C3_05: Life is No Picnic

my guess is the content of this program will add up to a message you already know too well here's the context and here's the message it's true isn't it years ago a picnic was a really grand occasion you and the table would get all dressed up and then you'd have a full four or five course meal you just have it in the open air ah well no time anymore for that kind of stuff is there we're all too busy grab a bite keep moving that's the way it goes fast food for a fast world instant everything and you know what you have to thank for that World War two that's when the instant idea really took off and all because of this coffee no powdered coffees been around since the 30s when Brazil has a series of fantastic coffee bean harvests and ends up with an excess of bean and no way are they going to sell it all then the nest sleigh company comes up with the answer easy enough you run a lot of hot water through ground coffee beans then you spray the water through very hot air that evaporates the water what falls to the bottom of your equipment is a fine powder later on add water and stir coffee and the reason the whole idea really takes off is because instant coffee weighs nothing which is just what you need but not in ballooning when you're a world war two American infantry grunt up to your knees in mud and crossfire on some European battlefield and the last thing you need is extra weight to carry that's why something called K rations are invented back then to give the troops maximum calories with minimum ounces so the new lightweight coffee really fits in there world war two makes instant coffee a real flier so the instant the war is over instant coffee is going to be an instant industry which leaves only one small problem the K rations are going to be great for the troops down there if you can find them not the Russians the troops by the last year of the war the US Army has 8 million people to get K rations - and they're all over the place and they all need everything from coffee to food mail spare parts toilet paper ammunition clothing you name it that's why for every soldier in the field there are three people back at supplier tearing their hair out because nobody's where they were last time you looked because the Army's mechanized in tanks and trucks and the reason I'm showing you this particular bit of film notice every other shot is of a jeep an amazing bit of vehicular pizzazz that will go anywhere and do anything and there is no terrain it can't go into or get out of and it'll do that pulling a trailer carrying up to four people mounted with a heavy machine gun it'll even carry stretcher cases so at the end of every day the last thing that moves is a Jeep carrying supplies after the front line and this is where the rock meets the hard place because as this little wonder machine races to launch its creating the problem it's supposed to so now why losers of the 27 pounds of supplies every American soldier needs every day just to go on fighting over half is gasoline if they eliezer to win the war this is a problem that has to be cracked so it is which cracking that's what happens in refineries like these cracking is the petroleum industry equivalent of getting that out of a stone getting refined product from oil and then doing it again with the same oil and then doing it again and again and again again all you need is a chimney stack okay down at the bottom of the stack you heat up crude oil it vaporizes you condense the vapors and get gas or heat what oils left hotter and condense out kara see keep what's left hotter and condense out naphtha heat what's left hotter and condense out gasoline then pressurize the whole shebang and squeeze out more of everything and you still get one last product coming out at the very top methane okay another quick bit of chemistry turns out that you can use methane to get acetylene believe it or not the obsession of an American Jesuit priest and chemistry professor called Newland well in 1918 he's played around with acetylene and discovered that you can turn it into something that will put a bit of bounce into life and as you will see changes the private life of everyone in the world Nuland causes bouncy stuff neoprene it solves another problem for the world war ii jeep because neoprene is synthetic rubber and you make tires with it not surprisingly the Reverend father's invention is taken up by a company for whom you might say chemistry is a bit of a religion DuPont and what they get up to is a very attractive proposition the attraction in question is the attraction that molecules have for each other never mind the chemistry gobbledygook what you're looking at is two molecules and some bits between them including these bits hydrogen hydrogen oxygen h2o water heat it up and the water boils off now for the molecules that like each other these two leftover bits carbon and oxygen really go for these two bits nitrogen and hydrogen so they get together and really bond so that links the two big molecule groups together and if you have a lot of them they all do it and when that happens whole strings of them join up and if you knit those fine strings together the way you would with thread you get something that will one day give every woman in the world a real leg up in life because the molecules make what dupont calls nylon there's never been anything like nylons in the first four days DuPont sells four million pair nylons make all the difference when you're on your way to a date as we are our date is the gear 18 11 here's a story the first nylon stockings get made on machines that essentially haven't changed since the first machines for making cotton stockings are invented here in England by a fella called cotton now this marvel of Industrial Revolution technology kicks off a movement back then that will one day in the modern world give its name the kind of people who hate technology with a passion the Luddites so you just know something bad is going to happen to this machine here's what I mean by bad stocking machines may be wonderful bits of technology but what they are doing back then besides making stockings for lots of rich people is putting lots of poor people at work the solution is simple the way to keep your job is to smash the machines now this may look like nothing more than dirty work at the crossroads to use but back then the punishment for doing something like this is hanging so you know these are desperate men here men with starving children and the whole power of the state against them including the army so there's nothing romantic about what these Luddites leave behind them well there's one romantic bit which I'll get to after a brief catch-up on where we are so far instant coffee gets off the ground in World War two when artificial rubber is invented and so are nylons made on machines like these original ones being smashed by the Luddites whose actions are defended by the romantic guy we're about to get to he's a young 24 year old nobody that nobody's ever heard of and his emotional defense of the Luddites in the British Parliament sounds like something you could have heard on the hill yesterday men are convicted of the capital crime of poverty we must not allow mankind to be sacrificed to improvements in mechanisms good libertarian stuff unfortunately before good libertarian stuff becomes fashionable so the speech goes over like a lead balloon until two weeks later when this guy's work turns him from a nobody into a megastar and then everybody's heard of Lord Byron at the time Biron is just back from touring the Mediterranean hotspots pressing the flesh and fact fighting about what politics is like in places like Portugal the home of democracy Greece and one place he doesn't think much of democracy lies this place the city of Istanbul byron turns up here with the absolute minimum a gentleman news seven trunks of clothes a bed and a saddle will his byron basically like all political serious fact-finding missions byron makes like a fun-loving tourist checking out all the sights the great Church of aya sofya sorry on a scale of ten byron gives it eight the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent oh yeah give it a five a spot of light refreshment tastes like dishwater one the blue mosque very posh 60 the city wall boring give mattoon sorry a little bit of the local folk culture firing loves this given a nine okay how about a taste of the local delicacies don't know what this is give it a three after the tourist stuff things start to look up at one point being an English aristocrat he gets an invite to meet the Sultan himself so a bit of local royalty so he walks in here to the Topkapi Palace dressed to kill well he is Byron and is promptly ignored so being Byron he goes all upset and Byronic about it hissy fit we'd call it France is often a total snit ruins the entire trip just before Byron heads for home he runs into a travelling Scots businessman well that's what he calls himself shady would be a better description he's one of those shifty characters you see on the Istanbul waterfront hanging around bars and expense-account restaurants looking for a deal you know the ones talking out of both sides of their mouths at once with a spiel that goes generally something like this okay you want me to get rid of this stuff at what we might describe as a reasonable profit no problem well there is one minor inconvenience Napoleon look I'd be better if I show you play in fact his old boy our friend Napoleon as Europe pretty well locked up I mean take a look blockades all round the coastline you tried getting your product in anywhere here they blow you right out of the water no chance but I John Gould his name a blockade runner and would-be profiteer have I got a plan we get the product into Europe through the back door sneak the stuff across the Mediterranean hmm through Instanbul and then at the back here and across the Hungarian border piece of cake you gotta hand it to gold his little blockade breaking scam very nearly comes off I mean he actually gets his contraband stuff all the way to the Hungarian border and then it all goes down the toilet because his frontier contact just doesn't turn up I mean areas with 45 camel loads of illegal cotton goods and no client fortunately for him a friendly local Turk takes it off him as cost goat Chuck's the whole thing up comes back a at Istanbul takes the first boat owned to fame and fortune as a novelist I bet you've never heard of John Galt nor have I nor has anybody for that matter meanwhile in 1810 Napoleon loses that war so the blockade is off so the smuggling business leaves Istanbul for other markets now the blockade has previously got the Brits into other kinds of difficulties at sea another problem for the Brits during that war is the Americans they don't seem to like being chased around by British ships claiming that the Yanks are carrying British deserters onboard which the Brits claim they need back to help with the war effort about which the Americans could care less but then things take an unpleasant turn one of these American ships is called the Chesapeake ready to cross the Atlantic from Norfolk Virginia with four of these quote deserters unquote onboard so the British Navy boards the ship with some cock-and-bull story about wanting to send mail back to their granny in England whip out their guns and it all gets very nasty with people killed and stuff starts the war of 1812 surprise surprise and that's why we are here in Baltimore Maryland because in 1814 after burning the White House the Brits moved down here to do more of the same they're feeling learned now this is going to be a piece of cake oh boy here's the reason the Brits are feeling quietly confident the low-tech indisciplined half-asleep American soldier inside fort mchenry here who will fall apart at the first shot now why the Brits at the time are making jokes about Americans and mincemeat let me use a modern analogy to show you why the Brits are so cocksure they see their situation so to speak as this versus this so you see it's only a matter of time old boy which is why a young American Lawyer who happens to be out here on a boat doing prisoner exchange and gets caught up in events stays up all night watching 1,800 British bombs and rockets reduce American defenders to what will undoubtedly be abject surrender oh boy except come the dawn and the time for the white flag what the Americans actually run up the flagpole at Fort McHenry isn't actually quite our young American is so blown away by all this he dashes off a quick commemorative song back of the envelope kind of thing well that's the kind of stuff they did back then and from then on everybody's singing it when the flag goes up and we Brits are history the ironic finger about Francis Scott Key's star-spangled song for America is the poem he writes to commemorate the way a few low-tech Yanks beat the British is actually set to a tune that is in fact English now I don't want to make a big deal about the star-spangled banner' being English so let me tell you a bit about the original song first of all here's a few bars of it the song is really called to Allah Creon in heaven and a Creon being the name of this 18th century London drinking club where Anna Creon members gather to sing bawdy songs pinch the serving wenches and get a little focused so does their singing see what I mean okay now for that strange name these bruisers give themselves the anachrome society an a crayon turns out to be the name of a sixth century BC ancient Greek poet who like these guys is into erotica alcohol at a general misbehavior and why have a bunch of London lushes ever heard of an a crayon well I'll get to that in a moment but first where are we you remember Byron who meets John bolt trying to get round the blockade that leads to the war of 1812 and star spangled songs that really start with a drinking club named after a nut Creole a writer people get to hear about because of the way literature back in the 16th century is not exactly easy to get at back then it's pretty easy to find your friendly local library just to check around for the nearest big church and you can hardly miss a place like this can you then things get difficult because now you have to find the particular thing you're looking for and they haven't invented a catalogue yet okay check the shelves that's no good there aren't any shelves for books yet just heaps of books okay check the titles on the spines of the books sorry no books with titles yet okay ask the librarian you've guessed most places don't have a librarian so rippling around is what you do in libraries 15:51 a French publisher called Henri STM is rooting around in Holland one day looking for buried treasure well that's what it is if you don't know it's there right and in terms of the Greek manuscript everyone's looking for at the time the cause of this literary archaeology Henry here is Henry stn comes across that Greek poet and a Creon remember him in the appendix of a manuscript about something entirely different so Henry hightails it back to Geneva with the manuscript to become the greatest European publisher of Greek late' ever and that's how those London boozes get to hear about an a crayon excuse me ah course stn does more than just print Greek doggerel for drunks he also makes sure you can understand it here's his greatest work a brick dictionary if the Greeks had a word for it you'd find it here makes his name and get him a son-in-law called Isaac Castle bond who teaches at the local Academy falls for Henry's books and then for three daughter eighteen children later that's eighteen Isaac has taken over Henry's job and is a Greek and Latin teacher better than whom there are very few one of the whom is a guy back in Holland called Julius Scalia hang on I'm getting good at this Scalia who writes to say how much he's enjoyed one of Isaac's books well it's the start of a beautiful friendship in the end Isaac writes in 1200 letters about one a month I say about a Scalia would have known the exact dates Scalia is a date and time freak because things like candle burn time and how long it takes for a sand blast to run out is the best people can do about knowing that time as for the date that's anybody's guess the second day of some festival or the tenth year of the reign of some king the real problem is it's all local when some guy writing The Chronicles of some monastery says things happened so scalia gets a grip on things with a giant chronology to pinpoint everything he takes the 28 year solar cycle multiplies it by the 19 year lunar cycle and multiplies that by the 15 year ancient Roman taxes cycle hey why not and gets a period in which these three cycles start on the same day cycle through and synchronize again this takes seven thousand nine hundred and eighty years and the last time all three cycles synchronized was January the first four thousand seven hundred and fifteen BC so that's kind of a year docked right and from that year everything is fixed by where it comes on the three cycles so for example what we call two thousand is two hundred and thirty-nine solar cycles plus 21 days 350 three lunar cycles for six days four for seven tax cycles plus eight days now when this thing gets published in what we call the year fifteen hundred and eighty to Europe decides to switch to a completely new calendar anyway the calendar we still use today as it happen so all Scalia's work is instantly useless he must have felt like taking a gun and pulling the trigger which is something his dutch boss prince morris is good at well getting troops to around 1600 Morrissey's running a large part of Holland and he's very keen on new weapons technology which has recently gone very high-tech with this little thing the rave new Wheelock pistol works like so pull the trigger that releases a wound up spring pushes a metal striker that hits a flint in its box ignites the powder by being wound up and ready like that also means you can fire the pistol from horseback the other new thing at the time is muskets with paper cartridges you just bite off the end pour in a measured charge speed things right up it means you get a shot off every two minutes Morris brings it all together into an army ready for anything including his final innovation firing by ranks poor old Morris all dressed up and nowhere to go in spite of his winning ways he never does get the chance to prove that he's got what it takes for big-league warfare the man who does and who wins so many battles he turns Sweden into a world power for all of 15 minutes is the king of Sweden Gustavus Adolphus in 1631 gustavus ups the ante with artillery you pound a weak spot in the enemy ranks with heavy cannon fire then you send the cavalry into the confusion to mop up Kasturba sees armies win all their battles with this new trick because sweden has tons of iron and copper essential raw materials you need when you want to be good at killing people a talent that as you will see runs in Gustavus is family that's why we are now in sunny Italy with the next king of Sweden a woman but Swedish monarchs are all called King named Christina who's good at killing people but first her other talents kristinia abdicates and runs away to Italy where she has an affair with a cardinal and protects this composer here Scarlatti from vatican intrigue as well as saving Roman Jews from persecution Christina also opens a philosophy school gets deeply involved with the civil rights movement and gives up her royal pension for good causes christina is one special lady which only leaves a bit about killing people well I don't suppose she actually kills him early on while she is still Queen sorry King she does royal command this chap to get up at 5 in the morning in Stockholm in January in blizzards but to give her lessons in how to think which gives him pneumonia and he dies who is this wimp only the man who gives us all lessons in how to think french mega genius engineer philosopher and general whizz Rene Descartes whom we'll get to after a few more bars okay where are we that teacher Kazu bond remember knows scalia who invents that chronology thing and who's boss prince morris makes military advances improved on by swedish King Gustavus whose daughter Christina runs away to Italy after she's caused the death of philosopher Rene Descartes speaking of which she has what Descartes thinks about the universe Descartes thinks the universe works a bit like this modern water supply control center because back then water power runs everything so Descartes thinks of everything plants animals people like machines operating on some kind of fluid power moving their bodies with valves and pumps and stuff sending fluid along tubes to make your muscles work he even takes this mechanical approach to the way the human brain works and since your brain controls your body he reckons it's a kind of fluid control center like this one is sending fluids down the nerves of course brain fluid is invisible because well but nobody's ever seen it mind you one english trap tries the brainy type in question is a top medical quiz at Oxford and he and other clever girls often meet elite at somebody's house so they can network on the latest stuff and be nerds together this is the guy Thomas Willis the wonderful thing about the past is you have to keep remembering the real world around them I mean these guys live at a time when they punish criminals by cutting them into four pieces the sewage in the streets would make you throw up and yet here they are 17th century propeller heads making like MIT surrounded by disease and filth with people being taken seriously dead of old age at 40 these guys are designing incredibly delicate instruments like this to observe oh the vacuum barometric pressure the lunar effect of the tides the nature of the blood willis himself takes on the last great nerds challenge how does the brain work and in 1664 he comes out with the book that will be the last word in brain ology for 150 years here we are the first time the new Descartes mechanical approach has been taken in medicine and a rave bestseller all over Europe the reason Willis blows everybody away with this load of scribble is because his books have some of the best brain pictures you've ever seen before or since take a look the first modern view of the brain which bit does what and Willis is the first person to finger this bit as having something to do with running your autonomic functions heart respiration that stuff and you're a neurologist thank Willis for having invented the word pretty amazing stuff a ho-hum to willis's pal who does all the drawings well take a look at what else he draws Willis's draftsman friend is a super egghead in a century of eggheads apart from this little job he's also expert in astronomy math optics weather forecasting and submarines as you can see he's also hot stuff on the drawing board and at the real thing in this case said Paul's Cathedral London of which he is the architect Sir Christopher Wren who gets the job when he's only 36 more than his fair share of success right mind you he does pretty well there too in shares now back then all you need to make money on the new stock market is money no problem all you have to do is persuade investors to buy shares in one of the newly invented banks it's the French who try at first persuaded by the guy who thinks up this nifty new idea a Scotsman called John Moore now the new shareholder bank in Paris is so successful the French government takes it over and in no time at all John law has persuaded the French whose economy is going down the toilet first by the way just start using an amazing new thing called paper money in 1717 thanks to John law on any French Street you can also buy shares in his new offshore investment properties any risk how dare you take a look at this evidence of how to get filthy rich it's the poster John law designs to act as a prospectus for what is touted to be an unequaled opportunity to make a killing but since this is before truth in packaging it's all smoke and mirrors stuff a beautiful city it hasn't been built yet fringed by scenic mountains there are none with obedient and hard-working locals that'll be the day and ships coming and going loaded to the gunnels with emeralds gold and silver in your dreams well French little old ladies put their savings into this scam likely we're going to make a thousand percent which some do and glories the cash to found a capital city in his overseas investment paradise called Louisiana and naturally gives a city a French name New Orleans well three years later law has introduced the word millionaire into the language has taken the title Duke of Arkansas and is about as rich as you can get when things go inevitably right down the toilet see the only legal thing about John law is his name basically the whole Louisiana thing is one gigantic gamble of course it all goes wrong all kinds of shady underworld types and crooked politicians get in on the game there's a national scandal followed by a run on the banks followed by the words every investor loves to hear sorry you lose so what does lore do next jump ship over the border from France into Switzerland leaving thousands of ruined investors in his wake jumping up the window things in France go from bad to catastrophic now you'd think the French reaction to this mess would be to ship their financial advisors off to prison somewhere and take austerity measures instead they'd do something totally insane which I'll get to after we stop for a quick catch-up you remember Descartes and his mechanical view of the brain and Willis's brain book with pictures by the guy who builds st. Paul's and who also makes money in stocks and shares as does John Law with his great Louisiana scam that bankrupts the French economy when it all goes wrong now for the bit I mentioned about insanity this the penniless French actually bankrolled the American Revolution a matter which must have been the subject of a severe embarrassment at the military debriefings held when it was all over and the impossible had happened a few American rebels had beaten of British Army right people I don't know how we let it happen but these are the facts the John law disaster sends the French economy down the tubes as you know next slide please the key player in what happens then a French guy called Carol de beaumarchais at some point the French Secret Service recruits beaumarchais and in 1776 he goes on a mission next slide please to London his impression is the British would like an excuse to pull out of North America so the French set him up with this fake company at this secret location in Paris Stage one infiltration of French agents into British America begins with the top secret purchase of 25,000 muskets 200 cannon and powder for the American rebels and this document congressional approval of undercover French military advisers then troops then ships than a Navy blockade all this of course totally deniable well you know the result run the tape the American Revolution which bankrupt the French economy so next slide please this guy a Swiss banker Jacques Necker is called in to sort out the mess now he does a smoke and mirrors job a fake national budget accounts rampant inflation by 1789 he's been fired and that triggers the French Revolution nikkor takes the same road as John lorded remember over the border to Switzerland to be forgotten by history unlike brother tape please his daughter as you will see Nikko's daughter marries and becomes Madame de Stael well-known as the author of a book on German culture and a general pain in the ass most of her life is spent in bedrooms with more lovers than she can count and with crowds of fans who sit around in the same bedroom while she holds forth on any subject you'd care to name these exercises in vacuous chatter become known as salons and to starves become famous all over Europe one thing this lady does not lack is an opinion now at one point when she's writing that book on Germany she gets deeply into the back-to-nature Romantic movement and meets a romantic writer and real drip named August 4th ladle who falls for her Slagle becomes dishtowels in significant other and learns to live with the fact that well it's never gonna happen so he settles for the role of lapdog and breakfast maker meanwhile writing the rules for the New Romantic movement as he and Madame de Stael rocking around Europe form and his middle name becomes laughingstock to stir things up even further slay girls wife has run off with one of his fellow Romantic gurus that guy up there the thinking woman's fancy Friedrich von Schilling who applies a romantic principle to everything and invents a new buzzword Nature philosophy now the ingredients to the new nature philosophy philosophy are quite simple nature overall has oneness and symmetry and according to French shelling if you're one of the new Industrial Revolution scientists oneness and symmetry should be your major project well for most of them that's easy to say but where to start first it's a chicken and egg problem funnily enough the guy who makes sense of shillings scrambled thoughts does just that he looks at chickens and eggs the guy who eggs everybody home to further study of oneness and symmetry lives here in a stone by 1828 he knows all there is to know about what happens to an embryo chicken from conception to hatch out that's why his face is on Estonian money today he's the country's greatest expert so to speak here he is this impact type name of bond bear a medical doctor whose research discoveries tend to make the scientific feathers fly even today here where he lives in the city of Tartu von Behr concentrates his attention on that business of nature being all oneness and symmetry as a result wait for this he classifies every living thing into four different symmetrical shapes a scientific breakthrough with which you could say he lays an egg well things are symmetrical aren't they underwhelming Paris government you say it's at this point that von Behr chickens out of the symmetry business and starts the work that I've been making all those bad jokes about after years of eye strain staring down the microscope at the most minut detail of bits of chicken you're getting the point von Behr is eventually able to make an announcement that will change only life as we know it take a sneak preview see those folds running along the center of the embryo tissue von Behr reckons they rolled up into nerves and spinal column but his really amazing contribution as an embryologist is something that will knock everybody's developmental socks off try a time-lapse view von Behr says this is the way chicken embryos develop from general blobs of tissue to more and more specialist bits legs wings beak all the things that chicken needs and this is a general rule development goes from the general to the specific okay blindingly obvious to you but remember back then nobody knows this stuff especially the really big news von Behr comes out with and that if you look very carefully at the way embryos develop in the case of humans along the way we pass through stages that in lower life forms would be the fully developed stage with gills for instance and a temporary but well-developed tail so at one point we human embryos go through a stage as complex as say a grownup oyster so not surprisingly the guy who first floats vaughn bears ideas to the scientific establishment does so after he's been at sea for a number of years he does his work in places that are holiday destinations today New Guinea East Australia the Pacific that stuff he's a young naval officer called Huxley and his obsession at the time is picking up on that developmental work of on bears like does it happen under the water as well so he spends most of four years between 1846 and 1850 splashing about in the water every time they park the boat well Her Majesty's ship rattlesnake actually which is doing an absolutely gripping survey of the South Seas but what turns Huxley to jelly with excitement is this jellyfish I suppose the really convenient thing about the gloves is if you can see through them so you can make all kinds of acute observations about how to chop them up before you actually do it so Huxley does make acute observations well more like earth-shattering discoveries actually Huxley sees that jellyfish seemed to consist of two kinds of tissue an outer skin tissue and an inner muscle tissue which is just what von Behr says his chicken embryos seemed to be made like so earth-shattering bit coming up now is the humble jellyfish lower and simpler than which it is difficult to find connected in some way to chickens and maybe even cats dogs apes and maybe even well I bet you're there ahead of me when I say that Huxley takes these ideas back to England we find himself agreeing with a guy who's saying that this is all true but the probe that includes human beings as well and getting into deep doo-doo with the church who don't like at all the idea of connecting humans with animals ladies and gentlemen in the blue corner theological champion for the Church of England Oxford bishop soapy Sam Wilberforce in the red corner representing science the thinking woman's fancy dr. th Huxley now ladies and gentlemen some of the highlights of this incredible match and the bell goes Wilberforce goes straight for the juggler everything the man writes is hypothetical there's not a fact in sight but lay buries the book is full of facts and as for it being hypothetical so is the wave theory of light and yet you are prepared to accept that another Sunday parts from Wilberforce species simply do not change if you look at ancient Egyptian tombs there they all are exactly the same cats pigeons people that's why he comes back what our right cross this is the best explanation for where species come from so far and now the killer exchange tell me which of your grandparents was descended from an ape touch these are the ropes and then I'd rather be related to enabled than to a man of ability and position who used his brains to pervert the truth thanks to Huxley the new theory survives all attacks and lives on to this day to explain how instant coffee and jeeps lead to nylons and stocking machines smashed by Luddites who are defended by Byron who in Turkey meets John Galt dodging the same blockade that inspires the star-spangled banner really an English song all about a Greek poet discovered by a publisher whose son-in-law his pals with Scalia of chronology Fame whose military boss Morris inspires Gustavus of Sweden father of the runaway Christina whose teacher de cartes mechanical universe inspires the book on brains by Willis illustrated by the architect of some poles Christopher Wren who's into investments like the Louisiana scam that ruins France and the French finance minister whose daughter is the opinionated dishtowel whose romantic pals get Huxley into jellyfish so he can defend the theory of evolution that survives to become the evolutionary explanation for everything and proving as I said at the start but life is no picnic you

Channel: SlimaksClass

Views: 24,177

Rating: 4.8216562 out of 5

Keywords: Connections3, 01

Id: Pe_fOLdcqtE

Length: 52min 4sec (3124 seconds)

Published: Thu May 17 2012