1 00:00:01,698 --> 00:00:03,098 [Gear noises] 2 00:00:43,944 --> 00:00:47,401 I would say it was a pretty safe bet that the one magic wish 3 00:00:47,401 --> 00:00:48,786 most people would like to be granted, 4 00:00:48,786 --> 00:00:50,754 would be to be able to see into the future 5 00:00:50,754 --> 00:00:52,136 I mean, think what it would mean. 6 00:00:52,136 --> 00:00:55,236 I'm backing the right horse, but we can't. 7 00:00:55,605 --> 00:00:57,358 We have to guess about tomorrow, and we have to act 8 00:00:57,358 --> 00:00:59,721 on that guess, and it's never been any different. 9 00:01:00,429 --> 00:01:03,891 And that's why following the trail from the past 10 00:01:03,891 --> 00:01:06,700 up to the emergence of the modern technology 11 00:01:06,700 --> 00:01:09,849 that surrounds us in our daily lives and affects our lives, 12 00:01:09,849 --> 00:01:14,076 is rather like a detective story, because at no time in the past, 13 00:01:14,076 --> 00:01:16,305 did anybody who had anything to do 14 00:01:16,305 --> 00:01:18,096 with the business of inventing or changing things 15 00:01:18,096 --> 00:01:21,237 ever know what the full effects of his actions would be. 16 00:01:21,237 --> 00:01:22,845 He just went ahead and did what he did, 17 00:01:22,845 --> 00:01:24,700 for his own reasons, like we do. 18 00:01:25,750 --> 00:01:28,558 That's how change comes about, 19 00:01:29,607 --> 00:01:32,814 and it's like a detective story because if you follow the trail, 20 00:01:32,814 --> 00:01:36,314 from the past up to a modern man-made object, 21 00:01:36,314 --> 00:01:41,366 the story is full of sudden twists and false clues and guesswork. 22 00:01:41,366 --> 00:01:43,654 And you never know where the story is heading 23 00:01:43,654 --> 00:01:45,590 until the very last minute. 24 00:02:03,429 --> 00:02:06,706 This detective story starts in the eastern mediterranean 25 00:02:06,706 --> 00:02:10,421 about 2.500 years ago, and it starts with a subject 26 00:02:10,421 --> 00:02:12,877 dear to most peoples's hearts: money. 27 00:02:12,877 --> 00:02:16,006 And, because that's the way things go in history, 28 00:02:16,006 --> 00:02:18,098 it will end, as will as all these programs, 29 00:02:18,098 --> 00:02:20,174 with something totally different. 30 00:02:20,174 --> 00:02:22,917 In this case, a modern day invention, 31 00:02:22,917 --> 00:02:26,919 that affect the life of every man, woman, and child on Earth. 32 00:02:31,864 --> 00:02:33,924 Take yourself back then, to a time 33 00:02:33,924 --> 00:02:36,184 when the mediterranean was practically empty, 34 00:02:36,184 --> 00:02:38,640 when the ancient greeks had only just turned up, 35 00:02:38,640 --> 00:02:41,073 and together with the finicians and the egyptians, 36 00:02:41,073 --> 00:02:42,491 were about all there was, 37 00:02:42,491 --> 00:02:45,029 living in cities we would call villages. 38 00:02:45,029 --> 00:02:48,112 When, if you wanted to trade with somebody, 39 00:02:48,112 --> 00:02:50,935 it was a case of 'meet me in the market square, 40 00:02:50,935 --> 00:02:53,328 and i'll give you my vegetables, if you give me your cloth'. 41 00:02:53,328 --> 00:02:56,988 You bartered because there was no such thing as cash. 42 00:03:02,202 --> 00:03:04,357 And the reason we've come looking for clues 43 00:03:04,357 --> 00:03:06,735 in this particular city on the mediterranean 44 00:03:06,735 --> 00:03:09,165 has to do with how cash was invented, 45 00:03:09,165 --> 00:03:10,890 and what happened as a result. 46 00:03:11,474 --> 00:03:14,129 The way it happened shows how change comes, 47 00:03:14,129 --> 00:03:16,312 as much as anything, by accident. 48 00:03:21,959 --> 00:03:26,558 Sometime around 700 B.C., in a place place called Lydia, 49 00:03:26,558 --> 00:03:29,436 what is now modern Turkey, there was a river 50 00:03:29,436 --> 00:03:32,459 that washed gold down from the local mountains. 51 00:03:32,459 --> 00:03:35,593 And, the local people used to pan it and note it down 52 00:03:35,593 --> 00:03:38,051 for religious objects, jewelry, that kind of stuff. 53 00:03:38,051 --> 00:03:42,570 And then, in the riverbed somebody came across this, 54 00:03:42,570 --> 00:03:46,284 it's called a touchstone, and if you rub gold 55 00:03:46,284 --> 00:03:48,948 onto it -- you get a streak. 56 00:03:48,948 --> 00:03:52,593 But if you rub gold mixed with silver or something else - 57 00:03:54,217 --> 00:03:56,100 you get a different kind of streak. 58 00:03:56,775 --> 00:03:57,828 See what that means? 59 00:03:58,309 --> 00:04:01,248 If that streak is pure gold and somebody's trying 60 00:04:01,248 --> 00:04:02,953 to offload garbage onto you, well, you take 61 00:04:02,953 --> 00:04:05,307 what he calls gold and you rub it on the touchstone, 62 00:04:05,307 --> 00:04:07,339 and you can see immediately, that what he says is gold, 63 00:04:07,339 --> 00:04:08,542 isn't up to your standards. 64 00:04:09,217 --> 00:04:11,944 Well, the lydians went immediately into the business 65 00:04:11,944 --> 00:04:13,643 of standardizing their precious metals, 66 00:04:13,643 --> 00:04:15,738 and over the next 300 years or so, 67 00:04:15,738 --> 00:04:18,559 all over mediterranean and in Persia, 68 00:04:18,559 --> 00:04:21,184 the habit spread of accepting metal 69 00:04:21,184 --> 00:04:23,647 instead of goods as payment because now, 70 00:04:23,647 --> 00:04:25,020 you could trust the value of the metal. 71 00:04:25,020 --> 00:04:28,210 After that point, in any state or empire 72 00:04:28,210 --> 00:04:30,003 that had a mint making coins, 73 00:04:30,003 --> 00:04:32,967 the new money really stimulated trade. 74 00:04:42,299 --> 00:04:43,940 By the time, Alexander the Great 75 00:04:43,940 --> 00:04:46,006 was running everything from India to Italy, 76 00:04:46,006 --> 00:04:48,382 his coinage was accepted everywhere, 77 00:04:48,382 --> 00:04:51,418 and his world was like one giant marketplace. 78 00:04:51,962 --> 00:04:56,371 Well, in 331 B.C., he decided to build a big commercial center 79 00:04:56,371 --> 00:04:58,911 to handle the flood of goods crisscrossing his empire. 80 00:04:59,427 --> 00:05:02,601 This was it, named after him, Alexandria. 81 00:05:02,601 --> 00:05:05,856 You could do two things here: get very rich 82 00:05:05,856 --> 00:05:08,836 and get yourself the best education in the world. 83 00:05:10,071 --> 00:05:15,665 You see, Alexandria had a library, and what a library! 84 00:05:16,685 --> 00:05:20,327 Its opening hours went on for maybe a thounsand years. 85 00:05:21,071 --> 00:05:25,629 At its height, it had more that a half a million books, and that was it. 86 00:05:25,629 --> 00:05:28,887 If it wasn't here, it wasn't worth knowing about. 87 00:05:28,887 --> 00:05:32,876 And then, in the end, somebody burnt every single book. 88 00:05:33,516 --> 00:05:36,291 Nobody knows who, fanatical christians, 89 00:05:36,291 --> 00:05:42,346 fanatical arabs, take your pick, religion at work, left nothing, 90 00:05:43,608 --> 00:05:45,654 well, almost nothing. 91 00:05:47,274 --> 00:05:49,835 Because the next clue in this particular historical 92 00:05:49,835 --> 00:05:52,304 detective story, takes us down a hole. 93 00:05:54,663 --> 00:05:56,929 Of course, this was no ordinary hole, 94 00:05:56,929 --> 00:06:02,814 it led down to a kind of extra backup library, 95 00:06:02,814 --> 00:06:07,270 and since it wasn't above ground to be destroyed it's still here. 96 00:06:07,270 --> 00:06:11,680 It's a real honeycomb of tunnels down here, 97 00:06:11,680 --> 00:06:14,232 like a literary rabbit warren. 98 00:06:16,125 --> 00:06:18,819 Now, all the books were stored and cataloged, 99 00:06:18,819 --> 00:06:21,050 just like we do today, according to subject heading, 100 00:06:21,050 --> 00:06:23,085 and placed in niches like these. 101 00:06:23,775 --> 00:06:26,229 Of course, being a big seaport, the main interest 102 00:06:26,229 --> 00:06:28,842 was in nautical things like maps, geography books, 103 00:06:28,842 --> 00:06:30,593 aids to navigation; that sort of thing. 104 00:06:31,012 --> 00:06:34,032 And they were all written in ink, on papyrus, 105 00:06:34,032 --> 00:06:37,237 made from slivers of reed stuck flat together, 106 00:06:37,237 --> 00:06:39,665 and they came out like this, in the form of scrolls. 107 00:06:40,346 --> 00:06:41,772 Now, they got these scrolls 108 00:06:41,772 --> 00:06:43,558 either because the local scholars wrote them, 109 00:06:43,558 --> 00:06:45,873 or because they had a rather crafty law. 110 00:06:45,873 --> 00:06:48,360 You see, if you came to Alexandria on a boat, 111 00:06:48,360 --> 00:06:49,266 and you owned a book, 112 00:06:49,266 --> 00:06:52,012 you had to lend it to the library to be copied, 113 00:06:52,012 --> 00:06:54,090 and sometimes, the copies were so good, 114 00:06:54,090 --> 00:06:55,741 the owners went off with the fakes, 115 00:06:55,741 --> 00:06:56,991 and the library kept the original. 116 00:06:58,172 --> 00:07:00,424 This is a copy of one of the library's bestsellers, 117 00:07:00,424 --> 00:07:05,667 author: Claudius Ptolemy title: "All you ever wanted to know about calculation" 118 00:07:05,667 --> 00:07:06,971 13 volumes. 119 00:07:06,971 --> 00:07:09,019 All the astronomy that was known at the time. 120 00:07:09,822 --> 00:07:11,844 One of the volumes was a star catalog, 121 00:07:11,844 --> 00:07:20,431 Containing 1022 stars. Look, here's the name of the star, 122 00:07:20,431 --> 00:07:23,938 here's the zodiac sign it's in, gemini, sagittarius, 123 00:07:24,198 --> 00:07:26,277 here's where it is in that zodiac. 124 00:07:26,714 --> 00:07:28,388 Is it northern or southern hemisphere? 125 00:07:28,741 --> 00:07:31,430 How many degree east or west on the sky is it? 126 00:07:32,150 --> 00:07:33,105 And how bright is it? 127 00:07:37,560 --> 00:07:41,237 Ptolemy did these squiggles about 150 AD. 128 00:07:41,237 --> 00:07:44,164 And they're one of the great examples of an idea 129 00:07:44,164 --> 00:07:46,647 ahead of its time, because one of the ways 130 00:07:46,647 --> 00:07:49,336 this was to be used by sailors to open up the world, 131 00:07:49,336 --> 00:07:52,299 in a way you're going to see happening later in this program, 132 00:07:52,899 --> 00:07:56,473 wasn't going to come for over 1.400 years. 133 00:07:57,144 --> 00:08:00,176 And, as for the sailors pouring in and out of Alexandria 134 00:08:00,176 --> 00:08:02,787 in Ptolemy's time, well, they just 135 00:08:02,787 --> 00:08:04,614 weren't interested in charts of the sky. 136 00:08:06,767 --> 00:08:09,779 Some sailing astronomers might have used them 137 00:08:09,779 --> 00:08:11,037 in order to find out their position, 138 00:08:11,037 --> 00:08:13,862 because you see, if the tables told you 139 00:08:13,862 --> 00:08:14,790 that at a certain time, 140 00:08:14,790 --> 00:08:16,965 a start should be in THAT position in the sky, 141 00:08:16,965 --> 00:08:19,367 and you actually saw it in that position, 142 00:08:19,367 --> 00:08:21,277 you could work backward so to speak, 143 00:08:21,277 --> 00:08:23,420 to find out what position you have to be in, 144 00:08:23,420 --> 00:08:24,958 in order to see it at that different angle. 145 00:08:24,958 --> 00:08:28,780 But, the sailors stuck to their maps and their winds. 146 00:08:29,520 --> 00:08:32,407 Because, from the very beginning, they'd used ships 147 00:08:32,407 --> 00:08:34,776 with the kind of sail that makes it hard to get into 148 00:08:34,776 --> 00:08:36,154 serious navigational problems, 149 00:08:36,154 --> 00:08:40,390 a square sail that only takes you the way the wind's blowing, 150 00:08:40,837 --> 00:08:42,987 which is what they did right through the roman period, 151 00:08:42,987 --> 00:08:45,471 with bigger ships and richer cargoes. 152 00:08:45,471 --> 00:08:49,069 Until suddenly, around 700 AD -- 153 00:08:56,436 --> 00:08:59,559 the newly arrived arab pirates gave one simple order, 154 00:08:59,559 --> 00:09:01,631 open your wallet and repeat after me, 155 00:09:01,631 --> 00:09:02,823 help yourself. 156 00:09:04,592 --> 00:09:06,864 If you didn't, they took it, anyway. 157 00:09:12,492 --> 00:09:14,856 It became clear to even the dumbest merchant 158 00:09:14,856 --> 00:09:16,399 that the quickest way to lose a fortune, 159 00:09:16,399 --> 00:09:19,068 was to put it all in one big fat cargo ship, 160 00:09:19,068 --> 00:09:20,692 so the arabs could take the lot. 161 00:09:21,456 --> 00:09:24,313 Everybody started spreading the risk in smaller ships, 162 00:09:24,313 --> 00:09:26,450 less to be plundered in one go. 163 00:09:26,450 --> 00:09:30,144 [Dramatic music] 164 00:09:37,024 --> 00:09:39,413 That switch to the use of smaller ships, 165 00:09:39,413 --> 00:09:42,177 brought into general use, something that would help 166 00:09:42,177 --> 00:09:44,540 europeans colonize America, centuries later. 167 00:09:45,459 --> 00:09:47,495 The very earliest picture we have of it 168 00:09:47,495 --> 00:09:50,101 comes from a manuscript written in the 9th century 169 00:09:50,101 --> 00:09:50,862 in Byzantium. 170 00:09:51,059 --> 00:09:53,669 It was a sail, the kind of sail that had previously 171 00:09:53,669 --> 00:09:56,638 only been used on smaller ships, and the kind of sail that you 172 00:09:56,638 --> 00:09:59,851 can find on a modern arab dhow, like this one, today. 173 00:09:59,851 --> 00:10:03,033 Look at the shape, it's triangular. 174 00:10:03,033 --> 00:10:05,769 Now, that is a lateen sail, and what you could do 175 00:10:05,769 --> 00:10:07,284 with a lateen sail was something you could 176 00:10:07,284 --> 00:10:09,187 never have done with the old roman square sail. 177 00:10:09,876 --> 00:10:11,615 Look, suppose the wind is coming in this direction, 178 00:10:11,615 --> 00:10:14,798 with a lateen sail, you can sail in any direction 179 00:10:14,798 --> 00:10:16,686 right up until you're almost sailing against the wind, 180 00:10:16,686 --> 00:10:17,990 on either side of it. 181 00:10:17,990 --> 00:10:19,993 So, on a long journey, they would go, 182 00:10:19,993 --> 00:10:22,372 take the wind from this side, they would tack, 183 00:10:22,372 --> 00:10:23,896 and take the wind from this side and then, 184 00:10:23,896 --> 00:10:26,455 they would tack again, take the wind again from this side. 185 00:10:26,727 --> 00:10:29,494 Mind you, it wasn't something they enjoyed doing too much. 186 00:10:30,318 --> 00:10:31,482 I mean, look what it involves. 187 00:10:35,790 --> 00:10:37,955 Apart from the fact that with the ton of tackle 188 00:10:37,955 --> 00:10:39,837 you needed and a lot more crew to handle it, 189 00:10:39,837 --> 00:10:41,207 the worst bit came 190 00:10:41,207 --> 00:10:43,103 when the ship was just about to cross the wind. 191 00:10:43,103 --> 00:10:45,636 At which point, you had to lift the spar 192 00:10:45,636 --> 00:10:47,408 right over the top of the mast, 193 00:10:47,408 --> 00:10:50,073 and doing that in rough weather was no picnic. 194 00:10:50,322 --> 00:10:52,947 Still, it was a lot better that going in the wrong direction. 195 00:11:09,786 --> 00:11:11,774 Now, if you're not a sailing buff, 196 00:11:11,774 --> 00:11:14,244 you may not be turned on by the lateen sail, 197 00:11:14,244 --> 00:11:17,227 but as you'll see, it means a great deal more to you 198 00:11:17,227 --> 00:11:18,288 than you might think. 199 00:11:18,288 --> 00:11:21,428 See, although it was nice to be able to zigzag everywhere, 200 00:11:21,428 --> 00:11:24,680 sailing like that wasn't the only thing that happened 201 00:11:24,680 --> 00:11:25,971 because of this canvas triangle. 202 00:11:28,464 --> 00:11:31,036 The lateen sail committed one other thing. 203 00:11:31,630 --> 00:11:33,662 With it, you could leave port pretty well 204 00:11:33,662 --> 00:11:35,789 when you wanted to, without having to wait for a wind 205 00:11:35,789 --> 00:11:37,329 that was going in the same direction you were. 206 00:11:37,329 --> 00:11:40,195 Now, that meant you would leave port more often, 207 00:11:40,195 --> 00:11:42,190 that meant there was more cargo on the move, 208 00:11:42,190 --> 00:11:43,892 more trade, more prosperity. 209 00:11:44,506 --> 00:11:47,132 It's probable that the arabs introduced the lateen sail 210 00:11:47,132 --> 00:11:49,489 into western europe just about in time 211 00:11:49,489 --> 00:11:51,223 to play a major role in the recovery 212 00:11:51,223 --> 00:11:53,666 of the european economy, after the chaos 213 00:11:53,666 --> 00:11:55,785 and confusion of the so-called dark ages. 214 00:11:57,709 --> 00:12:02,825 However, by about 1200, there was so much bulk cargo 215 00:12:02,825 --> 00:12:05,960 like grain or crusaders going to the holy land, 216 00:12:05,960 --> 00:12:07,533 so much bulk cargo on the move that the ships, 217 00:12:07,533 --> 00:12:09,572 had gotten very much bigger and then, 218 00:12:09,572 --> 00:12:11,627 they ran into another problem, the problem of steering. 219 00:12:11,627 --> 00:12:13,636 You see, up until that point, 220 00:12:13,636 --> 00:12:17,402 you steered with a couple of oars, one off either sides of the stern, 221 00:12:17,402 --> 00:12:20,168 but by about 1200, the ships were so big 222 00:12:20,168 --> 00:12:22,987 that those oars just really weren't feasible anymore, 223 00:12:22,987 --> 00:12:25,477 which is why they probably picked up an idea 224 00:12:25,477 --> 00:12:28,183 from the chinese, that solved the problem. 225 00:12:28,183 --> 00:12:31,592 This: the stern-post rudder. 226 00:12:31,592 --> 00:12:34,188 With the stern-post rudder, you could handle a ship 227 00:12:34,188 --> 00:12:36,976 of almost any size, in almost any sea condition. 228 00:12:37,727 --> 00:12:40,414 So, by the 13th century, the europeans 229 00:12:40,414 --> 00:12:44,376 had all the technology, the lateen sail, the old square sail, 230 00:12:44,376 --> 00:12:46,733 the stern-post rudder, to go anywhere they wanted to. 231 00:12:47,448 --> 00:12:50,645 They didn't need to use it until 1453, 232 00:12:50,645 --> 00:12:52,906 when Constantinople fell to the turks. 233 00:12:53,521 --> 00:12:55,376 And after that, it was -- if you wanted something 234 00:12:55,376 --> 00:12:58,221 from the far east, it was either pay the price the turks wanted, 235 00:12:58,221 --> 00:12:59,915 for letting it come through their territory, 236 00:12:59,915 --> 00:13:01,318 or go get it yourself, 237 00:13:01,767 --> 00:13:03,440 which is just what the europeans did, 238 00:13:03,440 --> 00:13:06,953 in the great 16th century, voyages of discovery, 239 00:13:20,437 --> 00:13:23,732 and, it was now that the mariners began to use those star charts 240 00:13:23,732 --> 00:13:27,787 prepared in such detail by Claudius Ptolemy, 14 centuries before. 241 00:13:32,202 --> 00:13:35,343 This is the Golden Hinde, the ship that carried 242 00:13:35,343 --> 00:13:36,725 Sir Francis Drake around the world. 243 00:13:37,075 --> 00:13:39,535 It's not unlike the earlier caravels 244 00:13:39,535 --> 00:13:41,796 that sailed with the great portuguese navigators 245 00:13:41,796 --> 00:13:43,862 down around the southern tip of Africa 246 00:13:43,862 --> 00:13:47,846 and then, out across the Atlantic with Columbus in 1492. 247 00:13:48,276 --> 00:13:50,432 So, what was it about these ships 248 00:13:50,432 --> 00:13:52,546 that meant that you could sail them at will, 249 00:13:52,546 --> 00:13:53,702 to the ends of earth? 250 00:13:54,264 --> 00:13:56,496 Well, look at the rigging. 251 00:13:59,155 --> 00:14:01,309 Now, i know it looks like a confused mass of ropes, 252 00:14:01,309 --> 00:14:04,298 but if you look carefully, you'll see the old square sail 253 00:14:04,298 --> 00:14:05,475 there on the front mast. 254 00:14:05,475 --> 00:14:07,892 And some of these ships had one, some two, 255 00:14:07,892 --> 00:14:10,880 sometimes even three masts carrying the square sails, 256 00:14:10,880 --> 00:14:13,352 but on the back-end, there was a mast 257 00:14:13,352 --> 00:14:15,982 with a familiar triangle of shape of the lateen. 258 00:14:15,982 --> 00:14:18,274 And it was this mixture of sail that allowed you 259 00:14:18,274 --> 00:14:20,843 to cross an ocean, anytime you wanted to. 260 00:14:20,843 --> 00:14:25,495 Look, here's Spain and here's the northern part of Africa, 261 00:14:25,495 --> 00:14:27,811 and over here, there's America and the gulf 262 00:14:27,811 --> 00:14:29,578 and then, South America. 263 00:14:29,578 --> 00:14:31,764 Now, in the area here off the coast, 264 00:14:31,764 --> 00:14:33,544 you get winds going in all sorts of direction, 265 00:14:33,544 --> 00:14:34,647 very variable. 266 00:14:34,647 --> 00:14:38,048 So, you use a lateen sail to tack yourself into a position 267 00:14:38,048 --> 00:14:40,729 where the steady northeasterly trade winds 268 00:14:40,729 --> 00:14:42,525 which you can pick up on the square sails, 269 00:14:42,525 --> 00:14:44,049 will take you straigt across the Atlantic. 270 00:14:44,049 --> 00:14:45,544 When you want to come home, you do the same thing, 271 00:14:45,544 --> 00:14:46,152 will take you straigtlant. The other way round. 272 00:14:46,152 --> 00:14:49,064 You tack through the variable winds until you pick up the westerlies, 273 00:14:49,064 --> 00:14:50,445 you put up the square sails, 274 00:14:50,445 --> 00:14:52,562 and the westerlies bring you all the way home. 275 00:14:59,549 --> 00:15:01,565 Most of the maps they used at the time 276 00:15:01,565 --> 00:15:04,794 were made in Myakka, and by the 14th century, 277 00:15:04,794 --> 00:15:08,658 they were turning out potolan charts 278 00:15:08,658 --> 00:15:09,643 and updating them, 279 00:15:09,643 --> 00:15:11,484 as explorers came back with more information. 280 00:15:11,484 --> 00:15:14,807 Now the charts contained only what a sailor needed to know. 281 00:15:14,807 --> 00:15:18,633 No inland detail at all, just details of the coastline, 282 00:15:18,633 --> 00:15:21,262 the names of the harbors, and these lines 283 00:15:21,262 --> 00:15:23,176 showing the directions of the major and minor winds, 284 00:15:23,176 --> 00:15:24,716 along which you steered. 285 00:15:25,598 --> 00:15:27,912 The charts were very precise, and because the aim 286 00:15:27,912 --> 00:15:30,796 of the people using them is profit, they were also very secret. 287 00:15:33,066 --> 00:15:34,794 But the thing that really gave Europe 288 00:15:34,794 --> 00:15:36,985 the world on a plate was that. 289 00:15:36,985 --> 00:15:39,027 The first reference we have to it 290 00:15:39,027 --> 00:15:40,962 is by an english monk around about 1200. 291 00:15:40,962 --> 00:15:44,227 It probably came from China via the arabs to Europe, 292 00:15:44,227 --> 00:15:46,747 and early on, they would have used it like this. 293 00:15:48,179 --> 00:15:51,198 And the magnetized needle stuck through the straw 294 00:15:51,198 --> 00:15:52,623 would point north. 295 00:15:53,638 --> 00:15:56,858 And then, around about 1300, somebody probably 296 00:15:56,858 --> 00:15:59,440 in the maritime republic of Amalfi, south of Naples, 297 00:15:59,440 --> 00:16:01,935 hit on the idea of mounting the needle 298 00:16:01,935 --> 00:16:03,328 and putting a card on it, 299 00:16:03,328 --> 00:16:05,645 and on the card, putting the wind dirrections 300 00:16:05,645 --> 00:16:07,082 and putting the whole thing in a box. 301 00:16:08,459 --> 00:16:10,763 The effect of the compass was electric, 302 00:16:10,763 --> 00:16:12,760 in more ways than one, as you'll see. 303 00:16:13,929 --> 00:16:15,983 Firstly, it meant that you 304 00:16:15,983 --> 00:16:17,882 could go out sailing under clouding skies, 305 00:16:17,882 --> 00:16:20,116 because you no longer needed the stars or the sun 306 00:16:20,116 --> 00:16:23,108 to steer by, and the immediate effect of that was to double 307 00:16:23,108 --> 00:16:24,534 the number of voyages because now, 308 00:16:24,534 --> 00:16:26,073 you could sail in winter. 309 00:16:26,867 --> 00:16:32,117 So, silk and spices from India, and gold and silver from America, 310 00:16:32,117 --> 00:16:33,396 began to pour into Europe. 311 00:16:34,467 --> 00:16:37,443 And it wasn't until enough men had sailed to enough places 312 00:16:37,443 --> 00:16:41,534 that they realized that the faithful compass was lying. 313 00:16:42,508 --> 00:16:45,090 There was true north the north of the pole star, 314 00:16:45,668 --> 00:16:47,314 and there was the magnetic north, 315 00:16:47,314 --> 00:16:50,751 and depending where on Earth you were, that varied. 316 00:16:51,299 --> 00:16:53,787 And, for a great mercantile empire like England, 317 00:16:53,787 --> 00:16:56,535 that was very bad news. 318 00:17:16,320 --> 00:17:19,266 I suppose Shakespeare and the travel agents have done 319 00:17:19,266 --> 00:17:22,242 more than anybody else to give us our technicolor view 320 00:17:22,242 --> 00:17:25,079 of Elizabethan England, starring the queen herself 321 00:17:25,079 --> 00:17:26,847 as a kind of swashbuckler in pearls. 322 00:17:27,180 --> 00:17:29,990 The fact is, about all she had time for, was bookkeeping. 323 00:17:30,238 --> 00:17:32,654 When she took the place over in 1558, 324 00:17:32,654 --> 00:17:35,756 it was national disaster week, the money was worthless. 325 00:17:35,756 --> 00:17:38,093 There was no money. There was plague. 326 00:17:38,093 --> 00:17:40,360 The cities were packed and stinking. 327 00:17:41,129 --> 00:17:43,833 Elizabeth appealed to the decent english middle class 328 00:17:43,833 --> 00:17:45,952 with their healthy desire for prestige, 329 00:17:45,952 --> 00:17:49,055 power, fun and games and cash. 330 00:17:49,055 --> 00:17:51,603 Soon, anybody who wanted to be anybody, 331 00:17:51,603 --> 00:17:52,697 was on the make, 332 00:17:53,205 --> 00:17:57,262 and none more than that famous bunch of privateering seadogs 333 00:17:57,262 --> 00:17:59,765 led by Drake, Raleigh and Hawkins, 334 00:17:59,765 --> 00:18:01,720 who sailed the Atlantic looking for new 335 00:18:01,720 --> 00:18:03,503 american trade opportunities for England, 336 00:18:03,503 --> 00:18:06,162 setting up colonies, knocking off spanish galleons, 337 00:18:06,162 --> 00:18:09,624 and doing it all with a kind of gutsy disregard for convention, 338 00:18:09,624 --> 00:18:12,793 that we describe today as criminal. 339 00:18:12,793 --> 00:18:15,321 [Laughter] 340 00:18:27,480 --> 00:18:29,563 The privateers would bring back everything 341 00:18:29,563 --> 00:18:32,698 they could lay their hands on, even eskimos. 342 00:18:34,439 --> 00:18:36,963 And somewhere, in among the hustle and bustle 343 00:18:36,963 --> 00:18:39,274 and talk of adventure during the great feast days 344 00:18:39,274 --> 00:18:42,237 of places like Hampton Court, there must have always been 345 00:18:42,237 --> 00:18:46,043 some bore saying, "Hey, listen, you'll never guess what happened 346 00:18:46,043 --> 00:18:47,533 to my compass needle last week." 347 00:19:38,828 --> 00:19:43,847 [Bells toll] 348 00:19:44,119 --> 00:19:47,564 Now, the reason why all those pushy, ambitious, 349 00:19:47,564 --> 00:19:49,921 high-living upper middle class elizabethans 350 00:19:49,921 --> 00:19:52,772 gave a damn about which way a compass needle pointed, 351 00:19:52,772 --> 00:19:56,075 was because there were fantastic profits to be had 352 00:19:56,075 --> 00:19:57,019 in overseas trade. 353 00:19:57,229 --> 00:19:59,528 And if your needle let you down, and you went off course, 354 00:19:59,528 --> 00:20:00,730 well, there was a pretty good chance 355 00:20:00,730 --> 00:20:02,573 you wouldn't get home with all the lovely money. 356 00:20:03,459 --> 00:20:05,480 See, the problem with the needle was really quite simple. 357 00:20:05,780 --> 00:20:08,370 It didn't always point in the same direction, 358 00:20:08,370 --> 00:20:10,988 and people had been saying that since 1492 359 00:20:10,988 --> 00:20:14,931 when Columbus on his way across to America got to about here 360 00:20:14,931 --> 00:20:17,739 and panicked because suddenly, he realized that his needle 361 00:20:17,739 --> 00:20:19,406 wasn't pointing at the North Star. 362 00:20:20,342 --> 00:20:24,257 And then, in 1580, when Sir Francis Drake got back 363 00:20:24,257 --> 00:20:26,173 from his around-the-world trip with enough gold 364 00:20:26,173 --> 00:20:29,100 and jewels pinched, from one spanish ship, 365 00:20:29,100 --> 00:20:34,087 on its way home from Peru, to give his backers 4.700% profit, 366 00:20:34,087 --> 00:20:36,326 well, it was obviously time to do something about it 367 00:20:36,326 --> 00:20:38,891 because if his needle had left him down, 368 00:20:38,891 --> 00:20:40,084 look what they would have all lost. 369 00:20:41,464 --> 00:20:45,282 So, in 1581, a compass maker called Robert Norman 370 00:20:45,282 --> 00:20:48,642 decided to look into the matter and he did THIS. 371 00:20:49,907 --> 00:20:51,579 And he saw nothing happening, which was very odd. 372 00:20:51,579 --> 00:20:53,573 I mean, for a start he said, if a needle is supposed 373 00:20:53,608 --> 00:20:54,641 to be attracted to the north, 374 00:20:54,641 --> 00:20:56,789 why doesn't it move to the north, instead of sitting 375 00:20:56,789 --> 00:20:58,177 in the middle of the bowl, doing nothing. 376 00:20:59,241 --> 00:21:02,410 Well, Norman's remarks attracted the interest 377 00:21:02,410 --> 00:21:05,255 of a certain William Gilbert, who wasn't a sailor, 378 00:21:05,255 --> 00:21:07,629 wasn't a merchant, as a matter of fact, 379 00:21:07,629 --> 00:21:09,676 he was a well-heeled society doctor, 380 00:21:09,676 --> 00:21:12,255 eventually to become physician to the Queen. 381 00:21:12,255 --> 00:21:15,092 Now, like most other medics at the time 382 00:21:15,092 --> 00:21:16,968 Gilbert knew a bit about magnetism 383 00:21:16,968 --> 00:21:19,811 because his profession was very much into metals. 384 00:21:19,939 --> 00:21:22,997 They had recently stopped an epidemic of syphilis 385 00:21:22,997 --> 00:21:27,497 by treating it with mercury in the form of mercuric oxide, this red powder. 386 00:21:30,806 --> 00:21:30,806 And magnetic metal was recommended for treating people with it, 387 00:21:30,841 --> 00:21:33,440 because it was supposed to bring the disease out of them. 388 00:21:34,209 --> 00:21:37,056 So, over a period of about 18 years, 389 00:21:37,056 --> 00:21:38,989 Gilbert went home at the end of every day, 390 00:21:38,989 --> 00:21:42,323 and fiddled around with natural magnets made of loadstone. 391 00:21:42,664 --> 00:21:44,719 And, since the name of the game was to find out 392 00:21:44,719 --> 00:21:47,149 why the compass needle varied as it went around the earth, 393 00:21:47,149 --> 00:21:49,531 he made his little magnets in the form of the Earth 394 00:21:49,531 --> 00:21:51,954 and when he'd got plenty of them ready, 395 00:21:51,954 --> 00:21:53,467 he started his experiments, 396 00:21:53,467 --> 00:21:55,489 and brought anything he could think of 397 00:21:55,489 --> 00:21:57,013 in contact with his magnets, 398 00:21:57,013 --> 00:21:59,321 including of course, a compass needle, 399 00:21:59,321 --> 00:22:02,247 which behaved exactly as he said it should. 400 00:22:02,303 --> 00:22:04,664 Wherever he moved it, the needle pointed 401 00:22:04,664 --> 00:22:06,327 at the north pole of his tiny magnet. 402 00:22:06,698 --> 00:22:10,103 So, he reckoned that the Earth itself had to be a giant magnet 403 00:22:10,103 --> 00:22:12,792 with a magnetic north pole, and it was that 404 00:22:12,792 --> 00:22:14,957 that the compass pointet out, not the North Star. 405 00:22:14,957 --> 00:22:17,059 What's more, he said, if you leave 406 00:22:17,059 --> 00:22:20,764 one of these things alone, it turns one in a day. 407 00:22:20,764 --> 00:22:24,388 And therefore, the Earth must do exactly the same thing. 408 00:22:24,388 --> 00:22:26,735 And, he said, if the Earth is a magnet, 409 00:22:26,735 --> 00:22:28,776 that's why what goes up must come down, 410 00:22:28,776 --> 00:22:29,615 because it's attracted. 411 00:22:30,371 --> 00:22:32,875 In 1600, he wrote down everything he'd discovered, 412 00:22:32,875 --> 00:22:34,416 in a vast book. 413 00:22:34,416 --> 00:22:37,333 And in doing so, he set in motion a train of events 414 00:22:37,333 --> 00:22:39,492 that would one day lead to one of the most frightening 415 00:22:39,492 --> 00:22:41,050 bits of technology in the modern world. 416 00:22:41,848 --> 00:22:45,847 He called his book 'de magnete', about the magnet. 417 00:22:47,594 --> 00:22:51,263 [Bells tolling] 418 00:22:57,049 --> 00:23:00,376 Gilbert's book was practically an overnight success in Europe. 419 00:23:00,376 --> 00:23:02,249 I mean, for a start, he was writing in latin, 420 00:23:02,249 --> 00:23:03,847 so he didn't have any translation problems, 421 00:23:03,847 --> 00:23:06,722 most of the intellectuals around used latin to work with. 422 00:23:07,448 --> 00:23:09,524 And then, look what he was saying, 423 00:23:09,524 --> 00:23:12,425 that the Earth is a giant magnet spinning in space, 424 00:23:12,425 --> 00:23:14,463 holding the moon with its power, 425 00:23:14,463 --> 00:23:16,875 surrounded by the vacuum of interplanetary space 426 00:23:16,875 --> 00:23:18,127 and out there in that vacuum, 427 00:23:18,127 --> 00:23:21,266 there are thousands and millions of unseen stars and planets, 428 00:23:21,266 --> 00:23:23,468 and he's saying this in 1600. 429 00:23:23,468 --> 00:23:25,870 I mean, no wonder everybody went bananas about it. 430 00:23:26,605 --> 00:23:28,692 And the reason our detective story takes us next 431 00:23:28,692 --> 00:23:32,110 to this small town on the Danube in southern Germany, 432 00:23:32,110 --> 00:23:34,661 is because of one man who got very excited 433 00:23:34,661 --> 00:23:35,910 by what Gilbert had said. 434 00:23:35,910 --> 00:23:40,030 His name is Otto Girica, and in 1653, 435 00:23:40,030 --> 00:23:41,744 he was here in Regensburg, 436 00:23:41,744 --> 00:23:45,109 commanded by the emperor to attend the coronation of his son. 437 00:23:45,859 --> 00:23:49,630 The coronation was the occasion for a great imperial shindig 438 00:23:49,630 --> 00:23:51,792 in the town, with dancing, and drinking and singing 439 00:23:51,792 --> 00:23:53,128 and generally, whopping it out, 440 00:23:53,128 --> 00:23:56,454 rather like the annual Regensburg brawl 441 00:23:56,454 --> 00:23:57,561 going on here today. 442 00:24:09,836 --> 00:24:09,836 In Regensburg, some of the more meaningful traditions 443 00:24:09,871 --> 00:24:12,167 haven't changed a bit, in hundreds of years. 444 00:24:12,167 --> 00:24:15,192 [Loud merrymaking] 445 00:24:28,831 --> 00:24:32,001 The sober citizens of Regensburg claim that it was here, 446 00:24:32,001 --> 00:24:36,563 in 1653, that Otto Girica did something quite amazing, 447 00:24:36,563 --> 00:24:38,976 as a result of reading what Gilbert had said 448 00:24:38,976 --> 00:24:41,111 about the nothingness in interplanetary space. 449 00:24:41,844 --> 00:24:45,111 Here in Regensburg, they say, he took a hollow ball 450 00:24:45,111 --> 00:24:47,579 made of two hemispheres that fitted together, 451 00:24:47,579 --> 00:24:50,053 harnessed horses to each side of the ball, 452 00:24:50,053 --> 00:24:53,606 and however hard they pulled, the ball refused to come apart, 453 00:24:53,606 --> 00:24:55,652 although the two halves were not held together 454 00:24:55,652 --> 00:24:56,863 by any kind of joint. 455 00:24:57,616 --> 00:25:00,217 What kept them united was a mysterious force 456 00:25:00,217 --> 00:25:03,184 so powerful that horses couldn't break it. 457 00:25:07,455 --> 00:25:09,355 They say that after the experiment was over, 458 00:25:09,355 --> 00:25:12,032 Girica went on to astound the onlookers 459 00:25:12,032 --> 00:25:13,921 by opening a tiny hole in the ball, 460 00:25:14,397 --> 00:25:17,404 at which point it fell apart, with a twist of his hands. 461 00:25:20,668 --> 00:25:22,713 Now, whether or not that actually happened, 462 00:25:22,713 --> 00:25:24,676 in Regensburg, is neither hare not there. 463 00:25:24,676 --> 00:25:26,848 The fact is it caused a tremendous stir 464 00:25:26,848 --> 00:25:29,466 all over Europe because the mysterious force 465 00:25:29,466 --> 00:25:31,024 holding those hemispheres together, 466 00:25:31,024 --> 00:25:34,954 is what Gilbert had been theorizing about in 1600, 467 00:25:34,954 --> 00:25:37,957 and what in 1654, has only just been discovered, 468 00:25:37,957 --> 00:25:41,231 the vacuum, put inside those hemispheres 469 00:25:41,231 --> 00:25:44,006 by the newly invented vacuum pump 470 00:25:44,006 --> 00:25:46,012 invented by Otto Girica 471 00:25:46,012 --> 00:25:49,079 or rather, adapted by Otto Girica, 472 00:25:49,079 --> 00:25:51,975 because what he did was adapted one of these, 473 00:25:51,975 --> 00:25:53,133 you know what that is? 474 00:25:53,402 --> 00:25:55,866 It's what you have to have handy if most of your buildings 475 00:25:55,866 --> 00:25:58,767 are made of wood, it's a fire extinguisher. 476 00:25:59,842 --> 00:26:01,028 See? 477 00:26:04,574 --> 00:26:08,447 And Girica adapted it to suck air instead of water, 478 00:26:09,375 --> 00:26:11,155 and it was a very big hit with him, 479 00:26:11,936 --> 00:26:14,518 Ferdinand the III, Holy Roman emperor. 480 00:26:21,399 --> 00:26:24,869 Ferdinand had taken the opportunity of his son's coronation 481 00:26:24,869 --> 00:26:31,127 to invite all the princes and bishops and barons and city representatives, 482 00:26:31,127 --> 00:26:35,009 from all over Germany, to come here to this Reichstag Hall, 483 00:26:35,009 --> 00:26:37,830 for several months of dicussions on things 484 00:26:37,830 --> 00:26:40,708 like taxation and war and economic policy. 485 00:26:41,365 --> 00:26:42,965 Now, they all sat on these benches 486 00:26:42,965 --> 00:26:45,766 and Ferdinand of course, being Emperor, 487 00:26:45,766 --> 00:26:47,328 sat up there on his throne 488 00:26:49,009 --> 00:26:52,763 anyway, towards the end of the sessions in 1654, 489 00:26:52,763 --> 00:26:56,117 Ferdinand asked Otto Girica, who was here, 490 00:26:56,117 --> 00:26:57,316 because he was mayor of Magneburg, 491 00:26:57,316 --> 00:26:59,331 if he, Girica, would do some of the tricks 492 00:26:59,331 --> 00:27:00,984 that the Emperor had heard he could do. 493 00:27:00,984 --> 00:27:05,724 And Girica, in this hall, obligingly used his vacuum pump 494 00:27:05,724 --> 00:27:07,671 to make vacuums in glass spheres. 495 00:27:08,103 --> 00:27:09,931 And then, he amazed the assembled company 496 00:27:09,931 --> 00:27:12,869 by showing them that mice suffocated in the vacuum, 497 00:27:12,869 --> 00:27:14,153 candles went out in it, 498 00:27:14,153 --> 00:27:16,002 if you rang a bell in it, you couldn't hear the bell, 499 00:27:16,002 --> 00:27:17,425 and all sorts of other goodies. 500 00:27:18,122 --> 00:27:19,956 Ferdinand was so tickled by the whole thing, 501 00:27:19,956 --> 00:27:22,286 that when it was over, he asked if could have all the apparatus. 502 00:27:22,286 --> 00:27:25,005 and being Emperor, of course, he got it. 503 00:27:25,925 --> 00:27:27,399 Still, he did have the whole thing writen up 504 00:27:27,399 --> 00:27:29,099 which is how the rest of Europe 505 00:27:29,099 --> 00:27:31,026 got to hear about the vacuum pump. 506 00:27:34,109 --> 00:27:39,193 Girica was a real dabbler, and he got very intrigued 507 00:27:39,193 --> 00:27:41,447 by one thing he read in Gilbert's book, 508 00:27:42,379 --> 00:27:45,768 the bit about some substances like sulfur attracting things. 509 00:27:45,768 --> 00:27:49,742 So, Girica quite solemnly, build himself this rather silly 510 00:27:49,742 --> 00:27:52,642 sulfur ball on a stick, and he spun it, 511 00:27:52,642 --> 00:27:54,604 and when he was spinning it, he rubbed it with his hand, 512 00:27:54,604 --> 00:27:55,303 like this. 513 00:27:59,232 --> 00:28:01,227 Now, the reason he did that is because 514 00:28:01,227 --> 00:28:03,712 he was looking for evidence of what we today would call gravity 515 00:28:03,712 --> 00:28:06,627 why things stuck to the space and didn't fly off into space. 516 00:28:07,418 --> 00:28:08,962 So, when he wrote this experiment up 517 00:28:08,962 --> 00:28:11,454 he went into great detail about things like 518 00:28:11,454 --> 00:28:13,504 the ball would attract a piece of thread 519 00:28:13,504 --> 00:28:15,235 and when the thread was in contact with the ball, 520 00:28:15,235 --> 00:28:16,643 the thread would attract things. 521 00:28:18,125 --> 00:28:20,375 Fortunately, he also mentioned something else 522 00:28:20,375 --> 00:28:22,427 about which he entirely missed the point. 523 00:28:23,139 --> 00:28:25,462 He said, if you spin the ball and rub it, 524 00:28:26,416 --> 00:28:28,489 and then, take it out and hold it next to your ear, 525 00:28:28,489 --> 00:28:29,358 you hear a crack. 526 00:28:29,704 --> 00:28:32,432 And, if you do it in the dark, the ball glows. 527 00:28:33,340 --> 00:28:35,080 Now, i said that was fortunate that he mentioned it, 528 00:28:35,080 --> 00:28:37,536 because his half-interested comments 529 00:28:37,536 --> 00:28:38,512 kicked off investigation 530 00:28:38,512 --> 00:28:40,513 into why the crack and the glow occured, 531 00:28:41,352 --> 00:28:43,057 and that turned out to be electricity. 532 00:28:47,942 --> 00:28:49,391 You know, the fascinating thing 533 00:28:49,391 --> 00:28:50,943 about moments like this in the history 534 00:28:50,943 --> 00:28:54,129 is that they lead to so many places at once. 535 00:28:54,880 --> 00:28:57,817 We could for instance, go forward from the vacuum pump 536 00:28:57,817 --> 00:29:02,239 to the investigation of air, to the discovery of oxygen, 537 00:29:02,239 --> 00:29:04,473 to finding out how the human lungs work, 538 00:29:04,473 --> 00:29:06,650 to modern respiratory medicine. 539 00:29:08,186 --> 00:29:13,629 Or, we could go vacuum pump, steam engine, locomotive. 540 00:29:14,813 --> 00:29:19,025 or, we could go vacumm pump, investigation of gases, 541 00:29:19,025 --> 00:29:22,437 sending electric sparks through them to see what would happen, 542 00:29:22,437 --> 00:29:25,725 the cathode ray tube, modern radar. 543 00:29:26,989 --> 00:29:31,232 Or, take the globe, the sulfur globe, the fact that the thread, 544 00:29:31,232 --> 00:29:32,706 when it was attached you remember, 545 00:29:32,706 --> 00:29:35,485 carried the mysterious force away down the thread, 546 00:29:36,347 --> 00:29:38,108 led to people trying to do that deliberately, 547 00:29:38,108 --> 00:29:40,125 to send the force down wire. 548 00:29:41,087 --> 00:29:44,991 That in turn, led to the telegraph, and that in turn led to the telephone. 549 00:29:45,949 --> 00:29:49,262 But for our purposes, let's take the route 550 00:29:49,262 --> 00:29:51,890 that leads to one of modern society's, 551 00:29:51,890 --> 00:29:53,418 most horrifying inventions. 552 00:29:54,453 --> 00:29:57,848 And the next step on that route from this 17th century 553 00:29:57,848 --> 00:29:59,777 government meeting, forward into the future, 554 00:29:59,777 --> 00:30:03,398 takes us into the area of the englishman's favorite 555 00:30:03,398 --> 00:30:06,469 topic of conversation, the weather. 556 00:30:09,506 --> 00:30:11,045 There was obviously some connection between 557 00:30:11,045 --> 00:30:14,050 Giricia's spar and lightning so people got all excited 558 00:30:14,050 --> 00:30:16,221 about atmospheric electricity in general. 559 00:30:16,221 --> 00:30:17,765 Was there gunpowder in clouds, 560 00:30:18,484 --> 00:30:20,857 was irish fog more electric than other kinds? 561 00:30:21,543 --> 00:30:24,826 Interest centered on the unfortunate church bell rings, 562 00:30:24,826 --> 00:30:28,148 who - now you mention it, did tend to get electrocuted 563 00:30:28,148 --> 00:30:31,023 with monotonous regularity, because one of their jobs 564 00:30:31,023 --> 00:30:33,170 was to ring the bell during storms. 565 00:30:33,170 --> 00:30:37,632 [Thunder and lightning] 566 00:30:39,573 --> 00:30:41,599 But lightning got taken really seriously 567 00:30:41,599 --> 00:30:44,369 only when they realized it was doing this little trick. 568 00:30:49,445 --> 00:30:51,944 Gunpowder stores kept on doing this. 569 00:30:54,689 --> 00:30:59,134 Now, this was serious, it wasn't just costing lives, it was costing money. 570 00:30:59,852 --> 00:31:02,098 It was these explosions that brought to public attention 571 00:31:02,098 --> 00:31:05,662 the ideas of the 15th son of an american silk maker 572 00:31:05,662 --> 00:31:08,367 who flew his kite in a storm, to prove his point. 573 00:31:09,298 --> 00:31:10,689 Franklin reckoned the key solution 574 00:31:10,689 --> 00:31:12,721 was lightning rods that would attract 575 00:31:12,721 --> 00:31:15,192 the negative electricity to their positive metal. 576 00:31:17,130 --> 00:31:18,683 Ships' masts were like lightning rods. 577 00:31:18,683 --> 00:31:22,075 And it was a disgruntled navy that finally got the subject widened 578 00:31:22,075 --> 00:31:25,054 to include storms in general, when this happened. 579 00:31:36,100 --> 00:31:37,896 In an attempt to warn their ships of storms, 580 00:31:37,896 --> 00:31:39,828 the Royal Navy started taking weather reports 581 00:31:39,828 --> 00:31:41,984 from them, as well as readings from their barometers. 582 00:31:42,530 --> 00:31:44,817 When the first of these collections was put together 583 00:31:44,817 --> 00:31:48,061 in 1861, they had the world's first weather chart 584 00:31:48,061 --> 00:31:51,364 of an Atlantic depression looking remarkably modern. 585 00:31:51,757 --> 00:31:54,994 On land, the same thing started with stations reporting 586 00:31:54,994 --> 00:31:56,288 via the new telegraph. 587 00:31:57,429 --> 00:32:00,607 Now, fortunately, all this seriousness was tinged 588 00:32:00,607 --> 00:32:03,184 with some of the peculiar insanity of the period, 589 00:32:03,184 --> 00:32:05,329 by the eagerness with which people now took 590 00:32:05,329 --> 00:32:08,564 to an amazing new invention, described just after it came out, 591 00:32:08,564 --> 00:32:12,485 as infinitely the most extraordinary and magnificient discovery 592 00:32:12,485 --> 00:32:13,903 perhaps since creation. 593 00:32:13,903 --> 00:32:16,071 Now, you may feel that's a bit exaggerated, 594 00:32:16,071 --> 00:32:20,129 but you can understand why people got so very lightheaded about it. 595 00:32:20,927 --> 00:32:22,319 It's one of the symptoms you suffer from, 596 00:32:22,319 --> 00:32:23,151 when you use it. 597 00:32:38,904 --> 00:32:40,897 Going up on a balloon makes you feel like doing 598 00:32:40,897 --> 00:32:42,178 all sorts of daft things. 599 00:32:57,343 --> 00:32:59,121 By the middle of the 19th century, 600 00:32:59,121 --> 00:33:01,255 the balloon enjoyed the same kind of reputation 601 00:33:01,255 --> 00:33:04,133 the back seat of the motorcar did, in the 1940s. 602 00:33:04,241 --> 00:33:06,165 It was ratheses often uses for purposes 603 00:33:06,165 --> 00:33:07,848 for which it had not been originally designed. 604 00:33:07,848 --> 00:33:09,403 I mean, french men in particular, 605 00:33:09,403 --> 00:33:11,589 would cruise along with their girlfriends, 606 00:33:12,916 --> 00:33:16,063 dropping empty champagne bottles on the gaping peasants below, 607 00:33:17,073 --> 00:33:19,893 and returning to earth to announce their engagement. 608 00:33:20,575 --> 00:33:23,551 Mind you, some of it was all serious science, 609 00:33:23,551 --> 00:33:25,415 they took up barometers and thermometers, 610 00:33:25,415 --> 00:33:27,220 and cats and dogs, and geese and ducks 611 00:33:27,220 --> 00:33:28,718 and sheep, and 200-Pound ladies 612 00:33:28,718 --> 00:33:31,622 to observe their effect on the weather, and vice versa. 613 00:33:32,205 --> 00:33:34,788 And these intrepid pioneers enjoyed all the privileges 614 00:33:34,788 --> 00:33:36,993 of going to high altitude without oxigen, 615 00:33:36,993 --> 00:33:40,437 bleeding at the ears and eyes, nausea, vomiting, 616 00:33:40,437 --> 00:33:42,128 swelling of the head and passing out. 617 00:33:42,809 --> 00:33:45,003 Mind you, in spite of all that, they did learn things 618 00:33:45,003 --> 00:33:46,677 they never would have if they'd stayed on the ground, 619 00:33:47,086 --> 00:33:50,236 like, the temperature does not decrease steadily 620 00:33:50,236 --> 00:33:53,313 as you rise in the sky, and, nor does the air pressure. 621 00:33:54,157 --> 00:33:56,250 Some of them stayed up for days, drifting along, 622 00:33:56,250 --> 00:33:58,920 enjoying their view, dropping notes by parachure 623 00:33:58,920 --> 00:34:00,820 that never seemed to say much other than, 624 00:34:00,820 --> 00:34:02,414 'Everything going remarkably well' 625 00:34:02,414 --> 00:34:04,877 including those you'll never see again. 626 00:34:14,595 --> 00:34:18,010 By the late 19th century, with all these airborne anemometers 627 00:34:18,010 --> 00:34:20,422 and reports from shipping and stations on the ground 628 00:34:20,422 --> 00:34:21,782 using the new electric telegraph, 629 00:34:22,617 --> 00:34:24,417 you could pick up a copy of your times in the morning 630 00:34:24,417 --> 00:34:26,943 and get almost as good a forecast, as you can today. 631 00:34:29,630 --> 00:34:32,248 The only disadvantage to all this high altitude information, 632 00:34:32,248 --> 00:34:34,120 which by now they regarded as vital, 633 00:34:34,120 --> 00:34:37,184 was that sooner or later, when you ran out of hot air, 634 00:34:37,184 --> 00:34:41,006 or hydrogen or food or champagne, you had to come down. 635 00:34:41,647 --> 00:34:43,354 What they needed was some way of staying 636 00:34:43,354 --> 00:34:44,960 at high altitude for a long as they liked 637 00:34:44,960 --> 00:34:46,947 which is why our story 638 00:34:46,947 --> 00:34:48,860 next takes us to a place you'd imagine 639 00:34:48,860 --> 00:34:50,340 they would have thought of long before, 640 00:34:50,340 --> 00:34:52,740 a place where you can stay at high altitude 641 00:34:52,740 --> 00:34:53,708 for as long as you like. 642 00:34:55,457 --> 00:34:56,356 The Highlands of Scotland. 643 00:35:14,968 --> 00:35:18,297 On october 17th, 1883, this ancestral home, 644 00:35:18,297 --> 00:35:20,170 at the bottom of the mountain was the venue 645 00:35:20,170 --> 00:35:23,169 for a get together by the cream of enlightened scottish gentility 646 00:35:23,169 --> 00:35:26,243 to the mark the grand opening of a new weather station 647 00:35:26,243 --> 00:35:28,028 on the top of the highest highland in Highlands, 648 00:35:28,028 --> 00:35:29,060 Ben Nevis. 649 00:35:29,702 --> 00:35:31,738 Refreshments were offered to the guests, 650 00:35:31,738 --> 00:35:34,410 and provisions were loaded for the journey to come, 651 00:35:34,410 --> 00:35:37,120 by numerous factors andgillies and other members 652 00:35:37,120 --> 00:35:39,480 of the unpronounceable scottish lower orders. 653 00:35:42,161 --> 00:35:44,546 "Ladies and gentlemen, could we have you on the lawn 654 00:35:44,546 --> 00:35:46,750 for the commemorative photograph, please." 655 00:35:48,150 --> 00:35:50,623 (James Burke) It was a grand, ludicrous overdone affair, 656 00:35:50,623 --> 00:35:53,653 in a way that all philanthropic victorian public occasions where. 657 00:35:54,154 --> 00:35:55,493 In any other country of the world, 658 00:35:55,493 --> 00:35:57,535 they'd have dropped the whole thing till the rain stopped, 659 00:35:57,535 --> 00:35:59,988 but this was 19th century's Scotland, 660 00:35:59,988 --> 00:36:01,953 and they were bent on serious matters. 661 00:36:02,579 --> 00:36:05,428 so, they gritted their teeth and cheerfully did their duty, 662 00:36:05,428 --> 00:36:07,466 as the rain filled up their bagpipes. 663 00:36:12,839 --> 00:36:16,147 After all, was the whole thing not being recorded for posterity? 664 00:36:35,692 --> 00:36:36,685 The really nice thing 665 00:36:36,685 --> 00:36:39,058 about what science did to the victorians 666 00:36:39,058 --> 00:36:41,414 was it made them all lunatic in the same way, 667 00:36:41,414 --> 00:36:43,627 so the town's people of fort William, 668 00:36:43,627 --> 00:36:46,196 also did their duty as the procession passed, 669 00:36:46,196 --> 00:36:48,461 by getting soaked and waving silly flags 670 00:36:48,461 --> 00:36:49,982 as they were supposed to. 671 00:36:57,024 --> 00:36:59,853 At 9 A.M., party began their trek up the mountain, 672 00:36:59,853 --> 00:37:03,272 led by a single piper, busting a catchy little celtic number 673 00:37:03,272 --> 00:37:04,972 called 'Laquelle - France' 674 00:37:05,188 --> 00:37:07,190 why, i've never been able to find out. 675 00:37:07,190 --> 00:37:10,158 and the rain obliginly turned to sleet. 676 00:37:10,158 --> 00:37:12,902 So, everybody could have what one is supposed to have 677 00:37:12,902 --> 00:37:15,638 when doing one's duty, a thoroughly rotten time. 678 00:37:21,682 --> 00:37:24,466 As more and more stations like Ben Nevis were set up, 679 00:37:24,466 --> 00:37:26,329 and people could sit and look at the weather 680 00:37:26,329 --> 00:37:28,583 as it shifted and changed, they notices 681 00:37:28,583 --> 00:37:29,968 that it made distinct patterns. 682 00:37:29,968 --> 00:37:32,671 So, in good victorian style, they cataloged them, 683 00:37:33,443 --> 00:37:36,178 and in the 1890s, came up with an official 684 00:37:36,178 --> 00:37:39,369 international cloud atlas, which gave clouds the names 685 00:37:39,369 --> 00:37:40,937 by which they're known today. 686 00:37:48,321 --> 00:37:51,470 And this catalog of clouds is the next clue 687 00:37:51,470 --> 00:37:53,519 in our detective story, because clouds 688 00:37:53,519 --> 00:37:56,731 caused something strange to happen at Ben Nevis. 689 00:37:56,731 --> 00:37:58,863 You see, from the moment it opened, 690 00:37:58,863 --> 00:38:00,994 the station observers worked 24 hours a day. 691 00:38:00,994 --> 00:38:04,096 Each shift would send off regular reports on temperature, 692 00:38:04,096 --> 00:38:05,545 pressure, rain and so on, 693 00:38:05,545 --> 00:38:07,393 And one of the reports they had to file 694 00:38:07,393 --> 00:38:08,913 would be about the clouds. 695 00:38:08,913 --> 00:38:10,857 And, if you were on the dawn shift, 696 00:38:10,857 --> 00:38:13,235 you'd sometime see the clouds in the valley 697 00:38:13,235 --> 00:38:15,917 do something very weird to your shadow. 698 00:38:23,273 --> 00:38:26,611 This is called 'a glory' and the strange thing about it 699 00:38:26,611 --> 00:38:28,423 is that the colors that appear in the halo 700 00:38:28,423 --> 00:38:30,603 don't appear in the order they do in the rainbow, 701 00:38:30,603 --> 00:38:32,127 but the other way around. 702 00:38:38,800 --> 00:38:42,035 At this point, events took the most extraordinary twist 703 00:38:42,035 --> 00:38:44,806 for the very mundane reason that the Ben Nervis observatory 704 00:38:44,806 --> 00:38:45,790 was short of cash. 705 00:38:46,641 --> 00:38:49,435 And so, because of that, they used to take on 706 00:38:49,435 --> 00:38:51,922 university students, during their vacation, 707 00:38:51,922 --> 00:38:55,101 to act as temporary unpaid observers, 708 00:38:55,101 --> 00:38:56,403 while their own staff is on holiday. 709 00:38:56,403 --> 00:39:00,236 And in september 1894, one of those young men 710 00:39:00,236 --> 00:39:03,139 was a Cambridge physics graduate called Charles Wilson. 711 00:39:03,139 --> 00:39:05,323 This is him, in much later life. 712 00:39:06,244 --> 00:39:10,826 And one morning, on Ben Nevis, Wilson saw a glory, 713 00:39:10,826 --> 00:39:13,822 and it turned him on so much that he decided 714 00:39:13,822 --> 00:39:15,654 to go back to Cambridge and make one for himself, 715 00:39:15,654 --> 00:39:17,090 to find out how they worked. 716 00:39:17,883 --> 00:39:20,501 And that's why our detective story brings us here. 717 00:39:22,977 --> 00:39:26,542 Because the way Wilson did it, and how in the long run, 718 00:39:26,542 --> 00:39:29,351 what he did came to effect the lives of every man, 719 00:39:29,351 --> 00:39:30,324 woman and child on earth, 720 00:39:30,898 --> 00:39:34,354 is illustrated in every museum of any size in the world. 721 00:39:35,456 --> 00:39:37,604 This one's the science museum in London 722 00:39:37,604 --> 00:39:40,867 and Wilson's machine is here, hidden away 723 00:39:40,867 --> 00:39:45,015 among the thousand of other clues to mankind's inventive genius. 724 00:39:53,992 --> 00:39:56,546 You know, considering the amazing thing 725 00:39:56,546 --> 00:39:59,534 that this helped give birth to, Wilson's machine 726 00:39:59,534 --> 00:40:02,454 is really a rather unimpressive looking object. 727 00:40:02,454 --> 00:40:05,765 And although you'd expect to find it in the weather section, 728 00:40:05,765 --> 00:40:08,124 you know, because of the glory business and all that, 729 00:40:08,124 --> 00:40:09,903 that'sot where they put it. 730 00:40:09,903 --> 00:40:14,323 Usually, the first thing you see is what the machine actually did. 731 00:40:14,323 --> 00:40:16,012 Take a look in here. 732 00:40:17,730 --> 00:40:20,085 See those tiny cloud formations? 733 00:40:27,040 --> 00:40:29,229 Now, Wilson wanted to make himself clouds 734 00:40:29,229 --> 00:40:31,645 because he wanted to make himself a glory to work on, 735 00:40:31,645 --> 00:40:35,609 So, he built himself a cloud chamber in 1895. 736 00:40:35,609 --> 00:40:38,273 This is a later version but the principle's the same. 737 00:40:39,403 --> 00:40:41,665 Here is a sealed glass cointainer, 738 00:40:41,665 --> 00:40:44,217 and fitting into the container below it, 739 00:40:44,217 --> 00:40:46,278 there's a piston inside that cylinder there. 740 00:40:46,278 --> 00:40:48,085 And underneath the piston, there's a gap. 741 00:40:48,085 --> 00:40:52,368 And leading from that gap, is a tube through 742 00:40:52,368 --> 00:40:55,139 to this container, in which there's a vacuum. 743 00:40:55,139 --> 00:40:58,779 Now, if you open the valve on that tube, 744 00:40:58,779 --> 00:41:01,627 the air underneath the piston whistles in here 745 00:41:01,627 --> 00:41:02,501 to fill the vacuum, 746 00:41:02,501 --> 00:41:05,451 that causes the piston to be jerked down very fast, 747 00:41:05,451 --> 00:41:08,644 and then, this air up here has more space to fill, 748 00:41:08,644 --> 00:41:10,464 which it does, so it gets thinner, 749 00:41:10,464 --> 00:41:13,869 so its air pressure drops and clouds form in here. 750 00:41:15,512 --> 00:41:17,883 Now, at that time, everybody thought clouds formed 751 00:41:17,883 --> 00:41:19,805 because the tiny droplets of moisture condensed 752 00:41:19,805 --> 00:41:21,850 on little specs of dust in the air. 753 00:41:21,850 --> 00:41:24,879 But, when Wilson cleared all the dust out of his machine, 754 00:41:24,879 --> 00:41:26,554 he still got clouds. 755 00:41:27,495 --> 00:41:28,737 Well, he reckoned it had to be something 756 00:41:28,737 --> 00:41:30,544 like radiation, because there wasn't anything else. 757 00:41:30,544 --> 00:41:34,820 So, in 1896, he took some of the newly discovered x-rays 758 00:41:34,820 --> 00:41:36,650 and beamed them into his cloud chamber, 759 00:41:36,650 --> 00:41:41,887 and sure enough, they made clouds, but they made them in tiny streaks 760 00:41:43,402 --> 00:41:46,380 well, thought Wilson, i've established a relationship 761 00:41:46,380 --> 00:41:49,243 between radiation and cloud, and that's good enough fort me, 762 00:41:49,243 --> 00:41:50,806 so the dropped his work on the cloud chamber, 763 00:41:50,806 --> 00:41:52,696 and went happily back to meteorology. 764 00:41:53,881 --> 00:41:55,320 And, what he didn't realize 765 00:41:55,320 --> 00:41:57,735 was that inside that cloud chamber, 766 00:41:57,735 --> 00:42:01,735 he had triggered a scientific time bomb. 767 00:42:06,774 --> 00:42:09,470 Over the next few years, Wilson, the magic cloud maker, 768 00:42:09,470 --> 00:42:12,332 got really turned on by really bad weather, 769 00:42:12,332 --> 00:42:14,076 and in particular thunderstorms, 770 00:42:14,076 --> 00:42:16,565 and in very particular, the situations 771 00:42:16,565 --> 00:42:18,870 where things got really spectacularly bad. 772 00:42:18,870 --> 00:42:22,046 And so, he was to be seen risking life and limb 773 00:42:22,046 --> 00:42:26,120 by poking his instruments as close as possible to gigantic 774 00:42:26,120 --> 00:42:26,985 lightning strikes, 775 00:42:26,985 --> 00:42:29,606 in order to find out how much power they gave off. 776 00:42:30,709 --> 00:42:35,392 And, if you're wondering why i'm telling you all this 777 00:42:35,392 --> 00:42:39,029 in the front end of a wartime B-29 Bomber, 778 00:42:40,171 --> 00:42:41,639 well, one of the reasons 779 00:42:41,639 --> 00:42:45,021 is that a result of Wilson being so interested in lightning, 780 00:42:45,021 --> 00:42:50,303 wartime flying was safer, if that's the right word to use. 781 00:42:55,391 --> 00:42:59,951 You see, when he found out what lightning was doing, 782 00:42:59,951 --> 00:43:02,144 he promptly told a friend of his, called Edward Appleton. 783 00:43:02,144 --> 00:43:05,124 Now, in 1915, what Appleton was trying to do 784 00:43:05,124 --> 00:43:07,907 is to find out why, when you turned on 785 00:43:07,907 --> 00:43:10,316 your new miracle machine called radio, 786 00:43:10,316 --> 00:43:12,966 what you got in your ear often, 787 00:43:12,966 --> 00:43:15,556 instead of long distance communication, was THIS 788 00:43:17,440 --> 00:43:19,840 so, Appleton decided to take a look 789 00:43:19,840 --> 00:43:21,585 at what the atmosphere did to radio waves, 790 00:43:21,585 --> 00:43:27,388 and in 1924, he finally shot some radio waves up in the sky, 791 00:43:27,388 --> 00:43:30,864 whereupon they promptly bounced back down again to the Earth. 792 00:43:31,249 --> 00:43:33,493 So, imagine how long it took them to bounce back, 793 00:43:33,493 --> 00:43:36,185 and he said, "Hey listen, there is a layer of something 794 00:43:36,185 --> 00:43:38,679 100 kilometers up there, I know because I measured it, 795 00:43:38,679 --> 00:43:40,410 that reflects radio waves." 796 00:43:41,608 --> 00:43:45,650 Now, all this measurement bit may seem just a touch dull to you, 797 00:43:46,078 --> 00:43:48,870 but it was music to the ears of another weatherman 798 00:43:48,870 --> 00:43:51,291 called Watson Watt, who at that time 799 00:43:51,291 --> 00:43:53,791 was trying to find out if he could use radio 800 00:43:53,791 --> 00:43:56,846 to locate storms, which of course, now he could do. 801 00:43:56,846 --> 00:44:00,050 So, he did it by using two radio transmitters, 802 00:44:00,050 --> 00:44:02,992 so that one would tell you a storm was in that direction, 803 00:44:02,992 --> 00:44:05,616 so many miles, and another would tell you 804 00:44:05,616 --> 00:44:07,381 it was in that direction, so many miles, 805 00:44:07,381 --> 00:44:09,609 and so, you knew where the storm was. 806 00:44:11,124 --> 00:44:14,223 Okay, I hear you say, what has this got to do 807 00:44:14,223 --> 00:44:16,151 with an obsolete wartime bomber? 808 00:44:16,151 --> 00:44:19,829 Well, all this radio wave super scientific stuff 809 00:44:19,829 --> 00:44:23,568 got the military very worked up and in 1935, 810 00:44:23,568 --> 00:44:26,372 the british air ministry asked Watson Watt 811 00:44:26,372 --> 00:44:28,151 if he could make them a deathray you know, 812 00:44:28,151 --> 00:44:29,874 destroy enemy planes in the sky. 813 00:44:29,874 --> 00:44:31,933 "No," he said. 814 00:44:32,171 --> 00:44:34,670 "But, if radio waves will bounce off storms, 815 00:44:34,670 --> 00:44:36,467 they'll also bounce off aircraft, 816 00:44:36,467 --> 00:44:37,983 so what about me giving you something 817 00:44:37,983 --> 00:44:40,018 that helps you find enemy aircraft in the sky, 818 00:44:40,018 --> 00:44:42,904 tell you how far away they are and in what direction. 819 00:44:43,714 --> 00:44:46,346 We could call it, 'radio detection and ranging' 820 00:44:46,346 --> 00:44:49,016 or radar, for short. 821 00:44:50,502 --> 00:44:52,477 We could also get to the returning echo 822 00:44:52,477 --> 00:44:54,811 from the aircraft to cause a beam of electrons, 823 00:44:54,811 --> 00:44:58,061 going down a cathode ray tube to make blip on a screen 824 00:44:58,061 --> 00:45:00,950 that had a range scale on it, so you could see the aeroplane 825 00:45:00,950 --> 00:45:02,027 and you could see where it was." 826 00:45:02,836 --> 00:45:05,478 "Great idea," they said, and this was the result. 827 00:45:08,056 --> 00:45:10,727 The radar that was used during the second world war. 828 00:45:12,098 --> 00:45:14,637 Today, because of radar, your holiday jet 829 00:45:14,637 --> 00:45:16,248 gets to its destination in safety, 830 00:45:16,248 --> 00:45:19,231 missing the storms and other holiday jets, 831 00:45:20,206 --> 00:45:23,232 and so, we come almost to the end of our detective story. 832 00:45:25,881 --> 00:45:28,955 You remember how it all started 2.700 years ago 833 00:45:28,955 --> 00:45:32,642 when the touchstone told you you could trust somebody's gold, 834 00:45:32,642 --> 00:45:35,029 and how that got all the merchants racing around 835 00:45:35,029 --> 00:45:36,911 the Mediterranean out to Russia, and out to India. 836 00:45:36,911 --> 00:45:40,294 And how, at the great trading port of Alexandria, 837 00:45:41,806 --> 00:45:43,104 the star table got written, 838 00:45:43,104 --> 00:45:46,736 but not used by navigators until a new sail and rudder 839 00:45:46,736 --> 00:45:48,310 got things moving again, in the middle ages, 840 00:45:48,310 --> 00:45:50,395 by which time they knew where they were going, 841 00:45:50,395 --> 00:45:53,742 thanks to the compass, which however, let them down. 842 00:45:53,742 --> 00:45:58,230 So William Gilbert tried to find out why, using his magnetic models of the Earth 843 00:45:58,230 --> 00:46:01,657 that attracted everything, and how Girica in Regensburg 844 00:46:01,657 --> 00:46:04,980 got so excited by attraction, he tried spinning a sulfur ball, 845 00:46:04,980 --> 00:46:07,116 and how the sulfur ball causes sparks, 846 00:46:07,116 --> 00:46:09,359 and got everybody into atmospheric electricity, 847 00:46:09,359 --> 00:46:12,269 and the weather and how, at the weather station 848 00:46:12,269 --> 00:46:15,334 on Ben Nevis, Wilson decided to make his cloud chamber, 849 00:46:15,334 --> 00:46:18,215 then got interested in storms, and helped to make radar happen. 850 00:46:19,517 --> 00:46:20,907 I said we were almost at the end 851 00:46:20,907 --> 00:46:23,055 of our detective story, not quite. 852 00:46:24,662 --> 00:46:27,085 The other reason we're onboard a B-29 853 00:46:27,085 --> 00:46:29,332 is because one of those bombers also carried 854 00:46:29,332 --> 00:46:32,590 the other child of Wilson's cloud chamber. 855 00:46:32,590 --> 00:46:35,725 Remember, i had told you that he'd set off a scientific time bomb. 856 00:46:35,725 --> 00:46:37,944 Well, he did that because back in 1911, 857 00:46:37,944 --> 00:46:40,941 he took this photograph of his little cloud streaks 858 00:46:40,941 --> 00:46:43,697 and he showed it to a phsicist called Ernest Rutherford, 859 00:46:43,697 --> 00:46:46,782 who said, "My god, you know what that is? 860 00:46:46,782 --> 00:46:49,497 That is a photograph of radiation particles, 861 00:46:49,497 --> 00:46:50,613 knocking bits off an atom. 862 00:46:50,613 --> 00:46:52,667 And that means, we can see what we're doing 863 00:46:52,667 --> 00:46:54,333 when we try to split the atom." 864 00:46:54,333 --> 00:46:58,366 So, Wilson's photograph made it infinitely easier 865 00:46:58,366 --> 00:47:01,248 to produce a modern invention that helps us to cure 866 00:47:01,248 --> 00:47:03,165 one of the most deadly diseases known to mankind, 867 00:47:03,165 --> 00:47:07,947 or if we choose, to wipe out all life on the face of the Earth. 868 00:47:08,994 --> 00:47:12,578 That invention was dropped by a B-29 at 9.15 869 00:47:12,578 --> 00:47:16,623 on a sunny august morning in 1945 on Hiroshima, 870 00:47:16,623 --> 00:47:18,702 it was the atomic bomb. 871 00:48:23,031 --> 00:48:26,217 Today, the nuclear bomb is like the sword of Damocles 872 00:48:26,217 --> 00:48:30,473 hanging over us, Will it fall again?