[gear noises]
Have you noticed
what's happened to plastic in the last ten years?
It's become something in its own right.
I mean, early on, if you made something in plastic,
you had to make it look exactly
like what it is replacing; I mean, particularly leather,
or people wouldn't buy it.
It's not so long since the word 'plastic' was an insult.
Cheap and nasty, remember?
Not any more.
It's as if we suddenly changed our attitude
to what REAL meant, and recognized plastic
for what it is;
something that permits us to own objects
that we couldn't possibly afford,
if they had to be made in the so-called real thing.
So, now it's everywhere.
I mean, look at this office; that's plastic.
So is that. So are these.
So is this,
And especially, what's inside it.
There's plastic paint on the wall;
There's plastic wood on this desk; my shirt is plastic.
And now, there's a new generation of objects
that can only be made in plastic,
like that cassette.
It's a plastic world, and because of plastic,
it's a plastic world in a different sense,
in the original sense of the word.
It changes its shape easily.
So now, we no longer buy the thing we want;
we buy the shape of that thing that we prefer.
And, when the shapes change regularly,
which they do,
we begin to want them to change regularly.
And the plastics industry is ready and willing
to satisfy our demand, or do they create it?
So, our plastic world changes, quicker every year;
we live in a world of fast turnover,
built-in obsolescence, novelty; thanks to plastics.
You can mold it, pre-form it, blow it, extrude it;
or, most meanindfully of all, you can cut it
into little rectangles.
This shape is the shape of our future;
because the only way the money can move around
fast enough to keep up with trade,
is electronically from bank to bank,
through computers; or in the case of you and me,
through this, the credit card.
This is you, coded into that magnetic tape.
see; in there is the world's newest virtue:
creditworthiness; are you a good risk or not?
And what people need to know about you
before you can become a coded signal on that stripe,
makes this much more than a substitute for money;
it's a judgment on you.
And that's why here, where they make credit cards,
the security is so tight.
Because, if you steal one truckload of credit cards,
then, you've practically got the key to,
oh, every bank in the country.
The question is, is any security tight enough?
As the data on you and your credit
flows from bank to shop to employer,
to police to tax inspector, what happens to privacy?
And, if you don't want credit, how do you live
in a world where they don't take cash?
What will happen when being in debt all the time,
is the normal way to live?
The first time that opportunity came up,
to live on credit on a major scale,
happened, when the banks opened, about 600 years ago.
And when it did, the behavior of the people involved
might remind you of yourself, under similar circumstances.
Look what it did to them.
The big spenders in question
were the 14th century dukes of Burgundy,
and what they did with the money they borrowed,
raised every eyebrow in Europe.
Oh, the overindulgent excesses they got up to,
looked very elegant to us,
but behind all the courtly dancing, duchess swapping?
There were only four dukes of Burgundy,
and the whole dynasty only lasted 94 years from 1383,
but what a time they had.
It was a crafty italian banker
who kicked it all off, by lending the first duke
enough money to buy a dukedom.
Now, he knew he'd get his money back,
because the new dukedom
included half the manufacturing centers of flanders,
and places like Bruges.
The second duke picked up his father's debts,
pawned his jewels, assassinated a few friends,
and generally kept the party moving right along.
The third duke kept four mistresses in every castle,
ruled the country stretching from Holland
to the swiss border, and drank.
The last of the dukes was a real weirdo;
they called him Charles the Bold.
He was an egomaniac, and he saw himself
as a sort of second Julius Caesar;
didn't go for women much,
and wore more jewels in more places
than anybody else in Europe.
And, he was so convinced he was going to be made emperor,
that he chased the real emperor around
with the crown in his saddlebags,
so that the emperor could proclaim him
heir to the throne.
Of course, the emperor kept dodging the crucial meeting
he also went on long military campaigns,
to increase his territory, and lost them all.
Of course, Charles was up to his neck in hock,
thanks to an ambitious bank manager
called Thomas Portinari.
He worked for a bunch of florentine bankers,
the Medicis, who ran their local office in Bruges.
And the deal he made with Charles
was that Portinari collected the rent on Charles' property,
in places like this.
And Charles got to borrow money whenever he needed it,
at nice fat interest rates, of course.
The first modern nation ran on tick.
Well, in 1470, Portinari got a letter
from no less than the president of his bank,
who also happened to be running Florence at that time,
a man called Lorenzo the Magnificent,
saying, "watch it when you're dealing
with Charles of Burgundy, won't you?"
Of course, Portinari ignored this advice,
and when Charles went off on new military disasters,
Portinari would write a letter to his friends
who had a bank near the battle,
and they would turn up, on the spot,
with bags full of loot;
all of which naturally enough tended to make Charles
an admirer of things italian, especially their soldiers.
He was bringing them in
to train his own men in new tactics.
And it was the italian connection
that finally blew it for Charles,
because in 1476, he decided to strengthen
his lines of communication with Italy,
by moving into an area south of him.
Now, that was going to bump him up against the swiss,
still who were 'a bunch of mountain louts'
to stand up against Charles the Bold of Burgundy,
the greatest thing since sliced venison.
So, off he set, and in doing so,
triggered off a series of events
that were to end 500 years later,
with the landing on the moon.
Now, the swiss economy; timber and a bit of dairy produce,
couldn't pay for a real army, so Charles reckoned
the whole thing would be a pushover.
Wrong!
Waiting for him in the woods, was a swiss secret weapon.
But even if he'd known, Charles would have laughed;
because at grandson in Switzerland
on March the 2nd, 1476, this was what he bought on credit,
fully armored mercenaries.
And, what could a few swiss pikes do against that?
Well, this.
Charles' army was routed.
A year later, it happened again.
Charles was killed,
and that was the end of his family tree.
It was how the swiss used the pike that did it;
in a formation called the pike square.
You get a feel for its power with these modern soldiers.
Any cavalry idiot enough to charge this lot,
got itself skewered on the four-foot steel tips;
but the real magic was the way the pike square moved.
You see the way they could come to a sudden stop,
and turn in any direction instantly and attack,
or open out like a porcupine in defense?
That's why 'a bunch of mountain louts'
whipped the cream of Burgundy and Chivalry.
The way the pikes had clobbered the mounted knights
changed the battle plans of every military commander in Europe.
For the next 40 years, the pike was it;
and the armies got bigger because they were cheaper.
And then, on April the 28th, 1503,
at Cerignola in southern Italy,
things changed again.
A new weapon had arrived.
It was a gun, the arquebus.
In skilled hands, it could kill at 60 yards;
used the new miracle ingredient, gunpowder.
An "S" shaped trigger brought the smoldering core
down on the powder, fired a 1-pound ball.
At Cerignola, the spanish commander de Cordoba
lined his outnumbered men up like this;
5.000 arquebusiers, backed by pikes and cavalry,
facing the french who were still using
the traditional pike square.
Okay, here's the battle; this is the french,
the arquebusiers are dug in behind the ditch
at the bottom of a hill, which is covered in vines,
so that when the french come down the hill,
they get snarled up in the vines,
and they are cut to pieces by the bullets.
Total involvement on both sides: 18.000 men.
Over a 100 years later, and another battle,
at which the arquebus has been replaced by a weapon
that was to change the face of war yet again.
This time, it was the flintlock musket.
In general service by 1590, fired a 2-pound ball, a 100 yards;
the trigger released a spring,
it snapped the flint down against the hammer,
made sparks; powder ignited.
[gunfire]
The pikes were still needed, for protection.
[battle commands]
This was the new trick.
Several ranks, the front row firing,
rest reloading like this, in stages.
[commands]
[gunfire]
As each rank fired, it countermarched to the rear,
and the next rank stepped forward,
ready for action.
[commands]
[gunfire]
On the 7th of September, 1631, at Breitenfeld,
just outside Leipzig, the swedish king Gustavus
took the technology to its logical conclusion.
Look how he set out his men;
you see how both the pikes and the muskets
are in this forward attack position.
and they're set out, muskets, pikes;
to cover each other.
Gustavus had also shortened the length of the pike,
and made the musket lighter.
Opposing him, in the imperial army,
they were still using the old-fashioned
defensive mode for the pikes, back here;
with relatively fewer musketeers.
And a few years before,
the dutch had started producing books like this
to make firing muskets easier.
They divided up the business between firing a musket,
reloading it and getting it ready to fire again
into nearly 45 separate maneuvers,
each one of them illustrated like that;
and Gustavus had taught his men from those illustrations.
That meant that on the field, he could do with five ranks;
two firing, three reloading;
what it took the other side ten ranks to do.
And what's more, his rate of fire was three times theirs.
So, whatever they did, however they moved,
his men were able to wheel and turn
and reposition themselves as necessary,
constantly keeping up a murderous rate of fire,
that in the end,
blew the imperial army right off the field.
Total number of men involved: 70.000.
Another 100 years, and another development;
this time, the shape of war was changed
by the arrival of two new bits of weaponry;
the bayonet, and the paper cartridge.
You bit the end off the paper cartridge
and poured a measured amount of powder
into the gun, very fast.
And as for the bayonet, well, when it was put
on top of the musket, you got musket
and pike in the same weapon.
So, on the 9th of May, 1745, at the battle of Fontenoy,
as you can see from the british lines,
no pikes.
And because of the fast reloading,
they were able to get by with only three ranks,
whereas the french were still using five ranks,
and they were less well drilled.
Now, on the battlefield, because of the need
to get where you could see the whites of their eyes
before you fired, and then, on in with the bayonet,
that brought the armies within 30 yards of each other.
First of all, the english pushed the french
back up into their ground, and then, beated by
superior numbers, the english retreated.
But, the days of the uniformed,
disciplined, regular armies had arrived.
Total number involved, over 100,000.
Less than 50 years later, came the first signs
of mass modern warfare,
thanks to the french revolution.
You see, with most of their aristocratic officers,
either guillotined or in exile,
there wasn't much the republic could do
except conscript every able-bodied man
in the country;
and in 1793, that's just what they did.
But sending out raw recuits
against the disciplined armies of the allies,
meant you had to send them in large numbers,
and they looked something like this:
a vast rabble of badly trained, ill-equipped recruits,
and in front, a few professionals
firing individually for maximum effect,
to try and break the enemy line,
so that the mob could then roll over them
and win by sheer force of numbers, whatever the cost.
To give you an idea of what those number were,
take a look at that.
That is not a battle line you're looking at;
you see, it starts at the channel,
and it ends in Switzerland.
More than 1.000.000 men, stretched in armies
all the way along the frontier.
Now, arming and supplying that number of men
and feeding them was bad enough
when they were just sitting there.
Try doing that and moving them, because in 1797,
that was the task Napoleon took on,
when he started to move his armies around Europe;
anywhere from 350.000 to 500.000 men at a time.
and suddenly, feeding huge armies
was the big new problem,
and one that almost blew it for Napoleon
at a little known spot in northern Italy.
It's one of those places, you know,
by the time you notice it, you've passed it;
which is what most people do.
So they never notice the statue -
- or indeed, the restaurant,
where they do a rather nice line in chicken.
And if you've got a pencil handy,
you might care for the recipe.
Cut up the chicken and flour it well.
Put the chicken pops to brown in oil
with just a touch of garlic.
While the chicken's browning,
prepare the other ingredients for simmering.
One or two mushrooms -
- half a cup fresh tomatoes,
add a quarter cup of brandy and water and simmer.
Steam a quarter cup of crayfish,
garnish with fried eggs and potatoes to taste.
Total cooking time, one hour;
absolutely awful.
It's not often that a dish of food
plays a deeply meaningful role in history, but this one did.
You see, the ingredients that went to make up
this little culinary work of art,
illustrate a fundamental problem
that Napoleon had with his army,
because this is chicken marengo; thank you.
So called after the place it was first served,
here in Marengo; it's a village,
not much more than a cluster of farmhouses,
outside the town of Alexandria in northern Italy.
And it's the site of battle against the austrians
that nearly finished Napoleon, before he started.
It was his first battle since becoming head of state,
and so, you could say, he cared about it;
a lot hung on it.
Anyway, about dawn on June the 14th, 1800,
Napoleon was jumped by virtually the entire austrian army,
outnumbered in terms of men and artillery.
Trouble was, the rest of his giant army
were out doing what you do
when there are hundreds of thousands of you;
they were off in separate groups, out foraging for food.
So, Napoleon was caught with his pants down.
Anyway, he started, fighting desperately,
and he sent out riders to the other group,
saying, "for god's sake, get here if you can."
And, by 03:00 in the afternoon, after nine hours of slaughter
with the french retreating all the way,
it looked like as if all was lost.
And then, over the hill, like the US cavalry coming to the rescue,
came one of the foraging columns,
and the boot was on the other foot.
By 6 o'clock, the austrians had surrendered.
That night, Napoleon's chef
gave him chicken marengo for dinner, cooked, he said apologetically,
with all he could find: some tomatoes,
some crayfish, little oil, garlic, eggs, and of course, chicken.
But then, he said, the whole army was eating like that,
eating what they could find, if anything.
And Napoleon recognized that he had
two major problems to solve.
He had to find a way of feeding an army
that was on the move, very fast,
and in this particular case,
his men couldn't even buy the food they needed,
because the local italians wouldn't accept their money.
a) because it was paper money, and,
b) because of the inflation back in France,
it was worthless paper money.
It was how Napoleon solved these problems
relating to food, that brings us ironically,
to his favorite drink, champagne.
Ah, champagne!
[drum roll]
When Napoleon got back home to France,
he did several things to get the country
out of the mess it was in.
For instance, he set up the bank of France,
and only let it issue notes that it could back with gold.
And, he set up the society
for the encouragement of national industry,
offering prizes for any idea
that could be put to profitable manufacturing use.
One of the prize winners was a mr. Nicholas Appert,
ex-cook and bottle washer,
and what he did fot national economic recovery,
was THIS ...
Now, I know it will seem odd that a country -
thank you,
with great gastronomic traditions like France
should shower fame and money on an ex-cook
and bottle washer, for stuffing soup and bits
of food into a bottle, but Appert's soup
and bits of food went into the bottle
and stayed fresh, for nearly six years.
At the time, Napoleon was doing his things in Marengo,
Appert already had a little shop in Paris,
and his catalog was offering things like
asparagus, beans, meat stew, apricots, and so on.
But it was the french navy who first caught
onto the possibilities of Appert's idea.
They were at war with England;
the british fleet was blockading all the supply ports,
and suddenly, this appeared to be a marvelous way
of keeping french ships independently provisioned.
So, in 1803, they took some vegetable soup,
some peas and beans,
and they went off on a three-month trip on the sea.
At the end of which, they ate the stuff,
and then, wrote back to monsieur Appert
and said, "marvelous, marvelous."
In 1805, the newspapers got hold of the story,
and they were raving poetically about monsieur Appert
who brings the spring to table in winter.
And all of a sudden, vintage boiled beef
and carrots were all the rage.
Then, it was the turn of the army,
who after all, march on their stomach.
And by chance, the minister for the army was also the secretary
for the society for the encouragement of national industry,
and that's why Appert endeed up getting
one of their prizes for 12.000 francs,
provided he made his technique public,
which he did in 1810, by publishing a small bestseller
excitingly entitled "The art of preserving for a number of years,
all animal and vegetable substances."
In the book, he says, take a champagne bottle
and empty it, and you'll notice that in those days,
the champagne bottles were the same shape they are now.
Now, he chose a champagne bottle
because he had worked as a bottler
here in Epernay, the home of champagne,
and he knew that the glass was very strong.
Okay, once you've emptied it, you put the food in,
and then you bang the cork home with one of these:
now I won't do that
because this is a collector's item.
I order to keep the cork in position,
he used the same technique they do today.
He used a little wire cage.
At that point, you put the bottle with the food in it
into a steam bath, where you leave it
for a number of hours, at 100 degrees.
After that, you let it cool, and then you leave it
as long as you like, and the food won't spoil.
Now, although they didn't know at the time,
what this humble ex-cook and bottle washer
had discovered, was something for which
the great scientist, Pasteur was to get all the credit
years later; the fact that heat sterilizes food.
So, back in the first place, partly because the italians
wouldn't take Napoleon's worthless paper money,
Appert presented his invention to the world.
And, by the most extraordinary trick of fortune,
the reason his invention ended up in the form
it takes on your supermarket shelves today,
packed in tin, has also to do with that worthless paper money.
The notes the french government issued,
called assignats by this time,
not worth the paper they were printed on,
were mostly made at a paper mill south of Paris,
at a place called Essonnes.
Now, what with the fact that most of the labor force
was off fighting with Napoleon,
and there was general inflation, the fellow running this paper mill,
called Didot, was having a lot of trouble with his production.
So, he wrote to his brother-in-law in Paris
and said, "send somebody down here to help me, will you?"
The man who turned up was called Nicholas Robert,
a clerk with a mechanical tunn of mind,
and he arrived with a remark, "well, look,
if you had yourself a machine that made paper,
all you troubles would be over."
So, Didot said: "okay, i'll back you; you invent it."
And in 1799, Robert did. And this is it.
Here is a big vat full of paper pulp;
inside here, there's a wheel with slats on it,
and as you turn the wheel, the slats scoop up the pulp
and dump it onto that slide;
slides down on to this moving mesh belt.
Now as the belt moves, it's shaken
so that the water in the pulp can drain away
through the mesh, and what water is left
is squeezed out by that roller.
That leaves the paper to be wound
on to this roller here.
The entire machine operates on one handle, like this.
Okay, I hear you say, but what's that got to do
with putting preserved food in cans?
Well, it has; but why -
it's like one of those french fast stories
where you have people rushing in and out of everywhere
and its wives and peoples' brother-in-laws,
and they're all going in all sorts of directions -
so, if you're ready for a rather nutty story,
here goes.
Remember how it all began with Didot
and trouble at the mill, and how he wrote to
his sister's husband and said,
"send me somebody down o sort the problem out."
And they sent Nicholas Robert,
who in 1799, invented this machine.
Well, after a while, things weren't going too well
and Didot said, "I wonder how it would go in England."
So, he wrote to his other sister's husband,
a fellow called John Gamble,
who was working in an office in Paris
for a royal navy captain called Coates.
Now, Coates was in charge of prisoner-of-war exchange.
In 1800, Coates got Gamble and his letters
in bits and pieces, across the channel to Dover,
with an introduction to the mayor of Dover,
who promptly invited Gamble to dinner,
where he met another fellow called Miliken.
Now, when Miliken heard what Gamble was up to,
he said, "oh i know the people you should meet."
He took him up to London, where he met two more people;
two brothers called Fourdrinier who were stationers.
They sais, "this is a great machine; we've got to make some."
So, they told their millwright, John Hall, to get on to the job.
Now, he was a bit busy, so he gave the job
to his wife's sister's husband, a fellow called Bryan Donkin;
and in 1803, Donkin made the machine.
Well, by 1809, things were going really badly;
people pirating the idea legal costs and so on;
and the Fourdriniers went bankrupt.
Gamble, who had got everybody into this mess,
was so worried, he was looking around
for an idea to save face.
And he met a fellow called Peter Durand,
who was a merchant, and who had just finished
reading a book translated from french; this was in 1810.
He'd copied everything down in that book
and got himself a patent on the content of the book,
and he sold that patent
to messrs. Gamble, Donkin, and Hall,
for 1.000 pounds.
Guess who's book it was.
Appert's book; the one about preserving food;
And that is what you call a chain of events.
Anyway, the partners went into business immediately,
in the food preservation line.
Only, since they knew all about how to handle metal,
they chose not to put the food into the bottles,
but to put it into the form that we all know
and love today: the tin can.
Well, in 1813, after three years of experiment,
the partners finally got their product
to Kensington palace, where the prince regent
and the queen, and various other nobs
pronounced the contents absolutely delicious,
and could they have some more.
Well, with backing like that, how can you fail?
So, they began to get their product
onto the royal navy ships, where they went over very big.
Around this time, the 1820s, the arctic explorations
were going on; and as the explorers sailed away
with their decks filled up with canned food,
it began to look as if canning was a quick way
to become a millionaire.
Around 1830, the cans began to appear in the shops.
And then, along came the crimean war,
with all those troops to feed.
And then, it happened; on the dockside in the Crimea,
somebody opened one of the new jumbo-sized cans of meat.
And, what did they find?
Rotten meat.
The market took a nosedive; everybody, but everybody
was trying to find out why it happened.
The cans had been sealed, they said;
the water had been at the right temperature
for long enough to kill the bugs, they said;
so, what was it?
They hadn't heated the cans long enough,
though they didn't know that;
they thought the culprit was this.
The kind of air that comes off rotting vegetation,
heat, and stagnant water,
very fashionable at that time, this rot;
everybody thought all disease was due to it;
which is why our story brings us
to this pleasant little holiday spot,
because if you ever wanted to see miles and miles
of hot rot, come here, to the Florida swamps.
At the same time, the meat packers in London
were going bananas about what bad air was doing
to their success rate, somebody else here in Florida
was doing just the same thing, for just the same reason.
Only, his success rate depended on keeping people healthy.
He was a doctor; a fellow called John Gorrie,
and in 1833, he had come to a small cotton port
on the gulf of mexico called Apalachicola;
Surrounded on three sides by this creepy stuff;
full of alligators and snakes that drop from the trees,
an other goodies, including malaria, which was John Gorrie's problem.
You see, every year, people went down with it
by the hundreds, and Gorrie reckoned,
well, just like everybody else,
that malaria was caused by an invisible disease-ridden gas
seeping in from these swamps, and made just like
the air in the London cans, from a mixture of
rotting vegetation, stagnant water, and heat.
So, when, not long after he got to Apalachicola,
Gorrie became bank manager, postmaster,
chief of the masonic lodge, the city treasurer, and mayor,
he thought he'd try to stamp the disease out
by draining wetlands, filling in ponds,
building in brick instead of wood, that would rot.
Great, everybody still got malaria.
So, defeated by the rotting muck and the stagnant water,
Gorrie turned to the one ingredient that he reckoned he could control;
the heat.
You see, back in those days, there were regular
shipments of ice down here to the southern states
from Boston, where they used to hack it out
of the frozen rivers and ponds during the winter,
and store it for shipment right through the summer;
went as far as Calcutta.
Now, Gorrie reckoned that since people
didn't get malaria in the winter,
he'd crack the problem if he could use the ice
to help his patients keep their cool
right through the summer.
What he didn't know, and what he couldn't have known
in 1837, because nobody had discovered
that malaria was caused by an insect, was that here
he was surrounded by a giant mosquito menagerie.
As far as Gorrie was concerned,
the billions of mosquitoes here were just an annoyance.
So, Gorrie set up a chilly fever room,
where you could have very easily caught youself a cold.
And, for a few years, Apalachicola murmured through
the chattering teeth of Gorrie's victims;
I mean, patients, as he proceeded with his grand design.
His idea was quite brilliant, and of course,
totally wrong, but Gorrie was indefatigable
in bending the ear of any visitors on the subject,
me too;
so, the hanging bucket is filled with ice,
above a pipe bringing in air from outside.
The ice chills the air, and if you block up the fireplace,
the only place the air can get out,
is down through a pipe in the skirting board.
Alas, poor Gorrie; he so nearly got it right;
gauze curtains help, he said, because they keep out
the vapors that bring in the disease.
His only problem, he thought, was a way of getting cheap ice.
Some time after 1845, he found it, with this machine;
may not look much, but if you've got
a cool house on a hot day, thank that.
Gorrie built it using an idea
that had been around for some time,
but that nobody had put into practice.
The idea was that if you compress air, it gets hot;
if you then let it expand, it gets cold
and it draws heat from its surroundings.
Look, here's a steam-driven wheel
driving a force pump that compresses the air;
here comes the compressed air through that coil
in a bath of cold water, into this chamber
where it expands; and as it expands,
it gets very cold.
Okay, the cold air then comes up through tubes
in this container, which is full of brine,
and the cold air draws heat from the brine,
now, on every cycle, the air draws heat from the brine,
until the brine is the same temperature as the cold air;
and from then on, as the air comes out
of the top here, it's cold.
Air conditionining: invented by a man
very few people have ever heard of,
I mean, had you?
One more trick; if you run the cold air tube up here,
through a reservoir of water, the cold air
chills the water down and the chilled water
drips down into a container which is immersed
in the super-cooled brine,
and that causes it to make something
that looked as if it was going to make
John Gorrie a very rich man in a very hot climate:
ice.
[band music]
On Bastille day, 1850,
Gorrie made his invention public.
The occasion was a boozy get-together
in the home of Apalachicola's french consul,
who was holding a little soiree in honor of
the anniversary of the french revolution,
with more french red wine and french champagne,
than you could shake a stick at.
Now, unfortunately, the iceboat from Boston
hadn't come, and snide remarks were passed
about what a social gaffe it was for a frenchman
to offer warm champagne.
We're having warm wine, and most possibly,
warm champagne.
In spite of the snikering however,
the host displayed all the symptoms of a man
utterly confident in his savior faire.
We're not only about to offer you chilled champagne,
but also cold oyster too.
You see, our hero had previously shown him
his magic machine, and both men were looking forward
to their little moment of triumph.
It was, sad to say, to be Gorrie's only moment of triumph.
[applause]
[organs]
It was at the port of New Orleans, in 1869,
14 years after Gorrie had died, broken by his failure
to get any backing for his machine
that this idea suddenly turned up again.
It was the end of a steamboat race,
along the coast of Texas;
The winner, the good ship Agnes
had beaten the other boat with a cargo of chilled beef;
the first in history and long since forgotten.
So, here we are on the New Orleans waterfront
in the summer of 1869, because Charles of Burgundy
got clobbered by swiss pike men, who then made infantry fashionable;
and because the armies got so big,
Napoleon desperately needed provisions for them;
Appert invented preserved food which Donkin put in cans
because his papermaking venture failed;
and the rot that spoiled the meat
and also maybe gave people malaria
which Gorrie tried curing with cold air,
that chilles the beef that the Agnes brought
for the great New Orleans beef race.
Remember?
[applause] [orchestra music]
Ladies and gentlemen to the chilled beef.
To the chilled beef!
[glasses clinking]
Now, by an extraordinary coincidence,
at the flower of New Orleans upper crust
were tucking into their beef,
a fellow called Mr. J.D. Passel
was chilling his first beef, also with cold air.
Only, he was doing it in a place
where interestingly, the idea ran very high,
because Passel lived in Australia.
See, unlike here in New Orleans,
these were the years of the great british starvation scare.
as the country became more industrialized
and the population shot up, the government decided
that if some new way of getting lots of fresh meat
from Australia and New Zealand wasn't found,
well then, the whole country was finished.
Spurred on by patriotism, and profit,
the australians did it.
They had a few horrendous goes at it first, though.
In 1873, a ship left Melbourne
with a cargo of meat covered in ice and salt.
it leaked; in London,
the smell was described as "indescribable".
They has another go in 1876, with a load of mutton
and a rather more sophisticated cooling system.
It leaked before it left, ended up at Sydney harbor.
Finally, in 1880, the SS Strath 11
docked in London with a cargo frozen solid,
to be sold here at Smithfield.
Britain was saved;
Queen Victoria enjoyed the beef;
refrigeration was a success.
What happens next has to do with the drinking habits
of the people who live here,
in and around the city of Munich in southern Germany,
and especially, what's going on right now,
about 50 feet above my head:
the annual Munich beer festival.
[festivity]
Hundreds of thousands of people come here
and get totally looped, in spite of the fact
that it was a german who said way back,
beer spoils the blood, burns it up,
causes great thirst, horrible red faces;
also leprosy, swelling of the body,
injury to the head,
and all internal parts of the intestines.
You'd think that would put them off.
it doesn't.
[loud merrymaking]
Now, one of the things that mob out there are doing
is drinking beer the way the french,
the italians, the greeks, the australians, the americans,
practically everybody drinks it: cold.
Whereas we english, we prefer our beer
at room temperature, or warm.
Now, the reason for the difference
is that english beer is fermented using a yeast
that does its fermentation
on the surface of the beer in the vats,
and it prefers to do it at slightly warmer temperatures,
which is why it also drinks slightly warmer.
Some people think it's an acquired taste.
Yeast in german beer vats
does its fermentation at the bottom of the vats.
It's called bottom-fermented beer,
and it takes anything up to three months to do that.
and it needs to be kept just above freezing point,
for the whole thing to work.
That's why, since oh, about the 16th century,
there have been laws all over Germany
saying, you can't brew beer in the summer,
because it will go bad.
Now, that's not very good news,
because, if you can't brew in the summer,
that's half the year gone,
when you could be brewing and making profit;
because especially here in Bavaria,
if you make beer, they'll drink it.
So, in about 1870, one of the biggest brewers
in Munich, this man, head of the Sedlmayr brewery,
went to one of his friends who was a locomotive engineer
called Carl von Linde, and asked him,
if he could come up with something
that would keep this place cool enough in summer,
to brew right through the year.
So, von Linde went off and basically used
John Gorrie's system; do you remember,
he'd used the idea of compressing air,
except that von Linde used compressed ammonia gas
because it does its thing at much lower temperatures.
What did he was, he got a piston,
and he squashed the ammonia gas until it became liquid.
And then, he released it
into an area of much lower pressure,
and as the pressure dropped, the ammonia evaporated.
Now, you know the way perfume or aftershave
cools your skin.
Well, that's because as it evaporates,
to do so, it needs energy.
And, it takes that energy in the form of heat
from the surrounding area.
So, it takes the heat from your skin,
cooling it down.
In Linde's case the ammonia took its heat
from its surroundings, which was a water tank
through which pipes containing the ammonia ran.
So, the water cooled down.
Since the water tank was all around the beer vat,
when the water cooled down, so did the beer.
And why von Linde should mean anything to you or me,
is because in the back of out domestic refrigerators,
we have his basic system at work.
Thanks initially, to german lager beer.
So, towards the end of the last century,
as the refrigeration precesses got better
and they could go to lower and lower temperatures,
people started trying to liquify gases
that would only liquify at very low temperatures indeed,
like hydrogen and oxygen,
because there was a ready market;
the limelight business, for example.
You make limelight by burning hydrogen
and oxygen and lime
and you can get a very brilliant light;
or small-scale welding like jewelers.
The trouble was, what do you do
with a load of liquid hydrogen when it evaporates away
all the time, which it does,
if you don't have an efficient container to keep it in.
and they didn't.
Well, they didn't, until this idea came along.
It's supposed to have been the brainchild
of the great scottish scientist James Dewar.
In fact, an obscure frenchman thought of it at first.
The flask, with a sealed vacuum between two layers
of silvered glass, kept things cold or hot;
revolutionized the great edwardian picnic in 1904.
So, the story takes one more twist, and we've reached the end.
You remember how it all began with credit,
and the swiss defeating Charles the Bold,
and the race for bigger armies,
until they got really big.
So, Napoleon had trouble feeding his men in battle.
And so, Appert used his champagne bottling experience
to invent food preservation in bottles;
and how, by a complicated series of events,
the bottled food idea got to England -
- which was where Donkin put it in cans instead.
And then, they went rotten, and John Gorrie thought
that it was the rot that caused malaria,
and he invented air conditioning to try and cure it,
and how refrigeration and liquid gas followed,
kept in the termos flask, marketed by a german
called Reinholt Burger.
It would be difficult to overestimate
the effect Burger had on life,
at the beginning of this century.
The thermos flask didn't only go to picnics.
It changed the working man's lunch break;
it provided airborne drinks for people on zeppelins.
It went to the South Pole and to central Africa,
both to sustain the intrepid explorers,
and to bring back hot and cold specimens.
And, it saved countless peoples' lives
because it stopped their insulin from going bad.
But it was in the form behind me here;
that the thermos flask
probably made its greatest impact on the 20th century,
and i use that word 'impact' advisedly.
It took that form, principally because of two men
whose work was virtually ignored,
and the third, who did his work in a way
that nobody could ignore.
The first was a russian called Chelkowski;
and he literally thought everything out,
and his work lay burried in russian disinterest,
until after his death.
The second was an american called Robert Goddard
who did most of his best work on his aunt's farm
in Massachusetts, and all he got for his pains
was some rather lukewarm interest
from american weather forecasters.
The third man was called Hermann Oberth,
and people noticed what he did, because in 1944,
what he was trying to do was destroy London.
His particular version of the thermos flask
became known as 'vengeance weapon 2,'
and before the war was over, it had killed
thousands of allied troops and civilians.
You see, all three men had understood
that certain gases ignite,
and that the thermos flask permits you to store
vast quantities of those gases safely,
in the frozen liquid form, until you want to ignite them;
at which point, you take the top off the flask,
the gases evaporate, you apply a light, and boom.
Now, two gases do that better than any other;
and it was Oberth's assistant
who put them together most efficiently.
His name was Wernher von Braun,
and the two gases that he released
from his particular version of the thermos flask;
the one lying on its side behind me now,
were hydrogen and oxygen.
If you release those two gases into a confined space
with the hole at the other end of it,
and mix them as you do so, and then,
set light to them, you get that.
Destination: the Moon or Moscow;
the planets or Peking.
[rocket engine]