Penguin
Review by Walter Cummins
The term “sleeping beauties” was new to me as a designation for artists, technologies, and scientific theories rediscovered after they had become obscure or were initially overlooked. David Byrne came across it in a 2004 paper by Anthony van Rann and found it an ideal title of this compilation of people and ideas that achieved major significance after being forgotten, ignored, or neglected for years or even centuries: “Our view of ourselves and the world changes, not always in a linear manner, and what was once forgotten can be reawakened and can come to seem obvious and valuable.”
Bryne is impressive for gathering so many diverse cases, but more so for his ability to explain the histories and technicalities pertinent to a variety of fields—from music to art to astronomy, architecture, plate tectonics, medicine, and much more. He is best known for his career in music as a performer and composer, starting with the group Talking Heads in the 1970s. But he has also written several books and might be considered an autodidact.
I knew of only a few of the sleeping beauties before I opened this book—how Malcolm Crowley’s 1945 Portable Faulkner resurrected the writer’s career from a point where almost all of his novels were out of print to a rapid new assessment that resulted in the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature. I also was aware of how Wegener’s theories of plate tectonics, now fully accepted, was ignored and even ridiculed by the experts for decades. One commonly known sleeping beauty is the recognition of germ theory and the deaths caused by doctors who did not wash their hands. Unfortunately, according to Byrne, in some parts of the world many doctors still don’t. Overall, I learned quite a bit from his explanations of sleeping beauties new to me or with initial fates that I had never imagined.
I certainly was ignorant of the facts of concrete before Bryne explained the magnitude of its presence in the world and its limitations, mainly the typical fifty-year life span illustrated by recent collapsed buildings, compared with Roman concrete structures. still standing after many centuries, even functioning as aqueducts. Scientific analysis finally revealed the reasons for such strength, leading to a return to that Roman technique.
Byrnes’s involvement with music may be a reason he can explain the harmonic developments that made Bach possible. “He and others adopted the new instruments that were made with the Werckmeister tuning system that allowed for key shifts and chord changes. It’s called equal temperament because the distance between every note in the scale is the same … This was a big technical breakthrough—and it was radical as well.” Bach, who had to convince the musical world of his time to use this new kind of turning, implemented those findings in compositions that started as exercises but are now recognized as some of the greatest musical works ever composed. I had no idea that, initially, many considered Bach only as an organist, teacher, and writer of pedagogical demonstrations.
It takes very different kisses to awaken a sleeping beauty in the arts and one in science or technology when change is resisted for challenging existing conceptual models. The arts call for conversions in audience tastes that often require acceptance of a new way to read, see, and hear, as with Bach. The sciences and technology involve evidence and awareness. Evidence changed geologists’ minds about Wegener’s theory of plate tectonics, reversing denial and scorn once geologists published an irrefutable explanation in 1956. Mendel’s theory of genetics demanded further studies that replicated his 1866 findings, as well as the 1900 endorsement by a well-born scientist, William Bateson, because Mendel was only an obscure monk from humble beginnings. Another barrier in the sciences is conflict with accepted beliefs, especially religious, as when Galileo contradicted the Church’s doctrine that the sun circled the earth: “The frustratingly slow spread and acceptance of prior existing knowledge is sadly often a matter of classism, xenophobia, and racism.”
In addition to Bach and Faulkner, the artists Byrne writes about include Fitzgerald, Melville, Kafka, Pieter Brughel, Botticelli, Caravaggio, and Goya, all major figures in today’s world that most people probably assume were always at the top of the list. The parallel list of once unrecognized findings in science and technology includes such phenomena as radio astronomy, the atom, the solar system, continental drift, black holes, inoculation, and many other theories that we now take for granted.
Byrne recognizes this dilemma for the acceptance of sleeping beauties, “Disrupting orthodox ideas, policies, and beliefs happens all the time—from Copernicus to the use of antiseptics. Foreign ideas, new ideas, new technologies are resisted for as long as possible. If it ain’t broke, why fix it? What’s interesting here is not the denial—sadly that seems like human nature—but why new ideas eventually do get accepted. How does that happen? How do we change our thinking?” Byrne’s book answers by documenting how many such radical changes came about.
He concludes with this optimistic note: “Thankfully, our perceptions can change over time. What we as humans view as normal, valuable, and acceptable can and does evolve. It’s not fixed, whether that means our appreciation and recognition of a sleeping beauty or our sense of what is important and acceptable.”
