100 Documents That Changed the World Read online

  William Wilberforce, a key figure in the fight for abolition, died in July 1833, a month before the Act received its Royal Assent.

  Charles Darwin on Natural Selection

  (1837–59)

  Twenty-two years after his first epiphany on the subject and 17 years after he coins the term ‘natural selection’, an English naturalist finally gets around to publishing his revolutionary theory. Documents show how his thinking has evolved, providing a paper trail of his development.

  Charles Darwin (1809–82), the English naturalist and geologist, often documented his field observations and ruminations in notebooks that recorded his newest discoveries as they were unfolding. The first expressions of his powerful new ideas were brimming with excitement.

  In mid-July of 1837, for example, shortly after returning home from his five-year-long, life-changing voyage of discovery aboard the Beagle, the then-28-year-old scientist drew an abstract sketch of a tree to symbolize some of his embryonic thoughts about evolution, along with the words, ‘I think’. He recorded it on here of his First Notebook on Transmutation of Species (Notebook B).

  In September 1838, while reading Thomas Malthus’s famous An Essay on the Principle of Population with its supposed statistical proof that human populations breed beyond their means and ability to survive, Darwin noted a similarity he perceived in the struggle for existence among different species of plants. On here of his Transmutation Notebook D, he described ‘a force like a hundred thousand wedges’ pushing well-adapted plant variations into ‘gaps in the economy of nature’, so that the survivors would somehow pass on their stronger qualities while lesser variations would simply die out.

  In a pencil sketch of 1842, Darwin wrote the words ‘Natural Means of Selection’, and he later coined the phrase ‘natural selection’ in another entry. These and other day-by-day writings recorded how Darwin developed his theory of natural selection over a long period but held back from publishing the results until he was ready. Scholars still speculate about why he waited, but clearly he recognized how astronomers and other scientists over the ages had suffered persecution for their new ideas. He also realized that his theory would upset many religious authorities who had adopted a literal version of the Creation from the Bible.

  At last Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution was published as On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection on 24 November 1859. ‘I have called this principle, by which each slight variation, if useful, is preserved, by the term of Natural Selection,’ he wrote. Although the work seemed fresh and revolutionary to most readers, it wasn’t new to him. He had developed it over many years and by then was 50 years old; the initial excitement had mellowed. Yet his thinking transformed the way that scientists viewed the natural world. ‘The expression often used by Mr. Herbert Spencer,’ he wrote, ‘of the Survival of the Fittest, is more accurate, and in some times equally convenient.’

  Darwin’s papers reside at Cambridge University and today readers can study them via Darwin Online.

  The original handwritten manuscript of On the Origin of Species (1859) and the now-iconic sketch from Notebook B, showing a prototype of the evolutionary tree that formed the basis of Darwin’s theory of natural selection.

  Morse’s drawings of overhead telegraph poles from his notebooks of 1844. In a letter from the same year, Morse raises a note of caution about this new form of communication: ‘Be especially careful not to give a partisan character to any information you may transmit.’ His warning is just as relevant in today’s age of instant messaging and social media.

  The first telegram, sent from Washington to Baltimore at 8.45 AM on Friday 24 May 1844.

  First Telegram

  (1844)

  Samuel F. B. Morse’s introduction of the telegraph seems to have fizzled until a young girl with a crush on the widower-inventor rekindles his hopes and also comes up with the famous text of the message that is transmitted as the world’s first telegram.

  By 1843, the gifted portrait painter Samuel F. B. Morse (1791–1872) had spent more than a decade trying to realize his idea for a revolutionary new communications system using electricity to transmit message signals for long distances over wires. Working with his assistant Alfred Vail, his old college friend Henry Ellsworth and others, the self-taught scientist struggled to gain the necessary funding and technical support to achieve his goal. The financial Panic of 1837 and other hardships didn’t help in his endeavours. After overcoming countless obstacles, Morse asked Congress for $30,000 that would allow him to build an overhead telegraph line from Washington to Baltimore, 40 miles away. At last he managed to get an appropriation bill through the House of Representatives but it had languished in the Senate through the final closing hours of the session, leaving him exhausted and bereft. In the bewitching hours of 3 March, he left the Senate Chamber with less than a dollar to his name, resigned to his ruin.

  Ellsworth, however, managed to pull off a last-minute approval of the legislation and President John Tyler immediately signed it into law. When an ebullient Ellsworth informed his family at the breakfast table, his 17-year-old daughter agreed to alert Morse before their friend’s scheduled departure back to New Haven. A part-time copyist at the Patent Office, Annie Ellsworth had long revered the 52-year-old widower and secretly had a crush on him, so she welcomed the chance to deliver the good news on her way to work. Morse was so thankful he said he would give her the honour of selecting the first message over his new telegraph line.

  That day came on 24 May 1844, when she gave Morse the words she had taken from Numbers 23:23: ‘What hath God wrought?’ From his station in the old Supreme Court chamber of the Capitol, Morse sent it to Alfred Vail at the Mount Clare depot in Baltimore, by means of his dot-and-dash code. The dits and dahs flashed over the wire as coded electrical impulses.

  At his telegraph station in Baltimore, Vail received the signals that the machine had converted to raised dots and dashes on a paper tape, which he translated to their corresponding letters of the alphabet. The resulting document proved the success of the experiment and inaugurated a world-changing new form of rapid long-distance communication. Proving relatively cheap to install and easy to use, the telegraph linked stations throughout the country.

  Yet the initial success received little notice. Only 15 people were present with Morse when he sent off his first telegraph message from Washington that day and the only newspaper coverage occurred in Baltimore, three days later. Annie Ellsworth’s text wasn’t mentioned.

  An illustration of a Morse Telegraph Receiver from 1844.

  The Communist Manifesto

  (1848)

  A 12,000-word pamphlet written by two young German philosophers offers a radical new interpretation of history and political economy – and forms the basis for a movement which will later sweep the world. ‘WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!’

  ‘The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle.’ So begins The Communist Manifesto, a brief statement of purpose that was written in late 1847 by two young German intellectuals and militants, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and first published in German as Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei in London in February 1848. Shortly after its appearance, and their prompt expulsion from England, the pair participated in the ill-fated Revolution of 1848 while serving as newspaper editors in Cologne.

  The first English translation of the Manifesto appeared two years later and numerous more editions were published in German, Russian, French and English over the next three decades. The first American publication occurred in 1872, a decade after Marx ended his assignment as a foreign correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. It was not until the 20th century that the work would reach its largest audience and give rise to numerous communist revolutions across the globe.

  According to the pair’s analysis (written mostly by Marx over a frantic six-week period), the nature of history’s ongoing class struggle unfolds according to the nature of the principal form of production. Thus, in agrar
ian societies the class struggle was between the landowners and those who worked the fields – lords versus serfs. Marx and Engels posited that during the Industrial Revolution a third class – the bourgeoisie – had emerged to own the means of production, whereas the proletariat (working class) owned nothing except their own ability to work. ‘Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today,’ he wrote, ‘the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class.’

  Marx coined the term ‘capitalism’ for the mode of production developed by the bourgeoisie – saying it was a profit-driven system that was constantly forced to expand, which it did by the ‘constant revolutionizing of production [and] uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions.’ The Communist Manifesto offered a penetrating analysis of capitalism along with the prediction that such an economic system would eventually be replaced by socialism and ultimately communism.

  ‘You are horrified at our intending to do away with private property,’ they write. ‘But in your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine tenths.’

  The work listed several short-term demands, such as the abolition of private land, state takeover of the means of production, a hefty progressive income tax, free public education and the abolition of child labor.

  No original copy of the manuscript has been found, except for a single page in Marx’s frenzied script, which is kept in a Moscow archive.

  The first edition of The Communist Manifesto, published in German and printed in London. All that remains of the original manuscript is one handwritten page of Marx’s text.

  Roget’s handwritten lists of synonyms, which he started to compile in 1805, formed a personal treasure trove of words that helped him ‘facilitate the expression of ideas’.

  In the preface to the first edition, Roget explained how the publication of his Thesaurus absorbed all of his spare time: ‘Since my retirement from the duties of Secretary to the Royal Society, however, finding myself possessed of more leisure ... I resolved to embark in an undertaking which, for the last three or four years, has given me incessant occupation.’

  Roget’s Thesaurus

  (1852)

  In an effort to aid himself in finding the proper word when he needs it, an English polymath invents his own classification system, and 47 years later he has it published as his ‘thesaurus’. The work has remained in print ever since, and become a standard reference tool for millions of writers.

  Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869) was a brilliant British physician and polymath. Like others in his family, he often suffered from bouts of depression, some of it stemming from a traumatic incident in which his beloved uncle had committed suicide by slashing his throat in the young man’s presence. Yet he was a high achiever, gaining election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1815 and serving as that organization’s secretary for over 20 years. He also held many other esteemed posts.

  As the author of innumerable scientific papers on a host of subjects, Roget was never one to sit idly by, however, and in an effort to keep himself on track and escape from melancholia, he became a compulsive list-maker. Obsessed with compiling indices, tables, catalogues and sorting schemes of many sorts, he was particularly influenced by Carl Linnaeus’s zoological classification system.

  Blessed with an insatiable hunger for knowledge and an inexhaustible appetite for work, Roget always strived to use the precise word for what he wished to convey. To aid himself in this task, in order to ‘supply my own deficiencies’, in 1805 he set about expanding this list-making to create a system whereby he could organize his word lists by meaning in order to efficiently find the right word when he needed it. He worked feverishly on the scheme for a year, calling the finished manuscript his ‘thesaurus’ from the Greek word for treasury or storehouse.

  Over the next 44 years, Roget often consulted his personal classification system of related words and found it useful in his writing. But he never shared the system with other writers. When he turned 70 his daughter suggested that he publish the document as a retirement project and he agreed.

  Three years later in 1852 Roget published his Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases Classified and Arranged so as to Facilitate the Expression of Ideas and Assist in Literary Composition. The book listed 15,000 words. Roget did not consider them synonyms because he believed every word was unique, but over time, the very name Roget would come to signify synonym for many readers.

  The book has been reprinted and expanded countless times, making it one of the standard desk reference works for students, teachers and writers of all kinds. The latest edition contains over 250,000 words. Millions of copies of the book remain in use.

  A collection of Roget’s manuscripts can be found in the Karpeles Manuscript Library in Illinois.

  Roget, photographed in the early 1860s, some 10 years after the publication of his Thesaurus. His intense work on the project offered a distraction from the bouts of depression that plagued his adult life.

  John Snow’s Cholera Map

  (1854)

  An independent-minded physician uses empirical methods to identify the source of a deadly cholera outbreak, thereby revolutionizing theories about the way that some diseases are transmitted. His findings prompt sweeping changes in public health and help to establish the new life-saving field of epidemiology.

  London in the mid-19th century was terrorized by a series of lethal cholera epidemics that turned its sufferers ‘dead-blue’. While the prevailing wisdom attributed the cause to everything from bad weather and foul smells to poverty, the source of the disease and an effective remedy remained unknown.

  John Snow (1813–58) was an empirically minded English physician whose groundbreaking research sought to improve the public health in such matters as anaesthesia and medical hygiene. His scientific studies had led him to doubt the then-dominant ‘miasma’ theory which attributed such diseases as bubonic plague and cholera to ‘bad air’. So when London’s Soho district near his home was struck by another deadly wave of cholera, Snow began compiling detailed evidence about the incidence and path of the disease.

  Using interviews, skilled reasoning, graphs and maps to record data about the victims’ locations, the investigator soon focused his interest on the Broad Street water pump. ‘I found that nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance of the pump,’ he wrote. He established that there had not been an outbreak of cholera throughout Soho, just among people who were in the habit of using the Broad Street pump.

  Research later revealed that the well from which the pump drew its water had indeed been dug only 3 feet from an old cesspit, causing it to leak deadly bacteria into the water supply.

  Snow published his findings, complete with maps showing the incidence of recorded deaths in Soho, which clustered around the suspicious water pump. The graphic results eventually convinced the authorities to shut down the pump in question, which brought an end to the epidemic. Snow’s findings regarding water-borne disease inspired fundamental changes in London’s public water and waste systems, which quickly led to similar improvements in other cities throughout the world.

  Snow died young from a stroke. But his work lived on. Known today as the ‘father of modern epidemiology’, his work is also credited with making some of the foundational contributions to the new field of data mapping and data visualization.

  Copies of Snow’s early cholera documents are widely published.

  John Snow received many posthumous accolades for his pioneering work. A statue of a water pump was erected on Broad Street (now Broadwick Street) in his memory and a nearby public house was named after him.

  Snow’s map showed that the majority of cholera-related deaths were concentrated around the Broad Street water pump. He concluded: ‘The result of the inquiry, then, is that there has been no particular outbreak or prevalence of cholera in this part of London except among the pe
rsons who were in the habit of drinking the water of the above-mentioned pump well.’

  Charles Pearson helped draft the North Metropolitan Railway Act that led to the opening of the first underground train system. He did not live to see the completion of the project, however, having died of dropsy in September 1862. The original Act of 1854 is kept in London’s Parliamentary Archives.

  First Underground Train System

  (1854–63)

  A visionary reformer recognizes the need for improved public transportation to and from London, and his relentless campaign to build a subterranean iron road beneath the teeming city finally becomes realized only a few months after his death.

  With a population of more than 2.5 million, London by the 1850s had developed into the world’s first megalopolis, stretching out from its ancient core on the Thames to distant suburbs, the hub of a mighty, imperial empire. As the seat of international commerce, it was both the richest city on the globe and one of the most congested, its roadways clogged each day with more than a quarter million commuters and horses that left tons of droppings amid the puddles and grime. The traffic to and fro was a nightmare.

  A Londoner from birth, Charles Pearson (1793–1862) was a dutiful member of the middle class who had entered public service in 1816 and spent his whole life engaged in various social causes. Being old enough to remember what the city had been like before the industrial revolution, he sought a way to clear the streets. Although railroads were still relatively new – the first locomotive-driven railway between cities, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway, had only begun operating in 1830 – by 1845 Pearson, now a solicitor for the City of London, began imagining a new kind of smokeless public rail transportation for the future.