Tag: #FOWC

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V is for Valve

Ancient Roman bronze valve, from Valve magazine. Photo credit: Ministry for Better Cultural Activities — Superintendent for Archaeological Good of Naples and Pompeii

Indoor plumbing doesn’t get enough credit. We take it for granted, but one night spent camping is always enough for me to write fan letters to my en suite bathroom at home. In fact, plumbing as a whole doesn’t get enough credit. Prehistorians love to wax lyrical about the plow or cave paintings or Platonic ideals. They should be talking about irrigation. After all, find a sizeable population in history, and you’ll probably find a valve.

The Romans kind of cornered the historical air time on valves since they were the gold standard (Bronze standard? it’s the Bronze Age…) for plumbing as well as central heating. Numerous articles cover this in Valve magazine, and yes, there’s a magazine dedicated to valves. However, while we should give the Romans their due, the Egyptians were the first to use valves in irrigation, the Indus Valley builders of the largest public baths, the Mesopotamians creators of one fabulous desert garden after another, and the Incans masters of harnessing gravity to create waterfalls and canals.

Harnessing the power of water was one of humanity’s first ways of controlling their environment. The valve was an integral part of the story, such a simple little thing but very powerful. The best inventions are. Let’s consider:

  1. What is a valve?
  2. When and where were valves first introduced in ancient civilizations?
  3. What does the creation of the valve and the control of water imply about human thinking?
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U is for Umbrella

Oil paper umbrella, Chinese-design, shown in cave paintings from India, @200 BCE-600CE. From wikimedia.

Combine the histories and myths of Daedalus, Da Vinci, Archimedes, and St. Joseph into a single person. Now give that guy a wife, one who has learned some practical science from her husband. She invents the umbrella. Sort of.

The umbrella, a device used as a sun shade or rain cover, dates back to almost 3000 BCE. Since the ancient cultures that we know most cluster around the Mediterranean, the primary use of umbrella-like instruments was as fans or canopies to protect mainly the royals, and later the wealthy and aristocratic. Thus, the umbrella in the most ancient sense, was a status symbol.

But the other form of umbrella we modern people know is the collapsible kind–that is, those of us who experience rain in the north (or extreme south). Collapsible umbrellas, invented somewhere between 600 BCE and 50 CE in China, were also more symbolic than functional, at least according to art left behind. The Chinese led the world in innovative designs of the umbrella. Europeans came to know the designs; they just didn’t use them. At least, not until umbrellas were re-invented as a status symbol, eventually to make their way into popular and practical use by schmoes like you and me.

In focusing on the history of the umbrella in ancient times, let’s consider:

  1. What were umbrellas for?
  2. Where and when were umbrellas used in ancient history?
  3. What does the invention and innovation of the umbrella signify?
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T is for Trepanation

From Switzerland, @3500 BCE, Bronza Age. A woman’s skull had been drilled, and she had survived for some time afterward. Photo by Rama.

I’m fixing a hole where the rain gets in
And stops my mind from wandering
Where it will go
I’m filling the cracks that ran through the door
And kept my mind from wandering
Where it will go

“Fixing a Hole,” McCartney/Lennon.

Archaeology was a pretty new discipline in the 18th and 19th century, so perhaps we can forgive the excavators who kept finding skulls with holes and tossing them aside. Oh, there’s another that’s been bashed in the head, poor bugger. Communication was a lot slower in, say, 1820, so they didn’t all talk to each other. They didn’t have a chat room where they could all post examples of what they’d found, to suddenly realize that Geez!, there were hundreds of these, and all over the world: Russia, China, Germany, France–especially France–Egypt, Greece, Peru–most especially Peru!

The key advance, if you will, came in 1867 in the Andes, when an artifact collector in South America named George Squiers wrote to an eminent French brain expert named Paul Broca. The rest is trepanation history. Because it turns out that 10,000 years ago, brain surgery was practiced, and it was practiced nearly everywhere.

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