"welcome aboard the pride of the Cunard line, the magnificent "QE2,"" "for a cruise through history I think you'II find surprising." "They say over the years, the "QE2" has seen everything:" "good-Iookers, millionaires, fancy dressers, con men," "French engineers, war, treason," "Scottish dancing, and deliverance, which, funnily enough, is what this show is about." "I suppose, to continue the nautical metaphor, the general theme of this particular program is the way, throughout history, people keep on stirring things up..." ""making waves."" "What's it going to be today?" "curly." "The permanent wave is just one of the many ways in which the modern woman of today gets to mix and match, image-wise." "I mean, all you need is a beauty salon and money, and you, too, can be different every time you look in the mirror." "Thanks to mud packs and seaweed baths and hydrotherapy and collagen and the rest of the $20 billion spent on cosmetics every year, nobody has to look themselves anymore." "And to think, the whole mega-business was started in 1904 by a German called NessIer, whose sister hated curIers." "NessIer's secret lay in the goo he covered your hair with under these cardboard rollers." "Then he plugged you into his electric machine-- well, a set of heaters that gradually dried out the goo." "12 minutes later, you'd come out looking like a million dollars." "In a flash of advertising genius," "NessIer called these temporary curls a permanent wave, all thanks to the mystery goo, which would keep your hairdo in shape for long enough to matter, a godsend for desperate women, thanks to a godsend for desperate men." "The desperate men in question were california miners who'd run out of pickings and were desperate to find another grubstake." "well, in the 1880s in Death valley, they did, and started hauling out wagonIoads of it to the nearest railroad." "It was where NessIer's goo would come from, a mineral ore they'd found that you could extract a magic ingredient from called borax." "actually, "extract" makes it sound harder than it really was because all you did was crush, boil, filter, boil, crystaIIize out, and grind, and you got yourself a fine powder you could use for hairdressing" "and glassmaking, plastering, table linen, starch, electric light fittings, pottery glaze, enamel, mouthwash, eyewash, antiseptic, and water softening." "You might say with a sense of irony that borax was worth its weight in gold." "And speaking of gold, these miners were only in california at all because of something that happened earlier in the place most people think of when they talk about wealth:" "switzerland." "I know the Swiss have a bit of a stuffy image-- cuckoo clocks, yodeling, you know-- but not all Swiss are that dull." "One of them dug up half of california, which is why they found the borax in the first place, thanks to one of the greater con men in the early West." "The chap in question also sounds like a real creep." "He starts life here as a grocery assistant in switzerland." "Then he leaves his wife and five kids destitute and sets out for pastures greener, passing himself off variously as a member of the Pope's Swiss guard, a classmate of the French emperor, a Swiss Army captain," "and a French officer, none of which, of course, he is." "Name of Johann Sutter." "His greatest scams really persuade some people to give him a Iot of land so that he can set up a kind of commune, which he names modestly New switzerland, here, outside Sacramento, california." "He then buys reject Russian Army uniforms with which he dresses his people up to run a trading post he names modestly Sutter's Fort." "Then in 1847, he starts a new moneymaking venture 50 miles up the American river from his fort." "The plan is to sell timber to the settlers coming out West in dribs and drabs cut and dressed at Sutter's new sawmill." "well, that's the plan." "But this is where friend Sutter's life starts to go very slightly haywire." "On January the 28th, 1848, evening," "Sutter is passing the time fiddling the books or something typical." "Outside, it's chucking it down, blinding rainstorm, when suddenly, in through the door rushes the carpenter who's been building Sutter's sawmill for him and who says, "Pant, pant, psst, holy schmoIey." "" bolt the door." ""Don't breathe a word." "Top-secret, look at this."" "And he gives Sutter a rag containing a small rock." "They look it up in Sutter's encyclopedia." "I kid you not." "And when they do what it says they should do, they know what the rock is and what to do next, which is to put Sutter's sawmill here-- in what is now CoIoma, CaIifornia-- firmly on the map," "and then to change the course of history for the state of california, the United States, the world, and this program, because they're about to kick off the 1848 california gold rush." "It's weII-known that the people who make the real fortunes out of the california gold rush were the people who got there first." "It's less weII-known that they got there first thanks to something that had been brewing for some time back in england... because the english had spent the previous 200 years becoming totally addicted to teatime." "And the real connoisseur of a good brew-- that is, any english person-- will for the very best tea Ieaves-- that is, the first crop of the season-- sell their grandmother." "So you got the stuff from China to London ahead of anybody else, you could name your price, so the Americans did... charged double." "Why?" "well, they've always been go-getters, so they went and got." "Of course, the english didn't like that one little bit, took the wind right out of their sails... because the Americans pulled the trick with an amazing new ship with more sails than anybody had ever seen" "and a new, Iow, slimline hull, a ship designed to take a cargo of tea at incredible speed from China around the Horn and up the atlantic to London, a ship known as the Yankee clipper..." "in 1851 , the fastest ship in the world." "small wonder gold rush people in a hurry took a clipper from New York to San Francisco and got there first." "You know, history's full of irony because the reason the American clippers were able to take tea and then anything else to Britain-- and I mean, legally abIe-- was because the Brits changed their laws." "And they did so partly because of something else American, something that starved over 2 million people to death." "It was an American fungus, and in 1845, it arrived in ireland and destroyed the potato crop," "leaving the Irish nothing to eat, not almost nothing, nothing." "There were too many corpses that winter to bury." "When the sheer scale of the human tragedy and devastation finally dawned on the British, they changed their very restrictive import laws so as to let American ships bring in extra corn to feed the Irish." "But the gesture was too little and too late." "The American corn shipments convinced British industrialists that all anti-import laws should be abolished, and they used the latest means available to get that free trade message out to rally all their supporters." "It was a simple enough message, because free trade would mean cheaper imports like American corn, and that would mean cheaper bread, and that would mean lower wages and jobs and economic expansion and more money all around." "But the major political row created by the potato famine that let the American clippers bring their corn to Britain strengthened the hand of the free trade lobby in parliament." "although, they'd never have got the bill through the House if it hadn't been for some crooked politicians and some rather frank behavior... thanks to which the free trade lobby would be able to spread the word." "The frank behavior involved a number of definitely strange brown paper parcels, among other things, a dog, a bed, and a housemaid, all sent through the mail free." "This was a kind of weird shenanigans a reformer called RowIand hill exposed in 1836, when he started looking into the murky workings of the British post office." "It was all to do with fraudulent franking." "See, members of parliament had free franking privileges, and they were using them to mail this kind of stuff to their pals all over the country," "losing the government millions in revenue." "Not to mention the time wasted by postmen collecting money because you paid to receive a letter, not to send one." "And in any case, you couldn't read half of them because you paid by the page, so people wrote up, down, and sideways." ""What we need,"" "said hill to the people here in parliament," ""is post boxes" ""and a standard postage rate payable in advance with a stamp on an envelope."" "In 1839, parliament agreed... to this stamp, the penny black, and if you ever see one, grab it because it's worth a fortune today." "And once again, thanks to America." "That's who did the penny black:" "a printer from Massachusetts." "His main aim in life had been just to make good money, but I mean literally good money, on account of all the bad money floating around." "So this American printer solved that problem by making paper money designs so complex it was too difficult to fake." "His name was Jacob Perkin, and in 1804, he developed a printing technique that was so good, by 1818, he was over here trying it on the Bank of england." "No luck." "Then he bumped into RowIand hill, got the stamp deal, and you know the rest." "well, not quite." "Jacob Perkin had picked up his printing techniques from an earlier idea by an Irishman who developed copperpIate printing to churn out this stuff by the ton:" "printed chintz, by 1790, all the rage in America and Europe, when all that matching covers and curtains business started in a big way." "people put chintz on everything, and the brighter, the better." "Speaking of which, notice how crisp the colors are?" "This was the first time they could put a whole mix of colors together, even on top of each other, that wouldn't run when you washed the material." "And all thanks to a new color paste that used a new thickening agent." "well, thanks, really, to a worm-ridden heap of junk known back then as the French navy." "See, mid-17th century, they were down to 22 ships, and every one of them full of holes." "And then this guy called CoIbert takes over, decides to get a total grip on the country, and turn it into an economic superpower." "CoIbert commissions new fortresses all around France, builds a new navy, and offers tax breaks to anybody who'II go looking for foreign trade, one lot of which whizzes down Africa to senegal and starts sending back everything from slaves" "to tobacco to sugar cane and a Iot of this:" "gum from senegal trees, which the cotton printers would use as a thickener in their color paste." "Remember?" "But CoIbert would have felt really fulfilled if he could've seen all this garbage-- sorry, tourist income-- that one of his economic recovery ideas helped to generate to improve transportation, this:" "the canal du Midi." "CoIbert's canal du Midi went from Bordeaux on the atlantic to MarseiIIes on the Mediterranean." "So you didn't have to sail around Spain anymore." "In 1681 , it was the hottest thing in commercial transportation the Western world had ever seen and became the model for every canal that followed it." "One of the engineers who designed the canal was a fellow called Vauban, and he became a very big wheel:" "marshal of France." "Designed this bridge, as a matter of fact, to carry the canal over a river." "Vauban's second greatest claim to fame was building all those French border fortresses I mentioned." "His first claim to fame was inventing a new way of using trenches to dig your way close enough to a fortress' walls to blow it up, about which we Brits could've cared less until certain rebels tried the technique on us" "at the siege of Yorktown during that unfortunate matter Americans insist on calling" "The War of Independence, which we, uh, lost and all went home." "well, not quite all." "There was one bunch of peopIe-- 100,000 of them-- who stayed on until the Americans started hanging them." "I mean, of course, all the American loyalists, the one in five of the population who'd supported the British and who would now suffer for having backed the wrong side." "As far as the Americans were concerned, they were all traitors." "And a certain Judge Lynch strung them up so fast, he gave the english language a new word." "So by about 1789, most of the ones left" "Iit out for a new life in a new country with another bunch of unfortunates who had also lost everything here in scotland." "This was the time of the clearances, the fancy name for the eviction and starvation and brutality and death happening in the Scottish highlands as the people were forced out to make way for moneymaking sheep." "And once the absentee landlords, many of whom lived in London, had got rid of their inconvenient tenants, a new genteeI scotland was born with bagpipes and fake tartans and CeIt revival poetry and baronial halls, a kind of 19th-century Disney version of the highlands." "This image of scotland we all have today was invented by the Victorians." "These ancient highland games only started in 1832, and Scottish dancing is really haIf-French." "Even the short kilt was designed by an english industriaIist to stop the Iong ones" "Scottish factory workers usually wore getting caught in the machine." "meanwhile, the real highIanders were long gone across the sea to join those American loyalists in a new scotland called Nova Scotia." "By the early 19th century, thousands of them were arriving in any ship they could get passage on... a fact not unnoticed by one particular ex-LoyaIist from philadelphia." "His name was Abraham Kunders, and he had "lost" a small merchant fleet he'd operated down there till the time of independence and his hasty departure." "Good evening." "Mrs. Newby and Mr. Burke." "Nice to meet you, Captain." "Captain." "So he started again... in halifax, Nova Scotia." "Did remarkably well." "By 1833, his son SamueI Kunders had a small fleet and was running the first regular transatlantic passenger line once he got the contract to carry the British royal mail, which was going to be a real moneymaker because of the penny post." "Remember?" "So the company never looked back." "And if you're wondering why I got the name wrong," "I didn't." "At some point in the Kunders' life in America, some official made a misprint and changed the family name to Cunard." "well, that's it." "I hope this one hasn't left you all at sea."