Noel Joseph Terence Montgomery Needham, CH, FRS,^[1] FBA (9 December 1900 – 24 March 1995), also known as Li Yuese (simplified Chinese: 李约瑟; traditional Chinese: 李約瑟; pinyin: Lǐ Yuēsè: Wade-Giles: Li Yüeh-Sê), was a British scientist, historian and sinologist known for his scientific research and writing on the history of Chinese science. He was elected a fellow of the Royal Society in 1941,^[2] and as a fellow of the British Academy in 1971.^[3] In 1992, the Queen conferred on him the Companionship of Honour and the Royal Society noted he was the only living person to hold these three titles.^[4]

Biography[link]

Early years[link]

Needham was the only child of a London family. His father was a doctor and his mother, Alicia Adelaïde Montgomery (1863–1945), was a French-Irish composer and music teacher. Needham was educated at Oundle School, before receiving his bachelor's degree in 1921 from University of Cambridge, master's degree in January 1925 and doctorate in October 1925. He had intended to study medicine but came under the influence of Frederick Gowland Hopkins and switched to Biochemistry.

Career[link]

After graduation, he worked in Hopkins's laboratory at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, specialising in embryology and morphogenesis. His 3-volume work Chemical Embryology, published in 1931, includes a history of embryology from Egyptian times up to the early 19th century, including quotations in most European languages. His Silliman memorial lecture of 1936 was published by Yale University under the title of Order and Life.^[5] In 1939 he produced a massive work on morphogenesis that a Harvard reviewer claimed "will go down in the history of science as Joseph Needham's magnum opus", little knowing what would come later.^[6]

Although his career as biochemist and an academic was well established, his career developed in unanticipated directions during and after World War II.

Three Chinese scientists came to work with Needham in 1937: Lu Gwei-djen (Chinese: 鲁桂珍; pinyin: Lu Gui-zhen), Wang Ying-lai (王應睞), and Chen Shi-zhang (沈詩章). Lu (1904–91), daughter of a Nanjingese pharmacist, taught Needham Chinese, igniting his interest in China's ancient technological and scientific past. He then pursued, and mastered, the study of Classical Chinese privately with Gustav Haloun.^[7]

Under the Royal Society's direction, Needham was the director of the Sino-British Science Co-operation Office in Chongqing from 1942 to 1946. During this time he made several long journeys through war-torn China and many smaller ones, visiting scientific and educational establishments and obtaining for them much needed supplies. His longest trip ended in far west in Xinjiang at the caves in Dunhuang at the end of the Great Wall where the first printed copy of the Diamond Sutra was found. The other long trip reached Fuzhou on the east coast, returning across the Xiang River just two days before the Japanese blew up the bridge at Hengyang and cut off that part of China. In 1944 he visited Yunnan in an attempt to reach the Burmese border. Everywhere he went he purchased and was given old historical and scientific books which he shipped back to England through diplomatic channels and were to form the foundation of his later research. He got to know Zhou Enlai and met numerous Chinese scholars, including the painter Wu Zuoren (吳作人), and the meteorologist Zhu Kezhen who was later to send him in Cambridge crates of books, including the 2,000 volumes of the Gujin Tushu Jicheng encyclopedia, a comprehensive record of China's past.^[8]

On his return to the west he was asked by Julian Huxley to become the first head of the Natural Sciences Section of UNESCO in Paris, France. In fact it was Needham who insisted that Science should be included in the organisation's mandate at an earlier planning meeting. After two years in which the suspicions of the Americans over scientific cooperation with communists intensified, Needham resigned in 1948 and returned to Gonville and Caius College, where he resumed his fellowship and his rooms, which were soon filled with his books. He devoted his energy to the history of Chinese science until his retirement in 1990, even though he continued to teach some biochemistry until 1966.

Needham's reputation recovered from the Korean affair (see below) such that by 1959 he was elected as president of the fellows of Caius College and in 1965 he became master (head) of the College, a post which he held until he was 76.

Science and Civilisation in China[link]

In 1948, Needham, proposed a project to the Cambridge University Press for a book on "Science and Civilisation in China". Within weeks of it being accepted, the project had grown to seven volumes and it has expanded ever since. His initial collaborator was the historian Wang Ling (王玲), who he had met in Lizhuang and obtained a position for at Trinity. The first years were devoted to compiling a list of every mechanical invention and abstract idea that had been made and conceived in China. These included cast iron, the ploughshare, the stirrup, gunpowder, printing, the magnetic compass, and clockwork escapements, most of which were thought at the time to be western inventions. The first volume eventually appeared in 1954.

The publication received widespread acclaim which increased to the lyrical as further volumes appeared. He wrote fifteen volumes himself and the regular production of further volumes continued after his death in 1995. After volume III the volumes were split into parts and currently 24 volumes have been published. Successive volumes have been published as they became ready, which means that they have not appeared in the order originally contemplated in the project's prospectus.

Needham's final organising schema:

• Vol. I. Introductory Orientations
• Vol. II. History of Scientific Thought
• Vol. III. Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and Earth
• Vol. IV. Physics and Physical Technology
• Vol. V. Chemistry and Chemical Technology
• Vol. VI. Biology and Biological Technology
• Vol. VII. The Social Background

See Science and Civilization in China for a full list

The project is still proceeding under the guidance of the Publications Board of the Needham Research Institute, chaired by Christopher Cullen.^[9]

The Needham Question[link]

"Needham's Grand Question", also known as "The Needham Question", is why China had been overtaken by the West in science and technology, despite its earlier successes. His works attribute significant weight to the impact of Confucianism and Taoism on the pace of Chinese scientific discovery, and emphasizes what it describes as the "diffusionist" approach of Chinese science as opposed to a perceived independent inventiveness in the western world. Needham held that the notion that the Chinese script had inhibited scientific thought was "grossly overrated".^[10]

His own research revealed a steady accumulation of scientific results throughout Chinese history. In the final volume he suggests "A continuing general and scientific progress manifested itself in traditional Chinese society but this was violently overtaken by the exponential growth of modern science after the Renaissance in Europe. China was homeostatic, but never stagnant."^[11]

Nathan Sivin, one of Needham's collaborators, while agreeing that Needham's achievement was monumental, suggested that the "Needham question", as a counterfactual hypothesis, was not conducive to a useful answer: "It is striking that this question – Why didn't the Chinese beat Europeans to the Scientific Revolution? – happens to be one of the few questions that people often ask in public places about why something didn't happen in history. It is analogous to the question of why your name did not appear on page 3 of today's newspaper."^[12]

A recent contribution (Leong, 2011^[13]) proposed an interesting and innovative economic perspective on "The Needham Question". Using a genetic algorithm agent-based model, Leong (2011) argued that distorted incentives could possibly shed light on why China had been superseded by the West despite its first-mover advantages in science and technology.

Evaluations and critiques[link]

Needham's work has been criticized by some scholars for its strong inclination to exaggerate Chinese technological achievements and its propensity to assume a Chinese origin for the wide range of objects his work covered:

J Needham's (1971) monumental work on Chinese nautics offers by far the most scholarly synthesis on the subjects of Chinese shipbuilding and navigation. His propensity to view the Chinese as the initiators of all things and his constant references to the superiority of Chinese over the rest of the world's techniques does at times detract from his argument.^[14]

Political involvement[link]

Needham's political views were unorthodox and his lifestyle controversial. His left-wing stance was based in an idiosyncratic form of Christian socialism and after 1949 his sympathy with Chinese culture was extended to the new government. During his stay in China, Needham was asked to analyze some cattle-cakes which the Communists claimed had been scattered by American aircraft in the south of China at the end of World War II, and found they were impregnated with anthrax.^[15] During the Korean War further accusations were made that the Americans had used biological warfare. Zhou Enlai coordinated an international campaign to enlist Needham for a study commission, tacitly offering access to materials and contacts in China needed for his then early research. Needham agreed to be an inspector in North Korea and his report supported the allegations. After post-cold war revelations that the Soviets had assisted the Chinese in setting up false scenarios, Needham's biographer Simon Winchester commented that "Needham was intellectually in love with communism; and yet communist spymasters and agents, it turned out, had pitilessly duped him." Needham was blacklisted by the U.S. government until well into the 1970s.^[16]

In 1965, with Derek Bryan, a retired diplomat who he first met in China, Needham established the Society for Anglo-Chinese Understanding, which for some years provided the only way for the British to visit the People's Republic of China. On a visit to China in 1964 he was met by Zhou Enlai, but on a visit in 1972 he was deeply depressed by the changes under the Cultural Revolution.

Personal life[link]

Needham was married to the biochemist Dorothy Moyle (1896–1987) in 1924 and they became the first husband and wife both to be elected as Fellows of the Royal Society.^[5] Simon Winchester notes that, in his younger days, Needham was an avid gymnosophist and he was always attracted by pretty women.^[17] When he and Lu Gwei-djen met in 1937, they fell deeply in love, which Dorothy accepted. The three of them eventually lived contentedly on the same road in Cambridge for many years. In 1989, two years after Dorothy's death, Needham married Lu, who died two years later. He suffered from Parkinson's disease from 1982, and died at the age of 94 at his Cambridge home. In 2008 the Chair of Chinese in the University of Cambridge, a post never awarded to Needham, was endowed in his honour as the Joseph Needham Professorship of Chinese History, Science, and Civilization.^[18]

Honours and awards[link]

In 1961, Needham was awarded the George Sarton Medal by the History of Science Society and in 1966 he became Master of Gonville and Caius College. In 1984, Needham became the fourth recipient of the J.D. Bernal Award, awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science. In 1990, he was awarded the Fukuoka Asian Culture Prize by Fukuoka City.

The Needham Research Institute, devoted to the study of China's scientific history, was opened in 1985 by Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh.

• Order of the Companions of Honour, 1992.^[4]
• British Academy, 1971.^[3]
• Royal Society, 1941.^[2]

Bibliography[link]

• Science, Religion and Reality (1925)
• Chemical Embryology (1931) C.U.P.
• The Great Amphibium: Four Lectures on the Position of Religion in a World Dominated by Science (1931)
• A History of Embryology (1934, 1959) C.U.P.
• Order and Life The Silliman lectures (1936)
• Perspectives in Biochemistry: Thirty-One Essays Presented to Sir Frederick Gowland Hopkins by Past and Present Members of His Laboratory (1937)
• Biochemistry and Morphogenesis (1942)
• Time: The Refreshing River (Essays and Addresses, 1932–1942) (1943)
• Chinese Science (1945) Pilot Press
• History Is On Our Side (1947)
• Science Outpost; Papers of the Sino-British Science Co-Operation Office (British Council Scientific Office in China) 1942-1946 (1948) Pilot Press
• Science and Civilisation in China (1954-2008...) C.U.P. - 27 volumes to date
• The Grand Titration: Science and Society in East and West (1969) Allen & Unwin
• Within the Four Seas: The Dialogue of East and West (1969)
• Clerks and Craftsmen in China and the West: Lectures and Addresses on the History of Science and Technology (1970) C.U.P.
• Chinese Science: Explorations of an Ancient Tradition (1973) Ed Shigeru Nakayama, Nathan Sivin. Cambridge : MIT Press
• Moulds of Understanding: A Pattern of Natural Philosophy (1976) Allen & Unwin
• The Shorter Science and Civilisation in China (5 volumes) (1980–95) - an abridgement by Colin Ronan
• Science in Traditional China : A Comparative Perspective (1982)
• The Genius of China (1986) A one-volume distillation by Robert Temple Simon & Schuster
• Heavenly Clockwork : The Great Astronomical Clocks of Medieval China (1986) C.U.P.
• The Hall of Heavenly Records : Korean Astronomical Instruments and Clocks, 1380-1780 (1986) C.U.P.

See also[link]

• List of Sinologists
• List of historians
• Rise of the West
• G.E.R. Lloyd
• Four Great Inventions

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Lyall, Sarah. "Joseph Needham, China Scholar From Britain, Dies at 94", New York Times. March 27, 1995.
• Winchester, Simon (2008). The Man Who Loved China: The Fantastic Story of the Eccentric Scientist Who Unlocked the Mysteries of the Middle Kingdom. New York: HarperCollins. ISBN 978-0-06-088459-8.  Also published as Bomb, Book and Compass.
• Sterckx, Roel, In the Fields of Shennong: An inaugural lecture delivered before the University of Cambridge on 30 September 2008 to mark the establishment of the Joseph Needham Professorship of Chinese History, Science and Civilization. Cambridge: Needham Research Institute, 2008 (ISBN 0-9546771-1-0).

External links[link]

English[link]

• Interview with biographer Simon Winchester on ABC Brisbane September 2000
• David Cosandy, Joseph Needham and the rise of the West
• Needham Research Institute (NRI)
• Science and Civilisation in China
• Asian Philosophy and Critical Thinking Divergence or Convergence?
• Guide to manuscripts by British scientists: N, O.
• BBC Radio4 'In Our Time' audio stream on the Needham Question.
• Works by Joseph Needham at Internet Archive
• Question marks: Chinese invention - The Economist, Jun 5th 2008, review of Needham biography by Simon Winchester
• Needham's wartime photos in China

Chinese[link]

• Xinhua：Today's NRI
• Papers in Chinese 1991-2004 on Needham and his Grand Question
• Needham and his early knowledge on Chinese culture

Simon Winchester, OBE (born September 28, 1944), is a British-American author and journalist who resides mostly in the United States. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel and his articles appear in several travel publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic. Simon Winchester lives in New York and on a farm in Massachusetts.

Early life and education[link]

Simon Winchester was born in the autumn of 1944 in northern London. Winchester attended several boarding schools in Dorset.^[1] He spent a year hitchhiking around the United States,^[2] then in 1963 went up to St Catherine's College, Oxford to study geology. He graduated in 1966 with a degree in geology and found work with Falconbridge of Africa, a Canadian mining company. His first assignment was to work as a field geologist searching for copper deposits in Uganda.^[3]

Career[link]

While on assignment in Uganda, Winchester happened upon a copy of James Morris' Coronation Everest – an account of the 1952 expedition which led to the first successful attempt to climb Mount Everest.^[4] Inspired by the book and with a desire to be a writer, Winchester sought career advice from Morris by mail. Morris urged Winchester to give up geology and get a job as a writer.^[5] Shortly after, Winchester left Africa and returned to England eventually finding work at The Journal in Newcastle upon Tyne.

In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent.^[1] Winchester's time in Northern Ireland placed him around several events of The Troubles, including the events of Bloody Sunday and the Belfast Hour of Terror.^[6][7]

After leaving Northern Ireland in 1972, Winchester was briefly assigned to Calcutta before becoming The Guardian's American correspondent in Washington, D.C., where Winchester covered news ranging from the end of Richard Nixon's administration^[8] to the start of Jimmy Carter's presidency.^[3] In 1982, while working as the Chief Foreign Feature Writer for The Sunday Times, Winchester was on location for the invasion of the Falklands Islands by Argentine forces. Suspected of being a spy, Winchester was held as a prisoner in Tierra del Fuego for three months.^[9]

In 1985, Winchester shifted to work as a freelance writer and travelled to Hong Kong.^[1] When Condé Nast re-branded Signature magazine as Condé Nast Traveler, Winchester was appointed the Asia-Pacific Editor.^[10] Over the next decade and a half, Winchester contributed to a number of travel publications including the aforementioned Traveler, as well as National Geographic and Smithsonian magazine.^[9] With the success of Winchester's books in the late 1990s, he has largely retired from journalism.

Winchester's first book, In Holy Terror, was published by Faber and Faber in 1975. The book drew heavily on his first hand experiences during the turmoils in Ulster. In 1976, Winchester published his second book, American Heartbeat, which dealt with his personal travels through the American heartland. Winchester's third book, Prison Diary, was a recounting of his imprisonment at Tierra del Fuego during the Falklands War and, as noted by Dr Jules Smith, is responsible for his rise to prominence in the United Kingdom.^[9]

Throughout the 1980s and most of the 1990s, Winchester produced several travel books, most of which dealt with Asian and Pacific locations including Korea, Hong Kong, and the Yangtze River.

Winchester's first truly successful book was The Professor and the Madman (1998) published by Penguin UK as The Surgeon of Crowthorne. Telling the story of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, the book was a New York Times Best Seller,^[11] and the rights to a film version were optioned by Mel Gibson;^[12] likely to be directed by John Boorman.^[13]

Though he still writes travel books, Winchester has repeated the narrative non-fiction form he used in The Professor and the Madman several times, many of which ended in books placed on best sellers lists. His 2001 book, The Map that Changed the World focused on geologist William Smith and was his second New York Times best seller.^[14] The year 2003 saw Winchester release another book on the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary, The Meaning of Everything, as well as the best-selling Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded.^[15] Winchester followed Krakatoa's volcano with San Francisco's 1906 earthquake in A Crack in the Edge of the World.^[16] The Man Who Loved China (2008) retells the life of eccentric Cambridge scholar Joseph Needham who helped to expose China to the western world.^[17]

Simon Winchester's latest book The Alice Behind Wonderland was released March 11, 2011.^[18]

On July 4, 2011, Winchester was naturalized as a United States citizen in a ceremony aboard the USS Constitution.^[2]

Bibliography[link]

• 1975 – In Holy Terror
• 1976 – American Heartbeat
• 1983 – Stones of Empire: Buildings of the Raj (by Jan Morris with photographs by Simon Winchester)
• 1983 – Prison Diary: Argentina
• 1984 – Their Noble Lordships: Class and Power in Modern Britain
• 1985 – Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire (also known as The Sun Never Sets)
• 1988 – Korea, A Walk Through the Land of Miracles — Korea
• 1991 – Pacific Rising: The Emergence of a New World Culture
• 1992 – Hong Kong: Here Be Dragons (by Rich Browne, James Marshall and Simon Winchester)
• 1992 – Pacific Nightmare: How Japan Starts World War III : A Future History (novel)
• 1995 – Small World: A Global Photographic Project, 1987–94 (by Martin Parr and Simon Winchester)
• 1996 – The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time — the Yangtze
• 1998 – The Surgeon of Crowthorne: A Tale of Murder, Madness and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (Published in the US as The Professor and the Madman) - Dr. William Chester Minor and Sir James Murray
• 1999 – The Fracture Zone: A Return To The Balkans
• 2001 – The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology — the work of geologist William Smith
• 2003 – The Meaning of Everything — the making of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED)
• 2003 – Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded — the August 27, 1883 eruption of Krakatoa
• 2004 – Simon Winchester's Calcutta (a collection of writings about the Indian city, edited with son Rupert)
• 2005 – A Crack in the Edge of the World: America and the Great California Earthquake of 1906 — the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
• 2008 – The Man Who Loved China — the life of Joseph Needham (title of the UK edition: Bomb, Book & Compass)
• 2010 – Atlantic: A Vast Ocean of a Million Stories. HarperCollins, 2010. ISBN 978-0-00-734137-5 (Alternative title: Atlantic: The Biography of an Ocean) — the Atlantic Ocean
• 2011 – The Alice Behind Wonderland — Alice Liddell

Honours[link]

Winchester was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire for "services to journalism and literature" in Queen Elizabeth II's New Year Honours list of 2006.

Winchester was named an honorary fellow at St. Catherine's College, Oxford in October 2009.^[19]

Winchester received an honourary degree from Dalhousie University in October 2010.^[20]

See also[link]

• 1906 San Francisco Earthquake
• Krakatoa
• James Murray (lexicographer)
• Oxford English Dictionary
• William Chester Minor

References[link]

External links[link]

• Simon Winchester interview on Counterpoint Radio with Marcus W. Orr Center for the Humanities at the University of Memphis.
• Bomb, Book & Compass — The Life of Joseph Needham, transcript of interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio National, October 3, 2008.
• Simon Winchester — From Harper Collins Publishers.
• Powells.com Interview with Simon Winchester.
• Simon Winchester — From the Contemporary Writers website, British Council Arts.
• Simon Winchester : Annotated Bibliography— Comprehensive bibliography of articles, essays, and all of Winchester's books.
• Simon Winchester's Smooth Forked Tongue, David Martin, December 26, 2005.
• Radio interview with Claudia Cragg KGNU on Simon Winchester's The Atlantic
• Booknotes interview with Winchester on The Professor and the Madman, C-SPAN, November 8, 1998
• In Depth interview with Winchester, C-SPAN, August 1, 2004
• Q&A with Simon Winchester, C-SPAN, October 26, 2011

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"The Man" is a slang phrase that may refer to the government or to some other authority in a position of power. In addition to this derogatory connotation, it may also serve as a term of respect and praise.

The phrase "the Man is keeping me down" is commonly used to describe oppression. The phrase "stick it to the Man" encourages resistance to authority, and essentially means "fight back" or "resist", either openly or via sabotage.^[1]

History[link]

The earliest recorded use^{[citation needed]} of the term "the Man" in the American sense dates back to a letter written by a young Alexander Hamilton in September 1772, when he was 15. In a letter to his father James Hamilton, published in the Royal Dutch-American Gazette, he described the response of the Dutch governor of St. Croix to a hurricane that raked that island on August 31, 1772. "Our General has issued several very salutary and humane regulations and both in his publick and private measures, has shewn himself the Man." ^{[2][dubious – discuss]} In the Southern U.S. states, the phrase came to be applied to any man or any group in a position of authority, or to authority in the abstract. From about the 1950s the phrase was also an underworld code word for police, the warden of a prison or other law enforcement or penal authorities.

It was also used as a term for a drug dealer in the 1950s and 1960s and can be seen in such media as Curtis Mayfield's "No Thing On Me", William Burroughs's novel Naked Lunch, and in the Velvet Underground song "I'm Waiting for the Man", in which Lou Reed sings about going to Uptown Manhattan, specifically Lexington Avenue and 125th Street, to buy heroin.

The use of this term was expanded to counterculture groups and their battles against authority, such as the Yippies, which, according to a May 19, 1969 article in U.S. News and World Report, had the "avowed aim ... to destroy 'The Man', their term for the present system of government". The term eventually found its way into humorous usage, such as in a December 1979 motorcycle ad from the magazine Easyriders which featured the tagline, "California residents: Add 6% sales tax for The Man."

In present day, the phrase has been popularized in commercials and cinema, featuring particularly prominently as a recurring motif in the 2003 film School of Rock.^[3][4][5][6]

Use as praise[link]

The term has also been used as an approbation or form of praise. This may refer to the recipient's status as the leader or authority within a particular context, or it might be assumed to be a shortened form of a phrase like "He is the man (who is in charge)." One example of this usage dates to 1879 when Otto von Bismarck commented, referring to Benjamin Disraeli's pre-eminent position at the Congress of Berlin, "The old Jew, he is the man."^{[7][dubious – discuss]}

In more modern usage, it can be a superlative compliment ("you da man!") indicating that the subject is currently standing out amongst his peers even though they have no special designation or rank, such as a basketball player who is performing better than the other players on the court. It can also be used as a genuine compliment with an implied, slightly exaggerated or sarcastic tone, usually indicating that the person has indeed impressed the speaker but by doing something relatively trivial.

See also[link]

• Absentee landlord
• Big Brother (Nineteen Eighty-Four)
• New World Order (conspiracy theory)
• Ruling class
• The Establishment
• Power elite
• Corrections officer
• YTMND

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Lighter, J.E. (Ed.). (1997). Random House Dictionary of American Slang. New York: Random House.