I remember my grandfather
talking about his grandfather talking about his grandfather.
I expect you do too.
Thing is, that's all it takes
to get you back to the late 18th century...
three grandfathers' lifetimes.
That's how close we are to it.
And yet, that world has disappeared so totally,
it's like fairy land...
thatched cottages, meadows, happy peasants, a golden age.
Garbage, all that.
Nasty, brutish, and short...
that's what life was all about...
and dirty and boring,
and it had been like that for thousands of years,
and then, suddenly...
the whole complex, polluted,
overpopulated, frenetic, nonstop, stressful,
high-tech rat race that is the modern world.
Life was suddenly no longer as simple as it had been.
And the extraordinary thing is, none of that was planned.
The fellow who caused it
and who ruined the water mill business
and then went on to change the entire world
in the life span of only three grandfathers
had no idea he was kicking off one let alone two revolutions.
Beneath the waves
is where the first of these two revolutions starts,
back around 1750,
here on the lonely windswept cliffs of Cornwall
in the far west of England,
where the people in these tin mines
are busy tunneling their way along
and finding this is taking them further and further out under the sea.
Not surprisingly, the fellows who work in these underwater mines
tend to come home wet.
So the thing to be is a fellow who makes pumps,
and somebody's already done that.
But fortunately for our hero, his pumps don't work,
in spite of the fact
that they're supposed to be the latest high-tech stuff.
Look, you've got a boiler,
a piston,
and a beam.
Coal heats a boiler full of water to make steam.
Here's the piston's cylinder.
The steam comes in here,
pushes the piston up,
tilts this beam.
The other end has a chain working a suction pump.
Now, when the piston's all the way up,
pipe ice-cold water onto the cylinder.
It chills down fast so the steam inside condenses.
So a vacuum forms.
So the pressure of the air outside the cylinder
can push the piston down.
That tilts the beam the other way, pulls up the pump chain, and so on.
Except, every time you chill the cylinder,
it gets that bit cooler.
So next time, the steam coming in condenses early.
So the vacuum forms halfway through the stroke.
And this goes on happening
until the whole thing eventually grinds to a halt.
Our hero, James Watt,
realizes that the problem is a chilly cylinder
and its premature condensation.
So he links it to a separate condensing cylinder
submerged in ice water.
So now, the steam rushes in, pushes up the piston,
open a valve,
and the steam rushes out into the condensing cylinder
and condenses.
Vacuum forms everywhere, and the main piston comes down.
That's it.
The main cylinder's hot all the time.
The condensing cylinder's cold all the time.
You've got yourself a steam pump that works.
And that, thinks James Watt, is that.
And then, his partners reveal what they have in mind...
which is to use steam power to drive factory machinery
so you can put the factories on the coal fields for fuel
and then put the workers next to the factories.
We call the result the industrial revolution,
and it created another problem.
The population went up so fast,
there was a real risk of starvation from lack of food,
which brings me back to James Watt again
and to one of those unknown facts about somebody
you win trivia games with.
See, back in 1778,
he's out in the mines selling steam pumps,
and back at head office,
they're screaming for invoices, letters of agreement, contracts,
you know, bureaucracy.
And the lawsuits... everybody's pirating his idea.
He's up to here in paperwork,
and what he desperately needs is a copier.
So he invents one.
It was a pretty simple idea, but it worked.
Do your writing or drawing with a wet mix of ink and gum.
Press on damp paper, and that's it.
You can make copies till your ink and gum dry out.
Great.
Everybody wanted one.
And the reason I'm here in an Italian graveyard
is because by the early 19th century,
no office was complete
without an advanced version of Watt's copier,
and then, in 1823,
Cyrus P. Dakin of Concord, Massachusetts,
found an even better way: this...
No, not the lamp.
This.
Carbon black.
And this: paraffin oil.
You chill paraffin oil right down, and you get paraffin wax.
Mix the paraffin wax with the carbon black,
and spread the resulting gunk on the back of a page,
and what you get is carbon paper.
And how did that end up feeding people?
Let me shed some light on that.
Look closely at this incandescent event.
See that stuff melting just below the match head,
making the wood catch on fire?
Paraffin wax.
That's there because the match wouldn't work without it.
As the phosphorus head ignited,
you'd get flare,
but you wouldn't get any flame.
That's what two Swedish brothers called Lundstrom did in 1851,
put the new paraffin wax together with phosphorus
and invented the match.
Of course, people had known for some time
that phosphorus would burn,
but it was something else about phosphorus
that would feed all those people I mentioned before.
And ironically,
the fellow who discovered it and became a world celebrity
did so by burning things.
He was a German chemist called Liebig,
and he burned plants to see what they took from the soil.
In the ashes, what does he find but phosphorus.
So he invents phosphorus fertilizer,
doubles crop yields... bags of food...
which is why all those industrial workers
didn't end up dying of starvation.
And that's why I'm here in this Italian graveyard.
Because Liebig got all worked up about the English...
by 1870, the fastest-growing population in Europe...
needing mountains of food
and processing 40,000 tons of phosphate fertilizer a year,
and according to Liebig,
raiding Italian cemeteries to get the raw materials:
bones, loaded with phosphorus.
Wasn't true, of course, about us robbing graves.
So where are we?
Watt's steam engine leads to mass production,
and his copier leads to matches and fertilizer and food.
So now we have well-fed, well-lit factory workers.
So how are the factories
going to get all the raw materials they need
if the whole industrial shebang is to keep on growing?
I'll tell you how...
or rather what.
They did it with this kind of steam power.
Two grandfathers' lifetimes ago,
when James Watt's steam engine was hauling trains everywhere,
think of what all those people now moving around
did to the gene pool.
People who'd lived in the same town or village
for generations were now able to travel all over the place
and maybe end up meeting and marrying somebody
from the other end of the country.
And by the end of the 19th century,
the railroads were keeping major cities alive
with food and drink.
I mean, nobody'd seen fresh milk in New York for a generation.
By the early part of this century,
the railroads were turning America into an economic superpower
because the new traveling salesman crisscrossed the country by train,
selling anything from mineral deposits
to every imaginable product
from factories now linked to their customers by rail.
The only way to handle the rocketing customer demand
was to run the production lines 24 hours a day.
Again, thanks to what?
And this stuff, coal.
Way back, one of Watt's people had cooked some coal,
lit the fumes it gave off,
and got gaslight for factory shift work.
And by the '30s, one other unintended side effect:
gaslit evening classes that had led
to the emancipated, educated working woman.
Well, now you've got qualified men and women,
fast transportation,
a national market.
All you need is a way
to talk to all the people in your business empire:
a telephone... once again, thanks to James Watt.
You remember that carbon black on the lamp chimney
that they used to make carbon paper with?
Here's the inside of an early phone.
You speak and make a membrane vibrate.
That makes an electromagnet generate a varying electric current,
exactly matching the vibration of the membrane.
This varying current then belts off down the phone line.
At the other end,
the varying current ends up
doing the reverse of what happened at the start.
It makes an electromagnet generate varying magnetism this time.
That, in turn,
causes the membrane you can see up top to vibrate,
and that reproduces the words you spoke...
"that they used to make carbon paper with"...
or rather yelled.
So somebody tells Thomas Edison that carbon black reacts to pressure
by letting the amount of electricity going through it increase.
So he puts a blob of it in the microphone
between the membrane and the magnet,
and even the quietest whisper comes out the other end
as clear as a bell,
which was just what the new skyscraper industry needed,
because one grandfather's lifetime ago,
while you might well have had
the architects and the steel to put these things up,
without a telephone wire strung between the floors,
nobody got to organize construction.
So the phone made a high-rise possible.
Well, we're nearing the end of the first part
of this journey through history,
because the first revolution James Watt started
finally brings us to just about the best known place
in the entire United States.
I suppose this is where
the first revolution Watt kicked off kind of ended,
three grandfathers' lifetimes after it started,
and I guarantee that whatever you didn't know
about all those things I said about Watt
and his amazing effect on history,
you know the next one,
or you will when you spot the clues coming up.
I'll give you an extra clue.
You're looking at equipment used
to make possible the most extraordinary voyage
in human history.
And you really ought to have it by now.
Ignition sequence starts.
Apollo was the most complex bit of machinery ever built.
It took 400,000 people to do it
and was the last example of megascale technology
made to be used and then thrown away.
So for that reason,
Apollo marked the end of James Watt's first revolution,
the industrial revolution that had done
so many amazing things with metal.
Ironically, because of the new high-tech aerospace alloys
developed for the moon landing,
Apollo would also help
to bring about James Watt's second revolution.
Watch this.
The greatest sword blades in history have always been made of the steel
invented in medieval Damascus... alloy steel...
which is where the second revolution
kicked off by James Watt begins,
because the one thing you need
when you're changing the shape of the world...
is hard metal to cut with
and even harder stuff to cut the hard metal,
which is why back in the late 19th century,
a fellow called Mushet did
what the Damascus sword makers had done centuries before.
He threw some tungsten into molten steel
and got the first new steel alloy
that was just what everybody had been waiting for...
everybody but drillers.
Only one thing was hard enough for their drill heads...
yes, a girl's best friend.
The trouble with which is, as I'm sure you know,
that they cost an arm and a leg,
which is why James Watt comes back into the story.
Because the first attempt to make artificial diamonds
involved an American called Acheson
fooling around with an electric furnace
and good old carbon black.
He heated up to eleventeen million degrees,
and out comes carborundum,
which isn't diamonds,
but it'll cut diamond.
So that's that solved.
Then, Acheson heats up the carborundum,
and out comes graphite.
Boring, right?
Except for the date:
1895.
That's the year all this began,
the start of a whole new kind of medicine
that didn't have to open you up any longer
to see what was wrong with you
because they could now see inside you.
Thanks to a German called Roentgen
who discovered if you bounce the new cathode rays
off a sliver of platinum,
you got another mysterious new kind of ray
that Roentgen called "x. "
And x-rays would go right through you.
Roentgen shot them at a human hand
and got the first ever x-ray picture.
Question was, what were x-rays?
A kind of light or what?
The answer was to come from Acheson's graphite crystals.
A few years earlier,
a French geologist had dropped a crystal he was examining
and noticed that it split neatly.
And the more he split it, the more it split neatly.
And all crystals did the same.
By the time he'd finished smashing and measuring,
he'd kicked off crystallography.
And helped find out what x-rays were
and begun the final stages of James Watt's second revolution,
one that may change the world in this little baby's lifetime...
maybe even give some babies
a life they might not otherwise have had,
because one of the things that French crystal smasher said was,
that if crystals had such incredibly regular shapes,
then their atoms had to be in incredibly regular patterns.
Okay, back to x-rays.
If x-ray beams were like light,
they'd interfere like light,
cancelling or boosting each other
to make light and dark interference patterns.
But what was going to be small enough
to bounce x-rays off to see if they interfered?
A series of precisely spaced atoms.
Where?
In a crystal.
So in 1912, they tried it.
The x-rays hit the rows of crystal atoms, bounced off,
and, sure enough, started to make the familiar light and dark.
That's called a diffraction pattern forming there.
And you know what it is?
It's James Watt coming back into the story again
to start his second revolution.
Because that pattern came from a crystal that finally showed them
what you might be able to do with x-ray diffraction.
A graphite crystal
made by that American from carbon black, remember?
And it turned out that the crystals in different materials
make different patterns,
and that tells you what the material is.
The pattern you're about to see is the most exciting one ever found,
and it'll change the world more than Watt's steam engine ever did,
because this pattern bounced off atoms
arranged in a formation known as a double helix.
This is the pattern from the molecule of life:
D.N.A.
So thanks to James Watt and the carbon black
they used to improve on his copier,
the graphite crystal gave us D.N.A.
and with it the power to change the shape of life.
That's the second revolution Watt helped to start:
the genetic revolution.
Like the first, it wasn't planned.
Like the first, it'll change the world.
But unlike the first,
it may take less than
three grandfathers' lifetimes to do so,
a lot less.
It's already happening.
Plants and animals are being genetically redesigned.
Cloning is already commonplace.
When these children grow up,
their computers may work
with genetically engineered biological memory systems.
Gene therapy already saves lives.
The search is already well on the way
to crack the human genetic code.
With it, we'll tell what's wrong with people
before it shows
and maybe fix it...
or tell little kids
they can't be what they want to be because the talent isn't in their genes
or change them to suit what their mother wants them to be
or their teacher or their employer or their government.
We may be the last generation shaped only by accident of birth,
crafted only by nature.
We weren't ready for Watt's first revolution.
Are we ready for this one?