These twenty-six people — twenty-seven, counting the Herschels as two — are drawn in these books as literature. Here is the plain record: when and where they lived, and what they left behind.
A Gentle Rain
Thirteen lives spread across some nineteen hundred years. None of them could have met the others.
1st century — Hero (Alexandria, Roman Egypt)
11th century — Bi Sheng (Northern Song China)
12th–13th century — Al-Jazari (Artuqid dynasty, in what is now southeastern Turkey)
15th century — Jang Yeong-sil (Joseon Korea)
17th century — Maria Sibylla Merian (Germany)
18th century — John Harrison (England)
18th–19th century — William and Caroline Herschel (England) · Mary Anning (England)
19th–20th century — Fritz Haber (Germany) · Alice Ball (United States) · Barbara McClintock (United States)
20th century — Claude Shannon · Malcom McLean (United States)
BI SHENG (畢昇, d. c. 1051 · Northern Song China)
A craftsman of common birth. He shaped individual characters in clay and fired them, inventing movable type printing — type that could be set, taken apart and set again. Some four hundred years before Gutenberg. Almost nothing of his life is recorded; a short passage by the scholar Shen Kuo in his Dream Pool Essays is nearly all we have.
HERO OF ALEXANDRIA (c. 10 – c. 70 · Alexandria, Roman Egypt)
Mathematician and engineer. He built the aeolipile, a sphere set turning by steam, counted as the first steam engine. He also devised temple doors that opened by themselves and a vessel that dispensed holy water when a coin was dropped in. He had the power of steam in his hands some seventeen hundred years before the Industrial Revolution, and it was never put to work — it remained a curiosity.
CLAUDE SHANNON (1916–2001 · United States)
Mathematician and engineer. His 1948 paper "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" founded information theory. He defined the bit, the smallest unit of information, and opened the way to treating any message as a number — the theoretical ground of digital communication and computing. He was also known as an eccentric, fond of unicycles, juggling and machines built for their own sake.
JOHN HARRISON (1693–1776 · England)
A self-taught clockmaker who began as a carpenter. He built a marine chronometer that kept accurate time on a rolling ship, solving the centuries-old problem of finding longitude at sea. He gave his life to four successive versions of the clock, and was denied fair reward by the authorities for decades before recognition came in his old age.
MARY ANNING (1799–1847 · England)
A fossil hunter from a poor working-class family. She unearthed ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs and other creatures no one had seen, contributing decisively to the understanding that the earth is very old and to the rise of palaeontology. As a woman she was barred from the learned societies, and credit for her finds commonly went to gentlemen geologists.
FRITZ HABER (1868–1934 · Germany)
Chemist. He found how to synthesize ammonia from nitrogen in the air — the Haber-Bosch process — which opened the way to artificial fertilizer, and a large share of the world's population is fed by it today (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1918). He also led the development and release of poison gas in the First World War, and came to be called the father of chemical warfare. Being Jewish, he was driven out of Nazi Germany and died in exile.
ALICE BALL (1892–1916 · United States)
A Black woman chemist. Chaulmoogra oil was the only treatment for leprosy, then considered incurable, but the body would not absorb it. She solved this by altering the oil chemically so that it could be injected — the first effective treatment. She died at twenty-four, and for a time the credit was taken by another and her name was lost.
BARBARA McCLINTOCK (1902–1992 · United States)
Geneticist. A lifetime of work on maize led her to transposable elements — "jumping genes" — showing that genes are not fixed in one place. She was far enough ahead of her time to be ignored for years; when her work was finally borne out she received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine at eighty-one (1983).
AL-JAZARI (Ismail al-Jazari, 1136–1206 · Artuqid dynasty, in what is now southeastern Turkey)
Court engineer. His Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices (1206) records a great many automata, among them an elephant water clock and a boat of mechanical musicians whose tune could be changed by moving pegs. He is counted a forerunner of robotics.
JANG YEONG-SIL (蔣英實, dates unknown · Joseon Korea)
Born a slave of a government office, he was taken into King Sejong's service for the skill of his hands. He built the self-striking water clock Jagyeongnu and the Ongnu, the sundial Angbuilgu, and the armillary sphere Honcheonui. The rain gauge is often credited to him as well, though the Annals of King Sejong record its beginning with the crown prince — later King Munjong — who, troubled by drought, had the depth of rainwater standing in a bronze vessel measured. After he was punished in 1442 when the king's palanquin broke, no record remains of his life or of when he died.
WILLIAM HERSCHEL (1738–1822) and CAROLINE HERSCHEL (1750–1848) · brother and sister, German-born astronomers in England
Together they built enormous telescopes and swept the night sky. William discovered Uranus, the planet beyond Saturn — the first planet ever found with a telescope, which doubled the known size of the solar system. Caroline not only recorded and calculated her brother's observations but discovered eight comets of her own, and is counted the first woman to be paid for scientific work.
MARIA SIBYLLA MERIAN (1647–1717 · Germany)
Naturalist and painter. At a time when insects were thought to arise of themselves out of rot, she raised caterpillars herself and documented metamorphosis — caterpillar to pupa to butterfly — in observation and in paint. By drawing insects together with the plants they feed on she became a forerunner of ecology, and past the age of fifty she travelled to Surinam in South America.
MALCOM McLEAN (1913–2001 · United States)
A businessman who began as a truck driver. In 1956 he introduced the standardized shipping container and the practice of moving it intact between truck, ship and train (the voyage of the Ideal-X). By cutting the cost and time of handling cargo dramatically, he laid the foundation of modern world trade. He is called the father of modern container shipping.
Bread of Wisdom
Thirteen lives spread across some twenty-five hundred years. None of them could have met the others.
c. 6th century BC — Laozi (China) · the Buddha (ancient India)
6th–5th century BC — Confucius (state of Lu, China)
5th–4th century BC — Socrates · Plato (Athens)
4th century BC — Mencius (state of Zou, China)
Date unknown (ancient) — Job (the land of Uz) · Qoheleth (Israel)
1st–2nd century — Ban Zhao (Eastern Han China) · Marcus Aurelius (Rome)
4th–5th century — Hypatia (Alexandria, Egypt)
early 11th century — Murasaki Shikibu (Japan)
16th century — Sinsaimdang (Joseon Korea)
LAOZI (traditionally c. 6th century BC · China)
The founding figure of Daoism, whose very existence is uncertain. He is said to have been an archivist of the Zhou court, though this is not certain. As the world fell into disorder he rode west on an ox, leaving behind five thousand characters. That text is the Dao De Jing, which teaches the Dao that cannot be spoken and wu wei, action without forcing — one of the roots of East Asian thought.
THE BUDDHA (c. 6th–5th century BC · ancient India, near present-day Nepal)
Born Siddhartha Gautama, a prince of a small kingdom, who left home after seeing old age, sickness and death. Enlightened beneath the bodhi tree, he taught the suffering of life and the way out of it — the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path. He never called himself a god; his teaching became Buddhism and spread across Asia.
CONFUCIUS (551–479 BC · state of Lu, China)
Born Kong Qiu. In the disorder of the Spring and Autumn period he sought to set people and the world right through ren, humaneness, and li, propriety. He wandered the states looking for a ruler who would employ his way, and never found one. Through the Analects, compiled by his disciples, he became the ground of East Asian ethics and education for more than two thousand years.
SOCRATES (c. 470–399 BC · Athens)
He wrote not a single line, and spent his life in the public square asking and answering. He left behind the saying that he knew only that he did not know, and the method of questioning that lets a person arrive at understanding himself. Condemned for corrupting the young, he drank the hemlock. Preserved in the writings of his student Plato, he stands at the beginning of Western philosophy.
PLATO (c. 428–348 BC · Athens)
Socrates' student. Having watched his teacher put to death, he gave his life to philosophy. He taught that beyond the visible world lie unchanging realities, the Forms, and is famous for the allegory of the cave. He founded the Academy, the first school in the West, and his dialogues are counted the source of Western philosophy entire.
MENCIUS (c. 372–289 BC · state of Zou, China)
The principal Confucian thinker after Confucius himself. He argued that human nature is good, illustrating it with the child about to fall into a well: anyone who sees it feels a stab of pity. He preached humane government, and is honored as the Second Sage, next after Confucius.
JOB (date unknown · the land of Uz)
The central figure of the Book of Job, a work of Hebrew wisdom literature. Blameless and upright, he lost everything to a calamity with no cause he could find, and argued to the end against undeserved suffering and the silence of God. Whether he lived, and when, cannot be known; the name stands for humanity's oldest question, the suffering of the innocent.
QOHELETH (date unknown · ancient Israel)
The speaker of Ecclesiastes in the Hebrew Bible; the name means the one who gathers, the one who proclaims. Tradition assigns the book to King Solomon (10th century BC), though scholars place its composition later. In the words traditionally rendered "vanity of vanities," it is the voice of wisdom looking more honestly than anyone at the fleetingness of life.
BAN ZHAO (c. 45 – c. 117 · Eastern Han China)
China's first woman historian. She took up the official history of the Han, the Han Shu, unfinished at her brother Ban Gu's death, and completed it. She taught the empress and the women of the court, and scholars of note studied under her. Her Lessons for Women has drawn both praise and criticism from later ages.
MARCUS AURELIUS (121–180 · Roman Empire)
Emperor of Rome and Stoic philosopher. While governing the empire and moving between frontier campaigns, he wrote each night a private reflection addressed to himself. Known only after his death, those writings are the Meditations, and they are read still for their wisdom about accepting what cannot be controlled and governing one's own mind.
HYPATIA (c. 350/360–415 · Alexandria, Egypt)
A woman scholar who taught philosophy, mathematics and astronomy at the center of a school, in an age that did not allow women the lecture floor. She built instruments for measuring the positions of the stars with her own hands. She was killed by a mob while the city was torn by religious conflict, and is remembered as one of the brightest minds antiquity produced.
MURASAKI SHIKIBU (c. 973 – after 1014 · Heian Japan)
The woman who wrote The Tale of Genji, counted the oldest full-length novel in the world. Serving as a lady-in-waiting at court, she wrote in kana, the script allowed to women, of dazzling love and its passing. She is regarded as the writer who caught most deeply mono no aware (物の哀れ), the tender sadness of things that fade.
SINSAIMDANG (1504–1551 · Joseon Korea)
Painter, calligrapher, poet, and mother. In an age when it was difficult for a woman to put her name forward, she left her mark with delicate paintings of small things — grasses and insects. She was the mother of the great scholar Yulgok Yi I, and is honored in Korea today as a model of both motherhood and artistry.
The stories of the thirteen above are told in Bread of Wisdom: A Guest from Outside Time.
Kindle — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H64WXBN3
Paperback — https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0H66CYK7M
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