Willa Paskin (5:07)
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.
