This program is not just about India;
it's about India and wine and war at sea
and electricity and steam engines and love affairs
and wallpaper and other stuff.
So this opening sequence is not what it seems.
However, to avoid confusion, throughout the program,
I'll keep you posted with regular "Feedback."
Oh, hi.
Could you hold it for a second?
Thanks.
Okay, access the uplink now.
Sorry about that.
Well, here we are, intrepid reporter James Burke
in one of the more remote parts of India,
ready to start the show;
a show that travels across the great web of knowledge,
through space and time,
to find the strangest connections between things...
and all that stuff you've heard before.
I suppose in a way, you know, the whole "Connections" concept
is a product of the technology.
Because back before the technology, you couldn't have seen life that way.
I mean, the way everything is connected...
because back then, it wasn't.
A hundred years ago, for instance,
I'd have been really cut off here... really intrepid.
50 years ago, 100 miles to the nearest telegraph office.
20 years ago, 50 miles to the nearest phone.
Today, this laptop, this cell phone, and that satellite...
and, bingo, here goes my script update back to the office in London.
Okay, I'll send it now.
This is what life in the 21st century's going to be all about.
Wherever you are... Siberia, Paris, Manhattan...
all of it's living on the great network
that will connect everybody; able to be and do anything;
free from the limitations of space and time;
with the world at your fingertips.
But only if we learn to live with one important little thing
in cyberspace: our other selves;
the electronic version of you that lives in the system
and works for you night and day; does anything you want,
sometimes even before you know you want it.
Watch this.
Run the agent program.
Good morning, James.
You have three appointments today,
and it's your mother's birthday, so I've sent pink roses.
George's electronic agent says,
"Could the next Wednesday meeting be Friday?"
I've confirmed you're free, and we've changed both your diaries.
Your checking account is close to red line,
so I've topped it up.
Don't forget it's your anniversary next week.
I've checked out some things she likes, okay?
Your blood test came back; you're fine.
I've completed the company upcoming tax returns,
if you want to review them.
Top temperature today: 95.
Your conference call's at 9:00,
and I've reminded everybody else's electronic agent.
That's it.
Good, eh?
And maybe for some people a bit scary,
because there's one thing that has to happen
if the electronic agent really is supposed to be another you:
The agent has to know you intimately.
Every detail of your every day; every moment of your business life;
your spending habits and those of your nearest and dearest;
your personal friends; doctor's records; spare time activities.
And every phone call you ever make.
And when you go anywhere, see anybody, buy anything,
break a law, tell a lie, catch a cold... it knows.
And on the network, it doesn't matter where you do that.
It knows.
And then it analyzes and records and updates your behavior profile.
And that's how it learns to be you.
And it does that thanks to the most fundamental element
in all learning.
Something that also kind of won the last World War
and every war since: Feedback.
Feedback is what stops this happening, because it stops this happening.
German missiles going just too fast
for people on the ground to hit... until feedback,
the magic idea thought up by M.I.T. and Bell Labs
for tracking the missile;
and then using fancy math to predict from the radar data
where the missile is likely to be a few seconds from now.
Then you keep feeding those predictions
to the guys trying to shoot the missile down.
So instead of shooting at where the thing is,
they shoot at where it's going to be.
By 1943, the predictors, as they're called,
are able to do this.
The feedback trick improved the artillery's success rate
to the point where Hitler stops trying.
And by 1944, thanks to feedback,
Allied guns everywhere are hitting anything that moves.
And people are beginning to drink
to the end of the war being in sight.
Appropriate, really, when you think of where the idea of feedback
came from in the first place.
It's all due to a guy who is a French winemaker
and who happens to find out what goes on inside you
when you do things, I'm happy to say, like this.
Cheers.
Ahh.
His name is Claude Bernard, and he lives here in this house
in one of the more beautiful bits of countryside
in the world... just outside.
Why don't you enjoy that while I enjoy this?
This is the Beaujolais country in the heart of France,
where some of the world's best wines come from.
And it's every bit as delightful as it looks.
Ironic that it should have inspired Claude Bernard
to do the awful things he did...
coming up, after another minute or so
of this enjoyable tourist stuff.
Right in the middle of the Beaujolais country,
this is that guy's vineyard, and that over there's his house.
And this is the reason he's in this program.
Because back in mid-19th century,
Claude Bernard, who's a doctor as well as a winemaker,
notices something rather funny about, well, rabbit wee-wee.
He discovers that if you give a rabbit regular meals to eat,
its urine is cloudy and alkaline.
But if a rabbit's had no food for a while,
its urine goes clear and acid.
This earth-shattering observation gets Claude Bernard all excited
about stomachs and gastric juices and other such internal matters.
And here in his farmhouse,
he decides to take a closer, more scientific look.
And he finds out about the way that rabbits and humans
automatically switch to living off their fat
if they don't get any food.
That's why the urine changes.
Further investigation also reveals that if you're short of sugar,
your liver dumps more sugar into your bloodstream...
and that there's a whole string or reactions like that
going on in your body: Feedback reactions
that keep all your body levels the way they're supposed to be.
Like, if you need water, you get thirsty and drink.
If you're hot, you sweat and cool down.
Other people pick up on this stuff
and, sure enough, find out about more feedback systems
working to control the level of things like adrenaline,
sex hormones, and other chemicals that kick in
when you're attracted or scared or angry or cold and so on.
All part of the marvelous body feedback mechanism
working to preserve what Claude labels the inner balance.
We today would call it homeostasis.
And it's from physiologists working on homeostasis
that those wartime predictor people you saw get their ideas
for those antiaircraft feedback fire controls systems, remember?
Oh, while we're here, take a look at the kind of science
Claude Bernard is doing in 1860.
Great big scales,
because they're still finding out what everything weighs.
Giant glass containers for boiling and condensing and reducing...
kind of science as cookery almost.
And then you write it all up in pen and ink,
because this is before even typewriters.
But then, in contrast, look at this:
The kind of delicate precision instruments
craftsmen handcraft back then.
Beautiful, eh?
This one's particularly relevant.
See, Claude's discovery of how your insides work
is great news for medicine but not such great news for rabbits
or guinea pigs, dogs, frogs, cats, rats, horses,
or any of the many experimental animals
that young medical students
now start to investigate the workings of...
in the interest of discovery or of just getting qualified.
Vivisection it's called.
Using instruments like this on animals like this.
As a result of which Claude's wife, well, leaves him
and joins some animal rights people, one of whom is trying to kill Claude
with something that science at the time has not yet discovered:
Thought waves.
The real movers and shakers
in antivivisection at the time are the English,
because up to now, they've treated animals worst of anybody
and have now decided it's time to develop a soft spot
for man's best friends.
So as early as 1822, there's a Society
for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection.
And it's leading light is a formidable lady called Cob,
whose followers start to call themselves humane societies
in spite of the fact that it was this kind of behavior
the original humane societies were set up to handle:
Saving what's described as "the apparently drowned"
from various watery graves.
That kind of humane stuff really hits the headlines
here at a place called Bamburgh in the northeast of England;
a place famous for its ancient castle
and even more famous for its lousy winter weather.
Rarely lousier than at 5:00 in the morning
on September the 7th, 1838,
when a luxury steamer with 68 people on board,
heading for Scotland, breaks up in a humungous storm
out there off the Farne Islands.
And everybody goes down except for nine people
clinging to the rocks and, fortunately for them,
spotted by the young daughter of the local lighthouse man.
The girl, Grace Darling, and her dad,
make two death-defying trips, rescue all the survivors,
and trigger massive public support for more of the same.
As a result of which, if you're ever clinging to the rocks,
with a bit of luck, this will happen.
Lifeboats is what Grace Darling starts,
and early on, they look like this.
Covered in cork to make them unsinkable,
with five pairs of oars,
eventually this design gets used all over the world.
So thanks to antimissile feedback
and Claude Bernard's vivisection and humane societies,
here we are on the way to help somebody in distress
from becoming an "apparently drowned."
South by southeast of the pinnacles,
and due west of the Longstown might.
Now, it has to be said that back in 1854,
when lifeboat associations really get going,
it isn't all volunteer altruism, although there's a lot of that.
No, rescuing people back then
tends to be something you do on the way to rescuing their cargo,
because what with industrial production going up in Europe and America,
and raw materials by the thousand tons crossing the ocean,
there's a lot more shipping out there, so there's a lot more money out there.
But there's another reason for all those ships,
as I'm sure you've guessed.
And it's linked to a new seafaring habit
of chucking bottles over the side.
Now, it's not often a bottle changes the course of history,
but this is no ordinary bottle, as you can see.
Meanwhile, all that extra shipping out there,
which is out there thanks to a young American naval officer,
who knows more about what goes on at sea
than you could shake a crab net at.
This guy is so hot at oceanography...
like how far winds and currents will take you
at particular times of the year...
that one day, when an American troop ship
gets hit by a gigantic storm in the Atlantic,
our pal, Matthew Maury, marks a cross on the chart,
and that's exactly where the rescue ship finds the survivors
floating in the water days later.
Pretty good, eh?
Maury's able to do that X marks the spot stuff
because by 1847, he's spent years
going through more than a million observations
on wind and currents from piles of dusty old ships' logbooks
that the department of the Navy have hung onto
but never done anything about.
And that's why I'm here in posh Academic surroundings
with a bunch of people who owe their careers to the bottle,
if you get my drift.
And if you don't, you soon will.
Attention on deck.
Thank you, take seats.
The end result of all Maury's data collecting
is basic training in every navigation class today.
Basically what Maury comes up with
is a kind of road map of the sea showing, well, the expressways.
This is one of his best examples: The Gulf Stream.
You jump on this 50-mile-wide current
going across the Atlantic that way at a time of the year
when Maury tells you the winds are also going that way,
and you will be across the Atlantic
quicker than you can say "path of minimum time sailing,"
which is what Maury calls this trick:
Using winds and currents instead of a straight line
to go from any A to any B,
thus saving a lot of time and, more important, a lot of money.
So Maury produces a book called "Sailing Directions"
and keeps it updated, because every navigator
gets a free copy of this book from the U.S. government
as long as they agree to fill in a form every day of a voyage
with temperature, pressure,
speed and direction of wind and currents, and so on;
and at certain times, throw over the side a bottle,
corked, of course, with a bit of paper inside saying:
Date, time, and position, see?
Oh, and pick up any other bottle they happen to see floating by.
As a result of all this, not surprisingly,
Maury becomes an international weather biggie,
which is why he gets to organize
the first international weather conference, in Brussels in 1853,
where he talks everybody into standard formats for weather charts.
The other thing Maury is hot for is a weather reporting network
that will use the latest wonder technology,
a new gizmo called the telegraph;
which of course bumps Maury into Sam Morse,
well-known by history for having invented the Morse code
and almost entirely forgotten by history for something else.
But before we get to that,
why are we doing all this about Maury here?
Because this place was his idea.
It's where you become a career naval officer like Maury:
The United States Naval Academy.
Okay, enough of the fun.
Now for Sam Morse, revelations of thwarted ambition,
and conspiracy theory.
And where better for such revelations
than the home of such revelations, Capitol Hill?
The court is in session.
All rise.
The evidence would seem to indicate
that Mr. Matthew Maury and all those other weather experts
are able to exchange data thanks to a trip Mr. Samuel Morse takes
back from Europe to America in 1832
and during which he "invents" the telegraph.
In fact, any court in the land would agree
that he's probably the sixth person to do so.
Anyway, back in New York... let me see...
he reads up on electricity, picks everybody's brains,
and has the two ideas that make his telegraph
the one that will end up famous rather than anybody else's.
Exhibit A, the key you tap with,
and exhibit B, the code you tap:
The Morse code.
In 1844, here in the old U.S. Supreme Court, 321a
in Washington D.C., before astonished members of Congress,
Sam Morse powers up his contraption and blows everybody away
with what must have seemed a little short of magic:
"An instant message all the way from Baltimore,
45 miles away," he says.
"And here it comes now."
And this happens.
And the rest, as they say, is history...
the history everybody knows.
Now for the less-known bit.
And get ready for some culture.
This is the Capitol building rotunda in Washington
and the next bit of the story.
The reason Morse is on that ship back from Europe... remember?...
is because he's been over there painting this kind of stuff,
for which he's already quite famous.
I mean, he's president
of the National Academy of Art and Design in New York, for a start.
So you won't be surprised to know that in terms of what happens next,
he pretty much reckons he's got the picture.
Thing is, back in 1836,
they haven't quite finished building the rotunda.
And of the decoration and stuff left to do, the main job
the rotunda art committee still have to commission
is for a set of four giant paintings like this one;
a commission which Sam Morse's pitch to the committee
kind of takes for granted.
Take a look at this, gentlemen,
and you'll see that important themes are my stock-in-trade.
This is called "The Gallery of The Louvre in Paris."
I mean, I think big.
So a job like the rotunda for a man of my talents
would be a piece of cake, right?
Wrong.
The problem is, Morse is a political looney.
He believes that the pope is infiltrating Catholics
into Missouri in preparation for an armed uprising;
that there is a foul foreign conspiracy
against these United States;
and that very soon there will be an American world empire!
Well, you can imagine the reaction
of the rotunda art committee, can't you?
Don't call us.
Morse is so ticked off, he gives up painting for good.
Still, as you know, he makes a fortune with the telegraph.
Can't win 'em all.
Meanwhile, why was he on that trip to Europe
in the first place?
Well, as I said, boning up on European art
in preparation for this presentation.
And also spending some time with his big hero,
a fellow who had the kind of disease
most of us would like to have.
The disease in question is a condition
for which the only cure, even today, is trips to Italy.
And Sam Morse's hero is nuts about the place,
especially this place: The tiny hill town of Olevano Romano,
just south of Rome, where the food and the wine
and the people and the architecture
and the sun and the olive groves
will do to you what they do to this gent here,
Washington Allston, who turns up in 1805,
so that he can do what all Romantic painters did:
Go totally over the top about how, well, Italian Italy is.
Now, clearly this program
hasn't suddenly turned into an art history class.
As usual, there's more to all this than meets the eye.
First of all, because Allston goes on to become
America's leading Romantic painter,
which is why Morse worships him and why he's in this program.
And because, apart from mooning around, hugging trees,
and smelling the flowers and taking his sketches home
and filling them with classical maidens and Greek temples
and all that good stuff,
Allston gets mixed up with a rather dubious type
I'm quite sure the puritanical Sam Morse never knew about.
The chap I have in mind turns up here to visit
and accompanies Allston on his daily commune with nature
while they discuss the meaning of life.
Only, however, on those very rare days
when the gentlemen in question
is in a fit state to discuss anything.
And the name of this candidate for the rehab clinic:
Romantic poetry hotshot Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
one of the greatest scribblers and drug addicts in English Lit.
And who spends time over in Olevano Romano, Italy,
visiting Allston on his way back to England
from this delightful spot: The holiday island of Malta,
where he's been up to some pretty strange shenanigans.
But before I dish the dirt, a quick catch-up on the story so far.
Electronic agents on the internet and wartime guns
use feedback techniques
discovered in the first place by Claude Bernard,
whose vivisection experiments
kick off all those animal rights movements
called humane societies
that really start out as lifeboat crews rescuing people
from all the shipwrecks happening
because of all the extra ships out there
who are using Maury's data on wind and currents
transmitted by the amazing new telegraph,
invented by Sam Morse, who's also a painter
whose hero is Washington Allston,
who spends time in Italy with Coleridge,
who is, as I said, here in Malta...
and, as you will see,
spending a lot of time writing back to London.
Okay, on with the story.
What Coleridge is up to here is traveling all over the island
on picnics and jolly trips to the countryside
and at the same time
working for the contemporary British equivalent of the CIA.
And trying and failing miserably
to get over his rather unfortunate habit,
which is to take humungous amounts of opium
four or five times a day and get totally off the wall.
So surprise, surprise, Coleridge is in Malta for his health.
By this time, his marriage is also on the rocks,
and he's broke, has rheumatism, gout, heart problems,
paranoia, hypochondria,
and a giant guilt complex about various kinds of sin,
and he's only 32.
Oh, and he has written some great poetry,
most of it hallucinatory.
Now, as I said, Coleridge isn't just taking in the scenery here.
By day, he's doing the 007 act,
deeply involved with "For Your Eyes Only" stuff.
On hush-hush missions he won't talk about,
for the fellow running this place,
the British governor of Malta, a Navy type called Alexander Ball.
That's Coleridge by day.
By night, he's burning the candle as rewrite man
on Governor Ball's secret reports back to London
about all the spying and skulduggery going on here.
Because Malta, in mid-Mediterranean, see,
is just where everybody wants to be.
Russia wants a Mediterranean outpost.
France wants to stop them.
Britain wants to stop France.
And America's having a war with Libya and needs a local base.
So the island is what you might call a classic hotbed of intrigue,
as they say on stuffier programs than this.
Well, you get the point about Coleridge.
Malta's the last place for a Romantic poet
to get a lot of musing and scribbling done.
So he doesn't.
And by 1806,
he's getting seriously worried about his literary output...
with good reason, because there isn't any.
So he heads for home, via Olevana Romano,
where he will stay with Allston,
leaving behind the good Governor Alexander Ball,
whose attitude to drug addict poets is typically Navy:
Shape up or ship out.
Alexander Ball gets that governor's job
in the first place because back in 1798,
he's a Navy captain fighting the French
and gets orders to join a new squadron in the Mediterranean.
The job of the squadron is to keep tabs on Napoleon.
His fleet is rumoured to be in the French port of Toulon, here.
Now, British intelligence says
his plan is to cross the Mediterranean and invade Egypt, here.
But just in case his real plan is to go for Britain,
the Brits are covering their bets here,
as well as blockading the other big French naval port of Brest, here,
as well as hanging around
another possible bolt-hole for the French fleet, in Cadiz, here.
So the Brits are stretched pretty thin.
Turns out Napoleon's real target is Egypt after all.
So he slips out of Toulon with 29 warships
and arms and ammunition up the ying-yang...
everything they need to take over Egypt.
Now, this is a catastrophe in the making,
and all there is to stop Napoleon
is Alexander Ball, his boss, and six measly little ships.
And then up comes a gale.
The Brits get driven way down here off Sardinia,
so there's nobody to prevent Napoleon
making it all the way to Egypt and taking over as planned.
And this is where Ball gets that job in Malta.
There they are in the teeth of a storm,
his boss' flagship has lost its mast,
and Ball is towing him.
The winds are up to force ten, the seas are humongous,
they're nearly on the rocks, and the boss signals,
"Cut loose and leave me."
The aptly named Ball signals, "No way."
Things are looking pretty disastrous,
and then, at the last minute, in the nick of time, the storm abates.
And it all ends like Hollywood, as you knew it would.
It just so happens, the guy whose life Ball has just saved
is Admiral Horatio Nelson, the great British hero,
who promptly thanks Ball
by making him Governor of Malta... down here, you remember...
while Nelson himself nips off to mop up Napoleon
at the Battle of the Nile.
From which he then sails off for some R and R
and all the pasta the crew can eat, to Italy, here.
It's in Naples that Nelson comes across
the hottest thing he's ever seen.
No, not Vesuvius; a lady called Emma Hamilton.
These two are about to make whoopee... sorry, history.
And this is where they will meet, Naples,
a city that has welcomed sailors with open arms for centuries;
the place for food, fun, and frolic.
And Emma Hamilton's husband is giving her enough rope,
so she's spending most of her time partying with the locals.
The elderly Hamilton is hardly the ideal match
for a dish like Emma,
so she's in the market for some pretty fishy stunts
with the local gentry, including one I can't possibly show you,
so try this spaghetti-eating contest instead.
But Emma knows her ship will come in
if she plays her cards right.
Well, it does, and I bet you've guessed who's on it.
Yes, in 1798,
the megastar Admiral Horatio Nelson arrives in Naples.
Everybody faints in fashionable style, especially Emma.
There are parties where Emma distributes buttons and ribbons
with "H.N." on them.
She also entertains Nelson wearing no underwear,
and not surprisingly, they become friends.
Nelson persuades his wife to stay back home
with tales of how Italy's bad for your health,
and eventually he and Emma return here to England,
where she has his child and they hit the tabloids, so to speak.
He leaves again for sea,
is killed at the Battle of Trafalgar,
and that's it: One of history's greatest soap operas.
Though grieving Emma lives on, widow of the nation's role model.
Not bad for a gal who got her start
in what can only be described as shocking circumstances.
Doors have been opening for Emma since she was a hooker, aged 14,
from which she graduates to be mistress of various aristocrats.
She hits the big time around 1780,
pouring drinks for the well-heeled suckers
who are flocking into London's latest health and beauty salon
with a difference, where they charge you
in more senses than one: With electric shocks.
Doctor James Graham claims his current treatment
will generate a galvanizing effect
on anybody who has a spark of life in them
and wants to be a real live wire.
And if you think that sentence was dreadful,
you should read Graham's original sales pitch.
But where Graham really scores
is with his Electrico-Magnetico Celestial Bed,
where, if you can't have children,
a few high-voltage sessions with the good doctor,
and from then on all your troubles will be little ones.
Now, this may all look like indictable offenses to you,
but you've got to remember that back then,
this is high-tech amazement... I mean, who knows?
This quack is a fully paid-up member
of the respectable professional classes,
a friend of Benjamin Franklin and various Dukes and Duchesses.
And of course, he's studied
at the best medical school in Britain: Edinburgh,
where he is taught by a fellow with a drinking problem.
The problem in question is being solved by Graham's prof,
Dr. Joe Black, here in bonny Scotland,
for the people who make this delicious stuff.
Here's how they do that.
Well, more or less.
Fire heats up the whiskey mash.
It makes steam.
You run the steam through a jacket of cold water,
which condenses the steam into drips of whiskey.
And that's still all there is to a still,
except, of course, for the secret magic ingredient
of the whiskey mash.
Okay, Black's job for the distillers is to quantify
how much fire you need to make how much steam
to be condensed by how much water
to give you how much whiskey.
In the inebriating course of these researches,
Black discovers that steam is so scalding hot
because it has a massive amount of heat in it.
Latent heat he calls it.
So he tells James Watt,
and that's why Watt comes up with a steam engine
that works so well it kicks off the Industrial Revolution.
And the legend is, he does it here,
at a place called Bo'ness, near Edinburgh, in this very cottage.
Well, ruin.
Standing, however,
in the grounds of something rather grander.
In 1764, Kinneil House is being rented
by a yuppie coal mine owner called Roebuck,
who backs Watt's steam engine research,
and then his coal mines flood out, and he goes bankrupt
before Watt can finish his work.
The two of them split amicably enough,
it's nobody's fault,
and there's not much point, is there,
in crying over spilt milk.
Appropriately enough, spilt milk is the reason
Roebuck makes his money in the first place.
See, this is the old way to bleach cotton,
soaked in sour milk for six weeks.
A lot of time and a lot of real estate.
Until Roebuck comes up with a better way... cheaper and faster.
But the bleachers aren't keen, with good reason,
because although Roebuck's new stuff will bleach in 24 hours
and costs a lot less, sulfuric acid's not exactly user-friendly
if you happen to spill it.
So thanks to the electrical Graham's link with Black,
who introduced Watt to Roebuck,
here we are about to see the bleach fields disappear forever
when somebody now invents a way to bleach cloth
just like the way you do it in your washing machine today.
This somebody is called Tennant, and he takes a scientific approach.
First he makes chlorine gas
and then mixes it with lime and water
and comes up with a magic liquid
that will put all these people out of work.
Tennant's bleaching liquid
relocates the bleaching industry into factories.
And when he produces a powdered version of the stuff,
you can bleach clothes in the comfort of your own kitchen.
So the bleach fields go back to being moorland,
and Tennant goes on to become a paper millionaire.
Ironic, considering what his bleaching powder does to paper.
Here's an important bit of paper I'll get to in a second.
Meanwhile, where are we?
Remember Coleridge in Malta?
Where he worked for Captain Alexander Ball,
who saves Nelson's life so he can fall for the dubious Emma,
whose electrical start in life was with Dr. Graham,
educated in Scotland by the whiskey experimenter Joe Black,
who's friends with the sulfuric Roebuck,
whose bleaching techniques are improved by Tennant,
who gets rich by making things whiter than white.
Not, however, this important bit of paper,
The American Declaration of Independence.
Have you ever noticed how American documents
from this period are all kind of mud colored,
and the English stuff from the same time is gray?
That's because they're made from rags,
and whatever color the rags are you get.
Well, Tennant's new bleach makes paper white at last,
because it does the same to the rags no matter what the cloth,
no matter what the pattern on them.
And the need for good white paper is on the rise,
like everything else in the Industrial Revolution.
Which is why, around 1812,
a new French patent makes such a big hit here in London.
Take a lot of bleached pulp made from rags
and spread it evenly on a wire mesh belt,
which is vibrating to shake all the water out.
Then run the damp pulp between a series of heated rollers,
and what you get is cheap enough to stick on the walls...
and cover with fancy designs too.
And the printing is mechanized by now, too,
because in 1840 a Yorkshire cotton printing firm
comes up with a way for printing paper with rollers.
Between them, mechanized papermaking and roller printing
make life in the modern world
just that little bit more fun for young home owners,
because they make possible... cheap wallpaper.
And this is where things take a left-hand turn
for the decorative, the medieval, and the socialist.
This is the medieval bit.
By the mid-19th century, the Romantic movement
has everybody nostalgic for the Middle Ages
and what life was like
before they built the factory down the street.
So real aesthetes turn their homes
into kind of Victorian versions of the 15th century with gas light.
Into this radical, chic world of historical inaccuracy
comes a failed architect
who is hot stuff at the new rustic simplicity,
name of William Morris,
who promptly invents what we now call decor,
the kind of country fresh design work people pay the earth for
at some of the fancier fabric outlets;
as well as arts and crafts furnishings and textiles
that are supposed to make your little suburban home
Iook less rookery nook and more "Queen Elizabeth slept here."
Now, you'd expect a nice middle-class decorator
like William Morris to have a favorite color, right?
Well, he does: It's red.
And here's where the left-hand turn I mentioned comes in.
Because Morris is also revolutionary.
Where home is a hovel and dull we grovel,
forgetting that the world is fair.
In 1883, Morris and Karl Marx's sister and others get together
and a year later, Morris founds The Socialist League
with uplifting class warfare songs to match.
Come, shoulder to shoulder ere the world grows older.
Help lies in nought but thee and me.
And over on the piano:
A couple of canoodling socialist nobodies
who are more than just friends
and who are about to become world famous.
...than men may be.
Now, those two lovebirds I mentioned,
George Bernard Shaw and Annie Besant
first meet when she gets herself embroiled
in what becomes know as the Great Contraception Trial.
Now, you've got to remember that back then,
you can get yourself in deep doo-doo just by
putting the words "family" and "planning" together.
Annie, however, does a good deal more than that.
In Britain, she publishes a new book,
recently arrived from America
and called "The Fruits of Philosophy."
Now, this little book is no big deal to you or me.
The stuff in here is so tame it would cure your insomnia.
But, boy, does it cook Annie's goose.
Let me read you a little bit of the stuff
that offends all right-thinking, decent-minded folk back in 1877,
gets Annie a fine and six months in jail.
And I hope you're ready for this.
"Another check which the old idea of conception
"has led some to recommend with considerable confidence
"consists in introducing, previous to connection,
"a very delicate piece of sponge moistened with water
"to be immediately afterwards withdrawn
by means of a very narrow ribbon attached to it."
Lurid stuff, eh?
Well, the fine and the sentence
turn Annie into a real revolutionary,
which accounts for me playing the piano badly here in India.
Madras, to be specific.
After a couple of decades
of fighting the establishment back in England for women's rights,
Annie comes out here to India to fight another cause.
We Brits are running the place at the time,
and Annie reckons we shouldn't be.
So she takes on the crazy task of getting the British out of India.
Did pretty well... we're out, aren't we?
By 1893, Annie's done courses in spiritualism, hypnotism,
and psychic perception,
and moved on to various swamis and gurus
and the Indian National Congress.
Of which, by 1917, she will become president
and get to know such movers and shakers as Gandhi and Nehru.
On the way to the political high life,
she also sets up this place,
the International Theosophy Headquarters,
where courses in comparative religion are given.
So Annie has come a long way since tinkling the ivories
with down-and-out socialists like George Bernard Shaw.
She's now very well-known wherever liberals flourish...
even America.
Where she and her gurus go over very big in 1893
at the Great Columbia Exposition in Chicago,
where they fire everybody's imagination.
And I don't just mean with the spices in the curry.
I mean the curry... vegetarianism.
Which, by this time,
has also become the subject of some visionary thinking
by another lady who knows a bit about religion... in Michigan.
The lady here in Michigan is Ellen White,
a leading member
of the 19th-century Seventh Day Adventist Church.
I hail thy hallowed day of rest.
Ellen White has a series of visions,
most of them about the direction the church ought to be going.
But as you'll see, from this little visionary home of hers,
she changes more than just life in the church.
The solace of my careworn breast.
See, one of the things Adventists stand for
is moderation in all things, and that includes
something close to Annie Besant's heart too.
Because the Adventist church discourages its members
from taking stimulants of any kind and from eating meat.
At one point, some Adventists visit Dansville, New York,
famous for its water cures... cold baths, that sort of stuff.
And hygiene and health
fit very well with the New Adventist diet.
The holy calm I find in Thee.
And this is where the Adventist church
begins to affect the rest of us.
Inspired by Dansville, they do this...
a 19th-century version of what I'm doing.
They set up the first real organized
health and fitness center,
and it sets a whole new style of living,
as a result of which, today, every morning, people like me
work up a sweat with some kind of keep fit thing or other.
And speaking of sweat, excuse me.
Well, we're almost at the end of our story.
In 1866, the Adventists open the Western Health Reform Institute
and, ten years later,
invite a young doctor they've sponsored through training
to be the superintendent.
He changes the name to The Sanitarium,
introduces room service and entertainment,
and turns this place into where the elite meet.
If you're into healthy living, this place is playing your tune.
The new superintendent is quite a guy.
18-hour days.
He can dictate letters at 125 words a minute for 48 hours.
He dresses only in white
and can often be seen with his cockatoo on his shoulder.
He does away with some of the more violent water cures
and opens schools of nursing, physical education,
and home economics.
He works everybody to exhaustion
on exercise machines known as muscle beaters
and makes everybody sit, all the time,
on posture chairs like this.
He starves his clients on a diet of water, yogurt, rice,
nuts, fresh fruit and veggies,
and then he does something that only changes the entire world.
Thank you, I'll take the breakfast, please.
So here we are with a new menu for living
thanks to the ingredients that have made up this program.
Electronic agents using feedback techniques
developed for wartime guns
because of Claude Bernard and all those experiments
that kick off the antivivisection humane societies
that really start out as lifeboat organizations
set up to rescue people from ships
using the wind and weather data from Maury,
based on telegraphy invented by Samuel Morse,
who learns painting from Allston,
who's a pal of Coleridge, who works in Malta for Ball,
who saves Nelson for Emma,
who's worked for the electrical Graham,
who's taught by Whiskey scientist Black,
who knows the sulfuric Roebuck,
who bleaches paper that will be decorated by Morris,
who's a socialist with Annie Besant,
who is a vegetarian just like the Seventh Day Adventists.
Which is why we end, as I said, with the day that changed the world.
Because here in 1895,
the superintendent was trying to invent a healthier kind of bread,
and all he came up with was some mushy gunk.
So just for kicks, he put it through rollers and baked it.
And what came out changed the daily routine
of the inhabitants of planet Earth.
Today, it's named after
the superintendent who produced the original mush,
and that is why a program that began with electronic agents in India
ends here in Battle Creek, Michigan, with this.
Kellogg's Corn Flakes.
Good for my feedback.