No, there's nothing wrong with your TV set.
It's just that,
compared with the razzle-dazzle of the modern world,
the past was really pretty colorless.
And in spite of what you may think,
the food in that picnic was monotonous, limited, and bland.
So it's odd that ad men today tend to sell consumer goods like this
with images of the past like this.
It's all made to look like an age of rosy apples,
farm-fresh eggs, crusty loaves, simple pleasures:
the way things used to be, the real thing.
Truth is, of course,
our fruit's far healthier than theirs ever was,
whatever the commercial tells you.
Why?
Well, that's what this program is all about:
how, thanks to a couple of clues you're looking at right now,
we're able these days to make it all:
I suppose, if the naughty '90s... the 1890s, that is...
really were naughty,
one of the reasons was this piece of immoral technology.
I mean, back then,
riding a bike was playing fast and loose,
not what nice boys and good girls did.
Thanks to the bicycle and the new rubber tires,
it was the latest daring thing to do
to go out into the country on a picnic before you were married.
But a girl still had to stay respectable,
which wasn't easy on a bike.
Even though some woman in Seneca, New York,
called Amelia Bloomer had invented bloomers
to make cycling more respectable,
that still left the immoral matter of visible ankle.
So the only way to save your reputation from getting the boot
was getting a boot,
which was a royal pain in the lower leg
because it took all day to do up the laces
until, yippee, around 1913, an engineer called Sundbach
came up with the answer,
which, speaking of morals, as we were,
was great news for a multiple bigamist
who had five simultaneous wives and called all his daughters Mary
so as not to blow his cover.
He loved zippers on boots
because this guy made the machines that made the boots.
Meet Isaac Merrit Singer
of the sewing machine of the same name:
a mechanic turned actor turned social climber
who beat his women up.
A real sweetheart.
But he made a fortune and built factories all over the world,
because he invented so-much-down and-so-much-a-month
and something else you'll see now.
You can't really miss it.
Okay, you get the point.
Singer's machines are cheap
because they're made of interchangeable parts:
an idea Thomas Jefferson has brought back
earlier from France, where he's also had this row
with a French scientist called Buffon, who's written a book about...
well, let's say, "Everything Since Creation. "
Buffon's book contains a vitriolic attack on America,
which he's never been to.
According to Buffon,
everything in America is retarded because it's so cold,
and degenerate American life forms are inferior to ze French.
Knocking America becomes popular
with other French scientists who've never been there either
and who invent 37-pound Louisiana frogs
and everything American having syphilis.
But what riles Jefferson most is Buffon's remark
about all American animals being smaller than anything French.
Things have now really hit the fan,
so Jefferson tells somebody in America
to mail Buffon a consignment of large American animals
with a note saying, "How'd you like them apples?"
The Americans make their point.
Buffon eats his words.
And that's the end of that.
Jefferson and Buffon
and everybody else back then before Darwin were all
deeply into something known as the Great Chain of Being:
the idea that God at creation had designed everything at once,
all the way from slime to humans,
and that everything was linked one to the next
all the way along the chain.
So slime was almost bugs,
and bugs were almost cells,
all the way up to human beings being almost angels.
Keep that in mind,
because the next guy in my great chain had it in his.
He was a German genius, diplomat, librarian,
and mathematical whiz called Leibniz.
And in 1675, he decided to measure
what was happening in the sky:
this kind of happening.
Leibniz was interested in the effect
of the sun's gravity on planetary orbits,
so he needed to calculate constantly changing velocity,
like the rate this is falling
now, at this infinitesimally small split-second...
not a zillionth of a second before,
not a zillionth of a second after.
The kind of math Leibniz developed to let him do
that infinitesimally small measurement
bumped him right up against the good old Great Chain of Being,
in which the graduation between one species and another
from slime all the way up
were, as you remember, infinitesimally small.
So Leibniz said, "I bet there are links between species
"so infinitesimally small,
you can't see them with the human eye. "
And like all those hotshots you love to hate
because they always win their bets,
he only said that because he had...
seen them.
in 300 letters written by a Dutch shop assistant
and microscope freak called Leeuwenhoek
to this pompous lot of old twits in the English royal society.
The letters are all about
what Leeuwenhoek has seen through his new microscope:
teeny, weeny animals.
Shocking thing is, Leeuwenhoek says he's seen them everywhere,
even, gulp, inside people.
Now, lenses started getting everybody down to real detail,
and that meant getting closer to the truth
about the Great Chain of Being.
Lenses were obviously going to reveal the secret of the Universe.
This chap was already on the case,
finding out that the funny bits sticking out of Saturn
were actually the planet's rings.
Now, unlike Leeuwenhoek, this guy, Christian Huygens,
has been everywhere, studied everything, and knows everybody,
and decides to find out
how to improve these amazing lens things,
which means he's going to have to shed some light
on why they're so bad at the time.
How bad?
Well, take a look at what he's seeing,
and you'll see.
See?
Huygens, being an intellectual,
takes a theoretical approach to the problem.
If light is what brings the images of anything to your eye,
then how does light itself actually move?
Huygens decides that light is made of little particles
that hit other particles
and pass their force on through them to others
in a straight line, like this...
except, for some strange reason,
when light goes through a crystal called Icelandic spar,
which splits the light ray in two:
one, refraction; the other, don't know.
What Huygens doesn't know because nobody knows
is that it's polarized light,
which is as good a reason as any to head for Scotland.
Things took a turn for the Tartan when in 1828,
an Edinboro University geology type called Nichol,
who was into rocks and crystals and such,
fiddled around with a bit of Icelandic spar
and came up with a thing called a Nichol prism
that would produce that strange polarized light on demand.
Now, Nichol had already been making super-thin slices of rock,
so thin they were almost transparent,
and looking at the rock structure detail with a microscope.
And then he realized, if you made super-super-thin slices
and shone the polarized light through them,
some of the rock structures would affect the light
according to what their molecular structure was,
like this; look.
That's limestone,
basalt,
granite.
Now, somebody somewhere was desperate to know
about this magic ability to see through rocks, right?
Except Nichol didn't tell anybody.
So how do I know?
Well, let me show you with a couple of polarized lenses:
one on the camera... you put yours in, Jim;
thank you... and one in my hand.
Have you ever tried doing this with polarized lenses?
See?
That's because when you rotate the lenses,
you rotate the polarized beams of light,
and when the two beams are at right angles to each other,
they cancel each other out.
Then you go on rotating, and there comes the light again.
IN 1840, that trick boosted the whole economy
because it got use to analyze sugar molecules,
and sugar then was like petroleum today.
Sugar profits encouraged investment in Scottish industry.
Now, industry needed metal, and for that,
you needed better-burning coal than Scotland had
till some guy blasted hot air into coal furnaces,
and, bingo, you're looking at Scottish steel.
Being able to use the local low-grade coal turned Scotland
into an iron-making industrial country overnight.
And all that ironstone and coal
that Scottish miners started digging out of the ground
kicked off a mining boom
that would finally make Nichol famous...
well, kind of.
See, this fellow called Witham
had met Nichol at Edinboro University,
and Nichol had told him
all about those super-thin rock slices, remember?
Now, the rock that turned Witham on...
these are funny people... was coal,
and especially the fossilized vegetables
that the Scottish miners had started discovering
in the coal seams.
So Witham... what else?... started slicing.
You will have no doubt noticed that we are now in a place
just a touch hotter than Scotland.
Right?
It's Indonesia, actually,
because this is where the story takes us in a minute.
Meanwhile, that mining boom I mentioned
and the fossil vegetables
the Scottish miners started finding as they dug:
well, Witham wrote one of those things you can't pick up,
called "Some Observations on Some Fossil Vegetables,"
and there was Nichol's work revealed...
and the things he'd said
about seeing little bubbles in rock crystals.
Now, I told you
there was somebody desperate to know all this, didn't I?
Name of Sorby.
Born, lived, and died in Sheffield
and never went anywhere without his mother.
Crazy about bubbles in rocks,
but bubbles like these, magnified 2,000 times.
This photograph told Sorby whether the tiny bubbles
had been made by hot gas or hot liquid or just heat.
And you know what that does:
gives you a handle on all this.
Sorby's microbubbles changed everybody's view
about how rocks got made in the first place,
back in the incandescent days of the Primeval era
when the planet was making itself in fire and lava
back when the earth began,
all thanks to that weirdo Witham and his mania for fossil veggies.
Things got back to vegetables again...
real ones, this time...
when somebody introduced Sorby to something called a spectroscope.
Works like so:
You shine a light through a vegetable solution
that absorbs wavelengths in the light according to what's in it.
Then you shine that light through a prism,
and you get the familiar spectrum
but with black line at the wavelengths of the light
that have been absorbed by the stuff in the solution.
So now you know what the stuff in the solution is.
Good. Thanks. Great.
By 1867, Sorby was doing that solution trick
with boiled-up autumn leaves
to see if he could find out
what caused them to change color in autumn.
Turned out to be a chemical you only see in autumn
when the green chlorophyll disintegrates, called carotene,
which is what gives plants their red-orange-yellow colors.
Now, the thing about carotene is what you're looking at now
or any time
because carotene's part of the way your eye works,
and without it, you can't see.
Well, you can't see at certain times of day
or in certain circumstances,
which you can guess we are now approaching.
Watch what happens when you go from light to dark...
like this.
First of all, you can't see anything in the dark bits.
And then your eye kind of goes into automatic exposure mode,
and gradually, here comes your vision back...
a bit grainy, but you can see.
Here's what's actually going on.
On the retina at the back of your eye,
you've got these purple things called rods:
very sensitive to dim light, so they let you see in the dark.
When you go into a brighter environment,
the rods bleach yellow,
and you're now in bright-light operating mode.
It's carotene that does the trick
by causing the yellow to change back to purple
once you're back in the dark.
Without carotene, that doesn't happen.
So if you're carotene deficient,
all you see in the dark is nothing...
which leads me to Indonesia's greatest gustatory delight, nasi goreng,
which brings together chicken and rice,
which is what I'm also about to do.
You see, back in 1886, when the Dutch were running this country,
they got all worked up about a very nasty disease called beriberi
that was putting colonial administrators into hospital.
So this young medical researcher called Eijkman
notices some chickens normally fed on hospital leftovers
staggering about with symptoms remarkably like beriberi,
so he does nothing about it
until one day, the hospital gets a new cook.
Now, the new cook isn't going to give fancy rice
specially prepared for Europeans...
that is, polished... to chickens, leftovers or not.
If the rough, unpolished stuff
was good enough for the local Javanese,
it was good enough for chickens.
Shortly after this, Eijkman suddenly starts to notice
chickens that aren't looking foul anymore.
These birds are looking healthy.
Takes a closer look at the problem and discovers it's the rice.
Once the chickens had switched from polished rice to unpolished rice,
they'd completely recovered from bird beriberi
and become once again well enough to turn into nasi goreng.
Turned out, their disease was another one of those deficiency things
like carotene-deficiency night blindness, remember?
Without something in the hulls of the rice,
which was missing when you polished the rice,
the chicken got beriberi.
But what was the missing something?
In 1917, the whole thing hit the front page.
World War I ships taking food to Britain
were being hit so hard and so regularly by German u-boats
that the country was in deep trouble.
Britain was down to four weeks' food reserves.
There was only one thing to do:
tighten their belts and cut down on the amount of food you got,
so Britain introduced rationing.
But would rationing give people enough food to survive?
Anyway, what was a healthy diet?
So a guy called Gowland
started taking a close look at the eating habits of rats
and discovered that
even if you gave rats more food than they could eat,
without a particular kind of food in their diets,
they wouldn't grow.
There was something missing in their food
and maybe in human food too
that was having the same effect
as the deficiency problems with chicken beriberi
and that night blindness thing, remember?
Something you needed as well as the basic
carbohydrates and fats and minerals you got in food.
Gowland called the something, whatever it was,
"accessory food factors"...
which brings me back to that picnic
and why I said at the beginning
that modern food is better than theirs was.
It didn't take long to find out what the mystery food factors were
that you had to have in your diet.
We call them vitamin "A", "B", "B1", "B12", "C", "D" and so on
because when they were discovered,
we didn't know what chemicals they were,
so they just got letters.
So there you have it.
Thanks to bikes and zippers and sewing machines
and light waves and fossils and Dutch chicken,
we got vitamins... and enrichment, enhancement,
and all those other names we give it
when the food's better than the real thing.
Oh, you know what the food was that the rats weren't getting?
Milk.
Don't forget to drink yours.