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| Lost discoveries | | February
23, 2003. | Day after day, we are witness
to an endless list of scientific discoveries and impressive technological developments.
In awe of these facts, we always assume that they are the first of their kind.
However many of them are inspired by nature while others are the consummate result
of the integration of trials and errors through time and various distinct civilizations. What
we will deal with here is those modern discoveries that as curious or surprising
as they may seem to us, have their roots in ancient cultures or, in the best of
cases, deal with re-discoveries of experiments or technologies described and developed
long ago, events which needed only a little dusting off to free them from the
dust of the centuries and the oblivion that hid them.  Author
Dick Teresi speaks to us of those ancient discoveries in his book "Lost Discoveries"
(2002, Simon & Schuster). In it, he takes us by the hand and leads us to take
a look into the history of mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry and technology
of civilizations as old as those of the Babylonians, Egyptians, Indians, Chinese,
Arabs and Maya, among others. Moreover, he tells us of the strong impact they
all have on our modern culture. To cite but a few examples, let us look at the
following.
Rubber is a sort of latex that flows out of
the rubber tree plants. In its natural dry form, the rubber is soft, sticky and
not very elastic. But in 1839, Charles Goodyear developed the process of vulcanization
by heating a combination of latex and sulfurs with which he got a resistant and
elastic type of rubber. Nevertheless, there are reports of this development by
the Olmecs, the Maya and the Aztec, maybe as far back as the year 1600. They mixed
the latex of the rubber tree with the juice they extracted from lianas, rich in
sulfuric acids. Generally, we tend to take the ancient
stories that deal with the creation of our planet with a grain of salt, mainly
because of their high fantasy content. However, the Huli tribe that lives on the
island of Papua in New Guinea tells a story about the origin of the earth that
is quite sophisticated. It is closely related to the modern theories that try
to explain the formation and development of the solar system. In
the Huli tradition, it is believed that the earth was created by a volcano that
emerged from the sun and from whose interior volcanic rocks erupted throughout
the universe. One of those became our home planet. They consider that all creatures
are interrelated and that all had a solar genesis. Huli myth involves magma in
the formation of the planet and the sun as the center of the solar system. Today's
geological sciences have determined that the sun and the planets were formed from
a gigantic cloud of dust and gas. Thus we can easily state that the Huli were
not entirely off the mark in their interpretations of the universe. To
this day, there has been a continuous debate dealing with astronomy - whether
it was more advanced in the Old World than in the New one, especially when considering
that the former had instruments it could use to observe the stars - telescopes.
However, astronomers of the Old Continent were not the first to develop instruments
used to contemplate the heavenly bodies. Chinese and Islamic astronomers had already
developed such tools to map the heavens. Although they
lacked instruments, New World astronomers proved more creative when it came to
locating objects in the sky. They used architecture and through the construction
of windows or doors, pillars, monticules, skylights and other natural structures,
they outlined the movement of celestial phenomena. Beyond
their instrumentation, the great contribution of Old World astronomers was the
application of mathematics to their understanding of the skies, thus setting the
bases for the science of astronomy, something greater than the naked eye contemplating
the heavens or the application of a little logic to the phenomena that surround
us. On the other hand, the Chinese are considered to be
the first seismologists as they were able to measure the intensity of earthquakes
based on the sound they produced. The very first reports date back to the year
1300 B.C. Some reports extracted from documents of the Wei Dynasty dating back
to 474 A.D., state: "There where the sounds are like those of thunder and
can be heard in Qicheng of Yanemn; they come from the West and repeat a dozen
times. When the sounds stopped, an earthquake occurred." In
fact, the first seismograph was devised by the scientist Chang Heng (78-139) in
the year 132 A.D. His "watercock" was a dome with a column inside with
the ability to move laterally in any one of eight directions, with a regulator
to operate a mechanism to open and close. Outside of the dome, there were eight
dragon heads, each with a ball in its mouth, and directly beneath them, there
were eight toads with their mouths open. When an earthquake occurred, the vibrations
caused the dragon head facing the direction of the quake to let the ball fall
into the open mouth of the toad below. This mechanism only allowed one ball to
be dropped during an earthquake. cupul@pvmirror.com Archives
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