Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity (38 page)

It is only a step from the contact lens to surgery that actually reshapes the cornea—most often to treat nearsightedness, but also for farsightedness and astigmatism. The most popular procedure, Lasik (“laser in situ keratomileusis”), was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1995 and now is performed on an estimated
million patients a year at a cost of $2.5 billion. A special knife removes a circular flap in the eye,
exposing the cornea, which is reshaped by a computer-controlled laser. The paradox of Lasik (and, to a lesser extent, other refractive surgery) is that because it has a generally high rate of satisfaction and offers unusually speedy and visible results to most patients, it has become the most
common elective surgery in the United States, so that even a small proportion of complications and disappointing results (such as impaired night vision) affects tens of thousands of people. Yet both this dissatisfaction and the joy of successful results arise from the same unhappiness with the eyeglass as an external technology. The technology of the body seems to follow a trend from heavier to lighter
and more flexible external devices, to even lighter ones worn against the body, and finally to the reshaping of the body itself. Thus, as Valerie Steele showed in an exhibition at the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2000, fashion has not so much rejected the corset in the twenty-first century as substituted diet programs and exercise machinery for fabric, whalebone, and steel.
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Even if a safe surgical procedure is developed, there will probably always be a strong market for eyeglasses. Surgical implants to correct presbyopia are still at an early experimental stage and are based on an unconventional theory of the condition’s development. Contact lenses for presbyopia are still at an early stage of development, and many people consider even soft contacts uncomfortable,
so that eyeglasses—perhaps using new materials but following principles established hundreds of years ago as musical keyboard layouts do—are likely to remain the most common form of vision correction.
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Correction will be needed. The twenty-first-century information society, already visible in its outlines a hundred years ago, continues to affect vision. Myopia appears to be spreading in the
United States and other industrial nations. It was estimated in the early 1970s that 25 percent of the population between twelve and fifty-four years old is myopic. A 1996 study in Massachusetts, though, revealed a 60 percent rate in the twenty-three- to thirty-four-year-old bracket, declining to 20 percent among state residents older than sixty-five. Contact lenses help conceal the true rate even
as they increase the cost of corrected vision.
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The causes of myopia are still debated. Genetics influences the likelihood of developing the condition; children with two myopic parents are over six times more likely to be affected than those with at least one nonmyopic
myopic parent. But environmental influences are even more striking, and epidemiologists have found strong links to schoolwork.
Among children enrolled in U.S. Orthodox Jewish secondary schools, males studied sixteen hours each school day—presumably this includes homework as well as instruction—and had an 81.3 percent myopia rate; females, who studied eight hours, had a 36.2 percent rate. (Among Jewish children attending secular high schools, with a six-hour study load, 27.4 percent of males and 31.7 percent of females
were nearsighted.) Asian societies with rigorous school programs are similarly affected. In Hong Kong 75 percent of high school students and 90 percent of college students are now myopic. In Singapore, fully 98 percent of medical students are nearsighted; the national air force can find few visually qualified pilot recruits. Yet there are also puzzles in the environmental history of nearsightedness.
Iceland has long been both homogeneous and literate; why should its rate of myopia have increased from 3.6 percent in 1935 to 20.51 percent in only forty years?
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Singapore, with its social discipline, high literacy, precision industries, and educational drive, recalls the values of nineteenth-century Prussia. Seemingly repeating, with a vengeance, the causes and effects that so alarmed Dr. Hermann
Cohn, it is now believed to have the world’s highest rate of myopia. A new complication has been added by the research of a biologist, Joshua Wallman, whose experiments with animals suggest to him that when children wear eyeglasses to correct myopia they may inadvertently be changing the ways in which the eyes grow, actually elongating them further. This idea still has not been proved or disproved.
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What is certain is that even a skill as abstract as literacy has an unexpectedly strong physical aspect. In the history of humanity, our attention has shifted from the horizon to the length of our own arms: the printed page or the electronic monitor, or at the farthest the television screen. As with other technologies of the body, in changing our world we have changed ourselves—and not only ourselves.
The Western metaphor of the Creator as watchmaker, popular ever since the Enlightenment, suggests even the Deity squinting through a lens, as though remade in our own image.

I
F THERE IS
a distinctively twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century body technology, it is paradoxically one of the oldest external modifications of the body, possibly older than the chair (and indeed sometimes used for seating): the helmet. Of all the familiar objects we have observed, it was the helmet that appeared anachronistic for most of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries. It was never entirely abandoned in military service, but for years it remained the specialty of firefighters and some police forces.

Helmets, more than any other technology, defy conventional chronology. They seem to evolve like metallic and polymeric crustaceans, but not conventionally; a form may disappear for a thousand years and then reappear on a new branch. Another
may keep its shape but change materials and habitats. Medievalists have advised the commanders of industrial armies, and armorers from dynasties of European craftsmen have helped tool up for new designs with classic jigs and hammers. Helmets represent risk aversion and aggression, ethnocentrism and cosmopolitanism and sometimes both sides of each dichotomy at once.

In itself the helmet is distinctive
because it does not increase comfort or improve performance as some footwear does, and as chairs do for people accustomed to them. It does not simplify learning or communication, as musical and text keyboards do, nor does it augment or extend our senses, as spectacles do. The helmet sacrifices comfort and even performance to protection. It increases the mass of the human head by as much as
two or three kilograms, impedes cooling in hot weather, and often limits both peripheral vision and hearing. Human skull shapes and sizes vary so
much that fitting troops has always been challenging. And with discomfort comes the risk that soldiers will remove their helmets and expose their heads to the enemy.

The helmet is also radical apparel. It is the only rigid prosthesis that able-bodied
men and women now routinely use—an exocranium. Humanity has evolved to discriminate keenly among faces, to see subtle nuances of feeling in changing expressions. Helmets are not just mechanical shields but symbolic frames, like spectacles. A human being wearing one acquires a new persona. The Greek hoplite peering from the depths of his Corinthian helmet, the medieval knight in his sallet, the World
War I—era German in his metal helmet, the World War II GI in his almost spherical pot, the astronaut, the patriotic hard hat, the deep-sea diver: heroes and villains almost become their helmets. And even flawed designs can build cohesion and morale by evoking shared values.
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Peoples all over the world have probably made head protection from organic materials such as shells, vegetable
matter, and layers of cloth, but few objects have survived. Some helmets, like those made by the Ibo of West Africa, helped make warfare more a ritual sport than the carnage of most Mediterranean and Near Eastern conflicts. Other peoples must have developed effective armor because their wars were deadly serious. As recently as the early twentieth century, the Gilbert Islanders of the South Pacific
were known for their spears studded with sharks’ teeth and for correspondingly durable armor, which included the skin of a puffer fish killed while inflated: its natural spikes protected the wearer while intimidating at least the inexperienced foe.
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The first metal helmets probably appeared in the third millennium
B.C.
in the Middle East; they were linked to the development of complex, literate
societies that conducted organized warfare. Head protection was part of the earliest version of the arms race, not yet between swords and shields but between maces (weapons with weights at the end of handles) and helmets. The earliest protection consisted of leather and felt caps, which in Homeric times were further protected by boars’ tusks. There must have been layers of cushioning under the
shells of even the simplest metal helmets, for comfort and heat transfer. An industrial study of the 1960s confirmed the value of head protection—and shows the link between the oldest conflicts and recent industry. A metal helmet spreads the force of an impact over the surface
of the indentation the blow makes. On the basis of this research, the military historians Richard A. Gabriel and Karen
S. Metz have calculated that a Sumerian helmet consisting of two millimeters of copper over four millimeters of leather could spread the force of an impact so that to knock an opponent unconscious required superhuman strength.
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As Gabriel and Metz observe, defensive equipment—helmets and body armor—drove the development of early offensive weaponry, not the other way around. The mace, despite
occasional revivals as late as the European Middle Ages, was considered an ineffective weapon in combat against helmeted men, and became the ceremonial object it remains. In the early third millennium, the Sumerians had already developed excellent metal helmets with protection for the ears and the back of the neck as the contemporary NATO helmet has; and it was the same people who developed a new
style of ax to pierce such armor, having a sharp, socketed copper blade in which a haft fit securely.
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In Mesopotamia, with closely spaced rival city-states and peoples sharing a military culture, these innovations spread quickly. Even Egypt largely abandoned the mace for the ax after invasion by the helmeted Hyksos around 1700
B.C.
Throughout the ancient world, the helmet became indispensable
for most forms of combat. In the second millennium and the early first millennium
B.C.
, the Assyrians became the first troops to be equipped with helmets on a massive scale. The helmet, usually with a conical shape ideal for deflecting downward blows, was part of the image of the Assyrian army, probably the world’s first dreaded fighting machine— all the more remarkable given Assyria’s short supplies
of metal and fuel. (The Assyrians were also the first ancient army to protect feet as efficiently as heads; they wore tall leather jackboots with iron-studded soles.)
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The Greeks were relative latecomers to the manufacture of metal helmets, yet they rather than the peoples of the Middle East are considered the founders of the Western tradition of armor. Aesthetically and technically, their achievements
were as impressive as those of the Sumerians and Assyrians. Around the middle of the eighth century
B.C.
, they developed a new style of warfare and distinctive arms and armor to accompany it. The Greek infantry soldier was typically a free farmer-citizen with a heavy civic and financial investment in a panoply of arms. (For the Greeks, armor’s essential component was not the helmet but the great
shield or
hoplon
, of bronze-reinforced wood.) The best known Greek armor is the Corinthian helmet, first documented about 750
B.C.
It reflected exceptional craftsmanship,
conforming closely to the head and sweeping forward to form integrated cheekpieces so that only the wearer’s eyes and throat were even partially visible.
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The protection of helmet and shield was cumbersome as well as costly.
The classical historian Victor Davis Hanson has speculated about how the features of the Corinthian helmet, which prevailed from about 750 to 500
B.C.
, affected ancient Greek tactics, in other words, how a technology helped shape techniques. The helmet had no earholes and allowed only a limited range of vision. These restrictions encouraged the rigidly stylized form that Hanson believes combat
took: two formations of heavy infantry several ranks deep, protecting each other with their giant shields, charging in formation until the two opposing masses collided on an open field, pushing each other with their shields and thrusting their spears to strike at throats and other gaps in armor. Only elementary commands could be heard, and all battles were fought in the helmets’ claustrophobic darkness,
the pressure of comrades on all sides replacing vision. The helmet weighed about 2.2 kilograms—the same as a U.S. infantry helmet of the Vietnam era—but lacked twentieth-century suspension systems. A blow could knock it off or even break a vertebra if the head snapped backward. Battles were fought in the Greek summer heat; hoplites must have perspired profusely, yet martially correct hairstyles
were long rather than close-cropped. Horsehair crests were as much for display and morale as for absorbing shocks. They added unwelcome weight and reduced usability by raising the helmets’ center of gravity. Only immediately before battle did soldiers lower the Corinthian helmet over their faces.
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Many scholars believe there was more individual combat, sometimes without helmets or armor, than
Hanson and others acknowledge. Hanson himself suggests that like later soldiers, hoplites modified and personalized helmets and other equipment, and that helmets may have been individually recognizable to members of a unit. But the Corinthian helmet still evokes the terror as well as the glory of combat for good reason.
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This uncomfortable, tactically limiting, and costly object remained in use
for 250 years, perhaps because of the prestige of its form but also because strategy and tactics became well adapted to it. It was replaced in the fifth century by a smaller, circular head covering of bronze, and sometimes possibly of felt alone, called the
pilos
. Casualties increased; the change evidently marked a riskier, more mobile style of fighting. Other troops began to wear a Thracian helmet,
modeled after a cloth cap from
the region and also affording far better visibility and hearing, even with the unnecessary weight of simulating a felt hood in bronze.
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The Greeks thus were paradoxically masters of the aesthetics and craftsmanship of helmets but unwilling to apply their analytical genius to shielding the brains that produced them. Jacques Ellul believes this attitude was not due
to fear or indifference, but suspicion of the potential for brute force and immoderation the Greeks found in all technology. With no such qualms, the eclectic Romans adopted the powerful short sword (
gladius
) of the Spaniards and the bronze helmets and steel-edged shields of the Gauls. The French historian Victor Duruy marveled at the proud Romans learning from their conquered enemies, “ceaselessly
improving the science by which they had subdued the world.”
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The Romans actually used a variety of bronze and iron helmets in the course of the Republic and Empire, showing great attention to battlefield realities. From a kind of reversed metal jockey cap, they developed complex forms with reinforcements, hinged cheekpieces, and effective neck guards, including some of the greatest masterpieces
of ancient armor. Even a simple design like the Montefortino helmet of the Republican period had cheek pieces combining side protection with unobstructed vision and hearing. Specialists disagree about just how the Romans used their weapons but admire the coherence of design.
¹¹

The most common Roman legionary helmet of Hollywood films is known to specialists as the Imperial Gallic (also called
Niederbieber from an important find) of bronze-clad iron. With its crossed ridges and brow and neck protection it is as much an icon as its Corinthian predecessor. One expert admirer, the German military historian and reenactor Marcus Junkelmann, calls it “the crowning conclusion, the synthesis and quintessence of the entire evolution of ancient helmets.” Junkelmann believes that at 2.5 kilograms
it was less comfortable than earlier models but that it provided more protection to the wearer than any other.
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The Roman helmet stayed at this high point for only a century or two before repeating the Greek experience of the fifth century
B.C.
, the transition to a simpler, conical form later called the
Spangenhelm
(German scholars often have the last word when Roman texts are silent). It was
made of iron riveted in segments rather than hammered from a single sheet of iron or brass; where they existed, cheek and neck pieces were attached with leather rather than with hinges. Private craftsmen had made the Imperial Gallic helmet; the
Spangenhelm
was produced by less skilled artisans in state workshops. It became the favorite of all the warriors of late antiquity
and the early Middle
Ages who had the means to buy one, including the Vikings. (Nineteenth-century Wagnerian production designers added the horns.)
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European medieval warfare added a weapon relatively uncommon until late antiquity: the bow, which Eurasian steppe nomads had used so fearsomely. And hand-to-hand combat could be brutal. Some foot soldiers may often have had only soft head
coverings, and a surprising number of head injuries appear in the remains found in a mass grave from the Battle of Tow-ton (1461) in the Wars of the Roses. Because armor was so valuable, none was found at the site. It is not clear whether helmets had been struck from the casualties’ heads or whether they were fighting with no head protection besides the soft hats shown in some depictions of medieval
warfare.
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