[gear noises]
This is a monument to one of the greatest
technological triumphs in the history of mankind.
And, for those of us who witnessed what happened here,
at 9:32 on the morning of July the 16th, 1969,
it's an object that brings back,
as fresh as if it were yesterday,
one of the most profoundly moving events of our lives,
for it was from this tower that Apollo 11
lifted off on incandescent flame and thunder,
to carry man to the surface of the Moon,
for the first time.
An estimated 1.000 million people watched the Moon landing.
and, what that landing involved
still somehow staggers the imaginations today,
becasue it involved launching from the Earth,
which was spinning at a 1.000 miles an hour,
and at the same time, circling the sun
at nearly 70.000 miles an hour,
and launching from a point on earth
away form where the Moon was,
and then, aiming at a point in space
where the Moon would be, in three days time.
and then, after a journey of 240.000 miles,
landing within 1.5 miles of the target point.
Apollo is a supreme example of why technology
is so often a double-edged weapon,
because the navigational instrument developed to make
a precision landing on the surface of the Moon,
makes child's play of the business of moving
from one part of our planet to another.
Those instruments are basically,
what take your holiday jet to its destination,
virtually unaided.
They also make it possible to launch
an intercontinental ballistic missile,
carrying several atomic warheads,
each one of which can be independently guided
to within 100 yards of its target point.
Now, what that means is that the underground
missile sites on the other side,
are no longer safe.
They will not survive attack
so as to be used in retaliation afterwards.
Now, the temptation, when you know that fact,
is to launch your missiles first.
The question is, will that happen?
It's not a new problem; this is the second time in history
that a major breakthrough in missile technology
has fundamentally changed the situation.
The last time, 600 years ago,
the missile was a cannonball.
And look what happened then.
15th century Europe was a place
where hardly a day went by
without somebody fighting somebody.
But, in those early years of the use of gunpowder,
the cannon was more bang and smoke than real impact.
Still, it frightened people enough.
Then, the armies devastating the countryside
stopped firing stones and rubble,
and started using the new iron cannonballs.
And life in places like this became very earnest.
This is Egmont in the south of France, ,
built in marshland on the edge of the Mediterranean,
and nothing much has ever happened here.
As you can see, it's never been destroyed by cannon fire,
which is why it serves as a perfect example
of why most of the other places like it, were.
It's one of the most untouched examples
of a pre-cannonball medieval fortification,
and it's also quite beautiful.
When this place was built in 1300,
life was simple.
Wraparound vision from these drum towers
gave your archers complete command
of anything within bowshot.
Nice, tall, slim walls, proof against catapults,
battering ramps, knights on horseback,
you name it; and if anybody should try
to scale the wall, boiling oil.
The cannonball changed everything;
it knocked the tall walls down, couldn't miss.
And, if they started firing at you from long range,
the only way to hit them was to get your own cannon
and fire back; and that left one problem,
and you're in it.
If i come down there and play the part of the attacker
and you go up there on the castle walls
and be the defender, i'll show you what I mean.
Okay, follow me with your gun; you can see me,
you can still see me, but now, you can't see me.
Now go to the other side of the tower.
Okay, now follow me again; you can see me,
you can still see me, but now, you can't see me.
So, there's a blind sopt in front of this round tower
that you can't cover.
It's an area between these white tapes, you see.
now, if I can get my commanders in here,
I can blow this wall up,
and there's nothing you can do about it.
So, what's the best solution to your problem?
You've got a hole; yes, fill it,
build the tower this shape;
and about 1450, that's just what they did.
It was an italian idea,
and it totally altered the shape of the towns.
This is what the new pointed rampart looked like,
called a bastion, and because it made town walls
look star-shaped the new defensive layout
became known as the star fort.
The architects that used to build these things
used to come along to towns, and sell the idea
rather like you sell cloth.
They'd say, you know now how many bastions
can you afford; you know,
we can give you five, six, two; whatever you like.
And the town would buy whatever it could afford;
but you forgot the cost, once you came up
on to the bastions.
Here, you get a warmly impregnable feeling.
Look around, the walls are nice and low;
they're very difficult to hit,
they're sloped so that any cannonnball
that hits them will ricochet off,
an they're built in brick to withstand impact.
Now, one bastion protects another.
See over there, in that inlet,
there would be guns over there firing along the side
of my bastion protecting me, and i can do
precisely the same thing for the other bastion.
And, what is more, between us, we can put up
really withering crossfire in this area,
protecting the main wall of the fortress.
Add to that scheme, the island in the moat,
the raveline as it's called, and put guns on it;
and you're really wrapped up, nice and snug.
And, should the enemy, by any chance,
get on to that island,
well, you've simply get a big pile of guns
on this bastion, a big pile of guns
on the other bastion, and you blow them to kingdom come.
That's what was so good about these bastions;
you could use the guns on them so effectively.
Look, the guns in the little inlet
behind one bastion cover the next and,
their neighbors return the favor.
They also protected the main wall,
if you got past this defense,
and you never even got that far;
the entire town was snug behind
a cat's cradle of cannon fire.
You wanted straight streets to move guns and ammunition
from bastion to bastion, if needed;
so, town planning got a boost.
From the mid 16th century onwards, people stood a fair chance
of living out their lives in safety behind their new walls.
All they need was food and, of course, ammunition.
Now, some of these places had as many as over 200 guns,
firing about once every ten minutes.
The guns were zeroed up before they were put into position;
that is to say, they were test fired.
You fire the gun horizontally,
and you see where the ball drops.
Then, you raise it one degree, see where the ball drops;
raise it one more degree, see how far the ball goes;
and so on until you reach maximum range.
Now, since you live here and you know
exactly how far across the moat the enemy are,
you know the angle at which your gun has to be,
in order to hit them.
To get that angle right, you use an adapted
astronomical instrument like this,
it's called a gunner's quadrant, dead simple to use.
You just shove it down the muzzle and watch
where the plum line goes past the scale,
so you know the angle of elevation of your gun;
and knowing that, you're ready to load and fire.
Well, expect for one thing; does your gunpowder
work as well as it should?
And that's what that rather silly pole
is all about, over there.
Testing gunpowder was a bit like going to the fair ground,
because this is what you did.
You took a measured amount of standard gunpowder
and you put it in that cup like that;
and then, you put a cannonball of a known weight on top;
and then, you lit the fuse and stood back,
and depending on how far up the pole the ball went,
you knew whether your gunpowder was okay or not.
Well, so much for the defenders,
what about the attackers out there?
Well, they had a much harder time;
they had to try and get those guns on the bastions out,
with whatever they were carrying at that time,
the instruments they had.
In general, that tended to be this.
It's an astronomical instrument called an astrolabe,
it's kind of a medieval astronomer's computer
that can do all sorts of amazing things
relating to the sky and eclipses, and so on.
Fortunately for the illiterate gunners,
and the back, it has a very simple star sighting device
which you can also use to find out how high above you
those guns are that you want to knock out.
You just line up the sites, read off the thing
and it says 7 degrees,
yo, so you know how high to elevate your gun.
Okay, how far away are they; that's important.
Well, if you take the astrolabe and turn it like that;
horizontal, you end up with a device
that was called a circumferente, here's one,
and that's used for getting the distance away from you
You line up north-south, because it's got a compass.
Then, you use these two sites here to draw a beat
on the guns you want to destroy,
and you can see from the scale
how many degrees they are away from north,
to one side as it were from you here.
You then go down the road a known distance
and do that again,
and that comes down to some very simple geometry;
which they used to do on their drumheads like this.
We are here.
That other observation point, let's say, is down there
and we know that''s a 100 meters away.
We just took a bead on the guns
that was this much of north, if that's north,
down the road; when we did it,
perhaps it would have been like that.
So, we know that the gun we want to hit is there.
If we get a pair of compasses, and use a scale,
that's a 100 meters and that's going to be about 110,
and this is going to be about 105.
So, we know how far away to shoot
if we're going to shoot from here or here.
Fine, that was all right; except that while
you were doing all this, they shot you.
So, when Leonard Diggs, an englishman, brought out
in about 1560, a thing called a theodolite
that did all these jobs in one go;
he was a very popular fellow.
This is it; see, it's got a plum line,
so you can set it up straight;
and a built-in compass for pointing north.
Well, the bit for finding the angle of the target
off to one side of you, works exactly the same way
as the circumferente, and so does the geometry bit
that you do afterwards to find out how far away
from the target your guns will be, once you've done two sightings.
The new thing is the part that tells you
how high up the target is, this bit.
With Diggs' theodolites, you know all you need,
fast enough to stay alive.
What you don't know is wether you're in
the right place or or not, because in spite of
all these sophisticated instruments,
at the time, maps were a joke.
Look, this is all you got; the rivers you were
going to cross, a few bridges where there was a bridge,
and if there was a town that was going to give you
something to eat, you've got a little box
with a steeple on it; that's all you had.
No wonder so many people got lost.
Anyway, Leonard Diggs and his theodolites solved
that mapmaking problem; thanks in the main,
to a recent and rather unsavory divorce case.
This is the short but sobering tale
of what happened to monasteries in England,
because Henry the VIII divorced his wife;
and how little Jack Horner pulled out his plum.
See, Henry divorced his wife in defiance of the pope,
that turned the country protestant, and in 1536,
started taking their lands and properties away
from these monasteries.
a) because they were catholic;
and b) because they had twice as much money as he had;
and he was a bit short of cash.
Now, at some places like Glastonbury,
they thought they knew how to buy a little time.
The idea was probably cooked up by the abbot's steward,
a certain Jack Horner, send a pie to the king
containing title deeds to some abbey properties.
This rich little pie thing was supposed to make the king
conveniently forget the rest of the abbey's property.
Well, on the way to London, little Jack Honer
pulled out his plum; one of the property deeds,
and the king got what was left,
which wasn't enough.
So, the plan failed. Henry took everything,
and that's why mapmaking got better;
because when Henry sold all those monastic lands,
he kicked off a surveyor's bonanza,
because all the buyers wanted their land mesured first.
Christopher Saxton, one of the surveyors,
put his profession on the map in 1584,
by producing the first national atlas in the western world,
showing almost every river and town,
and the rough idea of the terrain.
His maps didn't of course; include Scotland
because it was a separate sovereign state
at the time.
Strangely enough, John Ogilby left Scotland out of his maps too,
nearly 100 years later
when Scotland was ruled from London.
These were the first systematic surveys of all
main roads in the country, and like this one,
of the road north from London, they showed county names,
towns, bridges, and distance
marked by the new statute mile.
And yet, Ogilby went only as far as the border
with all this fancy detail.
Up here in the Scottish Highlands, there wasn't anything like that.
"Why bother", said the english,
"look at it; there's nothing worth bothering about."
Well, the 1715 rebellion proved that there was.
And still, nothing was done, until in 1724,
the member of parliament from Bath,
a retired major general called George Wade,
was sent up here to report on how
the post-war pacification of the clans was going.
He wrote back a letter saying that it wasn't;
and that they were as ready to revolt as they ever had been;
and that what this country needed was more garrisons,
more troops, and above all,
a road to move the troops around on.
So the king said, "Okay, go ahead;"
and they started to work.
The work took 500 men with picks and shovels;
and they laid a layer of large stones
and a layer of smaller stones; and then,
packed the surface with gravel
and where necessary,
built drainage ditches on either side of the road.
When the military road was finished,
it was one of the best in Europe.
and, to this day,
it's named after the man who built it.
This is called Wade's road.
The english were so pleased with Wade that in 1745,
when he was using his road to chase Bonnie Prince Charlie,
they even added a verse to the national anthem.
god grant that marshal Wade
may by thy mighty aid victory bring.
May he sedition hush,
and like a torrent rush,
rebellious scots to crush.
god save the king!
To a road maker, the road over Corryarack pass
must rank as Wade's greatest triumph.
It's ironic, because he built it
for english soldiers going north;
and in 1745, Bonnie Prince Charlie
used it for scottish soldiers going south,
on the trip that took them to oh well,
130 miles from London.
and the banks collapsed and everybody panicked,
and the king packed his bags.
It was the 1745 rebellion that actually,
finally convinced the english
that they should map Scotland for their generals.
And one of the surveyors on that job
was a fellow called Roy,
and he kept pushing for a national map
of the entire island; and still, nothing was done.
And again, it took war, this time
the fear of invasion from France,
to get the english to move.
Finally, in 1791, the ordinance survey
was set up, and off they went.
In 1820, they decided to map Ireland,
and that decision helped kick off a new kind of illumination,
because the very first mission that they wanted to take,
was from Divis mountain here outside Belfast,
right the way across over to that mountain
in Donegal called Slieve Snaght.
You remember that business that gunners did,
of working out how far away a target was
by drawing a triangle; that's what triangulation is.
Well, Divis and Slieve Snaght were two points of a triangle,
with a third on a mountain in Scotland.
In autumn 1824, the problem was,
you couldn't see from Divis to Slieve Snaght,
because the weather was so bad.
Weeks of fiddling went by, and still,
every time the royal engineers looked through the murk,
all they got was an eyeful of murk.
They lit fire on Slieve Snaught;
they stuck poles on it; nothing.
And you can't be master of all you do not survey,
so the english went rather politely hysterical,
when, at the tower of London, in a patriotic little ceremony,
a young surveyor called William Drummond
came up with the answer.
The show took place in the armory,
and quite literally, dazzled everybody.
William Drummond had invented a light you could stick
on any mountain, and see for miles.
The irish problem solved,
thanks to a shining example of british genius.
[applause]
Inferior foreign lights paled into insignificance
besides the brilliance of Drummond's device,
and english hearts burst with pride
because now, they could measure Ireland,
they could tax it better.
The new light worked like this:
up three tubes came alcohol, hydrogen, and oxygen.
these were sprayed on to a piece of limestone,
and ignited.
Behind the limestone, a curved reflector;
as the flames heated up the limestone,
it would glow brighter and brighter
until in the end, it would become incandescent.
When they put Drummond's limelight on the mountain,
their troubles were over.
By 1829 Drummond was trying to get his limelight
into lighthouses;
the obvious place to put it.
Early tests had shown that at night,
the light was to intense, it cast a shadow
at a distance of 10 miles from the lighthouse.
But, problems with leaking gas,
and not enough gas, and too expensive gas,
finally convinced the authorities
that although limelight was just what they needed,
it was going to cost more than they were prepared to pay.
So, Drummond dropped the idea.
Still, that wasn't the end of limelight,
as I'm sure you've guesses.
Well, I reckon the second you realized where I am now,
you also realized where Drummond
took his limelight next - into the theatre;
where limelight took on the meaning
it has in the modern world.
Of course, theaters at the time,
were already lit - by gas.
Trouble was, it wasn't just the stage that was lit;
many a fairy came to grief when her dress
got a bit to close to one of these open gas footlights,
and whole theaters went up in flames;
carelessness, leaking gas.
But it wasn't just the fires that got Drummond
into the theater, I mean, what actor could resist
stepping into the brilliance of limelight.
And so, from 1877 on, limelight was everywhere;
from pantomime to opera, to Shakespeare,
like Henry Irving's production of Macbeth;
got packed.
Critics didn't think the limelight looked real enough.
And, since we've arrived at a rather theatrical
period of history, let me explain what happened next,
the way they would have told you.
And now, ladies and gentlemen,
for a brief series of morally uplifting vignettes,
illustrating dedicated 19th century genius at work.
Observe the fatal problem of the day.
Rock A, inadequately illuminated;
enter ships B to strike rock A,
sinking into a watery grave at sea.
In 1845, over 1.000 such incident occured.
Solution, rocks A need lighthouses B,
so that ships C may avoid rocks A,
thanks to lighthouses B.
The problem: Drummond's limelight demands too much gas.
Solution: Volta's pile, which as the demonstratory
digit shows, is composed of discs of differing metals
which give off electricity; discharge aforesaid
electricity into indicated water via electrodes,
so that aforesaid water gives off the two gases
neccesary for limelight: hydrogen and oxygen.
Problem: not enough electricity.
Solution: professor Florist Nolet of Belgium's
amazing 1850 machine; spin wheels
carrying copper wire discs b, past magnets a,
so that magnets a induce in copper wire coils b
enough electricity to produce aforementioned gases.
Problem: professor Nolet's company embezzles.
Solution: his british colleague Holmes improves the machine.
This is a giant version of Nolet's idea carrying 96 coils,
56 magnets and weighing a colossal 3 tons.
So, by 1871, thanks to british genius,
the mighty Holmes generator was powering the world's
first fully operational lighthouse,
carrying not the limelight,
but a mysterious new source of light.
so mysterious that, problem:
it demands more power than Holmes can give.
Fortunately, solution: Holmes is already obsolete,
because of this.
One year before, a belgium carpenter Zenebe Graham
had put iron magnets a coiled with copper wire,
below and above an iron wheel,
coiled with copper wire b.
As wheel b spins, magnets a induce it
with electricity, which in turn induce
more magnetic power into magnet a,
which in turn induces more electricity in wheel b,
which etc, etc, etc, etc.
The dynamo produced enough electricity
to power the mysterious light source,
which has defeated Holmes: the arc light.
Well, enough of the theatrical stuff.
Let me tell you about the arc light,
oh, which incidentally, is that thing you've been seeing
at the beginning of every program.
It was the world's first electric light.
You ran electricity into two pointed bits of carbon;
as they almost touched, the current sparked
across the gap, and the carbon burnt.
The arc light made limelight look like a candle flame,
and in no time, it was in lighthouses
all over Europe and America.
And the crafty thing was;
the mechanism to move the carbon rods
was run by the same electricity that produced the light;
a light you could see as far as the horizon.
The arc light was as big a success in the theater
as it was in lighthouses.
It got rid of limelight, for a start.
It also did something else.
You've seen how change comes about in funny ways,
because of war, or accident or climate,
or any number of things.
Well, sometimes it also happenes
because all of the bits necessary for an invention
happen to come together,
in the same place, at the same time.
Well, the arc light turned out to be one of those bits.
And the modern invention it helped to bring into existence,
is sitting in your house right now.
The arc light was only the first bit;
the second nearly didn't happen at all,
because of THAT.
These are the docks at the quiet littlee kentish town
of Faversham, not to remain quiet for long.
Early in 1847, a local factory
had just started production of a new explosive.
It was made by soaking cotton in nitric and sulfuric acid;
a process, which the inventor assured them,
was totally without risk.
[explosions]
Everything within quarter of a mile was destroyed,
and 21 people were killed.
10 of them exploded to bits,
said the illustrated London news.
Can't have been much left to illustrate.
Well, that blew it, if you'll forgive the phrase,
for gun cotton and the search for
a bigger and better bang, for oh, almost 20 years.
And then, one day in 1863, in the United States,
there was a sudden and worrying shortage of teeth,
a particular kind of teeth, this kind.
You see, the great white hunter had been knocking off
african elephants so fast that there was now
a shortage of billiard balls,
because you get four of them from one of these.
So, there was now a $10.000 price being offered
for anybody who could come up with a substitute
for ivory billiard balls,
and yes, you've guesses it.
Gun cotton was involved again.
Mixed with camphor and alcohol, and compressed;
and the fellow who did it, was very good at pressing things,
because he was a printer from Albany, New York.
His name is John Wesley Hyatt, and you could say,
his balls went down with quite a bang.
The scene: a Colorado saloon;
enter a Hyatt billiard ball salesman.
Now, we only know of this curious event,
the only recorded failure of Hyatt's billiard balls,
because the saloon keeper wrote to the company afterwards,
to complain about what happened
the day a mysterious stranger rode into town,
and walked into his bar, carrying a funny looking case.
At first, he and his ball seemed harmless enough;
but remember the shell of the ball
was made with gun cotton, the explosive, get it?
Suddenly, it made the kind of noise you never made
in a western saloon, a noise like gunfire.
[gunfire]
Okay, so far in this final buildup
of the jigsaw of invention, we've got two bits;
the arc light and Hyatt's billiard ball
with its explosive tendencies.
The third bit comes next.
It started life originally in Vienna,
through a very odd relationship between an austrian
artillery officer, and a rather theatrical gent.
The officer was teaching ballistic theory to army cadets
in 1853, here in Vienna, at the new arsenal.
His name was Franz von Uchatius,
and he'd recently invented a thing
to help him teach students about firing guns.
It was a kind of projector using a limelight
to throw pictures of a cannon on the wall.
As he cranked the light around behind the glass disc
with the pictures on it, each successive picture
showed the ball at a different point in flight.
And why captain Uchatius matters is what happened to his projector.
It attracted the attention of one of three
greatest traveling magicians in the world,
a fellow called Ludwig Dobler.
Dobler's audiences were very excited
by his magic lantern shows,
and the new Uchatius machine was just what he needed.
So, he conned Uchatius into thinking
the whole thing was worth practically nothing,
leaving the captain happily clutching a few florins,
and Dobler happily palming a fortune,
which he made from his amazing consecutive picture shows
that soon became the rage of Europe;
and more significantly,
the west coast of the United States.
It was in California
that this guy, Eadweard Muybridge,
took the idea of consecutive pictures
one very important stage further.
See, Muybridge was an english immigrant,
photographer, and close friend
of the governor of California, who in 1872
asked him if he'd use his camera to settle a bet he had.
Muybridge agreed, and, because he was a photographer,
he took a shot of the preparation.
The experiment took place at the Union Park Race course
in Sacramento.
Did all the horses' legs come off to the ground at the gallop?
That was the question Muybridge had to settle.
So, he set up 12 cameras in a row,
pointing straight across the race track,
at interval of 21 inches, and worked by a system
thought out by a railway engineer friend of his.
Each camera was operated by a triggering device
that was activated when a piece of thread
attached to it, was jerked,
opening and closing the shutter.
The thread from each camera shutter
was stretched across the racetrack.
As the galloping horse passed, it would break the thread,
triggering the camera.
They even put numbers across the track,
to process the photographs in the right order.
As it turned out, the governor was wrong;
all four legs of the horse did leave the ground.
But this particular photography session
did something far more exciting
than just settling a bet at the racetrack.
In 1879, Muybridge putt paintings of his photographs
onto a glass disc, shone a light through it,
and then, spun the disc.
And the horse appeared to move; he calles it his zoopraxiscope.
Muybridge's zoopraxiscope
is the third bit of our jigsaw of invention.
You remember, the first two were
the arc light and Hyatt's billiard ball.
It took only one more piece, and to make up all the pieces
necessary for a major invention in the modern world.
And, here's what caused that fourth piece to happen.
If you've got single-track railways,
which they did in America,
you've got yourself a singularly difficult problem.
You have to have trains going in both directions.
That's okay, because you could put one train
on the siding while the other goes by,
if you get your timing well.
If you don't, you get trains
going in both directions, but not for long.
[loud crash]
These sudden stops stopped in 1856,
when a network of signaling stations were set up
using the recently invented morse telegraph system.
The key sent a coded electrical signal down a wire,
and when the on/off electricity got to the other end,
it turned a magnet on and off,
making a metal bar click up and down
sounding out the code.
Now, we come to the part where the jigsaw
gets put together, and that happened here
in this room in New Jersey,
in the last quarter of the 19th century;
and it was done by a man who put together
more jigsaw than anybody ever did.
A fellow called Thomas Edison.
He took the arc light idea of making it glow
by causing a spark to jump across two carbon rods
like this; then, he went through
oh, 6,000 different carbonized materials
before settling on carbonized thread,
put that thread inside a glass bulb,
and succeeded where maybe 20 people before him had failed,
because he had the one thing they didn't have:
this new german vacuum pump, which allowed him
to have an almost perfect vacuum inside his bulb.
He then ran electricity through the thread
and there, in 1879, was the world's
first commercially feasible electric light.
Now, what do you do with that?
Well, you remember Hyatt's billiard ball;
the outer shell of that was made of a material,
which an obscure clergyman called Hannibal Goodwin
turned into sheaths, and a famous businessman
called Eastman put into a camera: celluloid.
In 1886, Muybridge, remember him;
talked to Edison about his moving horse pictures
and Edison then asked Eastman if he would make him
a long strip of this celluloid: and on that,
he put a lot of pictures taken very quickly,
one after the other, just like Muybridge had done.
He also put a lot of holes on the strip,
so that he could move it because the holes
would get caught in a spinning wheel that had teeth in it.
Down there, is one of Edison's kinetoscopes
in which he put the whole thing together:
celluloid, tooth wheel in there; back here, the light source
that would later on become a light bulb,
and i don't have to tell you
what that all came together to become; roll 'em.
The trail has led us to the movies.
You remember how the cannonball changed things
in the 15th century,
causing a new kind of defensive fortification;
and how the gunners used
instruments to line up their guns -
- and when Henry the VIII closed all the monasteries
and sold the land, those same instruments
helped surveyors make maps of everywhere but Scotland.
Until Wade built his road, and they decided to map
the whole of Britain, but got nowhere in Ireland,
until William Drummond produced his new limelight;
surveyors could see from miles away.
And, how he tried it in lighthouses,
because too many ships were going down.
But the limelight needed so much gas,
Nolet and Holmes tried making it with electricity generators
that Graham improved on
enough to be able to power the arc light,
and how this arc light
was the first peice of a four-part jigsaw.
The second piece being Hyatt's billiard ball
that sometimes had explosive tendencies
in unfortunate places.
The third piece was the projector for teaching
artillery students that Dobler made famous.
And Muybridge picked up the idea to make consecutive pictures
that appeared to move when they were on film;
which leaves the fourth piece:
the morse telegraph, which I haven't explained yet.
The moving pictures, rapidly became all the rage,
as the new wonder of science kicked off
Hollywood and all that.
The only trouble with the new moving pictures was -
now, recorded sound was already around,
thanks again to Edison.
You see, early in his life,
he'd worked as a telegraph operator,
using the Morse telegraph; and he'd put together some ideas
that had already been around for sometime,
in order to make this.
It's called a repeating telegraph.
The Morse code signal comes in here;
and as it comes in, like this -
- it makes that needle go up and down,
and make indentations on that piece of paper.
When you've recorded the message,
you take the bit of paper off,
flip it over, put it on this turntable
so that the little indentations have now become little bumps,
and when you rotate this disk,
the reading head goes up and down over the bumps;
and when that happens, the up and down causes
on/off electrical contact,
and that sends the message out down the wire.
The story is, that one day Edison heard this thing
operating at high speed, and he noticed
that it made a sort of musical sound
as the reading head went over the bumps;
and it hit him that that was how Bell's telephone worked.
You spoke into a diaphragm, it vibrated,
and you could reproduce that vibration
on another diaphragm somewhere else, and make speech.
So, Edison reckoned if he could make a diaphragm vibrate,
he could make speech too.
All he had to do was to make speech into bumps first,
and here's how he did it.
He took a diaphragm, put a needle on it,
and rested the diaphragm on a strip of tin foil
wound around a metal cylinder.
As you turn the cylinder it moved along;
so doing so, he shouted at the diaphragm
as loudly as possible: mary had a little lamb,
its fleece was white as snow.
Then, he wound the cylinder back to the start point,
put the needle back in the bumpy grooves he'd just made,
and this time, when he rotated the cylinder,
what had gone in came back out.
"Mary had a little lamb, its fleece was white as snow."
They got that sound onto film, because years before,
somebody had noticed that there was a metal
called selenium that gave of electricity, if you shone a light at it.
And, the more light, the more electricity.
So, in 1923, somebody in Denmark.
got a light to flicker in response to a human voice,
and then, exposed this strip here,
down the side of the bit of film, to that flicker.
So, the light and dark patches
correspond to the changes in the voice.
Now, when you screen this bit of film,
more or less light gets through that strip,
and hits a piece of selenium,
which gives off more or less signals,
and that goes into a loud speaker,
and so, movies become talkies.
And, that takes us to the modern invention
that ends our story.
Because in 1928, a russian immigrant to America
called Vladimir Zvorykin,
took that selenium idea one stage further.
He realized that if you made a square plate,
made up od rows and rows and rows of thousands
of tiny little bits of light sensitive metal,
and pointed the plate at a scene,
each tiny bit of metal
would react to a tiny bit of the scene.
It would be like dividing a scene out,
let's say of my face, into thousands of little squares.
Each tiny bit of light sensitive metal would see
darkness or darkness, or darkness, or half light
or a lot of light or a great deal of light,
and would give off a corresponding signal;
nothing, nothing, nothing, something,
a great deal more, a lot of signal,
and so on.
Now, if you use those signals to reconstruct the picture,
line-by-line, by using a fluorescent screen
that react to the signals by producing a tiny dot of light
that was more or less bright, you'd get this.
Come a great deal closer, you'll see what I mean.
This area here, look, on your television screen;
you see all those lines of dots.
So, television is where this particular chain of events
brings us to, in the end.
Well, not quite the end.
It's ironic that the story of how television happened
should have been told here, in Edison's laboratory.
Television tells us everyday
that we live in a world we don't understand
and yet, in the main,
it does little to explain that world.
It tells us of new products that make the products
we have either old-fashioned or obsolete.
Above all, if today, we're aware of how fast
the world around us is changing, it's because television acts
as a relentless reminder of that fact.
Planned obsolescence;
the reason you buy a new model,
because they don't make last year's any more,
affects the way we get our information too.
I mean, take a look at the newspapers
and the TV programs of 20 years ago.
And, you can see how much more slick,
more brief is today's treatment of the world we see.
Communications technology has made it possible for us
to see very much more, but we still only have
the same amount of time to see it in.
So, does that fact accelerate change;
the fact that we can be more quickly saturated by an idea,
or a product, or an event.
Does this cycle that goes, interest in something,
involvement in it, tiring of it and rejecting it,
looking for something else, get shorter every decade?
That shouldn't surprize you.
Over 90% of the technologists and scientists,
and advertisers and salesmen
that have ever lived, are alive now.
And they've all got a job to do, haven't they?
I said it was ironic that we should be here,
because that overwhelming rate of change
has come dirctly from the work of Edison,
and men like him.
Edison invented inventing,
here at the world's first industrial laboratory;
and he laid down precise rules for it.
Is there a market for the invention?
Get financial backing before you start.
Publicize the whole thing in advance, so when it comes out,
the consumers are ready to pay for it.
And plough every penny and make,
back into making more inventions.
And that is how the modern world works.
So, if you believe that science and technology
have given us the highest standard of living in history,
or, that they have trapped us inside a machine
we can't escape from,
we live in a situation we inherited.
As a result of a long and complex series of events
through history, at no time in the past,
could anybody have known that what they were doing then,
would end up like this now.
So, the next and last program looks at whether or not,
we want to go on into the future like that;
and if not like that, like what?
And, I hope to show that you can only know
where you're going if you know where you've been.