Today, a mummy at the North Pole. The University of
Houston's College of Engineering presents this
series about the machines that make our
civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity
created them.
The craziest thing happened
the other day. An historian handed me a copy of an
article from one of those magazines you read in the
grocery checkout line. "Soviet researchers [find]
an Egyptian mummy at the North Pole," the headline
said. It claimed that ancient Egyptian explorers
flew to the North Pole in a human-powered airplane
and buried one of their dead there.
The man watched with a flickering smile while I
read the article. He didn't know that I'd always
wanted to invent headlines for one of those
magazines myself. Still, I would've forgotten the
incident, but the next day I read Anne Rice's new
novel, The Mummy. Her hero is the
reanimated mummy of Ramses II. He's bewitched by
early-20th-century technology, and he cries,
There is so much to be discovered ... we must go
to the North Pole in an aeroplane.
That was the second mummy flying to the
North Pole in less than 24 hours. It got my
attention. Then I remembered Clive Cussler's novel,
Treasure. It's about a ship from ancient
Egypt, found frozen into the ice of Northern
Greenland with its crew perfectly preserved. The mad
imagery goes on: Mary Shelley's Gothic tale of horror
began and ended with a crazed Victor Frankenstein
chasing his monster -- his living mummy -- across the
Arctic ice.
All this takes yet another turn when we learn that
Zoroastrians see the north wind as evil. Hindu
writings tell us that Lord Siva had to behead his
own son when he found him asleep with his head to
the north. The legends of the hot arid countries
associate cold, and the North, with evil and
finally with the end of life. Dante located the
portal of Hell at the North Pole and described its
first circle as a region where sinners are frozen
up to their noses in ice. And he placed his Hell in
the universe as it had been described by the
Egyptian astronomer Ptolemy 1300 years before.
Egypt and the North Pole -- warmth and frigidity --
life and death -- being aloft and being earthbound
-- the themes intertwine. That crazy magazine
retold the ancient myth of contrast and coupled it
all with the exotic idea of a 6000-year old
airplane. As mad as that part may seem, a team from
MIT, fascinated by the myth of Daedalus, recently
used 20th-century high-tech in an attempt to
replicate Daedalus's flight. They flew a
human-powered airplane 74 miles Northward from
Crete -- nothing compared with the legends. It was
only a fraction of Daedalus's mythical flight, and
a hundredth of this Egyptian one. But no matter.
The dream is what counts.
Our technology is deeply rooted in dreams no more
substantial than these -- dreams of flight or
dreams of teleportation to Mars. The person who
cooked up that goofy article was recalling the same
dream that, once upon a time, actually led us to
flight.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
