeronautical was building the Dixie Clipper’s four Cyclone engines to give 1,550 horsepower each at take-off.¹⁵15 “Boeing 314 Clipper”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_314_Clipper Ford cut the price of a Model T by more than two-thirds, and Americans went from owning 8,000 motor cars in 1900 to 26 million in 1939.¹⁶16 “State Motor Vehicle Registrations, by Years, 1900–1995”, table MV-200, Federal Highway Administration. https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/ohim/summary95/mv200.pdf Crookes warned in 1898 that wheat growers would soon run short of nitrogen. By 1914 the workers at Oppau were making 20 tonnes of ammonia a day from the air.

Rudolf Diesel had already given oil users a better engine. In his design, patented in 1892, he compressed the air in the cylinder until he had it hot enough to light the fuel he sprayed in, with no spark. At the Maschinenfabrik Augsburg, Moritz Schröter ran the official test on 17 February 1897. Diesel reported an efficiency of 26.2 per cent, where owners of good steam engines of the day got about 10.⁹9 Early History of the Diesel Engine, DieselNet. https://www.dieselnet.com/tech/diesel_history.php Shipowners and navies bought his engine, and later so did builders of locomotives and lorries.

The pile at Stagg Field

Enrico Fermi collected the Nobel Prize in Physics in Stockholm in December 1938 and did not go home. Mussolini’s government had passed racial laws against Jews, among them his wife, Laura. At Columbia University in New York he tried to start a chain of splitting uranium atoms and keep it under control. In 1942 Fermi moved his team to Arthur Compton’s Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago, part of the wartime bomb project.

Fermi tested before he built. At Columbia in 1941 his team stacked graphite blocks around cans of uranium oxide and measured how many new neutrons each generation of splitting atoms produced. They got a ratio of 0.87, then 0.918. At any figure below 1 they could not keep a chain going. Between 15 September and 15 November 1942 Herbert Anderson’s and Walter Zinn’s groups built 16 test piles under the west stands of Stagg Field, the university’s football ground.¹⁰10 Chicago Pile-1, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

From 16 November, crews under Zinn by day and Anderson by night stacked about 380 tons of graphite and 22,000 slugs of uranium on a rackets court beneath the stands.¹¹11 7 things you might not know about the world’s first nuclear reactor, Argonne National Laboratory. https://www.anl.gov/article/7-things-you-might-not-know-about-the-worlds-first-nuclear-reactor Leona Woods slid a neutron counter into the pile at the 15th layer. After each crew finished, Fermi divided the square of the pile’s radius by her reading and watched the figure fall from 390 at the 15th layer to 149 at the 36th. He predicted that it would reach 1 between the 56th and 57th layers, so Anderson halted after the 57th.¹⁰10 Chicago Pile-1, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

George Weil, alone on the floor of the court on 2 December, drew the last cadmium rod out six inches at a time while Fermi and the others watched from the balcony. At 3:25 in the afternoon Fermi announced that the reaction was self-sustaining.¹¹11 7 things you might not know about the world’s first nuclear reactor, Argonne National Laboratory. https://www.anl.gov/article/7-things-you-might-not-know-about-the-worlds-first-nuclear-reactor He let it run at half a watt, then ordered the rods back in. Compton telephoned James Conant: “The Italian navigator has landed in the New World.”¹⁰10 Chicago Pile-1, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Pile-1

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Power for the grid

Hyman Rickover, a Navy captain, went to Oak Ridge in Tennessee in 1946 to learn how to build a reactor. From 1949 he ran the submarine reactor programme from posts in both the Navy and the Atomic Energy Commission.

Rickover had Westinghouse engineers build a full-size copy of the submarine’s reactor plant inside a section of hull in the Idaho desert, with a tank of water around part of it. Truman laid the keel of the submarine itself at Groton, Connecticut, on 14 June 1952, before the prototype had run. The Idaho crew took the reactor critical on 30 March 1953. Within three months they ran it for 96 hours without a stop, as long as a submerged crossing from Newfoundland to Ireland.¹²12 S1W prototype, Idaho National Laboratory. https://inl.gov/content/flipbooks/75-milestones/inc/html/11.html Rickover made his crews qualify on the Idaho plant before they went to sea. He interviewed every officer for a nuclear ship himself, more than 14,000 new graduates among them.

Commander Eugene Wilkinson took Nautilus to sea from Groton on 17 January 1955. As she left the pier his signalman sent a message to the escort tug: “Underway on nuclear power.” That May the crew ran her 1,200 nautical miles to San Juan, Puerto Rico, submerged all the way. By February 1957 they had steamed 60,000 nautical miles on her first load of uranium.

Before Nautilus sailed, Dwight Eisenhower had offered to share atomic materials for peaceful work, in a speech to the United Nations General Assembly on 8 December 1953.

The United States knows that peaceful power from atomic energy is no dream of the future. That capability, already proved, is here—now—today. Who can doubt, if the entire body of the world’s scientists and engineers had adequate amounts of fissionable material with which to test and develop their ideas, that this capability would rapidly be transformed into universal, efficient, and economic usage. … Experts would be mobilized to apply atomic energy to the needs of agriculture, medicine, and other peaceful activities. A special purpose would be to provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.

In January 1954 the Atomic Energy Commission gave Rickover the job of building a civilian power station. Westinghouse built the reactor at Shippingport, on the Ohio River north-west of Pittsburgh, to a pressurised-water design like Nautilus’s. Operators took the reactor critical at 4:30 in the morning on 2 December 1957, fifteen years to the day after Fermi’s pile. Later that month they sent its first power into the Duquesne Light Company’s grid. At full power they drew 60 megawatts from it. The builders had spent $72.5 million and 32 months on the plant.¹³13 Shippingport Atomic Power Station, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shippingport_Atomic_Power_Station

Others had moved first. Soviet engineers at Obninsk had connected a 5-megawatt reactor to a grid on 27 June 1954. In Cumbria, Christopher Hinton’s team built the four reactors of Calder Hall mainly to make plutonium for British bombs, and fitted turbines for 240 megawatts of electricity as well. The Queen opened the station on 17 October 1956.

On 10 October 1957 workers at the older Windscale piles beside Calder Hall found eleven tons of uranium burning in Pile No. 1. Tom Tuohy put out the fire by shutting off the cooling air. For a month afterwards officials poured away the milk from about 500 square kilometres around the site. In 1988 government scientists estimated that 100 people would die of cancers caused by the fire.¹⁴14 Windscale fire, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windscale_fire

Union Oil’s crew lost control of a well on Platform A, six miles off Santa Barbara, on 28 January 1969. The company spilled an estimated 80,000 to 100,000 barrels along the California coast and killed 3,500 seabirds. That June Cleveland firemen put out a burning oil slick on the Cuyahoga, the river beside which Rockefeller had run his first refinery. In October 1973 the Arab oil exporters cut off supplies to the United States and other countries that had backed Israel. By 1974 buyers paid nearly $12 a barrel, four times the price before the embargo.

French power companies were then burning imported oil to make most of the country’s electricity. On 6 March 1974 the prime minister, Pierre Messmer, announced a plan to build about 80 nuclear plants by 1985. French builders put up 56 reactors over the next 15 years.

American drillers pumped 2,000 barrels of crude in 1859, the year William Smith struck oil on Oil Creek, and 3.5 billion barrels in 1970.¹⁵15 U.S. Field Production of Crude Oil, annual, US Energy Information Administration. https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MCRFPUS1&f=A Nuclear builders moved faster. Fermi’s team ran their pile at half a watt in 1942, and in 1957 the operators at Shippingport drew 60 megawatts from theirs. In France, Framatome began from a Westinghouse design and built the country’s fleet in three standard sizes, with 32 reactors of 900 megawatts, 20 of 1,300 and 4 of 1,450. The French now draw about 70 per cent of their electricity from them and export more electricity, net of imports, than any other country.¹⁶16 Nuclear Power in France, World Nuclear Association. https://world-nuclear.org/information-library/country-profiles/countries-a-f/france

American doctors reported nearly 58,000 polio cases in 1952, the worst outbreak in the country’s history. That year 3,145 patients died and 21,269 survived with some paralysis. Jonas Salk, a virologist at the University of Pittsburgh, grew poliovirus in the laboratory, killed it with formaldehyde and used the dead virus as a vaccine. Ordinary Americans paid for the work through the March of Dimes, the fundraising drive of the National Foundation for Infantile Paralysis. Thomas Francis of the University of Michigan then ran the largest medical trial anyone had yet attempted, with 1.8 million children in 44 states. About 440,000 of them received the vaccine and 210,000 a dummy injection of harmless culture fluid. Doctors observed the rest without injecting them.⁹9 “Polio vaccine”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polio_vaccine

Francis announced on 12 April 1955 that the vaccine was safe and effective. By late April health officials had found that Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley had shipped lots that contained live virus. Doctors counted 56 vaccinated children paralysed and five dead, and more cases among their families and neighbours.¹⁰10 “Cutter Laboratories”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutter_Laboratories Federal scientists then began testing every lot before release. Doctors reported 35,000 cases in 1953 and 5,600 in 1957. Asked on television who owned the patent, Salk said there was none: “Could you patent the sun?”¹¹11 “Jonas Salk”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk

The Moon

Soviet engineers put the first artificial satellite into orbit on 4 October 1957. They had built Sputnik 1 as a polished metal ball 58 centimetres across with four radio antennas. Listeners around the world picked up its beeps for the three weeks its batteries lasted. The Army Ballistic Missile Agency and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory answered with Explorer 1 at the end of January 1958, and the Defense Department founded the Advanced Research Projects Agency the next month. That July Eisenhower signed the law that created NASA, and Congress voted money for science and mathematics teaching through the National Defense Education Act.

Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space on 12 April 1961. That May Kennedy asked Congress to put a man on the Moon before the decade was out. In September 1962 he made his case to a crowd in Rice University’s football stadium in Houston.

But why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain. Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

NASA signed contracts with companies and universities, and Congress spent $25.4 billion on Apollo.¹²12 “Apollo program”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_program Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee died in a cabin fire during a ground test in January 1967, and engineers redesigned the spacecraft before anyone flew in it.

The MIT Instrumentation Laboratory designed the guidance computer for the command and lunar modules around silicon integrated circuits. Raytheon assembled each flight model from about 2,800 chips, and Margaret Hamilton led the team that wrote the flight software. Women at Raytheon then wove the programs into core rope memory by hand. They passed a wire-threaded needle back and forth through a panel. A wire that went through a tiny ferrite ring stood for a 1, and one that went past it for a 0. Astronauts told the computer what to do by typing two-digit codes, a verb for the action and a noun for the data.

Frank Borman, Jim Lovell and Bill Anders launched on 21 December 1968 and became the first people to orbit the Moon. On Christmas Eve Anders saw the Earth rise over the lunar horizon and called for colour film. The crew read the first ten verses of Genesis on a broadcast that, by one estimate, a quarter of the people on Earth saw.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins launched on 16 July 1969. Four days later Armstrong and Aldrin flew the lunar module Eagle down towards the Sea of Tranquility while Collins circled overhead in Columbia. During the descent the crew saw 1202 and 1201 alarms on the computer’s display, warnings of an overload. MIT’s programmers had written the software to shed its least important jobs under load, so flight controllers in Houston told the crew to keep going.

Armstrong set Eagle down at 20:17 UTC with about 98 kilograms of usable fuel left. Some 600 million people watched his first steps on television.¹³13 “Apollo 11”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_11 He and Aldrin worked outside for two and a half hours and collected 21.5 kilograms of rock and soil. The three men splashed down in the Pacific on 24 July.

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Five more crews reached the surface after Apollo 11. Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt lifted off from the Taurus–Littrow valley on 14 December 1972, the last of twelve men to walk on the Moon. No crew travelled beyond low Earth orbit again until the Artemis II astronauts flew around the Moon in April 2026.¹⁴14 “NASA’s Artemis II Crew Eclipses Record for Farthest Human Spaceflight”, NASA, 6 April 2026. https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasas-artemis-ii-crew-eclipses-record-for-farthest-human-spaceflight

Salk and Francis helped American doctors bring polio cases down from 35,000 in 1953 to 5,600 in 1957. An American born in 1972, the year Cernan and Schmitt left the Moon, could expect 71 years of life, six more than the figure Bush had given Truman. People elsewhere gained faster. Indian farmers who sowed Borlaug’s wheat raised their harvest by three-fifths in five years, and a child born anywhere in 1972 could look forward to about 57 years, up from 46 for one born in 1950.¹⁵15 “Life expectancy”, Our World in Data (United Nations World Population Prospects and other sources). https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy

Grace Hopper, a mathematician and Navy reserve officer, joined Mauchly and Eckert’s company in 1949 to work on their UNIVAC. She thought programmers should write in words close to English and leave a second program to turn their words into machine instructions. By 1952 she had written that second program, the A-0 system, often counted as the first compiler. A committee borrowed from her FLOW-MATIC language when it drew up COBOL in 1959, and programmers still maintain COBOL code.

Bell Labs had built the transistor in 1947 to do the work of the tube. Texas Instruments began selling transistors made of silicon in 1954. William Shockley, who had shared the Nobel Prize for the transistor, wanted to make better ones. Arnold Beckman, an instrument maker, put up the money. Shockley’s mother lived in Palo Alto, and to be near her he opened his laboratory in nearby Mountain View in 1956.

Eight engineers

Shockley hired able young scientists, among them Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and the Swiss physicist Jean Hoerni, and managed them badly. He posted every salary for all to see, dropped a promising line of transistors for a project of his own, and at one point demanded that everyone in the laboratory take a lie-detector test. In 1957 eight of his scientists asked Beckman to replace him as manager, but Beckman refused.

The eight looked for someone to back a new company. At the Clift Hotel in San Francisco they met Arthur Rock and Alfred Coyle, two bankers from the New York firm Hayden, Stone & Co. Coyle laid ten new dollar bills on the table and asked all ten men to sign every one, as a contract among them. Rock and Coyle introduced them to Sherman Fairchild, the inventor who had founded Fairchild Camera and Instrument. Fairchild lent them $1.38 million. In return the eight gave him the votes on their shares and the right to buy the shares for a fixed total of $3 million.²2 “Traitorous eight”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traitorous_eight

On 18 September 1957 Julius Blank, Victor Grinich, Jean Hoerni, Eugene Kleiner, Jay Last, Gordon Moore, Robert Noyce and Sheldon Roberts founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Sherman Fairchild bought their shares in 1959, as the deal allowed. Shockley never replaced the eight, and in 1960 Beckman sold the laboratory to Clevite.

Hoerni came up with the planar process at Fairchild in 1959. He grew a thin skin of glassy silicon dioxide over a silicon wafer, opened windows in it with light-sensitive chemicals and photographic masks, and diffused impurities through the windows to make transistors. He used the oxide to keep dirt and damp off the transistors’ surfaces. Fairchild began to make reliable transistors this way, flat and side by side, many to a wafer.

The chip

Jack Kilby joined Texas Instruments in Dallas in mid-1958. As a new hire he had no right to the summer holiday, so he stayed at work on a problem that engineers across the industry worried about. They could design circuits with thousands of parts, but workers had to solder each part to the next by hand. On 12 September he showed his managers an oscillator circuit made on a single sliver of germanium. He pressed a switch, and they watched a steady sine wave on an oscilloscope.³3 “Invention of the integrated circuit”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_circuit Texas Instruments filed the patent the next February.

In contrast to the approaches to miniaturization that have been made in the past, the present invention has resulted from a new and totally different concept for miniaturization. Radically departing from the teachings of the art, it is proposed by the invention that miniaturization can best be attained by use of as few materials and operations as possible. In accordance with the principles of the invention, the ultimate in circuit miniaturization is attained using only one material for all circuit elements and a limited number of compatible process steps for the production thereof. … According to the principles of this invention, all components of an entire electronic circuit are fabricated within the body so characterized by adapting the novel techniques to be described in detail hereinafter. It is to be noted that all components of the circuit are integrated into the body of semiconductor material and constitute portions thereof.

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Kilby linked the parts on his chip with fine gold wires. Noyce saw how to do without them. On 23 January 1959 he wrote in his notebook that Fairchild could lay metal lines across Hoerni’s oxide to connect every part on the wafer. He filed his patent that July. In September 1960 Jay Last’s group at Fairchild made the first working planar integrated circuit, the design chipmakers have followed ever since. Texas Instruments sued, and the two companies settled in 1966 by licensing each other’s patents. Kilby received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2000. Noyce had died in 1990, and the committee does not give the prize to the dead.

The Air Force ordered the first chips for the Minuteman missile. Between 1961 and 1965 NASA bought more integrated circuits for Apollo than anyone else. While chipmakers filled the Apollo orders they cut the price of a chip from about $1,000 to between $20 and $30.³3 “Invention of the integrated circuit”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invention_of_the_integrated_circuit

Gordon Moore, Fairchild’s head of research, wrote a short article for Electronics magazine in 1965. He reported that chipmakers had raised the number of components they could put on a chip at the lowest cost per part “at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year”.⁴4 Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming more components onto integrated circuits”, Electronics, 19 April 1965. https://hasler.ece.gatech.edu/Published_papers/Technology_overview/gordon_moore_1965_article.pdf He guessed that they would keep it up for ten years. In 1975 he revised his estimate to a doubling every two years, and chipmakers kept close to that pace for decades.

Noyce and Moore left Fairchild and founded Intel on 18 July 1968. Arthur Rock found the money for them again. The next year Busicom, a Japanese calculator maker, asked Intel to design a set of chips for a printing calculator. The Intel engineer Ted Hoff proposed one chip that could run any program stored in memory. Federico Faggin designed it with Busicom’s Masatoshi Shima, and Intel released the 4004 on 15 November 1971.

Mouse and windows

Douglas Engelbart ran a laboratory at the Stanford Research Institute with money from NASA and ARPA, the Pentagon research agency set up after Sputnik. On 9 December 1968 he sat on a stage in San Francisco before about 1,000 computer engineers. For 90 minutes he worked a computer back in Menlo Park, about 40 kilometres away.⁵5 “The Mother of All Demos”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos Engelbart moved a pointer with a mouse, which his chief engineer Bill English had first built in 1964 as a wooden box on two wheels. He opened windows, clicked on words to jump to linked pages, and edited a document with a colleague over a live video link.

Butler Lampson, at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, wrote a memo in 1972 proposing a computer for a single user. Chuck Thacker designed it, and his team put the Alto into service on 1 March 1973. It had an upright screen of black dots on white, a keyboard and a three-button mouse. Bob Metcalfe designed Ethernet to link the Altos to each other and to shared printers. Xerox built about 2,000 of them, at tens of thousands of dollars apiece, for researchers in its laboratories and at universities. In 1979 it showed one to Steve Jobs.

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs paid for their first computer, the Apple I, by selling Wozniak’s HP-65 calculator and Jobs’s Volkswagen van. Paul Terrell of the Byte Shop ordered 50 at $500 apiece, cash on delivery, on condition that they came fully assembled.⁶6 “Apple I”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_I Wozniak then designed the Apple II. Apple began selling it on 10 June 1977, at $1,298 with 4 KB of memory.⁷7 “Apple II”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II In 1979 Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston released VisiCalc, a spreadsheet program, for the Apple II, and many businesses bought the machine just to run it. Apple sold about 6 million Apple IIs before it stopped making them in 1993.

IBM saw small companies taking business from it and gave a team in Boca Raton, Florida, a year to build a personal computer. Don Estridge’s team used parts that anyone could buy: an Intel 8088 processor, standard slots for expansion cards and an operating system licensed from Microsoft. IBM launched the PC on 12 August 1981 at $1,565.⁸8 “IBM Personal Computer”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Personal_Computer Columbia Data Products built the first legal clone and put it on sale in June 1982. Compaq soon rewrote the PC’s start-up code from a description alone, to avoid breaking IBM’s copyright. Clone makers cut prices, and by the 1990s most office managers bought computers built to IBM’s design.

A network of networks

Bob Taylor at ARPA had three terminals in his Pentagon office, for time-sharing computers at MIT, at Berkeley and at the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica. He wanted to join the computers his agency paid for into one network, so their users could share programs and results. In February 1966 he persuaded the agency’s director, Charles Herzfeld, to move $1 million from a missile defence programme to a network project.⁹9 “Bob Taylor (computer scientist)”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Taylor_(computer_scientist) He put Larry Roberts in charge. At Bolt Beranek and Newman, a Cambridge firm, Frank Heart and Bob Kahn led the team that built small computers to pass messages between sites. At 10:30 at night on 29 October 1969 Charley Kline, a student programmer at UCLA, began to type “login” to a computer at the Stanford Research Institute, where Bill Duvall was waiting. Kline had typed two letters when he lost the connection, so the ARPANET’s first message read “lo”.¹⁰10 “ARPANET”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET

By 1973 Kahn wanted to join the ARPANET to radio and satellite networks built to different designs. He and Vinton Cerf, at Stanford, published a design in May 1974 for a common protocol that operators of any network could carry. In their scheme programmers made the computers at each end responsible for getting every message through intact, and the operators of the networks in between only passed packets along.

Lynn Conway, at Xerox PARC, used the ARPANET to have students’ chip designs made and sent back to them within weeks. She and Carver Mead had written a textbook of chip design for university courses. Her team set a cutoff of 4 December 1979 and received 82 projects over the network from 124 students and researchers at universities in the United States and Britain. They merged the projects onto shared wafers for Hewlett-Packard’s laboratory to make, and on 2 January 1980, four weeks after the cutoff, shipped packaged chips to every designer.¹¹11 Lynn Conway and others, Implementation Documentation for the MPC79 Multi-University Multiproject Chip-Set, Xerox PARC, 1980. https://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/VLSI/MPC79/ImpDoc/ImpDoc79Front.html From 1981 the University of Southern California’s Information Sciences Institute ran the service as MOSIS. Businesses, government agencies and universities have since sent more than 50,000 chip designs through it.¹²12 “Broadening Research”, USC Information Sciences Institute. https://www.isi.edu/about/history/broadening-research/

The Defense Department made TCP/IP its standard and on 1 January 1983 switched every computer on the ARPANET over to it. From then on any group that followed the published rules could connect. Universities, companies and governments joined their networks to the ARPANET through the 1980s.

Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer at CERN, wanted a way for the thousands of scientists who visited the physics laboratory near Geneva to find each other’s documents. In March 1989 he gave his boss, Mike Sendall, a proposal called “Information Management”. Sendall wrote on the front: “Vague, but exciting”.¹³13 “Here’s the feedback the inventor of the World Wide Web got from his boss on the idea”, CNBC, 12 March 2019. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/12/feedback-world-wide-web-inventor-berners-lee-got-from-boss-on-the-idea.html Berners-Lee wrote a browser, a server and the rules for linking pages, and by the end of 1990 he was running the first web server on a NeXT computer at CERN. He let colleagues at CERN use the software in March 1991 and announced it on internet newsgroups that August. In April 1993 CERN released the code free for anyone to use.¹⁴14 “A short history of the Web”, CERN. https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web

Congress used a 1991 act to pay for new projects at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois. Two programmers there, Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina, wrote a browser called Mosaic and put pictures inside the page beside the text. Andreessen announced a test version in January 1993. The NCSA team released version 1.0 on 21 April and versions for Windows and the Macintosh by September.¹⁵15 “Mosaic (web browser)”, Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser) In 1994 Andreessen and Jim Clark, a founder of Silicon Graphics, started the company that became Netscape.

Mauchly and Eckert’s crew had wired 18,000 tubes into a room. In November 2000 Intel put 42 million transistors on a chip about 15 millimetres square. Census Bureau surveyors found a computer in one American home in twelve in 1984 and in just over half by August 2000, when 42 per cent of households had someone who used the internet at home.¹⁶16 Eric C. Newburger, Home Computers and Internet Use in the United States: August 2000, Current Population Reports P23-207, US Census Bureau, September 2001. https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2001/demo/p23-207.pdf Around the world several hundred million people went online from computers built around chips like Intel’s, to send mail, read the news and buy books.

Three billion letters

Francis Collins, director of the public Human Genome Project, and Craig Venter, head of the rival company Celera, stood with President Bill Clinton in the East Room of the White House on 26 June 2000. Tony Blair joined them by satellite from Downing Street. More than 1,000 researchers in six countries had read nearly all 3 billion letters of human DNA. Clinton compared their work with an older map.

Nearly two centuries ago, in this room, on this floor, Thomas Jefferson and a trusted aide spread out a magnificent map, a map Jefferson had long prayed he would get to see in his lifetime. The aide was Meriwether Lewis, and the map was the product of his courageous expedition across the American frontier, all the way to the Pacific. It was a map that defined the contours and forever expanded the frontiers of our continent and our imagination. Today the world is joining us here in the East Room to behold a map of even greater significance. We are here to celebrate the completion of the first survey of the entire human genome. Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind.

Scientists still had gaps to fill. The public consortium declared the project complete on 14 April 2003, two years ahead of plan. Its members had read about 92 per cent of the genome, at a cost of $2.7 billion. Researchers in the Telomere-to-Telomere consortium published a sequence with no gaps, apart from the Y chromosome, in 2022.

Makers of sequencing machines then cut the price year after year. Researchers paid $95 million to read one human genome in 2001 and about $500 in 2022, by the National Human Genome Research Institute’s count.⁵5 “Cost of sequencing a full human genome”, Our World in Data, from National Human Genome Research Institute data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-of-sequencing-a-full-human-genome Cancer doctors now read the DNA of a tumour to pick a drug aimed at its faulty genes, a treatment Clinton had described in his speech.

Kate Rubins, a NASA astronaut with a doctorate in cancer biology, read DNA aboard the International Space Station in 2016. She plugged a MinION, a sequencer small enough to fit in a pocket, into a laptop’s USB port for power and read the genes of a mouse, a virus and a bacterium.

Phones and mobile money

Steve Jobs showed the iPhone at the Macworld conference in San Francisco on 9 January 2007, and Apple put it on sale in the United States on 29 June, at $499 for the 4 GB model. Apple left off the keyboard and gave buyers a glass touch screen and a full web browser. In July 2008 Apple opened the App Store with 500 apps, and outside programmers soon built companies around it. Google gave its Android software to any phone maker that wanted it, and manufacturers in China, Korea and India used it to sell smartphones at a fraction of the iPhone’s price.

The GSMA, the trade body of the mobile operators, counted 4.8 billion people who used the internet on a mobile phone at the end of 2025, nearly three people in five.⁶6 The State of Mobile Internet Connectivity, GSMA Intelligence, 2026. https://www.gsmaintelligence.com/research/the-state-of-mobile-internet-connectivity-2025-overview-report

Nick Hughes, a manager at Vodafone, helped design a service to let Kenyan borrowers repay small loans by text message. His team won nearly £1 million from a British government aid fund, which Vodafone matched. From 11 October 2005 Hughes and his colleagues gave phones to nearly 500 borrowers in central Nairobi, the Mathare slum and the market town of Thika. The customers loaded more money than they owed and sent the rest to friends and family. Safaricom and Vodafone dropped the loan features and in March 2007 launched M-Pesa, a way to send money home. More than 20,000 customers signed up in its first month.⁷7 Nick Hughes and Susie Lonie, “M-PESA: Mobile Money for the Unbanked”, Innovations, 2007. https://files.ifi.uzh.ch/hilty/t/Literature_by_RQs/RQ%20304/2007_Hughes_Lonie_M-PESA-%20Mobile%20Money%20for%20the%20Unbanked%20Turning%20Cellphones%20into%2024-Hour%20Tellers%20in%20Kenya.pdf A sender handed cash to an M-Pesa agent, usually a shopkeeper, who credited it to the sender’s phone. The person at the other end took the text message to another agent and collected the cash.

Tavneet Suri of MIT and William Jack of Georgetown followed 1,600 Kenyan households for years. In Science in 2016 they estimated that 194,000 households, 2 per cent of all Kenyan households, had escaped extreme poverty through M-Pesa, and that households headed by women gained the most.⁸8 “Study: Mobile-money services lift Kenyans out of poverty”, MIT News, 8 December 2016. https://news.mit.edu/2016/mobile-money-kenyans-out-poverty-1208 Customers around the world moved more than $2 trillion through mobile money accounts in 2025, the GSMA reports.

World Bank economists count as extremely poor anyone who lives on less than $3 a day, at 2021 prices. They put 2.3 billion people, 43 per cent of the world, below that line in 1990. From incomplete surveys they estimate that about 820 million people, one in ten, lived below it in 2025, even though nearly 3 billion more people were alive.⁹9 “Share of population living in extreme poverty”, Our World in Data, from World Bank Poverty and Inequality Platform data. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-in-extreme-poverty

Most of the people who left extreme poverty were farmers, factory hands and traders in East Asia. Economists counted two in three people there below the line in 1990 and fewer than one in fifty in 2025. In sub-Saharan Africa 580 million people, 44 per cent of the population, still live below it. When Covid struck in 2020, about 60 million people around the world fell back below it.

Cheaper rockets, cheaper power

SpaceX engineers crashed two boosters on a barge at sea in 2015 before they brought one down whole. On the night of 21 December 2015 they used the first stage of a Falcon 9 to push 11 Orbcomm satellites towards orbit, then flew it back to Landing Zone 1 at Cape Canaveral and set it down upright on its legs. In March 2017 they sent up the SES-10 satellite on a booster that had flown before, and landed the booster again on a drone ship.

Launch companies had thrown away almost every first stage after one flight. NASA’s recovery crews towed the shuttle’s solid boosters back from the sea, and workers rebuilt them at great cost. SpaceX crews had recovered Falcon boosters more than 650 times by late August 2026. On 25 August they flew one booster, B1067, for the 37th time.¹⁰10 “SpaceX launches Starlink mission on a Falcon booster’s record-breaking 37th flight”, Spaceflight Now, August 2026. https://spaceflightnow.com/2026/08/24/live-coverage-spacex-to-launch-starlink-mission-on-a-falcon-boosters-record-breaking-37th-flight/ SpaceX used the savings to launch thousands of its own Starlink satellites for internet service.

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Daryl Chapin, Calvin Fuller and Gerald Pearson of Bell Labs showed off the first practical silicon solar cell on 25 April 1954. They turned about 6 per cent of the sunlight that fell on it into electricity, enough to drive a toy Ferris wheel at the launch. For years engineers fitted solar cells mainly to satellites. As late as 1975 buyers paid about $132 a watt for solar modules, in 2025 dollars. German lawmakers guaranteed generous prices for solar power from 2000, and manufacturers, most of them in China, built huge factories to meet the demand. Our World in Data reckons that manufacturers cut module prices by about a fifth for every doubling of the world’s installed solar capacity.

Power companies and homeowners generated 2,778 terawatt-hours of solar power in 2025, 30 per cent more than the year before. The think tank Ember found that power companies made more of the world’s electricity that year from renewable sources than from coal, 33.8 against 33.0 per cent, a first in a hundred years.¹¹11 Global Electricity Review 2026, Ember. https://ember-energy.org/latest-insights/global-electricity-review-2026/

A vaccine within a year

Katalin Karikó, a Hungarian-born biochemist, and Drew Weissman, an immunologist, met at the University of Pennsylvania in 1997. Researchers had long hoped to make drugs and vaccines from messenger RNA, the working copy of a gene that cells use as a recipe for protein. When they injected it, they set off inflammation. From 2005 Karikó and Weissman published studies showing that chemists could calm the reaction by swapping one building block of the RNA for a modified version.

Zhang Yongzhen’s team in Shanghai uploaded the genome of the new coronavirus to the US National Center for Biotechnology Information on 5 January 2020. Six days later Edward Holmes, with Zhang’s permission, posted it on virological.org for anyone to read. Within two days scientists at Moderna and the National Institutes of Health had chosen a sequence for the virus’s spike protein and settled the design of an mRNA vaccine around it. Moderna shipped its first batch for trials on 24 February, and by mid-March doctors at Kaiser Permanente in Seattle had given the first trial dose. In Mainz, Uğur Şahin and Özlem Türeci, a married couple who had co-founded BioNTech, designed a rival vaccine and brought in Pfizer to test and make it.

At 6:31 in the morning on 8 December 2020, May Parsons, a nurse in Coventry, gave 90-year-old Margaret Keenan the first approved dose of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, less than eleven months after Holmes posted the sequence.¹²12 “Landmark moment as first NHS patient receives COVID-19 vaccination”, NHS England, 8 December 2020. https://www.england.nhs.uk/2020/12/landmark-moment-as-first-nhs-patient-receives-covid-19-vaccination/ Modellers at Imperial College London later estimated that the health workers who gave Covid vaccines prevented 14.4 million deaths in the first year, or 19.8 million counting all excess deaths.

Millions died of Covid all the same, and people in many poor countries got their doses months after people in rich ones. Karikó and Weissman shared the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2023.

Before Covid, Maurice Hilleman had made a vaccine faster than anyone. He swabbed the throat of his sick five-year-old daughter, Jeryl Lynn, in 1963, and by 1967 his employer, Merck, was selling a mumps vaccine made from her virus.¹³13 “Mumps: the story of the second fastest vaccine ever developed”, Gavi, VaccinesWork. https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/mumps-story-second-fastest-vaccine-ever-developed Şahin, Türeci and their partners at Pfizer took less than a year. Between 1998 and 2020, the years of Google, the iPhone and the mRNA vaccine, health workers kept more of the world’s children alive. UN statisticians estimate that one newborn in twelve died before turning five in 1998, and fewer than one in twenty-five in 2020.¹⁴14 “Child mortality rate”, Our World in Data, from the UN Inter-agency Group for Child Mortality Estimation (2025) and Gapminder. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality

Hinton and his two students set up a company, DNNresearch. In December 2012 he ran a secret auction for it from his hotel room at Lake Tahoe, where he was attending a conference. Google, Microsoft, Baidu and DeepMind bid. When the bidding reached $44 million, the three stopped the auction and chose Google, which completed the purchase in 2013. Within a few years engineers at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Baidu had rebuilt speech recognition, translation and photo search on deep networks. Google bought DeepMind, Demis Hassabis’s company in London, in 2014. Hassabis and his colleagues built AlphaGo. In Seoul in March 2016 they used it to beat Lee Sedol, then among the strongest Go players in the world, by four games to one.

Attention

Eight researchers at Google, among them Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer and Jakob Uszkoreit, published “Attention Is All You Need” in June 2017. In it they described a new design, the transformer. Engineers could feed a transformer a whole passage at once, instead of one word at a time, and have it weigh each word against every other. The authors trained their English-to-French model for 3.5 days on eight graphics chips and set a new best score for a single translation model.²2 Ashish Vaswani and others, “Attention Is All You Need”, arXiv, 2017. https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 Because engineers could train a transformer in parallel across thousands of chips, they could train much bigger ones. By 2026 scholars had cited the paper more than 250,000 times. All eight authors had left Google, and several had founded companies.

Researchers at OpenAI, a San Francisco laboratory founded as a non-profit in 2015, bet that bigger transformers trained on more text would keep improving. In May 2020 thirty-one of them described GPT-3. They trained it on hundreds of billions of tokens of text from the web and from books, and gave it 175 billion parameters, the numbers they tuned during training. Users could get it to write an essay, translate a paragraph or finish a program from a short prompt. The authors gave a full section of their paper to the harm people could do with it, from spam to misinformation.

Folding proteins

John Kendrew’s team in Cambridge published the first shape of a protein, a rough model of the myoglobin in whale muscle, in 1958, after years of growing crystals and working through X-ray patterns. Biologists read a protein’s job from its shape, the way its chain of amino acids folds. By 2020 they had solved roughly 170,000 shapes this way, often after years of work on a single protein. Every two years since 1994, researchers had entered a contest, CASP, to predict shapes from the sequence of amino acids alone.

John Jumper and colleagues at DeepMind entered AlphaFold 2 in CASP14. On 30 November 2020 the judges gave it a median score of 92.4 out of 100. John Moult, who co-founded the contest, counted about 90 as competitive with laboratory methods.³3 “AlphaFold: a solution to a 50-year-old grand challenge in biology”, DeepMind, 30 November 2020. https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphafold-a-solution-to-a-50-year-old-grand-challenge-in-biology/ Researchers at DeepMind and the European Bioinformatics Institute opened a free database of predicted shapes in July 2021 with more than 350,000 entries. In July 2022 they added predicted shapes for more than 200 million proteins, nearly every one known to science. More than half a million researchers in over 190 countries had looked up structures in it by that summer.

Hassabis and Jumper shared half of the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. David Baker, at the University of Washington, took the other half for designing new proteins by computer. The physics committee gave its prize that year to John Hopfield and Geoffrey Hinton, for their early work on networks that learn.

A chat window

OpenAI released ChatGPT on 30 November 2022 as a free research preview. Its researchers had trained a GPT model further on conversations and used ratings from human testers to reward helpful answers. A million people signed up in five days. Analysts at UBS estimated that 100 million people a month were using it two months after launch, faster growth than they had seen for any consumer app.

Google answered with Bard, which it relaunched as Gemini in February 2024. Dario and Daniela Amodei and other former OpenAI researchers founded Anthropic in 2021 and released Claude in March 2023. Meta gave out the weights of its Llama models, at first only to other researchers, for outsiders to run and adapt. Teams at Mistral in Paris and DeepSeek in Hangzhou released strong rival models. OpenAI said in February 2026 that 900 million people used ChatGPT every week.⁴4 “ChatGPT reaches 900M weekly active users”, TechCrunch, 27 February 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/27/chatgpt-reaches-900m-weekly-active-users

Users soon found the limits. Two New York lawyers, Steven Schwartz and Peter LoDuca, used ChatGPT to draft a brief in a suit against the airline Avianca and cited cases that did not exist. The airline’s lawyers could not find them, and neither could the court. On 22 June 2023 Judge P. Kevin Castel fined the two lawyers $5,000.⁵5 Roy Strom, “Fake ChatGPT Cases Cost Lawyers $5,000 Plus Embarrassment”, Bloomberg Government, 22 June 2023. https://news.bgov.com/us-law-week/fake-chatgpt-cases-costs-lawyers-5-000-plus-embarrassment Other users caught confident falsehoods and botched sums in its answers. In 2024 OpenAI released a reasoning model, o1, which its researchers had trained to write out a long chain of steps before answering and to catch some of its mistakes. DeepSeek followed the next January with R1, an open-weight reasoning model. That July teams at Google DeepMind and OpenAI both reported that they had used their models to solve five of the six problems at the International Mathematical Olympiad, enough for a gold medal, though only Google had its answers graded by the Olympiad’s coordinators.⁶6 Simon Willison, “Advanced version of Gemini with Deep Think officially achieves gold-medal standard at the International Mathematical Olympiad”, 21 July 2025. https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jul/21/gemini-imo/

Ada Lovelace warned against overrating calculating machines in 1843. In notes on Charles Babbage’s design for an Analytical Engine, she wrote that its operators would give it orders on punched cards, as weavers did with the Jacquard loom, and that it “weaves algebraical patterns just as the Jacquard-loom weaves flowers and leaves.”

It is desirable to guard against the possibility of exaggerated ideas that might arise as to the powers of the Analytical Engine. In considering any new subject, there is frequently a tendency, first, to overrate what we find to be already interesting or remarkable; and, secondly, by a sort of natural reaction, to undervalue the true state of the case, when we do discover that our notions have surpassed those that were really tenable. The Analytical Engine has no pretensions whatever to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.

Agents at work

GitHub, which Microsoft owned, launched Copilot in 2021 to finish lines of code as developers typed. Programmers picked up the new tools before anyone else. The AI companies went further in 2025. In February Anthropic released Claude Code, a tool that developers ran in the terminal and gave tasks in plain English. OpenAI followed in April with a similar open-source agent, Codex CLI, and Google in June with Gemini CLI. Developers let these agents read a whole codebase, edit files, run the tests, read the errors and try again, sometimes for hours.

Anthropic said in February 2026 that customers were paying for Claude Code at a rate of more than $2.5 billion a year.⁷7 “Anthropic raises $30B Series G at $380B valuation”, Anthropic, 12 February 2026. https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-raises-30-billion-series-g-funding-380-billion-post-money-valuation OpenAI said in June that more than 5 million people a week used Codex. Researchers at METR, a non-profit that tests AI systems, timed how long skilled people took over a set of software tasks, then measured the longest tasks on which the best agents succeeded half the time. In 2025 they reported that this length had doubled about every seven months for six years. In January 2026 they put the doubling time since 2023 at about four months.⁸8 “Time Horizon 1.1”, METR, 29 January 2026. https://metr.org/blog/2026-1-29-time-horizon-1-1/

Founders built companies with very few staff. Garry Tan, Y Combinator’s chief executive, said at its demo day in March 2025 that founders at a quarter of the startups in that winter’s batch had generated 95 per cent of their code with AI. Some, he said, had reached $10 million in yearly revenue with fewer than ten people.

A small team in 2026 could write a plain description of a feature, set several agents to work on separate copies of the code, and spend the day reading and testing what came back. The people on the team still chose what to build, judged the results and answered for any faults. Boris Cherny, who led Claude Code at Anthropic, said in January 2026 that for two months he had left all his coding to Claude Code and made no edits by hand. An Anthropic spokesperson put the share of AI-written code across the company at 70 to 90 per cent. Microsoft’s chief executive, Satya Nadella, had put his company’s share at 20 to 30 per cent in April 2025.

Researchers who measured the gains found mixed results. METR ran a trial in early 2025 in which 16 experienced open-source developers took 19 per cent longer on their own projects when they used AI tools, though they believed they had worked faster.⁹9 “Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity”, METR, 10 July 2025. https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ When METR repeated the trial with 57 developers in late 2025, its researchers saw signs of a speedup but judged their data too skewed to measure it, because many developers would no longer work without the tools. Stack Overflow surveyed more than 49,000 developers that year. More than four in five used AI tools or planned to, but nearly half did not trust the accuracy of what the tools produced. Anthropic reported in November 2025 that a group it linked to the Chinese state had used Claude Code to attack about 30 organisations and had broken into a handful.¹⁰10 “Full report: Disrupting the first reported AI-orchestrated cyber espionage campaign”, Anthropic, November 2025. https://assets.anthropic.com/m/ec212e6566a0d47/original/Disrupting-the-first-reported-AI-orchestrated-cyber-espionage-campaign.pdf The group had left most of the hands-on work to the agent, Anthropic said, but some outside security researchers doubted how much the agent had done alone.

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The engineers who trained and ran these models needed power. Data centre operators used 415 terawatt-hours of electricity in 2024, 1.5 per cent of the world’s supply. Analysts at the International Energy Agency expect them to use more than twice as much by 2030.¹¹11 Energy and AI, executive summary, International Energy Agency, 2025. https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/executive-summary The AI and cloud companies signed contracts for new solar farms, gas turbines and nuclear plants to supply them.

Krizhevsky needed two gaming cards and most of a week to train a network to sort photographs, and even then the contest’s organisers scored its top five guesses wrong on 15.3 per cent of the test images. Thirteen years later teams at Google DeepMind and OpenAI used their models to solve five of the six problems at the International Mathematical Olympiad. The companies that sold access to such models cut their prices fast. Stanford’s AI Index team found that buyers who paid $20 per million tokens for a model as good as GPT-3.5 in November 2022 paid 7 cents for one as good in October 2024.¹²12 Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, The AI Index 2025 Annual Report, chapter 1, Research and Development. https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report OpenAI, which had signed up a million people in ChatGPT’s first five days, counted 900 million weekly users in February 2026.