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00:00I see you.
00:03Hey!
00:07Hey!
00:08Hey!
00:08Hey!
00:28Got from a Charlie Roger.
00:30Mark's crossing approved.
00:47I suppose one of the secrets of success in war has always been preparedness.
00:52Anticipating the threat and knowing how to react to it.
00:55And where and when.
00:58And then doing what you had to do with surgical precision.
01:23The story of how we came to be able to use all this massive firepower to such deadly effect.
01:29As usual.
01:31Links the strangest things.
01:35Sheep.
01:36And canals.
01:37And breakfast food.
01:38And department stores for instance.
01:40And just this once.
01:42The story starts with the medieval equivalent of this tornado bomber.
01:46And the thing that makes them both unique in war.
01:49The supreme capability both of them have.
01:52For one thing above all.
01:56Flexible response.
02:15Now that's flexibility.
02:16And back in the 13th century the famous English longbow put the fear of God into anybody you pointed it
02:22at.
02:34The longbow was called long because it was six foot long.
02:38And it was a medieval terror weapon.
02:40It could skewer a knight to his horse at 400 yards.
02:43Or put an arrow through a six inch thick oak door.
02:46Longbowmen were top gun superstars.
02:49And anything they wanted, they got.
02:51I mean you were in a tight spot.
02:53And you said, I am an English longbowman.
02:56They'd even let you out of jail.
03:05Unless you were lying.
03:07Which of course you were.
03:08Because this wasn't English.
03:10That's a myth.
03:11This was Welsh.
03:13And speaking of myths.
03:14What about the greatest bowman of all?
03:17Robin Hood.
03:34In spite of the fact that Robin Hood is the stuff of song and legend, the truth is, he was
03:39real.
03:40Not Hollywood real.
03:42No band of merry men.
03:44Nothing to do with King Richard or the Sheriff of Nottingham or Sherwood Forest.
03:47But he was a real outlaw.
03:49In Yorkshire.
03:51So, no myth.
03:54The one who was.
03:56The one who was, was Maid Marian.
03:58She certainly never existed.
04:02Maid Marian is a character invented in 1285 by a song and dance man from Flanders called Adam de la
04:09Halle.
04:09who is down here in Italy with his boss and his boss's army, which is helping out the boss's cousin,
04:15the King of Naples.
04:17But, like all troops, the army is homesick and misses its girlfriends.
04:22So Adam raises morale with a little show all about some very slightly naughty goings on back in Flanders and
04:30starring Maid Marian.
04:40It's one of those little girl goes to big city stories that goes something like this.
04:46Act one, don't speak to strange men.
04:55Into the life of an innocent shepherdess comes a smoothie from the bright lights,
05:00who in no time at all works his oily charm on the unsuspecting maiden,
05:05and before she knows it, Marian's in act two.
05:09Some things a girl shouldn't do.
05:17Having persuaded Marian to leave home, this devious creep inveigles her into trying a little night-time naughtiness.
05:41This is shocking stuff for a poor peasant girl who's never even heard of a bear midriff.
05:46Never mind all these people jumping around and drinking booze
05:50and whooping it up to the strains of the 13th century equivalent of some very heavy rock.
06:00As the night wears on, the spell wears off.
06:06Finally, act three of our cautionary tale, Marian gets the point.
06:11Realising in the nick of time how close she has come to a fate worse than death,
06:15Marian decides to hightail it back to home and her faithful boyfriend named Robin.
06:21And that's how Maid Marian came into existence.
06:24Nothing to do with Robin Hood at all.
06:33Just a soft-porn burlesque with a plot really based on social problems back in Flanders
06:38between homespun villagers who raised the sheep and smooth city types who made all the profits from the wool.
06:46This is Flanders. Flat, isn't it?
06:49Which is why, back in the Middle Ages, this was where all the action was if you were in the
06:55business of making a bit of money.
06:57Well, look at the place. On the edge of the North Sea, rivers everywhere, so ships could get in and
07:02out easily.
07:03All the way from the Mediterranean one way to the Baltic the other.
07:07You unload their cargoes and then you ship the stuff all over Europe,
07:12which is a piece of cake because it's flat.
07:15So Flanders was flat, and also rich.
07:38Trouble with being flat, of course, was that every winter the place flooded and hundreds of people drowned.
07:43And more to the point, so did hundreds of sheep.
07:46And wool was by far the country's biggest export.
07:50Which is why Flanders was keen to become less wet,
07:53and why hydraulic engineers like this guy, Simon Stevan,
07:57got busy in the 16th century designing systems to drain the land and keep it drained with windmills.
08:15And the kind of problem you get when the country's made enough money to lend, which is when compound interest
08:22enters your life.
08:25Now, I know you didn't switch on to see a programme about compound interest, but bear with me, because it'll
08:31only take a minute.
08:32See, compound interest is always about fractions of an amount and never the whole thing, right?
08:37But adding and subtracting fractions is so complicated, it's a load of double dutch to most people.
08:43Quite a problem, even for people like Stevan.
08:51So one day, he went home and solved the problem.
08:55Basically, what he did was this.
08:57See, this sum of fractions adds up to 14 and 43 thousandths.
09:04Stevan changed the way you wrote fractions, so 14 and 43 thousandths became the decimal fraction 14.043.
09:18Made compound interest a snip, and life easier for accountants, and changed America.
09:24Because, I know it's obvious if you think about it, but when you have revolutions and set up a new
09:30country and a new government,
09:33what do you do with all the old stuff?
09:35Okay, old government you chuck out.
09:38But what, for instance, about old money?
09:41I mean, in 1782, American money was this.
09:46Well, ours.
09:48English guineas, shillings and pence, and French souss, French levers, Spanish doubloons, Portuguese modeures, or anything else anybody would take.
10:05And each one of them was worth something different if you went from New York to South Carolina to Georgia
10:10to Pennsylvania.
10:11There was no such thing as American money in 1782.
10:15Which was the year a one-legged, fun-loving New York socialite called Gouverneur Morris
10:21took up a Simon Stevan suggestion that everybody else had ignored for the first ever decimal coinage.
10:27By the time President Jefferson had finished fiddling around with Morris' idea, it had become dollars and cents.
10:34Written with the symbol for Spanish pesos and centavos.
10:42Still took Americans fifty years to give up using their English shillings.
10:46Of course, once Jefferson got involved, everybody forgot it was Morris who started it.
10:51And that might have been that for him.
10:54Except, eventually, Morris did make his mark on history.
10:58In an eerie way.
11:08In 1825, at the grand opening ceremony, when they poured a keg of Great Lakes water into the Atlantic to
11:15symbolise the joining of the two,
11:17the eerie canal was all thanks to Morris, who'd headed the commission to build it.
11:21Greatest transportation system in America.
11:25Till they built this, right next to the canal.
11:28Which drove it out of business, because trains changed the way business was done.
11:49Of course, it made good sense to run the railroad tracks alongside the canal, because canal land is flat.
11:55But look at the tracks. Single tracks.
11:58So how do you pass a train going the other way?
12:02Well, you sit in a siding till the other train comes by.
12:05How do you know it's coming?
12:07Well, that's why you sit so long. You don't.
12:10Which is why the trains back then were never on time.
12:15And then, in 1851, the eerie railroad changed the world when it got itself organised with this.
12:28The telegraph solved the single track problem at a stroke.
12:32Now trains knew they didn't have to wait around.
12:34So they ran more trains.
12:36So the price of freight went down.
12:38So the American economy went up.
12:40The telegraph got the railroad people so well organised,
12:44everybody in business started copying their methods.
12:47The railroad is where all this stuff started.
12:51Waybills, line managers, departments.
12:53Because running the railroads was really complicated,
12:56with hundreds of points of sale and hundreds of thousands of customers.
13:00An organisational nightmare.
13:02Which is why one of the people running the eerie,
13:05a fellow called McCallum, thank you,
13:07organised the whole thing with the first manager.
13:10A regiment chart.
13:12Areas of responsibility.
13:14Lines of communication.
13:16Data flow.
13:18Personnel breakdown.
13:20All that.
13:24By the late 19th century, the railroads were running trains
13:28right up to the door of American factories,
13:30to bring in fuel and raw materials and take away whatever they produced to be sold.
13:36Which left only one minor problem.
13:38So where?
13:40The question was, what outlet was ever going to be big enough to handle what American industry was churning out?
13:46Everything from soup to nuts.
13:49Answer.
13:50The department store.
13:51That's what.
13:52The place that changed the meaning of the word, shopping.
13:56I mean, this wasn't just a place for getting everything you needed,
13:59although getting everything you needed in one place was a new idea.
14:03No, this wasn't shopping.
14:05This was an experience.
14:07It was glamour.
14:08Chandeliers, plush carpets, marble, beauty salons, day nurseries, charge accounts.
14:14This wasn't buying.
14:16This was consuming.
14:18And it was big.
14:22By 1877, the department stores were everywhere,
14:25persuading people to buy things they never knew they needed.
14:29And speaking of persuading people to buy,
14:32that was a year some people in Ravenna, Ohio, started persuading consumers to eat.
14:37Something that up until then, only horses and poverty-stricken Scotsmen had eaten.
14:42It was a product that brought together everything happening in American industry.
14:46Railroads, management, consumerism, raw materials in one end, finished goods out the other,
14:52and one new vital ingredient, merchandising.
14:56This was the product.
15:16Quaker came up with most of the persuaders you see everywhere today.
15:19They gave away free gifts.
15:22They appealed to the housewife on a limited budget.
15:25They even made a vaguely colonialist appeal to patriotism.
15:30Quaker also invented the idea of box-top coupons and endorsements from consumers and stars like Shirley Temple.
15:37So, with all this persuasion to consume, about all that was left to do was persuade the workers to produce.
15:45Watch the closing gates.
15:46At this time, please remove your hands from the hornet so it may be checked for you.
15:51Motivation, it's called, and it's the only thing that could get me to do what I'm about to do.
15:56The idea of motivation all started with an experiment run at the Western Electric Hawthorne Plant in Cicero, Illinois, between
16:021924 and 1927.
16:06And the best way to appreciate the surprising results of the experiment is for you to be the psychologist.
16:28OK, here's what you're trying to do.
16:31Find out what you have to do to get workers to produce more.
16:35So, you explain carefully that you're going to try upping the light levels.
16:39Production goes up.
16:41Then you explain carefully you're going to lower the light levels.
16:46Production stays up.
16:47So, you explain carefully you're going to change everything at random.
16:51The heat, the working day, the length of the lunch break, rest periods.
16:56You do that for five years, and production goes up again.
17:00Then you explain carefully you're going to put everything back where it was.
17:04Production stays up.
17:06Then you get the point.
17:09Explaining carefully made workers happy and more productive.
17:13Now, for some people, that fact was pretty hard to swallow.
17:21But it was right up the street of a fellow called Cannon, who spent years looking at what happens when
17:27you get hungry.
17:28He invented the barrier meal, you know, that shows up on x-rays, to look at what happens when you
17:33eat something.
17:34Discovered that the food's moved along inside your stomach by a series of waves, and that the waves and a
17:40dry mouth are the sign that you're hungry.
17:45And then he discovered that when you get excited or scared, as I'm about to, the stomach waves stop.
17:55And a lot more happens.
18:00And a lot more happens.
18:08Your blood leaves your stomach and goes to your heart, your lungs and your muscles.
18:16You're hyperventilates.
18:21Your blood pressure shoots up.
18:23Energy supplies sugar pours out of your liver.
18:32Cannon realized that those were just the things your body needed when it was under extreme stress, like I am
18:38now.
18:46Cannon also discovered what happens to make you stop feeling all shook up.
18:51The way, after moments of extreme stress, like we're going through now, the body uses feedback to check that the
19:00environment is still dangerous.
19:01And if it isn't, it pumps up the necessary chemicals to bring all the levels back to normal.
19:06And you know what?
19:07Cannon was right.
19:09I can feel it happening.
19:1620 years later, Cannon's feedback concept was transferred from biology to engineering, with deadly results.
19:29In the 1940s, feedback went into machines with the first early forms of automation in artillery that used feedback from
19:37radar data to track the targets.
19:39Then in the 1960s, the principle was used to operate robots in factories.
19:43Today, the most spectacular form of feedback in action happens when this tornado does what it does best.
19:56It's feedback from the aircraft's altimeter to the onboard computer that lets the pilot concentrate on the mission, while the
20:04plane flies itself just above the ground.
20:16Feedback and flexible response could be the key to everything in the fast-changing world of the 21st century.
20:23In the world of technology, the world of business, maybe the world of individual survival.
20:36And most particularly, in the post-Cold War political world of constantly shifting allegiances and threats and saber-rattling,
20:43perhaps none of it holds together for long enough for ceasefires or negotiations or peace plans without the aid of
20:51one special kind of flexible response.
21:15So let's see.
21:46Transcription by CastingWords
22:01CastingWords
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