1
00:00:36,529 --> 00:00:38,793
This is the Istanbul spice market,

2
00:00:38,932 --> 00:00:42,095
and the reason I'm here is
because this is another tale

3
00:00:42,235 --> 00:00:45,261
about the extraordinary variety
you come across in history

4
00:00:45,405 --> 00:00:46,929
and the way it goes.

5
00:00:56,015 --> 00:01:00,076
And, as we all know,
variety is the spice of life...

6
00:01:00,220 --> 00:01:02,381
or, in this case, death,

7
00:01:02,522 --> 00:01:04,490
because this particular story
looks at the way

8
00:01:04,624 --> 00:01:06,956
a whole series of wars
was kicked off

9
00:01:07,093 --> 00:01:09,789
because back in the Middle Ages,
people would commit murder

10
00:01:09,929 --> 00:01:13,660
to get their hands on anything
that would blow your head off.

11
00:01:13,800 --> 00:01:15,859
I'm talking about spices, of course.

12
00:01:16,002 --> 00:01:18,971
Explosive stuff, like this.

13
00:01:22,842 --> 00:01:24,503
"Hot Pickle."

14
00:01:38,358 --> 00:01:42,351
Every year,
the Turks commemorate 1 453,

15
00:01:42,495 --> 00:01:44,793
when they took Istanbul
from the Christians

16
00:01:44,931 --> 00:01:46,956
and shut down
the great watering hole

17
00:01:47,100 --> 00:01:49,398
where Crusaders on their way
to the Middle East

18
00:01:49,536 --> 00:01:52,994
had previously stopped over
for some fun.

19
00:01:53,139 --> 00:01:56,165
And if you were a knight
with a night or two to spare,

20
00:01:56,309 --> 00:02:00,405
then this city was the place
for a bit of sophisticated R&R.

21
00:02:00,547 --> 00:02:03,380
And it was while savoring
these local delights

22
00:02:03,516 --> 00:02:07,976
that some of those Crusaders
developed other tastes here.

23
00:02:10,890 --> 00:02:14,053
I mean food,
because once they'd tasted

24
00:02:14,194 --> 00:02:16,719
an amazing new thing
called spices here,

25
00:02:16,863 --> 00:02:20,299
the food back home was never
going to be the same again.

26
00:02:23,136 --> 00:02:26,162
The instant craze
that happened all over Europe

27
00:02:26,306 --> 00:02:29,139
for the Eastern spices
you could buy here

28
00:02:29,275 --> 00:02:34,542
kicked off the medieval equivalent
of today's cartels and drug wars,

29
00:02:34,681 --> 00:02:37,013
because you know the way
the price of a drug changes

30
00:02:37,150 --> 00:02:40,017
between when it leaves a producer
and when it hits the street.

31
00:02:40,153 --> 00:02:41,313
Well, the same thing happened

32
00:02:41,454 --> 00:02:44,423
with medieval pepper
and cinnamon and ginger,

33
00:02:44,557 --> 00:02:47,788
only for Columbia,
read southeast Asia,

34
00:02:47,927 --> 00:02:51,226
which is where the medieval spices
came here from in the first place.

35
00:02:57,804 --> 00:03:01,365
So that Turkish takeover here in 1 453

36
00:03:01,507 --> 00:03:04,135
cut Europe off
from the spice supply...

37
00:03:06,346 --> 00:03:09,008
which is really why
Western colonialism began,

38
00:03:09,148 --> 00:03:10,740
because one after the other,

39
00:03:10,883 --> 00:03:13,477
the Spanish, Dutch, French,
Portuguese, and English

40
00:03:13,620 --> 00:03:16,521
headed out East to pick up
their own spices direct

41
00:03:16,656 --> 00:03:19,682
instead of dealing through
the new Turkish middlemen.

42
00:03:22,462 --> 00:03:25,124
Because by this time,
the European consumer

43
00:03:25,265 --> 00:03:27,233
had taken to Eastern herbs and spices

44
00:03:27,367 --> 00:03:29,699
with all the abandon
of an alcoholic in a brewery.

45
00:03:29,836 --> 00:03:30,860
We were hooked.

46
00:03:31,004 --> 00:03:32,699
And you know what they say
about addicts:

47
00:03:32,839 --> 00:03:34,033
They want everybody to be one,

48
00:03:34,173 --> 00:03:36,038
which is eventually
what happened.

49
00:03:36,175 --> 00:03:40,168
But by that time, the reason
wasn't pepper anymore.

50
00:03:48,588 --> 00:03:49,816
It was tea.

51
00:03:49,956 --> 00:03:52,151
By the late 1800s,
we Brits were importing,

52
00:03:52,292 --> 00:03:55,853
oh, 18 million pounds of it a year,
mostly from China.

53
00:03:55,995 --> 00:03:57,986
The great British teatime
was invented,

54
00:03:58,131 --> 00:04:00,622
leaving only the small matter
of how to get the money

55
00:04:00,767 --> 00:04:03,497
to pay for the
18 million pounds of tea.

56
00:04:12,211 --> 00:04:14,270
Solution: drugs.

57
00:04:14,414 --> 00:04:18,316
But this time, real drugs
from the poppies grown in India,

58
00:04:18,451 --> 00:04:20,612
which we are running at the time.

59
00:04:20,753 --> 00:04:23,051
AII we need is a market for the stuff.

60
00:04:23,189 --> 00:04:26,181
Well, given that we're trying
to find money to buy China tea,

61
00:04:26,326 --> 00:04:27,884
what an ironic surprise

62
00:04:28,027 --> 00:04:30,928
that China's already full
of illegal opium dens.

63
00:04:31,064 --> 00:04:34,158
So there's all those addicts to supply,

64
00:04:34,300 --> 00:04:37,531
and by paying for our tea
with their unfortunate habit,

65
00:04:37,670 --> 00:04:40,867
these guys will solve
the British balance-of-payments problem,

66
00:04:41,007 --> 00:04:42,531
because we're out of cash

67
00:04:42,675 --> 00:04:44,438
thanks to spending
all our gold reserves

68
00:04:44,577 --> 00:04:47,740
on a war back home
against Napoleon.

69
00:04:47,880 --> 00:04:49,745
And the addicts?

70
00:04:49,882 --> 00:04:52,146
Economic casualties, right?

71
00:04:57,156 --> 00:04:59,317
So now we have all these profitable

72
00:04:59,459 --> 00:05:03,190
smoke-filled opium dens
making us lots of lovely money,

73
00:05:03,329 --> 00:05:05,661
the trick is to keep
the whole scam going.

74
00:05:05,798 --> 00:05:07,356
And to do that,
we have to be sure

75
00:05:07,500 --> 00:05:09,195
we can keep
the China trade route open,

76
00:05:09,335 --> 00:05:12,133
and to do that,
we need one more thing.

77
00:05:12,271 --> 00:05:13,898
I'll give you a clue.

78
00:05:14,040 --> 00:05:15,974
Barman, could I have
another sling, please?

79
00:05:30,456 --> 00:05:31,821
Thank you.

80
00:05:31,958 --> 00:05:34,756
Okay, here's another clue.

81
00:05:36,329 --> 00:05:37,296
You're looking at it.

82
00:05:37,430 --> 00:05:38,419
This.

83
00:05:38,564 --> 00:05:40,361
This is the famous Long Bar
in the hotel

84
00:05:40,500 --> 00:05:43,526
named after the chap who got us
that one more thing.

85
00:05:43,669 --> 00:05:46,661
There he is down there.

86
00:05:46,806 --> 00:05:48,239
He was one of the few

87
00:05:48,374 --> 00:05:50,638
19th-century
British imperial bureaucrats

88
00:05:50,777 --> 00:05:53,109
who ever bothered
to learn the local lingo.

89
00:05:53,246 --> 00:05:56,079
Lived like a local,
dressed like a local.

90
00:05:56,215 --> 00:05:58,547
He even ate like a local.

91
00:05:58,684 --> 00:06:00,982
Extraordinary,
but it seemed to work.

92
00:06:01,120 --> 00:06:03,054
After a few years out here
in the East,

93
00:06:03,189 --> 00:06:05,214
he'd made
such a good reputation,

94
00:06:05,358 --> 00:06:09,488
London asked him to take Java
from the Dutch, so he did.

95
00:06:09,629 --> 00:06:11,620
Became lieutenant governor.

96
00:06:18,838 --> 00:06:22,399
And it was on his way to Java
that he came across

97
00:06:22,542 --> 00:06:24,874
a rundown, swamp-ridden dump
of a place

98
00:06:25,011 --> 00:06:27,002
belonging to some local sultan.

99
00:06:27,146 --> 00:06:30,547
So in exchange for guns
and, what else, a little opium,

100
00:06:30,683 --> 00:06:32,617
he gets us a long lease
on the place,

101
00:06:32,752 --> 00:06:34,913
which is going to be perfect
for keeping an eye

102
00:06:35,054 --> 00:06:36,715
on the nearby Straits of Malacca,

103
00:06:36,856 --> 00:06:39,017
through which our trade
with China passes,

104
00:06:39,158 --> 00:06:41,888
thereby keeping the whole
tea-for-opium thing

105
00:06:42,028 --> 00:06:43,757
nice and safe.

106
00:06:45,431 --> 00:06:46,955
Oh, who's our hero?

107
00:06:47,099 --> 00:06:48,464
Sir Stamford Raffles.

108
00:06:48,601 --> 00:06:52,367
And the run-down, swampy dump
he did the opium deal for?

109
00:06:52,505 --> 00:06:54,336
Well, it's changed a bit since.

110
00:06:54,474 --> 00:06:56,237
It was Singapore.

111
00:07:06,586 --> 00:07:09,384
Meanwhile,
Raffles and the Java jungle,

112
00:07:09,522 --> 00:07:12,116
where he spent most of his time
as lieutenant governor

113
00:07:12,258 --> 00:07:14,590
administering
enlightened British justice

114
00:07:14,727 --> 00:07:19,221
and grabbing the Javanese gold,
diamonds, coffee, teak, pepper,

115
00:07:19,365 --> 00:07:21,833
silk, tea, sugar, tin, and opium

116
00:07:21,968 --> 00:07:25,165
that the locals didn't seem
to want much.

117
00:07:25,304 --> 00:07:28,330
Not to mention the other stuff
Raffles was crazy about:

118
00:07:28,474 --> 00:07:32,137
nature in whatever shape or form
it happened to be

119
00:07:32,278 --> 00:07:34,508
wherever he happened to be.

120
00:07:34,647 --> 00:07:38,606
If it moved, he dried, stuffed,
or bottled it.

121
00:07:43,256 --> 00:07:46,885
In just one jungle trip,
30 tons of it.

122
00:07:47,026 --> 00:07:50,689
You name it;
Raffles collected it.

123
00:07:50,830 --> 00:07:53,230
And a lot more
you couldn't name.

124
00:07:53,366 --> 00:07:56,597
I suppose he was like
most colonial types.

125
00:07:56,736 --> 00:07:58,601
He wanted to take
all this exotic stuff

126
00:07:58,738 --> 00:08:02,697
back home to England
and classify it.

127
00:08:06,646 --> 00:08:11,413
And all because in 1802,
like everybody else at the time,

128
00:08:11,551 --> 00:08:12,711
he had been turned on to nature

129
00:08:12,852 --> 00:08:15,821
by an otherwise totally
forgettable English vicar

130
00:08:15,955 --> 00:08:17,445
called William Paley,

131
00:08:17,590 --> 00:08:20,650
who lived in the middle
of northern England nowhere

132
00:08:20,793 --> 00:08:23,421
and who had come up with one
of those happy thoughts

133
00:08:23,563 --> 00:08:26,726
that turned into an instant cliche.

134
00:08:26,866 --> 00:08:30,962
He said, "A watch doesn't happen
by accident.

135
00:08:31,103 --> 00:08:33,901
"It has a purpose,
lots of bits working together,

136
00:08:34,040 --> 00:08:35,837
"designed to do so.

137
00:08:35,975 --> 00:08:37,465
"Same with nature:

138
00:08:37,610 --> 00:08:40,909
"lots of bits working together,
designed to do so

139
00:08:41,047 --> 00:08:44,539
by the great designer in the sky."

140
00:08:48,087 --> 00:08:50,021
This scientific approach of Paley

141
00:08:50,156 --> 00:08:53,455
to religion and creation and such
went over very big.

142
00:08:53,593 --> 00:08:56,255
He took nature apart
like you would a watch,

143
00:08:56,395 --> 00:08:58,886
looking for God's purpose
in the design.

144
00:08:59,031 --> 00:09:01,727
So these webbed feet
fitted a waterbird.

145
00:09:01,867 --> 00:09:05,530
A big wing for long flights
and a long neck for bottom feeding,

146
00:09:05,671 --> 00:09:08,799
with a flat bill
to scoop aquatic plant food.

147
00:09:08,941 --> 00:09:11,603
When you put all
the purpose-built bits together,

148
00:09:11,744 --> 00:09:14,679
you get the only design
this animal could be:

149
00:09:14,814 --> 00:09:17,408
a swan.

150
00:09:17,550 --> 00:09:21,042
So people like Raffles were out
looking for specimens

151
00:09:21,187 --> 00:09:23,417
of this designer world
Paley was on about

152
00:09:23,556 --> 00:09:25,615
and then collecting
all the specimens together

153
00:09:25,758 --> 00:09:28,886
in small-scale versions
of God's grand plan.

154
00:09:29,028 --> 00:09:32,589
Modern Noah's arks, if you like.

155
00:09:35,668 --> 00:09:37,397
We call them zoos.

156
00:09:37,536 --> 00:09:39,128
That's how zoos started.

157
00:09:39,271 --> 00:09:43,435
In this case, one of the first,
the London Zoo,

158
00:09:43,576 --> 00:09:46,511
set up for the sole purpose
of getting a close-up look

159
00:09:46,646 --> 00:09:48,443
at nature
under controlled conditions

160
00:09:48,581 --> 00:09:52,278
and studying God's plan
and also, in this case,

161
00:09:52,418 --> 00:09:54,318
somewhere Raffles
could dump his collection

162
00:09:54,453 --> 00:09:59,152
when he retired from the job in Java
and got back to England in 1824.

163
00:10:05,331 --> 00:10:07,765
Three years after which,
the gates opened--

164
00:10:07,900 --> 00:10:09,026
members only, of course--

165
00:10:09,168 --> 00:10:12,228
on the London Zoological,
or Noah's ark, Society

166
00:10:12,371 --> 00:10:14,202
with Raffles as its president

167
00:10:14,340 --> 00:10:16,308
thanks to an influential pal of his,

168
00:10:16,442 --> 00:10:19,434
a very harrumph
British scientist called Davy,

169
00:10:19,578 --> 00:10:23,309
whose sole contribution
to zoology up to that point

170
00:10:23,449 --> 00:10:26,577
was to make the life
of the canary a little easier.

171
00:10:26,719 --> 00:10:29,313
See, back then,
the only way a miner knew

172
00:10:29,455 --> 00:10:31,923
when there was any dangerous
methane around him in the mine

173
00:10:32,058 --> 00:10:34,526
was when the canary,
which he carried in a cage,

174
00:10:34,660 --> 00:10:36,855
fell off its perch.

175
00:10:36,996 --> 00:10:38,793
The better way?

176
00:10:38,931 --> 00:10:41,832
Davy found out
that the methane needed

177
00:10:41,967 --> 00:10:43,992
quite a high temperature
to make it go bang,

178
00:10:44,136 --> 00:10:47,594
so he basically designed a lamp
that would keep cool.

179
00:10:47,740 --> 00:10:50,174
You got all the light you needed
from the burning wick,

180
00:10:50,309 --> 00:10:53,278
but he surrounded it
with a fine wire gauze

181
00:10:53,412 --> 00:10:55,209
that took away
the heat of the flame

182
00:10:55,347 --> 00:10:58,145
and kept the temperature
of the lamp exterior down

183
00:10:58,284 --> 00:11:00,548
below what would
set off the methane.

184
00:11:00,686 --> 00:11:02,153
They tested this design in two

185
00:11:02,288 --> 00:11:05,985
of the most dangerous mines
in England, and it worked.

186
00:11:07,660 --> 00:11:10,686
And as Davy was already
Sir Humphry Davy,

187
00:11:10,830 --> 00:11:13,822
with medals from Napoleon and
a member of the Royal Society,

188
00:11:13,966 --> 00:11:16,799
no notice was taken
of a mining engineering nobody

189
00:11:16,936 --> 00:11:18,528
called Stephenson,

190
00:11:18,671 --> 00:11:22,505
who said he'd invented a lamp
just as good before Davy.

191
00:11:22,641 --> 00:11:25,269
Stephenson's supporters
were so annoyed,

192
00:11:25,411 --> 00:11:28,141
they gave him
a consolation prize of £1,000,

193
00:11:28,280 --> 00:11:32,410
fortunately for anybody
who likes traveling on trains.

194
00:11:40,726 --> 00:11:43,991
That unknown mining nobody
made all this possible.

195
00:11:44,130 --> 00:11:47,998
You remember the way we Brits
manipulated the opium trade out East

196
00:11:48,134 --> 00:11:49,965
to make enough money
to pay for the tea

197
00:11:50,102 --> 00:11:52,229
and then had enough left over
to fund the war

198
00:11:52,371 --> 00:11:54,100
we were fighting against Napoleon?

199
00:11:54,240 --> 00:11:56,231
Well, one of the other things
that war did

200
00:11:56,375 --> 00:11:59,310
was to kick in
really high inflation rates.

201
00:12:01,247 --> 00:12:03,807
So the English miners were desperate

202
00:12:03,949 --> 00:12:05,883
for a cheaper way
to move their coal around

203
00:12:06,018 --> 00:12:07,542
than the horse-drawn way,

204
00:12:07,686 --> 00:12:10,211
because the price of horse feed
had gone up like a rocket,

205
00:12:10,356 --> 00:12:13,723
which is what that unknown
mining nobody I mentioned,

206
00:12:13,859 --> 00:12:17,192
George Stephenson, invented
to solve the problem.

207
00:12:17,329 --> 00:12:18,990
Made the front page.

208
00:12:19,131 --> 00:12:23,158
"Rocket" was what Stephenson
called his new wonder machine

209
00:12:23,302 --> 00:12:26,203
that would haul coal
and change the world.

210
00:12:26,338 --> 00:12:28,829
We call it the locomotive.

211
00:12:28,974 --> 00:12:31,875
To get the most steam pressure
he could from the boiler,

212
00:12:32,011 --> 00:12:33,842
he turned it
into a series of pipes

213
00:12:33,979 --> 00:12:37,210
to pick up maximum heat from the fire
and produce more steam

214
00:12:37,349 --> 00:12:39,408
to drive the pistons
in the cylinders,

215
00:12:39,552 --> 00:12:43,420
angled so they'd link directly
to cranks on the wheels.

216
00:12:49,495 --> 00:12:52,953
"On October the 8th, 1829,"
it says here,

217
00:12:53,098 --> 00:12:56,295
"at Rainhill on the new
Manchester-Liverpool line,

218
00:12:56,435 --> 00:12:59,734
thousands turned out for
the great steam engine race."

219
00:12:59,872 --> 00:13:02,636
They were watching
four competing locomotives

220
00:13:02,775 --> 00:13:05,869
going for the serious prize
of what in today's money

221
00:13:06,011 --> 00:13:07,808
would be half a million bucks.

222
00:13:07,947 --> 00:13:11,110
Well, George Stephenson's
"Rocket" won hands down.

223
00:13:11,250 --> 00:13:13,775
Interestingly,
this article didn't mention

224
00:13:13,919 --> 00:13:14,977
what happened to the fellow

225
00:13:15,120 --> 00:13:17,213
who designed the engine
that came last.

226
00:13:17,356 --> 00:13:21,349
He gave up railroads,
left England, went to New York.

227
00:13:25,731 --> 00:13:27,756
His name was John Ericsson,

228
00:13:27,900 --> 00:13:32,064
and when the civil war started
in 1861, he wrote to Lincoln,

229
00:13:32,204 --> 00:13:34,968
saying he knew Lincoln wanted
to blockade the Southern ports

230
00:13:35,107 --> 00:13:38,338
to stop the South exporting
cotton to pay for the war

231
00:13:38,477 --> 00:13:40,536
and that he, Ericsson, could design

232
00:13:40,679 --> 00:13:43,512
just the kind of ship
that could do that.

233
00:13:43,649 --> 00:13:46,550
It would have
a revolving gun turret on top.

234
00:13:46,685 --> 00:13:50,212
It would be so shallow in the water,
it would nearly be a submarine.

235
00:13:50,356 --> 00:13:53,951
And it would be covered
in armor plating from stem to stern.

236
00:13:54,093 --> 00:13:56,357
Lincoln went for this crazy idea,

237
00:13:56,495 --> 00:13:59,828
and Ericsson's "Monitor"
made him a household name

238
00:13:59,965 --> 00:14:04,834
after it clobbered the South's
finest ironclad ship, the "Merrimack."

239
00:14:04,970 --> 00:14:07,131
The cast-iron "Monitor"
made the blockade

240
00:14:07,273 --> 00:14:09,798
of Southern ports
a cast-iron certainty

241
00:14:09,942 --> 00:14:15,209
once the North grabbed a beachhead
behind enemy lines here at Port Royal

242
00:14:15,347 --> 00:14:18,839
on one of the Sea Islands
off the coast of South Carolina.

243
00:14:22,721 --> 00:14:26,851
Here, Washington set up one of
the most unusual social programs

244
00:14:26,992 --> 00:14:29,119
in the history of the United States.

245
00:14:29,261 --> 00:14:31,957
It became known
as the Port Royal Experiment,

246
00:14:32,097 --> 00:14:34,292
and it gave blacks ownership of land,

247
00:14:34,433 --> 00:14:35,798
voting rights,

248
00:14:35,935 --> 00:14:38,062
and the chance to form
their own local government.

249
00:14:38,203 --> 00:14:40,034
...times tables
that we went over last week.

250
00:14:40,172 --> 00:14:43,141
But the most radical part
of the experiment

251
00:14:43,275 --> 00:14:45,835
was run by a woman, a teacher

252
00:14:45,978 --> 00:14:49,072
who opened the first ever school
for the children of slaves

253
00:14:49,214 --> 00:14:53,378
to teach them the basic skills
of arithmetic, reading,

254
00:14:53,519 --> 00:14:56,079
and, above all, writing.

255
00:14:56,221 --> 00:14:58,246
...we know we still have
to practice our letters

256
00:14:58,390 --> 00:15:01,689
and work on those letters,
and today we will do an "M."

257
00:15:01,827 --> 00:15:04,489
An "M" is a very easy letter;
it is just two mountains...

258
00:15:04,630 --> 00:15:06,928
Alas, the experiment failed.

259
00:15:07,066 --> 00:15:09,660
After the war, things went back
to the way they were,

260
00:15:09,802 --> 00:15:13,260
and everybody went back
to growing Sea Island cotton.

261
00:15:13,405 --> 00:15:16,169
By the late 19th century,
Sea Island had taken over

262
00:15:16,308 --> 00:15:18,503
the luxury cotton market
all over Europe,

263
00:15:18,644 --> 00:15:22,205
which was going to be
just as well for investors

264
00:15:22,348 --> 00:15:24,145
in the booming gaslight industry.

265
00:15:24,283 --> 00:15:25,477
Very good.

266
00:15:28,520 --> 00:15:31,751
Now, there was only one thing
that could spoil the party

267
00:15:31,890 --> 00:15:35,656
for investors
in 19th-century gaslight shares,

268
00:15:35,794 --> 00:15:40,424
and that was the invention
of electric light.

269
00:15:40,566 --> 00:15:45,333
But fortunately for this program,
that's not how history always goes.

270
00:15:45,471 --> 00:15:49,271
It isn't always new lamps for old.

271
00:15:54,813 --> 00:15:57,577
Gaslight manufacturers
are saved from electricity

272
00:15:57,716 --> 00:15:59,877
by an Austrian called Welsbach,

273
00:16:00,019 --> 00:16:02,351
who gets an aristocratic title
for his work

274
00:16:02,488 --> 00:16:05,685
and takes as his family motto
"More light."

275
00:16:05,824 --> 00:16:07,553
Want to guess why?

276
00:16:07,693 --> 00:16:10,856
Right, Welsbach made gaslight
a lot brighter

277
00:16:10,996 --> 00:16:12,463
with a trick we still use

278
00:16:12,598 --> 00:16:15,431
in the camping lights
like these ones here.

279
00:16:15,701 --> 00:16:19,000
In 1885, Welsbach surrounded
the gas flame with a mantle

280
00:16:19,304 --> 00:16:21,397
made of Sea Island cotton

281
00:16:21,540 --> 00:16:24,839
impregnated with stuff
that would glow incandescent,

282
00:16:24,977 --> 00:16:26,877
just like all these do.

283
00:16:27,012 --> 00:16:30,038
But Welsbach's mantle
still wasn't bright enough

284
00:16:30,182 --> 00:16:32,207
to compete with lightbulbs.

285
00:16:39,825 --> 00:16:42,817
And then he tried mantles
made of various minerals

286
00:16:42,961 --> 00:16:47,057
that would do the same thing--
minerals called rare earths.

287
00:16:47,199 --> 00:16:50,293
Made the mantle brighter even
than electric light.

288
00:16:50,436 --> 00:16:53,098
And it was while Welsbach
was fiddling around

289
00:16:53,238 --> 00:16:56,264
with his rare earths
that he discovered a new one.

290
00:16:56,408 --> 00:17:00,401
Called it neodymium,
which is a lot less underwhelming

291
00:17:00,546 --> 00:17:01,808
than you might think

292
00:17:01,947 --> 00:17:06,577
and which I'll get back to
after a short theatrical break.

293
00:17:17,296 --> 00:17:21,790
Meet Miss Georgia Cayvan,
the hot Broadway star of the 1880s.

294
00:17:21,934 --> 00:17:26,234
Hot in more senses than one,
as were her summertime audiences.

295
00:17:26,371 --> 00:17:28,168
The theater management did their best

296
00:17:28,307 --> 00:17:30,639
with fans blowing air
across ice blocks

297
00:17:30,776 --> 00:17:35,236
to control the temperature, just like
the cotton manufacturers were doing.

298
00:17:35,380 --> 00:17:37,371
The factories called it "conditioning,"

299
00:17:37,516 --> 00:17:38,983
and the name of their game was

300
00:17:39,118 --> 00:17:42,849
to get the temperature and humidity
just right for cotton spinning.

301
00:17:42,988 --> 00:17:46,287
Miss Cayvan kind of solved
both problems at once.

302
00:17:46,425 --> 00:17:48,950
Well, her dress did.

303
00:17:52,030 --> 00:17:54,055
As far as I know,
only two were ever made--

304
00:17:54,199 --> 00:17:57,100
one for Miss Cayvan and the other
for a Spanish princess--

305
00:17:57,236 --> 00:17:59,670
by a company in Toledo.

306
00:18:01,440 --> 00:18:04,000
That's Toledo, Ohio,
not Toledo, Spain.

307
00:18:04,143 --> 00:18:06,304
And just this once,
the company didn't have to worry

308
00:18:06,445 --> 00:18:11,075
about getting the right kind
of air conditioning for these fibers,

309
00:18:11,216 --> 00:18:13,980
because the dress
was made of glass.

310
00:18:29,334 --> 00:18:32,565
Now, one of the guys
in the Toledo glass factory at the time

311
00:18:32,704 --> 00:18:35,070
was a fellow called Michael Owens,

312
00:18:35,207 --> 00:18:38,665
who went on to found one of the
biggest glass companies in America

313
00:18:38,810 --> 00:18:41,472
and then helped to make hot days
in holiday places

314
00:18:41,613 --> 00:18:44,514
a bit more bearable,
because in 1935,

315
00:18:44,650 --> 00:18:49,678
he was into the next stage
of spun glass: fiberglass.

316
00:18:52,057 --> 00:18:55,686
Which turned out to be ideal
for keeping things cool--mersi--

317
00:18:55,827 --> 00:18:58,489
or hot, because fiberglass
would take anything

318
00:18:58,630 --> 00:19:01,622
from plus 500
to minus 300 Fahrenheit.

319
00:19:01,767 --> 00:19:05,669
So that solved air conditioning
and insulation problems of all kinds,

320
00:19:05,804 --> 00:19:10,002
which leaves, as I said before,
neodymium.

321
00:19:10,142 --> 00:19:12,838
Remember Welsbach
and all those mantles?

322
00:19:12,978 --> 00:19:15,538
Well, thanks to him
and his neodymium,

323
00:19:15,681 --> 00:19:18,149
there was now something else
you could do with glass fiber:

324
00:19:18,283 --> 00:19:20,274
make war.

325
00:19:21,820 --> 00:19:26,883
By the 1960s, everybody's military
was turned on by very pure glass

326
00:19:27,025 --> 00:19:30,825
and what it would do
if you put neodymium in it.

327
00:19:30,963 --> 00:19:33,864
A magnetic field
excites neodymium atoms,

328
00:19:33,999 --> 00:19:35,330
so when you shine a light at them,

329
00:19:35,467 --> 00:19:38,664
they kind of overload
and shoot out their excess energy

330
00:19:38,804 --> 00:19:43,241
in an incredibly intense beam of light
so narrow and powerful,

331
00:19:43,375 --> 00:19:45,900
it'll reach all the way to the moon

332
00:19:46,044 --> 00:19:49,036
or do long-distance damage like this.

333
00:20:00,993 --> 00:20:02,722
By the late '80s,

334
00:20:02,861 --> 00:20:07,730
the laser was doing things
that looked like Buck Rogers.

335
00:20:07,866 --> 00:20:09,663
During the Gulf War,

336
00:20:09,801 --> 00:20:12,599
pilots could illuminate a target
with a laser beam

337
00:20:12,738 --> 00:20:15,866
and then guide a smart bomb
all the way down the beam

338
00:20:16,008 --> 00:20:18,704
with spectacular results.

339
00:20:29,554 --> 00:20:32,955
And that's why I started here
in the Istanbul spice market,

340
00:20:33,091 --> 00:20:36,492
because a lot of those
Gulf War aerial assets took off

341
00:20:36,628 --> 00:20:38,255
from air bases here in Turkey,

342
00:20:38,397 --> 00:20:40,422
and when they'd got
to where they were headed,

343
00:20:40,565 --> 00:20:42,089
they armed their laser bombs

344
00:20:42,234 --> 00:20:44,327
and got ready to do
what they had come for,

345
00:20:44,469 --> 00:20:47,529
which was to flick a switch
and release the bombs.

346
00:20:47,673 --> 00:20:49,265
And you know
what they call that switch

347
00:20:49,408 --> 00:20:52,206
when it's armed
and your ordnance is ready to go?

348
00:20:52,344 --> 00:20:54,471
A hot pickle.