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This is where I will be
at the end of this program--

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00:00:43,823 --> 00:00:46,621
in a perfectly ordinary-looking town
in the South.

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00:00:46,759 --> 00:00:49,387
Except this is no ordinary town.

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00:00:50,996 --> 00:00:54,329
This place was once so secret
that nobody knew it existed,

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full of people
who didn't know why

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they were doing the job
they were doing,

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00:00:58,037 --> 00:01:00,870
people working on something
that could still lead

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to the greatest conflict
in human history.

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And the strange thing is,
the story of how they got here,

10
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doing what they were doing,

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begins in a different place
and a different time...

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when the people involved thought
they were going through

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the greatest conflict
in human history,

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a conflict so basic
it split those people apart forever.

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At least that's what they thought

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until history brought them
together again in this town

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200 years after they had all
gone their "Separate Ways."

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That first conflict I mentioned
happened in 18th-century England,

19
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and it was all about having
a sweet tooth.

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See, back then,
the new rave taste craze

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that people went for like a drug
was sugar.

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Okay, nothing wrong with that
unless you're a dentist.

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But it was how they paid
for the sugar

24
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that caused the trouble,
because the sugar came

25
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from plantations
here in the Caribbean.

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And all they wanted was a source
of really plentiful labor.

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Well, there was only one source
of really plentiful labor

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at the time: African slaves.

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And that's what
the conflict was about.

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Any time from 1500 to 1807,

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if you wanted
to get seriously rich,

32
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you went into
the people-moving business.

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Demand for slaves
in the Caribbean

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started astronomical and went up.

35
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Just too good an opportunity
for English investors to miss.

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Oh, my dear, I must observe
how particularly fine

37
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the garden's looking this year.

38
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In 1770, 200 slave ships crossed
the Atlantic.

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30 years later, 1,200,

40
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carrying people you could get
$30,000 a head for.

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Mind you,
it wasn't all plain sailing.

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Unspeakable conditions
on board meant

43
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there was an average
commodity loss,

44
00:03:11,170 --> 00:03:14,139
euphemism for "death,"
of around 10%/ .

45
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But with profits like that, who cared?

46
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Overall, a total
of 12,420,000 Africans

47
00:03:21,480 --> 00:03:28,283
were forcibly and profitably
"settled" in the New World.

48
00:03:28,420 --> 00:03:31,218
But even here on
the Caribbean sugar plantations

49
00:03:31,357 --> 00:03:32,688
and back in England,

50
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there were arguments about slavery
almost from the start.

51
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Not, of course,
on ethical grounds.

52
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Heavens, no.

53
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The row was about money.

54
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The man's a buffoon.

55
00:03:42,368 --> 00:03:43,995
Sugar beet growers in Europe
complained

56
00:03:44,136 --> 00:03:47,537
about slaves being cheap labor,
which they were.

57
00:03:47,673 --> 00:03:50,107
Boring economists
like Adam Smith said

58
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that slavery would reduce
the workers' incentive.

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I expect it did.

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On the other hand,
the English treasury

61
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took the view that slavery
produced more sugar.

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That produced more sugar taxes,

63
00:04:00,219 --> 00:04:03,211
and that was an easy source
of revenue.

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Times are not easy.

65
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Every day, one hears
of another estate

66
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being handed over to one of
those obnoxious London brokers,

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and our island should be theirs,
I fear, before long.

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00:04:16,869 --> 00:04:18,803
The plantation owners argued

69
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they couldn't produce the goods
without Africans

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00:04:21,206 --> 00:04:23,197
any more, they said,
than the ancient Egyptians

71
00:04:23,342 --> 00:04:26,209
could have built the pyramids
without slaves.

72
00:04:49,068 --> 00:04:52,299
Holy, holy, holy,

73
00:04:52,438 --> 00:04:55,771
Lord God almighty.

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00:04:55,908 --> 00:04:57,136
Early in the...

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00:04:57,276 --> 00:04:59,938
Now, to the amazement
of many at the time,

76
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an increasing number
of dangerous radicals

77
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actually appeared
to object to slavery

78
00:05:05,184 --> 00:05:07,118
on religious and moral grounds--

79
00:05:07,252 --> 00:05:09,618
radicals
with revolutionary tendencies,

80
00:05:09,755 --> 00:05:12,656
like the Presbyterians
and other free-church people,

81
00:05:12,791 --> 00:05:14,952
some of whom went so far

82
00:05:15,094 --> 00:05:18,257
as to force their members
to free any slaves they had.

83
00:05:18,397 --> 00:05:22,458
By 1787, these reformers
had started organizing

84
00:05:22,601 --> 00:05:26,401
with the first
slavery abolition society.

85
00:05:26,538 --> 00:05:29,405
One of the society's
leading English lights

86
00:05:29,541 --> 00:05:31,839
was a Nonconformist
called Sampson Lloyd.

87
00:05:31,977 --> 00:05:34,241
If you know Lloyds Bank,
it's that Lloyd.

88
00:05:34,380 --> 00:05:36,439
The abolitionist society
had good reason

89
00:05:36,582 --> 00:05:38,174
to sing the praises
of Sampson Lloyd,

90
00:05:38,317 --> 00:05:40,842
because, well, with his support,
you had a lot of clout,

91
00:05:40,986 --> 00:05:42,886
because he had a lot of money,

92
00:05:43,021 --> 00:05:45,615
because back in the early days
of the industrial revolution,

93
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he was in
the very profitable business

94
00:05:47,693 --> 00:05:49,251
of holding things together.

95
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Well, he made nails.

96
00:05:51,130 --> 00:05:53,394
Well, he actually made wire first.

97
00:05:53,532 --> 00:05:54,794
Okay, the subject of wire

98
00:05:54,933 --> 00:05:57,128
may leave you
just a little underwhelmed,

99
00:05:57,269 --> 00:06:00,727
but you try driving
into New York without wire.

100
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I refer, of course, to the wire
holding up this bridge,

101
00:06:07,479 --> 00:06:10,778
the final link completing
the union of the United States,

102
00:06:10,916 --> 00:06:12,975
America held together by wire

103
00:06:13,118 --> 00:06:16,087
thanks to a German immigrant
called John Roebling,

104
00:06:16,221 --> 00:06:20,317
who was overwhelmed by the idea
of wire cable suspension bridges.

105
00:06:20,459 --> 00:06:24,259
Alas, his potential backers,
some people called Washburn & Co.,

106
00:06:24,396 --> 00:06:26,296
were underwhelmed by the idea.

107
00:06:26,432 --> 00:06:28,366
So Roebling went ahead alone.

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His first suspension bridge at Niagara

109
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had turned on-site cable spinning
into a household word

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with anybody who wanted
to hang anything heavy.

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Nobody'd ever tried making
wire ropes his way before.

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What Roebling did was

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to spin all the parallel wires
into a cable

114
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and then hold them together
with a binding wire

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set at intervals
all along the cable.

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It was that idea
that got Roebling the big one,

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the Brooklyn Bridge contract.

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On opening day 1883,

119
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it was the longest bridge span
in the world,

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held up by only four steel cables

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15 3/4 inches thick
and 3,568 feet and 6 inches long,

122
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all there is between you
and the river.

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Around about this time,
the telegraph gets invented

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and ups the demand for wire

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that will survive outside
in all weathers.

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So in 1860,
a Brit called Bedson comes up

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with a new way
to protect and strengthen wire.

128
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Nothing very complicated;

129
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you just dipped it into a bath
of molten zinc.

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Of course, Bedson gave it
the high-tech name of galvanizing.

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And there ought to be some
around here somewhere.

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Ah!

133
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This is galvanized.

134
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Bedson's galvanizing trick
was just one bit

135
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of a whole wire-making process
that he dreamt up

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that would turn 25 pounds of metal
into galvanized wire in 15 seconds flat.

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You're not impressed?

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In 1868, I'll tell you who was:
Washburn & Company.

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You remember the boring lot
that turned Roebling down?

140
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Well, anyway,
Washburn's took Bedson's idea

141
00:08:05,264 --> 00:08:08,791
and brought it to America
and, in doing so,

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killed off the Wild West.

143
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See, six years earlier,
the Homestead Act

144
00:08:19,144 --> 00:08:23,843
had started giving 160 acres free
to anybody over 21 who'd settled it.

145
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You lived on the land for five years,
and it was yours.

146
00:08:27,553 --> 00:08:31,580
One minor problem:
others had got there first--

147
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the cattlemen,
for whom public land

148
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had always been free grazing land

149
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and who were not
in the least inclined to give up

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this profitable state of affairs
without a fight.

151
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So they fought.

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The sodbusters won in the end
thanks to Washburn & Co.

153
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and the galvanized wire
they produced,

154
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because in 187 4,
some people in DeKalb, Illinois,

155
00:08:55,948 --> 00:08:59,577
came up with an amazing new idea
for cattle control.

156
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Mass produced, it was basically
just two strands

157
00:09:04,723 --> 00:09:07,783
of twisted galvanized wire
held together at intervals

158
00:09:07,926 --> 00:09:10,588
by small turns of wire
with sharpened points

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that stuck out sideways to form
a kind of barbed spur.

160
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It was barbed wire
that ended the range wars

161
00:09:19,571 --> 00:09:21,129
and killed off the Wild West,

162
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because it killed off the cowboy.

163
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So with farmland protected
from animals like this,

164
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the face of America would change,

165
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and the country would become
the breadbasket of the world

166
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thanks to corn.

167
00:09:37,089 --> 00:09:39,216
By the 1880s, canned corn

168
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was keeping the industrial cities alive
when disaster struck.

169
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For some reason,
the cans turned the corn black.

170
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Nothing worked until
they tried dipping the cans

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00:09:48,934 --> 00:09:51,960
in a free by-product of Bedson's
old galvanizing process,

172
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molten cadmium.

173
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Worked a treat.

174
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Then cadmium turned out
to be toxic enough to kill you,

175
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so it was good-bye, cadmium.

176
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Almost.

177
00:10:07,886 --> 00:10:09,820
Because a few years later,

178
00:10:09,955 --> 00:10:11,547
it turned out
to have another property

179
00:10:11,690 --> 00:10:14,750
that was just what was needed
in an industry a million miles

180
00:10:14,893 --> 00:10:18,761
from nails, wires, bridges,
fencing, canned foods,

181
00:10:18,897 --> 00:10:20,831
or anything else
I've mentioned so far.

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And its use
by that industry here

183
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would bring together again
those two historical trails

184
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that had separated 200 years before
over the slavery issue.

185
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So remember cadmium,
where this trail ends,

186
00:10:34,112 --> 00:10:37,047
while I go back to take
the proslavery trail

187
00:10:37,182 --> 00:10:40,743
through history
to meet myself again here.

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If you see what I mean.

189
00:10:46,725 --> 00:10:50,286
The modern sugar industry starts
back in 1650,

190
00:10:50,429 --> 00:10:52,659
when sugar was worth
a king's ransom.

191
00:10:52,798 --> 00:10:56,359
By 1750, it was
just an expensive luxury,

192
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the kind of raw material
so valuable

193
00:10:59,371 --> 00:11:02,135
a country would go to war
because of it.

194
00:11:03,942 --> 00:11:05,239
The reason sugar shares

195
00:11:05,377 --> 00:11:07,436
were the hottest thing
on the market was obvious:

196
00:11:07,579 --> 00:11:09,604
The industrial revolution
had put a lot of money

197
00:11:09,748 --> 00:11:11,773
into the pockets
of the new factory workers,

198
00:11:11,917 --> 00:11:14,442
and they spent most of it
on the Coca-Cola of the time,

199
00:11:14,586 --> 00:11:16,053
sweet tea.

200
00:11:16,188 --> 00:11:18,156
When you had a calorie intake
as low as theirs,

201
00:11:18,290 --> 00:11:20,349
sugar gave you a real buzz.

202
00:11:20,492 --> 00:11:24,622
So in 1807, when Britain and the U.S.
banned the slave trade,

203
00:11:24,763 --> 00:11:26,025
it was, to say the least,

204
00:11:26,164 --> 00:11:28,496
a bitter blow
to the sweet-tooth market.

205
00:11:28,633 --> 00:11:31,568
Plantation owners and investors
were jumping out of the window.

206
00:11:31,703 --> 00:11:33,830
Sugar exports dropped like a stone.

207
00:11:33,972 --> 00:11:39,205
Slaves started leaving the plantations
and, unheard of, refusing to work.

208
00:11:39,344 --> 00:11:41,574
The situation was catastrophic.

209
00:11:41,713 --> 00:11:44,113
It was enough
to drive a planter to drink.

210
00:11:51,690 --> 00:11:54,591
You won't be surprised to know,
given the bad jokes I make,

211
00:11:54,726 --> 00:11:58,560
that drink was where the solution
to the problem would come from

212
00:11:58,697 --> 00:12:02,565
to save the plantation owners
and put the rum in rum and Coke

213
00:12:02,701 --> 00:12:05,636
thanks to a contraption called
a multiple-effect evaporator

214
00:12:05,771 --> 00:12:09,104
invented in 1843,
the sugar maker's sweet dream.

215
00:12:09,241 --> 00:12:11,869
It worked just like that
steam-cooking thing over there.

216
00:12:13,211 --> 00:12:16,180
You see how, on top of the fire,
there's boiling water

217
00:12:16,314 --> 00:12:18,748
and then two food containers,
and the top one cooks

218
00:12:18,884 --> 00:12:20,442
with the steam
from the next one down,

219
00:12:20,585 --> 00:12:21,916
and that one cooks with the steam

220
00:12:22,053 --> 00:12:24,783
from the bottom one,
using the steam twice over,

221
00:12:24,923 --> 00:12:27,756
like the multiple-effect
evaporator I mentioned.

222
00:12:27,893 --> 00:12:31,226
And using steam twice over
meant they could boil out

223
00:12:31,363 --> 00:12:35,060
sugar cane juice
with only half the fuel.

224
00:12:35,200 --> 00:12:39,364
So a lot of cheap Caribbean sugar,
so a lot of molasses.

225
00:12:39,504 --> 00:12:41,495
Boil that down, a lot of rum.

226
00:12:41,640 --> 00:12:45,542
The evaporator idea
really started with a Scotsman

227
00:12:45,677 --> 00:12:48,043
who discovered that steam
was so scalding hot

228
00:12:48,180 --> 00:12:50,171
because it kind of absorbed heat.

229
00:12:50,315 --> 00:12:52,909
He told this to his pal James Watt,

230
00:12:53,051 --> 00:12:55,485
who used the data to design
a better steam engine,

231
00:12:55,620 --> 00:12:57,781
which was going to make Watt
a lot of money

232
00:12:57,923 --> 00:13:00,016
if only he could afford
to build a lot of engines,

233
00:13:00,158 --> 00:13:02,888
for which he was going to need
a lot of money.

234
00:13:05,430 --> 00:13:07,398
And then he found a guy
who was coining it,

235
00:13:07,532 --> 00:13:09,864
a fellow with a button factory
called Boulton.

236
00:13:10,001 --> 00:13:13,402
They went into business together,
and you know the rest.

237
00:13:13,538 --> 00:13:16,564
But why was Boulton coining it
from buttons?

238
00:13:18,376 --> 00:13:19,775
Because the other thing you can do

239
00:13:19,911 --> 00:13:22,345
with a steam-powered
button-stamping machine,

240
00:13:22,480 --> 00:13:25,677
which Boulton had invented,
was stamp coins.

241
00:13:25,817 --> 00:13:29,275
So Boulton was doing that
for America, France, Bermuda,

242
00:13:29,421 --> 00:13:32,652
India, Russia, Spain,
Denmark, and Mexico,

243
00:13:32,791 --> 00:13:34,725
making money hand over fist.

244
00:13:34,860 --> 00:13:38,318
Boulton's real up-market
artistic stuff was medallions,

245
00:13:38,463 --> 00:13:40,294
one of which, ironically enough,

246
00:13:40,432 --> 00:13:43,162
was to commemorate
the abolition of slavery.

247
00:13:45,837 --> 00:13:47,896
Boulton's new mint in Birmingham

248
00:13:48,039 --> 00:13:49,904
ended up with
eight coin-stamping machines

249
00:13:50,041 --> 00:13:52,635
that would produce any size
of coin you wanted.

250
00:13:52,777 --> 00:13:54,677
Each machine needed
only one worker,

251
00:13:54,813 --> 00:13:58,214
and the coins came off
the machines at 200 a minute,

252
00:13:58,350 --> 00:14:00,682
50 times faster than the old way.

253
00:14:00,819 --> 00:14:04,255
So fast, Boulton created
a copper shortage.

254
00:14:06,591 --> 00:14:08,957
And then Boulton got
the big money maker

255
00:14:09,094 --> 00:14:12,063
he'd been angling for all along:
the contract to make

256
00:14:12,197 --> 00:14:15,928
official national currency
for the English government.

257
00:14:16,067 --> 00:14:19,662
Now, the trouble with
English money at the time was,

258
00:14:19,804 --> 00:14:21,294
most of it was fake.

259
00:14:21,439 --> 00:14:24,704
So in 1797, Boulton really cleaned up

260
00:14:24,843 --> 00:14:27,744
when he produced four coins
that were so good,

261
00:14:27,879 --> 00:14:30,507
the counterfeiters kind of gave up.

262
00:14:30,649 --> 00:14:32,207
Here they are.

263
00:14:33,818 --> 00:14:38,380
Farthing, ha'penny,
penny, tuppence.

264
00:14:38,523 --> 00:14:41,458
So now there was money
you could trust.

265
00:14:41,593 --> 00:14:45,620
The government decided in 1824
to risk some more new coins.

266
00:14:45,764 --> 00:14:48,961
This time, they brought in
an Italian called Pistrucci

267
00:14:49,100 --> 00:14:50,465
to do the designs.

268
00:14:50,602 --> 00:14:51,864
Here's one of his.

269
00:14:52,003 --> 00:14:54,563
See that new national emblem idea?

270
00:14:54,706 --> 00:14:56,367
That really caught on.

271
00:14:56,508 --> 00:14:58,442
That's why we have them
on modern coins.

272
00:14:58,576 --> 00:15:02,342
Anyway, Pistrucci made
coin design really high-tech

273
00:15:02,480 --> 00:15:05,608
with one of these, a pantograph.

274
00:15:07,218 --> 00:15:10,847
I'll use this medallion
to show you what he did.

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00:15:10,989 --> 00:15:13,287
First, he designed a plaster model,

276
00:15:13,425 --> 00:15:16,053
and then he plated the model
to make it hard wearing

277
00:15:16,194 --> 00:15:19,186
and then, very carefully,

278
00:15:19,331 --> 00:15:24,268
retraced the design of the model
with a pantograph stylus

279
00:15:24,402 --> 00:15:30,136
so that over there,
a knife carved the same design

280
00:15:30,275 --> 00:15:34,371
to scale on a steel die.

281
00:15:34,512 --> 00:15:36,241
Bit like this.

282
00:15:37,916 --> 00:15:42,444
And then he used the die
to stamp out the coins.

283
00:15:42,587 --> 00:15:46,045
But did you notice I said
"plated" the model?

284
00:15:46,191 --> 00:15:50,218
That's because the latest
scientific miracle at the time

285
00:15:50,362 --> 00:15:52,660
was electroplating.

286
00:15:56,401 --> 00:16:00,428
Which brings me, alas,
to one of history's greater bores,

287
00:16:00,572 --> 00:16:04,975
a self-made English science hero
called Michael Faraday.

288
00:16:09,814 --> 00:16:13,306
Faraday was one of those people
most charitably described

289
00:16:13,451 --> 00:16:15,476
as "painstaking."

290
00:16:15,620 --> 00:16:17,520
So when he heard
that some Italian had come up

291
00:16:17,655 --> 00:16:20,715
with a new way to use electricity,
to electroplate,

292
00:16:20,859 --> 00:16:23,327
Faraday couldn't wait to see
how it worked.

293
00:16:23,461 --> 00:16:26,760
The Italian idea was one
of the those flashes of genius

294
00:16:26,898 --> 00:16:28,763
you wonder why
you didn't think of first,

295
00:16:28,900 --> 00:16:30,265
it was so simple.

296
00:16:30,402 --> 00:16:32,802
If chemicals
could make electricity,

297
00:16:32,937 --> 00:16:34,529
which they did in a battery,

298
00:16:34,672 --> 00:16:36,731
could you turn the thing
the other way 'round

299
00:16:36,875 --> 00:16:40,242
and make electricity do
something to chemicals?

300
00:16:40,378 --> 00:16:42,938
The Italian,
a fellow called Brugnatelli

301
00:16:43,081 --> 00:16:46,209
and also a pal of Volta,
who had invented the battery,

302
00:16:46,351 --> 00:16:47,716
did the following:

303
00:16:47,852 --> 00:16:49,979
He put an object connected
to a battery

304
00:16:50,121 --> 00:16:52,351
in a copper solution
in which there were also

305
00:16:52,490 --> 00:16:55,357
bits of copper
also connected to the battery.

306
00:16:55,493 --> 00:16:57,461
And something amazing happened.

307
00:16:57,595 --> 00:17:00,996
The atoms in the copper solution
deposited themselves

308
00:17:01,132 --> 00:17:04,260
all over the object,
copper plating it.

309
00:17:04,402 --> 00:17:07,633
And at the same time,
as the solution lost its atoms,

310
00:17:07,772 --> 00:17:11,173
they were replaced by atoms
from the bits of copper.

311
00:17:11,309 --> 00:17:14,642
The question for Faraday was,
why?

312
00:17:14,779 --> 00:17:19,113
In 1833, he discovered that it needed
a particular amount of electricity,

313
00:17:19,250 --> 00:17:22,151
depending on the metal,
to get the whole thing to happen,

314
00:17:22,287 --> 00:17:25,154
which meant that there had to be
a relationship

315
00:17:25,290 --> 00:17:26,484
between the mass of the metal

316
00:17:26,624 --> 00:17:28,592
and the amount of electricity
you needed.

317
00:17:28,726 --> 00:17:31,923
In other words, Faraday reckoned
there had to be some kind of link

318
00:17:32,063 --> 00:17:35,123
between mass and electric charge.

319
00:17:36,835 --> 00:17:39,804
Which brings us temporarily
to television,

320
00:17:39,938 --> 00:17:43,772
because by 1889, somebody
had discovered cathode rays

321
00:17:43,908 --> 00:17:46,001
and found that
you could move them around, too,

322
00:17:46,144 --> 00:17:48,476
if you controlled them
with electric fields,

323
00:17:48,613 --> 00:17:50,740
which is how your TV works.

324
00:17:50,882 --> 00:17:52,008
Look.

325
00:17:54,786 --> 00:17:58,051
So maybe cathode ray particles
had mass, as well,

326
00:17:58,189 --> 00:18:00,487
because the electric field
was moving them around

327
00:18:00,625 --> 00:18:05,221
just like electricity did to the atoms
during electroplating.

328
00:18:05,363 --> 00:18:07,888
In 1910, a fellow called Thompson

329
00:18:08,032 --> 00:18:10,796
shot neon particles
through electric fields,

330
00:18:10,935 --> 00:18:14,063
which, sure enough, affected
the particle flight path.

331
00:18:14,205 --> 00:18:15,672
But the weird thing was,

332
00:18:15,807 --> 00:18:18,469
the neon particles split
into two streams

333
00:18:18,610 --> 00:18:20,805
as if they had
two different masses,

334
00:18:20,945 --> 00:18:22,378
one lot lighter than the other,

335
00:18:22,514 --> 00:18:25,039
because Thompson saw
that one lot went further

336
00:18:25,183 --> 00:18:26,445
than the other lot.

337
00:18:26,584 --> 00:18:31,385
Thompson had discovered isotopes,
atoms with more than one mass.

338
00:18:31,523 --> 00:18:35,459
By 1919, you could use this trick
to separate out isotopes

339
00:18:35,593 --> 00:18:39,051
with masses
only 100 millionth different.

340
00:18:39,197 --> 00:18:41,597
The trick
is called mass spectrometry,

341
00:18:41,733 --> 00:18:43,200
and with it, you can identify,

342
00:18:43,334 --> 00:18:46,098
with the most
incredible precision, anything

343
00:18:46,237 --> 00:18:48,637
by firing particles of it
through electric fields

344
00:18:48,773 --> 00:18:50,502
and watching how far they go,

345
00:18:50,642 --> 00:18:54,476
which tells you their mass,
which tells you what they are,

346
00:18:54,612 --> 00:18:57,945
which means you can do
all sorts of good things,

347
00:18:58,082 --> 00:18:59,674
like forensic investigation,

348
00:18:59,817 --> 00:19:03,218
by identifying minute traces
from a scene of crime.

349
00:19:03,354 --> 00:19:06,915
Or tag an isotope tracer onto
the medication somebody's taking

350
00:19:07,058 --> 00:19:10,960
and watch where it goes
as the drug is absorbed by their body.

351
00:19:11,095 --> 00:19:14,861
Or identify terrorists,
because you can analyze

352
00:19:14,999 --> 00:19:17,024
the most minute residue
of explosives

353
00:19:17,168 --> 00:19:20,160
they might happen to have
on their hands.

354
00:19:33,484 --> 00:19:36,009
Which brings me to end here,
where the separate ways

355
00:19:36,154 --> 00:19:39,146
of the slavers and the antislavers
finally come together,

356
00:19:39,290 --> 00:19:42,157
because this proslavery trail
I've just been following

357
00:19:42,293 --> 00:19:44,261
led to mass spectrometry being used

358
00:19:44,395 --> 00:19:48,764
to separate out the
high-efficient isotopes of uranium 235

359
00:19:48,900 --> 00:19:52,028
from the abundant
but less effective uranium 238.

360
00:19:52,170 --> 00:19:56,436
And thanks to the trail triggered
by the antislavery people, cadmium--

361
00:19:56,574 --> 00:19:58,303
you remember, the stuff
that canners used

362
00:19:58,443 --> 00:20:00,035
to plate the insides
of the cans with--

363
00:20:00,178 --> 00:20:03,841
cadmium ended up being used
as a neutron absorber

364
00:20:03,982 --> 00:20:06,109
in the rods controlling the speed

365
00:20:06,251 --> 00:20:09,846
of the fission reaction
of the first nuclear pile.

366
00:20:09,988 --> 00:20:11,785
Remember this place?

367
00:20:13,591 --> 00:20:16,458
So having gone their separate ways,

368
00:20:16,594 --> 00:20:20,530
split apart by the most explosive issue
of the 18th century,

369
00:20:20,665 --> 00:20:23,725
history finally brings
the two sides together again

370
00:20:23,868 --> 00:20:25,927
here at the birthplace

371
00:20:26,070 --> 00:20:29,904
of the most explosive issue
in the 20th century:

372
00:20:30,041 --> 00:20:31,372
atomic weapons.

373
00:20:50,261 --> 00:20:52,661
And that's why I said
this was a secret place,

374
00:20:52,797 --> 00:20:56,392
because the Manhattan Project
that started in 1943

375
00:20:56,534 --> 00:20:58,126
and made the bomb
dropped on Hiroshima

376
00:20:58,269 --> 00:20:59,668
happened back in that lab

377
00:20:59,804 --> 00:21:03,240
here in the town where
separate ways came together:

378
00:21:03,374 --> 00:21:05,638
Oak Ridge, Tennessee.#