event. >> welcome, welcome to the september meeting of the lincoln group of the district of columbia. i am david jay kent, president of the lincoln group of the district of columbia. this is kind of a special night because, not only as our first meeting since june, but we also have zoom, we have video being recorded. and this is my official book launch for my new book, lincoln: the fire of genius he. so -- [applause] thank you. i know a lot of people but books and they came, and i appreciate that. i'm going to give a talk tonight about lincoln: the fire of genius. and basically look at, well, let me look at the subtitle. i think that really describes the book. it's how abraham lincoln's commitment to science and technology helped modernize america. that is what i'm going to talk about tonight. just to give you a little background, i'm going to talk about, i guess, i'll start with the book is really kind of -- you can piece it out to three different sections. the first days, what did lincoln know about science? what did he understand about technology? and where he learned that? i'm going to talk about that. but then, in the middle, there's really how did he implement this. especially and his two major careers, as a politician and as a lawyer. finally, how did this get implemented and what did he do as far as science and technology during the civil war? which is very critical to the north winning the civil war. 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, suddenly i just lost my screen. i'm going to be giving several talks over the future, in the future, to civil war round tables. i'm okay now. the -- in those talks, i'm going to talk more about the civil war. i'm not going to talk too much about the civil war, tonight i will talk about how lincoln institutionalized science during the civil war. so, if you want to come here more about the civil war, come to one of the civil war roundtable talks that i will be giving. and you can hear more about the civil war. tonight is more of a big picture thing. the idea is to give an overview of the book and color 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 in the science. most people don't really think of those two things together. part of it goes back to my hometown team. my hometown used to bill itself, still bills itself, as the birthplace of american independence. it's a long story, but it has something to do with complaining about taxes in the 16 hundreds. this is in massachusetts. so, the town itself is steeped in history. i, being kind of the odd man out, wasn't so interested so much in the revolutionary war and the colonial times. i got interested in abraham lincoln very, very early. i was pursuing lincoln. at the same time, this town is a sea coast town. it has long, beautiful beaches and miles and miles of salt marsh and forest. and at the time when i was growing up, all over the television was this really cool guy named jean cousteau. french oceanographer, he was on all the time it seemed. he won me over and i ended up going into science as a field. so, my degrees are all in science. i work wasn't science. i actually worked as a marine biologist for several years before somebody burned down my laboratory. another long story, we're not going to go into. then, i was in aquatic toxicology and i was eventually down here in d.c., doing regulatory science both here and in europe. and doing that for over 30 years. so, most of my career, my paid career, has been science. but all through this time, i have been pursuing abraham lincoln. those of you who know about my obsession, now that i have almost 2000 lincoln books in my house, probably more than that because i've got all the lincoln group lincoln books in my house right now to. i'm always reading about lincoln. so, this was really a way to blend the two. i think from the perspective of a scientist, i was able to see things that lincoln scholars wouldn't necessarily see. so, that is how this whole thing all got started. if i could make this work i. one of the things i will talk about is this, lincoln has a fragment, called a fragment on niagara falls. it's something he wrote and never finished, stuck in a 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 served just one term in congress. 1848 was between the two sessions of congress. back, then people talk about how congress doesn't work very much. well, back then they really didn't work very much. they only worked 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 is your two years. in between those two, sessions lincoln went off to massachusetts, my home state. did a lot of lectures and stumping for zachary taylor for president. and it helped zachary taylor when the election. on his way, back he went through upstate, new york went to buffalo and took his family to niagara falls. not beautiful niagara falls, i have information that says he got a haircut while he was there. then, they got into a steam ship and went through the great lakes, back to chicago through the illinois michigan canal. which i'll mention in 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 steam ship, this is where we think he wrote this fragment. when you look at this fragment, you can see tons and tons and tons of science. he starts off in this fragment talking about, you know, the physics of it is no great wonder. you have a river, it is flowing along nicely. and then it hits a perpendicular job, basically finds a cliff, falls off a bit, crashes into the river below it. sends up a lot of missed. if it's sunny, you will get perpetual rainbows. okay, he says that is no big stretch and everybody knows that. i actually, i talk about it in the book, how i think he really understood how rainbows are formed more than most people. because he does talk a lot about how the height works. i think he understood that rainbows are formed when sunlight hits the water droplets, which actually prisons and put the lights into its component wavelengths. you get different colors. there is that, i talk about 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 erosion of the false. he understands that some rocks are harder than other rocks. those rights that are not quite as hard road faster. and the false have eroded back from where they originally were. by several miles. and he calculates, on top in a second about how he was a math guy, he calculated that the age of the world according to how long it took for these rivers to erode backwards. it came up at least 14,000 years. i think everybody knows the world 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 the glaciers were going back. so, he knows something about that. he also understands hydrological cycles. he talks about how the water evaporates from the, river goes up into the atmosphere and cycles around. eventually falls back down. and it doesn't just fall back down on the river and the lake, and falls back down on this much wider watershed on the land and trains off into the lake into the rivers and eventually goes back down over the falls. calculated, again, i think this should be between 200 and 300,000 square miles. the correct answer is 265 square miles. so, he was pretty close. he understands that. he even talks about paleontology. he says, you know, when all of this was happening, he gets the title must've because he starts talking about adamant even vos and a few other things. bu he says that the mammoth and the mastoid on roamed the earth. mammoths and mastered on four giant elephants that are extinct, no longer exist, and we only really know about them from fossils. so, he had at least some understanding of fossils and the concept of science. this is why i started seeing this and started thinking this guy knows a lot more science than he lets on. and that most people think about. the other thing that got me thinking about lincoln and science is this, lincoln's lecture on discoveries and inventions, which he wrote right after the lincoln, douglass debates. and actually gave about half a dozen times in 1859, two varying levels of audiences and varying levels of applause. some people said it was not his best work you. but when you look at it, it shows an understanding of technology and the growth of man. development of man. so, of course, because everybody back then, most people, had bibles but not necessarily any other books, he starts to talk a lot about the bible as using them as timelines. he talks about adam and eve. adamant, even after the fall, realized wait a second, we have to have something. they invented this fig leaf apron. he makes kind of an off color joke later on about adam and eve and the free leaves a print, which i won't go into, but he talks about that. and that leads to clothing. >> you're sharing your screen. >> hold, on one second. i can't share my screen. he has to tell me how to share, has to let me share my screen, i can't do it. okay, i'm going to go back to talking now. he talks about clothing. initially, clothing is wearing animal skins. then, people learn, well, maybe we can just take the fibers from an animal. like a sheep, take will and make that into clothing. we could take fibers from plants like cotton, make that into clothing. so, that is an improvement. in order to do that, of course, you have to invent things like looms and sewing and other instruments, to be able to make this clothing out of these fibers. he goes on a jumps, forward now into talking about iron tools. he talks about steam, which, combined with iron, you could power boats and railroads and use it for manufacturing. so, you are seeing all of this growth in man, building technology. even gets to the point where he starts talking about wind power and water power. >> now you have to pick the window to share. >> this one? i think that's it. no, it's this one. okay, hopefully we are sharing the right screen now. and hopefully i can see what i'm doing. okay. so, he talks about wind power and water power. and he is way ahead of his time, talking about these things. these are all a progression of man and the building of things. he then talks about how he does that with communication. so, originally, we're just sort of grunting at each other and pointing and saying watch out for that mammoth. we have speech, where you can say that myth comes out a dusk every night, be careful. then we have writing, you could write it down and handed around. people can see that you should stay away from minutes at dusk. 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 those people who spend time in the archives and other places. a lot of these people have horrible handwriting, so it's hard to read the writing anyway. so, the next day, in the printing press. the printing presses something that is a great equalizer. prior to the printing, press you had to find some might monk in a monastery to hand right 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 flyer and distribute it wider. initially, you are doing things like wood cuts and printing that. then you had movable type, so you could start printing things like books and newspapers and that sort of thing. the other aspect of this, besides disseminating it out to wider audiences, is that you started being able to do this in the layman's language. prior to, this when you had monks copying with bible passages, it was mostly done in things like latin. which most people couldn't read, even if they could read anything. so, by the printing press, you could now get it down into the common peoples vernacular. 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. of course, by the civil war, the telegraph is big. he uses that in the civil war, the telegraph and the railroads may have been more critical to winning the civil war than advanced weaponry. today, if you are around, he would be texting and taking phone calls from people on that zoom call that are trying to get connected. so, lincoln looks at all of this. this is all on the discoveries and inventions lecture, which a lot of people panned. they said it wasn't that great. but he says that all of this advancement is done by discoveries, inventions and improvements. so, he says earlier on that man isn't the only animal who labours, but he's the only animal who improves upon that labor. well, how do you improve upon labor? it, says it takes observation, reflection, experiments to see, something think about how it might work and maybe even try out different things to experiment. for those who aren't scientists, that is essentially the scientific method. when can was one of those people that all of his colleagues, when he was out on the circuit, the judges, the lawyers and people who knew him, constantly, over and over in the records that we have say, you know, lincoln had a scientific mind. lincoln had a technical mind. we could could understand that technological advancement better than anybody. he definitely, and it was quite logical as, well which comes from this. lincoln understood that these technological advances were a way to do what they're already doing, and he encouraged it. democratizing government, economy, the economy, education was also part of this. hand in hand with it. this was something that could not just benefit the upper class. you look, back at somebody like thomas jefferson. thomas jefferson had actually invented several things, he just never patented them. so, lincoln is still the only president with a patent. but jefferson invented things. mostly, there were things like a clock and a nice little turn table, a portable desk. it's all things that made things easier for him. he also had several hundred people it was enslaving to do all the labor. when can i 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 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 in 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 get access to everyone. so, that is kind of the big picture of things that lincoln was looking at. so, i will talk, one more thing about these discoveries and inventions. that, in the end, he gets to the very end and ends very abruptly. but he gets to the very end and he talks about the patent system. says, prior to the patent system, if you invented something, we neighbor could steal it, make copies of, it sell it, you had no recourse. but the patent system changed this. so, now, for at least a short period of time, the time varies, for a certain period of time, you had the legal protection that nobody else could steal your invention or your idea. that patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius, in the discovery and production of new and useful things. then it kind of quickly end. the fire of genius, of course, it took for the title of my book. because that of the ingenuity, the innovation, the inventiveness, the creative -ness. but just as important is this fuel of interest. which is the fuel of financial interest. you could be protected and you could, market you could commercialize your idea. but having that capability, that put you in a position where he had an incentive to innovate, to come up with new ideas. that was critical. so, through all of this, before i go away from, it just one more thing, before i go away from the discoveries and inventions, it's really kind of complicated what exactly the lecture and discovery conventions actually is. there are two pieces. and when they first looked at them, they just said well, he must have just re-rode it for the second piece. because there is a little bit of overlap. but then, when you look at it, it looks like it's the front and back of the same lecture. and then you look at it and say, wait a second, the newspapers are talking about things that he didn't say. there is 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 goes, you know i had, this 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. where did lincoln get the science? what did he know? i can't go through all of it here because it's quite a lot. t, really there are three ffent areas where lincoln was learning everything, but learning science and technology. fit is, obviously, oth fire. he goe uon a farm in kentucky. he goes up and works on a farm in indiana, basically uil he is 21 plus years old. his work on a farm. he's doing other things on the si, but he basically works on a farm. you would think, a fireman, frontier can't be much science. when you think about, it it really is. i actually used to work on a farm when i was younger, my father grew up on a farm. so, i have done more than my share of farm work and i would never want to do it again. but when you look at this, the picture here i have is a john deere steel plow, which did not get invented until after lincoln had said goodbye to farm work and didn't want to have anything to do with it. he didn't get the benefits of the steel plow, which he could have used in illinois. but he did use earlier plow systems. when you look at the science, you can see that there are things like hydrology. there is a neat little story, when he seven years old in kentucky, the year that lets just before they move to indiana. his father has pointed corn seeds and he is dropping pumpkin seeds into the ground and covering them up. and then a week later, there is this huge, huge rain that falls on the hills. none of it on the fields, it all washes down, washes at the soil, what is at the seeds, washes everything. he learned pretty quickly that the weather and hot water moves, it's pretty critical to survival. that summer was also the summer with the year without the summer. they were freezes and a horrible summer, freeze wise. that is part of the reason why they left. he learns all of that stuff from there. but when he gets the indiana he, says okay, i was handed an ax. because he seven years old but he's very tall. seven years old, handed and acts. he very rarely put down that most useful instrument for the next 20 years. why did he have an ax? because they moved into an unbroken forest. if you've ever been to a real unbroken forest there were dozens and dozens of different species of trees. very tense, what a wild animals running around as well. a lot of understory. it's a lot of work to clear that in order to plant crops. but all these trees are different. obviously, you get a little small tree, you can cut that down with an ax. if you get a pretty big tree, not so easy. they all have different types of routes. some of them are pretty deep and it's hard to get them out. some trees are hardwood, some are softwood. some have a very dry, fairly dry already. others are very sappy and wet. which makes a difference, if you use something that is wet, as it dries, it's going to crack and twist and break. so, you need to know the difference between all of these things. because you are, at some point, going to have to use trees to build your log cabin. you don't want it leaking. there was some civil engineering when you build a log cabin, you want to make sure that when it rains it doesn't all just flood into your living room. so, there was that kind of science that he was learning. he was also learning some egg food ecology. while all these crops are dry, you need to know what you can forage for and eat that will be nutritious, versus what you would forage for and eat and would kill you. he grew up learning about disease. his mother dies of milk sickness. they knew it had something to do with, milk but they didn't really know why. but they were understanding and picking up on all of these. things a lot of it being passed down from father to father to father. father to son to son. there is a lot going on there, there is also things like soil nutrition that was a big thing. it actually becomes a major issue that increased the slavery. so, there were a lot of things he was learning on the farm. he didn't of course it down and say, i'm learning hydrology. but he does learn the basics of science. the other aspect is of course he had formal schooling. he says, i only had a less than a year from schooling. where i learned to read, to write and decipher to the rule of three. so okay, once you learn to read and write, it's just a matter of practice. then he practiced and practiced and practiced and read a lot. the suffering to the rule of three, the math side ke a little bit more effort. when you look at this, this is one of theleaf's from his some book thatherndon got from lincoln's stepmother. when you look at tse leaves, there's about 12 sheets that are still in existence. s stepmother said they were 100 ofthese sheets, also on together into a book. by the timethat herndon got, them there weren't many left. en looking at those sheets, you can see that it was a little bit more than what he ggested. the is obviously addition, subtraction, math and division. as long division and, i remember this early on, some people remember, long deficient on by a method that we no longer use anymore. once you get to the, answer you have to proof it. you have to calculate all the way back to the original numbers. which i remember doing, and it's very frustrating when you get through the proofing and it comes out with totally different numbers than you are supposed to get. so, he was learning that. but he says in his autobiography, he says i read all the way through pikes arithmetic. there was some other math books that he looked at. he said, okay, i'll see what is in pikes arithmetic. he gets pikes of metallic from that time, period i look at it and there's a lot more in there than just suffering to the rule of three. even on these sheets, you can see. there is a single rule , three a doublef three, discounts, interest rate calculations. you can see on the top right, there it says shuttlg. youad british currency units and erican or state currency uns. also the same for british weights and state waits. all these conversions back and forth. there was a lot more there than he admits. i go deeply in the book about what is in these other books that he read. finally, you get to so for, eating his self study. lincoln was an autodidact, which means he studied by himself and he read. he learned on his own. and he was very much capable of being able to do that, which some people aren't. so, this obviously, for most people who have been out there to newal, this is a picture i took of the top part of the surveyors statue that is out in salem. lioln had become a surveyor amongst other things that he did. well, what do you need to be a surveyor? not just a compass and a, chain you don't just look throu there and say okay, that's 50 meters and the comps, you measure it and you mark it down. he says he had to learn to be a surveyor, he had to learn to do that by reading all of flint. and some of another author, whose name i forget. i looked at those books. when you go through flint, one of the things that jumps out, one of the big things to jump, out it's obviously he was learning geometry. because geometry, the signs of shapes, the mathematics of shapes, that's important to surveying. but he was also learning trigonometry. i don't know how many people took trigonometry in high school or college, but it's signs, co-signs, tangents, inverse of all those things. figuring out angles. you would think it would be fairly simple, that is only so many angles, right? it's actually quite complicated. and he was learning all of that. but there is also, much much more that he was learning in those books. so, when it comes to mathematics, he was way ahead of his peers when it came to mathematics. and of, is of course, was long before he studied and nearly mastered the six books of yoke let's geometry, elements. which i also went through, there is some complicated stuff in. there was a scientist, but i was an environmental, scientist not a mathematician. a lot of that stuff is out of my league. but lincoln was learning all the stuff. so, he is gaining this, knowledge gaining some science knowledge and ecology, some hydrology. i'm not quite sure where he picked up paleontology yet, but he is learning a lot of math, learning a lot of things. so, from there, i go into really the second main section, i guess, in the sense that how did he implement this in his life? he was a politician and he was a lawyer, those are his two main jobs as an adult. as a politician, he was in the illinois state legislature for four terms, eight years. and he became the whip leader. and the wages and lincoln pushed this american system of economic development. the american system was basically believing in the modernization of modernizing the nation through government supported, a key point, government supported internal improvements. which is what we might call infrastructure today. now, they also push the idea of a national bank to help pay for it and high protective tariffs to protect american innovation from cheap foreign imports. the main thing was this, internal improvements. what were internal improvements at that time? , well it began with roads. the roads they were building to not look like this, this is dwight d. eisenhower's internal improvement program in the 1950s, with an interstate highway system. lincoln was a little bit more like, let's just have a road that is packed down and raised so it won't flood and turned into mud, like i have been used to moving from farm to farm and moving from i took my horse through on the circuit. they were also navigating and making navigate-able rivers. this was a little self serving, because he was living in salem. the single mom river runs through the middle, past the mill in salem where he worked. the river is this very small, narrow, meandering river. that if you went with us when a group went out to illinois in 2016, we will know that report doesn't even go by the middle anymore. it has changed direction and it is not there. he wanted that to be made navigable so you could get steam ships off the river. it didn't work for the single mom, but it did for other rivers. that was a big issue. another one was canals, he would just cut across some of these meanders and make a straight shot. we can have canals. the big one that he pushed was the illinois michigan canal. those who know something about the internal improvements program in illinois, in hindsight, it was kind of a disaster. they had come up with all of these programs for all these things are mentioning, including railroads. then, wall street created a financial crash that rippled across the united states. illinois went into terrible debt and they couldn't afford these infrastructure projects anymore. but lincoln kept pushing, he said we can get the federal government help us. and get this to help, but as we can get financing. it kept getting narrowed down and eventually one of the biggest projects that did get built was this illinois or michigan canal that lincoln just kept insisting on. , the illinois michigan canal is a pretty critical canal. lincoln told his friend, joshua speed, i want to be known as the dewitt clinton of illinois. those who know who dewitt clinton's, he was a governor of new york went the erie canal was put into service. he had been instrumental prior to being governor in getting the ear he can help build. the economic runs from new york, the hudson river above albany, over to lake erie. it was gangbusters for the new york, economy the new york state economy. and the new england economy, who could now more easily get products all the way through to lake erie and through the great lakes to chicago. the illinois michigan canal did get built, and it goes from chicago to lasalle, on the illinois river. which then goes down to the mississippi river. so, finish that connection. can't much more easily move product across by land. instead of having to go down the coast or having to put them on wagons and move them through the muddy roads. it was critical to making illinois grow, and chicago went from a very small, village a few hundred people, to tens of thousands within a couple of years. it was very quick, growing and and of course it's millions now. although, the illinois michigan canal is only there for pieces now, mostly not there. so, this is one area where he pushed it. he did things when pushing infrastructure projects, when he was in congress. and even when he was president, to keep financing this. one of the things that lincoln did well he was in illinois, and after this financial crisis that caused a lot of problems paying for these projects, he was proposing ways for the federal government to do there is a land and give money to the, states not just illinois but other states, to help pay for these projects. arctic of the land to the states and let them sell it and then -- or buy a cheap, and then sell it for hire. in order to pay for these projects. it was always working and he always knew that the federal government and the state governments had a role in these infrastructure projects. bringing this technology forward. what was the other thing he did, on the other side and his legal career? so, as a lawyer, early on he is doing mostly debt cases. he's doing divorces and, when you look at the total, the majority were actually those types of small cases. he would turn $5 and that would be it. but later on, especially in the 1850s, he began doing more and more cases that were related to science and technology. so, he was doing more patent related cases. he was doing medical malpractice cases, where he had to learn medical jargon and medical issues. and he was doing a lot of these technology cases with new machinery that was being built. all of this stuff was going on in that time period, it was a huge increase in technology during the early 18 hundreds. and what lincoln did was he encouraged that and then late on i will say how he set us up to go even furthe beyond, after his death. this picture actually is kind of reminiscent of the f e f didn't case, one of t bigger, more impornt cases that he did, related technology and science and a mix of everything. it was a sam, ship came out of st. louis and headnorth on the thiss hippie reverend promptly decides, promptlyi don't know if they decided, promptly crashes into the very first railroad bdge across the mississippi river. it had only been up for two weeks. this railroad bridge actually, if you've been to ro island, it's pretty cool to go to rock island and on the davenport iowa side there, there is a really cool statue of lincoln and lincoln talking to a kid about this case. there is really two bridges, one goes from illinois to the island, one from the island to the rest of the place, to what is now iowa. this steam ship crashes into the bridge, catches fire, burns down to its whole. luckily, none of the passengers were injured. but they lost millions of dollars worth of cargo and of course the ship itself. it also damaged the bridge, to the point where they couldn't run trains over it and they had only started running trains over it. so, lincoln takes this case. he is working for the railroads, he did quite a lot of work for the railroad. and, sorry, something just popped up on my screen. so, he goes out there and he, you can see what he writes here, he is about to speak to the angular position of the peers. he went out there, took his own experience on the flat boats, but he only had, done i talked about earlier in the, book was a pilot and a steam ship pilot in the river. he helped personally build canals. it was a lot of background he had, that he could bring to it. plus, he hired an engineer. and the two of them went out there and they worked out the speed of the river. the speed of the ship. any kind of angular position, because it curves a little bit and then the bridge goes across. all of this information, even 80s that circle around from the piers. he argues very technically to the jury that there was no way that this was an obstruction. this is it that negligence on the part of the steam ship captain, or it was intentional. there is no way it would have hit it otherwise. he convinces eight of the 12 jurors. because he convinces eight of the 12 jurors, it's a home journey and the trial is over for that time at least. eventually it goes on and they re-try it. but it doesn't matter anymore because, by this time, the railroads have rebuilt this bridge. and they are running trains across it. so, what this really does, from two perspectives. one, it shows how like it really understood the science and technology and really got into it. but, also how he could take that technical aspect and then rephrase it in a way that jurors could understand. most jurors, remember the oj simpson, child there were a lot of technical details and the jurors couldn't understand a lot of it. of, course it went on for so long. but, this he summarizes this in a very simple way, so that jurors could understand. that was important, but the other part of this that's really important is the idea that the steam ships, which were supported by the companies, they had a monopoly on most of the commerce going west. because they had to all go down the river to new orleans. then they would go to the golf, you would have to get it off the steam ship, cross it, across the panama or costa rica, kenya back on another steam ship and then out to the west coast. so, all this commerce was being dictated by the steam ship companies. they didn't want the railroads. railroads could go east to west. if they could go all the way, across get a bridge across the mississippi river, then they could go all the way to the west coast. which they eventually did, because of lincoln and the transcontinental railroad. this was a critical kind of juncture in our development, that lincoln essentially set the precedent that allowed the railroads to spread the way that they were able to spread. you look around today, we have a lot of railroads carrying a lot of product. not so many steam ships. so, certainly one for the railroads. so, the last part of this, the book, the last four chapters, i look at the civil war. various aspects in the civil war. one is a look at the technology, look at the weaponry and things like that. another is i look at science issues and i even look at the assassination and things like embalming and things like that. this is not a science book, it's not mething you have to worry about beg too technical. it's a bo about abraham lincoln. so, i focus in on what abram lincoln did. when you get to the war, i'm just goi to show these pictures but i'm not gointo talk about this because i'm gog to talk about these in more deptwhen i do the civil war roundtab talkater. basically, lincol though, encouraged the increase in technology and weaponry and other areas during the war. especially the east of the telegraph in the railroad. i'll do a whole lecture on that, i won't spend much time. but i do want to spend the last part of this on how lincoln kind of institutionalized science. prior to the civil war, there really wasn't much science, institutionalized at the federal level. the british at the royal society, the french had their royal academy. there are other countries had things. we basically didn't have much of anything besides some private clubs. what we did have was the smithsonian. thanks to a british guy named smith son who gave all his money to the u.s., even though he had never been here, said make a smithsonian institute. so, smithsonian had been doing research, scientific research and writing scientific reports. that is basically all it had been doing prior to the civil war. during the civil war, lincoln really relied on the smithsonian to begin with, but especially this guy who is joseph henry. he was the first secretary of the smithsonn. the smithsonian had been around, maybe operational for eight or ten years or so prior to the civil war. they lead the framework, for the cornerstone for it, wh lincoln was in the congress. he soughthem starting to build this congress, this wa what the smithsonian was at the time. but joseph henry became an informal science adviser to lincoln. like it also could count on him, if he had a science or technology, issue what he would call joseph henry. joseph henry ended up being the head of this something that lincoln and we'll set up called the permanent commission of the navy. when can, i think everyone here knows, lincoln had an open door policy. people kept walking in and they would, say i've got this new gun, new weapon. lincoln, as i showed in the last slide, went out and tested some of these itself like dispense a repeating rifle. almost got his head blown off testing a rocket out at that navy yard. luckily, he didn't, any skip the next test which was even worse. new, especially if it got turned down, that they the permanent they would he got to have to look at these inventions, people knew what they came to lincoln, especially if it was turned down by the commission, they would say wait a minute, i need to talk to lincoln, they would talk to lincoln, they would then get in through the backdoor, he could still deal with this stuff. so just henry did that. lincoln also signed into law the national academy of sciences in the civil war. now, the national academy, there is some argument as to how much lincoln did, whether he just signed the bill and did not know what it was. i have shown he knew a little bit more than that, he was probably working as a senator from massachusetts, to make sure that this happened. but also, he had spoken with a scientist, lou agee, who was pushing the national academy. of course, joseph henry was a charter memory of the national academy. one of the things they can meet in the civil war, they started to look at accomplices on ships, which should really well on wooden ships with sales, not so well when you are surrounded with ironclad material. does not do too well with a compass. so they had to work that out. as far as ironclads go, we will talk a little bit more in the other lecture, linking was critical in getting ironclads built. another issue that he clearly had more of an input on was the partment of agriculture. lincoln went to congress, and his very first annual message of congress in 1861, which sically was the state of the union,he said you know, we need a department of agriculture. all we have now is in a back roomsomewhere, some old guy, looking at statistics, that'sabout it. we need to do this. i think everyonein this room knows that lincoln hated the farm. he could not wait to get off the farm. but he did understand that at this point, at the time of the civil war most people in the united states were still employed in farming. north and south, even though the north moore manufacturing, they still at most of the farmers. so he pushed this idea and got it made. congress quickly passed a bill, he signed and got a department of agriculture. the idea was to collect statistics, do some scientific research on seeds, on nutrients, soil nutrition, and communicate all of this back out to farmers. so this was a pretty radical thing that was started at the time. in fact, it still exists. in my former career, i worked with an agricultural service today, about ten years ago. and on these different things. this is something that still exists. so the final thing that i will mention, because i am talking about ncol's institutionalizing science, is this last piece, which is, this yosemite valley. lincoln signed into law the yosemite grant. wh this did was it took federal land in california, gave it to the state of california, and said okay, you n keep this land but you must keep it as a natural area. you have to keep it, maintain it for the use and recreation of all men and women. you cannot change. that so we will let you have it. so it is the first time federal land was given to, in this case, a state for permanent protection as a part system. now later on, after lincoln was done, the park service, but national park system was created, and yellowstone became the very first national park. california said, we will just give the land back to the federal government, either back in the federal government made it the third national park. the yosemite valley and the mariposa grove, big trees, sequoias, redwoods, became the third national park. and i will just tell you right now, if anybody asks me of the second national park is between yellowstone and yosemite, i do not know. somebody, look that up in case somebody asks that. so just to reiterate, lincoln knew a lot of science. he understood the idea of technology, and a lot more than people know, a lot more than he let on. but he definitely knew a lot more. and obviously, the book, i go through all of these details, and talk more about it. like i said it is not a science book. it is a history book. and a few people here might have read it already. you can ask them. basically, he saw science and technology and education, which goes hand in hand with science and technology, has a way for everyday people to benefit. i should add, in addition to these things i mentioned, he signed into law the homestead act, which allowed people to get land moving west. the land grant act which gave land, money to states to create colleges, which would teach science and engineering. he also asylee pacific railway act, and determine the beginning of where that would start, to have a railway go all the way across to california. remember, a lot of that in the middle we're still not yet states. he did all of this, he felt the federal government was critical to advancing things, that people should be able to better their condition. but in order to have the capability to do that, you need to remove the burdens which were out there for people, so that everybody could benefit, not just the wealthy elites, the educated, but everybody. farmers, somebody starts a factory, somebody has their own shoe making business, or blacksmith business, but everybody could benefit from that. so i will end there and take questions. obviously, this is my book launch, so my book is over there. i have copies of my old book over there as well. they are very, three different books. one, the older one is filled with graphics. the new book has no graphics, but i think it does okay on its own, without the pictures. so i will stop there, i will take whatever questions you have, for as long as you guys can put up with me. [applause] >> some people on zoom lost my fantastic final five minutes. so, does anybody have any questions? i have to stay here for the zoomers, you know. >> dan, can we get a microphone? >> i was wondering, how did you discover that fragment about his trip to niagara falls, the stuff that he wrote after that? >> what about the fragment? >> how did you discovery? >> how did i discover it? i did not discover it, someone else discovered it a long time ago. actually, about one year ago, we had ron white over here, to talk to all of us on a zoom, to talk to us. and ron white had a book coming out lincoln in private. and the whole book is all of these little fragments of things that lincoln would write, some fairly long, some short. basically, they never saw the light of day. they were a couple he might've crib for later on lectures, the second inaugural was crib from a lot of the things he wrote. but the very first, he took ten of them and parse them out, the first one that he parsed out is the fragment on niagara falls. he looked at it, totally from a position, a linguistic position, a literary benefit. you know, i am a scientist, i'm looking through it and i see signs pop out. i did not think the literary part was that great, it's not his best work. but i saw the science. that is one of the things i started to think about, and realizing that there was science involved in what lincoln was doing. one of the other things, i did not talk much about it today, but if you see the opening screen, a picture in the bottom right of lincoln's pact. we probably know that lincoln see only one with a patent. he's not the only one who invented things. thomas jefferson has invented things, thomas jefferson invented things which helped thomas jefferson. lincoln invented something that he thought would help commerce, would help transportation. so, when you look at this model of what lincoln had invented, which is a method for getting ships, steam ship boats over scholes, over shallows, he did not know it at the time. i saw doubting which suggested that he understood that he was using the arc immediate principle, which is a scientific principle of buoyancy, and displacement. so things which state in the water, push down in the water, this place it and how much it is displaced, is a measure of its weight as well, but also buoyancy. so lincoln understood that concept, that scientific concept. probably not by name, but he understood the concept, and developed these things with bellows, which you could fill up with air, which would increase the buoyancy and reeves the ship. so that is one of the things he talked about. actually, when i go through niagara, we go through niagara falls, he takes the steam ship through the great lakes. as he is going through what is called the detroit river, from helping out with those leaks, huron and superior? somewhere in there. stuck , he is going through a narrow area, and he's steam ship passes another steam ship which is stuck in the shallows. the captain is sending all of his crew overboard, with barrels, boards, whatever they can get to get underneath it which would give it some lift, some buoyancy because they are later. so, he watched that, he combined that with his earlier experience is getting stuck under salem on his second flat boat trip, combined it with other things he had learned and probably also from his reading. and that's how we came up with his patent. he did understand the scientific principles behind this even though he was not a scientist, he did not study scientific text so much, one thing that i will mention is that he read the annuals of science, which herman brought home a copy of, the annual of science. every year they would put out a book, which would summarize all of the different scientific studies which were done, in very short summaries. lincoln right through that and said, herman, go by the rest of these. they were coming out for ten, 12 years at that point. i think that's where he got a lot of the science, we found a specific book. yes? >> david, thank you for a wonderful presentation. i learned a lot. what was the most surprising thing that you learned about lincoln through all of this research? >> the most surprising thing i learned about lincoln, through all of this? it is hard to tell you. i have been studying it now for so long, i am trying to remember what i am surprised at. i guess overall, i was generally just surprised how much he knew. because when you read that fragment, niagara falls, there is a lot of science. we don't know exactly when he wrote that. presumably, he is writing this on a steam ship, killing time on the way back to illinois. he did not have any source material. but we do know that, by that point he had been reading already a lot of these technical math books, especially, so we understood those. and i talk about some of the of their books, he definitely read, and then some, not sure if he read. those books have the information that he seems to understand. so i think that is the biggest thing, there was so much there. we all know, lincoln writes this little autobiography, and he actually gets several versions to people. they build this into biographies for his presidential run. in those, what he writes, he downplays, he downplays his background. basically, he is talking about the science as if, well, all i learned was reading, writing, suffering, the rule of three. but i studied flint, looked at flint and i thought, that is a big math course, that is not just studying course -- flint, but the big math course. and when you go through pikes arithmetic, which is a basic arithmetic, i can guarantee a lot of people in this room can't do that stuff in there, i know that i can't. and i don't know what they teach in high schools, colleges today, but there is some pretty interesting math in there, he went all of the way through it. also, he downplays and says, there was not really any standards for teachers. a teacher was anybody who could come in there and claim that he understood, reading, writing, the rule of three, and could convince parents to pony up money for a subscription to make it worth his while to teach their kids. so he says, if, if someone wandered, so adjourned into town, claiming to know latin, he was looked upon as a wizard. the standards were not high for teachers out there. in fact, one of the things that was surprising, he had very little schooling. by the time he was at the last bit of schooling, he was probably walking his sister, they had to walk five miles to school, he was probably just walking his sister there, because he knew more than the teacher did. he was ahead of the teachers. one teacher, had a spelling book. we spelling books, i went through all of spelling books, being grammars and everything. you know, you start with a three letter, one syllable word, four letters, five letters. once you get to the end, if there were students who got that far, he said i don't know what to do with, you just start from the beginning. see what stand -- send the advanced students back to the beginning. he learned most of what he learned from reading on his own. i think that was one of the big takeaways from lincoln, as far as lessons from us today, is he never stopped learning. he went to congress and said, these guys are smarter than we. i better study you clouds geometry. he gets to the civil war, and he does not know a lot about military, you had a very short time in the black hawk war, when he was 23. and that was, it he did not see any real service. so we get to the civil war and was like, i don't know what is going on, i better go to the library of congress. so he takes books out, including a book on strategy of war. he takes all of these books out, and he learns, how do you wage a war, what are the strategies, what materials do you have? he learns all of the way through it, at least until grant took over. then he said, i don't need these books anymore, and he gave them back. that's when he gave them back, after grand was put in charge. so it is pretty interesting, how he learned over time, kept learning overtime. i can relate to that, i learned all of the science. in order to live with the science and the consulting, you've got to learn a new thing every night. you have to be an expert on something, by the next morning, for your client. in order to stay in business, you had to keep adapting. then, i quit that and a book on nikola tesla, as well. now i need to learn everything that is about tesla, electrical engineering and, built a whole new network on people, that worked out pretty well. so i said okay, edison, edison was not so hard because i had already learned a lot of that stuff from tesla. and then by that time i was like, you know, i need to get into lincoln. i was really into lincoln long before that. i will give you a little bit of insider information. this idea for this book, i had it running through my head for many, many years. i pitched the idea for this book to a bunch of asians at a raging conference in january, 2012. this was the same month i joined the lincoln movement in d.c.. they said, this is a cool idea. i ended up writing a book about nikola tesla. then, i don't a couple other books, then i wrote the book on thomas edison. like, i want to write this book about lincoln and science. then, i wrote the earlier book about lincoln. then i said i am not writing another book until i write this book about lincoln and science. it is actually a good thing that it had taken a while to do. my only do a get ten more years of research in, and i do a lot of road trips, drives to go around the places where he grew up, lived and worked. i spend a lot more time in the library of congress before they locked it up, at a lot of libraries. i was able to refine the idea in that time. so this is a book that has been a long time coming. the next book will not take so long. john? speaking to the other mic, john. >> mechanic island was the second national park in northern michigan, by the way. being at the smithsonian, i talked about the lincoln flotation device a lot. apparently, the problem was it was too hard to connect. do you know, if anybody ever did perfect that thing, did it ever work? >> so, john is asking if anyone ever tested to this thing out. the answer is, well, they tested it. did they perfect it? no. but they did test it. i don't know if anyone saw this, by just a couple of weeks ago now, something like that, i was actually interviewed, quoted in a salon article by a guy who was writing an article about lincoln in this, and this invention, his passion. i gave him a link to the abraham lincoln association journal, and an article in there in 2018, where an engineer went into his patent, and even build pieces of the model, tested them in water troughs and everything. he came to the conclusion that well, it might have worked, which was the conclusion i have already reached. but it was ungainly, it had a lot of polls, a lot of ropes and pulleys. it might have worked, maybe on some boats, probably for bigger ships. with the technology of the time, there was a way for him to either pomp air into these inflatable bladders which come down, either by hand pumping, or some ships, they might have steam, they could turn, take the steam and use that to pump up these bladders. so i guess the bottom line was that it was possible, but not very practical. to other things about that. as far as the possible and practical. the concept of inflatable bladders is actually used today by the navy as part of how, if a ship sinks, how they raise it. they get inflatable bladders under it, they pump in air and they can lift it that way, in part, to get guidelines from cranes and things like that. so, the concept is actually being used today. but the other part of this that i look at, is just, we always think about, what a strange, little thing. and it's kind ofool. i don't havet on that screen, i will go back to the beginnin you e, on the bottom here, what is not on this model are all of the ropeand pulleys. so he using not only the our commite's principal, raising the ship with buoyancy displacement, he'ssing the idea of leverage, levers, because of the ropes and pulleys, being able to get more power by the way we connect these ropes and pulleys. he is a little further up than a lot of people at the time. i would not expect to see this actually being towed down the potomac river anytime soon, but if you decide to book one, i would like to see it. any other questions? okay, i think now we are all tired out, my throat is tired, out we are sore. hopefully, at least the zoom people got some of this, think you all for coming out tonight. [applause] >> middle and high school students, time to get out your phones and start recording for your chance to win $100,000 in total cash prices, with a grand prize of $5,000 by entering c-span student cam they are documentary contest. for this year's competition, we are asking students to picture yourself as a newly elected member of congress, tell us what your top priority would be, and why. create a 5 to 6 minute video, showing the importance of your issue, from opposing and supporting points of view. be bold wi your documentary, do not be afraid to take ri. there is still time to get started, but deadline for entries is january 20th, 2023. for competition rules and tips on how to get started, visit our website at student cam.org