S-R-C-P-B-1-2-B.
Absolutely.
Who wants to know when we're configured?
Copy that.
This program is about something
you wouldn't think you could make a TV program about: One of these.
Funny how we use the word light to mean not heavy, isn't it?
I mean, this flashlight is light.
These programs are light,
even though this kind of light, according to Einstein,
is heavier than you might think.
So if light does have weight as Einstein said,
then it ought to be affected by gravity.
And if that were true, black holes should be possible.
Black holes, dead stars so big their gravity pulls in light...
stops it from bouncing off them.
I mean, that's why you could see me now:
Light bouncing off me.
If it didn't bounce off, you couldn't see me.
That's why you can't see black holes.
But you can see their effect.
This gas jet is streaming out from one.
This cloud of gas is spinning around at such colossal speed,
you know it's being driven by a black hole at its center.
But the weirdest thing about space is that a lot of what you're looking at
isn't really there.
The light from the most distant stars
has taken such a colossal time to get here,
the real stars are long dead.
It's as if the telescope that produced these pictures
were a kind of time machine showing you a view of the universe as it once was
billions and billions of years ago.
But maybe the most spine-tingling
of all these ancient pictures is this one.
This is the outer edge of the universe,
so this light started towards us just after the very beginning.
Thing is, one day will we see past that outer edge,
back to before the bang?
And if we do, what will we see?
This is the time machine that took those pictures,
a model of the Hubble telescope orbiting 400 miles up,
searching for what it looked like out there
before the beginning of time.
Liftoff.
Here's Hubble launching aboard the space shuttle "Discovery"
in 1990,
and then in 1993,
and again in 1997,
two more flights to carry out some of the most spectacular
repair and maintenance jobs you've ever seen.
Hey, good morning, Houston.
Here's $1.5 billion worth of telescope floating in space,
which is why getting close to Hubble like this
with your 78-ton space shuttle
is something nobody wants to do in a hurry.
So when your docking arm reaches out towards the docking target on Hubble,
you're bringing your shuttle in there with all the delicate precision
of a mother reaching out for her baby.
And then, orbiting earth at 17,000 miles an hour:
The scene that still excites people to the core.
This incredible flying fix is all done
to the amazing capabilities of the space shuttle
and the way she flies.
To start with, getting up here to rendezvous with Hubble
involves some very strange rules of orbital dynamics.
Catch up doesn't just mean firing your engines,
because that puts you up into a higher orbit.
Braking drops you into a lower orbit.
So you don't get there in a straight line like this,
but something more like this.
We're ready to go with this GCM on.
Now, you remember that inch-by-inch stuff
as they came into dock with Hubble?
You do that with tiny thrusters all around the shuttle
pointing up, down, and sideways.
Here's two sets of them, see?
There are 44 of them in all
shooting minute puffs of a fuel called hydrazine
that gives you more bang for your buck than anything around.
But shuttle pilots aren't the only people who use hydrazine.
You have too in medication,
plastics, photography, rubber, all kinds of stuff...
and one rather special use.
Because long before hydrazine got used to spin the shuttle in space,
one of the greatest crises in history triggered the need
for that other thing hydrazine can do.
Here we are in the beautiful Medoc wine country
near Bordeaux in the southwest of France.
This is a tough assignment.
Anyway, hydrazine and all that.
Back in the 19th century,
if you live in a bijoux little residence like this
and you get fungus,
you go whatever the French for ape is, right?
But I don't mean fungus in there,
in the ancestral woodwork; I mean out here...
well, out there.
See, this is hydrazine country,
because that's the other thing hydrazine does:
Knocks off the fungus growth that can spoil your agribusiness day.
Which is what happened here over 100 years ago,
when something comes along to spoil their agribusiness day,
something that looks like... how shall I put it?
The end of civilization as we know it.
I mean, of course, a fungus on the vines.
So maybe no more French wine.
The cause of this potential apocalypse
is affectionately known as Downey mildew.
Now, there's one thing guaranteed to galvanize the French into action:
The threat of a national wine shortage.
So in 1882 in the Bordeaux vineyards,
here comes a professor of botany from the local university
worrying about the end of civilization as we know it.
And then he notices something strange
that gets the little gray cells doing overtime.
There is mildew and rotting vines everywhere,
except... sut alors... he discovers some vines
which appear to be painted blue and which appear
not to have ze mildew.
So he pops into the local Chateaux Du Coup Bucayou to ask why.
Well, why not?
And voila, there's the answer.
It's them doing it, painting bright blue stuff on their grapes
to stop tourists from snitching them.
So our professor hightails it back to Bordeaux
and comes up with a modified version,
the first ever fungicide you could spray on,
the ancestor of all fungicides, like hydrazine, in the modern world.
Now, this is not the first French wine crisis but the third.
The Downey mildew fungus, having been brought into France
on American vine shoots to solve the second crisis,
a kind of bug found on American vine shoots
brought into France to solve the third crisis,
another kind of fungus called powdery mildew,
brought into France on American plants.
Had enough?
Point is, the real killer diller was that second crisis
caused by something that still causes French nightmares,
something that could still bring the end of civilization as we know it.
That's why I am telling you this under surveillance,
because I would be instantly in ze handcuffs
if what I am about to show you were alive:
Insects called aphids, causing a disease called phylloxera.
And the last time this got loose in the vineyards,
it was jump-out-of-the-window time, mes amis.
By 1880, half the vines in France are dead from phylloxera,
and panic isn't the word.
They try urine, tobacco juice, buried toads,
magnetism, electricity... nothing works, until, as I said,
imported American vines do the trick and stop all that mayhem.
Turns out it's all because of technology.
The latest steamboats are crossing the Atlantic
to France from America fast enough
for the little aphids to get to their new French home still alive.
Well, guess what wouldn't be crossing any frontiers after that?
The phylloxera epidemic is why, when you fly
into certain very clean places like Switzerland these days,
if you happen to be arriving from somewhere
that the Squeaky clean Swiss authorities
regard as not squeaky clean... that's lots of places...
more is going to happen to your plane than an oil change and a top up.
As everybody knows, hygiene is practically a religion in Switzerland,
so the phrase you're likely to hear next is "let us spray."
This is one result of the International
Plant Quarantine Convention signed here in Switzerland
in 1878 after that wine disaster,
so as to stop those little aphids from traveling at all costs.
One minor consideration,
that the little aphids actually have wings,
seems to pass these guys by.
But no matter.
The idea is basically a good one, and eventually it catches on.
And that is why all over the world today
your plane is often much cleaner than you think it is...
and everything on board, even a letter from your old granny.
Okay, let's hold the mail for a moment and see where we are.
Black holes in space are seen by Hubble,
serviced by the space shuttle, fueled by hydrazine.
That's also a fungicide first invented during the French phylloxera disaster
caused by these little aphids,
the reason for the 1878 Swiss Quarantine Convention,
which is why your plane gets sprayed these days
and everything on it,
including a letter from your old granny,
which is only there at all thanks to something else
to benefit back then from the conventional Swiss:
Yet another convention in 1874, when they sort out
the international mail.
19th-century mail is like 20th-century airline baggage:
Destination uncertain.
So everybody agrees on the big issue:
They can each keep the money they make
from selling their own stamps.
With the money thing settled, that leaves only the money thing:
How to send money through the mail.
Well, in 1874, they standardized that.
And four years later, an American organization
comes up with the first ever crime-proof money order form
that isn't a rip-off because it's a rip-off.
Look.
Here are the amounts you might want to send,
all the way from big sums like $10 down in 5¢ bits to $1.05.
Say you wanted to send $2.25.
All you do is tear down to the amount you have expressly bought,
throw the rest away, and that's it...
expressly crook-proof, because it stymies any criminal
at the other end who might have the express intent
of getting more than you had expressly sent.
Good idea, no?
And because right from the start you can expressly
pick one of these up almost anywhere,
it's a raving success for the American organization
that expressly thinks it up: Mmm-hmm, American Express.
American Express starts life as a delivery business
run by a couple of guys you'll know: Henry Wells and William Fargo.
So guess what the original company's called.
Anyway, Henry and William blow away their competitors,
because they invent the cash-on delivery idea
and because they have the fastest route
to the west coast by ship and cutthroat prices.
So by 1859, Wells and Fargo are, so to speak, alone in the field...
in more senses than one.
And you can't get much more alone in America in 1859
anywhere between St. Louis, Missouri, here
and Sacramento, California, here... emptier than which there ain't.
The reason you might be here in the emptiness
is because of the Colorado gold strikes
and because the people here and the guys
in the California gold fields want to hear from back east
more than once every few months.
So the overland route started to look more attractive
to Misters Wells and Fargo, and this is what they do about that.
They go looking for young, skinny, wiry fellows
willing to risk death daily... orphans preferred.
In 1859, they find a few lunatics in bars
in the middle of nowhere happy to ride forever
to some other middle of nowhere...
places like this, right?
All the required orphans need...
besides a touch of insanity and a six-gun...
is a good horse and an undeveloped sense of self-preservation.
Well, they find such people, and all of a sudden
your letters start coming and going all of a sudden.
Snail mail this ain't.
The Pony Express only lasts for 16 months,
but it becomes a legend.
20 riders cover the 2,000 miles to Sacramento and back at full gallop,
risking death every step of the way.
The company mission statement: The mail must go through.
The greatest legend of them all is a 15-year-old kid
who rides the most dangerous stretch.
Coming into Three Crossings, Wyoming, one day,
he hears that the rider for the next stage has been killed.
So he changes his horses the way they did,
hardly touching the ground and rides on...
384 miles nonstop,
the longest Pony Express ride ever recorded.
And then the telegraph comes along and spoils all the fun.
And that's it for the Pony Express.
So that 15-year-old moves on to scout for the army
and then to shoot meat for the Kansas railroad people.
And because he's so good at it...
I mean 5,000 animals in just over a year,
if you're into that kind of thing...
he gets the name you know him by: Buffalo Bill.
In 1883, Bill hits the big-time all around the world
with his all-star wild west show,
bringing the thrills of frontier life to the city slickers.
He features hundreds of Indians playing hundreds of Indians,
buffalo hunts, cavalry attacks on Indian villages,
bucking broncos, even a full-scale rerun of Custer's last stand...
and the greatest sharpshooter of them all: Annie Oakley.
These amazing spectaculars give a whole new meaning
to the idea of Vaudeville.
Mind you, nobody knows the real meaning of Vaudeville anyway.
Not surprising, since it comes from France,
15th-century France: This river valley.
It's called the Vire valley.
In French, that's Vau, Valley, de Vire of the River Vire:
Vaudevire.
Okay, you mispronounce those words, Vau de Vire,
and you get Vaudeville;
the kind of entertainment that starts
here in the 15th century: Drinking songs...
the same kind of naughty stuff that turns up 300 years later
in American Vaudeville acts.
The most famous writer of these numbers is a guy called Olivier Basselin,
who tops the charts
because he writes about the same thing every time:
Wine, women, and song and people having a good time...
unlike Basselin himself, who has a really bad time,
when he comes to a sticky end just down the road from Vire
in this area at a place called Formigny in 1450,
where he gets mixed up with and killed in a battle,
where the French beat the English because,
surprise, surprise, the French have cannon
and the English have bows and arrows.
Here's how it all goes.
Here's the English army patrolling like they've been doing
since they invaded this bit of France 300 years earlier
when a French army suddenly comes out of nowhere.
Now, English bowmen have the laser weapons of the period,
so this is going to be a pushover...
when suddenly the French produce a couple of the very latest cannon
and start pounding the Brits.
The English send out their Green Beret types to grab the cannon.
They're on their way back with them when French reinforcements turn up.
The English archers can't open fire, because they'd hit their own guys,
so the French attack and massacre nearly 3,000 English troops.
It's a bloodbath.
Mind you, by this time, the English are through in France anyway.
They just won't give up and move out.
But like it or not, Formigny turns out to be one step from final defeat.
And then it's adieu, English.
Okay, where are we?
The Swiss postal convention helps to kick off American Express,
who in their early years as Wells Fargo
start the Pony Express, starring a 15-year-old
who becomes known as Buffalo Bill,
whose showbiz life starts in Vaudeville
that really begins back in medieval France
with drinking songs written by that guy who gets killed in a battle
between the French and the English, okay?
Now, the French finally chuck the English out of France,
because they're led to victory by a crazy woman.
Nobody's ever successfully diagnosed her condition,
but one thing's certain: She was hearing things.
This is a particularly unusual case.
Hmm, the file on her says,
"IIliterate peasant girl turns up out of the blue
"and convinces a bunch of sophisticated,
"backstabbing, highly political French aristocrats
to stop their infighting and follow her and kick out the English."
Interesting.
She's having visions
and hearing the voices of what she describes as saints.
There is one version of that condition
that would produce hallucinatory symptoms of this type.
She's also fanatically religious.
Well, you'd expect that, really.
They're a superstitious lot back then,
burning witches pretty much every afternoon.
There have also been prophecies about a young girl saving the country.
She's also apparently a virgin.
Well, that's pretty mystical back then, for a start.
Background, hmm, political situation.
France is in a total mess.
They're at each other's throats.
She dresses like a man and is hot stuff with a sword.
And the would-be king of France is a knock-kneed, yellow-bellied wimp.
And this girl turns up saying things like,
"I will lead you to victory,"
and "My voices are telling me what to do."
Well, nobody talks like that unless they're nuts.
So, they think, "Why not?
"Nothing else is working.
Let's give it a go."
Well, she wins all the battles and puts the wimp on the throne.
And the backstabbers sell her down the river to the English.
History isn't like Hollywood every time.
And, of course, who fingers her but the church?
Because all that person-to-person communication
with the saint stuff she's up to
is giving French peasants ideas about their station, isn't it?
So instead of a psychoanalyst, she gets the Inquisition.
They make mincemeat of her at what we would call a mistrial.
So she goes to the stake and is burned to death in 1431.
And that's it for Joan of Arc.
Of course, true to the loony psychology of the time,
as a servant of the devil, she's better off dead, right?
For the Inquisition, it's just another "case closed,
questions answered."
The reason the Inquisition are so good at getting answers out of people
is because the way they ask questions is straight out of a museum of horrors.
Top of the league in this kind of friendly persuasion are the Spanish.
Of course, they've had a lot of practice
on the well-to-do Jewish community.
See, back in 1492, the uptight northern Spanish Christians
take over southern Spain
from the laid-back southern Spanish Muslims.
Now, the new Christian rulers prevented Jews
from working in anything but finance, so guess what?
Jews make money like what else would they make,
which the Christians then borrowed...
but don't pay back, because all you have to do
is tell the Inquisition a Jew is eating meat on a Friday,
and he and his family get torched or worse.
And your debts go up in smoke.
By 1490, Tomas Torquemada is top Spanish torturer.
When he's on a winning streak, he can burn 13,000 in one year...
not houses, you understand, but people.
Well, if you're Jewish, what do you do?
Get out.
A lot of the Jews head up into northern Europe.
But the vast majority of them come here,
where they know they'll be treated like human beings,
even like talented and valuable human beings.
Because although in here this place is Jewish,
out there this place is Islamic... and tolerant
and in deep trouble.
The economy in Turkey is so bad they've been advertising for help.
So in the 16th century, 1/4 of a million exiled Jews turn up here.
One of these guys is a fellow called Joseph Nasi,
born in Portugal, chucked out,
spent some time in Holland in the family plank.
In 1554, he comes here to Istanbul,
meets up with his Aunt Grace, who is a financial hotshot...
and already well in with the Turkish sultan,
Suleiman the magnificent...
and more important with his influential favorite wife, Roxelane.
So with Aunt Grace's help, Joseph Nasi is in like Flynn.
See, Suleiman is running the biggest empire since Rome
on three continents.
And the problem is, his bureaucrats are "A:" corrupt
and " B:" wouldn't know a balance sheet if they fill in one.
So what Suleiman needs is the 16th-century equivalent of an MBA.
Enter Joe Nasi.
By 1560, Joe is virtually Suleiman's foreign minister
living in a posh palace here on the Bosporus
and with his eye on greater things,
like being King of Cyprus, where the best wine comes from
and where he wants the booze export monopoly.
In 1566, Suleiman kicks the bucket, and his wimpy son, Salim, takes over,
which means that Joe Nasi's really running the entire show.
So four years later, he's got his wine deal,
and he's calling himself King of Cyprus,
because he's persuaded the Turks to take the place over
and living in an even bigger palace.
Not bad for a guy who started with nothing, right?
Mind you, if you can survive the intrigue here
at the sultan's top-copy palace, you can survive anything.
So by this time, Joe Nasi is flavor of the month.
His only mistake is that business
about persuading the Turks to grab Cyprus,
because that gets the Europeans so ticked off
they set up a league to do something about it.
And basically what that means is,
any minute now everything for the Turks is about to hit the fan,
because one of the European allies
is a bunch you wouldn't want to meet on a dark night.
The Turks have already had a run-in with them.
That time the Turks won and threw them off the island of Rhodes here,
where these guys were headquartered at the time.
So now they're holed up in Malta, here.
And militarily speaking, these people are top-gun stuff.
Meet the knights of Malta and their new home,
the island of Malta.
By 1565, these guys have made so much trouble for the Turks
that they decide enough is enough
and send in a humungous military force to wipe them out
and fail, because the knights have nothing to lose
and nowhere to go.
And besides, they're sitting inside the last word in defense technology.
See these walls?
So eventually, the Turks give up and go home,
leaving the knights to enjoy their posh new grid pattern city
and look after their wounded in the 16th-century equivalent
of a high-tech emergency clinic.
This knights of Malta hospital is way out on the cutting edge.
I mean, they have separate wards for separate diseases
and one patient per bed.
They even use anesthesia.
Useful stuff to know
if you spend the other half of your time slicing people up.
Ironic that, because the knights
get their medical know-how from somebody else
who makes a specialty of slicing people up.
His name is Andreas Vesalius.
And in 1527, he's professor of surgery
here at the University of Padua in northern Italy,
which, if you want to be a doctor,
is where you want to be for two reasons:
One, Vesalius is the best anatomy wiz there is;
and two, the university is about to build
the amazing Padua anatomy theater.
All the students stand around up there in the galleries
while down here in the well at the bottom
the lecturer does interestingly new things to corpses.
See, up to the time of Vesalius, anatomy is pretty much anybody's guess.
You can't operate without killing people,
so there hasn't been much interest in how your body actually works.
So the new anatomy they're about to teach here,
thanks to Vesalius, is a much bigger deal than you might think.
See, up till now, about all they've been able to teach
is what the Greeks and Romans knew, which wasn't much.
That's why 16th-century doctors are still into cures
like boiled poppy, lily oil, and minced earthworms.
So the recovery rate is not too high.
So in 1543, when Vesalius comes out
with what is effectively a multimedia show-and-tell
all about the insides of sliced humans,
well, it's the biggest thing to hit medicine since sliced bread.
Vesalius dealt with every little bit: Brain, blood vessels, muscle, bone.
He's read anything he can get his hands on
and then found out for himself...
thanks to a helpful judge here in town who executes criminals
just in time for Vesalius' lectures on how to dissect.
And this copiously illustrated can't-put-it-down
give-it-to-your-doctor-friends book is the result.
This, centuries before the computer, is what-you-see-is-what-you-get.
No wonder medical students
kick off a wave of body snatching to check him out.
Because in Vesalius' great book on the structure of the human body,
it's all there in glorious graphics... drawings of every little gory detail.
And the reason why you couldn't buy the original book today
for a million bucks is because back then
Vesalius gets his illustrations done at the studio
of an an unknown young painter,
a guy who is so good at flesh tones, he'd turn on a mortician: Titian.
Okay, time for another catch-up.
Joan of Arc leads the French to victory
and is then burnt by the Inquisition,
who make life in Spain so difficult for the Jews
that most of them run away to Turkey,
where one of them, Joe Nasi,
persuades them to attack the knights of Malta,
who look after their wounded in the best hospital around at the time
because of the know-how that Vesalius comes up with
in his great anatomy book illustrated by Titian,
who's coming up next.
This is Titian, and he lives here in 16th-century Venice,
a knockout city with more liquid assets than it has water.
Now, the thing about having lots of money
is that Venice is so rich and powerful
it doesn't really give a rat's ass about what the pope thinks.
So Venetian wanna-bes commissioned people like Titian
to come up with portraits that will make them good-Iooking.
That's why Titian's portraits are a totally new kind of thing.
Because what he does is dump
the old medieval dead-body style the church recommends
in favor of a new touchy-feely approach.
This is what got Vesalius... that surgeon, remember...
so hot for Titian,
because this is real flesh-and-blood stuff, isn't it?
And take a look at something else new
Titian springs on everybody.
His backgrounds are 16th-century virtual reality.
Now, back then, this kind of stuff makes Titian instantly famous.
And in no time at all, he's graduated from naked models
to the real movers and shakers.
His portrait of Pope Paul III
makes it a cinch that he's going to do the ultimate biggie:
Holy Roman emperor Charles V, who invites Titian to come visit.
1548, and we're in Augsburg, Germany.
And so is Charles V, who's here for a shindig
with fellow Catholic royals
after they've beaten a bunch of Protestant royals at a battle.
Now, as they say in the tourist brochures,
Augsburg is in the mineral-rich mountains of southern Germany.
So they've got all the metal they need
for people like Charles V to go to war with,
including, strangely enough, metal to make armor with.
I say "strangely enough," because what would you be doing
on a battlefield wearing armor when, by this time,
the name of the game is shooting people with guns?
Answer: You don't wear armor, well, not to fight, anyway:
To watch.
Top people like the Emperor Charles V
get to wear posh, tailor-made metal suits called parade armor
while enjoying the show... sorry, bloody massacre...
from the crest of some nearby hill.
So Titian, the painter... remember him...
does Charles' portrait after the battle,
kind of come-as-you-are, like this.
And as you can see from Charles V here,
he would never make it to battle in parade armor.
I mean, they screw you into it,
which is another reason why we're here,
because it is another little-known tourist fact about Augsburg:
That it is the home of the metal screw, in places like this.
They're tiny jewelry screws originally,
because the other thing that Augsburg is full of besides iron
is precious metal.
So the other thing you come to Augsburg for,
besides a portrait, is jewelry... or both.
In 1550, one of Augsburg's famous goldsmith shops
gets a commission from King Henry of France
to send somebody to Paris to help with a little monetary scam
Henry's dreamed up,
the idea being that the shop also sends along
one of their new screw-operated coin-making machines as well
so that Henry can turn out new coins of the realm
that are not what they appear to be, called Henrys.
This is one.
The scam I mentioned is that these coins
have less gold and silver in them than they're supposed to.
But who will know?
And the king will save a bundle.
Point being, he's in serious hock.
Well, it works.
Nobody notices the new Henrys are only half Henrys.
So the real Henry makes enough from this sneaky little devaluation
to keep his new queen in the gastronomic style
to which she is rapidly making France accustomed,
because the lady in question, Catherine De'Medici,
is the person who kind of invents
the reason every woman needs jewelry.
Catherine D'Medici is the woman who thinks up
the modern dinner party.
When she marries King Henry in 1533,
she turns France into the food capital of the world it is today,
with rave new ideas like forks,
table settings, good wine, pasta, and fancy sauces.
Then when dinner is over, another amazing new indulgence
of which Catherine is also probably the first user:
Tobacco, because Catherine has always suffered from migraines.
And in one form, tobacco is supposed to be good for migraines.
Snuff.
Anyway, in no time at all,
smoking tobacco is the cure for everything:
Toothache, flatulence, sores, pregnancy pains,
itching, halitosis, tetanus, and, believe it or not, a bad cough.
Now, the great news for the governments of Europe
is that the new commodity is apparently addictive.
You just know what's going to happen next:
Colonies, where you can grow the stuff,
ship it back as a state monopoly and watch the money roll in.
By the 17th century, the English have found
just the place to grow their new drug: America...
and in particular, Maryland, America.
Most of the immigrants getting off the boat in America
in the 17th century are single young men
with no jobs back home in England, where life has been real fun.
I mean, you mention out loud words like "freedom of movement,
religious tolerance, justice for all, a chance to get ahead in life,"
and you can find yourself getting taken seriously...
and hanged.
So the next word that floats to your mind is "transatlantic."
But where?
New England is posting no vacancies.
The Barbados plantation owners only want slaves,
which leaves places like this.
Historic St. Mary's City in Maryland,
the only place for a fellow with no resume to make a buck.
All you need is a case of severe desperation...
and a hoe to clear the weeds, a few seeds,
a lot of luck, and 18-hour days.
All you do is plant and crop and move on,
living in one-room wooden huts.
You sleep on the floor, eat meat and vegetable stew and corn bread,
and drink booze.
And that's all you do, night and day, summer and winter,
till you die at around age 45.
So where are we?
Titian, great portrait painter, goes to Augsburg,
home of great jewelry,
where a goldsmith helps King Henry of France
make enough money to pay for his wife's dinner parties,
where they first smoked tobacco
that the English eventually get from Maryland,
where they set up a tobacco-growing colony,
where colonists get to work themselves into an early grave.
Well, back then, life is pretty nasty,
except for the people at the other end
of this economic process making a million:
The internal revenue,
once somebody makes the math to work out the taxes as easy
as falling off a log... dead easy.
Okay, look at the bottom of the screen.
2 times 2 times 2 five times gives you 32, right?
Do the same thing four times, and you get 16.
Okay, to multiply 32 by 16, add the little numbers,
and look this up in your log tables.
To do division, you do the same but subtract the little numbers.
In 1618, this is automated by the amazing new slide rule
invented by William Oughtred.
Find your numbers by swiveling the pointers like this,
and bottom right is the result.
Oughtred's slide rule is made for him
by one of the hottest instrument makers of the 17th century.
His name is Elias Allen, and he also happens, at one time,
to be a mover and shaker
in the clock maker's company of London,
who never get around to building their own banqueting hall,
so they have their little annual dinners in the lord mayor of London's.
Now, the clock makers start up just when the timekeeping business
is really getting into the swing of things,
with the amazing new high-tech wonder machine from Holland
invented by that swinging genius, Christian Huygens,
the pendulum clock.
The thing about this is,
the pendulum swing lasts the same time every swing.
See?
So it's an extremely accurate way to control the clock.
So now you can time anything to the second, like your cooking.
Just as well, given the way Huygens' assistant
puts any chef under pressure.
Huygens' assistant is called Dennis Papin,
and he's French.
So being French, he turns his genius to vitally important matters like food
and comes up with a gizmo you'll love if you love steamed potatoes.
Papin previously fooled around with steam engines,
so he knows all about stuff like air pressure and steam, right?
All right, Marla, let's have the vegetables.
Okay, here's the deal.
You're going to boil the water, and you're going to boil the food.
But you're going to do it with the lid screwed down
tight under pressure with a pressure escape valve.
Food cooks twice as fast.
Things called a pressure cooker makes boring food...
and 200 years later
solves another French crisis about drink,
in this case, beer.
And why isn't French beer as good as German beer?
This national disaster becomes an obsession
for the paranoid French chemist, Louis Pasteur, who, back in 1864,
is doing what Frenchmen usually do, drinking wine,
which he discovers to be bad... well, gone bad.
So since he's been doing tests in his lab
on why food goes moldy and is seeing many little bugs down his microscope,
he decides that these little bugs...
he calls them germs... get into the food from the air,
this after he's done tests leaving food lying around.
Pasteur takes his bugs and submits them to every known torture:
Boiling up, chilling down, sealing in jars.
You name it.
One approach to killing the little bugs
seems to work best of all: Heat.
So he tries the same trick with the wine.
He cooks it at 55 degrees centigrade.
You can hear the wine buffs all over France harrumphing.
" Boiled wine?
Mon dieu."
However, at a later wine tasting,
they can't tell which one has been boiled
and which hasn't.
So that's okay, and it solves the problem.
No more bad wine.
In 1870, France has a war with Germany and loses.
And Pasteur's idea of revenge
is to make French beer better than German beer.
As part of the process, he's looking at
why beer goes bad in summer... and guess what...
discovers the little bugs again.
So he tries the same boiling trick
and does to beer what he previously did to wine.
Why didn't he think of it the first time around?
Don't ask me.
Anyway, we call what he did pasteurizing.
And today we do it to milk products...
and in hospitals to surgical instruments,
in machines not a million miles away from that thing Papin invented.
Remember the pressure cooker,
in medical circles known as an autoclave.
Now, Pasteur's work doesn't owe to the fact
that in summer dairy products and pretty much anything
go bad in the heat.
So can science fix summer?
Well, it can make virtual winter and give me this delicious frosted glass
of the amber nectar in high summer.
Makes a job bearable.
And my beer is cold, thanks to beer.
Because back in Germany,
the brewers ask an engineer called Karl von Linde
if he can come up with something to keep their vats cold
during fermentation.
And he invents one of those, a refrigerator.
See, if you compress air or ammonia gas or ether,
they get hot.
Release the pressure, and they get colder than before,
so they'll chill down any liquid.
So there's your coolant:
In tubes running through the back of the fridge...
or an air conditioner,
which is why this bar is nice and chilly.
Just what you need when you're working in the steamy tropics.
And the reason I am telling you all this
in the steamy tropics is because
when the Australian sheep farmers first get their hands on refrigeration
at the end of the 19th century,
the first place they send their frozen cold meat to is hot countries,
Because now it'll keep, thanks to the fridge.
Now, the biggie Australian meat exporter
is a fellow called Harrison,
who repeats that German guy von Linde's freezing trick...
but this time on a much bigger scale.
And you can see what he comes up with here.
Harrison's freezing machines also get used
to chill down paraffin oil.
If you get the temperature low enough, some of the paraffin goes solid.
It produces stuff called paraffin wax,
a product ideal for making what this bar is full of: Candles...
and my sandwiches for tonight's beach party.
See this?
Paraffin wax paper does great things to the early food packaging industry
at the beginning of this century.
And what that does is make possible
something so commonplace that you probably
don't consciously see it even when you use it.
So here we are about to end the show
with an invisible object.
So how did it go?
Black holes in space, hydrazine fuel,
fungicidal French vines,
quarantine conventions and money orders,
American Express and Buffalo Bill,
Vaudeville and French battles,
Joan of Arc and the Inquisition,
Jews welcomed by Turks, who lose to Maltese knights
with surgeons trained on pictures by Titian,
who's in Augsburg,
where goldsmiths make French money to pay for tobacco.
That triggers logarithms and slide rules made by clock makers,
who also make pressure cookers that sterilize French beer
kept cool by refrigerators that get used to freeze meat
and chill down paraffin to produce paraffin wax for invisible objects.
Well, did you notice this: Wax paper cups?
I mean, when was the last time you really took a close look
at one of these?
And yet they're everywhere,
even here in a tropical paradise.
You know, sometimes this job is no picnic.