[Gear noises]
I would say it was a pretty safe bet that the one magic wish
most people would like to be granted,
would be to be able to see into the future
I mean, think what it would mean.
I'm backing the right horse, but we can't.
We have to guess about tomorrow, and we have to act
on that guess, and it's never been any different.
And that's why following the trail from the past
up to the emergence of the modern technology
that surrounds us in our daily lives and affects our lives,
is rather like a detective story, because at no time in the past,
did anybody who had anything to do
with the business of inventing or changing things
ever know what the full effects of his actions would be.
He just went ahead and did what he did,
for his own reasons, like we do.
That's how change comes about,
and it's like a detective story because if you follow the trail,
from the past up to a modern man-made object,
the story is full of sudden twists and false clues and guesswork.
And you never know where the story is heading
until the very last minute.
This detective story starts in the eastern mediterranean
about 2.500 years ago, and it starts with a subject
dear to most peoples's hearts: money.
And, because that's the way things go in history,
it will end, as will as all these programs,
with something totally different.
In this case, a modern day invention,
that affect the life of every man, woman, and child on Earth.
Take yourself back then, to a time
when the mediterranean was practically empty,
when the ancient greeks had only just turned up,
and together with the finicians and the egyptians,
were about all there was,
living in cities we would call villages.
When, if you wanted to trade with somebody,
it was a case of 'meet me in the market square,
and i'll give you my vegetables, if you give me your cloth'.
You bartered because there was no such thing as cash.
And the reason we've come looking for clues
in this particular city on the mediterranean
has to do with how cash was invented,
and what happened as a result.
The way it happened shows how change comes,
as much as anything, by accident.
Sometime around 700 B.C., in a place place called Lydia,
what is now modern Turkey, there was a river
that washed gold down from the local mountains.
And, the local people used to pan it and note it down
for religious objects, jewelry, that kind of stuff.
And then, in the riverbed somebody came across this,
it's called a touchstone, and if you rub gold
onto it -- you get a streak.
But if you rub gold mixed with silver or something else -
you get a different kind of streak.
See what that means?
If that streak is pure gold and somebody's trying
to offload garbage onto you, well, you take
what he calls gold and you rub it on the touchstone,
and you can see immediately, that what he says is gold,
isn't up to your standards.
Well, the lydians went immediately into the business
of standardizing their precious metals,
and over the next 300 years or so,
all over mediterranean and in Persia,
the habit spread of accepting metal
instead of goods as payment because now,
you could trust the value of the metal.
After that point, in any state or empire
that had a mint making coins,
the new money really stimulated trade.
By the time, Alexander the Great
was running everything from India to Italy,
his coinage was accepted everywhere,
and his world was like one giant marketplace.
Well, in 331 B.C., he decided to build a big commercial center
to handle the flood of goods crisscrossing his empire.
This was it, named after him, Alexandria.
You could do two things here: get very rich
and get yourself the best education in the world.
You see, Alexandria had a library, and what a library!
Its opening hours went on for maybe a thounsand years.
At its height, it had more that a half a million books, and that was it.
If it wasn't here, it wasn't worth knowing about.
And then, in the end, somebody burnt every single book.
Nobody knows who, fanatical christians,
fanatical arabs, take your pick, religion at work, left nothing,
well, almost nothing.
Because the next clue in this particular historical
detective story, takes us down a hole.
Of course, this was no ordinary hole,
it led down to a kind of extra backup library,
and since it wasn't above ground to be destroyed it's still here.
It's a real honeycomb of tunnels down here,
like a literary rabbit warren.
Now, all the books were stored and cataloged,
just like we do today, according to subject heading,
and placed in niches like these.
Of course, being a big seaport, the main interest
was in nautical things like maps, geography books,
aids to navigation; that sort of thing.
And they were all written in ink, on papyrus,
made from slivers of reed stuck flat together,
and they came out like this, in the form of scrolls.
Now, they got these scrolls
either because the local scholars wrote them,
or because they had a rather crafty law.
You see, if you came to Alexandria on a boat,
and you owned a book,
you had to lend it to the library to be copied,
and sometimes, the copies were so good,
the owners went off with the fakes,
and the library kept the original.
This is a copy of one of the library's bestsellers,
author: Claudius Ptolemy title: "All you ever wanted to know about calculation"
13 volumes.
All the astronomy that was known at the time.
One of the volumes was a star catalog,
Containing 1022 stars. Look, here's the name of the star,
here's the zodiac sign it's in, gemini, sagittarius,
here's where it is in that zodiac.
Is it northern or southern hemisphere?
How many degree east or west on the sky is it?
And how bright is it?
Ptolemy did these squiggles about 150 AD.
And they're one of the great examples of an idea
ahead of its time, because one of the ways
this was to be used by sailors to open up the world,
in a way you're going to see happening later in this program,
wasn't going to come for over 1.400 years.
And, as for the sailors pouring in and out of Alexandria
in Ptolemy's time, well, they just
weren't interested in charts of the sky.
Some sailing astronomers might have used them
in order to find out their position,
because you see, if the tables told you
that at a certain time,
a start should be in THAT position in the sky,
and you actually saw it in that position,
you could work backward so to speak,
to find out what position you have to be in,
in order to see it at that different angle.
But, the sailors stuck to their maps and their winds.
Because, from the very beginning, they'd used ships
with the kind of sail that makes it hard to get into
serious navigational problems,
a square sail that only takes you the way the wind's blowing,
which is what they did right through the roman period,
with bigger ships and richer cargoes.
Until suddenly, around 700 AD --
the newly arrived arab pirates gave one simple order,
open your wallet and repeat after me,
help yourself.
If you didn't, they took it, anyway.
It became clear to even the dumbest merchant
that the quickest way to lose a fortune,
was to put it all in one big fat cargo ship,
so the arabs could take the lot.
Everybody started spreading the risk in smaller ships,
less to be plundered in one go.
[Dramatic music]
That switch to the use of smaller ships,
brought into general use, something that would help
europeans colonize America, centuries later.
The very earliest picture we have of it
comes from a manuscript written in the 9th century
in Byzantium.
It was a sail, the kind of sail that had previously
only been used on smaller ships, and the kind of sail that you
can find on a modern arab dhow, like this one, today.
Look at the shape, it's triangular.
Now, that is a lateen sail, and what you could do
with a lateen sail was something you could
never have done with the old roman square sail.
Look, suppose the wind is coming in this direction,
with a lateen sail, you can sail in any direction
right up until you're almost sailing against the wind,
on either side of it.
So, on a long journey, they would go,
take the wind from this side, they would tack,
and take the wind from this side and then,
they would tack again, take the wind again from this side.
Mind you, it wasn't something they enjoyed doing too much.
I mean, look what it involves.
Apart from the fact that with the ton of tackle
you needed and a lot more crew to handle it,
the worst bit came
when the ship was just about to cross the wind.
At which point, you had to lift the spar
right over the top of the mast,
and doing that in rough weather was no picnic.
Still, it was a lot better that going in the wrong direction.
Now, if you're not a sailing buff,
you may not be turned on by the lateen sail,
but as you'll see, it means a great deal more to you
than you might think.
See, although it was nice to be able to zigzag everywhere,
sailing like that wasn't the only thing that happened
because of this canvas triangle.
The lateen sail committed one other thing.
With it, you could leave port pretty well
when you wanted to, without having to wait for a wind
that was going in the same direction you were.
Now, that meant you would leave port more often,
that meant there was more cargo on the move,
more trade, more prosperity.
It's probable that the arabs introduced the lateen sail
into western europe just about in time
to play a major role in the recovery
of the european economy, after the chaos
and confusion of the so-called dark ages.
However, by about 1200, there was so much bulk cargo
like grain or crusaders going to the holy land,
so much bulk cargo on the move that the ships,
had gotten very much bigger and then,
they ran into another problem, the problem of steering.
You see, up until that point,
you steered with a couple of oars, one off either sides of the stern,
but by about 1200, the ships were so big
that those oars just really weren't feasible anymore,
which is why they probably picked up an idea
from the chinese, that solved the problem.
This: the stern-post rudder.
With the stern-post rudder, you could handle a ship
of almost any size, in almost any sea condition.
So, by the 13th century, the europeans
had all the technology, the lateen sail, the old square sail,
the stern-post rudder, to go anywhere they wanted to.
They didn't need to use it until 1453,
when Constantinople fell to the turks.
And after that, it was -- if you wanted something
from the far east, it was either pay the price the turks wanted,
for letting it come through their territory,
or go get it yourself,
which is just what the europeans did,
in the great 16th century, voyages of discovery,
and, it was now that the mariners began to use those star charts
prepared in such detail by Claudius Ptolemy, 14 centuries before.
This is the Golden Hinde, the ship that carried
Sir Francis Drake around the world.
It's not unlike the earlier caravels
that sailed with the great portuguese navigators
down around the southern tip of Africa
and then, out across the Atlantic with Columbus in 1492.
So, what was it about these ships
that meant that you could sail them at will,
to the ends of earth?
Well, look at the rigging.
Now, i know it looks like a confused mass of ropes,
but if you look carefully, you'll see the old square sail
there on the front mast.
And some of these ships had one, some two,
sometimes even three masts carrying the square sails,
but on the back-end, there was a mast
with a familiar triangle of shape of the lateen.
And it was this mixture of sail that allowed you
to cross an ocean, anytime you wanted to.
Look, here's Spain and here's the northern part of Africa,
and over here, there's America and the gulf
and then, South America.
Now, in the area here off the coast,
you get winds going in all sorts of direction,
very variable.
So, you use a lateen sail to tack yourself into a position
where the steady northeasterly trade winds
which you can pick up on the square sails,
will take you straigt across the Atlantic.
When you want to come home, you do the same thing,
will take you straigtlant. The other way round.
You tack through the variable winds until you pick up the westerlies,
you put up the square sails,
and the westerlies bring you all the way home.
Most of the maps they used at the time
were made in Myakka, and by the 14th century,
they were turning out potolan charts
and updating them,
as explorers came back with more information.
Now the charts contained only what a sailor needed to know.
No inland detail at all, just details of the coastline,
the names of the harbors, and these lines
showing the directions of the major and minor winds,
along which you steered.
The charts were very precise, and because the aim
of the people using them is profit, they were also very secret.
But the thing that really gave Europe
the world on a plate was that.
The first reference we have to it
is by an english monk around about 1200.
It probably came from China via the arabs to Europe,
and early on, they would have used it like this.
And the magnetized needle stuck through the straw
would point north.
And then, around about 1300, somebody probably
in the maritime republic of Amalfi, south of Naples,
hit on the idea of mounting the needle
and putting a card on it,
and on the card, putting the wind dirrections
and putting the whole thing in a box.
The effect of the compass was electric,
in more ways than one, as you'll see.
Firstly, it meant that you
could go out sailing under clouding skies,
because you no longer needed the stars or the sun
to steer by, and the immediate effect of that was to double
the number of voyages because now,
you could sail in winter.
So, silk and spices from India, and gold and silver from America,
began to pour into Europe.
And it wasn't until enough men had sailed to enough places
that they realized that the faithful compass was lying.
There was true north the north of the pole star,
and there was the magnetic north,
and depending where on Earth you were, that varied.
And, for a great mercantile empire like England,
that was very bad news.
I suppose Shakespeare and the travel agents have done
more than anybody else to give us our technicolor view
of Elizabethan England, starring the queen herself
as a kind of swashbuckler in pearls.
The fact is, about all she had time for, was bookkeeping.
When she took the place over in 1558,
it was national disaster week, the money was worthless.
There was no money. There was plague.
The cities were packed and stinking.
Elizabeth appealed to the decent english middle class
with their healthy desire for prestige,
power, fun and games and cash.
Soon, anybody who wanted to be anybody,
was on the make,
and none more than that famous bunch of privateering seadogs
led by Drake, Raleigh and Hawkins,
who sailed the Atlantic looking for new
american trade opportunities for England,
setting up colonies, knocking off spanish galleons,
and doing it all with a kind of gutsy disregard for convention,
that we describe today as criminal.
[Laughter]
The privateers would bring back everything
they could lay their hands on, even eskimos.
And somewhere, in among the hustle and bustle
and talk of adventure during the great feast days
of places like Hampton Court, there must have always been
some bore saying, "Hey, listen, you'll never guess what happened
to my compass needle last week."
[Bells toll]
Now, the reason why all those pushy, ambitious,
high-living upper middle class elizabethans
gave a damn about which way a compass needle pointed,
was because there were fantastic profits to be had
in overseas trade.
And if your needle let you down, and you went off course,
well, there was a pretty good chance
you wouldn't get home with all the lovely money.
See, the problem with the needle was really quite simple.
It didn't always point in the same direction,
and people had been saying that since 1492
when Columbus on his way across to America got to about here
and panicked because suddenly, he realized that his needle
wasn't pointing at the North Star.
And then, in 1580, when Sir Francis Drake got back
from his around-the-world trip with enough gold
and jewels pinched, from one spanish ship,
on its way home from Peru, to give his backers 4.700% profit,
well, it was obviously time to do something about it
because if his needle had left him down,
look what they would have all lost.
So, in 1581, a compass maker called Robert Norman
decided to look into the matter and he did THIS.
And he saw nothing happening, which was very odd.
I mean, for a start he said, if a needle is supposed
to be attracted to the north,
why doesn't it move to the north, instead of sitting
in the middle of the bowl, doing nothing.
Well, Norman's remarks attracted the interest
of a certain William Gilbert, who wasn't a sailor,
wasn't a merchant, as a matter of fact,
he was a well-heeled society doctor,
eventually to become physician to the Queen.
Now, like most other medics at the time
Gilbert knew a bit about magnetism
because his profession was very much into metals.
They had recently stopped an epidemic of syphilis
by treating it with mercury in the form of mercuric oxide, this red powder.
And magnetic metal was recommended for treating people with it,
because it was supposed to bring the disease out of them.
So, over a period of about 18 years,
Gilbert went home at the end of every day,
and fiddled around with natural magnets made of loadstone.
And, since the name of the game was to find out
why the compass needle varied as it went around the earth,
he made his little magnets in the form of the Earth
and when he'd got plenty of them ready,
he started his experiments,
and brought anything he could think of
in contact with his magnets,
including of course, a compass needle,
which behaved exactly as he said it should.
Wherever he moved it, the needle pointed
at the north pole of his tiny magnet.
So, he reckoned that the Earth itself had to be a giant magnet
with a magnetic north pole, and it was that
that the compass pointet out, not the North Star.
What's more, he said, if you leave
one of these things alone, it turns one in a day.
And therefore, the Earth must do exactly the same thing.
And, he said, if the Earth is a magnet,
that's why what goes up must come down,
because it's attracted.
In 1600, he wrote down everything he'd discovered,
in a vast book.
And in doing so, he set in motion a train of events
that would one day lead to one of the most frightening
bits of technology in the modern world.
He called his book 'de magnete', about the magnet.
[Bells tolling]
Gilbert's book was practically an overnight success in Europe.
I mean, for a start, he was writing in latin,
so he didn't have any translation problems,
most of the intellectuals around used latin to work with.
And then, look what he was saying,
that the Earth is a giant magnet spinning in space,
holding the moon with its power,
surrounded by the vacuum of interplanetary space
and out there in that vacuum,
there are thousands and millions of unseen stars and planets,
and he's saying this in 1600.
I mean, no wonder everybody went bananas about it.
And the reason our detective story takes us next
to this small town on the Danube in southern Germany,
is because of one man who got very excited
by what Gilbert had said.
His name is Otto Girica, and in 1653,
he was here in Regensburg,
commanded by the emperor to attend the coronation of his son.
The coronation was the occasion for a great imperial shindig
in the town, with dancing, and drinking and singing
and generally, whopping it out,
rather like the annual Regensburg brawl
going on here today.
In Regensburg, some of the more meaningful traditions
haven't changed a bit, in hundreds of years.
[Loud merrymaking]
The sober citizens of Regensburg claim that it was here,
in 1653, that Otto Girica did something quite amazing,
as a result of reading what Gilbert had said
about the nothingness in interplanetary space.
Here in Regensburg, they say, he took a hollow ball
made of two hemispheres that fitted together,
harnessed horses to each side of the ball,
and however hard they pulled, the ball refused to come apart,
although the two halves were not held together
by any kind of joint.
What kept them united was a mysterious force
so powerful that horses couldn't break it.
They say that after the experiment was over,
Girica went on to astound the onlookers
by opening a tiny hole in the ball,
at which point it fell apart, with a twist of his hands.
Now, whether or not that actually happened,
in Regensburg, is neither hare not there.
The fact is it caused a tremendous stir
all over Europe because the mysterious force
holding those hemispheres together,
is what Gilbert had been theorizing about in 1600,
and what in 1654, has only just been discovered,
the vacuum, put inside those hemispheres
by the newly invented vacuum pump
invented by Otto Girica
or rather, adapted by Otto Girica,
because what he did was adapted one of these,
you know what that is?
It's what you have to have handy if most of your buildings
are made of wood, it's a fire extinguisher.
See?
And Girica adapted it to suck air instead of water,
and it was a very big hit with him,
Ferdinand the III, Holy Roman emperor.
Ferdinand had taken the opportunity of his son's coronation
to invite all the princes and bishops and barons and city representatives,
from all over Germany, to come here to this Reichstag Hall,
for several months of dicussions on things
like taxation and war and economic policy.
Now, they all sat on these benches
and Ferdinand of course, being Emperor,
sat up there on his throne
anyway, towards the end of the sessions in 1654,
Ferdinand asked Otto Girica, who was here,
because he was mayor of Magneburg,
if he, Girica, would do some of the tricks
that the Emperor had heard he could do.
And Girica, in this hall, obligingly used his vacuum pump
to make vacuums in glass spheres.
And then, he amazed the assembled company
by showing them that mice suffocated in the vacuum,
candles went out in it,
if you rang a bell in it, you couldn't hear the bell,
and all sorts of other goodies.
Ferdinand was so tickled by the whole thing,
that when it was over, he asked if could have all the apparatus.
and being Emperor, of course, he got it.
Still, he did have the whole thing writen up
which is how the rest of Europe
got to hear about the vacuum pump.
Girica was a real dabbler, and he got very intrigued
by one thing he read in Gilbert's book,
the bit about some substances like sulfur attracting things.
So, Girica quite solemnly, build himself this rather silly
sulfur ball on a stick, and he spun it,
and when he was spinning it, he rubbed it with his hand,
like this.
Now, the reason he did that is because
he was looking for evidence of what we today would call gravity
why things stuck to the space and didn't fly off into space.
So, when he wrote this experiment up
he went into great detail about things like
the ball would attract a piece of thread
and when the thread was in contact with the ball,
the thread would attract things.
Fortunately, he also mentioned something else
about which he entirely missed the point.
He said, if you spin the ball and rub it,
and then, take it out and hold it next to your ear,
you hear a crack.
And, if you do it in the dark, the ball glows.
Now, i said that was fortunate that he mentioned it,
because his half-interested comments
kicked off investigation
into why the crack and the glow occured,
and that turned out to be electricity.
You know, the fascinating thing
about moments like this in the history
is that they lead to so many places at once.
We could for instance, go forward from the vacuum pump
to the investigation of air, to the discovery of oxygen,
to finding out how the human lungs work,
to modern respiratory medicine.
Or, we could go vacuum pump, steam engine, locomotive.
or, we could go vacumm pump, investigation of gases,
sending electric sparks through them to see what would happen,
the cathode ray tube, modern radar.
Or, take the globe, the sulfur globe, the fact that the thread,
when it was attached you remember,
carried the mysterious force away down the thread,
led to people trying to do that deliberately,
to send the force down wire.
That in turn, led to the telegraph, and that in turn led to the telephone.
But for our purposes, let's take the route
that leads to one of modern society's,
most horrifying inventions.
And the next step on that route from this 17th century
government meeting, forward into the future,
takes us into the area of the englishman's favorite
topic of conversation, the weather.
There was obviously some connection between
Giricia's spar and lightning so people got all excited
about atmospheric electricity in general.
Was there gunpowder in clouds,
was irish fog more electric than other kinds?
Interest centered on the unfortunate church bell rings,
who - now you mention it, did tend to get electrocuted
with monotonous regularity, because one of their jobs
was to ring the bell during storms.
[Thunder and lightning]
But lightning got taken really seriously
only when they realized it was doing this little trick.
Gunpowder stores kept on doing this.
Now, this was serious, it wasn't just costing lives, it was costing money.
It was these explosions that brought to public attention
the ideas of the 15th son of an american silk maker
who flew his kite in a storm, to prove his point.
Franklin reckoned the key solution
was lightning rods that would attract
the negative electricity to their positive metal.
Ships' masts were like lightning rods.
And it was a disgruntled navy that finally got the subject widened
to include storms in general, when this happened.
In an attempt to warn their ships of storms,
the Royal Navy started taking weather reports
from them, as well as readings from their barometers.
When the first of these collections was put together
in 1861, they had the world's first weather chart
of an Atlantic depression looking remarkably modern.
On land, the same thing started with stations reporting
via the new telegraph.
Now, fortunately, all this seriousness was tinged
with some of the peculiar insanity of the period,
by the eagerness with which people now took
to an amazing new invention, described just after it came out,
as infinitely the most extraordinary and magnificient discovery
perhaps since creation.
Now, you may feel that's a bit exaggerated,
but you can understand why people got so very lightheaded about it.
It's one of the symptoms you suffer from,
when you use it.
Going up on a balloon makes you feel like doing
all sorts of daft things.
By the middle of the 19th century,
the balloon enjoyed the same kind of reputation
the back seat of the motorcar did, in the 1940s.
It was ratheses often uses for purposes
for which it had not been originally designed.
I mean, french men in particular,
would cruise along with their girlfriends,
dropping empty champagne bottles on the gaping peasants below,
and returning to earth to announce their engagement.
Mind you, some of it was all serious science,
they took up barometers and thermometers,
and cats and dogs, and geese and ducks
and sheep, and 200-Pound ladies
to observe their effect on the weather, and vice versa.
And these intrepid pioneers enjoyed all the privileges
of going to high altitude without oxigen,
bleeding at the ears and eyes, nausea, vomiting,
swelling of the head and passing out.
Mind you, in spite of all that, they did learn things
they never would have if they'd stayed on the ground,
like, the temperature does not decrease steadily
as you rise in the sky, and, nor does the air pressure.
Some of them stayed up for days, drifting along,
enjoying their view, dropping notes by parachure
that never seemed to say much other than,
'Everything going remarkably well'
including those you'll never see again.
By the late 19th century, with all these airborne anemometers
and reports from shipping and stations on the ground
using the new electric telegraph,
you could pick up a copy of your times in the morning
and get almost as good a forecast, as you can today.
The only disadvantage to all this high altitude information,
which by now they regarded as vital,
was that sooner or later, when you ran out of hot air,
or hydrogen or food or champagne, you had to come down.
What they needed was some way of staying
at high altitude for a long as they liked
which is why our story
next takes us to a place you'd imagine
they would have thought of long before,
a place where you can stay at high altitude
for as long as you like.
The Highlands of Scotland.
On october 17th, 1883, this ancestral home,
at the bottom of the mountain was the venue
for a get together by the cream of enlightened scottish gentility
to the mark the grand opening of a new weather station
on the top of the highest highland in Highlands,
Ben Nevis.
Refreshments were offered to the guests,
and provisions were loaded for the journey to come,
by numerous factors andgillies and other members
of the unpronounceable scottish lower orders.
"Ladies and gentlemen, could we have you on the lawn
for the commemorative photograph, please."
(James Burke) It was a grand, ludicrous overdone affair,
in a way that all philanthropic victorian public occasions where.
In any other country of the world,
they'd have dropped the whole thing till the rain stopped,
but this was 19th century's Scotland,
and they were bent on serious matters.
so, they gritted their teeth and cheerfully did their duty,
as the rain filled up their bagpipes.
After all, was the whole thing not being recorded for posterity?
The really nice thing
about what science did to the victorians
was it made them all lunatic in the same way,
so the town's people of fort William,
also did their duty as the procession passed,
by getting soaked and waving silly flags
as they were supposed to.
At 9 A.M., party began their trek up the mountain,
led by a single piper, busting a catchy little celtic number
called 'Laquelle - France'
why, i've never been able to find out.
and the rain obliginly turned to sleet.
So, everybody could have what one is supposed to have
when doing one's duty, a thoroughly rotten time.
As more and more stations like Ben Nevis were set up,
and people could sit and look at the weather
as it shifted and changed, they notices
that it made distinct patterns.
So, in good victorian style, they cataloged them,
and in the 1890s, came up with an official
international cloud atlas, which gave clouds the names
by which they're known today.
And this catalog of clouds is the next clue
in our detective story, because clouds
caused something strange to happen at Ben Nevis.
You see, from the moment it opened,
the station observers worked 24 hours a day.
Each shift would send off regular reports on temperature,
pressure, rain and so on,
And one of the reports they had to file
would be about the clouds.
And, if you were on the dawn shift,
you'd sometime see the clouds in the valley
do something very weird to your shadow.
This is called 'a glory' and the strange thing about it
is that the colors that appear in the halo
don't appear in the order they do in the rainbow,
but the other way around.
At this point, events took the most extraordinary twist
for the very mundane reason that the Ben Nervis observatory
was short of cash.
And so, because of that, they used to take on
university students, during their vacation,
to act as temporary unpaid observers,
while their own staff is on holiday.
And in september 1894, one of those young men
was a Cambridge physics graduate called Charles Wilson.
This is him, in much later life.
And one morning, on Ben Nevis, Wilson saw a glory,
and it turned him on so much that he decided
to go back to Cambridge and make one for himself,
to find out how they worked.
And that's why our detective story brings us here.
Because the way Wilson did it, and how in the long run,
what he did came to effect the lives of every man,
woman and child on earth,
is illustrated in every museum of any size in the world.
This one's the science museum in London
and Wilson's machine is here, hidden away
among the thousand of other clues to mankind's inventive genius.
You know, considering the amazing thing
that this helped give birth to, Wilson's machine
is really a rather unimpressive looking object.
And although you'd expect to find it in the weather section,
you know, because of the glory business and all that,
that'sot where they put it.
Usually, the first thing you see is what the machine actually did.
Take a look in here.
See those tiny cloud formations?
Now, Wilson wanted to make himself clouds
because he wanted to make himself a glory to work on,
So, he built himself a cloud chamber in 1895.
This is a later version but the principle's the same.
Here is a sealed glass cointainer,
and fitting into the container below it,
there's a piston inside that cylinder there.
And underneath the piston, there's a gap.
And leading from that gap, is a tube through
to this container, in which there's a vacuum.
Now, if you open the valve on that tube,
the air underneath the piston whistles in here
to fill the vacuum,
that causes the piston to be jerked down very fast,
and then, this air up here has more space to fill,
which it does, so it gets thinner,
so its air pressure drops and clouds form in here.
Now, at that time, everybody thought clouds formed
because the tiny droplets of moisture condensed
on little specs of dust in the air.
But, when Wilson cleared all the dust out of his machine,
he still got clouds.
Well, he reckoned it had to be something
like radiation, because there wasn't anything else.
So, in 1896, he took some of the newly discovered x-rays
and beamed them into his cloud chamber,
and sure enough, they made clouds, but they made them in tiny streaks
well, thought Wilson, i've established a relationship
between radiation and cloud, and that's good enough fort me,
so the dropped his work on the cloud chamber,
and went happily back to meteorology.
And, what he didn't realize
was that inside that cloud chamber,
he had triggered a scientific time bomb.
Over the next few years, Wilson, the magic cloud maker,
got really turned on by really bad weather,
and in particular thunderstorms,
and in very particular, the situations
where things got really spectacularly bad.
And so, he was to be seen risking life and limb
by poking his instruments as close as possible to gigantic
lightning strikes,
in order to find out how much power they gave off.
And, if you're wondering why i'm telling you all this
in the front end of a wartime B-29 Bomber,
well, one of the reasons
is that a result of Wilson being so interested in lightning,
wartime flying was safer, if that's the right word to use.
You see, when he found out what lightning was doing,
he promptly told a friend of his, called Edward Appleton.
Now, in 1915, what Appleton was trying to do
is to find out why, when you turned on
your new miracle machine called radio,
what you got in your ear often,
instead of long distance communication, was THIS
so, Appleton decided to take a look
at what the atmosphere did to radio waves,
and in 1924, he finally shot some radio waves up in the sky,
whereupon they promptly bounced back down again to the Earth.
So, imagine how long it took them to bounce back,
and he said, "Hey listen, there is a layer of something
100 kilometers up there, I know because I measured it,
that reflects radio waves."
Now, all this measurement bit may seem just a touch dull to you,
but it was music to the ears of another weatherman
called Watson Watt, who at that time
was trying to find out if he could use radio
to locate storms, which of course, now he could do.
So, he did it by using two radio transmitters,
so that one would tell you a storm was in that direction,
so many miles, and another would tell you
it was in that direction, so many miles,
and so, you knew where the storm was.
Okay, I hear you say, what has this got to do
with an obsolete wartime bomber?
Well, all this radio wave super scientific stuff
got the military very worked up and in 1935,
the british air ministry asked Watson Watt
if he could make them a deathray you know,
destroy enemy planes in the sky.
"No," he said.
"But, if radio waves will bounce off storms,
they'll also bounce off aircraft,
so what about me giving you something
that helps you find enemy aircraft in the sky,
tell you how far away they are and in what direction.
We could call it, 'radio detection and ranging'
or radar, for short.
We could also get to the returning echo
from the aircraft to cause a beam of electrons,
going down a cathode ray tube to make blip on a screen
that had a range scale on it, so you could see the aeroplane
and you could see where it was."
"Great idea," they said, and this was the result.
The radar that was used during the second world war.
Today, because of radar, your holiday jet
gets to its destination in safety,
missing the storms and other holiday jets,
and so, we come almost to the end of our detective story.
You remember how it all started 2.700 years ago
when the touchstone told you you could trust somebody's gold,
and how that got all the merchants racing around
the Mediterranean out to Russia, and out to India.
And how, at the great trading port of Alexandria,
the star table got written,
but not used by navigators until a new sail and rudder
got things moving again, in the middle ages,
by which time they knew where they were going,
thanks to the compass, which however, let them down.
So William Gilbert tried to find out why, using his magnetic models of the Earth
that attracted everything, and how Girica in Regensburg
got so excited by attraction, he tried spinning a sulfur ball,
and how the sulfur ball causes sparks,
and got everybody into atmospheric electricity,
and the weather and how, at the weather station
on Ben Nevis, Wilson decided to make his cloud chamber,
then got interested in storms, and helped to make radar happen.
I said we were almost at the end
of our detective story, not quite.
The other reason we're onboard a B-29
is because one of those bombers also carried
the other child of Wilson's cloud chamber.
Remember, i had told you that he'd set off a scientific time bomb.
Well, he did that because back in 1911,
he took this photograph of his little cloud streaks
and he showed it to a phsicist called Ernest Rutherford,
who said, "My god, you know what that is?
That is a photograph of radiation particles,
knocking bits off an atom.
And that means, we can see what we're doing
when we try to split the atom."
So, Wilson's photograph made it infinitely easier
to produce a modern invention that helps us to cure
one of the most deadly diseases known to mankind,
or if we choose, to wipe out all life on the face of the Earth.
That invention was dropped by a B-29 at 9.15
on a sunny august morning in 1945 on Hiroshima,
it was the atomic bomb.
Today, the nuclear bomb is like the sword of Damocles
hanging over us, Will it fall again?