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00:32No, leave me alone, I don't want to go anywhere!
00:35I don't want to go anywhere!
00:36I don't want to talk about it!
00:38I'm tired, I don't want to talk about it!
00:41Just go with me one time!
00:42No, no, no, no!
00:44I don't want to talk about it!
00:45There's nothing going on!
00:52Charlie 2, I've been shot. Starman Priority, back up.
01:04This is an all-too-familiar event in the modern world.
01:08In fact, this one's an exercise.
01:09A SWAT team training for the day when they'll have to do it for real.
01:14And real events happen somewhere every day.
01:20This programme looks at how those events can happen at all.
01:23But not at the hostages or the criminal plan.
01:27At the fact that what puts all the pieces together,
01:29the guns, the explosives, the computers, that chopper up there.
01:33And to start with, the anaesthetics waiting in the ambulance
01:36for this injured officer.
01:37What puts all the pieces together is history.
01:40Because history is all about getting it together.
01:53In 1783, two French brothers called Montgolfier
01:56amazed the world with the first human flight.
01:59By 1800, hot air balloons were the space satellites of the day,
02:04doing spy flights and weather watch.
02:07Then in 1875, a doctor called Paul Bear,
02:11interested in why the newly discovered laughing gas
02:14sent people unconscious,
02:16realised that doing this did, too.
02:20Now, surgeons needed to know how to knock people out
02:23for specific lengths of time.
02:25So Paul Bear started experimenting on high-altitude balloonists,
02:30concentrating above all on their consciousness,
02:34and how they might lose it.
02:35So for seven years, he ran trials on himself
02:38to see what the effects of different gases would be.
02:40And he discovered that what mattered wasn't how much gas there was,
02:44but what pressure the gas was at.
02:45So he tried an anaesthetic mixture,
02:48five parts laughing gas,
02:50one part oxygen,
02:51at one-and-a-half times atmospheric pressure,
02:53and he went unconscious.
02:54But he came to again,
02:56so he was obviously on the right track.
02:57What he needed now was an oxygen pressure field trial
03:01under survival conditions,
03:03at high altitude.
03:12Bear sent up a couple of volunteers
03:15carrying bags filled with oxygen to breathe
03:17when the high altitude caused them to start to black out.
03:20And it worked.
03:22Well, half worked.
03:24The one guy who went ahead and did it
03:26came back to a tumultuous reception.
03:30Bear now had all the data he needed
03:32to go ahead and invent anaesthetic gas
03:34and take the world of surgery
03:36to new heights of expertise,
03:38the prospect of which was,
03:40for his colleagues in the medical profession of the time,
03:42music to the ears.
03:57Meanwhile, back to the Montgolfier brothers.
04:00One day in 1795,
04:02one of them, Joseph Montgolfier,
04:04had a great idea for upgrading the royal amusements,
04:07which, amazing as it seems, you're looking at.
04:10The Versailles water gardens.
04:12Hydraulic engineering back then
04:14being the last word in gee whizzery.
04:21Now, you're not going to believe this,
04:23but back then, the way aristocrats had fun
04:25was by squirting water about.
04:27So, Montgolfier's idea fitted right in.
04:31Well, just like this toy.
04:32You compress air so that it builds up
04:34behind a water reservoir,
04:35and then when you release the water,
04:37this happens.
04:43Montgolfier compressed his air
04:45by dipping the whole contraption in a stream.
04:47The faster the stream,
04:48the more it compressed the air,
04:49the harder it rammed the water.
04:51So, he called it his hydraulic ram.
04:53Just a thing for irrigation,
04:55canals, water gardens, fountains,
04:58and squirting aristocrats.
05:01Ho, ho!
05:16Fifty years later, Montgolfier's water squirter sets in train something rather boring.
05:21See, mid-19th century, the king of Sardinia,
05:25who happens also to be king of a lot of northern Italy,
05:27decides it's high time he does something about his province of Savoy,
05:31stuck on the wrong, that is the north side, of the Alps.
05:34And besides, the entire European railway system,
05:37and most of the roads, stop at the Alps,
05:39depriving the king of lots of lovely tourist money.
05:44So, in 1857, they started boring a tunnel under the Alps.
05:48The work involved standing round
05:50while people hand-drilled holes for explosives and blew them up.
05:53Then you dug.
05:55Fifteen inches of tunnel a day was all they could manage.
05:58Until the chief engineer brought in a version of Montgolfier's hydraulic ram
06:02to compress air for pneumatic drills,
06:05and they started doing 15 feet a day.
06:09The breakthrough handshake came on Christmas Day, 1870,
06:13and it was champagne all round.
06:23Cutting through mountains became even more fun
06:25when somebody invented dynamite.
06:27So, by the turn of the century, there were three tunnels under the Alps,
06:31and a new, luxury way to get to Istanbul.
06:35On the Orient Express.
06:37Now, by an extraordinary irony,
06:39the three chief engineers building all three tunnels died of heart attacks.
06:44The irony being that the nitroglycerin they were using could have saved them.
06:49See, before dynamite, the main use for nitroglycerin
06:52was as medication to relieve the symptoms of a heart condition.
06:55Because in one form, nitroglycerin opens up the constricted blood vessels
06:59that can lead to a heart attack.
07:01There was one other less drastic medical use for nitro.
07:05It was discovered that handling dynamite every day
07:08could give you what was understatedly known by doctors at the time as a dynamite headache,
07:13relieved by taking nitroglycerin.
07:16Until, that is, things took a turn for the botanical.
07:22This little plant's called meadow sweet.
07:26And back in 1835, a French chemist had extracted some stuff from it called acetylsalicylic acid.
07:33Found out it would cure headaches.
07:35But the process took so long he gave up.
07:38Anyway, the botanical name for meadow sweets, Spirea almaria.
07:43Now, a few years later, when every German chemist was going nuts
07:48trying to extract anything they could find
07:50from the new wondergunk throwaway byproduct of gaslight, coal tar,
07:55one of them came across a chemical called phenol,
07:58with which you could artificially make acetylsalicylic acid quick and fast.
08:03So he made up a name for it.
08:06A, for acetylsalicylic acid.
08:09S-P-I-R, from the botanical name for meadow sweet.
08:14And nobody knows why he chose the last two letters.
08:16I-N.
08:19And that's why aspirin's called aspirin.
08:29From 1899, when aspirin first went on the market,
08:32headaches would never be dynamite again.
08:35Meanwhile, don't forget the name of the chemical it came from.
08:39Phenol.
08:49The other name for phenol was carbolic acid.
08:52And it got a surgeon called Lister all excited
08:54because it apparently disinfected cows.
08:57So in 1867, Lister tried dabbing it on his patients.
09:01And it worked.
09:02For the first time, a surgeon could make an incision
09:05and be pretty sure he wouldn't be committing murder.
09:08By 1871, Lister was squirting carbolic acid all over his hospital.
09:13Thus giving every British surgeon from then on
09:16the chance to kick off any operation with that immortal gag,
09:19let us spray.
09:23Then, in 1893, a German engineer picked up the spray idea.
09:28You probably don't know him.
09:30Name of Maybach.
09:32Working with a better known fellow called Daimler.
09:35Whose sales chief had a daughter, whose name you certainly do know.
09:40Mercedes.
09:42Maybach put the spray carburetor he invented into the car named after the girl.
09:49The carburetor basically jets a fine spray of air and gasoline into the cylinder,
09:54where a spark plug explodes the mixture and the explosion drives the cylinder piston up and down.
10:03This up and down is converted to round and round, thus moving the car wheels,
10:07and anything else that needs to turn at high speed.
10:09Like the turbine fans inside the engine of the police chopper,
10:12spinning on a blast of air, superheated by a spray of burning fuel,
10:16driving the rotors and keeping the aircraft in the air.
10:19So the chopper is here, thanks to the string of events that started back with anaesthetic gas.
10:25Remember?
10:28OK.
10:29This chopper is run by computer.
10:32Now, the reason the computer was available to work out this entire SWAT scenario,
10:36one reason the computer exists at all,
10:39is because one day in August 1949, this happened.
10:49The USSR detonated their first nuclear bomb.
10:55The shocked American response was to set up an entire new defence system
11:00stretching the full length of the northern coastline of Alaska and Canada.
11:04A chain of over 50 radar stations called the Distant Early Warning Line,
11:09that from the beginning gave them four hours' notice of the arrival of any Soviet atomic bombers,
11:14and then, as the system became more advanced,
11:18several minutes' warning of an intercontinental ballistic missile impact.
11:24The signals from all the radar stations in the network
11:27were transmitted in real time to the new command and control centre
11:31under Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado,
11:33where massive IBM computers analysed every incoming track,
11:37identified the enemy planes,
11:39and automatically guided fighters to intercept them.
11:51There was one other bunch of people with the same level of vigilant concern
11:54for what was going on in America's skies at the time,
11:57American Airlines.
11:59Only their particular concern wasn't so much what a plane was,
12:03as who was on it.
12:05Or rather, wasn't.
12:06Because it was becoming painfully clear
12:09that airline reservation systems just weren't fast enough
12:13to keep up with the rapidly rising customer demand for tickets.
12:18The fascinating thing about it is that an operator can access the system...
12:22And then one day in the spring of 1953,
12:24a senior sales representative from IBM
12:27happened to be on an American Airlines flight from Los Angeles to New York.
12:32In the next seat was a chap who turned out to be the airline's president.
12:35When both men discovered they were both called Smith,
12:38they got into conversation.
12:42It may have been one of the more meaningful conversations on an aeroplane ever,
12:46because of the way it affected virtually everything here in the modern world.
12:50Because it didn't take those two men back there long to realise
12:53that what IBM was doing for National Air Defence,
12:56linking a network of stations thousands of miles apart,
13:00synthesising massive amounts of data from all those different locations,
13:03making it available to anybody with a terminal,
13:06acting on their instructions and doing all that in real time,
13:10was, back in 1953, just what an airline reservation system needed to be able to do
13:15if it were to be ready for the jet age of the 60s.
13:19Well, great. Let me get my people from Santa Monica together and we'll set up...
13:23They agreed to take things further.
13:24Thirty days later, IBM made a proposal.
13:36After nine years of development,
13:38the new Sabre reservation system, as it was called, was up and running.
13:42Before Sabre, going flat out, it used to take you 90 minutes to book a seat.
13:47From 1962 on, you could book your seat and anything else you wanted for the flight,
13:51as you can today, in a few seconds.
13:59So as soon as you get your date set, give us a call back, we'll be happy to help you.
14:04Today, Sabre handles over one million passenger names every 24 hours.
14:09It processes 900 million telephone calls a week,
14:12sends 4,000 reservations messages every second,
14:15and deals with every other aspect of the airline's business at the same time.
14:19But the real reason an airline reservation system changed everything,
14:24and generated places like this was because what Sabre had done
14:28was to bring the computer out of the military arena
14:31into the business world in a major way for the first time,
14:33and show the business world the tremendous potential
14:36of what the computer could do for it.
14:38So, today, all over the world, places like this exist
14:41because of that one chance meeting on a flight in 1953.
14:47.
15:10Cashmere Shores is what put IBM on that American Airlines plane.
15:14See, back in 1798, Napoleon invaded Egypt,
15:18and as soldiers have done throughout history,
15:21after a while his men started sending home souvenirs.
15:24In this case, the cashmere shores that the Egyptians were importing from India.
15:28The shores were traditionally made as marriage gifts,
15:31and they often took months to weave.
15:33They were supposed to be so fine they would go through a wedding ring.
15:37And the patterns were copies of ancient fertility symbols.
15:44Anyway, fertility aside, the fashion caught on in Britain,
15:48where it kicked off a whole new textile industry
15:50in a place in Scotland called Paisley,
15:52where they started to turn out cheap cotton and wool imitation cashmere shores
15:57for the lower end of the market.
15:58As a matter of fact, if you happen to own a Paisley pattern tie or scarf,
16:02that's where the pattern got its name.
16:05Anyway, in 1890, these Indian weavers had their products onto the American market.
16:12That same year, a young engineer called Herman Hollerith happened to be working on the US Census,
16:17and he was desperate for an automated way to count people.
16:23Now, his brother-in-law happened to be in textiles,
16:26and he told him about a new loom going around
16:28that would do cashmere shawl patterns automatically.
16:32It worked a bit like this.
16:33He took a piece of paper and put a pattern of holes in it,
16:36a bit like this pianola roll.
16:39OK, you set up a bunch of wire hooks on springs,
16:42and you push the whole lot against the paper.
16:46Where there's a hole, a hook goes through
16:48and hooks up a particular thread,
16:50the particular thread you want for that particular part of the pattern,
16:53all of which makes weaving even the most complex stuff like this a piece of cake.
17:00Back in the States, Hollerith used the idea of holes in paper
17:03to represent every kind of census data the government wanted.
17:06If you were a male married carpenter from Oshkosh,
17:09you got a male hole, a married hole, a carpenter hole, and an Oshkosh hole.
17:16OK, you pushed a sprung, electrified set of wires against this car.
17:21Just like the cashmere loom, if there was a hole, the wire went through.
17:25It made an electrical contact on the other side.
17:28The signal worked an electric counter that added up the population.
17:32Did it so successfully, Hollerith went on to set up a business
17:35that later changed its name to International Business Machines.
17:41Now, the guy on the left here, the fellow called James Powers,
17:45was Hollerith's partner.
17:47And he designed a machine that would use the holes in the card
17:50to represent numbers for bills, inventory data, balance sheet totals,
17:55sales reports, that kind of stuff.
17:58But the link to the SWOT exercise going on throughout this program
18:02was how you put the holes in the card.
18:08With a ten-key punch like this one.
18:11I wonder if the design of those keys she's punching
18:13might remind you of something else you find in an office.
18:20Like a typewriter?
18:21That's why, in 1927, Powers took his idea to the Rand Company,
18:27the biggest office equipment outfit in America,
18:29selling over 4,000 office products from card indexes to typewriters.
18:35They'd bought a company that made typewriters.
18:41The typewriter had been invented in 1867
18:45by a fellow called Scholes,
18:46who'd based it on the idea of piano keys.
18:52Anyway, in 1873,
18:54he took his prototype to a company called Remington.
18:57The company Rand would end up buying.
18:59And by 1888, they couldn't keep up with demand.
19:09Now, Remington had bought the typewriter patent from Scholes
19:13just after the Civil War,
19:14when they were looking around for something else to do
19:16with the machine tools in their factories.
19:19During the war,
19:20the machine tools had been making something very different
19:22from typewriters.
19:25And it was something that brings us back,
19:27for the last time, to the SWOT exercise.
19:31because...
19:46Remington had previously made the most successful military rifle in the world,
19:50and sold over a million to armies in Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Egypt, France and the US.
19:55So, finally, the weapon in the hands of this SWOT counter-sniper here,
20:01is here, because the computer is here.
20:07The camera guy just indicated he's going to come out with the weapon,
20:10and it's very hostile, it's going to take a shot.
20:12I advise the, uh,
20:13that it comes out with the hostage, with the weapon.
20:15They have authorization for a diversionary device,
20:17and a CS has the green light to take a shot.
20:34And he's going to come out with the fire.
20:36He's going to go right now!
20:37He's going to go!
20:37Oh, my God!
20:39No!
20:41No!
20:43No!
20:45No!
20:58Okay, another exercise safely concluded.
21:00their's and mine and as i hope i've shown with the connections between anesthetics and explosives
21:06and engines and guns and computers and as the swat team here would undoubtedly agree
21:10getting it together is what it's all about
21:35so
22:00You
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