As the culture of the renaissance, and age of discovery inspired brilliance and innovation, the spirit of achievement broke through rigid confines of conformity and pushed a wave of creativity across Europe. One of those riding the wave of creativity was a student and later teacher at Trinity College in Cambridge, England named Isaac Newton. He helped to organize, and added to the growing body of knowledge that was the scientific revolution; building on the foundation of the philosopher Descartes, astronomers Galileo, Kepler and Copernicus, and mathematicians John Wallis, Isaac Barrow, Eudoxus, Aryabhata, Ibn al-Hatham and Sharaf al-Din al-Tusi to name only a scant few.
Regarded as the most important work of one of the most influential scientists of all time, Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy (Principia), was published in 1687. His contributions include pioneering work in optics where he demonstrated the color components in light through refraction and invented a reflective telescope based on mirrors to focus light without the refraction aberration common to lens focusing. And though he was instrumental in applying calculus to matters of physics, his fame derives from the introduction of the concept of gravity and his laws of inertia, acceleration and reaction that helped shape the future of physics and mechanics.
It was the work of men like Newton that helped planets and other celestial bodies escape the archaic confines of clear, glass-like spheres popular with Aristotle, and move through the vast universe tethered only by the touchless, invisible bonds of gravity. Principia also gave some valuable advice to any of those seeking the truth, by sharing some of Newton’s principles of reason. To prevent errors born of man’s recognized tendency to invent undue cause of questioned effect Newton penned the following four rules of philosophy:
Without such objective approaches to reason the 18th century surely wouldn’t be called the Age of Enlightenment. German philosopher Immanuel Kant echoed the sentiment of those resisting the old bully pulpit when he challenged, “Dare to Know!: Have the courage to use your own intelligence!” And at the end of the preceding century John Locke published his Essay Concerning Human Understanding wherein he influenced future Enlightenment thinkers by stressing the importance of experience and environment on shaping people's attitudes and understandings. Nowhere was the impact of experience better demonstrated than in the accounts written by adventurers, merchants and missionaries that traveled the world and reported on the myriad of customs and traditions of distant cultures, causing readers to question the benefit, truth and even necessity of their own rituals and convictions.
But tragically, mankind was so consumed by it’s own ignorance that enlightenment writers were forced to use a number of ploys to circumvent censorship such as overtly praising what they intended to criticize, publishing under pseudonyms, setting lessons in the form of dialogues among characters in a story, and criticizing customs of other lands that resembled undesirable customs at home. Society was in such a rut of selfishness that two critical themes of the Enlightenment involved toleration and equality.
There was beauty in generous thought that was accompanied by equally beautiful music, brought to life by such legends as Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. And the flowering of knowledge, art, and discovery was soon followed by major advancements in industry, with Britain being the principal seat of the industrial revolution in the late 1700s and early 1800s. It may have been no small coincidence that industry prospered in eighteenth century England along with a great rise of periodicals and newspapers that aided in the dissemination of news and information contributing to intellectual collaboration.
At that time one of the basic economic staples behind food was clothing. And it was in the textile industry that mechanization made great early strides, with some of the first machine production powered by water wheels and animals, but as textile machinery became more complex and efficient so did the engines that powered them. Some of the first practical steam engines saw early action pumping water out of coal mines, but after improvements by James Watts and fellow inventors, the steam engine became wildly popular in powering the emerging textile factories and other stationary applications like grain grinding.
Increased demand meant massive increases in the quantity and quality of iron production and machining in the eighteenth century that contributed to the dominance of the steam engine in transportation. Those steam engines drove giant locomotives and steamships that supplied factories with raw materials and delivered finished goods to markets around Britain and around the world, in addition to driving increased production by powering manufacturing processes.
Rapid increases in mechanization, power generation, chemical production, machining and metallurgy were complemented by Britain’s dominance of the seas to allow nineteenth century Britain and its still expanding overseas empire to stand head and shoulders above the rest of the world in wealth and power. Some of that British wealth and ingenuity was proudly presented by Queen Victoria in the first modern world fair, the Great Exhibition of 1851. And many other countries joined Britain in contributing to the 100,000 exhibits of the latest products and technologies under nineteen acres of glass and iron of the Crystal Palace display hall. The public enthusiasm for profitable industry and satisfaction of achievement may have been summed up by Victoria’s husband Prince Albert when he lauded man’s fulfillment of the sacred mission of conquering nature for his use.
On the foreign front Britain’s colonial dominance and growing empire was maintained the only way society knew to maintain control: by armed conflict. Britain’s control of India and aggressive trade development brought it into conflict with China in the Opium Wars from 1839 to 1842 and from 1856 to 1860. With victory, the British gained control of Hong Kong as a trading port, and favorable trade accommodations to counter the large trade imbalance that existed before the wars, as the Chinese maintained a self-sufficiency that contrasted starkly with steady demand in Britain for Chinese products and materials.
After the Americas, Australia, Atlantic and Pacific island groups, and much of Asia was under the control of the European colonial powers, they partitioned Africa near the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Britain connected its share of Africa with the rest of the Empire with an amazing telegraph system that extended from Europe to Africa, to Asia, south to Australia, across the Pacific to Canada and across the Atlantic to Ireland.
The world’s growing telegraph network was kept busy by the accelerated march of discovery and technological innovation during the nineteenth century. One of the very important developments was promotion of the germ theory by French chemist Louis Pasteur that truly revolutionized sanitation and healthy practices in food preparation and the field of medicine. His process of sterilizing substances by applying enough heat to kill microorganisms became known as pasteurization and is the basis of preservation in much of the canned and bottled foods consumed today.
Human civilization was drastically changed when, for the first time in history, Pasteur’s germ theory led to the general acceptance that many horrific diseases were the result of invasions of pathogenic microorganisms too small to see with the naked eye. Society was able to benefit from better hygienic practices in healthcare that greatly reduced the occurrence of deadly infections known as “hospital gangrene.” Also of keen importance, Pasteur’s work led to a preventative vaccine for rabies and helped lay the foundation for development of future immunizations against the world’s most deadly diseases. Together with the popularization of ether and chloroform anesthesia in the 1840s, microbiology finally ushered in the modern age of medicine.
But the French were busy with more than microscopic projects in the 19th century. In 1869 they finished the monumental Suez canal that recalled the engineering ambition of Darius of Persia that enabled maritime travelers between Europe and the pacific to bypass the large African continent. And in attempting to duplicate their success the French also undertook to link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans by building a canal through Panama. But unfortunately, their efforts in Panama were fatally compromised by malaria and yellow fever that claimed more than twenty thousand lives. Ironically, it was the work of men like Pasteur that enabled Americans to correctly surmise that mosquitoes were responsible for transmitting deadly tropical diseases, and in 1914 America completed the massive project began by the French decades earlier.
Science was still picking up speed in the 19th century when Russian Dmitri Mendeleev classified the known elements by their atomic weights and contributed to the grouping of elements into periods of substances with similar properties in the 1860s. And also that decade the world lost one of the preeminent experimental scientists of all time when the Briton Michael Faraday passed away in 1867. Thanks to Faraday’s pioneering breakthroughs in chemistry, and contributions to the electrical age through his work with motors, generators and electromagnetic theory, he was awarded a professorship for life at the Royal Institution of Great Britain; demonstrating that high accomplishment isn’t necessarily correlated with formal education, of which Faraday had very little.
But, there was still a running battle between fallacy and fact being waged between religious proselytizers and scientists. Early in the century, in 1809, Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck had presented a theory of evolution in which he postulated that plants and animals differed based on different environmental conditions shaping their development. It wasn’t until fifty years later however, that Englishman Charles Darwin, a naturalist that had been trained in theology, shook man’s world to its foundation when he presented the evolution of species.
The evolution of species seemed to make a lot of sense to people – until the public actually considered how that concept related to them. It wasn’t until Darwin published a book in 1872 discussing the evolution of men and apes from common ancestors that the general public woke up and considered the application of evolution to humanity. The idea that people might in any way be equal to or have common ties with their fellow earthlings was repugnant to the self-righteous and narrow minded masses, and great slanders were directed at Darwin for trying to associate mankind with the lowly apes. But, the true savages weren’t apes or monkeys, of course, but it was those assailing Darwin’s character for presenting the brilliant, honest truth. Never did they stop to consider how mankind’s progress to this point gives hope for greater understanding and accomplishment in the future.
Even the basic contradictions inherent in the variety of humans having descended from Adam and Eve and later Noah’s family in just a few thousand years was lost on the masses, as they were quite content believing what they wanted to believe without the burden of reason. Still today people refuse to embrace reality, and deception rages on amongst the ignorant; who slap each other on the back and praise one another for jobs well done, because Abrahamic mythological tradition to which Jews, Christians and Muslims cling gives dates for the age of the world of less than ten thousand years, and credits the universe to a creator in man's own image. But even the arrogance employed by many religious apologists arguing the savage (non-white) races were a blend of man and beast was in itself an erroneous affirmation of the very evolution they so vehemently opposed.
Widespread ignorance also led to war when England’s most famous former colony was torn apart by civil war because of the blatantly evil institutionalized injustice of slavery. When Abraham Lincoln won the election for President of the United States in 1860 despite not being on the ballot in nine Southern states, the spark was set to the smoldering, contentious issue of slavery. But Lincoln’s opposition to slavery was mild compared to many abolitionists and other Republican candidates for president. There were even some brave people that refused to sit by while politicians debated the legality of imprisoning, beating and terrorizing people in perpetual forced labor. With every passing day people were being abused for the little gain of greedy men.
John Brown’s raid on the armory at Harpers Ferry, Virginia in 1859 was the last major attempt to physically free the slaves prior to the Civil War. The largest was led by Charles Deslandes in 1811 in Louisiana when a group of as many as five hundred slaves were recaptured near the small town of Destrehan upstream of New Orleans. Sixty six slaves died in battle and Deslandes and twenty of his followers were executed and decapitated. The heads of the executed slaves were placed on poles along the river road as a warning to others, much as the slaves led by Spartacus were massacred and displayed by the Romans so many centuries before. Many other slaves that dared to seek freedom were burned or otherwise brutally murdered during the centuries of slavery in America. And their mutilated bodies were often hung for public display to terrorize any other would-be runaways and rebels.
The debate over slavery had resonated across America for about a century prior to the American Civil War. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine were among the leaders of the American Revolution that spoke out against the evils of slavery. Yet the oppression continued. Debates raged through the halls of congress, and states like Kansas were bloodied by the contests between opposing factions over the admission of new states as slave or free states. The general disgust with slavery grew in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with both sides of the issue becoming more entrenched in their positions. In 1861 the Russian monarch Alexander II freed Russian serfs, leaving America as the last great bastion of slavery.
After Lincoln was elected president, South Carolina renounced the Constitution and seceded from the United States. South Carolina was soon followed by other slave states, and a war of secession began in 1861. Still, President Lincoln was so unenthused about equal rights he didn’t announce the freedom of Union blacks until the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, and that act appears to be motivated in part by the need for a boost in the war effort. Actually, Lincoln had previously stated that he didn’t intend the negro to be elevated to voting rights and equality with white men.
Nevertheless, after the deaths of thousands and thousands of soldiers fighting for liberation in the deadliest American war, slavery was finally outlawed. It’s often forgotten that the American civil war largely marked the end of the barbaric practice of enslavement that had oppressed every ethnic group in the world at some time in history. Since before the time of Egypt and Sumer, no group of people have been spared the yoke of slavery at the feet of conquerors, savages, neighboring tribes and even traders. And as horrible as the wrongs of slavery were, they pale in comparison to the evil people subject our fellow animals to.
Even with the denouncement of slavery however, the Industrial Revolution contributed to the separation of the haves and have-nots. Never before did such a gap in technology and productivity exist as between those countries at the forefront of technology and those left behind. Many areas of the world still relied on meager agrarian economies. Britain’s European rivals, especially Germany, eventually lessened the industrial gap. But the mammoth countries of Russia and the United States were beginning to loom large on global considerations. As Britain was forming a widespread conglomeration of territories populated by diverse peoples, the United States had steadily spread westward from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
And Russia had extended its borders to the Baltic and Black Seas and eastward all the way to the Pacific Ocean. The industrial revolution had tilted world demand from labor to resources. While the large number of people in Europe and Asia were heavy burdens on available resources, leading the Europeans to push into Africa for raw materials; America and Russia had enormous reserves of resources in their own backyards to be exploited. But before Russia could ramp up a world-class economy, it’s global aspirations drew it into a long contest of influence in Central Asia with Britain which came to be called the Great Game.
The buildup of modern European militaries had left the Ottoman Empire at a disadvantage, and Russia wanted to extend its territory into that controlled by the Ottoman Empire. But others weren’t content to see Russia expand its formidable territory even further, and in the 1850s Britain, or the United Kingdom as it was known, joined with France, Sardinia and the Ottoman Empire in war to halt a Russian invasion of Ottoman territory. But in the late 1870s Russia did manage to successfully annex territory from the Ottoman Empire in what came to be known as the Russo-Turkish War.
Britain and Russia continued to feel the other was a threat to their interests and order, but it was the British that grew more concerned every time Russia expanded it’s territorial holdings, especially toward India, the Jewel of Britain’s Imperial Crown. The 1800s saw Russia expand in Central Asia up to the border of and even into Afghanistan. As a result, Britain invaded Afghanistan twice, at high cost, in an attempt to maintain British influence and keep a buffer against Russian encroachment. Undaunted, Russia extended its control into Northern Iran; and the two powers lobbied and threatened the Ottoman Empire, Persia and Tibet until a growing German influence in Asia gave them both pause to reconsider their priorities.