Science & ideas · Inventions & technology

They built the cannon, the clock and the compass, and lost anyway

Between 960 and 1279 China's Song dynasty produced a remarkable burst of practical science, much of it driven by scholar-officials who rose through the examination system alongside ingenious commoners. Shen Kuo stands out as a true polymath, working out true north and magnetic declination, debating the shape of the sun and moon, modeling planetary motion with a colleague, and dabbling in mathematics, geology, and archaeology on the side. His contemporary Su Song combined a pharmacological encyclopedia with a star atlas and, most famously, built a water-powered astronomical clock tower whose escapement mechanism anticipated European clockmaking by two centuries. Commoner inventors mattered too: Bi Sheng devised movable type printing generations before Gutenberg, and craftsmen built odometer carriages, south-pointing chariots with differential-style gearing, and revolving temple bookcases tall enough to hold entire Buddhist scripture collections.

Much of the dynasty's energy went into weapons and infrastructure needed to survive hostile neighbors and, eventually, the Mongols. Chinese engineers adapted Greek fire into flamethrowers, then moved on to fire lances, early handguns, cast-iron bombs packed with gunpowder, rockets, and even buried land mines used against Kublai Khan's forces. On the civil side, an engineer named Qiao Weiyue invented the pound lock to stop barges wrecking and being robbed on the Grand Canal, a fix later praised by Shen Kuo for freeing up laborers and letting boats carry far heavier cargo, while shipwrights built dry docks and seagoing junks with watertight bulkhead compartments, described vividly by foreign travelers who marveled at their size and self-sufficiency.

The same era saw steelmaking techniques that prefigured the Bessemer process, a sixfold rise in iron output, and a timely shift from charcoal to coal that spared northern forests from further clearance, output so large that historians later compared it to England's industry on the eve of its own industrial revolution. Paddle-wheel warships, some with a dozen wheels per side, were deployed in river battles against the Jin and later used as tugboats, while windmills arrived from the Islamic world via Jin-held northern China and were fitted with junk-style sails to pump irrigation water. Gentry antiquarians began treating bronze vessels and inscriptions as evidence for correcting flawed written histories, Shen Kuo read fossilized bamboo and marine strata as proof that climates and coastlines shift over vast stretches of time, and the physician Song Ci compiled an unusually systematic manual on autopsies, first aid, and crime-scene reasoning that even used insect behavior to identify a murder weapon.

Bi Sheng, a commoner, worked out movable type printing in the eleventh century, roughly four hundred years before Gutenberg's press.

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