Decoder Ring | How Books About Things That Changed the World… Changed the World

Summary

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Slow Burn – Decoder Ring: "How Books About Things That Changed the World… Changed the World"

Host: Willa Paskin
Date: March 26, 2025

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Episode Overview

This episode of Decoder Ring delves into the enduring trend of "thing biographies"—those nonfiction books with bold titles like The Fish That Changed the World or How Parking Explains the World. Host Willa Paskin investigates where this trend comes from, its surprising persistence, and whether such grand claims are justified. Featuring interviews with authors, publishers, and cultural critics, the episode asks: Do these books really change the way we see the world, or is “How X Changed the World” just a clever sales trope?

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Birth of the "Thing Biography"

• Simon Garfield's Mauve: Sparked by a two-page spread in his son's chemistry book about William Perkin, inventor of synthetic purple dye. Garfield thought the story deserved more ("It deserved a book of its own." – Garfield, 03:50).
• Subtitles That Sell: Garfield’s Mauve: How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World exemplifies the trend, but Garfield finds the subtitle “a little embarrassing” due to its ubiquity (04:33).

“There have been so many of those kind of things, all these other books about, you know, something that changed the world.”
— Simon Garfield (04:43)

• Notable Examples Cited: Banana: The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World, The Map that Changed the World, 10 Tomatoes that Changed the World, and more (05:03).

The Trend’s Roots: Longitude and Cod

• Longitude (Dava Sobel, 1995): Marked as a template-setting, best-selling "thing biography" about John Harrison’s marine chronometer ("A biography of an inanimate object" – George Gibson, 11:06).
  • Turned a niche subject into a global bestseller and TV miniseries (12:19).
• Cod (Mark Kurlansky, 1997): Kurlansky didn’t set out to write a hit but focused on his fascination with cod’s impact on culture and trade (13:28–15:06).

“Cod really united the Atlantic and brought Europe and the Americas together. Much more so than, you know, Columbus.”
— Mark Kurlansky (14:45)

• Publishing Copycats: The success of these books turned micro-histories into a mainstream trend ("As publishers, to some degree we're all copycats." – George Gibson, 15:56).

Why the 1990s?

• Bronwyn Everill (Princeton): After the Cold War, people sought to understand history beyond traditional political narratives; thing biographies offered a way to explore global interconnectedness through commodities and objects (17:11–18:26).

“They helped to explain the world after the end of the Cold War... needing a new way of thinking about how history is shaped by forces other than states being in a constant tension.”
— Bronwyn Everill (17:22)

• Shift in Tone: While post-Cold War optimism sparked the trend, modern iterations are often darker, focusing on challenges like environmental degradation ("They've just gotten a lot darker." – Everill, 20:09).

The Promise and Peril of Grandiose Claims

• Author’s Dilemma: The bold subtitle is both a sales tool and an intellectual challenge—writers must defend their sweeping claims (21:03).

“At the end of the day, we're trying to sell books here. You know what I mean?”
— Henry Grabar (21:23)

• Title Formula: The goal is to surprise and spark curiosity, which wouldn’t happen with less startling claims (“A book with the subtitle ‘How Cars Explain the World’ is so obvious it wouldn’t do the one thing these titles are supposed to do, which is raise eyebrows.” – Willa Paskin, 21:39).

Making the Case: Authors Defend Their Subjects

• How Refrigeration Changed the World (Nicola Twilley)
  • refrigeration revolutionized food, trade, and even geopolitics ("Britain’s Royal Society named refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food and drink." – Twilley, 23:11)
  • enabled urbanization, shaped diets, contributed to Irish independence, and today impacts global warming (23:19–30:01).
• How Rope Became the Backbone of Civilization (Tim Queenie)
  • Rope enabled everything from building pyramids and ships to modern spaceflight ("The oldest piece of rope ever discovered is 50,000 years old." – Queenie, 32:51)
  • Rope’s ubiquity has made it nearly invisible, but its impact is profound, from Neanderthals to Mars rovers and possible future space elevators (33:15–36:18).
• How One Weird Rodent Made America (Leela Philipp on beavers)
  • Beavers shaped North American environments and economies, sparked international wars ("It’s no exaggeration to say that beavers jump started capitalism in North America." – Philipp, 38:06)
  • The fur trade built fortunes like John Jacob Astor’s, and beaver-driven hydrology is newly vital in climate adaptation (43:01–47:47).

The Real Takeaway: Interconnectedness of Everything

• Willa Paskin reflects on initial skepticism, then concedes that the best books in this genre genuinely illuminate surprising connections in history and society.
• Philosophy of Wonder
  • “It reflects a kind of philosophy of wonder at the complexity of the world.” – Henry Grabar (49:21)

“If that’s your attitude towards life, you never run out of interesting things to look at or think about.”
— Henry Grabar (49:37)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Subtitles:
  “It’s a truism. But there have been so many of those kind of things, all these other books about, you know, something that changed the world.”
  — Simon Garfield (04:43)
• On Cod’s Impact:
  “Cod really united the Atlantic and brought Europe and the Americas together. Much more so than, you know, Columbus.”
  — Mark Kurlansky (14:45)
• On the Sales Imperative:
  “At the end of the day, we’re trying to sell books here. You know what I mean?”
  — Henry Grabar (21:23)
• On Rope’s Importance:
  “The oldest piece of rope ever discovered is actually 50,000 years old... Neanderthals were making rope.”
  — Tim Queenie (32:51)
• On Beavers and Capitalism:
  “It’s just no exaggeration to say that beavers jump started capitalism in North America.”
  — Leela Philipp (38:06)
• On the Point of Microhistories:
  “What they’re about is how intricately and unexpectedly connected the world is.”
  — Willa Paskin (47:47)
• Philosophy of Wonder:
  “If that’s your attitude towards life, you never run out of interesting things to look at or think about.”
  — Henry Grabar (49:37)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [00:37] – Simon Garfield discovers William Perkin’s story and Mauve.
• [11:00] – George Gibson recounts the inspiration and impact of Longitude.
• [13:28] – Mark Kurlansky realizes cod’s historical importance.
• [17:11] – Bronwyn Everill on the 'thing biography' trend post-Cold War.
• [21:03] – Henry Grabar reflects on the pressures of bold subtitles.
• [22:52] – Author Nicola Twilley defends refrigeration's world-changing impact.
• [31:06] – Tim Queenie on rope’s overlooked historical significance.
• [37:40] – Leela Philipp argues for beavers as environmental and economic trailblazers.
• [47:47] – Willa Paskin’s reflection on skepticism and the power of small stories.
• [49:21] – Henry Grabar on the philosophical value of wonder in micro-history.

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The Episode’s Tone & Style

Willa Paskin’s narration blends gentle skepticism with contagious curiosity and humor. The guests—often authors themselves—treat their unusual topics with passion and sometimes self-deprecation, providing both entertaining anecdotes and compelling arguments for the profound influence of everyday objects.

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Conclusion

Decoder Ring crafts a nuanced look behind the “thing that changed the world” book trend. Far from merely sales gimmicks, the best of these books spark wonder at the complex, interconnected nature of history, revealing how even the humblest objects are woven into the grand tapestry of our world.

Recommended for:

• Fans of popular nonfiction
• Curious readers seeking new lenses on history
• Anyone skeptical of bold subtitle claims—prepare to have your curiosity piqued

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Transcript

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[Willa Paskin]

In the late 1990s, the author Simon Garfield found himself leafing through a book his son had brought home from school.

[Simon Garfield]

It was like a Horrible Histories kind of book. And it was about all these experiments that people had conducted, mostly men, mostly Victorians, that had gone wrong in some way.

[Willa Paskin]

Like think of scientists who caused eye gouging, life taking explosions while trying to isolate compounds and elements. Or the one who discovered that waste from an ammunition factory made a good toilet bowl cleaner. But one story in the book particularly grabbed Simon.

[Simon Garfield]

It had a two page spread on this man called William Perkin.

[Willa Paskin]

In 1856, Perkin was an 18 year old chemist living in London who was.

[Simon Garfield]

Trying to find a way to make an artificial quinine to save troops dying in Africa and India of malaria.

[Willa Paskin]

So one day in his lab, Perkin was attempting to do just that.

[Simon Garfield]

And he got one element of the molecule wrong.

[Willa Paskin]

Instead of quinine, Perkin had made something.

[Simon Garfield]

New, a sort of dark, purpley sludge.

[Willa Paskin]

The legend goes that Perkin promptly got the sludge all over his shirt, which instantly turned a deep, bright, unfadable purple.

[Simon Garfield]

He thought, okay, that is interesting. This wasn't what I was going for at all. But if we can make an artificial color like this, then I can make quite a lot of money.

[Willa Paskin]

Up to this point, all clothing dyes had come from some natural source. And it had been particularly difficult to afford purple, which you could normally only.

[Simon Garfield]

Make by gathering, you know, a million shellfish from the Mediterranean shore, which was where purple came from.

[Willa Paskin]

So in 1859, William Perkin set up a dyeworks in London and began selling his creation, the first ever commercial artificial dye, a color known as mauve.

[Simon Garfield]

And people sort of just couldn't get enough of this color.

[Willa Paskin]

Queen Victoria started to wear it and soon the world seemed come down with a fever for it.

[Simon Garfield]

What I think Punch magazine called mauve measles.

[Willa Paskin]

Everyone wanted it. It was like the equivalent of millennial pink, if no one had ever been able to afford anything in any shade of pink before. And mauve was just the start.

[Simon Garfield]

Once you could make Mauve. You could make any other color of the rainbow as well.

[Willa Paskin]

Mauve was the first of what would become hundreds of artificial dyes, dyes that technicolored our lives, altering clothing and fashion as well as medicine and food. But it also paved the way for something we take as much for granted as a purple T shirt. The idea that a scientist and inventor like William Perkin should also be an entrepreneur.

[Simon Garfield]

He had sort of buffed that boundary. It was one of the very, very first applications of pure chemistry into the industrial world.

[Willa Paskin]

To Simon Garfield, Mauve obviously deserved more than two pages in his son's paperback about chemistry catastrophes. It deserved a book of its own. So he wrote one.

[Simon Garfield]

I kind of always quite liked the idea of taking a single topic that was a bit more unexpected.

[Willa Paskin]

When the book was published in 2000, the title was a no brainer. It was called Mauve. But Simon also knew he needed a subtitle that would help sell his honestly kind of oddball book that would position this very precise topic as expansive, exciting and important.

[Simon Garfield]

And the subtitle, which I now find slightly embarrassing, is How One Man Invented a Color that Changed the World.

[Nicola Twilley]

Why do you find it embarrassing?

[Simon Garfield]

I mean, it's not embarrassing because it's wrong or anything as such. It's a truism. But there have been so many of those kind of things, all these other books about, you know, something that changed the world.

[Willa Paskin]

Banana. The Fate of the Fruit that Changed the World. The Golden Thread. How Fabric Changed History. How Iceland Changed the World.

[Mark Kurlansky]

The Map that Changed the World.

[Simon Garfield]

The City that Changed the World.

[Willa Paskin]

The Corporation that changed the world. 10 tomatoes that changed the World. Mauve is one of scores, if not by this point. Hundreds of books that promise their seemingly mundane subjects have changed the world. So have they. This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. The world turns. Seasons pass. Children grow. Publishing trends come and go. But then there are the nonfiction books about the unexpected things that changed the world. Cod, potatoes, pickles, soccer, coffee, tea, bees, oak trees, sand, chickens. There are books about all of them and many more besides, with the phrase change the world or something similarly grandiose right there in the title. Where does this trend come from? Why has it been so persistent? And should I stop skeptically thinking, really, whenever I see a book like this? In this episode, we're going to answer all of these questions by establishing this trend's origins, and most of all by roping in a number of authors of books just like this to make their case directly to us. So today on Decoder ring. How did that change the world? The kind of books we're talking about today are sometimes called micro histories or thing biographies. They focus on one thing and often it's a surprising thing. So the books are showing you how something unexpected like nutmeg or kudzu, earthworms or the vocoder is actually connected in ways you could not have imagined to the wider world. In other books though, the one thing is more like uranium, penises, oxygen or tuberculosis. It's presented as so obviously important we've become blind to its relevance. Really could stand to grasp it even more. These books do not all have the exact phrase change the world in their title, but many have some kind of bold grand claim there or make that argument over the course of the text. If you chart the publication dates of volumes like this, there is a clear moment when they went from being rare and sporadic to ubiquitous and plentiful. And there are two books in particular that are responsible for this change. And to tell you about them, I'm going to take a page out of the books themselves, because whatever the topic, they tend to reveal that their subjects origins go back much further than you'd think. And so we're going to start our story 300 years ago in the middle of the Age of Sail. That's the period in European history when trade, exploration and war were all taking place on the high seas, and when, surprisingly often, sailors had no goddamn idea where they were. Oh, they knew how far north or south of the equator they were. Apparently a good sailor can figure that out from the sun. But when it came to east and west, they had about as much clue as a tourist without a data plan. Another way to say this is sailors could calculate their latitude, which is where they were, relative to the lines that circle the globe like belts, but not their longitude, the lines that slice it up and down like an orange. And not knowing your longitude was not a minor problem. Ships regularly smashed into land they didn't know was there. And if they stuck only to the established trade routes, they were easy targets for piracy and conflict. The problem was so bad that nations offered rewards of tremendous fortunes to anyone who could solve it. Even though there was already a theoretical solution. A ship should be able to calculate its longitude by comparing the time on board, which could be determined by looking at the sun to the time in another set point like its home port. What was needed then was just a clock, but building a clock that could accurately keep the time of a boat's home port while said boat was at sea in rolling Waves and storms in varying temperatures in corrosive water was such an enormous technical challenge that many people thought it was impossible. But in the early 1700s, an Englishman named John Harrison, with no education or even apprenticeship in clock making, devoted decades of his life to the task, overcoming skeptics and obstructionists to prototype, test and build a clock that could stop stay true. His invention, the marine chronometer, solved the problem of longitude. It changed sailing, exploration, trade and geopolitics forever. Yet despite all of this, few people had heard of John Harrison. In 1993, 300 years after his birth, when Harvard magazine ran a cover story about a symposium on longitude.

[George Gibson]

I remember climbing out of bed that night at around 11 o' clock and reading this article and thinking to myself, there's a book here.

[Willa Paskin]

George Gibson, who is now the executive editor at Grove Atlantic, was then the publisher of Walker and Company.

[George Gibson]

I mean, John Harrison's invention was so seismic. I mean, it really changed not just the way seamen navigated, but the way countries interacted with each other because trade suddenly became much more doable.

[Willa Paskin]

And so George, who was in the business of making books, reached out to the author of the article, a science journalist named Dava Sobel.

[George Gibson]

I just said I love this article and I think it's really a cool story. And, and I think there's a book here. And the only description I would give to the book is A, it should be short and B, think of it as a biography of an inanimate object, you know, the chronometer. And then Dava wrote this brilliant book.

[Willa Paskin]

Dava Sobel's Longitude, the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem problem of his time, was released by George's publishing house in 1995.

[George Gibson]

I knew when Dava finished the manuscript that it was really good. I remember saying, if we're really lucky, you know, I think we could sell maybe 25, 30,000 copies of it. And we ended up selling 150, 160,000 copies of it in hardcover. And it became, you know, a phenomenon.

[Willa Paskin]

It sold millions more in soft cover, was on the New York Times bestseller list for. For six months, and eventually got adapted into a TV miniseries.

[Simon Garfield]

It's a marine timepiece navigation device.

[Willa Paskin]

Impossible. Doesn't work. I've tried it.

[Simon Garfield]

It does work. I built it.

[Willa Paskin]

So Longitude is the trend's embarkation point. It wasn't the first book like this ever written, but because of its mega success, it would set the template for the books that followed. Books about an object like the chronometer or a noun like longitude that seems small, contained, finite, but upon careful close inspection reveal themselves to be fundamentally intertwined with the world as we know it. But it would take another book, Setting Sail soon after Longitude, to really put the wind behind this trends back. Because while longitude had many of the hallmarks of the books we have today, it was missing one. It did not have the phrase changed the world in its title, but this next book would.

[Mark Kurlansky]

The woman I was dating, who is now my wife, was extremely skeptical. He thought, you know, nice guy, but weird. He's writing a book about codfish.

[Willa Paskin]

Mark Kurlansky was working as a journalist in the 1990s when the idea for the book started to crystallize. He was in Europe reporting on how British waters were opening up to a very small amount of intra European and cod fishing.

[Mark Kurlansky]

And everybody was incredibly upset about this. I talked to people in fish and chip shops and they say, oh, it's all over. We won't get any chunky pieces anymore. And I started thinking, these people are just absolutely crazy about cod.

[Willa Paskin]

It actually reminded Mark of his own upbringing.

[Mark Kurlansky]

Because I'm from New England, you know, I grew up with people who were crazy about cod.

[Willa Paskin]

The more he thought about it, he realized that everywhere around the globe he'd reported the people had been obsessed with cod. Basque Country, Jamaica.

[Mark Kurlansky]

I even ran into it when I was in West Africa. It kind of followed me everywhere.

[Willa Paskin]

So Mark started digging into the history of this once hugely abundant fish. He learned Basque fishermen had been catching it in North America long before the so called discovery of the New World. Just one of the many fascinating details he found.

[Mark Kurlansky]

I mean, cod really united the Atlantic and brought Europe and the Americas together. Much more so than, you know, Columbus. I mean, John Smith was going around trying to get Englishmen to settle and colonize North America. What was he talking about? He was talking about cod. And I started thinking, this is a great story.

[Willa Paskin]

And George Gibson, the same man who had published Longitude, agreed.

[George Gibson]

I remember getting a call out of the blue just to say, you know, I got this thing from Mark and would you be interested? And I instantly, because I like the idea of short books about particular, I said, absolutely.

[Willa Paskin]

They published the book in 1997. Its title was Cod A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky. Who came up with a biography of the fish that changed the world.

[Mark Kurlansky]

I did. You know, I didn't have this idea I was writing a bestseller. I had this idea I was writing a funny little book.

[Willa Paskin]

But like Longitude, cod sold millions of copies on the Publishing end of things. These books worked like a one, two punch, signaling there was a market in thing biographies.

[George Gibson]

As publishers, to some degree we're all copycats. I mean we see what's happening with someone else and we say, oh, that's interesting. And we could do that.

[Willa Paskin]

And it wasn't just publishers. Many of the authors we talked to pointed specifically again and again to Longitude and Cod as their inspirations. And many books followed them, including Simon Garfield's Mauve and and Mark Kurlansky's own follow up A History. But if everything I've told you so far explains how this trend started when it did, I want to turn now to why it started when it did. Because these kinds of books had existed for a long time. All the way back in the 1800s, British magazines were publishing it narratives, fictional biographies told from the perspective of objects like a coat or a coin. Moving into the 20th century, there was a surprisingly jocular self proclaimed biography of typhus, John McPhee's monograph about oranges, and the scholar, Sydney Mintz's study of sugar, as well as books about the pencil and corn. So what was it about the 1990s that turned these from one offs into a trend?

[Bronwyn Everill]

I think the reason that these caught fire when they did was because they helped to explain the world after the end of the Cold War.

[Willa Paskin]

Bronwyn Everill is a lecturer at the Princeton Writing Program and she's written about books like this.

[Bronwyn Everill]

I think it really was a particular cultural moment, like needing a new way of thinking about how history is shaped by forces other than states being in a constant tension with each other.

[Willa Paskin]

For 50 years, the cold War had been the defining fact of geopolitics. What shaped the world was ideologies and armies and nations and great men. Now it was over and Bronwyn thinks that history writers could be a little more counterintuitive, have a little more fun, and they could do it while also supplying people with something. They needed a way to think about this new globalizing post Cold War world.

[Bronwyn Everill]

Like what is history like? Oh, can we go back and look at all these other things in history that may have actually been threads that now we can pick up? Oh, okay. Like trade shapes the world as well as geopolitics. Right.

[Willa Paskin]

Chronometers had helped ships travel to the far corners of the earth. Cod and salt had been factors in cultural transmission and global conflict. Dyes like mauve had been a part of industry and wardrobes the world over. These things might seem like trivial commodities, but they were connected to world Historical events.

[Bronwyn Everill]

Did you know that there were trade wars between Britain and Iceland over who controlled cod? You know, did you know that the American Revolution had this like weird cod element? I guess part of the lesson is like, oh, these seemingly frivolous things can change the world.

[Willa Paskin]

Bronwyn's theory makes intuitive sense to me. These thing biographies took off in the 90s as objects were once again hurtling around the globe and change seemed inherently good. And we had the time and space to seriously consider the seemingly not so serious. The only wrinkle is you'd figure books birthed in such a specific context would have faded away as that context changed. But 35 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, that's not what has happened at all.

[Bronwyn Everill]

I think it's like crazy that they all kept it up for so long, right? Like it's always that. It's just like, this is the thing. No, this is the thing.

[Willa Paskin]

It can feel at this point like all of the things have been given this treatment or will be soon. But Bronwyn has noticed some changes nevertheless over the years, the books have gotten much longer. And whether they're about coal or cobalt, as we've moved out of the optimism of the 1990s, they're not so light hearted.

[Bronwyn Everill]

I think that they've just gotten a lot darker.

[Leela Philipp]

Right.

[Bronwyn Everill]

It's like these commodity histories are much more focused on like the unexpected ways that a single thing will wreck the world.

[Mark Kurlansky]

You know, some work, some don't.

[Willa Paskin]

Author Mark Kurlansky, again, I mean, you.

[Mark Kurlansky]

Can kind of do this with any commodity, but it won't necessarily be an interesting book. There has to be something sort of surprising about the story.

[Willa Paskin]

But making a surprising claim of world altering impact can also elicit some pushback. As one of my colleagues well knows.

[Henry Grabar]

My name is Henry Grabar and my book is called Paved Paradise How Parking Explains the World.

[Willa Paskin]

Regular listeners may recall that Henry made an episode of Decoder Ring all about how interesting and important parking is. So consider me bought in. When the book came out, an interviewer tweaked Henry about the title.

[Henry Grabar]

He was like, okay, so you say parking explains the world, huh? Does it explain crime rates? Does it explain homelessness? And I was like, well, you know, I played along. I mean, ultimately I did say I felt a little bashful about the, like, grandiose claims of the subtitle. But at the end of the day, we're trying to sell books here. You know what I mean?

[Willa Paskin]

Henry could have used an alternate subtitle that wouldn't have raised Any eyebrows?

[Henry Grabar]

I don't think anybody would bat an eye if the book was called How Cars Explain the World. Everybody knows that cars explain the world and cars spend 95% of their time parked.

[Willa Paskin]

But a book with the subtitle How Cars Explain the World is so obvious it wouldn't do the one thing these titles are supposed to do, which is raise eyebrows, surprise you, jolt you. This kind of title may be formulaic, but it's still a promise.

[Henry Grabar]

I had to write something that would live up to that, and then when people interviewed me about this subject, that I had to be ready to defend this claim that I was making.

[Willa Paskin]

When we come back, we hit the books and ask some authors to deliver on their own claims. So now we're going to do something a little different. We're going to put some writers on the spot. While working on this episode, I compiled a very hefty but surely not comprehensive list of books like this. We looked it over and selected a few recent entries on it thing biographies with particularly grand sounding claims in their titles and asked their authors to make a case for why their subject really changed the world.

[Nicola Twilley]

Refrigeration. I mean, it's a time machine because what coal does is it slows down time and that remakes space.

[Willa Paskin]

Nicola Twilley is the co host of Gastropod and a writer.

[Nicola Twilley]

I am the author of How Refrigeration Changed Our Food, Our Planet and Ourselves.

[Willa Paskin]

Okay, so I'm hoping you can tell me why refrigeration changed the world in a succinct fashion.

[Nicola Twilley]

Okay, so refrigeration transformed what we eat, where it's grown, how it tastes, and, and how good it is for us and the planet. Just to add a little weight to my case, Britain's Royal Society named refrigeration the most important invention in the history of food and drink. So that's more important than the plow, more important than domesticating crops. And you can trace the impact of refrigeration everywhere from the tiniest things. The contents of our gut, microbiome, the invention of the hamburger or the hoodie. Two much bigger planetary geopolitical scale things. Irish independence, global warming. In the United States alone, there is already 5.5 billion cubic feet of artificial cold. That's almost impossible to imagine. But I mean, it's, it's. As the actual Arctic melts, they're increasingly comparable in size. So yeah, I'd say it changed the world.

[Willa Paskin]

Not gonna lie, I found this a compelling start. I asked Nicola to elaborate.

[Nicola Twilley]

For 99% of human history, people have eaten what was nearby and in season.

[Willa Paskin]

That worked until about the 1700s, when big cities started to become more common.

[Nicola Twilley]

And once people moved to cities, right away, it was a panic. People were like, oh, gosh, how are we going to feed these people? We can't get perishable food to them. We have to bring it to them, but it doesn't travel because it's perishable. It was a genuine crisis.

[Willa Paskin]

The immediate solution was to get the sources of the food as close to the city as possible.

[Nicola Twilley]

For example, herds of dairy cattle were kept in basements in London to provide milk. And those cattle would be, like, allowed above ground for two weeks a year and sent out of the city for like a two week vacation to see the sunshine.

[Willa Paskin]

In the meantime, they explored other modes of potential mass dehydration, compression, fumigation. The one solution they didn't even consider was using cold, because cold at the.

[Nicola Twilley]

Time, we did not have control of it. Yes, humans realized that ice stopped rot and mold, but they didn't have a way of making it on demand. So it wasn't going to be a solution to feeding London until we figured that out.

[Willa Paskin]

The person who began to figure it out in the early 1800s was a high school dropout and schemer from Boston named Frederick Tudor, who overheated on a vacation in Cuba and got a harebrained idea.

[Nicola Twilley]

He's like, oh, gosh, if only I could have an iced drink. There isn't any available on the island of Cuba. No ice, of course, non formed there. And so he was like, wow, if these Cubans could ever taste our ice in summer, they would go wild for it.

[Willa Paskin]

Fred started trying to ship ice from the greater Boston area to Cuba in 1806. It went about as well as you'd think at first, but Fred stuck with it through bankruptcies and arrests until he solved it and became a tycoon of a new global ice shipping industry.

[Nicola Twilley]

And he is shipping ice around the world to India, to South Africa. And once people have enough regular, guaranteed access to cold, they're like, wow, this is useful. We could use this for more than just ice cream or wine slushies. We could use this to preserve meat and to preserve milk and to solve our gigantic food crisis.

[Willa Paskin]

Scientists and engineers got serious about ice making technology until they were able to produce cold on demand. By the 1880s, they'd created refrigerated rail cars that could transport food over long distances. And to see the kind of huge cascading effects this would have, let's just look at what happened to Meat, the.

[Nicola Twilley]

Quantity of imported meat just goes through the roof. The price falls to nothing. The amount of meat people eat skyrockets in a decade.

[Willa Paskin]

And the change isn't just to our diet. You no longer had to bring living cows close to every city. Instead, you could chop them up and ship their parts cold. So in America, you get the centralization of slaughterhouses and the infamous Chicago stockyards, out of which would eventually come many of our food regulation laws. And to be able to chop up meat on an industrial scale, something called the disassembly line, which then Henry Ford.

[Nicola Twilley]

Copied for his groundbreaking assembly line, which revolutionized manufacturing. All of these things, refrigeration is the thing that allowed them to happen.

[Willa Paskin]

How? How did refrigeration lead to Irish independence?

[Nicola Twilley]

Yeah, so, I mean, with all due respect to the people of Ireland, there are a lot of facets here. But before you could ship meat around the world, Ireland was basically the meat growing resource for England. Until refrigeration comes along. Suddenly you can ship meat that has been raised in Australia, New Zealand, South America, undercut the Irish. Suddenly the price of Irish cattle collapsed.

[Willa Paskin]

For English landowners, that collapse in price upended the incentives of staying in Ireland. So many of them stopped resisting the independence movement quite so fiercely.

[Nicola Twilley]

And that is the turning point in allowing Ireland to become an independent nation again. I started out being like, that's a stretch. People are going to shoot me down.

[Willa Paskin]

If I say this.

[Nicola Twilley]

And then I would read academic papers crediting refrigeration with Irish independence and be like, oh, maybe I'm not nuts. Maybe it really is the precondition that allowed a lot of these much bigger forces that are maybe more visible to people. Refrigeration made them possible. It didn't make them inevitable, it made them possible. And listen, I only wrote about food. Cooling has even more transformative impacts that I didn't write about. If you want to, you know, truly change the world, like the most obvious.

[Willa Paskin]

Very important thing that it's connected to is global warming.

[Nicola Twilley]

Yeah. What happens when the billions of people around the world who don't have a US Style cold chain right now, get one. As it is now, it's already responsible for the same emissions as aviation. And we hear all the time, oh, you shouldn't fly. Does anyone say, wait a minute, we need to think about our relationship with refrigeration? They do not. It's just me. So, I mean, I don't ever want someone to come away from the book being like, wow, you hate refrigeration. Because that is absolutely not true. Refrigeration has changed, like I say, everything about what we eat, where it's grown, how it tastes, all of these things. Why don't we also look at its costs as well as its benefits?

[Willa Paskin]

Speaking with Nicola, I felt a bit sheepish for ever having doubted refrigeration's importance. And it's even easier to take our next subject with a claim to changing the world for granted.

[Tim Queenie]

When you think about the pyramids, for example, people tend to think about chisels and wooden sledges and ramps, but nobody ever thinks about rope.

[Willa Paskin]

Tim Queenie is a writer and lifelong sailor with a book coming out this August.

[Tim Queenie]

And the book is how a bundle of twisted fibers became the backbone of civilization.

[Willa Paskin]

So how did rope become the backbone of civilization?

[Tim Queenie]

Well, I think it's really one of humanity's big early inventions. It's right up there with learning to use fire and stone tools. You twist some plant fibers together and you get this tool that you can do all this great stuff with. You can haul things with it, you can lift things with it, you can bind things together. So you can organize all your stuff and you can tie up the family cow so it doesn't go wandering off. And I think it's very ubiquity, its very usefulness has led it to sort of disappear and become generic.

[Willa Paskin]

So this was a thing that I realized I actually had never thought about, like, what is rope? What takes fiber and makes it rope?

[Tim Queenie]

Right. What is rope? So it was made originally from just simple grasses that people would find. You take the fibers and you spin them together, just like spinning yarns. And then you spin the yarns together into what are called strands, and then the strands are twisted together, always changing the direction of twist each time you go up the ladder.

[Willa Paskin]

So it's like you're twisting and twisting and twisting, but in opposite directions, like multiple times.

[Tim Queenie]

Right. Because what you're actually creating is you're creating this sort of helix. It's pretty amazing. It sort of calls for some abstract mathematical thinking.

[Willa Paskin]

It's complex thinking humans, and not just humans, have been doing for a surprisingly long time.

[Tim Queenie]

The oldest piece of rope ever discovered is actually 50,000 years old. And it shows that Neanderthals were making rope using this method, twisting it one way and then twisting it the other way.

[Willa Paskin]

Eventually, homo sapien civilizations, like those pyramid building ancient Egyptians figured out just how powerful the application of this tool could be.

[Tim Queenie]

You know, if you have 500 workers, you need to move a 2 ton stone block. All 500 of them can't get their hands on that block to move it. But if you put a rope around it and extend it out in front, all 500 of them can haul away.

[Willa Paskin]

And it wasn't just pyramids. Rope became essential to construction of all kinds, from scaffolding to Stonehenge to Gothic cathedrals. It's also been used to communicate, sometimes symbolically. Many cultures have love knots, but also concretely. The Inca, for example, used khipu, a horizontal string with vertical strings knotted onto it in different ways to convey complex numerical and bookkeeping information. But rope's real star turn was in and on ships where it was an absolutely necessary ingredient to connecting and opening up the world.

[Tim Queenie]

One of the most amazing examples is the Austronesian and then the Polynesian peoples moving across the Pacific, completely settling the Pacific using outrigger canoes that required rope for the rigging, but also use rope to tie the pieces of the boat together.

[Willa Paskin]

And even more rope was required during a period we've already mentioned, Starting in the 1500s, the age of sail. That's when instead of or powered galleys, suddenly you had huge sailing ships, all requiring tens of thousands of feet of rope to hold the masts up and control the sails.

[Tim Queenie]

An 1840s whaling ship, for example, has something like 117 running rigging lines that the sailors have to know what each one of them are and what each one does. If you're in the middle of a storm and it's nighttime, you can't be looking at the labels. And there are no labels at which piece of rope you're going to use. You have to grab the right rope at the right time. So you have to learn what all.

[Willa Paskin]

These ropes do, hence the term learning the ropes. But since their heyday on sailing ships, ropes have slipped back into the background. You may not know much about the new, extraordinarily strong, wackily named synthetic ropes.

[Tim Queenie]

Tuaron, Technora, Spectra, Vectran, Kevlar.

[Willa Paskin]

You also may not have considered that rope was an essential part of anything as flashy as lowering the Mars rover to the surface of the red planet.

[Mark Kurlansky]

We're down to 86 meters per second.

[Willa Paskin]

At an altitude of 4 kilometers and descending.

[Tim Queenie]

Without the rope, they couldn't have used the parachute to slow the lander down. And then the lander was actually lowered to the surface on Vectran ropes.

[Willa Paskin]

Touchdown confirmed. We're safe on live. And you certainly haven't considered what Tim says might be in rope's future.

[Tim Queenie]

Well, there's a type of device that's called a space elevator.

[Willa Paskin]

The idea of a space elevator is that you'd have a super strong, super long rope made of a material called graphene. One end would be attached to the earth and the other end would be attached to a weight 60,000 miles in space.

[Tim Queenie]

And now you can have crawlers that just crawl up this tether. And when you get up to 20,000 miles, you open the doors and push your satellite out and it's in geosynchronous orbit. So it would be a great way to get to space and you wouldn't have to use any rockets. So rope, I think it's kind of a metaphor for civilization in a way. You know, a bunch of small strands of fiber, they're not that useful, but you put them together and you get this great tool and it's sort of like people working together can accomplish great things.

[Willa Paskin]

Where would we be without strings? It could be a, our most valuable thing. So rope everywhere, but hiding in plain sight. Of course, it changed the world. When we come back, something a little weirder and furrier too. Where would we be without string? Strings. Where would we be without string? For our final book, claiming to be about a subject that changed the world, we're turning to the animal kingdom and in particular to a creature of great importance to America, surprising as that may be.

[Leela Philipp]

We talk about the American bison or eagles, but how come beavers, which really literally made America, are not our national animal?

[Willa Paskin]

Leela Philipp is a writer and professor.

[Leela Philipp]

Of English and I'm the author of How One Weird Rodent Made America.

[Willa Paskin]

So just like jump in the deep end, jump into the beaver pond. How did this one weird rodent make America?

[Leela Philipp]

Okay, first of all, it's just no exaggeration to say that beavers jump started capitalism in North America. Our first foundations of wealth came from beaver furniture. But it wasn't just our first economies that were born on the back of the beaver. But that beavers literally shaped the continent. Beavers shaped the river system, that shaped the geology of North America over the eons. And that would lead to the great boreal forests and the great hardwood forests and the abundance of the Great Plains, which would lead to the abundance of animal life. They're also one of our greatest 20th century conservation comeback stories. And they have this vital new role to play helping us in our environmental future.

[Willa Paskin]

That's a lot of big claims about a buck toothed dam building furball. And before we get into them, I wanted Leela to tell me what makes the beaver so weird to begin with.

[Leela Philipp]

I'll just go beaver geek on you for a minute, if I may, Please. Okay, so first of all, this little 36 inch rodent, which is the, it's the largest rodent in North America. There are these mishmash of animal features. This like mammal head and this reptilian tail and these goose like hind feet. They're monogamous rodents. They're incredibly diligent parents. They rear their young for up to two years. They have these two sets of funky orange teeth. They can take down a tree in almost like 10 minutes. They work cooperatively, they worked over generations. And three beavers working together can move a hundred pound boulder. I mean it is capable of building the largest animal construction in the planet. The things that they can actually do are pretty stunning.

[Nicola Twilley]

And what do they use their tail for?

[Leela Philipp]

The tail is really amazing. So this flat paddle tail that looks like it's been run over by like a tractor tire. That tail is a sophisticated water sensor so they can feel water pressure. And anybody who's been around beavers knows that if you rattle the dam or if the dam is breached, they don't have to see it, they don't have to be anywhere near it, but they can feel the changes in the water pressure of the pond from far away and they'll come over to repair the dam.

[Willa Paskin]

So beavers kind of incredible animals. And it's actually because of some of their unique qualities that humans have been hunting them for millennia. We've killed them for their tails, which were considered a delicacy and an aphrodisiac for their castor, a musky secretion used in perfume and traditional medicines, and to this day in strawberry and raspberry flavorings. And then above all, there is their incredibly warm, dense fur.

[Leela Philipp]

They have 126,000 individual hairs in the size of about a postage stamp on their pelt. And so that much hair is the same amount of hair as the average human head. You know, a healthy human head. So that's very dense fur.

[Willa Paskin]

And beneath that is an even denser layer of under fur.

[Leela Philipp]

And by the 15th century in Europe, they figured out how to get the under fur out and make a kind of felt out of it. And then everybody needed a beaver felt hat. It wasn't just fashion, it was practical, you know, because it was the warmest, most waterproof material you could get.

[Willa Paskin]

Because of this, the Eurasian beaver was well on its way to being hunted to near extinction when a new source of beaver fur appeared in the new world.

[Leela Philipp]

Once it's discovered that there are beavers in North America, there is a rush on beavers, Because a beaver pelt, if you could get it back to London, had a markup of something like 900%. So you can imagine, right, everybody is coming here trying to get beaver. The Dutch, the French, the English. Everybody wants a piece of North America for beavers.

[Willa Paskin]

There were wars over beavers, Literally, the beaver wars. A century of conflict starting in the 1600s, in which European powers and native American nations fought to control the beaver trade in the east. Eventually, Europeans began to rely on their own trappers with steel cages rather than.

[Leela Philipp]

Indigenous peoples, and that accelerated the trapping, and the beaver became wiped out very, very quickly. And so they'd have to move to new areas. So the fur trade begins in New York harbor, then goes up the Hudson river, goes west along the Mohawk toward the Great lakes, and just keeps going west.

[Willa Paskin]

And everywhere fur trappers go, they're laying down routes and outposts. The story of the hunt for beavers is not some insular animal yarn. It is the story of the exploration, settlement, and colonization of this continent. It's also where we got our first multimillionaire businessman.

[Leela Philipp]

John Jacob Astor was a German immigrant who came here hoping to start a music business. But on his way, he heard about the beaver fur trade, and he quickly pivoted to trading beaver pelts in the wharves of Manahatta. And. And by the time he was, like, 25, he was already an incredibly wealthy man and founded a global trading empire.

[Willa Paskin]

The first American settlement west of the Rockies was established by Astor and was called Astoria in Oregon. Astor's company, the American fur company, was America's first multinational business and a monopoly that turned him into the richest man in the world. So it was the beaver trade that established an American oligarch and helped jumpstart capitalism in North America and played no small part in the War of 1812 to boot. When Astor extracted himself from the company, his fortunes continued to rise, but those of the beavers did not.

[Leela Philipp]

By 1810, they've exterminated the beaver.

[Willa Paskin]

For millennia, there had been around 400 million beavers in North America, but in just a few decades, they were hunted down to practically not thing. In their absence, we forgot exactly what streams and rivers and watersheds were like when beavers were around, constantly damming them up. And we might still not remember if this familiar story about an animal hunted to death hadn't taken a surprising turn.

[Leela Philipp]

Theodore Roosevelt and early conservationists were really worried about American men going soft and this idea that we needed to save the wildlife so there could be hunting if Americans lost their Wilderness, what would we have? So we had to save it. And so beavers were part of that restoration.

[Willa Paskin]

In the east, it was relatively straightforward. As industrialization proceeded, farmland started to rewild, and beavers, like deer and raccoons, proved surprisingly adept at moving into the spaces like left behind. In the west, the efforts to restore beavers could be more dramatic, like the.

[Leela Philipp]

Beaver parachute program in Idaho, you know, in 1946, where they literally drop them in boxes from airplanes to try to get them back into the Idaho wilderness.

[Willa Paskin]

Now into the air, and down they.

[Tim Queenie]

Swing, down to the ground near a.

[Willa Paskin]

Stream or a lake, and a most unusual and novel trip ends for Mr. Beaver. Today there are an estimated 10 to 15 million beavers in North America. And there are a million or so in Europe, some of whom just built a dam in the Czech Republic in the exact spot where the government was planning on building their own dam, saving them millions of dollars. And Leela says, we need beavers now more than ever.

[Leela Philipp]

You know, beavers are like this Swiss army jackknife when you have environmental problems.

[Willa Paskin]

The problem in particular is that we've destroyed our Wetlands. We lost 50% of them in the United States.

[Leela Philipp]

So that's why when we get a scalding rain event, we get all these floods. And that's why when we get a drought, we're really cooked. The river has no water to replenish.

[Willa Paskin]

Itself, but that's where beavers can help.

[Leela Philipp]

So what beavers do is they'll move into a creek or a stream and they'll build a dam, and the water will swell out, and they'll build a pond and another pond and another pond. Each pond has a wetland underneath it, a huge sponge underground that's holding at least three times as much water as you can see. And this is really, really important because that huge underground sponge is there to rehydrate the river. In times of drought, all that water will go back into the stream system if there's a drought, and that the stream won't dry out, the creek won't dry out, the river won't dry out. And then if there's a flood, the entire river system can absorb that scalding rain. So you get five inches of rain in two days, no problem. The river system can absorb it. That sponge also is acting like the kidney of the river. It cleanses the water. So by the time the water gets down into the aquifer, it's clean. So that's why beavers have this really important new role to play for us. Much more valuable than a pill. We're facing some really serious challenges. We're going to need to reset our relationship to the natural world to get through this. And beavers, this animal that really did make America. We're so obsessed with, like, looking at the moon and the stars for all our answers. But actually, I think the answers that are going to save us in the 21st century are probably under our feet.

[Willa Paskin]

I like to think of myself as a curious person, but I also think of myself and maybe like to think of myself as a skeptical one. And as I said earlier, my interest in thing, biographies was motivated by more than a little skepticism, a little eye roll. I felt any time I saw that someone was doing this yet again. And then I actually sat with more of these books, read them, thought about them, talk to more of their authors. What I found is the ones that work really are not just about one weird thing that changed the world. That's the hook, the selling point, the trick. Really, what they're about is how intricately and unexpectedly connected the world is now that we're all connected may be obvious. It may in fact be a cliche, a version of the butterfly effect. And it's easy enough to roll one's eyes about that. But what some of those books reminded me of is when those connections are illustrated correctly, they can still be kind of astounding. So, yes, this format is a publishing trope. And for sure, not all of these books are fantastic or created equal. And you bet not everything changed the world as much as everything else. But starting small, looking hard, sussing out connections until a single surprising thing gives you insight into the biggest ones, that's an exercise I can get behind.

[Henry Grabar]

Yeah, I mean, I think, to me, at least, it reflects a kind of philosophy of. Of wonder at the complexity of the world.

[Willa Paskin]

I thought my colleague Henry Grabar, the author of Paved Paradise, How Parking Explains the World, put it very well.

[Henry Grabar]

To me, it's almost like a philosophical shift in how you think about how the world is put together. And one that I. I think is kind of like a nice way to perceive the world, because you are constantly asking yourself, you know, why does the leaf of a tree have the shape that it does? How did a brick come to be that size? You know, just because I'm looking out the window at a brick wall, right? And it's like, if that's your attitude towards life, you never run out of interesting things to look at or think about.

[Willa Paskin]

I agree with Henry. And I also don't think you'll be surprised to hear that there's already a book about the brick.

[Leela Philipp]

My love was.

[Willa Paskin]

This is Decoder Ring. I'm Willa Paskin. I want to please ask you to check out all of the books we talked about in this episode.

[Nicola Twilley]

I swear there is so much more.

[Willa Paskin]

In depth and detailed information in them than we possibly could have gotten into. If in this episode, and if you're a Slate plus member ready to become one, please stick around. While putting this episode together, we talked to a lot of people who wrote really fascinating books about things that changed the world, and we couldn't fit all of them here. But if you're curious how red meat changed the world, well, we have got a conversation for you.

[George Gibson]

The push of United States power into the west and the Great Plains was.

[Tim Queenie]

All about cattle ranchers. Cattle were both a tool of and a justification for conquest.

[Willa Paskin]

If you want to hear more, you can sign up for Slate Plus. If you aren't already a member, you can subscribe now on Apple Podcasts by clicking Try Free at the top of the Decoder Ring show page or visit slate.comdecoder/ to get access wherever you listen. This episode was written by me and produced by Evan Chung, Decoder Ring's supervising producer. We produced Decoder Ring with Katie Shepard and Max Friedman. Merritt Jacob is senior Technical director. We'd like to thank Joshua Specht, Dan Cappell, Tina Lupton, Dan Kois, and Nancy Miller. If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email [e-mail] and you can also call us on our new Decoder Ring hotline. That number is 347-460-7281. We'd love to hear any and all of your ideas for the show. We'll see you in two weeks.