Nuclear science has provided mankind
with immense potential to do good;
to treat and perhaps cure
some of the most deadly of diseases;
to provide virtually free electricity;
to investigate the structure of the universe;
to examine the most detailed mechanisms of the human body.
It has also, of course, provided the world
with something else.
This is the nightmare of the second half
of the 20th century;
a suitcase with an atomic bomb inside it.
Once you steal the nuclear material,
any physics graduate can do the rest;
it's a timing device;
with an electrical circuit that fires two explosive charges,
which push the radioactive material together
fast enough for it to go critical, and boom.
And, there is no security force on Earth
that can prevent some fanatical nutcase
from placing this gently in downtown anywhere.
This breakthrough in military technology
completely unbalances the situation
carefully worked for, over the last 30 years,
by the major nuclear powers.
The nightmare is, what the result would be.
One of the results of the breakthrough
in military technology that happened here,
was that I'm speaking to you in english,
instead of a language close to say to dutch,
because this is the site of the battle of Hastings in 1066,
that abbey out there was built to commemorate the event.
The battle itself lasted maybe 5 and half hours.
It was an immensely violent affair;
full of sweat and fear, and blood.
Hand-to-hand combat in those days,
was unbelievably unpleasant, because it maimed people
rather than killing them;
you died of your wounds later.
They did most of the good work with this.
I'd like you to see what it does
On a bitterly cold morning on October the 14th, 1066,
about 16,000 men began to do that, as hard,
and as desperately as they could,
to each other in this field here.
The saxon king Harold had his headquarters
straight up there on the top of the ridge
where the abbey is now;
and he disposed his men, about 8,000 of them
from over there, the top of that ridge,
along the crest of the hill for about half a mile
to the horizon over there, as far as you can see.
Now, of these 8,000 men, he had about
5,000 professional soldiers, exhausted from a 270-mile march
in the previous 10 days, backed up by about
3,500 thousand local farmers who had been given hammers
and pitchforks and billhooks
to do whatever they could with it.
They were told, "come here and do your thing. "
Now, in front of him, in front of Harold,
about 150 meters down the hill,
arranged also along left to right,
were the troops of William the Conqueror.
8,000 men again,
but all battle hardened well-trained troops;
1,000 archers, 4,000 heavy infantry,
and 3,000 cavalry.
Okay, the battle started, and went on all morning.
Nobody could make any headway going up.
The Normans could get nothing against the Saxons,
who just stood there and fought
unto a standstill, all the time.
Around noon, everybody stopped; they'd pulled apart,
they picked up their weapons,
they had something to drink, something to eat,
and about 3 o'clock, they started again.
And this time, William sent his cavalry straight up
the hill at the saxon shield wall;
it banged up against it and got no further.
And they fought, and fought and fought until finally,
the norman cavalry began to pull back,
and it was then that the Saxons
made their real mistake.
The Saxons broke lines and came chasing down here
after the Normans, and here on level ground,
where I'm standing, was where England became norman,
because it was here that the Saxons
allowed the Normans the one advantage,
that one technological device they had
that the Saxons didn't have;
and it was the use of that device
that changed the history of the western world,
irrevocably.
It's the way the Normans fought that tells you
they were using that device.
Look, see the long shield; that's used to protect
the left side of the body, because the rider's
carrying a lance with the other hand,
so he can't fight off an attack.
And the only reason you use a lance like that,
is if you've got the device the Normans were using.
The stirrup.
The Saxons lost because the Normans were fighting
from horseback, thanks to the stirrup.
Trouble was, you hit so hard, you lost your lance.
As the stirrup went into more general use,
the first change it brought about was this;
a bit of cloth you could use to help heave your lance
back out of the corpse.
60 years after Hastings, anybody who was anybody,
was fighting from horseback,
wearing more armor to protect themselves;
so they were heavier.
So, while the massive shock of the impact
might kill the other guy,
it knocked you backwards off your horse;
and a fat lot of use you were to anybody,
in a heap on the ground.
Still, this was such a good way to slaughter people;
there had to be some way to make it work.
And by the middle of the 12th century,
they'd came up with what they thought was the answer.
They raised the back of the saddle
so the rider couldn't come off,
and strengthened the saddle girth.
Unfortunately, that just transferred the shock
to the poor old horse.
The only answer was a stronger horse
that could take all that punishment;
and rearing big horses, as anybody who knows
will tell you, ain't cheap.
Now, keeping a man like that supplied with the latest
weaponry and horses, in a period
when there was really little money in circulation,
needed the kind of wealth that could only come from land,
and peasants working it.
So, as you'll see, the coming of the knight
changed the basic structure of society.
It also gave birth to the tournament.
Now, in all the books, they're shown like that;
but in reality, they were very different.
Early on, the tournament was a kind of cross between,
the circus coming to town and a wild free for all,
where half the time,
things ended in an absolute shambles,
with whole towns getting burnt down.
Things got so out of hand, even the Pope
tried to ban this fun and games.
Yes, these were definitely not the days
of courtly manners and fair play.
But, behind all this chicanery and dirty tricks,
there were two very good reasons for these affairs,
and they both had to do with fighting on horseback.
See, the idea of cavalry was a whole new thing,
and you needed all the training you could get,
to use the lance right.
The other reason had to do with the prizes you won.
You knocked a guy off his horse at a tournament,
and you took everything; his armor, his saddle,
his horse, the lot;
and that was as good as a free ticket
to the upper classes, because it was only
when you possessed all the right equipment
and the horses,
that you got into the big league.
By 1250, the big league was a very exclusive club;
only the very rich could join.
Thanks, in the first place, to the stirrup,
and the way it had lead to the fully armored knight
on his massive warhorse.
The aristocrats now made sure the club stayed exclusive.
They made knighthood hereditary,
and took on permanent family names,
instead of just being son of somebody.
And, because the armor covered their faces,
they needed identification marks to show
who they were in battle, so they didn't get
clobbered by their own men.
These heraldic symbols completed the separation
of the aristocrats from the rest;
immensely powerful and immensely rich.
The armor-plated upper crust must have felt
that they had absolutely got it made.
By the 14th century, the knight was a massive,
expensive, complex two-ton war machine.
And at full gallop, he would annihilate
anything coming the other way,
except of course, another knight.
And then, from out of the valleys of South Wales,
came something that was to take away
from the armored knight,
his 4 centuries of domination, like that.
"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
for he to-day that sheds his blood with me
shall be my brother; be he ne'er so vile,
this day shall gentle his condition:
and gentlemen in England, now a-bed
shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
and hold their manhoods cheap while any speaks
that fought with us upon St. Crispin's day. "
That was the shakespearean version of this man,
Henry V, talking about the day
when everybody discovered that it was never
going to be the same again for the knight on horseback;
at the battle of Agincourt in northern France,
between Henry and the French,
on the morning of October the 25th, 1415.
It's funny, isn't it, how we all seem to need
big time heroes like Henry.
And yet, you read the Shakespeare,
the heavy stuff,
and you come here, to Westminster Abbey,
and you see the king lying on his tomb,
and the sword he used in the battle;
and you totally lose sight of the fact,
that, as a young man of 28,
well, Henry may have been a dab hand with the magic words,
but he would have been nowhere in that battle,
if it hadn't been for the one thing he had
and his French enemy didn't;
and I don't mean his princely sex appeal.
Let me tell you what happened.
Henry here had all oh, about 8,000 men,
knocked out with fatigue from marching non-stop
for 17 days in the rain.
About a mile away, across a battlefield of mud,
there were 30,000 frenchmen;
half of them fully armored aristocrats,
who'd been up the previous night,
because they had slept in their saddles,
because they didn't want to get their lovely armor dirty.
They were an arrogant overbearing, effete lot;
full of 'death or glory' and 'me first'.
So, when at about 11 o'clock in the morning,
Henry had some arrows shot at this mob,
in order to get them to do something, anything,
because they'd been standing around, arguing the toss
about who should be running the French army,
since 7 in the morning;
they suddenly upped and charged straight at Henry,
straight across the sea of mud,
straight onto the stakes that the English had put,
point up, in their path.
And that was when Henry played his trump card, didn't you?
He called up the secret weapon his grandfather had discovered
in the mountains of Wales; and when it came into action,
the slaughter was unimaginable.
That weapon was the welsh longbow,
and Henry had over 1,000 of them.
In the hands of a master,
the longbow would kill at 400 yards.
And in 3 bloody hours, the French were massacred.
Many of the french knights had their horses shot
from under them, to fall in the mud and suffocate,
as the bodies of their dead companions
piled on top of them.
When it was all over, the English had lost
maybe 500 men, the French 10,000;
most of them buried here,
in a common grave, under my feet.
The longbow did most of that.
It was a terrifying weapon.
And yet, a generation after Agincourt,
they couldn't find enough archers to muster a company,
let alone an army.
The reason; well, because that's the way things go.
The reason has nothing to do with Agincourt, or war,
or weapons.
It had to do with food,
and it had to do with the fields the food came from,
and the way the people worked the fields,
like these peasants
in the Duc de Berry's 'Book of hours'.
With 90% of the population on the land,
any development in agricultural technology
would affect everybody.
And in the 7th century, 700 years before Agincourt,
three agricultural inventions came,
one after the other,
to fundamentally change peoples' lives.
The first was a new kind of plough.
You see, up till then, the plough in general use
had been little more than a digging stick
pulled by oxen,
came from the Mediterranean where it is still in use today,
in the Middle East, and it was good enough
for the job of turning over the light soil in that area.
But up here, in northern Europe,
it got you nowhere.
Soil is too thick; so when around 700 AD,
this came along, it made a very big impression.
it had wheels, it had a knife
to cut through the sod, and the plough shear
had a curved board attached to it.
This new plough would cut through anything; look.
You see what the knife does; it cuts open the sod
and makes it easier for the plough shear that follows;
and then, the curved board throws the soil up
in the way to one side, leaving a clean furrow.
With a team of say, 8 oxen, in front of this,
you could farm the thick rich land up here
that no earlier plough could ever have done.
It was bloody hard work, but it could be done.
So, by about 900 AD, this plough was opening up
the North really fast; clearing the forests,
producing more food; and in consequence,
the population was rising.
Now, in those days, this would have had
a team of oxen upfront, not a horse.
The plough and the oxen were very expensive.
Few peasant farms could afford the whole deal.
So, they formed cooperatives,
each man bringing what he could.
And as they began to work close together,
they began to live close together in big groups,
villages; that's why villages happened.
So, the first invention was the plough;
the second came towards the end of the 9th century.
The situation was that up till then,
they were using oxen in front of the plough,
and if you put an ox harness on a horse,
it cuts across under the neck,
and strangles the animal.
The horse collar, that was the second invention,
spreads the load on the horse's shoulders
and so, now you could use a horse.
Now, a horse would do twice as much work as an ox,
because it does it faster.
So, production doubled; the population rose again.
The third invention took them, and their horses,
further afield.
Yes, it was the horseshoe.
See, with the shoe, you can use a horse
in all weathers, over rough countryside,
and it'll carry heavier loads further.
So, now you had a work animal and a transport animal;
and by this time, there was plenty to transport,
because they were producing so much,
they had a surplus.
You see, at the same time as all this,
a new crop system came in;
the idea of using three fields,
the three-crop rotation system, it's called.
One field is fallow,
so the animals can graze on it and drop manure on it;
one field is sown in the autumn
with cereals like oats, for example,
to feed the horses;
and one field is sown in the spring with legumes,
peas, beans, carbohydrates, vegetable protein.
This was why they dropped the longbow,
because when you have enough food
to sell the surplus for cash,
you've got better things to do on a Sunday
than obey the law and practice archery.
People went into business; they opened taverns;
and they even played games.
That's why they couldn't find any archers.
Nobody was practicing.
They were too full of beans.
Now, this may look very simple and rustic to you,
but what you're looking at is a medieval
present equivalent of 'Thank God, it's Friday',
but all the more so, because they'd never had one before;
a day off, I mean.
Thanks to the agricultural revolution,
and the opening up of new land with the plough,
there were actually spare goodies
a peasant could take to market,
and sell for that amazing new stuff, money.
All over Europe, the medieval lower classes
started doing something absolutely unheard of.
They started enjoying themselves;
some of them even started washing.
The reason for all this dynamic activity was because,
as Europe recovered from the chaos and confusion
of the 10th century, prosperity,
if I could just have your attention for a moment;
prosperity encouraged trade and merchants
began to travel around, selling anything
they could get people to buy.
Between 1150 and 1300, the population tripled.
Towns grew up, so did the number of craftsmen
and professionals,
and so did the paper work and the bureaucracy.
If you'd think about it, these must have been great days
for most of them: oh, cash to buy things with;
paying the landlord rent instead of forced labor;
justice perhaps, at the new village law courts;
even a little personalized medical treatment.
May have been a bit rough, but it was better than nothing.
Well, almost.
Okay, so a peasant couldn't get to be a prince,
but he could expect his kids to grow up to a better life.
Meanwhile, as the rustic rollicking continued
in the king's palace, it was lead balloon time.
I mean, here were all these Hessians
committing the unforgivable sin of not doing their duty,
which was to work till they dropped,
and practice the longbow on Sundays.
Remember the longbow?
It took a lot of practice to make a good archer
who'd go out and get himself slaughtered for you,
and these idiots weren't getting the practice!
It began to look to the kings and princes,
as if you couldn't go out and have yourself
a nice old-fashioned war anymore.
And then, good old human ingenuity
came up with a less demanding way to kill people.
And, to be fair to the Europeans,
they didn't actually invent it.
But they took to its immense destructive potential
with all the gay abandon of an alcoholic in a brewery.
And, in case you're wondering why I'm telling you all this
with my pig friends here,
it's because one of the first places
they found the principle ingredient
for the new terror weapon, was in a pigsty.
Why?
Well you see, a pig's home is also his toilet,
and you make gunpowder from urine and dung.
Using that kind of muck to get to this lethal powder
involved going through a bit of chemistry first.
The urine became ammonia, and the bacteria in the dung
turned the ammonia into a nitrate.
Having mixed the mess with wood ash
and then filtered water through it all,
boiling that water produced saltpeter crystals.
This powder is a mixture of saltpeter,
sulfur, and charcoal.
All you do now is apply a flame,
stand very far back and-
Gunpowder was a chinese invention,
and they had it maybe 700 years
before we in the West, got our hands on it.
And it's very probable we only got it,
because the Arabs picked it up in China
and brought it back with them,
like they did with so many chinese ideas.
It's very likely that whoever it was
who invented gunpowder;
he was one of their philosopher chemists,
actually searching for the secret recipe for immortality.
Ironic, isn't it?
In the main, apart from the odd rocket or grenade,
that was how the Chinese used their gunpowder;
for fireworks in religious rituals -
Which brings us, for a minute or two,
to the business about the Chinese inventing everything,
and yet, not using it the way we did.
This is part of the reason: their view of life.
The thing that surprises us, in the West,
because we use everything we can get hold of
to cause change to happen,
is that the Chinese had so much and changed so little.
What I mean by so much, is this.
They had gunpowder, you saw,
and look what we did with that.
And then, 2,000 years ago, they used to spin
magnetic spoons on pictures of the Earth and the sky,
and depending which way the spoon pointed when it stopped,
they made a political prediction.
When we got hold of that in the form of a compass needle,
we used it to conquer the world, to set up empires,
aided in our voyages by a chinese rudder.
Chinese looms, capable of making
complex patterns like that,
helped to set up the great 13th century
european textile industries.
A thousand years before us, the Chinese had blast furnaces,
steel, pistons, cranks, and this, paper.
Part of the reason why in spite of all these,
change didn't come in China, the way it did
when all this came to the West, was this.
Not printing, although they invented that too.
No. This word: tao.
Tao: it means the universal way,
the fundamental order of nature.
The taoist scholars were a group
who looked for some rational order in things,
to see how the universe worked;
and because of their investigations,
gave China what we would call technology.
And yet, explosive change, the kind we in the West
went through when we got hold of what China had invented,
didn't happen here.
And to explain why, I'm going to have to hit you
with a bit more of inscrutable chinese philosophy.
You see, the Chinese believed that the universe
was filled with shen; a spirit that was in everything,
and that all you could do was contemplate it.
Trees, mountains, birds, rivers, were all one; and so,
you couldn't reproduce a model of a bit of the universe
and examine it,
because you couldn't fill it with shen.
Now, in the christian West, we reckon that the universe
was made of rational bits and pieces
by a rational god,
and if you were a rational human being,
you could make a model of a bit of the universe
and then, take it apart to see how it worked,
and use what you learned.
The other fundamental reason
why change didn't happen here in China was that: water.
You see, about 5,000 years ago, the very first great
civilized act of the Chinese was irrigation,
on a vast scale; and that needed centralized planning,
and that needed a bureaucracy.
And what a bureaucracy.
They pigeonholed everybody,
and you stayed in your pigeonhole.
I mean, you were a merchant, you saw a bit of technology,
and you thought, hah, this will give me a lead
over the other fellow,
I'll rise in the world. No way.
You were not permitted to rise in the world.
So you didn't bother.
No incentive, no change.
Whereas in the medieval West,
you had a little money, you got ahead.
Profit motive, you know,
and that is why we were able to do with technology
what the Chinese could never have done,
like for instance, putting gunpowder into one of these;
or to be more accurate, one of those.
The fact that bell making was a peaceful
religious business didn't stop 13th century Europeans
from grabbing the idea.
Look how easy it was to adapt,
and the bell becomes a bombard, instant artillery.
For the princes and generals happily,
it was business as usual, once more.
This picturesque little town called Cividale
near the yugoslav border, was one of the first places
where the exciting new way of killing people
was tried out, in 1327, by a bunch of passing Germans.
Now, early on, the new guns made more bang
and smokes than real destruction,
and each cannon could only be fired about 10 times a day.
But a mere mention that guns were on their way
was enough to make a town surrender.
Well, what more could you ask?
In no time at all, everybody wanted one to play with;
which is why our story brings us here,
to a place called Yakimoff
in the mountains of northern Czechoslovakia.
It was a growing mania everybody had for cannons
that built this place, and turned it into
the 16th century Fort Knox of Europe.
You see, few inventions have ever been
more greedily seized on than the cannon;
and in consequence, the business of making war
became ruinously expensive; not in terms of men,
they were cheap, in terms of money.
And, all the way through the late Middle Ages,
that was the one thing that they were short of: cash.
Until in 1516, here in Joachimsthal,
as it was called at that time,
the biggest silver strike in history was made,
out there in the valley.
At its peak, Joachimsthal was turning out something like
3 million ounces of pure silver a year,
and they were minting these here in this building,
as fast as the stamping machines would make them.
They were called, after a shortened form
of the name of the town, Joachimsthal, thalers.
The modern word 'dollar' comes from thaler;
and just like the dollar today,
in their time, these thalers would buy you
anything you wanted, anywhere you went.
Well, you can guess what happened.
From all over Europe, miners and speculators
flooded into this place, seeking their fortune,
up there among the pine trees.
In these mountains, the prospectors found
no less than 134 separate silver veins,
each one richer in the precious ore than the last.
Some of the mines had tunnels running 7 miles long,
and shafts going down to 1,200 feet.
The cost of the mining operations,
and water-powered machinery to crush the ore
and smelt it, was so great
that no one individual could afford it.
So, Joachimsthal became the first great
capitalistic venture, with shareholders
forming companies to run the place.
And as the water flowed, the new wheels roared
and the hammers pounded, the owners of these lonely
mountain mining villages made money,
hand over fist.
Ever occur to you why so much mining so often took place
in these high cold wet mountain valleys?
Trees is one reason; they built everything from trees,
the trees provided the fuel for the blast furnaces;
and then, when it poured or snowed,
which it fairly often does here, the mountain streams
would turn the water wheels that operated
every single bit of machinery a mining engineer needed.
And, the reason we know
what kind of machinery they used, is this.
It's a book written by the local Joachimsthal town doctor,
a fellow called Georg Bauer,
he wrote it under the pen name of Agricola:
it's called 'De re metallica', about metal.
And it was the miners' Bible for 200 years
after it was published in 1556.
Look, it talks about everything.
Above all, it talks about how you get water
out of a mine, because as they went deeper and deeper,
the problem of flooding became a nightmare.
Oh, they had water-powered systems to handle it,
but at the lowest levels, the water was pouring in
as fast as they drained it.
They had three principle ways of getting it out.
One was to use a chain with balls of cloth on it,
and the cloth would soak the water up at the bottom,
and they'd squeeze it out at the top.
The other way was to use a standard system of buckets.
The third and most efficient way was this.
See, here's the water wheel, operating either
on the surface or down in the mine,
and using a system of cranks to pull piston rods up and down;
it's a suction pump.
But, look how they had to do it,
in three different sections.
Now, that was because for some mysterious reason,
they couldn't get the water further up than 32 feet.
It would go that far and then, it would stop.
Now, with that amount of silver at stake,
everybody wanted to find out why.
So, finally, somebody wrote to Galileo;
and Galileo put his pupil, Torricelli, on to it,
and Torricelli cracked it.
He reckoned that it had something to do
with the fact that the air above the surface of the water
down in the mine wasn't heavy enough to,
so to speak, to help the water up the tube.
And he reckoned, if you built yourself
a mini model using heavy mercury in a small tube
to represent the real thing, 32-foot tube ton of water,
you could study the thing scientifically.
So, he wrote all this out in a letter,
which he sent to his friend Ricci who lived in Rome;
diagrams, details: the lot.
Now, Ricci knew that whatever it was,
it involved the investigation of the vacuum,
and Rome was far too close to the Pope
for that kind of thing.
The Church said, there was no such thing as a vacuum,
and if you did,
then you could find yourselves suddenly dead.
So Ricci, clever lad, copies out the one section
of the letter that has to do with it,
the guts of it,
and sends it via a french friend
to somebody who is in a position to talk about the vacuum.
The letter was sent to Father Marin Mersenne in Paris,
and Mersenne was exactly the right man to send it to.
First of all, because he was in Paris
and a long way from the Pope; and second of all,
because he was a scientific monk,
with the biggest address book in the 17th century.
With his contacts, he wanted something fixed;
he fixed it.
He was known as the post box of Europe,
because everybody would write to him with their ideas,
and he'd spread the word around.
In this case, he mentioned the matter to a friend of his
who was going to be passing through the town of Rouen.
Interesting, the business of communications;
we take it so much for granted today.
I mean, this french postal van, it's so common a sight
as to be almost invisible, and yet,
it's because we can communicate so easily
that change happened so fast.
Something new, television tells everybody;
and in Mersenne's time, in the 17th century,
the new postal services made a real impact
on the spread of ideas and the changes that happened,
because people could contact each other,
like in this case, for example.
The message finally got to Rouen in northwest France
to a certain Blaise Pascal, who went out immediately
to the nearest glass factory,
and carried out Torricelli's experiment.
He took a glass tube filled with mercury,
and he put his finger over the open end, and then,
he inverted the tube and put the open end
into a dish of mercury.
And, when it was in it, he took his finger away.
And there, inside the tube, was the thing
the Church said couldn't exist.
A vacuum!
What's more, Pascal agreed with Torricelli
that the weight of the air pressing on that mercury there
must be the same as the weight of the mercury
in the glass tube,
to keep it standing up here like that.
So, if air pressure really existed,
was it the same everywhere?
He looked around for a mountain,
and there were no mountains in Rouen.
But his brother-in-law lived here, where I am now,
in Clermont-Ferrand, in the center of France,
where there are tons of mountains.
So, Pascal wrote another letter;
and finally, in September 1648,
his brother-in-law did as he'd been asked.
He took this lot 4,000 feet up to the top of a mountain
called Puy de Dome,
after marking the level of course, first.
At the top, he observed the tube in fog like this;
in rain, in shine, indoors and out;
and in each place the level stayed stubbornly the same,
about 3 inches below what it had been
at the bottom of the hill.
So, the air pressure up here on the dish of mercury
was less, because it would only support that much mercury
instead of that much.
Everybody was delighted: they'd invented the barometer.
This is one of those moments in history when,
because this has happened, the field's wide open,
you can go in any direction: vacuum research,
meteorology, investigation of gases,
but the route we're going to take happened
because a man was on the night shift.
This is a foggy night in gay Paris, 1675;
and this is a foggy french astronomer, Jean Picard.
On his way home from his observatory,
Picard was jauntily swinging his new barometer
when suddenly-
Picard was stunned.
'zut alors' he thought, and told everybody,
and kicked off a century of international insanity.
In England, Francis Hauksbee
cranked a glass globe round and round, and got this.
The more he rubbed these glass balls,
the weirder things got:
they became strangely attractive.
In 1709, he told everybody,
so, they all started doing it.
Around 1720, Steven Gray was rubbing a glass tube
to make it attractive; well, why not,
when he saw that the attraction went down a thread
attached to the tube.
In 1745, somebody found a way
to store up the mysterious force
in a jar full of water:
electricity was now portable.
There was no holding the intrepid investigators.
The big question now was, what exciting things
could you do with sparks?
German ladies of evident charms were placed in special chairs
connected to a Hauksbee machine,
and when a good stiff charge had been cranked up,
young men were invited to try their luck.
A fat german investigator called Housing
used the same machine to do similarly
electrical things to small, suspended boys.
A flamboyant french friar called Knowles,
who gave private courses in electricity to beautiful women,
and couldn't get out of the habit,
decided to run a charge through multiple monks,
to see if the effect would produce
an uplifting experience.
It did.
Well, it seemed obvious that electricity was good for you,
and in 1780, the famous Temple of Electrical Health
opened in London.
The star of the show,
the magnetico-electrico celestial bed,
where, accompanied by an orchestra,
electrified couples who couldn't have children
could, thanks to the inevitable cranking
of the Hauksbee generator.
You wanted ringside seats; you bought tickets.
In spite of all the ballyhoo, the bed failed;
and its owner went off and sold mud baths.
Still, others persevered.
Around 1783, an italian called Luigi Galvani
was poking around with a metal scalpel one day;
oh, it's all right, it's only frogs' legs.
I guess he was fond of frogs.
When suddenly the leg, lying on a metal plate, jerked.
Galvanized by this discovery,
Galvani announced animal's made electricity.
In 1800, another italian,
with the electrical name of Volta got it right.
Volta saw that the electricity came from the reaction
between Galvani's scalpel and the metal in the plate
under the frog, so he built a pile
of differing metal plates and got electricity.
Called it: his pile.
Well, now, our loonies had Volta's pile
to give them constant electricity,
and there was no stopping them.
Various attempts were made to send current down wires,
which would cause pith balls to swing;
each wire and ball represented a letter,
and the message could be read off the other end.
They actually got it going between Madrid
and a town, 26 miles away.
Then came a really zany one.
If you put an electrified wire into water,
it makes bubbles.
So, yes, you've guessed it: a german doctor
used the bubbles to send messages.
Things ended in typical chaos,
when somebody tried electricity with gunpowder.
By the beginning of the 19th century,
things became very much more purposeful than that.
And, although an awful lot of innovation and change
comes about by accident, by mistake, cheating,
fooling around;
it sometimes happens because people find
something out that sets them thinking.
And that's what happened in this case.
In 1820, a rather dull dane called Oersted
was teaching his students that an electric current
going down a wire shouldn't have any effect whatsoever,
on a compass needle,
when, to his utter chagrin, it did.
Well, no fool he;
Oersted immediately made it known
that if an electric current going down a wire
caused a compass needle to swing,
it had to be generating a magnetic field
and moving a needle.
Poor old Oersted; I mean, who's ever heard of him?
Michelangelo, yes.
Oersted?
And yet, the fact that an electric current
generates a magnetic field is fundamental
to the way the world is run today.
I mean, take just one thing
that happened because of Oersted.
If you wind a live wire round and round
a bit of iron, the magnetic field
generated by the current causes the iron
to become a magnet, an electromagnet.
Now, somebody did that in England, in 1825.
In 1857, a german took a tuning fork
and put it next to an electromagnet,
turned it on and off,
turned the magnetic field on and off,
and caused the tuning fork to vibrate.
And then, in 1870, a frenchman living in America,
took a diaphragm, put a bristle on the end of it,
and then, yelled into the diaphragm to make it vibrate.
And, the bristle jiggled up and down,
and made a pattern on smoked glass.
And the pattern was always the same
for the same word.
Now, I say all this because the brilliant invention
that came out of it,
and it was a brilliant invention,
was really no more than putting all those
bits and pieces together, like this.
You yell into that cone; that causes
a metal diaphragm here to vibrate;
now that metal diaphragm is within this magnetic field
and as it vibrates, it kind of drains it,
causing the current in the live wire to fluctuate.
This fluctuating current fluctuates along a wire
until it reaches an identical set up,
where because it's a fluctuating current;
it makes a fluctuating magnetic field.
And, that causes another metal diaphragm to vibrate,
in exactly the same pattern as the first one.
And, when it does that, it makes a noise in that cone.
So, what you yell in here - comes out there.
Now, that basic idea
occurred to two men at the same time.
Only, one of them, a scotsman living in Boston
in 1875, teaching deaf mutes,
got to the patent office 2 hours ahead of the other fellow;
and that two-hour difference is why we say that the telephone
was invented by Alexander Graham Bell.
The telephone was only one result of Oersted's accident
with that compass needle; another is our ability
to scan the universe with this giant antenna,
suspended above a reflector that covers an entire valley,
500 feet below.
Another is the way this program has been broadcast,
on radio waves; or the way we defend ourselves
against attack from incoming missiles
with radar,
because both radio and radar
work by sending out and receiving
electromagnetic signals.
And it was Oersted who found that connection
between electricity and magnetism.
It's ironic that this program should have begun with war;
with the bomb in the suitcase,
and the stirrup, remember?
And end with the means of preventing war
through the use of telecommunications,
perhaps to bring the peoples of the world
closer together, into one community.
And finally, perhaps to discover
that we are part of an infinitely larger community;
on the day when a transmitter receiver
like this one in Arecibo in Puerto Rico
makes contact with the galactic civilizations
that are almost certainly out there in space.
Meanwhile, as we wait for the great encounter,
at a more down-to-earth level, what will the capacity
that telecommunications provides
of organizing people, do to us?