The Renais­sance did not, strict­ly speak­ing, occur in Chi­na. Yet it seems that the Mid­dle King­dom did have its Renais­sance men, so to speak, and in much ear­li­er times at that. We find one such illus­tri­ous fig­ure in the Han dynasty of the first and sec­ond cen­turies: a states­man named Zhang Heng (78–139 AD), who man­aged to dis­tin­guish him­self across a range of fields from math­e­mat­ics to astron­o­my to phi­los­o­phy to poet­ry. His accom­plish­ments in sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy include invent­ing the first hydraulic armil­lary sphere for observ­ing the heav­ens, improv­ing water clocks with a sec­ondary tank, cal­cu­lat­ing pi fur­ther than it had been in Chi­na to date, and mak­ing dis­cov­er­ies about the nature of the moon. He also, so records show, put togeth­er the first-ever seis­mo­scope, a device for detect­ing earth­quakes.

A visu­al expla­na­tion of Zhang’s design appears in the Sci­ence­World video above. His seis­mo­scope, its nar­ra­tor says, “was called hòufēng dìdòngyí, which means ‘instru­ment for mea­sur­ing sea­son­al winds and move­ments of the earth,’ ” and it could “deter­mine rough­ly the direc­tion in which an earth­quake occurred.”

Each of its eight drag­on heads (a com­bi­na­tion of num­ber and crea­ture that, in Chi­na, could hard­ly be more aus­pi­cious) holds a ball; when the ground shook, the drag­on point­ing toward the epi­cen­ter of the quake drops its ball into the mouth of one of the dec­o­ra­tive toads wait­ing below. At one time, as his­to­ry has record­ed, it “detect­ed an earth­quake 650 kilo­me­ters, or 400 miles away, that was­n’t felt at the loca­tion of the seis­mo­scope.”

Not bad, con­sid­er­ing that nei­ther Zhang nor any­one else had yet heard of tec­ton­ic plates. But as all engi­neers know, prac­ti­cal devices often work just fine even in the absence of com­plete­ly sound the­o­ry. Though no con­tem­po­rary exam­ples of hòufēng dìdòngyí sur­vive from Zhang’s time, “researchers believe that inside the seis­mo­scope were a pen­du­lum, a bronze ball under the pen­du­lum, eight chan­nels, and eight levers that acti­vat­ed the drag­ons’ mouths.” Mov­ing in response to a shock wave, the pen­du­lum would release the ball in the oppo­site direc­tion, which would roll down a chan­nel and release the mouth at the end of it. How­ev­er inno­v­a­tive it was for its time, this scheme could, of course, pro­vide no infor­ma­tion about exact­ly how far away the earth­quake hap­pened, to say noth­ing of pre­dic­tion. For­tu­nate­ly, cen­turies of Renais­sance men still lay ahead to fig­ure all that out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Ancient Greeks Invent­ed the First Com­put­er: An Intro­duc­tion to the Antikythera Mech­a­nism (Cir­ca 87 BC)

The Advanced Tech­nol­o­gy of Ancient Rome: Auto­mat­ic Doors, Water Clocks, Vend­ing Machines & More

Behold Col­or Pho­tographs Tak­en Dur­ing the After­math of San Francisco’s Dev­as­tat­ing 1906 Earth­quake

China’s 8,000 Ter­ra­cot­ta War­riors: An Ani­mat­ed & Inter­ac­tive Intro­duc­tion to a Great Archae­o­log­i­cal Dis­cov­ery

What Ancient Chi­nese Phi­los­o­phy Can Teach Us About Liv­ing the Good Life Today: Lessons from Harvard’s Pop­u­lar Pro­fes­sor, Michael Puett

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

Buck­min­ster Fuller was, in many ways, a twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry man: an achieve­ment in itself, con­sid­er­ing he was born in the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry and died in the twen­ti­eth. In fact, it may actu­al­ly count as his defin­ing achieve­ment. For all the inven­tions pre­sent­ed as rev­o­lu­tion­ary that nev­er real­ly caught on — the Dymax­ion house and car, the geo­des­ic dome — as well as the count­less pages of eccen­tri­cal­ly the­o­ret­i­cal writ­ing and even more count­less hours of talk, it can be dif­fi­cult for us now, here in the actu­al twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, to pin down the civ­i­liza­tion­al impact he so earnest­ly longed to make. But to the extent that he embod­ied the faith, born of the com­bi­na­tion of indus­tri­al might and exis­ten­tial dread that col­ored the post­war Amer­i­can zeit­geist, that tech­nol­o­gy can ratio­nal­ly re-shape the world, we’re all his intel­lec­tu­al chil­dren.

In the video above, Joe Scott pro­vides an intro­duc­tion to Fuller and his world in about ten min­utes. After a much-ref­er­enced Dam­a­scene con­ver­sion, the once-dis­solute Fuller spent most of his life “try­ing to solve the world’s prob­lems,” Scott says, “specif­i­cal­ly in find­ing ways to save resources and pro­vide for every­body on the plan­et: to do more with less, as we would say.”

The title he gave him­self of “com­pre­hen­sive antic­i­pa­to­ry design sci­en­tist” neat­ly rep­re­sents both his glob­al­ly, even uni­ver­sal­ly scaled ambi­tions, as well as his com­pul­sive knack for self-pro­mo­tion. If the designs he came up with to achieve his utopi­an ends nev­er took root in soci­ety (even geo­des­ic domes end­ed up as some­thing like “the hula hoop of twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry archi­tec­ture,” James Gle­ick writes, in that they were “every­where, and then they were a bit sil­ly”), the prob­lem had in part to do with the ten­den­cy of his grand visions to out­pace the func­tion­al tech­nol­o­gy of his day.

In his sen­si­bil­i­ty, too, “Bucky” Fuller can come off as a famil­iar type in our own time, even to those who’ve nev­er heard of him. “There is no doubt what­ev­er in Fuller’s mind that the whole devel­op­ment of mod­ern sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy has result­ed from a will­ing­ness on the part of a very few men to sail into the wind of tra­di­tion, to trust in their own intel­lect, and to take advan­tage of their nat­ur­al mobil­i­ty,” wrote the New York­er’s Calvin Tomp­kins in a 1966 pro­file. No won­der he appealed to the Whole Earth Cat­a­log coun­ter­cul­ture of that decade, which even­tu­al­ly evolved into the cul­ture of what we now call Sil­i­con Val­ley, where no declared inten­tion to rein­vent the way humans live and work is too ridicu­lous­ly ambi­tious. Though few fig­ures could have seemed more like­ly to turn per­ma­nent­ly passé, Buck­min­ster Fuller con­tin­ues to inspire fas­ci­na­tion — and in a way, as a patron saint of tech­no-opti­mism, he lives on today.

Relat­ed con­tent:

A Three-Minute Intro­duc­tion to Buck­min­ster Fuller, One of the 20th Century’s Most Pro­duc­tive Design Vision­ar­ies

Buck­min­ster Fuller Tells the World “Every­thing He Knows” in a 42-Hour Lec­ture Series (1975)

Buck­min­ster Fuller, Isaac Asi­mov & Oth­er Futur­ists Make Pre­dic­tions About the 21st Cen­tu­ry in 1967: What They Got Right & Wrong

Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Dymax­ion Sleep Plan: He Slept Two Hours a Day for Two Years & Felt “Vig­or­ous” and “Alert”

The Life & Times of Buck­min­ster Fuller’s Geo­des­ic Dome: A Doc­u­men­tary

A New Online Archive Lets You Read the Whole Earth Cat­a­log and Oth­er Whole Earth Pub­li­ca­tions, Tak­ing You from 1970 to 2002

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. He’s the author of the newslet­ter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Sum­ma­riz­ing Korea) and Kore­an Newtro. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.