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“Thing-a-ma-jigger” and “What-cher-may-call-it”or a Magic Needle and aMagic Powder
Aboutthis same time that Marco Polo returned from his travels, people in Europe began to hear and talk about a magic needle and a magic powder that did remarkable things, and some say that Marco brought them back from Cathay, but this we doubt. The little magic needle when floated on a straw or held up only at its middle would always turn towards the north no matter how much you twisted it. Such a needle put in a case was called a compass.
Now, you may not see why such a little thing was so remarkable. But strange as it may seem, this little thing really made it possible to discover a new world.
Perhaps you have played the game in which a child is blindfolded, twisted around several times in the center of the room, and then told to go toward the door or the window or some other point in the room. You know how impossible it is for one who has been so turned round to tell whichway to go, and you know how absurd one looks who goes in quite the opposite direction when he thinks he is going straight.
Well, the sailor at sea was something like such a blindfolded child. Of course, if the weather were fine he could tell by the sun or the stars which way he should go. But when the weather was cloudy and bad there was nothing for him to go by. He was then like the blindfolded child. He might easily become confused and sail in just the opposite direction from the way he wanted to go without knowing the difference.
This was perhaps one of the chief reasons why sailors, before the compass was used, had not gone far out of sight of land. They were afraid they might not be able to find their way back. So only that part of the world was known which could be reached by land or without going far out of sight of land.
But, with the compass, sailors could sail on and on through storm and cloudy weather and keep always in the direction they wanted to go. They simply had to follow the little magnetic needle suspended in its box. No matter how much the boat turned or twisted or tossed, the little needle always pointed to the north. Of course sailors did not always want to go north, but it was very easy to tell any other direction if they knew which was north. South was exactly opposite, east wasto the right, and west was to the left. So all they had to do was to steer the boat on the course in whatever direction they wished.
It was a long while, however, before sailors would use a compass. They thought it was bewitched by some magic, and they were afraid to have anything to do with such a thing. Sailors are likely to be superstitious, and they were afraid that if they took the compass on board it might bewitch their ship and bring them bad luck.
The other magic thing was gunpowder.
Never before 1300 had there been such things in Europe as guns or cannons or pistols. All fighting had been done with bows and arrows or swords or spears or with some such weapons. A sword can only be used on a man a few feet away, but with guns an enemy may be killed and walls battered down miles away. But after gunpowder was invented the armor which the old knights wore was of course no longer of any use, for it could not protect them from shot and shell. So gunpowder has changed fighting completely and made war the terrible thing it has become.
Although Marco Polo was supposed to have told about gunpowder and its use in cannons as he had seen it in the East, most people think that an English monk named Roger Bacon knew about gunpowder and also about the compass and perhaps invented them. The monk Bacon knewabout so many things which people at that time thought were magic that he was supposed to be in league with the devil, and so he was put in prison. Bacon was the wisest man of his time, but he was ahead of his time. If he were living now he would be honored as a great scientist and inventor. But people thought he knewtoomuch—that any one who knew as much as he did was wicked—that he was prying into God’s secrets, which God did not want any one to know.
Others, however, give the credit or the blame for the invention of gunpowder to a German chemist named Schwarz. They say that one day Schwarz was mixing some chemicals in an iron bowl with an iron mixer called apestle, such as druggists use, when, all of a sudden, the mixture exploded and shot the iron pestle right up through the ceiling. Schwarz was much surprised; he had had a narrow escape from being killed; but this gave him an idea. Immediately he set to work to think out a way to use the same mixture in battle to shoot iron pestles at the enemy. Some people think it would have been far better if the pestle had struck and killed Mr. Schwarz at the time, and if his secret had been destroyed with him. We might then never have had the terrible wars and the killing of millions of human beings which have resulted from this discovery. It was quite a while, however, beforegunpowder was made strong enough to do much damage. In fact, it was over a hundred years before fighting with guns entirely took the place of fighting with bows and arrows.