Inventors. Male or female?
NOTICE ARCHIVE - 02/07/2023In the past, pages from daily newspapers were pasted on the inside walls of the timber houses, as a substitute for wallpaper. From a 200-year-old cabin in Sweden, we recently received a photo from such a wall, exposing an article from the newspaper “Aftonbladet” of July 28, 1897. That was 126 years ago! It was about an audacious expedition that had just started, a voyage of discovery to a land of nothing more than ice and silence.
It was three Swedes named Salomon August André, Knut Fraenkel and Nils Strindberg who intended to be the first in the world to reach the unexplored North Pole. The plan was to reach the Pole with the help of a balloon. The start took place from Svalbard. The mooring was cut, and the journey to the absolute North started. The World media waited interested for news of how it went. A carrier pigeon came with a message dated two days after takeoff, which said "all well on board". Then nothing more was heard from André, Fraenkel and Strindberg. 33 years later, their dead bodies were found on an island in the middle of the Arctic Ocean.
The tragic end was documented in a camera from their last camp. Through the pictures, it was discovered that the balloon had crashed due to icing and insufficient lifting power. The men had started a trek across the ice where the conditions got worse and worse, it must have been hell – a frozen hell.
Why did André, Fraenkel and Strindberg become enormously interested in travelling with balloons and the North Pole? What drove them to take the enormous risk of launching a balloon into one of the most inhospitable places on earth, a place that no human had never visited?
I have the answer. They were driven by the eternal male impulsion to explore the unexplored, to investigate the unknown. The male interest in technology and science. The male ability to focus extremely hard on a single task. They were driven by male fighting spirit and competitive instinct. And they were driven by masculine courage and willingness to take great risks. It is no coincidence that it was three men and not three women who tried to reach the North Pole by balloon.
There are individual exceptions, but at the group level, men's and women's brains are quite different. This is because nature has different roles in mind for the two genders. The fact that the characteristics I just listed are specifically male is not something I'm just making up. The brain researchers have confirmed that. In short, the woman's brain is more empathetic, while the man's brain is more systematic. It also shows the natural choice of professions in societies where women and men are allowed to choose freely without political or ideological influence. If you are interested to know more you can google researchers and authors such as Annika Dahlström, Arne Müntzing, Anna Servin, Sir Simon Baron-Cohen, Germund Hesslow, Anne Moir...
The newspaper article about the André expedition made me start to think about where humanity would have been if men had not had the specifically male characteristics I mentioned. If men had been like women, and instead focused on relationships, children and caregiving. Characteristics that in fact are very good and just as important as the male characteristics. I want to emphasize that men's and women's characteristics are intentionally complementary and thus fundamental for the human progress and wellbeing.
To get closer to an answer to the question of where humanity would have been, if hypothetically, there had only been women, and no men, I made a short research over which men and women were behind the great inventions and discoveries, which with life as a stake have taken humanity from the caves to the digital era.
It's mostly the same individual qualities that drive a person to become an inventor as those that drive a person to become an explorer. Only courage is less relevant to inventions. But what is the gender distribution behind the GREAT inventions?
Some of the earliest known scientists, Archimedes and Leonardo da Vinci, laid important theoretical foundations in hydraulics, mechanics, anatomy and mathematics. A. invented a lightning defense system against navies, based on optical mirrors as well as the rotating screw that is still used today to pump bulk material. Leonardo da Vinci was beside a skilled artist also engineer and designed new revolutionary solutions for mechanical devices and principles for various flying machines.
A printing technology with woodblocks, ink and paper was early invented in China and in Germany, around 1440, Johannes Gutenberg invented the movable-type printing press, which laid the foundation for an enormous information and knowledge revolution and thus for the whole of modern society.
The steam engine in its serviceable version was designed by James Watt. The steam engine enabled the industrial revolution with the mass production of goods in factories, and in addition, transportation could suddenly become incredibly efficient with the help of railroads.
Vaccination, which has saved the lives of hundreds of millions of people, was introduced by Edward Jenner. Development of synthetic antibiotic and anti-bacterial began in Germany with Paul Ehrlich in the late 1880 and in 1928 Sir Alexander Fleming developed the penicillin.
Nicolai Tesla made ground-breaking discoveries to electrify the world, something that today we hardly can´t live without, especially in northern latitudes. We can thank Thomas Edison for the fact that oozing and very dimly glowing kerosene lamps could be replaced by electric light just by pressing a button. He also invented the first recording device, the phonograph.
The telegraph revolutionized communication, so that a message from Europe to America could arrive in seconds instead of taking weeks. Three people are supposed to be the founders of the telegraph: William Cooke, Charles Wheatstone and Samuel Morse. Then communication was revolutionized even more by the telephone, which was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.
The car, which took the world by storm, is attributed in its serviceable form to Karl Benz. The electric motor was invented by William Sturgeon, radio and television were invented by Guglielmo Marconi & John Baird. The battery was invented by Alessandro Volta.
The first flying airplane was built by brothers Orville and Wilbur Wright. The rocket, which among other things later enabled satellites and thus GPS navigation, in its primitive form used by Chinese artillery was around the 1920´s improved by Robert Goddard and Herrmann Oberth and finally serviceable in the WWII as propulsion for airplanes and missiles, developed by Wernher von Braun, then refined as carrier rocket for command modules like Apollo and satellites.
Hydropower has been explored with water wheels since the Greek empire. In the 19th century, French engineer Benoît Fourneyron developed the first hydropower turbine. Wind power has existed since humans filled their sails with wind, but the first windmill used for production of electric power was built in Scotland in 1887 by Prof James Blyth. Charles Fritts installed the world's first rooftop photovoltaic solar array, using 1%-efficient selenium cells, on a New York City roof in 1884. Nuclear power was discovered by Enrico Fermi 1930 and developed under the 1940´s.
The transistor, a so-called semiconductor that forms the basis of just about everything electronic, was invented by John Bardeen, William Shockley and Walter Brattain. The computer is mainly attributed to John Vincent Atanasoff. A modern thing worth mentioning as the last thing is the Internet, which was created by Vinton Cerf and Bob Kahn.
We have mostly talked about inventions developed in the Western World. Many useful inventions were made earlier in China and it might be interesting to know if the Chinese possibly had any female inventors? Could it maybe been women who invented the first firearms? The earliest known recorded recipe for gunpowder is found in a military manuscript compiled in year 1044. But I suppose it is quite impossible, women should at least not invent something which destroy human life? And that seems to be a correct conclusion, as I found a relation of the 100 most famous female inventors. There are no inventions more harmful than Ken, Barbies boyfriend:
https://www.cadcrowd.com/blog/top-100-famous-female-inventors-in-history-modern-women-inventors/
If we suppose men had not existed, but humanity only had consisted of women, where would we stand today? What would society look like? More peaceful, more caretaking? Taking care of what, keeping peace on whom? Survival in a brutal environment without the inventions we developed for shelter, nutrition, health, transportation and protection? We can only speculate on that, but if we also eliminate the inventions that were made even earlier, 1000s of years ago, we would in best case still be living in caves and simple huts. In the absence of evidence, I let it to the reader speculate whether it´s men, or not, who are behind the basic inventions such as the wheel, ships, metal mining, the plough, etc....
