June 15, 2009 • 18 mins
With help from listeners, our resident history buffs take a look at the world's great innovators and try to pick the best of the bunch. Listen in to learn more about three of the best innovators in history with this podcast from HowStuffWorks.com.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandi Kennard, joined by fellow editor Katie Lambert's. Hello, Katie.
I am so excited to do the first of what
(00:23):
maybe many installments of fan picks colin three greatest innovators
in history? And why three, you may ask, Um, It's
because one Katie and I are both so crazy about
we had to share him, and then she had strong
feelings about another and I another. So without any further ado, um,
(00:44):
I did want to mention some of the other fabulous
names that the blog readers tossed out, and even though
we can't cover all of the innovators you suggested, we
picked three who we thought made huge impacts on society, culture, science, health,
the printed word content. We got a great suggestion from
Ben about Nikola Tesla. I really wanted to do just
(01:06):
so I could talk about the earthquake machine and the
death ray that Ben mentioned. And another big vote for
Jesus from Steve, which I thought would have been a
really interesting way to take this. Candice who spells her
name with an eye not an a. Uh, well that's
probably why. She suggested Alexander Hamilton, one of Thomas Jefferson's
greatest enemies. And she wrote a whole list of things
(01:29):
he accomplished, including writing the Federalist Papers, founding the Bank
of New York, serving as the first Secretary at the Treasury,
founding the US meant and the Coast Guard. And she
goes on and on. But did he have an earthquake machine? No, no,
he did not. He was pretty good looking, though, as
far as historical personages go, I will give him that. Um.
And then Aaron suggested a woman named Ada Lovelace, who
(01:52):
was credited, she says, with being the first computer programmer
and for inventing the first computer programming language, all from
eighteen fifteen to eighteen fifty two. Pretty wild, huh. And
we so did want a woman on this list. So
let's get into it. The three inventors we picked our
Johann Gutenberg, Leonardo da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin. And we
(02:16):
will start off with Johann Gutenberg, who you might know
as the inventor of the printing press. And because of Gutenberg,
you have al those lovely mass market paperbacks in your bookshelves.
He was born in the fourteenth century to a wealthy
German family. And even though we know him for his
contributions to the printing world, he began as a goldsmith
(02:37):
and then dabbled as a gym cutter. And you were
telling me he did something else interesting too. He doubled
in glasses making as well in his time in Strasbourg, France. Wow,
he did a little bit of everything. A renaissance man
before the Renaissance, shall we say, And he was above
all things a businessman and an entrepreneur because what he
(02:58):
did was not sir and and creating a printing press.
It was taking three existing innovations paper, ink and movable
type and combining them into the Guttenberg press. But he
did not come up with the idea of movable type
on his own. That actually originated back in China. Around
(03:19):
six D the Chinese began using engraved wooden blocks to
print in a process called sylography, and today that's still
an art, using wooden carvings to create some sort of
print on paper. And then around ten forty one to
one man came up with movable type, arranging the wooden
blocks on a tray, heating it and then pressing it
(03:40):
on paper to transfer the ink, and then in thirteenth
century Korea, metal type setting was created with up to
one hundred thousand pieces of type and about ten different fonts.
But the problem with movable type and China and Korea
was that there were so many characters it didn't take off,
so the art length quished for a bit, I guess
(04:01):
you could say, until the ideas of paper and ink
eventually made it over to Europe through different trade routes
and different conquests, and Garten realized that he had his
hands on the perfect alphabet to create a good type
setting system, so he used this new type of ink
that he created. It was an alloy uh made of
(04:21):
lead and tin and another ingredient that wouldn't shrink after
it was cooled, and it's actually still used today. So
combining this ink with paper originally using vellum, and then
the type of press that was used to squeeze grapes
and olives for wine and olive oil, he was able
to make actual printed materials. And the nice thing about
(04:43):
that metal movable type was that not only was it
faster to use, those letters made a much sharper impression
and therefore more durable and more uniform actually than the
woodblock printing was, because you could make each letter look
exactly the same, so all of your a's on a
page would look like all of the other a's. And
Gutenberg also printed on front and back of the pages,
(05:05):
eventually leading to the very famous forty two line Gutenberg Bible.
People today still talk about the pleasant layout design of
this Bible, forty two lines arranged in columns, playing of
space on either side of the page. Two copies he
printed up this book. It came in two volumes for
he totaled one thousand, two d two pages, and it
(05:26):
was printed in fourteen fifty five. And consulting a couple
of different sources, I was a little bit unsure as
to whether Guttenberg himself printed the Bible or whether by
this time he lost management of his printing press to
the man who would put up a capital for him
when he started his business. So if you have any
knowledge about that, and maybe you can fill us in.
(05:48):
But regardless, the Bible came out, it was extremely popular.
The rate of literate people in Europe at this time
was on the rise, so it was very good for
disseminating reading materials well and when not that many people
could afford to buy an illuminated manuscript, they were very,
very expensive. You're talking monks putting together these books for years. Yeah,
(06:09):
handwritten copies, so to expedite the process was huge and
it led to other developments too, not only in the
ways of the Reformation, Renaissance, and scientific revelation, but even
to the advent of book fairs. The Frankfurt book Fair
was huge. People came to get copies of reading materials.
I love book fars personally. I always they come back
and vogue. But by fifteen hundred, after my little digression
(06:33):
there half a million books had been printed and the
Guttenberg Revolution. Author John Mann says that a third of
all books in Germany printed between fifteen eighteen to fifty
eight were works by Martin Luther, essentially launching the Reformation.
So you could say that the Gutenberg press was as
simplistic as putting the printed word on a page, But
(06:54):
other history scholars would beg to differ, saying that it
put the world on its end and launched a huge
religious refer nation. And as a little aside, if you
are more interested in the printing aspects of Guttenberg's developments
and contributions as opposed to his uh shall we say, cultural, religious,
and social contributions. There were two Europeans who followed who
(07:14):
made additional efforts to help perfect the printing method. And
these are sort of whimsical, but I like them, so
I'll tell you anyway. There was Nicholas Jensen from France
who created Seraph's, which are those little tail flourishes at
the end of words and letters that you see. It's
an optical illusion that keeps your eye traveling across the
page to keep reading. Then from Italy we have a
(07:34):
man named Aldus Minutius who created italics Italics Italy, catch
the drift, and this was designed to maximize the number
of words on the page because they were all slanted.
So you see, thank you Guttenburg for reformations and Sarah's
really you put it all in motion. And the printing
press actually brings us into our next innovator, Di Vinci,
(07:57):
because he came up with his own innovations on gutten
Burg's printing press that would have made it much easier
to print. If his designs had been used, one person
would have been able to print instead of an entire
crew of people. But of course, being Da Vinci and
being rather secretive with his notebooks, no one actually saw
those designs. You might have heard of Da Vinci um.
He was the quintessential renaissance man. He painted a little
(08:19):
painting called the Mona Lisa, and also The Last Supper
and the Virgin of the Rocks. But painting wasn't all
he was about. He was very much interested in science
and in inventing things. And some of his inventions, and
I'm using Jane McGrath's research for this one, were an
orna thopter, which is a flying machine with wings that
(08:41):
the pilot could operate um. But he didn't quite manage
to pull that one off. He underestimated the importance of
feathers to a bird, and his own actor never would
actually have flown. He also designed a diving apparatus, which
is like a primitive version of a scuba suit or
a diving bell actually, as well as a parish shoot,
and the idea of a telescope um. He proposed that
(09:05):
lenses and mirrors would enable us to get closer to
the nature of the planets, and some of Da Fincy's
most interesting innovations were made ever more understandable and comprehensible
to me by virtue of Katie being our resident health editor.
And I am very much excited about the other thing
that Da Vinci was excited about. And I'm thrilled. Can
I interject because Katy is about to come across as
(09:27):
more morbid than I've ever sounded, So have edit, Katie.
I will take your morbid crown um da Vinci and autopsy. Actually,
he was very into empirical observation. His teacher Verocchio, had
told him it was important to sketch from life, so
he would take his notebook places and sketch people and
things exactly as they were. And part of learning to
(09:49):
sketch the human form was to see actually how human
bodies work. So he would go to these operating theaters,
which is how medical students used to learn back then.
And it will be a bunch of med students standing
around this corpse while a man cut it apart, and
a different man who wasn't even looking at the body
would be just talking from a book, this ancient wisdom
about the human body and things that weren't even necessarily true.
(10:13):
It could be a complete misunderstanding of how blood circulates
in the body. And even though what the students were
looking at didn't even remotely match what the text was saying,
they always deferred to the text rather than to their
own senses. But a great way to propagate knowledge and
advanced to feeling of medicine. It really was not. But
because of that, da Vinci sort of took matters into
(10:34):
his own hands and got really interested in dissection. He
injected a human brain with hot wax so he could
look at the ventricles, and took the skull apart and
sketched it from different angles. He boiled cow's eyeballs and
egg yolks so he could section them and see exactly
how the inside of them worked. But what he really
understood was the female form. Right. Oh yes, in case
(10:57):
you didn't know, um, Supposedly, when you're preg meant suppressed
menstrual blood turns into breast milk or DaVinci helpful, I'm
gonna go ahead and have to tell you that that's
not true. I'm sorry if that makes anyone sad. But
what he did figure out was how the optic nerve works,
which no one up to that time knew and also
how kidney stones are formed. So even though I may
(11:18):
be joking a little bit about some of his innovations
that turned out to be wrong, he was making suppositions
and putting forth research that no one really had. Like
you were saying, people were relying on ancient or not ancient,
that's not fair. People were relying on old and outmoded
texts to influence the way they practice medicine. But Da
Vinci's innovations changed all of that well. And the thing
(11:39):
I loved with the questions he had that no one
really had been asking their notes in his notebooks of
you know, how does a fetus breathe? What do testicles do? Like?
Why do we have this? And he had such a
curious inventive mind. Another curious inventor was Benjamin Franklin. And
the curious case of Benjamin Franklin was that he was
born a British colonist and Austin in seventeen oh six,
(12:02):
and he died an American in Philadelphia, So he lived
for a really long time, especially for that time frame.
And I found on PBS UH they did a special
about Benjamin Franklin, and they had a web page about
ben A to Z, and from A to Z they
wrote out all the different things he was. Seriously a
couple of attributes for each letter, and I wanted to
(12:23):
share four of my favorite letters. B balloon, enthusiast, Comma, bifocals, inventor,
F founding, father, flirt, firefighter, OH, organizer parentheses, militia, fire department,
street cleaning, closed parentheses, o'domino maker, and then the volunteer, visionary,
(12:46):
vegetarian Borarily. I just I love that he really was
so many things, and maybe he's belittled a little bit
for some silly things that we think might have been
gaffs or uh mistakes on his behalf, like wanting to
propose a turkey as the national bird of the United States.
But this is what he had to say about the
(13:07):
American eagle, and it really gives us a glimpse into
the way that his mind worked and and to his
type of character. He said, for my own part, I
wish the eagle had not been chosen the representative of
our country. He is a bird of bad moral character.
He does not get his living, honestly, And he goes
on to explain that the eagle pretty much sits on
a high perch, watches all the others do the work,
(13:30):
and then goes and takes their prey. So he was
very much a man who was fond of earning your living.
And he started out in a printing shop. He wanted
to be a sailor, but his father said, now you can't.
You have to work in a printing shop, and so
he did, and from there he made a big impact
on media with the Philadelphia Gazette Poor Richards Almanac. He
(13:51):
was a scientist developing a single fluid theory of electricity
to do the first political cartoon. He was a postmaster,
a philosopher, a dip that a musician created the bifocals.
I could go on and on and on, but I'll
stop and tell you some of the more interesting tidbits
about his innovations and contributions to society. He actually created
(14:13):
an instrument called the glass armonica, and it looks like
a pianoforte with um glass tumblers, a series of glass
tumblers inside and the glass spins and you dampen your
fingers and then you play them like the scene in
Miss Congeniality with Sandra Bullock playing the glasses. So it
was an actual instrument that he put together. The only
time that Sandra Bullock and Benment Franklin have ever been
(14:34):
in the same symptoms. And you didn't think we could
do it. This is what we girls are capable of.
In three he founded the American Philosophical Society. And the
purpose of this, to quote Franklin, was to promote useful
knowledge in the colonies. And it's still around today, still
essentially serving the same purpose. It's engaging people from different
professions and dialogue to disseminate knowledge and understanding. And the
(14:57):
original members were a physician, mathematician, geographer, philosopher, botanist, chemist,
and an engineer. And it was very similar to the
idea of a salon. You get intelligent people together to
discuss these things and to better society essentially. And in
addition to his I guess intellectual knowledge and contributions, one
of his physical contributions was forming a firefighting club. This
(15:21):
was a group of men in Philadelphia who got together
in seventeen thirty six to incorporate the Union Fire Company
and they were all required to have buckets to help
put off flames and bags to remove valuables from homes
because fires were incredibly common with all the wooden structors
around and all the fireplaces that abounded, and it was
members protecting members essentially, so if you weren't a member,
(15:42):
you were kind of out of luck. But from here
he had the idea to create mutual insurance, people paying
in for protection, and if any member of society lost
his home to fire, if he had this mutual insurance,
the group would give the money to him to recoup
him for his losses. So pretty and gene yes, And
to talk about his political side a little bit, he's
(16:05):
known for starting the Great Compromise during the drafting of
the Constitution. Originally he didn't really go along with this idea.
He wanted a unicameral legislation, but eventually he said, we'll
solve the problem of representation by having a House made
up of representatives that are determined by state's population, and
then senators, of which will have the same number from
(16:25):
every state. There was a moment when people thought the
Constitution wouldn't get signed because people were still pretty upset
about some differences among them. He made a very very
passionate speech and implored everyone to sign, and almost everyone did,
but not everyone. So he died with this legacy of
being the ultimate American citizen. He really was everything to
(16:47):
all subject areas and inventions as simple as bifocals on
the lightning rod. The Franklin still things like this that
still impact our society today. Speaking of things we still
use today, Franklin invented the flexible urine catheter. While although
it doesn't sound all of that exciting, has extremely practical uses.
And if you've ever been in the hospital and needed one,
(17:08):
I'm sure you're grateful. But that just goes to show
that the greatest innovations round the gamut from small practical
things to grandiose ideologies. And we're so thankful for all
the innovators in history who have made our world what
it is today. And if you've been listening and you've
gotten an idea for another innovator who was not proposed
on the first ground of comments, if you want to,
(17:30):
you can. You can still post a comment a couple
of days later um on that particular blog entry, or
you can wait until we do a little podcast round
up about this topic and another one when you visit
our blocks or email us a history podcast at how
stuff works dot com. And for more information about Benjamin Franklin,
lots of Da Vinci and some good old Gutenberg printing.
(17:52):
Be sure to visit the website at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to
check out this stuff you missed in History Class blog
on the how stuff works dot com tome page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm editor Kandi Kennard, joined by fellow editor Katie Lambert's. Hello, Katie.
I am so excited to do the first of what
(00:23):
maybe many installments of fan picks colin three greatest innovators
in history? And why three, you may ask, Um, It's
because one Katie and I are both so crazy about
we had to share him, and then she had strong
feelings about another and I another. So without any further ado, um,
(00:44):
I did want to mention some of the other fabulous
names that the blog readers tossed out, and even though
we can't cover all of the innovators you suggested, we
picked three who we thought made huge impacts on society, culture, science, health,
the printed word content. We got a great suggestion from
Ben about Nikola Tesla. I really wanted to do just
(01:06):
so I could talk about the earthquake machine and the
death ray that Ben mentioned. And another big vote for
Jesus from Steve, which I thought would have been a
really interesting way to take this. Candice who spells her
name with an eye not an a. Uh, well that's
probably why. She suggested Alexander Hamilton, one of Thomas Jefferson's
greatest enemies. And she wrote a whole list of things
(01:29):
he accomplished, including writing the Federalist Papers, founding the Bank
of New York, serving as the first Secretary at the Treasury,
founding the US meant and the Coast Guard. And she
goes on and on. But did he have an earthquake machine? No, no,
he did not. He was pretty good looking, though, as
far as historical personages go, I will give him that. Um.
And then Aaron suggested a woman named Ada Lovelace, who
(01:52):
was credited, she says, with being the first computer programmer
and for inventing the first computer programming language, all from
eighteen fifteen to eighteen fifty two. Pretty wild, huh. And
we so did want a woman on this list. So
let's get into it. The three inventors we picked our
Johann Gutenberg, Leonardo da Vinci, and Benjamin Franklin. And we
(02:16):
will start off with Johann Gutenberg, who you might know
as the inventor of the printing press. And because of Gutenberg,
you have al those lovely mass market paperbacks in your bookshelves.
He was born in the fourteenth century to a wealthy
German family. And even though we know him for his
contributions to the printing world, he began as a goldsmith
(02:37):
and then dabbled as a gym cutter. And you were
telling me he did something else interesting too. He doubled
in glasses making as well in his time in Strasbourg, France. Wow,
he did a little bit of everything. A renaissance man
before the Renaissance, shall we say, And he was above
all things a businessman and an entrepreneur because what he
(02:58):
did was not sir and and creating a printing press.
It was taking three existing innovations paper, ink and movable
type and combining them into the Guttenberg press. But he
did not come up with the idea of movable type
on his own. That actually originated back in China. Around
(03:19):
six D the Chinese began using engraved wooden blocks to
print in a process called sylography, and today that's still
an art, using wooden carvings to create some sort of
print on paper. And then around ten forty one to
one man came up with movable type, arranging the wooden
blocks on a tray, heating it and then pressing it
(03:40):
on paper to transfer the ink, and then in thirteenth
century Korea, metal type setting was created with up to
one hundred thousand pieces of type and about ten different fonts.
But the problem with movable type and China and Korea
was that there were so many characters it didn't take off,
so the art length quished for a bit, I guess
(04:01):
you could say, until the ideas of paper and ink
eventually made it over to Europe through different trade routes
and different conquests, and Garten realized that he had his
hands on the perfect alphabet to create a good type
setting system, so he used this new type of ink
that he created. It was an alloy uh made of
(04:21):
lead and tin and another ingredient that wouldn't shrink after
it was cooled, and it's actually still used today. So
combining this ink with paper originally using vellum, and then
the type of press that was used to squeeze grapes
and olives for wine and olive oil, he was able
to make actual printed materials. And the nice thing about
(04:43):
that metal movable type was that not only was it
faster to use, those letters made a much sharper impression
and therefore more durable and more uniform actually than the
woodblock printing was, because you could make each letter look
exactly the same, so all of your a's on a
page would look like all of the other a's. And
Gutenberg also printed on front and back of the pages,
(05:05):
eventually leading to the very famous forty two line Gutenberg Bible.
People today still talk about the pleasant layout design of
this Bible, forty two lines arranged in columns, playing of
space on either side of the page. Two copies he
printed up this book. It came in two volumes for
he totaled one thousand, two d two pages, and it
(05:26):
was printed in fourteen fifty five. And consulting a couple
of different sources, I was a little bit unsure as
to whether Guttenberg himself printed the Bible or whether by
this time he lost management of his printing press to
the man who would put up a capital for him
when he started his business. So if you have any
knowledge about that, and maybe you can fill us in.
(05:48):
But regardless, the Bible came out, it was extremely popular.
The rate of literate people in Europe at this time
was on the rise, so it was very good for
disseminating reading materials well and when not that many people
could afford to buy an illuminated manuscript, they were very,
very expensive. You're talking monks putting together these books for years. Yeah,
(06:09):
handwritten copies, so to expedite the process was huge and
it led to other developments too, not only in the
ways of the Reformation, Renaissance, and scientific revelation, but even
to the advent of book fairs. The Frankfurt book Fair
was huge. People came to get copies of reading materials.
I love book fars personally. I always they come back
and vogue. But by fifteen hundred, after my little digression
(06:33):
there half a million books had been printed and the
Guttenberg Revolution. Author John Mann says that a third of
all books in Germany printed between fifteen eighteen to fifty
eight were works by Martin Luther, essentially launching the Reformation.
So you could say that the Gutenberg press was as
simplistic as putting the printed word on a page, But
(06:54):
other history scholars would beg to differ, saying that it
put the world on its end and launched a huge
religious refer nation. And as a little aside, if you
are more interested in the printing aspects of Guttenberg's developments
and contributions as opposed to his uh shall we say, cultural, religious,
and social contributions. There were two Europeans who followed who
(07:14):
made additional efforts to help perfect the printing method. And
these are sort of whimsical, but I like them, so
I'll tell you anyway. There was Nicholas Jensen from France
who created Seraph's, which are those little tail flourishes at
the end of words and letters that you see. It's
an optical illusion that keeps your eye traveling across the
page to keep reading. Then from Italy we have a
(07:34):
man named Aldus Minutius who created italics Italics Italy, catch
the drift, and this was designed to maximize the number
of words on the page because they were all slanted.
So you see, thank you Guttenburg for reformations and Sarah's
really you put it all in motion. And the printing
press actually brings us into our next innovator, Di Vinci,
(07:57):
because he came up with his own innovations on gutten
Burg's printing press that would have made it much easier
to print. If his designs had been used, one person
would have been able to print instead of an entire
crew of people. But of course, being Da Vinci and
being rather secretive with his notebooks, no one actually saw
those designs. You might have heard of Da Vinci um.
He was the quintessential renaissance man. He painted a little
(08:19):
painting called the Mona Lisa, and also The Last Supper
and the Virgin of the Rocks. But painting wasn't all
he was about. He was very much interested in science
and in inventing things. And some of his inventions, and
I'm using Jane McGrath's research for this one, were an
orna thopter, which is a flying machine with wings that
(08:41):
the pilot could operate um. But he didn't quite manage
to pull that one off. He underestimated the importance of
feathers to a bird, and his own actor never would
actually have flown. He also designed a diving apparatus, which
is like a primitive version of a scuba suit or
a diving bell actually, as well as a parish shoot,
and the idea of a telescope um. He proposed that
(09:05):
lenses and mirrors would enable us to get closer to
the nature of the planets, and some of Da Fincy's
most interesting innovations were made ever more understandable and comprehensible
to me by virtue of Katie being our resident health editor.
And I am very much excited about the other thing
that Da Vinci was excited about. And I'm thrilled. Can
I interject because Katy is about to come across as
(09:27):
more morbid than I've ever sounded, So have edit, Katie.
I will take your morbid crown um da Vinci and autopsy. Actually,
he was very into empirical observation. His teacher Verocchio, had
told him it was important to sketch from life, so
he would take his notebook places and sketch people and
things exactly as they were. And part of learning to
(09:49):
sketch the human form was to see actually how human
bodies work. So he would go to these operating theaters,
which is how medical students used to learn back then.
And it will be a bunch of med students standing
around this corpse while a man cut it apart, and
a different man who wasn't even looking at the body
would be just talking from a book, this ancient wisdom
about the human body and things that weren't even necessarily true.
(10:13):
It could be a complete misunderstanding of how blood circulates
in the body. And even though what the students were
looking at didn't even remotely match what the text was saying,
they always deferred to the text rather than to their
own senses. But a great way to propagate knowledge and
advanced to feeling of medicine. It really was not. But
because of that, da Vinci sort of took matters into
(10:34):
his own hands and got really interested in dissection. He
injected a human brain with hot wax so he could
look at the ventricles, and took the skull apart and
sketched it from different angles. He boiled cow's eyeballs and
egg yolks so he could section them and see exactly
how the inside of them worked. But what he really
understood was the female form. Right. Oh yes, in case
(10:57):
you didn't know, um, Supposedly, when you're preg meant suppressed
menstrual blood turns into breast milk or DaVinci helpful, I'm
gonna go ahead and have to tell you that that's
not true. I'm sorry if that makes anyone sad. But
what he did figure out was how the optic nerve works,
which no one up to that time knew and also
how kidney stones are formed. So even though I may
(11:18):
be joking a little bit about some of his innovations
that turned out to be wrong, he was making suppositions
and putting forth research that no one really had. Like
you were saying, people were relying on ancient or not ancient,
that's not fair. People were relying on old and outmoded
texts to influence the way they practice medicine. But Da
Vinci's innovations changed all of that well. And the thing
(11:39):
I loved with the questions he had that no one
really had been asking their notes in his notebooks of
you know, how does a fetus breathe? What do testicles do? Like?
Why do we have this? And he had such a
curious inventive mind. Another curious inventor was Benjamin Franklin. And
the curious case of Benjamin Franklin was that he was
born a British colonist and Austin in seventeen oh six,
(12:02):
and he died an American in Philadelphia, So he lived
for a really long time, especially for that time frame.
And I found on PBS UH they did a special
about Benjamin Franklin, and they had a web page about
ben A to Z, and from A to Z they
wrote out all the different things he was. Seriously a
couple of attributes for each letter, and I wanted to
(12:23):
share four of my favorite letters. B balloon, enthusiast, Comma, bifocals, inventor,
F founding, father, flirt, firefighter, OH, organizer parentheses, militia, fire department,
street cleaning, closed parentheses, o'domino maker, and then the volunteer, visionary,
(12:46):
vegetarian Borarily. I just I love that he really was
so many things, and maybe he's belittled a little bit
for some silly things that we think might have been
gaffs or uh mistakes on his behalf, like wanting to
propose a turkey as the national bird of the United States.
But this is what he had to say about the
(13:07):
American eagle, and it really gives us a glimpse into
the way that his mind worked and and to his
type of character. He said, for my own part, I
wish the eagle had not been chosen the representative of
our country. He is a bird of bad moral character.
He does not get his living, honestly, And he goes
on to explain that the eagle pretty much sits on
a high perch, watches all the others do the work,
(13:30):
and then goes and takes their prey. So he was
very much a man who was fond of earning your living.
And he started out in a printing shop. He wanted
to be a sailor, but his father said, now you can't.
You have to work in a printing shop, and so
he did, and from there he made a big impact
on media with the Philadelphia Gazette Poor Richards Almanac. He
(13:51):
was a scientist developing a single fluid theory of electricity
to do the first political cartoon. He was a postmaster,
a philosopher, a dip that a musician created the bifocals.
I could go on and on and on, but I'll
stop and tell you some of the more interesting tidbits
about his innovations and contributions to society. He actually created
(14:13):
an instrument called the glass armonica, and it looks like
a pianoforte with um glass tumblers, a series of glass
tumblers inside and the glass spins and you dampen your
fingers and then you play them like the scene in
Miss Congeniality with Sandra Bullock playing the glasses. So it
was an actual instrument that he put together. The only
time that Sandra Bullock and Benment Franklin have ever been
(14:34):
in the same symptoms. And you didn't think we could
do it. This is what we girls are capable of.
In three he founded the American Philosophical Society. And the
purpose of this, to quote Franklin, was to promote useful
knowledge in the colonies. And it's still around today, still
essentially serving the same purpose. It's engaging people from different
professions and dialogue to disseminate knowledge and understanding. And the
(14:57):
original members were a physician, mathematician, geographer, philosopher, botanist, chemist,
and an engineer. And it was very similar to the
idea of a salon. You get intelligent people together to
discuss these things and to better society essentially. And in
addition to his I guess intellectual knowledge and contributions, one
of his physical contributions was forming a firefighting club. This
(15:21):
was a group of men in Philadelphia who got together
in seventeen thirty six to incorporate the Union Fire Company
and they were all required to have buckets to help
put off flames and bags to remove valuables from homes
because fires were incredibly common with all the wooden structors
around and all the fireplaces that abounded, and it was
members protecting members essentially, so if you weren't a member,
(15:42):
you were kind of out of luck. But from here
he had the idea to create mutual insurance, people paying
in for protection, and if any member of society lost
his home to fire, if he had this mutual insurance,
the group would give the money to him to recoup
him for his losses. So pretty and gene yes, And
to talk about his political side a little bit, he's
(16:05):
known for starting the Great Compromise during the drafting of
the Constitution. Originally he didn't really go along with this idea.
He wanted a unicameral legislation, but eventually he said, we'll
solve the problem of representation by having a House made
up of representatives that are determined by state's population, and
then senators, of which will have the same number from
(16:25):
every state. There was a moment when people thought the
Constitution wouldn't get signed because people were still pretty upset
about some differences among them. He made a very very
passionate speech and implored everyone to sign, and almost everyone did,
but not everyone. So he died with this legacy of
being the ultimate American citizen. He really was everything to
(16:47):
all subject areas and inventions as simple as bifocals on
the lightning rod. The Franklin still things like this that
still impact our society today. Speaking of things we still
use today, Franklin invented the flexible urine catheter. While although
it doesn't sound all of that exciting, has extremely practical uses.
And if you've ever been in the hospital and needed one,
(17:08):
I'm sure you're grateful. But that just goes to show
that the greatest innovations round the gamut from small practical
things to grandiose ideologies. And we're so thankful for all
the innovators in history who have made our world what
it is today. And if you've been listening and you've
gotten an idea for another innovator who was not proposed
on the first ground of comments, if you want to,
(17:30):
you can. You can still post a comment a couple
of days later um on that particular blog entry, or
you can wait until we do a little podcast round
up about this topic and another one when you visit
our blocks or email us a history podcast at how
stuff works dot com. And for more information about Benjamin Franklin,
lots of Da Vinci and some good old Gutenberg printing.
(17:52):
Be sure to visit the website at how stuff works
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Visit how stuff works dot com and be sure to
check out this stuff you missed in History Class blog
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