1
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And here
to get the good times rolling

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00:00:23,316 --> 00:00:25,113
are the hosts of "The Big Spin,"

3
00:00:25,251 --> 00:00:27,981
Geoff Edwards
and Maiquel Suarez.

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Hi, Maiquel.

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Nice to see you.

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Thanks a lot.

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Welcome to "The Big Spin."

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Yes, the week has gone by...

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Sometimes
you'd never believe the way

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the wheel of fortune can turn,
and incredible things happen--

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here, for instance,

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in the studio where they do
the California lottery

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and make somebody very rich
once a week.

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Or, as you'll see from the story
I'm about to tell,

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how once upon a time,
against all the odds,

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something happened that could be
the reason you're alive today

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thanks to the way chance works

18
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or, as they say here,
thanks to "The Big Spin."

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I suppose if you were ever going
to stake your life,

20
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you'd bet on a doctor, wouldn't you?

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I mean, when the chips are down,

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nothing matters more
than your health, does it?

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Nothing to gamble with, is it?

24
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Funnily enough, the greatest
medical discovery of all time

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started in a casino in World War I

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converted to a British army
field hospital in France,

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which is ironic,
because if you had known

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how this medical thing
was going to turn out,

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you would have never have bet on it
in a million years.

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Because the odds
against all the pieces

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falling together the way they did
were 1,000 to 1 .

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Still, that's history.

33
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Well, this next bit is.

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Okay, it's summer in England.

35
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The war is over,
and this is the problem:

36
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Wounded troops are being delivered
back home in critical condition

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because of the useless antibiotics
they were given in France.

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So when one of the doctors
in that casino I mentioned

39
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comes home
with the ambulance teams,

40
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he goes into antibiotics.

41
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Now, this guy is famous for chaos,

42
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and one day
in 1928 in the summer,

43
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he comes back from his holidays,

44
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and there's his usual pile
of unspeakable bacteria dishes

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where he left them, in the sink,
half covered by antiseptic liquid.

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So he idly picks one up
and sees nothing.

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Well, some mold,
something blown in from the street.

48
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So far, so what?

49
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And then he sees this,

50
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a zone of dead bacteria
around the mold,

51
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killed by the mold.

52
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Okay, this is what I meant
by 1,000 to 1 .

53
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First off, this was one
of the few dishes

54
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that hadn't slipped
into the antiseptic liquid.

55
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And then, of all of them,
this was the one he picked up.

56
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And then he'd left
the window open

57
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for the bug to get in
from the street.

58
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And then the bacteria and the mold
grow at different temperatures:

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cool for the mold
and hot for the bacteria.

60
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And that's exactly
what the London weather did

61
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for the right number of days in
the right sequence for this to happen,

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without which emergencies
would be emergency emergencies,

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because this is penicillin.

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AII thanks to
Alexander Fleming's untidiness.

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The ironic thing is, penicillin works
by killing the diseased bacteria cells,

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and how cells work was discovered
by a German called Virchow,

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who had a total obsession for tidiness.

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Back in 1848, Virchow was
turning Berlin upside down--

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by the way, this isn't Berlin--

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with wild talk about epidemics
being caused not by disease

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but by bad education
and no proper sanitation.

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So the obsessive Virchow
was deeply into public health,

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and because he'd made that link
between disease and social conditions,

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he helped to kick off the idea
that prevention is better than cure.

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Which is why in 1870

76
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he was advising
on the new Berlin sewage works,

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which, as I admitted before,
isn't this place,

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because this is Istanbul.

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And this is a bit of the ancient
Istanbul Roman water supply,

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which is why we're here,
because at the height

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of his otherwise tidy
and superefficient medical career,

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Virchow did something
that seems right out of character.

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Because he took up
with a complete weirdo,

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and that's why I'm saying this

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00:05:30,189 --> 00:05:32,749
in a subterranean
Turkish reservoir,

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because this is where Virchow
came with his weirdo pal,

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who was nuts about anything
underground and classical.

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Meet the weirdo in question,
Heinrich Schliemann, and wife.

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Schliemann is an ex-grocery
assistant and dye salesman

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00:05:49,942 --> 00:05:52,775
who's made his fortune
during the California gold rush,

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00:05:52,912 --> 00:05:56,746
where he developed a fatal attraction
for precious metal.

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Well, in 1870, he studies Greek,
goes nuts about the Trojan War,

93
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and decides to prove Homer
was telling the literal truth,

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because he, Heinrich Schliemann,

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is going to find
the fabled city of Troy,

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a project about which
he becomes quite deranged.

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Well, since he knows as much
about archeology as I do,

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he kind of destroys the site,
fails to find Troy,

99
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and accidentally turns up
a fortune in gold and jewels.

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This makes him
internationally infamous,

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because he kind of steals it.

102
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Well, what would you call
secret shipments back home?

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Fortunately, this tendency
to give the treasure to his wife

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and members of his family
gets noticed,

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and Heinrich has
to give it all back,

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pay the fines,
get thrown off the site,

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and the whole time denying
he'd done anything wrong.

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AII he gets to keep
are the publicity pictures

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of Mrs. Schliemann wearing
all the gear

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that he so nearly got away with.

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Which is why we find ourselves
in this police car,

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heading back to the station

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with what I believe is described
as "the alleged perp,"

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because what helped
to save Schliemann

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from his criminal tendencies

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and gave some
of his wilder archaeological ideas

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a bit of respectability was Virchow,
who went along for the ride,

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tried to keep Schliemann
on the right side of the law,

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and helped to collect
the kind of evidence

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that might make Schliemann's case,

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because Virchow
was also an expert witness

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in the hot new science
of anthropology

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and the history
of human development.

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No, that person came in here before
under a different name.

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So that's the link between Virchow
and the police,

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because that hot new science
he was involved in

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made police procedures
what they are today.

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That's where
all those descriptions came from

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that the cops used to use
to describe suspect and victim.

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Still do, in some places.

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AII this business
of classifying people

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started with anthropology
back around 1780

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with a German called Blumenbach,

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another freak
for putting things in order--

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in his case, only
the physical characteristics

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of the entire human race.

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Mr. Doe, what is your date of birth?

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1/29/65.

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Your height?

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5'10".

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And your weight?

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185.

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To be fair to Blumenbach,

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it was about time
somebody did the job,

145
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because back in the 18th century,

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people believed the kind of stuff
that these days only policemen hear

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in the middle of the night
from hallucinating drunks:

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that there were people
with eyes in their shoulders

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or no heads
or backward-pointing feet.

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That stuff.

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Okay, does he have
any medical problems?

152
00:09:01,334 --> 00:09:03,894
Well, Blumenbach pretty well proved

153
00:09:04,036 --> 00:09:06,300
that anybody
who thought that way was--

154
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how shall I put this--
out of their skull?

155
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Okay, great, thanks.

156
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Well, skulls, I should say,
which Blumenbach collected

157
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in order to make lists
of all their characteristics

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so he could classify
each type of skull

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on the basis of its shape,
which is when he came up

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with those descriptions I mentioned
that the police used up until recently,

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because it was Blumenbach
who invented classifications

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like "Caucasian."

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This classifying mania was quite
wide-spread at the time,

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because all was not rosy

165
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in what you might call
the garden of knowledge.

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What you're looking at is where
all that classification stuff started:

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in 17th-century English horticulture,

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where, in spite of appearances,

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things were, to put it mildly,
panic stricken

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00:10:02,294 --> 00:10:03,784
and where the cure for the panic

171
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was to stick names
all over everything

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in the hope that would make
the nightmare go away,

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the nightmare being America,

174
00:10:11,370 --> 00:10:13,895
because nobody had
the faintest idea what to do

175
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with the hundreds
of new American species

176
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being discovered by settlers
all the way

177
00:10:18,444 --> 00:10:22,403
from the top of Canada
to the bottom of Peru...

178
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and, by this time,

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giving everybody a bad case
of data overload.

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I mean, if you've never seen one
of these things before,

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what do you file it under?

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"Pine tree"?

183
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"Apple"?

184
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"Any other business"?

185
00:10:43,235 --> 00:10:46,693
Not to mention chilies
and chocolate and tobacco

186
00:10:46,839 --> 00:10:49,239
and maple syrup
and all the other weird things

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pouring in here to be given a name.

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And that's why I mentioned
panic attack at the beginning,

189
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because in the face
of new and unknown species

190
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by the zillion, all they knew was...

191
00:11:02,621 --> 00:11:04,953
they didn't know.

192
00:11:22,842 --> 00:11:27,438
And then in 1624, a legal eagle
called Francis Bacon

193
00:11:27,580 --> 00:11:28,945
comes up with the answer:

194
00:11:29,081 --> 00:11:34,212
a book on how to keep your head
when all about you are losing theirs.

195
00:11:34,353 --> 00:11:38,312
Make big lists, says Bacon,
and correlate everything.

196
00:11:38,457 --> 00:11:40,721
Above all, numbers is key.

197
00:11:40,860 --> 00:11:43,829
Stick to numbers,
and you'll be dead to rights.

198
00:11:43,963 --> 00:11:48,559
Which brings me to a church
and a baby.

199
00:11:50,936 --> 00:11:53,769
Polly, I baptize you
in the name of the Father...

200
00:11:53,906 --> 00:11:56,898
See, it turns out Bacon's thing
about numbers

201
00:11:57,042 --> 00:11:58,600
will answer the prayers
of somebody

202
00:11:58,744 --> 00:12:01,542
in the insurance business
name of Richard Price

203
00:12:01,680 --> 00:12:05,116
because of the way numbers
and newborn babies go together.

204
00:12:05,251 --> 00:12:08,220
It all begins in the parish
of AII Souls,

205
00:12:08,354 --> 00:12:11,983
Northampton, England.

206
00:12:12,124 --> 00:12:14,456
But first,
since we're at a christening,

207
00:12:14,593 --> 00:12:17,460
a few words on the subject
of mortality.

208
00:12:17,596 --> 00:12:20,326
This is a matter
of life and death.

209
00:12:20,466 --> 00:12:23,230
It's a Church of England
parish register.

210
00:12:23,369 --> 00:12:25,496
Womb-to-tomb data in here.

211
00:12:25,638 --> 00:12:27,071
Take a look.

212
00:12:29,308 --> 00:12:33,074
Here it is, moldering, ignored,
all over England

213
00:12:33,212 --> 00:12:35,237
since the year dot.

214
00:12:38,417 --> 00:12:41,409
And then this fellow
called Grant notes perceptively

215
00:12:41,554 --> 00:12:45,456
that you can use this stuff
in these things, births and deaths,

216
00:12:45,591 --> 00:12:48,185
to work out the size
of the population.

217
00:12:52,031 --> 00:12:53,259
Receive this light...

218
00:12:53,399 --> 00:12:55,594
Which is something
people suddenly care about,

219
00:12:55,734 --> 00:12:58,430
because little babies grow up
to become taxpayers,

220
00:12:58,571 --> 00:13:00,903
and Grant's data
now make it possible

221
00:13:01,040 --> 00:13:05,443
for a government to do
some expectable revenue planning.

222
00:13:05,578 --> 00:13:10,572
AII things bright and beautiful...

223
00:13:10,716 --> 00:13:14,152
So this event is future money
in the bank.

224
00:13:14,286 --> 00:13:18,552
AII things wise and wonderful,

225
00:13:18,691 --> 00:13:23,219
the Lord God made them all.

226
00:13:23,362 --> 00:13:26,195
These life-and-death figures
in here are just what

227
00:13:26,332 --> 00:13:29,301
the new 18th-century
insurance companies need,

228
00:13:29,435 --> 00:13:32,666
because your premium is based
on life expectancy, right?

229
00:13:32,805 --> 00:13:35,797
So Price has analyzed
the data in here

230
00:13:35,941 --> 00:13:39,240
and worked out that in 1769,

231
00:13:39,378 --> 00:13:45,908
the average little person's
life expectancy is 26.41 years.

232
00:13:46,051 --> 00:13:50,385
The Lord God made them all.

233
00:13:50,522 --> 00:13:52,251
Not much, eh?

234
00:13:52,391 --> 00:13:56,225
But Price's stuff really knocks
the socks off everybody in science,

235
00:13:56,362 --> 00:14:00,298
because his analytical techniques
kick off statistical math.

236
00:14:00,432 --> 00:14:02,457
Just what you need
if you're a scientist...

237
00:14:02,601 --> 00:14:04,796
and running away to America.

238
00:14:06,171 --> 00:14:08,435
Which a friend of Price's
called Priestley did

239
00:14:08,574 --> 00:14:11,304
shortly after he'd stunned
the world with this,

240
00:14:11,443 --> 00:14:15,607
a new miracle health cure:
carbonated water.

241
00:14:18,117 --> 00:14:22,076
One evening in 1803,
Priestley went to Yale for dinner,

242
00:14:22,221 --> 00:14:24,189
where he met
and charmed the pants off

243
00:14:24,323 --> 00:14:28,623
a nervous young professor of chemistry
called Benjamin Silliman,

244
00:14:28,761 --> 00:14:32,356
who figures in this tale
because he had hypochondria,

245
00:14:32,498 --> 00:14:34,966
nervous disorder, vertigo, lethargy,

246
00:14:35,100 --> 00:14:36,931
and anything else
he could imagine,

247
00:14:37,069 --> 00:14:38,764
as a result of which...

248
00:14:43,809 --> 00:14:48,712
he was to bring new meaning to the life
of the American teenager.

249
00:14:51,216 --> 00:14:54,811
Because Silliman kicked off
that great American institution:

250
00:14:54,954 --> 00:14:56,785
the soda fountain.

251
00:15:06,265 --> 00:15:09,632
I don't think Silliman
had anything like this in mind

252
00:15:09,768 --> 00:15:12,202
with his first
New York fizzy water shop.

253
00:15:12,338 --> 00:15:14,033
And anyway,
he was a lousy businessman,

254
00:15:14,173 --> 00:15:15,731
so the venture failed,

255
00:15:15,874 --> 00:15:18,138
which is why
you'd never heard of him.

256
00:15:21,680 --> 00:15:24,979
Okay, try his son, Silliman Jr.,
another chemist

257
00:15:25,117 --> 00:15:27,449
who was the fellow
who put America on the road,

258
00:15:27,586 --> 00:15:29,611
because he analyzed
some black muck

259
00:15:29,755 --> 00:15:31,450
oozing out of the ground
in Pennsylvania

260
00:15:31,590 --> 00:15:34,115
and called it petroleum,
which went over big

261
00:15:34,259 --> 00:15:36,284
with car-crazy American teenagers,

262
00:15:36,428 --> 00:15:40,831
would-be oil barons,
and French fossil hunters.

263
00:15:48,173 --> 00:15:50,437
Now, I'll get to the French in a minute,

264
00:15:50,576 --> 00:15:53,238
but meanwhile,
50 years before Silliman,

265
00:15:53,379 --> 00:15:54,846
a surveyor named Smith

266
00:15:54,980 --> 00:15:57,346
was staying at a place
in the west of England,

267
00:15:57,483 --> 00:16:01,510
getting ready to, well,
rip the place up.

268
00:16:12,831 --> 00:16:14,560
See, at the time,

269
00:16:14,700 --> 00:16:16,861
half of England looked
like a building site,

270
00:16:17,002 --> 00:16:20,597
because the country was in the grip
of a canal-digging craze.

271
00:16:20,739 --> 00:16:22,400
That's why Smith was here.

272
00:16:25,944 --> 00:16:28,572
The problem was,
the roads were so bad,

273
00:16:28,714 --> 00:16:30,944
they were slowing down
the industrial revolution,

274
00:16:31,083 --> 00:16:33,483
and canals
would be quicker and cheaper.

275
00:16:33,619 --> 00:16:36,679
When Smith's survey got
into the geology of the place,

276
00:16:36,822 --> 00:16:39,086
he noticed you could identify strata,

277
00:16:39,224 --> 00:16:41,055
because they always had
the same fossils,

278
00:16:41,193 --> 00:16:44,822
thus inspiring a boring
Frenchman called d'Orbigny

279
00:16:44,963 --> 00:16:48,126
to discover a new fossil
called foraminifera,

280
00:16:48,267 --> 00:16:50,428
which turned up
in so many places,

281
00:16:50,569 --> 00:16:52,696
it gave him an idea.

282
00:16:54,440 --> 00:16:56,305
To line up all 27 rock layers,

283
00:16:56,442 --> 00:16:59,377
which there appeared to be
below the ground,

284
00:16:59,511 --> 00:17:01,069
in chronological order.

285
00:17:01,213 --> 00:17:03,272
Time zones, if you like.

286
00:17:05,284 --> 00:17:10,620
Obvious enough to you, I know,
but back then, profoundly meaningful.

287
00:17:10,756 --> 00:17:13,281
You get a feel
for the fanatically detailed nature

288
00:17:13,425 --> 00:17:15,586
of this man's intellectual convolutions

289
00:17:15,727 --> 00:17:18,855
when you realize he then took
his 27 time zones

290
00:17:18,997 --> 00:17:22,592
and placed every known fossil
in one or other zone.

291
00:17:22,734 --> 00:17:28,001
That's 18,000 species of fossil,
one at a time.

292
00:17:29,842 --> 00:17:33,107
Imagine what his dinner table
conversation must have been like.

293
00:17:33,245 --> 00:17:36,078
Still, as it turned out,
his little foraminifera

294
00:17:36,215 --> 00:17:40,276
were just what Silliman and those
would-be oil barons were looking for,

295
00:17:40,419 --> 00:17:43,513
because when you drill an oil well
and your core sample comes up

296
00:17:43,655 --> 00:17:46,021
and the first thing you see
is foraminifera,

297
00:17:46,158 --> 00:17:48,524
you know the second thing
you're going to see is oil,

298
00:17:48,660 --> 00:17:52,790
because where there's one,
there's almost always the other.

299
00:17:52,931 --> 00:17:57,095
Only problem is how to know where
to drill the well in the first place,

300
00:17:57,236 --> 00:17:59,466
which brings us,
as you might expect,

301
00:17:59,605 --> 00:18:03,541
to World War I artillery
and a Russian nobleman.

302
00:18:14,987 --> 00:18:17,615
Welcome to life in the trenches.

303
00:18:17,756 --> 00:18:19,383
Mud and shells, mostly.

304
00:18:19,525 --> 00:18:21,049
Well, shells, mostly.

305
00:18:21,193 --> 00:18:23,525
So if you could target their guns
and knock them out,

306
00:18:23,662 --> 00:18:25,152
you might stay alive.

307
00:18:25,297 --> 00:18:28,698
So that Russian aristo
I mentioned, Boris Golitsyn,

308
00:18:28,834 --> 00:18:31,029
finds a great way
to pinpoint a gun

309
00:18:31,170 --> 00:18:34,765
from the vibrations it makes
through the earth with a new trick:

310
00:18:34,907 --> 00:18:38,434
using electricity to record the shakes.

311
00:18:40,212 --> 00:18:42,840
You know how
you generate electricity

312
00:18:42,981 --> 00:18:46,212
by moving a magnetic field
inside a copper coil.

313
00:18:47,886 --> 00:18:50,855
Well, here's an approximation
of what happens next.

314
00:18:50,989 --> 00:18:55,790
Boris hangs a small magnet
on a pendulum inside a coil.

315
00:18:55,928 --> 00:19:00,058
If the earth shakes for any reason,
like artillery firing,

316
00:19:00,199 --> 00:19:02,827
the pendulum rocks,
the magnet swings,

317
00:19:02,968 --> 00:19:06,199
and that causes
a varying current in the coil.

318
00:19:06,338 --> 00:19:09,796
Use that varying current
to shake a pen on a roll of paper,

319
00:19:09,942 --> 00:19:11,500
and you get a trace
that shows you

320
00:19:11,643 --> 00:19:15,170
the direction and distance
of the guns.

321
00:19:15,314 --> 00:19:17,714
And you can do the same trick for oil

322
00:19:17,849 --> 00:19:19,578
once you know
how shock waves travel

323
00:19:19,718 --> 00:19:21,948
through the ground
after they've bounced off

324
00:19:22,087 --> 00:19:24,214
the kind of rocks
you know contain oil

325
00:19:24,356 --> 00:19:25,983
and once you've used explosive

326
00:19:26,124 --> 00:19:28,058
to cause the shock wave
in the first place.

327
00:19:28,193 --> 00:19:31,094
Sometimes...

328
00:19:31,230 --> 00:19:33,391
as in the case of this trace,

329
00:19:33,532 --> 00:19:35,523
Nature provides
her own shock waves.

330
00:19:35,667 --> 00:19:37,897
When this...

331
00:19:38,036 --> 00:19:41,972
shows the kind of shake you get
from that.

332
00:19:58,790 --> 00:20:01,691
The chain of volcanos known
as the Ring of Fire

333
00:20:01,827 --> 00:20:06,491
that runs all the way 'round
the Pacific from here in Java

334
00:20:06,632 --> 00:20:09,795
to here in California,
where they live with chance

335
00:20:09,935 --> 00:20:13,871
here in the " Big Spin" studio
or out on the San Andreas fault,

336
00:20:14,006 --> 00:20:16,236
where those shock waves
make themselves felt

337
00:20:16,375 --> 00:20:19,037
in a rather particular way.

338
00:20:25,083 --> 00:20:27,745
This is the kind of chance
you have to reckon with

339
00:20:27,886 --> 00:20:30,446
if you live in one of the
world's earthquake zones.

340
00:20:30,589 --> 00:20:33,786
But then, as you've seen,
life is full of chances

341
00:20:33,925 --> 00:20:37,588
for doctors, treasure hunters,
anthropologists, gardeners,

342
00:20:37,729 --> 00:20:42,029
insurance brokers, chemists,
oil men, and fossil hunters

343
00:20:42,167 --> 00:20:45,967
and people in California TV studios.

344
00:20:47,039 --> 00:20:50,167
Okay, studio, let's wrap that one up.

345
00:20:52,778 --> 00:20:55,372
So before the next quake hits,
as you now know,

346
00:20:55,514 --> 00:20:57,243
for any advanced warning
you may get,

347
00:20:57,382 --> 00:20:59,714
you can thank penicillin
in the first place.

348
00:20:59,851 --> 00:21:02,911
After it hits, of course,
you may need to thank penicillin

349
00:21:03,055 --> 00:21:04,818
in the second place.

350
00:21:04,956 --> 00:21:06,253
Good luck.