/I often get asked what it takes to get to one of the very top universities in the country or the world. You know, the ones where you have to go for interview – Oxford, Cambridge, medical schools, some US universities. “If I work hard and get the grades, will I get there?” Well, the short answer to that is no, I am afraid – that is the minimum requirement – there are a lot of people who work hard and get good grades; and indeed you must all seek to do this. What you really need is curiosity, an insatiable quest for knowledge, a genuine interest in what you see around you and a real desire to just find out ‘stuff’ – and find it out for yourself.
So today, I have for you three stories from the past which, whether true or not, seek to explain something that we see around us today. This really provides some examples of a quest for knowledge simply for the sake of it. It took me some time over the weekend to check a few details and think about the answers; and I hope for some of you it helps to explain the answer to that ‘top university’ question, and may even persuade one or two of you to look them up for yourselves.
So, here is the first one. Have you ever asked yourself why a book is shaped as it is? They are nearly all rectangular, are they not? But why? Well, I am currently reading a book – a rectangular one! – by a man called Christopher de Hammel, who has a fascination with ancient manuscripts. Indeed, his book is titled Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. In it, he digresses on the history of book shapes and why ancient books were initially square. You will probably all know that until about the 1st Century AD, all literary texts were written on scrolls, sometimes made from leather or parchment (i.e. animal skins), but mostly from papyrus, a thick paper-type material cut from the papyrus plant, which grew mostly around the Nile Delta in Egypt. But around the time of early Christianity, scribes moved away from the scroll and first started using the codex format – these were pages of papyrus hinged together on their edges in the form of a modern-book; and you could write on both sides, which was convenient for use in Christian liturgy or legal manuscripts. A papyrus sheet was made by compressing strips of reeds laid one way and then the other at 90 degrees in a crossed patchwork pattern – and so ended up as a square. Each sheet was folded twice, and cut at the edge, to form four square pages – and then attached into the book. But by the end of the Roman empire, the papyrus trade with Egypt had collapsed, and scribes were forced to use animal skins again. They maintained the book format that they originally had, and used the same method to produce the pages, but because most mammals are typically not square, the pages themselves became rectangular. And here we are with one reason why we see what we see today – our own rectangular books probably have that shape simply because when paper was invented, the book manufacturers copied the methods of the old animal skin books.
The second story involves architecture. Have you ever wondered why the wonderful stone columns along many colonnades on grand buildings in great cities, or even in Bedford as it happens, are fluted – in other words, they have curved grooves running all the way up the column. This seems like an incredible waste of time and money – to make them originally must have been very fiddly – and do these grooves really add to the visual appeal? What is the point of them? Well, the clue for discovering why this is the case can be found in Ancient Olympia in Greece. One of the oldest temples left standing on that site is the Temple of the goddess Hera, built in the 6th century BC. When you look at the temple now, with its grand stone structure, one thing stands out – all the columns seem to be slightly different in proportion and detail. This is very strange, until one discovers the works of an ancient travel writer called Pausanias, who passed through the site in the second century AD (i.e. 800 years after it was first built) and he noted that one of the columns was wooden. It seems that what happened was that, when the temple was originally built, all the columns had been wooden; and over the centuries, and one by one, they had rotted and been replaced by stone columns. Each stone column, therefore, was made in a different era by different stone masons, hence the inconsistency, and yet they also reflected what was already there in the first place. Religions do not like change much; by nature they are extremely conservative – and religious conservatism here dictated that the new stone columns should resemble as closely as possible the old wooden ones. Now, if you can imagine a tree trunk as a temple column, you can then imagine how the grooves in the bark became the grooves in the stone columns – something which you continue to see on columns today, 2500 years later.
My last story is to do with geography. You will all have heard of Lord Nelson and the Battle of Trafalgar, a sea battle that saved Britain from Napoleonic France. Most of you will know that this was a battle that took place off the south coast of Spain – so why did it save Britain? Well, at the time of the battle, Napoleon had lined up over 100,000 troops on the coast of Northern France ready to cross the Channel and invade Britain. He had the most wonderful army; but what he did not have was control of the seas. In short, had the Battle of Trafalgar been lost by Nelson, Napoleon would have gained control of the seas, would have loaded his army onto his ships in safety, and Britain would certainly have been invaded. In Britain itself, all sorts of preparations were being made for invasion, particularly along the south coast (I can still see some of the forts from my parents’ home in the Isle of Wight). My favourite story was that ditches and barricades were being prepared around the perimeter of London, in open fields which are now Blackheath, Chelsea, Hampstead and Highgate. But the reason for telling you this is that part of the preparations for the invasion involved creating accurate maps of the South of England so that troops could be given precise instructions and the Government could receive reliable reports. So, the Government’s Board of Ordnance was sent to Kent in 1801 to create a map of that county with a scale of one inch to one mile – which became the first ever Ordnance Survey Map. At the very least I know that you will still use these in geography and Duke of Edinburgh; and you now know that the first one arose because of the threat of invasion by Napoleon’s French armies.
So there we are – and you might consider these are three useless bits of information – some mooted reasons for rectangular books, grooved columns and Ordnance Survey Maps. On the other hand, if you enjoyed the talk, and you are interested enough when you see something around you, or you hear something in a lesson or a conversation, or when you read something in a book, that makes you think, really think, and then you are prepared to go away and take the time to look up this sort of stuff for yourself, and be excited about it, and tell others about it – then you may just be the right stuff for those top universities I was mentioning earlier.