Welcome to the annual 24-hour race at the Le Mans Circuit in France.
This program is about
how one of the strange ways history connects things
is going to affect the way this race will end
24 hours from now.
Because every year at Le Mans,
the winner gets his picture taken as he crosses the line.
And because of the weird way history has of turning things on their heads,
that's why he's going to win.
The winner is photographed winning, because he's photographed winning.
So in more senses than one, when this is all over,
it's going to be a photo finish.
100 years ago,
the race to put photography into everybody's hands
got off to a rough start:
the bucket of chemicals you needed to develop your holiday snaps,
that tore when you tried to get them off the developer.
Then came a breakthrough:
a guy called George Eastman put film emulsion
on some flexible stuff that had just been invented in 1895.
Eastman then packaged this flexible stuff into rolls
that you could easily load into his new pocket camera,
that would revolutionize the business of holiday snaps,
called "The Kodak."
And by the strangest coincidence,
the clue to where that new flexible stuff came from
is in one of the first pictures shot with it
during a different kind of shoot.
Now, all those Eastman photos
of all those great white hunters up the jungle were only possible
because of what the great white hunters
were doing up the jungle:
causing the Great Disappearing Elephant Scare of 1867.
The reason: the market for ivory.
It had tripled in the previous 30 years.
England alone took 1 million pounds of ivory a year.
Work it out--
60 pounds a tusk, 2 tusks an animal,
that's 8,333 and a bit dead elephants a year
for England for fun.
This kind of fun.
Now, a good billiard ball was hard to find.
You had to knock off quite a few elephants
to get the right stuff.
Because a really good ball
came from the centerline of a perfect elephant tusk.
So the news out of Africa
was not good for playboys of the Western world,
never mind the elephants.
Then, in 1869, a couple of printers from Albany, New York, called Hyatt
came up with a substitute.
It was cheap,
it was indistinguishable from the original,
and it eventually got used for this,
because the ivory substitute was celluloid.
One other celluloid product will give you a clue
as to where it came from.
The Hyatts also manufactured celluloid false teeth,
which, on occasion, as per the "New York Times" of 1875,
tended to explode.
What was causing all the bangs and which, when heated, squeezed,
and mixed with camphor,
turned into celluloid, was guncotton,
specially treated cotton that made really good explosions--
in the late 19th century,
the new way to get more bang for your buck.
So, from then on, a lot more shooting went on.
Now, it was a well-known mystery at the time
that for those few a bullet just missed,
you had two bangs:
one, the gun firing,
the other--well, nobody knew.
So a Viennese gent called Ernst Mach decided to find out.
He used the way
turbulent air affects any light shining through it
to photograph a bullet in a high-speed air stream,
and he saw what looked like a bow wave
coming off the bullet's nose.
Mach worked out that this shock wave
propagated outwards faster than the speed of sound,
so the first bang you heard was the sound of a shock wave;
the second was the sound of the gun.
Two big deal things came out of Mach's amazing pictures.
The first was the modern science of aerodynamics,
without which these cars wouldn't look the way they do,
move the way they do,
maybe even stay on the track the way they do.
The second was noisier even than this place,
because once Mach had a photograph of shock waves,
he could look at how explosives happen,
how the shock wave propagates, how the force is shaped,
which meant, of course,
that you could now, for the first time,
plan an efficient explosion.
Mach's shock wave mathematics helped make the atom bomb work.
Now, the reason Mach had photographed shock waves
was so he could see them.
"Physical evidence was the only reality you could trust," he said.
And even then, the way you described experience
would still be relative to the context you were in at the time.
So a 24-hour race would really only be a reference
to what time meant on this planet,
spinning on this axis, during this sunset.
Elsewhere, who knows?
So even time and space would be constrained
by your perception of it.
You see what Mach was getting at,
if you take that kind of look at what's happening here.
Oh, and I'm presuming you're not a racing driver.
What I want to try and show you
is how this looks relative to different experience.
A pit stop and a wheel change is, for a professional driver,
the slowest thing that happens at Le Mans.
But, if you were doing this,
the whole thing would be just a blur of activity.
It was for me, filming this in the pits for the first time.
What seems to be happening is that you and I
are processing the data coming in from this experience
the only way we can:
based on our normal modes of operation,
which affect how we perceive
the business of traveling on a racetrack
at up to 150 miles an hour.
We get overload.
Everything's coming too fast at you to process,
and on top of it all, you're doing it in the dark.
So basically, you perceive everything happening
faster than it really is.
But for the professional racing driver, the effect is exactly the opposite.
Distance measurement becomes extremely precise.
Car in front. Car in front.
Turn left.
Turn left again.
Now turn right.
Time appears to slow down.
He sees things we wouldn't.
This is a world as perceived by the professional driver
relative to his experience in races.
Well, it's 3:30 in the morning here,
and they've been at it for nearly 12 hours.
Meanwhile, I presume all this talk about relativity
means you know who is about to pick up on Mach's idea
that there was no such thing as absolute space and time
that would be the same for everybody
everywhere in the universe.
He was a chap who would have said
that as these car drivers went faster and faster,
time for them really did slow down:
Einstein, thanks to whom you can hear all this stuff.
Because in 1900,
he heard about sunlight falling on a new metal called selenium
and making it give off electrons-- that is, electricity--
as if the sunlight
were knocking the electrons out of the selenium,
which is basically how modern solar energy systems work.
But back in 1900, light wasn't supposed to be able to do that,
because light was a wave, everybody thought--
till Einstein.
Light, he said, blowing physics apart,
was a wave and a particle.
Einstein used to explain
to people who didn't understand relativity and such--
most of us-- thank you--
that light could be both waves and particles
the same way that beer could be both beer and pints.
Now, whether or not that observation leads you to a closer understanding
of the duel nature of light, I won't presume to ask,
but it was good enough for Einstein.
There was, however, at the time,
one bunch of people who got very worked up
at this discovery that light could behave like particles,
but they weren't exactly physicists.
They were the kind of people
who'd been turning up to the party at Le Mans
or the PGA or the Oscars or whatever since the 1920s:
celebrities-- Hollywood people.
But it wasn't the duel nature of light that turned them on,
but because the way selenium made electricity from light
meant only one thing:
Well, what are we waiting for?
Waiting for sound.
I haven't a lot of time waiting for you.
Come on, sound.
Yes, sound on film.
Because if selenium were exposed to a varying light
produced by a varying current,
produced by a microphone membrane
vibrating from a sound going up and down,
then the varying light could expose film negative varyingly,
like this, making a sound track on the film.
When you projected the movie,
light shining on the sound track down the side
came through the pattern in varying amounts.
That varying light hit more selenium that generated varying current
that ended up vibrating the membrane on a loudspeaker
to reproduce the original sound.
Hooray for Hollywood? Wrong.
Listen.
There still wasn't enough sound for a cinema audience to hear
until an accident happened
that gave a chap called Lee de Forest an idea.
Here's a vacuum tube with a filament down this end
and a positive base plate at the other.
Electricity will make the filament give off negative electrons
that'll be attracted to the positive base plate, okay?
Now, remember that weak signal too small to hear on the film?
You want to boost it,
so you put a negatively charged grid in.
This'll repel the negative filament electrons.
But through that top wire,
a varyingly positive input coming onto the grid
will make the grid varyingly positive,
attracting the electrons from the filament in surges
through to the base plate.
Those surges are a boosted reproduction
of your input signal.
But you ought to see clearly on Sunday.
Thanks to that accident I mentioned, and Lee de Forest,
you could hear all the Hollywood stars on the movies,
or your grandmother long distance
now phone signals could be amplified too,
or big band swing on the radio for the same reason
because radio signals got amplified too--
which was also the same reason
you can hear what I'm saying now, too, of course.
Lee de Forest's Audion signal booster
made possible contact between people
no matter how far apart they were.
At first, with wireless and cable, and then, finally, all this:
the incredible shrinking world of TV and satellite communications.
Instant Le Mans all over the planet.
Thanks to Lee de Forest, it's a very talkative world.
Do you remember I said the de Forest invention
happened because of an accident?
The strange thing is, the accident didn't happen to de Forest.
It had happened to Thomas Edison.
Back in 1883, he was playing around
with the invention he'd just come up with,
his light bulb,
when he saw smutty carbon deposits
all round the bottom of the bulb
where he'd sealed it with a small metal base plate.
With typical modesty,
Edison called this strange phenomenon "The Edison Effect"
and added it to his growing list of patents and forgot it.
By this time, of course, Edison was already world famous
for all the inventions he'd thought up
while he was working on the railroads--
railroads that he'd helped to make so successful,
they were about to trigger the first American ecocrisis.
And you don't have to look very hard at this picture
to see what kind of crisis I'm talking about.
You see, back in the 19th century, America was made of wood.
And with the whole of the country still to open up,
it was a case of "plenty more where that came from."
But although it takes a good few years to grow a tree,
it doesn't take very long to do this to it.
Unlike the people in the lumber business today,
back then, nobody'd ever heard of sustainability.
Why should they have?
Well, thanks to the railroads, they were about to.
The problem is really very simple:
the wooden bits holding the rails together.
No big deal, I suppose, if you just say it like that.
But think about what was happening to railroads
by Edison's time in 1890:
they were expanding like crazy: ten new miles of track a day
Now, ten miles of track takes 20,000 wooden ties.
That's 500 trees a day.
And that's not counting the wood for wagons
and workers' accommodations,
the wooden towns that mushroomed alongside the railroads,
the wooden fuel the locomotives used,
and the bridges,
one of which could take 1 million feet of timber.
And then there were the telegraph poles.
They made a fortune
for the fellow who got the contract from Western Union
to put them up alongside every railroad track in America.
I give up on how many trees that took,
but it made him a lot of money.
Enough to found a university and end up naming it after himself:
Cornell.
So the railroads used up a lot of wood,
but back then, America had plenty,
so who cared?
True, but since the average bit of lumber left out in the open
lasts about seven years and then needs to be replaced--
well, you get the point.
Maybe there were going to be railroads all over America,
but maybe there weren't going to be any trees.
And then, at a stroke, America was saved.
by gaslight:
burning the gas you got by cooking coal.
By the 1830s, gaslight was all the rage.
Underneath the gaslight's glitter
stands a little fragile girl
heedless of the night winds bitter
as they round her bitter whirl.
Gaslight changed everybody's life.
People started going out in the evenings for the first time:
to the new night shift work at the factories,
evening classes, gentlemen's clubs.
Above all, to the excitement and bright lights
of the new, rave musical shows like this one.
There are many sad and weary
in this pleasant world of ours,
crying every night so dreary,
"Won't you buy my pretty flowers?"
Now, the trouble with gaslight was the by-product:
coal tar, a black, foul-smelling muck,
and an ecocrisis waiting to happen,
because all they did was chuck it in the nearest river
and get back to morally uplifting songs.
Then German chemists with a recycling turn of mind
started distilling the black muck
and got all sorts of amazing things--
brilliant artificial dyes, chemicals to make aspirin,
and something that would preserve wooden railroad ties for 30 years
and save America from that ecocrisis--
creosote.
There are many sad and weary
in this pleasant world of ours,
crying every night so dreary,
"Won't you buy my pretty flowers?"
Meanwhile, you'll be riveted to know that the coal tar story continues.
I'll just wait till I'm on the ground.
It's an extraordinary turn of fate
that even while German interest in coal tar
was saving the railroads with creosote,
that same interest would soon ruin the railroads,
thanks to war and the weather.
First, the weather:
it rains a lot in Britain,
so in the early part of the 19th century,
when a Scotsman called Macintosh discovered
that another by-product of coal tar, called naphtha,
would turn rubber into a solution,
he knew he was going to be rich.
Because when he spread the rubber between two sheets of cotton,
he produced the waterproof raincoat
we still call macintosh today.
So in 1854, the Crimean war and all those wet troops,
made Macintosh a million,
in spite of the fact that in summer heat, his coats stank,
and in winter ice, they cracked.
And the reason for this Goodyear Blimp
is because that's who solved Macintosh's problem.
Because by that time,
Charles Goodyear's amazing new vulcanized rubber was available,
thanks to another accident Goodyear had
when he dropped some rubber mixed with sulfur onto a hot stove,
and out came a new rubber that was perfect for Macintosh
and for groundsheet for troops in the Civil War,
which turned rubber manufacture into really big business.
And speaking of civil wars,
in 1863, a German military type was sent to America
to observe the use of balloons by the Northern army.
And he got so excited,
he went home and invented a kind of balloon
that would bring airborne warfare
to civilian populations for the first time.
He named the airship after himself--
the Zeppelin--
its propellors driven by the new gasoline engines
that would also fit into another invention
that would one day eventually ruin the railroads
and make possible the 24-hour race at Le Mans:
the automobile.
One last twist: You remember coal tar?
Well, one of its by-products was a synthetic dye called aniline.
Turned out, if you added aniline to rubber,
it speeded up the vulcanizing process for tires
and made the tire immensely more hard-wearing.
Hard-wearing enough
to handle the 24 hours of punishment it has to take
on the car that crosses the finishing line first.
Well, there you have it.
The end of another Le Mans, and the end of another program.
And as I promised,
thanks to the strange historical pathway that linked tires
back through gaslight, railroads,
relativity, and bullets to celluloid here at Le Mans,
where I took all these happy snaps.
The winner is photographed winning, because he's photographed winning.
That's what I thought I said.