[gear noises]
This giant metal box is one of the reasons
why the modern world changes as fast as it does.
Because of this, people living in Lima or Birmingham,
or Chicago or anywhere, can as easily
all have the same japanese model calculator,
dress in french fashions, use a telephone system designed and built in Germany,
get emergency medical equipment when they need it,
and eat fresh strawberries in the winter.
And they can do all that because you can put 100 tons
of anything into this metal box;
anything from helicopters to hairdryers.
Okay, you say, what's new about that?
Anybody can fill a box.
But this box will take its 100 tons of anything,
anywhere in the world within 24 hours,
because it's got wings and a big hole in the front.
It's the 747 air freighter,
the biggest thing like it in the world.
And they're already talking about building something
five times as big.
Now, it's not so much that these things
can move cargo around at 600 miles an hour.
It's the rate at which they bring change to places;
I mean, with one of these, you can deliver
the guts of an entire factory in one day,
and come back the next day with another factory.
High technology; door to door.
And, what for instance, is that going to do
to the developing countries,
and to their relationship with us?
This is not the first time a new kind of transport
has changed things.
The 747 is uncannily like another freighter
built to do exactly the same job, 400 years ago;
and anything you can say about the 747,
you could say about it.
Built by the richest nation in the world
to operate on international routes, to bring in bulk cargos
that could be split up and re-exported,
nothing radically new about its design,
just very efficient, low operating costs,
automated control systems,
a very small crew working in a very small cabin,
high up above the hold.
And yet, that first freighter, 400 years ago,
built with those same characteristics,
changed the world.
You see, if you're sitting drinking coffee
with sugar in it, smoking,
and you've got a bank account
or a mortgage on your house, and you're insured,
thank that other freighter, 400 years ago.
This little ship called De Liefde, that helped to make Holland
the riches country in the world.
By the mid 17th century, these dutch merchants
were bringing shiploads of tobacco,
sugar, pepper, silks; you name it,
into Europe by the ton because they were trading
from Archangel to Cape Town,
Brazil to Nagasaki.
Holland was the warehouse of Europe,
and everybody wanted some of the goodies.
Putting your money in Amsterdam
was like having a swiss bank account today.
Of course, the dutch made it easy to get credit,
safe investment, big profits; and above all,
you made a deal with the dutch,
and you knew they'd deliver, literally.
This is Hoorn, a little port in northern Holland
where the dutch developed that first regular
express service to almost anywhere in Europe.
See, back in 1595, these ship builders here
had realized, unlike anybody else,
that nobody was going to get very rich out of cargo delivery
unless they solved one basic problem.
Look at this Brueghel: see the problem?
That galleon, everybody used them,
great for fighting, otherwise useless;
I mean, just to put the sails up and down,
you needed a dozen of people.
and they cost, so get rid of them.
Okay, look at that deck or that crew accommodation,
taking valuable deck space you could pile up with cargo,
and if you're not a warship, why do you need the gun decks for?
In terms of cargo space, that's what the galleon gave you.
Ludicrous, so here's what they did,
they built as near a square hull as they could, for maximum space.
Remember the 747?
And like it, they put a very small crew cabin on top,
running the control surfaces with the help of automation;
in this case, block and tackle.
Like the 747, nothing radical about the design,
just the most efficient cargo ship in the world.
De Liefde made the dutch rich because it took imports
from across the oceans, and delivered them
all around Europe, practically door to door.
And with that kind of service, how could you lose?
This little ship went over very big with everybody, except the english.
Everywhere they went, they bumped into these guys.
The Dutch East India Company, who got everywhere the english wanted to go,
and got there first.
So, the english decided to take over, by going dutch.
They found a way to share the cost of sending out ships
to bring home the goodies.
They set up a way you could register
how much land you had, get a mortgage on it,
and then go to one of the new coffee houses in London,
and buy yourself a pice of the action.
And, to handle the money, the bank of England;
That started literally, over a cup of coffee.
In these places, you could trade anything
from ships, to girls, to land in America.
But the deal that made England great,
was this idea.
Kidnap africans, sell them in Barbados for sugar,
sell that in America for tobacco,
and make yourself a million.
With this amount of stuff pouring into the country,
and more and more ships spending up to a year away from home,
on voyages to India or Africa, America,
it is inevitable that somebody should turn
to the business of insurance, because after all,
what's the point of putting all your money
into a venture if the ship goes down, and you lose the lot?
So in 1688, a man called Edward Lloyd set up a new coffee house,
where you could go and get insurance.
And THIS is what that coffee house finally became:
the biggest insurance organization in the world,
Lloyd's of London.
Lloyd's made more and more voyages possible
because they regularized the business of insurance,
and because they paid up promptly,
even on mystery losses like that one.
They were able to do that because of the system
they introduced right from the start,
of categorizing ships.
Look, this is one of their earliest secret books,
and in here, they include details of the ship,
and they classify the hull according to its soundness,
by the letters A, E, I, O, or U;
and its equipment as either G-good, M-middling, or B-bad.
Take a look at this little ship,
which must have cost at a bit to insure.
She's The Maria: captain Nicholas Toknefs
leaving hull for Norway, 140 tons, single deck,
build in Norway, hull U-dreadful, equipment B-bad.
Wonder how long she lasted.
But it was this business of ships' hulls
that was to lead to a major invention
that you very probably have in your house today.
Let me tell you why.
As the ships travelled more and more in tropical waters,
their wooden hulls were attacked more and more
by a tiny worm that lived in those waters.
And the only protection against that worm,
was to cover the bottom of the hull
with a mixture of pitch and tar,
okay; except that in 1700, in the Baltic,
where most of the pitch and tar came from,
Sweden and Finland got themselves into a war.
And the price of the stuff went through the roof.
Fortunately, there was one other source of supply available.
And the english owned it.
But it was 4.000 miles away.
The plan was to offer the american colonists
prize money to make tar and pitch,
so a) you'd get what you needed,
and b) keep them so busy, they wouldn't have time
to set up industries to compete with Britain.
And especially in the southern states,
like the Carolinas,
they'd need extra manpower to produce the stuff.
So you'd also be able to sell them what they needed
to chop trees down, african slaves.
Why chop trees?
Well, that's how you make pitch, with pine trees,
which you buried in deep pits and roasted.
The tar in the wood bubbled out
and, so did turpentine;
run off the turpentine into barrels,
shovel the tar out of the pits later on,
and you're in business.
So, the british fleet was saved, covered in american pitch,
re-sailed on to greater and greater profits,
at the expense of the american colonies, to be sure.
But, who cared about them?
Well, in 1776, tired of being ripped off like this,
they did, and so -
and that, disastrously, was the end of cheap american pitch;
which is why our story takes us next
to a picturesque little village in Scotland,
just outside Edinburgh.
[bagpipers]
This is Culross, or to the locals, Cooross;
and at the time of the pitch crisis,
it belonged to the Cochrane family,
earls of Dundonald.
Anyway, by the time of american independence,
the next in line to rule the local peasants,
was a character called Archibald Cochrane,
9th earl and dismal failure.
For about 100 years, the previous earls
had backed the wrong king, or the wrong horse.
So that when Archibald inherited the title in 1778,
there wasn't much left except the very small estate
here at Culross, and a couple of tin pot coal mines.
Still, you've got to give him his due;
Archibald Cochrane was a real trier.
He decided to recoup the family fortunes
by going into the invention business;
all he needed was a little cash.
He threw himself enthusiastically into everything,
like three marriages, and seven children.
The trouble was, he tended to throw himself
enthusiastically in the wrong direction,
because, although Archibald was very long on bright ideas.
He was rather short on business sense.
And, everything he tried,
like new ways of making sailcloth, new ways of making gum,
new ways of making bread from potatoes,
either failed disastrously or if they worked,
it turned out afterwards that he hadn't read the fine print.
But the thing that really blew it all
was our hero's plan to save England from the pitch crisis.
It was an idea that other people had tried before,
but oddly enough, with Archibald, it actually worked.
This was his prototype: the idea was you put coal
inside a copper kettle, and you heat up the coal
and vapors come out, and you distil the vapors,
and the condensation that you end up with, turns out as coal tar.
Well, Archibald begged and borrowed
and practically stole, to finance a number of ovens,
like this one here on the estate at Culross,
in order to produce the stuff on a commercial scale.
And in 1781, he hightailed it down to London,
and he said to the royal navy, "yes, you can now paint
the bottom of your ships with coal tar."
And they said, "no, we can't, we have just decided
to cover the bottom of 'em with that - copper."
That's when 'copper bottom' came to mean what it does today, a safe investment.
But, the saddest thing about the seedy
9th earl of Dundonald was, something has happened here
that might have made him a millionaire
instead of going off as he did,
to die in poverty in a slum in Paris.
It was something about which typically, he entirely missed the point.
It was something he told his friend, James Watt about,
and James Watt was apparently uninterested,
because what Archibald told him
was that one day, one of the these ovens here
sprang a leak, and vapors came out, and as Archibald approaches it
with a light to find out what was up, guess what?
Now, these were the days of the great british
cotton factory boom;
working day and night they were.
And at night, if you put cotton and candlelight together,
you got more illumination than the factory needed.
Cotton rolls were going up in flames everywhere,
and the owners were desperate
for some kind of safer lighting.
In 1792, a scotman called Murdock said he'd invented it.
"You heat coal up", he said, "and set light to the vapors
the coal gives off, and you get this."
Idea sounds familiar?
It's what Dundonald told James Watt; who wasn't interested, remember?
Guess who Murdock worked for?
James Watt.
Murdock's factory gas lamps
made him illumination's leading light.
[applause]
But not for long.
Most mortals on Earth with smoke live in strife,
and many of beauty is smothered alive;
great London itself, the emporium of the world,
with clouds of black smoke is constantly furled,
smoke begot chimneys, chimneys beget smoke,
soot, fires and filth, all prevented by coke.
[applause]
If you turned up to the London Lyceum theater lecture in 1803,
that's the kind of garbage you got;
written by one of the more ludicrous promoters
of technology ever known; the flashing,
the incompetent, the semi-illiterate,
Mr. Friedrich Albrecht Wintzer,
a german gent who turned up in England
with the plan to light the entire country by gas,
and who changed his name to Fred Albert Winsor,
the better to mingle with the business community,
his english never did improve too much.
He used to say that the idea of lighting Englad by gas
struck him like an electric spark -
anyway, his lectures, which amazed the crowds,
were for the purpose of financing his grand plan;
to set up the imperial patriotic national light and heat company.
Put 50 pound in and you get 6.000 pounds out;
mind you, all most of his audience got was a headache from the escaping gas,
as he turned on his amazing burners of varying shapes,
sizes, and designs, and dazzled the onlookers.
All, he claimed, invented by himself, never mind Murdock.
Mind you, behind the showbiz chicanery,
he had seen something that Murdock hadn't.
Look -
this is the kiln where the coal gets cooked;
down here is where the tar condenses;
and the gas is contained in here, recognize it?
It's a gasometer, because Winsor recognized
that if you're going to do it, do it big;
Supply a whole town, not just an individual factory;
and that's why he got his money.
So, in 1812, the company got its charter, and away they went.
But Winsor's greatest hour was supposed to be
the great chinese gas pagoda show.
Now, you won't believe this, but here's the pagoda
with 10.000 leaky gaz jets, right? So, what do they do?
Lit fireworks!
Want to guess what happened next?
Well, with the crowned heads of Europe watching this fiasco,
Winsor got a bit of a royal roasting,
but gas had - if you'll forgive the phrase -
fired the public imagination.
And within six years, the country's major cities
had gas-lit streets.
Suddenly, people started going out to parties
in the evening, through brightly lit streets,
free from crime, or to the new workers institutes,
where poor people who'd never gone to school
were taught to read and write;
all because of the original need to cover ships' bottoms with tar.
Now, gas making produced a lot of tar,
and as you'll recall nobody wanted that for ship's bottoms anymore,
because they'd switched to copper bottoming.
So, in London, they conveniently got rid of the muck,
by nipping out at night and pouring it into the Thames.
and since there was a lot of ammonia
in among the coal tar, and ammonia stink,
the Thames were suddenly short on fish,
and long on pole.
Now, so is Glasgow, smelly I mean;
they had a gasworks too and tons of useless muck, until in 1819,
enter an optimist looking for useless muck.
Our mysterious muck hunter made colors,
and as part of his ingredients, he needed the ammonia,
which was mixed with the coal tar which the gas makers needed,
like a hole in the head.
He was welcomed with all the delirium we reserve
for somebody who comes to unblock your toilet.
The more he saw of the process that made the sticky tar,
the more he realized he had a fortune on his hands,
as long he didn't get it on his hands.
Now, although he didn't realize it,
as he gazed entranced at the gallons
of free liquid money that would be all his,
once he'd extracted his ammonia from the tar,
what was he going to do with the leftovers?
Never mind; he had to have the magic muck.
Well, when he'd got his ammonia out,
he fiddled around a bit,
and extracted another liquid called naphtha.
And it was while dropping things in naphtha,
that he made the discovery for which he's remembered today,
every time it rains.
Because, in 1819, he found that it would dissolve something
that was just beginning to come into the country
from South America: rubber.
By 1823, he'd worked out what to do with the rubber solution.
Spread it on a layer of cloth
and stick another layer of cloth on top.
Made the cloth waterproff, called it after his own name;
Yes, The Macintosh.
In 1826, Macintosh joined up with another guy
who was into rubber, called Hancock,
and together, they began delivering
waterproof everything all over the country.
And in Britain, where it rains a lot, how could he lose?
Well, they could if they had to go relying on South America.
Hancock wanted british rubber plantations,
so he started cultivating the right people.
If anybody was able to grow rubber seeds,
and organize plantations in the british far eastern colonies,
Kew Botanical Gradens in London was.
The matter was vital to Britain.
All Hancock wanted was that they understand
the critical connection between patriotism and rubber goods.
One pair rubber shoes - one breast bottle -
one pair of false teeth - one rubber cushion -
(narrator) Unfortunately, the middle of the 19th century
was the wrongest possible time to interest these guys
in rubber; they had something far more important in mind,
from the far east.
You see, at the time, when a lot of people were being sent
to the ends of the Earth, when the average brit
got to a place like this, the island of Penang,
off the coast of Malaysia,
he really cared a good deal less about culture
and things like that - temple of the 10.000 buddhas -
than he did about the stuff that surrounded it: the jungle,
out of which the british were hacking themselves an empire,
and getting themselves in quite a sweat,
and, not just because of the steamy climate.
Let me explain.
You see, this place is absolutely full of nutmeg plantations.
Here's a nutmeg tree; see, nutmegs were one of the reasons
why europeans came out here to the far east
in the first place; to look for spices,
oh, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, pepper; that stuff.
And, by 1852, the brits out here were doing really rather well,
thanks to cheap local labor and all those raw materials
lying around in places like India, and Ceylon,
and Malaysia, and various other imperial hotspots.
Now, most of the imperial goodies came from plantations,
and if you want to get a plantation going,
you've got to do one thing first;
You've got to hack the jungle down.
Now, what that gives you, apart from a heart attack,
is a lot of clear ground to do your planting,
and a lot of water exposed to sunlight.
So, you get your sugar or your cotton plantation going,
and the anopheles mosquito gets a warm and wonderfull place
to do its reproductive thing, because its babies love warm water;
and that's just what you've given them.
Now, the anopheles mosquito is a simple soul;
the most it wants out of life is to be able to give you,
and me, malaria;
and the feverish sweats that go with it.
And by 1852, that's just what it was doing;
all over the British Imperial Far East.
Now, that gave everybody a bit of problem
because you try running the trains on time,
or, keeping the army on its feet or the thousand and one other things
that the imperial administration demands,
with malaria everywhere; and you've got a job.
Life expectancy out here was about half
what it was back in England,
because although you may not die from malaria,
it'll weaken you to the point
where you'll get die from practically anything else.
So the stiff upper lip, the colonial service chaps,
are dropping like flies;
if that's the right phrase to use.
[train hooting]
Now, about all you could do to help to prevent malaria
was to try to get down out of the jungle,
to get regular supplies of a rather nasty white powder
like that, made from the bark of a tree
called the Cinchona.
Now, rather unfortunately, the Cinchona was only grown
in South America and Java;
Neither of which belonged to the british.
So, the british colonial government
was paying through the nose for this stuff;
very bad fall.
Still, every cloud has its silver lining;
and at least one good thing was to come out of the mess.
You see, they used to put the powder into water
that had a bit of sugar in it for taste,
and they got themselves quinine water
because that white powder was quinine.
Still tasted pretty foul, until somebody
had the bright idea, putting a drop of gin in it.
And that's why the gin and tonic was invented; medicinal purposes.
Well, back to the problem -
in 1852, the governor general of India,
sent a rather stiff note back home, saying:
"Now, look here, my botanists tell me
that we ought to be able to grow cinchona here."
And that's why the experts at Kew gardens in London
turned down the rubber plantation idea, remember?
They were working themselves into a lather
about the feverish far east, and the fact that
if they didn't manage to come up with a healthy cinchona plant,
they could take off to India and stick in the ground,
so the governor general would get what he asked for;
they'd be, so to speak, in the manure.
The trouble was, the more they learnt about cinchona,
the less likely it looked to survive a transplant;
heart failure all round.
And then, out of the blue,
the new Royal College of chemistry
suggested having a go at making quinine, artificially.
So, a young 18-year-old called Willian Perkin
was asked to get on with it.
And, in 1856, he was playing around with a byproduct of our old friend,
coal tar, when he came up with a load of muck that very definitely
wasn't the quinine he was trying to make.
It was very close, only a few molecules different,
but everybody should have that kind of accident.
Because, when Willian Perkin chucked this muck away
into some water, he got very rich;
and the world got - the first artifical dye.
Perkin's new mauve was an instant and raving success.
By the great exhibition of 1862,
most of the huffing and puffing
wasn't coming from the machine on show;
it was from the reporters who'd seen the new color miracle from coal tar.
They, and the thousand of others who came to the show,
went away harrumphing pompously
about how Britain was going to become
the greatest color exporting country in the world.
In 1862, most of these well fed, complacent,
middle class victorians regarded themselves,
and their country, as the rightful guardians
of anybody on Earth, they could muscle in on,
militarily or economically, to save them from themselves, of course.
The new artificial dye was just one more example
of how british genius was that much better
than any other variety.
That's what made Great Britain - Great.
Unfortunately, when it came to putting money
into the new color chemistry, the investors preferred
the easier profits to be had from the colonies.
There was no point in taking risks
with the new instant science nobody knew about.
Most of the investors didn't even know what chemistry was.
And, as for actually training chemists,
well, i mean, that was quite out of the question.
I mean, a chap who went to university,
just didn't do that sort of thing;
to have actually trained for a career,
would have been unspeakably lower class.
That's why Perkin's teacher in London had been a german.
See, they were awfully good at the rather sordid business
of opening universities and technical schools,
and actually letting anybody in on merit;
Never mind their family background.
And, they actually encouraged links
between university and industry; the kind of thing
that made the early victorian intellectual mind -
boggle;
So, let me ask you what you think the british did,
with that head start that William Perkin
had given them in color chemistry,
ahead of all their rivals;
a clear opportunity to grab and hang on to a lead
in one of the most profitable new industries
for a hundred years.
Yes; they blew it.
And you know who put them in the shade;
the wrong kind; the germans did.
By 1870, in color chemistry, the germans were calling the tune,
and the great german chemical industries were going full blast.
BASF, Hoechst, Agfa, Bayer;
thanks to their university contacts,
they were turning up dozens of colors a year.
Suddenly, it was a colorful world;
and every time they looked at coal tar,
there was another color to write home about; on color postcards.
See, the germans had realized what the british hadn't;
that there was a great deal more to color than color.
There was all that chemical knowledge you learned
from making orange, or blue or green, or whatever.
So, by the 1870s, they were selling color everywhere;
and when I say color,
i mean pretty well every color in the rainbow.
Now, all this success with color went right to the germans' heads.
Suddenly, there was nothing to be,
but a true dyed in the wool german;
their composers even wrote colorful tunes.
Here's a catcht little number that I think you'll find
will set your feet tapping, or your fingers itching,
or your head throbbing, or something.
[piano music, singing]
Can't think why this piece isn't better known
in the concert repertiore; well, maybe I can.
Well, back to the story; one of the germans'
biggest hits was this particular green
which a crafty french silk dyer
got the empress Jeanne to wear to the opera.
Knockout success; everybody wanted it.
And, if this program's giving you a headache,
thank the german color industry.
Painkillers came out of their labs too.
Success after success, and then, out of nowhere,
came something that looked as if it would stop
the german industrial machine - dead.
This is one of those stories that doesn't make sense
even when you've heard it twice.
Let me try it on you.
Combine harvester, invented by an american, McCormick,
a few years before that german color business.
Because of it, by the 1870s, America has got wheat
coming out of its ears, so the price drops,
they're practically giving bread away.
Good idea, no?
No; see, in Germany, they eat this;
black rye bread grown in Prussia
by a bunch of aristocrats called the Junkers;
very big deal people, the Junkers;
they've got the government in their pockets.
So, none of that cheap american wheat gets into Germany,
where the population is roketing, and they need food.
Okay, everybody can eat rye; uh huh.
The Junkers are exporting it all, to make money.
Now, let me see if that confuses you
as much as it confuses me.
You've got lots of rye, but you export it,
so you're short of food; never mind.
Foreign wheat is cheap, so you don't import it;
that's what a thought I said.
But, that's what they did; so in desperation,
somebody started trying to boost wheat growing in Germany.
And when they did, they ran slap bang into a brick wall;
no fertilizer, they had to bring it in from Chile,
at colossal expense.
And they just didn't have that kind of bread.
What am i saying; they didn't have any kind of bread.
What happens next, involves the curious way
things sometimes get kind of half done
and left hanging in midair, till they're picked up
and used later on, when the time is right.
So, if you're ready for a bit of that, here goes;
Germany was in a fix, because she'd got no fertilizer.
By the 1890s down on the farm, things were pretty desperate.
Industry might be making loads of money
but all of it was going on imported food
and especially, fertilizer.
The way the fertilizer problem got linked
and because of that, caused many more things to happen
than just increased food production
is a bit of a chemistry lesson,
although it does have a sting in the tail.
So, i hope you'll forgive me if i give it to you rather straight.
About 1900, thanks to their experience
making all those fantastic colors,
german chemists were among the best in the world.
And, one of them was a fellow called Fritz Haber,
who decided quite consciously, to try and make fertilizer.
And, this is what he ended up with;
although it's - in reality,
it would be on a vast industrial scale;
this is what he did.
In that long vessel there, he made very high pressure;
200 times normal air pressure,
and the temperature of about 600 degrees centigrade.
And into that vessel,
he sent a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen,
and as the gases went through the vessel,
they passed through a mesh made of a particular
kind of metal that would cause the gases to react,
and produce ammonia;
and that's what comes out at the bottom end.
Now, all the rest of this equipment
is for cleaning and filtering, and making the ammonia pure.
Okay, there's one more stage to go.
You make the ammonia gas, and you put it
into another hot oven, this one;
only this time, you put it in with air.
And, as the gases come though, once again they go
through a wire mesh, here's some.
and that causes the gases to react.
And this time, what goes out the other end
is nitrous oxide.
Now, if you mix nitrous oxide with water,
you get nitric acid;
and if you mix nitric acid then with soda,
you get sodium nitrate;
and sodium nitrate is a fertilizer.
By 1909, Fritz Haber and a colleague he worked
on this with, called Carl Bosch,
which is why it's called the Haber-Bosch process;
well, they were in a position to build factories
that would produce thousands of tons of fertilizer a year.
Great idea, the Haber-Bosch process;
Never got anywhere, of course,
because this is one of those galling moments in history
when some other fella working somewhere else,
on something totally unconnected with this,
has himself an accident and ruins everything.
The accident happened here, in gay Paris,
which is where the other fellow was, at the time,
where everybody was whopping it up,
having themselves the gay 90s.
Then, as now of course, diamonds
were a girl's best insurance,
not that our boring friend, Henri Moissan,
is interested in girls, though like them,
he is interested in the sparklers.
He wants to make artificial diamonds for serious chemical reasons.
And, while everybody else gets up to the things
people get up to, Paris,
Moissan is throwing various things into an electric furnace.
Things are getting very hot, but Moissan is obliged
to announce, sorry, no diamonds.
Still, he perseveres, and one day in 1895,
back in his lab, he throws in some lime and carbon
and what does he get; calcium carbide.
this material here -
Now, okay, he says, and what can I do with that?
And he strat fiddling around with this.
Nothing much happens until one day,
he dropped some water on it, look what happens.
Watch what comes out the other end;
That is acetylene gas burning.
Now, you put yourself in their position;
it's 1898, the price of electricity is very high,
town gas isn't very bright.
Naturally, they thought this was the new light
of the future.
A lot of people put a lot of money into it.
and by 1899, there were about a quarter of a million
acetylene gas jets all over Germany alone.
And then, in 1900, the price of electricity dropped,
and somebody came along with a gas mantle
to make town gas much brighter.
And the bottom dropped rights out of the acetylene market.
About all that came out of the mess
was the invention of oxyacetylene welding,
by a couple of frenchmen.
However, all over Europe there was now
tons of the calcium carbide that started the whole thing,
lying around, worthless, until along came two chemists,
two dying chemists called Karo and Frank,
who decided they'd try to see what they could make
of this calcium carbide,
and they did lots of things to it.
And, in one particular case, they passed nitrogen gas
over it in a very hot oven, and when they took it
back out again, the nitrogen had gone
into the calcium carbide, and that was the result.
Now that, contains 20% nitrogen,
and you could put it straight onto the fields
and feed the plants.
It's a fertilizer.
The fertilizer that Germany needed,
at a price Germany could afford to pay;
at THAT was what knocked the Haber-Bosch process
right on the head.
So now, everybody could eat again and the Haber-Bosch process?
Don't worry, it'll be back.
By now, Germany was on the way to being a superpower with an unbeatable chemical industry,
and expertise in metal she'd always had early on,
making silly toys and clocks.
Now, thanks to the coalfields in the Ruhr,
she was moving into the major league.
with steel - for weapons.
In 30 years, Germany went from being
a backward agricultural country
to being able to build projects like this;
the monorail in the industrial town of Wuppertal.
When the monorail opened in 1900,
it symbolized the nationalist ambitions of the man
who'd ruled Germany through her years of growth;
Kaiser Wilhelm,
who now saw his country on the edge of greatness,
thanks in part to coal tar
and the way german color chemists had used it.
How could poor old Dundonald all those years before,
have foreseen what cooking bits of coal in a kettle would lead to?
And, you recall i said,
the Haber-Bosch fertilizer attempt would come back; now.
The same year the Kaiser opened the Wuppertal monorail;
he also signed a bill
that was to bring Germany's destruction.
The bill was to the finance the construction of a bigger
and better german navy, and the reason was quite simple.
If Germany was to take her place in world markets,
if she was to use her industrial potential
to her own advantage, then she,
like the other major powers, had to have colonies.
Now, the only thing that stood in the way of those colonies was a british navy.
So, the germans built ships; then, so did the british;
and an arms race began that was to end
with the war in 1914.
It's no accident that the first major battle at sea,
in that war, was off the coast of Chile.
You see, for decades, the major powers,
Germany included,
had been using the vast natural deposits
of sodium nitrate found on Chile's west coast.
Sodium nitrate's a fertilizer;
but now, Germany needed that sodium nitrate
for an even more desperate reason
because, if you put sodium nitrate
together with sulfuric acid, you get nitric acid.
And nitric acid is essential for making explosives.
And the british had blockaded the chilean supplies.
So the germans in 1914, had about one-year in stock,
one year's supply.
More had to be found very urgently.
Where else, but in the Haber-Bosch process,
the process that ended by making sodium nitrate.
Money was poured in to building the factories
that Germany needed if she was to keep on fighting,
which she did.
As a result then, of the original demand for fertilizer,
the first world war lasted four years,
when it might well have ended in less than one.
That leaves only one thread hanging in our story.
What happened to the acetylene, you remember?
That was a bit of a flop, except for this?
Oxyacetylene welding; well that turned out to be
the most extraordinary thing of all.
In 1912, an obstinate german chemist called Fritz Klaetke
was still trying to do things with acetylene.
And one day, one of these mixtures was sitting
on a sunny window shelf,
when it gradually went thick and milky.
Now, whatever it was,
it wasn't what Klaetke was looking for.
And, being the kind of guy who didn't like things
to be left lying around, down the drain it went.
Poor old Klaetke; you know what he said afterwards?
He said, " I didn't think it was much use to anyone."
How wrong can you get?
[revving of plane]
27 years after Fritz Klaetke had flushed away
his useless sludge,
at the 1939 world's fair in New York,
millions came to see what other people had done with that muck.
You've already seen clues to why Fritz Klaetke
had boobed, in this film.
Shot in color by a lithuanian visitor to the fair,
and never screened till now, showing the world
on the first day of a new era.
The fair was the first big public display
of something we today, cannot do without.
One of the real crowd stoppers at the fair
was the DuPont pavilion, a place where people
stepped into the future, into a flash gordon world,
where chemistry made scientific magic.
And one of the most magical things came from the stuff
that Fritz Klaetke had thrown away, all those years before.
If only he'd had his ingredients a fraction different,
he would have turned his acetylene muck
into a usable polymer;
that's a bunch of super giant molecules
that can be turned into an artificial substance.
Now, why did it matter?
Well, the first world war gave both Germany and America
a severe rubber shortage, and they were desperate
for a substitute; and they found it.
And then, in 1938, DuPont came up with the most famous
substitute of all; itself made of super giant molecules
that their man, Wallace Carothers, had found.
You know where; in our old friend coal tar.
And that's why DuPont stopped the crowds;
everybody was high on substitutes.
It was inevitable that it was America
that would take the lead in making and using
the new substitutes.
There, more than enywhere else, novelty meant progress.
And at the rate these new materials were making out
from the test tube, paradoxically, novelty was here to stay.
You see what a strange trail has brought us
to the 1939 DuPont pavilion.
It started around 1600 with the De Liefde,
the dutch super ship that put fat profits into overseas trade
and sent the english hurrying across the ocean
to build an empire, on ships that hand to be insured,
and how Lloyd's of London wouldn't insure those ships
unless their hulls were covered
with a protective coating of tar.
Tar, that came from America,
until the american war of independence stopped supply,
forcing people like the earl of Dundonald
to look for the tar in coal, and accidentally make gas;
and how the coal tar sludge that the gas makers
were throwing away, was picked up by MacIntosh,
for his rubber products that he couldn't get
from the far east because the imperial administration
was too interested in making quinine
in order to fight malaria, and how Perkin,
looking for artificial quinine,
ended up with artificial dye and boosted the german economy
and its industries to the point where
the population rose so high,
it could only be fed with the help of fertilizers
produced through the acetylene process,
and how the other fertilizers they tried
made all the explosives necessary to keep
their artillery shells firing right through world war I,
a war which caused the kind of shortages
that forced them back to acetylene for substitutes,
and how finally,
DuPont came up with the greatest substitute of all;
Initially they thought of calling it dupereau,
that stands for "Dupont pulls a rabbit out of a hat."
Finally though, they settled on nylon;
and nylon opened the door to our modern world;
a world full of substitute materials
without which we can't survive;
a world which, because of those substitute materials,
changes everyday, a world of plastic.
Because of plastic, that rate of change
accelerates every year.
It's fun, but can we keep it up?