Welcome to the Endless Knot!
Today is no ordinary episode.
Today is an Average episode!
Actually, I have so much to say that it won't fit into one episode, so I'm averaging it
out over a three-episode series!
People often seem to want to predict the future.
I mean, after all, horoscopes are still regularly published in newspapers and magazines.
Businesses are always trying to predict what consumers will want and what the economy's
going to be like next year.
And in Norse mythology, the god Odin was always after wisdom and knowledge, particularly about
the impending Ragnarok, the Norse version of Doomsday, so much so that he even gives
up one of his eyes for wisdom.
And speaking of astrology, it's thanks to that that humans started studying the universe
around us.
It's why we invented constellations and star charts.
But soon enough people started to use those constellations and star charts for navigation.
One of the most influential star charts was produced by the Greek Ptolemy.
The work was originally titled Mathematike Syntaxis meaning "Mathematical Treatise",
and in fact was a work on Greek mathematics with a special focus on the maths of the apparent
motion of the celestial bodies as the Greeks saw it.
No mean feat as the Greek conception of the cosmos had the earth in the centre with everything
else revolving around it like giant glass spheres, a notion first introduced by the
philosopher Aristotle.
This geocentric conception came to be known as the Ptolemaic model.
The catalogue of 1022 stars within their constellations was only a part of this great work, but it
would come to be important to celestial navigation in later eras, especially when European sailors
gained the necessary naval technology to sail away from sight of land into the deep ocean.
But it was due to the Islamic world that the medieval west had access to this treatise,
as it had been translated into Arabic, and from there into Latin in the 12th century,
making it available to Europeans.
Its name had shifted to Greek He Megale Syntaxis "The Great Treatise" to simply Megiste
"greatest" which was rendered in Arabic as Al-majisti, leading to the European name
Almagest.
This is an example of the enormously important contribution of the Islamic world, who transmitted
and built upon the knowledge of ancient Greece, to European learning.
Christian Europeans generally had no access to or ability to read ancient Greek texts
in their original forms.
As we'll see, the Islamic world is above average in importance to our story in a number
of ways.
And this brings us to the word average.
The earliest senses of the word have to do with maritime shipping.
In English contexts it originally referred to a customs-duty or expense over and above
the freight incurred in the shipment of goods and payable by their owner.
But the word seems to come from the Old French availe which meant "damage to shipping"
and by extension any expense, with the -age ending coming by way of a parallel to the
semantically related damage.
And since the usual practise was to share out these expenses between all the owners
of freight on the ship as well as the ship owners, kind of like an early form of insurance,
the term gained the mathematical sense of the 'arithmetic mean' from the idea of
distributing a sum between a number of people, and the sense of "typical" or "usual"
developed from there.
Now the deeper etymology of this word is a matter of some speculation and disagreement.
As the Oxford English Dictionary puts it "few words have received more etymological investigation".
But the explanation that seems to carry the most weight, and the one we're going to
go with here, is that it comes from Arabic 'awariya "damaged goods", from 'awar
"fault, blemish, defect, flaw", from 'awira "to lose an eye", from a Proto-Semitic
root that means "to be or become blind".
Kind of recalls Odin giving up his eye, and in a way this is fitting since average in
its maritime shipping sense, which is the beginnings of insurance, is all about making
plans for future contingencies.
The practise, now referred to as general average, was to share out the losses in freight if
for instance some had to be jettisoned overboard in the event of a storm at sea in order to
save the ship.
The sailors therefore weren't faced with the decision of what to jettison on the basis
of who owned it since all the freight owners would share the expense of the loss.
This practise goes back a long way, and can be found in the Lex Rhodia, a maritime code
from Rhodes around 800 BCE.
The law disappeared after the fall of Rome, but the principle was revived in the Rolls
of Oléron promulgated by Eleanore of Aquitaine after returning from the Second Crusade around
1160 CE.
There were of course other ancient forerunners of insurance by distributing or transferring
risk, such as the 3rd century BCE Chinese practise of distributing goods among several
vessels in case one capsized in river rapids.
And in the Code of Hammurabi from around 1750 BCE a merchant taking a loan to fund a shipment
could pay an additional fee guaranteeing the loan would be cancelled in the event of theft
or loss.
By the way, the code of Hammurabi also records the first evidence of interest-bearing loans.
But in any case the first example of actual contract insurance for maritime shipping dates
to 1347 CE in Genoa.
Actual insurance laws became codified first in 15th century Barcelona, with the first
statute in England in 1601.
Insurance brokers kind of grew up organically from there, and funnily enough we have coffee
to thank for it.
Which is appropriate since coffee is another of those things that Europe got from the Islamic
world.
The word coffee came into English through Dutch and Italian from Turkish kahveh, which
in turn came from Arabic qahwah.
The ultimate origin of the word is debated.
Some trace it back to the Kaffa region of Ethiopia, where coffee was originally grown.
But a more likely etymology is that it comes from a Proto-Semitic root which means "to
be or become weak, dim, dull, dark", thus meaning "dark stuff", appropriately enough.
Interestingly, the word seems to have originally referred to a kind of wine, also dark in colour,
until the Islamic prohibition against drinking alcohol made the word obsolete, whereupon
it shifted over to refer to coffee, a non-alcoholic drink which nonetheless has a pleasant effect
on the drinker.
The drink itself made it to Europe in the 16th century by way of Turkey.
It arrived in England before the end of that century through trading by the Dutch and British
East India Companies, and soon coffeehouses sprang up in Europe, and they soon became
centres of social life and business.
For instance the Café Procope in Paris was where Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert
brewed up the idea of creating the first modern Encyclopedia.
But more important to our story is the coffeehouse opened in London in 1686 by a man named Edward
Lloyd.
You see, shortly after it opened, it was relocated in 1691 to an area called Exchange Alley which
was conveniently located near the Royal Exchange where the exchange of goods was carried out.
As a result people involved in trade and commerce began to congregate at the nearby coffeehouses
such as Lloyd's Coffeehouse.
Lloyd installed a pulpit from which shipping news could be announced, and for the benefit
of his patrons engaged in their wheelings and dealings began to compile a list of ships
engaged in trade which included information about the condition and seaworthiness of the
ships both in terms of the state of their hulls and the quality of their equipment.
That way you'd know what trade venture to underwrite.
He used an alphanumerical rating system — A1 was top notch both in terms of hull and equipment.
That's where we get the expression A1 for something that is first-rate.
At the time, a ship's hull was vulnerable to shipworms, actually a species of salt-water
clam which bored into the hull.
The solution for shipworm was to coat the hull with a mixture of tar and pitch.
No problem for England as their American colonies produced the necessary stuff.
But after American Independence, England was in a bit of a pickle.
Eventually a solution was found in sheathing the hull in copper.
And that's where we get the expression copper-bottomed, as in a copper-bottomed investment—a really
safe bet.
The practise began with the navy but soon was adopted by commercial ships, and in 1777
the first such ship was listed in Lloyd's register, and by 1786 there were 275 copper-bottomed
vessels.
And in case you hadn't guessed by now Lloyd's Coffeehouse eventually became the great insurance
market Lloyd's of London.
So thanks to Islamic prohibition and maritime shipping with its distributed averages, we
have insurance brokers.
Thanks for watching, and tune in tomorrow for part two of our look at the word Average,
in which we'll investigate the history of probability mathematics and property insurance.
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I'm @Alliterative on Twitter, and you can read more of my thoughts on my blog at alliterative.net
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