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Documentary, Connections 7 -connections theongchainree-2-02s 1936
"The Long Chain" is the seventh episode of the original 1978 documentary television series Connections, created, written, and presented by science historian James Burke. The series and episode are based on the premise of exploring the unexpected links between various historical events, inventions, and people that led to the development of modern technology.
Summary of "The Long Chain"
This episode traces a technological path from 17th-century mercantile competition to modern synthetic materials like nylon.
The key connections explored include:
Mercantile Competition and Ship Hulls: The need for a way to protect wooden ship hulls from rot and barnacles in the 17th century led to experiments with various coatings.
Coal Tar Pitch and Waterproofing: The development of a specific coal-tar pitch as a sealant and preservative for ships led to related innovations in using similar materials for waterproofing other items, such as clothing.
Gas Lighting: Byproducts from the production of this coal-tar material were eventually refined and utilized in the development of the first gas lighting systems for cities.
Synthetic Dyes and Plastics: Further chemical exploration of coal-tar derivatives later led to the accidental discovery of the first synthetic dyes by William Perkin, which in turn opened the door to the synthetic organic chemical industry, eventually including the creation of plastics and materials like nylon.
Burke highlights how the seemingly unrelated drive to keep ships at sea for longer periods ultimately resulted in the creation of many modern materials we use today.
"The Long Chain" is the seventh episode of the original 1978 documentary television series Connections, created, written, and presented by science historian James Burke. The series and episode are based on the premise of exploring the unexpected links between various historical events, inventions, and people that led to the development of modern technology.
Summary of "The Long Chain"
This episode traces a technological path from 17th-century mercantile competition to modern synthetic materials like nylon.
The key connections explored include:
Mercantile Competition and Ship Hulls: The need for a way to protect wooden ship hulls from rot and barnacles in the 17th century led to experiments with various coatings.
Coal Tar Pitch and Waterproofing: The development of a specific coal-tar pitch as a sealant and preservative for ships led to related innovations in using similar materials for waterproofing other items, such as clothing.
Gas Lighting: Byproducts from the production of this coal-tar material were eventually refined and utilized in the development of the first gas lighting systems for cities.
Synthetic Dyes and Plastics: Further chemical exploration of coal-tar derivatives later led to the accidental discovery of the first synthetic dyes by William Perkin, which in turn opened the door to the synthetic organic chemical industry, eventually including the creation of plastics and materials like nylon.
Burke highlights how the seemingly unrelated drive to keep ships at sea for longer periods ultimately resulted in the creation of many modern materials we use today.
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LearningTranscript
00:00The accident happened here in Gay Paris, which is where the other fellow was at the time,
00:12where everybody was moving it up, having themselves the gay 90s.
00:21Then, as now, of course, diamonds were a girl's best insurance.
00:25Not that our boring friend Henri Moisson is interested in girls,
00:28though, like them, he is interested in the sparklers.
00:32He wants to make artificial diamonds for serious chemical reasons.
00:39And while everybody else gets up to the things people get up to in Paris,
00:44Moisson is throwing various chemicals into an electric furnace.
00:47Things are getting very hot, but Moisson is obliged to announce, sorry, no diamonds.
00:53Still, he perseveres, and one day in 1895, back in his lab,
00:57he throws in some lime and carbon, and what does he get?
01:01Calcium carbide.
01:03This material here.
01:05Now, okay, he says, what can I do with that?
01:07And he starts fiddling around with this.
01:08Nothing much happens until one day he drops some water on it.
01:12Look what happens.
01:13Watch what comes out the other end.
01:22That is acetylene gas burning.
01:25Now, you put yourself in their position.
01:26It's 1898.
01:27The price of electricity is very high.
01:29Town gas isn't very bright.
01:31Naturally, they thought this was the new light of the future.
01:34A lot of people put a lot of money into it,
01:36and by 1899, there were about a quarter of a million acetylene gas jets all over Germany alone.
01:42And then, in 1900, the price of electricity dropped,
01:46and somebody came along with a gas mantle to make town gas much brighter,
01:49and the bottom dropped right out of the acetylene market.
01:52About all that came out of the mess was the invention of oxyacetylene welding by a couple of Frenchmen.
01:56However, all over Europe, there was now tons of the calcium carbide that started the whole thing,
02:04lying around, worthless.
02:06Until along came two chemists, two dying chemists, called Caro and Frank,
02:12who decided they'd try to see what they could make of this calcium carbide,
02:15and they did lots of things to it.
02:17And in one particular case, they passed nitrogen gas over it in a very hot oven,
02:20and when they took it back out again, the nitrogen had gone into the calcium carbide,
02:25and that was the result.
02:28Now that contains 20% nitrogen,
02:30and you can put it straight onto the fields and feed the plants.
02:33It's a fertiliser.
02:35The fertiliser that Germany needed at a price Germany could afford to pay.
02:39And that was what knocked the Haber-Bosch process right on the head.
02:46So now everybody could eat again.
02:49And the Haber-Bosch process, don't worry, it'll be back.
02:55By now, Germany was on the way to being a superpower with an unbeatable chemical industry
03:02and expertise in metal she'd always had, early on making silly toys and clocks.
03:07Now, thanks to the coal fields in the Ruhr, she was moving into the major league.
03:15With steel for weapons.
03:18In 30 years, Germany went from being a backward agricultural country
03:27to being able to build projects like this,
03:29the monorail in the industrial town of Wuppertal.
03:32When the monorail opened in 1900,
03:40it symbolised the nationalist ambitions
03:42of the man who'd ruled Germany through her years of growth,
03:45Kaiser Wilhelm,
03:47who now saw his country on the edge of greatness,
03:49thanks in part to coal tar
03:51and the way German colour chemists had used it.
03:54How could poor old Dundonald, all those years before,
04:09have foreseen what cooking bits of coal in a kettle would lead to?
04:12And do you recall I said the harbour Bosch fertiliser attempt would come back?
04:29Now.
04:31The same year the Kaiser opened the Wuppertal monorail,
04:34he also signed a bill that was to bring Germany's destruction.
04:38The bill was to finance the construction of a bigger and better German navy
04:43and the reason was quite simple.
04:44If Germany was to take her place in world markets,
04:47if she was to use her industrial potential to her own advantage,
04:50then she, like the other major powers, had to have colonies.
04:54Now the only thing that stood in the way of those colonies was the British navy.
04:57So the Germans built ships.
04:59Then so did the British.
05:00And an arms race began that was to end with the war in 1914.
05:03It's no accident that the first major battle at sea in that war was off the coast of Chile.
05:11You see, for decades the major powers, Germany included,
05:14had been using the vast natural deposits of sodium nitrate found on Chile's west coast.
05:20Sodium nitrate's a fertiliser.
05:22But now Germany needed that sodium nitrate for an even more desperate reason.
05:26Because if you put sodium nitrate together with sulphuric acid,
05:29you get nitric acid, and nitric acid is essential for making explosives.
05:35And the British had blockaded the Chilean supplies.
05:38So the Germans in 1914 had about one year in stock, one year supply.
05:42More had to be found very urgently.
05:44And where else but in the Harbour-Bosch process,
05:47the process that ended by making sodium nitrate.
05:50Money was poured into building the factories that Germany needed
05:53if she was to keep on fighting, which she did.
05:55As a result then of the original demand for fertiliser,
06:00the First World War lasted four years,
06:02when it might well have ended in less than one.
06:09That leaves only one thread hanging in our story.
06:13What happened to the acetylene?
06:14You remember?
06:15That was a bit of a flop except for this.
06:19Oxy-acetylene welding.
06:20Well, that turned out to be the most extraordinary thing of all.
06:24In 1912, an obstinate German chemist called Fritz Klattie
06:28was still trying to do things with acetylene.
06:31And one day, one of his mixtures was sitting on a sunny window shelf
06:34when it gradually went thick and milky.
06:37Now, whatever it was, it wasn't what Klattie was looking for.
06:40And being the kind of guy who didn't like things to be left lying around,
06:44down the drain it went.
06:45What?
06:45What?
06:46What?
06:50Poor old Klattie.
06:52You know what he said afterwards?
06:53He said, I didn't think it was much use to anyone.
06:56How wrong can you get?
07:0527 years after Fritz Klattie had flushed away his useless sludge,
07:09at the 1939 World's Fair in New York,
07:12millions came to see what other people had done with that muck.
07:15You've already seen clues to why Fritz Klattie had boomed in this film,
07:33shot in colour by a Lithuanian visitor to the fair
07:36and never screened till now,
07:38showing the world on the first day of a new era.
07:41The fair was the first big public display of something we today cannot do without.
08:02One of the real crowd stoppers at the fair was the DuPont Pavilion,
08:10a place where people stepped into the future,
08:12into a Flash Gordon world where chemistry made scientific magic.
08:17And one of the most magical things
08:18came from the stuff that Fritz Klattie had thrown away all those years before.
08:23If only he'd had his ingredients a fraction different,
08:26he would have turned his acetylene muck into a usable polymer.
08:29That's a bunch of supergiant molecules that can be turned into an artificial substance.
08:35Now why did that matter?
08:36Well, the First World War gave both Germany and America a severe rubber shortage
08:42and they were desperate for a substitute.
08:44And they found it.
08:46And then, in 1938, DuPont came up with the most famous substitute of all,
08:50itself made of supergiant molecules,
08:53that their man, Wallace Carruthers, had found.
08:55You know where?
08:57In our old friend, Cole Tarr.
09:00And that's why DuPont stopped the crowds.
09:02Everybody was high on substitutes.
09:04It was inevitable that it was America
09:17that would take the lead in making and using the new substitutes.
09:21There, more than anywhere else, novelty meant progress.
09:25And at the rate these new materials were coming out from the test tube,
09:28paradoxically, novelty was here to stay.
09:31You see, what a strange trail has brought us to the 1939 DuPont Pavilion.
09:41It started round 1600 with the Floyd,
09:43a Dutch super ship that put fat profits into overseas trade
09:47and sent the English hurrying across the oceans to build an empire
09:50on ships that had to be insured.
09:52And how Lloyds of London wouldn't insure those ships
09:56unless their hulls were covered with a protective coating of tar.
10:00Tar that came from America
10:01until the American War of Independence stopped supply,
10:05forcing people like the Earl of Dundonald
10:07to look for the tar in coal
10:09and accidentally make gas.
10:12And how the coal tar sludge
10:13that the gas makers were throwing away
10:15was picked up by McIntosh
10:17for his rubber products
10:18that he couldn't get from the Far East
10:20because the imperial administration
10:22was too interested in making quinine
10:24in order to fight malaria.
10:26And how Perkin, looking for artificial quinine,
10:29ended up with artificial dye
10:31and boosted the German economy and its industries
10:34to the point where the population rose so high
10:36it could only be fed with the help of fertilisers
10:39produced through the acetylene process.
10:41And how the other fertiliser they tried
10:43made all the explosives necessary
10:45to keep their artillery shells
10:47firing right through World War I.
10:50A war which caused the kind of shortages
10:52that forced them back to acetylene for substitutes.
10:55And how finally,
10:57DuPont came up with the greatest substitute of all.
11:00Initially, they thought of calling it DuPeru.
11:03That stands for
11:04DuPont pulled a rabbit out of a hat.
11:07Finally, though,
11:08they settled on nylon.
11:09And nylon opened the door to our modern world.
11:14A world full of substitute materials
11:17without which we cannot survive.
11:19A world which,
11:19because of those substitute materials,
11:21changes every day.
11:23A world of plastic.
11:27Because of plastic,
11:29that rate of change accelerates every year.
11:33It's fun.
11:34But can we keep it up?
11:39And,
11:56and
11:59Oh, my God.
12:29Oh, my God.
12:59Oh, my God.
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