Myths, Mechanisms, and the Grid, #6

The lone frontiersman. Rifle over one shoulder, axe in hand, squinting at the horizon with bacon fat in his pack and destiny and dust in his eyes. His boots? Homemade. His mule? Raised from birth. His clothes? Woven by candlelight, stitched with sinew, cinched by a belt carved from last winter’s elk. He is America’s favorite fiction.

Because that’s what he is: fiction.

He sounds self-sufficient, but he didn’t get there alone. He followed roads surveyed by the federal government. Claimed land acquired by government treaty or conflict. Relied on supply chains, currency, forts, railroads, and laws. His bacon fat probably came by boat. His independence rode on the back of infrastructure built stone by stone by collective effort, tax payers, and the many generations before him.

The idea of being “off-grid” was, in reality, made possible by the grid. Take the westward expansion:

• Land policy: The Louisiana Purchase, the Homestead Act, the annexations and territorial acquisitions of Texas, California, Nevada, Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Hawaii, and parts of Colorado and Wyoming, along with the purchase of Alaska years later, gave millions access to land they had not settled themselves. These examples do not even include the many wars and forced removals of Native Americans.

• Movement systems: Roads, canals, and railroads were surveyed, funded, and maintained by governments, tax payers, and networks of engineers.

• Knowledge flows: Land-grant universities spread the agricultural and engineering know-how required to prosper.

• Enforcement systems: Property rights, military security, and legal frameworks secured claims.

Similar myths live on in technology start-ups. Founders in garages eating pizza and wearing hoodies programming world changing software capture headlines, but under the surface are venture capital, cloud infrastructure, open-source libraries, universities,  intellectual property law, federal research grants, and global labor markets.

The myth of the self-made hero persists because it flatters. But the truth is more useful: civilization doesn’t grow from grit—it grows from grids. The myth sells. The grid delivers.

When Time Became Geography, #5

The world’s most powerful weapon in the 18th century wasn’t a cannon, a fleet, or a fortress. It was a clock. Not the kind that told you when to put the kettle on — the kind that decided whether your king’s treasure ships arrived in port or rested on the sea bed. A carpenter with a stopwatch ended up doing what navies and kings could not: he made the oceans predictable.

Clocks don’t usually win empires. But then again, most clocks don’t redraw the map of the world – on time.

The Scilly Naval Disaster: Longitude's Bloody Lesson

In October 1707, Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell, one of Britain’s most celebrated naval commanders, was sailing home from Gibraltar at the head of a great fleet. The journey had been brutal: storms, poor visibility, overcast skies that blotted out the stars. Latitude — north and south — they could measure. Longitude — east and west — they guessed. And guesswork at sea is gambling with death.

As the fleet approached England, the officers believed they were safely in the English Channel. In reality, they were dozens of miles off course, bearing straight for the Isles of Scilly — a rocky graveyard southwest of Cornwall.

On the night of October 22, the catastrophe unfolded.

• HMS Association, Shovell’s flagship, struck the rocks off Gilstone Ledge and sank in minutes. All 1,400 men aboard drowned.

• HMS Eagle, HMS Romney, and HMS Firebrand also ran into the rocks. Hundreds more perished.

• Survivors described chaos: the sea boiling with wreckage, men clinging to timbers, cries vanishing into the roar of the waves.

In a single night, between 1,600–2,000 sailors died — not by cannon fire, but by navigational error.

The disaster was a national humiliation. Britain’s most advanced navy had been defeated by the complexity of geography. Insurance markets trembled, trade partners panicked, families from Portsmouth to Plymouth mourned. Admiral Shovell’s body was later found washed ashore.

The Scilly Disaster laid bare a cruel truth: latitude without longitude doesn’t get you where you want to go. Confidence on one axis meant nothing without accuracy on the other. This was the disaster that pushed Parliament, in 1714, to establish the Longitude Prize. The empire needed a solution, or the seas would keep collecting bodies.