Know what this is?
Invisible technology.
Well, it is, isn't it?
I mean, something you hardly think about.
And yet what extraordinary connections
this humdrum stuff has.
And just this once, I'm going to tell you in advance
where it's going to lead us to at the end of the show:
back here to something in this scene you're already looking at.
See if you can spot it.
Okay, now I've given you a clue, it should be easy.
By the end of the show,
if you have not already decided where it is we're headed,
it'll be "High Time."
2125.
502.
The story begins here, deep below London, in 1940.
Battle of Britain.
British air defense headquarters.
England, France.
Okay.
We are here. The Germans are here.
Or rather here, here, and here, coming across the Channel towards us.
No problem.
Radar stations here, here, and here
will spot them and save us all.
But the radar aerials along the British coastline
are so big, they're a very easy target.
The answer:
cling wrap.
Technical term: polythene.
First discovered by accident in 1933
when there was an explosion in an English chemical lab--
they were actually looking for dye--
and there, stuck to the bits of glass, was polythene.
By the time they got it into production,
it was just what the defense staff here needed
and just in time for the first of the really massive air raids.
In all the wartime movies, it looks a piece of cake, doesn't it?
Spot the enemy aircraft on your glowing radar screens,
then guide the fighters to their targets.
Tally ho and all that.
Except the easiest target for the enemy is big radar aerials.
Small aerials are safer,
but they make small signals that need special insulation.
But what insulation?
Polythene turned out to be great insulation.
One of the ways you make polythene
is by blowing bubbles of it when it's melted.
Makes thin films like this.
Just like soap bubbles like this.
They're both colloids.
That's molecules
that make squeezy, stretchy, slippery stuff.
So a lot of what polythene people know about polythene
comes from what soap people know about soap.
Interesting things, soap bubbles.
A Scottish scientist once kept a soap bubble alive,
so to speak, for three years.
Of course, the bible on soap was written
at the beginning of the 19th century
by a fellow who did most of his work in Paris
name of Chevreul.
And Chevreul's contribution to the sum of total knowledge
was that he found out why soap makes you clean.
Turned out, it pulls the particles of dirt off you
and kind of hooks them onto the surrounding water molecules,
so when you rub, the dirt floats off your skin,
into the water, and then gets grabbed
by groups of big soapy molecules called micelles
that stop it sticking back onto you again.
So you get clean and stay clean.
Meanwhile, why did he get into soap at all?
Because he was really a dyer,
and dyes interact with cloth fibers just like soap does.
And Chevreul's obsession was to make intense color dyes
that wouldn't wash or fade out.
So instead of looking at the dyes, he looked at how you see color.
Chevreul called what he then discovered
"simultaneous contrast."
He said any color's intensity depends on what you put next to it.
You see the effect
with these different-colored tapestry threads
the further back from the tapestry you go.
These, as it happens,
are the greatest tapestries of all time,
made in the 18th century at the Gobelin tapestry factory here in France
to warm up the walls of the king's palaces,
like Versailles, which is far from hot.
And that's why Chevreul was doing what he was doing with soap,
because he was director of dying at the Gobelin tapestry factory,
and, as I said earlier, the way a dye acts on fiber
is very much like the way soap does.
Anyway, take a look
at a few million dollars' worth of colored thread.
I'll do just one more bit of art gallery stuff,
and then we're off to exotic foreign locations
on this trail that started with cling wrap.
50 years before Chevreul,
Gobelin tapestry design suddenly went very subtle,
because they started working
with a new kind of interlocking stitch
so you could weave very subtle designs.
So the then boss hired a couple of painters
to design this kind of pattern.
Subtle needlework, right?
But you've probably already guessed
you're not looking at a European design.
And these Chinese figures are a clue
to why the world-famous Gobelin factory
didn't begin life as a tapestry factory at all.
The reason was that back in the early 17th century,
the West had rediscovered the mysterious East,
and in spite of the fact that getting out here
involved months at sea in leaky boats
with rotten food and scurvy,
people were lining up for the privilege,
because the marketplaces of China and Japan
were full of the kind of stuff
that would make any European antiques dealer
seriously rich seriously quick.
That's because in the early part of the 18th century,
the hot stuff for doing up your house
was anything from the Far East: rugs, silks, porcelain,
and the one thing the market turned up
that was to turn out to be a real craze
and the reason the Gobelin factory was set up in the first place,
not to make tapestries at all; to make fake lacquer furniture.
The real lacquerwork stuff was turning up in Europe
from out here by 1610,
but it was such a smash hit, prices went through the roof.
So the French cornered the market with cheap imitations.
Of course, it wasn't just furniture that cost a lot;
a dealer could make 150% on pretty much anything
he wanted to bring back from the Far East.
And there was one particular bunch of Europeans
who could never resist the opportunity
to make that kind of profit: the Dutch.
By the 17th century, Europe's number one mail-order company.
"We will get you anything," they said, "from anywhere...
for the right price."
Which is why they were among the first
to rendezvous out here in southeast Asia
with the trading junks bringing cargos of lacquered furniture
and all kinds of other profitable goodies out of China.
Unfortunately, right from the start,
the Dutch had a small problem
with actually getting to the rendezvous.
Take a look at this map.
We are here.
Now, at the time,
there's only two ways to get here from Holland:
this way, south and across the Pacific;
and this way, south around Africa.
This route is sewn up by the Portuguese
and this route by the Spanish.
You try either way, and you got blown out of the water,
which wasn't going to stop the Dutch.
All the explorers and investors
from the six main Dutch ports got together,
set up a joint venture called the Dutch East India Company,
and started looking at ways around this minor problem
of how to get at all that profit out East.
And once they'd started really thinking about the problem,
the solution appeared to be idiotically simple.
lf you couldn't go south, go north.
You're smiling, because you know what they didn't,
because it wasn't on their maps,
because they didn't know it existed.
This:
The polar ice pack.
Still, ignorance is bliss.
And so on April the 23rd, 1607,
it was off out here to meet these junks
for an English captain called Henry Hudson
that the Dutch had hired
and, as it was to turn out, sent in the wrong direction.
Now, in the modern world,
we're so used to going straight where we want to go
that you might be amused at the way Hudson went about it.
Here's his mission:
to find a northwest passage through here
to get to the Far East.
So over four months, thanks to the pack ice,
here's what Henry did.
London, Shetland,
Iceland, Greenland,
Spitsbergen, Spitsbergen,
Spitsbergen, Greenland, Greenland,
give up and go home.
Failure? Not a bit of it.
Because all that bumping into Spitsbergen meant
he charted the place pretty well,
so when he got back, he was at least able
to tell his Dutch bosses where to land their whales,
because up north, apart from ice, all he'd seen was whales,
at that time the most financially rewarding thing afloat
this side of a Spanish treasure ship.
A whale is basically bone, blubber, and oil.
They used whalebone anywhere we'd use plastic today.
Blubber went into candles and soap, and the oil lit lamps.
So you could get very rich by just doing this.
Arctic whaling lasted 300 years,
and it's a perfect example of the strange way history works,
because Henry Hudson wouldn't have even had a bad map
if it hadn't been for a fellow here in Belgium
who sold French underwear, fancy leather, wine, mirrors,
and holy books.
This was his printing shop in Antwerp,
and he was the hottest publisher in the 16th century,
and his name was Christopher Plantin.
Why he was such a big shot
is because he'd talked himself into the biggest print job ever:
over 1,000 copies of what his sales pitch referred to
as "an amazing new scientific version of the Bible."
Eight volumes in all five biblical languages
and, of course, copiously illustrated
and costing a fortune.
Plantin's client was so impressed by the scientific angle,
he promptly ordered a lot of other sacred books, as well.
40,000 copies.
What a client he was.
Philip II of Spain,
the kind of client every publisher dreams of.
And how all this got Henry Hudson to Spitsbergen
has to do with the scientific spin
Plantin put on his proposition.
This was going to be a Bible, he said, with a database attached.
Something in the Bible you wanted to know more about,
here it was in an appendix.
Plantin pulled in experts to write these appendices:
linguists, zoologists, historians, draftsmen, bankers,
and of course cartographers
to do the all-important maps of the Holy Land.
And when they'd done their stuff for Plantin,
they went out and set up for themselves.
Caused a kind of knowledge fallout
that in a way helped to kick off
what we in the modern world call science.
One of these fallout people
was a Calvinist minister called Plancius,
who was a pupil of the great mapmaker Mercator,
who was also published here.
So Plancius was very keen on things nautical.
And it was Plancius who persuaded
the Dutch East India Company to hire Henry Hudson,
and it was Plancius who thought up
the northerly route to China
that got Henry Hudson nowhere but Spitsbergen.
And that's how the printing press
ended up doing for the poor old whales.
That's history for you.
And remember we got here from cling wrap.
But why here?
Why did Philip II need so many holy books?
Because the Catholic church was in trouble.
In mid-16th century,
Luther was persuading Catholics to go Protestant in droves.
In 1565, after a top-level meeting, Rome decided,
one, get the crowds back with music and decor like this;
two, get people like Plantin to publish standardized holy texts;
three, start a Jesuit crackdown;
four, discourage free thinking with a list of prohibited books.
One of the first books on that list
was written by a Pole called Copernicus,
who reckoned that the Earth wasn't the center of the universe,
which Rome said it was.
Now, nobody much took what Copernicus had said seriously
until 1610 when here, just outside Florence,
an Italian math professor called Galileo
living in the nearby village of Arcetri
published descriptions of what he'd seen the previous year
when he'd looked up at the sky
through an amazing new Dutch gizmo.
It was called a telescope.
Now, being a helpful chap,
Galileo drew pictures of what he'd seen through it.
Shocking pictures.
I mean, that little circle is Jupiter,
and those little "X"s on either side of it
are Jupiter's moons.
Now, if the church was right
and the Earth really was the center of everything,
then what business had those little moons
going 'round anything else?
Well, that put Galileo's work on the Pope's hit list right off,
because he was seeing things in the sky
you weren't supposed to see,
like mountains on the moon that the church said
was supposed to be a perfect, featureless heavenly body.
Meanwhile, back on Earth,
what got most ordinary people all excited
wasn't that theological stuff.
It was the fact that telescopes had now improved enough
for you to get really good fixes on stars.
Great news for ships' captains.
Take a star you want to fix on.
Okay, using a good telescope,
you find the angle that the star is at up in the sky.
Then you look that angle up in your book of star tables,
and they tell you where on Earth you have to be
to see the star at that angle at that time.
Trouble was, the star tables were based
on the Earth being a perfect sphere,
but if it wasn't,
you could be miles away from where you thought you were.
lf the Earth were a perfect sphere,
a one-degree difference in a star fix
would be seen from points on Earth--
let me exaggerate to make the point--
this far apart.
And wherever you went on Earth, that distance would be the same.
Well, in 1763, a bunch of French scientists
took some extremely precise star fix measurements
up in Lapland to check this out,
and they discovered that the Earth
was a flattened sphere, because up north,
thanks to the accuracy with which they did their star fixes,
at precisely the same time each night,
they found the one-degree difference here
was a mile longer than down at the equator.
They managed to do all that precision work
because they had one of the latest measuring instruments with them,
which took metalworking to new heights.
This is the miracle machine: George Graham's clock.
Most accurate ever built till then
because of the way Graham had shaped the pallet arms.
That's one moving in and out of the drive wheel teeth; see?
Its special shape means it releases the wheel
at a very precise moment.
So since the two pallet arms are rigidly fixed to the pendulum behind,
the drive wheel is caught and released by one arm or the other
with every swing of the pendulum.
Well, that was fine as long as the drive wheels worked okay,
which they don't always,
especially when they're here, at the top of a tower...
where the clock can get covered in bat droppings, old grease,
ice, snow, that kind of gunk,
which everybody knew was going to be a problem
with this particular clock.
A lawyer called Grimshaw saved the day.
Here's one of the pallet arms.
Now, instead of being fixed to the pendulum
like the Graham clock, it only touches it
via those two horizonal rods bottom left.
So that lets the pallet arm fall back
to capture the drive wheel under its own weight,
so there's no fixed connection to mess things up.
So it's fail safe, which is why what you're going to hear next
is accurate to within one fifth of a second.
Well, I expect you know the clock I was talking about:
this one.
Big Ben on the Houses of Parliament
thanks to plastic film.
Well, I suppose it's high time I wrap this one up.
Bye.