Happy Saturday. Not too long ago, we talked about John Wilkins and his efforts to devise a standard system of measurement so in early version of the metric system, and we mentioned that we had done a previous episode on a completely different project of his, which involved plans for a seventeenth century exploration of the Moon. So here that other episode is as Today's Saturday Classic. This one originally came out on August twenty sixth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Friday and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. As you may have noticed, particularly lately, I get on a kick. I get obsessed with one topic and explore it from multiple angles. That's happening again today. We talked about this very recently, but just to recap. On July twentieth, nineteen sixty nine, Neil Armstrong took his place in history as the first man to step on the lunar surface. He was joined by Buzz Aldrin. The two of them spent several hours walking around on the Moon's surface, collecting samples and planting that famous flag, but pertinent to today's podcast. More than three hundred years earlier, a man named John Wilkins was planning out what he thought it would take for humans to travel to the Moon. Wilkins is interesting because he managed to ride out a pretty rocky time in England's history quite well, and he was very well known in his day. He for example, appears in the Diaries of Samuel Peeps. And of course mankind was dreaming about the Moon and other space travel well before the sixteen hundreds, but the work that Wilkins did is the first documented effort at actually kind of making that dream a reality. He's not really ready to make it into reality, and we'll talk about why. But if you listen to our episode on Thomas Harriet that we did recently, you know that the early years of the seventeenth century were really exciting time when it came to looking at the Moon. Sixteen oh nine was the first time that Harriet and Galileo turned their telescopes to Earth's natural satellite, and the scientific community was really excited about all of the new information that was revealed as a consequence, and Wilkins kind of came in in that wave of excitement and became part of it. John Wilkins was born in sixteen fourteen in Northamptonshire in the East Midlands of England, so that was just after that huge first push of discoveries with the moon through telescopes had been made. He was born into a family of relative means. His father, Walter Wilkins, was a goldsmith with a successful business, and was a man described as ingenious, with a knack for understanding anything mechanical, and also ceaselessly curious. His mother's side of the family was of the gentry, a number of clergymen were in it, and her name was Jane Dodd. John attended grammar school at Edward Sylvester's in Oxford, and when he was still just a boy of eleven, his father, Walter died. That was sixteen twenty five, and not long after John's mother, Jane remarried, this time to a man named Francis Pope. Soon John had a little brother, Walter Pope, who would go on to be a poet and astronomer of renowned on his own. After a grammar school, John started attending Maudlin Hall in Oxford, and from there he became an ordained priest at the Church of England. In sixteen thirty eight, he moved to the hamlet of Fallsley in Northamptonshire and was provided a living by his mother's family. During his years of school, in which he had learned an advanced degree, he had been particularly interested in astronomy, and that interest continued as one of his pursuits beyond his formal education years. But even so he wasn't really discovering anything new. At this point. The available telescopic technology had been used to see everything possible with regards to the Moon, and it wouldn't be until the middle of the century the telescopes would get another boost in their capabilities. Besides this, Wilkins was also occupy with his duties as a vicar and working in his other areas of interest and responsibility. He certainly ran in very intellectual circles, and he and his friends and colleagues certainly discussed issues of space and science. So while he did love astronomy, it wasn't really his life's work by any means. In sixteen thirty eight, at the age of twenty four, Wilkins published The Discovery of a World. Its subtitle was a discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable that there may be another habitable world in the Moon, with a discourse concerning the possibility of a passage thither. Eventually he wrote a second edition with a second supplemental book to the Discovery of a New World, and that was titled A Discourse concerning a New Planet, and this two volume version was published in sixteen forty, so two years after the original. The title page of this second volume features Copernicus and Galileo facing one another in the foreground, with an illustration of the heliocentric planetary system in the background. Wilkins's name was not initially included as the author of the book. No writer was listed in the print, but I was not terribly uncommon at the time, and it was widely known as his work. It wasn't as though he was trying to publish anonymously. And the introduction to this book he offers the following mornings. Two cautions there are which I would willingly admonish thee of in the beginning. One that thou shouldst not here look to find any exact, accurate treatise, since this discourse was but the fruit of some lighter studies, and those two huddled up in a short time, being first thought of and finished in the space of some few weeks. And therefore you cannot, in reason expect that it should be so polished as perhaps the subject would require, or the leisure of the author might have done it. Two. To remember that I promise only probable arguments for the proof of this opinion, and therefore you must not look that every consequence should be of an undeniable dependence, or that the truth of each argument should be measured by its necessity. I grant that some astronomy appearances may possibly be solved otherwise than here they are. But the thing I aim at is this that probably they may so be solved as I have here set them down, which if it be granted as I think it must, then I doubt not. But the indifferent reader will find some satisfaction, and the main thing that is to be proved. So he was making it really clear right out of the gate. He's just theorizon. Look, people, I'm spitballing here. Don't get too hung up on those details. I think this is the opposite of the level of confidence from that voyage manuscript decoding that we talked about on Unearth recently that was like similarly done in a couple of weeks as part of a different thing. Yeah. Yeah, but Wilkins is very Look, I'm a minister, I know a lot about science, but I'm just I'm thinking through my thoughts and I'm bringing you along. But this kind of like slightly more casual approach was also probably why this actually ended up becoming a really influential publication. He was kind of kicking around ideas and working through the logistics of them, and he was basically showing his work for the reader to come along with. Wilkins' text helped further promote some of Galileo's ideas about the Moon, specifically that it was a solid, compacted, opacious body and that humans could potentially visit and maybe even live on it. Wilkins covered a number of other topics and the two volume work, though they weren't exactly groundbreaking, he bolstered the idea fairly commonly held in scientific community at the time that the Earth wasn't particularly special as a planet in the Solar System, but it was one of many. Yeah, this was a time when there was a big shift. We'll talk a little bit more about it. In how science and theology, which were closely mixed, saw the Earth and what it was in relation to the cosmos, and that was all changing really rapidly. And while these ideas were already pretty commonly accepted in the science community everything he was talking about, it was the way that Wilkins wrote about them that really made his work important. He wrote in a style, as you can tell, that was relatively casual compared to most scientific work of the day, meaning that the average person could read and understand it, and especially because it was illustrated in a way that was also aimed at readers who were not immersed in science. We have talked in previous episodes about how a lot of scientists in this era were polyglots, and that was in part just so they could read the work of other scientists who spoke and wrote in languages other than their own. But here was a book that translated everything for the reader. There was no knowledge of Latin or Italian required. We'll talk about another important aspect of Wilkins's writing in just a moment, but first we will pause or a sponsor break. We talked before the break about how part of the appeal of Wilkins's work at this point was that it was written for the average person to understand. And another tenant of Wilkins's work in this writing is change, as in, he was keenly aware of just how much our knowledge of the world had changed in just a few decades leading up to this writing, and he foresaw that the same kind of change in what was commonly known to entirely new ideas was going to continue. Wilkins is pretty self reflective, and he understands that even though the seventeenth century was seeing entire new vistas of science and understanding open up, that they were going to seem childish to later generations. On this revelation of new truths, he wrote one that a new truth may seem absurd and impossible, not only to the vulgar, but to those also who are otherwise wise men and excellent scholars. And hence it will follow that every new thing which seems to oppose common principles is not presently to be rejected, but rather to be pride into with a diligent inquiry, since there are many things which are yet hid from us and reserve for future discovery. Two, that it is not the commonness of an opinion that can privilege it for a truth. The wrong way is sometime a well beaten path, whereas the right way, especially to hidden truths, may be less trodden and more obscure. I sort of love that. Hey, you too, I also love listeners don't get to hear it, but like the slightly atypical spelling of many of these words is delightful. Yeah. Of course it fell to portracy to read the the uncorrected writing of John Wilkins. I didn't do that on purpose. So he definitely wanted his readers to look at science and particularly what humanity is a collective new about the universe with a new eye and an open mind. He pointed out the ways that the work of Aristotle, which had been groundbreaking in its own time, had become outdated and led the reader to the idea that knowledge and discovery was an ongoing, living thing that was not statf and in a way, the people in the seventeenth century kind of needed to hear this. So much of the world's scientific knowledge had been upended, as we said, in those three decades preceding it, particularly not just in astronomy, but in geography and physiology, In other fields and in this very short period of time. So Wilkins was to some degree preparing his readers for the fact that they were not going to get all the information and settle down, but in fact that change was the new normal of the Moon as a habital place. He wrote, quote, I must needs confess. Though I had often thought with myself that it was possible there might be a world in the Moon, yet it seemed such an uncouth opinion that I never durst discover it for fear of being counted singular and ridiculous. But afterward, having read Plutarch, Galileis, Kepler, and some others, and finding many of mine own thoughts confirmed by such strong authority, I then concluded that it was not only possible there might be, but probably that there was another habitable world in that planet. So at this point the details of the Moon's surface, the craters, and the mountains were things that had really only been part of our understanding since Galileo and Harriet started looking at the Moon about thirty years prior. Prior to that, most people thought that it was a pretty smooth body because they saw it with the naked eye all the time, and while it had some color variation. It wasn't perceived as being particularly textured, and some of that was tied up in thinking that today would be seen as very unscientific. British historian Alan Chapman wrote in a twenty fourteen paper about Wilkins and his work, quote, to understand the contemporary power of Wilkins's arguments, like those of Galileo before him, one must remember that the classical universe was not just a physical but also a moral place, seen most obviously in the juxtaposition between the corrupt, chaotic Earth and the perfect heavens. There were theories, for example, that the dark areas of the Moon were spots that had been tarnished by light reflected up from the Earth. Yeah, Earth was a yucky mass and the heavens were beautiful and celestial. But Wilkins saw Earth and the heavens as part of one large entity, which he considered in its totality to be a divine creation. And this was in contrast to the ideology of Aristotle and some of his followers, who thought that there was a boundary between Earth and the heavens and that the same scientific rules did not apply to those two things. In cosmology, it was essentially two different systems in their thinking. Wilkins's vision of a more holistic view of the universe was a departure from what had been believed and taught for centuries at that point. All the same matter and that quote the heavens do not consist of any such pure matter which can privilege them from the like change in corruption as these inferior bodies are liable unto was a thing that he was a big proponent of. It's all the same stuff, it's just arranged differently, and he wanted all of it to be subject to scientific exploration and analysis. Wilkins was also a proponent of the idea known as a plurality of worlds, and that's that our world was not the only world out in the vastness of space, and he believed quote that a plurality of worlds doth not contradict any principle of reason or faith. This led to ideas of other habitable places among the stars, and today we talk about the probability of life on other planets based on the likelihood that some sort of combination of elements created a hospitable environment similar to the ways our planet got lucky, but for Wilkins and his colleagues. Discussion was often centered around God creating life on other planets, just as they believed he had on Earth. To talk about the writing that Wilkins did regarding the Moon, we have to jump back to the year of his first one volume edition of his book, The Discovery of a World, That was sixteen thirty eight, and there was another book published that same year. This one was fictional and it was titled The Man in the Moon, and that story was written by Francis Godwin, and it told the tale of the main character, Domingo Gonzalez, being carried to the Moon by a flock of geese pulling a chariot. He was incidentally trying to get to Spain, but accidentally got the geese when they were doing their natural migration to the moon. Question mark. This mode of transit seems pretty swanky, but obviously completely impossible. But still this idea really got Wilkins thinking about what it would actually take to get a man to the moon, and that line of thought was part of his supplemental volume. Godwin was certainly not the first fiction writer to imagine traveling to the moon, but he was working with contemporary knowledge of it that previous writers had not had. There were certainly other books about moon exploration that stoked the fires of Wilkins's imagination as well, including work by Francis Bacon and Johannes Kuppler, and all of this that culminated in the sixteen forty edition of Wilkins's work, in which he stated quote that it is possible for some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world, and if there be inhabitants there, to have commerce with them. He is open in his writing to the idea that we probably can't really imagine what a moon inhabitant might be, though, and his evidence that there probably are some sort of inhabitants there is kind of the argument that he's been laying out in the previous chapters of the book. So it's kind of like, look, the Moon has this property and this property and this property, and I think probably maybe God would have put some people there. I sort of, as I was working on this, really really wished that he could have lived long enough to see the Great Moon hoax, but that was two centuries later. It can be one of our bad uses for a time machine. We're going to go, pick him up. Take it right, the teacher, John, come with me, don't ask questions. While his ideation on a subject was inspired in part by fantasy, Wilkins was methodical and cataloging the challenges of space travel. Space Travelers would have to carry their needed supplies such as food and water, although he theory that once they were out of the pull of Earth they might not need any food, And then there was figuring out how to breathe while also not freezing to death, although he was open to the idea that space might not be cold at all. But then there was the matter of conveyance. So for the vehicle there were of course myriad concerns. The weight of it would be a key factor in its success, and figuring out how to escape the Earth's pole was going to be a big issue. Keep in mind, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, in which he discusses the theory of gravity, was still almost five decades away. It wasn't published until sixteen eighty seven. So Wilkins was on to this idea of escape velocity, but he didn't really have the scientific vocabulary to really approach it with the right kind of mindset. And there was also this other matter of time and how we were going to keep humans alive during a journey to the Moon, which Wilkins estimated would take about one hundred and eighty days. And he had come to that conclusion based on his knowledge of earth bound travel over long distances, so calculating like ships traveling across the ocean, et cetera, led him to make some kind of estimates about that one hundred and eighty day timeline. Wilkins obviously did not solve that problem. In sixteen forty, he warned us readers, after all, that he was just dealing in theoreticals and some of his assertions were way off base. He thought that Earth was the Moon's moon, just like the Moon was Earth's moon, which I think is a thing that I might have thought when I was like four. Not trying to disparage him at all, I'm just saying I understand I could just come to that conclusion. He thought that the Moon had seasons just like the Earth does, and he made it clear that he didn't think they were exactly alike, but that the Earth and the Moon were sort of correspondent to one another. Yeah, he didn't think like that autumn on the Moon was the same as autumn on Earth, but that they had an autumn which was a shift from their previous season of summer. Uh. And he was also a little dismayed in all of this that humans were built in a way that they could not physiologically handle travel to the Moon on their own. So that was kind of his wrap up, like, I think we can do it. I don't know how. Here are my thoughts. So with his book second edition out in the world, he continued about his business of being a vicar and doing self directed scientific work as his time and interest allowed. Coming up next, we'll talk about what else was going on in England in the years following this second edition of Wilkins's book. First, we will take a quick break to hear from one of our sponsors. In the sixteen forties, England was in the midst of major upheaval. The reign of King Charles the First had been loaded with conflict almost since his coronation in sixteen twenty six. He had dissolved the parliament in sixteen twenty nine, setting off eleven years of what is referred to as personal rule, and made a series of unpopular decisions from there as usual when we talk about such events, this is worthy of a whole episode of its own, or even several. And after a series of conflicts Scotland, known as the Bishop's Wars, England became embroiled in Civil War in sixteen forty two, fought between Charles the First Royalist supporters and the Parliamentarians. This is again a very simplified version of this whole thing. That fighting continued in various different battles, and you'll sometimes see it listed out as even different wars right up into sixteen fifty two. One of the personal impacts to Wilkins was the the Anglican Church in which he was a minister was abolished. But he came through this very tumultuous time and history and pretty good shape. Although Wilkins had been associated with the royal family and had even been a chaplain to Charles the First's nephew, and though his position as an Anglican vicar was not a thing anymore, he was a moderate and amiable and good with people. And in his scientific circles his colleagues were aligned with either side of the much larger conflict, as well as having other ideological backgrounds, but their discussions of their work and the theories of the day really seemed to supersede all of their other loyalties. The Oxford Philosophical Club, as their group came to be known, met in both Oxford and London. Yeah, this was a very influential group in terms of like where science went from there. And in sixteen forty eight he was made warden of Wadham College, and this appointment was done by the Parliamentary Commissioners. But Wilkins remained able to walk that line between parliamentarians and royalists with a lot of grace. As we said, he got along kind of with everybody, and a lot of royalist families sent their sons to the school while Wilkins was its head. So while he hadn't abandoned his thoughts on flight, it was another eight years before he got back to writing about it. In sixteen forty eight, the same year of his appointment at Wadham, he published a new book which was titled Mathematical Magic, or the Wonders that May be Performed by Mechanical Geometry. And in this work he got a lot more detailed about exactly how one might attain flight. We should mention here that the use of the word magic isn't really what we might associate with it today, but more a scriptor of the marvel of science. Yeah, there was absolutely no actual magical element to this. He didn't think there were incantations involved. He just thought that learning about mechanics was a magical experience, and he wrote about all kinds of mechanisms in this book, Pulleys and Springs and Levers. The entire first section of the work is dedicated to examining the physics of these and other devices that form the sort of building blocks of larger machines, and like his previous writing, he doesn't stick strictly to scientific or known entities. Here. Many of his ideas are theoretical, and he owns that He suggests a way to harness the heat, for example, that rises through a chimney, so that you can then turn a spit with it so that the meat that's roasting on the fire below is cooked evenly. This sounds fairly great to me, or perhaps in his estimation, one could rig a series of gears in such a way that a simple puff of breath might pull a tree up from the roots. As with his previous writing, Wilkins builds his case very slowly throughout the book. He puts forth all these mechanical possibilities to make the case that if humans think creatively and harness the mechanisms at our disposal, couldn't we build machines that could fly and eventually leave the planet. All this theorizing culminates in the idea of a flying chariot, and Wilkins's approach is that if we can figure out how to fly around from place to place here on planet Earth, it will then be a very short jump to figure out how to fly into space. I love his optimism so much, but he doesn't, of course, have a specific version of the flying chariot in mind. He mentions various potential features it could have, but aside from thinking that it probably might need gears and wings and springs, it's pretty vague. He offers up some some theoretical pictures, but they're not really anything that could get to space. It starts to read a little bit like a theoretical baker bringing you a bunch of ingredients and telling you what those ingredients do, and then concluding with make a cake. So he clearly believed it was all possible and he really wanted humanity to make spaceflight a real thing, so that we could go meet the moon people and maybe trade with them. There are some notes written by wilkins protege Robert Hook that in the early sixteen fifties the two men tested out some kind of flying machine, although details on that one are scarce. Yeah, that's literally the only thing we know about him doing anything else in this arena. In sixteen fifty six, Wilkins married Rabina French, the widowed sister of Oliver Cromwell, and three years later, in sixteen fifty nine, Wilkins moved from Wadham to a more prestigious position as Master of Trinity College. That was thanks to the influence of his famous brother in law, but the country's fortunes made that appointment a very short stay. The English monarchy was restored in sixteen sixty, less than a year after his time at Trinity began, and Wilkins, who had also been an advisor to Oliver Cromwell, was removed from the post. Sixteen sixty wasn't all bad for John Wilkins, though, his Oxford Club received a royal decree from Charles's second new King and became the Royal Society for Promoting Natural Knowledge. This group, which had royal title but not funding, was the proto organization for what would eventually become the Royal Astronomical Society. The Church of England was also restored and he was once again an influential figure within it, and Wilkins rose through the ranks of the church, eventually becoming Bishop of Chester in sixteen sixty eight, and that same year he published another work titled An Essay Towards a Real Character and the Philosophical Language. In Wilkins's opening note to the reader states, it may perhaps be expected of some that I should give an account of my engaging in a work of this nature so unsuitable to my calling and business. In the text, he proposed that the development of universal language would really simplify things, and also that quote the several nations of the world do not more differ in their languages than the various kinds and proportions of these measures. He wanted there to be a consistent system of measurement for the entire globe as well. While Wilkins wrote many other works on subjects ranging from cryptography to prayer, it's this sixteen sixty eight work, along with his two volumes on the subject of the Moon and the potential to get there that are his most well known today. In sixteen seventy two, John Wilkins dine. He was fifty eight and he was buried at Saint Lawrence Jewry, where he had once been a vicar. He's so interesting because I don't think many people realize that there was a sixteen hundred minister going we need a space program, you guys. I can only deal with like the setup of ideas, but somebody else is gonna have to work out the details. I love it. Yeah, go to space. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. You can find us all over social media at missed in History, and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. Not too long ago, we talked about John Wilkins and his efforts to devise a standard system of measurement so in early version of the metric system, and we mentioned that we had done a previous episode on a completely different project of his, which involved plans for a seventeenth century exploration of the Moon. So here that other episode is as Today's Saturday Classic. This one originally came out on August twenty sixth, twenty nineteen. Enjoy Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Friday and I'm Tracy B. Wilson. As you may have noticed, particularly lately, I get on a kick. I get obsessed with one topic and explore it from multiple angles. That's happening again today. We talked about this very recently, but just to recap. On July twentieth, nineteen sixty nine, Neil Armstrong took his place in history as the first man to step on the lunar surface. He was joined by Buzz Aldrin. The two of them spent several hours walking around on the Moon's surface, collecting samples and planting that famous flag, but pertinent to today's podcast. More than three hundred years earlier, a man named John Wilkins was planning out what he thought it would take for humans to travel to the Moon. Wilkins is interesting because he managed to ride out a pretty rocky time in England's history quite well, and he was very well known in his day. He for example, appears in the Diaries of Samuel Peeps. And of course mankind was dreaming about the Moon and other space travel well before the sixteen hundreds, but the work that Wilkins did is the first documented effort at actually kind of making that dream a reality. He's not really ready to make it into reality, and we'll talk about why. But if you listen to our episode on Thomas Harriet that we did recently, you know that the early years of the seventeenth century were really exciting time when it came to looking at the Moon. Sixteen oh nine was the first time that Harriet and Galileo turned their telescopes to Earth's natural satellite, and the scientific community was really excited about all of the new information that was revealed as a consequence, and Wilkins kind of came in in that wave of excitement and became part of it. John Wilkins was born in sixteen fourteen in Northamptonshire in the East Midlands of England, so that was just after that huge first push of discoveries with the moon through telescopes had been made. He was born into a family of relative means. His father, Walter Wilkins, was a goldsmith with a successful business, and was a man described as ingenious, with a knack for understanding anything mechanical, and also ceaselessly curious. His mother's side of the family was of the gentry, a number of clergymen were in it, and her name was Jane Dodd. John attended grammar school at Edward Sylvester's in Oxford, and when he was still just a boy of eleven, his father, Walter died. That was sixteen twenty five, and not long after John's mother, Jane remarried, this time to a man named Francis Pope. Soon John had a little brother, Walter Pope, who would go on to be a poet and astronomer of renowned on his own. After a grammar school, John started attending Maudlin Hall in Oxford, and from there he became an ordained priest at the Church of England. In sixteen thirty eight, he moved to the hamlet of Fallsley in Northamptonshire and was provided a living by his mother's family. During his years of school, in which he had learned an advanced degree, he had been particularly interested in astronomy, and that interest continued as one of his pursuits beyond his formal education years. But even so he wasn't really discovering anything new. At this point. The available telescopic technology had been used to see everything possible with regards to the Moon, and it wouldn't be until the middle of the century the telescopes would get another boost in their capabilities. Besides this, Wilkins was also occupy with his duties as a vicar and working in his other areas of interest and responsibility. He certainly ran in very intellectual circles, and he and his friends and colleagues certainly discussed issues of space and science. So while he did love astronomy, it wasn't really his life's work by any means. In sixteen thirty eight, at the age of twenty four, Wilkins published The Discovery of a World. Its subtitle was a discourse tending to prove that 'tis probable that there may be another habitable world in the Moon, with a discourse concerning the possibility of a passage thither. Eventually he wrote a second edition with a second supplemental book to the Discovery of a New World, and that was titled A Discourse concerning a New Planet, and this two volume version was published in sixteen forty, so two years after the original. The title page of this second volume features Copernicus and Galileo facing one another in the foreground, with an illustration of the heliocentric planetary system in the background. Wilkins's name was not initially included as the author of the book. No writer was listed in the print, but I was not terribly uncommon at the time, and it was widely known as his work. It wasn't as though he was trying to publish anonymously. And the introduction to this book he offers the following mornings. Two cautions there are which I would willingly admonish thee of in the beginning. One that thou shouldst not here look to find any exact, accurate treatise, since this discourse was but the fruit of some lighter studies, and those two huddled up in a short time, being first thought of and finished in the space of some few weeks. And therefore you cannot, in reason expect that it should be so polished as perhaps the subject would require, or the leisure of the author might have done it. Two. To remember that I promise only probable arguments for the proof of this opinion, and therefore you must not look that every consequence should be of an undeniable dependence, or that the truth of each argument should be measured by its necessity. I grant that some astronomy appearances may possibly be solved otherwise than here they are. But the thing I aim at is this that probably they may so be solved as I have here set them down, which if it be granted as I think it must, then I doubt not. But the indifferent reader will find some satisfaction, and the main thing that is to be proved. So he was making it really clear right out of the gate. He's just theorizon. Look, people, I'm spitballing here. Don't get too hung up on those details. I think this is the opposite of the level of confidence from that voyage manuscript decoding that we talked about on Unearth recently that was like similarly done in a couple of weeks as part of a different thing. Yeah. Yeah, but Wilkins is very Look, I'm a minister, I know a lot about science, but I'm just I'm thinking through my thoughts and I'm bringing you along. But this kind of like slightly more casual approach was also probably why this actually ended up becoming a really influential publication. He was kind of kicking around ideas and working through the logistics of them, and he was basically showing his work for the reader to come along with. Wilkins' text helped further promote some of Galileo's ideas about the Moon, specifically that it was a solid, compacted, opacious body and that humans could potentially visit and maybe even live on it. Wilkins covered a number of other topics and the two volume work, though they weren't exactly groundbreaking, he bolstered the idea fairly commonly held in scientific community at the time that the Earth wasn't particularly special as a planet in the Solar System, but it was one of many. Yeah, this was a time when there was a big shift. We'll talk a little bit more about it. In how science and theology, which were closely mixed, saw the Earth and what it was in relation to the cosmos, and that was all changing really rapidly. And while these ideas were already pretty commonly accepted in the science community everything he was talking about, it was the way that Wilkins wrote about them that really made his work important. He wrote in a style, as you can tell, that was relatively casual compared to most scientific work of the day, meaning that the average person could read and understand it, and especially because it was illustrated in a way that was also aimed at readers who were not immersed in science. We have talked in previous episodes about how a lot of scientists in this era were polyglots, and that was in part just so they could read the work of other scientists who spoke and wrote in languages other than their own. But here was a book that translated everything for the reader. There was no knowledge of Latin or Italian required. We'll talk about another important aspect of Wilkins's writing in just a moment, but first we will pause or a sponsor break. We talked before the break about how part of the appeal of Wilkins's work at this point was that it was written for the average person to understand. And another tenant of Wilkins's work in this writing is change, as in, he was keenly aware of just how much our knowledge of the world had changed in just a few decades leading up to this writing, and he foresaw that the same kind of change in what was commonly known to entirely new ideas was going to continue. Wilkins is pretty self reflective, and he understands that even though the seventeenth century was seeing entire new vistas of science and understanding open up, that they were going to seem childish to later generations. On this revelation of new truths, he wrote one that a new truth may seem absurd and impossible, not only to the vulgar, but to those also who are otherwise wise men and excellent scholars. And hence it will follow that every new thing which seems to oppose common principles is not presently to be rejected, but rather to be pride into with a diligent inquiry, since there are many things which are yet hid from us and reserve for future discovery. Two, that it is not the commonness of an opinion that can privilege it for a truth. The wrong way is sometime a well beaten path, whereas the right way, especially to hidden truths, may be less trodden and more obscure. I sort of love that. Hey, you too, I also love listeners don't get to hear it, but like the slightly atypical spelling of many of these words is delightful. Yeah. Of course it fell to portracy to read the the uncorrected writing of John Wilkins. I didn't do that on purpose. So he definitely wanted his readers to look at science and particularly what humanity is a collective new about the universe with a new eye and an open mind. He pointed out the ways that the work of Aristotle, which had been groundbreaking in its own time, had become outdated and led the reader to the idea that knowledge and discovery was an ongoing, living thing that was not statf and in a way, the people in the seventeenth century kind of needed to hear this. So much of the world's scientific knowledge had been upended, as we said, in those three decades preceding it, particularly not just in astronomy, but in geography and physiology, In other fields and in this very short period of time. So Wilkins was to some degree preparing his readers for the fact that they were not going to get all the information and settle down, but in fact that change was the new normal of the Moon as a habital place. He wrote, quote, I must needs confess. Though I had often thought with myself that it was possible there might be a world in the Moon, yet it seemed such an uncouth opinion that I never durst discover it for fear of being counted singular and ridiculous. But afterward, having read Plutarch, Galileis, Kepler, and some others, and finding many of mine own thoughts confirmed by such strong authority, I then concluded that it was not only possible there might be, but probably that there was another habitable world in that planet. So at this point the details of the Moon's surface, the craters, and the mountains were things that had really only been part of our understanding since Galileo and Harriet started looking at the Moon about thirty years prior. Prior to that, most people thought that it was a pretty smooth body because they saw it with the naked eye all the time, and while it had some color variation. It wasn't perceived as being particularly textured, and some of that was tied up in thinking that today would be seen as very unscientific. British historian Alan Chapman wrote in a twenty fourteen paper about Wilkins and his work, quote, to understand the contemporary power of Wilkins's arguments, like those of Galileo before him, one must remember that the classical universe was not just a physical but also a moral place, seen most obviously in the juxtaposition between the corrupt, chaotic Earth and the perfect heavens. There were theories, for example, that the dark areas of the Moon were spots that had been tarnished by light reflected up from the Earth. Yeah, Earth was a yucky mass and the heavens were beautiful and celestial. But Wilkins saw Earth and the heavens as part of one large entity, which he considered in its totality to be a divine creation. And this was in contrast to the ideology of Aristotle and some of his followers, who thought that there was a boundary between Earth and the heavens and that the same scientific rules did not apply to those two things. In cosmology, it was essentially two different systems in their thinking. Wilkins's vision of a more holistic view of the universe was a departure from what had been believed and taught for centuries at that point. All the same matter and that quote the heavens do not consist of any such pure matter which can privilege them from the like change in corruption as these inferior bodies are liable unto was a thing that he was a big proponent of. It's all the same stuff, it's just arranged differently, and he wanted all of it to be subject to scientific exploration and analysis. Wilkins was also a proponent of the idea known as a plurality of worlds, and that's that our world was not the only world out in the vastness of space, and he believed quote that a plurality of worlds doth not contradict any principle of reason or faith. This led to ideas of other habitable places among the stars, and today we talk about the probability of life on other planets based on the likelihood that some sort of combination of elements created a hospitable environment similar to the ways our planet got lucky, but for Wilkins and his colleagues. Discussion was often centered around God creating life on other planets, just as they believed he had on Earth. To talk about the writing that Wilkins did regarding the Moon, we have to jump back to the year of his first one volume edition of his book, The Discovery of a World, That was sixteen thirty eight, and there was another book published that same year. This one was fictional and it was titled The Man in the Moon, and that story was written by Francis Godwin, and it told the tale of the main character, Domingo Gonzalez, being carried to the Moon by a flock of geese pulling a chariot. He was incidentally trying to get to Spain, but accidentally got the geese when they were doing their natural migration to the moon. Question mark. This mode of transit seems pretty swanky, but obviously completely impossible. But still this idea really got Wilkins thinking about what it would actually take to get a man to the moon, and that line of thought was part of his supplemental volume. Godwin was certainly not the first fiction writer to imagine traveling to the moon, but he was working with contemporary knowledge of it that previous writers had not had. There were certainly other books about moon exploration that stoked the fires of Wilkins's imagination as well, including work by Francis Bacon and Johannes Kuppler, and all of this that culminated in the sixteen forty edition of Wilkins's work, in which he stated quote that it is possible for some of our posterity to find out a conveyance to this other world, and if there be inhabitants there, to have commerce with them. He is open in his writing to the idea that we probably can't really imagine what a moon inhabitant might be, though, and his evidence that there probably are some sort of inhabitants there is kind of the argument that he's been laying out in the previous chapters of the book. So it's kind of like, look, the Moon has this property and this property and this property, and I think probably maybe God would have put some people there. I sort of, as I was working on this, really really wished that he could have lived long enough to see the Great Moon hoax, but that was two centuries later. It can be one of our bad uses for a time machine. We're going to go, pick him up. Take it right, the teacher, John, come with me, don't ask questions. While his ideation on a subject was inspired in part by fantasy, Wilkins was methodical and cataloging the challenges of space travel. Space Travelers would have to carry their needed supplies such as food and water, although he theory that once they were out of the pull of Earth they might not need any food, And then there was figuring out how to breathe while also not freezing to death, although he was open to the idea that space might not be cold at all. But then there was the matter of conveyance. So for the vehicle there were of course myriad concerns. The weight of it would be a key factor in its success, and figuring out how to escape the Earth's pole was going to be a big issue. Keep in mind, Sir Isaac Newton's Principia, in which he discusses the theory of gravity, was still almost five decades away. It wasn't published until sixteen eighty seven. So Wilkins was on to this idea of escape velocity, but he didn't really have the scientific vocabulary to really approach it with the right kind of mindset. And there was also this other matter of time and how we were going to keep humans alive during a journey to the Moon, which Wilkins estimated would take about one hundred and eighty days. And he had come to that conclusion based on his knowledge of earth bound travel over long distances, so calculating like ships traveling across the ocean, et cetera, led him to make some kind of estimates about that one hundred and eighty day timeline. Wilkins obviously did not solve that problem. In sixteen forty, he warned us readers, after all, that he was just dealing in theoreticals and some of his assertions were way off base. He thought that Earth was the Moon's moon, just like the Moon was Earth's moon, which I think is a thing that I might have thought when I was like four. Not trying to disparage him at all, I'm just saying I understand I could just come to that conclusion. He thought that the Moon had seasons just like the Earth does, and he made it clear that he didn't think they were exactly alike, but that the Earth and the Moon were sort of correspondent to one another. Yeah, he didn't think like that autumn on the Moon was the same as autumn on Earth, but that they had an autumn which was a shift from their previous season of summer. Uh. And he was also a little dismayed in all of this that humans were built in a way that they could not physiologically handle travel to the Moon on their own. So that was kind of his wrap up, like, I think we can do it. I don't know how. Here are my thoughts. So with his book second edition out in the world, he continued about his business of being a vicar and doing self directed scientific work as his time and interest allowed. Coming up next, we'll talk about what else was going on in England in the years following this second edition of Wilkins's book. First, we will take a quick break to hear from one of our sponsors. In the sixteen forties, England was in the midst of major upheaval. The reign of King Charles the First had been loaded with conflict almost since his coronation in sixteen twenty six. He had dissolved the parliament in sixteen twenty nine, setting off eleven years of what is referred to as personal rule, and made a series of unpopular decisions from there as usual when we talk about such events, this is worthy of a whole episode of its own, or even several. And after a series of conflicts Scotland, known as the Bishop's Wars, England became embroiled in Civil War in sixteen forty two, fought between Charles the First Royalist supporters and the Parliamentarians. This is again a very simplified version of this whole thing. That fighting continued in various different battles, and you'll sometimes see it listed out as even different wars right up into sixteen fifty two. One of the personal impacts to Wilkins was the the Anglican Church in which he was a minister was abolished. But he came through this very tumultuous time and history and pretty good shape. Although Wilkins had been associated with the royal family and had even been a chaplain to Charles the First's nephew, and though his position as an Anglican vicar was not a thing anymore, he was a moderate and amiable and good with people. And in his scientific circles his colleagues were aligned with either side of the much larger conflict, as well as having other ideological backgrounds, but their discussions of their work and the theories of the day really seemed to supersede all of their other loyalties. The Oxford Philosophical Club, as their group came to be known, met in both Oxford and London. Yeah, this was a very influential group in terms of like where science went from there. And in sixteen forty eight he was made warden of Wadham College, and this appointment was done by the Parliamentary Commissioners. But Wilkins remained able to walk that line between parliamentarians and royalists with a lot of grace. As we said, he got along kind of with everybody, and a lot of royalist families sent their sons to the school while Wilkins was its head. So while he hadn't abandoned his thoughts on flight, it was another eight years before he got back to writing about it. In sixteen forty eight, the same year of his appointment at Wadham, he published a new book which was titled Mathematical Magic, or the Wonders that May be Performed by Mechanical Geometry. And in this work he got a lot more detailed about exactly how one might attain flight. We should mention here that the use of the word magic isn't really what we might associate with it today, but more a scriptor of the marvel of science. Yeah, there was absolutely no actual magical element to this. He didn't think there were incantations involved. He just thought that learning about mechanics was a magical experience, and he wrote about all kinds of mechanisms in this book, Pulleys and Springs and Levers. The entire first section of the work is dedicated to examining the physics of these and other devices that form the sort of building blocks of larger machines, and like his previous writing, he doesn't stick strictly to scientific or known entities. Here. Many of his ideas are theoretical, and he owns that He suggests a way to harness the heat, for example, that rises through a chimney, so that you can then turn a spit with it so that the meat that's roasting on the fire below is cooked evenly. This sounds fairly great to me, or perhaps in his estimation, one could rig a series of gears in such a way that a simple puff of breath might pull a tree up from the roots. As with his previous writing, Wilkins builds his case very slowly throughout the book. He puts forth all these mechanical possibilities to make the case that if humans think creatively and harness the mechanisms at our disposal, couldn't we build machines that could fly and eventually leave the planet. All this theorizing culminates in the idea of a flying chariot, and Wilkins's approach is that if we can figure out how to fly around from place to place here on planet Earth, it will then be a very short jump to figure out how to fly into space. I love his optimism so much, but he doesn't, of course, have a specific version of the flying chariot in mind. He mentions various potential features it could have, but aside from thinking that it probably might need gears and wings and springs, it's pretty vague. He offers up some some theoretical pictures, but they're not really anything that could get to space. It starts to read a little bit like a theoretical baker bringing you a bunch of ingredients and telling you what those ingredients do, and then concluding with make a cake. So he clearly believed it was all possible and he really wanted humanity to make spaceflight a real thing, so that we could go meet the moon people and maybe trade with them. There are some notes written by wilkins protege Robert Hook that in the early sixteen fifties the two men tested out some kind of flying machine, although details on that one are scarce. Yeah, that's literally the only thing we know about him doing anything else in this arena. In sixteen fifty six, Wilkins married Rabina French, the widowed sister of Oliver Cromwell, and three years later, in sixteen fifty nine, Wilkins moved from Wadham to a more prestigious position as Master of Trinity College. That was thanks to the influence of his famous brother in law, but the country's fortunes made that appointment a very short stay. The English monarchy was restored in sixteen sixty, less than a year after his time at Trinity began, and Wilkins, who had also been an advisor to Oliver Cromwell, was removed from the post. Sixteen sixty wasn't all bad for John Wilkins, though, his Oxford Club received a royal decree from Charles's second new King and became the Royal Society for Promoting Natural Knowledge. This group, which had royal title but not funding, was the proto organization for what would eventually become the Royal Astronomical Society. The Church of England was also restored and he was once again an influential figure within it, and Wilkins rose through the ranks of the church, eventually becoming Bishop of Chester in sixteen sixty eight, and that same year he published another work titled An Essay Towards a Real Character and the Philosophical Language. In Wilkins's opening note to the reader states, it may perhaps be expected of some that I should give an account of my engaging in a work of this nature so unsuitable to my calling and business. In the text, he proposed that the development of universal language would really simplify things, and also that quote the several nations of the world do not more differ in their languages than the various kinds and proportions of these measures. He wanted there to be a consistent system of measurement for the entire globe as well. While Wilkins wrote many other works on subjects ranging from cryptography to prayer, it's this sixteen sixty eight work, along with his two volumes on the subject of the Moon and the potential to get there that are his most well known today. In sixteen seventy two, John Wilkins dine. He was fifty eight and he was buried at Saint Lawrence Jewry, where he had once been a vicar. He's so interesting because I don't think many people realize that there was a sixteen hundred minister going we need a space program, you guys. I can only deal with like the setup of ideas, but somebody else is gonna have to work out the details. I love it. Yeah, go to space. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. 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