Ever heard of Murphy's Law?
You know, the one that says if anything can go wrong, it will.
Well, if Murphy's Law ever strikes, this is the safest place to be:
Lloyd's of London.
Because there is nothing you can't insure against at Lloyd's.
All you have to do is pay the premium.
And, boy, have they insured against some really weird things
around here over the years:
piracy, lying, death by gin,
spacecraft parachute failure,
dead horses.
You name it.
And the reason they can do all these crazy things
and sometimes insure stuff for hundreds of million dollars at a time
is because, for 300 years,
the underwriters here have spread the risk.
Look.
Each underwriter takes a part of the risk
until the entire risk is covered,
at which point, Lloyd's can write the policy.
And the whole astronomically risky business
relies totally on two things:
international law for determining responsibility
if disaster strikes
and a signature from Lloyd's
to determine responsibility if disaster strikes
next to the two magic words that bind everybody under law:
"Sign Here. "
It is supremely ironic that international law
all started with an act of skullduggery,
here in the world's busiest shipping lane,
then, and now, the Straits of Malacca,
the stretch of water running between Indonesia and Singapore.
In 1604, a Portuguese galleon is trundling home
with a cargo of fat profit in the form of spices
when suddenly out of nowhere comes a Dutch warship
and snaffles the lot,
just like that on the open sea.
Causes one almighty stink.
Of course, the whole thing is set up by the Dutch,
who then hire one of their hotshot lawyers,
a fellow called De Groot,
to prove that what looked like piracy, stealing, smash-and-grab,
or anything else you want to call it, wasn't,
which he does,
and a lot more.
De Groot basically comes up with the concept
of the open sea that belongs to nobody
so you can't monopolize trade on it,
which is what the Spanish and Portuguese have done
with the spice trade,
hence the Dutch piracy.
In 1625, De Groot goes all the way
and invents only the whole of international law as we know it,
basically because, without it,
trade and exploration and colonialism and all that
are going to go from disorganized to chaotic.
I mean, the Western powers are up every undiscovered backwater,
planting the flag on anything dry enough to land on.
The Pope's carving up Brazil before anybody's even been there.
The Turks claim to own only the entire planet.
Protestant legislation doesn't work in Catholic countries.
And nobody is asking any local natives their opinion about anything.
So whose law is right?
Especially when it comes down to the essential matters in life:
money and commerce.
Well, De Groot says anybody should be free
to buy and sell anything they like,
writes out some rules for weighing the evidence,
and basically invents international law.
Law is only any good as long as everybody plays by the rules,
which, back then, you wouldn't have bet on.
16.
Too many.
Which is why, a little later,
a Frenchman called Blaise Pascal was to be found at the gaming tables
trying to work out the odds that would tell lawyers
which way a jury would jump one way or the other.
Well, to be fair,
he was also trying to come up with a foolproof system
for an aristocratic pal.
And in case you're that way inclined,
Pascal worked out that an even chance of getting a pair of sixes
needed 24.555 rolls of the dice,
if your nerve lasted that long.
But Pascal's real trump card was this little trick.
It's called the mathematical triangle,
and you can do all sorts of amazing things with it.
Here's just one.
That's not a row,
so this is row 1, row 2, row 3.
1 and 3 is 4
and 3 is 7 and 1 is 8.
The number of ways three coins can fall is 8,
and most probably this way:
once, three heads;
three times out of eight, two heads and a tail;
three times out of eight, two tails and a head;
and once, three tails.
And you can build this triangle up as big as you like
and handle really astronomically big numbers.
What Pascal had invented here was probability math.
Just as well,
because he was about to get into deep doo-doo
with the church about just that:
probability.
I suppose Pascal was the 17th-century equivalent of a hippie,
an unconventional freethinker,
a very dangerous thing to be
back at a time when the church had power of a thumbscrew.
So when he got friendly with some Freedom of Conscience activists,
very probably, things were going to get nasty.
Pascal's friends were called Jansenists,
and basically, they said, "Look, if you've got a problem
"with a matter of conscience that's bothering you,
"say, like this,
"then you bother the church with it,
"and the church will tell you what to do
because it's probable the church knows best. "
The Jansenists said, "Come on,
it's much more probable you know best. "
After all, it's your conscience.
Well, all this went over with kings and popes
like a lead balloon.
If you could hop on your bike and escape to Holland,
you might get away with it,
but in France, for instance,
the church went absolutely ape,
because if individuals didn't have to obey the church,
who would they obey?
So by 1700, most Jansenists were either under house arrest,
in hiding, or dead,
because if the powers-that-be said,
"Keep your mouth shut" back then,
you did.
Mind you, some monks did anyway.
Here's a couple of 17-century monks dishing the dirt on the abbot,
cracking the latest jokes, and generally networking.
Want to listen in?
Okay, here you go.
No, there's nothing wrong with your hearing.
These guys belong to a silent order,
and back then, they're only allowed to talk with their hands.
So not surprisingly, it's a monk who invents a sign language
for deaf people to use to communicate.
And then an out-of-work Jansenist priest opens a school to teach it.
But by mid-19th century, there's a row
about whether to teach deaf people to make signs or sounds.
And you've already heard about that argument
if you ever went to the movie "My Fair Lady. "
Say your alphabet.
I know my alphabet.
Do you think I know nothing?
I don't need to be taught like a child.
Professor Higgins in the original play
is based on a real Scottish elocution teacher
who'd invented something called visible speech,
symbols for sounds that Higgins uses
to write down Eliza Doolittle's speech patterns.
A, B, C, D...
Stop.
Listen to this, Pickering.
This is what we pay for as elementary education.
This unfortunate animal has been locked up
for nine years in school at our expense
to teach her to read and speak
the language of Shakespeare and Milton,
but the result is "A, B, C, D."
Say "A, B, C, D."
But I'm saying it.
A, B, C...
Stop!
Say "A cup of tea. "
A cup o' tea.
Put your tongue forward
until it squeezes against the top of your lower teeth.
Now say "cup. "
C...
c...
c... I can't.
Cup.
The Scotsman's visible speech book pushed that idea
about teaching deaf people to make sounds.
It was an idea that would lead
to one of the most important inventions in the modern world,
because in 1874,
that Scots elocution teacher's son was in Boston
teaching deaf people to talk,
and his problem was,
how would deaf people know
when they were making the right noises?
Tea, tea, tea, tea.
But I can't hear no difference
except it sounds more genteel-like when you say it.
Well, if you can hear that difference, what the devil are you crying for?
Pickering, give her a chocolate.
By the time I'm finished,
we shall hear music in the weather patterns of Europe.
The rain in Spain falls mainly on the plain.
And then he came across this French gizmo.
You speak down a horn at a thin membrane.
It vibrates,
and a bristle attached to it moves up and down
and traces a wiggly line on smoked glass.
The rain in Spain
falls mainly...
Like this.
The rain in Spain.
This gave our Scotsman's son an idea.
If you could get a metal membrane to vibrate and wriggle a bit of iron
in and out of a copper coil attached to a battery,
you'd get wavy electricity
that would go down a line
and cause the reverse to happen at the other end,
make another membrane wriggle, and reproduce the original sound.
By, Jehovah, what have I done?
We call the Scotsman's son's idea...
and by the way, his name was Alexander Graham Bell...
the telephone.
Meanwhile, where the whole business
of writing down speech as wriggly lines goes next,
the international community
and all that United Nations Geneva-speak talk,
every mind-numbing word of which has to be painstakingly recorded
so it can be published in a dozen languages
for nobody to read.
Record-keeping was the problem facing international organizations
when they started back in the late 19th century,
a problem solved by visible speech,
well, this version of visible speech:
shorthand,
the breaking up of speech sounds into symbols
that can be written down as fast as anybody can talk.
In other words,
the use of the wiggly line
and the invention of "Take a letter, Miss Smith. "
Now, Isaac Pitman, who invented shorthand,
was also a closet pacifist
and very keen on promoting international understanding
through the use of shorthand,
because it fitted all languages at all international meetings
because it was phonetic,
So it was common to all languages spoken by all delegates.
With respect to which any group in the world,
any significant group of states,
is opposed to that being a crime of general international law.
The whole common language thing got taken up in a very big way
by a failed Russian eye doctor
who invented a whole new international language
called Esperanto
on the basis that it would bring peace on Earth and end all wars
and besides, save a ton of money on interpreters and translators
sitting in booths like these doing things like this.
Esperanto nearly got made official here,
when this place was the League of Nations, as a matter of fact.
Nearly.
Well, even if Esperanto didn't catch on, at the end of 19th century,
with a war somewhere every ten minutes,
they were rather keen to find something
that might help promote some measure of international understanding.
The problem was solved by Pitman
with a development on his phonetic spelling idea,
because there is nothing in any language around the globe
that you cannot say
using the international phonetic alphabet.
Well, within seconds of the alphabet coming out,
every research student in sight
was grabbing for the nearest grant proposal,
one of which was for a cozy little piece of research
that some German guy fiddled called
"A Phonetic Examination of the French Accent,"
made more properly scientific
by some help from one of his physicist pals,
a guy called Pringsheim.
Katie.
Is that you, Katie?
Pringsheim's claim to fame
was that he used this little toy, the radiometer,
to study infrared radiation
because back then,
everybody thought the little paddles spun around
when any kind of radiation particles...
infrared, for instance...
hit them.
They were wrong, as it happens.
Meanwhile, what's all this funny business about Katie?
Katie,
have you come to speak with us?
I want to speak to you, Katie.
Well, the guy in the middle is Sir William Crookes,
who invented the radiometer
and saw something that wasn't really happening,
radiometers being spun by light.
He saw other things that weren't really happening too,
like Katie King, who was a ghost,
and other such psychic stuff the Victorians were all heavily into.
Why have you come to see us?
Is it to see Sir William Crookes?
There were even photographs of Sir William taken
arm-in-arm with the ghostly Katie,
so it was said.
She's gone.
Yes, she's gone.
Just for tonight.
Okay, back to the radiometer...
and what wasn't really happening with it,
because it turned out,
it wasn't light that made the little vanes spin.
It was common or garden heat flow.
This humdrum fact was revealed by an English engineer who...
wait for it...
knew more about any flow than anybody.
If it flowed, he could turn it into an equation.
Imagine.
Well, anyway, he said that the vacuum inside the radiometer
wasn't a total vacuum,
that there was a little bit of air left in there.
So when the light heated up the radiometer's little vanes,
it made the air molecules near them flow,
and the flow pushed the vanes around.
Name of Reynolds, this chap,
thanks to which this is here.
See, Reynolds put flat plates of different shapes into flowing liquid
and saw turbulence, wakes, smooth flow, all that,
and he came up with a way
to work out what shape would give what flow.
The speed of the flow times the density of the flow
times the length of the plate
gives you the plate's Reynolds number.
That's two people used at the beginning of this century
to change the world,
with Reynolds numbers for the behavior of air flow,
why I've been telling you this story riding my bike.
Because bikes are what
the Wright brothers sold and repaired...
before they made the world's first powered flight
at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina.
And because bikes used the first practical version
of something without which the Wrights' plane engine...
or any other engine... wouldn't have worked,
and they wouldn't have succeeded in doing this.
See, because that English engineer Reynolds
knew about flow...
remember?
He also knew about friction.
And because he knew about friction,
he wrote the engineer's bible on lubrication.
Don't yawn.
Without lubrication, almost nothing in the world would work.
Lubrication, that is, of some little things
that helped the Wright brothers run their bikes and fly their plane.
Ah.
Ball bearings.
King of ball bearings was a fellow called Stribeck,
and in 1900, he did everything you could do to steel spheres:
ran them in grooves, fast and slow,
hot and cold, large and small,
heavy steel and light steel,
day and night, months on end.
Came up with the Stribeck equation
which tells you what a ball bearing will take
before it goes phut,
in your washing machine, in an airplane engine,
or in this escalator.
After Stribeck, you knew what you could do with steel balls,
which brings me back to where I started for more reasons than one.
Because this is another one of those lovely circles through history
from insurance... remember...
to gambling, sign language,
wriggly lines, shorthand,
aerodynamics, Wright brothers,
ball bearings, and finally, back to Lloyd's.
But not to the policy this time,
to the pen you sign it with,
or rather,
to the ball bearing on the end of the pen.
Well, that's it.
Time to sign off.