Word: compasses
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...precisely defined the ingredients necessary for a society to generate innovation. Historian Barbara Tuchman notes that the 12th and 13th centuries enjoyed "one of civilization's great bursts of development," with the introduction of the compass, the spinning wheel and the windmill. Mid-19th century Europe and the U.S. enjoyed similar explosions. But why? Perhaps necessity is indeed the mother of invention, and the demands of the current energy and environmental crises may yet revive the spirit of the Yankee tinkerer...
They were the world's first masters of science. Long before the Europeans, they knew how to use the compass, make paper and gunpowder, print with movable type, build canal locks and segmented arch bridges. Now, after centuries of languishing behind the West, the Chinese are once again aspiring to leadership in science and technology. By the year 2000, China hopes to catch up with the U.S., Europe and Japan and in some areas even to exceed them...
Examining them with a hand compass earlier this year, Dartmouth Geographer Vincent H. Malmstrom found that its needle was sharply attracted whenever he held it to the navel of some of the statues, the right temple of others. Reason: these parts of their anatomy were themselves magnets. More astonishing, the rotund figures are about 4,000 years old, 2,000 years older than the first evidence of Chinese experiments with magnetism...
...ancient priestly center just across the border in Mexico. The gifted artisans did not insert magnetic rocks into the figures, but apparently carved them around natural magnetic poles in the original basaltic boulders. But how did they discover this magnetism? Mesoamerica's oldest known lodestone, or primitive compass, a 2.5-cm (1-in.) bar made of magnetic rock, dates back only to 1000 B.C., a millennium younger than the Fat Boys and some 2,000 years before the Europeans first began using magnetized needles in navigation. Apparently the Fat Boy sculptors did know how to use lodestones...
...inscription reads: Beyond philosophical dispute a great logician who has left a lasting imprint on his field; within our special compass a friendly teacher, a colleague of generous heart...