Numbers Don't Lie: 71 Things You Need to Know About the World

by Vaclav Smil

High-efficacy LEDs are already delivering significant electricity savings worldwide—it also helps that they can provide light for three hours a day for about 20 years, and if you forget to switch them off you will hardly notice on your next electricity bill. But, much like all other sources of artificial light, they still cannot match natural light’s spectrum. Incandescent lights gave out too little blue light, and fluorescent lights had hardly any red; LEDs have too little intensity in the red part of the spectrum and too much in the blue part. They don’t quite please the eye.

Light efficacies of artificial sources have improved by two orders of magnitude since 1880—but replicating sunlight indoors still remains beyond our reach.

Actually, the first one is scheduled to operate in 2021: the Yara Birkeland, built by Marin Teknikk in Norway, is not only the world’s first electric-powered, zero-emissions container ship, but also the first autonomous commercial vessel.

In 1902, a lightbulb with a tantalum filament produced 7 lumens per watt; in 2019, a dimmable LED light delivers 89 lm/W. That means that a lumen of electric light for a working-class household is now approximately 2,500 times more affordable than it was in the early 20th century.

Displacing 10 billion tons of fossil carbon is a fundamentally different challenge than ramping up the sales of small portable electronic devices to more than a billion units a year; the latter feat was achieved in a matter of years, the former one is a task for many decades.

by 1958 America’s first commercial turbojet, the Boeing 707, was making regularly scheduled flights from London to New York in less than 8 hours (see WHEN DID THE JET AGE BEGIN?, p. 204). Cruising speeds have not changed much: the Boeing 787 Dreamliner cruises at 913 km/h, and London–New York flights still last about 7.5 hours.

Only in 1866 did Pierre Lallement get his US patent for a bicycle propelled by pedals attached to a slightly larger front wheel. And starting in 1868, Pierre Michaux made this vélocipède design popular in France. But the Michaudine did not become the precursor of modern bicycles; it was just an ephemeral novelty. The entire 1870s and the early 1880s were dominated by high-wheelers (also known as “ordinary” or penny-farthing bicycles), their pedals attached directly to the axles of front wheels with diameters of up to 1.5 meters to provide a longer distance per pedal revolution. These clumsy machines could be fast, but they were also difficult to mount and tricky to steer; their use called for dexterity, stamina, and a tolerance for dangerous falls.

So, a simple balancing machine consisting of two equally sized wheels, a minimal metal frame, and a short drive chain emerged more than a century after Watt’s improved steam engines (1765), more than half a century after the introduction of mechanically far more complex locomotives (1829), years after the first commercial generation of electricity (1882)—but concurrently with the first designs of automobiles. The first light internal combustion engines were mounted on three- or four-wheel carriages by Karl Benz, Gottlieb Daimler, and Wilhelm Maybach in 1886. And although cars changed enormously between 1886 and 1976, bicycle design remained remarkably conservative. The first purpose-built mountain bikes came only in 1977. Widespread adoption of such novelties as expensive alloys, composite materials, strange-looking frames, solid wheels, and upturned handlebars began only during the 1980s.

Traditional farmers supplied the needed nitrogen in two ways: by recycling any available organic materials (straw, stalks, leaves, human and animal waste) and by rotating grain or oil crops with leguminous plants (cover crops such as alfalfa, clovers, and vetches; and food crops such as soybeans, beans, peas, and lentils). These plants are able to supply their own nitrogen because bacteria attached to their roots can “fix” nitrogen (convert it from the inert molecule in the air to ammonia that is available to growing plants) and they also leave some of it behind for the following grain or oil crop.

The second option required crop rotation and prevented continuous cultivation of staple grain crops, be it rice or wheat. As the demand for staple grains grew with an expanding (and urbanizing) population, it became clear that farmers would not be able to meet future food needs without new, synthetic sources of “fixed” nitrogen—that is, nitrogen available in forms that can be tapped by growing crops.

As a result, worldwide synthesis of ammonia and the subsequent production, distribution, and application of solid and liquid nitrogenous fertilizers are now responsible for about 1 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—and we do not have any commercial non-carbon alternative that could be deployed soon on the required mass scale of making nearly 150 million tons of NH4 a year.

In contrast, studies of actual food intakes show that the Japanese daily mean is now below 1,900 kilocalories, commensurate with age distribution and physical activity of the aging Japanese population. This means that perhaps the single most important explanation of Japan’s longevity primacy is quite simple: moderate overall food consumption, the habit expressed in just four kanji characters, 腹八分目 (hara hachi bun me, “belly eight parts [in ten] full”)—an ancient Confucian precept, and hence yet another import from China. But the Japanese, unlike the banqueting and food-wasting Chinese, actually do practice it.

Bacteria account for about 90 percent of the human body’s living cells, and as much as 3 percent of its total weight.

By 2050 there will be 9 billion people and, most likely, 2 billion cattle, together augmenting their already crushing dominance of Earth.

55,000 tons of ivory during the 19th century, and at least 40,000 tons during the 20th century.

In 1896, Svante Arrhenius, of Sweden, became the first scientist to quantify the effects of man-made carbon dioxide on global temperatures. He calculated that doubling the atmospheric level of the gas from its concentration in his time would raise the average midlatitude temperature by 5 to 6°C. That’s not too far from the latest results, obtained by computer models running more than 200,000 lines of code.