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00:41This is where I will be at the end of this program, in a perfectly ordinary looking town
00:45in the south. Except this is no ordinary town. This place was once so secret that nobody
00:53knew it existed, full of people who didn't know why they were doing the job they were
00:57doing. People working on something that could still lead to the greatest conflict in human
01:02history. And the strange thing is, the story of how they got here, doing what they were
01:08doing, begins in a different place and a different time. When the people involved thought they
01:15were going through the greatest conflict in human history, a conflict so basic it split
01:20those people apart forever. At least, that's what they thought. Until history brought them
01:26together again. In this town, 200 years after they had all gone their separate worlds.
01:58That first conflict I mentioned happened in 18th century England. And the first conflict
02:02was all about having a sweet tooth. See, back then, the new rave taste craze that people
02:09went for like a drug was sugar. Okay, nothing wrong with that, unless you're a dentist. But
02:14it was how they paid for the sugar that caused the trouble. Because the sugar came from plantations
02:20here in the Caribbean. And all they wanted was a source of really plentiful labor. Well, there
02:27was only one source of really plentiful labor at the time. African slaves. And that's what
02:33the conflict was about. Anytime from 1500 to 1807 you wanted to get seriously rich, you
02:38went into the people moving business. Demand for slaves in the Caribbean started astronomical
02:44and went up. Just too good an opportunity for English investors to miss.
02:54In 1770, 200 slave ships crossed the Atlantic. Thirty years later, 1200. Carrying people you
03:02could get $30,000 a head for. Mind you, it wasn't all plain sailing. Unspeakable conditions
03:08on board meant there was an average commodity loss, euphemism for death, of around 10%. But
03:14with profits like that, who cared? Overall, a total of 12,420,000 Africans were forcibly
03:22and profitably, quote, settled, unquote, in the new world. But even here, on the Caribbean
03:30sugar plantations, and back in England, there were arguments about slavery almost from the
03:35start. Not, of course, on ethical grounds, heavens no. The row was about money. Sugar beet
03:42growers in Europe complained about slaves being cheap labour, which they were. Boring economists
03:49like Adam Smith said that slavery would reduce the workers' incentive. I expect it did. On the
03:54other hand, the English Treasury took the view that slavery produced more sugar, that produced
03:59more sugar taxes, and that was an easy source of revenue. Times are not easy. Every day one hears of
04:07another estate being handed over to one of those obnoxious London brokers. The entire island
04:14should be theirs, I fear, before long. The plantation owners argued they couldn't produce the goods
04:20without Africans any more, they said, than the ancient Egyptians could have built the pyramids
04:24growers. They don't register twice without slaves.
04:27SажÃveis 5 Party
04:57Now, to the amazement of many at the time, an increasing number of dangerous radicals
05:03actually appeared to object to slavery on religious and moral grounds.
05:07Radicals with revolutionary tendencies, like the Presbyterians and other free church people,
05:13some of whom went so far as to force their members to free any slaves they had.
05:18By 1787, these reformers had started organising with the first Slavery Abolition Society.
05:27One of the society's leading English lights was a non-conformist called Samson Lloyd.
05:31If you know Lloyd's bank, it's that Lloyd.
05:34The Abolitionist Society had good reason to sing the praises of Samson Lloyd
05:38because, well, with his support you had a lot of clout.
05:41Because he had a lot of money.
05:43Because back in the early days of the Industrial Revolution,
05:45he was in the very profitable business of holding things together.
05:49Well, he made nails.
05:51Well, he actually made wire first.
05:53Okay, the subject of wire may leave you just a little underwhelmed,
05:57but you try driving into New York without wire.
06:04I refer, of course, to the wire holding up this bridge,
06:07the final link completing the Union of the United States.
06:11America held together by wire thanks to a German immigrant called John Roebling,
06:16who was overwhelmed by the idea of wire cable suspension bridges.
06:20Alas, his potential backers, some people called Washburn and Co.,
06:24were underwhelmed by the idea.
06:26So Roebling went ahead alone.
06:28His first suspension bridge at Niagara had turned on-site cable spinning into a household word
06:35with anybody who wanted to hang anything heavy.
06:38Nobody had ever tried making wire ropes his way before.
06:42What Roebling did was to spin all the parallel wires into a cable
06:46and then hold them together with a binding wire set at intervals all along the cable.
06:52It was that idea that got Roebling the big one, the Brooklyn Bridge contract.
06:57On opening day, 1883, it was the longest bridge span in the world,
07:02held up by only four steel cables, fifteen and three-quarter inches thick,
07:07and 3,568 feet and six inches long.
07:11All there is between you and the river.
07:15Around about this time, the telegraph gets invented
07:18and ups the demand for wire that will survive outside in all weathers.
07:22So in 1860, a Brit called Bedsley comes up with a new way to protect and strengthen wire.
07:28Nothing very complicated, you just dip it into a bath of molten zinc.
07:32Of course, Bedsen gave it the high-tech name of galvanizing.
07:35And there ought to be some around here somewhere.
07:37Ah!
07:38This is galvanized.
07:41Bedsen's galvanizing trick
07:43was just one bit of a whole wire-making process that he dreamt up
07:47that would turn 25 pounds of metal into galvanized wire in 15 seconds flat.
07:53You're not impressed?
07:55In 1868, I'll tell you who was.
07:58Washburn and Company.
07:59You remember the boring lot that turned Roebling down?
08:02Well, anyway, Washburn's took Bedsen's idea and brought it to America.
08:06And in doing so, killed off the Wild West.
08:16See, six years earlier, the Homestead Act had started giving 160 acres free
08:21to anybody over 21 who'd settled it.
08:23You lived on the land for five years, and it was yours.
08:27One minor problem, others had got there first.
08:31To cattlemen, for whom public land had always been free grazing land,
08:36and who were not in the least inclined to give up this profitable state of affairs without a fight.
08:41So they fought.
08:46The Sodbusters won in the end, thanks to Washburn & Co. and the galvanized wire they produced.
08:52Because in 1874, some people in DeKalb, Illinois, came up with an amazing new idea for cattle control.
09:01Mass produced, it was basically just two strands of twisted galvanized wire,
09:06held together at intervals by small turns of wire,
09:09with sharpened points that stuck out sideways to form a kind of barbed spur.
09:16It was barbed wire that ended the range wars and killed off the Wild West,
09:21because it killed off the cowboy.
09:23So, with farmland protected from animals like this,
09:26the face of America would change,
09:27and the country would become the breadbasket of the world,
09:31thanks to corn.
09:37By the 1880s, canned corn was keeping the industrial cities alive,
09:41when disaster struck.
09:43For some reason, the cans turned the corn black.
09:46Nothing worked until they tried dipping the cans in a free byproduct
09:49of Bedsen's old galvanizing process, molten cadmium.
09:54Worked a treat.
09:55Then cadmium turned out to be toxic enough to kill you.
09:58So, it was goodbye cadmium.
10:06Almost.
10:08Because a few years later, it turned out to have another property
10:11that was just what was needed in an industry a million miles from
10:15nails, wires, bridges, fencing, canned foods, or anything else I've mentioned so far.
10:21And its use by that industry, here, would bring together again those two historical trails
10:27that had separated 200 years before over the slavery issue.
10:30So, remember cadmium, where this trail ends,
10:34when I go back to take the pro-slavery trail through history,
10:37to meet myself again.
10:39Here.
10:41If you see what I mean.
10:46The modern sugar industry starts back in 1650,
10:50when sugar was worth a king's ransom.
10:52By 1750, it was just an expensive luxury.
10:56The kind of raw material so valuable, a country would go to war because of it.
11:04The reason sugar shares were the hottest thing on the market was obvious.
11:07The Industrial Revolution had put a lot of money into the pockets of the new factory workers,
11:11and they spent most of it on the Coca-Cola of the time.
11:14Sweet tea.
11:15When you had a calorie intake as low as theirs, sugar gave you a real buzz.
11:20So, in 1807, when Britain and the US banned the slave trade,
11:25it was, to say the least, a bitter blow to the sweet tooth market.
11:28Plantation owners and investors were jumping out of the window,
11:31sugar exports dropped like a stone,
11:34slaves started leaving the plantations,
11:36and, unheard of, refusing to work.
11:39The situation was catastrophic.
11:41It was enough to drive a planter to drink.
11:51You won't be surprised to know, given the bad jokes I make,
11:55that drink was where the solution to the problem would come from,
11:57to save the plantation owners and put the rum in rum and coke,
12:02thanks to a contraption called a multiple-effect evaporator,
12:05invented in 1843, the sugar maker's sweet dream.
12:09It broke just like that steam cooking thing over there.
12:13You see how, on top of the fire, there's boiling water and then two food containers,
12:17and the top one cooks with the steam from the next one down,
12:20and that one cooks with the steam from the bottom one,
12:23using the steam twice over,
12:25like the multiple-effect evaporator I mentioned.
12:28And using steam twice over meant they could boil out sugar cane juice with only half the fuel.
12:35So, a lot of cheap Caribbean sugar, so a lot of molasses, boil that down, a lot of rum.
12:42The evaporator idea really started with a Scotsman,
12:45who discovered that steam was so scalding hot because it kind of absorbed heat.
12:50He told this to his pal, James Watt, who used the data to design a better steam engine,
12:56which was going to make Watt a lot of money, if only he could afford to build a lot of
12:59engines,
13:00for which he was going to need a lot of money.
13:05And then he found a guy who was coining it, a fellow with a button factory called Bolton.
13:09They went into business together, and you know the rest.
13:13But why was Bolton coining it from buttons?
13:18Because the other thing you can do with a steam-powered button stamping machine,
13:22which Bolton had invented, was stamp coins.
13:25So Bolton was doing that for America, France, Bermuda, India, Russia, Spain, Denmark, and Mexico,
13:32making money hand over fist.
13:35Bolton's real upmarket artistic stuff was medallions,
13:38one of which, ironically enough, was to commemorate the abolition of slavery.
13:46Bolton's new mint in Birmingham ended up with eight coin stamping machines
13:50that would produce any size of coin you wanted.
13:52Each machine needed only one worker,
13:54and the coins came off the machines at 200 a minute,
13:5850 times faster than the old way.
14:00So fast, Bolton created a copper shortage.
14:06And then Bolton got the big moneymaker he'd been angling for all along,
14:11the contract to make official national currency for the English government.
14:16Now, the trouble with English money at the time was most of it was fake.
14:21So in 1797, Bolton really cleaned up when he produced four coins that were so good,
14:28the counterfeiters kind of gave up.
14:30Here they are.
14:33Farthing,
14:34halfpenny,
14:35penny,
14:36tuppence.
14:38So,
14:39now there was money you could trust,
14:41the government decided in 1824 to risk some more new coins.
14:45This time they brought in an Italian called Pistrucci to do the designs.
14:50Here's one of his.
14:51See that new national emblem idea?
14:54That really caught on.
14:56That's why we have them on modern coins.
14:58Anyway,
14:59Pistrucci made coin design,
15:01really high tech,
15:02with one of these.
15:03A pantograph.
15:07I'll use this medallion to show you what he did.
15:11First he designed a plaster model,
15:13and then he plated the model to make it hard wearing,
15:16and then,
15:17very carefully,
15:19retraced the design of the model
15:22with the pantograph stylus,
15:24so that over there
15:26a knife
15:28carved the same design
15:30to scale
15:32on a steel die.
15:34A bit like this.
15:37And then he used the die
15:39to stamp out the coins.
15:42But did you notice I said,
15:45plated the model?
15:46That's because
15:47the latest scientific miracle at the time
15:50was electroplating.
15:56Which brings me, alas,
15:58to one of history's greater bores,
16:00a self-made English science hero
16:02called Michael Faraday.
16:10Faraday was one of those people
16:11most charitably described as painstaking.
16:15So when he heard that some Italian
16:17had come up with a new way to use electricity
16:19to electric plate,
16:21Faraday couldn't wait to see how it worked.
16:23The Italian idea
16:24was one of those flashes of genius
16:26you wonder why you didn't think of first.
16:28It was so simple.
16:30If chemicals could make electricity,
16:33which they did in a battery,
16:34could you turn the thing the other way round
16:36and make electricity do something to chemicals?
16:40The Italian, a fellow called Brugnatelli,
16:43and also a pal of Volta who had invented the battery,
16:46did the following.
16:47He put an object connected to a battery
16:50in a copper solution
16:51in which there were also bits of copper
16:53also connected to the battery.
16:55And something amazing happened.
16:57The atoms in the copper solution
16:59deposited themselves all over the object,
17:02copper plating it.
17:03And at the same time,
17:05as the solution lost its atoms,
17:07they were replaced by atoms
17:09from the bits of copper.
17:11The question for Faraday was,
17:13why?
17:14In 1833, he discovered that it needed
17:17a particular amount of electricity,
17:19depending on the metal,
17:20to get the whole thing to happen.
17:22Which meant that there had to be a relationship
17:25between the mass of the metal
17:26and the amount of electricity you needed.
17:28In other words,
17:29Faraday reckoned,
17:30there had to be some kind of link
17:32between mass and electric charge.
17:36Which brings us, temporarily, to television.
17:39Because by 1889,
17:41somebody had discovered cathode rays,
17:44and found that you could move them around too,
17:46if you controlled them with electric fields.
17:48Which is how your TV works.
17:50Look.
17:54So maybe cathode ray particles had mass as well,
17:58because the electric field was moving them around,
18:00just like electricity did to the atoms
18:02during electroplating.
18:05In 1910, a fellow called Thompson
18:07shot neon particles through electric fields,
18:11which, sure enough, affected the particle flight path.
18:13But the weird thing was,
18:15the neon particles split into two streams,
18:18as if they had two different masses,
18:21one lot lighter than the other,
18:22because Thompson saw that one lot
18:24went further than the other lot.
18:26Thompson had discovered isotopes,
18:29atoms with more than one mass.
18:30By 1919, you could use this trick
18:34to separate out isotopes with masses
18:36only one hundred millionth different.
18:39The trick is called mass spectrometry.
18:41And with it, you can identify,
18:43with the most incredible precision,
18:45anything.
18:46By firing particles of it through electric fields,
18:48and watching how far they go.
18:50Which tells you their mass,
18:52which tells you what they are.
18:55Which means you can do all sorts of good things,
18:58like forensic investigation,
18:59by identifying minute traces from a scene of crime.
19:03Or tag an isotope tracer onto the medication
19:06somebody's taking,
19:07and watch where it goes
19:08as the drug is absorbed by their body.
19:11Or identify terrorists,
19:13because you can analyse
19:14the most minute residue of explosives
19:17they might happen to have on their hands.
19:33Which brings me to end here,
19:35where the separate ways of the slavers
19:36and the anti-slavers
19:37finally come together.
19:39Because this pro-slavery trail
19:41I've just been following
19:42led to mass spectrometry being used
19:44to separate out the high fission isotopes
19:47of uranium-235
19:48from the abundant but less effective uranium-238.
19:51And thanks to the trail triggered by the anti-slavery people,
19:56cadmium,
19:56you remember the stuff the canners used
19:58to plate the inside of the cans with,
20:00cadmium ended up being used
20:01as a neutron absorber
20:03in the rods controlling the speed
20:06of the fission reaction
20:07of the first nuclear pile.
20:10Remember this place?
20:13So, having gone their separate ways,
20:16split apart by the most explosive issue
20:19of the 18th century,
20:20history finally brings the two sides together again,
20:23here at the birthplace of the most explosive issue
20:27in the 20th century,
20:29atomic weapons.
20:50And that's why I said this was a secret place,
20:52because the Manhattan Project that started in 1943
20:56and made the bomb dropped on Hiroshima,
20:58happened back in that lab,
20:59here in the town where separate ways came together.
21:03Oak Ridge, Tennessee.
21:04We're going to see.
21:05We're going to see.
21:20We're going to see.
21:34We're going to see.
21:36All right.
21:46We're going to see.
21:49We're going to see you.
21:51All right.
21:59You
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