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00:28No, there's nothing
00:29wrong with your TV set.
00:34It's just that compared with the razzle-dazzle of the modern world, the past was really pretty
00:39colourless.
00:40And in spite of what you may think, the food in that picnic was monotonous, limited, and
00:46bland.
00:51So it's odd that ad men today tend to sell consumables like this, with images of the past,
00:59like this.
01:09It's all made to look like an age of rosy apples, farm-fresh eggs, crusty loaves, simple pleasures,
01:17the way things used to be, the real thing.
01:21Truth is, of course, our food's far healthier than theirs ever was, whatever the commercial
01:26tells you.
01:27Why?
01:28Well, that's what this programme's all about.
01:30How, thanks to a couple of clues you're looking at right now, we're able these days to make
01:37it all better than the real thing.
01:48I suppose if the naughty 90s, the 1890s, that is, really were naughty, one of the reasons
01:55was this piece of immoral technology.
01:58I mean, back then, riding a bike was playing fast and loose, not what nice boys and good
02:05girls did.
02:06Thanks to the bicycle and the new rubber tyres, it was the latest daring thing to do, to go
02:11out into the country on a picnic before you were married.
02:16But a girl still had to stay respectable, which wasn't easy, on a bike.
02:23Even though some woman in Seneca, New York, called Amelia Bloomer, had invented bloomers
02:28to make cycling more respectable, that still left the immoral matter a visible ankle.
02:33So the only way to save your reputation from getting the boot, was getting a boot, which
02:39was a royal pain in the lower leg, because it took all day to do up the laces, until, yippee,
02:46around 1913, an engineer called Sundbach came up with the answer.
02:52Which, speaking of morals as we were, was great news for a multiple bigamist who had five simultaneous
02:58wives and called all his daughters Mary so as not to blow his cover.
03:04He loved zippers and boots, because this guy made the machines that made the boots.
03:11Meet Isaac Merritt Singer, of the sewing machine of the same name, a mechanic turned actor
03:16turned social climber, who beat his women up.
03:19A real sweetheart.
03:21But he made a fortune, and built factories all over the world, because he invented so much
03:26down and so much a month.
03:28And something else you'll see now.
03:30You can't really miss it.
03:47OK, you get the point.
03:49Singer's machines are cheap, because they're made of interchangeable parts.
03:53An idea Thomas Jefferson has brought back earlier from France.
03:57Well, he's also had this row with a French scientist called Buffon, who's written a book
04:02about, well, let's say, everything since creation.
04:07Buffon's book contains a vitriolic attack on America, which he's never been to.
04:11According to Buffon, everything in America is retarded because it's so cold, and degenerate
04:18American life forms are inferior to the French.
04:21Knocking America becomes popular with other French scientists who've never been there either,
04:26and who invent 37-pound Louis-L frogs, and everything American having syphilis.
04:32But what riles Jefferson most is Buffon's remark about all American animals being smaller than
04:38anything French.
04:39Things have now really hit the fan, so Jefferson tells somebody in America to mail Buffon a consignment
04:45of large American animals, with a note saying, how'd you like them apples?
04:56The Americans make their point.
04:59Buffon eats his words.
05:03And that's the end of that.
05:12Jefferson and Buffon, and everybody else back then before Darwin, were all deeply into something
05:19known as the great chain of being.
05:23The idea that God, at creation, had designed everything at once, all the way from slime to
05:30humans.
05:34And that everything was linked one to the next, all the way along the chain.
05:40So slime was almost bugs, and bugs were almost cells, all the way up to human beings being
05:47almost angels.
05:49Keep that in mind, because the next guy in my great chain had it in his.
06:00He was a German genius, diplomat, librarian, and mathematical whiz called Leibniz.
06:06And in 1675, he decided to measure what was happening in the sky.
06:13This kind of happening.
06:18Leibniz was interested in the effect of the sun's gravity on planetary orbits, so he needed
06:23to calculate constantly changing velocity.
06:26Like the rate this is falling, now.
06:29At this infinitesimally small split second, not a zillionth of a second before, not a zillionth
06:36of a second after.
06:39The kind of math Leibniz developed to let him do that infinitesimally small measurement
06:44bumped him right up against the good old great chain of being, in which the graduation between
06:50one species and another, from slime all the way up, were, as you remember, infinitesimally
06:57small.
06:58So, Leibniz said, I bet there are links between species so infinitesimally small, you can't
07:05see them with a human eye.
07:07And like all those hotshots who love to hate because they always win their bets, he only
07:11said that because he had seen them.
07:15300 letters written by a Dutch shop assistant and microscope freak called Lovenhoek to this
07:21pompous lot of old twits in the English Royal Society.
07:24The letters are all about what Lovenhoek has seen through his new microscope, teeny weeny
07:29animals.
07:30Shocking thing is, Lovenhoek says he's seen them everywhere, even, gulp, inside people.
07:51Now, Leibniz started getting everybody down to real detail, and that meant getting closer
07:58to the truth about the great chain of being.
08:01Leibniz were obviously going to reveal the secret of the universe.
08:06This chap was already on the case, finding out that the funny bits sticking out of Saturn
08:12were actually the planet's rings.
08:18Now, unlike Lovenhoek, this guy, Christian Huygens, has been everywhere, studied everything,
08:25and knows every body, and decides to find out how to improve these amazing lens things,
08:30which means he's going to have to shed some light on why they're so bad at the time.
08:35How bad?
08:36We'll take a look at what he's seeing, and you'll see.
08:41See?
08:45Huygens, being an intellectual, takes a theoretical approach to the problem.
08:50If light is what brings the images of anything to your eye, then how does light itself actually
08:56move?
08:57Huygens decides that light is made of little particles that hit other particles and pass
09:03their force on through them to others.
09:07In a straight line, like this.
09:15Except for some strange reason when light goes through a crystal called Icelandic spar,
09:21which splits the light ray in two.
09:24One refraction, the other, don't know.
09:28What Huygens doesn't know, because nobody knows, is that it's polarised light, which is as good
09:34a reason as any to head for Scotland.
09:52Things took a turn for the Tartan when, in 1828, an Edinburgh University geology type called
09:57nickel, who was into rocks and crystals and such, fiddled around with a bit of Icelandic
10:02spar, and came up with a thing called a nickel prism, that would produce that strange polarised
10:08light on demand.
10:13Now, nickel had already been making super thin slices of rock, so thin they were almost
10:18transparent, and looking at the rock structure detail with a microscope.
10:23And then he realised, if you made super, super thin slices, and shone the polarised light
10:29through them, some of the rock structures would affect the light according to what their
10:32molecular structure was, like this, look, that's limestone, basalt, granite.
10:46Now, somebody somewhere was desperate to know about this magic ability to see through rocks,
10:51right?
10:54Except nickel didn't tell anybody, so how do I know?
10:57Well, let me show you with a couple of polarised lenses, one on the camera, you put yours in,
11:02Jim, thank you, and one in my hand.
11:05Have you ever tried doing this with polarised lenses?
11:08See?
11:09That's because when you rotate the lenses, you rotate the polarised beams of light,
11:14and when the two beams are at right angles to each other, they cancel each other out,
11:18then you go on rotating, and there comes the light again.
11:25In 1840, that trick boosted the whole economy, because it got used to analyse sugar molecules,
11:30and sugar then was like petroleum today.
11:33Sugar profits encouraged investment in Scottish industry.
11:37Now, industry needed metal, and for that you needed better burning coal than Scotland had.
11:42So some guy blasted hot air into coal furnaces, and bingo, you're looking at Scottish steel.
11:55And all that ironstone and coal the Scottish miners started digging out of the ground,
12:06kicked off a mining boom that would finally make nickel famous.
12:10Well, kind of.
12:12See, this fellow called Witham had met Nickel at Edinburgh University,
12:17and Nickel had told him all about those super-thin rock slices, remember?
12:21Now, the rock that turned Witham on, these are funny people, was coal,
12:28and especially the fossilised vegetables that the Scottish miners had started discovering in the coal seams.
12:35So Witham, what else, started slicing?
12:49You will have no doubt noticed that we are now in a place just a touch hotter than Scotland, right?
13:00It's Indonesia, actually, because this is where the story takes us in a minute.
13:04Meanwhile, that mining boom I mentioned,
13:06and the fossil vegetables the Scottish miners started finding as they dug.
13:12Well, Witham wrote one of those things you can't pick up, called Some Observations on Some Fossil Vegetables,
13:19and there was Nickel's work revealed.
13:23And the things he'd said about seeing little bubbles in rock crystals.
13:31Now, I told you there was somebody desperate to know all this, didn't I?
13:36Name of Sorby. Born, lived and died in Sheffield, and never went anywhere without his mother.
13:43Crazy about bubbles in rocks. But bubbles like these, magnified 2,000 times.
13:51This photograph told Sorby whether the tiny bubbles had been made by hot gas, or hot liquid, or just heat.
13:59And you know what that does? Gives you a handle on all this.
14:07Oh, this one also. Good.
14:08Sorby's micro bubbles changed everybody's view about how rocks got made in the first place.
14:12Back in the incandescent days of the primeval era, when the planet was making itself in fire and lava.
14:19Back when the earth began.
14:23All thanks to that weirdo Witham, and his mania for fossil veggies.
14:31Oh, this one also. Good.
14:33Well, things got back to vegetables again, real ones this time, when somebody introduced
14:38Sorby to something called a spectroscope.
14:41Works like so.
14:43You shine a light through a vegetable solution that absorbs wavelengths in the light according to what's in it.
14:51Then you shine that light through a prism, and you get the familiar spectrum.
14:56But with black lines at the wavelengths of the light that have been absorbed by the stuff in the solution.
15:03So now you know what the stuff in the solution is.
15:08Good. Thanks. Great.
15:14By 1867, Sorby was doing that solution trick with boiled up autumn leaves,
15:19to see if he could find out what caused them to change colour in autumn.
15:23Turned out to be a chemical you only see in autumn, when the green chlorophyll disintegrates,
15:28called carotene, which is what gives plants their red orange yellow colours.
15:38Now, the thing about carotene is what you're looking at now, or any time.
15:43Because carotene's part of the way your eye works, and without it you can't see.
15:47Well, you can't see at certain times of day, or in certain circumstances which you can guess we are now
15:54approaching.
15:56Watch what happens when you go from light to dark, like this.
16:02First of all you can't see anything in the dark bits, and then your eye kind of goes into automatic
16:07exposure mode,
16:08and gradually here comes your vision back. A bit grainy, but you can see.
16:16Here's what's actually going on. On the retina at the back of your eye, you've got these purple things called
16:22rods.
16:23Very sensitive to dim light, so they let you see in the dark.
16:27When you go into a brighter environment, the rods bleach yellow, and you're now in bright light operating mode.
16:34It's carotene that does the trick by causing the yellow to change back to purple once you're back in the
16:40dark.
16:41Without carotene, that doesn't happen. So if you're carotene deficient, all you see in the dark is nothing.
16:55Which leads me to Indonesia's greatest gustatory delight, Nasi Goreng, which brings together chicken and rice,
17:01which is what I'm also about to do.
17:09You see, back in 1886, when the Dutch were running this country, they got all worked up about a very
17:15nasty disease called beriberi,
17:18that was putting colonial administrators into hospital.
17:21So this young medical researcher called Eichmann notices some chickens, normally fed on hospital leftovers,
17:29staggering about with symptoms remarkably like beriberi.
17:33So he does nothing about it.
17:35Until one day, the hospital gets a new cook.
17:42Now, the new cook isn't going to give fancy rice specially prepared for Europeans, that is, polished, to chickens, leftovers
17:49or not.
17:50If the rough, unpolished stuff was good enough for the local Javanese, it was good enough for chickens.
18:00Shortly after this, Eichmann suddenly starts to notice chickens that aren't looking foul anymore.
18:07These birds are looking healthy.
18:10Takes a closer look at the problem and discovers it's the rice.
18:17Once the chickens had switched from polished rice to unpolished rice,
18:21they'd completely recovered from bird beriberi and become once again well enough to turn into Nasi Goreng.
18:39Turned out, their disease was another one of those deficiency things, like carotene deficiency night blindness, remember?
18:47Without something in the hulls of the rice, which was missing when you polished the rice, the chicken got beriberi.
18:53But what was missing something?
18:57In 1917, the whole thing hit the front page.
19:07World War I ships taking food to Britain were being hit so hard and so regularly by German U-boats
19:13that the country was in deep trouble.
19:15Britain was down to four weeks' food reserves.
19:23There was only one thing to do – tighten their belts and cut down on the amount of food you
19:28got.
19:29So Britain introduced rationing.
19:34But would rationing give people enough food to survive?
19:38Anyway, what was a healthy diet?
19:40So a guy called Gowland started taking a close look at the eating habits of rats
19:46and discovered that even if you gave rats more food than they could eat,
19:49without a particular kind of food in their diets, they wouldn't grow.
19:53There was something missing in their food, and maybe in human food too, that was having the same effect
20:00as the deficiency problems with chicken beriberi and that night blindness thing, remember?
20:06Something you needed as well as the basic carbohydrates and fats and minerals you got in food.
20:13Gowland called the something, whatever it was, accessory food factors.
20:20Which brings me back to that picnic and why I said at the beginning that modern food is better than
20:26theirs was.
20:28It didn't take long to find out what the mystery food factors were that you had to have in your
20:32diet.
20:33We call them vitamin A, B, B1, B12, C, D and so on, because when they were discovered,
20:41we didn't know what chemicals they were, so they just got letters.
20:45So there you have it. Thanks to bikes and zippers and sewing machines and light waves and fossils and Dutch
20:53chicken,
20:54we got vitamins. And enrichment, enhancement and all those other names we give it when the food's better than the
21:02real thing.
21:03Oh, you know what the food was that the rats weren't getting?
21:07Milk. Milk. Don't forget to drink yours.
21:12Oh, you know what the rats weren't getting?
21:13Oh, you know what the rats were getting?
21:29Oh, you know what the rats were getting?
21:29Oh, you know what the rats were getting?
21:30Oh, you know what the rats were getting?
21:30Oh, you know what the rats were getting?
21:30Oh, you know what the rats were getting?
21:33Oh, you know what the rats were getting?
21:36Oh, you know what the rats were getting?
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