first meeting since june, but we also have zoom. we have a video being recorded and this is my official book launch for my new book, lincoln the fire of genius. so thank you. i know a lot of people like when are coming in and i really appreciate that. i'm going to give a talk tonight about about lincoln and the fire and basically look at well, i just let me look at just the the the subtitle because that i think that really describes the book. it's however ham lincoln's commitment to science and technology helped modernize america. so that's what i'm going to talk about tonight. and just to give you a little background, i'm going to talk about, i guess start with the book is really kind of the kind of piece set out in the three different sections. the first is like, well, what did lincoln know about science? you know, what did he understand about technology? and where did he learn that? so i'm going to talk about that. but then in the middle, there's really like, well, how do they implement this? especially in his two major career as a politician and as a lawyer? and then finally, how did this get implemented and what did he do? what did he do as far as science, technology, during the civil war, which is very critical to the north, winning a civil war. so tonight, i'm not going to spend too much time on the civil war because i'm going to be giving several talks over the future and suddenly i just lost my screen. i'm going to be giving several talks into the over the future. in the future, two civil war roundtables. i'm okay now and the in those talks i'm going to talk more about the civil war. so i'm not going to talk too much about the civil war tonight. i will talk about how lincoln institutionalized science during a civil war. so if you want to come hear more about the civil war, come to one of the civil war. war. the civil war roundtable talks that they'll be giving. and you can hear more about civil war tonight is more of a big picture thing. so the idea is to kind of give an overview of the book and and cover why i think this is important now to get started. i guess i should start with a little bit of background and why i'm talking about lincoln and science because they don't you know, most people don't really think of those two things together. and part of that goes back to my hometown. my hometown used to bill itself as i still bills itself as the birthplace of american independence. and it's a long story, but it has something to do with complaining about taxes in the 1600s. this is a massachusetts. so the town itself is steeped in history. and i being kind of the odd man out, wasn't so interested so much in the revolutionary war and the prequel in the colonial times. i got interested in abraham lincoln very early, so i was pursuing lincoln, but at the same time, this town is a seacoast town and has a long, beautiful beaches and miles and miles of of saltmarsh and forest and at the time when i was growing up all over the television was this really cool guy named jacques cousteau, french oceanographer. he was on all the time, it seemed. so he won me over and i ended up going into science as my as a field. so my my degrees are all in science. my work was in science. i actually worked as a marine biologist for for several years before somebody burned down my laboratory. no. another long story. not going to go into that. i was in an aquatic toxicology and i was eventually hosed down here in d.c. and doing regulatory science both here and in europe and and doing that for over 30 years. so most of my career, my pain career has been science. but all through this time, i've been pursuing abraham lincoln. and those of you know about my obsession that i have almost 2000 lincoln books and my house probably more than that because i've got all the lincoln group. lincoln books in my house right now to so i'm always reading about lincoln. so this was really a way for me to blend. the two. and i think the prospect from the perspective of a scientist, i was able to see things that lincoln scholars wouldn't necessarily see. so that's that's how this whole thing whole got started. so if i could make this work. so one of the things i'll talk about is this lincoln has a fragment. it's called a fragment on niagara falls. it's something that he wrote never finished, stuck at the desk. nobody ever knew about it until after he was gone. and they started going through his papers. but he wrote this thing in 1848 because he had you know, he was just one term in congress in 1848 was between the two sessions of congress. and back then people talk about congress doesn't work very much. well, back then, they really didn't work very much. the only work for like three months. then they went home and they had their day job until they come back for the next session, which is three months. and that's your two years in between those two sessions, lincoln went up to massachusetts since my home state did a lot of lectures and stomping for zachary taylor. as for president and to help zachary zachary taylor when they when the election went on his way back, he went through upstate new york, went to buffalo and then took his family to niagara falls, saw his beautiful, beautiful niagara falls. and i have information that says he got a haircut while he was there and then he got into a steamship and they went through the great lakes back to chicago, through illinois and michigan canal, which i'll mention a little bit back down to springfield and then worked until the next session of congress several months later. so on this cruise, on this steamship, this is where we think he wrote this fragment. and when you look at this fragment, you can see there's tons and tons and tons of science. so he starts off in this fragment talking about, well, you know, the physics of it is no great wonder, you know, you have a river. it's flowing along nicely. and then he hits a perpendicular jog. so basically he finds a cliff, falls off of it, crashes into into that river below it sends up a lot of mist and if it's sunny, you'll get perpetual rainbows. okay he says that's no big, big stretch. and everybody knows that i actually and i talk about in the book how i think he really he understood how rainbows are formed more than most people because he does he talks a lot about how the eye works. so i think he understood that rainbows are formed when the sunlight hits the water droplets which act like prisms and split the light into its component wavelengths. and you get different colors. so there's that. and i talk about, well, you know, whether or not he actually knew that, but i think he did. but he definitely knew some things because he talks about the geology and the erosion of the falls. so he understands that some rocks are harder than other rocks and those rocks that are not quite as hard, they erode faster and that that the falls have eroded back from where they originally were by several miles. and he calculate it's now talking to a second about he was a math guy he calculated that the age of the world according to how long the it took for these for these the river to to erode backwards. and he came up with at least 14,000 years now i think everybody knows the world is longer is older than 14,000 years. but. 15,000 years is about the end of the last ice age, which is when niagara falls started to form, when that day the glaciers were going back. so we know some about that. he understands hydrological cycles. he talks about how the water evaporates from the river and goes up into the atmosphere and cycles around and eventually falls back down. and it doesn't just fall back down on the river and the lake. it falls back on this much wider watershed on the land and drains off into the into the lake and the rivers and eventually goes back down over the falls. and he calculate it again. well, i think this is should be between 200 and 300,000 square miles. the correct answer is 265,000 square miles. so he's pretty close. so he understands that. and he even talks about paleontology. he says, you know, when all of this was happening and he gets the timelines a little messed up because he starts talking about adam and evend moses and a few otr things. but but but he says that the they mammoth in the mastodon roamed the earth. well mammoth or mastodons are giant elephants that are extinct. they no longer exist. and we only really know about them from fossils. we had at least some undetanding of fossils and that concept of, of, of science. so this is what i started seeing this and started thinking, you know, this guy knows a lot more science and he lets on. and then most people think the other thing that got me thinking about lincoln and science is this lincoln's lecture and discovery and inventions which he wrote right after the lincoln-douglas debates and actually gave about half a dozen times in 1859 to never varying levels of audiences and varying levels of of, of applause. some people said it was not his best work, but when you look at it, it shows an understanding of technology and the growth of man and the development of man. so, of course, because everybody back then, most people had bibles, but not necessarily any other books. he starts, he talks a lot about the bible as using them as time lines. and he talks about the adam and eve and lanham and eve, you know, after the fall, realize, well, wait a second, we need to have some something. so they invented this fig leaf. april and he makes kind of an off color joke later on about about adam and eve and the fig leaf apron, but which i won't go into. but he he talks about that and that leads to clothing and you. okay, hold on one second. i can't share my screen. he has to tell me how to share. he has to let me share the screen. i can't do it. yes. okay. i'm going to go back and keep talking. and so he talks about clothing. and initially, clothing is is wearing animal skins. and then they people learn, well, you know, maybe we can just take fibers from an animal like sheep and take wool and make that in the clothing. or we can take fibers from plants like cotton and make that in clothing. so that's an improvement. and in order to do that, of course, you have to invent things like looms, heirlooms and sewing and and other instruments to be able to to make this clothing out of these fibers. he goes on, he jumps forward. he's now into talking about iron tools. he talks about steam, which combined with iron, you know, you can power boats and railroads and use it for manufacturing. so you're seeing all of this growth in and man and building technology even get to the point where he starts talking about wind power and water power. and now you have to share. this one. i think that's a. no, it's this one. okay. hopefully we're sharing the right screen now and hopefully i can i can see what i'm doing. okay. so he talks about wind power and water power and. all right. and so is way ahead of his time talking about these things. so these are all of progression and of man in the building of things. he then talks about how he does that with communicate ocean. so originally we're just sort of grunting at each other and pointing and saying, you know, watch out for that mammoth. and we have speech where you can say, you know, that mammoth out at dusk every night, you know, be careful. and then we have writing so you could write it down and hand it around. and people can see that, you know, you should stay away from mammoth set, not at dusk. so you know writing really does allow the communication to expand beyond just a couple of people but writing is difficult because only a few people can do it and only a few people can see what you write, especially when you look at us. people spend time in the in the archives and in other places. a lot of these people have horrible handwriting, so it's hard to read the writing anyway. so the next scan in the printing press and the printing press is really something that's a great equalizer. prior to the printing press, you had to find some monk in a monastery to handwrite and hand copy or your book. not many people did that, but now you could print this and put it in a book or just print a flier and distribute it wider. initially, you were doing things like with woodcuts and printing that and then you had movable type. so you could start printing things like books and newspaper versa and that sort of thing. the other aspect of this, besides disseminating it out to a wide audience, is that you started being able to do this in the layman's language prior to this, when you had monks copying, copying bible passages, it was mostly done in things like latin, which most people couldn't read, even if they could read anything. so by printing, printing, press, you can now get it down into the common people's vernacular. and lincoln starts to realize and he talks about how all of this growth, this technology, science and all this can benefit more people, not just the wealthy people that had benefited before. so, of course, by the civil war, the telegraph is big and he uses that in the civil war. and the telegraph and the railroads may have been more critical to winning the civil war than advanced weaponry today. if he were around, he'd be texting and taking phone calls from people on the zoom call that that that are trying to get connected. so lincoln looks at all of this and this is all in his discoveries and inventions lecture which you know a lot of people they said it wasn't that great but he says all of this advancement is done by discoveries, inventions and improvements. so he says earlier on that, you know, man isn't, the only animal who labors. but he's the only animal who improves upon that labor and well, how do you improve upon labor? this is a text observation, reflection, an experiment. so you see something you think about how it might work and you maybe even like try out different things to experiment for those who aren't scientists, that's essentially the scientific method. lincoln was one of those people that all of his colleagues when he was out on the on the circuit, the judges, the lawyers and people that knew him constantly over and over in in the records that we have say, you know, lincoln had a scientific mind. you know, lincoln had a technical mind. you know, lincoln could understand that technical, technological advancement better than anybody. he definitely and it was quite logical as well, which comes from from some of families. so lincoln understood that these technological advances were a way they were they were already doing. and he encouraged that democratizing government economy, the economy, education was also part of this. so with hand at hand with it that this was not something that could just benefit the upper class. i mean, you look back, you look at somebody like thomas jefferson. thomas jefferson actually invented several things. he just never patented them. so lincoln still the only president a with a patent, but jefferson invented things. but mostly there were things like a clock and a nice little turntable and and a portable desk. they were all things that made things easier for him. he also had several hundred people. he was enslaving to do all the labor. lincoln was like, i don't have that. i'm the one doing all the labor. i think that these things can benefit me and farmers and other people like like me. so he came to the conclusion that this science and technology, and education would allow all americans to better their condition and it would allow all americans to have an equal chance and the race of life. so this was basically the idea that the government should take an active role in facilitating these things to do for people what people could not do by themselves or could not do as well as the government could do for them to make it easier to give access to everyone. so that's kind of the big picture things that lincoln was looking at. so i will talk one more thing about this discovery and inventions is that in the end, he gets to the very end and it ends very abruptly, but he gets to the very end and he talks about the patent system and says prior to the patent system, if you invented something, your neighbor could steal it, make make copies of it, sell it. you had no you had no recourse. but the patent system changed this. so now for at least a short period of time, in the time varies for a certain period of time, you had the legal protection. so nobody could steal your your your invention or your idea. and that that patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius and discovery and production of new and useful things. and then a kind of a quickly ends the fire genius, of course i took for the court at the title of my book because that is the the ingenuity, the innovation, the inventiveness to creativeness, but justice important is this fuel of interest, which is the fuel of financial interest. so you could be protected and you could market, you could commercialize your idea. and by having that capable entity that put you in a position where you had an incentive to to innovate, to come up with new ideas, and that was critical. so through all all of this and before i away from just one more thing, before i go away from the discoveries, inventions, it's really kind of complicated. what exactly the lecture and discoveries inventions actually is. there are two pieces of and when when they first looked at them, they just said, well, you know, he must have just rewrote it for the second piece because there's a little bit of overlap. but then when you look at it, it looks like it's it's the front and back of the same lecture. and then you look at it and said, well, wait a second, newspapers are talking about things. so he didn't say this, probably a middle piece. and then to make it all even more confusing, there probably was a reading copy in a folder that robert lincoln had and lost. robert had a habit of losing things and he knows, i guess, you know, i had this i know i had, but i can't find it. so i talk about all of that history as well. but let's go back to the science idea. you know, where did lincoln get the science? what did he know? and, you know, i can't go through all of it here because it is quite a lot. but really, there are three different areas where lincoln was learning erything but learning and technology. so the first is obviouy the farm. he grows up on a farm. and in kentucky he grows up and works on fa in indiana, basicay ll he's 21 plus years old. he' working a farm. he's in other things on the side, but he is basically working a farm. and you would in well, a farm on the frontier. yeah, that can't be much science. when you think about it. it really is. i actllused to work on a farm when i was younger. my father grew up on a farm, so i've done more tn share of farm work and i would never want to do it again. but when you look at at the picture here, i have as a john deere steel plow, which not get invented until after lincoln had said goodbye to farm work and didn't want to have anything to do with it. so he didn't get the benefit of the steel plow, which he could he used in illinois, but he did use earlier plows systems. when you look at the science, you could see that there's things like hydrology. there's a there's a neat little story when he's seven years old and knob creek in kentucky that year that he just before they moved indiana and his father was planting corn seeds and he's he's dropping pumpkin seeds into the ground and covering them up. and then a week later, there's a huge, huge rain that falls on the hills, none of it on the fields at all, washes down, washes out the soil, washes up seeds, washes out everything. he learned pretty quickly that, you know, the weather and how water moves is pretty critical to survive all that summer. also the summer with the the year without a summer. so there wasn't there wa