Speaker 1: Hello, and good morning you too. How are you doing today?
Speaker 2: Good?
Speaker 3: Yes, doing great?
Speaker 1: Oh my god, you guys have put together a book
here that I can't keep my eyes out of it.
I mean really, there's so much information and what it
does it creates conversation.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's the idea, hopefully.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: Being a boy, of course, where did I go with it?
Inside the book? I had to check out the fire section,
oh man, especially reading the fire research laboratory.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, go ahead.
Speaker 3: I'm gonna say that's a that's a fun place to
start because who doesn't, you know, like to play with
fire and learn all about it?
Speaker 1: What did you learn about things like this? Because I mean,
I mean this had to have been a great exploration
for the two of you.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and you know, yeah, the book goes through this
interconnected web of inventions, starting as you mentioned with fire.
We talk about a cave in South Africa where first
evidence of even controlled fire a million years ago, and
then a lab in Maryland where they build entire houses
and then burn them down on the inside of this
laboratory to understand, okay, how this fire spread, what burns
more quickly? And then you know, once you've got fire,
you can make glass, and so we take you to
a glass bridge in China where glass is used as
a construction material and you can, you know, walk this
glass bridge looking straight down twelve hundred feet below you.
And once you have glass, next you can make lenses
and so you go to you know, vera Ruben telescope.
So it was really fun to make this book and
kind of follow this chain of technology and invention and
some of the some of the connections were super surprising,
like like article accelerators to neuroscience is my favorite surprise.
I did not know that there was this big connection,
and at some point Jen said, hey, I think this
could be a really good one. So the great example
of one that that definitely took me by surprise.
Speaker 1: Well, the one thing that you're proving in this book
is something that I learned as a martial artist becoming
a third Dawn, and that is is that before you
are in this moment of now, something happened before you
got here.
Speaker 2: And now.
Speaker 1: I think that's what this book is all about. There
are so many things that had to take place before
we get what we've got today.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely, and you know the inventors, I mean, there's
an invention usually it's like by a single person, but
that's not exactly true, right, because they've looked at maybe
they've they've built upon research or something that someone has
done previously to get to that point, or there's a
collection of people. It's built upon necessity. So sometimes inventions
are invented at the same time because people look around
and they are like, hey, we all need this, Let's
see what we can come up with. But hopefully kids
will see this as a collaboration, which is the best
science that you can make is something that is collaborated
upon because you have a lot that's the different ideas
and experiences that I'll come together to create something.
Speaker 1: That's interesting that you bring that up because one of
my good friends back in the eighties and early nineties,
she would sit there and she would talk about how
they were they were bringing together this new thing called
fiber optic, and I said, well, are you going to
get credit for that? And she says, I'm just doing
my job. I'm doing my job right, And that's me
right away said teamwork.
Speaker 2: Yes, that's right, And a good example of the many
different ways we could have done this book. You could
have gone. I mean, it's a big jump in time,
but you could go straight from glass to fiber optics
because you don't do fiber optics without all the work
in glass, and then the corning lab basically figuring out, oh,
there's a way to pull a perfectly fure rod of glass,
a flexible you know, wire of glass, and then that
opens up an entirely new type of communication and sort
of technological creation.
Speaker 1: Please do not move. There's more with Dylan's and Jennifer
Swanson coming up next. Hey, we're back with Dylan Thurson
and Jennifer Swanson. The Da Vinci Robotic Surgical System. As
a guy, of course, I'm looking at this thing and
I'm breaking it down inside my imagination. But man, to
what went into this product has changed people's lives.
Speaker 3: Oh absolutely. I mean it's made surgery so much faster, easier,
and recovery most importantly, because recovery can be you know,
within days or they'll send you home the same day.
I mean, it's all of these things that again was
created because we needed this or it improved upon something
that we were doing before to make life better for humans.
Speaker 2: One of the things we try to do in the
book is, you know, not just tell you about the inventions,
but it's all about that sort of the places too,
where you can actually go and interact with this stuff,
so that in that example, you can go to a
museum in Scotland, Yes, and you can operate the surge machine,
this giant you know, twelve hundred pound giant surgery machine.
You can like move its arms around and figure out, okay,
this is how it's actually used.
Speaker 1: I see it, and right away I'm thinking about, you know,
with those gigantic robotic arms that there's nothing more steady.
I mean because a human hand shakes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I can.
Speaker 1: Who is Ruby Frassan and what's going on here that
we're going to.
Speaker 2: Learn that she is the illustrator of this book. And
Ruby's illustrations are what bring this thing to life. Yeah,
she so good and space in the UK. Her style
is a little bit reminiscent of you know, sort of
a mid century style, almost like a Tintin style, but
she puts her own spin on it and it is
so beautiful. She has these you know, cutaway illustrations where
you get to look inside what a fusion reactor looks like.
He filled the book with these little sort of tiny details.
So the longer you kind of look at these spreads,
the more you see. I just cannot speak highly enough
this book. I'm biased, but I just think it is
absolutely beautiful.
Speaker 3: It's absolutely gorgeous. I still remember the first time we
saw the first spreads and we were just like thrown away.
We were like, this is so amazing.
Speaker 1: You talk about little, tiny things that are in detail.
One of the things that readers need to understand is
that I love the EEDBD globe there where you're showing
us as the reader where this actually took price. That
is so important to me because there's a lot of
people that don't talk about the globe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we wanted to show that. You know, when you
look at the big picture of technology a it takes
you all over the world. There are some, you know,
really surprising places. I mean, we have a spread on
smelting metal and one of the pages there is, you know,
two thousand years ago in Tanzania, folks had figured out
how to use the material of a termite mound to
create a steel smelting process. The oldest some of the
oldest steel probably came in very small batches from these
basically termite based kilns, and I drink. It's school. I
think people don't know about sort of some of these
deep and interesting connections.
Speaker 1: One of the things I've been a daily writer for
since nineteen ninety four. Every single day I've relied on writing.
You've got a chapter in here on writing, and once again,
it's going all the way back.
Speaker 3: Well, I mean writing. You know, people don't think about
writing as a technology, but it is. Yeah, I mean
it's how you defined you know, something like it moved
us forward because once we could write things down, and
then we could create paper and we could pass them around,
and then people could make books and read and think
about where we would be if we didn't start with writing.
Speaker 2: One of the most to your point earlier, Jen about
multiple inventions, writing was invented independently four times all around
the world. It basically, once you achieved a certain agricultural base,
and then you started to build cities around that agricultural base,
life got complicated enough and you needed to keep track
of the grain and who owed who what, and maybe
a recipe, you know, for how to make beer. Like
then the need, right, you need writing. And so it's
really fascinating to see some of the ways in which
some of these inventions and discoveries, you know, really discoveries.
In that case, they emerge almost out of the conditions.
You know. It's sort of like, if you have this, this,
and this, you end up with writing. And I love
that about sort of exploring the world in this way.
Speaker 1: Well, you talk about writing, that also means the internet,
and that also means you guys have to have a
website or something where people can learn more, and that's
all connected to writing too.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Sure, absolutely, you can go to Atlas Obscura dot
com if you want to learn more about the book,
and obviously it is Workman is our publisher. They have
great material on the book as well. And of course
you should go and check out Jen's website.
Speaker 3: John, Yeah, my website is Jenniferswonson books dot com. And
again you can get the book at your local indie
bookstore or you know, any of your online retailers.
Speaker 1: Hex Sol Well, please come back to the show anytime
in the future. The door is always going to be
open for you. Well, thank you having us be brilliant today. Okay, yeah,
I love that.
Speaker 3: Be brilliant