How much of our history is uncharted? I’m guessing over 99%, right? Countless events have occurred in the past that we know nothing about today. I first explored this idea in a previous post (here) and now find myself revisiting it as we consider the history of one of mankind’s earliest inventions – the lever.

The Lever

The physics behind the lever stumped many for many years. As I delved into the history of this and the other simple machines—wheel and axle, pulley, wedge, and screw— I found myself drawn to statements about the associated scientists, such as “[their works] are now substantially lost.”

Consider this about history

Consider that the history we read addresses only those artifacts or “fossils” that we have discovered or only those stories of the survivors or the winners.  In other words, consider that we only become aware of a small subset of the large sample pool.  For example, when we read about professional gamblers, we likely learn that each had good luck early on that enabled them to eventually succeed.  But we’re not reading about all those who started out to be professional and lost everything.  They don’t end up in the history books.  No one takes into account the “silent evidence”, as Nassim Taleb put it, of those who lost, those who died, the books that were never published, the books that were published but disappeared, the stone tablets that erosion erased—and the scientific findings, ideas, and dead ends [1] that never saw the light of day. 

Sadi Carnot and the thin threads of history

Also consider that some of the breakthrough ideas that we do learn about and that changed the course of science only barely survived.  Sadi Carnot wrote his famed book on the steam engine and hardly anyone read it.  But for the stroke of good fortune his book might never have been discovered by William Thomson (Lord Kelvin) and Rudolf Clausius.  Where would we have been then?  Who else was prepared to discover the 1^st and 2^nd Laws of Thermodynamics?  Would someone have discovered an entirely different set of laws that achieved the same solution, based on other properties of matter that we’re unaware of?

Redefining what ‘first’ means

So anytime the word “first” is used to describe someone’s achievement, we must take care to more accurately use the words “first recorded” or perhaps more accurately, “first recorded, survived. and found.”

Understanding the lever paved the way to the conservation of mechanical energy

Explore how understanding the lever paved the way to the concept of potential energy—weight x change in vertical height—in Chapter 9 of my book, Block by Block – The Historical and Theoretical Foundations of Thermodynamics.

Footnotes

[1] Regarding an extensive piece of experimental work by James Joule that went nowhere, D.S.L. Cardwell wrote, “It was to prove one of the dead ends that litter the record of science, that receive little or no mention in the history books and that are completely unknown to the practicing scientist.”  – Cardwell, D. S. L. 1989. James Joule: A Biography. Manchester ; New York : New York: Manchester University Press ; Distributed exclusively in the USA and Canada by St. Martin’s Press. p. 73.

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