History of ideas
Inventions and the people who imagined them.
1:40Sun Tzu's Art of War: count before you fight
Sun Tzu's arithmetic of war: 100,000 men, 1,000 ounces of silver a day, one captured cart worth twenty of your own, and the ratio that decides each move.
1:40Machiavelli's The Prince: fortune is a river
Machiavelli gave fortune half our actions and compared her to a flood: the same river that sweeps the plain passes harmlessly where banks were built in time.
1:40Plato's cave: why shadows fool us
Plato's cave, with the geometry of its shadows: a figure carried nearer the fire throws a bigger shadow. Then the climb to the sun and the return to the dark.
1:40Marcus Aurelius' Meditations: the present is all you can lose
Marcus Aurelius lived 21,510 days, under 2% of the three thousand years he imagined. Yet he argued the longest and shortest lives lose the same: the present.
1:40Orwell's 1984: how a cut becomes a rise
In 1984 a chocolate ration cut from 30 g to 20 g is hailed as a rise, and boots at 43% of plan become 109% once Winston rewrites the forecast.
1:40Thoreau's Walden: what a house really costs
Thoreau priced his Walden cabin to the half cent: $28.12½, less than a year's student rent, against $800 and years of work for an average house.
1:40How the printing press changed books
From hand-copied manuscripts to Gutenberg’s reusable metal type: how one invention made books cheaper and spread them across Europe.
1:40Leonardo’s aerial screw
Leonardo’s 1480s aerial screw: a spiral linen sail about 5 m in radius. Momentum theory gives an ideal power of about 1.45 kW to lift a 75 kg person.