Today, Kenneth Clark and Jacob Bronowski. 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.
Clark and Bronowski defined
the television historical documentary as we all
know and expect it today. Their two series were
named Civilisation and The Ascent of
Man. And we have yet to surpass either one.
Art historian Clark used art and architecture as
his window into the formation of
civilization. Biologist Bronowski generally used
science. But both saw far beyond any one
field. Both knew perfectly well that, if you truly
understand your subject -- whatever it might be --
it will, necessarily, embrace all
Bronowski, for example, takes us to the Alps in the
summer of 1847. British physicist James Joule is at
the foot of a waterfall trying to measure a
temperature rise in water that's fallen from the
cliff above. Bronowski goes on to mention that
Wordsworth had visited this same spot 57 years
earlier, and he had written,
nature then ...
To me was all in all -- I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion.
Joule never said it as well as that. But he did
say, "The grand agents of nature are
indestructible," and he meant the same
Clark goes the other way. Listen as he starts with
art and arrives at science,
People sometimes wonder why the Renaissance
Italians, with their intelligent curiosity, didn't
make more of a contribution to the history of
thought. The reason is that the most profound
thought of the time was not expressed in words, but
in visual imagery.
That remark immediately summons up Leonardo da
Vinci. Both Clark and Bronowski have a lot to say
about him. Clark says, "[We're] worn out by [his]
energy. He won't take yes for an answer. He can't
leave anything alone." Then you realize that art
historian Clark is describing Leonardo as a
In Bronowski's piece The Long Childhood
(about the evolution of the our brains) he offers
Leonardo's Madonna of the Rocks as an
expression of our struggle to grow. He sees
Leonardo's anatomical sketch of a child in the womb
as a universal expression of hope.
Watch either of these TV series by itself and I
promise you'll be enchanted. But watch both, and
you'll see a stunning convergence from two
directions. Clark and Bronowski converge on hope,
they converge on belief, they converge on the
pervasive unity of the human species. Of course
both are wary. In the end, Bronowski says,
We are all afraid ... That is the nature of the
human imagination. Yet [we have] gone forward.
And a worried Kenneth Clark, facing the social
upheaval of the late '60s, says (as much to himself
as to us),
... civilisation has been a series of rebirths.
Surely this should give us confidence in
They both clearly assert our capacity for saving
ourselves. They realize that technology, science,
and the other arts have always converged upon our
problems. And they surely remain our only real hope
in troubled times.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
J. Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, Boston:
Little, Brown and Company. 1973.
Sir K., Clark, Civilisation: A Personal
View, New. York: Harper and Row, Publishers,
Leonardo's version of the Vitruvian Man
The Engines of Our Ingenuity is
Copyright © 1988-2003 by John H.