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00:20and here to get the good times rolling are the hosts of the big spin jeff edwards and michael
00:30hi michael nice to see you thanks a lot welcome to the big spin yes the week has gone by
00:35in record
00:35sometimes you'd never believe the way the wheel of fortune can turn and incredible things happen
00:41here for instance in the studio where they do the california lottery and make somebody very rich
00:46once a week or as you'll see from the story i'm about to tell how once upon a time against
00:55all
00:55the odds something happened that could be the reason you're alive today thanks to the way chance
01:00works or as they say here thanks to the big spin
01:10so
01:30i suppose if you were ever going to stake your life you'd bet on a doctor wouldn't you
01:35i mean when the chips are down nothing matters more than your health does it nothing to gamble
01:40with is it funnily enough the greatest medical discovery of all time started in a casino
01:49in world war one converted to a british army field hospital in france which is ironic because if you
01:56had known how this medical thing was going to turn out you would have never have bet on it in
02:00a million
02:00years because the odds against all the pieces falling together the way they did were a thousand to one
02:09still that's history well this next bit is
02:19okay it's summer in england the war is over and this is the problem wounded troops are being delivered
02:26back home in critical condition because of the useless antibiotics they were given in france
02:31so when one of the doctors in that casino i mentioned comes home with the ambulance teams
02:36he goes into antibiotics
02:44now this guy is famous for chaos and one day in 1928 in the summer he comes back from his
02:51holidays and
02:52there's his usual pile of unspeakable bacteria dishes where he left them in the sink half covered
02:58by antiseptic liquid so he idly picks one up and sees nothing well some mold something blown in from the
03:07street
03:08so far so what and then he sees this a zone of dead bacteria around the mold killed by the
03:18mold
03:19okay this is what i meant by a thousand to one first off this was one of the few dishes
03:25that hadn't
03:25slipped into the antiseptic liquid and then of all of them this was the one he picked up and then
03:31he'd
03:32left the window open for the bug to get in from the street and then the bacteria and the mold
03:37grow at
03:37different temperatures cool for the mold and hot for the bacteria
03:47and that's exactly what the london weather did for the right number of days in the right sequence for
03:53this to happen without which emergencies would be emergency emergencies because this is penicillin
04:05all thanks to alexander fleming's untidiness
04:16the ironic thing is penicillin works by killing the disease bacteria cells
04:21and how cells work was discovered by a german called wiershoff who had a total obsession for tidiness
04:28back in 1848 wiershoff was turning berlin upside down by the way this isn't berlin with wild talk
04:35about epidemics being caused not by disease but by bad education and no proper sanitation
04:41so the obsessive wiershoff was deeply into public health and because he'd made that link between
04:48disease and social conditions he helped to kick off the idea that prevention is better than cure
04:58which is why in 1870 he was advising on the new berlin sewage works which as i admitted before
05:06isn't this place because this is istanbul and this is a bit of the ancient istanbul roman
05:13water supply which is why we're here because at the height of his otherwise tidy and super efficient
05:19medical career wiershoff did something that seems right out of character because he took up with a
05:27complete weirdo and that's why i'm saying this in a subterranean turkish reservoir because this is where
05:33wiershoff came with his weirdo pal who was nuts about anything underground and classical
05:42meet the weirdo in question heinrich schliemann and wife schliemann is an ex-grocery assistant and
05:49dye salesman who's made his fortune during the california gold rush where he developed a fatal attraction for
05:55precious metal well in 1870 he studies greek goes nuts about the trojan war and decides to prove homer
06:02was telling the literal truth because he heinrich schliemann is going to find the fabled city of troy
06:08a project about which he becomes quite deranged
06:16well since he knows as much about archaeology as i do he kind of destroys the site fails to find
06:23a
06:23troy and accidentally turns up a fortune in gold and jewels this makes him internationally infamous
06:30because he kind of steals it well what would you call secret shipments back home
06:37fortunately this tendency to give the treasure to his wife and members of his family gets noticed
06:42and heinrich has to give it all back pay the fines get thrown off the site and the whole time
06:49denying
06:49he'd done anything wrong all he gets to keep are the publicity pictures of mrs schliemann wearing all the gear
06:56that he so nearly got away with
07:06which is why we find ourselves in this police car heading back to the station with what i believe is
07:12described as the alleged perp because what helped to save schliemann from his criminal tendencies
07:19and gave some of his wilder archaeological ideas a bit of respectability was virshoff who went along
07:26for the ride tried to keep schliemann on the right side of the law and helped to collect the kind
07:31of
07:31evidence that might make schliemann's case because virshoff was also an expert witness in the hot new
07:36science of anthropology and the history of human development
07:47now that person came in here before under a different name so that's the link between
07:51virshoff and the police because that hot new science he was involved in made police procedures
07:56what they are today that's where all those descriptions came from that the cops used to use
08:02to describe suspect and victim
08:12still do in some places all this business of classifying people started with anthropology
08:18back around 1780 with a german called blumenbach another freak for putting things in order
08:24in his case only the physical characteristics of the entire human race
08:30mr doe what is your date of birth 129 65 your height 510 and your weight 185 to be fair
08:39to blumenbach
08:39it was about time somebody did the job because back in the 18th century people believed the kind
08:45of stuff that these days only policemen hear in the middle of the night from hallucinating drunks
08:51that there were people with eyes in their shoulders or no heads or backward pointing feet that stuff
08:59okay does he have any medical problems uh he's been cleared well blumenbach pretty well proved that
09:04anybody who thought that way was how shall i put this out of their skull okay great thanks
09:14well skulls i should say which blumenbach collected in order to make lists of all their characteristics
09:20so he could classify each type of skull on the basis of its shape
09:24which is when he came up with those descriptions i mentioned that the police used up until recently
09:29because it was blumenbach who invented classifications like caucasian this classifying mania was quite
09:36widespread at the time because all was not rosy in what you might call the garden of knowledge
09:50what you're looking at is where all that classification stuff started in 17th century
09:55english horticulture where in spite of appearances things were to put it mildly panic-stricken and
10:02where the cure for the panic was to stick names all over everything in the hope that would make the
10:07nightmare go away the nightmare being america because nobody had the faintest idea what to do
10:14with the hundreds of new american species being discovered by settlers all the way from the top
10:19of canada to the bottom of peru and by this time giving everybody a bad case of data overload i
10:33mean if you've
10:34never seen one of these things before what do you file it under pine tree apple any other business
10:43not to mention chilies and chocolate and tobacco and maple syrup and all the other weird things
10:49pouring in here to be given a name and that's why i mentioned panic attack at the beginning because
10:55in the face of new and unknown species by the zillion all they knew was they didn't know
11:22and then in 1624 a legal eagle called francis bacon comes up with the answer
11:28a book on how to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs make big lists says bacon
11:36and
11:36correlate everything above all numbers is key stick to numbers and you'll be dead to rights which brings
11:44me to a church and a baby polly i baptize you in the name of the father see it turns
11:55out bacon's
11:56everything about numbers will answer the prayers of somebody in the insurance business name of richard
12:01price because of the way numbers and newborn babies go together it all begins in the parish of
12:07all souls northampton england sarah and fell but first since we're at a christening a few words on the
12:15subject of mortality this is a matter of life and death it's a church of england parish register
12:23womb to tomb data in here take a look
12:29here it is moldering ignored all over england since the year dot
12:38and then this fellow called graham notes perceptively that you can use this stuff in
12:43these things births and deaths to work out the size of the population
12:51receive this light which is something people suddenly care about because little babies grow
12:57up to become taxpayers and grants data now make it possible for a government to do some expectable
13:03revenue planning
13:10so this event is future money in the bank
13:23these life and death figures in here are just what the new 18th century insurance companies need
13:29because your premium is based on life expectancy right so price has analyzed the data in here and worked
13:36out that in 1769 the average little person's life expectancy is 26.41 years
13:49not much eh but pricey stuff really knocks the socks off everybody in science
13:56because his analytical techniques kick off statistical math
14:00just what you need if you're a scientist and running away to america
14:05which a friend of pricey's called priestly did shortly after he'd stunned the world with this
14:11a new miracle health cure carbonated water
14:17one evening in 1803 priestly went to yale for dinner where he met and charmed the pants off
14:24a nervous young professor of chemistry called benjamin silliman who figures in this tale because he had
14:31hypochondria nervous disorder vertigo lethargy and anything else he could imagine as a result of which
14:44he was to bring new meaning to the life of the american teenager
14:51because cinnamon kicked off that great american institution the soda fountain
15:06i don't think silliman had anything like this in mind with his first new york fizzy water shop
15:12and anyway he was a lousy businessman so the venture failed
15:16which is why you've never heard of him
15:21okay try his son silliman jr another chemist who was the fellow who put america on the road
15:27because he analyzed some black muck oozing out of the ground in pennsylvania
15:31and called it petroleum which went over big with car crazy american teenagers
15:36would-be oil barons and french fossil hunters
15:48now i'll get to the french in a minute but meanwhile 50 years before silliman a surveyor named smith
15:55was staying at a place in the west of england getting ready to well rip the place up
16:12see at the time half of england looked like a building site because
16:17the country was in the grip of a canal digging craze that's why smith was here
16:25the problem was the roads were so bad they were slowing down the industrial revolution and canals
16:32would be quicker and cheaper when smith's survey got into the geology of the place he noticed you
16:37could identify strata because they always had the same fossils thus inspiring a boring frenchman
16:43called daubigny to discover a new fossil called foraminifera which turned up in so many places
16:51it gave him an idea
16:54to line up all 27 rock layers which there appeared to be below the ground in chronological order time
17:01zones if you like
17:05obvious enough to you i know but back then profoundly meaningful you get a feel for the fanatically
17:12detailed nature of this man's intellectual convolutions when you realize he then took his 27 time zones
17:19and placed every known fossil in one or other's own that's 18 000 species of fossil one at a time
17:29imagine what his dinner table conversation must have been like still as it turned out his little
17:35foraminifera were just what silliman and those would-be oil barons were looking for because when you
17:41drill an oil well and your core sample comes up and the first thing you see is foraminifera you know
17:46the second thing you're going to see is oil because where there's one there's almost always the other
17:53only problem is how to know where to drill the well in the first place which brings us as you
17:58might
17:58expect to world war one artillery and a russian nobleman
18:15welcome to life in the trenches mud and shells mostly well shells mostly so if you could target
18:22their guns and knock them out you might stay alive so that russian aristo i mentioned boris golytsin
18:28finds a great way to pinpoint a gun from the vibrations it makes through the earth with a new trick
18:35using electricity to record the shakes
18:40you know how you generate electricity by moving a magnetic field inside a copper coil
18:47well here's an approximation of what happens next boris hangs a small magnet on a pendulum inside a coil
18:56if the earth shakes for any reason like artillery firing the pendulum rocks the magnet swings and that
19:03causes a varying current in the coil use that varying current to shake a pen on a roll of paper
19:09and you get a trace that shows you the direction and distance of the guns
19:15and you can do the same trick for oil once you know how shock waves travel through the ground
19:21after they've bounced off the kind of rocks you know contain oil and once you've used explosive
19:26to cause a shock wave in the first place sometimes as in the case of this trace nature provides her
19:34own
19:34shock waves when this shows the kind of shake you get from that
19:58the chain of volcanoes known as the ring of fire that runs all the way around the pacific from here
20:05in java to here in california where they live with chance here in the big spin studio or out on
20:12the san
20:13andreas fort where those shock waves make themselves felt in a rather particular way
20:25this is the kind of chance you have to reckon with if you live in one of the world's earthquake
20:29zones
20:30but then as you've seen life is full of chances for doctors treasure hunters anthropologists gardeners
20:37insurance brokers chemists oil men and fossil hunters and people in california tv studios
20:52so before the next quake hits as you now know for any advanced warning you may get you can thank
20:58penicillin in the first place after it hits of course you may need to thank penicillin in the second place
21:04good luck
21:05so
21:07so
21:19so
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