Connections August 9, 2007
There’s an interesting educational series called Connections which follows the
circuitous paths of history and fills your brain with interesting facts.
But, while I do enjoy watching it, it’s premise drives me nuts because of
how amazingly tenuous some of the “connections” are. So, just to make sure I
wasn’t an idiot, I took notes through a couple of episodes. Here’s what I
learned in the episode called New Harmony. I may misspell some of the places and
people and be slightly off in my understanding of any of this but please bear
with me. At least I learned stuff.
Singapore is the cleanest modern city thanks in no small part to it’s ginormous
incinerator which is controlled by microchips which were discovered when
Shockley found that if you add impurities to crystals you get extra electrons
which led to the creation of the transistor without which we wouldn’t have
microchips. Now Schockley made this discovery with a crystal called
Germanium (remember this for later) which was discovered by a German named
Vinkler who also invented industrial air filters, the descendents of which clean
the air in Singapore’s incinerator.
But, Vinkler while a great mineralogist was really in the business of selling
cobalt which is used to make blue dye which was in demand to make fake Ming
vases because the real ones were too damn expensive. Ming vases are white
porcelain with cobalt blue pictures on them. Cobalt because it’s one of the few
things that can withstand the heat required to fire porcelain.
Now the Chinese discovered cobalt when they went to Istanbul which was at the
end of the Silk Road. In Istanbul they used cobalt on tiles in mosaics for
anything really important like the incredibly famous mosque called The Blue
Mosque of Istanbul (Isopia?) where they hired the greatest tile artists to make
it beautiful no expense spared (thus all the blue tile) and cover up the fact
that the Christians had actually built it and copy a lot of great Christian
mosaic work that displayed the glory of Byzantium along the way. Now these
Christians were actually an underground sect (literally at times) around that
point in time and weren’t given legitimacy until The Donation of Constantine
when Constantine gave the west to the Pope and thus legitimized him.
But, about a thousand years later the document on which The Donation of
Constantine was written was exposed as a fake (probably by the Vatican) by a guy
named Vinkler who surprisingly found himself not dead thanks to a local
Godfather to whom a lot of people owed favors including a Portuguese guy named
Martens who was the head of the Oceanic Exploration Agency which was roughly
what you’d get if you combined NASA with the Defense Department. And they were
the only ones who knew how to “run up the latitudes” thanks to a nifty invention
that only they had called a Quadrant. This meant they could intentionally leave
sight of land and not worry about never being able to find home again.
Well, one Portuguese accidentally went a bit too far west and hit Brazil which
the Portuguese colonized with Jews who wanted to get away from persecution
(again) but eventually The Inquisition made it to Brazil and many of those Jews
headed to Holland where they became diamond merchants.
One of the diamond merchants had a son who was really into optics and made some
really nice lenses which got the interest of the English Royal Society who came
over to check them out and see what else was going on in Holland. They came
across a guy with a 250x microscope who’d discovered and documented that there
were micro-organisms everywhere!
Word of this got round to Switzerland where Byron, Shelly, and Bryce (a child at
the time) where having dinner and ended up discussing them. One thing led to
another and someone mentioned that a scientist had recently galvanized pasteur
and brought it back to life. This got Shelly’s wife in a tizzy and she went and
wrote Frankenstein.
Except Frankenstein wasn’t just an attack on mucking about where we had no
business. It was also a subtle attack on the technology of the industrial
revolution which she felt was ruining people’s lives thanks in no small part to
the beliefs of her socialist father.
Her father happened to be friends with a guy who made a workers paradise in his
factory in New Lennik Scotland which was way too revolutionary for its time and
left him depressed that he’d never be able to get anywhere with the idea. Until
a colony came up for sale in Indiana which he bought with the financial backing
of a guy named William Maclure who was quite inspired by the factory and was all
into the idea of creating a socialist commune which they called New Harmony
Indiana.
Maclure happened to be a geologist who made the first geological map of the
fledgling United States and found some Germanium deposits which happened to be
the same mineral that was used in the first transistors that led to microchips
and Singapore being what it is today.
To summarize: microchip from transistor made with germanium discovered by a
German who sold cobalt for fake Ming vases. Ming era potters found cobalt in
Istanbul which has a great mosque which was a cover up for Christian works which
became legitimate by a The Donation of Constantine which a thousand years later
was exposed as a fake by a guy who wasn’t killed thanks to a Godfather who also
helped out the head of the Portuguese Oceanic Exploration Agency which had great
navigational tech and three years later “discovered” Brazil where their Jews
happily ran away to until the Inquisition caught up with them, at which point
many of them moved to Holland and one of them had a child who made great lenses
which caught the interest of the English Royal Society that found a dude with a
microscope who told them about micro-organisms which they in turn told everybody
about. Word got around to Mary Shelly who wrote a book that most people don’t
realize is an attack on industrialization thanks to her socialist father who had
a friend who started a commune in Indiana with the financial backing of a
geologist who found some Germanium deposits in the U.S. and Germanium is what
was used in the first transistor.
While the story is cool, some of those connections are Damn tenuous.
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