C3_04: An Invisible Object

this program is about something you wouldn't think you could make a TV program about one of these an invisible object but funny how we use the word light to mean not heavy isn't it I mean this flashlight is light these programs are light even though this kind of light according to Einstein is heavier than you might think so if light does have weight as Einstein said then it ought to be affected by gravity and if that were true black hole should be possible black holes dead stars so big their gravity pulls in light stops it from bouncing off them I mean that's why you can see me now light bouncing off me if it didn't bounce off you couldn't see me that's why you can't see black holes but you can see their effect this gas jet is streaming out from one this cloud of gas is spinning around in such colossal speed you know it's being driven by a black hole at its center but the weirdest thing about space is that a lot of what you're looking at isn't really there the light from the most distant stars has taken such a colossal time to get here the real stars are long dead it's as if the telescope that produced these pictures were a kind of time machine showing you a view of the universe as it once was billions and billions of years ago but maybe the most spine-tingling of all these ancient pictures is this one this is the outer edge of the universe so this light started towards us just after the very beginning thing is one day will we see past that outer edge back to before the bang and if we do what will we see this is the time machine that took those pictures a model of the Hubble telescope orbiting 400 miles up searching for what it looked like out there before the beginning of time cheers Hubble launching aboard the space shuttle Discovery in 1990 and then in 1993 and again in 1997 two more flights to carry out some of the most spectacular repair and maintenance jobs you've ever seen here's one and a half billion dollars worth of telescope floating in space which is why getting close to Hubble like this with your 78 tonne Space Shuttle is something nobody wants to do in a hurry so when your docking arm reaches out towards the docking a target on Hubble you're bringing your shuttle in there with all the delicate precision of a mother reaching out for her baby then orbiting Earth at 17,000 miles an hour the scene that still excites people to the core this incredible flying fix is all down to the amazing capabilities of the space shuttle and the way she flies to start with getting up here to rendezvous with Hubble involves some very strange rules of orbital dynamics ketchup doesn't just mean firing your engines because that puts you up into a higher orbit breaking drops you into a lower orbit so you don't get there in a straight line like this but something more like this now you remember that inch-by-inch stuff as they came in to talk with Hubble you do that with tiny thrusters all around the shuttle pointing up down and sideways here's two sets of them see there are 44 of them in all shooting minut puffs of a fuel called hydrazine that gives you more bang for your buck than anything around but shuttle pilots aren't the only people who use hydrazine you have to in medication plastics photography rubber all kinds of stuff and one rather special use because long before hydrazine got used to spin the shuttle in space one of the greatest crises in history triggered the need for that other thing hydrazine can do here we are in the beautiful medaka wine country near Bordeaux in the southwest of France this is a tough assignment anyway hydrazine and all that back in the 19th century if you live in a Bijou little residence like this and you get fungus you go whatever the French for ape is right but I don't mean fungus in there in the ancestral woodwork I mean out here well out there see this is hydrazine country because that's the other thing hydrazine does knocks off the fungus growths that can spoil your agribusiness dead which is what happens here over a hundred years ago when something comes along just spoil their agribusiness day something that looks like how shall I put it the end of civilization as we know it I mean of course a fungus on the vines so maybe no more French wine the cause of this potential apocalypse is affectionately known as downy mildew now there's one thing guaranteed to galvanize the French into action the threat of a national wine shortage so in 1882 in the border vineyards here comes a professor of botany from the local university worrying about the end of civilization as we know it and then he notices something strange that gets the little gray cells doing over time there is mildew and rotting vines everywhere except as doodle-oo he discovers some vines which appear to be painted blue and which appear not to have Zee mildew so he pops into the local Chateau du cool bukiyou to ask why well why not and what are their the answer its them doing it painting bright blue stuff on their grapes to stop tourists from switching them so our professor hightails it back to Bordeaux and comes up with a modified version the first ever fungicide you could spray on the ancestor of all fungus is like hydrazine in the modern world now this is not the first French wine crisis but the third the downy mildew fungus having been brought into France on American vine shoots to solve the second crisis a kind of bug found on American vine shoots brought into France to solve the third crisis another kind of fungus called powdery mildew wrote in France on American plants had enough point is the real killer Diller was that second crisis caused by something that still causes French nightmares something that could still bring the end of civilization as we know it that's why I am telling you this under surveillance because I would be instantly in the handcuffs if what I am about to show you we're alive insect called if it's causing a disease called Phil Akira and the last time this got loose in the vineyards it was jump out of the window time is I mean by 1880 half the vines in France are dead from Philips era and panic isn't the word they try urine tobacco juice berry tones magnetism electricity and nothing works until as I said imported American vines do the trick and stop all that mayhem turns out it's all because of technology the latest steamboats are crossing the Atlantic de France from America fast enough for the little Athens to get to their new French home still alive well guess what won't be crossing any frontiers after that the phylactery epidemic is why when you fly into certain very clean places like Switzerland these days if you happen to be arriving from somewhere that the squeaky clean Swiss authorities regard has not squeaky clean that's lots of places more is going to happen to your plane than an oil change and a topper as everybody knows hygiene is practically a religion in Switzerland so the phrase you're likely to hear next is let us spray this is one result of the international plant quarantine convention signed here in Switzerland in 1878 after that wine disaster so as to stop those little aphids from traveling at all costs one minor consideration that the little aphids actually have wings seems to pass these guys by but no matter the idea is basically a good one and eventually it catches on and that is why all over the world today your plane is often much cleaner than you think it is and everything on board even a letter from your old granny okay let's hold the mail for a moment and see where we are black holes in space are seen by Hubble serviced by the space shuttle fueled by hydrazine that's also a fungicide first invented during the French felix are a disaster caused by these little aphids the reason for the 1878 Swiss quarantine convention which is why your pain gets sprayed these days and everything on it including a letter from your old granny which is only there at all thanks to something else to benefit back then from the conventional Swiss yet another convention in 1874 when they sought out the International mail 19th century man is like twentieth-century airline baggage destination and in certain so everybody agrees on the big issue they can each keep the money they make from selling their own stamps with the money thing settled that leaves only the money thing how to send money through the mail well in 1874 they standardized that and four years later an American organization comes up with the first-ever crime proof money order form that isn't a ripoff because it's a ripoff look here are the amounts you might want to send all the way from big sums like ten dollars down in five cent bits to a dollar five say you wanted to send two dollars and 25 cents all you do is tear down to the amount you express Lee bought throw the rest away and that's it expressly crook proof because it's time he's any criminal at the other end who might have the express intent of getting more than you had expressly sent good idea no and because right from the start you can expressly pick one of these up almost anywhere it's a raving success for the American organization that expressly thinks it up mm-hmm American Express American Express starts life as a delivery business run by a couple of guys who know Henry wells and William Fargo so guess what the original company's called anyway Henry and William blow away their competitors because they invent the cash-on-delivery idea and because they have the fastest route to the west coast my ship and cutthroat prices so by 1859 Wells and Fargo are simply speak alone in the field in more senses than one and you can't get much more alone than America in 1859 anywhere between st. Louis Missouri here and Sacramento California here emptier than which there ain't the reason you might be here in the emptiness it's because of the Colorado gold strikes and because the people here and the guys in the California Gold Fields want to hear from back east more than once every few months so the overland route starts to look more attractive to mrs. Wells and Fargo and this is what they do about that they go looking for young skinny wiry fellas willing to risk death daily orphans prefer in 1859 they find a few rheumatics in bars in the middle of nowhere happy to ride health another to some other middle of nowhere places like this right all the required orphans need besides a touch of insanity and a six-gun is a good horse and an undeveloped sense of self-preservation well they find such people and all of a sudden your letters start coming and going all of a sudden snail mail this ain't the Pony Express only lasts for 16 months but it becomes a legend 20 riders cover the 2,000 miles to Sacramento and back and full gallop risking death every step of the way a company mission statement the mail must go through the greatest legend of them all is a 15 year old kid who rides the most dangerous stretch coming into three crossings Wyoming one day he hears that the rider for the next stage has been killed so he changes horses the way they did partly touching the ground and rides on 384 miles non-stop the longest Pony Express ride ever recorded and then the Telegraph comes along and spoils all the fun and that's it for the Pony Express so that fifteen-year-old moves on to scout for the army and then to shoot meat for the Kansas railroad people and because he's so good at it I mean 5000 animals in just over a year if you're into that kind of thing he gets the name you know him by Buffalo Bill in 1883 bill hits the big time all around the world with his all-star Wild West Show bringing the thrills of frontier life to the city slickers he features hundreds of Indians playing hundreds of Indians Buffalo hunts cavalry attacks on Indian villages bucking Broncos even a full-scale rerun of Custer's last stand and the greatest sharpshooter of them all and he okay these amazing spectacular give a whole new meaning to the idea of votive it might be nobody knows the real meaning of votive it anyway not surprising since it comes from France 15 century France this river valley it's called the vir Valley in French that voir valley de vere of the river vir votive ear okay you mispronounce those words votive here and you get vote oval the kind of entertainment that starts here in the 15th century drinking songs the same kind of naughty stuff that turns up 300 years later in American vote even the most famous writer of these numbers is a guy called Olivier vasana who tops the charts because he writes about the same thing every time wine women and song and people having a good time unlike Beslan himself who has a really bad time when it comes to a sticky end just down the road from fear in this area at a place called formini in 1450 where he gets mixed up with and killed in a battle where the french should beat the English because surprise surprise the French have Canon and the English have bows and arrows here's how it all goes here's the English army patrolling like they've been doing since they invaded this bit of France 300 years earlier when a French Army suddenly comes out of nowhere now English bowmen have the laser weapons of the period so this is going to be a pushing when suddenly the French produce a couple of the very latest can and start handing the Brits the English send out their green beret types to grab the cannon they're on their way back with them when French reinforcements turn up the English archers can't open fire because they'll hit their own guides so the French attack and massacre nearly three thousand English troops it's a bloodbath mind you by this time the English through in France anyway they just won't give up and move out but like it or not forming it turns out to be one step from final defeat and then it's harder English okay where are we the Swiss postal convention helps to kick off American Express who in their early years as Wells Fargo start the Pony Express starring a fifteen-year-old who becomes known as Buffalo Bill whose showbiz life starts in the Bois de Ville that really begins back in medieval France with drinking songs written by that guy who gets killed in a battle between the French and the English okay now the French finally chuck the English out of France because they're led to victory by a crazy woman nobody's ever successfully diagnosed her condition but one thing certain she was hearing things this is a particularly unusual case hmm the file on her says illiterate peasant girl turns up out of the blue and convinces a bunch of sophisticated backstabbing highly political French aristocracy to stop their infighting and follow her and kick out the English interesting she's having visions and hearing the voices of what she describes as Saints there is one version of that condition that would produce hallucinatory symptoms of this type she's also fanatically religious well you'd expect that really there are superstitious lot back then burning which is pretty much every afternoon there have also been prophecies about a young girl saving the country she's also apparently a virgin well that's pretty mystical back then for a start that ground political situation France is in a total mess they're at each other's throats she dresses like a man and his hot stuff with a sword and the would-be King of France is a knock-kneed yellow-bellied wimp and this girl turns up saying things like I will lead you to victory and my voices are telling me what to do well nobody talks like that unless they're nuts so they think why not nothing else is working let's give it a go well she wins all the battles and puts the WIMP on the throne and the backstabbers sell her down the river to the English history isn't like Hollywood every time and of course who fingers her but the church because all that person-to-person communication with the Saints stuff she's up to is giving French peasants ideas about their station isn't it so instead of a psychoanalyst she gets the Inquisition they make mincemeat of her at what we would call a mistrial so she goes to the stake and is burnt to death in 1431 and that's it for Joan of Arc of course true to the loony psychology of the time as a servant of the devil she's better off dead right for the Inquisition it's just another case closed questions answered the reason the Inquisition are so good at getting answers out of people is because the way they ask questions is straight out of a museum of Horrors top of the league in this kind of friendly persuasion are the Spanish of course they've had a lot of practice on the well-to-do Jewish community see back in 1492 the uptight northern Spanish Christians take over southern Spain from the laid-back southern Spanish Muslims now the new Christian rulers prevent Jews from working in anything but finance so guess what Jews make money like what else would they make which the Christians then borrow but don't pay back because all you have to do is tell the Inquisition a Jew is eating meat on Friday and he and his family get torched or worse your debts go up in smoke by 1490 thomas Torquemada is top Spanish torturer when he's on a winning streak he can burn 13,000 in one year not houses you understand but people well you're Jewish what do you do get out the Sherman okay a lot of the Jews head up into northern Europe but the vast majority of them come here where they know they'll be treated like human beings even like talented and valuable human beings because although in here this place is Jewish out there this place is Islamic and tolerant and in deep trouble the economy in Turkey is so bad they've been advertising for help so in the sixteenth century quarter of a million exiled Jews turn up here one of these guys is a fella called Joseph nosey born in Portugal chucked out spent some time in Holland in the family plank 1554 he comes here to Istanbul meets up with his aunt grace he was a financial hotshot and already will in with the Turkish sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and more important with his influential favorite wife rocks the land so without Grace's help Joseph now Z is in like Flynn C Sulaiman is running the biggest Empire since Rome on three continents and the problem is his bureaucrats are a corrupt and B wouldn't know a balance sheet if they fill in one so what's the laymen needs he's a 16th century equivalent of an MBA enter join as d by 1560 Joe is virtually still a man's foreign minister living in a posh palace here on the Bosphorus and we desire on greater things like being king of Cyprus where the best wine comes from and where he wants the booze export monopoly in 1566 Suleiman kicks the bucket and his wimpy sons Salim takes over which means that Jonah's is really running the entire show so four years later he's got his wine deal and he's calling himself king of Cyprus because he's persuaded the Turks to take the place over and living in an even bigger palace not bad for a guy who started with nothing right mind you if you can survive the intrigue here at the Sultan's topkapi palace you can survive anything so by this time Joan Ozzy is flavor of the month he's only mistake is that business about persuading the Turks to grab Cyprus because that gives a European sir ticked off they set up a lead to do something about it and basically what that means is any minute now everything for the Turks is about to hit the fan because one of the European allies is a bunch you wouldn't want to meet on a dark night the Turks have already had a run-in with them that time the Turks won and threw them off the island of Rhodes here where these guys were headquartered at the time so now they're holed up in motor here and militarily speaking these people are Top Gun stuff meet the Knights of Malta and their new home the island of Malta by 1565 these guys have made so much trouble for the Turks that they decide enough is enough and send in a humongous military force to wipe them out and fail because the Knights have nothing to lose and nowhere to go and besides they are sitting inside the last word in defense technology TVs Wars so eventually the Turks give up and go home leaving the Knights to enjoy their posh new grid pattern City and look after their wounded in the 16th century equivalent of a hi-tech emergency clinic this Knights of Malta Hospital is way out on the cutting edge I mean they have separate wards for separate diseases and one patient per bed they even use anesthesia useful stuff denotes if you spend the other half of your time slicing people up iconic that because the Knights get their medical know-how from somebody else who makes a specialty of slicing people up his name is Andreas Vesalius and in 1527 he's professor of surgery here at the University of Padua in northern Italy which if you want to be a doctor is where you want to be for two reasons one Vesalius is the best anatomy wiz there is and to the university is about to build the amazing Padua and nutterman theater all the students stand around up there in the galleries while down here in the well at the bottom the lecturer does interestingly new things two corpses see up to the time of his alias Anatomy is pretty much anybody's guess you can't operate without killing people so there hasn't been much interest in how your body actually works so the new Anatomy they're about to teach here thanks to his alias is a much bigger deal than you might think see up to now about all they've been able to teach is what the Greeks and Romans knew which was much that's why sixteenth century doctors are still into cures like boiled puppy lily oil and minced earthworms so the recovery rate is not too high so in 1543 when Vesalius comes out with what is effectively a multimedia show and tell all about the insides have sliced humans where it's the biggest thing to hit medicine since sliced bread Azealia steals with every little bit brain blood vessels muscle bone he's read everything he can get his hands on and then found out for himself thanks to a helpful judge here in town who execute criminals just in time for Vesalius lectures on how to dissect and this copiously Illustrated can't put it down give it to your doctor friends book is the result this century's before the computer is what you see is what you get no wonder medical students kick off a wave of body snatching to check him out because invisi is his great book on the structure of the human body it's all there in glorious graphics drawings of every little gory detail and the reason why you couldn't buy the original book today for a million bucks is because back then Vesalius gets his illustrations done at the studio of an unknown young painter a guy who is so good at flesh tones he'd turn on a mortician Titian okay time for another ketchup Joan of Arc leads the French to victory and is then burnt by the Inquisition who make life in Spain so difficult for the Jews that most of them run away to Turkey where one of them Joan Ozzy persuades them to attack the Knights of Malta who look after their wounded in the best Hospital around at the time because of the know how that Vesalius comes up with in his great anatomy book illustrated by Titian who's coming up next this is Titian and he lives here in 16th century Venice a knockout city with more liquid assets than it has water now the thing about having lots of money is that Venice is so rich and powerful it doesn't really give a rat's ass about what the Pope thinks so Venetian wannabes commissioned people like Titian to come up with portraits that will make them good-looking that's why I shion's portraits are a totally new kind of thing because what he does is dump the old medieval dead body style the church recommends in favor of a new touchy-feely approach this is what got visalia s-- that surgeon remember so hot for Titian because this is real flesh and blood stuff isn't it and take a look at something else nutrition Springs on everybody his backgrounds are sixteenth-century virtual-reality now back then this kind of stuff makes Titian instantly famous and in no time at all he's graduated from naked models to the real movers and shakers his portrait of Pope Paul the third makes it a cinch that he's going to do the ultimate biggie Holy Roman Emperor Charles the fifth who invites Titian to come visit 15:48 and we're in Augsburg Germany and South Charles v who's here for a shindig with fellow Catholic Royals after they've beaten a bunch of Protestant Royals at a battle now as they say in the tourist brochures Augsburg is in the mineral-rich mountains of southern Germany so they've got all the metal they need for people like Charles v to go to war with including strangely enough metal to make armor with I say strangely enough because what would you be doing on a battlefield wearing armor win by this time the name of the game is shooting people with guns answer you don't wear armor well not to fight anyway to watch top people like the Emperor Charles v get to wear posh tailor-made metal suits called parade armor while enjoying the show sorry bloody massacre from the crest of some nearby hill so Titian the painter remember him does Charles's portrait after the battle kind of come as you are like this and as you can see from charles v here you've never make it to battle in parade armor I mean they screw you into it which is another reason why we're here because it is another little-known tourist fact about Augsburg that it is the home of the metal screw in places like this there are tiny jewelry screws originally because the other thing that algae work is full off besides iron is precious metal so the other thing you come to Augsburg for besides a portrait is jewelry or both in 1551 of Augsburg famous Goldsmith's shops gets a commission from King Henry of France to send somebody to Paris to help with a little monetary scam Henry's dreamed up the idea being that the shop also sends along one of their new screw operated coin making machines as well so that Henry can turn up new coins of the realm that are not what they appear to be called Henry's this is one the scam I mentioned is that these coins have less gold and silver than they're supposed to but who will know and the King will save a bundle point being he's in serious hock well it works nobody notices the new Henry's are only half Henry's so the real Henry makes enough from this sneaky little devaluation to keep his new queen in the gastronomic style to which she is rapidly making France accustomed because the lady in question Catherine de Medici is the person who kind of invents the reason every woman needs jewelry catherine de medici is the woman who thinks up the modern dinner party when she marries king henry in 1533 she turns france into the food capital of the world it is today with rave new ideas like forks table settings good wine pasta and fantasy sources then when dinner is over another amazing new indulgence of which catherine is also probably the first user tobacco because catherine has always suffered from migraines and in one form tobacco is supposed to be good for me grains snuffle anyway in no time at all smoking tobacco is the cure for everything toothache flatulence sores pregnancy pains itching halitosis tetanus and believe it or not a bad cough now the great news for the governments of Europe is that the new commodity is apparently addictive you just know what's going to happen next colonies where you can grow the stuff ship it back as a state monopoly and watch the money roll in by the 17th century the English have found just the place to grow their new drug America and in particular Marilyn America most of the immigrants getting off the boat in America in the 17th century are single young men with no jobs back home in England where life has been real fun I mean you mentioned out loud words like freedom of movement religious tolerance justice for all a chance to get ahead in life and you can find yourself getting taken seriously and hanged so the next word that floats to your mind is transatlantic but where New England is posting no vacancies the Barbados plantation owners only want slaves which leaves places like this historic Saint Mary's City in Maryland the only place for a fellow with no resume to make a buck all you need is a case of severe desperation and a home to clear the weeds a few seeds a lot of luck and 18-hour days all you do is plant and crop and move on living in one room wooden huts you sleep on the floor eat meat and vegetable stew and cornbread and drink food and that's all you do night and day summer and winter till you die at around age 45 so where are we petition great portrait painter goes to Augsburg home of great jewelry where a goldsmith helps King Henry of France make enough money to pay for his wife's dinner parties where they first smoked tobacco that the English eventually get from Maryland when they set up a tobacco growing colony where colonists get to work themselves into an early grave well back then life is pretty nasty except for the people at the other end of this economic process making a million the Internal Revenue once somebody makes the math to work out the taxes as easy as falling off a log dead easy okay look at the bottom of the screen two times two times two five times gives you 32 right do the same thing four times and you get 16 okay to multiply 32 by 16 add the little numbers and look this up in your log tables to do division we do the same but subtract the little numbers in 1618 this is automated by the amazing new slide rule invented by William orchard find your numbers by swiveling the pointers like this and bottom right is the result Oh drugs slide rule is made for him by one of the hottest instrument makers of the 17th century his name is Elias Allen and he also happens at one time to be a mover in shaker in the clock makers company of London who never get around to building their own banqueting-hall so they have their little annual dinners in the Lord Mayor of London's now the clock makers started just when the timekeeping business is really getting into the swing of things with the amazing new high-tech wonder machine from Holland invented by that swinging genius Christian Huygens the pendulum clock the thing about this is the pendulum swing lasts the same time every swing see so it's an extremely accurate way to control the clock so now you can time anything to the second like you're cooking just as well given the way Huygens assistant puts any chef under pressure poignant assistant is called Dennis papa and he's French surveying French he turns his genius to vitally important matters like food and comes up with a gizmo you love if you love steamed potatoes Papa has previously fooled around with steam engines so he knows all about stuff like air pressure and steam right okay here's the deal you're going to boil the water and you're going to boil the food but you're going to do it with the lid screwed down tight under pressure with a pressure escape valve food cooks twice as fast thing is called a pressure cooker makes boring food and 200 years later solves another French crisis about drink in this case beer and why isn't French beer as good as German beer this national disaster becomes an obsession for the paranoid French chemist Louis Pasteur who back in 1864 is doing what Frenchmen usually do drinking wine which he discovers to be bad well gone bad so since he's been doing tests in his lab on why food goes mouldy and has seen many little bugs down his microscope he decided that these little bugs he calls them germs and get into the food from the air this after he's done tests leaving food lying around Buster takes his bugs and submits them to every known torture boiling up chilling down sealing in jars you name it one approach to killing the little bugs seems to work best of all heat so he tries the same trick with the wine he cooks it at 55 degrees centigrade you can hear the wine bars all over France a rum fail boiled wine more EUR however as a later wine tasting they can't tell which one has been boiled in which hasn't so that's okay and it solves the problem no more bad wine in 1870 France has a war with Germany and losses and pastures idea of revenge is to make french beer better than German beer as part of the process he's looking at why beer goes bad in summer and guess what discovers those Italy bugs again so he tries the same boiling trick and does two beer what he previously did two wine why didn't he think of it first time around don't ask me anyway we call what you did pasteurizing and today we do it to milk products and in hospitals to surgical instruments in machines not a million miles away from that thing FepA invented remember that pressure cooker in medical circles known as an autoclave no masters work doesn't alter the fact that in summer dairy products and pretty much anything go bad in the heat so can science fix summer well it can make virtual winter and give me this delicious frosted glass of the amber nectar in high summer makes it your bearable and my beer is cold thanks to beer because back in Germany the Brewers asked an engineer called Karl von Linda if he can come up with something to keep their fat cold during fermentation and he invents one of those a refrigerator see if you compress air or ammonia gas or ether they get hot release the pressure and they get colder than before so they'll chill down any liquid so there's your coolant in tubes running through the back of the fridge or an air conditioner which is why this bar is nice and chilly just what you need when you're working in the steamy tropics and the reason I am Telling You all this in the steamy tropics is because when the Australian sheep farmers first get their hands on refrigeration at the end of the 19th century the first place they send their frozen told me to is hot countries because now it'll keep thanks to the fridge now the biggie Australian meat exporter is a fella called Harrison who repeats that German guy Vaughn Linda's freezing trigger but this time on a much bigger scale and you can see what he comes up with here Harrison is freezing machines also get used to chill down paraffin oil if you get the temperature low enough some of the paraffin goes solid produces stuff called paraffin wax a product ideal for making what this bar is full of candles and my sandwiches for tonight's beach party see this paraffin wax paper does great things to the early food packaging industry at the beginning of this century and what that does is make possible something so commonplace that you probably don't consciously see it even when you use it so here we are about to end the show with an invisible object so how did it go black holes in space hydrazine fuel fungicide on French vines quarantine conventions and money orders American Express and Buffalo Bill vaudeville and French battles Joan of Arc and the Inquisition Jews welcomed by Turks who lose to Maltese Knights with surgeons trained on pictures by Titian who's in Augsburg we're Goldsmith's make French money to pay for tobacco that triggers logarithms and slide rules made by clock makers who also make pressure cookers that sterilized French beer kept cool by refrigerators that get used to freeze meat and chill down paraffin to produce paraffin wax for invisible objects well did you notice this wax paper cups I mean when was the last time you really took a closer look at one of these and yet they're everywhere even here in a tropical paradise you know sometimes this job is no picnic

Channel: SlimaksClass

Views: 29,578

Rating: 4.7345972 out of 5

Keywords: Connections3, 02

Id: xtwK-FZVuMQ

Length: 52min 4sec (3124 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2012