Surprisingly Late Scientific Discoveries
Or how my 1970s children's science book lied to me!
I’m always amazed that having discovered the wheel some several thousand years ago (we likely had horse-drawn chariots before we rode horses), it took until the late twentieth century before someone came up with putting wheels on suitcases (it was probably the 1990s before I personally witnessed such a thing). Apparently, this delay was a combination of classism (“there should be a poor person employed to carry my luggage”) and toxic masculinity (“I’m a man so I need to carry the luggage for myself and my wife”).
But this isn’t the only example of something invented / discovered in my lifetime that should surely have been around far, far earlier. Like a correct understanding of dog vision, for example.
When I was a kid in the 1970s, I used to like reading the children’s science books in the non-fiction portion of the children’s end of the library. (This was before I hit 11 or so and graduated, via my brother’s Sven Hassel collection, to Gunther Lutz’s Nazi Paratrooper series and Leo Kessler’s Otto Stahl series. Christ knows what the librarians must have thought, but given that I’m now a left-progressive member of the Green Party, maybe it proves that you shouldn’t police what children read.)
Anyway…
I distinctly remember one of the books having an entire two-page spread devoted to explaining how bad dogs’ vision was, and specifically stating that they were entirely colour-blind, seeing in only black and white. They had a graphic of an experiment where a monochrome cardboard cut-out depicting a dog’s owner was placed nearer to the dog than the owner and the dog would sprint at the cardboard cut-out until it got near enough to spot that it wasn’t real, at which point it would spot its actual owner and change course.
Fast forward about thirty something years and it’s lunchtime and I’m throwing a ball for my dog, Pebbles. It was one of a set we’d bought, one green, one red.
The evening before I’d been throwing the green ball until it had got quite dark, dark enough that I was having difficulty seeing the ball. But Pebbles had no trouble, easily being able to snatch it off the grass where it had landed.
This lunchtime though, I’d bought the red ball. It was bright glorious sunshine. I threw the ball for her, and she ran straight past it. She eventually found it, but only after setting up a sort of search pattern where she went round and round in larger circles until she stumbled on it. This happened again, and again,
And I thought… She’s red-green colour blind. I figured that out because it was the only thing that made sense. If she was red-green colourblind, with her world consisting of two primary colours, red-green and blue, then what we had was two red-green balls, one of them (the slightly dark red one on the left) being about the same shade as the red-green grass) and the other (the lighter green one on the right) being a lighter shade than the grass.
I Googled it, and it turns out all dogs are basically red-green colourblind - but not totally colourblind. At some point since that children’s science book was written, someone had decided to actually study dogs’ vision and had discovered what I’d independently discovered with two rubber balls, a dog, and a lawn.
(It further turns out that professional dog trainers use blue play equipment because that will always show up clearly against grass no matter whether the grass is lush and dark green or dry and yellow-green).
As discoveries go, it’s hardly Nobel-worthy, and I don’t think my canine co-discoverer was particularly bothered. But it was quite satisfying to work it out.
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