Circles : Fifty Roundtrips Through History, Technology, Science, Culture... - Hardcover

James Burke

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 074320008X ISBN 13: 9780743200080

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 2000

Synopsis

The best-selling author of The Knowledge Web examines the world of technology in a series of essays that originally appeared in his popular Scientific American column, examining everything from hypnotism to electromagnetic fields. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

James Burke's books include the bestselling Connections, The Pinball Effect, The Day the Universe Changed, and The Knowledge Web. He contributes a monthly column to Scientific American and serves as director, writer, and host of the television series Connections 3, which airs on the Learning Channel. He lives in London, England.

Reviews

Adult/High School-A collection of 50 of the author's columns from Scientific American that appeared originally from 1995 through 1999. Each of the pieces ends where it began, tracing seemingly unrelated threads; chains of events; and people, places, and ideas that pop up and disappear in a flash, until, four or five pages later, the "circle" is complete. For example, "Sheer Poetry" begins, "Give me your tired, your poor," and in a few pages Burke zips through the Statue of Liberty; Emma Lazarus; unstable French politics of the 1870s; Gustav Eiffel; aerodynamics; manometers; Louis-Paul Cailletet and liquid oxygen; Raoul-Pierre Pictet and the "cascade process"; James Dewar and absolute zero; Pierre and Marie Curie; piezoelectric crystals; Paul Langevin and the "Langevin sandwich"; Ren?-Just Ha?y and modern crystallography; Ha?y's brother Valentin (who founded the Institute for Blind Children in Paris); Louis Braille; the Braille system of embossed dots; Samuel Gridley Howe; and lastly, Howe's wife Julia, who penned the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," which Burke sees as "the other great hymn for America, besides the one on Miss Liberty." Burke offers an important lesson: everything is potentially connected to everything else, and history does not develop in a simple sequential pattern. The concept is great fun for those who like to skim the surface of many subjects, or for those who enjoy watching a curious mind meander hither and yon and somehow draw things together into neat little circles. Witty, nontechnical, and full of surprises, the volume provides the ideal fodder for serendipitous readers.
Robert Saunderson, Berkeley Public Library, CA
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this delightful collection of 10-minute essays that first appeared in his popular Scientific American column, "Connections," Burke (author of the bestselling The Knowledge Web, etc.) charts the far fewer than 360 degrees of separation between the famous, the not-so-famous, and their technical and artistic creations across far-flung epochs, locales and professions. Burke believes, and demonstrates, that everything comes full circle: for example, in "Cheers," a gin and tonic at a hotel bar gets Burke thinking about Jacob Schweppes, who first devised bottle-cap effervescence, which leads to Joseph Priestley, inventor of soda water and a product of the Dissenter academies inspired by Amos Komensky, who also influenced the great Leibnitz, whose role as librarian to the Elector of Hanover brings Burke to diarist, bibliophile and Admiralty secretary Samuel Pepys... and he follows the thread on until it leads him to Felix Booth, who had made his fortune from Booth's Gin. Whew! Readers will be fascinated by Burke's route through the labyrinthine corridors of history. This book is ideal for dipping into, a few essays at a time. Agent, Carlton Sedgeley, Royce Carlton Inc. (Dec. 12) Forecast: Though British, Burke has a dedicated following on these shores. In addition to writing his Scientific American column, he hosts the Learning Channel's Connections 3, and his Knowledge Web was on Business Week's bestseller list. This book is an alternate selection of several of Doubleday Selects' science clubs (Natural Science, Library of Science) and the Readers Subscription club, and it is also a QPB alternate. There will be a radio satellite tour and online publicity for the book, as well as a national print publicity campaign. Nonscientists and young readers will enjoy following Burke through his web of knowledge.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For our delectation, Burke has drawn 50 essays from "Connections," his column for Scientific American. One essay moves by a series of logical connections from a bridge outside Burke's home on the Thames to transatlantic telephone cables, Samuel Morse, Sam Colt, Karl Marx's daughter, and Gustav Holst, who once lived near that bridge. Who knew that the history of technology could be so much fun?
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The reason Burke is such a popular writer and TV presenter on science is that he is always springing surprises. A piece may commence with him contemplating a quotidian scene--say, washing a dish or quaffing some potion. Five pages later, he drops readers back at that beginning, after having entertainingly conducted them through the particular process of better mousetrap building that is that essay's subject. In technology, one gizmo--that may be Burke's favorite word--begets another. In Burke's literary modus, one technological phenomenon leads to another. The dish he washes under a pressurized faucet inspires him to remember the invention of hydraulic rams in revolutionary France. Someone involved in that effort knew the inventor of the automatic riveting machine, which was used to assemble the ship Great Eastern, which. . . , which. . . , etc. At the end of this great chain of becoming is the food that had been on the dish Burke was washing: cornflakes. Now can you retrace Burke's circle backward? A book to keep its readers on their toes. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1: A Bit of a Flutter

I suppose my view of history tends away from the orderly and toward the chaotic, in the sense of that much overused phrase from chaos theory about the movement of a butterfly's wing in China causing storms on the other side of the world. Which is why I decided to have a go at reproducing the butterfly effect on the great web of knowledge across which I travel in these essays.

This thought came to me at the sight of a giant cabbage white in a Lepidoptera exhibit at the Natural History Museum in London, which reminded me of the other great Natural History Museum, the Smithsonian. Which owes its life to the persistence of one Robert Dale Owen. The two-term Democrat from Indiana almost single-handedly pushed through Congress the 1845 Bill accepting the Englishman James Smithson's $2-billion-and-change bequest (in today's money) that helped to set up the esteemed institution. Owen's efforts also involved unraveling one of the shadier deals in American financial history: most of Smithson's money, which had arrived in the United States a few years before, was at the time in the dubious grip of a foundering real estate bank in Arkansas, into which the U.S. Treasury had thoughtlessly placed it for safekeeping.

Owen was a liberal thinker, the son of a famous British reformer who had earlier started an unsuccessful utopian community in New Harmony, Indiana. Well ahead of his time, Owen championed women's rights, the use of plank roads (for rural areas not served by the railroads), emancipation, and family planning. This last he espoused in a pamphlet in 1830. Subtitled "A Brief and Plain Treatise on the Population Question" (which gives you a feel for the cut of his jib), it advocated birth control by everybody and included three examples of how you did it. Two years later much of Owen's text was lifted (unacknowledged) for a bestselling tract by Dr. Charles Knowlton of Boston: "The Fruits of Philosophy," which went into greater physiological detail.

Forty years on, Knowlton's/Owen's work was republished by activist Annie Besant in England, where it was judged obscene and likely to pervert morals. Ms. Besant conducted her own defense at the trial and in doing so became the first woman to speak publicly about contraception. Which earned her a fine and a sentence. Undeterred, Besant took up larger causes: Indian independence (she was President of the first Indian National Congress), vegetarianism, and comparative religion. This was some years after she'd broken off a romantic interlude with another left-winger, a penniless nobody called George Bernard Shaw, with whom Annie played piano duets at the regular meetings of William Morris's Socialist League in London. Later, Shaw would become fairly well known as the author of Pygmalion and then world-famous as the author of its Hollywood remake, My Fair Lady. The play was all about talking proper (which Eliza Doolittle didn't, you may recall) and featured a prof. of elocution, Henry Higgins, whom Shaw modeled on a real-life linguistic academic named Henry Sweet.

In the 1880s Sweet was one of the inventors of the phonetic alphabet, interest in which was triggered by the contemporary craze for old languages kicked off by William Jones, a Welsh judge in Calcutta. In 1786 Jones had revealed the extraordinary similarities between the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit and Latin and Greek. The revelation revved up nationalism among early-nineteenth-century Romantic movement Germans (whose country had not long before lost a war with the French and was going through a period of cultural paranoia) because it gave them the idea that they might be able to trace their linguistic roots back into the Indo-European mists of time, thus proving they had a heritage at least as paleolithic as anybody in Paris.

This mania for reviving the nation's pride might have been why German graduate students were also getting grants for such big-science projects as sending out forty thousand questionnaires to teachers all over the country asking them how the local dialect speakers pronounced the sentence "In winter the dry leaves fly through the air." On the basis of such fundamental research, pronunciation atlases were produced, and dialectology became respectable. So much so that at the University of Jena, a guy called Edward Schwann even got the money to do a phonometric study of zee French accent. Nice work if you can get it. Schwann was aided in his task by the eminent German physicist Ernst Pringsheim.

In 1876 Pringsheim was one of the science biggies visited by Franz Boll, a researcher who was working on the process by which the human eye is able to see in low light, thanks to the presence of a particular chemical. Or not, in the case of its absence. The whole view of such visual deficiency was taken a stage further by a sharp-eyed Dutch medical type, Christiaan Eijkman. This person happened to be in Java with a Dutch hospital unit, sent out there in 1886 to grapple with the problem of beriberi, a disease that was laying low large numbers of colonial administrators and army people. Eijkman happened to notice some chickens staggering about the hospital compound with symptoms not unlike those of the disease he was studying. But because these were chickens and not humans, he did nothing about it. Until suddenly, one day the chickens got instantly better. What kind of fowl play was going on here?

Turned out, the new cook at the hospital had decided that what was good enough for the local Javanese workers was good enough for birds. So he had stopped feeding to the chickens gourmet leftovers from the table of the European medical staff. Difference being in the rice. Europeans were given polished rice ("military rice"); locals and the chickens got the stuff with the hulls left on ("paddy"). Months of chicken-and-rice tests by Eijkman ended up with a meaningful thought: There had to be something in the rice hulls that was curing the chickens. Or, to put it more meaningfully, without this "something" in their diet, the chickens got the staggers. So was that why people did the same?

A few years later, in England, Gowland Hopkins, an ex-insurance broker turned biochemist, observed that baby rats wouldn't grow, no matter what they were fed, if their diet didn't include milk. He became convinced there was something in normal food that was essential for health and that wasn't protein, carbohydrate, fat, or salt. Gowland labeled these mystery materials "accessory food factors" and went on to share the Nobel with Eijkman, because their work would lead to the discovery of what these accessories actually were: vitamins (in the case of the chickens, thiamine).

Now, why all this made me think that how the web works might remind you distantly of chaos theory was because of what Gowland had been doing before he got into nutrition. He was able to work with pure proteins and their role in nutrition once new techniques had been developed (at Guy's Hospital in London, where Gowland had trained) to analyze uric acid proteins in urine.

And he was interested in uric acid because his very first scientific work had been with insects, when he had conjectured (wrongly, as it turned out) that uric acid was involved in producing the white pigment of the wings of the cabbage white butterfly.

Copyright © 2000 by London Writers

Edition details

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 074320008X
• ISBN 13: 9780743200080
• Binding: Hardcover
• Illustrator: Dusan Petricic
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288