The point is that entrepreneurs need to be able to recognize infant global industries to avoid being caught in a global squeeze. They also need to recognize pseudoglobal industries to avoid overextension when it is not a requirement.

The ability of a segment of a glass sphere to magnify whatever is placed before it was known around the year 1000, when the spherical segment was called a reading stone, essentially what today we might term a frameless magnifying glass or plain glass paperweight. Scribes, illuminators, and scholars held such stones directly over manuscript pages as an aid in seeing what was being written, drawn, or read.

The state Xinhua news agency said Tan Li, Communist Party chief of Mianyang in the quake zone, ordered 1.3 million people downstream from Tangjiashan to “evacuate to higher ground”. But Zhou Hua, a Mianyang official who is a spokesman for the lake relief effort, told Reuters that report was “mistaken”.

Until the war of 1914-18 the largest proportion of coal was shipped for export or coastwise movement to U.K. ports, and even with the decline of the industry between the wars this trend continued until the Second World War.