I suppose you could call this program a travelogue.
It does travel through space and time.
Or you could call it a kind of detective story.
It's certainly full of mysteries.
Or you could say it's about one
of history's greatest cases of mistaken identity.
Or you could call it any one of these things.
After all, what's in a name?
Here we are in the mysterious Orient, right?
Colorful, exotic customs, ancient rituals.
Above all, perhaps, different.
Well, that's what it says in the brochure.
The fact is, that might have been true 50 years ago,
but today half the world's cities,
including Singapore, look more like Dallas.
And anyway, nowadays, most travelers and holidaymakers
don't actually want all that foreign stuff, do they?
I mean, ask anybody on a package tour.
Ah, room service.
Thank you.
What most people care about when they're abroad
is the state of their insides.
So you ought to stick to international food.
Well, that way, you don't get Montezuma's revenge
or Delhi belly or whatever you want to call it.
Well, not with this, you don't:
The new global diet for the new global person...
the calorie-aware, weight-conscious, healthy-living individual.
This little flake is eaten
by hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
Pretty much anywhere you go, you can get corn flakes.
Now, there are those gourmets
and old-fashioned exploring adventurers
who lament the passing of local customs in things like food
and the disappearance of exotic breakfasts
of fried ants, boiled tripe, black pudding, meat soup,
cheese and olives, or whatever people used to eat
before this new high-speed diet for a high-speed world.
There are even those who would say that,
gastronomically speaking, this is a load of garbage,
which would be unfair.
There is garbage associated with it,
but I assure you it comes into the story
well after you've finished your corn flakes.
So let me bring it into the story now.
This is what I'm talking about,
what's left after you've taken the corn for the corn flakes.
There are thousands of tons of it being produced every day.
Ah.
Used corncobs.
And thanks to a totally forgotten German chemist
who I think really didn't know what he was doing anyway,
this garbage is far from garbage.
For much of modern industry, what you could do
with this stuff really beats the band.
This musical interlude is happening in the market square
of the small eastern German town where the story starts.
It's called Jena, and back in 1810,
it got one of the best universities in the country
and two professors, one of whom becomes world famous.
The other one's totally forgotten
until this program drags him out of obscurity
thanks to those corncobs I mentioned.
But let's have a little more oompah first, hmm?
Okay, sorry.
Back to corncobs again while I lead you up the garden path
in what can only be described as the corniest story I've ever told.
One of the things in the 19th century
you're not going to find in fancy botanical gardens like this
is that.
I mean, from a horticultural point of view,
this is pretty low-rent stuff.
Back then, you feed corncobs to cows and chickens,
you grow mushrooms on them, you use them to fill swampy ground,
and sometimes you make pipes out of them.
What are you going to do with corncobs?
And then in 1810, the fellow who lives in this house
and runs this botanical garden and administers Jena university
and is one of those academics I mentioned,
the one who becomes world famous, the great German poet Goethe,
takes up the cause of a corncob and changes history.
Thanks to encouragement from Goethe,
an associate professor of chemistry here
that I bet my life you've never heard of
called Wolfgang Doebereiner takes a close look
at various organic matters
and comes up with a totally new chemical
I also bet my life you've never heard of
called furfural.
Now, don't ask me or him
why Doebereiner should do such a thing.
He just does and then does nothing about it,
except to write the usual humongously boring
scientific paper, about which for 100 years,
nobody else does anything either.
But wait.
Here we are in the 1930s, and still nobody cares
about poor, old Doebereiner's furfural.
Until people start drilling oil wells all over the place.
Bad news for farmers.
Till this point, most useful chemicals came from plants,
but now they're going to be petroleum by-products.
Agribusiness better find some new way to use their leftovers, or they'll be...
One day, the people at Quaker Oats
dig up Doebereiner's stuff and discover
that if you press, boil, steam, and shove acid into corncobs
and other kinds of organic garbage
left after people have had their breakfast,
what do you get but furfural, which now turns out to be
a chemical that goes into all kinds of good stuff.
So from the dim recesses of academic life,
Doebereiner's little discovery ends up
in every chemical library in the world,
one of the great solvents of all time,
used in the production of stuff like petroleum products,
synthetic rubber, insecticides, herbicides,
and all kinds of pharmaceuticals, lubricants, weed killers,
and something in quantum physics I don't understand.
Oh, and one thing Doebereiner would really have appreciated:
Anticarbuncle cream, which, fortunately for you,
is not the next connection in this program.
Because the other place furfural gets used
is in making a resin that is just what people want
for bonding abrasives to grinding wheels,
a subject you've waited all your life to know about, I know.
So I won't make light of it.
The light in question is a quarter of a million bulbs
lighting up the great Chicago Columbia Exposition of 1893.
All thanks to George Westinghouse,
who gets around Edison's patent for a one-piece lightbulb
with a two-piece lightbulb.
Bottom, an open-necked bulb
into which, above, the filament base fits.
You plug it into the open neck of the bulb,
and you maintain the vacuum inside the lightbulb,
because everything's airtight thanks to
the ground-glass collar that fits perfectly.
Ah.
Meet abrasive American Edward Goodrich Acheson,
who does all that ground-glass work for Westinghouse,
because thanks to an accident, he owns a Carborundum company.
The accident happens earlier, in 1861,
when Acheson is bashing a lot of electricity
into a mixture of coke and clay.
At a humongously high temperature, the whole lot melts.
Big deal and certainly not the abrasives
Acheson's trying to make at the time.
And then he notices some tiny crystals in the clay.
He puts a bit on the end of a pencil lead,
and it scratches glass like diamonds.
Bingo.
Well, where else would he go but here?
Now, if there's one industry that needs good abrasives,
it's the diamond business,
harder and more polished than which there isn't.
Back then, Tiffany's is where the bejeweled elite meet
to choose their sparklers, so, not surprisingly,
it's somebody at Tiffany's who encourages Acheson
to do something about his accident,
like do it again on purpose
and market the world's hardest material after diamonds,
Carborundum, chemical name silicon carbide.
Carborundum is soon being described as an indispensable tool of industry
by anybody with anything that needs an edge.
Like plowshares.
And speaking of plowshares, swords.
One spectacular modern use of Acheson's silicon carbide
happens in 1960s Vietnam
with the invention of an outfit called the air cavalry,
whose choppers are highly maneuverable,
well-armed, and everywhere.
Now, taking the wounded out or dropping Green Berets in
and delivering supplies, doing reconnaissance,
or conducting rocket attacks, chopper people
are constantly and acutely aware of one minor problem.
One of the reasons choppers are so clever
is because they can sit still in midair,
which kind of makes them a target it is difficult to miss.
So it's the chopper people who think up a use
for Acheson's silicon carbide as a protective lining
for their vulnerable machines,
thing being, silicon carbide's a lot tougher than most of the stuff
shooting up at them from the jungle below.
One of the nicest things you can say to somebody
fighting a war on the ground, in the jungle is,
"Put this on, and you won't get hurt."
So what starts up there with the chopper pilots
very soon comes down here with the grunts,
where the fighting is very
close-quarters, spoil-your-day type of stuff.
So in no time at all,
what the well-dressed dogface is wearing
is some helicopter protection for humans called a flak jacket,
which has some very interesting features to it.
Like if you're wearing one, you can throw a grenade
just a few yards, turn and hunch up,
and survive your blast while others do not.
And more than half of all wounds that were previously lethal
become no longer lethal.
You still get a real pain in the chest maybe,
but that's a lot better than getting taken seriously dead
by somebody's armor-piercing ordnance.
Speaking of which, let me give you some hard facts.
It all started with corn flakes made from corncobs
that Doebereiner turned into furfural
to bond silicon carbide abrasives
that Westinghouse used to grind lightbulbs
and that also ended up as protection for choppers
and in flak jackets
to protect against armor-piercing ammunition,
which originally got developed for use against something
that first appeared in World War I.
The main snag for World War I infantry
is getting snagged and then shocked on rows of barbed wire.
So here's the solution,
named... because it looks just like a water tank... a tank.
Main job: Roll over and flatten the barbed wire
so the troops can get through okay
and then act as protection for the troops
as they go on into the advance.
Small wonder the tank soon becomes
everybody's favorite war machine.
Except for the people inside, where it can get
up to 125 degrees, cramped, and smelly.
But what a ride.
It can handle 6-foot vertical slopes
and 15-foot vertical drops.
Only question is, can the crew?
Tanks are a smash success, and nothing can stop them,
except, as I said, the armor-piercing ammunition,
which is now invented.
Meanwhile, tanks win the war for the Allies.
In 1918, 59 British divisions beat 99 German divisions
because the Brits have tanks and the Germans have no chance.
Tanks also offer a bright future
to one particular bunch of soldiers, who take them over:
The old sabre-wielding cavalry.
And speaking of swords, plowshares.
Now, if you take a close look at this picture,
you'll see two things that caused the tank to happen in the first place.
The soft soil here in the beautiful San Joaquin Valley, California.
That and the fact that all the horses are about to be taken off the farms
to be sent to Europe for the war effort.
This critical situation inspires an enterprising type called Ben Holt,
who lives here in the San Joaquin Valley,
to invent one of those amazing labor-saving devices
for which America has always been famous,
set the stage for the development of the tank,
and change the whole nature of farming
here on the local fields and then all over the world
virtually at a stroke.
Introducing...
the machine that turns America into the world's breadbasket
and solves the problem of horselessness,
Take a look at this wonderful thing.
It won't surprise you that one of Holt's pals,
watching this thing at work,
says it reminds him of a caterpillar.
So guess what the company ends up being called?
And the rest is farm equipment history.
But let me give you a quick tour of the place.
Number one, the secret of the Holt success,
the crawler tracks.
The trick here is, the track spreads the load
all the way along the track so the weight of the machine
isn't concentrated on the wheels.
And what that means is,
there's nowhere too soft for this baby to go.
Which is great news for farmers here
in the San Joaquin Valley and then everywhere else.
Number two, a wheel at the front,
so if it rolls down into a hole, it rolls up, out the other side.
Number three, Holt drives each track separately.
So what that means is, if you want to change direction,
you just do this.
Turn on a dime.
Well, a quarter.
But you can see why the generals back in Europe
jump at the idea, though.
You can use one of these things to haul army supplies
night and day, thick and thin, and it doesn't need hay.
And you can also turn it into a tank, which they do.
Well, that's World War I in the bag.
Drinks all 'round.
One last thing about tractors: Their engines,
which is why I mentioned the drink.
Beer, as it happens, because that's what it takes
for Holt and everybody else in the U.S. To get to hear about diesel engines.
You know, history's funny in some ways,
because the fellow who helps
to make tractors synonymous with diesel engines
is a brewer from St. Louis called Gustavus Adolphus Busch.
You can still buy his stuff today, see?
Anyway, Busch buys the U.S. rights to diesel engines in 1897,
because the technical director at his brewery is a German
who was at school with a fellow called Rudolf Diesel.
And Diesel gets his first job
with a fellow who kind of invents refrigeration,
and he does that to keep beer cool.
Anyway, Diesel.
Lonely childhood.
Grows up obsessed with mechanical efficiency.
What can I say? It takes all sorts.
Besides, it does end up making Rudolf rich and famous,
so let's hear it for mechanical obsessions.
Now, the really clever thing about a diesel engine is,
it's not a gasoline engine.
And the reason that's clever
can only be described as a lot of hot air.
First because a gasoline engine
compresses the air and the fuel spray mix,
and then a spark explodes the mixture,
so you have to get the timing just right,
or the spark'll happen when the mixture's not ready.
And if you let the air compress too much,
it'll ignite the fuel spontaneously.
But that's just the point with a diesel engine.
Here, there's no mixture, just air, which you compress.
And when you do, its temperature rises to about 8,000 degrees Celsius.
At the top of the cycle, at maximum temperature and pressure,
you spray in some fuel.
The hot air ignites it and pushes the piston down.
What you're getting here is extremely efficient use of fuel,
because the very high compression gives you more bang for your buck.
And because it's so efficient, you save fuel,
and what that does is save you money.
But the really brilliant thing about Diesel's idea
is that his engine will run on almost anything.
And that's great news for Europeans,
because since the engine doesn't explode the fuel
the way a gasoline engine does,
it doesn't need refined petroleum product,
and that's good, because back then in Europe,
with almost no oil industry to speak of,
that kind of stuff costs an arm and a leg.
Anyway, some time around 1893, Diesel gets a contract
from a big engine factory here in Germany,
and in no time at all, diesel engines are in everything
from battleships to fancy cars.
And what makes all this happen for a a man with a Ionely childhood
is the fact that one of the fuels
Diesel says the engine might be able to use,
there's lots of in Germany.
It's coal.
So all you have to do is dig a big hole.
Now, there's one man who owns more coal mines
than anybody else in Germany...
and shipyards, steelworks, armaments factories,
and practically the whole German industrial machine.
What am I saying?
He is the whole German industrial machine.
And his name is Krupp.
Krupp comes in on that engine deal with Diesel I mentioned
and helps Diesel make enough for a comfortable old age.
Come to think of it, as you'll see,
the Krupps are rather good at that kind of thing.
So Krupp is the reason why the next stop on our journey
is the coal fields of the German Ruhr.
Thanks to the fact that corncobs make adhesives
to bond Carborundum, otherwise known as silicon carbide,
to grinding wheels used to grind lightbulbs.
Silicon carbide is also then used
as protection against armor-piercing shells
developed to hit tanks that start life as American tractors,
which use diesel engines
developed thanks to funding from Krupp.
Okay, enough of this hole.
By the 1860s, the Krupps are well on their way
to running everything in Germany.
They own all the bits of the jigsaw:
Steelworks to make the machinery they own
to dig up the coal they own to be sent around the country
on railroad rolling stock they own,
carrying the fuel essential to the running
of the steelworks they own.
It's what's known as a win-win situation.
But I didn't come here to get covered in coal dust
just to tell you about boring industrial machinery
but because there's another, more intriguing side to Krupp.
The real reason Krupp is so successful
is the way he treats his workers, because he hates socialism.
To put it in a nutshell, Krupp reckons
that if the workers are going to go on strike
for better working conditions, then give them just that.
So he gives them just this.
Krupp invents company benefits
with showers and changing rooms and work uniforms
and everything to make a Krupp worker want
to stay a Krupp worker.
He also provides a canteen, hospitals, a pension fund,
and all kinds of other goodies.
And across the road from the mine or the factory,
he also builds company housing.
And in the pleasant company suburb,
there's also a company school, a company church,
a company kindergarten,
and, of course, there's always a company store.
Working for Krupp is womb to tomb.
Now, what with all that armament stuff,
Krupp is called the "cannon king"
and gets to know all the Prussian military biggies,
and they don't come any bigger than Bismarck,
who loves a good war and is running the country at the time.
And who is so impressed by Krupp... among other things,
they both vastly prefer trees to people...
that he, Bismarck, tries out the Krupp welfare thing
on a national scale.
In 1889, he starts the world's first ever state pension scheme
by which the average person gets enough to live on...
once, that is, Bismarck knows what constitutes the average person,
a concept, naturally enough, thought up by a Belgian astronomer.
Meet Alphonse Quetelet, who's about to turn
the kind of bodies astronomers observe
into the kind of bodies governments observe.
See, the trouble with planets and such is that sometimes,
if you don't see them frequently enough,
you lose track of them.
So 19th-century astronomers used probability math
to predict where you should look,
even if all you've had are a few sightings.
Quetelet's bright idea is to use the same probability math
to work out another kind of prediction,
the kind governments want to make about people,
even if they're only able to keep their eye on a few of them.
We call Quetelet's math for people "statistics,"
and with it, he invents an amazing new concept
you and I take for granted today,
the average person and what average people do.
No wonder Bismarck jumps at this new way
of analyzing how people behave, because it lets you predict
how they'll react to events, their voting patterns,
how effective propaganda might be on them.
The new math is great for manipulating people.
And before you start feeling smug
about repressive Prussians and what else would you expect
from countries where things get violent,
the place Quetelet's new numbers are about to make a real splash
is the ever-so-genteel surroundings
of the University of Cambridge in England,
mainly because, as is so often the case in these programs,
things are not quite what they seem...
in this case, peaceful.
Behind the elegant facade of early 19th-century British society,
the living and working conditions
of the average factory employee are so horrendous
as to make the government of the day just a touch perturbed.
Ah, come in.
Now, it's in this room in Trinity College in 1833,
while everybody's up here for a science conference in Cambridge
that Quetelet gets together for tea...
oh, muffin?
With a bunch of academics whom he persuades to set up
what eventually becomes known as the Royal Statistical Society.
Of course, the real statistical aim of every middle-class Victorian... tea?
Is to gather data on the population of the growing industrial cities...
people living in stinking, overcrowded, diseased squalor...
so as to turn them into decent, obedient, hard-working,
thrifty, nonrevolutionary workers.
Milk?
Essential statistical facts are then discovered:
How many ragged families can sing a jolly song,
how many starving mothers can knit,
the number of inspiring prints hanging on the walls of their filthy hovels,
how often this kind of person gets their hair cut.
Speaking of which, one of the guys at this uplifting Cambridge chitchat
gets his life changed by French hairdressers.
Now, before we get to French hairdressers,
where are we?
Apart from France, that is.
Krupp's welfare benefits got Bismarck keen on statistics
that Quetelet persuaded the Cambridge people to get into.
Right.
Now why we're here: French weights and measures.
If you want metric, how do you know
your shoe size in centimeters, for instance?
Sit down for a drink.
Do you know you can drink 75 centiliters of wine?
Well, it's easy enough for the locals.
But once upon a time, they were in exactly the same mess,
which is why this is one of those very rare occasions
when the course of history is changed by a haircut,
because that fellow from Cambridge I mentioned,
a mathematician called Charles Babbage,
takes a trip to France and turns up here
not long after they've had a revolution and gone metric.
Every single calculation they'd previously done
in Paris feet or Marseilles gallons or whatever
now has to be done in centimeters and liters
and kilos and so on.
Every table of calculation
for every shop and factory and profession
has to be recalculated.
As it happens, at the time,
French fashions in hairstyling have gone all revolutionary.
And apart from the fact that half the aristocrats in France
have lost their heads so there's not much work around
for people like Pierre Gilles here to do anyway,
the new revolutionary cut is kind of short back and sides.
So most places like this in France have so little work to do,
they are, to put it mildly, tearing their hair out.
Well, wouldn't you know it?
The French solve their metric problem
and their out-of-work-hairdresser problem
with typical panache.
They let one problem solve the other.
As Babbage discovers when he gets here,
they've used 60 unemployed hairdressers
sitting there for months, struggling with pencil and paper
to work out every single sum needed
to turn the country's old-fashioned measurement system
on its head.
Mind you, the thought of all that amateur arithmetic
is enough to make your hair curl.
And to make matters worse, on average,
there's hundreds of mistakes in every table they churn out.
Merci.
Well, thinks Babbage, there's just got to be an easier way.
So he comes up with an absolutely amazing invention
that for anybody from then on
who wants to do complicated mathematical tables
will make all the difference.
Babbage's difference engine does sums,
and this is a really simple version
of something so complicated, he never actually makes one.
Say you want to add three on the right to seven on the left.
Turn the little cog on the right three places,
and that does the same to the cog on the left.
And when it gets to ten, it moves a lever
that moves the cog above, with tens on it, to one.
So the sum of seven and three is ten.
Then Babbage automates the process with the use of a punch card.
Whichever rod gets through whichever hole in the card
activates a selected set of levers
that moves whichever cog you want to use for the sum.
Now, Babbage never builds this thing,
but since you know what a punch card is,
you know something happened.
Well, in 1845, this does:
The Britannia bridge between England and Wales,
two giant, 1,500-foot tubes each big enough to take a train
and each needing 2 million rivets,
all done by a riveting machine controlled... you've guessed it...
with punch cards.
Engineer in charge Robert Stephenson also thinks up the idea
of floating the massive tubes into position,
an idea that causes ripples in more ways than one.
See, one of Stephenson's close pals
is the fellow who masterminds the floating delivery
of the tube girders for the bridge.
He's also a hotshot engineer in his own right,
and he's done everything from bridges in Australia
to railways in Italy.
Isambard Kingdom Brunel is his name, and he's got two problems.
And, as it happens, both of them will be solved
by the Britannia bridge.
The first problem is rivets, because Brunel is planning
to punch in no fewer than 31/2 million of them.
And the second problem
is what he's planning to punch them into.
Yet another Victorian megaproject.
It is Brunel's modest aim to build only
the biggest ship ever in the history of the whole world
and use it to take thousands of people out to Australia
without having to stop off in several places like Singapore
on the way to refuel, which, back then,
is the main thing you see on the docksides
on the way out from Europe.
Coal, mountains of it.
But Brunel's new monster ship is going to be so big,
it'll carry all the coal it needs.
Well, it never actually happens, but for sheer effort,
you've got to take your hat off to Brunel.
Here's Brunel wearing his famous hat
and, behind him, his monster ship,
the "Great Eastern," built of the same tube girders
as the Britannia bridge and a zillion rivets.
I'll sing you a song of the fish of the sea,
for we're bound for...
And, as I said, the wrong ship
in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Just too big too soon.
Mind you, she does totally change transoceanic communication
but not in any way Brunel could have ever foreseen.
...for we're bound for the Rio Grande.
See, as I said, life in Victorian times
is lived on the grand scale
if you're ambitious and you like to think big.
And they all did.
Well, they don't come much bigger,
if you think about it, than the Atlantic.
Three miles deep in some places,
and the shortest way across is 2,000 miles
of some of the worst weather in the world.
Not exactly the kind of place anybody sane
would want to do delicate precision engineering.
But, hey, these are Victorians, and they can do the impossible,
which is what is now proposed by an American gent
called Cyrus Field.
He's a millionaire, which helps when you're thinking big.
Now, Cyrus has an ocean crossing in mind
but one with a bit of a difference.
This is the Atlantic I was talking about.
Us, America.
And in between, a lot of nothing heaving up and down.
Cyrus checks the place out with another American,
Atlantic weather guru Matthew Maury,
who says, "Go in August, and do it like this."
From Valentia Island off Ireland to Heart's Content Bay, Newfoundland,
because it's flat all the way.
The bottom, Maury means.
Because what we're into here
is the first transatlantic submarine telegraph cable.
Now, you know there's only one ship in the world capable
of carrying what is needed for all this madness,
which is 2,000 miles of cable weighing 6,000 tons,
600 tons of equipment,
and, above all, eleventeen million tons of coal.
Yes, the out-of-work
and by now up-for-auction "Great Eastern."
I'll sing you a song...
In July 1866, they're off at about eight miles an hour,
paying out the cable from gigantic drums in the hold
with a crafty bit of equipment to control the tension
as the cable disappears over the stern and they go up and down.
Somehow, they inched their way painfully across the Atlantic.
13 days later,
they're hauling the cable ashore in Newfoundland.
So now you can send a cable along the cable.
The first day, they transmit $10,000 worth of messages.
So as with so many great acts of technology,
at one stroke, the world is changed
thanks also, above all, in this case,
to something that changes your stroke,
the one thing that allows a transatlantic cable to operate
three miles down
in the incredibly hostile environment of the ocean floor,
the stuff wrapped 'round it, the cable insulation,
which turns out also to change this kind of stroke.
Well, I never said I had a good drive, did I?
The underwater cable insulation is a new wondergunk
that comes, as it happens, from these trees.
And in 1840, it's being used by the locals here in Singapore
when a young assistant surgeon called Montgomery
happens to stumble across it.
It's a sap.
You slash the tree and milk it
much the same way as you tap rubber.
And it's called gutta-percha.
Now, you know how useful and everywhere plastic is today.
Well, gutta-percha is like that for people back in 1840.
You dip it in boiling water so it softens
and you can shape it, and then it hardens again.
So gutta-percha turns up, just like plastic today,
as a substitute for wood, leather, cardboard,
paper, metal, and in the weirdest places:
Stethoscopes, false teeth, inkstands, flower vases,
and, of course, wrapped around Cyrus Field's transatlantic cable.
But the real reason for all this palaver
with me and the clubs is what gutta-percha does
to the ancient and exclusive game of golf.
And if you're a golf fanatic,
get ready to take a picture of your TV screen now and frame it.
Because gutta-percha goes into golf balls
and makes them cheaper, fly straighter,
and last longer than once around the course.
And this is an original gutta-percha ball.
Thank you.
Of course, the new ball has to pass the old buffers
at St. Andrew's royal and ancient golf club
in Scotland, where, after all, the 18-hole golf course was invented.
Well, after a lot of buffing, the old buffers finally agree.
The new ball is introduced, and Scottish golf really takes off.
I mean, all sorts of ordinary people turn up and want to play.
So a quick catch-up.
Krupp welfare uses statistics calculated by Babbage's engine
using punch cards that rivet bridges and the "Great Eastern"
that lays the cable insulated by gutta-percha
that gets used to make cheap golf balls
so now ordinary Scotsmen can get to play.
Thank you. Thank you.
And the reason they do that is because
there's a wonderful new thing called leisure time.
All that trade with America is boosting the Scottish economy,
and the powerful and straightlaced Scottish church
would rather the newly affluent workers
spent their money on sports and family holidays by the sea
instead of drinking it away in the pub outside the factory.
So in pulpits all over Scotland, a lot of hot air is being talked
about the "evils of industrialization."
Ironic, since hot air's the cause of it.
The hot air in question is the business of a guy called Neilson,
the manager of the gasworks in Glasgow, Scotland.
In 1832, he thinks up the idea
of blasting hot air into iron-melting furnaces,
making them hot enough to burn even low-grade Scottish coal,
thus turning Scotland into an instant industrial country
with factory managers who have enough money and spare time
to go off to St. Andrew's and play golf.
And in no time at all,
the whole of Scottish manufacturing is really on a roll
and, like rolling stones, gathering no moss.
Well, except for one Scottish businessman,
who was up here in the wild glens of Scotland gathering moss.
Why moss?
Well, there's a lot of it up here.
There's not much else.
Now, when you're talking about
whether a country makes it to industrial status,
which Scotland now does, as you saw, thanks to Neilson,
having those iron foundries is the litmus test,
which is what Neilson's new partner, Charles Macintosh,
and his father, George here, have been doing
in the Scottish glens.
Because litmus paper does all that stuff,
like changing color when you dip it in acid or alkali,
if you recall your school chemistry lessons,
because it's impregnated with this stuff,
a particular lichen or moss that George Macintosh is looking for.
The moss is one ingredient of a dye called cudbear,
which will color cloth bright red.
So since back in 1777, George Macintosh,
who dyes cloth, has been spending weeks at a time
out on romantic moss-collecting trips
among the heather to get his raw material.
Now, most unfortunately, cudbear dye needs
one other vital ingredient besides Scottish moss,
and it's something that will take us back
from these Ionely highlands
to that hot air gas company manager Neilson,
because the other ingredient for cudbear dye
requires the Macintosh company to go looking for raw materials
in less salubrious places than the Scottish glens.
It's urine, which contains ammonia,
which is why Neilson and the Macintosh family
got together in the first place, since ammonia is a by-product
of what you get when you make coal gas,
and you recall that's what Neilson made at his gasworks.
Okay, let's leave George Macintosh up this mountain
while I change the subject,
because at this point in the story, the path of history splits into two.
The first pathway takes us away from moss collecting
to some pretty weird goings on a good deal farther south.
In India, to be exact.
This is one of those "isn't it a small world" stories.
Back in Scotland, Neilson's father
has been employed by a fellow called John Roebuck,
who owns coal mines, and Roebuck has been taught
in Edinburgh by a professor called Joe Black.
Roebuck tells Black about the water flooding his mines,
and Black tells Roebuck about James Watt
of steam engine fame.
And together, Watt and Roebuck make mine-draining music
with Watt's new steam-driven pump.
Roebuck's money sets Watt up in business,
and he makes a fortune
and eventually becomes an amateur scientist,
like all gentlemen did at the time.
Thank you.
Now, one of Watt's experiments causes a bit of a stir
in the hallowed halls of the British Royal Society
when he crosses swords
with an aristocrat called Lord Henry Cavendish.
They're always all about which one of them has done
some experiment or other to find out what water is.
Well, Watt becomes a member of the Royal Society,
the two of them meet and become friends,
and that's that.
However, at the time,
Cavendish is also sponsoring to the Society a young man.
That's why I'm telling you all this in India,
because the young man is a fellow called James Macie,
and his main contribution to science is to investigate... hang on a minute.
To investigate a liquid that appears in the joints of bamboo.
Because in 1791, some of this mystery liquid
has been sent back to England from India,
and out here, it's used as an eye ointment.
And, well, you never know.
So friend Macie takes this medicinal bamboo juice
and does everything but drink it.
Under differing circumstances, it effervesces, turns jellylike,
goes into a glass shape, or becomes a powder.
Now, there is no point in asking why anybody would do all that to this.
He just does.
The upshot is, Macie manages to get the liquid
to turn into something resembling a flint pebble.
The point?
I don't know.
And that is Macie's stupefying addition to the sum of human knowledge.
Well, not quite.
Macie also happens to be the illegitimate son
of one of the oldest aristocratic families in England,
the dukes of Northumberland, so the boy's socially well placed,
as a result of which, he ends up quite rich.
And since he never marries, he leaves it to a cousin
unless the cousin dies without children, which he does,
in which case, all the money is to go to America.
And there, for a moment, we leave James Macie.
Now we return to moss-collecting Macintosh.
Remember him?
One of his early partners in the cloth-dying business,
David Dale, builds a textile mill
at New Lanark in Scotland, where he philanthropically
employs orphan children aged seven or so to run the machines.
Back then, this is reckoned to be do-good stuff,
because it saves the kids from starving to death in the streets.
Dale even builds them a school,
and they get clean clothes once a week.
In return for such generosity, the deal with the orphanage is,
Dale doesn't have to pay any wages to his little employees
until they're age 15.
What a sweetheart deal.
Now, Dale's liberal attitude attracts
a young socialist mill manager called Robert Owen,
who marries Dale's daughter and takes over the mill.
In 1824, he leaves here for America, where he sets up a commune
at a place called New Harmony, Indiana.
Well, the venture fails, and he comes back here to Britain.
But his four sons take out American citizenship
and stay on in the States, where their story
and that of James Macie, the rich bamboo freak, join up.
This is where it all comes together and when things get to hit the fan
in a really spectacular manner.
See, Owen's eldest son is a fellow called Robert Dale Owen,
and in 1842, he gets elected to Congress as an Indiana Democrat.
Well, in 1844, he gets mixed up in the affairs
of an Englishman called James Macie.
Remember him?
He's the fellow who did all that weird work on bamboo juice.
And you remember he left a fortune of 104,960
of these things, English gold sovereigns,
to America.
Well, by 1844, they've arrived in the States,
been melted down, and turned into U.S. money.
And when I tell you how much money,
you'll know why I said things are about to hit the fan.
$2 billion and change.
Suddenly, it's Washington behind closed doors time.
Turns out as soon as the money is available in greenbacks,
the treasury has invested no less
than $2 billion worth of it in this interesting outfit
known as the Real Estate Bank of the State of Arkansas.
Let me put it this way.
There are criminal charges against some of the bank's directors.
Somebody involved has been knifed.
Above all, everybody knows the bank's going to go bust,
because its real estate
has been grossly and deliberately overvalued.
And the U.S. government is in bed with these people?
Never mind which moron in the treasury okayed the deal.
By this time, there are now $2.5 billion invested
in these examples of junk.
And how's the treasury going to get their hands on it?
Never mind the interest
the Real Estate Bank of Arkansas hasn't paid.
Well, you can imagine the kind of field day
the legislators up here on the hill have with this little peccadillo.
Gentlemen from Massachusetts... John Quincy Adams, to be exact...
make caustic comments about theft.
Gentlemen from Arkansas make comments about honor
and meeting their commitments in due course.
Others wonder when that distant day might be.
The Arkansas people say in 20 years, when the bonds mature,
Arkansas will repay its debts.
Finally, it's agreed the treasury will guarantee the interest,
so the money can do what James Macie wanted it to do.
And then there's a real row.
Certain members regard the gift as an insult to the American people
and say that the United States has humbled and degraded itself
by accepting this money from degenerate aristocrats.
Others argue that the United States should take the money and run.
Eventually, common sense prevails,
and in December 1846, Owen's bill is passed,
and they get to spend the money the way Macie wanted.
You know how, of course.
And if you don't, I'll tell you in a minute.
So winding up this debate, let me summarize.
Corncobs become resins for diamond polishing with Carborundum
that protects you from shells fired at tanks
developed from American tractors that used Diesel engines built
with funding from Krupp, who inspired
Bismarck's welfare scheme based on Quetelet's statistics
that inspired the Babbage engine,
whose punch cards were used to rivet the "Great Eastern,"
the monster ship that laid the transatlantic cable
insulated with gutta-percha used to manufacture golf balls
for factory managers in industrial Scotland,
where James Watt had a run-in with Cavendish,
whose protegee was James Macie,
who caused all the row here in the capitol building
for reasons you know but maybe don't know you know.
Get it?
You remember I said James Macie was the illegitimate son
of the Duke of Northumberland.
Well, after his father's death, James took on the father's family name.
Well, what's in a name?
So the money got used to set up a world-renowned institution
named after James Macie's new family name,
which was Smithson:
The institution known as the Smithsonian.