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Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History

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Class from how Stuff Works dot com.

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Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm editor

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Kandi Kennard, joined by fellow editor

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Katie Lambert's. Hello,

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Katie. I am so excited to

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do the first of what maybe many installments

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of fan picks colin

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three greatest innovators in history?

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And why three, you may ask, Um,

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It's because one Katie and I are both so crazy

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about we had to share him, and then she had

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strong feelings about another and

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I another. So

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without any further ado, um,

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I did want to mention some of the other

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fabulous names that the blog readers

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tossed out, and even though we can't cover all

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of the innovators you suggested, we picked

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three who we thought made huge impacts

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on society, culture, science,

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health, the printed word

1:00

content. We got a great suggestion

1:03

from Ben about Nikola

1:05

Tesla. I really wanted to do just so I could

1:07

talk about the earthquake machine and the

1:09

death ray that Ben mentioned. And

1:11

another big vote for Jesus from Steve,

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which I thought would have been a really interesting way to

1:16

take this. Candice who spells

1:18

her name with an eye not an a. Uh,

1:21

well that's probably why. She suggested Alexander

1:23

Hamilton, one of Thomas Jefferson's greatest

1:25

enemies. And she wrote

1:28

a whole list of things he accomplished,

1:30

including writing the Federalist Papers,

1:32

founding the Bank of New York, serving as the first

1:35

Secretary at the Treasury, founding

1:37

the US meant and the Coast Guard. And she

1:39

goes on and on. But did he have an earthquake

1:41

machine? No, no, he did not. He

1:43

was pretty good looking, though, as far as historical personages

1:46

go, I will give him that. Um. And

1:48

then Aaron suggested a woman

1:50

named Ada Lovelace, who was credited,

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she says, with being the first computer programmer

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and for inventing the first computer programming

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language, all from

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eighteen fifteen to eighteen fifty two. Pretty

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wild, huh. And we so did want a

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woman on this list. So let's get

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into it. The three inventors we picked our

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Johann Gutenberg, Leonardo da Vinci,

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and Benjamin Franklin. And

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we will start off with Johann Gutenberg,

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who you might know as the inventor

2:21

of the printing press. And

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because of Gutenberg, you have al those lovely mass

2:25

market paperbacks in your bookshelves. He

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was born in the fourteenth century to a wealthy

2:30

German family. And even though

2:32

we know him for his contributions to the printing

2:34

world, he began as a goldsmith

2:37

and then dabbled as a gym cutter. And

2:39

you were telling me he did something else interesting too.

2:42

He doubled in glasses making as

2:44

well in his time in Strasbourg, France.

2:47

Wow, he did a little bit of everything. A

2:49

renaissance man before the Renaissance, shall

2:51

we say, And he

2:53

was above all things a businessman

2:56

and an entrepreneur because what he did

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was not sir and and creating a printing

3:01

press. It was taking three

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existing innovations paper, ink

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and movable type and combining

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them into the Guttenberg press.

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But he did not come up with the idea of movable

3:14

type on his own. That actually originated

3:17

back in China. Around

3:19

six D the Chinese began

3:21

using engraved wooden blocks to print

3:24

in a process called sylography,

3:26

and today that's still an art, using wooden

3:28

carvings to create some sort of print on paper.

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And then around ten forty one to one

3:35

man came up with movable type, arranging

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the wooden blocks on a tray, heating it

3:39

and then pressing it on paper to transfer

3:42

the ink, and then in thirteenth

3:44

century Korea, metal type

3:46

setting was created with up to one hundred

3:48

thousand pieces of type and about

3:50

ten different fonts. But the problem

3:53

with movable type and China and Korea

3:55

was that there were so many characters it

3:57

didn't take off, so the art

3:59

length quished for a bit, I guess you could say,

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until the ideas of paper and ink eventually

4:04

made it over to Europe through different trade routes

4:06

and different conquests, and

4:08

Garten realized that he had his hands on the perfect

4:11

alphabet to create

4:13

a good type setting system,

4:15

so he used this new type of ink

4:18

that he created. It was an alloy uh

4:20

made of lead and tin and

4:23

another ingredient that wouldn't shrink

4:25

after it was cooled, and it's actually still

4:27

used today. So combining this ink with

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paper originally using vellum,

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and then the type of press that was used to squeeze

4:35

grapes and olives for wine and olive

4:37

oil, he was able to make actual

4:40

printed materials. And the

4:42

nice thing about that metal movable

4:44

type was that not only was it faster

4:46

to use, those letters made a much sharper

4:48

impression and therefore more durable

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and more uniform actually than the woodblock

4:53

printing was, because you could make each

4:56

letter look exactly the same, so all of your a's

4:58

on a page would look like all of the other a's. And

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Gutenberg also printed on front

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and back of the pages, eventually

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leading to the very famous forty

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two line Gutenberg Bible. People

5:10

today still talk about the pleasant layout

5:12

design of this Bible, forty

5:14

two lines arranged in columns, playing

5:16

of space on either side of the page. Two

5:19

copies he printed up this book. It

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came in two volumes for he totaled one

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thousand, two d two pages,

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and it was printed in fourteen fifty

5:28

five. And consulting

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a couple of different sources, I was a little bit unsure

5:33

as to whether Guttenberg himself printed

5:35

the Bible or whether by this

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time he lost management of

5:39

his printing press to the man who would put

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up a capital for him when he started

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his business. So if you have any knowledge

5:45

about that, and maybe you can fill us in. But

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regardless, the Bible came out, it was extremely

5:50

popular. The rate of

5:52

literate people in Europe at this time was

5:55

on the rise, so it was very good for

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disseminating reading materials well

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and when not that many people could afford

6:02

to buy an illuminated manuscript,

6:04

they were very, very expensive. You're talking

6:06

monks putting together these books

6:09

for years. Yeah, handwritten copies, so

6:11

to expedite the process was huge

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and it led to other developments too, not only

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in the ways of the Reformation, Renaissance,

6:18

and scientific revelation, but even

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to the advent of book fairs. The Frankfurt

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book Fair was huge. People came to get copies

6:25

of reading materials. I love book

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fars personally. I always they come back and vogue.

6:31

But by fifteen hundred, after my little digression

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there half a million books had been

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printed and the Guttenberg Revolution.

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Author John Mann says that a third

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of all books in Germany printed between

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fifteen eighteen to fifty eight were works

6:44

by Martin Luther, essentially launching

6:46

the Reformation. So you could say

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that the Gutenberg press was as simplistic

6:51

as putting the printed word on a page,

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But other history scholars would beg to differ, saying

6:56

that it put the world on its end and

6:58

launched a huge religious refer nation. And

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as a little aside, if you are more interested

7:03

in the printing aspects

7:05

of Guttenberg's developments and contributions

7:08

as opposed to his uh shall we say,

7:10

cultural, religious, and social contributions.

7:13

There were two Europeans who followed who made

7:15

additional efforts to help

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perfect the printing method. And these

7:19

are sort of whimsical, but I like them, so I'll tell you

7:21

anyway. There was Nicholas Jensen from

7:23

France who created Seraph's, which are

7:25

those little tail flourishes at the end of words

7:27

and letters that you see. It's an optical

7:29

illusion that keeps your eye traveling across

7:32

the page to keep reading. Then from

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Italy we have a man named Aldus Minutius

7:36

who created italics Italics

7:39

Italy, catch the drift, and this was designed

7:41

to maximize the number of words on the page because

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they were all slanted. So you see,

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thank you Guttenburg for reformations

7:48

and Sarah's really you

7:50

put it all in motion. And the printing press

7:52

actually brings us into our next

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innovator, Di Vinci, because

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he came up with his own innovations on

7:59

gutten Burg's printing press that would have made it much

8:01

easier to print. If his designs

8:03

had been used, one person would have been able to print

8:06

instead of an entire crew of people. But of

8:08

course, being Da Vinci and being rather secretive

8:10

with his notebooks, no one actually saw those designs.

8:13

You might have heard of Da Vinci um. He was

8:15

the quintessential renaissance man. He

8:18

painted a little painting called the Mona Lisa,

8:21

and also The Last Supper and the Virgin of the

8:23

Rocks. But painting wasn't all

8:25

he was about. He was very much

8:28

interested in science and in

8:30

inventing things. And

8:32

some of his inventions, and I'm using Jane

8:34

McGrath's research for this

8:37

one, were an orna thopter, which

8:39

is a flying machine with wings that the pilot

8:41

could operate um. But he

8:43

didn't quite manage to pull that one

8:45

off. He underestimated the importance of

8:48

feathers to a bird, and his own actor

8:50

never would actually have flown. He

8:52

also designed a diving apparatus,

8:54

which is like a primitive version of a scuba suit

8:57

or a diving bell actually, as well as

8:59

a parish shoot, and the

9:01

idea of a telescope um.

9:04

He proposed that lenses and mirrors

9:06

would enable us to get closer to the nature of

9:08

the planets, and some of Da Fincy's

9:10

most interesting innovations were made

9:13

ever more understandable and comprehensible

9:15

to me by virtue of Katie being

9:17

our resident health editor. And

9:19

I am very much excited about

9:21

the other thing that Da Vinci was excited about. And I'm

9:24

thrilled. Can I interject because Katy is about

9:26

to come across as more morbid than I've ever

9:28

sounded, So have edit, Katie. I

9:30

will take your morbid crown um

9:33

da Vinci and autopsy. Actually,

9:36

he was very into empirical observation.

9:39

His teacher Verocchio, had told him it was important

9:41

to sketch from life, so he would

9:43

take his notebook places and sketch

9:46

people and things exactly as they were. And

9:49

part of learning to sketch the human form was

9:51

to see actually how human bodies

9:53

work. So he would go to these operating

9:55

theaters, which is how medical students used to learn

9:57

back then. And it will be a bunch of med students

10:00

standing around this corpse while a

10:02

man cut it apart, and a different man

10:04

who wasn't even looking at the body would be just

10:07

talking from a book, this ancient wisdom

10:09

about the human body and things

10:11

that weren't even necessarily true. It

10:13

could be a complete misunderstanding of how

10:15

blood circulates in the body. And even though

10:17

what the students were looking at didn't even remotely

10:20

match what the text was saying, they

10:22

always deferred to the text rather than

10:24

to their own senses. But a great way to propagate knowledge

10:27

and advanced to feeling of medicine. It

10:29

really was not. But because

10:31

of that, da Vinci sort of took matters

10:34

into his own hands and got really interested

10:36

in dissection. He injected a

10:38

human brain with hot wax so he could look

10:40

at the ventricles, and took the skull

10:42

apart and sketched it from different angles.

10:45

He boiled cow's eyeballs

10:47

and egg yolks so he could section

10:50

them and see exactly how the inside of them

10:52

worked. But what he really understood was

10:54

the female form. Right. Oh yes,

10:56

in case you didn't know, um, Supposedly,

10:59

when you're preg meant suppressed menstrual

11:01

blood turns into breast milk or

11:04

DaVinci helpful, I'm

11:06

gonna go ahead and have to tell you that that's not true.

11:08

I'm sorry if that makes anyone sad. But

11:11

what he did figure out was how the optic nerve works,

11:13

which no one up to that time knew and

11:15

also how kidney stones are formed. So

11:18

even though I may be joking a little bit

11:20

about some of his innovations that turned out to be

11:22

wrong, he was making suppositions

11:24

and putting forth research that no one really

11:26

had. Like you were saying, people were relying on

11:28

ancient or not ancient, that's not fair. People

11:30

were relying on old and outmoded

11:33

texts to influence the way they practice

11:35

medicine. But Da Vinci's innovations

11:37

changed all of that well. And the thing I loved

11:39

with the questions he had that no one really

11:42

had been asking their notes in his notebooks

11:44

of you know, how does a fetus breathe?

11:46

What do testicles do? Like? Why do we have this?

11:49

And he had such a curious inventive mind.

11:51

Another curious inventor was

11:53

Benjamin Franklin. And the curious

11:56

case of Benjamin Franklin was that he was born

11:58

a British colonist and Austin

12:00

in seventeen oh six, and he died

12:03

an American in Philadelphia, So

12:06

he lived for a really long time, especially for that

12:08

time frame. And I found on PBS

12:12

UH they did a special about Benjamin Franklin,

12:14

and they had a web page about ben

12:16

A to Z, and from A to Z

12:18

they wrote out all the different things he was. Seriously

12:21

a couple of attributes for each letter, and

12:23

I wanted to share four of my favorite letters.

12:26

B balloon, enthusiast,

12:28

Comma, bifocals, inventor, F

12:31

founding, father, flirt, firefighter,

12:35

OH, organizer parentheses,

12:38

militia, fire department, street cleaning,

12:40

closed parentheses, o'domino maker,

12:43

and then the volunteer, visionary,

12:46

vegetarian Borarily. I

12:48

just I love that he really was so

12:50

many things, and maybe

12:53

he's belittled a little bit for some silly

12:56

things that we think might have been gaffs or

12:58

uh mistakes on his behalf, like wanting

13:01

to propose a turkey as the

13:03

national bird of the United States.

13:05

But this is what he had to say about the American

13:07

eagle, and it really gives us a glimpse into

13:10

the way that his mind worked and and

13:12

to his type of character. He said,

13:15

for my own part, I wish the eagle had not

13:17

been chosen the representative of our country.

13:19

He is a bird of bad moral character.

13:22

He does not get his living, honestly, And

13:25

he goes on to explain that the eagle pretty much sits

13:27

on a high perch, watches all the others

13:29

do the work, and then goes and takes

13:31

their prey. So he was very much a man

13:33

who was fond of earning your living.

13:36

And he started out in a printing shop.

13:38

He wanted to be a sailor, but his father said, now you

13:41

can't. You have to work in a printing shop, and

13:43

so he did, and from there

13:45

he made a big impact on media with the Philadelphia

13:48

Gazette Poor Richards Almanac.

13:50

He was a scientist developing a single

13:52

fluid theory of electricity to do the

13:55

first political cartoon. He was a

13:57

postmaster, a philosopher,

13:59

a dip that a musician

14:02

created the bifocals. I could go on and

14:04

on and on, but I'll stop and tell you some of the more

14:06

interesting tidbits about his

14:09

innovations and contributions to society.

14:12

He actually created an instrument called

14:14

the glass armonica, and it looks like a pianoforte

14:17

with um glass tumblers,

14:19

a series of glass tumblers inside and

14:21

the glass spins and you dampen your

14:24

fingers and then you play them like the

14:26

scene in Miss Congeniality with Sandra Bullock

14:28

playing the glasses. So it was an actual

14:30

instrument that he put together. The only time

14:32

that Sandra Bullock and Benment Franklin have ever

14:34

been in the same symptoms. And you didn't think we could

14:36

do it. This is what we girls are capable of. In

14:39

three he founded the American Philosophical

14:42

Society. And the purpose of this, to quote Franklin,

14:44

was to promote useful knowledge

14:46

in the colonies. And it's still around

14:48

today, still essentially serving the same purpose.

14:51

It's engaging people from different professions

14:53

and dialogue to disseminate knowledge and understanding.

14:56

And the original members were a physician,

14:59

mathematician, geographer, philosopher,

15:01

botanist, chemist, and an engineer. And

15:03

it was very similar to the idea of a salon. You

15:05

get intelligent people together to discuss

15:07

these things and to better society

15:10

essentially. And in addition

15:12

to his I guess intellectual

15:15

knowledge and contributions, one of his physical

15:17

contributions was forming a firefighting

15:20

club. This was a group of men in

15:22

Philadelphia who got together in seventeen

15:24

thirty six to incorporate the Union Fire

15:26

Company and they were all required to have buckets

15:29

to help put off flames and bags to remove

15:31

valuables from homes because fires were

15:33

incredibly common with all the wooden structors

15:35

around and all the fireplaces that

15:37

abounded, and it was members protecting

15:40

members essentially, so if you weren't a member, you

15:42

were kind of out of luck. But from

15:44

here he had the idea to

15:46

create mutual insurance, people

15:48

paying in for protection, and if

15:51

any member of society lost his home to fire,

15:53

if he had this mutual insurance, the

15:55

group would give the money to him to recoup him

15:58

for his losses. So pretty and gene

16:00

yes, And to talk

16:02

about his political side a little bit, he's

16:05

known for starting the Great Compromise

16:07

during the drafting of the Constitution. Originally

16:10

he didn't really go along with this idea. He wanted

16:12

a unicameral legislation, but eventually

16:14

he said, we'll solve the problem of representation

16:17

by having a House made up of representatives

16:20

that are determined by state's population, and

16:22

then senators, of which will have the same

16:24

number from every state. There

16:27

was a moment when people thought the Constitution

16:29

wouldn't get signed because people were still pretty

16:31

upset about some differences among them.

16:34

He made a very very

16:36

passionate speech and implored everyone to sign,

16:39

and almost everyone did, but not everyone. So

16:41

he died with this legacy of being

16:44

the ultimate American citizen. He really

16:46

was everything to all subject areas and

16:49

inventions as simple as bifocals

16:52

on the lightning rod. The Franklin still

16:54

things like this that still impact our society

16:57

today. Speaking of things we still

16:59

use today, Franklin invented the flexible

17:01

urine catheter. While although it doesn't sound all

17:03

of that exciting, has extremely practical

17:05

uses. And if you've ever been in the hospital and needed

17:07

one, I'm sure you're grateful. But

17:10

that just goes to show that the greatest innovations

17:13

round the gamut from small practical things

17:15

to grandiose ideologies. And

17:17

we're so thankful for all the innovators

17:19

in history who have made our world

17:21

what it is today. And if you've been listening

17:24

and you've gotten an idea for another innovator

17:26

who was not proposed on the first ground of

17:28

comments, if you want to, you can.

17:30

You can still post a comment a couple of days

17:32

later um on that particular

17:34

blog entry, or you can wait until we do a

17:36

little podcast round up about

17:38

this topic and another one when you

17:40

visit our blocks or email us

17:43

a history podcast at how stuff

17:45

works dot com. And for more information

17:47

about Benjamin Franklin, lots

17:49

of Da Vinci and some good old Gutenberg

17:51

printing. Be sure to visit the website at

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