I suppose a detective catches a crook because he follows a trail
from one uniquely relevant event or person to another,
until he finds a unique piece of evidence
that points to the only person in the world
who could've done the deed.
And strangely enough, the story I'm about to tell you
about why modern detectives are able to do that at all
follows exactly the same kind of trail,
from one unique character to another, through history.
Here's my first unique character:
Steve Davis,
one of the best snooker players in the world.
You should see him in action.
In fact, why don't you?
Mr. Davis is uniquely relevant to this detective story
not just for his unbelievable skill at the table
but to draw your attention to one of the tools of his trade:
This: to all modern detectives,
probably the most unique piece of evidence in history.
But if I tell you any more,
I'll give it away.
Thank you very much, Steve.
Thank you, and I've been asked to give you this.
Thank you.
So now you're thoroughly mystified,
here's a tale of unique historical characters
whose unique actions will lead us back to that unique ball,
in a show entitled:
And speaking of individuals,
I don't suppose there's ever been an individual
quite like the one we call Renaissance Man...
you know, those people who once knew
everything there was to know about everything?
Like this guy, George Bauer,
the first character in our historical detective story,
and who was here in the 16th century at Bologna University.
George Bauer was really quite a guy.
He taught Greek, then Latin, then grammar.
Then he went into physics, then chemistry,
then linguistics, and then publishing.
And then, in the middle of the 16th century,
he came here to northern Italy to the best university in Europe,
because he'd finally decided what he really wanted to be...
a doctor.
This place had all the latest anatomy techniques and stuff,
and the classes were jammed.
Anyway, George finishes the course
and in time, goes off to become a G.P.
in a mining town in what would now be the Czech Republic,
where he promptly writes a multi-volume reference book,
but not about medicine,
about mining, of course.
After all, George is a unique Renaissance Man,
so mining is just another string to his bow.
The book covered everything from surface operations
all the way down to the bottom of a mine
and anything you might do on the way...
ore crushing, smelting, tunneling, ventilating...
the illustrated manual of all a miner needed to know...
or rather, anybody interested in buying a mine needed to know:
the first example in history of a technological best-seller...
and our second piece of evidence.
Now, if you bought a mine
that George's assaying techniques showed
was full of what you particularly wanted...
I mean, really valuable stuff like copper...
then, as a financial investor, you would know in advance
that things financial were going to go with a bang.
Copper was so valuable because it helped to make
the Renaissance equivalent
of the gift for the man who has everything:
a bronze cannon.
Because what you had to have in the 16th century
if you were a new nation, an ambitious king,
a bunch of world explorers, or fighting the pope...
which describes the countries of Europe
one way or another at the time...
what you absolutely had to have was firepower.
Everybody was doing it.
Hardly a 16th-century week went by without a war somewhere,
all made that bit easier,
thanks to the unique talents of George Bauer.
Now, the only fly in the ointment for cannon-firing princes and such
was that fighting battles back then wasn't like it is today.
There was no such thing as a regular army,
which gave them a particularly inconvenient problem.
They couldn't get hold of money when they needed it
to pay their mercenary troops when they wanted it,
which was always yesterday,
because there were no banks...
well, not banks we'd call banks.
And even if you did find somebody with a bit of cash to help you out,
the interest rates could be 30%/.
But as one famous mercenary said to Louis XIII,
"To go to war, you only need three things:
money, money, and money. "
Buenos dias.
Kings, of course, weren't stony broke.
They just had cash-flow problems.
By the time you'd collected
your annual taxes, tithes, rents, revenues, or whatever,
your mercenaries had high-tailed it
to work for somebody who could pay them regularly every Friday evening,
and all armies were mercenaries.
Which is why the royals back then were up to here in hock
to the next character in our detective story:
Anton Fugger.
Because he lent money to everybody
from Russia to here in Hispaniola...
in this case, to the particular royal
who owned that palace down there at the end of the street.
Nice piece of property, isn't it?
Well, Hispaniola was the Caribbean headquarters
for the conquest of America.
But not even that would turn out to be enough
to make up for the monetary miscalculations
of this royal borrower,
because what was going on between him and Anton Fugger
needed more collateral than even he had
at the end of the day.
Because nobody ever burnt the financial candle at both ends
quite like this chap:
Charles V of Spain, Europe, and the New World,
who was unique...
uniquely bankrupt.
See, Charles hocked his entire income
from Hispaniola, Spain, Naples, Sicily, Holland, and Austria
so as to borrow a fortune from the Fuggers
so as to bribe everybody in sight... kings and archbishops, mostly...
so as to vote him rather than the other candidate for the job:
the king of France,
the position of Holy Roman Emperor.
Now, Charles wasn't poor.
But not even all the boatloads of Inca gold and silver
coming through this palace in Hispaniola
on its way back to Europe
was enough for that kind of debt.
So finally, he kind of declared bankruptcy,
and the Fuggers went out of business.
And so did Charles, leaving his son, Philip Il,
with the royal crest, the royal crown,
and a royal financial pain.
Phil, a chip off the old block,
tried solving the problem in the traditional manner:
by invading someone.
Picked the wrong person to do it to, though:
a uniquely talented woman called Queen Elizabeth of England.
Elizabeth was running things in 1588, when Philip made his play,
which was to head up the English Channel with an invasion fleet
called, for psychological warfare reasons,
the Armada, meaning "tons of guns. "
Philip's grand plan was to wipe out the English navy,
take over a fast-growing economy, and get some money.
As the shock news of the approaching Spanish megafleet
reached the English naval high command,
they were out having a quiet game of bowls.
So like any Englishman would in moments of impending disaster,
they went on with their game, of course,
because they knew that they could finish their match
and still get out there
before the Armada was within spitting distance
and still clobber them.
Yeah, you got it.
Because thanks to Queen Elizabeth,
they had new, high-tech, high-speed ships
able to run circles around the Spanish,
which they did,
and won.
Cheers.
But the Armada had given the English
the kind of scare you don't forget,
so by the mid-17th century,
they, and then everybody else, were into building really big ships.
I mean, one of those monsters took 1,000 oak trees.
Well, that put the kaibash on people making glass,
because they'd been chopping down all the wood
to make charcoal for fuel for their glass furnaces.
Well, they got out of wood pretty quick and turned to coal for fuel
and a new kind of glass for the big, new building boom
because by the late 17th century,
there were new housing starts all over Europe.
the particular one I happen to be at right now
was just the biggest one of all.
The palace of Versailles, outside Paris:
a glazier's dream.
I mean, look at all those windows.
Well, with plenty of coal around for fuel,
the glassmakers started to experiment,
and in 1674, an Englishman called Ravenscroft
put powdered flint and lead oxide into his glass
and got stuff so transparent,
you could read a newspaper through it.
New thing at the time, that: newspapers,
and clear glass, of course.
A year later, a Frenchman called Nehou
came up with a way of making big slabs of it,
thus inventing plate glass.
As it happens, the factory he ran in 1688
still produces glass today: Saint-Gobain.
Another clue in our detective story.
Anyway, after windows, plate glass got used
for the one thing that makes any room bigger and brighter.
Not surprisingly, in a world filled with candles,
it got used for mirrors.
The Versailles Hall of Mirrors started a new craze
among the willfully extravagant,
and there were plenty of them around,
because for the first time,
in an age when nothing mattered more than your image,
think what it must have been like to see yourself
again and again and again and again and again.
Everybody had to have their own hall of mirrors.
Now, this may not look like much to you,
but back then, this mirror was a miracle in precision:
clear image, smooth, carefully ground surface,
undistorted reflection...
just what you needed if you were one of two people:
the fellow who paid for all this, Louis XIV,
the egomaniac whose glory is reflected here
and who called himself the Sun King;
and the next character in our historical detective story,
an English precision freak called James Hadley...
who put two new precision mirrors
on a navigation instrument he invented, called a sextant.
Line up the horizon through the telescope
on the half-silvered mirror.
With the top mirror, move the image of a star
so it's superimposed on the horizon in the half-silvered mirror.
Read the angle off the bottom scale.
Then do the same again with another star.
Then your star tables will tell you
where on earth you would have to be
to get those two stars at those two angles,
so now you know where your ship is.
So now you know that fact, you can try another trick.
Check your distance from an onshore headland.
Turn the sextant flat,
and measure the horizontal angle to the next headland.
Basic geometry will then tell you how far apart those headlands are.
This was the technique used in the 1770s
by a couple of surveyors from the Royal American Regiment
called DeBarre and Holland.
They mapped the east coast of America for the British.
The reason we paid somebody to map America
was because we owned it.
And besides, we needed the charts
so that our ships could get over there
with guns and soldiers and supplies to fight the American revolutionaries.
Unfortunately, by the time the charts were ready,
we'd lost the war.
Still, DeBarre and Holland did teach Captain Cook,
who then went off
and found Australia and New Zealand for us.
Win some, lose some.
Which left only one problem: heights.
There still weren't any on maps yet,
until the next character in our detective story:
this chap...
over there.
His name was Saussure,
and he lived here in Switzerland,
and he was unique...
uniquely obsessed by Mont Blanc.
In 1787, he climbed it with a barometer to measure the height.
The Swiss were so knocked out by this feat,
they nearly changed the name from Mont Blanc to Mont Saussure
and because Saussure also started
all that mountaineering and skiing stuff
that brings all the tourists in.
Anyway, up there, Saussure got turned on by what he saw.
No, not that.
This: bits of granite and shellfish fossils.
Saussure reckoned if you found shellfish up a mountain,
the ancient seabed must have risen to become mountains.
Why?
Because the mountains were made of granite,
volcanic upheavals of molten granite way back.
And since granite didn't exactly wear down easily,
then the present-day erosion you could see in granite rocks
must have taken quite a while.
And if that took a long time,
how long had it taken to cause the erosion
you could see all around you on the mountains?
So Saussure wrote a book saying,
if erosion took the same amount of time
in the ancient past as it did today,
that meant the ancient past was really ancient;
the earth was incredibly old.
More evidence.
Well, I don't have to tell you where that would lead.
Saussure's ideas eventually got to Charles Darwin,
who used the enormous age of the earth
to back his theory of evolution,
where species with the luck to have certain characteristics
survive change.
The others end up like these people.
All luck.
Now, Darwin happened to have a cousin,
whose name was Francis Galton.
He had a unique thought.
Could you make your own luck?
If you happened to be a member of a "good family"...
his words...
could you keep the luck in the family
by marrying somebody from another good family...
like his?
Galton studied funeral records and death certificates
and came to the conclusion that the data backed him up.
It showed, he said, eminent men came from eminent families,
and imbeciles came from imbeciles.
He called his theory eugenics, set up a professorship in it,
and became the darling of the new thinkers,
especially those writing
American immigration quota laws in 1924,
who used eugenics to keep out what were called "undesirables. "
In 1934, the Nazis used Galton's sincere attempt
to discover why people were different
to give spurious credentials to their policies on racial purity.
Poor old Galton would've turned in his grave.
I said at the beginning that this detective story
would involve a series of unique people,
which now, of course, includes you and me,
because as Francis Galton was trying to point out,
we're all unique.
Each of us has a unique mix of genetic inheritance,
which is why Galton's work
resulted in something else much more important
than just his book about good breeding.
Galton was trying to pinpoint the way in which we're all different,
and he found it in a code he thought up.
It's a code that tells how you are uniquely you
and that would also identify
these detective story clues I've picked up as we went along
and prove that I was there just now in Bologna University,
at that bank in Hispaniola,
up the mountain with Saussure,
and at the palace of Versailles,
because my version of the code is all over these clues.
Here's the code.
The code describes the different pattern everybody has.
Some bits of the pattern are identified by a pair of letters.
Other bits are given a number.
Take a look at one particular bit of detail:
this number, nine.
It's the number of times my pattern crosses a reference line
from one feature in the pattern to another.
In my case, the pattern crosses the reference line nine times.
So with Galton's code,
you can identify my unique patterns
in any one of these.
My fingerprint.
That's what Galton invented at the turn of the century:
fingerprinting.
The number of possible pattern variations
and the number of possible fingerprint ridges
crossing that reference line on any single print
means that the chances of you and anybody else
having the same set of fingerprints is one in ten trillion.
And that's the end of the story,
because in 1902, for the first time ever,
Scotland Yard used fingerprints to catch a petty criminal
called Harry Jackson.
And you know how they knew who done it?
Remember this?
The fingerprints at the scene of crime
matched the fingerprints they found all over the stuff he'd stolen:
a set of billiard balls.
Case closed.