Today, thoughts about the isolated hero of Western
technology. 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.
Daniel
Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe in
1719. Only a third of the book is about his
survival on a remote island. But that part is now a
metaphor for the way we save ourselves with
technology.
Fourteen years earlier, a real person, Alexander
Selkirk, was left by his shipmates on a real island
-- off the coast of Chile. Selkirk had fled his
contentious Scottish family in 1702 and gone to sea
in a British privateer. Its business? Harassing
Spanish outposts in the Pacific. Conditions on the
ship were terrible, and Selkirk carried trouble
with him.
One day, in a rage, he told his shipmates to put
him ashore. So they did -- on a deserted island. As
the longboat pulled away, he screamed for them to
take him back. They would not. And there he stayed
'til a British ship found him four years later.
A London magazine published the story in 1713, and
Defoe read it. Meanwhile, Selkirk went back to his
erratic life -- marrying women here and there --
going to sea now and then. He died in 1721, two
years after Defoe published Robinson
Crusoe.
Of course, Defoe changed his hero. He modeled
Crusoe on himself -- made him part of the
conservative middle class. He used Crusoe to
explore his own ideas about imperialism. Crusoe
becomes the benevolent colonizer -- teaching the
savage, Friday, to be what he himself is. There was
no Friday in Selkirk's story.
Selkirk was pretty savage before he was deserted,
and he brought little technology to his
imprisonment. The sailors who found him said he was
almost naked -- that he had to relearn human
speech. Oddly enough, Defoe undercut his own
survival thesis in another book. He wrote,
"Necessity makes an honest man a knave."
In 1750, the Spanish built a small fort on
Selkirk's island. Later, they made the island into
a prison. Neither lasted long. In 1966, the Chilean
government changed the name of the island to
Robinson Crusoe. They hoped to pick up tourist
trade. Today the population is around 600 -- mostly
fisherfolk who live in near isolation. There are
three small hotels -- not heavily used.
The theme of a lone technological man carving
civilization from the primeval forest recurs down
through our technical/scientific world -- from
Crusoe all the way to Gilligan's
Island!
Mark Twain put that old wine in a new skin when he
wrote A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court. But Twain was smarter. His Yankee
hero eventually made a mess of things.
So: what about the lone technological hero? Well,
it didn't work for Selkirk, and I doubt it'd work
for anyone. In the end, technology is culture --
something we do together. Technology does define
our survival, but only in the framework of
community.
I'm John Lienhard at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
(Theme music)
See two articles in Conde Nast Travel,
May 1990: Quennell, P., The Man who was Robinson
Crusoe, pp. 140-141, 182. Payne, B, ... and his
Island, pp. 141, 182-187.
Image courtesy of Special
Collections, UH Library
From The life and adventures of Robinson
Crusoe, 1862
Image courtesy of Special
Collections, UH Library
From The life and adventures of Robinson
Crusoe, 1862
Image courtesy of the Documents
Department, UH Library
Selkirk's island was one of those in the San Juan
Archipelago -- too tiny to show on the left-hand
side of this map
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-1997 by John H.
Lienhard.
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