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Welcome to the annual 24-hour race
at the Le Mans Circuit in France.

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This program is about

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how one of the strange ways
history connects things

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is going to affect the way
this race will end

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24 hours from now.

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Because every year at Le Mans,

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the winner gets his picture taken
as he crosses the line.

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And because of the weird way history
has of turning things on their heads,

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that's why he's going to win.

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The winner is photographed winning,
because he's photographed winning.

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So in more senses than one,
when this is all over,

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it's going to be a photo finish.

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100 years ago,

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the race to put photography
into everybody's hands

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got off to a rough start:

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the bucket of chemicals you needed
to develop your holiday snaps,

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that tore when you tried
to get them off the developer.

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Then came a breakthrough:

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a guy called George Eastman
put film emulsion

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on some flexible stuff
that had just been invented in 1895.

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Eastman then packaged
this flexible stuff into rolls

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that you could easily load
into his new pocket camera,

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that would revolutionize
the business of holiday snaps,

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called "The Kodak."

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And by the strangest coincidence,

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the clue to where
that new flexible stuff came from

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is in one of the first pictures
shot with it

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during a different kind of shoot.

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Now, all those Eastman photos

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of all those great white hunters
up the jungle were only possible

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because of what
the great white hunters

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were doing up the jungle:

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causing the Great Disappearing
Elephant Scare of 1867.

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The reason:
the market for ivory.

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It had tripled
in the previous 30 years.

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England alone took
1 million pounds of ivory a year.

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Work it out--

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60 pounds a tusk,
2 tusks an animal,

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that's 8,333 and a bit
dead elephants a year

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for England for fun.

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This kind of fun.

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Now, a good billiard ball
was hard to find.

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You had to knock off
quite a few elephants

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to get the right stuff.

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Because a really good ball

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came from the centerline
of a perfect elephant tusk.

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So the news out of Africa

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was not good for playboys
of the Western world,

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never mind the elephants.

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Then, in 1869, a couple of printers
from Albany, New York, called Hyatt

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came up with a substitute.

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It was cheap,

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it was indistinguishable
from the original,

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and it eventually
got used for this,

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because the ivory substitute
was celluloid.

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One other celluloid product
will give you a clue

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as to where it came from.

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The Hyatts also manufactured
celluloid false teeth,

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which, on occasion, as per
the "New York Times" of 1875,

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tended to explode.

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What was causing all the bangs
and which, when heated, squeezed,

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and mixed with camphor,

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turned into celluloid,
was guncotton,

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specially treated cotton that
made really good explosions--

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in the late 19th century,

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the new way to get more bang
for your buck.

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So, from then on,
a lot more shooting went on.

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Now, it was a well-known mystery
at the time

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that for those few
a bullet just missed,

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you had two bangs:

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one, the gun firing,

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the other--well, nobody knew.

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So a Viennese gent called
Ernst Mach decided to find out.

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He used the way

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turbulent air affects any light
shining through it

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to photograph a bullet
in a high-speed air stream,

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and he saw
what looked like a bow wave

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coming off the bullet's nose.

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Mach worked out
that this shock wave

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propagated outwards
faster than the speed of sound,

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so the first bang you heard
was the sound of a shock wave;

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the second was
the sound of the gun.

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Two big deal things came out
of Mach's amazing pictures.

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The first was the modern science
of aerodynamics,

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without which these cars
wouldn't look the way they do,

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move the way they do,

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maybe even stay on the track
the way they do.

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The second was noisier
even than this place,

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because once Mach
had a photograph of shock waves,

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he could look
at how explosives happen,

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how the shock wave propagates,
how the force is shaped,

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which meant, of course,

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that you could now,
for the first time,

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plan an efficient explosion.

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Mach's shock wave mathematics
helped make the atom bomb work.

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Now, the reason Mach
had photographed shock waves

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was so he could see them.

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"Physical evidence was the only
reality you could trust," he said.

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And even then,
the way you described experience

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would still be relative to the context
you were in at the time.

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So a 24-hour race
would really only be a reference

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to what time meant
on this planet,

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spinning on this axis,
during this sunset.

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Elsewhere, who knows?

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So even time and space
would be constrained

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by your perception of it.

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You see what Mach was getting at,

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if you take that kind of look
at what's happening here.

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Oh, and I'm presuming
you're not a racing driver.

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What I want to try and show you

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is how this looks relative
to different experience.

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A pit stop and a wheel change
is, for a professional driver,

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the slowest thing
that happens at Le Mans.

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But, if you were doing this,

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the whole thing would be
just a blur of activity.

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It was for me, filming this
in the pits for the first time.

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What seems to be happening
is that you and I

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are processing the data
coming in from this experience

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the only way we can:

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based on our normal modes
of operation,

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which affect how we perceive

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the business
of traveling on a racetrack

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at up to 150 miles an hour.

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We get overload.

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Everything's coming
too fast at you to process,

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and on top of it all,
you're doing it in the dark.

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So basically, you perceive
everything happening

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faster than it really is.

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But for the professional racing driver,
the effect is exactly the opposite.

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Distance measurement
becomes extremely precise.

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Car in front.
Car in front.

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Turn left.

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Turn left again.

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Now turn right.

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Time appears
to slow down.

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He sees things we wouldn't.

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This is a world as perceived
by the professional driver

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relative to his experience
in races.

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Well, it's 3:30
in the morning here,

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and they've been at it
for nearly 12 hours.

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Meanwhile, I presume
all this talk about relativity

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means you know who is about
to pick up on Mach's idea

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that there was no such thing
as absolute space and time

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that would be the same
for everybody

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everywhere in the universe.

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He was a chap
who would have said

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that as these car drivers
went faster and faster,

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time for them
really did slow down:

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Einstein, thanks to whom
you can hear all this stuff.

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Because in 1900,

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he heard about sunlight falling
on a new metal called selenium

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and making it give off electrons--
that is, electricity--

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as if the sunlight

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were knocking the electrons out
of the selenium,

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which is basically how modern
solar energy systems work.

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But back in 1900, light wasn't
supposed to be able to do that,

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because light was a wave,
everybody thought--

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till Einstein.

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Light, he said,
blowing physics apart,

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was a wave and a particle.

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Einstein used to explain

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to people who didn't
understand relativity and such--

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most of us--
thank you--

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that light could be
both waves and particles

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the same way that beer could be
both beer and pints.

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Now, whether or not that observation
leads you to a closer understanding

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of the duel nature of light,
I won't presume to ask,

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but it was good enough for Einstein.

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There was, however, at the time,

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one bunch of people
who got very worked up

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at this discovery that light
could behave like particles,

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but they weren't exactly physicists.

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They were the kind of people

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who'd been turning up
to the party at Le Mans

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or the PGA or the Oscars
or whatever since the 1920s:

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celebrities--
Hollywood people.

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But it wasn't the duel nature
of light that turned them on,

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but because the way selenium
made electricity from light

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meant only one thing:

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Well, what are we waiting for?

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Waiting for sound.

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I haven't a lot of time
waiting for you.

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Come on, sound.

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Yes, sound on film.

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Because if selenium were exposed
to a varying light

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produced by a varying current,

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produced
by a microphone membrane

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vibrating from a sound
going up and down,

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then the varying light could
expose film negative varyingly,

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like this, making
a sound track on the film.

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When you projected the movie,

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light shining
on the sound track down the side

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came through the pattern
in varying amounts.

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That varying light hit more selenium
that generated varying current

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that ended up vibrating
the membrane on a loudspeaker

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to reproduce the original sound.

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Hooray for Hollywood?
Wrong.

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Listen.

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There still wasn't enough sound
for a cinema audience to hear

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until an accident happened

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that gave a chap called
Lee de Forest an idea.

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Here's a vacuum tube
with a filament down this end

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and a positive base plate
at the other.

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Electricity will make the filament
give off negative electrons

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that'll be attracted to
the positive base plate, okay?

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Now, remember that weak signal
too small to hear on the film?

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You want to boost it,

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00:11:06,459 --> 00:11:09,553
so you put
a negatively charged grid in.

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00:11:09,695 --> 00:11:13,358
This'll repel
the negative filament electrons.

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But through that top wire,

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a varyingly positive input
coming onto the grid

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will make the grid
varyingly positive,

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00:11:20,339 --> 00:11:22,933
attracting the electrons
from the filament in surges

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00:11:23,075 --> 00:11:24,770
through to the base plate.

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Those surges are
a boosted reproduction

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of your input signal.

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But you ought to see clearly
on Sunday.

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Thanks to that accident
I mentioned, and Lee de Forest,

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you could hear all
the Hollywood stars on the movies,

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or your grandmother
long distance

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now phone signals
could be amplified too,

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00:11:44,730 --> 00:11:48,666
or big band swing on the radio
for the same reason

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00:11:48,801 --> 00:11:51,065
because radio signals
got amplified too--

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which was also the same reason

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you can hear what
I'm saying now, too, of course.

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00:12:04,650 --> 00:12:07,312
Lee de Forest's
Audion signal booster

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made possible
contact between people

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00:12:09,522 --> 00:12:11,285
no matter how far apart they were.

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00:12:11,423 --> 00:12:16,656
At first, with wireless and cable,
and then, finally, all this:

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the incredible shrinking world
of TV and satellite communications.

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00:12:20,466 --> 00:12:22,400
Instant Le Mans all over the planet.

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Thanks to Lee de Forest,
it's a very talkative world.

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Do you remember I said
the de Forest invention

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happened because of an accident?

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The strange thing is, the accident
didn't happen to de Forest.

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It had happened to Thomas Edison.

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Back in 1883,
he was playing around

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00:12:39,385 --> 00:12:41,148
with the invention
he'd just come up with,

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his light bulb,

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when he saw
smutty carbon deposits

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all round the bottom of the bulb

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where he'd sealed it
with a small metal base plate.

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With typical modesty,

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00:12:51,130 --> 00:12:54,998
Edison called this strange
phenomenon "The Edison Effect"

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00:12:55,134 --> 00:12:58,661
and added it to his growing list
of patents and forgot it.

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00:13:01,807 --> 00:13:05,072
By this time, of course,
Edison was already world famous

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00:13:05,211 --> 00:13:07,008
for all the inventions
he'd thought up

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00:13:07,146 --> 00:13:09,808
while he was working
on the railroads--

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00:13:09,949 --> 00:13:12,816
railroads that he'd helped
to make so successful,

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00:13:12,952 --> 00:13:16,513
they were about to trigger
the first American ecocrisis.

251
00:13:21,827 --> 00:13:24,295
And you don't have to look
very hard at this picture

252
00:13:24,430 --> 00:13:27,365
to see what kind of crisis
I'm talking about.

253
00:13:35,541 --> 00:13:39,375
You see, back in the 19th century,
America was made of wood.

254
00:13:39,511 --> 00:13:41,706
And with the whole
of the country still to open up,

255
00:13:41,847 --> 00:13:44,680
it was a case of "plenty more
where that came from."

256
00:13:44,817 --> 00:13:48,981
But although it takes
a good few years to grow a tree,

257
00:13:49,121 --> 00:13:51,817
it doesn't take very long
to do this to it.

258
00:14:01,600 --> 00:14:04,660
Unlike the people
in the lumber business today,

259
00:14:04,803 --> 00:14:07,533
back then, nobody'd ever heard
of sustainability.

260
00:14:07,673 --> 00:14:08,935
Why should they have?

261
00:14:09,074 --> 00:14:12,373
Well, thanks to the railroads,
they were about to.

262
00:14:14,280 --> 00:14:16,510
The problem is really
very simple:

263
00:14:16,649 --> 00:14:18,913
the wooden bits
holding the rails together.

264
00:14:19,051 --> 00:14:22,316
No big deal, I suppose,
if you just say it like that.

265
00:14:22,454 --> 00:14:24,547
But think about
what was happening to railroads

266
00:14:24,690 --> 00:14:26,920
by Edison's time in 1890:

267
00:14:27,059 --> 00:14:32,224
they were expanding like crazy:
ten new miles of track a day

268
00:14:32,364 --> 00:14:36,562
Now, ten miles of track
takes 20,000 wooden ties.

269
00:14:36,702 --> 00:14:40,069
That's 500 trees a day.

270
00:14:43,208 --> 00:14:45,608
And that's not counting
the wood for wagons

271
00:14:45,744 --> 00:14:47,268
and workers' accommodations,

272
00:14:47,413 --> 00:14:50,405
the wooden towns that mushroomed
alongside the railroads,

273
00:14:50,549 --> 00:14:52,949
the wooden fuel
the locomotives used,

274
00:14:53,085 --> 00:14:54,313
and the bridges,

275
00:14:54,453 --> 00:14:56,512
one of which could take
1 million feet of timber.

276
00:14:56,655 --> 00:14:58,350
And then there were
the telegraph poles.

277
00:14:58,490 --> 00:14:59,650
They made a fortune

278
00:14:59,792 --> 00:15:02,124
for the fellow who got
the contract from Western Union

279
00:15:02,261 --> 00:15:05,458
to put them up alongside
every railroad track in America.

280
00:15:05,597 --> 00:15:07,497
I give up
on how many trees that took,

281
00:15:07,633 --> 00:15:09,362
but it made him a lot of money.

282
00:15:09,501 --> 00:15:13,437
Enough to found a university
and end up naming it after himself:

283
00:15:15,441 --> 00:15:17,033
Cornell.

284
00:15:20,379 --> 00:15:22,939
So the railroads
used up a lot of wood,

285
00:15:23,082 --> 00:15:24,515
but back then,
America had plenty,

286
00:15:24,650 --> 00:15:25,617
so who cared?

287
00:15:27,086 --> 00:15:30,578
True, but since the average bit
of lumber left out in the open

288
00:15:30,723 --> 00:15:34,250
lasts about seven years
and then needs to be replaced--

289
00:15:34,393 --> 00:15:36,020
well, you get the point.

290
00:15:36,161 --> 00:15:38,789
Maybe there were going to be
railroads all over America,

291
00:15:38,931 --> 00:15:41,365
but maybe there weren't
going to be any trees.

292
00:15:41,500 --> 00:15:44,264
And then, at a stroke,
America was saved.

293
00:15:50,142 --> 00:15:52,337
by gaslight:

294
00:15:52,478 --> 00:15:55,038
burning the gas you got
by cooking coal.

295
00:15:55,180 --> 00:15:59,947
By the 1830s,
gaslight was all the rage.

296
00:16:00,085 --> 00:16:04,419
Underneath the gaslight's glitter

297
00:16:04,556 --> 00:16:08,686
stands a little fragile girl

298
00:16:08,827 --> 00:16:13,127
heedless of the night winds bitter

299
00:16:13,265 --> 00:16:17,793
as they round her bitter whirl.

300
00:16:17,936 --> 00:16:20,427
Gaslight changed everybody's life.

301
00:16:20,572 --> 00:16:23,700
People started going out
in the evenings for the first time:

302
00:16:23,842 --> 00:16:26,140
to the new night shift work
at the factories,

303
00:16:26,278 --> 00:16:28,576
evening classes,
gentlemen's clubs.

304
00:16:28,714 --> 00:16:31,808
Above all, to the excitement
and bright lights

305
00:16:31,950 --> 00:16:35,545
of the new, rave
musical shows like this one.

306
00:16:35,687 --> 00:16:39,453
There are many sad and weary

307
00:16:39,591 --> 00:16:43,960
in this pleasant world of ours,

308
00:16:44,096 --> 00:16:48,192
crying every night so dreary,

309
00:16:48,333 --> 00:16:52,793
"Won't you buy my pretty flowers?"

310
00:16:52,938 --> 00:16:56,738
Now, the trouble with gaslight
was the by-product:

311
00:16:56,875 --> 00:17:00,436
coal tar, a black,
foul-smelling muck,

312
00:17:00,579 --> 00:17:02,444
and an ecocrisis
waiting to happen,

313
00:17:02,581 --> 00:17:04,845
because all they did was
chuck it in the nearest river

314
00:17:04,983 --> 00:17:07,850
and get back
to morally uplifting songs.

315
00:17:10,255 --> 00:17:12,587
Then German chemists
with a recycling turn of mind

316
00:17:12,724 --> 00:17:14,157
started distilling the black muck

317
00:17:14,293 --> 00:17:16,284
and got all sorts
of amazing things--

318
00:17:16,428 --> 00:17:19,363
brilliant artificial dyes,
chemicals to make aspirin,

319
00:17:19,498 --> 00:17:23,935
and something that would preserve
wooden railroad ties for 30 years

320
00:17:24,069 --> 00:17:26,833
and save America
from that ecocrisis--

321
00:17:26,972 --> 00:17:28,530
creosote.

322
00:17:28,674 --> 00:17:32,735
There are many sad and weary

323
00:17:32,878 --> 00:17:37,474
in this pleasant world of ours,

324
00:17:37,616 --> 00:17:41,416
crying every night so dreary,

325
00:17:41,553 --> 00:17:47,116
"Won't you buy my pretty flowers?"

326
00:17:55,567 --> 00:18:00,630
Meanwhile, you'll be riveted to know
that the coal tar story continues.

327
00:18:00,772 --> 00:18:02,603
I'll just wait till I'm on the ground.

328
00:18:06,044 --> 00:18:07,807
It's an extraordinary turn of fate

329
00:18:07,946 --> 00:18:09,914
that even while German interest
in coal tar

330
00:18:10,048 --> 00:18:12,915
was saving the railroads with creosote,

331
00:18:13,051 --> 00:18:15,815
that same interest would soon
ruin the railroads,

332
00:18:15,954 --> 00:18:18,286
thanks to war and the weather.

333
00:18:22,895 --> 00:18:24,556
First, the weather:

334
00:18:24,696 --> 00:18:26,425
it rains a lot in Britain,

335
00:18:26,565 --> 00:18:28,624
so in the early part
of the 19th century,

336
00:18:28,767 --> 00:18:30,667
when a Scotsman
called Macintosh discovered

337
00:18:30,802 --> 00:18:34,704
that another by-product
of coal tar, called naphtha,

338
00:18:34,840 --> 00:18:36,774
would turn rubber
into a solution,

339
00:18:36,909 --> 00:18:39,241
he knew he was going to be rich.

340
00:18:39,378 --> 00:18:42,677
Because when he spread the rubber
between two sheets of cotton,

341
00:18:42,814 --> 00:18:44,406
he produced
the waterproof raincoat

342
00:18:44,550 --> 00:18:46,848
we still call macintosh today.

343
00:18:46,985 --> 00:18:51,547
So in 1854, the Crimean war
and all those wet troops,

344
00:18:51,690 --> 00:18:53,453
made Macintosh a million,

345
00:18:53,592 --> 00:18:57,824
in spite of the fact that
in summer heat, his coats stank,

346
00:18:57,963 --> 00:19:00,830
and in winter ice, they cracked.

347
00:19:03,168 --> 00:19:05,136
And the reason
for this Goodyear Blimp

348
00:19:05,270 --> 00:19:07,966
is because that's who solved
Macintosh's problem.

349
00:19:08,106 --> 00:19:09,835
Because by that time,

350
00:19:09,975 --> 00:19:13,706
Charles Goodyear's amazing new
vulcanized rubber was available,

351
00:19:13,845 --> 00:19:16,143
thanks to another accident
Goodyear had

352
00:19:16,281 --> 00:19:19,773
when he dropped some rubber
mixed with sulfur onto a hot stove,

353
00:19:19,918 --> 00:19:22,648
and out came a new rubber
that was perfect for Macintosh

354
00:19:22,788 --> 00:19:25,382
and for groundsheet for troops
in the Civil War,

355
00:19:25,524 --> 00:19:29,255
which turned rubber manufacture
into really big business.

356
00:19:29,394 --> 00:19:31,521
And speaking of civil wars,

357
00:19:31,663 --> 00:19:34,962
in 1863, a German military type
was sent to America

358
00:19:35,100 --> 00:19:37,591
to observe the use of balloons
by the Northern army.

359
00:19:37,736 --> 00:19:39,067
And he got so excited,

360
00:19:39,204 --> 00:19:41,365
he went home and invented
a kind of balloon

361
00:19:41,506 --> 00:19:42,939
that would bring airborne warfare

362
00:19:43,075 --> 00:19:45,942
to civilian populations
for the first time.

363
00:19:46,078 --> 00:19:47,602
He named the airship
after himself--

364
00:19:47,746 --> 00:19:49,077
the Zeppelin--

365
00:19:49,214 --> 00:19:52,206
its propellors driven
by the new gasoline engines

366
00:19:52,351 --> 00:19:54,683
that would also fit
into another invention

367
00:19:54,820 --> 00:19:57,288
that would one day
eventually ruin the railroads

368
00:19:57,422 --> 00:20:00,983
and make possible
the 24-hour race at Le Mans:

369
00:20:02,361 --> 00:20:03,521
the automobile.

370
00:20:05,564 --> 00:20:07,896
One last twist:
You remember coal tar?

371
00:20:08,033 --> 00:20:11,901
Well, one of its by-products
was a synthetic dye called aniline.

372
00:20:12,037 --> 00:20:13,937
Turned out,
if you added aniline to rubber,

373
00:20:14,072 --> 00:20:16,700
it speeded up the vulcanizing
process for tires

374
00:20:16,842 --> 00:20:19,572
and made the tire
immensely more hard-wearing.

375
00:20:26,518 --> 00:20:27,746
Hard-wearing enough

376
00:20:27,886 --> 00:20:30,650
to handle the 24 hours
of punishment it has to take

377
00:20:30,789 --> 00:20:34,452
on the car that crosses
the finishing line first.

378
00:20:51,109 --> 00:20:52,736
Well, there you have it.

379
00:20:52,878 --> 00:20:55,312
The end of another Le Mans,
and the end of another program.

380
00:20:55,447 --> 00:20:56,812
And as I promised,

381
00:20:56,948 --> 00:21:00,179
thanks to the strange historical
pathway that linked tires

382
00:21:00,319 --> 00:21:02,446
back through gaslight, railroads,

383
00:21:02,587 --> 00:21:06,387
relativity, and bullets
to celluloid here at Le Mans,

384
00:21:06,525 --> 00:21:09,289
where I took
all these happy snaps.

385
00:21:09,428 --> 00:21:13,524
The winner is photographed winning,
because he's photographed winning.

386
00:21:13,665 --> 00:21:15,724
That's what I thought I said.