This program is a double journey,
one back into history and the other across India,
looking for the origins of that feeling
you sometimes get, you know, of depression,
when you want to grab a map and find somewhere exotic, like this,
just to get away from it all.
And the extraordinary thing is,
because of the strange way history goes,
the map and the depression will come together here in India.
I suppose the best way to describe this particular holiday trip
is as a criminal, heavenly, colorful, precise,
transparent, medicinal, electrifying, but above all sentimental journey.
Here's where we start our journey:
in Vienna with Sigmund Freud.
Because if you do happen to be feeling a bit low,
he's the guy to blame,
because Vienna's where Sigmund Freud
changed the way we think about the way we think
about the way we think.
Upper-crust 19th-century Vienna was one long party.
You went from receptions to banquets to grand balls
to champagne at dawn
then got up next afternoon and did it again.
In 1882, into this nonstop insanity comes Freud,
who joins an upmarket society doctor
who's doing financially very nicely with more cases than he can handle
of the single most frequent condition
suffered by Vienna ladies: their lifestyle.
Liebchen, mein Liebchen.
Symptoms are tears, hysteria, sleepwalking,
exhaustion, and being generally, well, off-the-wall.
After a while, Freud leaves these problems for Paris
to learn the latest techniques.
Then he comes back, sets up on his own,
and starts treating his patients with a totally new kind of therapy.
At first, he gets his patients to lie down
and talk about themselves in their dreams
while he applies a little light pressure to their heads.
Then he drops the pressure thing and just lets them talk.
Seems to work.
Now, at the time, the new wonder cure is electricity.
Touching a live wire is known to make you breathless
and give you spots before the eyes.
So obviously it's doing something.
So on the basis that something is better than nothing,
which is what medicine at the time does for you,
doctors get busy shocking their patients.
One of the things Freud saw in Paris, for instance,
is still used today: electroconvulsive therapy.
Back then, nobody knew how it worked,
but that didn't seem to matter too much.
But the real cutting edge in medicine
involved something they thought was related to electricity,
something they called animal magnetism.
Look me right in the eyes, Liebchen,
right in the eyes.
If you can really tell my--
Okay, here comes the animal magnetism bit now.
Watch the eyes.
In 1776, Mesmer qualifies as a doctor,
marries a wealthy widow, becomes very fashionable
with the Viennese upper crust--
strokes his patients in darkened rooms
wearing flowing robes and a feathered hat
and has magnetic baths.
Don't laugh.
It might not have been the dawn of modern medicine,
but it was better than bloodletting and enemas, right?
Of course, Mesmer didn't just dream it all up.
This, don't forget, is the Romantic Period,
when even hard-boiled scientists believe
the earth is a giant magnet,
so there ought to be magnetic fluid around
that would, well, seep into people from bushes and trees
and generally, well, flow everywhere.
Well, fluids do flow, don't they?
And, of course, this magic fluid is also invisible.
Well, it would have to be, given that you can't see it.
These dancing Indian gods would really have turned on
the next characters in our historical journey,
because they were a couple of doctors
who believed that the invisible fluid
ran around your body in tubes
and worked all the different bits of you,
no matter how many bits you had.
These two guys, Gall and Spurzheim,
believed that the vital fluid had to originate in the brain.
Where else?
And since the brain was obviously controlling
many different parts of you, it had to be able
to do many different jobs.
So maybe there were many different control centers
up there in your head.
This idea went over very big with some very big people,
including, among others, the lady controlling this place at the time.
Victorian England was like one of those wild west film towns.
It only looked good from the front.
Behind all these posh facades,
the place was on the edge of revolution.
The rich were rolling in it, and the poor were starving.
Gall and Spurzheim offered their amazing new social science
of phrenology.
The bumps on your head covered your control centers,
so they were a guide to your character--
useful when it came to self-improvement for the poor.
And then phrenology was to take a turn for the criminal.
As the material wealth of industrial manufacturing society
left more and more goodies lying around,
more and more criminals started helping themselves.
In 1839, this rising crime rate spurred the invention of the cops,
who promptly caught the robbers and started putting them away for good
in places that can best be described
as shut-'em-up-and-forget-'em hell holes--
until this: Pentonville Prison, London,
one of the new-look reformatory prisons
first started in England and the U.S.
called a panoptican, because, as you can see,
you can see every prisoner cell at a glance
because of the layout.
the cell blocks radiate out from a central control room.
So now with this new open plan stuff,
you could bring some enlightenment to p-nology.
You could call it p-nology for a start.
So now the phrenological social reformers
could actually study the bumps on criminal heads, close up,
in large numbers--
and under completely controlled conditions.
Well, they are, aren't they?
Now, by this time, Darwin was coming up
with all his stuff about human beings
being distantly descended from the apes.
Well, according to one Italian phrenology freak called Lombroso,
in the case of criminals "distantly" was hardly the word.
Lombroso was convinced criminals were a good deal closer to apes
than law-abiding folk.
So he went around the prisons and measured 9,000 convict heads
and announced you could identify villains
because they looked like throwbacks to the apes.
In fact, that's when the idea of throwbacks started.
Criminals had great big ears.
They also had very broad sinuses.
Another crooked characteristic was heavy jaws.
They had broad cheekbones and above all sloping foreheads.
So maybe you could finger a criminal
before he committed the crime.
And then into Lombroso's lab came a guy
who was to knock phrenology right on the head,
because he decided to dig down under the bumps
to see what was really there.
His name was Golgi,
and I'm going to show you an amazing picture he took.
Golgi left a slice of brain for several hours
in a solution of silver nitrate.
Because if there was anything there, the nitrate would stain it,
and then, just like photographs did,
the stain would show up when you develop the picture.
Here it comes now,
because what you're looking at is what Golgi found
under the bumps inside the brain:
brain cells.
Golgi's amazing pictures gave us neurophysiology
as we know and love it today.
So if you're ever in for a brain op, thank Golgi.
And just as my Indian journey has brought me
to this colorful cloth market, the program takes a turn for the blue,
because Golgi got his brain stain ideas
from a German who changed the world with this color--
and got himself in deep trouble with some rather orthodox types
here in Moscow.
His name was Paul Ehrlich,
and he was a colorful medical research type
whose work ran him up against the Russian Orthodox Church.
See, Golgi's basic idea of staining tissue
had come from Ehrlich when he'd accidentally dropped
some new synthetic blue dye on one of his tissue cultures
and discovered it stained only the bacteria in the culture.
Over the next few years, this amazing technique
made it possible to identify
virtually all the killer bacteria
causing epidemics: cholera, T.B., gonorrhea.
Ehrlich found that some of his dyes would actually kill specific bugs
without harming the rest of the patient's body.
We call the technique chemotherapy.
And the first of these new wonder drugs
Ehrlich was to produce was called salvarsan.
It cured syphilis.
Sounds great to you and me--
caused an almighty row with the synod
of the Russian Orthodox Church,
who reckoned that syphilis was heavenly punishment
for doing what you weren't supposed to
and as such shouldn't be cured by any medicine,
thank you very much--
none of which cramped Ehrlich's style.
Chemotherapy went on to become the answer to many a prayer.
Now, the English had invented the first artificial dye,
but they'd done nothing about it,
because their idea of a good education
was giving civil servants a background in Latin literature
so they could run India and the rest of the empire,
not teaching them stuff like chemistry.
That was strictly for the lower classes,
not really the kind of thing a gentleman did.
The Germans weren't that stupid,
which is why Germany was so full of chemists,
one of whom, a fellow called Caro,
was to come up with the next synthetic dye,
the one that Ehrlich would use.
And he was to do it in the lab of a chap
who would make every school kid's chemistry lessons hell ever since
here in Heidelberg.
Back in 1855, a guy called Bunsen
came up with a hot new gizmo called the Bunsen burner.
He'd been looking at ways to save fuel in iron foundries,
where a whole lot of unburnt coal gas
was going up the chimneys.
And he found you could get a much hotter flame from the gas
and because of that use the gas a lot more efficiently--
and because of that save a lot of money--
if you mixed air with the gas before you burned it.
If you did that, you also got a clear, nonluminous flame
that was free of impurities,
which meant that if you wanted to take a close look
at how some material behaved when you burned it,
you could be sure that all you'd be looking at in the flame
was what you were burning.
Bunsen's sidekick, Kirchoff,
discovered that if you shone light through the burning stuff in the flame,
the flame would absorb the wavelengths in the light
that matched the wavelengths of the burning stuff.
If you then looked at the light through a prism,
you'd see a spectrum.
And at the missing wavelength where that matching
between light and burning material happened,
you'd get a line.
And you could work out from the position of the line
on the spectrum what the burning stuff was.
Kirchoff called this trick spectroscopy.
Now, Kirchoff had heard of these mysterious lines before
thanks to what happened to a bit of a loser
called Fraunhofer, who lived near Heidelberg
and who had a weird obsession.
He wanted to make the world's most perfect glass.
In 181 4, he was looking through a bit of glass
at some fine spectrum lines to spot if the glass
had the slightest imperfection.
At one point, when he was obsessively
triple-checking some stuff by looking through it--
and a spectrum and a telescope--
at the very intense light of the sun,
he saw more of those lines.
So he took a look at the other lights in the sky.
By the time he'd checked all the planets and the stars,
Fraunhofer had identified no fewer than 57 4
of what are now known as Fraunhofer lines.
Now, since all our old friend, Fraunhofer,
really cared about was his glass obsession--
he could have cared less about why the lines were there--
he kept his glassmaking stuff secret,
but he published a bit about the lines,
hence 50 years later Kirchoff and Bunsen
doing their thing.
Poor old Fraunhofer did make his mark in the end, though--
ironically, since I'm in such a heavenly Indian spot,
'cause he did it in astronomy with perfect glass lenses
that allowed astronomers to see deep into outer space
for the first time ever.
What kind of lenses they were,
that's the next stage of our journey, which takes us back again to London.
This is an 18th-century astronomer
looking a long way-- the only way back then--
with thin lenses.
Glass was so bad you went for thinness to avoid defects.
But thin lenses meant long focal lengths,
which meant long telescopes.
Shorter telescopes meant thick lenses--
and lousy focus and color fringes and a lot of interference.
Then in 1758 and Englishman called Dolland
put two different shapes of lenses together
and solved the problem.
A convex lens at one end cancelled out the defects
of a concave lens at the other.
Now you could make telescopes as short as you wanted,
like the kind needed by the fellow
who married Dolland's daughter: Jesse Ramsden.
In 1788, Ramsden came up with an amazing new way
to point telescopes better than ever before.
Ramsden had come up with a way
to make incredibly precise scale markings on the sextants,
which was great.
'Cause if you got a star fix one degree wrong,
you were 15 miles off course.
So anybody who wanted to point anything
with great precision went crazy for Ramsden's ability
to deal with these fiddly bits.
I mean, look at the scale of this scale.
Ramsden did that with a tiny tangent screw
set at an angle to the metal plate.
You'd turn the screw, and you can move the metal plate
by fractions of an inch,
so you can mark your scale with extreme precision
on sextants for sailors, telescopes for astronomers,
and theodolites like this for people like that.
And it was in 1847 when they were surveying
their way east on the final stretch
out along the hills towards the plain of the Ganges
that they saw for the first time the amazing Himalayas.
And being intrepid surveyors, they measured them
with their Ramsden theodolites,
because you can triangle heights as well as distances.
One of the mountains in their sights was unbelievable.
They were so impressed, they named the mountain
after the boss of the whole India survey:
George Everest.
Well, that's it.
Our journey ends here at the foot of the Himalayas
in Everest's headquarters,
among the decaying Victorian splendors
of the hill station of Mussoorie,
pinpointed on this modern map
made possible by all that early survey work.
So thanks to that original feeling that I had--
that maybe I was a bit depressed, needed to get away from it all--
thanks to Freud and phrenology, criminals and brain research,
bug hunting and tissue staining, Bunsen and spectroscopy,
astronomers and theodolites...
I have the map I needed to get away from it all.
So I will.