The Chinese
- Episode aired Feb 23, 2005
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China Before Smog.
If there were such a thing as reincarnation and you had a choice of which kind of animal you would be, a lot of people would choose a hawk. Plenty of glamour there -- beauty, grace, and strength. I don't think anybody would want to be a silkworm. They're ugly creatures about two inches long. They hatch, they eat mulberry leaves day and night for three months, then they disappear. That's all they do -- eat. Then they spin cocoons preparatory to changing into moths. The Chinese found that properly prepared cocoons yield silk, which became a national currency. We get the silk; the caterpillars get to be moths.
Discovering silk was no small achievement. The merchant has to boil away the glue that hold the cocoon together, and what you wind up with is one very long strand of silk -- up to a quarter of a mile long. Unlike other fabrics, you don't have to twirl several pieces around to get a strand. The strand is already there, and it makes silk a particularly strong fabric. Gram for gram it's stronger than steel but not stronger than spider silk -- 0.5 gigpascals vs. 1.3 gigapascals, according to Wikipedia. I know who Pascal was but I don't know what a pascal is. It still sounds impressive to me. Anyway, that's why early parachutes were made of it, as in, "Hit the silk." And that's why it could serve as a makeshift armor against projectiles or knives.
They invented a lot of other things too, including what we call noodles. In China they're all hand pulled, not machine made. They invented an arch bridge using only the "segment", the part that I learned in high school was called a chord. The segmented arch bridge, as described here, puts the stress at an angle to the ground instead of straight down, like a full arch. How the Chinese compensated for this isn't satisfactorily explained.
Their unique ancient lacquer ware -- wooden utensils painted with tree sap -- can withstand boiling water, heat that would melt an aluminum can, and sulfuric acid without being damaged. And yet, made of wood, it's light and portable. Around 600 AD they invented tuned metal bells, the kind that are on your wind chimes. They invented lots of other things -- gunpowder for use in warfare, paper, block printing, paper money (ca. 500 AD in China; ca. 1600 in Europe), and so on.
As you can see, the series deals chiefly with technology. It's a bit less loose-limbed than James Burke's "Connections" from the 1960s. If you find this series interesting you might want to dig up Peter Weller's "Engineering an Empire," which is just as entertain and informative but goes into a bit more detail for each culture.
Discovering silk was no small achievement. The merchant has to boil away the glue that hold the cocoon together, and what you wind up with is one very long strand of silk -- up to a quarter of a mile long. Unlike other fabrics, you don't have to twirl several pieces around to get a strand. The strand is already there, and it makes silk a particularly strong fabric. Gram for gram it's stronger than steel but not stronger than spider silk -- 0.5 gigpascals vs. 1.3 gigapascals, according to Wikipedia. I know who Pascal was but I don't know what a pascal is. It still sounds impressive to me. Anyway, that's why early parachutes were made of it, as in, "Hit the silk." And that's why it could serve as a makeshift armor against projectiles or knives.
They invented a lot of other things too, including what we call noodles. In China they're all hand pulled, not machine made. They invented an arch bridge using only the "segment", the part that I learned in high school was called a chord. The segmented arch bridge, as described here, puts the stress at an angle to the ground instead of straight down, like a full arch. How the Chinese compensated for this isn't satisfactorily explained.
Their unique ancient lacquer ware -- wooden utensils painted with tree sap -- can withstand boiling water, heat that would melt an aluminum can, and sulfuric acid without being damaged. And yet, made of wood, it's light and portable. Around 600 AD they invented tuned metal bells, the kind that are on your wind chimes. They invented lots of other things -- gunpowder for use in warfare, paper, block printing, paper money (ca. 500 AD in China; ca. 1600 in Europe), and so on.
As you can see, the series deals chiefly with technology. It's a bit less loose-limbed than James Burke's "Connections" from the 1960s. If you find this series interesting you might want to dig up Peter Weller's "Engineering an Empire," which is just as entertain and informative but goes into a bit more detail for each culture.
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- rmax304823
- Nov 15, 2015
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