...looking at the C2FM weather, and what a morning it is.
We're talking paradise, nothing to worry about today.
Sunny, high of 85, with a cool breeze.
Cruisin' weather on C2FM.
This is a program about nothing.
It's about why, several times a year,
people from all over the world spend their life savings
to come to one special picnic spot in the United States
so they can stare at the sky for hours.
Sometimes nothing happens.
But when it does, the event is out of this world...
an event which is the end of a sequence
that started 300 years ago with nothing.
It's the event that is due to happen here today
in 23 minutes and 45 seconds,
if everything goes according to plan.
The reason we're all here.
And it's going to be a free show... "Something For Nothing. "
In the middle of the 17th century,
if you were within earshot of the Pope here in Rome,
you could not talk about nothing.
That's not a double negative.
You couldn't talk about nothing.
I mean, nothing as in the vacuum.
See, the Pope said there was no such thing,
because God was supposed to be everywhere,
filling the whole of existence, so nowhere could be nothing,
because that would be somewhere God wasn't,
and he couldn't be nowhere.
Is this getting out of hand?
So to talk about the vacuum and air pressure and such
was, well, heresy.
Which was no help to the people sinking mine shafts all over Europe
and who were coming across a mystery force
that was making it extremely difficult
for them to do their job without getting their feet wet.
See, the miners' problem was that their suction pumps
wouldn't suck water further than 30 feet up a tube.
But the deeper they dug, the more it flooded.
Now, a pupil of Galileo's called Torricelli reckoned
it was probably air pressure.
Now, this isn't real, but it'll give you the idea.
You suck some liquid up the straw, let it go,
and most of it runs out.
But because of the air pressure on the surface of the liquid,
some of it still remains supported some way up the tube.
Okay, so there was such a thing as air pressure.
Question was, did it get less the higher you went?
So they went up a mountain with some mercury in a tube.
And sure enough, as they went up,
the air pressure on the surface of the mercury went down,
and so did the level of the mercury in the tube.
They'd invented the barometer.
And then they noticed the empty bit at the top of the tube:
the impossible,
the thing the Pope said didn't exist:
the vacuum.
Well, you won't be surprised to know that the barometer
immediately became a Protestant project,
given the religious climate here in Rome.
And speaking of climate, it didn't take them long
to realize that while you got falling mercury
from low air pressure up a mountain,
you also got falling mercury
from low air pressure in bad weather.
But it would take 200 years and a megadisaster
for them to do anything with that fact.
The weather-related disaster happened
on November the 13th, 1854, during the Crimean War,
and the results were so appalling,
the British government tried the first ever propaganda cover-up
with these specially posed pictures
of happy troops relaxing at the front.
The papers got hold of the real story and brought the government down.
The entire British Army supply fleet had been sunk by a hurricane
that a weather forecast could have predicted
almost as easily as we can today.
They had the tools to do it, like the barometer,
but nobody bothered.
So thousands died.
Well, that did it.
Official national weather forecasting kicked off
literally the following week,
without which the event for which we all came today
couldn't happen.
Still, perfect weather for it.
So anyway, on with the story.
19th-century forecasting couldn't have come
at a better time for the English...
well, those of them in London's Oxford Street.
Now, back in 1850, Oxford Street wasn't as spiffy as it is today.
They were shoveling 24 tons of horse manure off it
every 24 hours, for a start.
So you can imagine what it was like when it rained.
And then a Scotsman called John McAdam
invented the blacktop waterproof road surface.
Delighted everybody.
Well, everybody except certain gents
who were less than happy at the prospect
of more storm water runoff
now the rainfall couldn't soak into the ground anymore.
But at least they now had weather statistics to help.
They knew, for instance,
that severe storm rainfall could be six times the normal.
And being number-crazy Victorians,
they also knew that annually,
Londoners generated 15,208,083 cubic feet
of what was euphemistically referred to as "flow. "
I presume you can guess
what these unhappy data-gathering gents were up to
or rather down to.
Yup, sewage.
By 1855, they were building this,
the biggest sewage network in the world,
because it was either do that, or things were going to become
what can only be described as indescribable.
Now, the key problem in building a sewer,
as I'm sure you know, is good old flow.
Too little, and it, so to speak, doesn't move along.
Too much, and, well, I don't have to spell it out.
So they built for statistically average fluctuations
in what they called
"various freely discharging foul matters. "
Nice turn of phrase, eh?
Plus a bit for storms.
When the great work was over,
these tunnels drained over 100 square miles of London.
Where would we be without them?
But the whole thing took 16 years and cost an absolute fortune.
Now, the English only spent that kind of money
because they were desperate for any kind of sanitation
because of a terrifying disease they'd imported from India:
cholera.
Terrifying because by mid-19th century,
it had killed 100,000 people in England,
and they hadn't the faintest idea what caused it
or how to stop it.
Truth was, the population wasn't in a fit state
to fight off a cold, never mind a killer epidemic from India.
Just like the third world today,
back then, English country people
had poured into the industrial cities looking for work.
And when cholera struck, they were living in filthy slums,
ragged and starving,
packed by the dozen in one-room shacks
swimming in sewage.
And this is downtown 19th-century London I'm talking about.
The frightened Victorians tried everything, even cricket.
Yes!
This classic English scene...
the Sunday match, village green, the pub, all that...
epitomizes the public-relations exercise
the Victorian authorities dreamt up
in an attempt to prevent the social anarchy
they thought a cholera epidemic might bring.
They thought up slogans for people to cling to
like "fair play," "stiff upper lip,"
"the straight bat," "jolly good sport," all that,
all those myths people still believe about the English,
including the English.
On a more pragmatic level,
the government also cancelled the excise tax on soap.
Sales doubled overnight.
Maybe washing would prevent cholera.
Cleanliness, now more affordable, was suddenly next to godliness.
Now, it's an ill wind, as they say.
See this?
Toby jug.
For decades, English potters had churned these out
by the thousands for country pubs.
Fun, aren't they?
You could have one that looked like you
or the king or some infamous hero.
The cholera scare made the guys who made these guys a million.
I mean the potters, because if you can make toby jugs,
you can make sewer pipes and ceramic kitchen sinks
and pitcher-and-bowl china toilet sets
and the plumbing to link everybody to the new sewage systems,
because suddenly the thing to have was a lavatory.
Everybody wanted one.
Come to think of it, so do I.
Of course, being Victorians,
they wanted their lavatories respectable,
so the manufacturers made them in decorous white vitreous china
painted with designs called, with a perfectly straight face,
Magnolia, Wild Rose, Morning Glory.
For those more concerned with their sanitary efficiency,
high-tech names included Directo, Rapide, and Deluge.
The first properly modern ceramic flush lavatories
were sold in 1884 by George Jennings.
The most successful introduced the oval seat design
known today to every bottom in the Western world...
inspired, apparently, by a picture frame.
And ceramics is the second of those modern things
I said would be something for nothing,
the first being the weather forecast.
And since we still have a bit of time,
more about nothing.
Back in the 17th century,
the vacuum rapidly became a hot-shot experimental tool.
But to make a vacuum,
you had to suck the air out of something,
so they invented a pump to suck with
and then one to blow with, and there was compressed air.
Great news for insurance companies,
because now you could go and get your shipwreck cargo back.
All you needed was a trusty friend pumping away
above your head up there on the surface.
One day in 1858,
a young American entrepreneur called George
liked the look of a girl who was selling magazine subscriptions,
so he bought one.
The very first copy he read had a story in it
about an amazing new use for compressed air
but not underwater... under mountain.
The magazine story was all about
the knockout new compressed-air drills
being used for the first time ever to cut a hole through the Alps.
" Bingo," thought George.
Or something like that.
Tickets!
George, whose other name was Westinghouse,
traveled quite a bit
and, like every other American at the time,
knew he was taking his life in his hands
whenever he got on a train for the very simple reason,
as you are about to see,
that the brakes on trains didn't work very well.
Any minute now.
Well, you get the point.
In 1869, the Westinghouse compressed-air brake meant
you didn't have to get off trains this way anymore.
George used compressed air to hold back a sprung piston
in a cylinder below each coach.
In an emergency, you released the air pressure,
and the piston slammed shut, putting on the brake.
The air brake let them run so many trains,
Westinghouse needed electricity generators
to power new signalling systems and all the lights they needed,
which is why he took up with a guy called Nikola Tesla,
who solved the problem by designing
the world's first hydroelectric power station
under a waterfall.
Westinghouse installed Tesla's power generators here,
at what has to be the most spectacular source
of electricity in the world.
Tesla also came up with a brilliant idea
to use electricity for more than just lights and railway signals.
See, this gigantic mass of falling water
makes electricity with turbines
that spin copper coils next to magnets.
Here's a coil spinning and cutting through a magnetic field
first one way and then the other to make electricity
that goes first one way and then the other.
Alternating current.
No good for motors, because it goes backwards and forwards.
Okay, you remember an electric current in a coil
sets up a magnetic field?
Tesla puts a series of coils, one after the other, 'round a circle
and turns them on and off in sequence,
so their magnetic fields turn on and off in sequence
around the circle,
creating what is effectively a rotating magnetic field.
Put a metal disk in that rotating field,
and the rotating magnetism will make it spin.
Put a belt 'round the disk,
and you've got a motor that will turn things.
But the really great thing about Tesla's electric motor
was that there were no moving parts,
and it came in all sizes.
I mean, there's one running this toy; look.
And back then, a small electric motor
was just what boat builders were looking for,
but not this kind of boat.
Or this kind of boat.
This kind of boat,
the latest giant, all-steel, armor-plated,
heavyweight battleship known as the dreadnought,
bristling with the amazing 15-inch guns
that could throw a 2,000-pound shell 14 miles.
Now, at that distance on a heaving sea,
aiming wasn't exactly easy.
Tesla's little motor solved that problem,
because it would keep a new gun-aiming gizmo
called a gyroscope spinning.
The gyroscope would sense the roll of the ship
and compensate for it.
The new gyro-controlled guns were so good at hitting the target,
everybody's navy had to have them.
So this time, the something for nothing is the gyro.
See how it works.
Because of the inertia of the spinning wheel,
the gyro always points the same way.
Whatever happens to my hand or the guns on a dreadnought
or the Earth going 'round the Sun,
the gyro always knows which was is up.
Okay, one last trail
starting back with the nothing we began with.
You remember how the vacuum got everybody all worked up about air...
also about the lack of it.
For instance, for some strange reason,
animals and plants, well, died in a vacuum,
and you couldn't hear bells in one.
Meet Stephen Hales,
in 1709 a Church of England vicar
and obsessed by anything to do with air or lack of it.
His mission: to discover how plants breathed.
He reckoned air was carried around plant bodies by their sap.
Question then was, what was it that moved the sap around?
So night and day for ten obsessive years,
Hales fed and watered his subjects
and monitored their horticultural particulars.
You could, I suppose,
call Hales' sap-measuring science cutting-edge stuff,
because all he did to find out how fast sap rose
was just cut a big hole in the stem of the plant,
stick a glass sap-collecting tube into the hole,
and then wait to see how long it took
for the sap to go how far up the tube.
And then it struck him;
sap pressure was very like blood pressure.
If only he could work out the figures.
After a number of experiments
better not discussed in front of the children,
Hales announced that blood pressure
in your veins moved your muscles.
Turned out, though,
there just wasn't enough pressure to do that,
so Hales was wrong.
But fortunately, science is full of weirdos
waiting to pick up where others fail.
Like the guy who spent most of his life
in this strange wooden operating theater
filled with wax statues in Bologna, Italy:
Luigi Galvani,
professor of anatomy and crazy about muscles.
If it wasn't blood pressure that moved muscles,
maybe it was some invisible force.
So was it some form of electricity?
In 1891, Galvani galvanized the world of science
by doing nasty things to frogs.
"I had this pair of frog's legs," he announced,
"hanging by a copper hook on an iron stand,
"and the legs jerked
"every time I gave them a shock or there was lightning around
"but only when my scalpel touched the nerves.
"Well, I got a bit bored, and I was idly scraping
"the copper hook against the iron stand,
"and the legs jerked.
"No lightning, no shock.
Eureka," I thought.
"The source of the force is in the frog.
This must be animal electricity. "
Sbagliate di grosso.
Garbage.
Galvani's discovery went over like a lead balloon
with a contemporary electricity freak called Volta.
"Okay, it was the frog,
"but only because it happened to be something wet and salty
"in between the two different metals
"in your scalpel and your hook.
"I had a go at making the mystery force the same way,
"but I used disks of paper soaked in salty water
"and sandwiched between alternating zinc and copper disks.
"And there it was, electricity.
"Nothing to do with the frog.
My A battery, the world's first. "
Roger, Jerry.
The thing's looking real good to us up here.
Copy that, flight; same to us.
That's affirmed down here, as well.
The battery is the last
of those modern something-for-nothing inventions
that brings us here now,
where it's finally time for what we came here to see,
the one thing that could only exist
when all those inventions came together:
weather forecasting, ceramics, the gyro, and the battery.
Independent battery power keeps the shuttle crew alive.
The onboard gyroscope tells them where they are.
Ceramic tiles protect them against reentry temperatures
as high as 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
And an accurate weather forecast tells them
when it's safe to come home.
You're touchdown.
Stand by for drag chute deployment.
Chute's deployed and appears down.
Discovery's crew returned with a bounty of new knowledge
of the Sun, our home planet, and its fragile atmosphere.
Discovery rolling out on runway 33.
Copy; wheels stopped, Discovery,
and you got a bunch of smiling faces in the room here.
That was a beautiful piece of flying, Ken.
And welcome home to the crew after a super mission.