The Emperors Of Ice Cream

One of the most profound things I've ever seen took place on a guided tour of Queensland.  In amongst the usual touristic sights of natural beauty--the LOTR-worthy lakes, the picture-book rain forests, and the prehistoric cassowaries--we stopped to get ice cream.

One of my fellow tourists was a young woman toting a squint-faced newborn.  The new mother scooped some ice cream up in one of those diminutive plastic ice cream shovels, then held it out to the child.

The baby's lips puckered.  She blinked.  Once the ice cream was on her lips, there was a moment of tension.

"This is her first ice cream," mom drawled.

The baby's eyes grew as large as baby eyes can go.  She laughed.  She reached out before.  This new stuff--it was good!  This new stuff--it was more than good!  It was fantastic!

I felt lucky to watch this--a person realizing that existance is awesome enough to include ice cream.

On the face of it, ice cream seems like it must go hand-in-hand with the glories of electric refrigeration.   Human beings are a crafty bunch however, and our sweaty summers have been relieved by ice-cooled treats for at least four millennia.

The Chinese--first at everything--produced the earliest recorded ice confection, made by taking milk, overcooked rice, and spices, and throwing the mix all together with some fresh snow.  Yum!

The Chinese practice of mixing snow with sweets passed along to the Persians, who add fruit juice to snow to refresh themselves during the summer.  This is the origin of the word sherbet--a Persian word meaning 'he drank.'  From here, the technology passed on to Alexander the Great who--in addition to his usual claim to fame of having one of the largest land Empires ever, must add 'bringer of iced delicacies to Europe.'  Alexander's gift to the western world shows up again in the reign of the maligned Emperor Nero, whose bacchanals often were accompanied by refreshing mixtures of fruit juice and snow.

But where did the snow come from in the summer?  The mountains.  In Rome's case, the ice came from the alps.  Back in the ancient world, there existed an ice trade.  Entrepreneurial mountain-dwellers would collect snow or lake ice, cover it with a thick sheet, then transport it to the the sweltering metropole for the refreshment of the pest-ridden city-dwellers. The ice was stored in icehouses--insulated sometimes underground storage rooms, in which a cache of ice could remain frozen even in the hottest month of summer.  The first recorded building of an ice house goes all the way back to 1700 BC, when the snow-loving Persians constructed one 'which never before had any king built.'

The Turkish Sultan so loved ice that they had an entire class of servant dedicated to the upkeep of the ice and snow stores.  (This was just some of the 1570 people who as of the 16th century were employed in the Sultan's kitchens, others including the oh-so-necessary yogurt makers, simit bakers, and wheat pounders.)

Simits, though not involving ice or ice cream in any way, remain food fit for a Sultan.

The Chinese came up with a further ice confection improvement around the 17th Century.  Salt.  You may remember making 'home made' ice cream back in school, and, because of the infinite cruelty of the education system, this somehow involving turning a crank.  You also for some reason needed salt.  No one could tell me why this was so.

Notice the hand-crank of cruelty.

Adding salt to ice reduces the freezing point of water.  Immersing a thing into this super-cooled brine allows for the freezing of more than just ice--now people could freeze ice or custard.  Sometime in the 18th Century a Sicilian Procopio Cuto at the Parisian Cafe Procope made some of the first for-sure European ice cream available to non-royalty.  (Cafe Procope is named after the Byzantine historian Procopious, he of the Secret History fame.)

Ice cream was an ever-popular dish for the illustrious rich.  George Washington spent over two hundred dollars on ice cream one summer.  Thomas Jefferson was such a fan of ice cream that, in very Jeffersonian fashion, he laid out an 18-step process on how to make the perfect ice cream.  Supposedly it tastes a little bit like a baked alaska.

Ice cream recipe written in the same hand as the Declaration of Independence.

It took until the middle of the Nineteenth Century for ice cream to reach the common people.  Then, a Baltimore man named Jacob Fussel, a dairy merchant, needed a way to get people to buy cream.  He started the world's first ice cream factory, became rich by selling affordable cream, and gave middle class America a taste for what Wallace Stevens called 'concupiscent curds.'  A devout Quaker, Fussel took time out of being an ice cream impresario by also supporting the underground railroad.

Ice cream is one of those parts of human life so unabashedly wonderful, so flawless, so pure, that it is certain to accompany human culture to the very twilight.  Indeed, in that last age, when man crouches in some burnt-out wasteland, if he still has culture, he will sometimes wipe the sweat off his brow and get a double scoop of chocolate.

Five Surprisingly Cool Clocks

Clocks must be one of the most ho-hum pieces of technology in our modern techno-overwhelmed world.  So cheap that they are absolutely everywhere.  So everywhere that we forget they even exist.  But clocks used to be fantastically precious pieces of high technology, the culmination of all the mechanical genius of their time.

Today we'll be looking at five clocks that will remind you how cool telling the time actually is.

Drip Drop Instead Of Tick Tock

Time-keeping started when people watched the progress of shadows on the ground.  It just makes sense.  Should be easy.  Okay!  Blog post finished guys, everyone go home!

Except there's a problem with solar clocks.  Let's say that you want a particular event (religious ritual; bacchanal) to last the same amount of time every single day.  You stick a pole in the ground and mark the shadow cast at the beginning of the event, and then mark the shadow cast at the end of the event.  The next day you just start when the shadow hits the first mark, and finish when the shadow hits the second mark.  Problem solved, right?

Wrong.  You're forgetting that the sun rises and sets at a slightly different time every day, so the positions of those shadows will change as the year does its always going forward thing.

The water clock is an ingeniously simple solution to this problem.  Here's how it works:

• Take a basin.
• Puncture a hole in said basin.
• Fill Mr. Basin with water.
• Stick a measuring stick in the water.
• Wait.
• There you go.

The earliest water clock was found in the tomb of Pharoh Amenhotep back in 1500 B.C--it's the big jug thing pictured above.  But the water clock continued to be a useful way of keeping time for another three thousand years.

The water clock reached its finest expression in the Muslim scholar al-Jazari's book called Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices published in the beginning of the 13th Century.  In this tome al-Jazari describes the Castle Clock, a water-powered clock which had so many special features it was like a 12th Century Casio.  Not only did it show the time.  Not only could you reprogram the length of the hours to account for the changing seasons.  Not only did it show the position of the zodiac.  Not only did it reveal one of five musical mannequins every hour.  But the thing had two falcon robots that would drop a ball into a vase.  Take that, iPod.

Smells Like Turmeric--Must Be Two O'Clock

Of course, no matter how advanced your timepiece is, you're not going to be able to actually tell the time unless you can see the timepiece.  This was a problem during that long era before light-switches.  If you happened to want to know what time it was at night, you had a problem.

But for every problem there's a solution.  The genius of nocturnal time-keeping was enterprising French inventor called M. de Villayer, who created a spice clock.  The hour hand of the clock would point to a bowl of spices--a different one for every hour.  You followed the hour hand with your own hand, dipped a finger in the appropriate bowl, and literally tasted the correct time.

But like all great European inventions, this one was anticipated in the east by a good number of centuries.  Starting in the 10th Century the Chinese made incense clocks like the one pictured above.  These held specially calibrated sticks of incense known to burn at a particular rate.  The first hour would smell of sandalwood, for instance, and the next of cinnamon.  Instead of a sideways glance at your wrist-watch all you needed to do to tell the time was sniff.

Too Useful For You?

The clocks we've seen today are all built on a human scale.  If I know anything about my decadent readers it's that you want something a little bit more impractical.  Well our final clock is so lacking in applications, so abstract in conception, that it must stand either as one of the coolest things on earth--or one of the dumbest.  Or both.

Buried deep in a mountain in Texas, the 10,000 Year Clock will tick at the speed of continents drifting. It will tick once a year for ten-thousand years.  Why?  The short answer:  because.

Mock all you want, but I find the long answer is inspiring.  Our lives--everything that we ever will know and feel, every terror and every heartbreak, all the love and all the trouble, the sum of this incredibly important biological lump I call me--it comes to only an instant in the turning of the universe.  We are here, we proudly beat our chests--and then we are gone.  And it's staggering to think of how much time there has been before us, and how much time will indifferently move on after we are gone.  Around us the stars grind on, the arms of our galaxy slowly spin, our planet changes--and to those slow movements, does a me or a you really amount to much?  The 10,000 Year Clock stands for me as a metaphor for one of mankind's greatest virtue:  our ability to step up on our tippy-toes and look beyond our cramped perspective, seeing what lies beyond--the proud mountains washed away by ten thousand years of rain, the lakes dried by a hundred years of sun--the ape evolve into a man.

This post was inspired by the In Our Time episode on the Measurement of Time, which might be one of the finest forty minutes of erudite discussion I have ever had the pleasure of listening to.

A note:  surprisingly little documentation exists about the spice clock.  The only source I could find of it is a book by Carlo Cipolla called Clocks and Culture.  Check it out if you are interested.

Learning Today: The Four Great Inventions And Four Genius Tinkerings. Part 2: The Compass

This is the second of a four-part look the neat things that happened when people started tinkering with the Chinese Four Great Inventions.

Let's start by thinking about an element of household mystery--the kitchen magnet. Like every inquisitive toddler, your humble writer as a younger human spent hours sticking magnets to the fridge and pulling them off again.

Lodestone

The Chinese were also interested in the magic of magnets--specifically lodestone, one of only two naturally magnetized rocks on earth. While lodestone was described in about the fifth century, it took another five hundred years before we get a description of the first compass. It looked a lot different from what we'd include in our Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness Kits. Step 1: Make a fish out of lodestone. Step 2: Float fish in a bowl of water. The fish's head will point north. Step 3: ???? Step 4: Profit.

The Chinese compass evolved. The fish turned into a ladle, and it was placed in the middle of a square plate representing the cosmos. Very useful if you wanted to practice geomancy. Not terribly useful for taking on a camping trip.

Today, with compasses being so common-place that they're included as consolation prizes at Skee-Ball rinks, we might take pause to see the compass ranked as a great invention. But do not pause! No! Resist the pausing! Be assured the humble compass changed the world by opening up the map to exploration.

The true power of the compass couldn't be realized however until two other inventions came on the scene. The first was the sextant, a tool used to accurately measure the distance between two points in the sky. The second was the marine chronometer, nothing more than a really really solid, accurate clock.

Latitude

This is what the ancients thought the world looked like. And why they needed better navigation.

Think of how easy it is to get lost, even these days with iPads equipped with Google Maps. Antiquity did not have iPods or Google, and because of this they suffered from an almost chronic case of disorientation. Maps were bad and often centuries out of date. Roads were treacherous when they existed, rife with tolls both official and unofficial and ruffian-enforced. And--unless you risked the moods of the sea or were rich enough to afford a horse--you had to make all your wrong turns on foot. The heroic historian Fernand Braudel estimated that in the 16th Century it took news roughly thirty days at top speed to get from the center of Europe to the edge.

Here's where the compass comes in. With a compass, you can orient yourself north. This is useful enough. But knowing where magnetic north becomes almost magical if you can get an accurate measurement of the sky.

No sextant jokes today.

To do this we have to wait until the sixteenth century for the invention of the sextant. The sextant is a majestic work of technology elegantly combining no less than three genius inventions. It consists of a telescope (necessary inventions: glass grinding; optics), a mirror, and a frame. If you know how to use a sextant, you can use it to find the distance between any two points in the sky.

Big whoop, boy scout, I can hear you snickering. But wait. If you know which way's north, and you can measure the position of the starts accurately, then you can fix you latitude with astonishing accuracy. This is convenient when your caravan gets stuck in the winding streets of Istanbul and you want to know how long it will take to make it to the Black Sea, but it can be downright life-saving if you are a booty-laden ship drifting across the Atlantic Ocean, wondering whether you took a wrong turn at Ireland.

Once people were able to get a handle of how far up or down the earth they were, the distance of the seas essentially shrunk. Ocean travel was less dangerous. The world was a little freer for commerce and freedom.

Longitude

But not, you know, completely free. Because while seamen could figure how much they'd moved up or down the earth, they were still could only guess how far East or West they were. The problem of longitude was a great concern for sailors.

The problem was that to figure out your longitude by looking at the stars, you needed to know exactly what time it was. Well, the haters are already saying to themselves, why don't they just use a watch?

Didn't you hear me say exactly? I mean exactly. The earth moves about fifteen degrees every hour, so an inaccuracy of a minute or two on the clock can mean a difference of hundreds of miles on land--that's the difference between landing your sloop in Manhattan or landing it in Maine. Added to this was the fact that the high seas were not very kind to clocks. On a long ocean voyage, clocks would heaved up and down by the crashing waves, they would stop, they would run fast or slow, their parts would expanded by the heat, and corroded by the humidity.

The solution was there for everyone to see. You just needed a really awesome clock. But while the solution was obvious, actually building an awesome clock without a pendulum was dreadfully difficult, and the intellectual giants of the 18th Century (I'm looking at you, Newton) didn't even think it was possible.

In the 18th Century, the British Government, knowing both the necessity of discovering longitude and that impossible things could indeed be achieved if you threw money at it, introduced the Longitude Prize to spur those dastardly inventors to invent a clock that could be used on the high seas. John Harrison, a British clockmaker, devoted his life to making this clock of all clocks in a story stuffed with so much event that it merited a book so wonderful to merit a TV series based on the book.

Once Harrison made the awesomest clock ever (officially called a marine chronometer, but whatevs) navigation became less guesswork, and more science. We came a long way from a lodestone fish floating in a pool of water. But remember--that's where it started, with Chinese geomancers playing with rocks.

Thanks for sticking around for this fact! I promise the next one won't be so involved! Please check back tomorrow, when we'll be looking at the third great Chinese invention--the printing press.

Learning Today: The Four Great Inventions And Four Genius Tinkerings. Part 1: Paper

The history of the world can be written in many different ways. We can mark the centuries by the passing of kings, by the empires' ebbs and flows, or by the progress of science and invention. Each focus will make a different kind of history, with its own heroes, tragedies, and triumphs.

If we look at the history of civilization as the history of invention, the West crouches perilously on the fringes of world history, a minor player with only a few moments of greatness. Who dominates the story instead? China.

The most conspicuous evidence of classical Chinese technical superiority are the Four Great Inventions. Paper-making. The compass. Printing. Gunpowder. These, undoubtably, paved the way for the modern world.

Tinkering

We think of invention the same way we think of magic. A single person--lab coatted and wise--huddles in a dark room and creates this new thing. He emerges after months of invention, an iPod or a pulley in his hand, waiting for the thronging crowds of people to use the creation of his inventive genius.

In Malcom Gladwell's recent article on Steve Jobs, Gladwell suggests that real invention doesn't happen like this at all. Instead, it happens by tinkering. One person has a great idea--a washing machine or a printing press--and then other people take that idea and fool around with it until it becomes perfect. The first iteration of a great idea is like first tries everywhere. Kinda incomplete and crap.

These next few days we will be looking at the Four Great Inventions of China--not just the history of their invention, but also the genius that came when they were tinkered with. We will start with paper.

Paper

Before paper, if you wanted to write something down, you were in trouble. What could you use? Leather, which was expensive--or papyrus, which was expensive. Writing, literacy, the whole great life of the mind was relegated only to the rich who could afford the luxury of paper. (This also led to people actually having to remember stuff--using their brain!--and a number of mnemonic systems, including the Memory Palace, which perhaps is a topic for another post.)

But the course of the world was changed when Cai Lun appeared in the pages of history, because it's Cai Lun who assured that the pages of history would be paper, and not the skin of a stillborn calf. Cai Lun was a eunuch in China's Han dynasty. In the turn of the first century AD, he created the first modern-looking paper from mulberry bark and trash.

In the centuries to come this paper would be used for everything we use paper for and more. Armor, clothing, toilet paper, tea bags--and yes, good old fashioned writing material.

And so how was paper tinkered with? For that let's jump ahead a couple hundred years to the turn of the millennia. Because paper is not only simple writing material. Paper can become power. Dear reader, it was also in China that paper assumed its most potent transformation, from simple writing material--to money, the store of value, the root of all evil, step one in Tony Montana's simple rules for success.

The Chinese state issued the first paper currency. Again, it was made from mulberry bark. Printed with a picture of the amount in cash that the bank note could be exchanged for, these little scraps of paper greased the wheels trade for hundreds of years before the whole system crashed in an inflationary cataclysm.

Check back next time. Hopefully we'll have time for a double-header--we'll be tackling the invention of the compass and the printing press.

Learning Today: May 16th, 2011. The Eight-legged essay of China.

Welcome to Learning Today. I come across a huge number of facts in my daily procrastinating, and I thought--why not share those facts with the world? Or at least with the tiny number of humans and web-bots that read this blog?

Our inaugural bit of wisdom comes today from China's imperial examination system. Civil servants in Imperial China were chosen on the basis of their performance on a test. Hooray meritocracy, you say! Not so fast. This wasn't a test of actual practical things. This was a test of the Chinese classics. It was horrifically difficult. The leader of the Taiping Rebellion, Hong Xiuquan, failed his examinations over four times--despite scoring in the top one percent of applicants. People would spend their lives taking the exams. Makes GRE test prep look peachy, no?

Why were the exams so hard? For an example, look at the dreaded eight-legged essay. Not only did the eight-legged essay give strict limits on the word count, structure and expression, but it demanded that writers not mention anything that happened after the death of Mencius in 298 B.C. From Wiki:

Words, phraseology, or references to events that occurred after the death of Mencius in 298 BC were not allowed, since the essay was supposed to explain a quote from one of the Confucian classics by "speaking for the sage"; and Confucius or his disciples could not have referred to events that occurred after their deaths.^[1]

That's what I call learning.