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00:28In
00:29spite of appearances, this program is not about fruit.
00:43Did you know that over 150 years ago, one of the greatest scientific institutions in
00:49the modern world was set up with money from the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland?
00:56A guy whose scientific qualifications included discovering a better way to make a cup of
01:00coffee. Strange, but true. But that's the way it was back then. Anybody could be a scientist,
01:09like this guy was, name of Smithson, who gave America two billion in today's money because
01:16he reckoned the country needed to spread the light of knowledge. Ironic, since this program
01:21will end with knowledge of life. Oh, there's the place I was talking about, named after
01:27James Smithson. The Smithsonian. A few statistics. 140 million things in the museum collections,
01:36over 25 million visitors a year. All getting lit by knowledge. Smithson would have been proud.
01:43And research projects all over the world, including this archaeological dig in the Middle East,
01:48picking up treasures and a suntan. Speaking of which, apart from the coffee,
01:54Smithson also did a lot for sunburn and poison ivy and cosmetics and diaper rash and zits and
02:02photocopiers and tyres and ceramics, which is where a lot of the gunk in this bottle gets used.
02:08Smithson discovered it when he was crystal hunting in England and came across stuff like this.
02:13It's called calamine, as in calamine lotion, which is made of one form of the crystal.
02:20OK, no big deal, unless you suffer from sunburn or poison ivy or die up a rash.
02:25But there's something very strange about calamine.
02:28So, for a few moments, here comes a brief dissertation on everything you ever wanted to know about crystals.
02:34Don't worry. It's electrifying stuff.
02:37In 1880, a couple of French physicist brothers discover the amazing secret of crystals like this.
02:43If you slice a bit out and then squeeze it, put pressure on it, the crystal changes shape slightly.
02:50And when it does that, it gives off an electric charge.
02:56And the more pressure you put on it, the more electric charge it makes.
03:01And it does the opposite.
03:02Zap it with an electric charge, and it changes shape.
03:07And the bigger the electric charge, the more it changes shape.
03:12OK, now for what you can do with all this.
03:15Put two crystal slices up against each other, and hit one with electricity.
03:21It changes shape, squeezes the other one, and it makes electricity.
03:25The same charge that affected the first one.
03:28So if the first crystal's affected by an electric field, the second crystal will react.
03:34The whole thing's a tiny electricity gauge.
03:41Now, don't nod off, because, as you will see, this turns out to be a tale of genius and dark
03:48passion,
03:49and behaviour that perhaps can best be described as bohemian, in more ways than one.
03:55Because one of those two French brothers working on crystals, a fella called Pierre,
04:00marries a girl called Marie, who comes from Poland, and the reason they both care deeply about where I am
04:05now,
04:05down the bottom of a mine in the Czech Republic, together with this very slightly radioactive water,
04:15is because this is where they get the raw material on which they will use their little electricity gauge
04:19and change the entire world.
04:24Here's where the raw material comes from.
04:27The northern mountains of the Czech Republic, in Bohemia.
04:30And it comes out of these mountains by the tonne.
04:35Here's a bit.
04:36It's called Pitch Blend.
04:38And before our curious couple get interested in it, it's used for colouring ceramics.
04:43And it's mined here, just outside the little town of Yakimov, down there.
04:51Oh, by the way, that use of Pitch Blend to colour ceramics was something to do with glazing pottery,
04:58and nothing to do with my story, so I won't go on about it.
05:04OK, in 1896, a German called Röntgen totally blows away the world of science
05:12with one of the most amazing discoveries anybody has ever seen.
05:16Well, I suppose I mean seen through.
05:19This.
05:21X-rays.
05:23So everybody immediately jumps on the bandwagon, looking for more mystery rays,
05:28and what you might do with them.
05:32It only takes a few weeks, and bingo, some Frenchman repeats the trick.
05:36Only what he comes up with is even more stupefying.
05:40Because what he does is fiddle around with some of that stuff from around here I showed you before.
05:46Pitch Blend.
05:48One of the things you get from Pitch Blend is uranium.
05:52And it turns out, if you put an object between the uranium and a photographic plate,
05:57and then leave the whole shebang in darkness,
05:59the next time you look, there's a shadow of the object on the plate,
06:05as if the uranium had been giving out some mysterious invisible light.
06:11The other thing uranium does, our Frenchman discovers,
06:15is to very slightly charge up the air around it.
06:19But this is ho-hum stuff, and nothing at all to do with the exciting mystery rays.
06:25So our Frenchman kind of ignores that bit.
06:30But not that Franco-Polish couple I mentioned, Mari and Pierre.
06:34Family name, Curie.
06:36Who, you will recall, are using that little crystal electricity gauge, right?
06:44In 1898, the Curies are getting concentrates of various materials by boiling and distilling them,
06:50and one of the things they do that to is pitch blend.
06:53And their crystal electricity gauge identifies an amazingly powerful electrical charge
06:59in the air all round the stuff.
07:02One night, they pop into the lab and there's the sample glowing in the dark.
07:06The world gets radioactivity, and they get the Nobel Prize.
07:12Soon, everybody's decided slightly radioactive water is good for your health.
07:17Speaking of health, unfortunately, Mari's husband Pierre is killed by a truck not long afterwards.
07:25Five years later, the widow Curie is sending out loneliness signals
07:29to the guy who has been their lab assistant for years, a fellow called Paul Langevin,
07:34who gets the message, and in no time at all the two of them become a bit of an item.
07:39And a national scandal.
07:41Because back then, widows are not supposed to send that kind of signal to unattached men.
07:47Of course, given what Langevin is about to do with the Curie's little crystal gizmo,
07:52receiving signals is right up his street.
08:00You're watching Langevin's use of the crystal right now, because that's how this submarine hunter
08:06knows when to fire her depth charges to best effect.
08:11Because, thanks to Langevin, and what's called the Langevin Sandwich,
08:15the ship knows she's sailing over the top of an enemy's sub.
08:19Here's how.
08:20Attached to the hull of the ship is a small kind of dome structure.
08:24And inside, that Langevin sandwich I mentioned.
08:28A slice of crystal sandwiched between two plates of steel.
08:33OK, you recall the crystal reacts to electricity by changing its shape each time you zap it.
08:37When that happens, the vibration caused by the changing crystal shape makes the steel plates vibrate too.
08:44And when that happens, the vibrations are really powerful,
08:48and send out waves into the water surrounding the dome, like this.
08:52The waves go out in all directions, and when they hit something like a sub,
08:56they bounce back, put pressure on the crystal, and it makes electricity.
09:00And that's what generates the pinging noise that tells the sub hunter where the sub is,
09:06and what to do about it.
09:16The Langevin sandwich becomes known as sonar,
09:19and early in World War II, it makes life very uncomfortable for the German U-boat wolf packs lurking under
09:25the surface,
09:25and helps the Allies win the Battle of the Atlantic.
09:29By the end of the war, thanks to sonar,
09:31the Allies have sunk 782 U-boats, or forced them to surface, to surrender.
09:39Mind you, in spite of that, the wolf packs take their grim toll.
09:43Over 23,300 merchant ships get sunk between 1939 and 1945.
09:55Here's one the U-boats didn't get, the USS Jeremiah O'Brien,
09:59the only one of her kind still in one piece, anchored in San Francisco as a tourist attraction.
10:05She's a special kind of ship, designed to carry supplies and American troops to Europe through thick, thin and wolf
10:13packs.
10:17Not very impressive looking, is she?
10:20But you should hear what they say about her at the time.
10:23When the project to build these ships is announced,
10:26they are referred to by President Roosevelt as, quote,
10:30dreadful looking objects, unquote.
10:34And to add insult to injury, when they are launched, they have no radio detection finders,
10:39no fire detection equipment, no emergency power generators, and no lifeboat radios.
10:45But with a war on, the name of the game is fast, and above all, cheap.
10:53They're cheap, because they're standardised.
10:56Every single one of them is exactly the same.
10:59You go from one ship to another, and you don't know you've left.
11:02And that's because nobody's ever built a ship this way before.
11:08The shiplards that built the Jeremiah look more like car plants,
11:13where they literally assemble a ship from 30,000 parts made in 30 different states.
11:21OK, let me do a quick catch-up.
11:24We're here assembling wartime ships because the Curie's crystal electric gauge
11:29got used by Langevin to develop sonar that helped to knock out German U-boats,
11:34attacking the ships you're looking at being put together faster than the U-boats can sink them.
11:39The first ship takes 257 days to get built.
11:43By 1942, they've got it down to an incredible 15 and a half hours.
11:48They carry 9,000 tons, go at 11 knots, and nobody thinks they'll last longer than five years,
11:55even if a U-boat doesn't get them first.
12:02All in all, they build 2,710 of these ugly tubs.
12:07And between them, they save Britain and tens of thousands of lives.
12:14And if I tell you that the first one to be launched is named the Patrick Henry,
12:18you'll know what these ships are called.
12:20Liberty ships.
12:22If you take a careful look at this Queen of the Sea,
12:26you'll see why back in the 1940s putting a ship together that way is such a calculated risk,
12:30and why they managed to put them together so fast.
12:34Because at the time, they're doing something nobody's ever tried before.
12:39The Liberty is an all-welded ship.
12:42That's another reason why, during World War II, this ship is such hot stuff.
12:48The point about welding a ship is it's faster than joining the bits together with rivets,
12:53but not as strong.
12:56OK, oxyacetylene welding.
12:58The oxy stands for oxygen, and the acetylene I'll get to in a minute.
13:02But the thing about mixing oxygen and acetylene is the flame.
13:06It burns at about 4,000 degrees centigrade,
13:101,000 degrees hotter than any other gas will give you.
13:12So it's great for welding the sheet steel Liberty ships are made of.
13:21So the Jeremiah O'Brien is a one-piece ship.
13:24Going aboard is quite a theatrical experience.
13:27And speaking of theatre, and the acetylene I said I'd get back to,
13:31it's acetylene that leads to this funny-looking object,
13:35which is something that changes life in the theatre,
13:38and something that puts the phrase bright lights into your vocabulary,
13:41because this funny-looking object is the arc light.
13:51OK, now for a quick burst of mysterious 19th-century chemistry.
13:58You get acetylene gas by slowly dripping water onto calcium carbide.
14:04Which some guy discovers you can make by banging high-voltage electric current
14:10into a mixture of lime and coke.
14:13You deliver the current through a pair of carbon rods
14:16and do the whole thing in something called an electric arc furnace.
14:23This works on the same principle.
14:26Look, you run electricity through each of these two carbon rods
14:32and then you slightly separate them.
14:35And when you do, you put on your sunglasses.
14:49This is the brightest light in history so far,
14:52caused by electricity arcing across between these two carbon rods
14:56and causing them to burn incandescent.
14:59Keeping the rods the right distance apart as they burn away
15:02is something a Frenchman called Foucault thinks up.
15:08He calls it a regulator,
15:10and basically it uses the tiny variation in current as the rods burn away
15:14to run a clockwork mechanism that moves the rods,
15:17keeping them close together.
15:19In the theatre, the arc light is the answer to every actor's prayer.
15:23Meanwhile, Foucault has other, more heavenly ideas.
15:45The other thing Foucault does can only be described as cosmic.
15:52The first proper experimental version of it happens here,
15:56in the Pantheon in the centre of Paris.
15:59And it's one of those science discoveries that gives you goosebumps.
16:03Foucault takes a heavy ball and attaches it to a great long wire
16:08and makes sure the wire isn't twisted.
16:11Then he pulls it off to one side
16:13and fixes it to the wall with a piece of string.
16:17And then, to make sure nothing will influence the swing of the ball
16:21in the slightest way, he burns the string.
16:24The string burns through, snaps, and the ball starts to swing.
16:32Now, here's the bit that boggles the mind.
16:35If we move our camera so that it stays in line with this ball,
16:38and we do a bit of time-lapse photography,
16:41and I sit as still as I can, you'll see what Foucault saw.
16:52The ball goes on swinging in the same place, in inertial space, independent of the earth.
16:58What you're seeing now is extraordinary.
17:01It's what you'd see if you were watching the earth from somewhere in outer space.
17:05In 1851, when Foucault does this, he finally proves that Copernicus was right.
17:12The earth does rotate.
17:14Watch it again.
17:15You see what I mean about goosebumps.
17:18This is the earth turning.
17:22I said this was a cosmic idea.
17:25Because if you put Foucault's clockwork arc light regulator,
17:28together with his inertial pendulum,
17:31there's only one thing you can use them for.
17:33To save astronomers from eye strain.
17:42Put yourself in the astronomers' place, staring up at the nightly show, whizzing by.
17:47Because, thanks to the fact that the earth spins at a thousand miles an hour,
17:52you're moving around at a fair lick, and the stars aren't.
17:56Look at a starfield through a fixed telescope,
17:59and what you see is, there it was, gone.
18:06Foucault's doing that inertial pendulum thing of his,
18:09and realises that the trick to stargazing is to use a clockwork regulator
18:14– remember the arc light – to turn a telescope the opposite way to the earth.
18:19So, heavenly bodies stay in the frame just long enough for Foucault to do what he does next.
18:27Take a photograph.
18:28In 1845 he gets the first clear shot of the sun,
18:32and then six years later, this, the solar corona,
18:37and these things here called prominences,
18:39which people have always thought were optical illusions.
18:43Foucault's photo shows they're real.
18:45And then, the first clear detail of these, sunspots,
18:51which turn out not to be mountains.
18:59Hmm, where are we?
19:01I mean in the story.
19:03Electric crystals help Pierre and Marie Curie discover what they call radium,
19:08and then Langevin uses the crystal to develop sonar that helps save liberty ships,
19:13put together with welding techniques using acetylene made with carbon arcs,
19:17also working in arc lights with clockwork regulators built by Foucault,
19:21whose pendulum helps him to take pictures of solar eclipses.
19:26And astronomy really takes off.
19:29Look.
19:31With tracking telescopes, you can take precise enough photographs
19:34to spot the smallest changes between one photograph and another.
19:38You overlay the pictures, and it's easy to see what you just missed.
19:42Watch this spot again.
19:47See?
19:48And then you can overexpose the photograph, and even very faint stars become visible.
19:53And you can really start to enjoy that wonderful nightly show up there.
20:02And speaking of shows, that's where Foucault gets his photography from in the first place.
20:08OK, this is the 1822 version of virtual reality, called a diorama, and the latest excitement for the Paris glitterati.
20:18Now, bottom left is the view the audience gets.
20:21Into a spring scene behind a cloister setting, we lower a giant gauze panel,
20:25and light it to put a fog effect onto everything.
20:29Put a light on the scene itself, and off the fog effect gauze, and the scene clears.
20:36Take light off the spring scene, and onto the snow scene behind, and that's what you see.
20:41A painted gauze scene either shows up because it's lit, or doesn't because it's not.
20:46Boring, right?
20:48Wrong.
20:49Back then, for the locals, this is boffo crazy Hollywood extravaganza stuff.
20:54And all thanks to this French fanatic for virtual reality called Daguerre.
20:59Name ring a bell?
21:04By 1840, Daguerre's next version of virtual reality, which Foucault will use in his astronomy,
21:10is something that gives people cramp.
21:12Well, they have to keep still for so long if they want to enjoy the latest rave experience,
21:16which is to have their daguerreotype taken.
21:20Daguerre's amazing new invention becomes an instant worldwide craze.
21:27You take a silvered copper plate out of its case, in darkness of course, expose it to the scene,
21:33and then utter those immortal photographic words,
21:36Stay very still please, and start counting.
21:40One, two, three.
21:43Developing the picture goes like this.
21:45Put the exposed plate in iodine vapour to get a film of silver iodide on the plate.
21:50Now put it in mercury vapour that only sticks to the bits hit by bright light.
21:54Dipping the plate in hypo-sulphite, wash it off the bits not mercurised.
21:59Wash everything with distilled water, and you get the world's first photograph.
22:09And it costs so much, it comes in a frame.
22:13Now, all the magic ingredients Daguerre uses are known to any chemist at the time.
22:19Mercury, distilled water, silver, copper.
22:22But there's one new chemical in the mix.
22:25Iodine.
22:26Discovered thanks to a recent accident.
22:29Now, you know iodine has all kinds of healthful properties.
22:32This is ironic, given the job of the guy who discovers it.
22:36He kills people.
22:45In 1804, Napoleon's problem, and that of the guy who discovers Hyade, is this.
22:51The way to win wars is with gunpowder.
22:54Key ingredient, saltpeter.
22:57Problem is, it's an import, and you can't import when there's a war on.
23:00So the French have to make saltpeter themselves.
23:04That's okay.
23:05Saltpeter's made from wood ash, lime, and something Frenchmen make in abundance themselves.
23:11Dung.
23:31Standing guard over the nation's prime resource, French troops collect enough, um, raw material
23:37to ensure that their chance of victory has not gone down the toilet.
23:40And then the guy who's making the gunpowder hits a snag.
23:50His name is Courtois, he's a chemist, and his problem is this.
23:56The wood ash he also needs, remember?
23:59But all the timber they've got is going for shipbuilding.
24:06Fortunately, there's an alternate replacement for wood ash,
24:09so Courtois gets on with making his gunpowder.
24:11And one day, his vats need cleaning out, so he chucks in some sulphuric acid,
24:18and out come violet fumes that condense to become what he then discovers is iodine,
24:25for Daguerre to use in his photographs.
24:28The reason for the fumes is what Courtois has been using as a replacement for wood ash.
24:33Where from? Well, find any beach.
24:41This one, for instance, in northern Scotland, where a lot of that wood ash replacement comes from.
24:48Thanks to the fact that the 18th century Scottish nobility are pretty fed up with living in crumbling ancestral homes,
24:55with no heat or running water or lavatories.
24:58Nope, they'd rather be enjoying the high life down in London.
25:02But with no money, no way.
25:04And then the wood ash crisis strikes, also in Britain.
25:08Well, look around, where do you see trees?
25:11And then, yippee, it turns out that the Scottish coastline is positively choked with something else you can use to
25:19make wood ash.
25:21Seaweed.
25:22All you have to do to make yourself a fortune is persuade all those penniless, starving and unemployed peasants who
25:28live on your land to collect it for you.
25:31This is the easy bit, since the law at the time prevents them from emigrating to a better life in
25:37America,
25:37they are desperate for any work, and most of them owe you rent.
25:41So in no time at all, they are down on the water line cutting kelp off the rocks.
25:46Kelp is the type of seaweed in question.
25:49And turning it into money, that is, wood ash, is a piece of cake.
25:54You just, well, burn it.
25:58In pits.
26:00And then pile stones on top to compress the ashes down.
26:04Which is why making money with kelp is a piece of cake.
26:08Because what comes out is cakes of wood ash.
26:12Ship these off to the factories in England, where they grind the cakes into a fine powder which they call
26:18potash,
26:18and Scottish aristocrats call money for jam.
26:24The profits from this local slavery are so humongous, that soon some Scottish castle owners have enough cash to spare
26:33to build more castles,
26:34with no heat, running water or lavatories, in which they don't have to live, because now they are having fun
26:40spending the rest of the profits down in London.
26:43Hey, what can I tell you? Most of these guys went around in skirts.
26:52So, thanks to the kelpers, the ash crisis is over.
26:55So, gunpowder makers can get on with manufacturing their salt peter.
27:01And something a little more meaningful can happen.
27:04I refer, of course, to that minor event, otherwise known as the Industrial Revolution, for which potash is essential.
27:12Especially in the underwear business.
27:17See, down south in England, three decades of hot Indian summers has meant great harvests and cheap food.
27:25So, spare cash to buy a knockout new foreign fabric called cotton.
27:30Once you get the natural grease out with a solution of potash, you've got a really comfortable, cheap, lightweight cloth.
27:37If certain production problems can be solved.
27:44So solved they are, by machines. Hence, the Industrial Revolution.
27:49And this is also one of those chains of events, where technology solves one problem and creates another,
27:55which gets solved and creates another, which gets solved and creates another, and so on.
28:03Problem number one, make more of this new wonder cloth, but for the same amount of money.
28:13So, in 1753, they automate the weaver's shuttle, by putting it on little wheels and tying a bit of string
28:20to it,
28:21so the weaver can tug it backwards and forwards.
28:27This simple little gizmo doubles output at a stroke, so that's problem number one solved.
28:36Problem two, the thread makers can't make thread fast enough to keep up with this new weaving speed.
28:43So, in 1776, they automate the way the cotton wool is drawn off bobbins and pulled out into thread.
28:51So, the old thread making by hand problem is solved, and the old thread makers are out of work.
28:57But, hey, that's progress, right?
29:02Problem three, they've got to make more stuff.
29:05So, in 1771, a new thread making machine pulls the thread out and twists it into yarn.
29:12Problem four, the market's differentiating.
29:15Some people want even finer cloth for that fancy new idea I mentioned earlier, underwear.
29:23So, in 1779, somebody sorts that one out with a really nifty trick.
29:29Run the thick thread between rollers going at different speeds so that when it comes out the other side, it's
29:35much finer.
29:36And finer thread, of course, means finer fabric.
29:43Problem five, the real problem, demand goes through the roof.
29:48And all this thanks to those Indian summers.
29:56The other place they have Indian summers is India, where the cotton comes from.
30:02Places like Madras, founded by the English.
30:05OK, a quick catch-up again.
30:07Electric crystals, sonar, welding, arc lights, pendulums, dioramas, photographs, iodine, gunpowder, seaweed ash, and cotton from India.
30:21By 1790, the stuff is leaving here for Britain by the ton.
30:27At first, it's finished articles like shirts going back to England for the rich to wear.
30:33But as all that Industrial Revolution textile machinery gets into high gear, back in the UK, we're into mass marketing.
30:40And that's a very different story.
30:46See, this may all look very picturesque, but you just know it isn't going to keep up with production lines
30:53and steam-driven machinery and order books.
30:56I mean, the Indian growers can't guarantee a crop, the packaging falls apart, and with roads the way they are
31:02out here, regular delivery is in your dreams.
31:06None of which helps British cloth manufacturers, tearing their hair out because they've got a market growing like Topsy.
31:23It's enough to turn an English mill owner to drink.
31:26Fortunately, bootleg gin saves the day.
31:29Ah, no, not this kind.
31:31The kind invented around 1793 by a penniless American called Eli Whitney.
31:36A cotton gin, a machine that takes the seeds out of cotton automatically.
31:41A bit like that.
31:49Whitney's gin de-seeds cotton 300 times faster than a human can, so the price of American cotton goes through
31:55the floor.
31:56And then when everybody bootlegs Whitney's gin, so does the price of a gin.
32:00And that's the end of India.
32:06That switch to cheap American cotton really boosted the economy of the southern states,
32:11and expanded cotton growing until there was almost nothing else going on there.
32:15None of which helped Whitney very much, who early on has switched from gins to muskets anyway.
32:20And a new French idea for making guns with interchangeable parts,
32:24so that if a bit breaks in battle, you just slam in a replacement.
32:29Well, this idea finally makes Whitney a lot of money.
32:32And given the fact that everybody has pirated his gin idea, and getting in debt and practically starving,
32:38he must have thought it was about time.
32:48OK, OK, so you saw it coming.
32:50Yes.
32:51Time.
32:52Clocks.
32:53And back then, clockmaking is a very time-consuming business.
32:56Till Eli Whitney's interchangeable parts idea gets around.
33:01And suddenly, now everybody can know what time it is.
33:04Because with a few lathes and patterns and measuring gauges,
33:07you can churn out cheap wooden clocks made of interchangeable parts,
33:11till it's time for the cows to come home.
33:18In 1816, a young fellow named Chauncey Jerome sets up shop in New England and uses the same technique.
33:25But this time, instead of wood, he uses sheets of brass,
33:29and gets machines to cut out the patterns for each bit by the thousand.
33:34Jerome's production line approach turns the household clock into the world's first consumer durable.
33:40And since these brass clocks only cost him 50 cents to make,
33:43and they can sell for five times that,
33:46financially speaking, Jerome is going to be in like Flynn.
33:53This is a Jerome clock. Nice, isn't it?
33:56You may even have one in your family.
33:59Wouldn't be surprising, given the fact that in one year,
34:02Chauncey's factory turns out 200,000 of them.
34:06And by the end of his life, he's sold millions, all over the world, from London to Sydney.
34:11So he ends up rich, right?
34:14Wrong.
34:16Chauncey's too successful.
34:18So when there's a dip in the market, he has to take out a gigantic loan
34:22from a fellow who's recently made rather a lot of money.
34:25A little bit later on, when this guy discovers that most of his money is being used to pay off
34:30Chauncey's debts,
34:31well, he pulls out, declares bankruptcy,
34:34and for Jerome, time has run out.
34:44And on that note, how's our schedule?
34:48Smithson's crystals,
34:50Curie's radium,
34:52sonar protecting ships welded by acetylene that leads to arc lights and pendulums,
34:57so stargazers can photograph the sky,
35:00with daguerreotypes using iodine from seaweed,
35:03which gets burnt for potash used on cotton,
35:06which is processed by the gin invented by Whitney,
35:09whose interchangeability ideas kick off poor old Chauncey Jerome.
35:13Meanwhile, Jerome's erstwhile backer,
35:16the man who pulled out, remember?
35:18He's a real sharp type,
35:19a man known as the Prince of Humbug,
35:22a person for whom the ups and downs of the investment world
35:26are just one big three-ring circus.
35:40The three-ring circus is, after all, invented by the Prince of Humbug,
35:45a.k.a. P. T. Barnum,
35:47who starts in showbiz with a freak show.
35:49Then he finds a two-foot-high man he calls Tom Thumb
35:53and shows him off to European royalty.
35:56But in 1880, his piece de resistance is the greatest show on earth.
36:10Earlier on, in 1850, Barnum makes a good deal of money
36:14as the American tour manager for The Biggest Thing in Music Maybe Till Elvis,
36:18an opera singer known as the Swedish Nightingale.
36:22Jenny Lind, one of the greatest singers who ever lived.
36:26Miss Lind's tour is so successful,
36:28people buy tickets just to buy tickets.
36:31Of course, the whole thing is brilliantly stage-managed
36:34by the Prince of Humbug himself, who takes a hefty cut.
36:37The phrase, musical notes, takes on a whole new meaning.
36:49And, speaking of notes,
36:51another musical genius with an interest in cash
36:54gets an offer from London to write an opera for Lind,
36:57which he jumps at because foreign commissions like that
37:00pay seven times what he gets from La Scala back home in Italy.
37:05Giuseppe Verdi's opera, starring Lind to the usual rapturous audiences,
37:09is called Imazna Dieri.
37:12And if you've never heard of it,
37:13that's because some people say,
37:15without Jenny Lind, it would have bombed.
37:17Point is, what it says about Verdi,
37:20like, he gets away with a lot.
37:25I'm not saying he isn't one of the greatest operatic geniuses of all time,
37:28but what he tends to write about, given what's going on at the time,
37:32is, to say the very least, dangerous lunacy.
37:49Let me tell you about what's going on at the time
37:52and why Verdi's a lunatic.
37:54In 1847, when he and Lind get together,
37:58the Austrians are occupying Italy, right?
38:00So here's Verdi writing stuff with choruses called Long Live Italy,
38:04and storylines about the Israelites in captivity,
38:08and arias about the fight for freedom.
38:11One opera, Joan of Arc, is about how to chuck out an occupying power.
38:15OK, he's camouflaging it all by setting the things in France or Israel or even America.
38:22But you'd have to be tone deaf not to get the message behind Verdi's political pitch.
38:29L'ombra maastrausi, l'ombra maastrausi, l'ombra maastrausi,
38:40l'ombra maastrausi, ai me!
38:44About the only word missing from all this nationalistic libretto stuff
38:48is the word get it.
38:50You see the point?
38:51I mean, it's a wonder Verdi makes it to the podium,
38:54let alone stay out of jail long enough to receive a letter,
38:57in 1869, from the Cairo Opera House,
39:01asking him if he'll whistle up a new opera
39:04for His Excellency, the Khedive of Egypt.
39:08Here's the man himself, who probably has three reasons for asking Verdi.
39:13Number one, Verdi's famous, and the Khedive is not.
39:17Number two, this guy, the Khedive's boss, Turkish Sultan Abdul Aziz,
39:23who has the Khedive well under his thumb, and the Khedive wants out from under.
39:28Besides which, the Khedive is keen to make Egypt look less like a third-rate run-down dump,
39:33which, at the time, it is.
39:35So the offer to Verdi is,
39:38do something Egyptian and nationalist,
39:40which, as you know, Verdi's good at.
39:43And as regards the fee,
39:45well, it's kind of, open your wallet and repeat after me, help yourself,
39:49so Verdi obliges,
39:51with the most successful opera ever written,
39:54and called Aida.
40:04Unfortunately, Verdi delivers Aida too late for the Khedive's third reason for asking him,
40:10which is to celebrate the inauguration of another great Egyptian showpiece,
40:14the Suez Canal.
40:16When it opens in 1869, it's the ninth wonder of the world.
40:20It brings East and West six weeks closer, because now you don't have to go around Africa,
40:25and it brings Thomas Cook into the story,
40:28because Cook is one of the nobodies who goes to the opening of the canal.
40:31Now, the red carpet gets rolled out for princes and ambassadors and assorted entertainment megastars,
40:37but rubberneckers like Cook get to pay their own way
40:40and to spend a day here on the Mediterranean island of Malta en route.
40:48Not long afterwards, Thomas Cook Limited are starting to run the Cook's tour,
40:52as they've done ever since, and they've opened an office here in Malta.
40:57And, of course, one of the tours they're offering is Egypt,
41:00and, of course, the canal,
41:03which, as ninth wonder of the world, is well worth your package to a dollar.
41:08Let me show you what you get for your money.
41:15Here it is, the high-tech amazement of the age, a hundred miles long,
41:21starting at an unknown village that becomes Port Said,
41:24then through the desert, hitting various lakes on the way,
41:28one of which gets a new town named after the Khadiv, Ismailia,
41:32then through a final ridge, and the Mediterranean is finally joined to the Red Sea.
41:3925,000 labourers, ten years to build, and runs Egypt into so much debt
41:44that Khadiv has to sell his shares.
41:47A lot of new harbours are built, as well as a lot of new lighthouses.
41:51They even build another canal, all the way from the Nile,
41:55to provide drinking water for the workers.
41:57But the thing about the Suez Canal is,
41:59there may be no question that, historically speaking,
42:02it's the greatest idea since shish kebab.
42:05The question is, whose idea?
42:08The French engineer who actually builds it is a guy called Ferdinand de Lesseps,
42:13who has a great, I thought of it first, row with another engineer.
42:17And his hero is yet another Suez Canal wannabe,
42:21who, by the strangest coincidence, has a couple of brothers here in Malta.
42:29And this third person also claims to have designed the canal.
42:34Name of Henry Saint-Simon.
42:37A curious character, to say the least.
42:40At one point, Saint-Simon shoots himself in the head six times and survives.
42:46Then he invents a new version of the Catholic religion strictly for businessmen.
42:52And finally he comes up with a totally new scientific view of history.
42:59Now, Saint-Simon's secretary, a fellow called Auguste Conte,
43:05another loony and the last, I promise,
43:08regards Saint-Simon as a kind of world-class genius, the guru of all time.
43:13Speaking of which, India.
43:21Now, Auguste Conte never actually visited India.
43:24He married a hooker and lived unhappily ever after.
43:27But India illustrates Conte's ideas rather well.
43:30Well, that's my excuse.
43:33And now for his world-changing contribution to science.
43:37Conte follows upon Saint-Simon's scientific view of history.
43:40Look around you, he says, at museums and such,
43:43which we don't have to because what Conte is talking about is all around you here in India.
43:48And you see that humanity's gone through three historical stages.
43:54To start with, we all go through the theological stage with this kind of stuff.
44:00Gods and spirits and other such supernatural mumbo-jumbo, says Conte.
44:05That's the first of the three stages of development.
44:08The second is what he calls the metaphysical stage, the half-theological stage,
44:14when people discover how to harness the basic forces of nature, like steam power, for instance,
44:19or gravity, electricity or magnetism, with some form of God kind of pulling the levers behind the scenes.
44:30And finally, says Conte, we get to the scientific stage.
44:33No mumbo-jumbo, no hobgoblins, no deities writing the laws of nature.
44:38Just rational, scientific observation of how all the bits of the world fit together.
44:46The thing is, back at the theological stage of development, there's no way people can be scientific.
44:52There are no instruments that you would call instruments.
44:54And since nobody believes in stuff like natural laws that can be investigated, there aren't.
45:00And they don't.
45:03At the metaphysical stage of steam power and such, they just don't have the science to find out what the
45:09mystery forces of nature actually are,
45:11so they leave that side of things to guard.
45:14On humanity's great journey from the past, says Conte,
45:18all you can ever say is people at different times see things differently.
45:27And he clinches that argument like this.
45:30The ultimate science has to be a science that looks at the individual view that each individual has,
45:35and at how all the individual views add up to how a society works at any one time.
45:40So the ultimate science has to be the science of human behaviour, which Conte invents and calls sociology.
45:47And he says, when you're looking at how a person functions, all you can go on is their view of
45:52the world,
45:53and that depends on their point of view.
45:55There are no absolutes.
46:08On the subject of absolutes, Buddhism's all about that.
46:12You know, no absolutes.
46:14No centre to the universe.
46:16Nothing but, er, nothingness.
46:27Buddhism is attractive to the guy who takes over from Conte,
46:30because Buddhism represents a point of view that kind of says there's no point of view.
46:35The fellow who turns that into a science is the professor of physics at the University of Vienna in 1895.
46:43Ernst Mach, famous for his popular science lectures.
46:50One of which is not a million miles from what these shows are all about,
46:54the accidental nature of discovery.
46:57Anyway, Mach takes Conte's ideas to their logical conclusion.
47:06First of all, Mach looked at how you view the world from a sensory point of view,
47:11by whirling people around blindfold and seeing what that does to them.
47:19Then Mach decides to take on bigger things, like how you view the entire universe.
47:25Take Newton's apple, for instance.
47:28Say you drop the apple.
47:29OK, no problem.
47:31Here it is, falling.
47:36Except, due to the fact that the Earth spins as it travels in space,
47:40the apple's really going this way.
47:42Unless, that is, the solar system happens to be turning like this,
47:47as it travels through space, so that the apple's doing this.
47:52Mind you, if our galaxy's turning, then the apple's really turning.
47:56Unless our local section of the cosmos is going this way,
47:59in which case that's what the apple's doing.
48:02Unless the universe is expanding and contracting.
48:05So, unless you know your frame of reference, you can't say the apple's falling.
48:10Or say, anything.
48:13You see the Buddhist connection.
48:15Without a frame of reference, all you get is the local effect,
48:19which is no use to anybody.
48:21Certainly not the hard heads in science.
48:24So Mach comes up with a view of how to view
48:27that somebody else calls Mach's principle.
48:30And it says,
48:31everything in the cosmos is affected by everything else.
48:35Which means that anything you ever experience is going to be strictly relative.
48:42You've already guessed, I'm sure, who the somebody else is.
48:45The most famous scientist ever, who writes Mach's obituary,
48:48and who says all physicists get Mach in their mother's milk.
48:52And who turns all this philosophy and science and history and stuff I've been on about,
48:56into an idea that you could say,
48:59puts the totality of only everything, everywhere,
49:04into an entirely new light.
49:07Albert Einstein's the name.
49:09Relativity is the game.
49:10See, Einstein reckons that if everything in the cosmos is affected by everything else,
49:16then that should include everything.
49:19Including light.
49:22Which Einstein reckons is affected by gravity.
49:26Now there's only one way to check that.
49:28So on May the 29th, 1919, they do.
49:32With this.
49:34An eclipse.
49:36Here's the partial eclipse track.
49:38And here's the total eclipse track.
49:41So here, on Prince's Island,
49:43they photograph the moment of total eclipse.
49:45When, because of the darkness,
49:48the stars are visible in the sky.
49:52Now, earlier on,
49:54they've taken a shot of the same stars
49:56when the sun wasn't in the sky.
49:58Look.
49:59Here's a couple.
50:01See?
50:01Printed black on white
50:03to make them easier to make out.
50:06Now, here comes the incredibly minute bit of detail
50:10that so often changes the course of history.
50:13They come back from Prince's Island
50:15with this photograph.
50:17Remember, it's all black on white.
50:19There's the eclipse sun,
50:20and there's those two same stars.
50:25Now, because everything's so incredibly small,
50:28you blow those pictures up 300 times,
50:30and you get this.
50:32Here's one of the stars
50:33when the sun wasn't in that bit of the sky.
50:36And here's the same star
50:38when the sun was there.
50:40See that tiny shift?
50:43That's because in the eclipse photos,
50:44the light from the star
50:46is coming past the sun
50:48and being bent by the sun's gravity.
50:50So the star position seems to change.
50:54Thanks to that minute displacement,
50:58everything in existence has changed.
51:02Well, that's it.
51:04Thanks to the Smithsonian and sonar,
51:08welding, ash from seaweed,
51:10interchangeable parts for clocks,
51:12the world of opera,
51:14gurus,
51:15and Einstein's theory of the gravity effect.
51:18We've come from the light of knowledge
51:19to the knowledge of light.
51:21Because of which, it's Einstein's universe now,
51:25not Newton's anymore.
51:27So you can drop the apple.
51:29And it is for you to us.
51:32And it is awful.
51:37And I will continue.
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