And here to get the good times rolling
are the hosts of "The Big Spin,"
Geoff Edwards and Maiquel Suarez.
Hi, Maiquel.
Nice to see you.
Thanks a lot.
Welcome to "The Big Spin."
Yes, the week has gone by...
Sometimes you'd never believe the way
the wheel of fortune can turn, and incredible things happen--
here, for instance,
in the studio where they do the California lottery
and make somebody very rich once a week.
Or, as you'll see from the story I'm about to tell,
how once upon a time, against all the odds,
something happened that could be the reason you're alive today
thanks to the way chance works
or, as they say here, thanks to "The Big Spin."
I suppose if you were ever going to stake your life,
you'd bet on a doctor, wouldn't you?
I mean, when the chips are down,
nothing matters more than your health, does it?
Nothing to gamble with, is it?
Funnily enough, the greatest medical discovery of all time
started in a casino in World War I
converted to a British army field hospital in France,
which is ironic, because if you had known
how this medical thing was going to turn out,
you would have never have bet on it in a million years.
Because the odds against all the pieces
falling together the way they did were 1,000 to 1 .
Still, that's history.
Well, this next bit is.
Okay, it's summer in England.
The war is over, and this is the problem:
Wounded troops are being delivered back home in critical condition
because of the useless antibiotics they were given in France.
So when one of the doctors in that casino I mentioned
comes home with the ambulance teams,
he goes into antibiotics.
Now, this guy is famous for chaos,
and one day in 1928 in the summer,
he comes back from his holidays,
and there's his usual pile of unspeakable bacteria dishes
where he left them, in the sink, half covered by antiseptic liquid.
So he idly picks one up and sees nothing.
Well, some mold, something blown in from the street.
So far, so what?
And then he sees this,
a zone of dead bacteria around the mold,
killed by the mold.
Okay, this is what I meant by 1,000 to 1 .
First off, this was one of the few dishes
that hadn't slipped into the antiseptic liquid.
And then, of all of them, this was the one he picked up.
And then he'd left the window open
for the bug to get in from the street.
And then the bacteria and the mold grow at different temperatures:
cool for the mold and hot for the bacteria.
And that's exactly what the London weather did
for the right number of days in the right sequence for this to happen,
without which emergencies would be emergency emergencies,
because this is penicillin.
AII thanks to Alexander Fleming's untidiness.
The ironic thing is, penicillin works by killing the diseased bacteria cells,
and how cells work was discovered by a German called Virchow,
who had a total obsession for tidiness.
Back in 1848, Virchow was turning Berlin upside down--
by the way, this isn't Berlin--
with wild talk about epidemics being caused not by disease
but by bad education and no proper sanitation.
So the obsessive Virchow was deeply into public health,
and because he'd made that link between disease and social conditions,
he helped to kick off the idea that prevention is better than cure.
Which is why in 1870
he was advising on the new Berlin sewage works,
which, as I admitted before, isn't this place,
because this is Istanbul.
And this is a bit of the ancient Istanbul Roman water supply,
which is why we're here, because at the height
of his otherwise tidy and superefficient medical career,
Virchow did something that seems right out of character.
Because he took up with a complete weirdo,
and that's why I'm saying this
in a subterranean Turkish reservoir,
because this is where Virchow came with his weirdo pal,
who was nuts about anything underground and classical.
Meet the weirdo in question, Heinrich Schliemann, and wife.
Schliemann is an ex-grocery assistant and dye salesman
who's made his fortune during the California gold rush,
where he developed a fatal attraction for precious metal.
Well, in 1870, he studies Greek, goes nuts about the Trojan War,
and decides to prove Homer was telling the literal truth,
because he, Heinrich Schliemann,
is going to find the fabled city of Troy,
a project about which he becomes quite deranged.
Well, since he knows as much about archeology as I do,
he kind of destroys the site, fails to find Troy,
and accidentally turns up a fortune in gold and jewels.
This makes him internationally infamous,
because he kind of steals it.
Well, what would you call secret shipments back home?
Fortunately, this tendency to give the treasure to his wife
and members of his family gets noticed,
and Heinrich has to give it all back,
pay the fines, get thrown off the site,
and the whole time denying he'd done anything wrong.
AII he gets to keep are the publicity pictures
of Mrs. Schliemann wearing all the gear
that he so nearly got away with.
Which is why we find ourselves in this police car,
heading back to the station
with what I believe is described as "the alleged perp,"
because what helped to save Schliemann
from his criminal tendencies
and gave some of his wilder archaeological ideas
a bit of respectability was Virchow, who went along for the ride,
tried to keep Schliemann on the right side of the law,
and helped to collect the kind of evidence
that might make Schliemann's case,
because Virchow was also an expert witness
in the hot new science of anthropology
and the history of human development.
No, that person came in here before under a different name.
So that's the link between Virchow and the police,
because that hot new science he was involved in
made police procedures what they are today.
That's where all those descriptions came from
that the cops used to use to describe suspect and victim.
Still do, in some places.
AII this business of classifying people
started with anthropology back around 1780
with a German called Blumenbach,
another freak for putting things in order--
in his case, only the physical characteristics
of the entire human race.
Mr. Doe, what is your date of birth?
1/29/65.
Your height?
5'10".
And your weight?
185.
To be fair to Blumenbach,
it was about time somebody did the job,
because back in the 18th century,
people believed the kind of stuff that these days only policemen hear
in the middle of the night from hallucinating drunks:
that there were people with eyes in their shoulders
or no heads or backward-pointing feet.
That stuff.
Okay, does he have any medical problems?
Well, Blumenbach pretty well proved
that anybody who thought that way was--
how shall I put this-- out of their skull?
Okay, great, thanks.
Well, skulls, I should say, which Blumenbach collected
in order to make lists of all their characteristics
so he could classify each type of skull
on the basis of its shape, which is when he came up
with those descriptions I mentioned that the police used up until recently,
because it was Blumenbach who invented classifications
like "Caucasian."
This classifying mania was quite wide-spread at the time,
because all was not rosy
in what you might call the garden of knowledge.
What you're looking at is where all that classification stuff started:
in 17th-century English horticulture,
where, in spite of appearances,
things were, to put it mildly, panic stricken
and where the cure for the panic
was to stick names all over everything
in the hope that would make the nightmare go away,
the nightmare being America,
because nobody had the faintest idea what to do
with the hundreds of new American species
being discovered by settlers all the way
from the top of Canada to the bottom of Peru...
and, by this time,
giving everybody a bad case of data overload.
I mean, if you've never seen one of these things before,
what do you file it under?
"Pine tree"?
"Apple"?
"Any other business"?
Not to mention chilies and chocolate and tobacco
and maple syrup and all the other weird things
pouring in here to be given a name.
And that's why I mentioned panic attack at the beginning,
because in the face of new and unknown species
by the zillion, all they knew was...
they didn't know.
And then in 1624, a legal eagle called Francis Bacon
comes up with the answer:
a book on how to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs.
Make big lists, says Bacon, and correlate everything.
Above all, numbers is key.
Stick to numbers, and you'll be dead to rights.
Which brings me to a church and a baby.
Polly, I baptize you in the name of the Father...
See, it turns out Bacon's thing about numbers
will answer the prayers of somebody
in the insurance business name of Richard Price
because of the way numbers and newborn babies go together.
It all begins in the parish of AII Souls,
Northampton, England.
But first, since we're at a christening,
a few words on the subject of mortality.
This is a matter of life and death.
It's a Church of England parish register.
Womb-to-tomb data in here.
Take a look.
Here it is, moldering, ignored, all over England
since the year dot.
And then this fellow called Grant notes perceptively
that you can use this stuff in these things, births and deaths,
to work out the size of the population.
Receive this light...
Which is something people suddenly care about,
because little babies grow up to become taxpayers,
and Grant's data now make it possible
for a government to do some expectable revenue planning.
AII things bright and beautiful...
So this event is future money in the bank.
AII things wise and wonderful,
the Lord God made them all.
These life-and-death figures in here are just what
the new 18th-century insurance companies need,
because your premium is based on life expectancy, right?
So Price has analyzed the data in here
and worked out that in 1769,
the average little person's life expectancy is 26.41 years.
The Lord God made them all.
Not much, eh?
But Price's stuff really knocks the socks off everybody in science,
because his analytical techniques kick off statistical math.
Just what you need if you're a scientist...
and running away to America.
Which a friend of Price's called Priestley did
shortly after he'd stunned the world with this,
a new miracle health cure: carbonated water.
One evening in 1803, Priestley went to Yale for dinner,
where he met and charmed the pants off
a nervous young professor of chemistry called Benjamin Silliman,
who figures in this tale because he had hypochondria,
nervous disorder, vertigo, lethargy,
and anything else he could imagine,
as a result of which...
he was to bring new meaning to the life of the American teenager.
Because Silliman kicked off that great American institution:
the soda fountain.
I don't think Silliman had anything like this in mind
with his first New York fizzy water shop.
And anyway, he was a lousy businessman,
so the venture failed,
which is why you'd never heard of him.
Okay, try his son, Silliman Jr., another chemist
who was the fellow who put America on the road,
because he analyzed some black muck
oozing out of the ground in Pennsylvania
and called it petroleum, which went over big
with car-crazy American teenagers,
would-be oil barons, and French fossil hunters.
Now, I'll get to the French in a minute,
but meanwhile, 50 years before Silliman,
a surveyor named Smith
was staying at a place in the west of England,
getting ready to, well, rip the place up.
See, at the time,
half of England looked like a building site,
because the country was in the grip of a canal-digging craze.
That's why Smith was here.
The problem was, the roads were so bad,
they were slowing down the industrial revolution,
and canals would be quicker and cheaper.
When Smith's survey got into the geology of the place,
he noticed you could identify strata,
because they always had the same fossils,
thus inspiring a boring Frenchman called d'Orbigny
to discover a new fossil called foraminifera,
which turned up in so many places,
it gave him an idea.
To line up all 27 rock layers,
which there appeared to be below the ground,
in chronological order.
Time zones, if you like.
Obvious enough to you, I know, but back then, profoundly meaningful.
You get a feel for the fanatically detailed nature
of this man's intellectual convolutions
when you realize he then took his 27 time zones
and placed every known fossil in one or other zone.
That's 18,000 species of fossil, one at a time.
Imagine what his dinner table conversation must have been like.
Still, as it turned out, his little foraminifera
were just what Silliman and those would-be oil barons were looking for,
because when you drill an oil well and your core sample comes up
and the first thing you see is foraminifera,
you know the second thing you're going to see is oil,
because where there's one, there's almost always the other.
Only problem is how to know where to drill the well in the first place,
which brings us, as you might expect,
to World War I artillery and a Russian nobleman.
Welcome to life in the trenches.
Mud and shells, mostly.
Well, shells, mostly.
So if you could target their guns and knock them out,
you might stay alive.
So that Russian aristo I mentioned, Boris Golitsyn,
finds a great way to pinpoint a gun
from the vibrations it makes through the earth with a new trick:
using electricity to record the shakes.
You know how you generate electricity
by moving a magnetic field inside a copper coil.
Well, here's an approximation of what happens next.
Boris hangs a small magnet on a pendulum inside a coil.
If the earth shakes for any reason, like artillery firing,
the pendulum rocks, the magnet swings,
and that causes a varying current in the coil.
Use that varying current to shake a pen on a roll of paper,
and you get a trace that shows you
the direction and distance of the guns.
And you can do the same trick for oil
once you know how shock waves travel
through the ground after they've bounced off
the kind of rocks you know contain oil
and once you've used explosive
to cause the shock wave in the first place.
Sometimes...
as in the case of this trace,
Nature provides her own shock waves.
When this...
shows the kind of shake you get from that.
The chain of volcanos known as the Ring of Fire
that runs all the way 'round the Pacific from here in Java
to here in California, where they live with chance
here in the " Big Spin" studio or out on the San Andreas fault,
where those shock waves make themselves felt
in a rather particular way.
This is the kind of chance you have to reckon with
if you live in one of the world's earthquake zones.
But then, as you've seen, life is full of chances
for doctors, treasure hunters, anthropologists, gardeners,
insurance brokers, chemists, oil men, and fossil hunters
and people in California TV studios.
Okay, studio, let's wrap that one up.
So before the next quake hits, as you now know,
for any advanced warning you may get,
you can thank penicillin in the first place.
After it hits, of course, you may need to thank penicillin
in the second place.
Good luck.