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A contemporary duck farmer in China leads his charges along a busy street.
Zhu Yigui was a Fujianese duck farmer who lived in Formosa (now Taiwan) during the 18th century. He was said to command his ducks with martial precision: according to legend, he even trained his ducks to march in military formations like soldiers (although mother ducks have long mastered the same feat with their ducklings–so perhaps Zhu’s soldierly duck-training prowess was less illustrious than legend would make it seem). In 1721 an earthquake rocked the island and caused extensive damage. Some people lost everything. The imperial prefect of Formosa was not interested in hearing excuses and levied punitive taxes on the peasantry—even though smallholders were trying to cope with disastrous losses from the earthquake.
Unable to put up with this abuse from the incompetent Qing authorities, the people rose in rebellion. When they were looking for a leader they remembered the duck-raising prowess of Zhu Yigui who thus became a general. On the 19th of April of 1721 he attacked and captured the city of Gangshan. Soon other rebel factions joined the rebellion, as did the oft-abused aboriginal people of Formosa. Zhu Yigui was given the sobriquet “Mother Duck King.” His forces went on to capture Tainan, the island’s capital without even fighting.
Unfortunately, Zhu’s mastery over ducks did not adequately prepare him for dealing with rebels. He quarreled with his fellow rebel captains just as the Machu relief army was landing on Formosa. The rebels fell apart in pitched battle with professional soldiers and Zhu Yigui was captured and executed. Because of these troubling events duck farming was prohibited in Central Taiwan for many years. Still, whenever one compiles a list of illustrious duck-breeders from the Qing dynasty, Zhu’s name is certainly on the list!
Ned Ludd was a person with severe developmental problems back in the 18th century, when society lacked effective ways of assisting people with disabilities. In the cruel parlance of the time he was a “half-wit”. Supposedly, Ned worked as a weaver in Anstey (an English village which was the gateway to the ancient Charnwood forest). In 1779, something went wrong—either Ned misunderstood a confusing directive, or he was whipped for inefficiency, or the taunts of the villagers drove him to rage. He picked up a hammer and smashed two brand new stocking frames (a sort of mechanical knitting machine used to quickly weave textiles). Then he fled off into the wilderness where he lived as a freeman. Some say that in the primal forests he learned to become a king.
The Leader of the Luddites (Annymous, published in 1812 by Mess, Walker and Knight)
Ned is important not because of his life (indeed it seems likely that he was not real—or, at best, he was just barely real) but because he was mythicized into a larger-than-life figure around whom the Luddite movement coalesced. This diffuse social rebellion had some roots in the austere and straightened times of the Napoleonic war but it was mostly a direct response to the first sweeping changes wrought by the Industrial revolution. Skilled weavers and textile artisans were aggrieved that machines operated by unskilled workpeople could easily produce much more fabric than trained artisans using traditional methods. The unskilled workpeople were angry at being underpaid and mistreated in the harsh dangerous early factories. This anger was combined with widespread popular discontent about the privations of war and the rapacity of the elite. Free companies of rebels met and drilled at night in Sherwood Forest or on vacant moorland. Anonymous malefactors smashed the new machines. Mills burnt down and factory owners were threatened. It was whispered that it was all the work of “King Ludd” whose rough signatures appeared on broadsheets and threatening letters.
The first wave of Luddite Rebellion broke out in 1811 centered in Nottingham and the surrounding areas. It is interesting that the same region which came up with Robin Hood, the hero-thief of folklore, also was responsible for remaking Ned Ludd from a lumpen outsider into a bellicose king of anti-technology. Disgruntled (male) artisans marched in women’s clothes and called themselves “Ned Ludd’s wives”. Circulars were addressed from the “king’s” office deep in Sherwood forest.
The original teasing tone quickly vanished as Luddite uprisings broke out across Northern England in the subsequent months and years until British regulars were sent in to quash them. For a brief period, there were more redcoats putting down Luddite insurrections in England than there were fighting Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula. Professional soldiers made short work of the rebels and Parliament hastily enacted a series of laws which made “machine-breaking” a capital crime. A number of Luddites were executed and others were transported to Australia.
Ned Ludd escaped these reprisals by being from a different era (and fictional). “Luddite” has now become a preferred label for all people who eschew technology. The half-wit King Ned still lives on in the imagination of people who have lost their jobs to the march of progress and in the nightmares of technophiles and economists. Indeed one of the great constructs/truisms of economics is the Luddite fallacy—which holds that labor saving devices increase unemployment. Neoclassical economists (who named the concept) assert that it is a fallacy because labor saving devices decrease the cost of goods—allowing more consumers to obtain them. However there are some who believe this has only been the case so far because the machines have not become sophisticated enough. Once a certain threshold of technology is passed thinking machines might replace many skilled positions as well as unskilled ones. This simultaneously awesome and horrifying concept will be our theme tomorrow.
By its very nature building involves limits. The great cathedrals of Medieval Europe were the apogee of technology during their time—the peak accomplishment of the architects, masons, and artisans of the day. As the centuries passed, the mighty churches became larger and more ambitious—the buildings soared ever higher on increasingly lofty flying buttresses until finally the builders reached the limits of stone and iron and mortar.
Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais
This happened at the Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais (hereafter Beauvais Cathedral) an incomplete cathedral which many people regard as the most daring achievement of Gothic architecture. Work was commenced on the cathedral in 1225. From the very beginning the building was designed to be the tallest and most splendid church in the world. This magnificence was probably partially intended as an act of defiance by France’s northern barons, who were allied with the episcopacy in a struggle with the French throne–a struggle for power which culminated when the northern lords revolted against Louis VIII and attempted to kidnap his son Louis IX (who escaped the plot to ascend first to the throne and later to sainthood, and after whom Saint Louis, Missouri is named). Unfortunately the grandiose architectural plans were hampered by funding problems and by structural flaws.
Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais from the west
Although Beauvais Cathedral was intended to be taller than other cathedrals, the original planners also designed the flying buttresses to be thinner. This was both to allow them to soar higher (since they weighed less!) and to allow maximum light into the stained glass windows of the building. Unfortunately the design did not work out. The cathedral collapsed in 1284 (well, actually only part of the choir vault collapsed, along with multiple flying buttresses). Contemporary structural engineers believe that the failure was the result of resonant vibrations—an unhappy mixture of spindly buttresses which were just the wrong length to cope with the region’s high winds. The cathedral was built and rebuilt off and on throughout the following centuries, with mixed results. In 1573 the structure suffered another major setback when the 153 meter tall central tower collapsed.
The Plan of Cathédrale Saint-Pierre de Beauvais (the black is extant, the gray is missing)
Today only the transept and choir remain, but they are indeed magnificent. Unfortunately, the structure is still in peril. In the sixties, the cathedral’s caretakers removed iron bars which were laterally connecting the buttresses in hopes of making the cathedral look even more graceful. Unsurprisingly, this action caused the transept to separate from the choir. Steel rods were quickly added, but, being more rigid than iron, they seem to have increased the rate of fissure. A wide number of sundry modern braces were added throughout the eighties and nineties, and in 2001 a team of architects from Columbia University scanned the entire edifice. They hope to use their comprehensive imaging resources to design less unwieldy solutions to the cathedral’s many problems, but, at present, the world’s most ambitious gothic edifice remains a masterpiece of beauty but a failure of function.
Inside Beauvais Cathedral
ferrebeekeeper 