Any "Connections" program is full of the unexpected...
this one, more than usual.
Here are a few clues.
Okay, here we go on a journey that will end with "Fire from the Sky. "
Welcome to Iceland.
Hey, this job isn't all tropical beaches, you know.
Okay, folks, watch this.
Three, two, one.
Thank you.
You know why that happens here in Iceland?
Same reason New York used to be a part of Portugal.
And this snail...
well, a fossil ancestor of this snail...
once walked from Brazil to Africa in a few seconds,
because... oh, hang on a minute.
Because the continents began all joined up and then floated apart
when the surface of the planet cracked
and molten magma started spewing out from the center of the Earth.
As they floated apart, the continents rode on plates of rock:
Tectonic plates that cracked and buckled when they collided.
Iceland sits right on top of the split
between two of those ancient tectonic plates.
The tectonic plates are the reason
Iceland has volcanoes and geysers, like this.
And we know all this, thanks to a German guy called Wegener,
who's regarded back then
as a crackpot who knows nothing about geology
because he's just a weatherman, so what would he know?
You know Wegener's crackpot idea as the Continental Drift Theory.
He thinks it all up in 1912, when he's out here in Iceland
flying kites to check on the winds and stuff...
you know, being a weatherman.
One day, he watches an ice floe cracking apart
and dreams up Continental Drift...
which explains those ancient snails crawling from Brazil to Africa.
Back when the continents were joined together.
It was easy.
Big idea, Wegener's, right?
Takes 30 years for him to be taken seriously.
Most geologists, noodling away at their rock tapping,
look at this continental-fit idea
and think poor old Wegener's seeing things.
Ironic, that.
The other thing Wegener's crazy about is mirages.
Okay, this is a mirage of something that's not really there.
You see a mirage across a flat surface when hot air bends the light
so it kind of curves around the Earth
and brings an image from beyond the horizon.
Sometimes wind will distort the image in weird and wonderful ways.
It was medieval scientists
who gave this castles-in-the-air mirage its name, Fata Morgana,
a magic illusion by Morgan the Witch,
the most powerful magician in medieval mythology,
none other than the sister
of the legendary ruler of ancient Britain,
the sovereign of Camelot, the great King Arthur.
Hi.
This is the usual view you get of Arthur, isn't it?
The Hollywood view... this stuff.
Garbage.
I mean, if he ever existed, Arthur was probably some Romanized kilt
trying to stop stuff going down the toilet
when the Romans evacuated Britain and the barbarian Saxons turned up
and started all that rape and pillage stuff.
Ohh.
Mind if I sit down?
This outfit weighs a ton.
Mind you, it's just as likely that the whole Arthur thing
is some ancient Welsh myth about the calendar,
like Stonehenge here is a calendar.
You know, on a certain day,
the Sun comes up right between two particular stones,
and that's how they used this place: To tell them the date back then.
That's why some people think Arthur is really the Welsh Sun god
and the 12 Knights of the Round Table, the 12 months of the year,
and the whole thing's all about ancient fertility rites
and all that good stuff.
Well, be that as it may,
the reason we all know about King Arthur...
whoever and whatever he is...
is because about 500 years after it all happens,
or doesn't,
some young French monk called Chretine De Troyes
comes over here on a trip to England, oh, around 1170.
He hears all the local stories
about Arthur and Camelot and Guinevere and all that
and decides to take the stories back to France,
where they're bound to top the charts.
Well, they do, once Chretine turns them into love poems,
and they're the basis
for the Hollywood Arthur you get in the movies.
Let me read you a bit of medieval soap opera.
"Whoever wishes to love must feel fear,
"but he must fear only the one he loves.
"What causes his wound to fester and pain him the more
is that he dares not speak of his desire. "
Sounds like the guy needs a shrink. Right?
Wrong.
This in medieval terms is a new kind of interpersonal relationship
called courtly love.
Funny business.
Well, see for yourself.
Courtly love is a game played by aristocrats in northern Europe
who get married not for love but for business,
so alone in their boudoirs,
the wives dream of handsome lovers
while their husbands spend their entire adult lives
riding off to have military fun in some Crusade or other.
Now, in the modern world,
this would be a recipe for marital disaster.
Not in the Middle Ages,
reason being, you commit adultery, they drown you,
so you're kind of between a rock and a hard place.
The only solution is courtly love.
When one of your admirers turns up, neither of you commits adultery.
You just sublimate your urges by kind of pretending.
She plays the ice princess.
He does the heavy breathing, frustrated bit.
Now, they both know where it's not going to lead,
like, "Are you kidding?"
Meanwhile, nudge, wink, it's fun to fantasize.
Well, there's only so much pressure a gal can take,
and some of the songs get really heavy.
I mean, words like "body" get used.
So for the sake of everybody's mental and physical health,
there's only one way it ever ends,
and that's courtly love.
Now, all this looks more hot Latin lover
than cool northern Europe, right?
Right.
Because chances are, all this risque stuff
really starts way down in the south of France
where a bunch of religious deviants are stirring things up.
Those southern religious types may be the original inspiration
for this romantic revolution in interpersonal relationships
going on here up north,
except what's going on down south
is a good bit more revolution than romantic.
What kicks off the revolution is what's going on in places like this,
where fat-cat churchmen are, according to the revolutionaries,
boozing, fornicating, and worse.
The revolutionaries are mystics known as Cathars.
They believe in meditation, free love, and vows of poverty for churchmen.
Well, guess how Rome reacts.
The Pope declares an anti-Cathar Crusade,
and the usual fun and games then follow.
Dozens of castles are destroyed,
there's lots of fighting and killing and all that good stuff,
thousands of people are burned without trial.
And that's it for the mystical Cathars.
So where are we?
The Continental Drift Theory by Wegener,
who's crazy about mirages that medieval scientists think are magic
made by the sister of King Arthur,
stories about whom inspire the substitute for adultery, courtly love,
that probably really starts
with those church radicals, the mystical Cathars.
Which brings us to the other mystics
with whom the Cathars have a lot in common
and who are in the same place at the same time: The Jews.
Well, not just Jews, special Jews
who are also into meditation and stuff and reciting magic formulas
so as to get what we would describe as high,
in a trance, ecstatic... whatever.
These guys are known as cabalists,
and for them, the secret of the universe is numbers.
First you give every letter in a language, like Hebrew, a number
to encode the knowledge every language contains
hidden in its words.
Well, it does, doesn't it?
So let me try and show you what the cabalists do
with letters and numbers.
Okay, it's 13th-century Spain,
and this is cabalist Abraham Abulafia,
who writes a book on the strange truths
words and numbers can reveal.
But instead of Hebrew, let me try it with English.
If you give the alphabet numbers from 1 to 26,
the numbers for each letter of this phrase, "God is,"
are these:
And added up,
they give you the same total as the numbers for this word,
so the existence of God is the same as love.
Here's another.
The numbers for the words "bad sky"
add up to the same as "plague. "
And what about this next one?
"Holy trinity" adds up to 175,
and so does "father, son," and "ghost. "
For cabalists like Abulafia,
the way of cabala
and meditating on the mystery of words and numbers
brings endless peace.
You see what I mean about revealing strange truths, eh?
I'll just give you a moment to meditate on that.
In 1270, Abulafia leaves Spain
and takes his cabalist mysteries elsewhere.
Abulafia's cabalism goes over very big
in Mirandola, Northern Italy...
a little town about which little can be said.
Cabalism really turns on this guy: Pico, Count of Mirandola in the 1480s.
And this is Pico's castle...
well, what's left of it...
now a condo and pizzeria, as you can see.
Oh, and a hairdresser's.
Still nice enough place.
The castle sits at one end of the main square,
the place where locals meet and greet.
At the other end of the square: Pico's family home, now the town hall.
Now, as I said, Pico gets excited by Jewish cabala
and produces his own version of it,
mixed with a little philosophy and mathematics.
You remember, numbers matter to cabalists.
And what he comes up with may not seem much to you,
but some people say
it kicked off science in the modern world.
Oh, that's the cathedral.
See, what Pico della Mirandola tells everybody is
that there has to be a way, with numbers,
to understand how the mysterious forces of the sky affect life on earth.
Do you hear cabalism talking?
A way that isn't mumbo jumbo: Astrology.
Numbers, says Pico, are the secret to understanding
how the universe works.
Do you hear science talking?
Then Pico really blows it.
He applies cabalism to Christianity,
which may be the reason he doesn't get buried here,
among the family tombs.
Hey, he's lucky he gets a Christian burial at all
because of this stuff.
See, because of his interest in cabalism,
he has a real love affair with Hebrew,
the language he says you have to know
if you want to understand the Bible.
Okay, a little risky saying that back then,
but Pico's near-fatal mistake with the pope,
who, you will recall, has power of thumbscrew,
is to go one more step further
and say that the mysteries of cabalism...
wait for this...
are the only way to understand the divinity of Christ.
Well, everything hits the papal fan,
and it doesn't help that a very senior German Catholic intellectual
agrees with Pico.
Nothing helps.
You just do not wave this stuff in Rome's face
without lighting a fire under somebody.
The senior German intellectual churchman
that Pico turns on to cabalism and the Hebrew language
is this guy, John Reuchlin,
who is troubled by a really burning question.
See, Reuchlin thinks anybody worth his salt
ought to know Hebrew,
so he writes the first Hebrew Latin grammar,
so eventually, the German church authorities ask him
about which Hebrew books they should burn
because they're anti-Christian, and Reuchlin says none
and attacks the whole book-burning idea.
By 1514, Reuchlin's been making loud enough noises
about freedom of thought
and how there's nothing wrong with cabalism
that there's only one way all this can end.
That year, the German bishops drag him up before a court
and accuse him of heresy,
for which the punishment is death by fire.
The case drags on for six years.
In the end, Reuchlin is found not guilty,
but the experience destroys him.
He's lucky.
All that gets burnt is books.
Problem is his supporters,
including a guy the Catholic Church regards
as just about the most dangerous theological maverick
Rome's had to deal with in more than 1,000 years:
The breakaway Protestant revolutionary, Martin Luther.
And one of the reasons Luther speaks up for Reuchlin
is something else that doesn't help Reuchlin very much.
Luther's right-hand man is Reuchlin's nephew.
His name's Philip Melanchthon,
and he moves my story along towards its unexpected end
in the comfortable surroundings of Wittenburg, Germany.
Wittenburg is the center of a new radical movement
started by Martin Luther, who was excommunicated by the pope
and starts his own religion here.
This includes training a totally new kind of minister
at a totally new kind of university teaching totally new kinds of stuff,
which is why the 16th-century ancestors of these staid modern Wittenburgers
are regarded back then by Rome as dangerous lunatics.
Here's why any pope might think that.
It's on the door of the church where it happened,
so you know it's important.
These are the words that changed the history of the western world,
and they're cast in bronze here to make sure you don't forget.
They are a shocking attack on the Catholic Church by Martin Luther
about everything that's wrong with the church,
in reaction to which remarks, Rome goes totally ape.
Luther and his pals protest
and become known as "protestants," Protestants.
Anyway, in 1518,
three years after everything theological has hit the fan,
Melanchthon... remember him?
Turns up here as professor of Greek,
and between him and Luther, it's love at first sight.
Melanchthon and Luther are the kind of guys kids love to hate,
because they believe kids need one thing above all else:
Regular classes.
So the two men come up
with the all-time biggest ideas for school reform.
Educated kids, they say, make educated citizens.
The Wittenburg town council loves the idea.
By 1528, there are school inspectors, teachers on contract,
a new junior-, middle-, and upper-school system,
standardized textbooks, a curriculum,
and Latin till it's coming out of your ears.
The reason for the Latin is, the Protestant Bible's in Latin,
and Melanchthon's view is,
bang that into their heads, and you can't fail.
Mind you, there are extremists in the Protestant movement
who think Melanchthon's lying down on the job.
Instead of all this education stuff, they reckon he ought to be out there
giving hell and brimstone to Catholics...
and sinners.
One of these radicals,
who has the mother and father of all rows
with Melanchthon about this,
is a guy who is a professor at Koenigsberg University,
on the Baltic, here.
His name is Andreas Osiander, who is...
how shall I put this?...
an arrogant, unqualified creep who only gets the job
because he's in like Flynn with the local prince.
Everybody hates him.
Osiander ends up in the history books with a reputation so bad, it's cosmic.
Here's the official view of the cosmos at the time,
with the earth... and, of course, humankind...
at the center of everything,
circled by the Sun and the Moon and all the planets.
This idea has been around for 2,000 years,
ever since the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle
dreams up a universe made of giant invisible concentric spheres
made of some magic material,
each one of the spheres carrying
each one of the heavenly bodies attached to it.
Now, this whole gobbledygook works fine until you take a closer look,
because it doesn't explain why, from time to time,
Mars appears to go backwards, which it ain't supposed to do.
Well, by 1514, the calendar, based on this wrong view of things,
is so far out of whack
that good Catholics don't know if it's really Friday,
and, like, can they eat meat or not?
So the pope puts a Pole on the case, and in 1542 in Nuremberg,
they're about to print what he's done about it all.
So the editing job goes to that creep Osiander.
Remember him?
So you just know
something really bad is going to happen to this book...
because its Polish author comes up with an idea
that nails Aristotle's entire concept nearly stone dead.
If you put the Sun at the center and everything else in orbit,
it explains everything,
including why Mars appears to go backwards
whenever the earth catches up and moves ahead of it for a while.
Take another look at Mars as if you were on the earth,
and you'll see it happening.
There.
Now, as far as Osiander is concerned, this crazy stuff will prove
the church has been wrong all along about everything,
so he writes to the author, Nicolaus Copernicus,
saying, "Hey, why don't you say you don't mean it?
"Say this is all theory,
nothing to do with what's really happening up in the sky. "
Right.
Time for a pause and a catch-up.
Abulafia's cabalist numbers
get Pico of Mirandola into Hebrew studies,
which get the Catholic John Reuchlin into book-burning trouble,
not helped by support from his Protestant nephew, Philip Melanchthon,
who has a terrible row with the creep Osiander,
who tries to persuade Polish author Nicolaus Copernicus
to say his new astronomy is just theory.
Well, Copernicus flips him the bird.
So Osiander promptly passes the manuscript to the printer
and says, "Go for it," and they print.
But what nobody knows until it's too late is
that Osiander has ripped out Copernicus' preface
and slipped in his own,
where it says all that stuff about it not being real.
Too late for Copernicus to do anything about it.
He gets a copy on his deathbed and croaks.
Well, wouldn't you?
The printer back in Nuremberg says, "Looked kosher to me,"
and all they know in Rome is, it's all just theory.
So Osiander has pulled off the greatest con in history,
so he gets back to his astrology and writing letters to an Italian pal.
This is Osiander's Italian pal, and this is somebody we'll get back to.
Okay, meet Girolamo Cardano,
an Italian doctor who writes the first great book on algebra,
and he's here in Scotland
attending a patient who will, like this program, come to a sticky end.
As you can see, friend Cardano is also a bit of a gambler,
and he works out that there are only three results
you get from throwing dice:
Impossible: You'll throw two sevens;
certain: You'll get numbers between one and six;
and possible: You'll throw two sixes.
Cardano has discovered the first law of probability.
Anyway, in 1551, he comes to Scotland to treat this unfortunate type,
John Hamilton, archbishop of St. Andrews,
who has asthma.
Now, Cardano's worked out a treatment for asthma
involving some weird mixture of herbs and stuff,
so he tries it on the archbish, and it works.
So Cardano collects his fee and hightails it back to Italy.
Alas, as you will see,
things don't go that well for Cardano's poor old Episcopal patient.
In the great card game of life,
Archbishop Hamilton is about to draw a really lousy hand,
and the fatal mistake he is destined to make is,
he bets on the queen.
Mary, the queen in question,
leads a life that's more like a whodunit,
full of intrigue and betrayal and dead bodies.
It's a miracle she makes it through the mayhem and skulduggery.
Well, she doesn't.
But anyway, here's why.
English royal family:
King Henry Vlll;
his daughter, Elizabeth;
his sister, Margaret;
her first husband, James IV of Scotland;
his son, James V of Scotland;
his daughter, the lady I'm talking about.
As you can see,
Mary has a claim to the Scottish throne, like this,
and, where the whole mess begins,
also to the English throne, like this,
which does not make Liz, here...
queen of England at the time... her pal.
Okay?
Mary marries a wimpy French royal.
He snuffs it.
She goes back to Scotland as queen of the place,
so now she's Mary, Queen of Scots.
And then she gets the hots for and marries
a guy called Henry Darnley.
Okay, time for family trees again.
Here's Henry Darnley.
His father is the great-great-grandson
of James II of Scotland,
and his mother's father is the second husband
of Margaret... you remember, the sister of Henry VllI of England.
Get it?
Henry Darnley has a claim
to the English and Scottish thrones too.
Trouble is, Darnley's a real lout
who drinks and cheats on his wife and wants to be a real king
and not just Mary's significant other.
So his pals dream up a scam to discredit Mary
by killing her executive assistant
and claiming she was having an affair with the guy.
Mary reacts by bringing in the Earl of Bothwell.
Bothwell masterminds the great explosion.
In 1564, he gets rid of the sleazeball Darnley
by blowing up the house he's in at the time.
Actually, Bothwell blows it in every sense.
The cops find visible trails of gunpowder,
the fuses are provided by soldiers who spill the beans,
and Bothwell buys the candles at the shop down the street.
What follows is total insanity.
Bothwell gets his marriage annulled by Archbishop Hamilton.
Remember him?
So he and Mary can then do something absolutely crazy:
Become man and wife.
Well, Mary marrying Bothwell really ticks everybody off,
because now Bothwell wants to be king.
So in no time at all, there's Queen Elizabeth's army outside;
Mary is captured, accused of okaying the plot to kill Darnley
and conspiring against Queen Elizabeth and executed;
and so is the asthmatic Archbishop Hamilton,
leaving one survivor, the devious Bothwell,
who sorts out his travel plans and heads for Scandinavia.
Where he thinks he'll be safe.
Alas, Scandinavia is where the lights go out for Bothwell.
What comes next is one of those stories I really think I have a nose for.
See, Bothwell's ship gets intercepted by the local navy,
and he gives them a load of flimflam about "Who, me?
I'm just here looking for work. "
Unfortunately, he picks the wrong place to try that one on.
Here's where he ends up:
Scandinavia,
Norway,
Bergen,
where the local duke has a cousin,
who is a gal who, years back, Bothwell...
how shall I put this?
Done wrong.
So she fingers him.
So they stick him in jail down the road here
and leave him to rot,
in spite of a lot of shuttle diplomacy by the French ambassador,
a fellow called Charles Dancay, who acts like a go-between,
trying to get Bothwell out of the pokey.
Fails.
Bothwell goes nuts and dies.
Meanwhile, a Danish pal of Dancay's
is about to do another one of those cosmically meaningful things
here at his home, Knutstorp Castle,
where he looks up one night and sees something impossible.
Now, he's looking up because he's an astronomer,
and what he sees is impossible because it's a new star.
You remember I said
Copernicus stuck one nail in Aristotle's coffin?
Well, this is going to be nail number two...
banged in by our astronomer friend, Tycho Brahe,
because another thing Aristotle and the church say is
that the heavens never change.
So what's this new star thing?
Let me show you how Brahe blows everybody away with the news:
This.
This is a cross staff for measuring stars back then.
Here are the degrees marked on it.
This is a movable crossbar with sights, one at each end,
and here's the sighting ring.
Right.
Say here's the new star
and the nearest constellation to it, Cassiopeia.
Okay, watch this.
You move the crossbar up and down
so as to line up the sights at each end of the bar,
one with the star and the other with the constellation.
And then you can read how many degrees apart they are.
See?
Every night for months, Brahe gets the same readings,
so nothing up there is changing, so all this is real.
And wherever you look from, that separation angle is the same,
so both heavenly bodies are out there in space.
In 1573, Brahe goes into print about this stuff,
becomes so famous, he ends up as imperial astronomer,
in spite of this,
which I thought I'd try to see what it felt like.
All his life, he keeps quiet about it,
and the only reason we know he loses his nose in a duel
and wears a metal replacement
and carries glue everywhere with him in case it falls off
is because the story gets blown by one of his assistants,
a loudmouth Dutchman named Willem Blaeu.
Now, the talkative Blaeu leaves Tycho
for a job that gives him a particular problem.
When he produces what he produces, it's already out of date.
You know what I mean?
In Blaeu's case, what's out of date
every time a ship comes back from somewhere is this stuff:
Maps.
I mean, here they are in the 18th century,
opening up the world with every voyage of exploration,
blah, blah, blah,
and when the guys get back from their intrepid trip,
every time, the first thing they say is,
"Hey, you know that island
"everybody says is north of the headland?
"Well, it's not.
It's south," or some such.
So Blaeu is a very busy guy.
See, after he quits Tycho and astronomy,
he sets up in Amsterdam as a mapmaker.
Astronomy and mapmaking go together
because sailors use the stars to navigate by, don't they?
So by 1602, he's got one of the biggest print shops around,
churning out updated versions of anything you might want to know
about tides, winds, coastlines, star positions,
you name it...
anything, in fact, you might want to know
in order to get yourself from "A" for Amsterdam
to " B" for anywhere else,
which is why he gets the plum job
of mapmaker to the Dutch East India Company,
whose main aim in life is, in fact,
to get from that "A," Amsterdam,
to this " B,"
the beautiful island of Sri Lanka.
Why?
Money, of course.
Well, let me explain that cutting remark.
Here we are in one of the profit-making places
found by those 17th-century Dutch explorers.
What you're looking at is
the botanical equivalent of a license to print money,
a load of money, because this is no ordinary load.
It's something you've probably eaten, maybe without even knowing you did,
and it's why those Dutch guys
risk life, limb, and shipwreck to get here.
Take a look at one of the greater 17th-century profit centers of all time.
Great thing is, no production line to eat up your capital.
Just scrape the bark off each branch,
then rub the branch all over with any old metal rod,
and once you've softened it,
very carefully slice off the next layer in strips,
like this.
Once you've done that, the next bit doesn't involve anybody.
You just leave the strips to dry out in the sun.
Then you roll the strips into each other
so they form a kind of stick,
and then package the sticks in big bundles like this,
and then take the whole lot back to Holland
and make at least 600°/° profit on the deal.
Why?
Well, as I said, take a look at the production costs.
And the mysterious plant that's worth all this effort?
Cinnamon, and Sri Lanka has the best around,
which is why getting here is so important.
So when that guy, Willem Blaeu,
put somebody else's knockout navigational trick
into his printed atlases,
well, he goes straight into the charts.
Here's the previous problem:
As a navigator going from "A" to " B,"
you want to go straight there, right?
But because the earth's a globe,
your angle back to the North Star keeps changing,
screws up your calculations,
till a fellow named Mercator solves the problem
by flattening the earth on a chart, like this.
So now, when you head off on your straight line from "A" to " B,"
this time, your angle's the same all the way.
See?
The fact that the new system distorts the real size of countries
doesn't seem to matter much.
Anyway, all this navigational stuff's
put together in a giant atlas
by a guy working in Italy for the Duke of Tuscany,
an Englishman, name of Dudley,
who also provides the duke with a new seaport he badly needs.
Then Dudley brings in English shipbuilders
to give the duke the navy he wants.
Dudley also builds canals and drains marshes
and other such stuff
for the duke's superintendent of public works,
a guy called Bernardo Buontalenti,
and this is where the story takes a really unexpected turn.
Because Buontalenti's quite an entertaining guy,
the duke gets him to do something quite entertaining.
Okay, just before I go on stage, where are we?
You recall Dr. Cardano and his sick patient,
Archbishop John Hamilton,
who gets executed for helping Mary, Queen of Scots,
whose lover, Bothwell, ends up in a Scandinavian jail
near the home of astronomer Tycho Brahe,
whose assistant, Blaeu,
makes maps incorporating Mercator's new system
that features in the atlas Dudley creates
before building canals for that public works superintendent,
Bernardo Buontalenti.
Now, Buontalenti's an engineer,
so the Duke of Tuscany asks him to do something to liven up
the entertainments the duke likes to put on for his guests,
and Buontalenti goes right over the top,
with movable scenery and people all dressed up in costumes
and a plot that involves a real story line
and all the stuff you associate with going out to the theater today,
with gods and goddesses and fake sea monsters
and all kinds of gizmos
you will now see in one of the world's first operas,
which must have gone a bit like this.
Thank you, thank you.
Now, this opera thing catches on like wildfire in France,
where the guy running the country for the king
is an Italian called Mazeran...
after he spent time reading the play in his giant new 40,000-volume library,
put together for him
by a Frenchman who writes a book rivetingly entitled...
"How to Run a Library,"
promptly translated into English,
whereupon it falls into the hands of a fellow named Samuel Pepys,
who's building up a collection of books on how to run... this stuff,
a navy.
When Pepys takes over as secretary to the English navy in 1665,
it's a mess.
There are hardly any ships.
Admirals get their jobs from pals in the government.
Captains don't know how to sail.
Pepys takes the navy apart and puts it together again.
This time, it works.
Pepys makes would-be officers start as midshipmen
and do three years' training at sea.
They have to be able to navigate.
Is the boat ready to go?
Captains have to be certified.
The size of the ship dictates how big the crew is.
And they all get standardized pay scales,
medical treatment, pensions, and discipline.
Guns are standardized,
and so is the kind of ammunition they fire.
Pepys organizes the supply of everything a navy needs
to stay afloat and ready to fight.
Best of all, he manages to persuade the English parliament
that the one thing the country needs is
a fleet big enough, well, to control the sea.
They okay 30 new ships, and Pepys' dream looks like coming true.
Britannia really is going to rule the waves.
One last thing Pepys gets a grip on
is making sure everybody in a fleet knows what they're all doing at sea
by clearing up all the confusion over signaling,
which, back then, wasn't too sophisticated.
I mean, if you needed a supply of wood, you hung up an ax.
Hanging up a tablecloth meant "Come to dinner. "
Well, things move ahead,
and by 1817, you've got a system
that will let you send up to 11,000 signals.
Great, except for one minor inconvenience.
In a flat calm, your flags won't flutter.
Fortunately, a French chap is on the case, name of Chappe,
working for Napoleon during the war against England.
This is Chappe's signaling gizmo, called a semaphore,
shown here during a field trial by a guy named Gamble
for the British navy
after Chappe's blueprints have been found during the war.
Story is that Gamble's working in prisoner-of-war camps,
and he's going through the pockets of some French officer
and finds Chappe's drawings,
so he dashes home and builds a version for the navy.
Okay, how Gamble's version works:
A matter of pulling the strings to alter the position of the flaps
and make a coded pattern on the frame.
Now, each pattern stands for a letter,
so all you have to do is decode the patterns,
and you know what the message is.
Unfortunately, somebody else thinks up an even better version,
and he gets the contract.
As for that guy Gamble,
he goes back to prisoner-of-war exchange work
after Napoleon's defeat,
and during this work, he comes across some French guy
selling a pattern for preserving food in bottles.
Gamble passes the idea on to a metalworking pal of his,
and he turns it into something
that lasts longer than the semaphore ever does:
Canned food,
just what intrepid explorers need in 1831,
heading for the frozen North.
Now, I know this isn't the frozen North,
but, hey, I'll get there.
Thank you.
Okay, where was I?
Oh, yes, the frozen North.
Here's the story.
The deal is to find a passage running north of Canada
between the Atlantic over there and the Pacific over there, right?
Well, frozen North expedition leader Sir John Ross
and his nephew James don't find this passage thing.
But at one point,
the nephew takes off over the ice to here,
where he discovers the magnetic North Pole.
Hangs a magnetized needle on a bit of thread, like this,
sees it point straight down, like this,
so he claims the magnetic pole for king and country...
harrumph...
in spite of the fact that, as the magnetic pole is
something that moves all the time,
it's already kind of gone by the time he claims it.
Now for the twist in this expeditionary tale.
Aah.
This is the reason they all get there in the first place.
Well, take another look at the map.
See these place names?
Boothia Peninsula, Felix Harbor, Boothia Isthmus, Cape Felix,
Gulf of Boothia.
That's who pays for the expedition:
Felix Booth of Booth's gin.
Now, on board the ship,
there's a young guy nowhere gets named after.
Well, his name's Hooker.
But he's the reason for the tonic
because he goes back to London
and becomes director of the botanical gardens,
where they're trying to grow
the kind of tree that will produce quinine,
a treatment for malaria,
which you can get back then in places like this, Sri Lanka,
which we Brits are running at the time.
Now, quinine tastes awful,
so put it in sugared water, and you get quinine tonic water.
Add gin, and you've invented gin and tonic.
Keeps the British Empire going out here,
where the people at the time are also busy
trying to grow something else,
thanks to those people back in the botanical gardens.
This is one of those moments when you realize
how often in history people can't see the forest for the trees.
Back in 1888, all those botanical types know is,
hooray, they've succeeded in transplanting rubber trees
from South America to Sri Lanka here,
so now, good things like raincoats can be invented
and one day, tires for automobiles and surgical rubber gloves
and a million other wonderful examples of the progress of science.
How could any of them have foreseen,
back when this stuff happened for the first time
and rubber tapping kicked off
one of the greatest industries of the 19th century,
where it would end?
All they could have predicted, maybe,
was that as the latex flowed from these trees,
the profits would protect British industry
against some future economic rainy day.
Well, rubber was good news for raincoat makers...
and really bad news for people living in Hamburg, Germany, in 1943,
because at one point during World War II,
the Japanese invade
most of the places out east growing rubber, like Malaysia,
and here in Sri Lanka is about all the rubber
the Allies have left for the war effort.
One of those efforts is a really nifty idea...
well, it's a nifty idea if you're having a war...
and that is to mix rubber with gasoline,
which makes the gasoline burn slower
and stick to anything while it does that.
So thanks to Continental Drift and Wegener's passion for mirages,
magic images from the sister of King Arthur,
whose chivalry supposedly triggers
the medieval courtly love answer to adultery,
inspired by the free love ideas of the mystical Cathars,
who live next to the mystical cabalists with their thing about mystic numbers
that turn Pico of Mirandola on to Hebrew,
which then brings trouble for John Reuchlin,
not helped by his nephew, the Protestant Melanchthon,
who has a row with the creep Osiander,
who pulls that famous con
when he rewrites the work of Copernicus.
Osiander's Italian pal, Dr. Cardano,
who cures the asthmatic Archbishop Hamilton,
executed for helping Mary, Queen of Scots,
whose lover, the explosive Bothwell, ends up in Scandinavia
with a pal of astronomer Tycho Brahe,
whose assistant, Willem Blaeu, makes maps
updated in the first proper atlas by the Englishman Dudley,
working in Italy for Buontalenti,
who kind of kicks off opera: A rave success,
especially with the French big cheese Cardinal Mazeran,
whose library inspires the secretary to the English navy,
which eventually buys that French semaphore,
after which Gamble gets the patent for food in cans
that feeds explorers like Hooker,
who transplants rubber trees to Sri Lanka.
As a result of all that,
we have rubber to mix with gasoline to make it burn slower,
a very effective idea
if what you have in mind is what they had in mind
on the night of July 24, 1943...
this:
The World War II firebombing of Hamburg.