This program reveals how, if you stay cool,
free,
tropical,
healthy,
maritime,
watery,
foolish,
Eastern,
on the move,
frog loving,
and experimental,
you, too, can stay In Touch.
Okay, this is all very scenic,
but please focus your attention on this headline:
In Spanish, it says something like,
"Argentina Solves All the World's Power Needs
With a Totally New Kind of Energy. "
What?
Believe it or not, this newspaper story
about what some minor ex-German scientist in Argentina
was or was not up to
triggers one of those ideas that changes the world.
The triggering happens on a ski lift in Colorado in 1951.
Okay, here's the story.
An American scientist called Lyman Spitzer
is apparently on one of these things for about half an hour.
On the way up the mountain, he's thinking
about that newspaper story about some guy in Argentina
who's cracked the nuclear fusion problem.
In 1951?
Well, with hindsight,
your view's going to be the same as his was back then.
His first thought is, "Garbage. "
The second thing he thinks is, because he's an astrophysicist
and fusion is like what happens inside stars,
"Hmm, we ought to do something about that. "
This is the result:
An experimental nuclear fusion reactor.
If we can get fusion to work,
you could power Los Angeles for a month on a bucket of seawater,
which contains the kind of atoms you need for the fusion process.
There's only one minor snag.
First of all, you have to reproduce the conditions inside the sun,
because the trick is to be able to fuse together those atoms
deuterium and tritium.
When you do, they release a humungous amount of heat
to make steam to drive turbines to make electricity.
So first you need a gas packed with the atoms
so they're more likely to hit each other,
and the gas has to be hot, like a million degrees.
In this state, the gas is called plasma.
And that's the catch.
You've got to make the plasma hotter
than anything that ever existed on the planet.
Problem with that is, it'll vaporize everything in sight.
Except there's one thing that won't vaporize everything:
A magnetic field to hold the plasma in.
To kick start the thing, you need so much electrical power,
you've got to find a way to get it cheap,
which would save you having to share
the experiment costs with other countries.
You know, what's called "going Dutch. "
Funny, that.
It's this Dutchman who originally discovers
how you might get electricity for almost nothing.
Nothing is what gets Kamerlingh Onnes his Nobel Prize...
getting the temperature down to nearly nothing.
Because Onnes thinks that when things are chilled
close to absolute zero, they do strange things.
Take a small magnet, and place it gently
on a special kind of metal plate you're going to make extremely cold.
Okay, now for the chill down
with a liquid gas colder than minus 100 degrees.
At this temperature, something extraordinary happens.
The magnetic field being generated by the tiny magnet
creates a current in the metal plate
where this current generates another magnetic field.
As long as the plate's kept cold,
the current stays, and so does the magnetic field,
interacting with the magnetic field in the magnet
and making the magnet levitate.
Onnes discovers that.
Back in 1911, he uses some liquid helium,
colder than which there isn't much,
to get some mercury chilled down to just above absolute zero.
That's minus 273 degrees Centigrade.
He zaps the mercury with electricity
and, to his amazement, sees its resistance
to the electric current almost totally disappear.
It has become a superconductor.
Like the metal plate under the magnet.
That's why its current and its magnetic field
don't fade away.
No resistance.
Now, back in 1911, all this might have been no more
than some physicist's little game.
Not today.
Any minute now, they're also going to be able to do this.
They're going to be able to light places like this
from a single power station hundreds of miles away
without all those power stations in the middle to boost the current,
because there'll be no resistance in the power cable.
Get it?
Saves tons of money and power station pollution.
And, as you've seen with the magnet,
they're well on their way to be able to do that trick
thanks to something that happened back before Onnes.
And I'm not just talking hot air.
Well, in one sense, I am.
Meet Louis-Paul Cailletet, French ballooning freak,
and his group of fellow noodlers.
Cailletet's another physicist who is keen on getting high,
so he invents the first ever liquid oxygen breathing system
for people heading up where the air is thin.
Cailletet's got the liquid oxygen to use
thanks to an accident in his laboratory,
which I'll get to when these guys finally manage
to get their act off the ground.
Okay, now for that laboratory accident.
In 1877, Cailletet's squeezing oxygen in a cylinder
when some tube or other cracks.
The cylinder pressure and the oxygen temperature plummet.
No fool Cailletet, he takes the cold oxygen
and repeats the trick,
each time dropping the pressure deliberately.
Each time, the oxygen temperature
drops further and further until, at one point,
it's so cold, it goes liquid.
Cailletet carries his liquid oxygen in a flask
and sniffs the vapors.
This, of course, leads him on
to study breathing and pressure and all that good stuff.
Takes the whole science of physiology to new heights.
Now, even in Cailletet's time, there's another way to get high,
feel the pressure, get your heart rate up,
huff and puff, all that stuff Cailletet's into,
and that's go up a really high tower...
in 1889, the highest tower in the world,
so high, the pressure is meaningfully different
between the bottom and the top.
900 feet different.
Phew.
So Cailletet climbs all 900 feet
and runs a giant tube all the way from top to bottom
and fills it with various liquids and gases
to see what the height does to them.
Hey, what did you think noodlers did back then?
Speaking of which, one of the greatest noodlers of all time
builds the thing up which Cailletet climbs
and a zillion other people, maybe you too.
The Eiffel Tower, built of wrought iron by, guess who, Gustave Eiffel.
As I said, Gustave is also a noodler
and obsessed by what you can do with towers,
like release things and observe their aerodynamic behavior, for instance.
Now, take a closer look at the structure,
and you'll see what Gustave is good at
besides wrought iron.
See all the delicate tracery?
Know why?
The wind just blows straight through it,
which means the Tower won't get blown down.
So Gustave's Tower can be what the French need so badly:
The biggest anything in the world.
This tower thing is Gustave's second attempt
at boosting French morale, which, at the time,
is going in the same direction I am now.
Here's the problem.
You know how the French political system
is like musical chairs?
You know, "It's my turn to be prime minister. "
No different back then.
So the new French republic is far from secure.
I mean, there are monarchists who want a king
and crazy radicals who want another revolution
and socialists and anarchists and every other kind of -ists.
So the idea is to come up with something
that will strengthen the moderates
and give the place a little political stability.
So they decide to give America a present, made by Gustave,
to remind all Frenchmen
of their good, moderate, democratic friends, the Yanks.
And, of course, remind the Yanks and the rest of the world
that, nudge nudge, it was the French who bankrolled
the American war of independence.
Phew.
Well, they certainly get "A" for effort.
Doesn't work, though.
I mean, as far as the Americans are concerned,
this French offer
they're not supposed to be able to refuse
is, well, how shall I put this?
A bit of a liberty.
When the Statue of Liberty went up in 1866,
it wasn't the symbol of America it is today.
It was French, looking away from America
back towards what the French regarded
as the home of liberty, France.
So the Statue was intended to be nothing less
than a permanent reminder of French culture,
a gigantic ad for French achievements
right in the middle of New York harbor.
But now take a look at how the Americans
give French political intentions the old switcheroo.
What does it is the famous poem written for the Statue.
"Give me your tired, your poor,
"your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
"the wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
"Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost, to me.
I lift my lamp beside the golden door. "
For refugees worldwide, the Statue of Liberty
is now a symbol of the American welcome
that lies ahead of them...
refugees like the Jews fleeing repression and violence
in Russia and Germany.
In the 1880s, tens of thousands of Jews arrive in America.
But some Jews don't come to America.
They head instead for what today is Israel,
urged on by the young woman
who writes that poem for the Statue of Liberty.
She's Emma Lazarus.
She's Jewish.
And it's she who really kicks off zionism,
the call for Jews to set up a Jewish state,
because, at the time, there isn't one.
But before all that, where are we?
Nuclear fusion needs a lot of electric power
that could be a lot cheaper
thanks to Onnes and superconductivity chill down
with liquid gas made by Cailletet,
whose liquid oxygen helps high-altitude research,
some of it done up the tower built by Gustave Eiffel,
who also builds Miss Liberty
with her poem by zionist Emma Lazarus,
whose zionism takes my story to tropical shores.
At one point during her efforts to establish a Jewish state,
which this isn't,
Emma Lazarus goes off to England,
which this isn't,
and meets a guy, who this isn't,
who is so pro-zionist
and who lobbies so successfully for the Jewish cause,
he ought to be Jewish but isn't.
So where are we, and why are we here?
To meet that guy, Laurence Oliphant,
who starts life here in Sri Lanka,
where his dad is chief justice for the British colonial authorities.
After building the foundations of a legal career,
Oliphant gets itchy feet and sets off
on a hectic, nonstop life that ends in old age in Israel.
Between Sri Lanka and Israel,
Laurence Oliphant really packs in a busy career:
Lawyer, correspondent for the "Times,"
diplomat, administrator, trouble-shooter, you name it.
Oh, and, of course, travel writer.
Well, what would you do
if the map of your life looked like this?
Laurence Oliphant is a travel agent's dream.
I suppose I ought to mention
that most of the traveling Oliphant gets up to,
he's doing something somewhere for queen and country.
One job he gets is working for a diplomat name of Elgin,
who hits the headlines when he forces Beijing
to accept opium instead of money for exports to Britain
and brings addiction and ruin to China.
Still, ruins are nothing new to the Elgin family.
The name of these ruins is, as I'm sure you know,
the Parthenon in Athens, Greece,
bits of which are missing, as you can see.
The missing bits look like this, and in 1803, they're removed
by one of the Elgin family, Lord Elgin.
The pieces he snitches
had originally been the Parthenon temple frieze,
found in bits by Lord Elgin
after the Parthenon was blown up during a war.
Elgin discovers them being ground up for cement by local builders
and decides he'd better save them
and then sells them to the British Museum,
where they still are,
with the help of Thomas Lawrence, a really big-name, high-society painter.
Lawrence paints the queen and anybody else that matters,
as a result of which he gets appointed painter to the king,
which is going to be great for Lawrence's financial health,
speaking of which, in 1776,
His Majesty also appoints his new doctor.
The new royal medical team faces an immediate challenge.
The king, George III, is going nuts,
and really drastic measures are tried to prevent this from happening.
The measures fail.
Not surprising, considering the background
of the new royal physician, John Hunter,
who was a bit of a slower learner.
Well, it takes till he's 17 before he can read and write.
Then he has a go at carpentry for three years.
Well, that doesn't work.
But with all that experience, where else would he go but surgery?
Hunter is so good at it,
he kind of kicks off modern surgical procedures.
So he and his brother open an anatomy school in London,
a knockout success,
and John indulges his other obsessions:
The study of codfish hearing,
the digestion of hibernating lizards,
and hedgehogs.
Oh, and listening to his wife trying out
the libretto she writes for various composers.
Hear that Muzak playing?
In 1760, before Hunter becomes royal physician,
he has a terrible row with his brother,
who promptly walks out on him...
to be replaced by another anatomist
called William Hewson, who, in 1770,
has the luck to marry a lady whose lodger is a kind of negotiator
and who comes in to help settle a row William Hewson's having
about a contract.
And the reason we care about this negotiator person
is something I'll get to after I have this tooth fixed.
Oh, the other reason I'm in the dentist's chair,
another obsession of John Hunter.
He writes the first book on the diseases of the teeth.
Sorry.
He writes the first book on the diseases of the teeth.
Okay, doctor, go ahead.
Okay, now for Mrs. Hewson's lodger.
Remember? The guy who did all that negotiating.
Benjamin Franklin, who does his best negotiating
for the American government after the war of independence
and, as a result, spends most of his time
crisscrossing the Atlantic.
The other thing Franklin gets up to with all these transatlantic crossings
is find out you can get across the Atlantic faster
if you get your ship onto a mysterious current
moving east across the ocean.
And you know you're on this current
because its water is warmer than the surrounding sea.
So Franklin uses all his voyages to check up on the current
by gradually taking the temperature of the water
all the way across from America to Great Britain,
point of it all being,
if he can map the current well enough for sailors to use it regularly,
it'll save time and money.
He does, and it does...
to this day.
We call the current Franklin charts the Gulf Stream.
Franklin's work kind of kicks off modern oceanography
and, strangely enough,
all because of yet another example
of how stealing things can change history.
Not by Franklin, of course.
I'm talking about the thermometer he uses,
the idea for which is snitched by its so-called inventor,
the famous Dutch instrument maker Gabriel Fahrenheit.
1714 in Amsterdam, Fahrenheit produces his thermometer.
Great news for all.
Especially hypochondriacs.
Phew, that's a relief.
98.4, so that's okay.
Ah, now, where was I?
Oh, yeah, Fahrenheit.
Now, the reason Fahrenheit's thermometer is such a boffo success
is because back in the 18th century,
finding out what the temperature is
is not what you'd call an exact science.
In fact, you could say they're all working in the dark.
Fahrenheit clears up the confusion
created by everybody doing it a different way
with different scales on their instruments
so temperature is a matter of anybody's guess.
Now, to start with,
the way Fahrenheit makes his thermometer is nothing new.
You just melt the end of a glass rod
with a hole down the middle and then blow down the hole
to make the molten blob on the end expand
into what will become the thermometer bulb
that contains the mercury.
Getting the mercury into the bulb's really nifty.
Watch.
You put the hot rod, bulb up, into the mercury,
and the vacuum you made in there with the heat
sucks the mercury up into the bulb.
Okay, now for the absolutely lunatic way
Fahrenheit comes up with the Fahrenheit scale,
so hang in there.
He starts with a scale the bottom end of which
is going to be the temperature of frozen ice, zero.
He calls boiling water 60.
1/8 and 3/8 up the scale are freezing water
and the temperature of a healthy armpit.
Are you still with me?
Okay, make each degree four degrees,
which turns freezing water from 71/2 to 30
and a healthy armpit to 90 but doesn't divide by 8.
So make 3032 and 9096, and there you are,
plus one last tweak.
Clear as mud?
I never said what Fahrenheit did would make any sense.
Well, there's one thing I can explain:
That armpit number.
Remember I said he snitched the whole idea?
In 1708, Fahrenheit visits Copenhagen
and meets the ex-mayor of the city,
one of those talented scientific amateurs
the place is full of back then,
guy by the name of Ole Rømer.
Never heard of him?
Thank Fahrenheit for that.
See, the whole thermometer thing is Rømer's idea.
So's the armpit number and all the basic research.
Fahrenheit kind of just turns up, takes notes of Ole Rømer's notes,
and then nips back down south to Amsterdam,
not long after which
Ole Rømer's notes get destroyed in a terrible fire,
not long after which, it's "Ole who?"
End of that sad tale.
Okay, time for a quick catch-up.
Remember the pro-Jewish Oliphant,
who works for Elgin,
whose father grabs the Elgin Marbles
aided by Lawrence, painter to the king,
whose doctor John Hunter has an assistant
whose wife's lodger is Benjamin Franklin,
who charts the Gulf Stream with a thermometer,
whose design Fahrenheit steals from poor old Ole Rømer.
Mind you, Rømer has already hit the bright lights
with a guy who lives in this modest little place.
In 1672, before Fahrenheit meets Rømer,
Rømer gets picked up by a French astronomer
and brought here to France, where he does amazing things
like working out the speed of light
and becomes the favorite foreign egghead of King Louis XIV.
And that's eventually why the king of Denmark
asks Ole to come home, and that's eventually why
Ole is in Copenhagen for Fahrenheit to meet.
And that French guy who picked him up,
Jean Picard, a major French science nerd,
one of those "I can go anywhere, do anything" types, you know?
Serve him right, considering what King Louis XIV
asks him to do next, which is to ask him to do this.
Fancy fountains is what the king wants
to go with the new palace he's building at Versailles.
So guess what he gets?
Fancy fountains up the ying yang.
The only minor problem is,
because Louis XIV is in such a royal hurry,
they're building them faster
than hydraulic engineers can keep up theory-wise.
Like, "Okay, you guys,
see if you can make THIS design work. "
So nothing goes right.
The reservoirs run out.
The aqueducts fall down.
The king is getting annoyed.
Picard discovers the awful truth:
Versailles is higher than the surrounding countryside.
Hang on a minute.
That's supposed to be why it's here, right?
Picard solves the problem
with the 17th-century equivalent of what these guys are up to.
He rigs up a telescope to measure the slightest differences in land levels
so he knows exactly where to site the reservoirs.
So by 1683, there's a whole network
of interconnecting channels and pools and stuff
to keep enough water coming
to keep fountains spurting night and day
and, most important of all,
provide the king with the water show he wants
and enough water for the other little thing the king has in mind.
This little thing: A garden center
the like of which nobody has ever seen before.
The Versailles gardens are put together for Louis
by one of the greatest gardeners in history,
fellow named Le Nôtre,
a man for whom nature needs a haircut.
Louis' gardens take 36,000 people 20 years to complete.
Well, if you're king by divine right,
it's no fun if you can't think really big.
What Louis XIV does to satisfy his megalomania
makes even Hollywood consumption look inconspicuous.
About the only thing Louis doesn't mess with
are the French forests,
only because the other thing he wants is a navy,
which is why the next royal inspector of the French marine
has an obsession about wood.
Here we are on a British man-of-war
awaiting the arrival of the aforementioned
French inspector general of marine,
a genial twit by the name of Duhamel du Monceau.
Duhamel is here because this is where you come back then
if you want to learn all about making wooden warships.
In the middle of the 18th century,
it takes more than French gold braid and fancy hats
to impress the British navy, who are busy taking over the world.
I mean, they're so accustomed to winning every sea battle they fight,
they even write catchy little tunes about ruling the waves.
Now, the reason this scribbling fool
is taking so many notes is, in terms of timber use,
this place is the equivalent of a fair-sized bit of forest.
Like oak for the interior fittings belowdecks,
oak for the decks, oak for the ship's furniture,
and oak for the hull.
Then there's oak for the cannon supports,
more oak for the pulley blocks you wind all the ropes on,
and, of course, the gangways are made of oak.
What else?
Oh, well, oak for your masts, of course,
and the rigging systems
and all the spars and yardarms and stuff.
Even Duhamel is starting to get the point.
By the time Duhamel has done his sums
and realizes that building one single ship like this
will take no fewer than 1,000 oak trees,
you just know what he's going to do next:
Hotfoot it back to France
and get a new law banning the use of trees
for anything else but building ships
and a massive program of conservation
and replanting and forest management,
something the English have already done.
All this scribble-scribble gives Duhamel another idea, as well.
So when he gets back to France, he becomes a tree hugger
and sets up the first real arboretum
with experimental shrubs and trees on his family estate,
where he also writes copious works on fertilizing
and hoeing and manuring and general agricultural muck.
One of his books gets translated into English in 1759
and becomes a big hit with British architectural types,
a matter which takes us once more to tropical shores.
Duhamel's book about gardens strikes just the right note
with an English guy who's just written a book of his own,
which is kind of about what you do
once you've got the garden Duhamel talks about in his book.
All about the kind of building you might like to have
if you had a really posh garden
and you wanted a really fancy place to live in.
Architecture like this.
The architectural author is William Chambers,
who dreams up an exotic new style
while he's working out here in the East...
traveling between Europe and China and Sri Lanka here
for the Swedish East India Company
and seeing all kinds of stupefying things,
like this stupa, as it's called.
Good, eh?
Anyway, Chambers finally gets back home to jolly old England
and turns out that book on architecture
and becomes the designer you call
if you want your home to feature in all the mags,
by which I mean if you want it to look Eastern,
the latest rave craze.
There's probably never been a more instant fashion
than the one Chambers kicks off, especially for this kind of stuff.
Chambers' greatest hit is pagodas.
After the British royal family commission him
to build this one in the Royal Botanical Gardens,
well, pagoda mania spreads across Europe like wildfire.
It's okay; I'm not going to visit any more of them.
But the pagoda thing does make Chambers
flavor of the royal month.
By 1761, he's chief royal architect,
and by 1774, he's getting really big jobs.
I mean, take a look at this desirable residence,
a giant palace called Somerset House
in downtown London.
Pompous, right?
Ends up as the home of the Internal Revenue Service.
I'd say they were made for each other.
Anyway, there was one other job Chambers got,
which must have been a lot of laughs.
It was to design an overblown bit of architecture on wheels
for his pal King George III.
Here we go.
State coronation coach.
I guess the word that floats to mind
is "theatrical," and speaking of stagey...
How about this for getting around?
The local bus back then.
Not royal, of course,
and, if you live up here in Scotland
and you're waiting to catch the next one to somewhere,
not frequent, if at all, given the state of the roads.
By 1802 or so, the state of Scottish roads
becomes the concern of a stone mason
employed by William Chambers
back when he was building Somerset House, remember?
Thomas Telford's this guy's name,
and he's one of the greatest road builders ever.
Now, Telford's a Scotsman, so he knows the place well.
And he knows the problem.
See, for the previous 50 years, the English have been evicting
Scottish Highlanders from their land
and setting fire to their houses and all that good stuff
and are now wondering what's happened
to Scotland's population, like most of them
have hightailed it to the U.S. and Canada.
So the English ask Telford to think about measures
to get the Scots to come back.
Well, being a road builder, Telford's report doesn't go on
about atrocities and civil rights and all that, does it?
Look at it from his point of view.
Telford builds roads.
That's what he's good at.
And that's how he sees everything.
And what he sees in Scotland is that what few roads there are
are falling to pieces for lack of repair and maintenance.
So when he presents his report to the bigwigs in London,
it's about transportation, not politics.
Telford's report says, "What this place needs
"is me to give it better communications,
and the Scots'll come back. "
He does. They don't.
In spite of the greatest road- and bridge-building program
this side of the Roman Empire.
I mean, take a look.
This is Scotland.
Over 28 years, Telford puts in harbors,
900 miles of new roads, and 1,000 new bridges.
So when the committee for the new London bridge
turns down his high-tech cast-iron design,
Telford reckons the committee just hasn't seen the light.
Actually, one of them has.
But just before you meet him, where are we?
Jean Picard surveys the Versailles fountain network
so the king can have all the water he needs
to grow trees that Duhamel writes about
in a book read by pagoda builder William Chambers,
whose stone mason, Thomas Telford,
comes up with a design for a cast-iron London bridge
which is turned down by the London bridge committee,
a bunch of politicians and science biggies,
including the guy who's about to do something to this program
which I hope you'll find illuminating.
The committee member in question is Thomas Young here,
who is, by this time, on everybody's committee,
being, well, a genius.
Here's just one of the reasons Young is so clever.
He's investigating dew.
I'll say that again.
Dew... you know, water droplets...
by looking through the droplets at a light.
And he sees lots of little different-sized rainbow rings
around different-sized droplets.
Yet another bit of pointless noodling?
Uh-uh.
Quick as a flash, Young squeezes some blood
between plates of glass, lights his candle,
sees more little rainbow rings,
and works out the size of blood corpuscles.
But where this guy really shines is when he decides
to shed a little light on light in 1803.
Okay, watch this bit of magic.
Here we have a candle, a lens, a card with a pinhole in it,
and one with two slits.
Okay, shine the light from the candle
through the lens so you get a nice, focused beam.
Then carefully place your cards so that the light goes first
through the pinhole, then the slits,
and voila.
Young realizes
the light going through the slits and mingling
must be coming in light waves,
because this interference pattern could only be made by waves.
Question is, what do light waves travel in?
They decide to call the mystery stuff "ether,"
and the hunt for it shakes up the brains
of most of the 19th century's complement
of serious propellerheads.
Now, the biggest propeller in Germany at the time
is a harrumph type name of Helmholtz,
prof at the University of Berlin,
and he puts one of his whiz kids, Hertz, onto the case.
Here is a very oversimple view... sorry... of what Hertz does.
Say this water is that mystery ether stuff, right?
Hertz is into electricity at the time
and wonders if it travels through ether in waves,
like light.
And he finds out it does.
An electric spark sends out electric waves
moving like light waves or waves in the sea,
which brings me to the delightful Belgian beach resort of Ostend.
Now, remember Helmholtz?
His own professor is Johann Müller, this guy,
who is deeply into Life with a capital L
and what makes everything tick.
And he's spending time here in the Belgian drizzle
because he's overworked like crazy
and is hiding out in Ostend with a presuicide depression.
Fun guy.
Meanwhile, what does Müller mean by that stuff
about what makes everything tick?
Well, what Müller is thinking of is one of those weird
"may the Force be with you" things
operating in people, in animals, even in plants.
To start with, take a look at the bit of a plant
that fascinates Müller: The buds.
And remember this is before Darwin and evolution and all that.
"Okay," says Müller.
How do the new plants come into existence?"
Like, are they in here already, and when they do,
how do they get to end up the way they are, like this,
all neat and organized and doing whatever
each bit of the plant is supposed to do?
And is that all already organized in here?
And if that's the case, are all the bits
of all the future descendants of this little plant in here?
Nah.
Müller says what does
all the organizing and running of everything
is another one of those mystery phenomena
you can't see or examine: The Life Force.
And not just in plants... in animals,
like the force going down one of your nerves.
And this force Can Never Be Measured.
Well, Helmholtz reacts to this mumbo jumbo,
and in 1852, he runs some experiments on a frog muscle.
Don't worry; this frog is safe.
Helmholtz zaps the frog muscle with electricity.
The muscle twitches and makes a mark on recording paper.
So you knew to the eleventeen millionth of a second
when you did the zapping, and now you know
how long it takes for the electricity
to go down the frog muscle nerve and make it twitch:
At about 90 feet a second.
So you can measure the mystery life force.
Which is why I'm back on the beach at Ostend.
Because Müller's life force idea is known as vitalism,
and after what Helmholtz does to it,
you'd think that would be the death of the life force idea, right?
Except for another German who spends
many experimental years on the beach...
in his case, Monte Carlo...
and takes over as leader of the vitalist movement.
His name is Ludwig Klages,
and you know Klages better than you may think
for something else he gets up to,
because Klages is the guy who analyses the way people move
and comes up with what we now call body language
and the language of gesture.
Stuff like this:
Klages says body language gives your secret feelings away.
I mean, take this couple.
See how she's crossed her legs away from him
and folded her arms defensively?
She doesn't like him.
But look at him, leaning towards her,
nodding when she nods, legs crossed towards her.
This, says Klages, is a couple of people
trying not to display their inner feelings
but sending out messages in spite of themselves.
Klages reckons every move you make
gives you away like that, shows the real you
behind what he calls the "mask of courtesy. "
Klages uses his research
to develop a new science he calls characterology
and sells it as a hotshot analytical tool
when you're interviewing people for job selection.
Now, remember what the date is, hmm:
By this time, just after the first World War.
And Klages is a German.
And he's into irrational life force stuff
and behavioral studies
and all that what's-behind-the-mask stuff.
And it's just before you-know-what happens in Germany.
So you just know what kind of job selection
his characterology is going to get used for.
Die Fahne hoch
die Reihen fest geschlossen.
S. A...
This is the job Klages' characterology gets used for
when the Nazis are trying to find the type of person
who will make an ideal officer in the S.S.,
men of iron self-control, superior,
all that stuff.
Marschier'n im Geist in unsern Reihen mit.
Something else Klages dreams up gets grabbed by the Nazi selectors too:
Handwriting analysis.
Klages is the guy who starts all that stuff
about handwriting being another way to see
into a person's character,
the idea being the way you write is a mixture
of all the conflicting forces that make up your personality.
And graphology, as it's called, can reveal
which side of your personality has got the upper hand.
So Klages' graphology says, for example,
large sloping letters show
either enthusiasm and getting on with people
or, depending which side of you is stronger,
lack of realism and a tendency to rashness.
On the other hand, small vertical writing
is either realism and rationality or lack of enthusiasm
and a certain coldness of character.
So how do you know which?
Well, according to Klages, you can see that
from how rhythmic the writing is,
which, what do you know, is another one of those things
that Can't Be Measured in Any Scientific Way.
It can only be understood intuitively.
Don't think I'd have made it through to the S.S.
My handwriting is clearly realistic and rational
with a touch of paranoia
and, you will note, barely readable.
Now, one of the reasons why Klages' graphology claims
to be able to reveal character from writing
is because everybody's is unique,
a painful fact of life for anybody trying to deal
with the U.S. mail in the 1960s when they start trying
to get some automation into the process
by inventing the zip code
because the increase in business mail
gets kind of overwhelming and goes on that way.
So by the 1980s,
there are nifty new optical character-recognition machines,
which are able to read the zip
and then spray a bar code onto the piece of mail
so computers read the bar code and sort the mail.
But you still have to write the zip code in capital letters
because of what Klages calls
the "extreme individualism" of handwriting.
Mind you, all this black marks on paper and handwriting stuff
will all disappear anyway when we switch from ink to electronics.
I mean, the same electronics
that made possible optical character recognition
so machines can read the zip code on this envelope
and tell me where to bring this letter exactly.
For instance, here to Sri Lanka,
to the southern province of Sri Lanka, here,
to a village in the middle of nowhere called Balana.
Population: 35.
Total cash income: $0.
Running water, electricity, phones, televisions, freezers, cars, toilets,
and almost anything else you care to name: None.
What they do have is a desperate desire for education.
But maybe the same technology that got my letter here
will soon help bring education here from anywhere in the world,
as it enables all of us to communicate instantly
all over the planet, from New York to here or anywhere,
without thought to geography...
with the equivalent of a laptop, a cell phone, and a satellite
on the great global net.
And if you've been watching this series,
you'll know what I mean, because throughout this series,
we've been traveling on a kind of global net
through time and space on the great web of knowledge
where everything is connected to everything else
and everybody else.
That's why we're here at the end of our last journey
that went from cheaper fusion power
thanks to superconductivity, discovered by Onnes,
with liquid gas provided by the aeronautical Cailletet,
who carries out experiments up the tower built by Eiffel,
who also built the Statue of Liberty
with its famous poem by the Jewish activist Emma Lazarus,
who gets a lot of help from Oliphant,
whose boss Elgin is the son of the guy
who snitches the Elgin Marbles and sells them
with the help of royal painter Thomas Lawrence,
whose colleague Dr. Hunter has an assistant
whose wife's lodger is none other than Benjamin Franklin,
who charts the Gulf Stream
with a thermometer Fahrenheit snitches from Ole Rømer,
whose pal Picard surveys Versailles
and provides the water for the fountains
and the royal gardens and all the trees
that inspire Duhamel to write the book on gardening
that gets read by the architect William Chambers,
who hires the Scottish stone mason Thomas Telford,
whose idea for London Bridge is turned down by Thomas Young,
whose light waves travel in ether,
as do Hertz's electricity waves,
with which Helmholtz zaps that frog
to disprove the vitalists, whose leader, Klages,
analyzes handwriting so individual
zip codes have to be capital letters to get your mail to a jungle village
where we began this whole series ten programs ago like this:
Oh, hi.
Could you hold it for a second?
Thanks.
Okay, access the uplink now.
Sorry about that.
Well, here we are.
Intrepid reporter James Burke in one of the more remote parts of India,
ready to start the show, a show that travels
across the great web of knowledge,
through space and time, to find...
So we end where we started, in a third-world village
In Touch, where we're all going to be in the 21st century...
on the net and, like it or not, connected.