Customer Reviews

Throwing Fire: Projectile Technology through History

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Crosby's "Throwing Fire" is well written and engaging, and it is a useful overview of the development and use of projectiles from the appearance of hominids in Africa over two million years ago through the launch of Pioneer 10, the first space probe to leave the Solar System. Still, two million years is an awful lot of ground to cover in 200 pages of well-spaced text, and "Throwing Fire" is more of a long essay than a ground-breaking synthesis like Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel."

For my money, the first few chapters are the most interesting parts of the book. Crosby does a good job of summarizing what scientists know about the ability of Australopithicenes and other ancient hominids to throw rocks and other projectiles, the first known appearance of javelins an astonishing 400,000 years ago, the use of fire to "terraform" the planet, and the possible role of the atlatl (spear thrower) in the great extinction of megafauna that took place in the Upper Paleolithic. The chapters that deal with relatively recent historical developments--gunpowder, crossbows, trebuchets, artillery, missiles, and the like--cover a lot of familiar ground with a broad brush and do not offer as many intriguing observations as the first parts of the book.

If this subject interests you and you'd like to read a more elaborate history of weapons development (albiet without Crosby's excellent examination of prehistory), try Robert O'Connell's highly readable "Soul of the Sword: An Illustrated History of Weaponry and Warfare from Prehistory to the Present." If you are intrigued by Crosby's brief discussion of the counterweight trebuchet (an impressive if little known medieval siege weapon), have a look at Fisher & Fisher, "Mysteries of Lost Empires," which includes a chapter about a project to reconstruct a trebuchet (everyone needs a hobby, I guess, and this one can be used to knock down castle walls).

This book has some similiarities with Jared Diamond's wonderful "Gun's, Germs and Steel", but it is much more focused. Crosby discusses the historical use of projectile weapons by humans (and hominids), and how in a lot of ways, this helps to define humanity. No other animal has shown the ability to throw hard, far, and with accuracy, and this ability might have been crucial to the adoption of a terrestial lifestyle by our ancient ancestors. Throwing stones at predators might just have been key to allowing Australopithecenes to survive. The use of fire is also a key characteristic of humans, and with it humanity has helped shaped the environment to suit our purposes. Moving on from simple stones; through javelins; atlatls; slings; bows; siege engines; and, finally, chemically propelled projectiles (which mix fire and throwing), including satellites that have left our solar system, Crosby shows how developments in projectile technology have helped shaped history as we know it. This book is an interesting read, and is very well footnoted. Those interested in such areas as general anthropology, historical science and military science might also find book quite enjoyable.

There's an entire genre of books about projectile weapons: trebuchets, catapults, etc. This is not one of them. This is an astonishing examination about how mankind evolved in a rather unlikely way, transformed by the odd shape of the foot and the lack of a clawed hand to emerge as a precision throwing machine. Thoroughly researched and well-written, "Throwing Fire" is more than a study of projectile technology: it is a deft history of mankind's triumphant journey towards mastery of its environment... but also reveals how mastery of projectiles and incendiary technologies not only resulted in mass extinctions of other species and, in a chilling way, presages our own likely self-extinction. Not at all what I expected... a brilliant and engaging social history of how one unlikely species used precision and elegance to surpass and dominate ferocious megafauna. Masterful work by Dr. Crosby.

If you're expecting a straight military history of distance-weapons systems, this isn't it. But if you're into the anthropology and sociology of human control of the environment, this is a fascinating study of one of the key elements in what makes homo sapiens the success he is. The ability to throw a rock -- to effect change in the world at a distance, essentially -- is dependent on bipedalism, so that's where Crosby, an expert in economic and environmental history, starts his story. But the act of throwing something is a much more complex mental and biological operation than you would ever expect. Crosby calls this the "first acceleration." The second key human discovery -- the second acceleration -- is the ability to create fire, which is so basic to our very natures, it may now have developed a genetic component. And that, of course, leads directly to gunpowder and its combustible successors. The third acceleration is much more recent: The ability to launch a controlled rocket, either as a bomb or as a vehicle into space. The author approaches each of these stages in our cultural evolution with wit and sagacity and plenty of references. (My reading list after digesting this book has grown somewhat.) And it's worth noting that the same human ability may make it possible for us either to destroy the world or to escape from it. This remarkable volume is slightly less than 200 pages but you'll be thinking about the arguments it elucidates for some time.

Except for the part that is left out -- a rather important part, as it turns out -- Alfred Crosby's little essay on human action at a distance is an amusing, not entirely reliable assertion of one of those facts we all know but never perhaps knew we knew -- unknown knowns, as Don Rumsfeld might have put it if he had been of a reflective turn of mind.

The unconsidered known is that we humans, alone of creatures, can throw for both accuracy and power.

But just as we must walk before we can run, we must be able to walk before we can throw. The joking description of man as a featherless biped turns out to have more than a little profundity in it. Crosby spends much time marveling that by some uncertain path of evolution, we traded one of our two sets of hands for an apparently less flexible set of feet.

What he does not also say -- in fact, gets wrong -- is that we also traded our fur for bare skin. The ability to walk upright freed our hands for further development. The loss of fur increased our endurance.

Crosby declares that humans could not outrun predators. This is incorrect. A man can outrun a horse, if the course is long enough, and it is probably our hairlessness that makes our extraordinary endurance possible.

Anyway, even if he gets about half the picture out of focus, Crosby is undoubtedly correct that the ability to project objects was a great advance. Combined with that other great advance, control over fire, it resulted in the ability to project fire: and that led to a holocaust of species and a great deal of mutual slaughter within our own.

That's true enough, but the development from thrown rocks to spears assisted by atlatls to bows and arrows to rockets and firearms to nuclear bombs was not as linear as "Throwing Fire" insists.

Crosby spends an inordinant proportion of a small book marveling over little David's victory over the hands-on brute Goliath. But the historical fact is, hands-on brutes fighting at arms' length won almost all the important wars for many centuries. Even long after the introduction of firearms, which dumbed the requirements for being an effective warrior way down, the wise aggressor relied on "push of pike" for results.

Even the Mongols and Turks, who conquered most of Asia by fighting with bows, depended mostly on the horse. Their empires were limited by pasturage, and where their horses went hungry, their bows availed them not.

For an historian who has obtained quite a considerable reputation as an interpreter of technology, Crosby makes some cracking howlers about what technology was capable of, especially when he gets his feet wet.

In fact, he appears to know little about naval history. How the Greeks "threw fire" without setting their own vessels ablaze is a consideration that does not trouble him. Furthermore, although cannon went to sea early and were decisive at Lepanto (which, however, was an undecisive battle), for a long time, as in land campaigns, hand-to-hand combat decided sea fights.

When it comes to whaling, Crosby manages to make the opposite mistake, attributing too much success to muscle-powered missiles. It is noteworthy that the Yankee whalemen were still using spears in the era of telegraphs and steam, but it is not true, as Crosby asserts, that they nearly drove whales extinct that way.

In fact, humans have never made any cetacean extinct, and although they began to come close with right whales and bowheads, that did not happen until they developed the harpoon gun.

Rather more surprising, if less relevant to the main theme, is Crosby`s gullible swallowing of Chinese propaganda about their voyages in the Indian Ocean in the 15th century.

Their ships were not, as Crosby imagines, the biggest in the world, and they could not have been 500 feet long, as claimed by a great many people who ought to know better, since a wooden ship unreinforced with iron cannot be much longer than 200 feet. This is an absolute limit imposed by the tensile strength of wood.

Two other errors: The first successful American space satellite was not launched by the Army and was not attributable to Wernher von Braun`s team (although the sentence that contains this error is artfully worded and it may be that Crosby knows who was first); and it is not true -- at least not inarguably true -- that Kamehameha the Great was the "last of the classic gunpowder emperors." That was probably Tippoo Tib, who lived into the 20th century.