This is the Istanbul spice market,
and the reason I'm here is because this is another tale
about the extraordinary variety you come across in history
and the way it goes.
And, as we all know, variety is the spice of life...
or, in this case, death,
because this particular story looks at the way
a whole series of wars was kicked off
because back in the Middle Ages, people would commit murder
to get their hands on anything that would blow your head off.
I'm talking about spices, of course.
Explosive stuff, like this.
"Hot Pickle."
Every year, the Turks commemorate 1 453,
when they took Istanbul from the Christians
and shut down the great watering hole
where Crusaders on their way to the Middle East
had previously stopped over for some fun.
And if you were a knight with a night or two to spare,
then this city was the place for a bit of sophisticated R&R.
And it was while savoring these local delights
that some of those Crusaders developed other tastes here.
I mean food, because once they'd tasted
an amazing new thing called spices here,
the food back home was never going to be the same again.
The instant craze that happened all over Europe
for the Eastern spices you could buy here
kicked off the medieval equivalent of today's cartels and drug wars,
because you know the way the price of a drug changes
between when it leaves a producer and when it hits the street.
Well, the same thing happened
with medieval pepper and cinnamon and ginger,
only for Columbia, read southeast Asia,
which is where the medieval spices came here from in the first place.
So that Turkish takeover here in 1 453
cut Europe off from the spice supply...
which is really why Western colonialism began,
because one after the other,
the Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and English
headed out East to pick up their own spices direct
instead of dealing through the new Turkish middlemen.
Because by this time, the European consumer
had taken to Eastern herbs and spices
with all the abandon of an alcoholic in a brewery.
We were hooked.
And you know what they say about addicts:
They want everybody to be one,
which is eventually what happened.
But by that time, the reason wasn't pepper anymore.
It was tea.
By the late 1800s, we Brits were importing,
oh, 18 million pounds of it a year, mostly from China.
The great British teatime was invented,
leaving only the small matter of how to get the money
to pay for the 18 million pounds of tea.
Solution: drugs.
But this time, real drugs from the poppies grown in India,
which we are running at the time.
AII we need is a market for the stuff.
Well, given that we're trying to find money to buy China tea,
what an ironic surprise
that China's already full of illegal opium dens.
So there's all those addicts to supply,
and by paying for our tea with their unfortunate habit,
these guys will solve the British balance-of-payments problem,
because we're out of cash
thanks to spending all our gold reserves
on a war back home against Napoleon.
And the addicts?
Economic casualties, right?
So now we have all these profitable
smoke-filled opium dens making us lots of lovely money,
the trick is to keep the whole scam going.
And to do that, we have to be sure
we can keep the China trade route open,
and to do that, we need one more thing.
I'll give you a clue.
Barman, could I have another sling, please?
Thank you.
Okay, here's another clue.
You're looking at it.
This.
This is the famous Long Bar in the hotel
named after the chap who got us that one more thing.
There he is down there.
He was one of the few
19th-century British imperial bureaucrats
who ever bothered to learn the local lingo.
Lived like a local, dressed like a local.
He even ate like a local.
Extraordinary, but it seemed to work.
After a few years out here in the East,
he'd made such a good reputation,
London asked him to take Java from the Dutch, so he did.
Became lieutenant governor.
And it was on his way to Java that he came across
a rundown, swamp-ridden dump of a place
belonging to some local sultan.
So in exchange for guns and, what else, a little opium,
he gets us a long lease on the place,
which is going to be perfect for keeping an eye
on the nearby Straits of Malacca,
through which our trade with China passes,
thereby keeping the whole tea-for-opium thing
nice and safe.
Oh, who's our hero?
Sir Stamford Raffles.
And the run-down, swampy dump he did the opium deal for?
Well, it's changed a bit since.
It was Singapore.
Meanwhile, Raffles and the Java jungle,
where he spent most of his time as lieutenant governor
administering enlightened British justice
and grabbing the Javanese gold, diamonds, coffee, teak, pepper,
silk, tea, sugar, tin, and opium
that the locals didn't seem to want much.
Not to mention the other stuff Raffles was crazy about:
nature in whatever shape or form it happened to be
wherever he happened to be.
If it moved, he dried, stuffed, or bottled it.
In just one jungle trip, 30 tons of it.
You name it; Raffles collected it.
And a lot more you couldn't name.
I suppose he was like most colonial types.
He wanted to take all this exotic stuff
back home to England and classify it.
And all because in 1802, like everybody else at the time,
he had been turned on to nature
by an otherwise totally forgettable English vicar
called William Paley,
who lived in the middle of northern England nowhere
and who had come up with one of those happy thoughts
that turned into an instant cliche.
He said, "A watch doesn't happen by accident.
"It has a purpose, lots of bits working together,
"designed to do so.
"Same with nature:
"lots of bits working together, designed to do so
by the great designer in the sky."
This scientific approach of Paley
to religion and creation and such went over very big.
He took nature apart like you would a watch,
looking for God's purpose in the design.
So these webbed feet fitted a waterbird.
A big wing for long flights and a long neck for bottom feeding,
with a flat bill to scoop aquatic plant food.
When you put all the purpose-built bits together,
you get the only design this animal could be:
a swan.
So people like Raffles were out looking for specimens
of this designer world Paley was on about
and then collecting all the specimens together
in small-scale versions of God's grand plan.
Modern Noah's arks, if you like.
We call them zoos.
That's how zoos started.
In this case, one of the first, the London Zoo,
set up for the sole purpose of getting a close-up look
at nature under controlled conditions
and studying God's plan and also, in this case,
somewhere Raffles could dump his collection
when he retired from the job in Java and got back to England in 1824.
Three years after which, the gates opened--
members only, of course--
on the London Zoological, or Noah's ark, Society
with Raffles as its president
thanks to an influential pal of his,
a very harrumph British scientist called Davy,
whose sole contribution to zoology up to that point
was to make the life of the canary a little easier.
See, back then, the only way a miner knew
when there was any dangerous methane around him in the mine
was when the canary, which he carried in a cage,
fell off its perch.
The better way?
Davy found out that the methane needed
quite a high temperature to make it go bang,
so he basically designed a lamp that would keep cool.
You got all the light you needed from the burning wick,
but he surrounded it with a fine wire gauze
that took away the heat of the flame
and kept the temperature of the lamp exterior down
below what would set off the methane.
They tested this design in two
of the most dangerous mines in England, and it worked.
And as Davy was already Sir Humphry Davy,
with medals from Napoleon and a member of the Royal Society,
no notice was taken of a mining engineering nobody
called Stephenson,
who said he'd invented a lamp just as good before Davy.
Stephenson's supporters were so annoyed,
they gave him a consolation prize of £1,000,
fortunately for anybody who likes traveling on trains.
That unknown mining nobody made all this possible.
You remember the way we Brits manipulated the opium trade out East
to make enough money to pay for the tea
and then had enough left over to fund the war
we were fighting against Napoleon?
Well, one of the other things that war did
was to kick in really high inflation rates.
So the English miners were desperate
for a cheaper way to move their coal around
than the horse-drawn way,
because the price of horse feed had gone up like a rocket,
which is what that unknown mining nobody I mentioned,
George Stephenson, invented to solve the problem.
Made the front page.
"Rocket" was what Stephenson called his new wonder machine
that would haul coal and change the world.
We call it the locomotive.
To get the most steam pressure he could from the boiler,
he turned it into a series of pipes
to pick up maximum heat from the fire and produce more steam
to drive the pistons in the cylinders,
angled so they'd link directly to cranks on the wheels.
"On October the 8th, 1829," it says here,
"at Rainhill on the new Manchester-Liverpool line,
thousands turned out for the great steam engine race."
They were watching four competing locomotives
going for the serious prize of what in today's money
would be half a million bucks.
Well, George Stephenson's "Rocket" won hands down.
Interestingly, this article didn't mention
what happened to the fellow
who designed the engine that came last.
He gave up railroads, left England, went to New York.
His name was John Ericsson,
and when the civil war started in 1861, he wrote to Lincoln,
saying he knew Lincoln wanted to blockade the Southern ports
to stop the South exporting cotton to pay for the war
and that he, Ericsson, could design
just the kind of ship that could do that.
It would have a revolving gun turret on top.
It would be so shallow in the water, it would nearly be a submarine.
And it would be covered in armor plating from stem to stern.
Lincoln went for this crazy idea,
and Ericsson's "Monitor" made him a household name
after it clobbered the South's finest ironclad ship, the "Merrimack."
The cast-iron "Monitor" made the blockade
of Southern ports a cast-iron certainty
once the North grabbed a beachhead behind enemy lines here at Port Royal
on one of the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina.
Here, Washington set up one of the most unusual social programs
in the history of the United States.
It became known as the Port Royal Experiment,
and it gave blacks ownership of land,
voting rights,
and the chance to form their own local government.
...times tables that we went over last week.
But the most radical part of the experiment
was run by a woman, a teacher
who opened the first ever school for the children of slaves
to teach them the basic skills of arithmetic, reading,
and, above all, writing.
...we know we still have to practice our letters
and work on those letters, and today we will do an "M."
An "M" is a very easy letter; it is just two mountains...
Alas, the experiment failed.
After the war, things went back to the way they were,
and everybody went back to growing Sea Island cotton.
By the late 19th century, Sea Island had taken over
the luxury cotton market all over Europe,
which was going to be just as well for investors
in the booming gaslight industry.
Very good.
Now, there was only one thing that could spoil the party
for investors in 19th-century gaslight shares,
and that was the invention of electric light.
But fortunately for this program, that's not how history always goes.
It isn't always new lamps for old.
Gaslight manufacturers are saved from electricity
by an Austrian called Welsbach,
who gets an aristocratic title for his work
and takes as his family motto "More light."
Want to guess why?
Right, Welsbach made gaslight a lot brighter
with a trick we still use
in the camping lights like these ones here.
In 1885, Welsbach surrounded the gas flame with a mantle
made of Sea Island cotton
impregnated with stuff that would glow incandescent,
just like all these do.
But Welsbach's mantle still wasn't bright enough
to compete with lightbulbs.
And then he tried mantles made of various minerals
that would do the same thing-- minerals called rare earths.
Made the mantle brighter even than electric light.
And it was while Welsbach was fiddling around
with his rare earths that he discovered a new one.
Called it neodymium, which is a lot less underwhelming
than you might think
and which I'll get back to after a short theatrical break.
Meet Miss Georgia Cayvan, the hot Broadway star of the 1880s.
Hot in more senses than one, as were her summertime audiences.
The theater management did their best
with fans blowing air across ice blocks
to control the temperature, just like the cotton manufacturers were doing.
The factories called it "conditioning,"
and the name of their game was
to get the temperature and humidity just right for cotton spinning.
Miss Cayvan kind of solved both problems at once.
Well, her dress did.
As far as I know, only two were ever made--
one for Miss Cayvan and the other for a Spanish princess--
by a company in Toledo.
That's Toledo, Ohio, not Toledo, Spain.
And just this once, the company didn't have to worry
about getting the right kind of air conditioning for these fibers,
because the dress was made of glass.
Now, one of the guys in the Toledo glass factory at the time
was a fellow called Michael Owens,
who went on to found one of the biggest glass companies in America
and then helped to make hot days in holiday places
a bit more bearable, because in 1935,
he was into the next stage of spun glass: fiberglass.
Which turned out to be ideal for keeping things cool--mersi--
or hot, because fiberglass would take anything
from plus 500 to minus 300 Fahrenheit.
So that solved air conditioning and insulation problems of all kinds,
which leaves, as I said before, neodymium.
Remember Welsbach and all those mantles?
Well, thanks to him and his neodymium,
there was now something else you could do with glass fiber:
make war.
By the 1960s, everybody's military was turned on by very pure glass
and what it would do if you put neodymium in it.
A magnetic field excites neodymium atoms,
so when you shine a light at them,
they kind of overload and shoot out their excess energy
in an incredibly intense beam of light so narrow and powerful,
it'll reach all the way to the moon
or do long-distance damage like this.
By the late '80s,
the laser was doing things that looked like Buck Rogers.
During the Gulf War,
pilots could illuminate a target with a laser beam
and then guide a smart bomb all the way down the beam
with spectacular results.
And that's why I started here in the Istanbul spice market,
because a lot of those Gulf War aerial assets took off
from air bases here in Turkey,
and when they'd got to where they were headed,
they armed their laser bombs
and got ready to do what they had come for,
which was to flick a switch and release the bombs.
And you know what they call that switch
when it's armed and your ordnance is ready to go?
A hot pickle.