1964 Awake! - Theocratic Collector.com

It Started in the East
By "Awakel" correspondent in Hong Kong
IF YOU were to ask the average person
to name a half -dozen things the Orient
has added to his life, or at least that the
Orient had first, he probably would get no
farther than naming off silk and "all the
tea in China." A few, perhaps, would push
bravely on with only the merest tinge of
doubt in their voices as they added "printing?"
But how many would recognize that
every time they wear a garment of loomed
cloth, pick up a sheet of paper, navigate
the ocean or speed through the air in a
plane, they are indebted in whole or in part
to some astute Oriental whose ability went
far beyond abacus mathematics and eating
with a tricky pair of chopsticks?
Notwithstanding the trepidation those
two slender ba mboD sticks can cause the
inexperienced Occidental who ventures into
a Chinese restaurant, it would take an
even hardier adventurer to sail off across
an ocean without the all-essential compass.
But it is just possible he might have to
sail without it, had it not been for the
Chinese restaurateur's ancestors. "The
Chinese were the first to understand and
utilize the directive properties of the lodestone"
on which the magnetic system of
the compass is based, says Cambridge University
Fellow Joseph Needham in Science
and Civilization in China, adding that this
piece of knowledge was "the greatest Chinese
contribution to physics."
The same authority contends that "the
undeniably earliest clear description of the
magnetic needle compass in any language"
is in a Chinese text of about A.D. 1088.
Two years earlier another Chinese text
mentions government ships navigating by
the stars at night, but proceeding in dark
weather according to the directions of "the
,
south pointing needle," as the compass was
called. This text "is a very detailed statement
of the use of the mariner's compass
about a century before its first mention in
Europe."
Movies and the Loom
Not all Oriental inventiveness, however,
was in a serious vein. The same authority
points to a vaned lamp "which may well
have originated in China" as an ancestor
to the cinematograph. The lamp had a
canopy over it with vanes that caught the
rising column of heated air and caused the
canopy to spin. When it spun fast enough
it seemed that the animals and men painted
on the lamp were moving.
Chinese children in the modern apartments
and frugal huts of Hong Kong still
gaze in wide-eyed wonder at the "moving"
figures when the lamps are lit in the Chinese
mid-autumn festival.
Textile centers of the world owe at least
part of their prosperity to nimble fingers
and minds in the land of silk. The silk industry
itself originated in China at a very
remote time, as did certain developments
with the loom. In his book Man, Machines
and History, S. Lilley credits China with
giving Europe "an important new type of
loom, the draw loom, which allowed the
weaving of complex patterns through an
arrangement for selecting the set of
warped threads to be raised or lowered at
each passage of the shuttle."
China had this loom between the third
and ninth centuries B.C., whereas the Near
East did not have it until the fourth century
A.D. and Europe not until the Middle
Ages.
The Printer's Trade
As early as the second century, China
had paper; the secret was well kept until