Matt Kilty

That's writer Victor Hugo in 1866.

And for him, and others like him, painters, philosophers, poets, the sea became this place to go to contemplate our very own existence.

I'm going to wait for the helicopter at this pivotal juncture.

I'm giving it a second.

I'm giving it five seconds.

So we contemplated the smallness of it in the face of such enormity.

Hit it, Victor.

All right, it was incredible, but that was then and this is now.

And if you are one of those people who still looks out across an ocean, you feel a sense of awe and wonder and a little bit of terror.

Well, I'm sorry, but you're a child.

I don't know what to tell you.

It's really not that big of a deal.

It's like a six hour flight to Europe, which is probably what you're looking at.

That's it.

And I mean, I don't know, to be fair, for like 300 years or whatever, this ocean was kind of like the biggest thing any of us could conceive of.

There was nothing bigger.

Until some very obsessive women came along.

So...

Around 1890, Boston, Harvard, every night, a team of astronomers, all men, would sit in the Harvard Observatory, and they would point an 11-foot-long telescope into the night sky, and then they would open the shutter, and the telescope on a clock-driven mount would move in time with the rotation of the Earth so that the faint light of the stars would stay fixed in relation to it.

They would move at the same rate.