ShmoopTube
Where Monty Python meets your 10th grade teacher.
Search Thousands of Shmoop Videos
History of Technology 2: Sailing 17 Views
Share It!
Description:
ime to learn about sailing...takes me away to where I've always heard it could be, just a dre––oh. Not the Grammy award winning song of the year "Sailing"? Real sailing? Well, there goes our lesson plan.
Transcript
- 00:00
the first person to ever sail in a boat was Christopher Columbus who
- 00:06
discovered the United States and populated it with Eagles who had machine [ Columbus on a ship]
- 00:10
guns on their heads and squawk the star-spangled banner. right oh no.
- 00:16
opposite of right wrong. that's totally ridiculous but it's kind of the way most
- 00:19
history books deal with a history of sailing like it didn't matter until an
Full Transcript
- 00:23
Italian dude accidentally sailed into the Caribbean. well today we're setting
- 00:27
the record straight. sailing did not start with ol Chris. it
- 00:31
started around 3000 BCE with the Egyptians, and it has a long history of
- 00:36
crucial improvements brave expeditions and wild money-making schemes. we've
- 00:41
spent a lot of time talking about the magical combination of big critters good
- 00:45
roads and wheeled vehicles. little trade networks growing cities globalization [witch stirs a brew]
- 00:50
and vehicles did all that right? no not quite.
- 00:53
sailing was actually the technology that contributed to globalization the most.
- 00:58
take that real vehicles. sales were one of those things that appeared
- 01:02
independently all around the world as far apart as Egypt and Ecuador. the most
- 01:06
early sales worked on the same principle. if the win was directly behind you you
- 01:11
could raise a big square of cloth and the wind would push you in that
- 01:15
direction. well modern sailboats are a lot more complicated than that. the
- 01:20
cruise always shout things like get hoist the rigging and tack three degrees
- 01:25
northward on the lead jib something like that. [people attempt to sail a modern sail boat]
- 01:28
obviously we've never actually been on a sailboat but we know they're complicated
- 01:33
and we know enough to stay off the poop deck. by 1200 BCE the Greeks and
- 01:38
Phoenicians had improved on early designs and built sails that could swing
- 01:42
on a boom to face the wind. that means the wind didn't always have to be
- 01:47
pointing in precisely for the direction they wanted to go well. they also cheated
- 01:52
a little bit and had rows of long oars that could steer and power the boat
- 01:56
whenever the wind couldn't. well for several hundred years the combination of
- 02:00
sail and sweat was the best thing on the maritime scene. but there was another
- 02:05
problem. how did they know where they were going you know in the wide open
- 02:09
ocean? well most ancient civilizations have a
- 02:12
simple solution to that problem. don't go into the wide open ocean. so [two men ask Siri for navigation aboard their old style sailing ship]
- 02:17
most chefs spent their voyages hugging the coast. well if they went into open
- 02:22
waters they relied on stars for navigation which sounds nice and all but
- 02:26
we prefer soothing robotic tones of a GPS thank you very much.
- 02:30
despite the iffy navigation and simple sails ancient people did a lot with
- 02:34
their ships. the Greeks and Romans built huge and deadly navies and the Romans
- 02:38
even hooked catapults to their ships and bombarded cities. while other societies
- 02:44
who weren't as smash and Burney as the Romans used sailing ships for
- 02:48
exploration. the Phoenicians were some of the first great long-distance sailors
- 02:53
and they managed to explore most of the north african coast.
- 02:56
the Phoenicians also created an alphabet that was adopted by the Greeks and
- 03:00
further mutated by the Romans. though they might not have been as smashing
- 03:04
Burney has the Romans but they still made their mark on the world and it was
- 03:08
their seafaring skills that allowed them to do so. that and the slight insanity it [man in robes receives a trophy ]
- 03:13
took to sail off into the Mediterranean in one of those old-school sail boats.
- 03:17
seriously what were they thinking? we would have waited for the Carnival
- 03:21
Cruise Line. [man hitch hikes on the beach]
Up Next
GED Social Studies 1.1 Civics and Government
Related Videos
When you're about to marry the love of your life, not many things could stop you. However, finding out that your future hubby is keeping his crazy...
Here at Shmoop, we work for kids, not just the bottom line. Founded by David Siminoff and his wife Ellen Siminoff, Shmoop was originally conceived...
ACT Math: Elementary Algebra Drill 4, Problem 5. What is the solution to the problem shown?