[gear noises]
What you're looking at
is a bit of paper with holes in it.
How's that for a spectacular way to start a program?
But, this may be the most important
bit of paper with holes in it
since the hole was invented.
It's a punch card,
and it stands for one of the most
meaningful inventions man has ever given himself: the computer.
In most people's everyday life,
the computer isn't much more than a very fast adding machine.
It tends to send you bills,
but it is very much more than that.
The modern world could not function without computers,
because they operate everything
from production lines to telephone exchanges,
to traffic systems, to international finance.
But the main reason why computers matter to you and me,
and our future, is because they have perfect memories.
They never forget anything they're told
about you and me.
The kind of data, say, you have to give somebody
if you want a bank account, or credit,
or to be able to vote, or buy a house,
or if you've been accused of a crime.
And that's why computers contain the future within them.
If you tell a computer everything
about a group of people, it'll juggle the mix
and come up with the one factor that is most likely
to affect the decision that group will make
about something, one way or the other.
Knowing that is knowing the future,
and that is power; but in whose hands?
This computer has a particulary spectacular
kind of memory of the past,
and knowledge of the future, in its databanks.
[typewriter keys clattering]
Watch this.
This computer runs a planetarium,
and so it handles, as a matter of simple routine,
the universe, as far forward in time
as you like, or back.
How would you like the beginning of everything?
Or, here's one full turn of the Earth, tomorrow in 15 seconds.
Now, the reason I'm showing you all this fun and games
is not because i'm some kind of astronomy freak.
It's because the very first time
mankind gained the power to see into the future,
like the computer can now,
that power was in the hands of the priest astronomers
over 3.000 years ago,
and look what that led to.
First, the Moon.
Roughly every 12 times you saw this happen,
the waxing and waning of the Moon,
you were back where you started
in terms of planting, or harvesting,
or irrigation, once a year.
So the priest astronomers were able to tell the farmers,
"plant now."
Now, the more they looked up at the Moon,
the more they learned about the stars.
And so by, the fifth century, B.C.,
they had identified and named most of the major constellations.
Twelve of them stretching across the sky:
aries, taurus, gemini, cancer, leo, virgo, libra,scorpio,
sagittarius, capricorn, aquarius, and pisces.
So they divided the sky in 12 sections,
six in one hemisphere, six in the other.
They called these sections, houses,
and gave the houses power over life, health,
money, love, and so on.
So, which house a constellation was in
affected life on Earth they said.
Now, the more this astrology stuff, became popular,
the more astronomers saw.
They saw, for instance, that besides the Sun and the Moon,
there were five other things in the sky
that moved - like this:
so they called them the wanderers.
In greek, planeta: planets.
So, by the second century A.D., this is the kind of stuff
the astronomers were turning out.
It's a copy of a bit of an astronomical bestseller
by a fellow called Claudius Ptolemy.
It's a star table.
There's the name of the star, which constellation it's in,
how many degrees up in the sky,
which hemisphere, how bright.
And he did that for 1.022 stars.
But it was still the old magic that got he crowds on their feet,
especially the magic of being able to predict
something like this.
So, by the middle ages,
they thought they got a pretty clear idea
of the kind of universe they'd got.
I say "they." We didn't.
Up here in cold, windy northern Europe,
we were too busy just trying to get through the dark ages in one piece.
But the arabs did, and they'd learned it
from the persians and the indians.
Take a look at this.
This is a mechanical version of an arabic universe
we built so we could crank it around.
First, for very obvious reasons, they thought the Earth,
here where I am now, was at the center of everything.
All around it, out in space, was a gigantic crystal sphere
carrying the constellations, and rotating slowly.
Inside that were another seven crystal spheres,
also rotating,
each one carrying a different planet.
Closest to the Earth, they thought, was the Moon,
then Mercury, then Venus, then came the Sun,
and beyond that Mars and then Jupiter,
and finally Saturn.
If you were an arab, all this was vital,
because it told you in which direction
Mecca, the holy city, lay, and it told you what time it was
so that you could pray when you should,
because they had this.
It's a kind of heavenly computer called an astrolabe.
Each one of these little points represents a star,
and you can move the whole lot so that you can reproduce
what you see in the sky on a particular night.
And when you've done that,
the astrolabe will tel you what the date is.
On the other side, there are these two little sites.
You line the sites up on a star,
then you read the angle off there,
and you look that angle up on your star tables,
and they tell you that the star
will be at that angle at a certain time of night,
accurate to within a minute.
And, of course, if you know what direction the stars is in,
you can work out where Mecca is.
So, the arabs were able to say
where everything in the sky would be,
throughout the year at any time, day or night.
I mean, take, for example,
dawn on september the 14th, 714, A.D.
At that point, Venus would have been up in the third house.
Let's get it up there.
Mercury would have been in the second house.
And everybody else would have been clustered
in the first house,
together with the constellation virgo;
except for Jupiter, which would have been
down below the horizon in the 12 house.
So since this vast universe was so powerful -
I mean, the Sun made plants grow,
and the stars changed the seasons -
everybody reckones that the sky ruled all life on Earth.
So, if you got sick, say, a great deal hung
on what was in the sky when you were born.
And that's why dawn on september the 14th, 714,
matters so much.
It was the birthday of the caliph Al-Mansur,
the founder of Baghdad, who in 765,
got as sick as a dog, and couldn't be cured.
And what happened because of that
is one of the most extraordinary accidents in history.
You see, up in the mountains, a few hundred miles away,
at a place called Jundi-Shapur,
there was a monastery that that had a medical school.
and, finally, in desperation,
the director of the medical school was invited down,
and he promptly cured the caliph,
and he probably used astrology to do it.
See, astrologers reproduced what was in the sky
on a chart, very much like the ones
in your daily paper.
Each planet or constellation was supposed to have power
over metals, plants, medicine, your career, your live, desease.
You name it, they ruled.
So, any medical astrologer looking
at the caliph's birth horoscope would have said,
"wow, look at this lot here in one influential grouping in the house of life."
I mean, virgo gives you stomach trouble.
Saturn gives you a hernia, Mars gives you ulcers.
And the moon makes you vomit.
So, diagnosis would have been a piece of cake.
Now, you may think that's a lot of garbage.
So do I.
But history records that Al-Mansur
actually did have stomach trouble.
Well, he was up and about in no time,
and Jundi-Shapur became a very popular place.
And that's when it happened.
Because when the arabs turned up for a look around,
they found it stuffed full of manuscripts
containing a vast amount of ancient greek knowledge,
which they jumped at and started translating,
knowledge that might have been lost to us forever,
if Al-Mansur hadn't gone sick.
Because, as arab civilization moved west
across the Mediterranean it took that knowledge with it,
and a belief in a mechanical universe,
whose science could be read
for the benefit of mankind, trapped inside it.
The new knowledge was to take us out
of the treadmill of ignorance, and put us in charge
of our lives in a way we'd never been before,
especially when the amazing new arab translations
and medical stuff got to pox-ridden Europe.
The first european medical unit
was set up at Salerno in Italy in the 11th century,
complete with do-it-yourself instruction manuals like this lot.
Salerno had its first big success as a medieval mash,
you know, crusaders stopping off on their way back
for repairs, and then moving on
to tell the folks at home
all about this amazing, new thing called 'curing people'.
Well, to the europeans, so short on medical knowledge,
that with any disease, you tended to get seriously dead,
this was something they had to have.
And in their new universities, one of the two
really avant-garde things to study became doctoring.
The other academic turn-on was also due to the muslims.
When the christians took Toledo back
from the spanish arabs in 1105,
they found libraries stacked with astronomy books,
which the king promptly ordered translated.
You could hear the sound of scribbling
and excitement all over Europe.
Remember those star tables of Ptolemy's?
That sort of stuff was turning up.
Well, by the 13th century, anybody studying
the new medicine and astronomy was into what we would call
scientific investigation, a hard-nosed approach
to things that definitely underwhelmed
one very heavy bunch of people.
[man speaking latin]
See, these were the days of the great clerical carve-up
between the traditionalists in the church,
and the new thinkers who got turned on
by the new science.
[man speaking latin]
On the one hand, the traditionalists who said,
"listen, all you has to do is to believe,
and whatever the early church fathers wrote,
that's the horse's mouth."
And on the other the new thinkers
who reckoned that if something didn't stand up to analysis
and argument, then you couldn't trust it,
no matter who it was.
Well, that kind of made the traditionalists
foam at the mouth.
To them, it was revolutionary clap trap,
though, to us, this new new view is obvious.
If you could examine the sky and the human body,
and find out how they worked,
whas there any limit to what you could do?
Why believe anything, unless you could prove it?
Our modern approach to learning starts here.
But what drove the traditionalists bananas
was that these guys were even suggesting
you could apply the same experimental approach
to what god was.
[men speaking latin]
Worst of all, they said this:
"you compare one holy writer with another on some crucial point,
and they don't agree."
Put yourself in the pope's position,
with all these guys rocking the boat.
There was only one thing to do:
invent the inquisition.
And we all know what that got up to:
very nasty stuff.
Now, while some of the knowledge coming in via the arabs
was causing the church a little trouble,
some of it was about to help solve a really serious problem.
The problem the church had, was telling the time.
You see, the church had rules that if you were a monk,
you had to say certain prayers at certain hours
of the day and night.
And as a monk, your salvation depended
on doing that properly.
So, knowing what time it was, was vital.
Now, in the Mediterranean, in the south,
they had sundials, and they had candles.
Now, they had both up here in northern Europe, too,
but the problem with the sundial in northern Europe
is that there's not very much sun.
It's cloudy a lot of the time.
And as for candles, well, at the time,
they were very expensive,
and they did sometimes tend to burn places down.
Now, the only way we know how they solved the problem
of getting the prayer right at the right time
was because of a chronicle
written by a monk called Jocelin de Brakelond.
And he lived in the abbey church
of Bury St. Edmonds in England,
where the body of St. Edmond was buried.
So it was a very important church.
Anyway, he says that one night, june 23rd, 1198,
everybody in the abby was awakened
by the sound of the most gigantic fire.
And they raced out, terrified, and sure enough,
the whole place was going up in smoke,
it was a major catastrophe.
And he says, "the young men among us ran,
some to the well and some to the clock."
Now, the reason they ran to the clock
to put the fire out
was because they were using a water clock,
and that's fine by day, but who wakes you up at night
and says, "excuse me, it's 5:00,
and you've got to do that particular prayer."
Now, we haven't known for centuries
how they solved the problem of waking up in the middle of the night,
until recently, when a fragment of an 11th century manuscript
was discovered in a monastery in the Pyrenees.
And in this fragment - it said in latin, of course -
"this is how you build a water-powered alarm clock."
So we did.
We think it's the only one in the world.
And you know what?
It works.
I think it's fantastic.
Here's the reservoir of water,
running water coming down here
at a very carefully controlled speed,
fills the reservoir here.
Weel, there's a float down in there,
and top of the float is this shaft,
and on the shaft, there are teeth.
Now, as the float rises slowly, these teeth engage
in this cog system here on the face of the clock.
And that turns the clock very slowly.
And for daytime, there's your clock,
you know what time it is.
Now, for your alarm call at night,
you take a little sliver of metal like that,
and you stick it in one of these slits
around the outside of the clock face,
depending on what time you want, like,
say, 3:00 in the morning.
And when 3:00 in the morning comes around
that little metal sliver rises just -
and it touches this ledge here and trips it,
as it goes by, causing this tiny weight
to swing down here, pulling this noose off
that restraining arm.
Now, once the noos is off that restraining arm,
this shaft here spins round and round.
Now, it does that, because in here,
it's got rope wound round and round it,
and that rope's attached to some very heavy weights.
So when the shaft is free, the weight fall,
and the shaft spins.
And when it does, this bit here goes forward
and hit the bell, and that's your alarm call.
And who said genius was simple?
Look at it in action.
Great showbiz. But the trouble was,
in winter, the water still froze.
So it wasn't until about 1280
that somebody came up with a brilliant idea
of getting rid of the water completely,
and using only the weight to power the clock.
The system that made that idea feasible
was probably one of the greatest inventions
in the history of mankind: the verge and foliot.
This is it.
You see, this wheel with teeth in it,
well, it's being turned by a weight and a piece of rope
wrapped around a shaft,
just like the one in the alarm clock.
It's not whizzing around so fast,
because is beiong held in check
by the verge and the foliot system I told you about.
Look.
This is the verge bit, and it has a blade in there
which comes, and it catches the teeth,
and stop the wheel moving for a second like that.
Now, every time it does that, fit's then kicked away
by the wheel, because the wheel is being pulled by the main weight.
And when that happened, another blade down at the bottom
catches in the teeth and holds the wheel
for another split second before it, too, is kicked away.
And the two blades alternate between them,
back and forth, holding the wheel back all the time.
And as they operate, you can hear the sound
with which the world has become familiar
over the last 700 years,
the sound of tick-tock, tick-tock.
By 1400, what had started as a machine to tell people
when to pray, had become a machine
for telling people when to work.
Towns all over Europe got clocks,
and when they rang, you moved, and you moved
until they rang again, when you stopped.
Does that idea ring a bell?
This was also when we got our 12-hour clock,
because striking 24 for one of these monster
was much too complicated.
The new clocks made the towns more efficient,
and production went up.
Okay, put yourself back then, say, in the position
of a successful merchant or businessman,
riding high on the late medieval economic boom.
All around you, towns are running their businesses
with clocks like these in their towers.
Time is becoming money.
So what do you want?
You want time, but you don't want it like that at the tower.
You want it in your pocket.
So there must have been a very ready market around
when some craftsman, i don't know,
around about 1450, 1460, made the next great step.
He might even have been, say, a locksmith.
Because if you look at the locks of the time,
you see that they work -
they stay open or stay closed -
because of the power of that - bending metal.
So, the spring is the concept i'm talking about.
But it was what you do with the spring
that was really clever.
You see, a spring has problems.
When it's wound up tight, it starts to unwind.
It's working very powerfully, strongly.
As it unwinds, it becomes weaker and weaker.
So if you're going to get a spring to work,
you have to make sure that it's given the hard work
at the beginning, and the easy work at the end.
Now, in clocks, this is how they did that.
They put the spring inside a barrel.
There's a barrel.
And the spring is connected to the barrel,
so that as the spring unwinds, the barrel turns.
Now, coiled around the outside of the barrel,
there's either catcut, or chains, in this case,
and that chain is then taken across over here
and wound round and round
to the main drive shaft of the clock.
But you see that?
That drive shaft is tapered so that, as the chain unwinds,
the first parts inwind down here,
where the hard work has to be done by the spring.
And then, as it weakens, it's unwinding further
and further up the shaft, until, right at the top,
the easiest work is being done,
the position it's in now, as a matter of fact.
Now, that threaded shaft there is called a fusie.
And if you're ever looking at your wristwatch one day
and wondering why you're a slave to it,
blame the fusie. That's where it all started.
These spring-driven clocks were, as you would expect,
instant raving success.
I mean, imagine being given something like that,
when the world you live in is full of bears, and wolves,
and dark forests, and muddy tracks, and thatched roofs.
It must have been like one of us getting
a personal interstellar spacecraft to play with,
and park around behind the house.
Most of these medieval mechanical marvels
came from the same town in southern Germany
that this one did, because it's called a Nuremberg egg.
Okay, enough of the tourist bit.
On with the story.
Nuremberg was good at clock making,
because it was good at metal work,
because it was in the greatest mining area in Europe:
gold, silver, iron, copper, so it was very, very rich,
and it had the best craftsmen in Europe.
They used to boast that your average burger here
lived better than the king of Scotland.
Nuremberg was also on a main road,
so a lot of people came through.
In most cases, they came for the expertise
that the craftsmen here guarded so jealously,
keeping their earnings up by keeping other craftsmen
out of town.
At one end of the scale, they produced
some of the best armor around,
at the other, extremely delicate
and extremely expensive trinkets like this.
Nuremberg became a center for research into metallurgy.
And since they also ran silver mines,
they also had the biggest banking corporations in Europe.
They lent money to everybody to finance their wars,
and then made even more money by selling them
a nice little line in weapons they also made.
And where have we heard that trick before?
But, the point of all this,
I hear you ask.
Well, because Nuremberg was so well placed
to make fantastically complex clocks like this,
it started turning out sky-watching instruments.
Thanks to the locksmiths and the clockmakers,
you could now look at the sky in such detail
with the new, improved instruments,
you began to see that there was something wrong
with the old idea of the Earth being at the center of everything.
This frightening possibility took over Europe by storm.
Up North, everybody was talking about it.
Down south, here in Italy nobody was.
Or if they were, they made sure they were alone.
Well, most of them did.
Except one, which is why out story takes us next
to the italian cathedral city of Pisa.
And this is where the catholic church comes into the picture.
It was probably a man, called Hans Lippershey,
a spectacle maker who lived in Holland,
who is as responsible as anybody for kicking the whole thing off, because in 1603,
he offered THIS to the Dutch army for use in the battlefield
He called it, his 'looker'. We call it a 'telescope'.
A years later, in 1609, one was in the hand of Galileo.
And, from the very firts moment
that he looked through it at the night sky,
our view of where we stand in the universe changed,
because what Galileo saw confirmed what the polish astronomer Copernicus
had been saying theoretically for 60 years:
that the Earth was not the center of the universe,
with everything going round it.
Galileo saw something that shock him rigid: Jupiter.
That was Okay. But with Moons going round it?
So if Jupiter was the center for its Moons,
that blew the idea that the Earth was the center of everything.
When Galileo published what he thought,
the result was the Inquisition and house arrest
until the day he died.
In those days, you simply did not question
what the catholic church said, and the catholic church said
that the Earth was the center of everything.
However, something else Galileo wrote about
wasn't quite so revolutionary so it didn't get suppressed,
so people got to hear about it.
It was something he noticed that was to turn out to be
the solution to another problem that the telescope created.
You see, now astronomers had these things to observe with,
they need better clocks that they had,
to time the movements of the planets they were watching.
And over a long period of time,
a spring-driven clock was just not good enough.
According to the legend, this was what Galileo noticed
here in Pisa Cathedral, one day in 1581.
Out of curiosity, he timed the length of the swing
on his pulse, and he noticed
that the length of time it took the lamp to swing,
was exactly the same, whether it was a big swing or,
as the swing lessened, a little swing.
In other words, it was an extremely accurate unit of measurement.
Well, neither in Pisa nor anywhere else in Italy
did Galileo do very much about his observation.
It took somebody from a northern country,
a protestant country with no fear of the Inquisition,
to take things to their logical conclusion.
He was an astronomer, too,
and he needed an accurate clock, just like everybody else.
His name is Christiaan Huygens, a dutchman.
And in 1656, he produced THIS, a pendulum.
You remember the verge and foliot system,
the very first mechanical clock system,
the one that had a big weight pulling a wheel with teeth on it,
and the theet were held in check one at a time
by a rod with blades that went like this,
as the whell was pulled round?
Well, instead of using a swinging weight
to give those blades the power to hold the wheel,
Huygens used the swinging power of the pendulum,
so that as the pendulum swung, the blades went hold, release,
hold, release, hold, release.
Very accurate indeed,
so it solved all the problems the astronomers had.
But there was another bunch of stargazers
who couldn't use that system,
they were sailors who had to know the time.
And the reason they couldn't use this system?
Well, you try a pendulum clock an a pitching sea,
and you'll get the point.
The pendulum goes, all over the place.
Now, the reason why navigators had to be able to tell the time,
was that by the beginning of the 17th century,
the trade routes to America and to India
had been opened up,
and the great maritime empires were really going:
the portuguese, the spanish, the dutch, and the english.
And in that order, their goverments offered
really big money for anybody who would come up
with a way to help their navigators tell the time.
Here's why.
Each navigator had a book of star tables with him,
and what those star tables
told him was the position of any star or the Moon,
at any particular hour of any particular day during the year.
And, if he observed a star,
he would check the position of it in the sky,
so many degrees up, so many degrees to north or south.
Then, he'd go and look in his book,
and the book would say, "Well, if that's where it is
at this particular time, then, that means
you're in the only place where you would see it in that position,
therefore, you must be at X"
And that would be his position.
Now, the problem with that is that those star tables
were only made to be used when you were either going
north or south in the same time zone.
Suppose you, say, go out into the Atlantic
west toward America, say, to the point where the sun
comes up an hour later that when you left home?
Then all you measurements are an hour out.
So you look at your star tables,
and the star tables tell you information that is okay
for when you left home
but not for where it's actually an hour later.
And in terms of distance, the Earth turns 1000 miles during an hour,
so your position is 1000 miles out.
And even if you got the time right to within one minute,
you'd still be 15 miles off course.
15 miles off course, you miss the place you're going to,
you don't get the cargo you've been sent to pick up.
And that kind of thing was happening all the time.
They were absolutely desperate to get a clock
to those navigators that would tell them
what time it was back home, so they could make
the necessary alterations in their star tables.
And the one thing it couldn't be was a pendulum clock.
So, where have we got?
The sick caliph, the arab science that turned on european monks,
their need for alarm clocks, up came the spring,
fancy metal work followed, and sky-watching instruments
like the telescope, and them, the pendulum clock
that timed the planets, but was useless for navigators.
Their need to get the position of the Moon
and the sky or a star right
demanded a better clock spring, and that need triggered off
a series of events that begins with a spring,
but end typically, somewhere different.
It starts, of all places,
here in a glassmaking furnace in Sheffield, and it ends
with something that was good for the muscles,
thanks to the way all these bits and pieces on this table go together.
You see, the steel in the springs
was made by piling up alternative layers
of iron bars and charcoal and keeping the pile hot for,
oh, anything up to a week.
The carbon in the charcoal defused into the surface
of the iron, and made a layer of steel.
Now you knock those layers off, and then you hammer them together,
and what you come up with is laminated steel made up of the compressed layers.
Now, when you coil that steel into a spring,
you've given yourself a problem.
Because of the different qualities of the different layers,
the spring tend to unwind irregularly.
Now, if only you could melt the layers,
they would all run together, and form a steel of uniform strength.
But in 1740, who could melt steel?
Well, the glass makers who worked in this pace could,
only they didn't know it.
Until a clockmaker called Benjamin Huntsman
came along and noticed that the local glass makers
were putting old bits of glass into their furnaces
and managing to melt them,
because they lined the walls of these places
with the kind of clay that reflected the heat
back into the furnace, and that sent the temperature way up.
The first thing that Hunstman did was to make pots out of that clay.
Because it could stand terrific heat.
Then he'd put these pots into one of the amazing new coke furnaces.
And here's where he pinched the glass maker's technique.
He put bits of old steel into the pots,
left the lot to simmer at very high temperature,
and after five hours, instead of a week,
the pots came out of the furnace
full of white hot melted steel
that what just the stuff for clock springs,
and, as it turned out, a lot of other things.
So the glass industry helped solve Huntsman's problem.
The new steel also, incidentally,
gave Sheffield steel cutlery its start in life,
and that's a clue to what esle it did, too.
Because, at the time, navigation instruments
had become really very precise.
Look at this sextant. This is the viewing tube.
You put your eye at that end,
and you look, let's say, for the Moon.
At the other end, half of it's glass,
and you see the Moon through that.
The other half of it's a little mirror,
and you also see the Moon reflected in there
because of that main reflecting mirror here.
It picks up the image of the Moon, sends it down to
the tiny mirror and back into your eye.
So when you look at the Moon, you actually see two Moons.
One's always superimposed on the other.
To find how high the Moon is in the sky,
you come down until you're looking at the horizon,
and then using this rod,
you tilt the main reflecting mirror back gradually
until it picks up the Moon again,
and now, you see a horizon and a Moon.
The angle at which you had to tilt that main mirror back
to find the Moon is the angle at which the Moon is up in the sky.
It's a very precise instrument, but it is only as precise
as those scales down there, of which you read the angle.
And that's where he comes in: Jesse Ramsden.
Jesse Ramsden was the fellow who invented or stole
a way of marking a scratch every sixth of degree on a sextant,
and he did it with a screw.
See how the foot pedal pulls a cord wound round the screw?
That turn the screw at exact number of times,
moving a bit, flat, circular plate round exactly a sixth of a degree,
each time you mark the instrument clamped on top of a plate.
Ramsden's machine came out in 1774,
cut the price of marking instrumets by 50 times,
won him a prize, and put him on the road to riches.
This was the secret of Ramsden's success:
the idea of using a screw to measure like that.
But you can only get a good screw when you wanted one,
thanks to what was going on in the furniture business.
You know all that knobbly 17th century furniture with bulbous legs?
Well, that happened because of some unknown wood turner
doing things to this, the pole lathe.
Here's the springy pole, fix a strap to it,
wind it round the wood, and cut on every other turn.
Now, if you give the turner something to rest his knife on,
that's the same shape as the leg you want,
he can cut it to a pattern.
Jesse Ramsden realized that if you cut a table leg
by following a table leg pattern,
then you should cut a screw by following a screw pattern.
So this, at least in principle, is what he did.
He mounted a cutter on a base that had a threaded hole in it,
and through the threaded hole,
he put the master screw he wanted to copy,
so that as he turned the master screw,
the cutter moved along it.
Now, with the work peice turning on the lathe
at exactly the same speed as the master screw,
the cutter made an exact copy.
All Ramsden had to find was a cutter that would make
screw after screw without going blunt,
and there was only one metal around
that was remotely hard enough to do that job.
Yes, Huntsman steel.
So by the 1797, all the ingredients in this story I've just told you
were waiting around, as so often happens in history,
for somebody to put them together, which, of course, somebody did.
And this is another one of those rare times
when somebody sees beyond the bits and pieces.
In 1800, Henry Maudslay put the edge of Huntsman steel
together with Ramsden's idea of using the screw
to measure with, and came up with a machine
that would cut metal to within a 10.000th of an inch,
because he was a precission freak.
And he realized a screw that accurate
would guide a cutter to make anything else that accurate.
And, curiously, that was great news for the navy.
You see, at that time boats used things called blocks
by the thousand,
complicated bits of wood with pulley wheels inside;
great for sailors with no muscles, because it gives you a pull
three times your own strength.
In 1800, a fellow called Brunel got Maudslay to use his precision machinery
to make other machines that would make blocks.
The british navy jumped at the idea.
By 1808, in Portsmouth stockyard, this was happening.
It may look like a bunch of dusty old guys
cutting wood to you, but this is the beginnings
of an idea that runs your life today.
Maudslay built a long line of machines,
each of which did one job.
From a tree trunk, the wood was sawn into wooden cubes.
And it was passed from one machine to the next,
the block was gradually shaped and drilled and contoured
one step at a time, and so were the wooden pulley wheels that fitted inside it.
It took 43 separate machines to finish the job,
and 43 men each doing just one job over and over again.
Sound familiar?
With Maudslay's line of machines,
each one doing just part of the operation,
you've got yourself the ability to shove raw material
in at one end of the line, run the whole thing
from one power shaft spinning up above,
and pick up the finished product as it comes off the last machine.
I'm sure you recognize this for what it is.
And it was the world's first.
Everybody went crazy about the idea,
everybody, that is, except the craftsmen
machines like these would put out of work.
But 4000 miles away, this system was just what the doctor ordered.
See, the british were putting the screws on America
with a naval blockade, and americans desperately needed
to make their own goods.
And short of manpower, the first thing they did
was grab that factory system idea.
This is the other thing americans were doing at the time: making guns.
Take a close look at this rifle.
This bit here is called the breach block.
Now, there's a trigger.
You pull the trigger, the spring inside
releases this hammer here, carrying a bit of flint,
the flint jumps forward,
hits that metal, causes sparks.
The sparks cause the powder in that little shelf to ignite.
The flame goes through that tiny hole,
ignites the main charge inside the gun,
and causes the bullet to be fired down the barrel.
A complicated bit of workmanship, wouldn't you say?
And that, at the end of the 18th century,
is just what America couldn't do.
She didn't have enough skilled men,
and that put the country in a real hole,
because at the time, they were importing
most of their guns from us europeans,
and half the time, they were on the edge of war with us.
So what do they do?
They came up with a way of making handcrafted weapons
without making handcrafted weapons.
And that's why this isn't what it appears to be.
See, it's not made by hand, it's made by machine.
It was a european idea,
oh, rather like that Portsmouth block-making system
that went over like a lead ballon in Britain,
only this time, is was in France.
A fellow called Henri Leblanc who was getting zero interest
from his fellow frenchmen, told the american ambassador
about his idea,
Thomas Jefferson, who promptly went bananas,
wrote to the folks back home,
and they jumped at the idea.
Let me tell you, in principle,
what that idea turned out to be.
It was to get a machine to do all the clever work,
so you don't need a skilled operator.
See what's happening?
The machine cuts only so far and stops.
So, the guy working the machine doesn't need any skill.
And the reason the machine knows what he doesn't
is because you use a master of the shape
you want to cut, to set the machine.
So every time, the drills and the knives go so far, and no further.
So every time, you get an identical piece
cut in metal or in wood.
That was Leblanc's idea picked up here in New England
by Eli Whitney and John Hall, and Simeon North,
to make each part of a gun on a machine
set to make that part and that part only, over and over again.
Now, the result of that idea was that if your gun
went gablooey in the middle of a battle,
you just got your little screwdriver and did this.
And any other block will do, because they're a standard shape.
And because they're standard, they're interchangeable.
And if that doesn't blow your mind,
well, it should.
I mean, almost everything you possess, you only have
because of the way those guns were made by machines.
Have you ever heard of a one-off handcrafted television set?
So, anyway, when these two great ideas got together,
the factory system the textile manufacturers
were using, and the interchangeability idea
that gun makers were into, America really took off.
And look what the country had going for it:
water power coming out of your ears,
mountains of raw materials,
and the uniquely american way of using machine tools.
The humble machine tool probably did more
to make America great than almost anything else.
Because although each machine tool only did one thing,
like grinding, or boring, or drilling,
all machine tools had to solve the same general problems -
control systems, gearing, power transmission - so that what you learned
in making machine tools, you could use
when you made the machines with the machine tools.
And what you got from that was a kind of
technical cascade from guns, to sewing machines,
to bicycles, to cars.
I mean, did you know that Cadillac started with bicycles?
Anyway, by the end of the 19th century,
american machines were so good,
the only thing that wasn't was the people.
The fellow who helped to turn people into machines
used to go berserk watching bricklayers work,
or rather - not work.
He was an american engineer, a guy called Frank Gilbreth,
who studied expert oyster openers,
swordsmen, typists, you name it,
and got all fussed up about how disorganized
ordinary peoples' work was.
And he and his psychologist wife set about putting things right.
They looked at the way people moved when they did a job,
put lights in their hands, filmed in action,
and then, used the films to make 3D models,
of the movements, so they could redesign the moves,
so as to make the jobs more efficient.
They even put a grid everywhere
to measure the movement, down to the inch.
This was world champion typist, miss Hortense Stolinitz,
showing just what she could do.
And you know how the surgeon says, "forceps",
and the nurse slaps it into his hand?
That was one of the Gilbreth's ideas, too.
Everywhere they went, they took a job to bits
and put it together again, in a way that saved time.
Time and motion was their thing.
Bored out of your skull at work?
Thank the Gilbreths.
To be fair to them, they rand their own lives the same way: had 12 kids,
and wrote a book about it called, 'Cheaper by the dozen'.
So here we are, at the modern production lines, because:
1) knowledge of the sky apparently cured that arab caliph.
2) the arabs got excited by astronomy
and translated greek books on it,
and medical astrology and other science.
3) that knowledge helped the church
to find a way to make alarm clocks
that sprea and took over peoples' working lives,
4) the pendulul that still left sailors
looking for a good spring made of steel that -
5) cut screws for precision work that -
6) built machines to make blocks for warships,
thanks to putting the machines in -
7) a long production line set-up that led to -
8) the manufacturing system that helps to give us
all the same possessions, made by people
doing identical things with identical machines
to make everything from cars, to gingerbread men
for everybody, not just the privileged few.
This place, America, is a democracy of common possession,
and the rest of the industrial world
is rapidly going that way, too.
But, there's a price: the way our lives
have to become an extension of the production line.
We work together, we holiday together,
we sit in the same traffic jam together,
we wear the same clothes, we live in the same house,
we drive the same car, we have the same ambitions.
That's the price: watching the clock.
And, ironically, we're back with the question
they were asking at the beginning of this program:
"what happens to individuality?"
Oh, sure, superficially it's there.
My car is a different color from yours.
I watch a different television program from you.
But empty your pockets and see what you get:
a pen, a watch, checkbook, some money, credit card, keys,
driving license, comb, some money, lighter.
The paraphernalia of people's private lives.
And yet, is there one object here
that thousands of other people don't own?
All of it made by machine, not one object uniquely, individually, me.
And, if i'm not here, where am I?
[end]