This program is like a theme park water ride:
Thrills and spills all the way.
How does the ride end?
You'll find out when we:
Awesome, this piece of metal, right?
One of these Tornado fighter bombers
can put a bomb through the keyhole and really spoil your day.
And is this plain clever:
Smart bombs,
smart missiles,
smart navigation,
and very smart pilots.
One of the lethal things this warplane can drop on the enemy
is something that changed the face of war over 50 years ago
with a rubber shortage...
rubber they used to use in World War II mixed with gasoline
so it would burn slowly when you dropped it on something:
An incendiary bomb.
In 1942, the Japanese captured the Allied rubber plantations.
The solution to this crisis produces
one of the most controversial weapons of all time.
What these early '50s flights are testing
is a kind of gel that does this:
But its most controversial use still lies a decade ahead, in the 1960s.
Meanwhile, what is this stuff?
The raw material looks like this:
An extremely fine powder.
All you do is stir it into the gasoline,
leave it overnight, after which, it looks like this.
Oh, excuse me.
Sorry about that.
Okay, by the 1960s,
this stuff is being loaded into streamlined drop tanks
and released all over South Vietnam,
getting the serious attention of those below.
Napalm is the name.
Interdiction is the game.
The really effective thing about napalm is
that when they stick it to you, they really stick it to you.
When a 100-gallon drop tank
filled with sticky napalm hits the ground,
within an area 30 by 90 yards, everything is toast.
It's ironic, that toasting effect that napalm has,
considering where it all starts:
On toast,
with this stuff,
invented by an obscure Frenchman named Mége
to solve a crucial problem facing France at the time:
A rapidly rising population
of people too poor to have breakfast.
What little food they can afford is a lousy diet, anyway...
when it comes to energy-giving food
that'll keep you going all day long in some factory or other.
And as for meat, that's something poor people never see.
Now, butter would give you enough energy for the factory shift,
but the only people who can afford butter
don't do factory shifts.
So Mége comes up with a mixture of beef suet and milk that will spread
and is cheap enough for all those poor, starving factory workers to afford.
And for reasons that mystify me, he sells the pattern to a Dutchman,
and the world gets margarine and likes it so much,
there isn't enough beef suet to go around,
which, you might say, changes the name of the game.
This is where they find the substitute for beef suet:
Here in Sri Lanka
and other places that grow these palm oil trees.
Palm oil is better and cheaper than suet.
Oh, and incidentally, it's the key ingredient in napalm.
But back in the late 19th century,
palm oil is the reason
there's margarine on your supermarket shelves today,
and it's so easy to get.
You just reach up
and cut...
and then squeeze the oil out of the fruit.
Course, it's not as straightforward as I've made out,
especially that bit about palm oil being used in margarine.
Here's why:
When you process the palm oil fruit,
what you get is this.
You will note that, being oil, it runs, right?
And margarine doesn't.
So what's the trick?
Well, about 20 years after Mége does his thing,
they find a way to harden up the vegetable oils in margarine
so it'll spread on the bread.
Now, to be perfectly fair,
the way they do this is extremely boring,
but I'll be extremely quick.
Okay, here are your palm oil molecules,
and here are some hydrogen molecules,
which don't normally belong together
until you introduce stuff called kieselguhr, a fine powder,
onto which you deposit a little nickel,
and what the nickel on the kieselguhr does
is act like a catalyst.
All you have to do is get the whole lot well mixed up,
and bingo, the hydrogen molecules
stick themselves into the palm oil molecules.
Because it's getting hydrogen into the oil,
the process is called hydrogenation,
and it makes the oil stiff enough so it'll spread on your toast.
And the kieselguhr-nickel catalyst
will do that hardening trick to most oils,
including, ironically, fish oils.
Because that stuff with the funny name, kieselguhr,
is why the fish are where they are to be fished
in the first place.
See, kieselguhr starts life
as shells on the world's smallest seafood,
otherwise known as plankton, aka lunch for teeny-weeny shrimps,
which get eaten by bigger fish,
then eaten by bigger fish that you get to eat.
It's called a food chain.
Now, when the tiny plankton die, their tiny shells sink
and zillions of years later have become
sedimentary layers you grind up into kieselguhr powder.
And we know this because of a fellow named Victor Hensen,
who in 1888 is trying to make more money
for the German fishing fleet.
Hensen designed special nets to catch plankton.
There's some in this jar, about 100 million.
Take a look from a satellite,
and you can see what Hensen discovers.
Here's some time-lapse satellite shots, taken once every month.
Okay, watch the green bits... that's living plankton...
and you can see plankton don't much like the tropics, do they?
Up north and down south,
where the gales churn up the ocean,
if the plankton eat up all the surface food,
there's always more being brought up from down below,
so there's always plenty to eat.
Doesn't happen in the windless tropics.
North and south, with pretty constant strong winds
drawing cold, food-rich currents up from the depths,
plankton thrive.
And what that does is explain why you get all those anchovies and tuna
off the coast of Peru at certain times of the year.
See that plankton growth up the coast of Peru?
The cold Humboldt Current runs up that coast,
driven by the winds coming in over the Pacific
and pulling food for the plankton up from the deep ocean.
So the anchovies that live on the plankton have a feast,
and then the tuna that live on the anchovies have a feast,
and then we have a feast.
And the reason that current happens at all
is discovered by a Dutchman called Ballot.
One last satellite shot.
Ballot discovers that Humboldt Current exists
because of that west-to-east South Pacific weather you can see
that happens because of the way the earth rotates.
Those west-to-east winds pull the Humboldt Current in their train.
And I make that bad joke
because of another Ballot experiment he does in 1845.
Here's Professor Ballot, and here's his experiment.
And here are Ballot's experimental subjects.
Now, I know this looks goofy,
but please try to remember that back then,
this is rocket-science stuff.
Okay, here they go.
And they're off.
Meanwhile, down the line, the waiting research assistants.
Their job: To record with exact precision
what they and you are about to hear:
The note played by the traveling trumpeters.
And here they come.
And here is their note.
But please note how the research assistants hear the note
as the train approaches.
The pitch of the note rises,
proving to Ballot what some guy in Prague has said,
that pitch rises as a sound approaches you
and falls as it departs.
Thank you, gentlemen.
Now, that guy in Prague I mentioned, Christian Doppler...
well, as well as sound waves, he's also talking about light waves.
Here's what he means by that bit of it.
If this were a light approaching at a zillion miles an hour,
its light waves would get to you increasingly frequently.
Higher frequency light is bluer,
so the approaching light source should look bluer.
If the light is departing,
light waves from it hit you less frequently.
Low-frequency light's redder,
so Doppler reckons the red stars astronomers see
must be stars moving away from us
and the blue stars, coming towards us.
Six years later in France,
a guy called Armand Fizeau comes up with the same idea,
only he takes it a bit further.
"Look," he says, "if the speed of light is constant,
"this red-blue thing means
"you can work out the speed the stars are actually going at
"in order to make that color change happen,
if you knew the speed of light, right?"
And he works that out with a cogwheel.
The cogwheel has 712 teeth.
Fizeau shines a light from a precise distance
through the spinning teeth.
When the wheel is going at exactly 12.6 revolutions a second,
the teeth... watch the bottom...
pass at exactly the same time as the light wave crests
and block the light.
Fizeau does the math...
wheel spin rate, light wave frequency,
distance to the light...
and announces light speed's 190,000 miles a second.
Everybody's delighted.
Bouquets all round.
Meanwhile, time for a quick catch-up.
On our way to hitting the water, palm oil is hardened for margarine
with a process using that stuff called kieselguhr,
made from shells of dead plankton
that live in currents identified by Ballot,
who also tests the Doppler effect
that happens with moving sound and moving stars,
so Fizeau works out the speed of light.
Fizeau marries the daughter
of a spectacularly boring French flower freak
about whom virtually nothing has been written,
you'll be happy to hear,
not even by his best pal,
who lives here in Paris and writes a lot.
The scribbling friend is
the greatest French romantic novelist nobody's ever heard of,
named Prosper Merimee.
Here's his greatest work,
"The Chronicle of the Reign of Charles IX."
I had to read it at school.
Try it.
It'll cure your insomnia.
Thing is, I bet you know Prosper Merimee
but didn't know you did, on account of the fact
that somebody more famous stole one of his stories
and turned it into something more famous:
A tale of flowering passion.
Merimee's story is better known in the musical version, "Carmen,"
the story of a gypsy girl who stabs her lover in a jealous rage.
Mind you, the idea isn't Merimee's in the first place.
He gets told the story when he's traveling in Spain
and bumps into an aristocratic Spanish family
and becomes a good pal of them all, and especially the little daughter.
That friendship with the little girl turns out to be
one of the best things that ever happens to Merimee.
Years later, when he's back in Paris,
so is she, grown up and empress of France.
Okay, we fast-forward to 1834, when Merimee's back here in Paris
and his little pal is empress,
and Merimee gets to be the great savior of Notre Dame Cathedral
because the empress gets him the job of inspector general of monuments,
most of which are falling down,
and he saves about 4,000 of them, including Notre Dame.
You enjoy the architectural treasures of France?
Thank Merimee.
Of course, sometimes they replace a bit,
so some of what you're admiring as Gothic isn't,
like this bit
or this bit...
or these bits...
or this bit.
Mind you, most people are fooled.
And speaking of getting away with it,
at one point, Merimee gets mixed up
with a criminal Italian type named Libri,
who's living in France
and is inspector general of French libraries.
Well, he is until they start noticing
that every time he inspects a library, valuable books kind of go missing.
Chased by the cops, he escapes to England...
where another Italian book lover offers him a job.
No danger of Libri stealing this guy's books.
I know.
I've spent most of my life waiting for days
just to get my hands on one...
here at the British Museum library.
Libri's pal, Antonio Panizzi, becomes the head librarian in 1856,
and he's the guy who designs the great main reading room
beloved of readers and snoozers the world over.
It's Panizzi who turns the library into a major institution.
The library has the greatest collection of rare volumes in the world today,
thanks to bookworm Antonio Panizzi.
You can imagine him, can't you, in retirement,
settling down in the evening over a nice cup of hot chocolate
and thanking the fellow who made it all possible:
The guy who invented hot chocolate, Dr. Hans Sloane,
fortunately for Panizzi,
the guy who got the British Museum built in the first place.
So let's hear it for doctors who invent hot chocolate drinks
and help to cure beautiful women.
Well, she was beautiful,
until the unfortunate event.
The unfortunate event occurs
not long before the aristocratic lady in question
sets off in 1715 for Turkey.
What that doctor, Hans Sloane, has done back in London
is save the life of Lady Mary Wortley Montague
from a disease that nearly always kills
and always disfigures: Smallpox.
Lady Mary heads straight for Turkish high society...
places like the sultan's harem,
where she meets the wives and concubines
and gets to know all about life and love in Istanbul.
One day, on one of her visits,
Lady Mary gets the word about something the Turks are up to
that interests her a lot more than the art and architecture stuff.
She discovers that smallpox in Turkey
isn't the killer disease it is back in England.
So she takes a closer look,
and what she discovers puts her in the medical history books.
Turns out the Turks are taking
the liquid from the pustules of people with smallpox
and inoculating healthy children with it,
who then never catch smallpox.
This turns Lady Mary on so much, eventually, back in England,
she persuades the medical profession to start inoculating.
The other thing she does here
is write flowery letters home about her experiences,
including how Turkey is coveting tulips.
At the time, there's a tulip craze among the Turkish aristocracy,
so they're worth a fortune, and there are 1,300 varieties.
Tulips have been a rarity in the West since the 1560s,
when Europeans get their first glimpse of them
in a book by a Swiss guy, Conrad Gesner,
who's also the first person to classify plants
by their structures and seeds.
But Gesner's real claim to fame
is a modest work he comes up with in 1555,
entitled "The Universal Collection of Books."
Every author since the printing press 100 years before
and dictionaries, encyclopedias, grammar books,
and the Lord's Prayer in 22 languages,
and something complicated
on how to analyze the real meaning of ancient texts.
That last thing endears him to his godfather,
who's keen on that kind of approach to the Bible
and partial to sausages.
What happens next is a rare case of history being changed,
thanks to Conrad Gesner's godfather,
by somebody's eating habits.
Point is, Gesner's godfather is a Swiss, sausage-eating Catholic priest
about to turn Protestant
and persuade many other Swiss Catholics to do the same,
so we're talking the theological importance of sausages,
because if you were about to lead a Protestant revolt against Rome,
one way to rally others to your cause could be with sausages.
Thing is, Gesner's godfather is one Ulrich Swingli,
and he eats the sausage in question in 1522 in zurich in Lent,
Lent being a time when Catholics aren't supposed to eat meat,
which is bad enough, except Swingli's a priest
at zurich's biggest church.
And it gets worse.
He's also secretly married.
And worse again: He's a fan of Martin Luther,
the guy just recently excommunicated by Rome.
And then Swingli goes totally ape.
I mean, he gets up in the pulpit...
He gets up in the pulpit and lets the pope have it.
"Down," he says, "with celibacy for priests.
"Down with the Mass...
"holy images...
"music...
"Latin...
"clerical clothing...
"church taxes...
and baptism."
The zurich town council love it.
By 1525, Swingli is flavor of the month.
Anything he says goes.
So when he says, "turn Protestant," they all do
and go for a new Puritan lifestyle.
No more late nights or boozing.
As their spiritual leader, Swingli comes on pretty strong.
But when he says, "Roll up the sidewalks,"
they roll them up, and anything else he asks.
He says, "For two centuries, our biggest export has been mercenaries
fighting for Catholic countries like France.
Now we're Protestant; forget it."
Okay, time for a quick catch-up.
You remember Merimee,
who writes the original story of "Carmen,"
and his pal who works in the British Museum,
first opened to house the collection of Dr. Hans Sloane,
who treats Lady Mary Wortley Montague for her smallpox
before she heads off for Turkey,
land of tulips, first drawn by Gesner,
whose sausage-eating godfather Swingli cancels a contract
to supply mercenaries to the French,
who couldn't care less
because they've just got a radical new idea:
Establishing a permanent professional army
from people like these:
The oldest English regiment, the Coldstream Guards,
who move with precision in battle with this new trick.
The new idea of maneuvering on the battlefield
in close ranks like this
means they also drop big hats and wide cloaks
in favor of combat outfits.
The French also pick up on ideas like the new flintlock weapons;
providing their soldiers
with pensions, hospitals, and retirement homes;
the whole system of ranks;
and organizing their new professional army
into different regiments,
each with their own uniforms and traditions.
And then, in the 1660s,
the French come up with an idea of their own
that everybody else copies:
The idea of doing all this stuff to music.
The guy who introduces marching bands
also goes on to put music and movement together
in a very different way.
His name is Lully,
and by 1673, he's master of music for Louis XIV,
and he's putting on some of the very first versions of this: Ballet.
Lully writes ballets starring the king himself.
No fool, he.
And then, in 1681, he does the unthinkable: This.
He includes women dancers on the stage.
What they do there
is the business of the king's superintendent of dance,
one Pierre Beauchamps, who invents choreography,
which is taught by this ingenious method.
The idea really catches on,
and soon, dancers are, so to speak, toeing Beauchamps' line.
The technique is called track notation
from the line you follow to the different positions of the feet.
So using these notations, here for the first time
is what early ballet must have looked like
when they put it on stage in London in 1717...
something like this.
You see how much more limited the movements are than in ballet today?
The first time ballet and drama are put together,
it's a smash hit called the " Beggar's Opera"
by a guy named John Gay,
who does most of his scribbling behind closed doors.
Whom does he dream of?
Himself.
Whom is he ogling at yonder?
Why, himself in his looking glass.
John Gay is a minor writer nobody ever hears from again.
But for a few months back in 1714,
he's secretary to a club of literary biggies.
The name of the game is
to publish anonymous articles attacking public figures
without getting caught.
What divides good Christians but the words transubstantiation,
consubstantiation, and no substantiation?
Of course, none of this makes any sense today,
but back then, these guys really dipped their pens in vitriol,
aided and abetted by the only one among them
who can afford to wine and dine everybody
because he's the queen's doctor, John Arbuthnot.
Okay, get ready to be bored out of your skull.
Arbuthnot is crazy for statistics,
and he does an analysis of the register of births and deaths
and finds out that over a period of 82 years...
are you still awake?
More boys are born than girls.
Divine providence, he calls it.
Sounds dull and uneventful to you?
Music to the ears
of a dull and uneventful young mathematician in Holland.
And that's all I want to say about him,
except to say his name is Willem s'Gravesande,
and he's writing an analysis of Isaac Newton's work.
Fortunately, Willem's not the only one
doing a version of Newton.
Everybody and his dog is.
But in this case, one of these guys visits Willem in Holland
to get his opinion...
this, however, well before the Frenchman in question
becomes a famous hotshot philosopher,
international scientist, and literary lover.
Here we are in France,
where the literary lover does his literary loving.
I'll get to the "literary" in a minute.
First, the loving, about which it's difficult to be precise.
Rough count, apart from too many casual dalliances to name:
Oh, about 14 different amorous affairs
with everybody from embassy secretaries
to Ionely aristocratic wives to his own niece.
The only affair that matters happens here,
at the Chateau de Cirey in eastern France.
This is where our lover, name of Voltaire,
ends up spending several years of unwedded bliss
with the lady of the house...
the beautiful Emily du Chatelet,
whose husband is in the military and permanently somewhere else.
Now for the literary bit.
Most men think Emily is beautiful and brilliant,
which is what most women think Voltaire is,
so they're made for each other,
besides which they're both doing the same thing at the same time:
Different translations
of Newton's new blockbuster bestseller.
Voltaire is doing the Reader's Digest version
for general readers,
and Emily's tackling the math for the propeller heads.
I guess the best way to describe this amorous couple
is compulsive workaholics
and, I suppose...
control freaks,
because when you come here to visit these two,
which I suppose half of European brainpower does,
it doesn't matter
what kind of intellectual big cheese you might be back home,
here you live by the bell.
Excuse me.
Time for the next bit...
which might be being woken up at 4:00 in the morning
for a poetry reading...
or at 6:00 for a little philosophy;
at 10:00,
being woken up for a political discussion group.
Now and again, you might get to go on a picnic.
Naturally, you take the books with you.
Voltaire and Emily wouldn't want to waste time at a picnic just eating.
Mind you, in spite of all the egghead intensity,
life in the country is pretty relaxing,
so Voltaire and Emily have a constant stream of guests.
After the hustle and bustle of Paris
and all those husbands he might run into,
Voltaire settles down here for a few years,
happily, at Cirey.
And for the rest of his life, takes things at a snail's pace.
Small wonder, years later, long after Emily's dead
and Voltaire is still living
at the same snail's pace in Switzerland,
somebody sends him a long and earth-shattering report
on some experiments involving snails.
Okay, time for that bit.
This is the northern Italian city of Avila,
center of the universe for contemporary snail research
by a towering intellect of Italian science
who is also into worms and bugs at the time.
The worm and bug man
works in the hallowed halls of the University of Avila,
where they still remember him,
name of Lazaro Spallanzani,
the man who turns the lowly worm into a science star.
Back in the 1760s,
Spallanzani is putting the knife
into certain very important and pompous science types,
specially one in England,
with what can only be described as cutting remarks,
which I will get to in a moment,
when we will hear about Spallanzani
opening a whole can of worms, life-sciences-wise.
But first, this.
You know, it's a pity so few people know about Spallanzani,
mainly because somebody else got all the credit
nearly 100 years later
for a nifty idea that was really Spallanzani's.
Pasteur is that other guy's name, and I'll bet you've heard of him.
Well, here's what Spallanzani does,
way ahead of Pasteur, and never gets the credit.
Here's a flask full of dirty water full of little whizzer microorganisms
that Spallanzani sees down a microscope like this.
Okay, here we go.
See all the little whizzers?
Okay, here's another little flask, same little whizzers in it.
Spallanzani boils it up to kill all the little whizzers,
seals it shut,
leaves it for a while,
cracks it open,
and takes an instant sample.
Shoves it under the microscope,
and sees that all the boiled whizzers are dead.
Well, he expected that.
But hold it, folks.
Suddenly, new little whizzers appear,
but only after the flask is cracked,
so the microorganisms must be in the air...
which is what Pasteur discovers 100 years later.
Meanwhile, on with the story
and the ticklish religious question of where souls come from.
Okay, remember that jar of worms I was carrying?
Spallanzani solves a theological riddle with worms.
If you cut a worm into two bits,
after a while, both bits become two worms.
Now, if a worm has a soul... and it's supposed to...
but you can't cut a soul in two, where did the other soul come from,
because both worms have got one?
Spallanzani says, "No problem.
It was there all along in an egg of some kind,"
and kicks off the whole of modern reproductive physiology,
so let's hear it for worms.
And on that note, where are we?
The French invent military music, written by Lully,
who also writes ballets staged in London by John Gay,
whose pal Arbuthnot does statistics
that impress that Dutchman who meets the great Voltaire,
who gets sent a report about snails from Spallanzani,
who slices up worms.
Spallanzani is the big hero of a German scribbler,
name of Hoffman, who writes a story
where a Spallanzani-type figure is the science wizard
who creates a life-sized living doll, Coppelia,
seen here with her inventor
in the ballet made from Hoffman's tales,
and titled the "Tales of Hoffman."
It's a weird plot.
The doll behaves just like a human being
until young men start messing with her,
when she goes completely haywire
and can't be controlled.
Ernst Hoffman's life goes a bit like Coppelia,
full of fits and starts.
He's a lawyer, then a playwright,
then a theater impresario, then out of work,
and in 1819, a judge
and the author of the first weirdo psychological novels.
As judge, he's investigating a bunch of nationalists,
one of whom, name of Karl Follen, decides he won't get a fair trial.
So in 1820, he runs away, vaulting the border to France,
then vaulting the border to Switzerland,
then vaulting the Atlantic to the U.S. A...
where the other side of his nationalism takes him over every obstacle
because he's also deeply into this stuff.
Modern gymnastics kicks off back in the Germany of 1820 or so.
But back then, it's a political thing,
a symbol of the new Germany the Nationalists want:
Ready for conflict,
united, everybody working in unison;
order is everything, obedient to discipline.
Heard that stuff somewhere else?
Right; Nazism is the ideology that grows out of German gyms.
Meanwhile, in Harvard,
Karl Follen, the runaway radical... remember...
turns up and gets a job
and opens the first college gym in the U.S.
Gymnastics then gets taken up by the American YMCA,
and in 1852, the first YMCA world conference
is organized by Henry Dunant of Switzerland,
and then things for Dunant take a really nasty turn.
One day in 1859,
the French and the Austrians fight a battle,
naturally enough, neither in France nor Austria
but just outside a small village in northern Italy called Solferino.
The day before the fight,
Henry Dunant, that guy from Switzerland,
turns up at the the village of Solferino
above the battlefield just before they kick off.
What happens next is what you get all over the world
when they have some heroic battle or other
and scads of people die,
and it's all for the glory of some cause or other,
a few years later, long forgotten.
This one is worse than most.
In the fields out there...
today, peaceful and quiet under the Italian sun...
350,000 people hack and shoot and bayonet each other,
and 40,000 of them are seriously wounded or die.
Course, it's all sanitized now, as you can see.
Tourists come here and take pictures.
But on that day, this neat little square
is full of young boys crying for their mothers
as they die.
The wounded crawl away to shelter.
Back then, it takes them all day.
Today you can drive it in ten minutes.
Shelter is the nearby little town of Castiglione delle Stiviere.
It's still a little town today.
And it's still dominated by the cathedral,
where the next bit of the story takes place.
See, Henry Dunant is so appalled
by the unspeakably dreadful things he's seen and heard
that he helps to get as many of the wounded as possible
back to the cathedral,
where they drag as many as they can inside.
And then, together with the priest and the townspeople,
Dunant tries to do something, anything,
for soldiers lying in pools of their own blood.
For three straight days and nights,
everybody works like hell with nothing but water
and strips of cloth for bandages.
And what do you know?
Some of them survive,
lying here, stacked against the walls.
Over the next five years,
Henry bends the ear of anybody who is anybody all over Europe:
Kings, princes, emperors... you name it.
And finally, in 1864, he persuades 15 countries
to get together to set up battlefield medical teams,
cross the lines, help the wounded, go anywhere.
Henry's little meeting, which they have in Geneva,
agrees on a convention.
Today we call it the Geneva Convention.
The convention brings into existence
an organization that takes as its symbol the red cross
for at least a couple of reasons:
You can't really miss it,
and it reminds people of the color of spilt blood,
speaking of which...
World War I and major blood problems.
Some wounded guy is losing blood like crazy.
You join his blood vessel to somebody else's,
a crude transfusion takes place, and the guy dies.
Nobody knows why
till it is discovered that blood contains things
that mean all bloods don't necessarily mix well.
These things turn out to be factors that put blood into identifiable groups:
A, B, AB, and O: Blood types.
You do transfusions between compatible blood groups,
and it's no problem.
The guy who discovers this gets a Nobel Prize for his work
back in 1900 because it makes possible modern surgery.
Well, almost.
There is still that messy business back then
of getting the blood from one person into another.
And at the time, that means joining up blood vessels.
This is the guy, Alexis Carroll,
who gets the blood vessel problem all sewn up
with a new stitching technique he's soon demonstrating to surgical staff.
The technique's simple.
Your assistant holds the blood vessels together
and pulls the edges taut,
and you sew in a straight line.
Then you repeat that trick twice, so temporarily,
you've turned the vessel tube into a triangle shape,
easy enough to sew.
And when you've done the three sides,
the vessel springs back circular and joined all the way round.
Next thing Carroll wants
is to be able to pump replacement blood and nutrients
into organs removed for treatment so they'll survive to go back.
This pump, designed by a pal of his, does that,
so now Carroll can work towards his real goal:
Organ transplants.
The pump takes its designer
many Ionely hours of total concentration, day and night.
But then, he's used to that.
He's Charles Lindbergh,
and he's just done the first solo transatlantic flight.
He's also just flown down to Mexico to get married.
Lindbergh's new father-in-law is an American ambassador,
and in 1930, he's in London at an Allied conference,
trying to get a grip on disarmament,
and the conference decides that
Germany will be limited to three new battleships,
each one at 10,000 tons,
over three times smaller than Allied battleships.
On January 6, 1936, the Germans launch the first.
It's called the "Admiral Graf Spee," and it blows everybody away.
"Graf Spee" is only 10,000 tons, but what a package:
32 guns, special armor, fastest battleship afloat,
and goes 12,000 miles without refueling.
World War II starts,
and in the Atlantic, "Graf Spee" strikes.
"Graf Spee" sinks nine British ships in a few days.
The Brits track her down, there's a battle,
and she gets away to a neutral port,
where the captain scuttles the ship,
and she sinks,
leaving the crews of those nine British ships
prisoners somewhere on the "Graf Spee's" supply vessel.
There's another chase, and in a Norwegian fjord,
the "Altmark," the supply ship, is cornered,
still carrying the 300 prisoners.
There's a brief firefight, and the Brits board "Altmark,"
and it's all over, except for Adolf Hitler,
who decides the Brits have come to invade Norway, so he does.
In April 1940, the Germans take Norway,
the final link in the chain of events
I've been following in this program
towards the moment when we hit the water, remember?
The German invasion of Norway takes place in a matter of days.
Three weeks later,
they've got the biggest security ring you've ever seen
round that place down there.
It's a hydroelectric plant,
and it's the most important German invasion target in Norway
because it uses the electricity
generated by water falling from this dam high in the mountains
to make more water,
but it's water of a special kind...
which is why, three years later,
a small team of dedicated Allied commandos
and Norwegian partisans
come in over these mountains and clobber the place...
in spite of the fact that
there's only one suspension bridge across the gorge to the plant,
and there's no other way to get there.
Of course, they could go down, across, and up.
Add searchlights, minefields, and guards mitt machine guns,
and the whole thing's impossible.
Wrong.
The Germans believe the place is so well protected,
they're half asleep, till the explosives go off
after the Allied commandos have gone...
the point of it all being that secret water I mentioned.
Now, all water has tiny amounts of deuterium in it,
and with unlimited electricity from the hydroelectric station,
you can kind of reduce the mix
and end up with water heavy in deuterium,
which is why they call it "heavy water."
Now, if you shoot neutrons through this heavy water,
the deuterium atoms will slow the neutrons down just enough
so that when they hit a bit of uranium on the other side,
they kick off a nuclear chain reaction,
and boom.
Well, not quite yet,
because thanks to napalm,
made with palm oil, also used for margarine,
stiffened with a process using kieselguhr
that comes from plankton
living in currents Ballot studies
before doing the Doppler test
that causes Fizeau to measure light speed.
Fizeau's father-in-law's pal, Merimee, who writes "Carmen"...
his pal, Panizzi, who works at the British Museum,
opened to house the collection of Dr. Sloane,
who treats Lady Montague's smallpox
before she sees Turkish tulips,
first drawn by Gesner, whose godfather eats sausages
and cancels the military contract with France,
where they invent military music and choreography,
used in a London show by John Gay,
whose friend Arbuthnot does statistics that impress the Dutch mathematician
who knows Voltaire,
who hears from the worm-slicing Spallanzani,
who stars in the story by Judge Hoffman,
who tries German nationalists who start gymnastics,
adopted by the YMCA
and the guy who kicks off the Red Cross,
who need blood typing, surgical stitching,
and the transfusion pump invented by Lindbergh,
whose father-in-law's disarmament treaty
leads to "Graf Spee," "Altmark,"
and the German invasion of Norway
and the Allied commandos whose mission was to hit the water.
Thanks to all that, Hitler is never able to do this.