- 6 weeks ago
Documentary, Connections Episode 9 Countdown James Burke
Connections is a science education television series created, written, and presented by British science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science and Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (US). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention, and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology. The series was noted for Burke's crisp and enthusiastic presentation (and dry humour), historical re-enactments, and intricate working models.
The popular success of the series led to the production of The Day the Universe Changed (1985), a similar programme, but showing a more linear history of several important scientific developments and their more philosophic impact on Western civilisation.
Years later, the success in syndication led to three sequels. Connections2 (1994) and Connections3 (1997) were made for TLC. In November 2023, the six-episode series Connections with James Burke, premièred on Curiosity Stream, again with Burke as the on-screen presenter. [1]
In 2004, KCSM-TV produced a program called Re-Connections, consisting of an interview of Burke and highlights of the original series, for the 25th anniversary of the first broadcast in the US on PBS
Connections is a science education television series created, written, and presented by British science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science and Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (US). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention, and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology. The series was noted for Burke's crisp and enthusiastic presentation (and dry humour), historical re-enactments, and intricate working models.
The popular success of the series led to the production of The Day the Universe Changed (1985), a similar programme, but showing a more linear history of several important scientific developments and their more philosophic impact on Western civilisation.
Years later, the success in syndication led to three sequels. Connections2 (1994) and Connections3 (1997) were made for TLC. In November 2023, the six-episode series Connections with James Burke, premièred on Curiosity Stream, again with Burke as the on-screen presenter. [1]
In 2004, KCSM-TV produced a program called Re-Connections, consisting of an interview of Burke and highlights of the original series, for the 25th anniversary of the first broadcast in the US on PBS
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LearningTranscript
00:00Oh
00:30This is a monument to one of the greatest technological triumphs in the history of mankind.
00:46And for those of us who witnessed what happened here at 9.32 on the morning of July the 16th, 1969,
00:54it's an object that brings back, as fresh as if it were yesterday,
00:58one of the most profoundly moving events of our lives.
01:02For it was from this tower that Apollo 11 lifted off on incandescent flame and thunder
01:09to carry man to the surface of the moon for the first time.
01:13An estimated 1,000 million people watched the moon landing.
01:18And what that landing involved still somehow staggers the imagination today.
01:25Because it involved launching from the earth which was spinning at 1,000 miles an hour
01:31and at the same time circling the sun at nearly 70,000 miles an hour
01:35and launching from a point on earth away from where the moon was
01:39and then aiming at a point in space where the moon would be in three days' time.
01:44And then, after a journey of 240,000 miles, landing within one and a half miles of the target point.
01:55Apollo is a supreme example of why technology is so often a double-edged weapon.
02:00Because the navigational instruments developed to make a precision landing on the surface of the moon
02:05make child's play of the business of moving from one part of our planet to another.
02:11Those instruments are basically what takes your holiday jet to its destination virtually unaided.
02:20They also make it possible to launch an intercontinental ballistic missile
02:24carrying several atomic warheads,
02:26each one of which can be independently guided to within 100 yards of its target point.
02:33Now, what that means is that the underground missile sites of the other side are no longer safe.
02:41They will not survive attack so as to be used in retaliation afterwards.
02:46Now, the temptation, when you know that fact, is to launch your missiles first.
02:51The question is, will that happen?
02:56It's not a new problem.
02:58This is the second time in history that a major breakthrough in missile technology
03:02has fundamentally changed the situation.
03:05The last time, 600 years ago, the missile was a cannonball.
03:11And look what happened then.
03:13The last time, 600 years ago, the missile was a cannonball.
03:14The missile was a cannonball.
03:15The missile was a cannonball.
03:16The missile was a cannonball.
03:17The missile was a cannonball.
03:18The missile was a cannonball.
03:19The missile was a cannonball.
03:20The missile was a cannonball.
03:21The missile was a cannonball.
03:22The missile was a cannonball.
03:23The missile was a cannonball.
03:24The missile was a cannonball.
03:25The missile was a cannonball.
03:26The missile was a cannonball.
03:27The missile was a cannonball.
03:28The missile was a cannonball.
03:29The missile was a cannonball.
03:30The missile was a cannonball.
03:31The missile was a cannonball.
03:32The missile was a cannonball.
03:33The missile was a cannonball.
03:34The missile was a cannonball.
03:35The missile was a cannonball.
03:3615th century Europe was a place where hardly a day went by without somebody fighting somebody.
03:48But in those early years of the use of gunpowder, the cannon was more bang and smoke than real
03:53impact.
03:54Still, it frightened people enough.
03:57Then the armies devastating the countryside stopped firing stones and rubble and started
04:02using the new iron cannonballs.
04:04And life in places like this became very earnest.
04:08This is Egmont in the south of France, built in marshland on the edge of the Mediterranean
04:13and nothing much has ever happened here.
04:15As you can see, it's never been destroyed by cannon fire.
04:19Which is why it serves as a perfect example of why most of the other places like it were.
04:25It's one of the most untouched examples of a pre-cannonball medieval fortification and it's
04:30also quite beautiful.
04:32When this place was built in 1300, life was simple.
04:46Wrap-around vision from these drum towers gave your archers complete command of anything within
04:50bow shot.
04:51Nice, tall, slim walls.
04:53Proof against catapults, battering rams, knights on horseback, you name it.
05:00And if anybody should try to scale the walls, boiling oil.
05:05The cannonball changed everything.
05:06It knocked the tall walls down.
05:08Couldn't miss.
05:09And if they started firing at you from long range, the only way to hit them was to get
05:12your own cannon and fire back.
05:14And that left one problem.
05:15And you're in it.
05:17If I come down there and play the part of the attacker and you go up there on the castle
05:20walls and be the defender, I'll show you what I mean.
05:23Okay, follow me with your gun.
05:26You can see me.
05:27You can still see me.
05:29But now you can't see me.
05:32Now go to the other side of the tower.
05:34Okay, now follow me again.
05:37You can see me.
05:38You can still see me.
05:39But now you can't see me.
05:44So there's a blind spot in front of this round tower that you can't cover.
05:48It's in the area between these white tapes, you see?
05:51Now if I can get my commandos in here, I can blow this wall up and there's nothing you
05:53can do about it.
05:55So what's the best solution to your problem?
05:57You've got a hole.
05:58Yes.
05:59Fill it.
06:00Build the tower this shape.
06:03And about 1450, that's just what they did.
06:09It was an Italian idea, and it totally altered the shape of towns.
06:17This is what the new pointed rampart looked like, called a bastion, and because it made
06:22town walls look star-shaped, the new defensive layout became known as the Star Fort.
06:36The architects that used to build these things used to come along to Townsend,
06:39and sell the idea rather like you sell cloth.
06:41They'd say, you know, how many bastions can you afford?
06:43You know, we can give you five, six, two, whatever you like.
06:46And the town would buy whatever it could afford.
06:48But you forgot the cost once you came up onto the bastions.
06:51Here you get a warmly impregnable feeling.
06:54Look around.
06:55The walls are nice and low.
06:56They're very difficult to hit.
06:58They're sloped so that any cannonball that hits them will ricochet off.
07:01And they're built in brick to withstand impact.
07:04Now, one bastion protects another.
07:06You see over there in that inlet, there would be guns over there firing along the side of
07:10my bastion protecting me, and I can do precisely the same thing for the other bastion.
07:15And what is more, between us, we can put up really withering crossfire in this area protecting
07:19the main wall of the fortress.
07:22And to that scheme, the island in the moat, the ravelin, as it's called, and put guns
07:28on it, and you're really wrapped up nice and snug.
07:30And should the enemy, by any chance, get onto that island, well, you simply get a big pile
07:33of guns on this bastion, a big pile of guns on the other bastion, and you blow them to
07:38kingdom come.
07:39That's what was so good about these bastions.
07:41Look, the guns in the little inlet behind one bastion covered the next, and their neighbours
07:54returned the favour.
07:55They also protected the main wall, if you got past this defence.
08:00And you never even got that far.
08:02The entire town was snug behind a cat's cradle of cannon fire.
08:19You wanted straight streets to move guns and ammunition from bastion to bastion if needed,
08:23so town planning got a boost.
08:26From mid-16th century onwards, people stood a fair chance of living out their lives in
08:30safety behind their new walls.
08:33All they needed was food and, of course, ammunition.
08:40Now some of these places had as many as old, 200 guns firing about once every 10 minutes.
08:45The guns were zeroed up before they were put into position, that is to say, they were test
08:48fired.
08:49You fire the gun horizontally and see where the ball drops, then you raise it one degree,
08:53see where the ball drops, raise it one more degree, see how far the ball goes, and so
08:56on until you reach maximum range.
08:59Now since you live here, and you know exactly how far across the moat the enemy are, you
09:02know the angle at which your gun has to be in order to hit them.
09:05To get that angle right, you use an adapted astronomical instrument like this, it's called
09:09a gunner's quadrant, dead simple to use, you just shove it down the muzzle, and watch
09:14where the plumb line goes past the scale, so you know the angle of elevation of your
09:18gun, and knowing that, you're ready to load and fire.
09:23Well, except for one thing, does your gunpowder work as well as it should, and that's what
09:27that rather silly pole is all about over there.
09:31Testing gunpowder was a bit like going to the fairground, because this is what you did,
09:34you took a measured amount of standard gunpowder, and you put it in that cup like that, and then
09:39you put a cannonball of a known weight on top, and then you lit the fuse, and stood back,
09:44and depending on how far up the pole the ball went, you knew whether your gunpowder was okay
09:48or not.
10:18Well, so much for the defenders.
10:24What about the attackers out here?
10:26Well, they had a much harder time.
10:28They had to try and get those guns on the bastions out with whatever they were carrying at the
10:32time, the instruments they had.
10:34In general, that tended to be this.
10:35It's an astronomical instrument called an astrolabe.
10:37It's a kind of medieval astronomer's computer that can do all sorts of amazing things relating
10:41to the sky and eclipses and so on.
10:43Fortunately for the illiterate gunners, on the back it has a very simple star sighting device,
10:48which you can also use to find out how high above you those guns are that you want to
10:51knock out.
10:52You just line up the sights, read off the thing, and it says seven degrees, so you know
10:57how high to elevate your gun.
10:58Okay, how far away are they?
11:00That's important.
11:01Well, if you take the astrolabe and turn it like that, horizontal, you end up with a device
11:07that was called a circumferenta.
11:08Here's one, and that's used for getting the distance away from you that those guns are.
11:12You line it up north-south because it's got a compass.
11:15Then you use these two sights here to draw a bead on the guns you want to destroy.
11:19And you can see from the scale how many degrees they are away from north to one side, as it
11:23were, from you here.
11:24You then go down the road a known distance and do that again.
11:27And that comes down to some very simple geometry, which they used to do on their drum heads
11:30like this.
11:31We're here.
11:33That other observation point, let's say, is down there, and we know that's 100 metres
11:36away.
11:37We just took a bead on the guns that was this much off north, if that's north.
11:41Down the road, when we did it, perhaps it would have been like that.
11:44So we know that the gun we want to hit is there.
11:46If we get a pair of compasses and use a scale, if that's 100 metres, then that's going to
11:50be about 110, and this is going to be about 105.
11:53So we know how far away to shoot if we're going to shoot from here or here.
11:57Fine.
11:58That was all right, except that while you were doing all this, they shot you.
12:01So when Leonard Diggs, an Englishman, brought out in about 1560 a thing called a Theodolite
12:05that did all these jobs in one go, he was a very popular fellow.
12:10This is it.
12:11See, it's got a plumb line, so you can set it up straight, and a built-in compass for
12:15pointing north.
12:17Well the bit for finding the angle of the target off to one side of you works exactly the same
12:23way as the circumferenta.
12:26And so does the geometry bit that you do afterwards to find out how far away from the target your
12:30guns will be once you've done two sightings.
12:34The new thing is the part that tells you how high up the target is, this bit.
12:39With Diggs's Theodolites, you know all you need fast enough to stay alive.
12:44What you don't know is whether you're in the right place or not, because in spite of
12:48all these sophisticated instruments, at the time maps were a joke.
12:52Look, this is all you've got.
12:54The rivers you were going to cross, a few bridges where there was a bridge, and if there was
12:58a town that was going to give you something to eat, you've got a little box with a steeple
13:02on it.
13:03That's all you had.
13:04No wonder so many people got lost.
13:05Anyway, Leonard Diggs and his Theodolite solved that map-making problem, thanks in the main
13:10case.
13:11This is the short but sobering tale of what happened to Monasteries in England because Henry VIII
13:28divorced his wife, and how little Jack Horner pulled out his plumb.
13:35Henry VIII divorced his wife in defiance of the Pope, turned the country Protestant, and
13:47in 1536 started taking their land and properties away from these monasteries.
13:52A, because they were Catholic, and B, because they had twice as much money as he had, and
13:57he was a bit short of cash.
14:06Now at some places, like Glastonbury, they thought they knew how to buy a little thyme.
14:18The idea was probably cooked up by the abbot's steward, a certain Jack Horner.
14:24Send a pie to the king containing title deeds to some abbey properties.
14:37This rich little pie filling was supposed to make the king conveniently forget the rest
14:41of the abbey's property.
14:42Well, on the way to London, little Jack Horner pulled out his plumb, one of the property
14:47deeds, and the king got what was left, which wasn't enough.
15:03So the plan failed.
15:04Henry took everything.
15:06And that's why map-making got better.
15:08But when Henry sold all those monastic lands, he kicked off a surveyor's bonanza, because
15:13all the buyers wanted their land measured first.
15:25Christopher Saxton, one of the surveyors, put his profession on the map in 1584 by producing
15:30the first national atlas in the Western world, showing almost every river and town, and a rough
15:36idea of the terrain.
15:37His maps didn't, of course, include Scotland, because it was a separate sovereign state at
15:42the time.
15:46Strangely enough, John Ogilby left Scotland out of his maps, too, nearly a hundred years
15:50later, when Scotland was ruled from London.
15:54These were the first systematic surveys of all main roads in the country, and like this
15:58one, of the road north from London, they showed county names, towns, bridges, and distance
16:04marked by the new statute mile.
16:06And yet Ogilby went only as far as the border with all this fancy detail.
16:12Up here in the Scottish Highlands there wasn't anything like that.
16:15I mean, why bother, said the English, look at it, there's nothing worth bothering about.
16:19Well, the 1715 rebellion proved that there was, and still nothing was done.
16:25Until, in 1724, the member of parliament for Bath, a retired major general called George
16:31Wade, was sent up here to report on how the post-war pacification of the clans was going.
16:37He wrote back a letter saying that it wasn't, and that they were as ready to revolt as they
16:41ever had been, and that what this country needed was more garrisons, more troops, and above
16:46all, a road to move the troops around on.
16:50So the king said, okay, go ahead, and they started to work.
16:52The work took 500 men with picks and shovels, and they laid a layer of large stones, then
16:58a layer of smaller stones, and then packed the surface with gravel, and when necessary,
17:03built drainage ditches on either side of the road.
17:06When the military road was finished, it was one of the best in Europe, and to this day,
17:11it's named after the man who built it.
17:14This is called Wade's Road.
17:36The English were so pleased with Wade, that in 1745, when he was using his road to chase
17:45Bonnie Prince Charlie, they even added a verse to the national anthem.
17:49God grant that Marshal Wade may by thy mighty aid victory bring, may he sedition hush, and
17:56like a torrent rush, rebellious Scots to crush, God save the king.
18:01To a roadmaker, the road over Coriarrick Pass must rank as Wade's greatest triumph.
18:18It's ironic, because he built it for English soldiers going north, and in 1745, Bonnie Prince
18:22Charlie used it for Scottish soldiers going south on the trip that took them to 130 miles
18:27from London, and the banks collapsed, and everybody panicked, and the king packed his bags.
18:31It was the 1745 rebellion that actually finally convinced the English that they should map Scotland
18:36for their generals.
18:38And one of the surveyors on that job was a fellow called Roy, and he kept pushing for
18:42a national map of the entire island, and still nothing was done.
18:46And again it took war, this time the fear of invasion from France, to get the English to
18:51move.
18:52Finally, in 1791, the Ordnance Survey was set up, and off they went.
18:59In 1820, they decided to map Ireland, and that decision helped kick off a new kind of illumination,
19:06because the very first measurement they wanted to take was from Divis Mountain here outside
19:10Belfast, right the way across over to that mountain in Donegal, called Slevesnacht.
19:16You remember that business the Gunners did of working out how far away a target was by drawing
19:35a triangle?
19:36That's what triangulation is.
19:37Well, Divis and Slevesnacht were two points of a triangle, with the third on a mountain
19:42in Scotland.
19:44In autumn 1824, the problem was you couldn't see from Divis to Slevesnacht, because the
19:49weather was so bad.
19:50Weeks of fiddling went by, and still, every time the Royal Engineers looked through the
19:55murk, all they got was an eyeful of murk.
19:58They lit fires on Slevesnacht, they stuck poles on it, nothing.
20:03And you can't be master of all you do not survey.
20:06So the English went rather politely hysterical, when at the Tower of London, in a patriotic
20:12little ceremony, a young surveyor called William Drummond came up with the answer.
20:17The show took place in the armoury and, quite literally, dazzled everybody.
20:35William Drummond had invented a light you could stick on any mountain and see for miles.
20:40The Irish problem was solved, thanks to a shining example of British genes.
20:56Inferior foreign lights paled into insignificance besides the brilliance of Drummond's device,
21:01and English hearts burst with pride, because now they could measure Ireland, they could tax
21:05it better.
21:18The new light worked like this.
21:20Up three tubes came alcohol, hydrogen and oxygen.
21:24These were sprayed onto a piece of limestone and ignited.
21:27Behind the limestone, a curved reflector.
21:30As the flames heated up the limestone, it would grow brighter and brighter until, in the end,
21:35it would become incandescent.
21:47When they put Drummond's limelight on the mountain, their troubles were over.
21:55By 1829, Drummond was trying to get his limelight into lighthouses, the obvious place to put it.
22:00Early tests had shown that at night, the light was so intense it cast a shadow at a distance
22:04of ten miles from the lighthouse.
22:07But problems with leaking gas, and not enough gas, and too expensive gas, finally convinced
22:12the authorities that although limelight was just what they needed, it was going to cost
22:16more than they were prepared to pay.
22:17So Drummond dropped the idea.
22:27Still, that wasn't the end of limelight, as I'm sure you've guessed.
22:30Well, I reckon the second you realise where I am now, you also realise where Drummond took
22:41his limelight next, into the theatre, where limelight took on the meaning it has in the
22:45modern world.
22:46Of course, theatres at the time were already lit, by gas.
22:52Trouble was, it wasn't just the stage that was lit, many of the fairy came to grief when
22:57her dress got a bit too close to one of these open gas footlights.
22:59And whole theatres went up in flames.
23:02Carelessness, leaking gas.
23:04But it wasn't just the fires that got Drummond into the theatre.
23:08I mean, what actor could resist stepping into the brilliance of limelight?
23:12And so, from 1837 on, limelight was everywhere, from pantomime to opera to Shakespeare.
23:20Like Henry Irving's production of Macbeth got panned.
23:24Critics didn't think the limelight looked real enough.
23:28And since we've arrived at a rather theatrical period in history, let me explain what happened
23:32next, the way they would have told you.
23:37And now, ladies and gentlemen, for a brief series of morally uplifting vignettes, illustrating
23:42dedicated 19th century genius at work.
23:46Observe the fatal problem of the day.
23:51Rock A inadequately illuminated.
23:53Volter ships B to strike rock A, sinking to watery grave C.
24:01In 1845, over 1,000 such incidents occurred.
24:04Solution, rocks A need lighthouses B so that ships C may avoid rocks A thanks to lighthouses B.
24:14Problem, Drummond's limelight demands too much gas.
24:18Solution, Volter's pile, which, as the demonstratory digit shows, is composed of discs of differing
24:27metals which give off electricity.
24:30Discharge aforesaid electricity into indicated water via electrodes so that aforesaid water
24:38gives off the two gases necessary for limelight, hydrogen and oxygen.
24:45Problem, not enough electricity.
24:48Solution, Professor Floris Nolley of Belgium's amazing 1850 machine.
24:53Spin wheels carrying copper wire discs B past magnets A, so that magnets A induce in copper
25:02wire coils B enough electricity to produce aforementioned gases.
25:09Problem, Professor Nolley's company embezzles.
25:13Solution, his British colleague Holmes improves the machine.
25:17This is a giant version of Nolley's idea, carrying 96 coils, 56 magnets and weighing a colossal
25:25three tons.
25:26So, by 1871, thanks to British genius, the mighty Holmes generator was powering the world's
25:33first fully operational lighthouse, carrying not the limelight, but a mysterious new source
25:39of light.
25:40So mysterious that, problem, it demands more power than Holmes can give.
25:44Fortunately, solution, Holmes is already obsolete.
25:49Because of this.
25:51One year before, a Belgian carpenter, Zeneby Graham, had put iron magnets A, coiled with
25:57copper wire, below and above an iron wheel, coiled with copper wire, B.
26:03As wheel B spins, magnets A induce it with electricity, which in turn induce more magnetic power into
26:11magnets A, which in turn induce more electricity in wheel B, which et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,
26:16et cetera.
26:17The dynamo produced enough electricity to power the mysterious light source which had defeated
26:23Holmes, the arc light.
26:25Well, enough of the theatrical stuff.
26:31Let me tell you about the arc light.
26:32Oh, which incidentally is that thing you've been seeing at the beginning of every programme.
26:36It was the world's first electric light.
26:38You ran electricity into two pointed bits of carbon.
26:52As they almost touched, the current sparked across the gap and the carbon burned.
26:58The arc light made limelight look like a candle flame.
27:02And in no time it was in lighthouses all over Europe and America.
27:05And the crafty thing was, the mechanism to move the carbon rods was run by the same electricity
27:11that produced the light.
27:13A light you could see as far as the horizon.
27:18The arc light was as big a success in the theatre as it was in lighthouses.
27:22It got rid of limelight for a start.
27:24It also did something else.
27:27You've seen how change comes about in funny ways because of war or accident or climate or
27:31any number of things.
27:33Well, sometimes it also happens because all the bits necessary for an invention happen
27:38to come together in the same place at the same time.
27:41Well, the arc light turned out to be one of those bits.
27:44And the modern invention it helped to bring into existence is sitting in your house right now.
27:49The arc light was only the first bit.
27:51The second nearly didn't happen at all because of that.
27:55These are the docks at the quiet little Kentish town of Favosham, not to remain quiet for long.
28:06Early in 1847, a local factory had just started production of a new explosive.
28:11It was made by soaking cotton in nitric and sulphuric acid, a process which the inventor assured them
28:26was totally without risk.
28:41Everything within a quarter of a mile was destroyed and 21 people were killed.
28:57Ten of them exploded to bits, said the Illustrated London News.
29:01Can't have been much left to illustrate.
29:04Well, that blew it, if you'll forgive the phrase, for gun cotton and the search for a bigger
29:09and better bang for almost 20 years.
29:12And then one day in 1863, in the United States, there was a sudden and worrying shortage of teeth.
29:18A particular kind of teeth.
29:20This kind.
29:21You see, the great white hunter had been knocking off African elephants so fast
29:25that there was now a shortage of billiard balls, because you get four of them from one of these.
29:31So there was now a $10,000 prize being offered for anybody who could come up with a substitute
29:36for ivory billiard balls.
29:37And yes, you've guessed it, gun cotton was involved again, mixed with camphor and alcohol and compressed.
29:43And the fellow who did it was very good at pressing things, because he was a printer from Albany, New York.
29:49His name was John Wesley Hyatt, and you could say his balls went down with quite a bang.
29:54The scene, a Colorado saloon.
30:14Enter a Hyatt billiard ball salesman.
30:16Now, we only know of this curious event, the only recorded failure of Hyatt's billiard balls,
30:25because the saloon keeper wrote to the company afterwards
30:28to complain about what happened the day a mysterious stranger rode into town
30:32and walked into his bar, carrying a funny-looking case.
30:37At first, he and his ball seemed harmless enough.
30:57But remember, the shell of the ball was made with gun cotton, the explosive.
31:02Get it?
31:02Suddenly, it made the kind of noise you never made in a Western saloon,
31:11a noise like gunfire.
31:13Oh!
31:17It's the best music for this retailer!
31:28Eloise Ghost in slow motion.
31:34That's what you do.
31:36You donne thebewγγ.
31:37Let's go, οΏ½' animated.
31:38Don't go, οΏ½' divin.
31:39Oh, Giba Hamer.
31:40lessons are great for you to do by your good generalγ§γγ.
31:41OK. So far, in this final build-up of the jigsaw of invention, we've got two bits,
31:57the arc light and Hyatt's billiard ball with its explosive tendencies.
32:01The third bit comes next.
32:03It started life originally in Vienna through a very odd relationship
32:08between an Austrian artillery officer and a rather theatrical gent.
32:19The officer was teaching ballistic theory to army cadets in 1853 here in Vienna at the new arsenal.
32:26His name was Franz Eucatius, and he'd recently invented a thing to help him teach students about firing guns.
32:33It was a kind of projector using a limelight to throw pictures of a cannon on the wall.
32:36As he cranked the light round behind a glass disc with the pictures on it,
32:41each successive picture showed the ball at a different point in flight.
32:44And why Captain Eucatius matters is what happened to his projector.
32:59It attracted the attention of one of the three greatest travelling magicians in the world,
33:03a fellow called Ludwig DΓΆrbler.
33:15DΓΆrbler's audiences were very excited by his magic lantern shows,
33:18and the new Eucatius machine was just what he needed.
33:22So he conned Eucatius into thinking the whole thing was worth practically nothing,
33:25leaving the captain happily clutching a few florins and DΓΆrbler happily palming a fortune,
33:32which he made from his amazing consecutive picture show that soon became The Rage of Europe,
33:37and more significantly, the west coast of the United States.
33:40It was in California that this guy, Edward Muybridge,
33:47took the idea of consecutive pictures one very important stage further.
33:51See, Muybridge was an English immigrant, photographer,
33:54and close friend of the governor of California,
33:57who in 1872 asked him if he'd use his camera to settle a bet he had.
34:02Muybridge agreed, and because he was a photographer,
34:05he took a shot of the preparation.
34:12The experiment took place at the Union Park racecourse in Sacramento.
34:24Did all a horse's legs come off the ground at the gallop?
34:27That was the question Muybridge had to settle.
34:29So, he set up 12 cameras in a row,
34:34pointing straight across the racetrack at intervals of 21 inches,
34:38and worked by a system thought out by a railway engineer friend of his.
34:42Each camera was operated by a triggering device
34:45that was activated when a piece of thread attached to it was jerked,
34:48opening and closing the shutter.
34:50The thread from each camera shutter was stretched across the racetrack.
35:00As the galloping horse passed,
35:02it would break the thread, triggering the camera.
35:04They even put numbers across the track
35:06to process the photographs in the right order.
35:08As it turned out, the governor was wrong.
35:21All four legs of the horse did leave the ground.
35:23But this particular photography session
35:39did something far more exciting
35:40than just settling a bet at a racetrack.
35:43In 1879, Muybridge put paintings of his photographs
35:57onto a glass disc,
35:59shone a light through it,
36:00and then spun the disc.
36:04And the horse appeared to move.
36:07He called it his zoopraxiscope.
36:09Muybridge's zoopraxiscope is the third bit of our jigsaw of invention.
36:14You remember the first two were the Arclight and Hyatt's brilliard ball.
36:18It took only one more piece
36:20to make up all the pieces necessary
36:22for a major invention in the modern world.
36:25And here's what caused that fourth piece to happen.
36:29If you've got single-track railways,
36:31which they did in America,
36:33you've got yourself a singularly difficult problem.
36:35You have to have trains going in both directions.
36:37That's OK, because you can put one train on a siding
36:40while the other goes by,
36:41if you get your timing right.
36:43If you don't,
36:45you get trains going in both directions,
36:47but not for long.
36:48These sudden stops stopped in 1856
37:09when a network of signalling stations was set up
37:12using the recently invented Morse telegraph system.
37:15The key sent a coded electrical signal down a wire
37:18and when the on-off electricity got to the other end,
37:22it turned a magnet on and off,
37:24making a metal bar click up and down,
37:26sounding out the code.
37:27Now we come to the part where the jigsaw gets put together.
37:33And that happened here in this room in New Jersey
37:36in the last quarter of the 19th century.
37:38And it was done by a man
37:39who put together more jigsaws than anybody ever did,
37:42a fellow called Thomas Edison.
37:44He took the arc light idea of making a glow
37:47by causing a spark to jump across two carbon rods like this.
37:50Then he went through, oh,
37:556,000 different carbonised materials
37:57before settling on carbonised thread,
37:59put that thread inside a glass bulb,
38:02and succeeded where maybe 20 people before him had failed
38:05because he had the one thing they didn't have,
38:07this new German vacuum pump,
38:09which allowed him to have an almost perfect vacuum
38:11inside his bulb.
38:12He then ran electricity through the thread,
38:15and there, in 1879,
38:18was the world's first commercially feasible electric light.
38:22Now, what do you do with that?
38:24Well, you remember Hyatt's billiard ball?
38:28The outer shell of that was made of a material
38:30which an obscure clergyman called Hannibal Goodwin
38:32turned into sheets,
38:34and a famous businessman called Eastman
38:37put into a camera.
38:40Celluloid.
38:41In 1886, Muybridge, remember him?
38:44Talked to Edison about his moving horse pictures,
38:47and Edison then asked Eastman
38:49if he would make him a long strip of this celluloid,
38:51and on that he put a lot of pictures,
38:53taken very quickly, one after the other,
38:55just like Muybridge had done.
38:57He also put a lot of holes on the strip
38:59so that he could move it
39:00because the holes would get caught
39:02in a spinning wheel that had teeth in it.
39:06Down there is one of Edison's kinetoscopes
39:08in which he put the whole thing together.
39:11Celluloid.
39:13Toothed wheel in there.
39:14Back here, the light source
39:15that would later on become a light bulb.
39:19And I don't have to tell you
39:20what that all came together to become.
39:23Roll'em.
39:24The trail has led us to the movies.
39:30You remember how the cannonball changed things
39:32in the 15th century,
39:33causing a new kind of defensive fortification?
39:35And how the gunners used instruments to line up their guns?
39:46And when Henry VIII closed all the monasteries
39:49and sold the land,
39:50those same instruments helped surveyors
39:52make maps of everywhere but Scotland.
39:56Until Wade built his road
39:57and they decided to map the whole of Britain
39:59but got nowhere in Ireland
40:01until William Drummond produced his new limelight,
40:05surveyors could see from miles away.
40:06And how he tried it in lighthouses
40:11because too many ships were going down.
40:14But the limelight needed so much gas,
40:16Nolley and Holmes tried making it
40:18with electricity generators
40:20that Graham improved on
40:21enough to be able to power the arclight.
40:23And how this arclight
40:25was the first piece of a four-part jigsaw.
40:28The second piece being Hyatt's billiard ball
40:32that sometimes had explosive tendencies
40:34in unfortunate places.
40:40The third piece was the projector
40:42for teaching artillery students
40:43that Durbler made famous.
40:47And Muybridge picked up the idea
40:48to make consecutive pictures
40:50that appeared to move when they were on film.
40:55Which leaves the fourth piece,
40:57the Morse Telegraph,
40:58which I haven't explained yet.
41:02The moving pictures rapidly became all the rage
41:04as the new wonder of science
41:06kicked off Hollywood and all that.
41:09The only trouble with the new moving pictures was...
41:14Now, recorded sound was already around,
41:17thanks again to Edison.
41:19You see, early in his life,
41:20he'd worked as a telegraph operator
41:22using the Morse Telegraph.
41:25And he'd put together some ideas
41:26that had already been around for some time.
41:28In order to make this,
41:30it's called a repeating telegraph.
41:32The Morse code signal comes in here,
41:35and as it comes in, like this,
41:38it makes that needle go up and down
41:41and make indentations on that piece of paper.
41:44When you've recorded the message,
41:46you take the bit of paper off,
41:48flip it over, put it on this turntable,
41:50so that the little indentations
41:52have now become little bumps.
41:53And when you rotate this disc,
41:55the reading head goes up and down over the bumps,
41:58and when that happens,
42:00the up and down causes on-off electrical contact,
42:03and that sends the message out down the wire.
42:07The story is that one day,
42:08Edison heard this thing operating at high speed,
42:11and he noticed that it made a sort of musical sound
42:13as the reading head went over the bumps.
42:15And it hit him that that was how Bell's telephone worked.
42:19You spoke at a diaphragm, it vibrated,
42:22and you could reproduce that vibration
42:23on another diaphragm somewhere else and make speech.
42:26So Edison reckoned if he could make a diaphragm vibrate,
42:29he could make speech too.
42:31All he had to do was to make speech into bumps first.
42:34And here's how he did it.
42:36He took a diaphragm, put a needle on it,
42:38and rested the diaphragm on a strip of tinfoil
42:42wound around a metal cylinder.
42:44As you turned the cylinder, it moved along.
42:48So, doing so, he shouted at the diaphragm
42:51as loudly as possible,
42:53Mary had a little lamb,
42:55its fleece was white as snow.
42:59Then, he wound the cylinder back to the start point,
43:04put the needle back in the bumpy groove he'd just made,
43:08and this time, when he rotated the cylinder,
43:11what had gone in came back out.
43:14They got that sound onto film
43:24because years before,
43:25somebody had noticed that there was a metal called selenium
43:28that gave off electricity if you shone a light at it.
43:30And the more light, the more electricity.
43:32So, in 1923, somebody in Denmark got a light to flicker
43:38in response to a human voice
43:39and then exposed this strip here,
43:43down the side of a bit of film, to that flicker.
43:45So, the light and dark patches correspond to the changes in the voice.
43:49Now, when you screen this bit of film,
43:52more or less light gets through that strip
43:55and hits a piece of selenium which gives off more or less signals,
43:58and that goes into a loudspeaker,
44:01and so movies become talkies.
44:04And that takes us to the modern invention that ends our story.
44:07Because in 1928,
44:10a Russian immigrant to America called Vladimir Zwarikin
44:13took that selenium idea one stage further.
44:16He realised that if you made a square plate
44:19made up of rows and rows and rows of thousands of tiny little bits of light-sensitive metal
44:23and pointed the plate at a scene,
44:25each tiny bit of metal would react to a tiny bit of the scene.
44:29It would be like dividing a scene up,
44:31let's say, of my face,
44:33into thousands of little squares.
44:35Each tiny bit of light-sensitive metal
44:37would see darkness or darkness or darkness
44:41or half-light or a lot of light or a great deal of light
44:44and would give off a corresponding signal.
44:47Nothing, nothing, nothing, something,
44:50a great deal more, a lot of signal, and so on.
44:53Now, if you used those signals
44:55to reconstruct the picture line by line
44:59by using a fluorescent screen
45:02that reacted to the signals by producing a tiny dot of light
45:05that was more or less bright,
45:07you'd get this.
45:09Come a great deal closer, you'll see what I mean.
45:11This area here, look, on your television screen.
45:14You see all those lines of dots?
45:17So, television is where this particular chain of events
45:21brings us to, in the end.
45:23Well, not quite the end.
45:29It's ironic that the story of how television happened
45:32should have been told here in Edison's laboratory.
45:36Television tells us every day
45:38that we live in a world we don't understand,
45:39and yet in the main it does little to explain that world.
45:43It tells us of new products that make the products we have
45:47either old-fashioned or obsolete.
45:49Above all, if today we are aware
45:51of how fast the world around us is changing,
45:55it's because television acts
45:56as a relentless reminder of that fact.
45:58Planned obsolescence,
46:05the reason you buy a new model
46:07because they don't make last year's any more,
46:09affects the way we get our information, too.
46:11I mean, take a look at the newspapers
46:14and the TV programmes of 20 years ago,
46:16and you can see how much more slick,
46:18more brief,
46:19is today's treatment of the world we see.
46:23Communications technology has made it possible
46:24for us to see very much more,
46:26but we still only have the same amount of time to see it in.
46:29So does that fact accelerate change,
46:32the fact that we can be more quickly saturated
46:34by an idea or a product or an event?
46:38Does this cycle that goes
46:40interest in something, involvement in it,
46:43tiring of it and rejecting it
46:44and looking for something else,
46:46get shorter every decade?
46:48That shouldn't surprise you.
46:50Over 90% of the technologists and scientists
46:53and advertisers and salesmen
46:56that have ever lived are alive now.
46:59And they've all got a job to do, haven't they?
47:03I said it was ironic that we should be here
47:05because that overwhelming rate of change
47:07has come directly from the work of Edison
47:10and men like him.
47:12Edison invented inventing,
47:15here at the world's first industrial laboratory,
47:17and he laid down precise rules for it.
47:20Is there a market for the invention?
47:22Get financial backing before you start.
47:24Publicise the whole thing in advance
47:26so when it comes out the consumers are ready to pay for it.
47:28And plough every penny you make
47:30back into making more inventions.
47:33And that is how the modern world works.
47:36So, if you believe that science and technology
47:39have given us the highest standard of living in history
47:42or that they have trapped us inside a machine
47:44we can't escape from,
47:46we live in a situation we inherited
47:47as a result of a long and complex series of events
47:51through history.
47:51At no time in the past
47:53could anybody have known that what they were doing then
47:56would end up like this now.
47:57So, the next and last programme
48:01looks at whether or not we want to go on
48:04into the future like that.
48:06And if not like that,
48:08like what?
48:13And I hope to show
48:14that you can only know where you're going
48:16if you know where you've been.
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