Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
Speaker 1: to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm tre P P. Wilson.
Speaker 1: As you may have noticed, particularly lately, I get on
Speaker 1: a kick, I get obsessed with one topic uh and
Speaker 1: explore it from multiple angles. That's happening again today. Uh.
Speaker 1: We talked about this very recently, but just to recap.
Speaker 1: On July nine, Neil Armstrong took his place in history
Speaker 1: as the first man to step on the lunar surface.
Speaker 1: He was joined by buzz Aldren. The two of them
Speaker 1: spent several hours walking around on the Moon's surface, collecting
Speaker 1: samples and planting that famous flag but pertinent to today's podcast.
Speaker 1: More than three hundred years earlier, a man named John
Speaker 1: Wilkins was planning out what he thought it would take
Speaker 1: for humans to travel to the Moon. Wilkins is interesting
Speaker 1: because he managed to ride out a pretty rocky time
Speaker 1: in England's history quite well, and he was very well
Speaker 1: known in his day. He, for example, appears in the
Speaker 1: Diaries of Samuel Peeps Uh. And of course, mankind was
Speaker 1: dreaming about the Moon and other space travel well before
Speaker 1: the sixteen hundreds. But the work that Wilkins did is
Speaker 1: the first documented effort at actually kind of making that
Speaker 1: dream of reality. He's not really ready to make it
Speaker 1: into reality, and we'll talk about why. But if you
Speaker 1: listen to our episode on Thomas Harriet that we did recently,
Speaker 1: you know that the early years of the seventeenth century
Speaker 1: were really exciting time when it came to looking at
Speaker 1: the Moon. Sixteen o nine was the first time that
Speaker 1: Harriet and Galileo turned their telescopes to Earth's natural satellite,
Speaker 1: and the scientific community was really excited about all of
Speaker 1: the new information that was revealed as a consequence, and
Speaker 1: Wilkins kind of came in in that wave of excitement
Speaker 1: and became part of it. John Wilkins was born in
Speaker 1: sixteen fourteen in Northamptonshire and the East Midlands of England,
Speaker 1: so that was just after that huge first push of
Speaker 1: discoveries with the Moon through tell Us scopes had been made.
Speaker 1: He was born into a family of relative means. His father,
Speaker 1: Walter Wilkins, was a goldsmith with a successful business and
Speaker 1: was a man described as ingenious with a knack for
Speaker 1: understanding anything mechanical and also ceaselessly curious. His mother's side
Speaker 1: of the family was of the gentry, a number of
Speaker 1: clergymen were in it, and her name was Jane Dodd.
Speaker 1: John attended grammar school at Edward Sylvester's in Oxford. When
Speaker 1: he was still just a boy of eleven, his father,
Speaker 1: Walter died that was si and not long after John's mother,
Speaker 1: Jane remarried, this time to a man named Francis Pope.
Speaker 1: Soon John had a little brother, Walter Pope, who would
Speaker 1: go on to be a poet and astronomer of renowned
Speaker 1: on his own. After grammar school, John started attending Madeline
Speaker 1: Hall in Oxford, and from there he became an ordained
Speaker 1: priest at the Church of England, and six thirty eight
Speaker 1: he moved to the hamlet of Fawsley in Northamptonshire and
Speaker 1: was provided a living by his mother's family. Ring his
Speaker 1: years of school, in which he had learned an advanced degree,
Speaker 1: he had been particularly interested in astronomy, and that interest
Speaker 1: continued as one of his pursuits beyond his formal education years.
Speaker 1: But even so he wasn't really discovering anything new. At
Speaker 1: this point. The available telescopic technology had been used to
Speaker 1: see everything possible with regards to the Moon, and it
Speaker 1: wouldn't be until the middle of the century that telescopes
Speaker 1: would get another boost in their capabilities. Besides this, Wilkins
Speaker 1: was also occupied with his duties as a vicar and
Speaker 1: working in his other areas of interest and responsibility. He
Speaker 1: certainly ran in very intellectual circles, and he and his
Speaker 1: friends and colleagues certainly discussed issues of space and science.
Speaker 1: So while he did love astronomy, it wasn't really his
Speaker 1: life's work by any means. At the age of twenty four,
Speaker 1: Wilkins published The Discovery of a World. It's subtitle was
Speaker 1: a Discourse tending to prove that tis probable that there
Speaker 1: may be another habitable world in the Moon, with a
Speaker 1: discourse concerning the possibility of a passage thither. Eventually he
Speaker 1: wrote a second edition with a second supplemental book to
Speaker 1: the Discovery of a New World, and that was titled
Speaker 1: A Discourse concerning a New Planet, and this two volume
Speaker 1: version was published in sixteen forty, so two years after
Speaker 1: the original. The title page of this second volume features
Speaker 1: Copernicus and Galileo facing one another in the foreground, with
Speaker 1: an illustration of the heliocentric planetary system in the background.
Speaker 1: Wilkins name was not initially included as the author of
Speaker 1: the book. No writer was listed in the print, but
Speaker 1: I was not terribly uncommon at the time, and it
Speaker 1: was widely known as his work. It wasn't as though
Speaker 1: he was trying to publish anonymously. And the introduction to
Speaker 1: this book he offers the following warnings. Two cautions there
Speaker 1: are which I would willingly admonish thee of in the beginning. One,
Speaker 1: that thou shouldst not here look to find any exact,
Speaker 1: accurate treatise, since this discourse was but the fruit of
Speaker 1: some lighter studies, and those two huddled up in a
Speaker 1: short time, being first thought of and finished in the
Speaker 1: space of some few weeks. And therefore you cannot, in
Speaker 1: reason expect that it should be so polished as perhaps
Speaker 1: the subject would require, or the leisure of the author
Speaker 1: might have done it. Two, to remember that I promise
Speaker 1: only probable arguments for the proof of this opinion, and
Speaker 1: therefore you must not look that every consequence should be
Speaker 1: of an undeniable dependence, or that the truth of each
Speaker 1: argument should be measured by its necessity. I grant that
Speaker 1: some astronomical appearances may possibly be solved otherwise than here
Speaker 1: they are. But the thing I aim at is this
Speaker 1: that probably they may so be solved as I have
Speaker 1: here set them down, which if it be granted as
Speaker 1: I think it must, then I doubt not. But the
Speaker 1: indifferent reader will find some satisfaction in the main thing
Speaker 1: that is to be proved. So he was making it
Speaker 1: really clear right out of the gate. He's just theorizing. Look,
Speaker 1: people have spitballing here, don't get too hung up on
Speaker 1: those details. I think this is the opposite sit of
Speaker 1: the level of confidence from that voyage manuscript decoding that
Speaker 1: we talked about on on Earth recently that was like
Speaker 1: similarly done in a couple of weeks as part of
Speaker 1: a different thing. Yeah. Yeah, but Wilkins is very Look,
Speaker 1: I'm a minister, I know a lot about science. I'm um,
Speaker 1: but I'm just I'm thinking through my thoughts and I'm
Speaker 1: bringing you along. But this kind of like slightly more
Speaker 1: casual approach was also probably why this actually ended up
Speaker 1: becoming a really influential publication. He was kind of kicking
Speaker 1: around ideas and working through the logistics of them, and
Speaker 1: he was basically showing his work for the reader to
Speaker 1: come along with wilkins text helped further promote some of
Speaker 1: Galileo's ideas about the Moon, specifically that it was a solid, compacted,
Speaker 1: opacious body and that humans could potentially visit and maybe
Speaker 1: even live on it. Wilkins covered a number of other
Speaker 1: topics and the two volume work, though they weren't exactly groundbreaking,
Speaker 1: he bolstered the idea fairly commonly held in scientific unity
Speaker 1: at the time that the Earth wasn't particularly special as
Speaker 1: a planet in the Solar System, but it was one
Speaker 1: of many. Yeah, this was a time when there was
Speaker 1: a big shift we'll talk a little bit more about
Speaker 1: it in in how science and theology, which were closely mixed,
Speaker 1: saw the Earth and what it was in relation to
Speaker 1: the cosmos. Uh, And that was all changing really rapidly.
Speaker 1: And while these ideas were already pretty commonly accepted in
Speaker 1: the science community, everything he was talking about, it was
Speaker 1: the way that Wilkins wrote about them that really made
Speaker 1: his work important. He wrote in a style, as you
Speaker 1: can tell, that was relatively casual compared to most scientific
Speaker 1: work of the day, meaning that the average person could
Speaker 1: read and understand it, and especially because it was illustrated
Speaker 1: in a way that was also aimed at readers who
Speaker 1: were not immersed in science. We have talked in previous
Speaker 1: episodes about how a lot of scientists in this era
Speaker 1: were polyglots, and that was in part just so they
Speaker 1: could read the work of other scientists who spoke and
Speaker 1: wrote in languages other than their own. But here was
Speaker 1: a book that translated everything for the reader. There was
Speaker 1: no knowledge of Latin or Italian required. We'll talk about
Speaker 1: another important aspect of Wilkins's writing in just a moment,
Speaker 1: but first we will pause or a sponsor break. We
Speaker 1: talked before the break about how part of the appeal
Speaker 1: of Wilkins's work at this point was that it was
Speaker 1: written for the average person to understand. And another tenant
Speaker 1: of Wilkins's work in this writing is change, as in,
Speaker 1: he was keenly aware of just how much our knowledge
Speaker 1: of the world had changed in just a few decades
Speaker 1: leading up to this writing, and he foresaw that the
Speaker 1: same kind of change in what was commonly known to
Speaker 1: entirely new ideas was going to continue. Wilkins is pretty
Speaker 1: self reflective, and he understands that even though the seventeenth
Speaker 1: century was seeing entire new vistas of science and understanding
Speaker 1: open up, that they were going to seem childish to
Speaker 1: later generations. On the e relation of new truths, he
Speaker 1: wrote one that a new truth may seem absurd and impossible,
Speaker 1: not only to the vulgar, but to those also who
Speaker 1: are otherwise wise men and excellent scholars. And hence it
Speaker 1: will follow that every new thing which seems to oppose
Speaker 1: common principles is not presently to be rejected, but rather
Speaker 1: to be pride into with a diligent inquiry, Since there
Speaker 1: are many things which are yet hid from us and
Speaker 1: reserve for future discovery. Too, that it is not the
Speaker 1: commonness of an opinion that can privilege it. For a truth.
Speaker 1: The wrong way is sometime a well beaten path, whereas
Speaker 1: the right way, especially to hidden truths, may be less
Speaker 1: trodden and more obscure. I sort of love that here,
Speaker 1: you too. I also love listeners don't get to hear it,
Speaker 1: but like the slightly atypical spelling of many of these
Speaker 1: words is delightful. Yeah, of course it felt to portracy
Speaker 1: to read the the uncorrected writing of John Wilkins. I
Speaker 1: didn't do that on purpose, so he definitely wanted his
Speaker 1: readers to look at science and particularly what humanity is
Speaker 1: a collective new about the universe with a new eye
Speaker 1: and an open mind. He pointed out the ways that
Speaker 1: the work of Aristotle, which had been groundbreaking in its
Speaker 1: own time, had become outdated and led the reader to
Speaker 1: the idea that knowledge and discovery was an ongoing, living
Speaker 1: thing that was not static, and in a way the
Speaker 1: people of the seventeenth century kind of needed to hear this.
Speaker 1: So much of the world's scientific knowledge had been upended,
Speaker 1: as we said, in those three decades preceding it, particularly
Speaker 1: not just in astronomy, but in geography and physiology and
Speaker 1: other fields, and in this very short period of time.
Speaker 1: So Wilkins was to some degree preparing his readers to
Speaker 1: the fact that they were not going to like get
Speaker 1: all the information and settle down, but in fact that
Speaker 1: change was the new normal of the moon as a
Speaker 1: habital place. He wrote, quote, I must needs confess though
Speaker 1: I had off been thought with myself that it was
Speaker 1: possible there might be a world in the moon. Yet
Speaker 1: it seems such an uncouth opinion that I never durst
Speaker 1: discover it for fear of being counted singular and ridiculous.
Speaker 1: But afterward, having read Plutarch, galile As, Kepler, and some others,
Speaker 1: and finding many of mine own thoughts confirmed by such
Speaker 1: strong authority, I then concluded that it was not only
Speaker 1: possible there might be, but probable that there was another
Speaker 1: habitable world in that planet. So at this point the
Speaker 1: details of the Moon's surface, the craters in the mountains
Speaker 1: were things that had really only been part of our
Speaker 1: understanding since Galileo and Harriet started looking at the Moon
Speaker 1: about thirty years prior. Prior to that, most people thought
Speaker 1: that it was a pretty smooth body because they saw
Speaker 1: it with the naked eye all the time, and while
Speaker 1: it had some color variation, it wasn't perceived as being
Speaker 1: particularly textured, and some of that was tied up in
Speaker 1: thinking that today would be seen as very unscientific. British
Speaker 1: historian Alan Chapman wrote in a paper about Wilkins and
Speaker 1: his work, quote to understand the contemporary power of Wilkins
Speaker 1: arguments that, like those of Galileo before him, one must
Speaker 1: remember that the classical universe was not just a physical
Speaker 1: but also a moral place. Seemed most obviously in the
Speaker 1: juxtaposition between the corrupt, chaotic Earth and the perfect heavens.
Speaker 1: There were theories, for example, that the dark areas of
Speaker 1: the moon were spots that had been tarnessed by light
Speaker 1: reflected up from the Earth. Yeah, Earth was a yucky
Speaker 1: mess and the heavens were beautiful and celestial. But Wilkins
Speaker 1: saw Earth and the heavens as part of one large entity,
Speaker 1: which he considered in its totality to be a divine creation.
Speaker 1: And this was in contrast to the ideology of Aristotle
Speaker 1: and some of his followers, who saw that there was
Speaker 1: a boundary between Earth and the heavens, and that the
Speaker 1: same scientific rules did not apply to those two things
Speaker 1: in cosmology. It was essentially two different systems in their thinking.
Speaker 1: Wilkins's vision of a more holistic view of the universe
Speaker 1: was a departure from what had been believed and taught
Speaker 1: for centuries at that point. All the same matter, and
Speaker 1: that quote, the heavens do not consist of any such
Speaker 1: pure matter which can privilege them from the like change
Speaker 1: in corruption as these inferior bodies are liable unto was
Speaker 1: a thing that he was a big proponent of. It's
Speaker 1: all the same stuff, it's just arrange differently, and he
Speaker 1: wanted all of it to be subject to scientific exploration
Speaker 1: and analysis. Wilkins was also a proponent of the idea
Speaker 1: known as a plurality of worlds, and that's that our
Speaker 1: world was not the only world out of the vastness
Speaker 1: of space, and he believed quote that a plurality of
Speaker 1: worlds doth not contradict any principle of reason or faith.
Speaker 1: This led to ideas of other habitable places among the stars,
Speaker 1: and today we talk about the probability of life on
Speaker 1: other planets based on the likelihood that some sort of
Speaker 1: combination of elements created a hospitable environment similar to the
Speaker 1: ways our planet got lucky. But for Wilkins and his colleagues,
Speaker 1: discussion was often centered around God creating life on other planets,
Speaker 1: just as they believed he had on Earth. To talk
Speaker 1: about the writing that Wilkins did regarding the Moon, we
Speaker 1: have to jump back to the year of his first
Speaker 1: one volume edition of his book, The Discovery of a
Speaker 1: World Um that was eight and there was another book
Speaker 1: published that same year. This one was fictional and it
Speaker 1: was titled The Man in the Moon, and that story
Speaker 1: was written by Francis Godwin, and it told the tale
Speaker 1: of the main character Domingo Gonzalez being carried to the
Speaker 1: Moon by a flock of geese pulling a chariot. He
Speaker 1: was incidentally trying to get to Spain, but accidentally got
Speaker 1: the geese when they were doing their natural migration to
Speaker 1: the moon. Question Mark Uh. This mode of transit seems
Speaker 1: pretty swanky, but obviously completely impossible. But still this idea
Speaker 1: really got Wilkins thinking about what it would actually take
Speaker 1: to get a man to the moon, and that line
Speaker 1: of thought was part of his supplemental volume. Godwin was
Speaker 1: certainly not the first fiction writer to imagine traveling to
Speaker 1: the Moon, but he was working with contemporary knowledge of
Speaker 1: it that previous writers had not had. There were certainly
Speaker 1: other books about moon exploration that stoked the fires of
Speaker 1: Wilkins's imagination as well, including work by Francis Bacon and
Speaker 1: Johannes Kepler, and all of this that culminated in the
Speaker 1: sixty edition of Wilkins's work Uh, in which he stated
Speaker 1: quote that it is possible for some of our posterity
Speaker 1: to find out a conveyance to this other world, and
Speaker 1: if there be inhabitants there, to have commerce with them.
Speaker 1: He is open in his writing to the idea that
Speaker 1: we probably can't really imagine what a moon inhabitant might
Speaker 1: be though, and his evidence that there probably are some
Speaker 1: sort of inhabitants there is kind of the argument that
Speaker 1: he's been laying out in the previous chapters of the book.
Speaker 1: So it's kind of like, look, the Moon has this
Speaker 1: property and this property and this property, and I think
Speaker 1: probably maybe God would have put some people there. I
Speaker 1: sort of, as I was working on this, really really
Speaker 1: wish that he could have lived long enough to see
Speaker 1: the Great Moon hoax. But that was two centuries later.
Speaker 1: It can be one of our bad uses for a
Speaker 1: time machine. We're gonna go pick him up and take
Speaker 1: him right John, come with me. I don't ask questions.
Speaker 1: While his ideation on the subject was inspired and bart
Speaker 1: by fantasy, Wilkins was methodical and cataloging the challenges of
Speaker 1: space travel. Space travelers would have to carry their needed supplies,
Speaker 1: such as food and water, although he theorized that once
Speaker 1: they were out of the pool of Earth, they might
Speaker 1: not need any food, and then there was figuring out
Speaker 1: how to breathe while also not freezing to death. Although
Speaker 1: he was open to the idea that space might not
Speaker 1: be cold at all. But then there was the matter
Speaker 1: of conveyance. So for the vehicle there were of course
Speaker 1: myriad concerns. The weight of it would be a key
Speaker 1: factory in its success, and figuring out how to escape
Speaker 1: the Earth's pool was going to be a big issue.
Speaker 1: Keep in mind, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, in which he
Speaker 1: discusses the theory of gravity, was still almost five decades away.
Speaker 1: It wasn't published until seven, So Wilkins was onto this
Speaker 1: idea of escape velocity, but he didn't really have the
Speaker 1: scientific vocabulary to really approach it with the right um
Speaker 1: kind of mindset. And there was also this other matter
Speaker 1: of time and how we were going to keep humans
Speaker 1: alive during a journey to the moon, which will cons
Speaker 1: estimate it would take about a hundred and eighty days.
Speaker 1: And he had come to that conclusion based on his
Speaker 1: knowledge of earthbound travel over long distances, so calculating like
Speaker 1: ships traveling across the ocean, et cetera, led him to
Speaker 1: make some some kind of estimates about that one eight
Speaker 1: day timeline. Wilkins obviously did not solve that problem. In
Speaker 1: sixteen forty he warned us readers, after all that he
Speaker 1: was just dealing in theoreticals, and some of his assertions
Speaker 1: were way off base. He thought that Earth was the
Speaker 1: Moon's moon, just like the Moon was Earth's moon, which
Speaker 1: I think is the thing that I might have thought
Speaker 1: when I was like four. Not trying to disparage him
Speaker 1: at all, I'm just saying I understand how you could
Speaker 1: just come to that conclusion. He thought that the Moon
Speaker 1: had seasons just like the Earth does, and he made
Speaker 1: it clear that he didn't think they were exactly alike,
Speaker 1: but that the Earth and the Moon were sort of
Speaker 1: correspondent to one another. Yeah, he didn't think like that
Speaker 1: autumn on the Moon was the same as autumn on Earth,
Speaker 1: but that they had an autumn which was a shift
Speaker 1: from their previous season of summer. Uh. And he was
Speaker 1: also a little dismayed in all of this that humans
Speaker 1: were built in a way that they could not physiologically
Speaker 1: handle travel to the Moon on their own. So that
Speaker 1: was kind of his his wrap up, like, I think
Speaker 1: we can do it, I don't know how. Here are
Speaker 1: my thoughts. Uh. So, with his book second edition out
Speaker 1: in the world, he continued about his business of being
Speaker 1: a vicar and doing self directed scientific work as his
Speaker 1: time and interest allowed. Coming up next, we will talk
Speaker 1: about what else was going on in England in the
Speaker 1: years following the second edition of Wilkins's book Forest. You
Speaker 1: will take a quick break to hear from one of
Speaker 1: our sponsors. In this sixteen forties England was in the
Speaker 1: midst of major upheaval. The reign of King Charles the
Speaker 1: First had been loaded with conflict almost since his coronation
Speaker 1: in sixteen twenty six. He had dissolved the Parliament in
Speaker 1: sixteen twenty nine, setting off eleven years of what is
Speaker 1: referred to as personal rule, and made a series of
Speaker 1: unpopular decisions from there. As usual when we talk about
Speaker 1: such events, this is worthy of a whole episode of
Speaker 1: its own, or even several. And after a series of
Speaker 1: conflicts with Scotland, known as the Bishop's Wars, England became
Speaker 1: embroiled in civil war in sixteen forty two, fought between
Speaker 1: Charles the First, Royalist supporters and the Parliamentarians. Uh. This
Speaker 1: is again a very simplified version of this whole thing.
Speaker 1: That fighting continued in various different battles, and you'll sometimes
Speaker 1: see it listed out as even different wars right up
Speaker 1: into sixteen fifty two. One of the personal impacts to
Speaker 1: Wilkins was that the Anglican Church in which he was
Speaker 1: a minister was abolished. But he came through this very
Speaker 1: tumultuous time in history and pretty good shape. Although Wilkins
Speaker 1: had been associated with the royal family and had even
Speaker 1: been a chaplain to Charles the first nephew, and though
Speaker 1: his position as an Anglican vicar was not a thing anymore,
Speaker 1: he was a moderate and amiable and good with people,
Speaker 1: and in his scientific circles his colleagues were aligned with
Speaker 1: either side of the much larger conflict, as well as
Speaker 1: having other ideological backgrounds, but their discussions of their work
Speaker 1: and the theories of the day really seemed to supersede
Speaker 1: all of their other loyalties. The Oxford Philosophical Club, as
Speaker 1: their group came to be known, met in both Oxford
Speaker 1: and London. Yeah, this was a very influential group in
Speaker 1: terms of like where science went from there. Uh And
Speaker 1: in sixty eight he was made warden of Wadham College,
Speaker 1: and this appointment was done by the Parliamentary Commissioners. But
Speaker 1: Wilkins remained able to walk that line between parliamentarians and
Speaker 1: royalists with a lot of grace as we said, he
Speaker 1: got along kind of with everybody. Uh, and a lot
Speaker 1: of royalist families sent their sons to the school while
Speaker 1: Wilkins was its head. So while he hadn't abandoned his
Speaker 1: thoughts on flight, it was is another eight years before
Speaker 1: he got back to writing about it. In six the
Speaker 1: same year of his appointment at Wadham, he published a
Speaker 1: new book which was titled Mathematical Magic, or the Wonders
Speaker 1: that May be Performed by Mechanical Geometry. And in this
Speaker 1: work he got a lot more detailed about exactly how
Speaker 1: one might attain flight. We should mention here that the
Speaker 1: use of the word magic isn't really what we might
Speaker 1: associate with it today, but more a descriptor of the
Speaker 1: marvel of science. Yeah, there was absolutely no actual like
Speaker 1: magical element to this. He didn't think there were incantations involved.
Speaker 1: He just thought that learning about mechanics was a magical experience,
Speaker 1: and he wrote about all kinds of mechanisms in this book,
Speaker 1: Pulleys and springs and levers. The entire first section of
Speaker 1: the work is dedicated to examining the physics of these
Speaker 1: and other devices that formed the sort of building blocks
Speaker 1: of larger machines, and like his previous writing, he doesn't
Speaker 1: stick strictly to scientific or known entities. Here, many of
Speaker 1: his ideas are theoretical, and he owns that uh. He
Speaker 1: suggests a way to harness the heat, for example, that
Speaker 1: rises through a chimney, so that you can then turn
Speaker 1: a spit with it so that the meat that's roasting
Speaker 1: on the fire below is cooked evenly. This sounds fairly
Speaker 1: great to me. Or perhaps in his estimation, one could
Speaker 1: rig a series of gears in such a way that
Speaker 1: a simple puff of breath might pull a tree up
Speaker 1: from the roots. As with his previous writing, Wilkins builds
Speaker 1: his case very slowly. Throughout the book. He puts forth
Speaker 1: all these mechanical possibilities to make the case that if
Speaker 1: humans think creatively and harness the mechanisms at our disposal,
Speaker 1: couldn't we build machines that could fly and eventually leave
Speaker 1: the planet. All this theorizing culminates in the idea of
Speaker 1: a flying chariot, and Wilkins's approach is that if we
Speaker 1: can figure out how to fly around from place to
Speaker 1: place here on planet Earth, it will then be a
Speaker 1: very short jump to figure out how to fly into space.
Speaker 1: I love his optimism so much. Um. But he doesn't,
Speaker 1: of course, have a specific version of the flying chariot
Speaker 1: in mind. He mentions various potential features it could have,
Speaker 1: but aside from thinking that it probably might need gears
Speaker 1: and wings and springs, it's pretty vague. He offers up
Speaker 1: some some theoretical pictures, but they're not really anything that
Speaker 1: could get to space. It starts to read a little
Speaker 1: bit like a theoretical baker bringing you a bunch of
Speaker 1: ingredients and telling you what those ingredients do, and then
Speaker 1: concluding with make a cake. So he clearly believed it
Speaker 1: was all possible, and he really wanted humanity to make
Speaker 1: spaceflight a real thing so that we could go meet
Speaker 1: the moon people and maybe trade with them. There are
Speaker 1: some notes written by wilkins protege Robert Hook that in
Speaker 1: the early sixteen fifties the two men tested out some
Speaker 1: kind of flying machine, although details on that one are scarce. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's literally the only thing we know about him doing
Speaker 1: anything else in this arena. In sixteen fifty six, Wilkins
Speaker 1: married Rabina French, the widowed sister of Oliver Cromwell, and
Speaker 1: three years later, in sixteen fifty nine, Wilkins moved from
Speaker 1: Wadham to a more prestigious position as Master of Trinity
Speaker 1: College that was thanks to the influence of his famous
Speaker 1: brother in law, but the country's fortunes made that appointment
Speaker 1: a very short stay. The English monarchy was restored in
Speaker 1: sixteen sixty, less than a year after his time at
Speaker 1: Trinity began, and Wilkins, who had also been an advisor
Speaker 1: to Oliver Cromwell, was removed from the post. Sixteen sixty
Speaker 1: wasn't all bad for John Wilkins, though, His Oxford Club
Speaker 1: received a royal decree from Charles the Second, England's new king,
Speaker 1: and became the Royal Society for Promoting Natural Knowledge. This group,
Speaker 1: which had royal title but not funding, was the proto
Speaker 1: organization for what would eventually become the Royal Astronomical Society.
Speaker 1: The Church of England was also restored, and he was
Speaker 1: once again an influential figure within it, and Wilkins rose
Speaker 1: through the ranks of the church, eventually becoming Bishop of
Speaker 1: Chester in sixteen sixty eight, and that same year he
Speaker 1: published another work titled An Essay Towards a Real Character
Speaker 1: and a Philosophical Language, and Wilkins's opening note to the
Speaker 1: reader states, it may perhaps be expected of some that
Speaker 1: I should give an account of my engaging in a
Speaker 1: work of this nature, so unsuitable to my calling in business.
Speaker 1: In the text, he proposed that the development of universal
Speaker 1: language would really simplify things, and also that quote the
Speaker 1: several nations of the world do not more differ in
Speaker 1: their languages than the various kinds and proportions of these measures.
Speaker 1: He wanted there to be a consistent system of measurement
Speaker 1: for the entire globe as well. While Wilkins wrote many
Speaker 1: other works on subjects ranging from cryptography to prayer, it's
Speaker 1: the sixteen sixty eight work, along with his two volumes
Speaker 1: on the subject of the Moon and the Potential to
Speaker 1: get There, that are his most well known today. In
Speaker 1: sixteen seventy two, John Wilkins dined. He was fifty eight,
Speaker 1: and he was buried at St. Lawrence Jewry, where he
Speaker 1: had once been a vicar. He's so interesting because I
Speaker 1: I don't think many people realize that there is a
Speaker 1: sixteen hundred minister going we need a space program. You've
Speaker 1: got I can only deal with like the setup of ideas.
Speaker 1: But somebody else is gonna have to work out the details.
Speaker 1: I love it. Yeah, go to space. Yeah. Do you
Speaker 1: have listener mail also? I do. This listener mail is
Speaker 1: from our listener um, Judy, and she writes, hello all,
Speaker 1: it was strange to hear the Klondike Big Inch promotion
Speaker 1: as history. We just reran that as one of our
Speaker 1: classic episodes, she wrote. We all watched Sergeant Preston of
Speaker 1: the Yukon. I watched because of his dog King, and
Speaker 1: we all ate Quaker cereal to get the deeds to
Speaker 1: the Klondike. But we had a plan. We joined forces
Speaker 1: and collected all our deeds, figuring we could get enough
Speaker 1: land to build a house and live there. And as
Speaker 1: a group we collected over two hundred deeds. And then
Speaker 1: my mother broke our hearts by putting down a piece
Speaker 1: of paper that would be the size of our estate.
Speaker 1: After all of our collecting, there was barely enough room
Speaker 1: for two of us to sit. I think we learned
Speaker 1: to read the fine print that day. Thanks for all
Speaker 1: you do with the podcast and I love the humor
Speaker 1: you an. She says, I have a request, but I
Speaker 1: have no idea if you could work it into your
Speaker 1: podcast or go on someone else's podcast to do it.
Speaker 1: I'm really curious about how you two got to where
Speaker 1: you are, your career path and a bit of your
Speaker 1: personal path. I volunteer with kids at the Y as
Speaker 1: part of intergenerational programs, and a number of them are
Speaker 1: interested in podcasts and social media, and I like to
Speaker 1: bring them career slash life stories from people doing those jobs.
Speaker 1: Maybe do a podcast of women on radio. In the podcast,
Speaker 1: she writes, In any case, thanks for what you do.
Speaker 1: Know that your role models for the younger set and
Speaker 1: are contributing to the older set. As I learned about
Speaker 1: podcasting to best regards, Judy, Judy, that's so sweet. Um.
Speaker 1: The brief version is that Tracy and I both were
Speaker 1: working at house to works the informational site, Tracy as
Speaker 1: site director and me as a copy editor. I was
Speaker 1: the tech editor, and then our boss heard us at
Speaker 1: a party being kind of snarky and thought we were
Speaker 1: funny and thought we should be podcasting. Literally how it
Speaker 1: started for us. Um. So, so there are many paths,
Speaker 1: and now I feel like the great thing that I'm
Speaker 1: always sort of preaching about podcasting is that if you
Speaker 1: have a smartphone in your pocket, you have all the
Speaker 1: technology you need to start a podcast. It will maybe
Speaker 1: not be as um produced and smooth as a professional
Speaker 1: podcast or as someone with um you know, extra equipment
Speaker 1: that they can afford to have in their home. But
Speaker 1: it is easy enough to do it, uh and all.
Speaker 1: It seems like a lot of different platforms are making
Speaker 1: it easier than ever. So really you have the technology
Speaker 1: right now, which I love. Everybody's got stories to tell,
Speaker 1: Go out and tell them. Um. If you would like
Speaker 1: to write to us, you can do so at History
Speaker 1: podcast at how s to works dot com. You can
Speaker 1: also find us everywhere on social media as Missed in
Speaker 1: History and Missed in History dot Com is the website
Speaker 1: for our show. You would like to subscribe to the show,
Speaker 1: we would like you to do so as well. You
Speaker 1: can do that on Apple Podcasts, on the I Heart
Speaker 1: Radio app, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Stuff you
Speaker 1: Missed in History Class is a production of I Heart
Speaker 1: Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for my Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.