The age of auThoriTy

VISION OF THE FUTURE

Arab scientist Alhazen fakes insanity to
found modern optics

P hotography, modern telephones,

and television are just a few of
the inventions that depend on optics
– the science of light. For hundreds
of years, the subject was in confusion.
Then, about 1,000 years ago, a “crazy”
Arab scientist called Alhazen helped
everyone to see things more clearly.
The story is that Alhazen went to Cairo,
Egypt’s fastest-growing city, to advise the
notoriously cruel ruler al-Hakim on how to control
the flow of the all-important Nile River. But Alhazen’s
City of Cairo ideas didn’t work, and the Nile flowed on as usual. He thought that the
Cairo, the capital of Egypt,
is on the Nile River, 100 miles only way to escape the wrath of the terrifying leader – who had once had
(160 km) south of the all the dogs in Cairo killed just to stop them from barking – was to
Mediterranean coast. In the
10th century, it became a pretend to be insane. Fortunately, his idea worked, and al-Hakim let him
walled city, one of the greatest get on with his studies of mathematics and physics.
of the medieval world. Its name
comes from the Arabic words
Alhazen stopped thinking about water and started thinking about light.
al-Qahhirah, which What happened when he saw something? Did feathery feelers come out
mean “victorious”. of his eyes to explore the surface of objects, as Pythagoras had
thought? Or was ancient Greek philosopher
Epicurus right to think that light, from a
Greek philosopher
and mathematician
source like the Sun, bounced off objects
Pythagoras. and entered the eye?
SenSe
To a scientist like Alhazen,
of Sight Pythagoras’ ideas seemed ridiculous. If
Pythagoras, they were true, why couldn’t people see
who lived
from about in the dark? So he sided with Epicurus,
580 to 500 bc, but took his ideas a lot further. Using his
was one of the
first people to mathematical skills, Alhazen worked out
think about how much of what is known today about the
the eye worked.
About two way light is reflected by flat and curved
hundred years
Epicurus (c 341 – c 270 bc)
mirrors, and bent by glass or the
later, Epicurus realized
that sight was caused by
was, like Pythagoras, atmosphere. He even explained why
born on the Greek
light entering the eye. island of Samos. two eyes work better than one.

66
 c 499 bc – 1400

Like modern rulers, Cairo’s

al-Hakim relied on scientists for
help with technical problems, such
as controlling the waters of the
Nile during its annual flood.

Alhazen wrote all this down in a great book called

Optics, which was translated into Latin and reached
Europe in 1270. It may be a coincidence, but this was
exactly when magnifying glasses
and eyeglasses, the forerunners of
microscopes and telescopes, began
to appear in Europe.
The feared al-Hakim
eventually disappeared in
mysterious circumstances one
helpful lenses
night in 1021. Alhazen, who was 17th-century Lenses to improve vision first
glass was often
instantly restored to sanity, lived on colored appeared in the late 13th
century, perhaps as a result of
for another 20 years. Brilliant though 17th-century Alhazen’s work. By the 17th
he was, he can never have imagined eyeglasses century, eyeglass making had
led to the development of
where his work would lead. Even 17th-century much more powerful optical
magnifying
the internet makes use of ideas glasses instruments. But simple
eyeglasses and magnifying
that Alhazen wrote about glasses like these were still
nearly a thousand years ago. needed, just as they are today.

67
The age of auThoriTy
RuddeR This model
of an English ship of
about 1430 has a fully
developed rudder. Copied
from a small image, it
does not show the tiller
that would have been
used to control it.
1215 Supported by the
Archbishop of
Canterbury, England’s barons
demand a declaration of rights
68
Crowsnest, from
where the ship’s Rudder
lookout would
have kept watch
c1200
I t is thought that some early
Chinese boats were steered
with simple rudders, but until
about ad 1200, most boats
around the world were steered
by sailors trailing oars over the
side. The modern rudder
arrived in stages. First, a large
Stay to hold steering oar was attached near
up the mast to the back, or stern, of the
boat. In about 1200, it was
moved right to the stern to
become a simple rudder.
By about 1300, a long
steering lever, called
the tiller, had been
added to complete
the rudder.
Rudder was placed
amidships at the
stern of the ship,
and extended the
depth of the hull
from King John. The Magna
Carta (great charter) is drafted at
Runnymede, near Windsor, and
1225 On the Île de la Cité
in the centre of
Paris, the great cathedral of Notre
sealed by John on June 15. Dame (Our Lady) is completed
Modern
numerals
1202
Leonardo Pisano
T he modern number system
arrived in the West after a
long, slow trip from India. The
system, which was started in
the 6th or 7th centuries in
India, was taken up by Arab
mathematicians in the 9th
century and reached the West
during the 10th century. It
made little impact until
Leonardo Pisano wrote Liber
Abaci (Book of the Abacus) in
1202. The book explained
everything about Arabic
numerals, from how to write
them to the mysteries of
hundreds, tens, and units.
The new system made
calculations much easier.
Propaganda
dropped from
the air
1232
M ilitary
commanders
have often tried to
win battles with
words instead
of weapons.
One way is to
drop leaflets
from the air.
This tactic was tried
as early as 1232,
when the Mongols
(nomads of central
Asia) besieged the
Chinese city of K’ai-
feng. They used kites
to drop leaflets on
the people inside.
It is not known
whether any of the
citizens read the
leaflets, but by 1234
the Mongols had
taken over the city.
after 65 years’ work. It sets a new
standard for cathedrals and will
become one of the world’s most
visited buildings.

Buttonhole
c 1250
Y ou might think that
buttons and buttonholes
were invented together, but
buttons actually came first.
The ancient Greeks and
Romans used buttons to fasten
their clothes at the shoulder,
but these went through loops,
not holes. Buttonholes were
invented in Europe in the
13th century. They made
buttons so popular that
laws were passed to limit
the number that people
could have, to prevent rich
people from having too many.
Magnetic poles
1269
Petrus Peregrinus de
Maricourt
F rench engineer Petrus
Peregrinus de Maricourt did
the first known scientific
experiment on a magnet. He
put a sliver of iron in various
places on a round lump of
magnetic rock called lodestone,
and marked the stone to show
how the iron positioned itself
each time. His lines converged
at opposite sides of the stone.
The marked stone looked like a
globe with lines of longitude
radiating from the north and
south poles. He called these
points the magnetic poles, a
term that is still used today.
Spectacles
c 1280
S pectacles, in the form of a
pair of lenses clipped on to
the nose, appeared in the 13th
century, but nobody is sure
where they came from. The
English scientist Roger Bacon
described a magnifying glass
for reading small print in 1268,
but this is not quite the same
1275 Venetian explorer
Marco Polo crosses
Asia’s Gobi desert into China,
where he travels to the court of
thing. In Italy, where spectacle
making was established by
1301, two men from Florence,
Alessandro di Spina and
Salvino degli Armati, have been
credited with the invention.
But, like so much else at this
time, spectacles
may have been
invented in
China as early
as the 10th
century.
SpectacleS
Medieval
spectacles were
pivoted to grip
the nose.
Mathematics of
the rainbow
c 1280
Qutb ash-Shirazi,
Kamal Farisi
W orking out what’s going
on when we see a
rainbow requires advanced
trigonometry (✷ see page 53),
and by about 1280, Muslim
astronomers had created the
maths they needed. At an
observatory financed by a
grandson of the 13th-century
Mongol ruler Genghis Khan,
two students, Qutb ash-Shirazi
and Kamal Farisi, applied the
new math to the optical theories
of Alhazen (✷ see pages
66–67) to offer an explanation
of the way rain bends sunlight
into a multicolored circle.
Rocket
c 1300
A lthough the Chinese may
have made simple rockets
as fireworks soon after the
invention of gunpowder,
Kublai Khan, ruler of China and
lands beyond. Polo will later
recount this meeting, and more,
in The Travels of Marco Polo.
c 499 bc – 1400
chart
NavigatioN
This 1375 Navigation chart
chart centres on the
Mediterranean Sea.
The many straight
1311
lines aided navigation.
Petrus Vesconte
serious military use came only
later. “Arrows of flying fire”
were used when the Mongols
W orld maps were mostly
used as book illustrations
prior to the 12th century. Petrus
besieged the Chinese city of
Kai-feng in 1232, but these
Vesconte of Genoa, Italy, was one
of the first to make navigation
were probably just fireworks charts – maps useful to sailors.
tied to arrows. Chinese soldiers A 1311 chart made by him,
are not thought to have begun drawn mostly from information
using rockets as weapons until
1300 at the earliest, but by
1330, rockets were equipped
he collected from sailors, rather
than based on careful measure-
ments, is the oldest known
with explosive warheads and
were no longer toys. Printer’s
Shoe sizes type case
c1305 c1313
Wang Chen
T he earliest system of
standard shoe sizes may
U naware of Bi Sheng’s failure
possibly date back to 1305,
when King Edward I of
with movable type in 1045
(✷ see page 64), Chinese
England decided that the inch
should be fixed at the length
magistrate Wang Chen tried
something similar in about
of three barleycorns. This made 1313. He needed 60,000
the official barleycorn one-third
of an inch long. It has been
wooden Chinese characters to
print a book. To store these, he
said that children’s shoes then
began to be based on this
invented the first printer’s type
case, which had a compartment
barleycorn measure. As a large for each character. Because he
child’s foot at that time was
about 13 barleycorns (4.33 in/
11 cm) long, a shoe to fit it
needed so many cases, Wang
Chen stacked them in layers on
a spindle so that he could
was called size 13. swivel one out as needed.
1306 A small town
protected by a dam
on the Amstel River in the
recognition after being granted
privileges in 1275. Its name,
Amsterdam, from “Amstel dam,”
Netherlands finally gets official will become familiar to millions.
69
The age of auThoriTy
Practical manual
of anatomy
1316
Mondino de’ Luzzi
M uch of what doctors now
know about the human
body originally came from early
examinations of the dead. An
Italian doctor, Mondino de’
Luzzi, did a lot of this, and
often gave public lectures
while he dissected corpses.
Although he tended to see what
his predecessor Galen (✷ see
page 58) told him he should,
his 1316 book Anathomia
Mundini was the first European
anatomy book since ancient
times that was based on
observation of human bodies.
It was the first systematic guide
to human dissection and
remained the standard manual
until 1543, when Andreas
Vesalius’ manual was published
(✷ see page 80).
1321 Italian poet Dante
Alighieri dies on
September 14 at the age of 56.
His Divine Comedy, written in
70
Cannon This French print shows
highly developed cannons being
used during the siege of Paris by
the German Empire, 1870–1871.
Cannon
c 1320
T he Chinese made cannons
(large guns that stand on
the ground) soon after they
invented gunpowder (✷ see
page 63), but because they
were made only of bamboo
they were really just oversized
fireworks. Only cannon barrels
made of bronze or iron were
strong enough to withstand a
powerful explosion. They were
not made until about 1320,
when techniques for casting
and boring them were perfected.
The new weapons were rushed
into action all over Europe. By
the 15th century, the cannon
had grown into a monster that
could fire balls weighing more
than 55 lb (25 kg).
Italian, not Latin, describes a
journey through hell, purgatory,
and paradise. It is one of the
greatest poems in all literature.
Alchemy Striking clock
textbook 1335
c1320
Geber E arly clocks just rang a bell
to mark the beginning of
each hour. The first clock to
T he first popular books on
alchemy – the study of base
sound out the actual time was
built in Milan, Italy, and started
metals and theories for turning
them into gold – were
published in 1320 under a false
striking in 1335. It was a major
achievement for medieval
technology – a machine that
name. By 1300, several books could count. The Milan clock
written by 8th-century Arab was quickly followed by others
alchemist Jabir ibn Hayyan had throughout Europe, including
been translated into Latin. The one in Salisbury cathedral,
books had made Jabir famous, England, which was installed in
so an unknown alchemist 1386 and is still working today.
pretended to be Jabir when he
wrote De Investigatione
Perfectionis (The Study of
Chromatic
Perfection) to make people read
it. He wrote several other books
keyboard
under the name Geber (his
version of Jabir), but he could c1350
really have used his own name.
His books were so good that
alchemists everywhere used
them anyway.
T he first keyboard instrument
was the organ, but it
couldn’t play all the different
1333 A catastrophic flood
sweeps through the
Italian city of Florence as the
All of the city’s bridges are
destroyed. Despite this, Florence
grows and prospers, becoming
Arno River overflows its banks. one of Italy’s finest cities.

sharps and flats, or semitones.
It was therefore a great step
forward when, in about 1350,
organs in Europe began to have
chromatic keyboards. These
had semitones as well as whole
notes, allowing them to play in
more than one key. But the
keyboards were designed for
chubby fingers, and it was the
end of the 15th century before
organ keys slimmed down to
their present size.
Firearms
c 1350
Canal lock
c 1373
C anal locks are pieces of
medieval technology that
can still be seen in action. They
move boats up and down
between stretches of canal with
different water levels, trapping
boats in a basin that fills to
raise them or empties to lower
them. The first is said to have
been built at Vreeswijk in the
Netherlands, in 1373, but there
were certainly locks at Viterbo,
Italy, by 1481.
c 499 bc – 1400
As the name suggests, the
French game was played with
Carpenter’s
hands, not rackets. By about
1400, wooden bats had
brace
replaced hands, and a game
c1400
resembling tennis emerged. In
the 16th century, it was played
indoors with rackets. Then,
about 300 years later, a British
army officer, Walter Wingfield,
A type of drill invented in
about 1400, the brace is
also the ancestor of the car-
adapted the game to engine crankshaft. It is a
outdoors, creating rod with a U-shape
“lawn” tennis as it in the middle, a
is now known. hand-rest at the
Tennis The game
top, and a drill bit
at the bottom. The
of jeu de paume
was popular in
18th-century France.
carpenter steadies it
with the hand-rest,
grasps the U, and moves

C annons were fairly easy to

design, but working out
how smaller, portable weapons
could be charged with powder,
aimed, and fired proved more
difficult. The earliest attempts,
used in Europe from about
1350, had no triggers and were
held under the arm, making it
impossible to aim them
accurately. The first firearm that
looked anything like a modern
weapon was the harquebus.
This didn’t reach the battlefield
until about 1470, and it was
useless against fast, accurate
bows and arrows.
Clavichord
c 1360
Woodcut his arm, making the
same action as a
c 1400 piston in
a car.
A woodcut is a picture
carved on a piece of fine-
grained wood, which is then
used for printing. Whole books
were being printed from wood
blocks in China by ad 600, but
the woodcut has a different
history. It began to be used in
about 1400, especially for the
production of playing cards.
But it really came into its
own after 1450, when
printing from movable
types had been perfected.
Readers wanted to see the
same kind of pictures they had
always had in handwritten
books, and the woodcut was

T he clavichord is a distant
ancestor of the piano.
The first reference to what
there to provide them.

was probably a clavichord

is in a French ledger of
about 1360, although the Players used a bat
musical instrument did not resembling a modern
tennis racket
get its modern name until
later. The clavichord’s
mechanism is very simple:
when a key is pushed
down, a thin metal blade
Tennis
strikes the string. The note
sounds until the key is c 1400
released, giving the player great
control over the sound – a
definite advantage for
musicians who like to practice
T ennis today is a very
different game from the
French pastime jeu de paume
at night. (palm game) that started it all.

1347 Germ warfare hits

Europe as soldiers
from the East catapult corpses
infected with Black Death into a
trading post in southern Ukraine.
The virulent disease spreads
rapidly, killing a third of Europe’s
population in four years.
1362 For the first time
since 1066, English
court proceedings are conducted
Norman French. The Statute of
Pleadings, which makes this
possible, says that proceedings
in English instead of Latin or must still be recorded in Latin.

71
 new worlds,
new ideas
Human understanding of the
world grew enormously between
1400 and 1750. Our planet ceased
to be seen as the center of the
universe, and seemed to grow as
explorers reached new lands.
New discoveries, and new means
to communicate them, led to an
age of reason and the beginnings
of modern science.

72
 1401 – 1750
meTal
movable Type
Tower windmill Sails
turned by
These casts are the wind
from Korean
bronze type used
c1420
in about 1406.

O ne problem with
windmills is
Code breaking that the wind
doesn’t always
Fantail
regulates
1412 blow from the
same direction.
movement of
the top cap

al-Kalka-shandi Early windmills

contained their Gear wheel
Metal E arly attempts at secret
writing were not effective,
entire mechanism
in a huge wooden
transmits
power to the
grindstone
movable type but by the late 14th century
Arab code writers and breakers,
box mounted on a
pivot, so it was
1403 called cryptographers, were
getting serious. They invented
difficult to swing the
sails into the wind.
Htai Tjong systems for changing each letter The tower mill,
into a different one, and used invented in about

P eople in Korea started

working on movable metal
types in the 14th century, and
the fact that some letters occur
more often than others to
decipher supposedly secret
1420, had all its
heavy machinery
in a fixed
in 1403, King Htai Tjong of messages. These tricks of the tower.
Korea had the first true font of trade were published in 1412
metal type made. One hundred by Egyptian scholar al-Kalka-
thousand bronze characters shandi, forming the first
Top cap
were cast, and that was just the reliable set of instructions for turns so the
start. The king had two more code makers and breakers. sails face
complete fonts ready long the wind
before movable type was
perfected in Germany (✷ see
Perspective Grindstone
pages 75 and 76–77).
c 1412
Water-powered Filippo Brunelleschi, Only the sails,
which were mounted
Leon Alberti
iron works on a movable cap,

1408 T he Italian architect and

artist Filippo Brunelleschi
discovered linear perspective –
had to
be moved
to track
Walter Skirlaw the art of drawing objects in a the wind –
way that gives an impression of a much

M edieval ironworkers
heated iron ore with
charcoal in a furnace to
their size and relative position
– between 1410 and 1415. The
discovery revolutionized the
easier task.

produce a spongy lump of iron
called a bloom. The hotter the
fire was, the better the furnace
worked, so air was pumped in
with bellows to feed the flames.
As demand for iron grew and
furnaces got larger, something
more than muscle power was
needed to work the bellows. In
England, which would become
the largest iron producer in the
world, the problem was tackled
by Walter Skirlaw, the Bishop
of Durham. He set up a water-
powered bloomery in 1408.
Tower windmill
way artists drew pictures. Until The 19th-century mill
represented by this
he discovered the “vanishing model could steer its
point,” to which all parallel sails into the wind
lines converge, pictures were automatically.
built up from flat shapes.
Twenty years later, his friend
Leon Alberti wrote a book
giving detailed instructions on
how to create the correct
perspective. This enabled
painters to produce
pictures with a realism
that was unsurpassed
until 19th-century
photography.

1405 Chinese admiral

Zheng He ends
China’s isolation with the first of
a series of missions to countries
around the South China Sea,
which he knows as the Western
Oceans. Sixty-two ships reach
Indochina, Java, and Sri Lanka.
1418 Italian architect
Filippo Brunelleschi
is asked to design the dome of
original solution, octagonal in
form, with its white structural
ribs exposed on the outside, will
Florence’s cathedral. His highly dominate the city’s skyline.

73
New worlds, New ideas
Flywheel
c1430
A car engine (✷ see page
150) wouldn’t work
without its flywheel, a heavy
wheel that stores energy during
the brief bursts of burning
inside the cylinders, then
releases it to keep the engine
running smoothly. Although
early devices like the potter’s
wheel incorporated a kind
of flywheel action,
separate flywheels
first appeared in the
early 15th century.
They evened out
the jerky rhythm
of machines
powered by feet
moving up and
down on a treadle.
Oil
painting
1430
Robert Campin,
Jan van Eyck
A lthough the Romans knew
about oil paint, it was the
French and Flemish painters
Robert Campin and Jan van
Eyck who perfected its use in
art. Both were attracted by the
realism that oil paint allowed.
Earlier paints, such as tempera,
which was made with eggs,
couldn’t produce the same
smoothly graded tones. Using
the new paint and the new
laws of perspective (✷ see
page 73), van Eyck painted
pictures with a realism never
seen before.
Peep show
1437
Leon Alberti
H aving studied perspective,
Leon Alberti realized that
he could apply the same laws
1431 French military
leader Joan of Arc is
burned at the stake by the English
in Rouen on Wednesday, May 30.
74
HarpsicHord This harpsichord
was made in Belgium in about
1600. It has two keyboards,
known as manuals.
Greek word
“anemos,” meaning
“wind”). The
type with cups
attached to a
vertical shaft
dates from about
1850, but the
first anemometer
was devised
400 years earlier.
Italian artist and
Beautifully decorated case mathematician
indicates the status of the Leon Alberti’s
harpsichord’s owner
instrument
was much simpler – just a
rectangular metal plate, hinged
at the top. When the wind
blew, the plate tilted, giving a
(✷ see page 100).
Unlike the piano,
rough indication of the speed.
Alberti described it in about
its strings are 1450 in his book The Pleasures
plucked, not of Mathematics. As British
struck with scientist Robert Hooke was
to a miniature scene to
make it more realistic.
The peep show was a
hammers, as the
keys are pressed.
Because of this, it
reinventing a more accurate
form of anemometer, Mayans
were building “windtowers.”
box with a hole in one is not possible to
end. Inside was a three-
dimensional scene
vary the loudness
of a note by
Trombone
modeled in perspective.
When the model was
striking the key
with more or less c1450
viewed through the force. Some harpsichords have
hole, it leapt to life
with startling realism.
Alberti made his first
several sets of strings so that
pieces of music can be played
at different volumes. The
O riginally called the
sackbut, the trombone
was invented in France in
peep shows in 1437. instrument was first described about 1450. It is basically
He even painted the in about 1450. It spread a tube that produces sound
scenery on glass to allow rapidly throughout Europe from vibration of the lips. The
for lighting effects. and is still played today. simplest instruments of this
type can play only a few notes
Harpsichord Anemometer because their length is fixed. A
trombone can play a full range
c1450 c1450 of notes because its length can
be changed with tubes that
Leon Alberti slide in and out. The modern
T he harpsichord was king
of the keyboards from
about 1500 until well after the W
trombone has not changed
eather watchers measure much since the original
the speed of the wind instrument was designed
piano was invented in 1709 with an anemometer (from the more than 550 years ago.
Guided by inner voices, she had
incited the French to expel the
English at the battle of Orleans
1435 Italian sculptor
Donatello completes
a nearly life-size bronze statue of
nude figure made since ancient
times. People are astonished by
the expressive realism of this
during the Hundred Years’ War. the biblical hero David, the first freestanding work of art.
 1401 – 1750

Metal printing used for the same purpose in

instruction books for dancers,
Roman type
plate such as two found in the
library of Margaret of Austria:
c1455 The book of Low Dances (c.1460)
and The Art and Teaching of Fine
an alphabet they thought was
Roman, but which had actually
1464 been designed by a 9th-century
English monk. The first
Adolf Rusch “roman” type was used by
German printer Adolf Rusch in

W oodcuts, made in Europe

from about 1400 (✷ see
Dancing (c.1488).
T he first printed books used
heavy, spiked letters.
Printers soon wanted lighter
1464. In 1465, two other
German printers, Sweynheim
and Pannartz, used a type even
Roman type This title page from
page 71), could not produce a 16th-century philosophical work letters better suited to the new closer to today’s roman type,
as finely detailed pictures, but shows the elegant type at its best. printing technique. They chose which is what you are reading.
metal plates could. An artist
engraved the required lines on
the plate, usually made of
copper, with a sharp tool called
a graver. The plate was then
covered with greasy ink and
the surface wiped clean again,
leaving ink only in the
engraved lines. When damp
paper was pressed hard onto
the plate, it picked up the
ink from the lines, forming a
print. This process, known
as intaglio, was first used in
about 1455. It required more
pressure than normal printing,
so printers still used woodcuts
in books containing text
printed with type.

Letterpress
printing
1455
Johann Gutenberg

S ee pages 76–77 for the

story of how Gutenberg
died in poverty as printing
changed the world.

Dance notation
c1460
P eople who teach dance or
develop dances have often
needed to write down the
movements they want the
dancers to make. The ancient
Egyptians did this to some
extent with hieroglyphs, but
the earliest written system
appeared in Spain in about
1460, using letters to represent
movements. In other parts of
Europe, shortened words were

1436 The first of two laws

limiting trade in
grain is passed in Britain. The
aim of the Corn Laws is to make
Britain self-sufficient in grain by
restricting both imports and
exports. The effect is widespread
starvation as prices rocket.
1452 The cathedral in
Florence receives the
last of three pairs of bronze doors
They show Old Testament scenes
modeled in deep, naturalistic
relief. Centuries later, people will
by sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti. still flock to see them.

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