Dan Snow's History Hit - Great Scientists We've Forgotten to Remember

Episode Date: April 25, 2022

We are told that modern science was invented in Europe, the product of great minds like Nicolaus Copernicus, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin and Albert Einstein. But science has never been a uniquely European endeavour. Copernicus relied on mathematical techniques borrowed from Arabic and Persian texts. When Newton set out the laws of motion, he relied on astronomical observations made in Asia and Africa. When Darwin was writing On the Origin of Species, he consulted a sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopaedia. And when Einstein was studying quantum mechanics, he was inspired by the Bengali physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose.James Poskett is an Associate Professor in the History of Science and Technology at the University of Warwick. James joins Dan on the podcast to uncover the ways in which scientists from Africa, America, Asia and the Pacific fit into the history of science.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, everybody. Welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit.

Now, I was brought up in the 80s. We were told that Europeans took this world from a place of superstition and ignorance to a place of enlightenment. A lot of science was done from Copernicus onwards. But you know what? I'm picking that narrative now. Like much of what I learned at school, it turns out it might not have been true. And no one's doing that more so than an associate professor in the history of science and technology

at the University of Warwick, James Poskett. He's just written a gigantic book, a radical retelling of the history of science that challenges this Eurocentric narrative. I tell you, you can't walk across the street with these days without someone challenging a Eurocentric narrative, but it's good because they need challenging. I'm happy to see it. His book leaves Europe behind,

and it talks about scientists from Africa, America, Asia, Pacific, and he really convinces me that science is this extraordinary, very rich story of global cultural exchange. And we talk in this podcast about ideas rattling up and down the Silk Roots and people like Newton, like some of the great European scientists that we've all heard of, engaging, learning, listening, and building on the work of scientists all over the world super exciting stuff if you wish to listen to other podcasts about science and history of science we do more and more of that here at history i think it's the older i'm getting the more i realize that

maybe i need to spend less time on the generals more time on the scientists right and so we're doing a lot of that we did a lot of that during the pandemic and a lot of it is to come so please check out history hit tv it's where we keep all these podcasts throughout the ads. You can go listen to them all. You can also access hundreds of hours of history documentaries we've got there. It's like Netflix for history. It's all over there. You get two weeks free if you start today. And if you tap on the link in the description of this podcast, you'll get whisked there by the power of science. Boom. In the meantime, folks, here's James Poskett. Boom. In the meantime, folks, here's James Poskett. Enjoy. James, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks very much for inviting me.

You know what? I'm guilty. I'm a guilty party here because I think science was pretty much invented by Copernicus and then obviously developed by many other people but you're here to tell me that it's absolute nonsense I'm afraid so yeah um good that is what I'm here for good tell me all about it I mean are these scientific traditions in places that are completely distinct I guess in the case of America's that they have they must be are they scientists that are drawing on the same body of like ancient near east and Mediterranean eastern Mediterranean kind of traditions Or how and where are these things springing up? Yeah, so I try and unravel this myth that modern science was invented in Europe and that it started

with people like Copernicus, as you said. In some cases, there are quite distinct traditions, although I think that's only really in the case of the Americas, as you suggest, for the reason that it was isolated from the West, from Europe and Africa and Asia. Elsewhere, there are traditions, but they're remarkably well connected from the medieval period onwards. So there are Muslim astronomers in China in the late medieval and early modern period. there are Arabic manuscripts crossing the Sahara to places like Timbuktu and also into Europe. So I think the idea of a set of isolated different scientific traditions, like a Hindu tradition, a Muslim tradition, a Chinese tradition, is also part of the myth, which makes it hard to tell a genuinely connected global history of

science. It's tempting to immediately flip back and talk about Europeans and how they depended on these famous, you know, that kind of Arab texts coming in and igniting Christendom. Just talk to me, though, about the scientific tradition in the Near East, in what we call the Middle East. I mean, was that during and following the great golden age of the caliphate? the Middle East? I mean, was that during and following the great golden age of the caliphate? Yeah, so there is this, as you say, a really strong scientific mathematical tradition in what's now the Middle East, in the Islamic world broadly, and as I said, it's kind of a really broad, actually, Islamic world, but yes, it's centred on places like Baghdad initially, later Istanbul with the Ottoman Empire, but stretches all the

way to West Africa through South Asia with the Mughal Empire later on and into China. And those scholars are, on the one hand, they're translating and reading ancient Greek texts, but they're also critiquing them. And I think this is something that's often forgotten, that they're not simply a kind of stepping stone for the European rediscovery of the ancient world. They're doing original scientific thinking themselves. So they read ancient Greek texts like Ptolemy's account of the universe, and they very quickly start pulling holes in it, saying, wait a minute, and they very quickly start pulling holes in it saying, wait a minute, this doesn't add up. Clearly, the planets don't move in perfect circles. And to preserve that, we're going to have to do some pretty interesting mathematical gymnastics to sort that out. So there are lots of

critiques of ancient science already in the Islamic world and lots of new, particularly mathematical and astronomical techniques that are coming out of what is now Iran, Iraq, Turkey etc and those after the fall of Constantinople after the Ottoman defeat of the Byzantine empire lots of those texts begin to arrive in Europe often through an intermediary Byzantine translation and part of of the history you write is showing how Europeans absolutely relied on other cultures of science. Although the other important part of my argument is that it wasn't just Europeans relying on these other cultures. Other cultures actually were making their own scientific discoveries throughout the modern period as well. discoveries throughout the modern period as well. We talk about the Silk Route, but is it as easy for ideas to travel on those great arteries of Eurasia as it was for bits of silk or pepper?

Yes, I think it was, to cut a long story short. I think you're spot on with the analogy. I think there was a long history of the Silk Roads that connects together the sciences of West Africa, that connects together the sciences of West Africa, the Middle East, South and East Asia, and sort of Europe to an extent. And this is particularly in the late medieval and the early modern period, a period in which those connections are intensifying through trade and through religious networks. So a lot of it is pilgrimage. There are scholars from Mali who travel to Mecca or Medina and return with Arabic manuscripts that describe new astronomical ideas and vice versa. And it is also in both directions. So there are Indian scholars that are sent by wealthy Maharajas to Europe, even in the early 18th century, to collect scientific texts from

Europe and return. So there's these really two-way exchanges of knowledge. And for the early modern period, it is all religious and trading networks, which often overlap. And it's the physical things. So it really is like the silk, you know, it's an Arabicic manuscript it's a printed account of a book in europe that ends up in a library in jaipur it's those kind of physical connections and what's the relationship between science and technology so the one thing in the 1980s when i was at school we were allowed to think that the chinese were quite good at was inventing bits of pieces that made their way to europe and allowed europeans to kill each more effectively. Paper and gunpowder and things, are they travelling? Is it the data? Is it the knowledge required to make these things locally? Or are that bits and bobs travelling alongside

those manuscripts? It's very interesting you mention your own schooling, because part of the argument is my book is also trying to explain, if I'm right and this is a big myth, well, where did it come from? And a lot of it has to do with the Cold War and attitudes to the East generally, to the Soviet Union, Communist China, etc. And a vision, as you say, of perhaps these places as being technologically advanced. It was kind of hard to argue the Soviet Union wasn't in the early Cold War, but they're devoid of ideas because they've got the wrong ideology. And that division was often made in terms of science and technology. So historians of science and technology have argued a lot about this, about what's the difference between science and technology?

Does science help produce technology or is it the other way around? Does actually practical skills produce science? My view is that the distinction clearly has a kind of contemporary value in classifying things, but in terms of the way that knowledge develops is a slightly artificial distinction in that all knowledge is produced by, it's not ever somebody sitting in a room thinking. Even historians, we do things, we read things, we pick up things. So I think the material worlds of those technologies, of the trade, of the books, of the things, of the instruments, is really important to the sciences. And I would also say that this distinction, this idea that, say, Chinese knowledge was all technical but not scientific, or actually it's often the opposite way around with Indian science. So there's a kind of claim that Hindu science was

very precise and mathematical and spiritual but lacked any practicality. I'd say those distinctions, they have a kind of, maybe a partial truth, but it's a question of degree rather than kind. Chinese science was also, in other ways, very precise, mathematical. It wasn't just technical. The astronomical theories that were developed were very advanced, and some of the astronomical systems were more precise in certain ways than European ones. When it came to natural history, there was an enormous effort to classify the natural world in a systematic way that would have been totally out of place in Europe until Linnaeus came along in the 18th century. But the Chinese have been doing that for generations,

and particularly at the end of the Ming dynasty. I'm very suspicious of that distinction to cut a long story short and like everything we're taught in school we should be very suspicious. Yeah good definitely suspicion. Before we come on some of the great scientists who we've forgotten to remember you do a really interesting way you point out even the famous the kind of canonical European scientists what they owe to people beyond Europe. So on Copernicus, we kind of dealt with that, that he is reliant on these sets coming from the Near East. Newton's really interesting.

I didn't realise how connected he was to a kind of global network. Yeah, Newton is a great case study because he pretty much says it himself when he says, everyone knows I don't make any of my own observations. And then later Enlightenment scholars like Voltaire, they would say Newton couldn't have done anything without the voyages of various people. So it's right there in the Principia, in Newton's famous work, it's there in the sources from the Europeans. And once you think about it, it makes sense.

Once you think about it, it makes sense. Newton's theory of gravitation, of the laws of motion, relied on collecting astronomical and other observational data from around the world, because it was about reconciling the differences between these observations, particularly in terms of the length of a pendulum to swing for a second at different places around the world due to gravity. And unsurprisingly, in the 17th century, if you were going to get observations, well, the reason Europeans were travelling around the world was colonial trade. So the East India Company, particularly, lots of observations come via there, and the transatlantic slave trade. So many of Newton's observations, which he directly cites and indeed kind of provide the

problem that he's trying to solve with gravity, come from the voyages made by French slave traders and astronomical observations made by a particular French astronomer called Jean Richer, who travelled to West Africa aboard a slave ship and then travelled to the West Indies and South America via French slave trading ships. So what I show here in the book, and what a number of historians of science have been arguing, is that there would be no Principia without those connections. And those connections are also really disturbing and problematic connections in terms of thinking about how it is that Newton collected knowledge. A man who himself was personally invested in the South Sea Company,

the East India Company, and so on. So there is a quite direct connection between the way in which Newton developed his theory, the data he provided for it, and the world of enslavement and empire that he was a part of, of course. Every time people talk about this kind of stuff, I just think about the phone in my hand and how our descendants will be absolutely furious with their old granddad, the cobalt on his phone so he could check his Twitter was all coming from appalling mines in the Congo, whatever else, it's dark. Anyway, talk about darwin yeah so

darwin is another nice example because darwin's held up as this real innovator and he was in the context of victorian british society because evolution was incredibly radical for british upper class people it was associated with French radicalism. It seemed to undermine the view of God's creation of humans and animals and life. But I often like to think Europe was weird. Europe was about the only place that didn't think evolution was a thing before Darwin. Now, Darwin had a more specific theory about natural selection, of course, that we can get onto. But the broad idea that nature and the world we see today and the different species we identify had come about through some kind of organic process was very common in particularly South Asia, East Asia, Japan, China, Hinduism. So there's that side of it. And Darwin kind of acknowledged this as

well, actually. The other side of it is a bit like Newton. Darwin, after the Beagle War, never went anywhere. And he was very reliant on collecting information from around the world. Because of course, the special thing about science is it's a global thing. It's supposed to work everywhere. So you've got to collect the information everywhere. And he was pretty liberal, I guess, in terms of where he was willing to collect information from. Famously, he corresponded with pigeon fanciers. He wrote letters to Argentine fossil hunters. And he also asked a friend at the British Museum if they would translate sections of a Chinese work of natural history that had been published in the

16th century. In fact, a very famous and influential one, Li Xinzhen's Chinese Materia Medica, the Benkao Gangmu. And Darwin literally cites this 16th century Chinese work of natural history on the origin of species. And he cites other works of Chinese natural history in On the Origin of Species. And he cites other works of Chinese natural history in particular in On the Origin of Species, often French translations or English translations. Darwin couldn't read Chinese. And through them, he both had an appreciation that other cultures were talking about the processes of evolution. And he was just collecting evidence for evolution of different kinds of animals beyond what he could see in the fields around Kent at Down House. So again, to kind of do that global science, he himself had to be engaged in a global network, also a kind of global history.

He was almost like a historian. He was collecting historical information through linguistic sources as well. Love that. And then Einstein, tell me about him. Yeah, Einstein. Famous pioneer, theories of special and general relativity. Also, slightly forgotten, an early pioneer of quantum mechanics, although he later fell out with them, some of the later interpretations. He was very very active actually in both travelling around the world, giving lectures. This was particularly in the context of the rise of antisemitism in Germany, so he actively chose to leave Germany on a big worldwide tour in order to give lectures, correspond, work with Japanese physicists, Indian physicists and the like. And one in particular, now often forgotten

really outside of India, but really influential 20th century Indian physicist called Sachendranath Bose, born in Dhaka, now Bangladesh, part of British India at the time. Bose produced with his friend Magna Zaha the first English translation of Einstein's theories of special and general relativity. And he also corresponded with Einstein. He wrote a letter to Einstein saying, I've just realised that the statistical accounts of particles, they don't work. Now quantum mechanics has come along. I've got a new statistical account. What do you think? And Einstein wrote back and said that this was hugely important. They continued to correspond. He invited Sir Chandranath Bose to Germany and they met up and worked

together and ultimately produced this new account of particle physics, the groups of particles, which is now called Bose-Einstein statistics. And the really interesting thing here, I think, is that the particle, the boson, so the Higgs boson was the famous one that was discovered a few years ago. The boson bit is named after Bose, so any particles that follow this statistical pattern is called a boson. I think it's because it's always a lowercase b, so it's very interesting the way people get forgotten. People say boson and they think nothing, they think Higgs. Okay, it's Peter Higgs, the British physicist. But the boson is named after Bose, and in fact that was acknowledged at the time. The British physicist Paul Dirac actually called it the boson in honour of Bose in the mid-20th century. I think he also gets forgotten, and there's suggestion that this was

the case because he published quite a lot in German, and I think probably lots of people thought he was German, as in it was a German Bose, not a Bengali Bosch, basically. You listened to Dan Snow's History, we're talking about a new history of science. Big stuff, more coming up. a new history of science. Big stuff. More coming up. Did you know that the earliest condoms were made of animal guts and they were designed to be reused?

Or that beans were once considered to be an aphrodisiac? Join me, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a new podcast from History Hit, where I, Kate Lister, ask the questions about the stuff we didn't learn in history lessons This is History's Heroes. Twix the sheet now, wherever you get your podcasts. This is History's Heroes.

People with purpose, brave ideas and the courage to stand alone. Including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you. Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts. Talk to me about some of the other people that have been overlooked. You mentioned Kwasi, you mentioned other people.

Run me through a few scientists who you think ought to be in our pantheon, but aren't, probably because they're from outside Europe. Yeah, I think Grumman Kwasi is one that has had a bit more recognition recently, but is a really important example of how African scientific figures have both contributed to the making of modern science, but also been forgotten because of the history of enslavement, racism and structural racism. So Grauman Crusty was born in West Africa in the late 17th century. He was enslaved, transported to the Dutch colony of Suriname in South America. But he discovered a local plant, pink flowering plants, which could be ground up the roots into a bitter tea, basically, and used as a treatment for

malaria. So a bit like Peruvian bark and the other kinds of barks that were being used. This was another source. And so a very valuable, I mean, very medicinally important, but also commercially valuable thing. So that was a great discovery. But the thing that was important here is that he was really fusing his existing knowledge of West African medical traditions and herbal traditions with those of Amerindian herbal traditions to produce both the knowledge of this plant and this tea. And usually this kind of knowledge was just straightforwardly appropriated by European naturalists. They would frequently force enslaved people to tell them about the medicinal qualities of plants. In this case, Gramen quasi was unusual in that he was publicly recognized. So Karl Linnaeus, the very famous Swedish naturalist who gives us the binomial system of classification,

he learned about this plant, he learned about quasi, and he named the plant after it. It's called, its scientific name is Cassia amara, from the Latinized version of quasi. Amara is in bitter, so like a bitter. So Grumman Quasi is a nice example of how West African science was both overlooked, but was really part of the medical and natural world of science in the 17th and 18th century. He's useful because he has a name,

but there were countless others that were often unnamed that fulfilled a similar role. Tell me about Nagoka, the Japanese scientist. Yeah, so Hantaro Nagoka is maybe the best smoking gun evidence for overlooked scientists. A Japanese physicist working in Japan, in Tokyo, in the middle of the 19th and late 19th century, one of a new generation of scientists trained after the Meiji Restoration, lots of emphasis on industry, economy, nation building. And he proposed what turned out to be the correct structure of the atom. This is another school myth that I was taught, you know, the atom, people used to think it was like a plum pudding,

a kind of just one big mass with some electrons and protons swished together. And then we're usually told the British New Zealand physicist Ernst Rutherford came along, did some experiments and worked out that it was this nucleus with lots of space around it and the electrons spinning around it. But Hantar and Nagoka suggested this seven years before Rutherford did. He worked it out mathematically, so from a kind of theoretical principle about the nature of the atom, the forces involved, and he called it the Saturnian atom, as in like Saturn, the planet, like the rings of Saturn. So he visualised this through this idea that there was a big nucleus in the middle, and there were these rings that were the electrons going round. But today, we're just told about

Rutherford, we're not told about Nagorka. And again, I think, is this some kind of conspiracy theory? What's James on about? But it was widely acknowledged at the time. It's another thing that's really been forgotten, and I think quite deliberately forgotten during the 20th century for various political reasons. Nagoka met Rutherford. They talked to one another. Rutherford invited Nagoka to his laboratory in Manchester, where the famous experiments were done. And Rutherford invited Nagoka to his laboratory in Manchester where the famous experiments were done. And Rutherford cited Nagoka in his famous 1911 paper saying, you know, this very similar model was suggested by Nagoka and Rutherford had basically done the experimental work to show it was correct. And if you look at textbooks from the time, they talk about Nagoka.

I think after the Second World War, in this case, there's a kind of Cold War story, but there's something quite specific about Japan and the way in which pre-Second World War Japanese science was quite deliberately forgotten in that period of kind of imperial nationalist science was uncomfortable, both for Japan and for the West, for the kind of rebuilding the image of Japan. So I think that might be partly it, as well as kind of broader issues to do with diversity and race in STEM. Give me one more. The Chinese physicist, I love this one, he discovered antimatter. Zhao Zongyao was a Chinese physicist. He was born right at the end of the Qing dynasty. So he lived through this

period of the Republican revolution in 1911. He was involved in kind of radical movements, the May 4th movements, and he wanted to study modern physics. This was the future. This wasn't the old kind of ways. This was a way to be new and modern and so he ends up going to the United States as many Chinese scientists did in this period he trained ultimately at Caltech and he did a PhD on looking for new particles basically and he did these experiments in what's called the cloud chamber, where you fire particles through a chamber and you can create a photographic image of their trace. This new particle popped up on one of his photographs, and he wasn't quite sure what it was, but he published a paper describing it, its mathematical and physical properties.

A couple of years later, an American physicist who worked with zhao zhongyao at caltech who was doing a phd at the same time they shared offices on the same corridor they used to chat about their experiments together a physicist called carl anderson he won the nobel prize for the discovery of the positron so the positive electron form of antimatter that had been predicted. And at the time he said, oh, I just happened to cross it by chance. But later, to be fair to him, he was very honest and said, well, actually, you know, I was inspired by the fact that Zhao Zongyao had already done these experiments where he discovered this new particle, which I assume must have been the positron. So Zhao Zongyao, again, was quite swiftly forgotten. He discovered, he

was the first to experimentally produce and identify a positron. And I think, again, because of the politics of the 20th century, much like with Japan, pre-World War II Chinese scientists were quite quickly forgotten by the communist state, but also the West. That period of Republican history didn't sit well with either party. The communists didn't want to admit that anything worthwhile had happened in the Republic, and the West didn't really want to think too much about that earlier phase of nationalism. It also, I think, is a good example of how we apportion scientific credit. So yeah, it's reasonable to say, well, Zhao Zongyao didn't exactly know what this was,

and someone else had done the experimental work later to kind of reconfirm it. Paul Dirac had done lots of the theoretical work. So it's not necessarily my point that it should be Zhao Zongyao instead of whoever. I think some of the way we apportion it solely to individuals is part of the problem and part of the point of the book is to build up this much bigger picture of all the people that contributed to modern science and inevitably when we do apportion it to individuals it reproduces the sort of hierarchies and structures of today so it does tend to end up being white dudes from Europe and the United States. And we're living in such an interesting time because, A, there's a natural tendency, sadly, for us to believe that all the best things have come from one of us,

like one of our little group. Yeah. And we tend to privilege members of this group over others. But B, there was a brief period of like very, very obvious manifest white European global hegemony, right? In military, cultural and science, in the fields, all those fields. Now that's changing anyway. So we now need to reappraise how we think about these things

to challenge our natural biases, I guess, but also because the facts on the ground really, really are changing. 100%. So it's those two things you've mentioned, which really motivated me to write the book. I grew up in a generation where I was at university during the financial, 2007-8 financial crisis, the world was changing. And that brief period of sort of post-Cold War optimism, it's a small world, collapsed very quickly. And yeah, there's a longer but not

very long history of European hegemony, as you say, in science and technology. And yeah, there's a longer but not very long history of European hegemony, as you say, in science and technology. So partly it's about looking at ourselves, as you say, our own societies, thinking about why there's lack of diversity in the sciences, who we value in the sciences, what kinds of ideas and people and places matter. But the other is looking outwards, as you say. The West is not the leader in many of the sciences, and it won't be for very long in any case, particularly China, obviously, is the big player in terms of scientific investment, in terms of the number of papers published. It outstrips the USA in both those categories, of the number of papers published. It outstrips the USA in both those categories, in particular fields like artificial intelligence. It's investing incredible amounts of money and is ahead

of the US in various ways. But as I make the case in the book, the point of the global history approach, and as I talk about quite a lot in the epilogue, is to not just think of this as an East-West or USA versus China, who's the new superpower, but to recognise that the rest of the world also matters. That today, the Middle East is also investing massively in the sciences. We've seen things like the UAE's Mars mission. South Asia, India, I mean, has long been actually a really important centre for scientific and technical development in mathematics, computing, physics, more recently in the biological sciences. We've seen that with COVID, obviously, in terms of the production of pharmaceuticals. And I think something that's really missed because of a long history of racism, to be frank,

is the rise of sub-Saharan Africa as a place for doing science and technology. The AI centres are being established there, there's a massive growth in African computer science, medical and biological science, and post-Covid a real, even stronger awareness amongst African states that they can't rely on the rest of the world to come save them because the rest of the world is too preoccupied by its own problems. And also the kinds of approaches that have, quote unquote, worked in the West aren't necessarily suitable for the demographic and environmental conditions in sub-Saharan Africa. And there's a massive growth in the middle class as well in that region. I mean, as one African computer scientist recently said, Mustafa Cisse, the future of artificial intelligence is in Africa. And that may have

been rhetoric, but I think in the long term, recognising a future of science that yes, is going to include China, but is also going to include India, Pakistan, the UAE, the Gulf States, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, etc. That's really, really important. And that's partly the message of my book, because I get the impression lots of people just look at China. Well, thank you very much indeed. That was a gigantic rampage through the history of science and around the world. What's the book called? It's called Horizons, a Global History of Science.

Going good, everyone. Thank you very much. Cheers. I feel we have the history on our shoulders. All this tradition of ours, our school history, our songs, this part of the history of our country,

all were gone and finished. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. all of our gods, and finish. Thanks, folks. You've reached the end of another episode. Hope you're still awake. Appreciate your loyalty. Sticking through to the end. If you fancied doing us a favour here at History Hit, I would be incredibly grateful if you would go and wherever you get these pods,

give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Please head over there and do that. It really does make a huge difference. It's one of the funny things the algorithm loves to take into account. So please head over there and do that. Really, really appreciate it. This is History's Heroes. People with purpose, brave ideas, and the courage to stand alone, including a pioneering surgeon who rebuilt the shattered faces of soldiers in the First World War. You know, he would look at these men and he would say, don't worry, Sonny, you'll have as good a face as any of us when I'm done with you.

Join me, Alex von Tunzelman, for History's Heroes. Subscribe to History's Heroes wherever you get your podcasts.