"And here to get the good times rolling are the hosts of "The Big Spin,"" "Geoff Edwards and MaiqueI Suarez." "Hi, MaiqueI." "Nice to see you." "Thanks a Iot." "welcome to "The Big Spin."" "Yes, the week has gone by..." "Sometimes you'd never believe the way the wheel of fortune can turn, and incredible things happen-- here, for instance, in the studio where they do the california lottery and make somebody very rich once a week." "Or, as you'II see from the story I'm about to tell, how once upon a time, against all the odds, something happened that could be the reason you're alive today thanks to the way chance works" "or, as they say here, thanks to "The Big Spin."" "I suppose if you were ever going to stake your life, you'd bet on a doctor, wouldn't you?" "I mean, when the chips are down, nothing matters more than your health, does it?" "Nothing to gamble with, is it?" "FunniIy enough, the greatest medical discovery of all time started in a casino in world War I converted to a British army field hospital in France, which is ironic, because if you had known how this medical thing was going to turn out," "you would have never have bet on it in a million years." "Because the odds against all the pieces falling together the way they did were 1 ,000 to 1 ." "still, that's history." "well, this next bit is." "Okay, it's summer in england." "The war is over, and this is the problem:" "Wounded troops are being delivered back home in critical condition because of the useless antibiotics they were given in France." "So when one of the doctors in that casino I mentioned comes home with the ambulance teams, he goes into antibiotics." "Now, this guy is famous for chaos, and one day in 1928 in the summer, he comes back from his holidays, and there's his usual pile of unspeakable bacteria dishes where he left them, in the sink, half covered by antiseptic liquid." "So he idly picks one up and sees nothing." "well, some mold, something blown in from the street." "So far, so what?" "And then he sees this, a zone of dead bacteria around the mold, killed by the mold." "Okay, this is what I meant by 1 ,000 to 1 ." "First off, this was one of the few dishes that hadn't slipped into the antiseptic liquid." "And then, of all of them, this was the one he picked up." "And then he'd left the window open for the bug to get in from the street." "And then the bacteria and the mold grow at different temperatures:" "cool for the mold and hot for the bacteria." "And that's exactly what the London weather did for the right number of days in the right sequence for this to happen, without which emergencies would be emergency emergencies, because this is penicillin." "AII thanks to alexander fleming's untidiness." "The ironic thing is, penicillin works by killing the diseased bacteria cells, and how cells work was discovered by a German called Virchow, who had a total obsession for tidiness." "Back in 1848, Virchow was turning berlin upside down-- by the way, this isn't BerIin-- with wild talk about epidemics being caused not by disease but by bad education and no proper sanitation." "So the obsessive Virchow was deeply into public health, and because he'd made that link between disease and social conditions, he helped to kick off the idea that prevention is better than cure." "Which is why in 1870 he was advising on the new berlin sewage works, which, as I admitted before, isn't this place, because this is istanbul." "And this is a bit of the ancient istanbul Roman water supply, which is why we're here, because at the height of his otherwise tidy and superefficient medical career," "Virchow did something that seems right out of character." "Because he took up with a complete weirdo, and that's why I'm saying this in a subterranean Turkish reservoir, because this is where Virchow came with his weirdo pal, who was nuts about anything underground and classical." "Meet the weirdo in question, Heinrich SchIiemann, and wife." "SchIiemann is an ex-grocery assistant and dye salesman who's made his fortune during the california gold rush, where he developed a fatal attraction for precious metal." "well, in 1870, he studies Greek, goes nuts about the Trojan War, and decides to prove Homer was telling the literal truth, because he, Heinrich SchIiemann, is going to find the fabled city of Troy," "a project about which he becomes quite deranged." "well, since he knows as much about archeology as I do, he kind of destroys the site, falls to find Troy, and accidentally turns up a fortune in gold and jewels." "This makes him internationally infamous, because he kind of steals it." "well, what would you call secret shipments back home?" "fortunately, this tendency to give the treasure to his wife and members of his family gets noticed, and Heinrich has to give it all back, pay the fines, get thrown off the site, and the whole time denying he'd done anything wrong." "AII he gets to keep are the publicity pictures of Mrs. SchIiemann wearing all the gear that he so nearly got away with." "Which is why we find ourselves in this police car, heading back to the station with what I believe is described as "the alleged perp,"" "because what helped to save SchIiemann from his criminal tendencies and gave some of his wilder archaeological ideas a bit of respectability was Virchow, who went along for the ride, tried to keep SchIiemann on the right side of the Iaw," "and helped to collect the kind of evidence that might make SchIiemann's case, because Virchow was also an expert witness in the hot new science of anthropology and the history of human development." "No, that person came in here before under a different name." "So that's the link between Virchow and the police, because that hot new science he was involved in made police procedures what they are today." "That's where all those descriptions came from that the cops used to use to describe suspect and victim." "still do, in some places." "AII this business of classifying people started with anthropology back around 1780 with a German called BIumenbach, another freak for putting things in order-- in his case, only the physical characteristics of the entire human race." "Mr. Doe, what is your date of birth?" "1/29/65." "Your height?" "5'10"." "And your weight?" "185." "To be fair to BIumenbach, it was about time somebody did the job, because back in the 18th century, people believed the kind of stuff that these days only policemen hear in the middle of the night from haIIucinating drunks:" "that there were people with eyes in their shoulders or no heads or backward-pointing feet." "That stuff." "Okay, does he have any medical problems?" "well, BIumenbach pretty well proved that anybody who thought that way was-- how shall I put this-- out of their skull?" "Okay, great, thanks." "well, skulls, I should say, which BIumenbach collected in order to make lists of all their characteristics so he could classify each type of skull on the basis of its shape, which is when he came up" "with those descriptions I mentioned that the police used up until recently, because it was BIumenbach who invented classifications" "like "Caucasian."" "This classifying mania was quite wide-spread at the time, because all was not rosy in what you might call the garden of knowledge." "What you're looking at is where all that classification stuff started:" "in 17th-century english horticulture, where, in spite of appearances, things were, to put it mildly, panic stricken and where the cure for the panic was to stick names all over everything in the hope that would make the nightmare go away," "the nightmare being America, because nobody had the faintest idea what to do with the hundreds of new American species being discovered by settlers all the way from the top of Canada to the bottom of Peru... and, by this time," "giving everybody a bad case of data overload." "I mean, if you've never seen one of these things before, what do you file it under?" ""Pine tree"?" ""apple"?" ""Any other business"?" "Not to mention chiIies and chocolate and tobacco and maple syrup and all the other weird things pouring in here to be given a name." "And that's why I mentioned panic attack at the beginning, because in the face of new and unknown species by the zillion, all they knew was... they didn't know." "And then in 1624, a legal eagle called Francis Bacon comes up with the answer:" "a book on how to keep your head when all about you are losing theirs." "Make big lists, says Bacon, and correlate everything." "Above all, numbers is key." "Stick to numbers, and you'II be dead to rights." "Which brings me to a church and a baby." "polly, I baptize you in the name of the Father..." "See, it turns out Bacon's thing about numbers will answer the prayers of somebody in the insurance business name of Richard Price because of the way numbers and newborn babies go together." "It all begins in the parish of AII souls," "Northampton, england." "But first, since we're at a christening, a few words on the subject of mortality." "This is a matter of Iife and death." "It's a Church of england parish register." "Womb-to-tomb data in here." "Take a look." "Here it is, moIdering, ignored, all over england since the year dot." "And then this fellow called Grant notes perceptiveIy that you can use this stuff in these things, births and deaths, to work out the size of the population." "Receive this light..." "Which is something people suddenly care about, because little babies grow up to become taxpayers, and Grant's data now make it possible for a government to do some expectabIe revenue planning." "AII things bright and beautiful..." "So this event is future money in the bank." "AII things wise and wonderful, the Lord God made them all." "These Iife-and-death figures in here are just what the new 18th-century insurance companies need, because your premium is based on life expectancy, right?" "So Price has analyzed the data in here and worked out that in 1769, the average little person's life expectancy is 26.41 years." "The Lord God made them all." "Not much, eh?" "But Price's stuff really knocks the socks off everybody in science, because his analytical techniques kick off statistical math." "Just what you need if you're a scientist... and running away to America." "Which a friend of Price's called PriestIey did shortly after he'd stunned the world with this, a new miracle health cure:" "carbonated water." "One evening in 1803, PriestIey went to yale for dinner, where he met and charmed the pants off a nervous young professor of chemistry called Benjamin SiIIiman, who figures in this tale because he had hypochondria, nervous disorder, vertigo, lethargy," "and anything else he could imagine, as a result of which... he was to bring new meaning to the life of the American teenager." "Because SiIIiman kicked off that great American institution:" "the soda fountain." "I don't think SiIIiman had anything like this in mind with his first New York fizzy water shop." "And anyway, he was a lousy businessman, so the venture failed, which is why you'd never heard of him." "Okay, try his son, SiIIiman Jr., another chemist who was the fellow who put America on the road, because he analyzed some black muck oozing out of the ground in pennsylvania and called it petroleum, which went over big" "with car-crazy American teenagers, wouId-be oil barons, and French fossil hunters." "Now, I'II get to the French in a minute, but meanwhile, 50 years before SiIIiman, a surveyor named Smith was staying at a place in the west of england, getting ready to, well, rip the place up." "See, at the time, half of england looked like a building site, because the country was in the grip of a canaI-digging craze." "That's why Smith was here." "The problem was, the roads were so bad, they were slowing down the industrial revolution, and canals would be quicker and cheaper." "When Smith's survey got into the geology of the place, he noticed you could identify strata, because they always had the same fossils, thus inspiring a boring Frenchman called d'Orbigny to discover a new fossil called foraminifera," "which turned up in so many places, it gave him an idea." "To line up all 27 rock layers, which there appeared to be below the ground, in chronological order." "Time zones, if you Iike." "Obvious enough to you, I know, but back then, profoundly meaningful." "You get a feel for the fanatically detailed nature of this man's intellectual convoIutions when you realize he then took his 27 time zones and placed every known fossil in one or other zone." "That's 18,000 species of fossil, one at a time." "Imagine what his dinner table conversation must have been like." "still, as it turned out, his little foraminifera were just what SiIIiman and those wouId-be oil barons were looking for, because when you drill an oil well and your core sample comes up and the first thing you see is foraminifera," "you know the second thing you're going to see is oil, because where there's one, there's almost always the other." "only problem is how to know where to drill the well in the first place, which brings us, as you might expect, to world War I artillery and a Russian nobleman." "welcome to life in the trenches." "Mud and shells, mostly." "well, shells, mostly." "So if you could target their guns and knock them out, you might stay alive." "So that Russian aristo I mentioned, Boris GoIitsyn, finds a great way to pinpoint a gun from the vibrations it makes through the earth with a new trick:" "using electricity to record the shakes." "You know how you generate electricity by moving a magnetic field inside a copper coil." "well, here's an approximation of what happens next." "Boris hangs a small magnet on a pendulum inside a coil." "If the earth shakes for any reason, Iike artillery firing, the pendulum rocks, the magnet swings, and that causes a varying current in the coil." "Use that varying current to shake a pen on a roll of paper, and you get a trace that shows you the direction and distance of the guns." "And you can do the same trick for oil once you know how shock waves travel through the ground after they've bounced off the kind of rocks you know contain oil and once you've used explosive to cause the shock wave in the first place." "Sometimes... as in the case of this trace," "Nature provides her own shock waves." "When this... shows the kind of shake you get from that." "The chain of volcanos known as the Ring of Fire that runs all the way 'round the Pacific from here in Java to here in california, where they live with chance here in the " Big Spin" studio or out on the San Andreas fault," "where those shock waves make themselves felt in a rather particular way." "This is the kind of chance you have to reckon with if you live in one of the world's earthquake zones." "But then, as you've seen, life is full of chances for doctors, treasure hunters, anthropologists, gardeners, insurance brokers, chemists, oil men, and fossil hunters and people in california TV studios." "Okay, studio, Iet's wrap that one up." "So before the next quake hits, as you now know, for any advanced warning you may get, you can thank penicillin in the first place." "After it hits, of course, you may need to thank penicillin in the second place." "Good luck."