History isn't about being first

Did you know that Johannes Gutenberg didn’t actually invent the printing press? Did you know that Christopher Columbus didn’t actually discover the Americas? Did you know that Thomas Edison didn’t actually invent the light bulb?

I’m going to guess that you actually did know all of those things, as they seem to all be the kinds of well known factoids that people on the internet love to disprove. The Chinese and Koreans had printing and movable type before Gutenberg created his press. Leif Erikson travelled to the Americas before Columbus, not to mention Native Americans who discovered it millennia before, and the invention of the light bulb is a more complex history than I care to recount here, save to say that Edison was only one in a long chain of people contributing to the science of incandescence.

Now of course more historical accuracy is always better than less historical accuracy. However. I can’t help but feel that oftentimes, in their refutation of the above factoids, people often tradeoff between adding facts to create a more complete narrative, while forgetting to talk about why these subjects might be important in the first place. Like, why should anyone care that Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press? It is important because it greatly reduced the cost of written material, which enabled mass literacy in Europe, which allowed for the diffusion of information, and ultimately helped spur the Protestant Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution, etc. Yeah it’s cool that China and Korea had printing and movable type before Gutenberg, but how did it actually impact their society? Did it radically decrease the price of textual material? Did it allow for mass literacy and the diffusion of information? Did it have some other impact that printing did not in Europe? While it did slightly reduce the cost of broadly distributed textual materials compared to manuscripts (while Asia may have had printing, it seems not to have been mechanised before Gutenberg, as setting and pressing was all done by hand), the broader societal implications of the invention were slim to none. Gutenberg’s invention was important because it enabled social revolutions in Europe. Printing in east Asia is a trivial fact, its greatest impact being to have set the groundwork for Gutenberg’s invention (even in Europe, printing existed before Gutenberg, though it was not mechanised and did not have movable type).

Similarly with Christopher Columbus, there is a sense in which he didn’t discover the Americas. Yes there were people there before him. Yes, there were even Europeans there before him. But also, Columbus’ voyage CHANGED THE WORLD (not necessarily for the better, this isn’t a defence of celebrations of Columbus, merely his importance in the narrative of history). First, let us tackle Leif Ericson’s voyage to the Americas. Again, Leif’s voyage is definitely a cool trivia fact, but what does his voyage actually matter? How does the world actually look different if he never sets food on Vinland? Butterfly effect notwithstanding, probably not one iota. I’d be willing to wager that he is only as well known as he is, simply because of the prominence of Columbus in popular history, and Lief being brought in as a footnote to comments about Columbus’ “discovery”.

Next, let’s address those quotes around the word “discovery”. I want you to imagine for a moment that sometime in the future, we find an intelligent alien civilisation elsewhere in space. MIRI puts out a press statement celebrating humanity’s discovery of intelligent alien life. CNN picks up the press conference, and sends out Wolf Blitzer to report:

Wolf: MIRI today has issued a statement claiming that they have discovered an intelligent alien civilisation on the planet B174i-i, nicknamed “Harriet”. They claim that definitive proof of the aliens came last night when they managed to decode ultra-low frequency radio broadcasts picked up by their participating network of satellites, which they found to include regularly encoded messages, thought to be a form of video communications. MIRI has not yet released images, however they’ve released this statement concerning the find:

Wolf, quoting MIRI, text on screen: At 9:37 EDT yesterday, a group of scientists led by Taylor Nun managed to decode a message inadvertently broadcast by a heretofore undiscovered intelligent species from planet B174-i. The exact meaning of the contents are as of yet unknown, but clearly represent an intelligent and regular form of communications broadcast by this civilisation. Further details to follow. Never again shall humanity ask “are we alone in the universe?” after this momentous discovery.

Back to Wolf: Of course we should note that the word “discovery” in this context may be considered inappropriate, as this civilisation is no doubt already aware of their own existence.

Does not Wolf’s final comment seem to miss the point? Has not new knowledge been generated? Is the world not now changed thanks to MIRI’s discovery? Is the nature of MIRI’s discovery really different from Columbus’? Did not Columbus generate new knowledge, both for Europeans, and Americans? (note that the presence of the Norse in North America was never widely distributed knowledge either in its own time or the time of Columbus, was only brought back into prominence as a possibility in the 19^th century, and only became confirmed in the 1960s) Was the world not then changed after this voyage? Is not then the question of whether he discovered the Americas mostly pedantry, and the real point is to examine the actual impact of his voyages? Can we not just say that his discovery was independent of Native Americans having discovered the same land?

Then finally there’s the case of Thomas Edison, for whom I don’t think I could do a better job describing his historical impact than the Wikipedia page I’ve stolen this entire idea from:

Historians Robert Friedel and Paul Israel list inventors of incandescent lamps prior to Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison. They conclude that Edison’s version was able to outstrip the others because of a combination of three factors: an effective incandescent material, a higher vacuum than others were able to achieve (by use of the Sprengel pump) and a high resistance that made power distribution from a centralized source economically viable.

Historian Thomas Hughes has attributed Edison’s success to his development of an entire, integrated system of electric lighting.

The lamp was a small component in his system of electric lighting, and no more critical to its effective functioning than the Edison Jumbo generator, the Edison main and feeder, and the parallel-distribution system. Other inventors with generators and incandescent lamps, and with comparable ingenuity and excellence, have long been forgotten because their creators did not preside over their introduction in a system of lighting.

Thomas P. Hughes, in Technology at the Turning Point, edited by W. B. Pickett

The problem principally comes from two different places: first, in the fact that generating memes that are both truthful and sticky is really hard. At some point, you’re trading off between the reproductive success of the meme, and the completeness of the originally encoded information. No doubt the misconceptions the above-linked articles were seeking to correct arose in part due to simple memetic evolution – Gutenberg invented the printing press is the minimal possible version of “Gutenberg created a printing press which was the first of its kind in Europe to introduce mechanisation and moveable type, building off of the existing manual woodblock printing that already existed in Europe, which itself had travelled West from its origin point in China which already had moveable type, but not mechanised printing”. Quite a mouthful, and quite obvious why the simplified not exactly wrong but not exactly right version won out in the popular imagination. Ditto for Columbus and Edison.

Second is the fact that people use history as a means of national glorification – Johannes Gutenberg and Thomas Edison are symbols of German and American ingenuity respectively, and Christopher Columbus is a symbol of Spanish, or European civilisation. Some people want to bask in the warm glow of the accomplishments of these men, and so tack on their own country’s contributions to these histories, while others resent the actual impact of these men on their society (especially Columbus), and so seek to deny that they have any accomplishments that might be celebrated. So people attempt to reduce the accomplishments of these men in order to provide a space for their own national heroes (though in the case of Columbus, much effort is actually put into simply pointing out his actual impact and how celebration of him as a person was really inappropriate in the first place).

I’m not sure if this second point is really solvable – I can’t imagine that asking people not to have a sense of national pride at the accomplishments of some of their historical compatriots would ever actually work, or that other people would seek to attempt to bask in the limelight of those most important historical figures.

Canadian history is a prime example of the worst of these two traits – trying to claim some of the limelight from important historical characters and events, or blowing up historical footnotes into defining moments – the invention of the light bulb, the voyages of the Norsemen and John Cabot, and Vimy Ridge are just a couple of events that, growing up in Canada, you’re led to think had been Canadian events that had been pivotal to the course of history, even if the Canadian involvement in them was little to none, or they really didn’t impact the broader course of history at all.

Ultimately my plea is this: when attempting to convey historical information, an explanation of why the facts being learned are important is more important than the strict completeness of the chronology of the story – understanding that Gutenberg led to the protestant reformation is more important than understanding that printing in China led to more printing in Europe. Understanding that Leif Ericson was the first European to visit the Americas is less important than understanding the impact of Christopher Columbus’ voyages, and the exchanges and conflicts within and between Europe and the Americas that they caused. The tradeoff between completeness and stickiness should always prioritise keeping the impact of the story/event over the completeness of the story itself. Studying history is more than just studying a collection of facts – it is understanding how those facts weave together into a narrative that shaped the world as it was and as it is, and that in and of itself is more important than the completeness brought by any footnote, as the footnotes are always optional reading.