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00:24This program reveals how, if you stay...
00:27Cool. Free. Tropical. Healthy. Maritime. Watery. Foolish. Eastern. On the move. Frog-loving. And experimental. You, too, can stay in
00:46touch.
00:48OK, this is all very scenic, but please focus your attention on this headline.
00:56In Spanish, it says something like, Argentina solves all the world's power needs with a totally new kind of energy.
01:05What? Believe it or not, this newspaper story about what some minor ex-German scientist in Argentina was or was
01:14not up to triggers one of those ideas that changes the world.
01:19The triggering happens on a ski lift in Colorado in 1951. OK, here's the story. An American scientist called Lyman
01:29Spitzer is apparently on one of these things for about half an hour.
01:32On the way up the mountain, he's thinking about that newspaper story about some guy in Argentina who's cracked the
01:40nuclear fusion problem.
01:43In 1951, well, with hindsight, your view is going to be the same as his was back then. His first
01:49thought is garbage.
01:51The second thing he thinks is because he's an astrophysicist and fusion is like what happens inside stars. Hmm. We
01:59ought to do something about that.
02:05This is the result. An experimental nuclear fusion reactor. If we can get fusion to work, you could power Los
02:13Angeles for a month on a bucket of seawater, which contains the kind of atoms you need for the fusion
02:19process.
02:20There's only one minor snag. First of all, you have to reproduce the conditions inside the sun because the trick
02:28is to be able to fuse together those atoms, deuterium and tritium.
02:33When you do, they release a humongous amount of heat to make steam, to drive turbines, to make electricity.
02:39So first you need a gas packed with the atoms so they're more likely to hit each other and the
02:45gas has to be hot like a million degrees.
02:47In this state, the gas is called plasma.
02:55And that's the catch. You've got to make the plasma hotter than anything that ever existed on the planet. Problem
03:01with that is, it'll vaporise everything in sight.
03:04Except there's one thing that won't vaporise everything, a magnetic field to hold the plasma in.
03:12To kickstart the thing, you need so much electrical power, you've got to find a way to get it cheap.
03:19Which would save you having to share the experiment costs with other countries.
03:24You know, what's called going Dutch. Funny that.
03:35It's this Dutchman who originally discovers how you might get electricity for almost nothing.
03:41Nothing is what gets Cameling Honest his Nobel Prize.
03:45Getting the temperature down to nearly nothing.
03:47Because Honest thinks that when things are chilled close to absolute zero, they do strange things.
03:56Take a small magnet and place it gently on a special kind of metal plate you're going to make extremely
04:02cold.
04:05OK, now for the chill down, with a liquid gas colder than minus 100 degrees.
04:10At this temperature, something extraordinary happens.
04:14The magnetic field being generated by the tiny magnet creates a current in the metal plate where this current generates
04:21another magnetic field.
04:22As long as the plate's kept cold, the current stays and so does the magnetic field.
04:28Interacting with the magnetic field in the magnet and making the magnet levitate.
04:37Honest discovers that.
04:39Back in 1911, he uses some liquid helium, colder than which there isn't much,
04:45to get some mercury chilled down to just above absolute zero.
04:50That's minus 273 degrees centigrade.
04:53He zaps the mercury with electricity and, to his amazement, sees its resistance to the electric current almost totally disappear.
05:02It has become a superconductor.
05:07Like the metal plate under the magnet.
05:10That's why its current and its magnetic field don't fade away.
05:14No resistance.
05:17Now back in 1911, all this might have been no more than some physicist's little game.
05:24Not today.
05:26Any minute now, they're also going to be able to do this.
05:32They're going to be able to light places, like this, from a single power station hundreds of miles away,
05:38without all those power stations in the middle to boost the current.
05:42Because there'll be no resistance in the power cable.
05:45Get it?
05:46Saves tons of money and power station pollution.
05:49And as you've seen with the magnet, they're well on their way to be able to do that trick.
05:53Thanks to something that happened back before Onnis.
05:58And I'm not just talking hot air.
06:00Well, in one sense I am.
06:16Meet Louis-Paul Cayet, French ballooning freak, and his group of fellow noodlers.
06:22Cayet is another physicist, who is keen on getting high.
06:26So he invents the first ever liquid oxygen breathing system for people heading up where the air is thin.
06:37Cayet has got the liquid oxygen to use, thanks to an accident in his laboratory,
06:42which I'll get to when these guys finally manage to get their act off the ground.
06:55Okay, now for that laboratory accident.
07:02In 1877, Cayet is squeezing oxygen in a cylinder when some tube or other cracks.
07:09The cylinder pressure and the oxygen temperature plummet.
07:12No fool Cayet.
07:13He takes the cold oxygen and repeats the trick, each time dropping the pressure deliberately.
07:19Each time the oxygen temperature drops further and further, until at one point it's so cold it goes liquid.
07:32Cayet carries his liquid oxygen in a flask and sniffs the vapours.
07:37This, of course, leads him on to study breathing and pressure and all that good stuff.
07:41It takes the whole science of physiology to new heights.
08:01Now, even in Cayet's time, there's another way to get high, feel the pressure, get your heart rate up, huff
08:07and puff.
08:08All that stuff Cayet's into, and that's go up a really high tower.
08:15In 1889, the highest tower in the world.
08:18So high, the pressure's meaningfully different between the bottom and the top.
08:24900 feet different.
08:32Phew, so Cayet climbs all 900 feet and runs a giant tube all the way from top to bottom.
08:39And fills it with various liquid and gases to see what the height does to them.
08:43Hey, what did you think noodlers did back then?
08:48Speaking of which, one of the greatest noodlers of all time builds the thing up which Cayet climbs.
08:54And a zillion other people, maybe you too.
09:02The Eiffel Tower, built of wrought iron by, guess who, Gustav Eiffel.
09:09As I said, Gustav is also a noodler and obsessed by what you can do with towers.
09:15Like, release things and observe their aerodynamic behaviour, for instance.
09:22Now, take a closer look at the structure and you'll see what Gustav is good at, besides wrought iron.
09:33See all the delicate tracery?
09:35Know why?
09:36The wind just blows straight through it, which means the tower won't get blown down.
09:41So Gustav's tower can be what the French need so badly.
09:45The biggest anything in the world.
09:49This tower thing is Gustav's second attempt at boosting French morale, which at the time is going in the same
09:56direction I am now.
09:59Here's the problem.
10:00You know how the French political system is like musical chairs?
10:03You know, it's my turn to be Prime Minister.
10:06No different back then.
10:08So the new French Republic is far from secure.
10:11I mean, there are monarchists who want a king, and crazy radicals who want another revolution,
10:15and socialists and anarchists and every other kind of ists.
10:20So the idea is to come up with something that will strengthen the moderates and give the place a little
10:25political stability.
10:27So they decide to give America a present, made by Gustav, to remind all Frenchmen of their good, moderate, democratic
10:36friends, the Yanks.
10:40And, of course, remind the Yanks, and the rest of the world, that nudge-nudge, it was the French who
10:46bankrolled the American War of Independence.
10:51Phew! Well, they certainly get here for effort.
10:54It doesn't work, though. I mean, as far as the Americans are concerned,
10:58this French offer they're not supposed to be able to refuse is, well, how shall I put this?
11:04A bit of a liberty?
11:16When the Statue of Liberty went up in 1866, it wasn't the symbol of America it is today.
11:21It was French, looking away from America, back towards what the French regarded as the home of liberty, France.
11:29So the statue was intended to be nothing less than a permanent reminder of French culture,
11:34a gigantic ad for French achievements right in the middle of New York Harbour.
11:51But now, take a look at how the Americans give French political intentions the old switcheroo.
12:00What does it?
12:01What does it?
12:01Is the famous poem written for the statue.
12:05Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,
12:12the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
12:15Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me.
12:19I lift my lamp beside the golden door.
12:31For refugees worldwide, the Statue of Liberty is now a symbol of the American welcome that lies ahead of them.
12:38Refugees like the Jews fleeing repression and violence in Russia and Germany.
12:42In the 1880s, tens of thousands of Jews arrive in America.
12:52But some Jews don't come to America.
12:55They head instead for what today is Israel,
12:58urged on by the young woman who writes that poem for the Statue of Liberty.
13:04She's Emma Lazarus, she's Jewish, and it's she who really kicks off Zionism,
13:10the call for Jews to set up a Jewish state.
13:13Because at the time, there isn't one.
13:16But before all that, where are we?
13:23Nuclear fusion needs a lot of electric power
13:25that could be a lot cheaper thanks to honest and superconductivity chill-down
13:29with liquid gas made by Kayate, whose liquid oxygen helps high-altitude research,
13:35some of it done up the tower built by Gustav Eiffel,
13:38who also builds Miss Liberty with her poem by Zionist Emma Lazarus,
13:42whose Zionism takes my story to tropical shores.
13:51At one point, during her efforts to establish a Jewish state, which this isn't,
13:57Emma Lazarus goes off to England, which this isn't,
14:00and meets a guy, whom this isn't,
14:03who is so pro-Zionist and who lobbies so successfully for the Jewish cause,
14:08he ought to be Jewish, but isn't.
14:13So where are we, and why are we here?
14:16To meet that guy.
14:18Lawrence Oliphant, who starts life here in Sri Lanka,
14:22where his dad is chief justice for the British colonial authorities.
14:26After building the foundations of a legal career,
14:29Oliphant gets itchy feet and sets off on a hectic, non-stop life
14:33that ends in old age in Israel.
14:41Between Sri Lanka and Israel,
14:43Lawrence Oliphant really packs in a busy career.
14:47Lawyer, correspondent for the Times,
14:50diplomat, administrator, troubleshooter, you name it.
14:53Oh, and of course, travel writer.
14:56Well, what would you do if the map of your life looked like this?
15:01Lawrence Oliphant is a travel agent's dream.
15:07I suppose I ought to mention that most of the travelling Oliphant gets up to,
15:11he's doing something somewhere for queen and country.
15:31One job he gets is working for a diplomat named Elgin,
15:35who hits the headlines when he forces Beijing to accept opium
15:39instead of money for exports to Britain
15:41and brings addiction and ruin to China.
15:44Still, ruins are nothing new to the Elgin family.
15:57The name of these ruins is, as I'm sure you know,
16:00the Parthenon, in Athens, Greece.
16:04Bits of which are missing, as you can see.
16:07The missing bits look like this,
16:10and in 1803 they're removed by one of the Elgin family,
16:14Lord Elgin.
16:15The pieces he snitches had originally been
16:18the Parthenon temple frieze,
16:20found in bits by Lord Elgin
16:22after the Parthenon was blown up during a war.
16:24Elgin discovers them being ground up for cement by local builders
16:28and decides he'd better save them,
16:30and then sells them to the British Museum,
16:33where they still are,
16:34with the help of Thomas Lawrence,
16:36a really big-name high-society painter.
16:49Lawrence paints the Queen,
16:51and anybody else that matters,
16:53as a result of which she gets appointed painter to the King,
16:56which is going to be great for Lawrence's financial health.
17:01Speaking of which, in 1776,
17:05His Majesty also appoints his new doctor.
17:17The new royal medical team faces an immediate challenge.
17:21The King, George III, is going nuts,
17:24and really drastic measures are tried to prevent this from happening.
17:27The measures fail.
17:29Not surprising,
17:30considering the background of the new royal physician,
17:33John Hunter,
17:35who is a bit of a slow learner.
17:37Well, it takes till he's 17 before he can read and write.
17:40Then he has a go at carpentry for three years.
17:43Well, that doesn't work.
17:45But with all that experience,
17:46where else would he go but surgery?
17:50Hunter is so good at it,
17:52he kind of kicks off modern surgical procedures.
17:55So he and his brother open an anatomy school in London,
17:58a knockout success,
18:00and John indulges his other obsessions.
18:03The study of codfish hearing,
18:05the digestion of hibernating lizards,
18:07and hedgehogs.
18:09Oh, and listening to his wife,
18:11trying out the librettos she writes for various composers.
18:14Hear that music playing?
18:19In 1760, before Hunter becomes royal physician,
18:22he has a terrible row with his brother,
18:24who promptly walks out on him.
18:28To be replaced by another anatomist called William Hewson,
18:32who in 1770 has the luck to marry a lady
18:36whose lodger is a kind of negotiator,
18:39and who comes in to help settle a row William Hewson's having
18:43about a contract.
18:45And the reason we care about this negotiator person
18:48is something I'll get to after I have this tooth fixed.
18:51Oh, the other reason I'm in the dentist's chair?
18:54Another obsession of John Hunter.
18:57He writes the first book on diseases of the teeth.
19:03Sorry, he writes the first book on the diseases of the teeth.
19:07OK, Doctor, go ahead.
19:23OK, now for Mrs Hewson's lodger, remember?
19:27The guy who did all that negotiating?
19:29Benjamin Franklin, who does his best negotiating
19:32for the American government after the War of Independence,
19:34and, as a result, spends most of his time crisscrossing the Atlantic.
19:51The other thing Franklin gets up to
19:54with all these transatlantic crossings
19:55is find out you can get across the Atlantic faster
19:58if you get your ship onto a mysterious current
20:01moving east across the ocean.
20:03And you know you're on this current
20:05because its water is warmer than the surrounding sea.
20:09So Franklin uses all his voyages to check up on the current
20:12by gradually taking the temperature of the water
20:15all the way across from America to Great Britain.
20:18Point of it all being,
20:20if he can map the current well enough for sailors to use it regularly,
20:23it'll save time and money.
20:25He does.
20:26And it does.
20:27To this day.
20:29We call the current Franklin charts the Gulf Stream.
20:33Franklin's work kind of kicks off modern oceanography
20:36and, strangely enough, all because of yet another example
20:40of how stealing things can change history.
20:43Not by Franklin, of course.
20:45I'm talking about the thermometer he uses,
20:49the idea for which is snitched by its so-called inventor,
20:52the famous Dutch instrument maker Gabriel Fahrenheit.
21:031714 in Amsterdam, Fahrenheit produces his thermometer.
21:07Great news for all.
21:10Especially hypochondriacs.
21:12Phew, that's a relief.
21:1498.4.
21:15So that's okay.
21:16Ah, now where was I?
21:18Oh yeah, Fahrenheit.
21:19Now, the reason Fahrenheit's thermometer is such a boffo success
21:23is because back in the 18th century,
21:25finding out what the temperature is,
21:28is not what you'd call an exact science.
21:30In fact, you could say they're all working in the dark.
21:40Fahrenheit clears up the confusion,
21:42created by everybody doing it a different way,
21:45with different scales on their instruments,
21:47so temperature is a matter of anybody's guess.
21:50Now, to start with,
21:52the way Fahrenheit makes his thermometer is nothing new.
21:55You just melt the end of a glass rod with a hole down the middle,
21:59and then blow down the hole,
22:01to make the molten blob on the end expand
22:03into what will become the thermometer bulb that contains the mercury.
22:08Getting the mercury into the bulb is really nifty.
22:11Watch.
22:11You put the hot rod bulb up into the mercury,
22:16and the vacuum you made in there with the heat
22:18sucks the mercury up into the bulb.
22:23Okay.
22:24Now for the absolutely lunatic way,
22:26Fahrenheit comes up with a Fahrenheit scale,
22:28so hang in there.
22:31He starts with a scale,
22:32the bottom end of which is going to be the temperature of frozen ice,
22:36zero.
22:38He calls boiling water sixty.
22:42One eighth and three eighths up the scale are freezing water,
22:45and the temperature of a healthy armpit.
22:48Are you still with me?
22:50Okay.
22:51Make each degree four degrees,
22:53which turns freezing water from seven and a half to thirty,
22:58and a healthy armpit to ninety,
23:00but doesn't divide by eight.
23:02So, make thirty, thirty-two,
23:05and ninety ninety-six,
23:06and there you are, plus one last tweak.
23:09Clear as mud?
23:10I never said what Fahrenheit did would make any sense.
23:13Well, there's one thing I can explain,
23:16that armpit number.
23:19Remember I said he snitched the whole idea?
23:22In 1708, Fahrenheit visits Copenhagen
23:25and meets the ex-mayor of the city,
23:26one of those talented scientific amateurs the place is full of back then.
23:30Guy by the name of Ole Romer.
23:34Never heard of him?
23:35Thank Fahrenheit for that.
23:38See, the whole thermometer thing is Romer's idea.
23:41So's the armpit number, and all the basic research.
23:45Fahrenheit kind of just turns up,
23:48takes notes of Ole Romer's notes,
23:49and then nips back down south to Amsterdam.
23:53Not long after which,
23:55only Romer's notes get destroyed in a terrible fire.
23:57Not long after which,
23:59it's only who?
24:01End of that sad tale.
24:03Okay, time for a quick catch-up.
24:07Remember the pro-Jewish Oliphant,
24:09who works for Elgin,
24:11whose father grabs the Elgin marbles,
24:13aided by Lawrence, painter to the king,
24:16whose doctor John Hunter has an assistant,
24:19whose wife's lodger is Benjamin Franklin,
24:22who charts the Gulf Stream with a thermometer,
24:24whose design Fahrenheit steals from poor old Ole Romer.
24:28Mind you, Romer has already hit the bright lights,
24:31with a guy who lives in this modest little place.
24:41In 1672, before Fahrenheit meets Romer,
24:45Romer gets picked up by a French astronomer
24:47and brought here to France,
24:48where he does amazing things like working out the speed of light
24:52and becomes the favourite foreign egghead of King Louis XIV.
24:59And that's eventually why the King of Denmark asks Ole to come home,
25:03and that's eventually why Ole is in Copenhagen for Fahrenheit to meet.
25:09And that French guy who picked him up?
25:11Jean Picard.
25:13A major French science nerd.
25:15One of those, I can go anywhere, do anything types, you know?
25:19To serve him right,
25:20considering what King Louis XIV asks him to do next,
25:24which is to ask him to do this.
25:35Fancy fountains is what the king wants,
25:37to go with the new palace he's building at Versailles,
25:40so guess what he gets?
25:42Fancy fountains up the yin yang.
25:46The only minor problem is,
25:48because Louis XIV is in such a royal hurry,
25:51they're building them faster than hydraulic engineers can keep up,
25:54theory-wise.
25:55Like, OK, you guys, see if you can make this design work.
25:59So nothing goes right.
26:01The reservoirs run out, the aqueducts fall down,
26:04the king is getting annoyed.
26:08Picard discovers the awful truth.
26:11Versailles is higher than the surrounding countryside.
26:14Hang on a minute.
26:16That's supposed to be why it's here, right?
26:23Picard solves the problem with the 17th century equivalent
26:26of what these guys are up to.
26:28He rigs up a telescope
26:29to measure the slightest differences in land levels,
26:32so he knows exactly where to site the reservoirs.
26:35So by 1683, there's a whole network of interconnecting channels and pools and stuff
26:41to keep enough water coming to keep fountains spurting night and day,
26:45and most important of all, provide the king with the water show he wants.
26:51And enough water for the other little thing the king has in mind.
27:01This little thing, a garden centre the like of which nobody has ever seen before.
27:19The Versailles gardens are put together for Louis by one of the greatest gardeners in history,
27:24fellow named Le Notre, a man for whom nature needs a haircut.
27:29Louis's gardens take 36,000 people 20 years to complete.
27:34Well, if you're king by divine right, it's no fun if you can't think really big.
27:39What Louis XIV does to satisfy his megalomania makes even Hollywood consumption look inconspicuous.
27:53About the only thing Louis doesn't mess with are the French forests,
27:57only because the other thing he wants is a navy,
28:00which is why the next royal inspector of the French marine has an obsession about wood.
28:15Here we are on a British man-of-war,
28:17awaiting the arrival of the aforementioned French Inspector General of Marine,
28:22a genial twit by the name of Duhamel du Monceau.
28:30Duhamel is here because this is where you come back then
28:33if you want to learn all about making wooden warships.
28:39In the middle of the 18th century,
28:41it takes more than French gold braid and fancy hats to impress the British Navy,
28:46who are busy taking over the world.
28:49I mean, they're so accustomed to winning every sea battle they fight,
28:53they even write catchy little tunes about ruling the waves.
29:05Now, the reason this scribbling fool is taking so many notes is,
29:10in terms of timber use,
29:12this place is the equivalent of a fair-sized bit of forest.
29:19Like oak for the interior fittings below decks,
29:22oak for the decks,
29:24oak for the ship's furniture,
29:26and oak for the hull.
29:32Then there's oak for the cannon supports,
29:35more oak for the pulley blocks you wind all the ropes on,
29:38and, of course, the gangways are made of oak.
29:48What else?
29:49Oh, well, oak for your masts, of course,
29:52and the rigging systems,
29:53and all the spars and yard arms and stuff.
30:00Even Duhamel is starting to get the point.
30:05By the time Duhamel has done his sums,
30:08and realises that building one single ship like this
30:11will take no fewer than 1,000 oak trees,
30:14you just know what he's going to do next.
30:16Hot-foot it back to France,
30:18and get a new law banning the use of trees
30:21for anything else but building ships.
30:23And a massive programme of conservation and replanting
30:27and forest management.
30:29Something the English have already done.
30:37All this scribble-scribble gives Duhamel another idea as well.
30:41So when he gets back to France,
30:43he becomes a tree-hugger
30:45and sets up the first real arboretum
30:47with experimental shrubs and trees
30:49on his family estate,
30:51where he also writes copious works
30:53on fertilising and hoeing
30:55and manuring and general agricultural muck.
30:58One of his books gets translated into English in 1759
31:02and becomes a big hit with British architectural types,
31:06a matter which takes us once more to tropical shores.
31:23Duhamel's book about gardens
31:25strikes just the right note with an English guy
31:28who's just written a book of his own,
31:30which is kind of about what you do
31:32once you've got the garden Duhamel talks about in his book.
31:40All about the kind of building you might like to have
31:43if you had a really posh garden
31:45and you wanted a really fancy place to live in.
31:48Architecture like this.
31:54The architectural author is William Chambers,
31:57who dreams up an exotic new style
31:59while he's working out here in the East.
32:05Travelling between Europe and China and Sri Lanka here
32:08for the Swedish East India Company
32:11and seeing all kinds of stupefying things
32:14like this stupa as it's called.
32:17Good, eh?
32:18Anyway, Chambers finally gets back home
32:20to jolly old England
32:23and turns out that book on architecture
32:25and becomes the designer you call
32:28if you want your home to feature in all the mags.
32:32By which I mean if you want it to look Eastern,
32:35the latest rave craze.
32:41There's probably never been a more instant fashion
32:45than the one Chambers kicks off.
32:48Especially for this kind of stuff.
32:54Chambers' greatest hit is pagodas.
32:57After the British royal family commission him to build this one
33:00in the Royal Botanical Gardens,
33:02well, pagodamania spreads across Europe like wildfire.
33:07It's okay, I'm not going to visit any more of them.
33:10But the pagoda thing does make Chambers' flavour of the royal month.
33:17By 1761 he's chief royal architect
33:19and by 1774 he's getting really big jobs.
33:23I mean, take a look at this desirable residence.
33:26A giant palace called Somerset House in downtown London.
33:33Pompous right ends up as the home of the Internal Revenue Service.
33:39I'd say they were made for each other.
33:41Anyway, there was one other job Chambers got
33:44which must have been a lot of laughs.
33:46It was to design an overblown bit of architecture on wheels
33:49for his pal King George III.
33:51Here we go.
33:52State coronation coach.
33:56I guess the word that floats to mind is theatrical.
34:00And speaking of stagey...
34:07How about this for getting around?
34:09The local bus back then.
34:11Not royal, of course.
34:12And if you live up here in Scotland
34:14and you're waiting to catch the next one to somewhere,
34:17not frequent, if at all,
34:20given the state of the roads.
34:27By 1802 or so,
34:29the state of Scottish roads
34:31becomes the concern of a stonemason
34:33employed by William Chambers
34:35back when he was building Somerset House, remember?
34:43Thomas Telford's this guy's name
34:45and he's one of the greatest road builders ever.
34:48Now, Telford's a Scotsman,
34:51so he knows the place well.
34:53And he knows the problem.
34:55See, for the previous 50 years,
34:58the English have been evicting Scottish Highlanders
35:00from their land
35:01and setting fire to their houses
35:03and all that good stuff
35:04and are now wondering what's happened
35:06to Scotland's population.
35:08Like most of them have hightailed it to the US and Canada.
35:11So the English ask Telford
35:13to think about measures
35:14to get the Scots to come back.
35:17Well, being a road builder,
35:18Telford's report doesn't go on about
35:20atrocities and civil rights and all that, does it?
35:24Look at it from his point of view.
35:26Telford builds roads.
35:28That's what he's good at.
35:29And that's how he sees everything.
35:31And what he sees in Scotland is
35:33that what few roads there are
35:35are falling to pieces for lack of repair and maintenance.
35:39So when he presents his report to the bigwigs in London,
35:43it's about transportation, not politics.
36:01Telford's report says,
36:03what this place needs is me to give it better communications
36:06and the Scots will come back.
36:08He does.
36:09They don't.
36:10In spite of the greatest road and bridge building program
36:13this side of the Roman Empire.
36:15I mean, take a look.
36:17This is Scotland.
36:18Over 28 years, Telford puts in harbours,
36:22900 miles of new roads
36:23and a thousand new bridges.
36:25So when the committee for the new London Bridge
36:28turns down his high-tech cast iron design,
36:31Telford reckons the committee just hasn't seen the light.
36:35Actually, one of them has.
36:38But just before you meet him, where are we?
36:46Jean Picard surveys the Versailles fountain network
36:49so the king can have all the water he needs
36:51to grow trees that Duhamel writes about
36:53in a book read by pagoda builder William Chambers,
36:57whose stonemason, Thomas Telford,
37:00comes up with the design for a cast iron London Bridge
37:03which is turned down by the London Bridge Committee,
37:06a bunch of politicians and science biggies.
37:10Including the guy who is about to do something to this program
37:14which I hope you'll find illuminating.
37:17The committee member in question is Thomas Young here,
37:21who is by this time on everybody's committee,
37:24being, well, a genius.
37:35Here's just one of the reasons Young is so clever.
37:37He's investigating Duh.
37:39I'll say that again.
37:41Duh.
37:41You know, water droplets.
37:43By looking through the droplets at a light.
37:46And he sees lots of little different sized rainbow rings
37:49around different sized droplets.
37:52Yet another bit of pointless noodling?
37:55Uh-uh.
37:56Quick as a flash, Young squeezes some blood
37:58between plates of glass, lights his candle,
38:01sees more little rainbow rings
38:03and works out the size of blood corpuscles.
38:06But where this guy really shines
38:08is when he decides to shed a little light on light in 1803.
38:13OK.
38:14Watch this bit of magic.
38:17Here we have a candle,
38:19a lens,
38:20a card with a pinhole in it
38:22and one with two slits.
38:24OK.
38:25Shine the light from the candle through the lens
38:27so you get a nice focused beam.
38:30Then carefully place your cards
38:32so that the light goes first through the pinhole,
38:35then the slits,
38:36and voila!
38:38Young realises the light going through the slits
38:41and mingling must be coming in light waves
38:43because this interference pattern
38:45could only be made by waves.
38:48Question is,
38:49what do light waves travel in?
38:52They decide to call the mystery stuff ether
38:55and the hunt for it shakes up the brains
38:58of most of the 19th century's complement
39:00of serious propeller heads.
39:02Now,
39:03the biggest propeller in Germany at the time
39:05is a Harumph-type
39:07named Helmholtz,
39:09prof at the University of Berlin.
39:11And he puts one of his whiz-kids,
39:13Hertz, onto the case.
39:15Here is a very oversimple view, sorry,
39:18of what Hertz does.
39:21Say this water is that mystery ether stuff, right?
39:25Hertz is into electricity at the time
39:28and wonders if it travels through ether in waves,
39:31like light.
39:32And he finds out it does.
39:40An electric spark sends out electric waves
39:43moving like light waves,
39:45or waves in the sea.
39:47Which brings me to the delightful Belgian beach resort
39:51of Ostend.
39:55Now, remember Helmholtz?
39:57His own professor is Johan Muller,
40:00this guy,
40:01who is deeply into life with a capital L
40:04and what makes everything tick.
40:06And he's spending time here in the Belgian drizzle
40:09because he's overworked like crazy
40:11and is hiding out in Ostend
40:13with a pre-suicide depression.
40:16Fun guy.
40:18Meanwhile, what does Muller mean by that stuff
40:20about what makes everything tick?
40:23Well, what Muller is thinking of
40:25is one of those weird
40:26may-the-force-be-with-you things
40:29operating in people,
40:31in animals,
40:32even in plants.
40:38To start with,
40:39take a look at the bit of a plant
40:41that fascinates Muller.
40:42The buds.
40:45And remember, this is before Darwin
40:47and evolution and all that.
40:49OK, says Muller.
40:51How do the new plants come into existence?
40:53Like, are they in here already?
40:56And when they do,
40:57how do they get to end up the way they are?
41:00Like this.
41:01All neat and organized
41:02and doing whatever each bit of the plant
41:04is supposed to do.
41:07And is that all already organized in here?
41:11And if that's the case,
41:13are all the bits of all the future descendants
41:16of this little plant in here?
41:19Nah.
41:21Muller says,
41:22what does all the organizing
41:23and running of everything
41:24is another one of those mystery phenomena
41:26you can't see or examine.
41:28The life force.
41:31And not just in plants.
41:33In animals.
41:34Like the force going down one of your nerves.
41:37And this force...
41:39Can never be measured.
41:44Well, Helmholtz reacts to this mumbo-jumbo.
41:47And in 1852,
41:49he runs some experiments on a frog muscle.
41:51Don't worry.
41:52This frog is safe.
41:54Helmholtz zaps the frog muscle with electricity.
41:58The muscle twitches
41:59and makes a mark on recording paper.
42:03So,
42:04you knew to the 11 millionth of a second
42:07when you did the zapping.
42:09And now you know how long it takes
42:11for the electricity to go down the frog muscle nerve
42:14and make it twitch.
42:18At about 90 feet a second.
42:20So you can measure the mystery life force.
42:27Which is why I'm back on the beach at Ostend.
42:31Because Muller's life force idea is known as vitalism.
42:36And after what Helmholtz does to it,
42:38you'd think that would be the death of the life force idea, right?
42:44Except for another German,
42:46who spends many experimental years on the beach.
42:49in his case, Monte Carlo.
42:51And takes over as leader of the vitalist movement.
42:54His name is Ludwig Klages.
42:56And you know Klages better than you may think
42:58for something else he gets up to.
43:01Because Klages is the guy who analyses the way people move
43:04and comes up with what we now call body language
43:08language and the language of gesture.
43:11Stuff like this.
43:27Klages says body language gives your secret feelings away.
43:31I mean, take this couple.
43:33See how she's crossed her legs away from him
43:35and folded her arms defensively?
43:38She doesn't like him.
43:39But look at him.
43:41Leaning towards her.
43:43Nodding when she nods.
43:44Legs crossed towards her.
43:46This, says Klages,
43:48is a couple of people trying not to display their inner feelings,
43:51but sending out messages in spite of themselves.
43:57Klages reckons every move you make gives you away like that.
44:01Shows the real you.
44:02Behind what he calls the mask of courtesy.
44:09Klages uses his research to develop a new science he calls characterology
44:14and sells it as a hotshot analytical tool
44:17when you're interviewing people for job selection.
44:22Now, remember what the date is, hmm?
44:24By this time just after the First World War.
44:27And Klages is a German.
44:28And he's into irrational life force stuff and behavioural studies
44:33and all that what's behind the mask stuff.
44:37And it's just before you-know-what happens in Germany.
44:42So you just know what kind of job selection his characterology is going to get used for.
45:05This is the job Klages characterology gets used for
45:09when the Nazis are trying to find the type of person who will make an ideal officer in the SS.
45:15Men of iron self-control.
45:17Superior.
45:18All that stuff.
45:26Something else Klages dreams up gets grabbed by the Nazi selectors too.
45:31Handwriting analysis.
45:33Klages is the guy who starts all that stuff about handwriting being another way to see into a person's character.
45:39The idea being, the way you write is a mixture of all the conflicting forces that make up your personality.
45:45And graphology, as it's called, can reveal which side of your personality has got the upper hand.
45:52So Klages graphology says, for example, large sloping letters show either enthusiasm and getting on with people,
46:01or, depending which side of you is stronger, lack of realism and a tendency to rashness.
46:07On the other hand, small vertical writing is either realism and rationality,
46:13or lack of enthusiasm and a certain coldness of character.
46:17So, how do you know which?
46:19Well, according to Klages, you can see that from how rhythmic the writing is.
46:24Which, what do you know, is another one of those things
46:27that can't be measured in any scientific way.
46:31It can only be understood intuitively.
46:34Don't think I'd have made it through to the SS.
46:37My handwriting is clearly realistic and rational, with a touch of paranoia.
46:42And, you will note, barely readable.
46:50Now, one of the reasons why Klages graphology claims to be able to reveal character from writing
46:56is because everybody's is unique.
46:58A painful fact of life for anybody trying to deal with the US mail in the 1960s
47:04when they start trying to get some automation into the process by inventing the zip code,
47:09because the increase in business mail gets kind of overwhelming and goes on that way.
47:14So, by the 1980s, there are nifty new optical character recognition machines
47:19which are able to read the zip and then spray a barcode onto the piece of mail
47:24so computers read the barcode and sort the mail.
47:27But you still have to write the zip code in capital letters
47:32because of what Klages calls the extreme individualism of handwriting.
47:42Mind you, all this black marks on paper and handwriting stuff
47:46will all disappear anyway when we switch from ink to electronics.
47:56I mean, the same electronics that made possible optical character recognition
48:01so machines can read the zip code on this envelope
48:04and tell me where to bring this letter exactly.
48:06For instance, here to Sri Lanka, to the southern province of Sri Lanka, here,
48:14to a village in the middle of nowhere called Bellana.
48:24Population 35, total cash income zero.
48:29Running water, electricity, phones, televisions, freezers, cars, toilets
48:33and almost anything else you care to name, none.
48:37What they do have is a desperate desire for education.
48:41But maybe the same technology that got my letter here
48:44will soon help bring education here from anywhere in the world.
48:49As it enables all of us to communicate instantly all over the planet
48:52from New York to here or anywhere without thought to geography.
48:58With the equivalent of a laptop, a cell phone and a satellite.
49:03On the great global net.
49:05And if you've been watching this series, you'll know what I mean.
49:09Because throughout the series we've been travelling on a kind of global net
49:12through time and space.
49:14On the great web of knowledge where everything is connected to everything else.
49:18And everybody else.
49:22That's why we're here at the end of our last journey.
49:26That went from cheaper fusion power,
49:29thanks to superconductivity discovered by Onnis,
49:32with liquid gas provided by the aeronautical Cayete,
49:35who carries out experiments up the tower built by Eiffel,
49:39who also built the Statue of Liberty,
49:41with its famous poem by the Jewish activist Emma Lazarus,
49:45who gets a lot of help from Oliphant,
49:48whose boss Elgin is the son of the guy who snitches the Elgin marbles
49:52and sells them with the help of royal painter Thomas Lawrence,
49:55whose colleague, Dr Hunter, has an assistant whose wife's lodger
49:59is none other than Benjamin Franklin,
50:02who charts the Gulf Stream with the thermometer Fahrenheit snitches from Ole Roma,
50:07whose pal Picard surveys Versailles
50:09and provides the water for the fountains and the royal gardens,
50:12and all the trees that inspire Duhamel to write the book on gardening
50:17that gets read by the architect William Chambers,
50:19who hires the Scottish stonemason Thomas Telford,
50:23whose idea for London Bridge is turned down by Thomas Young,
50:26whose light waves travel in ether,
50:28as do Hertz's electricity waves,
50:31with which Helmholtz zaps that frog to disprove the vitalists,
50:34whose leader Clargis analyzes handwriting so individual
50:38zip codes have to be capital letters to get your mail to a jungle village,
50:43where we began this whole series ten programmes ago like this.
50:54Oh, hi. Could you hold it for a second? Thanks.
50:58OK, access the uplink now.
51:02Sorry about that.
51:04Well, here we are, intrepid reporter James Burke,
51:07in one of the more remote parts of India, ready to start the show.
51:11A show that travels across the great web of knowledge through space and time...
51:16So we end where we started, in a third-world village.
51:20In touch, where we're all going to be in the 21st century.
51:26On the net, and like it or not, connected.
51:37The End
52:06Transcription by CastingWords
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