Abracadabra228
Two years before Pliny the Elder died, during a daring rescue of…
Two years before Pliny the Elder died, during a daring rescue of friends after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, the legend- ary Roman historian and scholar completed his proto-encyclopedia, JVaturalis Historiae. In it he tells the story of a device winemakers had recently invented, a new kind of press that employed a screw to “concentrate pressure upon broad planks placed over the grapes, which are covered also with heavy weights above.” There is some
debate among scholars over whether Pliny may have been rooting for the home team in attributing the invention to his compatriots, since evidence for the use of screw presses in producing wines and olive oils dates back several centuries, to the Greeks. But whatever the exact date of its origin, the practical utility of the screw press, unlike so many great ideas from the Greco-Roman period, ensured that it survived intact through the Dark Ages. VVhen the Renais- sance finally blossomed, more than a millennium after Pliny’s de-
STEVEN JOHNSON
mise, Europe had to rediscover Ptolemaic astronomy and the se- crets of building aqueducts. But they didn’t have to relearn how to press grapes. In fact, they’d been tinkering steadily with the screw press all along, improving on the model, and optim izing it for the mass production of wines. By the mid-1400s, the Rhineland re- gion of Germany, which historically had been hostile to viticulture for climate reasons, was now festooned with vine trellises. Fueled by the increased efficiency of the screw press, German vineyards reached their peak in 1500, covering roughly four times as much land as they do in their current incarnation. It was hard work pro- ducing drinkable wine in a region that far north, but the mechani- cal efficiency of the screw press made it financially irresistible.
Sometime around the year 1440, a young Rhineland entre- preneur began tinkering with the design of the wine press. H e was fresh from a disastrous business venture manufacturing small m ir- rors with supposedly magical healing powers, which he intended to sell to religious pilgrims. (The scheme got derailed, in part by bu- bonic plague, which dramatically curtailed the number of pilgrims.) The failure of the trinket business proved fortuitous, however, as it sent the entrepreneur down a much more ambitious path. H e had immersed himself in the technology of Rhineland vintners, but Johannes Gutenberg was not interested in wine. H e was interested in words.
As many scholars have noted, Gutenberg’s printing press was a classic combinatorial innovation, more bricolage than break- through. Each of the key elements that made it such a transfor- mative machine- the movable type, the ink, the paper, and the press itself- had been developed separately well before Gutenberg printed his first Bible. Movable type, for instance, had been inde-
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pendently conceived by a Chinese blacksmith named Pi Sheng four centuries before. But the Chinese (and, subsequently, the Koreans) failed to adapt the technology for the mass production of texts, in large part because they imprinted the letterforms on the page by hand rubbing, which made the process only slightly more effi- cient than your average medieval scribe. T hanks to his training as a goldsmith, Gutenberg made some brilliant modifications to the metallurgy behind the movable type system, but without the press itself, his meticulous lead fonts would have been useless for creating mass-produced Bibles.
An important part of Gutenberg’s genius, then, lay not in con- ceiving an entirely new technology from scratch, but instead from borrowing a mature technology from an entirely different field, and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem. We don’t know exactly what chain of events led Gutenberg to make that associative link; few documentary records remain of Gutenberg’s life between 1440 and 1448, the period during which he assembled the primary components of his invention. But it is clear that Gutenberg had no formal experience pressing grapes. H is radical breakthrough re- lied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rh ineland wine- making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology. He took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication.
Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait
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Choose a reading from the past few weeks (or weeks ahead) and work out an Aristotelian analysis of the argument in that reading (find the thesis and supporting points). Try to identify the different components of the rhetorical triangle (Ethos, Logos, and Pathos), and determine whether the reading has a “balanced” argument according to those criteria. Finally, propose an argument about how to strengthen the argument in the paper with specific examples. Work this argument out in a separate document for better results. Ensure the paper is cohesive and coherent: there should be an introduction; body with background information, definitions, and support; and a conclusion.
Process
Use a chart or worksheet to identify quotes within each of the different appeals
Use a minimum of two direct quotes and one paraphrase from the readings
Use a minimum of five sources in the paper for background information
Write out a longer-form argument of your outline
Introduce your argument: Was the reading balanced around the appeals or not? Was something missing? Was it an effective argument by the author?
Provide background and definitions on Aristotle and the appeals
Provide evidence to support your argument about the reading (using quotes) based on your analysis of the rhetorical triangle
Using specific examples, add an argument about how you improve or strengthen the argument (even it already seems to be well balanced)
Conclude your paper
