My guess is, the contents of this program
will add up to a message you already know too well.
Here's the contents.
And here's the message:
It's true, isn't it?
Years ago, a picnic was a really grand occasion.
You and the table would get all dressed up,
and then you'd have a full four- Or five-course meal.
You'd just have it in the open air.
Ah, well, no time anymore for that kind of stuff,
is there?
We're all too busy.
Grab a bite, keep moving.
That's the way it goes.
Fast food for a fast world.
Instant everything.
And you know what you have to thank for that?
World War II.
That's when the instant idea really took off,
and all because of this:
Coffee.
Now, powdered coffee's been around since the '30s,
when Brazil has a series of fantastic coffee bean harvests
and ends up with an excess of bean,
and no way are they going to sell it all.
Then the Nestle company comes up with the answer.
Easy enough: You run a lot of hot water
through ground coffee beans.
Then you spray the water through very hot air.
That evaporates the water.
What falls to the bottom of your equipment
is a fine powder.
Later on, add water and stir.
Coffee.
And the reason the whole idea really takes off
is because instant coffee weighs nothing,
which is just what you need, but not in a balloon,
when you're a World War II American infantry grunt
up to your knees in mud and cross fire
on some European battlefield
and the last thing you need is extra weight to carry.
That's why something called K-rations
are invented back then: To give the troops
maximum calories with minimum ounces.
So the new, lightweight coffee really fits in there.
World War II makes instant coffee a real flyer,
so the instant the war is over,
instant coffee is going to be an instant industry,
which leaves only one small problem.
The K-rations are going to be great
for the troops down there... if you can find them.
Not the rations, the troops!
By the last year of the war, the U.S. army
has 8 million people to get K-rations to,
and they're all over the place, and they all need everything...
from coffee to food, mail, spare parts, toilet paper,
ammunition, clothing, you name it.
That's why for every soldier in the field,
there are three people back at supply
tearing their hair out
because nobody's where they were last time you looked,
because the army's mechanized in tanks and trucks.
And the reason I'm showing you this particular bit of film...
notice every other shot is of a Jeep?
An amazing bit of vehicular pizzazz
that'll go anywhere and do anything.
And there is no terrain it can't go into or get out of.
And it'll do that pulling a trailer,
carrying up to four people,
mounted with a heavy machine gun.
It'll even carry stretcher cases.
So at the end of every day,
the last thing that moves is a Jeep,
carrying supplies out to the front line.
And this is where the rock meets the hard place,
because as this little wonder machine races along,
it's creating the problem it's suppose to solve.
Know why?
It uses gasoline.
Of the 27 pounds of supplies every American soldier needs
every day just to go on fighting,
over half is gasoline.
If the Allies are to win the war,
this is a problem that has to be cracked.
So it is,
with cracking.
That's what happens in refineries like these.
Cracking is the petroleum industry equivalent
of getting blood out of a stone:
Getting refined product from oil
and then doing it again with the same oil
and then doing it again and again and again and again.
All you need is a chimney stack.
Okay, down at the bottom of the stack,
you heat up crude oil.
It vaporizes.
You condense the vapors and get gas oil.
Heat what oil's left hotter, and condense out kerosine.
Heat what's left hotter, and condense out naphtha.
Heat what's left hotter, and condense out gasoline.
Then pressurize the whole shebang,
and squeeze out more of everything.
And you still get one last product coming out
at the very top: Methane.
Okay, another quick bit of chemistry.
Turns out that you can use methane
to get acetylene, believe it or not
the obsession of an American Jesuit priest
and chemistry professor called Nieuwland.
Well, in 1918, he's played around with acetylene
and discovered that you can turn it into something
that will put a bit of bounce into life...
and, as you will see, changes the private life
of every woman in the world.
Nieuwland calls his bouncy stuff neoprene.
It solves another problem for the World War II Jeep,
because neoprene is synthetic rubber,
and you make tires with it.
Not surprisingly, the reverend father's invention
is taken up by a company for whom you might say
chemistry is a bit of a religion:
DuPont.
And what they get up to is a very attractive proposition.
The attraction in question is the attraction
that molecules have for each other.
Never mind the chemistry gobbledygook.
What you're looking at
is two molecules and some bits between them,
including these bits: Hydrogen, hydrogen, oxygen.
H2O, water.
Heat it up, and the water boils off.
Now for the molecules that like each other.
These two leftover bits, carbon and oxygen,
really go for these two bits, nitrogen and hydrogen,
so they get together and really bond.
So that links the two big molecule groups together.
And if you have a lot of them, they all do it.
And when that happens, whole strings of them join up.
And if you knit those fine strings together
the way you would with thread, you get something
that will one day give every woman in the world
a real leg up in life.
Because the molecules make what DuPont calls nylon.
There's never been anything like nylons.
In the first four days, DuPont sells 4 million pair.
Nylons make all the difference
when you're on your way to a date,
as we are.
Our date is the year 1811.
Here's the story.
The first nylon stockings get made on machines
that essentially haven't changed
since the first machines for making cotton stockings
are invented here in England by a fellow called Cotton.
Now, this marvel of industrial revolution technology
kicks off a movement back then that will one day
in the modern world give its name
to the kind of people who hate technology with a passion,
the Luddites.
So you just know something bad is going to happen
to this machine.
Here's what I mean by "bad."
Stocking machines may be wonderful bits of technology,
but what they are doing back then,
besides making stockings for lots of rich people,
is putting lots of poor people out of work.
The solution is simple.
The way to keep your job is to smash the machines.
Now, this may look like nothing more
than dirty work at the crossroads to you,
but back then, the punishment for doing something like this
is hanging.
So you know these are desperate men here,
men with starving children
and the whole power of the state against them,
including the army.
So there's nothing romantic
about what these Luddites leave behind them.
Well, there's one romantic bit, which I'll get to
after a brief catch-up on where we are so far.
Instant coffee gets off the ground in World War II,
when artificial rubber is invented and so are nylons,
made on machines like these original ones
being smashed by the Luddites, whose actions are defended
by the romantic guy we're about to get to.
He's a young, 24-year-old nobody that nobody's ever heard of,
and his emotional defense of the Luddites
in the British Parliament sounds like something
you could have heard on the hill yesterday.
"Men are convicted of the capital crime of poverty.
"We must not allow mankind to be sacrificed
to improvements in mechanisms."
Good libertarian stuff... unfortunately
before good libertarian stuff becomes fashionable,
so the speech goes over like a lead balloon,
until two weeks later,
when this guy's work turns him from a nobody into a megastar.
And then everybody's heard of Lord Byron.
At the time, Byron is just back
from touring the Mediterranean hot spots,
pressing the flesh and fact finding
about what politics is like in places like Portugal;
the home of democracy, Greece;
and one place he doesn't think much of democracy-wise,
this place, the city of Istanbul.
Byron turns up here
with the absolute minimum a gentleman needs:
Seven trunks of clothes, a bed, and a saddle.
Well, he is Byron.
Basically, like all political, serious, fact-finding missions,
Byron makes like a fun-Ioving tourist,
checking out all the sights.
The great church of Hagia Sophia.
Oh, sorry.
On a scale of ten, Byron gives it eight.
The mosque of Sueleyman the Magnificent.
Oh, yeah?
Give it a five.
A spot of light refreshment.
Tastes like dishwater.
One.
The Blue Mosque.
Very posh.
Six.
The city wall.
Boring.
Give 'em a two.
Sorry.
A little bit of the local folk culture.
Now, Byron loves this.
Give it a nine!
Okay, how about a taste of the local delicacies, hmm?
Excuse me.
Don't know what this is.
Give it a three.
After the tourist stuff, things start to look up.
At one point, being an English aristocrat,
he gets an invite to meet the sultan himself,
so a bit of local royalty.
So he walks in here to the Topkapi Palace
dressed to kill... well, he is Byron...
and is promptly ignored.
So being Byron,
he goes all upset and Byronic about it.
Hissy fit, we'd call it.
Flounces off in a total snit.
Ruins the entire trip.
Just before Byron heads for home,
he runs into a traveling Scots businessman.
Well, that's what he calls himself.
"Shady" would be a better description.
He's one of those shifty characters
you see on the Istanbul waterfront
hanging around bars and expense-account restaurants
Iooking for a deal.
You know, the ones talking
out of both sides of their mouths at once
with a spiel that goes generally something like this:
Okay, you want me to get rid of the stuff
at what we might describe as a reasonable profit?
No problem.
Well, there is one minor inconvenience:
Napoleon.
Look, it'd be better if I show you.
Plain fact is, old boy, our friend Napoleon
has Europe pretty well locked up.
I mean, take a look.
Blockades all round the coastline.
You try getting your products in anywhere here,
they'd blow you right out of the water.
No chance.
But I, John Galt...
his name, a blockade runner and would-be profiteer...
have I got a plan.
We get the product into Europe through the back door.
Sneak the stuff across the Mediterranean, hmm?
Up through Istanbul and then up the back here
and across the Hungarian border.
Piece of cake.
You got to hand it to Galt.
His little blockade-breaking scam
very nearly comes off.
I mean, he actually gets his contraband stuff
all the way to the Hungarian border.
And then it all goes down the toilet,
because his frontier contact just doesn't turn up.
I mean, there he is with 45 camel loads
of illegal cotton goods and no client.
Fortunately for him,
a friendly local Turk takes it off him at cost.
Galt chucks the whole thing up, comes back here to Istanbul,
takes the first boat home to fame and fortune
as a novelist I bet you've never heard of.
John Galt?
Nor have I.
Nor has anybody, for that matter.
Meanwhile, in 1810, Napoleon loses that war,
so the blockade is off, so the smuggling business
leaves Istanbul for other markets.
Now, the blockade has previously got the Brits
into other kinds of difficulties at sea.
Another problem for the Brits during that war
is the Americans.
They don't seem to like
being chased around by British ships
claiming that the Yanks are carrying
British deserters on board, which the Brits claim
they need back to help with the war effort,
about which the Americans could care less.
But then things take an unpleasant turn.
One of these American ships is called the "Chesapeake,"
ready to cross the Atlantic from Norfolk, Virginia,
with four of these "deserters" on board.
So the British navy boards the ship
with some cock-and-bull story
about wanting to send mail back to their granny in England,
whip out their guns,
and it all gets very nasty, with people killed and stuff.
Starts the war of 1812, surprise, surprise.
And that's why we're here in Baltimore, Maryland,
because in 1814, after burning the White House,
the Brits move down here to do more of the same.
They're feeling good.
Now, this is going to be a piece of cake, old boy.
Here's the reason the Brits are feeling quietly confident:
The low-tech, indisciplined, half-asleep American soldiery
inside Fort McHenry here,
who will fall apart at the first shot.
Now, why the Brits at the time are making jokes
about Americans and mincemeat.
Let me use a modern analogy
to show you why the Brits are so cocksure.
They see their situation, so to speak, as this:
Versus this:
Retreat!
So, you see, it's only a matter of time, old boy.
Which is why a young American lawyer,
who happens to be out here on a boat
doing prisoner exchange and gets caught up in events,
stays up all night watching 1,800 British bombs and rockets
reduce American defenders to what will undoubtedly be...
abject surrender, old boy.
Except come the dawn and the time for the white flag,
what the Americans actually run up the flagpole at Fort McHenry
isn't actually white.
Our young American is so blown away by all this,
he dashes off a quick commemorative song.
Back-of-the-envelope kind of thing.
Well, that's the kind of stuff they did back then.
And from then on,
everybody's singing it when the flag goes up.
And we Brits are history.
The ironic thing, though, about Francis Scott Key's
star-spangled song for America is,
the poem he writes to commemorate the way
a few low-tech Yanks beat the British
is actually set to a tune that is, in fact, English.
...in heav'n, where he sat in full glee,
where he sat in full glee.
Now, I don't want to make a big deal
about the "Star-Spangled Banner" being English,
so let me tell you a bit about the original song.
First of all, here's a few bars of it.
...that he their inspirer and patron would be.
The song's really called "To Anacreon in Heaven,"
Anacreon being the name
of this 18th-century London drinking club
where Anacreon members gather to sing bawdy songs,
pinch the serving wenches, and get a little unfocused.
So does their singing.
Voice, fiddle, and flute, no longer be mute.
Voice, fiddle, and flute,
no longer be mute.
See what I mean?
Okay, now for that strange name these boozers give themselves,
the Anacreon Society.
Anacreon turns out to be the name
of a 6th-century B.C. Ancient Greek poet
who, like these guys,
is into erotica, alcohol, and general misbehavior.
And why have a bunch of London lushes
ever heard of Anacreon?
Well, I'll get to that in a moment.
But first, where are we?
You remember Byron, who meets John Galt,
trying to get 'round the blockade
that leads to the war of 1812 and star-spangled songs
that really start with a drinking club
named after Anacreon, a writer people get to hear about
because of the way literature back in the 16th century
is not exactly easy to get at.
Back then, it's pretty easy
to find your friendly local library.
Just check around for the nearest big church.
And you can hardly miss a place like this, can you?
Then things get difficult, because now you have to find
the particular thing you're looking for,
and they haven't invented a catalog yet.
Okay, check the shelves.
That's no good.
There aren't any shelves for books yet,
just heaps of books.
Okay, check the titles on the spines of the books.
Sorry, no books with titles yet.
Okay, ask the librarian.
You've guessed; most places don't have a librarian.
So rootling around is what you do in libraries.
1551, a French publisher called Henri Estienne
is rootling around in Holland one day,
Iooking for buried treasure.
Well, that's what it is
if you don't know it's there, right?
And in terms of the Greek manuscript
everybody's looking for at the time,
"buried" is the right word.
It's in the course of this littering archeology
that Henri... ah, here he is.
Henri Estienne comes across that Greek poet Anacreon...
remember him?... in the appendix of a manuscript
about something entirely different.
So Henri hightails it back to Geneva with the manuscript
to become the greatest European publisher
of Greek lit ever.
And that's how those London boozers
get to hear about Anacreon.
Excuse me.
Ah.
Of course, Estienne does more
than just print Greek doggerel for drunks.
He also makes sure you can understand it.
Here's his greatest work, a Greek dictionary.
If the Greeks had a word for it, you'd find it here.
Makes his name
and gets him a son-in-law called Isaac Casaubon,
who teaches at the local academy,
falls for Henri's books, and then falls for his daughter.
18 children later... that's 18...
Isaac has taken over Henri's job and is a Greek and Latin teacher
better than whom there are very few.
One of the whom is a guy back in Holland
called Julius Scaliger.
Hang on; I'm getting good at this.
Ah!
Scaliger, who writes to say
how much he's enjoyed one of Isaac's books.
Well, it's the start of a beautiful friendship.
In the end, Isaac writes him 1,200 letters,
about one a month.
I say "about."
Scaliger would have known the exact dates.
Scaliger is a date and time freak,
because things like candle-burn time
and how long it takes for a sandglass to run out
is the best people can do about knowing the time.
As for the date, that's anybody's guess.
The second day of some festival?
Or the tenth year of the reign of some king?
The real problem is, it's all local,
when some guy writing the chronicles
of some monastery says things happened.
So Scaliger gets a grip on things
with a giant chronology to pinpoint everything.
He takes the 28-year solar cycle,
multiplies it by the 19-year lunar cycle,
and multiplies that
by the 15-year ancient Roman tax cycle.
Hey, why not?
And gets a period
in which these three cycles start on the same day,
cycle through, and synchronize again.
This takes 7,980 years.
And the last time all three cycles synchronized
was January the first, 4713 B.C.
So that's kind of the year dot, right?
And from that year, everything is fixed
by where it comes on the three cycles.
So, for example, what we call 2000
is 239 solar cycles plus 21 days,
353 lunar cycles plus 6 days, 447 tax cycles plus 8 days.
Now, when this thing gets published
in what we call the year 1582, Europe decides to switch
to a completely new calendar anyway...
the calendar we still use today, as it happens.
So all Scaliger's work is instantly useless.
He must have felt like taking a gun and pulling the trigger.
Which is something his Dutch boss, Prince Maurice,
is good at...
well, getting troops to.
Around 1600, Maurice is running a large part of Holland,
and he's very keen on new weapons technology.
Aim, fire!
Which has recently gone very high-tech
with this little thing, the rave new wheel-Iock pistol.
Works like so:
Pull the trigger.
That releases a wound-up spring,
pushes a metal striker that hits a flint.
It sparks, ignites the powder, bang.
Being wound up and ready like that
also means you can fire the pistol from horseback.
The other new thing at the time
is muskets with paper cartridges.
You just bite off the end, pour in a measured charge.
Speeds things right up.
It means you get a shot off every two minutes.
Maurice brings it all together into an army ready for anything,
including his final innovation, firing by ranks.
Aim, fire!
Rear rank, march on.
Aye!
Prepare to fire.
Aim, fire!
Poor old Maurice, all dressed up and nowhere to go.
In spite of his winning ways,
he never does get the chance to prove
that he's got what it takes for big-league warfare.
The man who does and who wins so many battles
he turns Sweden into a world power
for all of 15 minutes
is the king of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus.
In 1631, Gustavus ups the ante with artillery.
You pound a weak spot in the enemy ranks
with heavy cannon fire.
Then you send the cavalry into the confusion to mop up.
Gustavus' armies win all their battles
with this new trick,
because Sweden has tons of iron and copper,
essential raw materials you need
when you want to be good at killing people,
a talent that, as you will see, runs in Gustavus' family.
That's why we are now in sunny Italy
with the next king of Sweden, a woman...
but Swedish monarchs are all called "king"...
named Christina, who's good at killing people.
But first her other talents.
Christina abdicates and runs away to Italy,
where she has an affair with a cardinal
and protects this composer here, Scarlatti,
from Vatican intrigue,
as well as saving Roman Jews from persecution.
Christina also opens a philosophy school,
gets deeply involved with the civil rights movement,
and gives up her royal pension for good causes.
Christina is one special lady.
Which only leaves the bit about killing people.
Well, I don't suppose she actually kills him.
Early on, while she is still queen... sorry, king...
she does royal-command this chap to get up at 5:00 in the morning
in Stockholm in January in blizzards
to give her lessons in how to think,
which gives him pneumonia, and he dies.
Who is this wimp?
Only the man who gives us all lessons in how to think,
French megagenius, engineer, philosopher,
and general whiz Rene Descartes,
whom we'll get to after a few more bars.
Okay, where are we?
That teacher Casaubon, remember, knows Scaliger,
who invents that chronology thing
and whose boss, Prince Maurice, makes military advances
improved on by Swedish king Gustavus,
whose daughter Christina runs away to Italy
after she's caused the death of philosopher Rene Descartes,
speaking of which,
here's what Descartes thinks about the universe.
Descartes thinks the universe works
a bit like this modern water supply control center,
because back then, water power runs everything.
So Descartes thinks of everything...
plants, animals, people...
like machines operating on some kind of fluid power
moving their bodies with valves and pumps and stuff,
sending fluid along tubes to make your muscles work.
He even takes this mechanical approach
to the way the human brain works.
And since your brain controls your body,
he reckons it's a kind of fluid control center,
like this one is, sending fluids down the nerves.
Of course, brain fluid is invisible,
because, well, nobody's ever seen it.
Mind you, one English chap tries.
The brainy type in question is a top medical whiz at Oxford,
and he and other clever pals
often meet and eat at somebody's house
so they can network on the latest stuff
and be nerds together.
This is the guy, Thomas Willis.
The wonderful thing about the past is,
you have to keep remembering the real world around them.
I mean, these guys live at a time
when they punish criminals by cutting them into four pieces.
The sewage in the streets would make you throw up.
And yet here they are,
17th-century propellerheads making like M.I.T.
Surrounded by disease and filth,
with people being taken seriously dead of old age at 40,
these guys are designing incredibly delicate instruments
like this to observe, oh, the vacuum, barometric pressure,
the lunar effect of the tides, the nature of the blood.
Willis himself takes on the last great nerds' challenge:
How does the brain work?
And in 1664, he comes out with a book
that will be the last word in brainology for 150 years.
Here we are.
The first time the new Descartes mechanical approach
has been taken in medicine
and a rave best-seller all over Europe.
The reason Willis blows everybody away
with this load of scribble is because his books
have some of the best brain pictures you've ever seen
before or since.
Take a look.
The first modern view of the brain,
which bit does what.
And Willis is the first person to finger this bit
as having something to do with running
your autonomic functions: Heart, respiration, that stuff.
And you're a neurologist?
Thank Willis for having invented the word.
Pretty amazing stuff, eh?
Ho hum to Willis' pal who does all the drawings.
Well, take a look at what else he draws.
Willis' draftsman friend
is a superegghead in a century of eggheads.
Apart from this little job, he's also expert
in astronomy, math, optics, weather forecasting,
and submarines.
As you can see, he's also hot stuff
on the drawing board and at the real thing...
in this case, St. Paul's Cathedral, London,
of which he is the architect.
Sir Christopher Wren, who gets the job when he's only 36.
More than his fair share of success, right?
Mind you, he does pretty well there too,
in shares.
Now, back then, all you need
to make money on the new stock market
is money.
No problem.
All you have to do is persuade investors
to buy shares in one of the newly invented banks.
It's the French who try it first,
persuaded by the guy who thinks up this nifty new idea,
a Scotsman called John Law.
Now, the new shareholder bank in Paris is so successful,
the French government takes it over.
And in no time at all,
John Law has persuaded the French,
whose economy is going down the toilet fast, by the way,
to start using an amazing new thing called paper money.
In 1717, thanks to John Law, on any French street,
you can also buy shares
in his new offshore investment properties.
"Any risk?"
"How dare you!"
Take a look at this evidence of how to get filthy rich.
It's the poster John Law designs to act as a prospectus
for what is touted to be an unequaled opportunity
to make a killing.
But since this is before truth in packaging,
it's all smoke-and-mirrors stuff.
A beautiful city... it hasn't been built yet...
fringed by scenic mountains... there are none...
with obedient and hardworking locals...
that'll be the day... and ships coming and going,
Ioaded to the gunwales with emeralds, gold, and silver.
In your dreams.
Well, French little old ladies put their savings into this scam
like they were going to make 1,000%, which some do.
And Law uses the cash to found a capital city
in his overseas investment paradise,
called Louisiana,
and naturally gives the city a French name, New Orleans.
Well, three years later, Law has introduced
the word "millionaire" into the language,
has taken the title Duke of Arkansas,
and is about as rich as you can get...
when things go, inevitably, right down the toilet.
See, the only legal thing about John Law is his name.
Basically, the whole Louisiana thing
is one gigantic gamble.
Of course, it all goes wrong.
All kinds of shady underworld types
and crooked politicians get in on the game,
there's a national scandal followed by a run on the banks,
followed by the words every investor loves to hear:
"Sorry, you lose."
So what does Law do next?
Jump ship over the border from France into Switzerland,
leaving thousands of ruined investors in his wake
jumping out of the window.
Things in France go from bad to catastrophic.
Now, you'd think the French reaction to this mess
would be to ship their financial advisors off
to prison somewhere and take austerity measures.
Instead, they do something totally insane,
which I'll get to after we stop for a quick catch-up.
You remember Descartes
and his mechanical view of the brain?
And Willis' brain book
with pictures by the guy who builds St. Paul's
and who also makes money in stocks and shares,
as does John Law with his great Louisiana scam
that bankrupts the French economy
when it all goes wrong.
Now for the bit I mentioned about insanity.
This.
The penniless French
actually bankroll the American revolution,
a matter which must have been the subject
of severe embarrassment at the military debriefings held
when it was all over and the impossible had happened:
A few American rebels had beaten the British army.
Right, people.
I don't know how we let it happen,
but these are the facts.
The John Law disaster sends the French economy
down the tubes, as you know.
Next slide, please.
The key player in what happens then,
a French guy called Caron de Beaumarchais.
At some point, the French secret service
recruits Beaumarchais, and in 1776,
he goes on a mission... next slide, please...
to London.
His impression is,
the British would like an excuse to pull out of North America.
So the French set him up with this fake company
at this secret location in Paris.
Stage one infiltration of French agents
into British America begins with the top-secret purchase
of 25,000 muskets, 200 cannon, and gunpowder
for the American rebels,
and this document, congressional approval
of undercover French military advisors,
then troops, then ships, then a navy blockade.
All this, of course, totally deniable.
Well, you know the result.
Run the tape.
The American revolution, which bankrupts the French economy.
So next slide, please.
This guy, a Swiss banker, Jacques Necker,
is called in to sort out the mess.
Now, he does a smoke-and-mirrors job.
Fake national budget accounts, rampant inflation.
By 1789, he's been fired,
and that triggers the French revolution.
Necker takes the same road as John Law did.
Remember?
Over the border to Switzerland to be forgotten by history.
Unlike... run the tape, please... his daughter, as you will see.
Necker's daughter marries and becomes Madame de Stael,
well-known as the author of a book on German culture
and a general pain in the ass.
Most of her life is spent in bedrooms
with more lovers than she can count
and with crowds of fans who sit around
in the same bedroom while she holds forth
on any subject you'd care to name.
These exercises in vacuous chatter
become known as "salons,"
and de Stael's become famous all over Europe.
One thing this lady does not lack is an opinion.
Now, at one point, when she's writing that book on Germany,
she gets deeply into
the back-to-nature romantic movement
and meets a romantic writer and real drip
named August von Schlegel, who falls for her.
Go!
Schlegel becomes de Stael's insignificant other
and learns to live with the fact
that, well, it's never going to happen.
So he settles for the role of lapdog and breakfast maker,
meanwhile writing the rules for the new romantic movement
as he and Madame de Stael rocket around Europe.
And his middle name becomes Laughingstock.
To stir things up even further, Schlegel's wife has run off
with one of his fellow romantic gurus,
that guy up there, the thinking woman's fancy,
Friedrich von Schelling,
who applies the romantic principal to everything
and invents a new buzzword: Nature philosophy.
Now, the ingredients
to the new nature philosophy philosophy are quite simple.
Nature, overall, has oneness and symmetry.
And according to friend Schelling,
if you're one of the new
industrial revolution scientists,
oneness and symmetry should be your major project.
Well, for most of them, that's easy to say.
But where to start first?
It's a chicken and egg problem.
Funnily enough, the guy who makes sense
of Schelling's scrambled thoughts
does just that: He looks at chickens and eggs.
The guy who eggs everybody on
to further study of oneness and symmetry
lives here in Estonia.
By 1828, he knows all there is to know
about what happens to an embryo chicken
from conception to hatch-out.
That's why his face is on Estonian money today.
He's the country's greatest eggs-pert, so to speak.
Here he is, this henpecked type, name of von Baer,
a medical doctor whose research discoveries tend
to make the scientific feathers fly even today.
Here, where he lives, in the city of Tartu,
Von Baer concentrates his attention on that business
of nature being all oneness and symmetry.
As a result... wait for this... he classifies every living thing
into four different symmetrical shapes,
a scientific breakthrough
with which you could say he lays an egg.
Well, things are symmetrical, aren't they?
Underwhelming kind of discovery, wouldn't you say?
It's at this point
that von Baer chickens out of the symmetry business
and starts the work
that I've been making all those bad jokes about.
After years of eyestrain, staring down the microscope
at the most minute detail of bits of chicken...
you're getting the point...
Von Baer is eventually able to make an announcement
that will change only life as we know it.
Take a sneak preview.
See those folds running along the center of the embryo tissue?
Von Baer reckons they roll up into nerves and spinal column.
But his really amazing contribution as an embryologist
is something that will knock
everybody's developmental socks off.
Try a time-lapse view.
Von Baer says this is the way chicken embryos develop...
from general blobs of tissue to more and more specialist bits:
Legs, wings, beak, all the things a chicken needs.
And this is a general rule.
Development goes from the general to the specific.
Okay, blindingly obvious to you,
but remember, back then, nobody knows this stuff,
especially the really big news von Baer comes out with
and that if you look very carefully
at the way embryos develop...
In the case of humans, along the way,
we pass through stages that in lower life-forms
would be the fully developed stage...
with gills, for instance,
and a temporary but well-developed tail.
So at one point,
we human embryos go through a stage
as complex as, say, a grown-up oyster.
So not surprisingly, the guy who first floats
Von Baer's ideas to the scientific establishment
does so after he's been at sea for a number of years.
He does his work in places that are holiday destinations today:
New Guinea, east Australia, the Pacific, that stuff.
He's a young naval officer called Huxley,
and his obsession at the time is picking up
on that developmental work of von Baer's,
like does it happen under the water, as well?
So he spends most of four years, between 1846 and 1850,
splashing about in the water every time they park the boat.
Well, Her Majesty's ship "Rattlesnake," actually,
which is doing an absolutely gripping survey
of the south seas.
But what turns Huxley to jelly with excitement is this:
Jellyfish.
I suppose the really convenient thing
about these blobs is that you can see through them,
so you can make all kinds of acute observations
about how to chop them up before you actually do it.
So Huxley does... make acute observations.
Well, more like Earth-shattering discoveries, actually.
Huxley sees that jellyfish seem to consist
of two kinds of tissue,
an outer skin tissue and an inner muscle tissue,
which is just what von Baer says
his chicken embryos seem to be made like.
So Earth-shattering bit coming up now.
Is the humble jellyfish,
lower and simpler than which it is difficult to find,
connected in some way to chickens?
And maybe even cats, dogs, apes, and maybe even...
well, I bet you're there ahead of me
when I say that Huxley takes his ideas back to England,
where he finds himself agreeing with a guy
who's saying that this is all true
but the process includes human beings, as well,
and getting into deep doo-doo with the church,
who don't like at all the idea
of connecting humans with animals.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the blue corner,
theological champeen for the Church of England,
Oxford bishop "Soapy" Sam Wilberforce.
In the red corner, representing science,
the thinking woman's fancy, Dr. T.H. Huxley.
And now, ladies and gentlemen,
some of the highlights of this incredible match.
And the bell goes.
Wilberforce goes straight for the jugular.
Everything the man writes is hypothetical.
There's not a fact in sight.
Huxley parries.
The book is full of facts.
And as for it being hypothetical,
so is the wave theory of light,
and yet you are prepared to accept that.
Another Sunday punch from Wilberforce.
Species simply do not change.
If you look at ancient Egyptian tombs,
there they all are, exactly the same:
Cats, pigeons, people.
Huxley comes back with a right cross.
This is the best explanation
for where species come from so far.
And now the killer exchange.
Tell me, which of your grandparents
was descended from an ape?
Huxley's on the ropes!
And then...
I'd rather be related to an ape
than to a man of ability and position
who used his brains to pervert the truth.
It's a knockout! It's a knockout!
Thanks to Huxley, the new theory survives all attacks
and lives on to this day to explain...
how instant coffee and Jeeps
lead to nylons and stocking machines
smashed by Luddites, who were defended by Byron,
who in Turkey meets John Galt, dodging the same blockade
that inspires the "Star-Spangled Banner,"
really an English song all about a Greek poet
discovered by a publisher whose son-in-law is pals
with Scaliger of chronology fame,
whose military boss, Maurice, inspires Gustavus of Sweden,
father of the runaway Christina,
whose teacher Descartes' mechanical universe
inspires the book on brains by Willis,
illustrated by the architect of St. Paul's, Christopher Wren,
who's into investments like the Louisiana scam
that ruins France and the French finance minister,
whose daughter is the opinionated de Stael,
whose romantic pals get Huxley into jellyfish
so he can defend the theory of evolution
that survives to become the evolutionary explanation
for everything
and proving, as I said at the start,
that life is no picnic.
Thank you.