I suppose making these programs and watching them
is a little bit like finding your way through an historical labyrinth.
And this program is going to be full of strange twists and turns,
but, ironically, we're going to end up back here,
in Indiana, in this labyrinth.
Because there's more to what you're looking at
than meets the eye.
See, nearly 200 years ago, the people who founded
a small, utopian community here in Indiana
dreamed of a better life.
Alas for them, the dream died.
But because of the strange way history works,
maybe for us it didn't because of this.
Oh, the dream?
They named this place after it.
The story starts here on the eastern Pacific Rim
with one of its more meaningful products, the microchip,
which runs only the entire modern world.
It's so commonplace, this little thing, isn't it,
that most of the time, you don't even know it's there:
in your car, your TV, your washing machine,
or here in what most people agree is the world's cleanest city.
Singapore.
Some people say Singapore and the people here
all work a bit like a giant microchip:
efficient, automatic, logical, untiring, productive.
And one of the things
that makes Singapore the world's cleanest city
is the fact that this runs this,
Singapore's super-high-tech garbage incinerator
thanks to what happened in 1945 when an American called Shockley
discovered something extraordinary about a crystal.
If you add impurities to some crystals,
you can end up with spare electrons
on many of the crystal atoms-- here, the ones in red.
If you then send into the crystal a minute electrical charge like this,
it kind of knocks the spare electrons off their atoms,
and they leave the crystal as a much bigger electric charge.
So tiny charge in, big charge out.
So the crystal acts like an amplifier.
Shockley and his team called it a transistor.
Now, the first crystal Shockley used
was a crystal called germanium.
No prizes for guessing
where a mineral called germanium gets its name.
Ja wohl, Germany.
Discovered by a German in 1885 name of Winkler,
who is so good at analyzing minerals
because he's done nothing else all his life.
Well, he has done one other thing.
Winkler designed the first machine for making sure there was no junk
in the gasses going up industrial chimneys,
which kind of matters when you run an incinerator
to burn unspeakable muck like this.
So you can thank Winkler for today's clean environment.
But apart from germanium and hot air,
Winkler's real full-time business was cobalt,
a mineral that dyes things blue, the kind of blue you need
when you're into expensive fakes--
Chinese fakes, I mean.
And if you've ever tried to buy a Ming vase,
you'll know why there was a market for fakes.
It costs an arm and a leg.
Oh, and they're blue, of course, and cobalt is the only stuff
that will take the high temperatures you need to make porcelain,
so the real Ming chinaware had also used cobalt.
The story picks up not in China but here in Istanbul in Turkey.
Because Istanbul is the link back to the Chinese porcelain masters
and how they came across the cobalt they used.
Now, Istanbul may not exactly be where the elite meet today,
but back in the Middle Ages, it was a kind of world trade center,
because this was the western end of the Silk Road,
the great trade route that started
in China way out to the east and ended here.
One day in the 1 4th century, out along the Silk Road
at a place called Kashan in Iran,
the traveling Chinese traders found this stuff,
blue tiles colored blue by cobalt.
So at incredible expense,
they took the stuff back home to China,
which is why Ming porcelain is blue and costs a lot
and why I'm telling you all this in a Turkish graveyard.
Look in here.
This is a tomb.
And even when I tell you...
whose tomb it is and you get a look at it...
you may still not be all that impressed.
But you should be, because the chap lying in state in here
is Sueleyman the Magnificent, history's absolutely top Turk.
And you can tell that, because when something
was that special in the Islamic world,
they said it with Kashan blue tiles.
Look at the walls.
Now, I said that those blue tiles
were only ever used in very special Islamic places,
and you may still feel you haven't seen one yet.
Okay, you want special?
Here's special.
The incomparable mosque at the heart of old Istanbul
called Aya Sofia.
The greatest tilers in the Islamic world
were brought here to cover the walls,
no expense spared.
Which is why Aya Sofia is one of the wonders of Islam.
Well, kind of, because the ironic thing
about all this amazing Islamic decor
is that the guys who did it
used the tiles for a great cover-up job.
See, the original builders and decorators of this place
weren't Islamic at all.
They'd started out as a banned underground movement,
and you can tell that
from the materials they used for their decor.
Look, if you put little bits like this all over the wall,
each one at a different angle, they reflect the light; see?
Just what you need down a dark hole,
where the Christians were,
designing the mosaics that the Islamic artists
would copy and then cover up centuries later,
mosaics that would reflect the imperial glory of Byzantium...
once the Christians came out of hiding
when the emperor made them official
and then gave the whole of the West to the Pope
in a document called The Donation of Constantine.
1,000 years later,
some Italian scholar called Valla reveals
the document on which the Pope's authority rests
is a fake, probably by the Vatican.
Which brings us, as I'm sure you were expecting, to a funeral.
It's being held not long after Valla's shock revelations
in the small central Italian town of Todi just north of Rome.
But the news to emerge from this funeral
may not be quite what you're expecting.
The surprising thing is, it isn't Valla's.
Surprising because back then, you just don't go
on the front page with a Vatican expose like that
and stay alive.
So whose funeral is it?
It's for an ecclesiastical godfather who'd saved Valla's neck
and the necks of everybody else here,
paying their respects for similar favors,
one of whom is a Portuguese type called Martins
who's the head of Portugal's secret oceanic exploration agency,
about which he's saying nothing on account of it's the equivalent
of the Department of Defense and NASA rolled into one.
We're on the main channel just above the 27 buoy.
I'll be cutting across.
Now, I said NASA
because Martins' explorers are like NASA people:
right out on the edge.
Well, back then, what they're up to
is as mind-blowing and dangerous as going to the moon was for us,
because what they're planning is to boldly go
where no European has gone before.
They've been down the coast of Africa for gold
and then out across the Indian Ocean
to the Far East for spices, but this is the big one:
the vast, trackless, unexplored wastes of the Atlantic.
...one side of the bridge.
Now, that's nothing
to a modern, sophisticated ship like this.
But to the Portuguese,
it was off the edge of the known world.
Now, the Portuguese were able to take risks like that
because they had various bits of equipment that added up
to the 15th-century equivalent of satellite navigation.
Now, other people have that stuff,
as well as the Portuguese, but what nobody else knows
is the mysterious business of running up the latitudes,
for which you need this secret Portuguese gizmo.
Okay, you go north until the polestar
is a certain number of degrees above the horizon on your quadrant,
and you measure those degrees like this.
The star's up there.
Line it up, check the plumb line's free,
and read off the angle there.
And when the polestar is 39 degrees above the horizon,
you turn right, and sooner or later,
you'll hit Lisbon, home, and mother.
And that's why nobody else was doing the one thing
that really makes the Portuguese like NASA:
deliberately losing sight of land,
going on secret navigational proving exercises
deep into mid-Atlantic, which is why in 1 497
Martins is able to tell his explorers something quite extraordinary.
To forget hugging the coast of Africa
on the way to India like everybody else does,
instead to take the best winds by going due south
down the Atlantic from the Cape Verde islands
and then left around the bottom of Africa.
It works.
So three years later, a fellow called Cabral
tries doing the same thing,
only he goes a little bit too far west
and bumps into Brazil.
So here we are in Amsterdam,
because the Portuguese colonized Brazil
with Jews who wanted to get away from persecution.
But after a while, the Inquisition arrived in Brazil,
so a lot of them hightailed it back
but not to Portugal; here to Holland.
See, in the 17th century, Holland had probably the rarest
and most valuable commodity of any country anywhere:
tolerance.
So refugees of all kinds came here
and in the case of the Portuguese Jews
became diamond merchants,
in the business of light and reflections.
And speaking of light and reflections and such,
one of the kids of one of these Portuguese refugees,
a young guy called Baruch Spinoza,
goes into lense grinding to make a living
after he's achieved the unique distinction
of being called a heretic by Jews, Catholics, and Protestants.
Reason being, Spinoza's got everybody all stirred up
with stuff about how mathematics is the only truth
and how everybody should have absolute freedom
to speak and think as they choose.
Spinoza's less revolutionary optical work
attracts the attention of the M.I.T. of the period,
the English Royal Society, who promptly zip over here
to see what other scientific ideas are being floated in Holland.
It doesn't take them long to get all excited
by an ex-draper's assistant called Leeuwenhoek,
who's got a new microscope and is seeing things.
Well, that's what the Royal Society think
when they take a really close look
at his drawings of what he's been seeing:
at 250 times magnification, what looks like minute little animals.
Now, this blows everybody away, because all these creepy crawlies
are apparently creeping and crawling inside us
and everything else in the world.
Leeuwenhoek's little organisms also went over very small in Switzerland,
where they had an unexpectedly literary effect,
which is why I'm here in this charming little restaurant
on a lake in Switzerland,
because in 1813, for the average joe,
the key question is, "Is life as we know it
just moving too fast for people to take?"
I mean, every day, new scientific amazements:
gravity, chemistry, physiology, electricity, geology--
anything, it seems, with a "y" in it.
Thank you.
AII of which seriously underwhelms
one particular bunch of scribbling misfits
on holiday here in Geneva--
the Romantic megastars Byron and Shelley
and their child brides--
over here for a bit of wife swapping
and dope smoking and stuff like that.
Anyway, one night at dinner, the conversation gets 'round
to the subject of microscopic creepy crawlies
and how, apparently, some scientist
has galvanized a piece of pasta and made it come alive.
Well, back then, who knew?
So Shelley's wife, Mary, gets all exercised
about how "science will destroy us all
by tampering with the forces of nature"
and decides to write a novel about it.
Mary's novel is all about a scientist called Victor
who does too much tampering, and it all goes horribly wrong.
You already know what I'm talking about,
because you know what Victor's other name was:
Frankenstein.
But Mary had a secret agenda inspired by her socialist father.
"Frankenstein" was really an attack
on the kind of technology that she thought
was destroying people's lives
in the unspeakable conditions of industrial revolution factories.
One of her father's friends and admirers
was a young factory manager called Owen,
who turned his factory in New Lanark, Scotland,
into a kind of workers' paradise.
We'd describe Owen as politically middle-of-the-road,
but back then, he was revolutionary.
So seeing no future for his plans in Britain,
Owen took his revolutionary ideas
where most revolutionaries at the time did...
America. Well, Indiana.
Which brings us back to where we started:
here in New Harmony, remember?
So this is how the Harmonists would have made candles,
like this.
Owen's dream, still described to tourists today,
was to set up a utopian socialist commune
away from the factories and the exploitation.
So when the tiny American settlement of New Harmony
came up for sale, he jumped at it.
I will take them and straighten them.
But the reason I started the show in New Harmony
has to do with a fellow called Maclure,
who had been so impressed by the New Lanark experiment,
he offered start-up money to Owen for the New Harmony venture.
And what brings a final twist in my story
is that besides liberal causes, Maclure had one other passion.
Rocks.
By the time of New Harmony, Maclure had been
to every state and territory of America with his bag and his hammer,
chipping, cataloguing, and collecting stuff like that.
And in 1817, he produced what would turn out to be
the first and only proper geological map
of the United States for the next 25 years.
Looked like this.
I won't bore you with the detail.
Different rocks, different colors.
But there in the area
where Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma touch,
Maclure identified something that brings my story full circle:
the kind of mineral deposits that in the 20th century
would provide the germanium Shockley needed
for his first transistor.
And that's why New Harmony maybe wasn't a failure in the end,
because if we in the modern world are ever to find a way to unite
the fragmented post-Cold War chaos
that the 21st century looks like becoming,
it'll be with what the transistor made possible:
the open-access, global communications network
that might give us a chance to build
what those people tried to here all those years ago:
a community where we can all live together in new harmony.