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00:07You
00:37I remember my grandfather talking about his grandfather talking about his grandfather.
00:42I expect you to do too.
00:44Thing is, that's all it takes to get you back to the late 18th century.
00:47Three grandfathers' lifetimes.
00:49That's how close we are to it.
00:54And yet that world has disappeared so totally.
00:56It's like fairyland.
00:58Thatched cottages, meadows, happy peasants, a golden age.
01:15Garbage, all that.
01:16Nasty, brutish and short, that's what life was all about.
01:20And dirty and boring.
01:22And it had been like that for thousands of years.
01:25And then, suddenly...
01:28The whole complex, polluted, overpopulated, frenetic, non-stop, stressful, high-tech rat race that is the modern world.
01:38Life was suddenly no longer as simple as it had been.
01:44And the extraordinary thing is, none of that was planned.
01:49The fellow who caused it, and who ruined the watermill business, and then went on to change the entire world,
01:54in the lifespan of only three grandfathers, had no idea he was kicking off one, let alone two, revolution.
02:19Beneath the waves is where the first of these two revolutions starts.
02:22Back around 1750, here, on the lonely windswept cliffs of Cornwall, in the far west of England,
02:29where the people in these tin mines are busy tunnelling their way along,
02:33and finding this is taking them further and further out under the sea.
02:40Not surprisingly, the fellows who work in these underwater mines tend to come home wet.
02:47So, the thing to be is a fellow who makes pumps, and somebody's already done that.
03:01But, fortunately for our hero, his pumps don't work,
03:05in spite of the fact that they're supposed to be the latest high-tech stuff.
03:09Look, you've got a boiler, a piston, and a beam.
03:14Coal heats a boiler full of water to make steam.
03:18Here's the piston's cylinder.
03:20The steam comes in here, pushes the piston up, tilts this beam.
03:26The other end has a chain working a suction pump.
03:29Now, when the piston's all the way up, pipe ice-cold water onto the cylinder.
03:33It chills down fast, so the steam inside condenses.
03:38So a vacuum forms.
03:39So the pressure of the air outside the cylinder can push the piston down.
03:45That tilts the beam the other way, pulls up the pump chain, and so on.
03:51Except, every time you chill the cylinder, it gets that bit cooler.
03:56So next time, the steam coming in condenses early.
04:00So the vacuum forms halfway through the stroke.
04:02And this goes on happening, until the whole thing eventually grinds to a halt.
04:09Our hero, James Watt, realises that the problem is a chilly cylinder and its premature condensation.
04:15So, he links it to a separate condensing cylinder, submerged in ice water.
04:22So now the steam rushes in, pushes up the piston, open a valve,
04:26and the steam rushes out into the condensing cylinder and condenses.
04:32Vacuum forms everywhere, and the main piston comes down.
04:37That's it.
04:38The main cylinder's hot all the time.
04:40The condensing cylinder's cold all the time.
04:43You've got yourself a steam pump that works.
04:46And that, thinks James Watt, is that.
04:49And then his partners reveal what they have in mind.
04:56Which is to use steam power to drive factory machinery,
04:59so you can put the factories on the coal fields for fuel,
05:02and then put the workers next to the factories.
05:05We call the result the Industrial Revolution.
05:09And it created another problem.
05:11The population went up so fast, there was a real risk of starvation from lack of food.
05:16Which brings me back to James Watt again,
05:19and to one of those unknown facts about somebody,
05:21you win trivia games with.
05:26See, back in 1778, he's out in the mines selling steam pumps,
05:31and back at head office, they're screaming for invoices,
05:35letters of agreement, contracts, you know, bureaucracy.
05:38And the lawsuits, everybody's pirating his idea.
05:42He's up to here in paperwork, and what he desperately needs is a copier.
05:48So he invents one.
05:52It was a pretty simple idea, but it worked.
05:55Do your writing or drawing with a wet mix of ink and gum.
06:00Press on damp paper, and that's it.
06:03You can make copies till your ink and gum dry out.
06:06Great!
06:18And the reason I'm here in an Italian graveyard is because by the early 19th century,
06:25no office was complete without an advanced version of Watt's copier.
06:29And then, in 1823, Cyrus P. Dolkin of Concord, Massachusetts, found an even better way.
06:36This.
06:41No, not the lamp.
06:44This.
06:47Carbon black.
06:48And this.
06:50And this.
06:51Paraffin oil.
06:52You chill paraffin oil right down, and you get paraffin wax.
06:56Mix the paraffin wax with the carbon black, and spread the resulting gunk on the back of a page,
07:02and what you get is carbon paper.
07:05And how did that end up feeding people?
07:08Let me shed some light on that.
07:16Look closely at this incandescent event.
07:19See that stuff melting just below the match head, making the wood catch on fire?
07:24Paraffin wax.
07:25That's there because the match wouldn't work without it.
07:28As the phosphorus head ignited, you'd get flare, but you wouldn't get any flame.
07:35That's what two Swedish brothers called Lindström did in 1851.
07:39Put the new paraffin wax together with phosphorus, and invented the match.
07:46Of course, people had known for some time that phosphorus would burn,
07:50but it was something else about phosphorus that would feed all those people I mentioned before.
07:54And ironically, the fellow who discovered it, and became a world celebrity,
07:58did so by burning things.
08:03He was a German chemist called Liebig,
08:06and he burned plants to see what they took from the soil.
08:09In the ashes, what does he find but phosphorus?
08:12So he invents phosphorus fertilizer, doubles crop yields, bags of food,
08:17which is why all those industrial workers didn't end up dying of starvation.
08:25And that's why I'm here in this Italian graveyard.
08:29Because Liebig got all worked up about the English.
08:32By 1870, the fastest growing population in Europe,
08:35needing mountains of food,
08:37and processing 40,000 tons of phosphate fertilizer a year.
08:41And according to Liebig,
08:43raiding Italian cemeteries to get the raw materials.
08:48Bones, loaded with phosphorus.
08:54Wasn't true, of course, about us robbing graves.
08:57So, where are we?
08:58What steam engine leads to mass production,
09:01and his copier leads to matches and fertilizer and food?
09:05So now we have well-fed, well-lit factory workers.
09:10So, how are the factories going to get all the raw materials they need
09:13if the whole industrial shebang is to keep on growing?
09:16I'll tell you how.
09:17Or rather, what.
09:21They did it with this kind of steam power.
09:29Two grandfathers' lifetimes ago,
09:31when James Watt's steam engine was hauling trains everywhere,
09:35think of what all those people now moving around did to the gene pool.
09:41People who'd lived in the same town or village for generations
09:44were now able to travel all over the place
09:46and maybe end up meeting and marrying somebody
09:49from the other end of the country.
09:54And by the end of the 19th century,
09:56the railroads were keeping major cities alive with food and drink.
10:00I mean, nobody'd seen fresh milk in New York for a generation.
10:12By the early part of this century,
10:14the railroads were turning America into an economic superpower
10:17because the new travelling salesmen crisscrossed the country by train,
10:21selling anything from mineral deposits
10:23to every imaginable product from factories
10:26now linked to their customers by rail.
10:29The only way to handle the rocketing customer demand
10:31was to run the production lines 24 hours a day.
10:35Again, thanks to Watt.
10:39And this stuff, coal.
10:42Way back, one of Watt's people had cooked some coal,
10:45lit the fumes it gave off,
10:46and got gaslight for factory shift work.
10:50And by the 30s, one other unintended side effect,
10:54gaslit evening classes
10:55that had led to the emancipated, educated working woman.
11:07Well, now you've got qualified men and women,
11:10fast transportation,
11:11a national market,
11:13all you need is a way to talk to all the people in your business empire.
11:17A telephone.
11:18Once again,
11:19thanks to James Watt.
11:21You remember that carbon black on the lamp chimney
11:24that they used to make carbon paper with?
11:27Here's the inside of an early phone.
11:29You speak and make a membrane vibrate.
11:32That makes an electromagnet generate a varying electric current,
11:36exactly matching the vibration of the membrane.
11:39This varying current then belts off down the phone line.
11:43At the other end,
11:44the varying current ends up doing the reverse of what happened at the start.
11:48It makes an electromagnet generate varying magnetism this time.
11:53That in turn causes the membrane you can see up top to vibrate,
11:57and that reproduces the words you spoke.
11:59That they used to make carbon paper with.
12:03Or rather, yelled.
12:05So somebody tells Thomas Edison
12:07that carbon black reacts to pressure
12:09by letting the amount of electricity going through it increase.
12:12So he puts a blob of it in the microphone,
12:15between the membrane and the magnet,
12:17and even the quietest whisper comes out the other end,
12:20as clear as a bell.
12:24Which was just what the new skyscraper industry needed.
12:27Because one grandfather's lifetime ago,
12:29while you might well have had the architects and the steel
12:32to put these things up,
12:33without a telephone wire strung between the floors,
12:36nobody got to organise construction.
12:38So the phone made high-rise possible.
12:50Well, we're nearing the end of the first part of this journey through history.
12:54Because the first revolution James Watt started
12:57finally brings us to just about the best-known place
13:01in the entire United States.
13:05I suppose this is where the first revolution Watt kicked off kind of ended.
13:09Three grandfathers' lifetimes after it started.
13:12And I guarantee that whatever you didn't know
13:14about all those things I said about Watt
13:15and his amazing effect on history,
13:17you know the next one.
13:19Or you will when you spot the clues coming up.
13:25I'll give you an extra clue.
13:27You're looking at equipment used
13:29to make possible the most extraordinary voyage in human history.
13:33And you really ought to have it by now.
13:37Ignition sequence starts.
13:39Flung and T screenshot runs.
13:40I don't know.
13:46All right.
13:53Blunt of all.
14:14Apollo was the most complex bit of machinery ever built.
14:18It took 400,000 people to do it and was the last example of mega-scale technology made to be
14:25used
14:25and then thrown away.
14:27So for that reason, Apollo marked the end of James Watt's first revolution,
14:32the industrial revolution that had done so many amazing things with metal.
14:37Ironically, because of the new high-tech aerospace alloys developed for the moon landing,
14:43Apollo would also help to bring about James Watt's second revolution.
14:48Watch this.
14:59The greatest sword blades in history have always been made of the steel invented in
15:05medieval Damascus, alloy steel, which is where the second revolution kicked off by James Watt
15:11begins.
15:13Because the one thing you need when you're changing the shape of the world...
15:19is hard metal to cut with, and even harder stuff to cut the hard metal.
15:24Which is why, back in the late 19th century,
15:28a fellow called Mushet did what the Damascus sword makers had done centuries before.
15:33He threw some tungsten into molten steel,
15:35and got the first new steel alloy that was just what everybody had been waiting for.
15:42Everybody but drillers.
15:44Only one thing was hard enough for their drill heads.
15:57Yes, a girl's best friend.
15:59The trouble with which is, as I'm sure you know,
16:03that they cost an arm and a leg.
16:06Which is why James Watt comes back into the story.
16:09Because the first attempt to make artificial diamonds involved an American called Atchison,
16:15fooling around with an electric furnace and good old carbon black.
16:19He heats it up to 11 million degrees, and out comes carborundum,
16:23which isn't diamonds, but it'll cut diamond.
16:27So that's that solved.
16:29Then Atchison heats up the carborundum, and out comes graphite.
16:34Boring, right?
16:35Except for the date, 1895.
16:41That's the year all this began.
16:43The start of a whole new kind of medicine that didn't have to open you up any longer
16:48to see what was wrong with you, because they could now see inside you.
16:53Thanks to a German called Röntgen, who discovered if you bounced the new cathode rays
16:58off a sliver of platinum, you got another mysterious new kind of ray that Röntgen called X.
17:07And X-rays would go right through you.
17:10Röntgen shot them at a human hand and got the first ever X-ray picture.
17:15Question was, what were X-rays?
17:18A kind of light, or what?
17:20The answer was to come from Atchison's graphite crystals.
17:26A few years earlier, a French geologist had dropped a crystal he was examining
17:31and noticed that it split neatly.
17:33And the more he split it, the more it split neatly.
17:37And all crystals did the same.
17:39By the time he'd finished smashing and measuring, he'd kicked off crystallography,
17:43and helped find out what X-rays were, and begun the final stages of James Watt's second revolution.
17:50One that may change the world in this little baby's lifetime.
17:58Maybe even give some babies a life they might not otherwise have had.
18:02Because one of the things that French crystal smasher said was,
18:05that if crystals had such incredibly regular shapes,
18:08then their atoms had to be in incredibly regular patterns.
18:13OK, back to X-rays.
18:15If X-ray beams were like light, they'd interfere like light,
18:19cancelling or boosting each other to make light and dark interference patterns.
18:26But what was going to be small enough to bounce X-rays off to see if they interfered?
18:30A series of precisely spaced atoms.
18:33Where?
18:35In a crystal.
18:36So in 1912, they tried it.
18:40The X-rays hit the rows of crystal atoms, bounced off,
18:44and sure enough, started to make the familiar light and dark.
18:48That's called a diffraction pattern forming there.
18:51And you know what it is?
18:53It's James Watt coming back into the story again to start his second revolution.
18:59Because that pattern came from a crystal that finally showed them
19:02what you might be able to do with X-ray diffraction.
19:04A graphite crystal made by that American from carbon black, remember?
19:09And it turned out that the crystals in different materials make different patterns,
19:14and that tells you what the material is.
19:18The pattern you're about to see is the most exciting one ever found.
19:22And it'll change the world more than Watts' steam engine ever did.
19:26Because this pattern bounced off atoms arranged in a formation known as a double helix.
19:33This is the pattern from the molecule of life, DNA.
19:41So thanks to James Watt and the carbon black they used to improve on his copier,
19:46the graphite crystal gave us DNA, and with it, the power to change the shape of life.
19:59That's the second revolution what helped to start, the genetic revolution.
20:04Like the first, it wasn't planned.
20:06Like the first, it'll change the world.
20:08But unlike the first, it may take less than three grandfathers' lifetimes to do so.
20:13A lot less.
20:17It's already happening.
20:19Plants and animals are being genetically redesigned.
20:21Cloning is already commonplace.
20:24When these children grow up, their computers may work with
20:27genetically engineered biological memory systems.
20:30Gene therapy already saves lives.
20:37The search is already well on the way to crack the human genetic code.
20:41With it, we'll tell what's wrong with people before it shows.
20:46And maybe, fix it.
20:50Or tell little kids they can't be what they want to be
20:53because the talent isn't in their genes.
20:56Or change them to suit what their mother wants them to be.
20:59Or their teacher.
21:00Or their employer.
21:01Or their government.
21:03We may be the last generation shaped only by accident of birth.
21:07Crafted only by nature.
21:09We weren't ready for Watts' first revolution.
21:12Are we ready for this one?
21:14That's a really big thing.
21:44See you soon, see you soon.
21:48See you soon, see you soon.
21:51See you soon.
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