 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today we're getting creative as part of the Create ICG event. Check out the playlist at the end of this video to see more great videos on the theme of Create. And now let's take a closer look at the word create itself. The word create comes from the Latin verb creara with more or less the same range of meanings. But if we go back further, we come to the Proto-Indo-European root care, which means to grow. So Latin creara actually comes from a suffixed form of the verb with the sense of to cause to grow. We can see that sense of to grow in a different suffixed form, which leads to the related Latin verb crescara. But it's from these two ideas, the base sense of growing and the causative sense of creating, that we can find an interesting insight into the act of creation more generally. Creation isn't always a deliberate act. Sometimes it's a more organic process of growing, and can therefore involve the influence of one's surroundings and build on what has come before. No one creates an evacue. Well, except in many creation myths from different cultures around the world, which sometimes describe the creation of the cosmos from chaos, which originally meant gap or void, so creation out of nothingness. One story of creation is the Judeo-Christian biblical narrative, you know, the let there be light story, which is creatively retold in musical form in the 1799 oratorio, the creation composed by Joseph Haydn. The text of Haydn's oratorio draws not only on the biblical account, but also on the epic poem Paradise Lost by John Milton. Milton's poem, which actually focuses mainly on the story of the fall of Adam and Eve and of the rebel angels led by Lucifer, was a very influential work, also in part inspiring the novel Frankenstein by Mary Shelley. Frankenstein is the story of the creation of life as well, how the scientist Victor Frankenstein fashions and brings to life a creature, which has since become an icon of Gothic horror. Note that word creature, it comes of course from create, and thus meant something created by God. Here Frankenstein tries to play God, but the thing he creates turns out to be a monster, giving us the common modern meaning of creature as monster. Think creature feature. In the novel, the creature sees himself as a sort of atom, but out of spite at being abandoned by his creator, turns to evil and becomes, like the rebel angels in Milton's poem, a sort of devil. Another inspiration for Mary Shelley in writing the novel was the Greek myth of Prometheus. According to one version, Prometheus created the human race on the instructions of the chief god Zeus. However, he went against Zeus's wishes in also giving to human beings the secret of fire, the metaphorical light of invention, and for that he was punished with continual torture, just like Lucifer is punished by being cast into hell in Paradise Lost. And Mary Shelley had one last source of inspiration for her story about the creation of life, some experiments that Erasmus Darwin, grandfather of evolutionary scientist Charles, made when investigating the theory of the spontaneous generation of life. Though the exact nature of the experiments are a little unclear, as she recalled it involving Darwin causing spontaneous movement in a piece of, believe it or not, Vermicelli. So a sort of spaghetti monster. And that's a little taste of how the lines of creative inspiration can work. But turning from the taste of pasta to the taste of breakfast, that Latin verb Crescara also gives us the word crescent from the idea of the waxing or growing moon, and from there the word croissant, that crescent shaped breakfast pastry. But even more breakfasty is another word we get from that same growing root. Cereal, from the Roman goddess of agriculture, Ceres. Cereal basically means grain, but of course the eating of cooked grains as a breakfast food, I think porridge or oatmeal, goes back hundreds if not thousands of years. One of the first cold breakfast cereals as we know them today was Corn Flakes, invented by John Harvey Kellogg in 1894. Kellogg, who ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium, a kind of 19th century health spa, was a bit of an oddball who, in addition to having rather unsavory views about eugenics and general mutilation, also believed that a bland vegetarian diet would suppress the urge to masturbate, which he thought was just about the worst thing you could do, and would lead to a myriad of health problems, not least of which was blindness. Kellogg was experimenting with a breakfast gruel made from a variety of grains, but accidentally allowed some to go hard. In an attempt to rescue the situation, he passed the muck through rollers and then toasted the resulting flakes, and voila, the Corn Flake was born, leading eventually to the multi-million dollar breakfast cereal industry. And as we know, what every breakfast cereal needs to catch the eyes of consumers is a mascot. Famous Corn Flake rooster was suggested to Kellogg by his Welsh friend, Harpist Nancy Richards, as a pun on his name, since the Welsh word for rooster is caleog. Richards was a student of Harpist John Thomas, who himself was admitted at age 14 into the Royal Academy of Music in London through the influence of Ada Lovelace, the daughter of poet Lord Byron, today celebrated as the creator of computer programming for her work with Charles Bammage on the first mechanical computer ever designed, the Analytical Engine. Lovelace was introduced to Bammage by her tutor, Mary Somerville, who was also a highly celebrated scientist, in fact, arguably the very first scientist, as the word itself was first coined by William Hewell in his glowing review of Somerville's book on the connection of the physical sciences, which was one of the best-selling science books of the 19th century. Somerville was also one of the first two female members of the Royal Astronomical Society, being jointly inducted along with Caroline Herschel, sister of famed astronomer William Herschel, the discoverer of the planet Uranus. William Herschel was often pestered by visitors, including composer Joseph Haydn, who, it turns out, was a bit of an astronomy fanboy, and included a section in his oratorio The Creation on the Creation of the Planets. But getting back to breakfast, the etymology of the word itself will prove instructive for our story of creation. You see, breakfast, which is first recorded in the 15th century, literally means to break one's fast, fast here in the sense of not eating overnight. The funny thing is, so does the earlier 13th century word, dinner. The word dinner comes through French from the Latin elements dis, basically a negative prefix, and yeunis, meaning fasting or hungry. So literally, dinner means to break one's fast, or breakfast, the first meal of the day. And indeed, in the Middle Ages, dinner really was the first big meal of the day, and was eaten around noon. So dinner meant breakfast, but was eaten at lunch, and now often refers to the last meal of the day. Confused yet? These shifting mealtimes have a number of causes, including the working day, which originally followed the daylight hours, assuming you were a farmer working the fields, for instance. But with the shift to indoor factory work during the Industrial Revolution, often with artificial lighting, the major meal, dinner, would have a tendency to move later in the day after working hours, with a light lunch, meaning originally lump, so a small bit of handheld food one could eat quickly, in the middle of the day. Another factor influencing the mealtimes of the non-working class was the various social obligations of the 18th and 19th centuries. The afternoon was taken up with social calls one was expected to pay and repay, so again, dinner had the tendency to slip later and later in the day to accommodate this. But perhaps the most interesting social activity of the leisure class that had an impact on mealtimes was the ever-creative world of the theatre. You see, in Shakespeare's day, theatres were open air, like the famous Globe Theatre, and relied on the natural lighting of the sun. But later, as the theatre moved indoors with artificial lighting, theatre hours were no longer fixed. We can see this also reflected in the word matinee, which we now think of as an afternoon performance. Etymologically speaking, matinee, from French matin, meaning morning, originally referred to a morning musical performance, from the French phrase, matinee musicale. So, for instance, you might go to see a performance of Haydn's creation in the morning as a matinee. But as the main performance slipped later and later, so too did the matinee, giving us the afternoon performance we think of now. Once again, all thanks to artificial lighting. The history of artificial lighting, of course, goes back a long way with such technologies as oil lamps, burning fuels like olive oil in ancient Greece and Rome, and candles made from animal fats in the medieval period. But there were no real advances in artificial lighting for thousands of years. In the theatres of the 17th century, stages were lit with large chandeliers, which had the disadvantage of dripping hot grease on theatregoers and actors alike. The first creative breakthrough came with the advent of footlights, putting the candles at the front of the stage with reflectors in front of them to cast the light back on the actors and shield the direct light from the audience. To this day, the word footlights still means the theatre, even though they are no longer used. The famed 18th century actor and theatre manager, David Garrick, is sometimes claimed to have imported the new lighting techniques into England from France. And though they may predate him, Garrick was certainly responsible for dispensing with the chandeliers at his theatre-royal Drury Lane and adopting new stage lighting techniques, including lighting from the wings. The next technological breakthrough came with the invention of a new type of oil lamp called the argonde lamp patented by its inventor, a mahogonde in 1780, which featured a hollow circular wick and glass chimney, allowing for a much brighter light with less smoke, though requiring a considerable amount of oil. And these were quickly adopted by theatres such as Drury Lane, though after Garrick's time. Another big innovation was gas lighting, pioneered by William Murdoch in 1792, who produced combustible gas by heating up coal and designed a lamp to burn it in. The process of producing the coal gas was actually originally discovered by accident by one Archibald Cochrane, who was trying to produce tar to preserve the wooden hulls of ships, and in passing mentioned the flammable gas to James Watt, inventor of the steam engine. As for Murdoch, he claimed the idea as his own and brought it to Matthew Bolton, industrial revolution bigwig and partner of James Watt, big coincidence, at whose firm Murdoch were, and soon Murdoch's coal gas lamp was lighting the Bolton and Watt Soho factory. Bolton, by the way, was a good friend of Erasmus Darwin. Remember him? In any case, these new gas lights were a boon to the industrial revolution, allowing for better factory lighting and also had knock-on social effects such as night classes and popular science lecture, which further bolstered the creativity and innovation and evening social functions, like the theatre and musical concerts. Drury Lane and other theatres were quick to adopt the new gas lights by the early 19th century. It was around this time, by the way, that Haydn's creation was first performed in London and, coincidentally enough, Thomas Lindley, who was in charge of the oratorios at Drury Lane, may have had a hand in writing the first English text of Haydn's great work, Small World. But getting back to artificial lighting innovations, next up was limelight, produced by using an oxyhydrogen flame to superheat quicklime, in other words, calcium oxide, which then incandesces, producing a tremendously bright light. The effect was originally discovered in the 1820s by a surgeon and chemist by the name of Goldsworthy Gurney, but was put into practice in a viable lamp by Scottish civil engineer Thomas Drummond, who, after hearing about the effect in a public lecture by famed scientist Michael Faraday, invented his lamp, initially to aid in the surveying work he did as a civil engineer. But it wasn't long before the lighting technology was adopted in the theatre world, by around the middle of the 19th century, especially for spotlights. And to this day, we still have the expression in the limelight, though nowadays, of course, spotlights are all electric. The first kind of viable electric light invented was the carbon arc light, which essentially works by causing an electric current to jump between two pieces of carbon, which very slowly combust, producing a brilliant light. As it turns out, the arc light was invented in 1809 by Humphry Davy, sometime employer of Michael Faraday. But of course, the type of electric light we most likely think of today is the light bulb, invented by Thomas Edison. I say invented, but it was really perfected by him in 1879, as there were numerous other creators of versions of the light bulb before Edison. But through trial and error, with various materials for the filament, Edison and his team made the technology viable. And again, this is very appropriate for understanding how the creative process works, often through accidental discovery and never working in a vacuum, unless you're putting a filament in a vacuum to make a light bulb. And this is appropriate too, given that the light bulb has become the standard iconic representation of creative inspiration. What's more, this story has come just about full circle, as Edison happened to be a patient of John Harvey Kellogg, though there's no word on whether or not he ate the corn flakes. Let there be light. As I mentioned at the beginning, this video was part of the Create ICG event, a week-long celebration of online creation, and of the Internet Creators Guild, a non-profit organization that supports and connects online creators. To find other takes on the theme of Create, check out the playlist, or search the hashtag Create ICG on your social media of choice. Thanks for watching. If you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections, please subscribe to this channel or share it, and check out our Patreon page, where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos. On Twitter, I'm at alliterative, and you can read more of my thoughts on my blog at alliterative.net.