The reason why Traditional Chinese has so many characters is that it doesn’t really work phonetically, so words cannot be built up from single sounds. Instead, there is a separate character for each word or syllable. Originally, written Chinese was based on simple graphic pictures (pictographs) of natural objects. There are pictographs like this dating back to the eleventh century BC. Many written languages started like this and moved towards a phonetic alphabet, but Chinese characters only have a hint at pronunciation. Instead, as it developed, Chinese combined pictures to create new abstract meanings or ideographs. Thus a combination of the pictures for sun and moon meant ‘bright’ while a combination of the pictures for woman and child meant ‘happiness’. Tellingly, three pictures of women together mean ‘treachery’. Chinese characters also developed as pictures came to be used for words that sounded the same when spoken. So the picture character for an ear of corn developed into the character for the verb ‘to come’ because these words sound similar when spoken.
Several different writing styles developed as China split into different kingdoms between the seventh and third centuries BC, but when the country was unified under the Qins in 221 BC, the Qin style was imposed everywhere. The Qin style was substantially modified under the Han (206 BC–220 AD), but modern ‘Traditional’ Chinese characters are essentially no more than a development of the ancient Han characters.
Chinese characters look impossibly complex at first, but they are always made up from a particular number of strokes of the pen in a particular order. So the character for ‘mouth’, which is basically a square, is written with three strokes: first the left side, then the top and right together in a single stroke, and lastly the base. Typically, too, the character has two parts, with the right-hand side signifying the meaning in some way and the left, called the radical, signifying the sound. In the most common system, there are about 214 of these radicals, which are the closest thing Chinese has to Western letters.
Written Traditional Chinese is hard even for Chinese children to learn, and in the 1950s, it was felt that this was holding back any improvements in literacy. So the government introduced two controversial measures. The first was to simplify the most commonly used few thousand characters, making them easier to learn and quicker to write.[2] It also used just one simple character in place of several elaborate traditional characters. This is a dramatic reduction of course, and while making Chinese hugely easier to write, it loses some of the richness and complexity of the language.
But Simplified Chinese wasn’t just about literacy. This was Mao’s China, and it was all part of the attack on China’s bourgeois intellectuals that reached a head in the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and Mao’s death in 1976. The complexity of Traditional Chinese was so tied up with the intellectual elite that teachers of it were persecuted and even murdered. Taiwan came to regard the imposition of Simplified Chinese as a communist plot and banned it until 2003. Even on the mainland, many did and still do regard it as a terrible betrayal of Chinese heritage.
The enforced introduction of Simplified Chinese, however, was highly effective. Literacy rates did soar, although this was maybe more because of the wider spread of education than the writing system. Indeed, China has some of the highest literacy rates in the world – an astonishing achievement for a country where the vast majority of people were barely educated peasants little more than half a century ago.
Simplified Chinese is now the dominant form of writing in mainland China. Indeed, less than 5 per cent of Chinese people on the mainland write in Traditional Chinese – although in places like Taiwan and Hong Kong the Traditional characters are still used, and they are making something of a comeback among intellectuals on the mainland where they are seen as more sophisticated. Officially, the law on the mainland sanctions the use of Traditional writing only for ceremonial purposes and for historical literature, but shops and businesses often use it for displays and logos, even though it is not strictly legal.
The debate over the relative merits of Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese is detailed and intense. Some argue that Traditional Chinese is just unsuited to the modern world, with the character for ‘electricity’ symbolising rain to link it with lightning, whereas now, of course, electricity comes from a wide range of sources. Others say that Simplified Chinese loses much of the richness of Traditional Chinese, with the Simplified Chinese character for ‘love’ losing the heart that made the Traditional character so evocative. This is a perfect symbol, say critics, for the limitations of Simplified Chinese – it is a writing system without a heart.
Simplified Chinese is now massively dominant but there is still considerable energy behind Traditional Chinese, especially coming from Hong Kong and Taiwan. Whichever wins out ultimately, if either does, it is more likely to be because of its political backing than its genuine merits. A traditional Chinese proverb says: ‘Listen to both sides and be enlightened; listen to one side and be left in the dark.’ At the moment there is slightly more darkness than light.
[1] The reason for this particular comparison is that both Portuguese and Romanian are ‘romance’ languages with an underlying connection because they are both derived from Latin.
[2] The second, even more drastic, measure was to try to dispense with Chinese characters altogether and write Chinese instead in the Roman alphabet. This Romanised Chinese was called pinyin and essentially involved using 25 letters of the Western alphabet (excluding the letter ‘v’) to create the sounds of Mandarin Chinese, along with accents above each syllable to create the four different tones. Pinyin never caught on in China, and the idea was quickly dropped, but pinyin is very useful for foreigners since it allows any Westerner, after a little basic instruction, to read and pronounce Chinese words without knowing any Chinese characters. It was the widespread adoption of pinyin that led to the change of Peking to Beijing and Mao Tse-tung to Mao Zedong. The pinyin version is much closer to the way Chinese people would say these words, and street signs in China are often written in pinyin as well as in characters.
#28 Refrigeration
Imagine a world with no cold beer. No ice cream. No butter or milk. Fresh fruit and vegetables for only a few months a year – and even then outrageously expensive. No fresh fish, and definitely no sushi. Meat a costly luxury. No cut flowers for that romantic date …
All of these things we could well manage without, but what a loss to our modern lifestyle! Refrigeration has transformed the way people in cities eat and drink. Foods that you might once have been able to get only if you lived on a farm – and even then only at certain times of year – you can get night and day simply by opening the freezer. Exotic foods that come from the other side of the world, such as bananas or tropical prawns, are there in your local supermarket all year round, kept fresh as the day they were harvested by refrigeration. This variety of fresh food not only brings us immense pleasure but also provides us with a diet that is much healthier than we’d otherwise have.
Chilling preserves food by reducing the growth of microorganisms such as bacteria and mould that make food go off and be rendered potentially poisonous.[1] It also restricts and slows the activity of chemical enzymes and other chemical activity that spoil food, making fruit, for instance, go soft and mushy and brown, and butter go rancid. Complete freezing can preserve some foods[2] even longer because the freezing of water in the food into ice makes it unavailable to the microorganisms that need it for growth. It may also preserve the food’s nutrient content.[3]
It’s been discovered how all this works only recently, but people noticed how cold and ice could keep things fresh for longer thousands of years ago. At least 3,000 years ago, the Chinese were harvesting ice in winter and storing it in caves to preserve food, while the Romans collected snow from the high mountains and kept it in straw-covered pits to cool water and wine, and for cold summer baths known as frigidaria. For centuries, people preserved food by keeping it in cooler cellars and larders. Sometimes, the wealthy had ice brought dow
n from the mountains to store in thickly built ice houses, ready to add to cool drinks or make ice cream.
In the nineteenth century, demand for fresh food soared even while the growth of cities was increasing the distance between farmers and consumers, and food merchants began to experiment with ways of keeping food fresh in transit to the customer. Specially insulated trucks with ice bunkers at either end or on top kept fish and dairy products fresh on their journey, while insulated food stores were set up in cities and kept cool with ice shipped in from considerable distances. Norway became a major supplier of natural ice to Western Europe. New Englander Frederick Tudor became known as the Ice King, shipping North American ice all around the world.
In the USA in the late nineteenth century, millions of ordinary households acquired ‘iceboxes’ – insulated metal boxes with ice compartments that could be used for keeping meat, fish and dairy products fresh, and for cooling beer. Ice carts became a familiar sight in many neighbourhoods. Whenever the ice melted, people would put out a note for the iceman saying ‘Ice today, please’ and he would drop off a big block of it. Such was the demand for ice that every river, lake and pond was raided in winter, including Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts, made famous by the writer Henry Thoreau. Unfortunately, many of the sources of ice were polluted by sewage and industrial waste, and soon natural ice began to be seen as a health hazard.
The idea of artificial cooling dates back thousands of years. The Ancient Egyptians, for instance, would put boiling water in pots on the roof at night, so that it might cool as it evaporated. The Persian polymath Ibn Sina (Avicenna) created a coil in which aromatic vapours evaporated and cooled the coil. In sixteenth-century Italy, people often cooled wine by smearing the bottle neck with saltpetre (sodium nitrate) and rotating it in water, a process described in 1550 by Blasius Villafranca, a Spanish physician living in Rome, in a book entitled Methodus Refrigerandi ex vocato Salenitro Vinum Aquanque ac Potus quodvis aliud Genus. As saltpetre dissolves, it takes the heat out of water and makes it cooler. English natural philosopher Francis Bacon (1561–1626) heard about this technique and began to apply it to other food. He caught pneumonia in 1626 while testing the effect of freezing on meat preservation by going out in a blizzard and stuffing a chicken with snow. Bacon had his chips a month later but the chicken was preserved. It was the great Irish chemist Robert Boyle who began to work out some of the science behind it all, and wrote an important treatise called An Experimental History of Cold (1665).
We now know that artificial cooling can work in two main ways. Chemical cooling (as with saltpetre) works because of the heat taken out of the water as the salt dissolves. Mechanical cooling can be either evaporative or vapour-compression. Evaporative cooling occurs because liquids take heat energy from their surroundings in order to evaporate, which is why sweat keeps us cool as it evaporates from our skin.[4] Evaporative cooling is especially effective with volatile liquids such as alcohol and ether.[5] Vapour-compression cooling, discovered by John Dalton (1766–1844), works by compressing a gas or vapour then letting it expand. As it expands, it draws heat from its surroundings.
Most modern refrigerators use a combination of the two. First the vapour is compressed (usually with a piston), before being passed through a cooling coil where it is cooled and condensed into a liquid by contact with water or air. When it emerges from the coil, the vapour expands suddenly and partially evaporates, drawing in heat from its surroundings. Finally, it goes to an evaporator unit where it evaporates completely, causing further cooling, and returns to the compressor to begin the cycle again.[6]
In the nineteenth century, inventors experimented with various techniques to create a mechanical refrigerator. The first successes were with vapour-compression. American inventor Oliver Evans designed but never built a vapour-compression refrigerator in 1805. An American living in Britain, Jacob Perkins, made the first artificial refrigerator in 1834, also using vapour-compression. And in 1842, American physician John Gorrie created the first ice-making machine. Doctor Gorrie also had the idea of using refrigeration to cool the air and help his malaria patients recover, but this pioneering air conditioning was never built.
The commercial breakthrough for refrigeration came in the 1850s, with machines such as those devised by Alexander Twinning in the USA and James Harrison in Geelong, Australia. By the 1860s, a dozen meat-packing houses across Australia were using Harrison’s refrigeration system. Within twenty years, refrigerator ships such as New Zealand’s Dunedin and the English SS Selembria were plying the oceans, carrying frozen meat and dairy products right around the world from New Zealand and Australia and South America. Livestock farming began to boom on a massive scale in Australasia and South America, and Europeans started to enjoy the pleasures of plentiful and cheap meat and dairy products – even though they originated on the other side of the world.
The impact on farming was dramatic, since particular areas or countries could now specialise in products they were especially suited to, no matter how far their markets. And countries no longer had to feed themselves, but could rely instead on the abundance of particular foods in other countries far away, allowing an upsurge in industrialisation and development right across the globe. The brewing industry, too, was installing its own refrigeration units, and ice cool German lagers began to spread across the world.
For a while, refrigeration remained largely in commercial and industrial units, because the ammonia used as a refrigerant was far too toxic for homes, which continued to rely on natural iceboxes. But in the 1920s, the Frigidaire company created CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) that went under the trade name Freon. Of course, now we know that CFCs, while harmless to humans, damage the world’s protective layer of ozone in the atmosphere, without which we’d be exposed to harmful UV rays from the sun.[7] But back in the 1920s, CFCs seemed like a miracle – cheap and harmless and perfect as refrigerants because they evaporate at low temperatures. Domestic refrigerators became a reality, and by the Second World War, millions of homes across Europe and North America had their own personal refrigerators, allowing people to keep food fresh as never before. It was like having a farm full of fresh food in your kitchen, as well as ice cool drinks even on the hottest day of the year.
Now, neither our lifestyle nor the global food industry could function at all without refrigeration, and refrigeration has found numerous other uses, too. The oil business uses it to help refine oil. The metal industry uses it to temper and improve steel.[8] The pharmaceuticals industry uses it to make drugs such as blood-pressure-lowering statins. Hospitals use it for everything from safely storing live vaccines and blood samples, to keeping donor organs in good condition long enough to reach transplant patients. Morgues use it to preserve cadavers in good condition for the funeral or for a police investigation. The woollen business uses refrigeration to reduce moth attacks. Munitions factories keep explosives cool. Some people even believe they might preserve their bodies by freezing for a future time of immortality. A chilling thought.
[1] Milk turns sour, for instance, because bacteria in the milk ferment the lactose (milk sugar) into lactic acid.
[2] Salad vegetables and soft fruits don’t freeze well because the formation of ice crystals breaks down the cell membranes, turning the food soft and mushy.
[3] Just how well, varies from food to food. Before some fruits and vegetables are frozen commercially they are blanched by brief immersion in boiling water to deactivate enzymes and yeasts that would otherwise continue the spoiling process, even in the freezer. The blanching reduces the vitamin C content by as much as 20 per cent. Freezing has almost no effect on the nutrient content of meat and fish, though water-soluble vitamins and minerals are sometimes lost from fish during defrosting.
[4] Self-cooling drink cans work by evaporative cooling. As you open the can, a desiccant inside a special compartment within the can spills into the liquid. As it does, it evaporates, cooling the liquid sharply.
[5] American scientist and statesman
Benjamin Franklin and British professor John Hadley used bellows to evaporate alcohol quickly from the bulb of a thermometer and discovered that they could bring the temperature down dramatically, well below freezing point. ‘From this experiment,’ Franklin wrote wryly, ‘one may see the possibility of freezing a man to death on a warm summer’s day.’
[6] Recently, inventors have been experimenting with different systems such as sonic and magnetic refrigeration. Sonic refrigeration, developed in the Sounds Cool refrigerator, uses high-pressure sound waves to compress (and expand) helium gas and create a cooling effect. Magnetic refrigeration relies on the discovery that an alloy of gadolinium, germanium and silicon gets cool when exposed to a magnetic field. When a wheel made of this powdered alloy is spun next to a magnet, it creates a simple, cheap refrigeration unit.
[7] CFCs have now been replaced by refrigerants such as R134a, R-407C (‘Suva’) and R410a (‘Puron’).
[8] In the late 1990s, cryogenic (below –150°C) tempering of metals was developed to make better baseball bats, golf clubs, amplifiers and much more.
#27 Marxism
The impact of Karl Marx’s ideas on the twentieth century is incalculable. A century after his death more than half the world’s population lived under governments that claimed to draw their inspiration from Marxism, and both monstrous tyrants such as Stalin and Mao and professed freedom fighters like Che Guevara saw themselves as his followers. Millions of people of myriad political intents and persuasions once called themselves Marxists. And if the high-water mark of his influence seems to have passed with the collapse of Soviet communism, it does not diminish the extraordinary power of Marx’s ideas.
The World's Greatest Idea Page 14