Historically Speaking: The Long Road to Protecting Inventions With Patents

Gunpowder was never protected. Neither were inventions by Southern slaves. Vaccines are—but that’s now the subject of a debate.

The Wall Street Journal

May 20, 2021

The U.S. and China don’t see eye to eye on much nowadays, but in a rare show of consensus, the two countries both support a waiver of patent rights for Covid-19 vaccines. If that happens, it would be the latest bump in a long, rocky road for intellectual property rights.

Elijah McCoy and a diagram from one of his patents for engine lubrication.
ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

There was no such thing as patent law in the ancient world. Indeed, until the invention of gunpowder, the true cost of failing to protect new ideas was never even considered. In the mid-11th century, the Chinese Song government realized too late that it had allowed the secret of gunpowder to escape. It tried to limit the damage by banning the sale of saltpeter to foreigners. But merchants found ways to smuggle it out, and by 1280 Western inventors were creating their own recipes for gunpowder.

Medieval Europeans understood that knowledge and expertise were valuable, but government attempts at control were crude in the extreme. The Italian Republic of Lucca protected its silk trade technology by prohibiting skilled workers from emigrating; Genoa offered bounties for fugitive artisans. Craft guilds were meant to protect against intellectual expropriation, but all too often they simply stifled innovation.

The architect Filippo Brunelleschi, designer of the famous dome of Florence’s Santa Maria del Fiore, was the first to rebel against the power of the guilds. In 1421 he demanded that the city grant him the exclusive right to build a new type of river boat. His deal with Florence is regarded as the first legal patent. Unfortunately, the boat sank on its first voyage, but other cities took note of Brunelleschi’s bold new business approach.

In 1474 the Venetians invited individuals “capable of devising and inventing all kinds of ingenious contrivances” to establish their workshops in Venice. In return for settling in the city, the Republic offered them the sole right to manufacture their inventions for 10 years. Countries that imitated Venice’s approach reaped great financial rewards. England’s Queen Elizabeth I granted over 50 individual patents, often with the proviso that the patent holder train English craftsmen to carry on the trade.

Taking their cue from British precedent, the framers of the U.S. Constitution gave Congress the power to legislate on intellectual property rights. Congress duly passed a patent law in 1790 but failed to address the legal position of enslaved inventors. Their anomalous position came to a head in 1857 after a Southern slave owner named Oscar Stuart tried to patent a new plow invented by his slave Ned. The request was denied on the grounds that the inventor was a slave and therefore not a citizen, and while the owner was a citizen, he wasn’t the inventor.

After the Civil War, the opening up of patent rights enabled African-American inventors to bypass racial barriers and amass significant fortunes. Elijah McCoy (1844-1929) transformed American rail travel with his engine lubrication system.

McCoy ultimately registered 57 U.S. patents, significantly more than Alexander Graham Bell’s 18, though far fewer than Thomas Edison’s 1,093. The American appetite for registering inventions remains unbounded. Last fiscal year alone, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued 399,055 patents.

Is there anything that can’t be patented? The answer is yes. In 1999 Smuckers attempted to patent its crustless peanut butter and jelly sandwich with crimped edges. Eight years and a billion homemade PB&J sandwiches later, a federal appeals court ruled there was nothing “novel” about foregoing the crusts.

Historically Speaking: The Winning Ways of Moving the Troops

Since the siege of Troy, getting armed forces into battle zones quickly and efficiently has made a decisive difference in warfare

The Wall Street Journal

May 6, 2021

The massing of more than 100,000 Russian soldiers at Ukraine’s border in April was an unambiguous message to the West: President Putin could dispatch them at any moment, if he chose.

How troops move into battle positions is hardly the stuff of poetry. Homer’s “The Iliad” begins with the Greeks having already spent 10 years besieging Troy. Yet the engine of war is, quite literally, the ability to move armies. Many scholars believe that the actual Trojan War may have been part of a larger conflict between the Bronze Age kingdoms of the Mediterranean and a maritime confederacy known as the Sea Peoples.

The identity of these seafaring raiders is still debated, but their means of transportation is well-attested. The Sea Peoples had the largest and best fleets, allowing them to roam the seas unchecked. The trade network of the Mediterranean collapsed beneath their relentless attacks. Civilization went backward in many regions; even the Greeks lost the art of writing for several centuries.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

The West recovered and flourished until the fifth century, when the Romans were overwhelmed by the superior horse-borne armies of the Vandals. Their Central European horses, bred for strength and stamina, transformed the art of warfare, making it faster and more mobile. The invention of the stirrup, the curb bit, and finally the war saddle made mobility an effective weapon in and of itself.

Genghis Khan understood this better than any of his adversaries. His mounted troops could cover up to 100 miles a day, helping to stretch the Mongol empire from the shores of eastern China to the Austrian border. But horses need pasture, and Europe’s climate between 1238 to 1242 was excessively wet. Previously fertile plains became boggy marshes. The first modern invasion was stopped by rain.

Bad weather continued to provide an effective defense against invaders. Napoleon entered Russia in 1812 with a force of over 500,000. An unseasonably hot summer followed by an unbearably cold winter killed off most of his horses, immobilizing the cavalry and the supply wagons that would have prevented his army from starving. He returned with fewer than 20,000 men.

The reliance on pack animals for transport meant that until the Industrial Revolution, armies were no faster than their Roman counterparts. The U.S. Civil War first showed how decisive railroads could be. In 1863 the Confederate siege of Chattanooga, Tenn., was broken by 23,000 Federal troops who traveled over 1,200 miles across seven states to relieve Union forces under General William Rosecrans.

The Prussians referred to this kind of troop-maneuvering warfare as bewegungskrieg, war of movement, using it to crushing effect over the less-mobile French in the Franco-Prussian War. In the early weeks of World War I, France still struggled to mobilize; Gen. Joseph S. Gallieni, the military governor of Paris, famously resorted to commandeering Renault taxicabs to ferry soldiers to the Battle of the Marne.

The Germans started World War II with their production capacity lagging that of the Allies; they compensated by updating bewegungskrieg to what became known as blitzkrieg, or lightning strike, which combined speed with concentrated force. They overwhelmed French defenses in six weeks.

In the latter half of the 20th century, troop transport became even more inventive, if not decisive. Most of the 2.7 million U.S. soldiers sent into the Vietnam War were flown commercial. (Civilian air stewardesses flying over combat zones were given the military rank of Second Lieutenant.)

Although future conflicts may be fought in cyberspace, for now, modern warfare means mass deployment. Winning still requires moving.

Historically Speaking: The Tragedy of Vandalizing the Past

The 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan reminds us of the imperative of historical preservation

April 15, 2021

Twenty years ago this spring, the Taliban completed their obliteration of Afghanistan’s 1,500-year-old Buddhas of Bamiyan. The colossal stone sculptures had survived major assaults in the 17th and 18th centuries by the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb and the Persian king Nader Afshar. Lacking sufficient firepower, both gave up after partly defacing the monuments.

The Taliban’s methodical destruction recalled the calculated brutality of ancient days. By the time the Romans were finished with Carthage in 146 B.C., the entire city had been reduced to rubble. They were given a taste of their own medicine in 455 A.D. by Genseric, King of the Vandals, who stripped Rome bare in two weeks of systematic looting and destruction.

One of the Buddhas of Bamiyan in 1997, before their destruction.
PHOTO: ALAMY

Like other vanquished cities, Rome’s buildings became a source of free material. Emperor Constans II of Byzantium blithely stole the Pantheon’s copper roofing in the mid-17th century; a millennium later, Pope Urban VIII appropriated its bronze girders for Bernini’s baldacchino over the high altar in St. Peter’s Basilica.

When not dismantled, ancient buildings might be repurposed by new owners. Thus Hagia Sophia Cathedral became a mosque after the Ottomans captured Constantinople, and St. Radegund’s Priory was turned into Jesus College at Cambridge University on the orders of King Henry VIII.

The idea that a country’s ancient heritage forms part of its cultural identity took hold in the wake of the French Revolution. Incensed by the Jacobins’ pillaging of churches, Henri Gregoire, the Constitutional Bishop of Blois, coined the term vandalisme. His protest inspired the novelist Victor Hugo’s efforts to save Notre Dame. But the architect chosen for the restoration, Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc, added his own touches to the building, including the central spire that fell when the cathedral’s roof burned in 2019, spurring controversy over what to restore. Viollet-le-Duc’s own interpolations set off a fierce debate, led by the English art critic John Ruskin, about what constitutes proper historical preservation.

Ruskin inspired people to rethink society’s relationship with the past. There was uproar in England in 1883 when the London and South Western Railway tried to justify building a rail-track alongside Stonehenge, claiming the ancient site was unused.

Public opinion in the U.S., when aroused, could be equally determined. The first preservation society was started in the 1850s by Ann Pamela Cunningham of South Carolina. Despite being disabled by a riding accident, Cunningham initiated a successful campaign to save George Washington’s Mount Vernon from ruin.

But developers have a way of getting what they want. Not even modernist architect Philip Johnson protesting in front of New York’s Penn Station was able to save the McKim, Mead & White masterpiece in 1963. Two years later, fearing that the world’s architectural treasures were being squandered, retired army colonel James Gray founded the International Fund for Monuments (now the World Monuments Fund). Without the WMF’s campaign in 1996, the deteriorating south side of Ellis Island, gateway for 12 million immigrants, might have been lost to history.

The fight never ends. I still miss the magnificent beaux-arts interior of the old Rizzoli Bookstore on 57th Street in Manhattan. The 109-year-old building was torn down in 2014. Nothing like it will ever be seen again.

Historically Speaking: The Long Fight to Take the Weekend Off

Ancient Jews and Christians observed a day of rest, but not until the 20th century did workers get two days a week to do as they pleased.

Wall Street Journal

April 1, 2021

Last month the Spanish government agreed to a pilot program for experimenting with a four-day working week. Before the pandemic, such a proposal would have seemed impossible—but then, so was the idea of working from home for months on end, with no clear downtime and no in-person schooling to keep the children occupied.

In ancient times, a week meant different things to different cultures. The Egyptians used sets of 10 days called decans; there were no official days off except for the craftsmen working on royal tombs and temples, who were allowed two days out of every 10. The Romans tried an eight-day cycle, with the eighth set aside as a market day. The Babylonians regarded the number seven as having divine properties and applied it whenever possible: There were seven celestial bodies, seven nights of each lunar phase and seven days of the week.

A day of leisure in Newport Beach, Calif., 1928. PHOTO: DICK WHITTINGTON STUDIO/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

A day of leisure in Newport Beach, Calif., 1928. PHOTO: DICK WHITTINGTON STUDIO/CORBIS/GETTY IMAGES

The ancient Jews, who also used a seven-day week, were the first to mandate a Sabbath or rest day, on Saturday, for all people regardless of rank or occupation. In 321 A.D., the Roman emperor Constantine integrated the Judeo-Christian Sabbath into the Julian calendar, but mindful of pagan sensibilities, he chose Sunday, the day of the god Sol, for rest and worship.

Constantine’s tinkering was the last change to the Western workweek for more than a millennia. The authorities saw no reason to allow the lower orders more than one day off a week, but they couldn’t stop them from taking matters into their own hands. By the early 18th century, the custom of “keeping Saint Monday”—that is, taking the day to recover from the Sunday hangover—had become firmly entrenched among the working classes in America and Britain.

Partly out of desperation, British factory owners began offering workers a half-day off on Saturday in return for a full day’s work on Monday. Rail companies supported the campaign with cheap-rate Saturday excursions. By the late 1870s, the term “weekend” had become so popular that even the British aristocracy started using it. For them however, the weekend began on Saturday and ended on Monday night.

American workers weren’t so fortunate. In 1908, a few New England mill owners granted workers Saturdays and Sundays off because of their large number of Jewish employees. Few other businesses followed suit until 1922, when Malcolm Gray, owner of the Rochester Can Company in upstate New York, decided to give a five-day week to his workers as a Christmas gift. The subsequent uptick in productivity was sufficiently impressive to convince Henry Ford to try the same experiment in 1926 at the Ford Motor Company. Ford’s success made the rest of the country take notice.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was moving in the other direction. In 1929, Joseph Stalin introduced the continuous week, which required 80% of the population to be working on any given day. It was so unpopular that the system was abandoned in 1940, the same year that the five-day workweek became law in the U.S. under the Fair Labor Standards Act. The battle for the weekend had been won at last. Now let the battle for the four-day week begin.

Historically Speaking: The Ordeal of Standardized Testing

From the Incas to the College Board, exams have been a popular way for societies to select an elite.

The Wall Street Journal

March 11, 2021

Last month, the University of Texas at Austin joined the growing list of colleges that have made standardized test scores optional for another year due to the pandemic. Last year, applicants were quick to take up the offer: Only 44% of high-school students who applied to college using the Common Application submitted SAT or ACT scores in 2020-21, compared with 77% the previous year.

Nobody relishes taking exams, yet every culture expects some kind of proof of educational attainment from its young. To enter Plato’s Academy in ancient Athens, a prospective student had to solve mathematical problems. Would-be doctors at one of the many medical schools in Ephesus had to participate in a two-day competition that tested their knowledge as well as their surgical skills.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

On the other side of the world, the Incas of Peru were no less demanding. Entry into the nobility required four years of rigorous instruction in the Quechua language, religion and history. At the end of the course students underwent a harsh examination lasting several days that tested their physical and mental endurance.

It was the Chinese who invented the written examination, as a means of improving the quality of imperial civil servants. During the reign of Empress Wu Zetian, China’s only female ruler, in the 7th century, the exam became a national rite of passage for the intelligentsia. Despite its burdensome academic requirements, several hundred thousand candidates took it every year. A geographical quota system was eventually introduced to prevent the richer regions of China from dominating.

Over the centuries, all that cramming for one exam stifled innovation and encouraged conformity. Still, the meritocratic nature of the Chinese imperial exam greatly impressed educational reformers in the West. In 1702, Trinity College, Cambridge became the first institution to require students to take exams in writing rather than orally. By the end of the 19th century, exams to enter a college or earn a degree had become a fixture in most European countries.

In the U.S., the reformer Horace Mann introduced standardized testing in Boston schools in the 1840s, hoping to raise the level of teaching and ensure that all citizens would have equal access to a good education. The College Board, a nonprofit organization founded by a group of colleges and high schools in 1899, established the first standardized test for university applicants.

Not every institution that adopted standardized testing had noble aims, however. The U.S. Army had experimented with multiple-choice intelligence tastes during World War I and found them useless as a predictive tool. But in the early 1920s, the president of Columbia University, Nicholas M. Butler, adopted the Thorndike Tests for Mental Alertness as part of the admissions process, believing it would limit the number of Jewish students.

The College Board adopted the SAT, a multiple-choice aptitude test, in 1926, as a fair and inclusive alternative to written exams, which were thought to be biased against poorer students. In the 1960s, civil rights activists began to argue that standardized tests like the SAT and ACT were biased against minority students, but despite the mounting criticisms, the tests seemed like a permanent part of American education—until now.

Historically Speaking: Women Who Made the American West

From authors to outlaws, female pioneers helped to shape frontier society.

The Wall Street Journal

September 9, 2020

On Sept. 14, 1920, Connecticut became the 37th state to ratify the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote. The exercise was largely symbolic, since ratification had already been achieved thanks to Tennessee on August 18. Still, the fact that Connecticut and the rest of the laggard states were located in the eastern part of the U.S. wasn’t a coincidence. Though women are often portrayed in Westerns as either vixens or victims, they played a vital role in the life of the American frontier.

The outlaw Belle Starr, born Myra Belle Shirley, in 1886.
PHOTO: ROEDER BROTHERS/BUYENLARGE/GETTY IMAGES

Louisa Ann Swain of Laramie, Wyo., was the first woman in the U.S. to vote legally in a general election, in September 1870. The state was also ahead of the pack in granting women the right to sit on a jury, act as a justice of the peace and serve as a bailiff. Admittedly, it wasn’t so much enlightened thinking that opened up these traditionally male roles as it was the desperate shortage of women. No white woman crossed the continent until 17-year-old Nancy Kelsey traveled with her husband from Missouri to California in 1841. Once there, as countless pioneer women subsequently discovered, the family’s survival depended on her ability to manage without his help.

Women can and must fend for themselves was the essential message in the ‘”Little House on the Prairie” series of books by Laura Ingalls Wilder, who was brought up on a series of homesteads in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the 1870s. Independence was so natural to her that she refused to say “I obey” in her marriage vows, explaining, “even if I tried, I do not think I could obey anybody against my better judgment.”

Although the American frontier represented incredible hardship and danger, for many women it also offered a unique kind of freedom. They could forge themselves anew, seizing opportunities that would have been impossible for women in the more settled and urbanized parts of the country.

This was especially true for women of color. Colorado’s first Black settler was a former slave named Clara Brown, who won her freedom in 1856 and subsequently worked her way west to the gold-mining town of Central City. Recognizing a need in the market, she founded a successful laundry business catering to miners and their families. Some of her profits went to buy land and shares in mines; the rest she spent on philanthropy, earning her the nickname “Angel of the Rockies.” After the Civil War, Brown made it her mission to locate her lost family, ultimately finding a grown-up daughter, Eliza.

However, the flip of side of being able to “act like men” was that women had to be prepared to die like men, too. Myra Belle Shirley, aka Belle Starr, was a prolific Texas outlaw whose known associates included the notorious James brothers. Despite a long criminal career that mainly involved bootlegging and fencing stolen horses, Starr was convicted only once, resulting in a nine-month prison sentence in the Detroit House of Correction. Her luck finally ran out in 1889, two days before her 41st birthday. By now a widow for the third time, Belle was riding alone in Oklahoma when she was shot and killed in an ambush. The list of suspects included her own children, although the murder was never solved.

Historically Speaking: Golfing With Emperors and Presidents

From medieval Scotland to the White House, the game has appealed to the powerful as well as the common man.

June 3, 2020

The Wall Street Journal

The history of golf is a tale of two sports: one played by the common man, the other by kings and presidents. The plebeian variety came first. Paganica, a game played with a bent stick and a hard ball stuffed with feathers, was invented by Roman soldiers as a way to relieve the monotony of camp life. It is believed that a version of Paganica was introduced to Scotland when the Roman emperor Septimius Severus invaded the country in 208 A.D.

Golf buddies Arnold Palmer (left) and Dwight Eisenhower.
PHOTO: AUGUSTA NATIONAL/GETTY IMAGES

Golf might also have been influenced by stick-and-ball games from other cultures, such as the medieval Chinese chuiwan (“hit-ball”) and Dutch colf, an indoor game using rubber balls and heavy clubs. But the game we know today originated in the 15th century on the Links—the long, grassy sand dunes that are such a distinctive feature of Scotland’s coastline. The terrain was perfect for all-weather play, as well as for keeping out of sight of the authorities: Scottish kings prohibited the game until 1502, anxious that it would interfere with archery practice.

Two years after lifting the ban, King James IV of Scotland played the first recorded golf match while staying at Falkland Palace near St. Andrews. In theory, anyone could play on the Links since it was common land. Starting in 1754, however, access was controlled by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St. Andrews, known today as the “Home of Golf.” The R & A did much to standardize the rules of the game, while cementing golf’s reputation as an aristocratic activity.

In the 19th century, innovations in lawn care and ball manufacturing lowered the cost of golf, but the perception of elitism persisted. When William Howard Taft ran for president in 1908, Teddy Roosevelt urged him to beware of projecting an upper-crust image: “photographs on horseback, yes; tennis, no. And golf is fatal.” Taft ignored Roosevelt’s advice, as did Woodrow Wilson, who played more rounds of golf—nearly 1,200 in all—than any other president. He even played in the snow, using a black-painted ball.

Wilson’s record was nearly matched by Dwight Eisenhower, who so loved the game that he had a putting green installed outside the Oval Office in 1954. At first the media criticized his fondness for a rich man’s game. But that changed after Arnold Palmer, one of the greatest and most charismatic golfers in history, became Eisenhower’s friend and regular golf partner. The frequent sight of the president and the sports hero playing together made golf appear attractive, aspirational and above all accessible, inspiring millions of ordinary Americans to try the game for the first time.

But that popularity has been dented in recent years. The number of golfers in the U.S. dropped from a high of 30 million in 2005 to 24.1 million in 2015. In addition to being pricey, golf is still criticized for being snobby. Earlier this year, Brooks Koepka, a professional golfer once ranked number one in the world, told GQ that he loved the game but not “the stuffy atmosphere that comes along with it.” “Golf has always had this persona of the triple-pleated khaki pants, the button-up shirt, very country club atmosphere,” he complained. Now that almost all of the country’s golf courses have reopened from pandemic-related shutdowns, golf has a new opportunity to make every player feel included.

Historically Speaking: Hobbies for Kings and the People

From collecting ancient coins to Victorian taxidermy, we’ve found ingenious ways to fill our free time.

Wall Street Journal, April 16, 2020

It’s no surprise that many Americans are turning or returning to hobbies during the current crisis. By definition, a hobby requires time outside of work.

Sofonisba Anguissola, ‘The Chess Game’ (1555)

We don’t hear much about hobbies in ancient history because most people never had any leisure time. They were too busy obeying their masters or just scraping by. The earliest known hobbyists may have been Nabonidus, the last king of Babylonia in the 6th century B.C., and his daughter Ennigaldi-Nanna. Both were passionate antiquarians: Nabonidus liked to restore ruined temples while Ennigaldi-Nanna collected ancient artifacts. She displayed them in a special room in her palace, effectively creating the world’s first museum.

Augustus Caesar, the first Roman emperor, was another avid collector of ancient objects, especially Greek gold coins. The Romans recognized the benefits of having a hobby, but for them the concept excluded any kind of manual work. When the poet Ovid, exiled by Augustus on unknown charges, wrote home that he yearned to tend his garden again, he didn’t mean with a shovel. That’s what slaves were for.

Hobbies long continued to be a luxury for potentates. But in the Renaissance, the printing press combined with higher standards of living to create new possibilities for hobbyists. The change can be seen in the paintings of Sofonisba Anguissola, one of the first Italian painters to depict her subjects enjoying ordinary activities like reading or playing an instrument. Her most famous painting, “The Chess Game” (1555), shows members of her family engaged in a match.

Upper-class snobbery toward any hobby that might be deemed physical still lingered, however. The English diplomat and scholar Sir Thomas Elyot warned readers in “The Boke Named the Governour” (1531) that playing a musical instrument was fine ”‘for recreation after tedious or laborious affaires.” But it had to be kept private, lest the practitioner be mistaken for “a common servant or minstrel.”

Hobbies received a massive boost from the Industrial Revolution. It wasn’t simply that people had more free time; there were also many more things to do and acquire. Stamp collecting took off soon after the introduction of the world’s first adhesive stamp, the Penny Black, in Britain in 1840. As technology became cheaper, hobbies emerged that bridged the old division between intellectual and manual labor, such as photography and microscopy. Taxidermy allowed the Victorians to mash the macrabre and the whimsical together: Ice-skating hedgehogs, card-playing mice and dancing cats were popular with taxidermists.

In the U.S., the adoption of hobbies increased dramatically during the Great Depression. For the unemployed, they were an inexpensive way to give purpose and achievement to their days. Throughout the 1930s, nonprofit organizations such as the Leisure League of America and the National Home Workshop Guild encouraged Americans to develop their talents. “You Can Write” was the hopeful title of a 1934 Leisure League publication.

Even Winston Churchill took up painting in his 40s, saying later that the hobby rescued him “in a most trying time.” We are in our own trying time, so why not go for it? I think I’ll teach myself to bake bread next week.

Historically Speaking: Beware the Red Tide

Massive algae blooms that devastate ocean life have been recorded since antiquity—and they are getting worse.

Real life isn’t so tidy. Currently, there is no force, biological or otherwise, capable of stopping the algae blooms that are attacking coastal waters around the world with frightening regularity, turning thousands of square miles into odoriferous graveyards of dead and rotting fish. In the U.S., one of the chief culprits is the Karenia brevis algae, a common marine microorganism that blooms when exposed to sunlight, warm water and phosphorus or nitrates. The result is a toxic sludge known as a red tide, which depletes the oxygen in the water, poisons shellfish and emits a foul vapor strong enough to irritate the lungs.

The red tide isn’t a new phenomenon, though its frequency and severity have certainly gotten worse thanks to pollution and rising water temperatures. There used to be decades between outbreaks, but since 1998 the Gulf Coast has suffered one every year.

The earliest description of a red tide may have come from Tacitus, the first-century Roman historian, in his “Annals”: “the Ocean had appeared blood-red and…the ebbing tide had left behind it what looked to be human corpses.” The Japanese recorded their first red tide catastrophe in 1234: An algae bloom in Osaka Bay invaded the Yodo River, a major waterway between Kyoto and Osaka, which led to mass deaths among humans and fish alike.

The earliest reliable accounts of red tide invasions in the Western Hemisphere come from 16th-century Spanish sailors in the Gulf of Mexico. The colorful explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (ca. 1490-1560) almost lost his entire expedition to red tide poisoning while sailing in Apalachee Bay on the west coast of Florida in July 1528. Unaware that local Native American tribes avoided fishing in the area at that time of year, he allowed his men to gorge themselves on oysters. “The journey was difficult in the extreme,” he wrote afterward, “because neither the horses were sufficient to carry all the sick, nor did we know what remedy to seek because every day they languished.”

Red tides started appearing everywhere in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Charles Darwin recorded seeing red-tinged water off the coast of Chile during his 1832 voyage on HMS Beagle. Scientists finally identified K. brevis as the culprit behind the outbreaks in 1946-47, but this was small comfort to Floridians, who were suffering the worst red tide invasion in U.S. history. It started in Naples and spread all the way to Sarasota, hanging around for 18 months, destroying the fishing industry and making life unbearable for residents. A 35-mile long stretch of sea was so thick with rotting fish carcasses that the government dispatched Navy warships to try to break up the mass. People compared the stench to poison gas.

The red tide invasion of 2017-18 was particularly terrible, lasting some 15 months and covering 145 miles of Floridian coastline. The loss to tourism alone neared $100 million. Things are looking better this summer, fortunately, but we need more than hope or luck to combat this plague; we need a weapon that hasn’t yet been invented.

Historically Speaking: How We Kept Cool Before Air Conditioning

Wind-catching towers and human-powered rotary fans were just some of the devices invented to fight the heat.

ILLUSTRATION: THOMAS FUCHS

What would we do without our air conditioning? Given the number of rolling blackouts and brownouts that happen across the U.S. each summer, that’s not exactly a rhetorical question.

Fortunately, our ancestors knew a thing or two about staying cool even without electricity. The ancient Egyptians developed the earliest known technique: Evaporative cooling involved hanging wet reeds in front of windows, so that the air cooled as the water evaporated.

The Romans, the greatest engineers of the ancient world, had more sophisticated methods. By 312 B.C. they were piping fresh water into Rome via underground pipes and aqueducts, enabling the rich to cool and heat their houses using cold water pipes embedded in the walls and hot water pipes under the floor.

Nor were the Romans alone in developing clever domestic architecture to provide relief in hot climes. In the Middle East, architects constructed buildings with “wind catchers”—tall, four-windowed towers that funneled cool breezes down to ground level and allowed hot air to escape. These had the advantage of working on their own, without human labor. The Chinese had started using rotary fans as early as the second century, but they required a dedicated army of slaves to keep them moving. The addition of hydraulic power during the Song era, 960-1279, alleviated but didn’t end the manpower issue.

There had been no significant improvements in air conditioning designs for almost a thousand years when, in 1734, British politicians turned to Dr. John Theophilus Desaguliers, a former assistant to Isaac Newton, and begged him to find a way of cooling the overheated House of Commons. Desaguliers designed a marvelous Rube Goldberg-like system that used all three traditional methods: wind towers, pipes and rotary fans. It actually worked, so long as there was someone to crank the handle at all times.

But the machinery wore out in the late 1760s, leaving politicians as hot and bothered as ever. In desperation, the House invited Benjamin Franklin and other leading scientists to design something new. Their final scheme turned out to be no better than Desaguliers’s and required not one but two men to keep the system working.

The real breakthrough occurred in 1841, after the British engineer David Boswell Reid figured out how to control room temperature using steam power. St. George’s Hall in Liverpool is widely considered to be the world’s first air-conditioned building.

Indeed, Reid is one of history’s unsung heroes. His system worked so well that he was invited to install his pipe and ventilation design in hospitals and public buildings around the world. He was working in the U.S. at the start of the Civil War and was appointed inspector of military hospitals. Unfortunately, he died suddenly in 1863, leaving his proposed improvements to gather dust.

The chief problem with Reid’s system was that steam power was about to be overtaken by electricity. When President James Garfield was shot by an assassin in the summer of 1881, naval engineers attempted to keep him cool by using electric fans to blow air over blocks of ice. Two decades later, Willis Haviland Carrier invented the first all-electric air conditioning unit. Architects and construction engineers have been designing around it ever since.

Fears for our power grid may be exaggerated, but it’s good to know that if the unthinkable were to happen and we lost our air conditioners, history can offer us some cool solutions.