45 Forward | Searching for the Origin of Today’s Technology in the Middle Ages

45 Forward | Searching for the Origin of Today’s Technology in the Middle Ages

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welcome everyone to another edition of 45 forward where our mission is to help you our listeners from los angeles to long island make this your second half of life even better than the first over the last half century we've been this a blizzard of technological advances that have had a profound impact on our daily lives but if we take the time to reflect for a moment and look around at the commonplace devices we take for granted we would discover that many of them actually had their origin during an era we don't normally associate innovation middle ages in today's episode author and producer john w farrell takes us through a fascinating series of stories in his book the clock and the camp shaft that describe how dozens of inventions that are part of virtually every aspect of contemporary technology had their roots in medieval times between the 11th and 14th centuries john takes us behind the invention of keep the key mechanism in the mechanical clock perhaps as a means of automating the ringing of church bells he'll explain how cylindrical axles known as camp shafts originated in windmills centuries before they evolved into a key component of the internal combustion engine we'll take a walk through architectural innovations like flying buttresses which allowed the design of grand cathedrals then there were social innovations such as universities ignited by the popes as a way to protect the church against european monarchs and the marines astrolabe and the compass tools that help spur the expansion of european trade enable navigators like columbus to take real chances outside the comfortable commerce between mediterranean port cities perhaps most remarkable in john's themes throughout his stories is the refreshing discovery that while many of the world's most important inventions were due to the engineering of particular individuals many others came out of the work of everyday people whose names may be unknown today but whose legacy lay the foundation of the modern world so now john welcome to the show thank you so much uh it's delighted delighted to be here yeah now before we uh dive into a little bit of your background and the book john i just wanted to mention it is a real pleasure for me to have you on the show you know i i have a wide range of topics many of them pragmatic covering health and finances or aging in place or long-term planning and so it's great to have you know a 45 moment of reflection oh here thank you so much yeah where we just sort of take away anyway let's just take a step back and look around at life where we are right now and what's going on around us and this was a great opportunity for me to do that so again welcome to the show and um uh so before we actually talked about the book let me uh ask you about yourself a little bit about you know your journey because i find many of my guests in addition to having great you know things to say about some various subjects a very interesting life themselves in terms of their evolution so you you basically began as a science writer right yes or actually i was interested in creative writing um since i was a kid um middle school high school i edited the high school literary magazine that kind of thing and then as an undergrad um i had to take you know there was a science requirement and um i picked a year-long survey survey course uh in the history of astronomy i mean i just thought it was astronomy but i didn't realize the professor was also a professor of the history of astronomy and i just fell in love with the topic and i and actually considered whether i should major in history of science um but i was so far behind in calculus with everybody else i thought by the time i catch up it'll be time to graduate so i stuck with uh english and american literature but i started reading um history of science and then um as i my first writing job was actually for union newspapers government employee union newspapers which was quite a way to kind of break into journalism um and then the history of science aspect was kind of a serendipity um what happened was uh there was a kind of a crackpot article in um national review written by a guy who claimed that einstein was probably wrong and a friend of mine can show you why and i was like so outraged that they just they published that without any kind of review i wrote this long angry letter to the editor and they published it um so from there in i started getting requests to do book reviews and stuff like that but um so i mean i was already interested in the topic but then when i realized hey you could actually maybe make a living doing this it sort of um took off from there yeah yeah well it's interesting it is a you know it's it's a good niche it's an it's an important niche i think today more than ever you know good science writing is important you know there's there's uh i remember um several years ago one of my mentors a man named william zinzer who wrote this book called on writing well it's excellent yeah yeah um so he had a chapter on science writing and good clear science writing is really you know a craft you know and it's uh making it accessible making clear um i i did a couple of i guess one of our assignments was you know explain how something works and uh you know i was like that's harder than you think to explain clearly how something works whatever it is um and i think that in general i think a good clear science communication for the public is important i i guess um i did some teaching at the um the school of journalism and communication at stony brook um a couple years ago and and of course now they have the al and all the you know um program for the center for communicating science so i think what we realize today in this sort of age it's important to have people who really can do this well and you're one of them so glad to have you on the show oh thank you yeah sure sure i actually think um too that um the history of science component i found um as i was learning the science that if i understood why things were discovered from an historical perspective that made it easier to understand the science when you know you had to learn all the you know the problem sets as opposed to just the abstract you know giving you say einstein or or darwin or whatever for in a textbook because you have to learn it uh and i found that actually learning how it evolved historically uh made the ideas even clearer and right and that also kind of helped yeah and does help i think with the writing of it right right so did you in the course of research did you have sort of a like an aha moment of like when you were looking at these various inventions like wait a minute these are all happen you know in middle ages you know isn't that this that interesting that that's you know sort of uh beyond the the stereotype yes yeah in fact i think my my first book was um um about the catholic priest who came up with the first version of the big bang theory the book was the day without yesterday and um father lemaitre who was a belgian catholic priest uh a world war one veteran and um i got the opportunity to write about him uh basically because i realized no one else had written about him in the us and uh he was one of those figures you'd kind of see in the background if you write if you you know read a general history of um cosmology or the big bang or einstein or relativity le metro he'd always be in there as a footnote or something or the guy who came up with what they called the cosmic egg hypothesis but uh as i was doing a few different um articles uh on einstein uh he kept showing up in some of the research articles and i thought this guy was probably a lot more cool than we realized and um an editor basically um gave me an opportunity um what happened was i was pitching an editor in new york would you like to read my fiction and he was like you know fiction's really hard to sell uh but i like these articles you've already written would you like you know do you have an idea for non-fiction books so i just popped back by email well what about a book about this catholic priest and he's like that's a great idea you know that's literally how it happened um but as i was researching that book i had to go further and further back in time uh i mean this is the general kind of scientific revolution stuff leading up to einstein um and as i was researching that i came across more and more things that just went further and further back like into the middle ages and i just thought oh you know i those were far older than i thought i know i thought they were more kind of recent inventions um right so that kind of kind of um lit the fuse for me in a sense for what late became the newer book right right yeah it certainly is you know refreshing that you know breaking the stereotype of you know the middle ages is just a time of like middle earth you know everybody doing battle with one another and you know feudal kings and dukes fighting it out yeah bring out your dad yeah yeah yeah right right so tell us a little bit about the process of writing the book itself did you um you know what was some of your research um any surprises in in doing so um yes i um i didn't when it's funny because we were my agent and i were shopping the book idea around for a few years and i was actually starting to you know worry that okay this is never going to happen and then we got the offer from prometheus books but they wanted the book kind of in a hurry so oh boy i had to kind of literally block out my time like i'm gonna need to take you know three to four months just reading and then you know you know put my butt in the seat and just write you know and get it to get it done in time uh and so um i reached out to a couple of people with one particular historian of science in europe whom i've been friends with for 15 years and uh he specializes in not the middle ages but sort of um mathematics in the renaissance but he was really plugged in and i just said look um i'm going to need some help on this can you help me you know come up with a bibliography here's what i need to read here's here's my um table of contents and uh so basically um i hired him to help me uh again because of time constraints and it was great because he would send me books to read i'd run out to the library uh and just pile them up at home do the reading then i would set like give myself a certain number of weeks to write a chapter i'd send him the chapter and also to two or three other historians that uh i've known either from since school or i've met since and they all critique them quickly and send back comments so it was kind of like a um uh an assembly line like i'll write a chapter while they're reading the previous one and then just kind of you know put the whole thing together to get it done in time then of course covet happened and everything stalled out and i realized afterwards you know you probably could have taken a lot longer to do this than you thought but you know that's life as you know as a journalist yeah yeah yeah it's right it's it's a lot of you know wait and wait and then hurry up and finish and win like all this in a while okay yeah yeah it's it's never um uh i i had a a woman on recently a psychologist talking about you know the the virtues of patients these days and one of her definitions i forget who where she got it from but but it was like patience is is being able to um deal with things that that don't happen in the order that you expect and i think that's very true of writing and publishing yeah yeah yeah so uh let's so why don't we let's talk about some of the uh the chapters um uh well let's let's start with your your title inventions you know the clock and the cam shaft i guess uh um now i happen to know what the camshaft is because when i was when i was uh you know uh i guess maybe about 10 my parents who are very interested in educational toys i got my brother and me um you know the uh the visible there was the one thing called invisible man and there was another thing called you know the visible you know machine and it was an engine and so you had to put together an engine so i learned oh this is what a camp shaft is but if it weren't for that i'd have no idea so why don't you talk about how that cam shaft was invented it's funny you should say that because if you google a camshaft usually the first image that pops up is an internal combustion engine right with the intake valve right right yeah so um the camshaft was probably invented um uh well i should say its use um the way we understand was probably in the early centuries of the common area uh common era both in china and in the roman empire i think initially scholars thought that it was invented in china and then kind of moved west uh but more recently they've discovered um evidence in roman spain in ruins and stuff that they were using mills uh with trip hammers to um pound ore uh to pound ore um probably for the making of weapons for their armies right around the same time that the chinese were using cam shafts in their mills to haul rice basically to um you know for food purposes so um but the invention basically um what was unique about it was it was a way to uh turn rotational energy into linear so mills had been around already for several centuries both vertical water mills and horizontal water mills again all across the middle east all across the roman empire and in various sizes i mean small villages could kind of whip together a horizontal water mill high up in a mountain you know with a relatively strong stream to grind grain and so forth um and then with bigger water sources you know the romans could build huge vertical water mills and uh and use them um but the camshaft came along i think at a time when i think they realized wow we can go in a lot more directions than just grinding grain for food if you throw in a camshaft with cams literally these little fins um now you can do all sorts of things that are uh well like for example the chinese were hauling rice but then you realized well we could also drive the forge bellows um for um the blacksmiths um you could uh um basically um power a bunch of trip hammers out of sequence for a fulling cloth or for pounding or uh and then if you add um a crank instead of a camshaft you can actually power sawmills um and again there's evidence of this uh from the roman empire stone saws which is really kind of remarkable again in the kind of early centuries of the comedy era so once that that camshaft you know came into being it was rapidly employed for all sorts of um aspects of the economy you know food clothing building um um wood uh and um and you know um purposes of um anything they could think up uh using water power um right windmills came later uh again this is something that was invented um some of the earliest windmills showed up in persia they were kind of ingeniously dug out of canyons uh and they could only work um uh from one direction in other words you kind of designed this thing to face the north so when the wind blew from the north it would go through these kind of self-dug uh canyons with uh windmills inside them right and they think independently the europeans invented windmills um in the northern part you know finland north europe and they what they uh ingeniously figured out was way to uh build put the windmills on turrets so that you could just adjust it to whatever direction the wind was coming from um so there were post mills which were kind of simple ones that were almost like built uh on uh like a tree trunk something really thick and then they started to build towers like castles um stone towers and put the windmills up on top of those uh those were kind of the later middle ages um and uh but uh they were kind of uh they were ingenious in the sense that they realized look we don't want to just use these when the wind's coming from the north we want to be able to adjust quickly right and then these things in some cases would be powered by um you know you'd have some poor guy outside on a horse and you'd have to kind of pull the turret around to change directions um but that uh that was a european invention probably like the uh 11th 12th centuries wow wow well that's a really interesting evolution of and as as you point out i think in for a number of your inventions it's really a confluence it's not just one even as as it was done by people whose names we might not have known but it wasn't just from one direction it was from different cultures and different influences and uh you know that's a great story so john we're going to take actually a quick break um uh when we come back we'll be talking much more with you um author and producer john farah will get on to the clock and other inventions so folks don't go anywhere lots more to talk about with john farrell welcome back folks we're talking with john w farrell the author of the clock and the camshaft now before we continue i wanted to let you know you can find out much more about john's work including his articles posts and reviews short fiction and so forth at his website farrellmedia.com that's f-a-r-r-e-l-l media dot com so john before the break we were talking about the many um influences that led to the camp shaft and and i know that the camshaft itself led to was a component of uh the other you know title invention that you mentioned the clock um so talk about how that how that contributed the clock and and what uh what that story was about sure um so um the clock i think what's fascinating about the clock is that um it was one was we don't really know who invented it the scholars assume it was probably a group of blacksmiths working with a group of millwrights probably at the instigation of a bishop and it wasn't really to invent necessarily a time keeping device what the what it looks like they wanted to do was um automate the ringing of church bells either in a church or in a monastery and up until that point you know you had water clocks which weren't that reliable you know you'd fill a basin with water put a hole in it and let the water kind of run out slowly at a certain amount of time and as the water dropped it kind of you know went by the markers inside the bowl right and then somebody had to stay up and keep refilling it and then of course you know you had candles could also be used as time keeping devices uh but again not really that reliable um especially if it got drafty in the castles of northern europe so um to automate church bells um they came up with a device um uh and what's fascinating is that it's sort of uh the reverse of what we've just been talking about you know water wheels and camshafts to you know to power various things uh in the case of the clock what they wanted to do was figure out is there a way we could use gravity to power something you know we've been using water we've been using wind is there a way to harness the force of gravity to power a machine and um the problem there though was that well the power everybody knows gravity you know we've all fallen we know um what gravity feels like but what they had to do is figure out a way to exploit it but inhibit it just enough so that it could be used uh to tell well to basically to tell time to the point where okay the bells are gonna go off at midnight so the monks can get up and do their prayers and then the bells are gonna go off again five hours later at dawn so the monks can get up and do their prayers so what's ingenious about it is the device they use um it's called a virgin foliate was basically um a way to interrupt the axle from just basically spinning out of control and the weights plummeting to the floor so you create um uh and a device to inhibit it and basically what it was was a camshaft in reverse so they built um if you look at it and you can google this and there's an illustration in my book it almost looks like a weird coat hanger which with adjustable weights on either side um and then a shaft basically a kind of a camshaft except it's it's vertical not horizontal and there are only two cams on it one at the top and one at the bottom and they're sort of in reverse direction so that the one at the top uh bottom stops it again and they kind of go back and forth you know this is where tick tock tick tock comes from it's this little this kind of you know carefully designed um inhibition mechanism so that um the weights can keep pulling the axle around but very very slowly uh and what kind of uh fascinates me is um the amount of trial and error that must have gone into this but it also the kind of intuitive genius to realize that there was such a thing as inertia i mean we think of newton you know the laws of inertia and um you know physical dynamics and stuff but these people figured it out without any kind of mathematics without any theory without any principles of dynamics as we would understand them they just worked they just knew what they knew from working with their hands and you know creating mills and creating all these things and came together and said we're going to come up with this device and see if it works and then how often do we have to repair it you know can we adjust the weights and figure out what seems to work the best and uh this was they figured this is probably at the end of the 1200s um again probably to build a device for church uh but then once it succeeded it it took off i mean all across europe i mean it became a kind of a competition thing well our church has to have a bigger clock than them so let's build ours and then you know uh within a century i think you had the king of france establishing uh a standard of time for the whole country which was yeah exactly fascinating and um and as you know we've all become slaves to the clock ever since thanks guys yeah well but you know i think that uh i think the stories that you uh tell behind these inventions are are really interesting because i think that you know we we usually think about inventions at least uh i do you know in terms of you know more conventional you know thomas edison in his lab you know people doing you know experiments and these are basically experiments in real life people have problems to solve and and they just as you said it was instead of trial and error in in a laboratory it was trial and error in daily life because they had and do something fix something make something work better you know so i think that's interesting um yeah i'd like to imagine that um they were sitting around you know after a long day's work maybe with the beer at the fireplace saying okay uh the weights were too heavy this time it didn't work let's try this again tomorrow you know right right and how often the blacksmith had to go back and make smaller weights or you know yeah that's all right this is a three a three beer weight you yes exactly right yeah yeah so um for for you know journalists like me uh of course people talk about the history of uh journalism and it's always the you know the gutenberg and you mentioned the printing press but as you point out um a printing press without uh accessible paper and cheap paper you know is uh it's not worth much so talk about the about paper is the role really of paper in terms of promoting you know the printed word oh yes yeah gutenberg's a fascinating story um you can't help feeling terrible for the guy because you know he put all this work into inventing the printing press um and uh and perfecting you know the right kinds of ink so that it can produce i think his first he produced about a thousand copies of the bible and he'd been loaned the money uh by a wealthy lawyer um and then after selling not many copies uh he basically went bankrupt and the lawyer you know basically took all the equipment away from him and he spent the rest of his life working in someone else's printing shop and i think in sort of dying in obscurity um but around this time a little shortly later um the invention of paper of course was in china and this definitely moved westward through islamic kingdoms islamic civilization and in italy is basically in italy that the same thing mills mills were now devised to make paper make cheap paper um basically pounding all the uh the rags that they would use to kind of come up with uh the material and once that was done once paper this is an interesting thing is the initial drive for paper was for the emerging merchant class in italy because they needed paper to write down to keep accounts about everything they were selling everything they were buying um and then this very quickly got adopted into bookmaking so that within you know again a very uh short amount of time books could be produced much more cheaply and so that they wouldn't be just you know these expensive bibles sold to like you know rich clerics but now everyday people could buy their own bibles uh and pamphlets and uh and and this opened up the door towards to um all sorts of uh possibilities um the bad news for the catholic church of course was that in those days when people once people started reading their own bibles they started questioning a lot of the things that the church had been teaching and said hey wait a minute this isn't in the bible where did this come from and uh you know that's that's one of the main instigators of the protestant reformation wow and uh but also down the road also the scientific revolution because again as literacy spread you had more and more people wanting to go to the university and study science right so yeah um another thing that um you know people sort of take for granted you know we go and we visit these uh magnificent churches but uh you know it took some specific inventions uh like you mentioned things like the the flying buttresses which you usually don't learn about until you take an art history class in college but um you know just talk a bit about uh how that came to be yeah yeah well that's that's one of the rare cases where we kind of do we can attach a name not so much to the invention of the flying buttress but to the inspiration that kind of drove all the inventions that were kind of put together to build the cathedrals and that was uh abbot soujir um he was a belgian abbott um who was um kind of working in reaction to what was the kind of leftover you know roman style of architecture you know churches were basilicas you know kind of in the shapes of crosses they were huge where they were you know they were sturdy but um the way they were built the windows were very small and even on nice days you know going to church was kind of a gloomy experience so they'd have to light lots of candles and so forth and the abbott wanted to figure out there's got to be a way to get more light into our churches so that they're more uplifting uh and this was right around the same time too where glassmakers were inventing you know stained glass you know using colors to make uh a glass so the um the architects were like okay we want to build these uh so that we can have bigger windows that means thinner walls well how are we gonna you know we've got thinner walls that's dangerous so then they came up with the flying buttresses the outside sort of buttresses well these will hold up the walls and we can make the walls as high as we want in some cases you know well over 100 feet um and then we can put in these huge windows and and really kind of cheer up the interior of the churches and as they were doing it they they also kind of came up with um the pointed arches just the doorways which again could kind of bear more weight than the older style rounded archers of the roman style and then rib vaults um which were an invention to kind of again hold more weight on the roofs uh so basically you had the cathedrals um going a lot higher with a lot bigger windows and um and to this day people you know they're a huge tourist attraction uh as you know if you've been to europe yeah yeah yeah well they are magnificent they they're i'm gonna say that bringing the light like that and sort of in combination with these stained glass windows you know yeah interesting going back to your premise of trying to solve a problem or trying to make something better or but in in you know in real life as opposed well certainly hard to build a cathedral and in a lab so yes yes so that's that's interesting and it's funny when you when you think about now like um um how long how long you know we kind of gripe about you know it's gonna take five or ten years to build a new highway overpass and right these cathedrals often outlived the people who started to build them in fact you know it would take sometimes two to three generations uh to see them through to completion and and i still marvel at the idea that they actually got done that somewhere halfway through the second generation said ask for this let's do something else you know they actually finished them right right yeah absolutely absolutely um many of your things uh your your inventions are you know actual products and so forth but one of the things i found interesting too was you know you talk about um not just specific devices but what i i guess i refer to sort of as social inventions um you know like uh universities and labor guilds um being the outgrowth of the legal revolution so let's talk about that a little bit i'm fascinated by that yes so that was um um in the uh eleven hundreds uh the popes um we're getting worried about uh their autonomy the encroachment of um european kings monarchs the dukes and to protect themselves um i think it was pope gregory vii he basically basically initiated what they call a papal legal revolution he basically um it was gratian i think one of the uh the monks who basically synthesized all of the law texts that they had available to them available to them so what was left over from the roman empire the old roman law what they knew from the bible you know the law codes from the bible and then the laws from um the local european kingdoms you know the germanic kingdoms and synthesized all of these into a kind of a new com comprehensive law so that the church could kind of protect its own autonomy the big thing the popes were worried about was they didn't want kings appointing bishops the pope wanted that right reserved to himself and to protect again um all of the priests and the churches from being seized or taken over by the governments once they did that um um again kind of other people realized hey we can also use this law to protect ourselves so like the blacksmiths or um uh the weavers realized hey we can create a guild a little literally we're gonna incorporate ourselves we'll have a charter uh and this is who we are and we can kind of like stand up for our rights uh and this also kind of uh came to um uh be really important for the universities the cathedral schools as they got bigger and bigger as more and more students came in uh they created their own charters and you know the university of paris the university of bologna and oxford and again they became kind of independent entities for the first time uh and even though again the bishops tried to exercise as much control over what they taught which is something i can get into a little later um they never let nevertheless felt that they were independent from um uh the religious authorities and one again wanted to kind of govern themselves right right yeah it's interesting uh you know that again in telling your stories uh how many of these things are really the confluence of uh different influences you know political and religious you know kind of in concert and sometimes in opposition yeah yeah and um you know so don we're going to take another quick break uh but when we come back i want i want to talk a little bit more about that and also about you know the confluences of different civilizations that contribute to some of these inventions so um so folks um we're going to come back after a quick break with john farrell don't go anywhere welcome back folks once again i'm talking with john farrell author of the book the clock and the cam shaft by the way if you're looking looking him up don't forget it's john w farrell because there are other ferals who have different middle initials and so our john farrell is john w farrell but anyway so john before the break we were talking about um you know um various confluences of uh of influence and one of them i wanted to elaborate on is it's just how you know islamic civilization and during this period uh contributed to the culture advances in the west you know and so you you mentioned you know for example preserving the ancient greek texts which we don't think of that something that uh islamic culture did oh exactly yeah i mean i grew up you know um thinking that oh yeah aristotle plato a lot of that stuff we just kind of inherited in a direct line you know through the roman empire right uh and not realizing that well there was kind of an interesting detour that they didn't teach us about when i was a kid right and that said after the collapse of the roman empire especially in the west there was there were you know the eastern empire the byzantine empire um kind of didn't have as catastrophic a decline as the west did but basically everything was lost in terms of intellectual uh most of aristotle almost all aristotle a lot of plato a lot of medicine a lot of philosophy disappeared and then um in the 11th and 12th centuries as right around the time of the crusades and which is of course kind of ironic you had monks going to spain basically because they had heard that the arabs had uh more reliable astronomical charts and these would be necessary if they were going to improve their uh means of predicting way in advance you know what are the dates for easter what are the dates for you know all the kind of holy days so there was a kind of religious motivation there to get kind of better better um better data uh and once they got to toledo and this is again during the process of what they call the reconquest uh the spanish kings were slowly retaking the iberian peninsula away from the muslim rulers and toledo turned out to be just a wealth of um of texts uh not just the astronomical stuff they were looking for but once they arrived there they realized oh my god all of aristotle all all of these texts that they thought had been lost after the fall of the roman empire were available in arabic so i was like oh we need to translate this back into latin and around the same time something similar was happening in sicily now in sicily you actually had um the original greek text of of aristotle and plato and so forth um but um and they very soon sent people there to translate those uh back into latin as well so basically over the course of 150 years right around the time when the cathedral schools were evolving into the universities you had a sudden huge influx into these schools of translations of aristotle plato of arabic medicine arabic philosophy jewish philosophy and it just had a huge impact to the point where some of the bishops of paris were becoming alarmed about you know uh well what is in these books and seems to you know contradict christian doctrine and there were fights you know during the course of thomas aquinas life for example there were fights about what could and could not be taught and as i mentioned before the universities kind of stood their ground they kind of hemmed in hard and you know complained about it but they never banned aristotle which is what some of the bishops wanted uh because of some of his um pagan philosophies and that's just a fascinating um era because you had this all going on at the same time we were trying to retake jerusalem you know basically the crusades were going on so it was a war but at the same time you had these fantastic cultural uh transformations happening right at a very friendlier level yeah yeah yeah during the break i was talking to you a bit about um um a book that i read a little while ago called ornament of the world which was interesting it's sort of the time period of covers is a little bit before yours but basically the middle ages and it's it's really the story of um of how um you know uh christian islamic and jewish populations lived in peace for several hundred years in southern spain you know and i guess and under the under the the rule of of uh uh an islamic ruler who had to flee northern africa because he was involved in in in battle for battles for control of you know who was going to establish the caliphate and he he lost so he had he had to flee for his life but but when he settled in northern spain he created this uh culture of tolerance essentially in which a lot of what you're talking about happened you know and and it was the islamic culture that that he basically um use as a framework you know to keep the peace but also tolerate you know many different um cultures and religions and influences so again i think these are things we kind of don't think about we you know we kind of um uh you know sectorize you know inventions and cultures and a lot of things are just a fascinating um integration of lots of of influences yeah and and ways of thinking too yeah yeah yeah absolutely absolutely so before um we we only have uh you know a shorter last segment but i wanted to you know give you some time to just talk about something your other work i mean so you we mentioned your earlier book on the day without yesterday um uh you're uh you you're uh you've done other work you've done some fiction you've done uh you know uh reviews um talk a bit about the relationship between the fiction and non-fiction i know that one of the things you mentioned earlier is absolutely true when you when you do pieces of fiction and you try to get an agent they're like oh fiction i can't i can't sell fiction and then they they gravitate back to your non-fiction until they realize you're a really good writer and then they said well maybe show me some of your fiction let's see what what happens now you know but anyway so just tell me about the relationship of different you know genres of your work um i've published um a handful of short stories over say the last um i hate to say the last 20 years in different uh in different magazines some of which no longer exist as and this is another thing you'll be able to understand as a journalist is how quickly some you know exciting new magazines come and go [Laughter] right but um yes i started out initially as a fiction writer and then moved into nonfiction because you know that's where the opportunities were and uh but but and also um i've been interested in film um another thing i did was like you know writing scripts um one of the um um interesting things that uh opportunities that came up was um i got to write a script for the late british actor christopher lee and it was sort of based on um his autobiography his service during world war ii and blended with the history of my wife's family my wife's from slovenia and um something in his biography kind of inspired this idea for a film script so i wrote the film script for him uh which he really liked and he never got around a chance to um producing it uh so a few years ago um i got together with some actors and pulled a little bit of funding together and made the film myself and it's up on amazon uh now and uh but again it's not history of science but it is history and uh and fascinating history about what happened uh in europe after the end of world war ii a lot of these kind of dark stories and it was interesting because my wife's parents would often talk about these massacres that took place in slovenia at the very end of the war and i remember thinking i've never heard of these is this just something they're talking about and and then when christopher lee's when i read his autobiography he made a reference to them and i thought oh there's something fascinating here so that was basically um like a a one-hour feature uh which was really interesting and we combined footage from slovenia which i shot there and we shot it over here um using professional stage actors with british accents of course yeah but um so that was that was a different a different thing to do um but i really enjoyed it yeah and it's called a fine pavement right fine pavement yes right yeah right and people can see it up on that on amazon use amazon yeah it's on amazon yeah amazon prime yeah good yeah they're interesting you know one of the things that you know i've i've done just a little bit of work in phil mostly in graduate school but i think it's an instructive experience you know i think you really certainly when you you're writing books you um um you know the importance of sort of the structure of the book does it really work and and with film it really teaches you that lesson yes if the structure doesn't work the film you can't watch it it doesn't make sense yes so right right yeah exactly yeah readers will have a lot more tolerance for tangents when you're writing non-fiction that they will absolutely not tolerate when you're trying to tell a story exactly exactly yeah so uh uh so before we close though i'd like to then also just talk a little bit now just prospectively going forward you know looking at some context um what do you think are some of the um you know the the more important inventions and more contemporaneous times um physically uh well of course uh speaking of camshafts um and we just take them so much for granted but i think you know the internal combustion engine the automobile right has been transformative uh both for good and for bad uh the bad part is you know what it's done to the environment you know right sometimes you when you look at the earth at night sometimes and see these patterns of traffic and realize oh my god it's just like millions and millions it's like what is it doing to the uh the surface of the planet but on the other hand a car what a car can do for a small family you know in the middle of nowhere i mean the freedom it can still give you in terms of being able to travel to places to work and to make something of your life it's still hard to kind of um i mean i think it's still something that has to be appreciated i think in america it's it's probably less so but i think in places you know like china in india where you know and in south america where economies are still kind of like lifting themselves up automobiles are a huge factor and uh and again it's it's kind of a strange uh thing where you feel like on the one hand you know they rely on fossil fuel and you know we we're going to use it all up eventually we have to figure out another means of doing it but at the same time we've created something that you know is a extremely useful uh fruitful product for um for poor people for people who you know need to travel great distances to work and so forth right you had some of that too in the middle ages when they were deforesting the hell out of europe and didn't realize that right right yeah i guess another thing today too is a medical technology right i mean i think you know we kind of take it for granted now like well i don't know we take phantom but but it's all around us and certainly as we were developing covert vaccines you know um you know the the rapidity of of well accumulated knowledge over the years to create these things i i think that's seems to me that's one of the areas where there's going to be a lot of innovation and you know medical and health and sort of uh combining you know sort of personal you know lifestyle and issues and and health in general and just discovering things that we never really discovered about our biology right oh yeah and i think it's amazing i know it it's been hard the pandemic but when you think how quickly they came up with a vaccine it's just you know it's it's almost like world war ii level ingenuity like let's just go do it and make it happen right right yeah one area which probably would need a whole other show to talk about but but i i was interested in your your article about you know artificial you know intelligence and you know you wrote a great piece i think i think you can find it on your website right is it on your website yeah it's on my website it's a common wheel yeah yeah yeah so that's an area i think we we really just started to scratch the surface and i'm not sure we as you as you put it they understand that the promise versus the peril of it yes uh i'm kind of a science fiction geek so i like to be optimistic about it um but yes there is i mean the the downside of it we're already seeing is is how automation is putting so many people out of work because you know companies figure they can save money by um just coming up i mean they're not like robots like smart robots the way we think of it but they they're smart enough to put you know a whole class of people out of work which is uh which is not a good thing right yeah yeah i think it also raises a lot of issues that you mentioned which is really understanding what well what these machines do versus what is true consciousness i don't think we really understand what that is and these things you know yeah you can program them to do things you know but they're still basically you know um you know humans putting in you know programming you know and structuring the kind of thinking so they're not only thinking on their own but uh you know but that's that will be the subject for a whole other conversation that hopefully will have with you some uh sometime soon that would be great yeah so unfortunately john we that's we'll have to leave it today but i want to thank you for a very informative insightful unusual conversation uh and people have questions for you how do they what's the best way to reach you uh i'm on twitter and um on my website i've got a contact page okay my email yeah but i mean it's like john w farrell at gmail it's the easiest email he could break up okay good good okay folks so if tell your friends if they missed my conversation with john today you can still listen to it as podcast on voiceamerica.com search for my show 45 forward um you can find an apple google podcast spotify heart radio or go to my website brobelresources.com and click on 45

forward so be sure to join me next monday 12 noon pacific 3 p.m eastern time i'll be talking with rhonda schwartz from the administration up for community living a federal agency that's leading the nation's observance of older americans month which is every may and she'll be talking about this year's theme age my way so folks until then keep moving forward 45 forward

2022-06-24 23:38

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