I’ve just started reading William E. Burrows’ This New Ocean and came upon this passage on page 22:
If true, this event should have heralded a technological revolution similar to that which the Wright Bros. did in 1903.
How far up could a 54 pound skyrocket carry a grown man? What would the “wings” have been made out of? Silk? If such “wings” were available why don’t we hear stories of daredevils soaring from the minarets of 17th Century Istambul?
Burrows doesn’t name the two Turkish sources. All the references to Celebi I’ve been able to find online are of the “Great Muslims in History” type with no citations.
From [url=http://users.erols.com/zenithco/]Muslim scientists{/url]
“Two hundred years before a comparable development elsewhere, Turkish scientist Hazarfen Ahmet Celebi took off from Galata tower and flew over the Bosphorus. Fifty years later Logari Hasan Celebi, another member of the Celebi family, sent the first manned rocket into upper atmosphere, using 150 okka (about 300 pounds) of gunpowder as the firing fuel.”
There obviously seems to be some discrepancy of accounts. The above not only has a different spelling but a different amount of gunpowder. You’re absolutely right about the lack of a cite as well.
The message board was gone so I posted it over at TM as well, but now that it’s back…
"Hazarfen Ahmed Celebi.
The most famous Turkish flyer used Johari’s calculations and with some corrections and balancing adjustments, derived from studying the eagle in flight, finally, after 9 experimental attempts, gave shape to his wing apparatus. His famous flight took place from the Galata tower near the Bosphorus in Istanbul, during the reign of the Turkish Sultan Murad IV. The flight was successful. Hazarfen Celebi landed on the other side of the Bosphorus. With this success Hazarfen proved to be 200 years ahead of his time since it was 2 centuries later that comparable developements took place elsewhere. The event is recorded by Evliya Celebi (traveller), an eye witness to the feat, in his book “Seyahatnama” (a book of travel). The word Hazarfen means expert in 1000 sciences, in-fact, a reward of 1000 gold pieces was given to Hazarfen for his achievement. A turkish postal stamp bears tribute to the historic flight.
Ladari Hasan Celebi.
50 years later, another member of the Celebi family, Hasan Celebi invented the first manned rocket which he launched using about 300 pounds of gun powder as the firing fuel. The event is recorded by an artist sketch drawing (courtesy of Turkish Newspaper Zaman 1988)."
Not necessarily. History is full of inventions that weren’t followed up on - and which often weren’t even understood by others of the time. For an innovation to really take off, a well-developed infrastructure of associated technologies and a certain degree and type of ‘mass cultural conditioning’ must often be in place, whereas that same infrastructure and social understanding are not necessarily required for a genius to have an idea and develop it.
Witness the fact that the Wright’s did not invent the glider. (They were years off on that one.) What they did have available, however, was a compact-enough internal combustion motor - without which they would probably not have (arguably) “invented” powered, denser-than-air flight.
Also witness the claim made in China: Land of Discovery and Invention (I lent my copy and don’t have it before me) that manned flight was recorded in China in the 6th century CE. (These were kites, but I’d say it counts, at least as much as a balloon or a glider do.) As far as the claim is reliable, this predates the Turks by about 1100 years - but one most salient fact is that not long after these experiments were recorded, that kingdom was concquered and passed from history.
Who knows what great discoveries have already been made and lost, and are waiting to be invented again?
It has been my observation that we in the West, perhaps because our ancestors were convinced of their superiority, are quite happy to accept that we and ours invented most of the good things in life, and don’t bother looking deeper.
Would reports of an invention that basically died on the vine have made it to the capitals and historians of Western Europe in the 17th century? Probably not, even leaving out the question of racial and religious bigotry. Would the descendants of those historians, steeped in knowledge accumulated over the centuries, have thought to scour the rest of the world looking for obscure facts withy which to challenge the status quo? Evidently not, or at least they didn’t find this one. Will modern historians follow up on reports such as that you point out and amend the histories as necessary, and furthermore make sure that our kids get taught the truth (as far as we can establish it)? We can only hope.
In the meantime, I guess it’s up to us common types to make sure we maintain a healthy skepticism. For me, I find the Encyclopedia Britannica and its ilk to be disturbingly incomplete and Euro-centric - but I hold out hope that that will change, if slowly.
I must seriously disagree with your reason #2, {:-Df; reason #1 explains it all.
Let us take the colonization of the Americas as an example. There were four groups that, to the best of our knowledge, made it over here and left genetic and memetic descendants: proto-Amerinds, proto-Na Dene, proto-Eskimo/Aleuts, and Europeans subsequent to the 15th and 16th centuries. In addition to these, there were certainly Norse from Greenland, and a wide variety of other Europeans, Africans, and Asians who are claimed to have made the trip. Also, skeletal and other archaeological evidence suggests that there may have been pre-Amerind inhabitants of the Americas. Why, then, do we ignore all of those claims?
Because they do not matter! Assuming for the sake of argument that all other claims are dismissed as being supported by insufficient evidence, there can be no doubt that the Norse colonists of Greenland came to Newfoundland in the 11th century. Yet there are no loan words, no technologies, no descendants of them, that can be traced at all in the Americas. They were irrelevant; they wintered over a few seasons, and went home.
A Celebi may have been the first to fly (using a broad, but not unrealistic
definition of “fly”), or it may have been nameless Chinese criminal or mandarin. It does not matter! Nothing in the present state of the art can be traced to them. In some alternate history, it may have been better or worse that their attempts were followed up on; that follow-up did not happen here.
“I don’t just want you to feel envy. I want you to suffer, I want you to bleed, I want you to die a little bit each day. And I want you to thank me for it.” – What “Let’s just be friends” really means
Well, It’s not like Istambul was on the other side of the World. Tulips and coffee managed to make it to Europe around the same time. Why not stories of wings that enable men to fly like the birds.
We know from modern hang gliders and para-sails that the materials and technology involved aren’t that sophisticated. It seems to me quite conceivable that someone may have hit upon a workable design 350 years ago. What I find inconceivable is that such a demonstration employing two forms of modern manned flight would not be followed up by encores by Celebi or an immitator.
I don’t doubt the story because it is incredible. I doubt it because such an event should have had consequences. I can’t believe the several men of science one would expect to find at a Sultan’s court didn’t pursue the possibilities suggested by such a remarkable demonstration.
How much did 300 lbs. of black powder cost in the Turkish Court of the mid-seventeenth century?
With a good deal more incentive, the personal rocket pack has been developed several times in this century, and has never gotten off the ground as a viable form of locomotion.
I do find Ursa’s argument persuasive, but I can also envision a scenario in which the glorious one-time feat is recorded while the subsequent practical trials, that all ended in failure, were allowed to fade into oblivion.
Only slightly hijacking the thread (I think that it has a lot of bearing on the issue of why the Western European nations, assuming they heard about it, didn’t follow up on it):
Hogwash.
We don’t celebrate anything before Columbus because we are so tightly Western European centered that it doesn’t matter to us what any country other than England, France or Spain did. Hell, most of the time people in the US don’t even know what the Portugese did in the way of colonization and trading, because other than Brazil, they didn’t have a colony that directly affected America (was physically located here).
Further, the assertion that the ‘discovery’ of the Americas by proto-Amerinds doesn’t matter because they left nothing of value behind is pretty silly; it is, unfortunately, pretty indicative of past and current valuation by European descendants of the value of Amerind culture.
Celebi was quoted in a contemporary pamphlet Türkiye Bugün as saying it had scared the gubre out of him and he’d never do it again. The men of science had too much scense not to believe him.
Man, I love this forum. Where else do you get to read about Turkish rocketeers and cat weenies in the same place?
I would offer some speculation about why the incident did not make more of an impact on western thought. “Science,” back in those days, was proprietary and secretive, and in many cases kept in the family. Consider the Byzantines, predecessors to the Turks on the Bosporus. One family held the secret to the manufacturing of Greek Fire, a composition that even Cece does not claim to fully understand today. When that family died out, so did Greek Fire.
I think the reference to the second Celebi rocketeer fifty years later is indicative of a similar situation. Many details survive, but they are probably not precise enough to reproduce the event. This was probably intentional. If you wanted to profit from a great idea in those days, you kept it close to the vest. It looks to me like nobody came along to make the idea profitable for the Celebi family, and so the event remained a stunt rather than a prodigious moment.
DSYoung, I think you slightly misread Akatsukami’s post. The proto-Amerinds were among the four groups that do matter and are recorded. It is the wide variety of others for whom claims have been made (the Vikings, St. Brendan, an African chief or explorer, etc.) that are dismissed as having made no impact.
I think your basic thesis that our culture is focused on northwestern European exploits and that history is not well taught in our schools is valid. I don’t think that, in this instance, Akatsukami’s post supports your contention. (It is rather like the Kiwi that GuanoLad recently pointed to as having preceded the Wright brothers in powered heavier-than-air flight. He may have accomplished that goal. However, he apparently viewed it as a stunt, himself, and did nothing to develop or build on what he learned from the experience. His feat was a single human activity that did not influence the course of manned flight in nay way.)
Akatsukami, those weren’t really two reasons I listed, but rather individual responses to separately quoted sentences. (i.e.: Why no follow up technology? See #1. Why not even any stories? See #2.)
As for your contention that previous discoveries are ignored if they have no significant effect, I must respectfully disagree, at least in part. In some cases, your observation is spot on. In others, where attempts to uncover true origins are lacking, it cannot be said that significant results of a discovery do not exist - it can only be said that the linkages are not known. If the linkages were known, they might be significant indeed - and I submit that the lack of questioning along those lines, at least where an ethnocentric pattern emerges, is both indicative of a lack of concern for truth and harmful to our common understanding of the world and our place in it. There are yet other examples, where information concerning true origins is available but is apparently ignored, and I would say with respect to them that, rather than placing blame on the alleged unimportance of the origin, we could more profitably learn something about ourselves from these examples.
Let me illustrate with another example from the source I referenced above.
The last time I checked the Encyclopedia Britannica, it gave approximately the following information on “Bessemer steel:”
Named for Henry Bessemer, who patented the process in England. Actually discovered and patented in the U.S. by an American (whose name is given, but escapes me) some few years previous.
Okay. But what goes unmentioned is that the American apparently hired a team of Chinese engineers to come here and reproduce a thousand-year-old Chinese technology. Presumably, he then dismissed them and then applied for a patent.
What makes the American’s, or Bessemer’s, contribution worthy of the notice of ‘history,’ but not the Chinese contribution? It’s true that the true origins of the technology are anonymous and somewhat shrouded by the mists of time; it is NOT true that this particular technology had no effect on our modern industrial civilization - in fact, the effect was direct. Is this ONLY an issue of putting a face on something, the same way that Edison is remembered but his labworkers are not? Or is there more to it?
Similarly, why is Gutenberg still honored as ‘the inventor’ of printing? He wasn’t even the first European to do it, apparently. In part, his excessive estimation would appear to be due to the basic inertia of historical accounts. But do you really think it just to dismiss all others who came before with a simple claim that those previous printers had no impact on the world? Just because we can’t prove a precise link from them to modern times? (Remember, that inability to prove the link might result from a lack of searching, not from a lack of evidence.) Or is it possible that, since those others are 1) faceless, 2) far away in time, and 3) presumably lacking a strong degree of cultural ‘identifiability,’ we then just discount or devalue them? (Essentially, ‘who cares if some anonymous team of ancient monks printed hundreds of thousands of copies of some Buddhist text centuries before the Crusades in a then-unknown part of the world; Ol’ Gramps Gutenberg printed (hundreds of copies of) The Bible much more recently, right here in figurative River City.’)
In fact, isn’t that a large part of what you’re saying, that “those who do not effect ‘our’ existence are largely ignored by our histories?” I would then observe that this sounds like a perfect recipe for the ethnocentric filtering (or unjust twisting) of history. Yes, in some cases, a given explorer or inventor did not affect our world of today. In other cases that explorer’s cousin DID affect the world but hi/r contribution is ignored because some ‘crucial’ psychological link with us seems to be missing: the other was Muslim while ‘we’ are Christian; or they were Indian or Chinese while ‘we’ are European; etc. It’s not that the historical link is missing, so much as that it is unconsciously devalued because we (generally) can’t incorporate the ‘other’ into our mental world as easily as we can the more-Western ancestor.
If your contention is that archaeology, palentology, etc., have been in the past and continue to be influenced by preconceptions, prejudices, lack of professional, und so wieter – why, yes, I will agree with you there. A severe disappointment, to be sure, but I do not see the necessary dispassion anywhere, nor am I sanguine about the possibility of its arising anytime in the forseeable future.
As for specific cases – I would ask: “Where is the evidence?” If we were to discover, let us say by way of example, a metallurgical tradition among the Arawaks that could not be plausibly attributed to predecessor cultures (and leaving aside the absurb and racist notion that they must have been instructed in such by ancient astronauts), we might note it as an unexplained and, in light of current knowledge, unexplainable phenomenon. Or, we might also note that there have been and continue to be (truly) claims that Ghanians had a transatlantic maritime technology and ability in the 1st millennium CE, and investigate not only similarities in metallurgy, but other connections: language associated with metallurgy, to take only one example.
OTOH, when we find no plausible connection between pre-Columbian Arawaks and first millennium Ghanians (I suggest that it takes no leap of imagination to hold that a considerable number of African slaves were imported to the Carribean from the 16th century), we are reduced to the suggestion that a party or parties of Ghanians travelled to the Carribean without leaving so much as a trace in the cultural record. In such case, they have no more significance than did the Greenlanders who failed utterly to impact the “Skraelings” in any way.
No, I would claim the exact opposite: that the absence of evidence (which, I agree, is not the same as evidence of absence) leaves us unable to pronounce on the purported impact of the varied claims of others on history.
After all, what do the presence of Caucasian-appearing mummies in the Takla Makan have to do with Han achievements? If Clovis Man was one of the displacers of a pre-Amerind population of the Americas, do we then presume that that negates his (hypothetical) descendants’ claims. If the Chinese claims of quasi-powered flight, which, IIRC, date from the Ming dynasty, are accepted, do we then demote Celebi to a mere nonentity once again?
“I don’t just want you to feel envy. I want you to suffer, I want you to bleed, I want you to die a little bit each day. And I want you to thank me for it.” – What “Let’s just be friends” really means
Hmm, Akatsukami, I begin to suspect we may be discussing slightly different things.
The examples you give are each ones I would characterize as being “spot on” with regard to your statement, that is, they are examples in which the pre-existence of some thing (culture, discovery, etc.) does probably not influence the later independent discovery (or group) which had an impact on the larger world, and so the first should not be given undue credit or weight.
The examples I gave are, I again submit, good evidence for the parallel contention (not counter-argument) that some unknown linkages might be very significant and the further contention that important linkages may go unremarked - or unsought - for ethnocentric reasons.
Let us turn again to the Bessemer process for steel. The widespread use of that process had huge implications for the industrial revolution, and thus on our world. If the source I referred is correct, it was lifted whole (with some subsequent refinements) from elsewhere in the world, where it was not an isolated, rare, or unimportant technology - it was merely not known in the West. However, the Enc. Britannica says with regard to it:
In reading the article, the “the contributions of many investigators” does not reference the (supposed) actual, foreign discoverers. So, B copies A, but gets all the credit. Was A’s contribution negligible? No. (In some cases yes, but not in this case.) A’s ‘fault’ lies merely in being part of a tradition without direct exchange with our own histories (yet). The link is there, and it could be or is important, and the fact that the proof is in another language does not rob its power except in our perceptions concerning the issue. To argue that “it simply couldn’t have been very important or else we’d know about it” is, I think, not supportable.
Again, take Gutenberg. Very few inventions have affected our world as much as the printing press. But I submit that, if one tries to picture the actual inventors in situ somewhere near the Han or Sung capital, speaking an unintelligible (to us) language, involved with cranking out unknown (but unrelated to our own culture) religious tracts, and then one tries to picture that very technology being transmitted to and having vast affect on our world, that that mental attempt suffers a great deal of “fogginess” and just doesn’t have the emotional impact that picturing Gutenberg (a good, more-recent Germanic type at that) printing Bibles, copies of which we still possess. And it is that lack of emotional impact, not the unimportance of the discovery or of the transmission, that pulls the process of perception and thus of historical valuation along what are ethnocentric lines.
Now, I am not claiming that all history is twisted and racist. But an “[inability] to pronounce on the purported impact of the varied claims of others on history” does not mean we should close our eyes and rule out the possibility of impact AND the possibility that some history is wrong for ethnocentric or racist reasons. It DOES mean we should be more careful in accepting “common knowledge” and it DOES mean we should be open to trying harder to get it right. We should recognize that what was impressed upon me as a child by endless cultural messages - and maybe this is just my trip, but I really don’t think so - that ‘the West’ is responsible for most things good (the ‘best’ religion, democracy, almost all philosophy, mathematics, science and medicine, advanced art and architecture, music, nearly all advanced technology (where advanced means anything post-Renaissance), world peace, freedom, romantic love, etc., etc., etc.) is to some extent untrue and unjust, and to the extent it is those things it is both dangerous from a philosophical and probably from a historical standpoint and reprehensible from a civilized standpoint.
As for your question of demoting Celebi to a “non-entity:” I’d say no. His and his predecessor’s achievements seem to be remarkable soarings of the human spirit regardless of whom may have come earlier. What we should attempt to do is keep a better perspective on these and other things.