"I suppose making these programs and watching them is a little bit like finding your way through an historical Iabyrinth." "And this program is going to be full of strange twists and turns, but, ironically, we're going to end up back here, in Indiana, in this labyrinth." "Because there's more to what you're looking at than meets the eye." "See, nearly 200 years ago, the people who founded a small, utopian community here in Indiana dreamed of a better life." "alas for them, the dream died." "But because of the strange way history works, maybe for us it didn't because of this." "Oh, the dream?" "They named this place after it." "The story starts here on the eastern Pacific Rim with one of its more meaningful products, the microchip, which runs only the entire modern world." "It's so commonplace, this little thing, isn't it, that most of the time, you don't even know it's there:" "in your car, your TV, your washing machine, or here in what most people agree is the world's cleanest city." "Singapore." "Some people say Singapore and the people here all work a bit like a giant microchip:" "efficient, automatic, logical, untiring, productive." "And one of the things that makes Singapore the world's cleanest city is the fact that this runs this," "Singapore's super-high-tech garbage incinerator thanks to what happened in 1945 when an American called ShockIey discovered something extraordinary about a crystal." "If you add impurities to some crystals, you can end up with spare electrons on many of the crystal atoms-- here, the ones in red." "If you then send into the crystal a minute electrical charge like this, it kind of knocks the spare electrons off their atoms, and they leave the crystal as a much bigger electric charge." "So tiny charge in, big charge out." "So the crystal acts like an amplifier." "ShockIey and his team called it a transistor." "Now, the first crystal ShockIey used was a crystal called germanium." "No prizes for guessing where a mineral called germanium gets its name." "Ja wohl, Germany." "Discovered by a German in 1885 name of WinkIer, who is so good at analyzing minerals because he's done nothing else all his life." "well, he has done one other thing." "WinkIer designed the first machine for making sure there was no junk in the gasses going up industrial chimneys, which kind of matters when you run an incinerator to burn unspeakable muck like this." "So you can thank WinkIer for today's clean environment." "But apart from germanium and hot air," "WinkIer's real fuII-time business was cobalt, a mineral that dyes things blue, the kind of blue you need when you're into expensive fakes" "Chinese fakes, I mean." "And if you've ever tried to buy a Ming vase, you'II know why there was a market for fakes." "It costs an arm and a leg." "Oh, and they're blue, of course, and cobalt is the only stuff that will take the high temperatures you need to make porcelain, so the real Ming chinaware had also used cobalt." "The story picks up not in China but here in istanbul in Turkey." "Because istanbul is the link back to the Chinese porcelain masters and how they came across the cobalt they used." "Now, istanbul may not exactly be where the elite meet today, but back in the middle Ages, it was a kind of world trade center, because this was the western end of the silk Road, the great trade route that started" "in China way out to the east and ended here." "One day in the 1 4th century, out along the silk Road at a place called Kashan in Iran, the traveling Chinese traders found this stuff, blue tiles colored blue by cobalt." "So at incredible expense, they took the stuff back home to China, which is why Ming porcelain is blue and costs a Iot and why I'm telling you all this in a Turkish graveyard." "Look in here." "This is a tomb." "And even when I tell you... whose tomb it is and you get a look at it... you may still not be all that impressed." "But you should be, because the chap lying in state in here is SueIeyman the Magnificent, history's absolutely top Turk." "And you can tell that, because when something was that special in the islamic world, they said it with Kashan blue tiles." "Look at the walls." "Now, I said that those blue tiles were only ever used in very special islamic places, and you may still feel you haven't seen one yet." "Okay, you want special?" "Here's special." "The incomparable mosque at the heart of old istanbul called Aya Sofia." "The greatest tiIers in the islamic world were brought here to cover the walls, no expense spared." "Which is why Aya Sofia is one of the wonders of islam." "well, kind of, because the ironic thing about all this amazing islamic decor is that the guys who did it used the tiles for a great cover-up job." "See, the original builders and decorators of this place weren't islamic at all." "They'd started out as a banned underground movement, and you can tell that from the materials they used for their decor." "Look, if you put little bits like this all over the wall, each one at a different angle, they reflect the light; see?" "Just what you need down a dark hole, where the Christians were, designing the mosaics that the islamic artists would copy and then cover up centuries later, mosaics that would reflect the imperial glory of Byzantium... once the Christians came out of hiding" "when the emperor made them official and then gave the whole of the West to the Pope in a document called The Donation of Constantine." "1 ,000 years later, some italian scholar called VaIIa reveals the document on which the Pope's authority rests is a fake, probably by the Vatican." "Which brings us, as I'm sure you were expecting, to a funeral." "It's being held not long after VaIIa's shock revelations in the small central italian town of Todi just north of Rome." "But the news to emerge from this funeral may not be quite what you're expecting." "The surprising thing is, it isn't VaIIa's." "Surprising because back then, you just don't go on the front page with a Vatican expose like that and stay alive." "So whose funeral is it?" "It's for an ecclesiastical godfather who'd saved VaIIa's neck and the necks of everybody else here, paying their respects for similar favors, one of whom is a Portuguese type called Martins who's the head of portugal's secret oceanic exploration agency," "about which he's saying nothing on account of it's the equivalent of the Department of Defense and NASA rolled into one." "We're on the main channel just above the 27 buoy." "I'II be cutting across." "Now, I said NASA because Martins' explorers are like NASA people:" "right out on the edge." "well, back then, what they're up to is as mind-bIowing and dangerous as going to the moon was for us, because what they're planning is to boldly go where no European has gone before." "They've been down the coast of Africa for gold and then out across the Indian Ocean to the Far East for spices, but this is the big one:" "the vast, trackless, unexplored wastes of the atlantic." "...one side of the bridge." "Now, that's nothing to a modern, sophisticated ship like this." "But to the Portuguese, it was off the edge of the known world." "Now, the Portuguese were able to take risks like that because they had various bits of equipment that added up to the 15th-century equivalent of satellite navigation." "Now, other people have that stuff, as well as the Portuguese, but what nobody else knows is the mysterious business of running up the latitudes, for which you need this secret Portuguese gizmo." "Okay, you go north until the polestar is a certain number of degrees above the horizon on your quadrant, and you measure those degrees like this." "The star's up there." "Line it up, check the plumb line's free, and read off the angle there." "And when the polestar is 39 degrees above the horizon, you turn right, and sooner or later, you'II hit Lisbon, home, and mother." "And that's why nobody else was doing the one thing that really makes the Portuguese like NASA:" "deliberately losing sight of land, going on secret navigational proving exercises deep into mid-AtIantic, which is why in 1 497" "Martins is able to tell his explorers something quite extraordinary." "To forget hugging the coast of Africa on the way to India like everybody else does, instead to take the best winds by going due south down the atlantic from the Cape Verde islands and then left around the bottom of Africa." "It works." "So three years later, a fellow called CabraI tries doing the same thing, only he goes a little bit too far west and bumps into brazil." "So here we are in Amsterdam, because the Portuguese colonized brazil with Jews who wanted to get away from persecution." "But after a while, the Inquisition arrived in brazil, so a Iot of them hightaiIed it back but not to portugal;" "here to holland." "See, in the 17th century, holland had probably the rarest and most valuable commodity of any country anywhere:" "tolerance." "So refugees of all kinds came here and in the case of the Portuguese Jews became diamond merchants, in the business of light and reflections." "And speaking of light and reflections and such, one of the kids of one of these Portuguese refugees, a young guy called Baruch Spinoza, goes into Iense grinding to make a living after he's achieved the unique distinction" "of being called a heretic by Jews, catholics, and Protestants." "Reason being, Spinoza's got everybody all stirred up with stuff about how mathematics is the only truth and how everybody should have absolute freedom to speak and think as they choose." "Spinoza's less revolutionary optical work attracts the attention of the M.I.T. of the period, the english royal Society, who promptly zip over here to see what other scientific ideas are being floated in holland." "It doesn't take them long to get all excited by an ex-draper's assistant called Leeuwenhoek, who's got a new microscope and is seeing things." "well, that's what the royal Society think when they take a really close look at his drawings of what he's been seeing:" "at 250 times magnification, what looks like minute little animals." "Now, this blows everybody away, because all these creepy crawlies are apparently creeping and crawling inside us and everything else in the world." "Leeuwenhoek's little organisms also went over very small in switzerland, where they had an unexpectedly literary effect, which is why I'm here in this charming little restaurant on a lake in switzerland, because in 1813, for the average joe," "the key question is, "Is life as we know it just moving too fast for people to take?"" "I mean, every day, new scientific amazements:" "gravity, chemistry, physiology, electricity, geoIogy-- anything, it seems, with a "y" in it." "Thank you." "AII of which seriously underwheIms one particular bunch of scribbling misfits on holiday here in Geneva-- the Romantic megastars Byron and shelley and their child brides-- over here for a bit of wife swapping and dope smoking and stuff like that." "Anyway, one night at dinner, the conversation gets 'round to the subject of microscopic creepy crawlies and how, apparently, some scientist has galvanized a piece of pasta and made it come alive." "well, back then, who knew?" "So SheIIey's wife, Mary, gets all exercised about how "science will destroy us all by tampering with the forces of nature"" "and decides to write a novel about it." "Mary's novel is all about a scientist called Victor who does too much tampering, and it all goes horribly wrong." "You already know what I'm talking about, because you know what Victor's other name was:" "Frankenstein." "But Mary had a secret agenda inspired by her socialist father." ""Frankenstein" was really an attack on the kind of technology that she thought was destroying people's lives in the unspeakable conditions of industrial revolution factories." "One of her father's friends and admirers was a young factory manager called Owen, who turned his factory in New Lanark, scotland, into a kind of workers' paradise." "We'd describe Owen as politically middIe-of-the-road, but back then, he was revolutionary." "So seeing no future for his plans in Britain," "Owen took his revolutionary ideas where most revolutionaries at the time did..." "America." "well, Indiana." "Which brings us back to where we started:" "here in New Harmony, remember?" "So this is how the Harmonists would have made candles," "like this." "Owen's dream, still described to tourists today, was to set up a utopian socialist commune away from the factories and the exploitation." "So when the tiny American settlement of New Harmony came up for sale, he jumped at it." "I will take them and straighten them." "But the reason I started the show in New Harmony has to do with a fellow called MacIure, who had been so impressed by the New Lanark experiment, he offered start-up money to Owen for the New Harmony venture." "And what brings a final twist in my story is that besides liberal causes, MacIure had one other passion." "Rocks." "By the time of New Harmony, MacIure had been to every state and territory of America with his bag and his hammer, chipping, cataloguing, and collecting stuff like that." "And in 1817, he produced what would turn out to be the first and only proper geological map of the United States for the next 25 years." "Looked like this." "I won't bore you with the detail." "Different rocks, different colors." "But there in the area where Kansas, Missouri, and oklahoma touch," "MacIure identified something that brings my story full circle:" "the kind of mineral deposits that in the 20th century would provide the germanium ShockIey needed for his first transistor." "And that's why New Harmony maybe wasn't a failure in the end, because if we in the modern world are ever to find a way to unite the fragmented post-CoId War chaos that the 21st century looks like becoming," "it'II be with what the transistor made possible:" "the open-access, global communications network that might give us a chance to build what those people tried to here all those years ago:" "a community where we can all live together in new harmony."