Susan Denham Wade
Appearances
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
The very first eyeglasses were convex glasses, which is the ones that correct for long sight. They were most useful for people who were reaching middle age. So just as today, we reach our 40s or 50s and we find it more difficult to see close up. And convex glass lenses can help us, convex spectacles can refocus our eyes better. to improve that sort of vision.
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So if you were born very short-sighted around the time that the first spectacles were invented, around 1278 in Italy, I'm afraid they wouldn't have been much help to you. But what was so important about glasses at the time they were first invented was
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
was that they extended the useful life of so many of the artists, artisans and scholars of that time because they allowed them to keep working beyond a time when ordinarily their failing eyesight would have forced them to stop.
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And I don't think it's a coincidence that the invention of spectacles, as I say, towards the end of the 1200s happened just on the cusp of what became the Renaissance, the amazing and in Italy, the amazing flowering. of art, scholarship, architecture that happened in the next couple of hundred years.
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It wasn't until around 1450 that concave spectacles, which correct for short sight, were invented. But obviously that, again, would have been a massive revelation for people who were born short-sighted. Although there were many, many fewer short-sighted people then than there are now.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
There's been a massive increase in short-sightedness in particular over the last 70 years since the invention of television, in fact. And the explanation for that is not that television itself damages our eyes, but ever since televisions came into our lives, children in particular have spent more time inside and that does damage our eyes.
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One report suggests that for every additional hour spent outside, your chance of developing myopia, that's short-sightedness, reduces by 2%. And that's because even on the dullest day, natural daylight is about 10 times as bright as artificial light. And our eyes need daylight for their health, and especially children as their eyes are growing and developing.
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Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, television created the consumer society as we sat watching, happily watching TV shows through the 50s, funded by advertisers who showed us all the lovely products we could buy and we obediently went out to buy them, whereas previous generations did without those things.
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Now, I'm not saying that a lot of those products haven't made our lives easier and better, but they have convinced us that we need a lot of stuff that somehow we managed to live without before we saw it all advertised on television. And politics drastically changed by television.
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You'll remember, well, probably not yourself, but you'll know the story of the television debate between Nixon and Kennedy. just before the election, the presidential election between those two. Those who listened to it on radio named Nixon the winner of the debate. But those who watched it on television saw Nixon looking a little sweaty. He'd been ill. He had a dark shadow under his...
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under his makeup of his beard coming through. Kennedy, who was a much more sickly person on the whole, had spent the morning sitting in the sun, had a crisp white shirt and exuded relaxed good health. And those who watched the debate on television, and it was the most watched program ever, I think something like 60 million people watched it, declared Kennedy the winner.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
And sure enough, he won that election. And, you know, more recent times have seen telegenic candidates become president once again.
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We spend hours and hours a day checking our phones. Many, many people have their phone by their bed. It's the last thing they look at before they go to bed. It's the first thing they look at when they wake up in the morning. It's become the dominant feature of our lives, really.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
Increasingly, with all the apps available, pretty much every aspect of our lives can be channeled through this little screen in our hand. It's not just a phone. In features of a smartphone. It's our encyclopedia. It's our car key. It's our bank. It's our email. It's our encyclopedia. It's our entertainment device. It's pretty much
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
everything that um it's our window onto the world um and what that's meaning um it seems to me is that we're using uh our other senses less and less so we are um i'm sure we're all guilty of sending a text to someone even if they're in the next room rather than putting our head around the corner and having a conversation or texting a friend or one of our family members
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
just to say hi and have a little catch up, just because it's kind of quicker and easier rather than speaking to them on the phone. And this is actually not great for our mental and eventually leading on from that physical health, because we really need to hear each other.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
There was a research study done in Wisconsin University that put a group of young girls, school children, ages I think seven to 12, in a stressful situation where they were asked to give a presentation to some strangers. And after that, and they had them wired up to measure the level of cortisol, the stress hormone in their bodies.
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And after they'd been put in this situation, a quarter of the girls were allowed to go and be with their mothers and talk to them face to face. A second quarter was allowed to speak to their mothers on the phone. The third quarter was allowed to text with their mothers. And the fourth group had to go and sit quietly alone.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
And what the researchers found was that the girls who spoke to their mothers on the telephone calmed down as much as the girls who were with their mothers and talking to their mothers face-to-face, whereas the girls who just texted their mothers calmed down as little as the girls who just sat quietly alone. And although researchers, serious researchers, are very concerned
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
wary about jumping to too many conclusions from what they find. The title of the research was Why We Still Need to Hear Each Other. And if you think about it, verbal and oral communication has been our primary form of communication for tens of thousands of years. Language is one of the things that made us human. We are hardwired to learn to speak. No child needs to be taught to speak
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
they just pick it up naturally. It's part of our, it's in our DNA. Whereas everyone has to be taught to read and write. It's not an innate human skill. It's a learnt ability.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
Well, thank you very much, Mike.
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It's great to be here, Mike.
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Well, the inspiration for the book was the 2014 internet meme that became known as hashtag the dress. This was a photograph of a dress that was bought for a wedding that found its way onto the internet and the dress was striped.
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And the reason it went so viral and was actually one of the first global memes was because when people looked at the image online, they couldn't agree whether the stripes of the dress were white and gold or blue and black. This went all around Twitter with various celebrities weighing in on their opinions. It was discussed on newscasts. And this really intrigued me and got me to wondering why.
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wow, if people in the same time and place can look at the same thing and see something different, did people who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago see their worlds differently? And that was the question I set out to answer. And that was the beginning of the journey.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
Well, I found that indeed people have seen their worlds differently over time and that there've been a variety of technologies that mankind has either harnessed or discovered or invented that have really changed the world as we saw it. But not only that, each of these visual technologies has coincided with a really major inflection point in human history.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
So one of the big conclusions that I came to was, that the world seen differently becomes a different world.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
Well, if you take, for example, the invention of mirrors, the very first known mirrors were discovered in a proto-town, one of the very earliest settled communities, which is in Anatolia, which is now part of Turkey. And this was a settlement of about up to 8,000 people, which existed between about 8,000 and 5,500 years ago.
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And archaeologists exploring this site came upon these mirrors at a time when the society fundamentally changed as far as they could tell. Up until the point that we're talking about, the archaeologists described it as fiercely egalitarian. There were no signs of different status. Food and other implements were shared. People's homes were more or less the same size. And then
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
Around the layer of the site where these mirrors were discovered, archaeologists noted a shift in the psychology of this community to identify a much greater sense of individualism and the emergence of a sense of self, which I think is completely mind-blowing that we don't know what came first, the sense of self, and then that generated a desire to find mirrors, or whether someone had
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
created these mirrors, and that, being able to see their own reflection, gave people a self-realization, the idea that they could see themselves as others saw them, and that got them thinking about, well, who am I? I am actually a different person. I'm not just part of the group. I'm an individual.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
And in later history with the development of psychology, for example, in the 19th century, well, actually going right back to the Romans, the mirror has become symbolic as a tool for exploring the self. But it's incredibly interesting to me that going right back through human history, it appears that
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
Mirrorless societies tend to be highly egalitarian without much of a sense of individuality, but the appearance of mirrors tends to coincide with that individuality. So this is an example from a long time ago of how a change in visual technology and seeing something different caused a fundamental shift in mindset.
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All the excitement about photography when it was first announced, this amazing technology that could capture an image permanently, was all about how it was going to represent the great landscapes of the world and the great monuments of antiquity and the works of art. And none of the inventors or promoters of early photography mentioned the idea of portraiture.
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But as soon as photography was announced, people set up portraiture studios. And this was the absolute killer app for photography. All very well to see the great sights of the world and the great works of art. But what people really wanted to see was themselves and each other. And photography studios set up all around Europe and around the USA.
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And people for the price of a day's wages could get an image of themselves to keep forever. And the market for it was huge. Something like 90% of photographs taken in the first 50 years of photography were portraits.
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Well, in the earliest photographs, the earliest process was called a daguerreotype. They took about 10 to 15 minutes for the exposure to happen. So people had to stand very, very still in that time. So the photographic studios developed all kinds of algorithms props to help people stay still.
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Eleven Inventions That Changed the World & The Right Way to Make Love and Money Decisions - SYSK Choice
And that, being able to see their own reflection, gave people the idea that they could see themselves as others saw them, got them thinking about, well, who am I? I am actually a different person. I'm not just part of the group.
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So if you see people standing up, often you'll see them, there's a pedestal that they've got an arm resting on, or they're sitting on a chair with a slightly unnaturally raised arms. And all of these were devices to help people stand really still for that time. so that the image could take on the film used at the time. And so I guess it's pretty hard to hold a smile for that length of time.
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So they were probably advised just to keep it fairly serious.
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usually credited to Galileo, but in fact, the first telescope to be brought forward publicly was from a Dutch spectacle maker whose name was Lipperhey. But he tried to patent his telescope, but he was refused because the patent office decided it was too easy to copy. And unfortunately for him, the patent office was right because people started making telescopes all around Europe.
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And Galileo was this very talented mathematician and craftsman, and he got the idea of the telescope, heard about the idea of the telescope, and made his own very much, much more powerful than the original telescopes that were made. And he trained his telescope on the night sky and saw things that amazed, truly amazed the world and changed lives. forever really how people saw their world.
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What he saw was around the planet of Jupiter, three smaller stars. The planets were called the wandering stars. They were all considered to be stars, but it had long been observed that the planets move through the night sky in a different way than the other, what were called the fixed stars.
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But he saw that there was this smaller group of stars that followed Jupiter across the sky throughout from night after night. And this was a radical thought because up until then, the received view of how the universe worked was with the earth was at the center and And the Sun, the Moon and all the other planets, the stars rather, the wandering stars and the fixed stars rotated around the Earth.
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But there had been some theorizing in the previous 50 years. most famously by Copernicus, that this might not be the right way to view the universe, that in fact the sun might be the center of the universe and the planets revolved around it. But this was a heresy because there were various passages in the Bible that suggested that the earth was the center. And so on.
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But Galileo's discovery showed that because these mini stars followed Jupiter around, he concluded that they were moons of Jupiter. And that demonstrated that the Earth wasn't necessarily the center of the universe. This was radically controversial at the time. And indeed, Galileo eventually was hauled up in front of the Inquisition more than once. And he spent his final years under house arrest.
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So it didn't have a happy ending for him. But it did kick off a whole new way of viewing nature.