C3_02: What's in a Name

I suppose you could call this program a travelogue it does travel through space and time or you could call it a kind of detective story it's certainly full of mysteries or you could say it's about one of history's greatest cases of mistaken identity or you could call it any one of these things after all what's in a name here we are in the mysterious Orient right colorful exotic customs ancient rituals above all perhaps different well that's what it says in the brochure fact is that might have been true fifty years ago but today half the world cities including Singapore look more like Dalits in any way nowadays most travelers and holidaymakers that actually want all that foreign stuff do they I mean ask anybody in a package to ah room service thank you what most people care about when they're abroad is the state of their insides so you also stick to international food well that way you don't get Montezuma's Revenge or Delhi Belly or whatever you want to call it well not with this you don't the new global diet for the new global person a calorie aware weight conscious healthy living individual this little flake is eaten by hundreds of millions of people worldwide pretty much anywhere you go you can get corn flakes now there are those gourmets and old-fashioned exploring adventurers who lament the passing of local customs in things like food and the disappearance of exotic breakfasts of fried amps boiled tripe black pudding meat soup cheese and olives or whatever people used to eat before this new high speed diet for a high-speed world there are even those who would say that gastronomically speaking this is a load of garbage which would be unfair there is garbage associated with it but I assure you it comes into the story well after you finished your cornflakes so let me bring it into the story now this is what I'm talking about what's left after you've taken the corn for the cornflakes there are thousands of tons of it being produced every day ah used corn cobs and thanks to a totally forgotten German chemist who I think really didn't know what he was doing anyway this garbage is far from garbage for much of modern industry what you could do with this stuff really beats the band this musical interlude is happening in the market square of the small Eastern German town where the story starts it's called llena and back in 1810 it's got one of the best universities in the country and two professors one of whom becomes world-famous the other one's totally forgotten until this program drags him out of obscurity thanks to those corn cobs I mentioned but let's have a little more OPA first hmm okay sorry back to corncobs again while I lead you up the garden path in what can only be described as the corniest story I've ever told one of the things in the 19th century you're not going to find in fancy Botanical Gardens like this is that I mean from a horticultural point of view this is pretty low-rent stuff back then you feed corn cobs to cows and chickens you grow mushrooms on them you use them to fill swampy ground and sometimes you make pipes out of them what are you going to do with corn cobs and then in 1810 the fellow who lives in this house and runs this botanical garden and administers llena University and is one of those academics I mentioned the one who becomes world-famous the great German poet Goethe takes up the cause of a corn cob and changes history thanks to encouragement from Goethe an associate professor of chemistry here that I bet my life he's never heard of called Wolfgang debris no takes a close look at various organic matters and comes up with a totally new chemical I also bet my life you've never heard of called firfer al now don't ask me or him why do Brina should do such a thing he just does and then does nothing about it except to write the usual humongously boring scientific paper about which for 100 years nobody else does anything either but wait here we are in the 1930s and still nobody cares about poor old debry knows fur fur up until people start drilling oil wells all over the place bad news for farmers till this point most useful chemicals came from plums but now they're going to be petroleum byproducts agribusiness better find some new way to use their leftovers or they'll be one day the people at Quaker Oats dig up do Briner stuff and discover that if you press boil steam and shove acid into corn cobs and other kinds of organic garbage left after people have had their breakfast what do you get but furfural which now turns out to be a chemical that goes into all kinds of good stuff so from the dim recesses of academic life de bruyne his little discovery ends up in every chemical library in the world one of the great solvents of all time used in the production of stuff like petroleum products synthetic rubber insecticides herbicides and all kinds of pharmaceuticals lubricants weed killers and something in quantum physics I don't understand oh and one thing the brighter would really have appreciated anti carbuncle cream which fortunately for you is not the next connection in this program because the other place furfural gets used is in making a resin that is just what people want for bonding abrasives to grinding wheels a subject you've waited all your life to know about I know so I won't make light of it the light in question is a quarter of a million bombs lighting up the great Chicago Columbia Exposition of 1893 all thanks to George Westinghouse who gets around Edison's patent for a one piece light bulb with a two piece light bulb bottom and open-necked bulb into which above the filament base fits you plug it into the open neck of the bowl and you maintain the vacuum inside the light bulb because everything's airtight thanks to the ground glass collar that fits perfectly ah meet abrasive American Edward Goodrich Atchison who does all that ground glass work for Westinghouse because thanks to an accident he owns a carborundum company the accident happens earlier in 1861 when Atchison is bashing a lot of electricity into mixture of coke and clay at a humongously high temperature the whole lot melts big deal and certainly not the abrasives artisans tried to make at the time and then he notices some tiny crystals in the clay he puts a bit on the end of a pencil lead and it scratches glass like diamonds bingo well where else would he go but here now if there's one industry that needs good abrasives it's the diamonds harder and more polished than which there isn't back then Tiffany's is where the bejeweled elite meet to choose their sparklers so not surprisingly it's somebody at Tiffany's who encourages a Acheson to do something about his accident like do it again on purpose and market the world's hardest material after diamonds carborundum chemical name silicon carbide carborundum is soon being described as an indispensable tool of industry by anybody with anything that needs an edge like plowshares and speaking of plowshares swords one spectacular modern use of Acheson silicon carbide happens in 1960s vietnam with the invention of an outfit called the air Kevin whose choppers are highly maneuverable well-armed and everywhere no ticking the wounded out or dropping green berets in delivering supplies during reconnaissance or conducting rocket attacks jappa people are constantly and acutely aware of one minor problem one of the reasons choppers are so clever is because they can sit still in midair which kind of makes them a target it is difficult to miss so it's the chopper people who think up I use for axis and silicon carbide as a protective lining for their vulnerable machines thing being silicon carbides a lot tougher than most of the stuff shooting up at them from the jungle below one of the nicest things you can say to somebody fighting a war on the ground in the jungle is put this on and you won't get hurt so what starts up there with the chopper pilots very soon comes down here with the grumps where the fighting is very close quarters spoil your day type of stuff so in no time at all but the well-dressed a Dogface is wearing is some helicopter protection for humans called a flak jacket which has some very interesting features to it like if you're wearing one you can throw a grenade just a few yards turn and hunch up and survive your blast while others do not and more than half of all wounds that were previously lethal become no longer lethal you still get a real pain in the chest maybe but that's a lot better than getting taken seriously dead by somebody's armor-piercing ordnance speaking of which let me give you some hard facts it all started with cornflakes made from corn cobs that de Bruyn attended to furfural to bond silicon carbide abrasives that Westinghouse used to grind light bulbs and that also ended up as protection for choppers and in flak jackets to protect against armor-piercing ammunition which originally got developed for use against something that first appeared in World War 1 the main snag for World War one infantry is getting snagged and then shot on rows of barbed wire so here's the solution named because it looks just like a water tank a tank main job rollover and flatten the barbed wire so the troops can get through okay and then act as protection for the troops as they go on into the advanced small wonder the tank soon becomes everybody's favorite war machine except for the people inside where it can get up to 125 degrees cramped and smelly but what a ride it can handle six foot vertical slopes and 15 foot vertical drops only question is can crew tanks are a smash success and nothing can stop them except as I said the armor-piercing ammunition which is never invented meanwhile tanks win the war for the Allies in 1918 59 British divisions beat 99 German divisions because the Brits have tanks and the Germans have no chance tanks also offer a bright future to one particular bunch of soldiers who take them over the old saber wielding cavalry and speaking of swords plowshares now if you take a close look at this picture you'll see two things that caused the tank to happen in the first place the soft soil here in the beautiful San Joaquin Valley California that and the fact that all the horses are about to be taken off the farms to be sent to Europe for the war effort this critical situation inspires an enterprising type called Ben Holt who lives here in the San Joaquin Valley to invent one of those amazing labor saving devices for which America has always been famous set to the stage for the development of the tank and changed the whole nature of farming here on the local fields and then all over the world virtually at a stroke introducing the machine that turns America into the world's breadbasket and solves the problem of horseless Ness the horseless tractor take a look at this wonderful thing they weren't surprising that one of Holt pals watching this thing at work says it reminds him of a caterpillar so guess what the company ends up being cold and the rest is farm equipment history but let me give you a quick tour of the place number one the secret of the whole success the crawler tracks the trick here is the track spreads the load all the way along the track so the weight of the machine isn't concentrated on the wheels and what that means is there's nowhere too soft for this baby to go which is great news for farmers here in the San Joaquin Valley and then everywhere else number two have wheel at the front so if it rolls down into a hole it rolls up out the other side number three Holt drives each track separately so what that means is if you want to change direction you just do this turn on a dime well a quarter but you can see why the generals back in Europe jump at the idea though you can use one of these things to haul army supplies night and day thick and thin and it doesn't need hay and you can also turn it into a tank which they do well that's world war one in the bag drinks all round one last thing about tractors their engines which is why I mentioned the drink beer as it happens because that's what it takes for holt and everybody else in the u.s. to get to hear about diesel engines you know history's funny in some ways because the fellow who helps to make tractors synonymous with diesel engines is a brewer from st. Louis called Gustavus Adolphus Busch you can still buy his stuff today see anyway Busch buys the US right to diesel engines in 1897 because the technical director at his brewery is a German who was at school with a fella called Rudolf diesel and diesel gets his first job with a fellow who kind of invents refrigeration and he does that to keep beer cool anyway diesel lonely childhood grows up obsessed with mechanical efficiency what can I say takes all sorts besides it does end up making rudolph rich and famous so let's hear it for mechanical obsessions now the really clever thing about a diesel engine is it's not a gasoline engine and the reason that's clever can be described as a lot of hot air first because a gasoline engine compresses the air and the fuel spray mix and then a spark explodes the mixture so you have to get the timing just right or the sparkle happen when the mixture is not ready and if you let the air compress too much it will ignite the fuel spontaneously but that's just the point with a diesel engine here there's no mixture just air which you compress and when you do it's temperature rises to about 8,000 degrees Celsius at the top of the cycle at maximum pressure and temperature you spray in some fuel the hot air ignites it and pushes the piston down what you're getting here is extremely efficient use of fuel because a very high compression gives you more bang for your buck and because it's so efficient you save fuel and what that does is save you money but the really brilliant thing about Diesel's idea is that these engine will run on almost anything and that's great news for Europeans because since the engine doesn't explode the fuel the way a gasoline engine does it doesn't need refined petroleum product and that's good because back then in Europe with almost no oil industry to speak of that kind of stuff costs an arm and a leg anyway sometime around 1893 diesel gets a contract from a big engine factory here in Germany and in no time at all diesel engines are in everything from battleships to fancy cars and what makes all this happen for a man with a lonely childhood is the fact that one of the fuels diesel says the engine might be able to use there's lots of in Germany its coal so all you have to do is dig a big hole now there's one man who owns more coal mines than anybody else in Germany and shipyards steel works armaments factories and practically the whole German industrial machine what am I saying he is the whole German industrial machine and his name is crop crumb comes in on that engine deal with diesel I mentioned and helps diesel make enough for a comfortable old age come to think of it as you'll see the crops are rather good at that kind of thing so crop is the reason why the next stop on our journey is the coal field to the German rule thanks to the fact that corn cobs make adhesives to bond carborundum otherwise known as silicon carbide - grinding wheels used to grind light bulbs silicon carbide is also then used as protection against armor-piercing shells developed to hit tanks that start life as American tractors which use diesel engines developed thanks to funding from crop okay enough of this whole by the 1860s the Crips are well on their way to running everything in Germany they own all the bits of the jigsaw steelworks to make the machinery they hope to dig out the coal they own to be sent around the country on railroad rolling stock they own carrying the fuel essential to the running of the steelworks they own it's what known as a win-win situation but I didn't come here to get covered in coal dust just to tell you about boring industrial machinery but because there's another more intriguing side to crop the real reason crop is so successful is the way he treats his workers because he hates socialism to put it in a nutshell crook reckons that if the workers are going to go on strike the better working conditions then give them just that so we give them just this crup invents company benefits with showers and changing rooms work uniforms and everything to make a crop worker want to stay a crop work he also provides a canteen hospitals a pension fund and all kinds of other goodies and across the road from the mine or the factory he also builds company housing and in the pleasant company suburb is also a company school a company Church a company kindergarten and of course there's always a company store working for crop is wound to tomb now what with all that armament stuff croup is called the cannon King and gets to know all the Prussian military piggies and they don't come any bigger than Bismarck who loves a good war and he's running the country at the time and who is so impressed by crook among other things they both vastly prefer trees to people that he Bismarck tries out the crook welfare thing on a national scale in 1889 he starts the world's first ever state pension scheme by which the average person gets enough to live on once that is Bismarck knows what constitutes the average person a concept naturally enough thought up by a Belgian astronomer meet Alphonse kettle a who is about to turn the kind of bodies astronomers observe into the kind of bodies governments observe see the trouble with planets and such is that sometimes if you don't see them frequently enough you lose track of them so 19th century astronomers use probability math to predict where you should look even if all you've had are a few sightings kettle A's bright idea is to use the same probability math to work out another kind of prediction the kind governments want to make about people even if they're only able to keep their eye on a few of them we call kettle A's math for people statistics and with it she invents an amazing new concept you and I take for granted today the average person and what average people do no wonder bhisma jumps at this new way of analyzing how people behave because it lets you predict how they'll react to events their voting patterns how effective propaganda might be on them the new math is great for manipulating people and before you start feeling smug about repressive Russians and what else would you expect from countries where things get violent the place Quetta lays new numbers are about to make a real splash is in the ever so genteel surroundings of the University of Cambridge in England mainly because as is so often the case in these programmes things are not quite what they seem in this case peaceful behind the elegant facade of early 19th century British society the living and working conditions of the average factory employee are so horrendous as to make the government of the day just a touch perturbed ah come in now it's in this room in Trinity College in 1833 while everybody's up here for a science conference in Cambridge that kettle a gets together for tea Oh muffin with a bunch of academics whom he persuades to set up what eventually becomes known as the Royal statistical Society of course the real statistical aim of every middle-class Victorian tea is to gather data on the population of the growing industrial cities people living in stinking overcrowded diseased squalor so as to turn them into decent obedient hard-working thrifty non revolutionary workers look essential statistical facts are then discovered how many ragged families can sing a jolly song how many starving mothers can knit the number of inspiring prints hanging on the walls of their filthy hovels how often this kind of person gets their hair cut speaking of which one of the guys at this uplifting Cambridge chitchat gets his life changed by French hairdressers now before we get to French hairdressers where are we apart from France that is crops welfare benefits got Bismarck keen on statistics that cattle a persuaded the Cambridge people to get into right now why we're here French weights and measures if you want metric how do you know your shoe size in centimeters for instance sit down for a drink do you know you can drink seventy five centimeters of wine well it's easy enough for the locals but once upon a time they were in exactly the same mess which is why this is one of those very rare occasions when the course of history is changed by a haircut because that fella from Cambridge I mentioned a mathematician called Charles Babbage takes a trip to France and turns up here not long after they've had a revolution and gone metric every single calculation they'd previously done in Paris feet or Marseilles gallons or whatever now has to be done in centimeters and liters and kilos and so on every table of calculation for every shop and factory and profession has to be recalculated as it happens at the time French fashions in hairstyling have gone all revolutionary and apart from the fact that half the aristocrats in France have lost their heads so there's not much work around for people like piers you'll hear to do anyway the new revolutionary cut is kind of short back and sides so most places like this in France have so little work to do they are to put it mildly tearing their hair out well wouldn't you know it the French solve their metric problem and they're out-of-work hairdresser problem with typical panache they let one problem solve the other as a Babbage discovers when he gets here they've used sixty unemployed hairdresser sitting there for months struggling with pencil and paper to work out every single son needed to turn the country's old-fashioned measurement system it's head mind you the thought of all that amateur arithmetic is enough to make your hair curl and to make matters worse on average there's hundreds of mistakes in every table they churn out let's see well fixed Babbage there's just got to be an easier way so he comes up with an absolutely amazing invention that for anybody from then on who wants to do complicated mathematical tables will make all the difference Babbage's Difference Engine does thumbs and this is a really simple version of something so complicated he never actually makes one say you want to add three on the right to seven on the left turn the little cog on the right three places and that does the same to the cob on the left and when it gets to ten it moves a lever that moves a cog above with tens on it to one so the sum of seven three is 10 then Babbage automates the process with the use of a punch card whichever rod gets through whichever hole in the card activates a selected set of levers that moves whichever comp you want to use for the sum now Babbage never builds this thing but since you know what a punch card is you know something happened well in 1845 this does the britannia bridge between England and Wales two giant 1500 foot tubes each big enough to take a train and each needing two million rivets all done by a riveting machine controlled you've guessed it with punch cards engineer in charge Robert Stevenson also thinks up the idea of floating the massive tubes into position an idea that causes ripples in more ways than one see one of Stevenson close pals is the fellow who masterminds the floating delivery of the tube girders for the bridge he's also a hotshot engineer in his own right and he's done everything from bridges in Australia to railways in Italy Eisen barred Kingdom Brunel his name and he's got two problems and as it happens both of them will resolve by the Britannia bridge the first problem is rivets because Brunel is planning to punch in no fewer than three and a half million of them the second problem is what he's planning to punch them into yet another Victorian mega project it is Brunel modest aim to build only the biggest ship ever in the history of the whole world and use it to take thousands of people out to Australia without having to stop off in several places like Singapore on the way to refuel which back then is the main thing you see on the dock sides on the way out from Europe cold mountains of it but Brunel 's new monster ship is gonna be so big it'll carry all the coal it needs well it never actually happens but for sheer effort you've got to take your hat off to Brunel here's Brunel wearing his famous hat and behind him his monster ship the Great Eastern built of the same tube girders as the Britannia bridge and a zillion rivets and as I said the wrong ship in the wrong place at the wrong time just too big too soon mind you she does totally change transoceanic communication but not in any way Brunel could have ever foreseen see as I said life in Victorian times is lived on the grand scale if you're ambitious and you like to think big and they all did well they don't come much bigger if you think about it then the Atlantic three miles deep in some places and the shortest way across is 2,000 miles of some of the worst weather in the world not exactly the kind of place anybody sane would want to do delicate precision engineering but hey these are Victorians and they can do the impossible which is what is now proposed by an American gent Cyrus field he's a millionaire which helps when you're thinking big now Cyrus has an ocean crossing in mind but one with a bit of a difference this is the Atlantic I was talking about us America and in between a lot of nothing heaving up and down Cyrus checks the place out with another American Atlantic weather guru Matthew Mori who says go in August and do it like this from Valencia island of Ireland to heart's content Bay Newfoundland because it's flat all the way the bottom more remains because what we're into here is the first transatlantic submarine Telegraph cable now you know there's only one ship in the world capable of carrying what is needed for all this madness which is 2,000 miles of cable weighing 6,000 tons 600 tons of equipment and above all 11 million tons of coal yes the out of work and by now up for auction Great Eastern in July 1866 they're off at about 8 miles an hour paying out the cable from gigantic drums in the hold with a crafty bit of equipment to control the tension as the cable disappears over the stern and they go up and down somehow they inch their way painfully across the Atlantic thirteen days later they're hauling the cable Shore in Newfoundland so now you can send a cable along the cable the first day they transmit $10,000 worth of messages so as with so many great acts of technology at one stroke the world is changed thanks also above all in this case to something that changes your stroke the one thing that allows a transatlantic cable to operate three miles down in the incredibly hostile environment of the ocean floor the stuff wrap around it the cable insulation which turns out also to change this kind of stroke well I never said I had a good Drive did I the underwater cable installation is a new wonder gun that comes as it happens from these trees and in 1840 it's being used by the locals here in Singapore when a young assistant surgeon called Montgomery happens to stumble across it it's a SAP you slash the tree and milk it much the same way as you tap rubber and it's called gutta-percha now you know how useful and everywhere plastic is today well gutta-percha is like that for people back in 1840 you dip it in boiling water so it softens and you can shape it and then it hardens again so gutta-percha turns up just like plastic today as a substitute for wood leather cardboard paper metal and in the weirdest places stethoscopes false teeth ink stands flower vases and of course wrapped around Syrus fields transatlantic cable but the real reason for all this pallava with me and the clubs is what gutta-percha does to the ancient and exclusive game of golf and if you're a golf fanatic get ready to take a picture of your TV screen now and frame it because a gutta-percha goes into golf balls and makes them cheaper fly straighter and last longer than once around the course and this is an original gutta-percha ball okay course the new ball has to pass the old buffers at st. Andrews Royal and Ancient Golf Club in Scotland where after all the 18 hole golf course was invented well after a lot of buffing the old buffers finally agree the new ball is introduced and Scottish golf really takes off I mean all sorts of ordinary people turn up and want to play so a quick ketchup crop welfare uses statistics calculated by Babbage's engine using punch cards that rivet bridges and the Great Eastern that laser cable insulated by gutta-percha that gets used to make cheap golf balls so now ordinary Scotsman can get to play thank you thank you and the reason they do that is because there's a wonderful new thing called leisure time all that trade with America is boosting the Scottish economy and the powerful and straight-laced Scottish church would rather the newly affluent workers spent their money on sports and family holidays by the sea instead of drinking it away in the pub outside the factory so in pulpits all over Scotland a lot of hot air is being talked about the evils of industrialization ironic since hot air is the cause of it the hot air in question is the business of a guy called Nielsen the manager of the gas works in Glasgow Scotland in 1832 he sinks up the idea of blasting hot air into iron melting furnaces making them hot enough to burn even low-grade Scottish cold thus turning Scotland into an instant industrial country with factory managers who have enough money and spare time to go off to st. Andrews and play golf and in no time at all the whole of Scottish manufacturing is really on a roll and like rolling stones gathering no moss well except for one Scottish businessman who's up here in the wild Glen's of Scotland gathering Moss why Moss well there's a lot of it up here there's not much else now when you're talking about whether a country makes it to industrial status which Scotland now does as you saw thanks to Neilson having those iron foundries is the litmus test which is what Nielsen's new partner Charles Macintosh and his father George here have been doing in the Scottish lens because litmus paper does all that stuff like change in color when you dip it in acid or alkali if you record your school chemistry lessons because it's impregnated with this stuff a particular liking or moss that George Macintosh is looking for the moss is one ingredient of a dye called cud beer which will color cloth bright red so since back in 1777 George Macintosh who dyes cloth has been spending weeks at a time out on romantic moss collecting trips among the Heather to get his raw material now most unfortunately can be a dye needs one other vital ingredient besides Scottish moss and it's something that will take us back from these lonely Highlands to that hot air gas company manager Neilson because the other ingredient forked beer die requires the Macintosh company to go looking for raw materials in less salubrious places than the Scottish Glen's it's urine which contains ammonia which is why Neilson and the McIntosh family got together in the first place since ammonia is a byproduct of what you get when you make coal gas and you recall that's what Neilson made that his gas works ok let's leave George Macintosh up this mountain while I change the subject because at this point in the story the path of history splits into two the first pathway takes us away from Moss collecting to some pretty weird goings-on a good deal for the south in India to be exact this is one of those isn't it a small world stories back in Scotland Nielsen's father has been employed by a fella called John Roebuck who owned coal mines and Roebuck has been taught in Edinburgh by professor called Joe Black Roebuck tells black about the water flooding his mines and black tells Roebuck about James Watt of steam engine fame and together what and Roebuck make mind rainy music with what's new steam driven pump roebucks money sets what up in business and he makes a fortune and eventually becomes an amateur scientist like all gentlemen did at the time thank you now one of what experiments causes a bit of a stir in the hallowed halls of the British Royal Society when he crosses swords with an aristocrat called Lord Henry Cavendish they're ours all about which one of them has done some experiment or other to find out what water is well what becomes a member of the Royal Society the two of them meet and become friends and that's that however at the time Cavendish is also sponsoring to the society a young man that's why I'm telling you all this in India because the young man is a fellow called James Macy and his main contribution to science is to investigate hang on a minute to investigate a liquid that appears in the joints of bamboo because in 1791 some of this mystery liquid has been sent back to England from India and out here it's used as an ironmen and well you never know so friend Maisie takes this medicinal bamboo juice and does everything but drink it and a differing circumstances it effervesces turns jelly like goes into a glass shape or becomes a powder now there is no point in asking why anybody would do all that to this he just does the upshot is Maisie manages to get the liquid to turn into something resembling a Flint pebble the point I don't know and that is Maisie stupefying addition to the sum of human knowledge well not quite Maisie also happens to be the illegitimate son of one of the oldest aristocratic families in England the Dukes of Northumberland so the boys socially well placed as a result of which he ends up quite rich and since he never marries he leaves it to a cousin unless the cousin dies without children which he does in which case all the money is to go to America and there for a moment we leave James Maisie now we return to Moscow letting Mackintosh remember him one of his early partners in the cloth dyeing business David Dale builds a textile mill at New Lanark in Scotland where he philanthropic Lee employs orphaned children aged 7 or so to run the machines back then this is reckoned to be do good stuff because it saves the kids from starving to death in the streets Dale even builds in a school and they get clean clothes once a week in return for such generosity the deal with the orphanages Dale doesn't have to pay any wages to his little employees until they're age 15 what a sweetheart deal now Dale's liberal attitude attracts a young socialist mill manager called Robert Owen who marries Dale's daughter and takes over the mill in 1824 he leaves here for America where he sets up a commune at a place called New Harmony Indiana well the venture fails and he comes back here to Britain but his four sons take out American citizenship and stay on in the states where their story and that of James may see the rich bamboo freak join up this is where it all comes together and when things get to hit the fan in a really spectacular manner see Owens eldest son is a fella called Robert to Dale Owen and in 1842 he gets elected to Congress as an Indiana Democrat well in 1844 he gets mixed up in the affairs of an Englishman called James Macey remember him he's a fella who did all that weird work on bamboo juice and he remember he left a fortune of one hundred and four thousand nine hundred and sixty of these things English gold sovereigns to America well by 1844 they've arrived in the States been melted down and turned into US money and when I tell you how much money you'll know why I said things are about to hit the fan two billion and change suddenly it's Washington behind closed doors time turns out as soon as the money is available in greenbacks the Treasury has invested no less than two billion dollars worth of it in this interesting outfit known as the real estate bank of the state of Arkansas let me put it this way there are criminal charges against some of the backs directors somebody involved has been knifed above all everybody knows the bank is going to go bust because it's real estate has been grossly and deliberately overvalued and the US government is in bed with these people never mind which [ __ ] in the Treasury okayed the deal by this time there are now two and a half a billion dollars invested in these examples of junk and how the Treasury going to get their hands on it never mind the interest the real estate bank of Arkansas hasn't paid well you can imagine the kind of field day the legislators up here on the hill have with this little peccadillo gentleman from Massachusetts John Quincy Adams to be exact make caustic comments about theft gentleman from Arkansas make comments about honor and meeting their commitments in due course others wonder when that a distant day might be the Arkansas people say in 20 years when the bonds mature Arkansas will repay its debts finally it's agreed the Treasury will guarantee the interest so the money can do what James Macey wanted it to do and then there's a real Rao certain members regard the gift as an insult to the American people and say that the United States has humbled and degraded itself by accepting this money from degenerate aristocrats others argue that the United States should take the money and run eventually common sense prevails and in December 1846 Owens bill is passed and they get to spend the money the way Maisie wanted you know how of course and if you don't I'll tell you in a minute so winding up this debate let me summarize corn cobs become resins for diamond polishing with carborundum that protects you from shells fired at tanks developed from American tractors that used diesel engines built with funding from Krupp who inspired Bismarck's welfare scheme based on catalase statistics that inspired the Babbage engine whose punch cards were used to river the Great Eastern the monster ship that laid the transatlantic cable insulated with gutta-percha used to manufacture golf balls for factory managers in industrial Scotland where James Watt had a run-in with Cavendish whose protege was James Macey who caused all the Rao here in the Capitol building for reasons you know but maybe don't know you know get it you remember I said James Macey was the illegitimate son of the Duke of Northumberland well after his father's death James took on the father's family name well what's in a name so the money got used to set up a world-renowned institution named after James Macy's new family name which was Smithson the institution known as the Smithsonian's

Channel: SlimaksClass

Views: 44,672

Rating: 4.8267717 out of 5

Keywords: Connections3, 02

Id: 3RFAwRuccDs

Length: 51min 59sec (3119 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2012