From the Archives: Alhazen–The First True Scientist?
Anyone who built a pinhole camera from a cereal box to watch the solar eclipse last week owes a debt to Islamic scholar Abu Ali al-Hassan Ibn al-Haytham (ca. 965-1041), known in the West as Alhazen.
Alhazen began his career as just another Islamic polymath. He soon got himself in trouble with the ruler of Cairo by boasting that he could regulate the flow of the Nile with a series of dams and dikes. At first glance, it had looked like such a simple problem. But the more he studied it, the more impossible it seemed. Al-Hakim, known to his subjects as the Mad Caliph with good reason, was getting impatient. Alhazen only saw one way out: he pretended to be crazy. Safely confined as a madman until the caliph’s death ten years later, Alhazen continued to work.
Time and isolation? It was the perfect situation for a man with a book to write.
While confined in his home, Alhazen revolutionized the study of optics and laid the foundation for the scientific method. (Move over, Sir Isaac Newton.) Before Alhazen, vision and light were questions of philosophy. Alhazen considered vision and light in terms of mathematics, physics, physiology, and even psychology. In his Book of Optics, he discussed the nature of light and color. He accurately described the mechanism of sight and the anatomy of the eye. He was concerned with reflection and refraction. He experimented with mirrors and lenses. He discovered that rainbows are caused by refraction and calculated the height of earth’s atmosphere. In his spare time, he built the first camera obscura.
Modern physicist Jim al-Khalili, in his excellent The House of Wisdom: How Arabic Science Saved Ancient Knowledge and Gave Us the Renaissance, calls Alhazen the greatest physicist of the medieval world, and possibly the greatest in the 2000 years between Archimedes and Sir Isaac Newton. His Book of Optics was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth or early thirteen century. It had an enormous impact on the work of western scientists from Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) to Isaac Newton (1642-1727)., calls Alhazen the greatest physicist of the medieval world, and possibly the greatest in the 2000 years between Archimedes and Sir Isaac Newton. His Book of Optics was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth or early thirteen century. It had an enormous impact on the work of western scientists from Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) to Isaac Newton (1642-1727). calls Alhazen the greatest physicist of the medieval world, and possibly the greatest in the 2000 years between Archimedes and Sir Isaac Newton. His Book of Optics was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth or early thirteen century. It had an enormous impact on the work of western scientists from Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1292) to Isaac Newton (1642-1727).
Stamping Out Women Warriors–In A Good Way
In the course of doing the research for this book on women warriors, I’ve found plenty of attempts to write women warriors out of history.* It doesn’t make me happy,** but I expected it.
What I didn’t expect were the number of women warriors whose countries later embraced them as national heroines and celebrated them with a postage stamp. It makes sense to me. It’s not only cheaper than putting up a statue, but it has the potential to be seen by many more people.
The woman warrior who has been most thoroughly “stamped” is Joan of Arc–probably the best known woman warrior of all time.*** In addition to being the subject of numerous French stamps, the Maid of Orleans has appeared on stamps issued by places as unlikely as Liberia, Korea, and the Seychelles.
More interesting to me are the women who are honored in their own countries and largely unknown in the West. (Or at least in the United States.) Here are a few of my favorites so far:
Khawlah bint al-Azwar, who fought in the armies of Islam in the 7th century
Queen Amina of 16th (or possibly 15th) century Nigeria, who united the Hausa states
Queen Njinga of Ndongo, who successfully defended her state against the Portuguese in the 17th century
Vasilisa Kozhina, who organized peasants to fight against Napoleon’s army
*My “favorites” are the historians who claim various women warriors are simply metaphors for a people’s resistance or a nation’s expansion. Grrr.
**If you walk past my study door on a bad day, you may hear me growling at one of my sources. I try not to do this in the library.
***When I first told people I was researching women warriors, almost everyone had the same response: “You mean like Joan of Arc?” The exceptions were two attorneys and a federal judge. They thought I said “women lawyers.”
From the Archives: The Most Successful Pirate in History
Any guesses? Edward Teach, commonly known as Blackbeard? Captain Kidd? Captain Morgan?* Grace O Malley, aka the Pirate Queen? Sir Francis Drake?** None of them are even close, though Drake has the distinction of capturing what may well have been the largest prize taken in a single raid: the Spanish galleon Cacafuego.
The title goes to Cheng I Sao (aka Hsi Kai Ching, Ching Shih, Lady Ching, or Mrs. Ching depending on the vintage and quality of the account you read), who terrorized the South China Seas in the first half of the nineteenth century–a time when many Chinese women were literally hobbled by bound feet.***
Piracy was a family business in nineteenth century China. Pirate clans lived on their boats–some of them lived their entire lives without setting foot on land. Within the world of the pirates. some women held rank, commanded ships, and fought shoulder to shoulder with their male counterparts. Cheng I Sao took female participation in the family business to a new level.
According to popular accounts, Cheng I Sao was a Canton prostitute who married the successful pirate Cheng I in 1801 and soon became his partner in building a successful confederation of pirates from competing clans. When Cheng I died in 1807, his widow took over. She avoided succession struggles by appointing her adopted stepson as her second in command and later marrying him.
At the height of her success, Cheng I Sao controlled 1500 ships and more than 70,000 men, organized in six fleets, each with its own flag and commander. (Talk about a pirate queen!) Her fleets attacked ships of all kinds, from small traders to imperial war ships, and ran a protection racket along the coast.
By 1809, Cheng I Sao was powerful enough to threaten the port city Canton (now Guangzhou). The Chinese government turned to the European powers for help, leasing the 20-gun ship HMS Mercury and six Portuguese men-of-war. Big guns were not enough to defeat the pirate admiral’s fleet. In 1810, the Chinese changed tactics and offered the pirates amnesty.
Cheng I Sao decided it was in her best interests to negotiate peace terms with the Chinese empire. She proved to be as effective at the bargaining table as she was on the deck of a ship: the Chines granted her pirates universal amnesty, the right to keep the wealth they had accumulate, and jobs in China’s military bureaucracy. Cheng I Sao retired in Canton, where she reportedly lived a peaceful life until her death at 69 “so far as was consistent with the keeping of an infamous gambling house.” ****
* Not just a brand of rum
**After all, a privateer is just a pirate with a license to steal
***They were also barred from holding public office and had limited opportunities for education and employment, but this didn’t make China unique.
****What? You expected her to take up knitting and mahjong?