A feng shui compass has a lot more information than just the cardinal directions on it.
The three inventions Bacon considered world transformers—paper and printing, the magnetic compass, and gunpowder—were also cited by Karl Marx as the inventions that prefigured capitalist economics. Bacon regarded the origins of these inventions as "obscure and inglorious." They all came from China.
At the beginning of the second millennium A.D., China was an advanced scientific and technological society, and would continue to dominate for another three or four centuries. To a visitor from another continent it might seem that China had invented everything anyone could ever need and beyond. Besides Bacon's big three, other Chinese technological feats included cast iron, porcelain, sternpost rudders for ships, canal lock gates, stirrups and harnesses for horses, fishing reels, hot-air balloons, the seismograph, whiskey, gimbals, the umbrella, crank handles, kites, mechanical clocks, paper money, convertible bank notes, and many agricultural innovations, such as row cultivation, the iron plow, and the seed drill. The Chinese also spun off, with glorious abandon, oddities such as the south-pointing carriage, fantastical fireworks, magic mirrors, and a rocket-propelled toy called an "earth rat."
The invention we most associate with ancient China is gunpowder. In the ninth century A.D., during the Tang dynasty, Chinese priests described a new compound they'd created by combining charcoal, saltpeter, and sulfur in the proper proportions. Long before the first written observations of these investigations, the Taoist alchemists were down in the basement mixing up variations of these ingredients, often blowing themselves to smithereens. Later Taoist literature strongly recommends that investigators not mix these chemicals, especially with arsenic, since some who had done so set their beards on fire, seared their fingers, and burned down the house.
One hypothesis holds that gunpowder was invented by alchemists searching for a drug of deathlessness, or for the metallurgical key to the making (and faking) of gold. One can imagine, wrote Joseph Needham, these alchemical adepts "mixing everything off the shelves in all kinds of permutations and combinations to see what would happen, whether perchance an elixir of life would be formed."
Saltpeter was recognized and isolated at least by A.D. 500. It seemed almost inevitable, wrote Needham, that "the first compounding of an explosive mixture would arise in the course of a systematic exploration of the chemical and pharmaceutical properties of the substance."
In Science Since Babylon, Derek de Solla Price says that while science must follow what seems to be a dictate of nature rather than a property of our mental perspective, technology is an arbitrary property of a civilization. A technology evolves within a culture and its particular demands and preoccupations, intertwined with that society's particular environment. That being so, it is not surprising that the Chinese were the first to invent gunpowder.
The Chinese were fascinated and preoccupied with preparations of perfumes, gases, airborne poisons, noxious bombs, explosions, and flaming eruptions. From the Ch'in and Han dynasties onward (221 B.C.—A.D. 220) they burned incense; fumigated for health reasons, to rid their houses and books of insects and pests; and produced smoke ritually to drive out demon spirits. Smoke, detonations, and loud explosions were intrinsically associated with the spirit world. Militarily, they used toxic smoke screens generated by pumps and furnaces in siege warfare from the fourth century B.C., or perhaps earlier.
The Chinese did (and do) love fireworks, and created them in a huge variety of Catherine wheels, Roman candles, and many other styles. Fireworks flourished at the dynastic courts, with colored lights and balls of flame. Rockets and rocket-composition gunpowder must have been used in these displays as soon as they were discovered.
Around 1040 Tseng Kung-Lang published a gunpowder formula to be used in a variety of weapons, including an incendiary arrow, an incendiary bullet, a burning bomb with a hook to catch on wood, a bomb to be hurled by a trebuchet (a Chinese version of the catapult), and a hand grenade. By the mid—tenth century, the fire lance, or fire spear, had appeared.
The oldest image of a fire lance and a grenade is on a silk banner from Tun-huang from about A.D. 950 now hanging in the Musée Guimet in Paris. The banner depicts the meditating Buddha. Surrounding him are Mara the Tempter and her minions, who hurl things at the Buddha in an attempt to distract him from attaining enlightenment. One of her demons, sporting a headdress of three striking snakes, aims a cylinder from which flames spout forth horizontally. Another is in the act of throwing a weak-casing bomb from which flames are starting to fly.
The fire lance consisted of a tube mounted on the shaft of a lance and filled with a mix of gunpowder, toxic chemicals, lead pellets, and pottery fragments. When ignited it spouted flame and sparks for about five minutes, frying the enemy in streams of fire. Made first from bamboo tubing, the fire lance used homegrown materials. Like the natural abundance of saltpeter in the ground, the plentiful growth of bamboo was a factor in the development of firearms. As a natural tubing, Needham maintains, the stem of the bamboo is the ancestor of all barrel guns and cannons. Later the tube was made of cast iron and bronze.
The fire lance played a large role in the wars between the Sung and the Juchen Tatars from around 1100 onward. By the middle of the thirteenth century, the Sung and Mongols were locked in combat, and by 1230 we find written descriptions of destructive explosions in the campaigns, and accounts of continuing advances in the development of barrel guns and cannons. At first, soldiers held fire lances. The southern Sung made them in much larger diameter, perhaps a foot across, and mounted on legs with wheels. It is with these that the first bronze or iron barrels appeared, using high-nitrate gunpowder and a projectile—a cannonball or bullet—that completely filled the barrel. The true gun or cannon probably appeared in the 1280s, three and a half centuries after the invention of flamethrowers.
By 1288, Chinese soldiers under Mongol command were using weapons that had made the transition from fire lance to gun. A bronze barrel found at a battle site in Manchuria was meant to fit on the end of a wooden shaft. It was designed for an explosion at the base of the barrel, not for slow burning from the barrel mouth. The bronze has thicker walls and a touchhole in the area where the explosion would occur. The thickening of gun barrel walls around the point of the explosion became a distinctive characteristic of Chinese guns. Another prototype, designed for mounting in a fortification, looked like a vase or bottle.
The array of gunpowder weaponry developed by the Chinese starting in the ninth century is of Strangelovian proportions: the "thunderfire whip," a fire lance in the shape of a three-foot-long sword that discharged lead balls the size of coin; the "vast-as-heaven enemy exterminating Yin-Yang shovel," with a broad crescent-shaped blade that emitted poison as well as lead pellets and flames. There was a huge battery of fire lances called "the ingenious mobile ever-victorious poisonfire- rack." Later there came the "cartwheel gun," which had thirty-six barrels radiating from its center like the spokes of a wheel but was small enough that a mule could carry two.
For mortars you had "the flying, smashing, and bursting bombcannon." By the eleventh century there was the "thunderclap bomb," hurled from a trebuchet that terrified enemies' horses while starting fires. Thunderclaps were also made in the form of grenades that could be hurled by hand. A new improved bomb in the twelfth century was the "thundercrash bomb," with an iron casing to cause maximum shrapnel damage. The Chinese were just getting started. They let a thousand bomb varieties bloom: some packed with anti-personnel material, poison bombs, gaseous bombs, bombs filled with human excrement. There was also the "bone-burning and bruising fire-oil magic bomb," the "magic fire meteoric bomb that goes against the wind," the "dropping from- heaven bomb," and the "bees-swarm bomb releasing ten thousand fires."
By 1277 the Chinese had developed land mines; one was called "the ground-thunder explosive camp." Some of the trigger mechanisms of these land mines were kept secret until the seventeenth century. The Fire-Drake Artillery Manual, published in 1412, describes the "submarine dragon-king," a complex wrought-iron sea mine carried on a submerged wooden board. This device for blowing up ships featured a burning joss stick floating above the water that determined the fuse ignition time.
In 1245 Pope Innocent IV sent an ambassador to the great khan's capitol in Mongolia, most likely to check out the fabled firepower the Mongols had picked up from their enemies to the south. Soon thereafter other Europeans visited, including one Willem van Ruysbroeck, a Franciscan who returned to Europe in 1257 and told his associates about gunpowder weapons. The following year, Europeans began experimenting with gunpowder. Other Westerners discovered gunpowder the hard way, in their warring with Islamic nations. In 1249, Crusaders ran into an Islamic counterattack of incendiary devices and grenades in Palestine. The effect was horrific.
The Europeans learned quickly. A picture of the bombard, a small bulbous cannon that fired arrows, appears in a 1327 manuscript, On the Majesty, Wisdom, and Prudence of Kings, in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. Chinese drawings of bombards reveal sets of them mounted on a carriage, similar to the first European ones. Copies? "If so, it would mean the purely propellant phase of gunpowder and shot, [the] culminating stage of all gunpowder uses, was attained in China with bottleshaped bombards before any knowledge of gunpowder itself reached Europe," says Needham. It appears that the entire line of development took place in China first, and passed to Islamic nations and then to Europe. The export of gunpowder and guns to the West led to the utter transformation of Europe.
This was not the first time inventions from China had revolutionized Europe. The widespread use of the Chinese stirrup in the early Middle Ages had given birth to the knight, a warrior now able to stabilize himself on his horse. The advent of gunpowder blew away that knight, perched like a big immobile target on his horse. Gunpowder that could punch holes in the heaviest fortifications signed the death warrant for the castle and Europe's aristocratic military feudalism.
While Europe was broken into hundreds or thousands of small economic and social units, the Chinese usually lived under a powerful centralized administrative authority with close internal commerce and a unified language, writing, and religion. (The operative word is "usually." In between stretches of order, barbarians kept barging in from the north, and there were, according to Alfred Crosby, "periods of godawful instability.") " Maintaining stability required military strength, hydraulic control, transportation systems, a calendar, land measurement, technology, map drawing, palace building, and other construction technologies to display the images of imperial power.
Metallurgy and metal manufacturing was a unifying technology. The Chinese "industrial-dynastic-military complex" was a voracious consumer of iron and steel products. Records from the eleventh century show a single order for nineteen thousand tons of iron just to make coins. The million-men-plus army maintained by the Sungs was a giant maw for iron and steel: two government arsenals manufactured thirty-two thousand suits of armor a year.
A superb bronze and cast-iron metallurgy was part of what the physiologist Jared Diamond calls an autocatalytic process, one that catalyzes itself in a positive-feedback cycle, proceeding ever faster once it is started. Long before iron and bronze casting provided the receptacles for gunpowder weapons, the early mastery of cast iron led to the sharp axes that opened up vast areas to forestry; it provided craftsmen with honed chisels, awls, saws, and other tools of a firmness previously unknown. Cast iron allowed new kinds of construction for buildings and bridges and the hard rotary bits for a deep-drilling industry not seen in the West until the seventeenth century. From around the sixth century B.C., the Chinese were adept in cast-iron forging in special vertical blast furnaces. With the vertical furnace, iron and steel technology in China diverged from that of other regions of the world and followed a unique path.
The Chinese were blessed with clays with high refractory qualities, which they used for the walls of their blast furnaces, thus intensifying the heat. They discovered that phosphorus reduced the temperature at which iron melts. By the fourth century B.C., the Chinese were able to cast iron into ornamental and functional shapes. In the West, blast furnaces are known to have existed in Scandinavia by the late eighth century A.D., but cast iron was not widely available in Europe before 1380. By the third century B.C., the Chinese had discovered annealing (heating then cooling) techniques for making a malleable, nonshattering cast iron. Plowshares could survive hitting large rocks; swords could clang with impunity. So plowshares, longer swords, and even buildings were eventually made of iron. During the Han dynasty (206 B.C.—A.D. 220), iron was of such interest to the officials that in A.D. 119 the rulers nationalized all cast-iron manufacture. During the Han there were forty-six Imperial Iron-Casting Bureaus throughout the country where bureaucrats supervised the mass production of cast-iron goods.
Chinese iron making inspired a continuous stream of inventions. First were the agricultural tools: cast-iron hoes in the sixth century B.C. and a new model in the first century B.C. called the "swan-neck" hoe capable of weeding around plants without damaging them; the moldboard plow was invented in the third century B.C. Called the kuan, it was made of malleable cast iron, with a central ridge ending in a sharp point to cut the soil, and with wings that sloped gently up toward the center to throw the soil off the plow to reduce friction.
Again, the introduction of Chinese iron agricultural tools to the West revolutionized European culture. Intensive hoeing and the iron plow were perhaps the greatest technological advantages China held over the rest of the world. "Nothing underlines the backwardness of the west more than the fact that for thousands of years, millions of human beings plowed the earth in a manner that was so inefficient, so wasteful of effort, and so utterly exhausting, that this deficiency of sensible plowing may rank as mankind's single greatest waste of time and energy," writes sinologist Robert Temple. Throughout the first millennium B.C., the Chinese refined the iron plow. When the newfangled plow (along with the Chinese seed drill) finally arrived in the Netherlands and England in the seventeenth century, it instigated an agricultural revolution.
The Chinese were making steel by the second century B.C., although they were probably not the first civilization to do so. They furthered metallurgical technology with at least two inventions that were to be reinvented centuries later in the West. One is what we call the Bessemer steel process today, invented in England by Sir Henry Bessemer in 1856. Bessemer's work had been anticipated a few years earlier by William Kelly, who brought four Chinese steel experts to a small town near Eddyville, Kentucky, in 1845. The experts taught Kelly the secrets of steel production that had been used in China for more than two thousand years.
In short, the Bessemer process is the removal of carbon from iron. Cast iron is brittle because it contains a large amount of carbon, about 4.5 percent. To get steel, one removes most of the carbon. (For wrought iron, nearly all the carbon is removed.) As carbon is removed, the metal gets more supple. Steel with high carbon is strong but is more brittle than lower-carbon steel. The Chinese used different carbon contents to great effect. For example, the back, blunt edge of a saber might be made of wrought iron, for elasticity, while the cutting edge would made of harder steel. The Chinese removed carbon from cast iron by blowing oxygen on it, a technique similar to the one "discovered" by Henry Bessemer in the nineteenth century. The Chinese technique is described in the classic work Huai Nan Tzu, published in about 120 B.C.
In the fifth century A.D., the Chinese invented another steel manufacturing process, in which cast iron and wrought iron were melted together to yield steel. In the modern world this is called the Siemens process, invented in 1863 in England. The Chinese were doing it fourteen hundred years earlier. It is more properly called the Ch'iwu Huai Wen process, in honor of the metallurgist who made sabers of "over-night iron" by baking wrought and cast iron together for several days and nights.
With a variety of irons and steels of differing hardness and flexibility, the Chinese did more than build spiffy swords. They used wrought iron, for example, to construct the world's first suspension bridges, possibly as early as the first century A.D., using chains of wrought-iron links instead of woven bamboo. By comparison, the first suspension bridge in the West of any size was built in 1809 across the Merrimack River in Massachusetts.
Chinese metallurgical advances made possible a whole range of innovation. In A.D. 976, for example, an engineer named Chang Ssu- Hsun invented the chain drive for use in a large mechanical clock. The Chinese were fascinated with chains and clocks. Since the first century A.D., they had used iron-linked chain pumps and the common sprocket chain to transmit power in clocks and elsewhere.
Chang Ssu-Hsun's successor, the even more famous clockmaker Su Sung, also adopted the chain drive for his huge astronomical clock, in 1090, calling it the "celestial ladder." The first European chain drives were made in the eighteenth century, and in 1897, chain drives became the basis of the bicycle. It is ironic, Temple comments, given that bicycles are a leading form of transportation in China, that only a few Chinese have any idea that the chain drive was a native invention nine hundred years in advance of its application in Europe for the bike.
The first completely printed book is thought to be the Buddhist Diamond Sutra, completed in A.D. 868 and now preserved in perfect condition in the British Museum. A scroll 17.5 feet long and 10.5 inches wide, it contains the text of a Sanskrit work translated into Chinese. There were also large print runs for ordinary books. Calendars and horoscopes were as popular then as now. In fact, so many astrological calendars were being privately printed that in 858 the governor of the Szechwan province tried to ban them. They were sold under the counter in marketplaces before the Board of Astronomers could approve and issue them. The prohibition spurred sales of these calendars, which contained weather forecasts, prophesies for lucky and unlucky days, edifying sayings, and other Farmers' Almanac types of things.
Writing is the unification technology par excellence of civilization. Chinese writing is preserved from the second millennium B.C. but probably began earlier. The Hsia dynasty, c. 2205—1766 B.C. and shrouded in legend, may have had rudiments of literacy. Inscriptions from the Chou dynasty from 1100 to 221 B.C. record the conquest and absorption of non-Chinese-speaking populations by the Chinese states. (Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss wrote that ancient writing's main function was to "facilitate the enslavement of the other human beings.")
Although writing evolved around the same time in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Chinese writing of 1300 B.C. had unique signs and principles that lead most scholars to think it evolved independently. The preserved writing of those times consists of religious divination and ritual inscription about dynastic affairs incised into "oracle bones." Before paper's invention, words were written on various materials—on grass stalks by the Egyptians, earthen plates by the Mesopotamians, tree leaves by the Indians, sheep skins by the Europeans, and even on tortoise shells and shoulder blades of oxen by the early Chinese. Then the Chinese invented paper.
The oldest surviving piece of paper in the world comes from a tomb near Sian, in Shensi Province. It was made sometime between 140 and 87 B.C. from pounded and disintegrated hemp fibers.115 From this and other fragmentary evidence it is clear the Chinese knew the general mechanics of papermaking one thousand years or more before the Europeans. (Paper is not that complicated. It's a layer of disintegrated fibers in a watery solution pressed onto a flat mold. The water is drained away, the layer is dried, and you have paper.)
Although most early Chinese paper was made of hemp, in the second century A.D. a court official named Cai Lun produced a new kind of paper from a mix of bark, rags, wheat stalks, and other things. Perhaps the first recycled paper, it was also the first modern paper. It was fairly cheap, thin, light, strong, and suitable for brush strokes. The Chinese also used paper for clothing, shoes, and toilet tissue, which amazed the Europeans when they first saw it. They invented wallpaper, kites, umbrellas, paper money, the paper-folding art of origami, and more. Paper reached India in the seventh century, and the Islamic nations a hundred years later. For five hundred years the Arabs jealously guarded the secret of papermaking from the Europeans, but sold paper to them at a hefty profit. Paper manufacturing did not come to Europe until the thirteenth century, when the Italians took it up.
The beginnings of printing are lost in history. About two thousand years ago in the Western Han dynasty (206 B.C.—A.D. 28), stone-tablet rubbing was the favored way to spread Confucian texts or Buddhist sutras. The practice of block printing began in the Sui dynasty (A.D. 581—618): one engraved writing or pictures on a wooden board, smeared the board with ink, then printed the image on pieces of silk (or, later, paper) page by page. During the Tang dynasty (618—907), the technology spread to Korea, Japan, Vietnam, and the Philippines.
Block printing was cumbersome, with boards that were sometimes useless after one printing. A single mistake in carving could ruin a whole block. Between 1041 and 1048, Pi Sheng (sometimes called Bi Sheng) invented movable type. He carved single characters on pieces of fine clay as thin as the edge of a copper coin, which he slow-baked until extremely hard. He then set the type in an iron frame and stuck it to an iron plate with a mixture of resin, wax, and paper ash melted over fire. A plate thus prepared could print hundreds or thousands of sheets of paper. Each piece of type could be removed to be used again.
The first record of Bi Sheng's invention is found in the 1086 book Dream Pool Essays by the scientist-encyclopedist Shen Kua. It was not unusual for a chronicler to own fifty thousand books, he wrote. To pub lish books with Chinese characters, a printer might need up to 360,000 pieces of type. In the centuries that followed, the Chinese used wood, enamelware, or metal type more commonly than clay.
The American physicist and essayist Philip Morrison noted in 1974 that when Gutenberg first set the Mainz Bible in print, "Chinese libraries already held editions of printed books older than Gutenberg's product is now." For every Book of Songs or Analects the West has, wrote Morrison, there are ten thousand printed texts from every period of China. The Mongol armies pressing into Russia, Poland, and Hungary in the thirteenth century reached the borders of Germany not long before printing surfaced there. Johannes Gutenberg printed his now famous Bible using movable type in 1456.
Perhaps the non-western world peaked too soon, technologically speaking. By inventing a method of vulcanizing rubber a thousand years before Goodrich or originating the Bessemerizaton of iron a thousand years before Bessemer, these ancient inventors may have given the West a chance to "reinvent" and rename their innovations. Today we view technologically oriented societies as being superior. We see exploration and the ability to conquer as exponents of superiority.
There is an old skit from the TV comedy show Saturday Night Live in which extraterrestrials land their spaceship on earth and demand that humans bow down to them. It becomes quickly apparent that the extraterrestrials are stupid and ignorant. They eventually admit that they didn't invent their spaceship; they found it. Imagine the reaction of the Aztecs to the conquering Spaniards, treating their wounds by pouring hot oil on them and praying, while the "backward" Amerindians used early antibiotics. Cortés and his men had guns; they had found them in China. As New York Times writer Gail Collins put it, "The Chinese . . . had toothpaste, while people in Europe barely had teeth."
The seafaring ways of the Europeans have often been attributed to superior technology, but, in fact, the Chinese invented a staggering number of shipbuilding advances—fore-and-aft rigging, the lateen sail, the sternpost rudder, and watertight bulkheads, to name a few. With those advances and the compass, the Chinese could have theoretically gone anywhere the Europeans did—and long before. Indeed, while Columbus was making the rounds of the courts of Europe seeking funding for his adventures, Chinese maritime technology was advanced enough for Chen Ho, chief admiral and eunuch of the Ming emperor, to send to India and then to East Africa fleets of vessels armed with cannons and manned with thousands of sailors and passengers.
It is this admiral, suggests Alfred Crosby, who should be acknowledged as the greatest explorer in the age of exploration. "If political changes and cultural endogeny had not stifled the ambitions of Chinese sailors," writes Crosby, "then it is likely that history's greatest imperialists would have been far easterners, not Europeans." The Chinese could have made arduous journeys around the world on any seas they wanted, had they had a reason to do so. Western European economies offered nothing China could not acquire much closer to home at much less cost.
So as it happened Chen Ho did not sail east, and Christopher Columbus sailed west, "greedy to find the gold of Cathay and the courts of the Grand Khan as described by his countryman Marco Polo, who had traveled by different means and from the other direction," as the late biologist Stephen Jay Gould put it.
LINK
