BOMB, BOOK AND COMPASS

Joseph Needham and the Great Secrets of China
The seventeenth-century philosopher-statesman Francis Bacon famously declared that nothing had changed the world more profoundly than three great discoveries: printing, gunpowder and the compass. What he didn't know was that all three had already been conceived of and successfully employed by a single people, living on the far side of the globe, long before the West ever 'invented' them. And yet it was not until more than three hundred years later, in a young scientist's study in Cambridge, that one remarkable man set out to give these people the credit they rightly deserved.
Joseph Needham was a keenly intelligent, charismatic young biochemist, working towards a glittering career at Cambridge, when he fell in love with a young Chinese student. His passion for his mistress quickly led to a fascination with her country's language and history, and he soon developed an astonishing reputation as a self-taught, albeit eccentric, scholar of Chinese culture. When, in 1943, the British government sent him on a diplomatic mission to help save China's universities from the occupying Japanese forces, he began the research that would occupy him for the rest of his life and which would one day lead him to write the greatest work on China ever created in the Western World.
Needham's twenty-four-volume masterpiece, Science and Civilization in China, remains an unrivalled account of the nation's astonishing history of invention and technology: from blast furnaces and suspension bridges, to the game of chess and the first toilet paper. In Bomb, Book and Compass, Simon Winchester tells the story of this man, his book, the passion that inspired it - and the extraordinary rise of the Chinese nation that continues to this day.