"It's funny, isn't it, how the people who do something that changes the world all have to be dead before they get a special place in history?" "All for doing things like this?" "Well, just this once, meet somebody who changed the world and is still alive, in this case, somebody who would have made Sherlock Holmes green with envy." "He does the thing that changes history in 1984." "Here he is." "Professor Sir Alec Jeffries of Leicester University in England." "Take a good look at him." "Tell you what." "Take a really close look." "Wait a minute;" "I've got a better idea." "How about this?" "This couldn't be anybody else but Alec Jeffries." "Well, maybe among 30 billion people, if there were 30 billion people, there might be another 1 like this." "Because this is what Alec Jeffries comes up with in 1984:" "The DNA profile." "This one's his pattern, and you can produce it from any tiny bit of a human being left behind, say, at the scene of a crime." "That's why this thing changes life for detectives and maybe paternity suit lawyers and maybe dog tag manufacturers, because this is the identifier to end all identifiers." "These marks show the position of certain groups of molecules in Alec's DNA." "You can see that in my DNA, molecule groups come in different places." "Like all humans except for identical twins," "Alec Jeffries and I are two quite separate individuals, and separate is the first thing you do when you're making a profile like this." "Okay, here's your DNA, four particular molecules arranged in thousands of different groupings." "One group repeats, but at different points in each person." "Separate these out and identify their position with a radioactive tag like this;" "then wash all the other ones away." "The radioactive groups show up on photographic film like this." "That separating-out business is first done by this guy, Swedish chemist Arne Tiselius, back in the 1930s." "Tiselius takes proteins floating in a liquid and zaps them with electricity." "The charge makes the proteins move away from it." "The lighter the proteins, the farther they move." "And you can see them grouped according to weight like this with a kind of photography called schlieren, normally used for this." "Schlieren photography is mostly used in aerodynamic research when you're looking at how air behaves, because it shows shock waves as these dark lines, so you can design planes that go supersonic, like this one." "Now, one of the hotshots in this kind of work is a Hungarian called Theodore von Karman, who ends up in the U.S., where he kind of gets the Jet Propulsion Lab off the ground and then does much to get other things off the ground," "things like this." "Ignition." "Liftoff." "Von Karman's real obsession is with what happens to air at exciting moments like that or exciting moments like this." "One of the things that turns Von Karman on are these wingtip trails you see happening on a damp day." "Vortices, they're called." "Watch how they happen." "When an airflow streams over any surface, it breaks off the back of the surface..." "it's called shedding... in regular waves that kind of swirl around." "Interesting but academic, right?" "Not if you're on the Tacoma Narrows bridge in Washington state on November 7, 1940, when the bridge starts shedding vortices like this." "The regular swirl of the vortices sets up sympathetic vibrations in the bridge, and this happens." "And here's an action replay." "So much for interesting but academic matters." "And that's why there are holes in the sides of suspension bridges today:" "To stop them shedding vortices..." "or you." "Turns Von Karman into a real science big shot." "Speaking of which..." "Ever tried one of these virtual reality electronic games?" "I never hit anything." "But take a look at this game." "The name of the game is to fire but miss your own propeller." "Not easy." "Try again." "In 1915, this is no game." "When you're shooting at the enemy, shredded propeller is not what you want." "Back in World War I, that's one of the problems Von Karman fails to solve, but a pal of his called Anthony Fokker succeeds." "At the time, he's making the hottest planes around for the Germans." "In 1915, a French plane gets shot down over German territory, and on board, they find this neat little trick:" "On the propeller blades, steel wedges to deflect any bullet that comes from the machine gun on board, like this." "The ones that miss, of course, go through and hit the enemy plane." "That's the theory." "Fokker makes it work." "Look." "Fokker puts gearing between the machine gun and the propeller so the gun will only fire bullets when the propeller is not there." "So now all you have to do is point the plane and pull the trigger." "The new gizmo makes lots of money for comic book publishers." "Fokker's little trick creates one of the greatest comic book heroes of all time." "A real one, though... a guy known as the Red Baron." "Meet Manfred von Richthofen." "Manfred is a rich German aristocrat and daredevil who becomes a World War I fighter ace in his red Fokker plane, drinks a lot of champagne, and wins too many medals to wear." "For Manfred, war is just a great gentleman's game which he is better at than anybody else." "Now, up in the thick of it, aerial combat consists of careering around the place, desperately dodging bullets, and desperately wondering where you are." "Mind you, getting lost would be especially embarrassing for Manfred von Richthofen." "Tell you why when we've had a quick catch-up, after this guy crashes." "Okay, Jeffries does the DNA profile after protein separation with schlieren photography that shows vortices to plane-makers and bridge-builders." "Anthony Fokker solves the problem of shredded propeller, boosting the career of Manfred von Richthofen, who never gets lost because geography runs in his family." "See, Manfred's great-uncle is a great geologist who kind of puts geography on the map." "To start with, like great-nephew Manfred, he's pals with royalty, so he gets what he wants, which is to spend, oh, about 12 years on abstruse missions with oodles of boodle to go and do, well, whatever he likes." "Geography-wise." "This includes long tours of the Alps here, and China and California." "Then he gets back to his comfortable little university study and..." "don't you just know it?" "... writes yet another one of those giant multivolume works they all churn out." "This one's about Von Richthofen's new view of the view." "I mean, like this view." "A valley, right?" "Okay, here's how you break down the view:" "Mountains, trees and grass, and lake." "Now concentrate on one bit of the scene." "Tree." "Foliage." "Trunk." "Roots." "Grass." "Stems." "Soil." "Okay, that breakdown trick Von Richthofen calls chorography." "Hard to believe nobody ever thought of this before, don't you think?" "Anyway, then Von Richthofen takes the other stuff you see in the view..." "human beings and their effect." "Here's the valley again." "And here's the people effect." "Buildings." "Roads." "Garbage." "Traffic." "Cows." "Power lines." "Land that's been cleared." "So all this is what humans have done to the place, and Richthofen calls the people effect thing chorology." "Chorology and chorography:" "Ferdinand von Richthofen's contribution to the sum of human knowledge, and you heard it first here." "Oh, and you know what I said about it being strange nobody else has the idea before he does?" "Well, they do." "Ferdinand snitches the idea from another geographer called Ritter," "And don't panic;" "that's all I'm going to say about him." "Except Ritter does that people thing in reverse." "Places affect people, making people different from one place to another." "Or from one time to another." "And, of course, Ritter snitched this idea too... not from another geographer, you'll be happy to know." "Bit more romantic than that." "Actually, the guy in question kind of invents Romanticism." "Chorologically speaking," "I suppose it might have been because the place he was in at the time was a bit romantic." "Now, Romanticism, you'll recall, is all that back-to-nature, personal-feelings stuff, and it all kicks off here in 1776, in Weimar, Germany, with a nice guy named Herder, who the people here in Weimar really like." "But then, he is a nice guy and, like all nice guys, finishes last." "I mean, have you ever heard of him?" "Goethe, Wordsworth, Schubert, Keats:" "Yes." "Herder?" "That's because all those other famous people became famous by snitching Herder's new Romantic concept known as..." "wait for this... the balance of forces." "Now, this balancing experience thing happens, says Herder, because of the way your physical senses work." "Artistic experiences, says Herder, are really physical experiences." "Herder is deeply into touchy-feely flower power, the late-18th-century equivalent of psychobabble, and I suppose in regard to him and his ideas, the word that floats to mind is self-indulgent." "Herder's really big thing is his new view of history." "To understand the art of the past, you have to bury yourself in it." "Funny, that word bury." "The guy that Herder snitches the idea from in the first place comes up with the concept thanks to a new craze sweeping Europe at the time for digging things up." "In the middle of the 18th century, and Italian prince is noodling away down some holes on his property and discovers the long-Iost ancient Roman city of Pompeii, just outside Naples, buried for centuries under a ton of lava spewed all over it" "by the local volcano, Vesuvius." "Around 1762, Johann Winckelmann, the fellow from whom Herder steals these ideas, visits the new excavations of the ancient city that everybody down here is raving about, tells all his pals all over Europe, and then everybody else starts raving about it." "And guess what." "Yippee, just what we wanted." "Mass tourism is invented." "Thing about Winckelmann is, though, he's the first person to try and see ancient ruins the way they were when people lived in them, like, you know, out here in the streets doing a bit of shopping, just like us;" "living a small country town with public buildings and markets and squares just like we do." "So here they are, living lives like ours, doing dinner parties, having elections, checking on the entertainment guide for what's on, and nipping out in the evening to the theater for a show." "Winckelmann reckons the Greeks and Romans are, culturally speaking, boffo... the purest forms of theater, the best architecture, the greatest art." "And all this with a posh lifestyle to match." "Not bad, this little Roman ruin, is it?" "I mean, you can imagine a small, elegant cocktail party here 2,000 years ago not all that different from something you might want to go to yourself." "Winckelmann writes all this up, so Herder can snitch the best bits, in a thing about Greek and Roman art history." "Well, he really invents art history." "And bingo; there's a new coffee table craze:" "The big book about art." "And everybody goes crazy about the antique and the classical." "Meanwhile, all this classical stuff takes the world of the aesthete by the short and curlies." "In between the time when Winckelmann writes and Herder rewrites, the discovery of Pompeii kicks off a kind of intermediate style called neoclassical... imitation Greek and Roman decor for your stately home in England, for instance, which turns out to be a great career opportunity" "for the first woman ever in the history of painting to make it through the glass ceiling." "Well, she paints them." "In 1766, Angelica Kauffman is here in London, painting anybody who is anybody, including a guy she knew earlier in Italy, a pal of Winckelmann's, and by this time, they're acting like old friends." "Well, he would." "Act." "He's an actor." "Well, he's the guy who kind of invents what you and I would call acting." "Meet David Garrick." "He's the actor who becomes the manager of the Drury Lane Theatre in London in 1747 and replaces the boring classical backdrops they've used till then with modern, realistic stuff." "He brings in a scene-change curtain you can drop." "And while the play goes on, behind the curtain, they change the scene for the next act." "He also stops members of the audience from sitting up on the stage, chatting to the actors." "And most of all, he turns acting from the old, overdone, posing style to the modern realism we're used to today, moving around naturally with natural gestures." "This goes over very big at the box office and is probably why Garrick has his best idea." "See, here you are with all this new range of expression and stuff, very thespian, but not much good if nobody can see what you're doing because all they've got to light you with is a chandelier and a few candles." "So Garrick improves the lighting with reflectors behind the candles." "A few years later, Drury Lane Theatre is the first to try a new kind of lighting." "This, invented by a Swiss called Argand in 1874." "So simple, you wonder, "Why not before?"" "How does it work?" "Let me illuminate you." "Here's the place where you put the oil." "Here's where the oil goes into the lamp." "Here's the cotton wick, and next to it, the wick-moving mechanism." "And now for the amazing bits." "Amazement number one:" "The slits that let air in and up around the burning wick so you can get a brighter flame." "Now for amazement number two:" "The glass chimney, so not only do you get a brighter flame, but you also get it flicker-free." "Nobody has ever seen a brighter flame." "Comforting words if you're feeling under the weather." "Argand's lamp is great news for sailors when it goes into lighthouses." "Well, some sailors." "I'll tell you why after a quick catch-up." "Okay, remember Ferdinand von Richthofen's idea that people are affected by their environment, copied from Herder's idea that people are affected by their times, copied from Winckelmann's art history stuff he develops in Italy," "where Angelica Kauffman meets actor David Garrick, whose theater uses Argand lamps that go into lighthouses and cause problems like this?" "See, lighthouses make the ocean safer, so a lot more ships, so extra hassle for the people who live here in Hispaniola, today the Dominican Republic, but back in the 18th century, the stopping-off point for ships headed for Spain" "loaded with South American gold and silver, some of which gets spent building Hispaniola's capital city." "Now, you'd think that having tons of gold and silver would be nothing but good news for the Spaniards, right?" "Wrong." "As any economist will tell you, there's such a thing as having too much money." "Like, it causes inflation." "One of the other effects it has is to attract the kind of person whose standard phrase is" ""Have I got a deal for you," which is what happens here." "Talk about making waves." "The problem back then is the same today:" "Smugglers selling contraband and being chased by the coast guard people." "And the reason this is all happening this way today is because of all that gold and silver going home to Spain back in history, because those people in Hispaniola didn't like the way French and English smugglers were stopping their treasure ships" "and offering them all kinds of cheap contraband and getting paid with the gold that should have been going back to Spain." "So the coast guard got invented, and all this started happening." "Now, one day back in the 18th century, a Spanish gold ship sails off after they've bought goodies from some smugglers, in this case, off an English smuggler about to be clobbered by the new coast guard," "in this case, the guys on the right." "The coast guard eventually board the English ship, there's a big fight, and the English captain, a guy called Jenkins, gets his ear cut off." "The English pick it up off the deck, take it home in a box, and wave it about in Parliament and stir everybody up, which is why the Anglo-Spanish war that follows in 1739 is called the War of Jenkins' Ear." "Good, eh?" "Now, during that war, an English naval captain called Anson gets the job of taking six ships and over a thousand men to attack the Spaniards in the Pacific." "Which he does in spades." "Anson's crew get home with enough captured Spanish treasure to keep them for life, because there's so pitifully few of the survivors left alive to tell the terrible tale." "Of the thousand-odd men Anson starts out with, he gets home with 145, and not because of battles with the Spaniards, no." "Because of a dreaded mystery disease nobody understands... horrible swellings followed by terminal diarrhea, and then you croak." "Apparently something to do with the fact that the British are not yet known as Limeys." "I bet you've guessed it." "The disease Anson's sailors die of is scurvy, and the cure is lime juice." "Lime juice, Limeys." "Thanks to a young navy doctor who learns his trade from a certain professor Alexander Monro, who is, as far as we know, still here where they left him." "I make that point because Monro is the inspiration for an outbreak of grave-robbing at the time." "See, Monro teaches dissection, and his daily classes need a daily corpse, which his students get from the nearest plentiful supply:" "Any graveyard." "Anyway, Monro has studied all over Europe and has done enough cutting up to become top man in what's under your skin." "And in 1726, he puts it all together in "Anatomy of the Human Bones,"" "the last word." "Funny thing, in a book about skeletons, no skeletons." "Turns out Monro's ex-teacher, a guy from London called William Cheselden, is bringing out his own book on bones with pictures." "So what?" "Well, it could be because Cheselden's a Queen's Physician, he's a friend of Isaac Newton, he's a big cheese in medical circles, and he knows everybody who's anybody, and he got Monro into the Royal Society." "But I'm guessing." "Anyway, Cheselden's book." "Here we go." "No question what this book's about." "And are these pictures accurate." "All thanks to a crafty visual gizmo that, earlier on, has changed only the entire universe... in Austria, in a tent." "Okay, here's the tent, inside which, here's the man with the gizmo," "Johannes Kepler, in 1600, using a camera obscura." "A mirror outside the tent reflects a beam of light in through a pinhole to show a detailed image, which Kepler is tracing out." "It's the image of the partial solar eclipse happening outside, and Kepler's doing this because he's an astronomer." "Being a 17th-century astronomer means being heavily into astrological mumbo jumbo, so take a sneaky look at what friend Kepler is up to in the privacy of his own home." "See, Kepler is one of those "cosmic harmony" weirdos." "In the search for which, what does he come across but some ancient Greek bits of geometry that are supposed to have magic powers." "Here they are, called the five perfect solids." "Now, there's something deeply meaningful about these things that really turns Kepler on, so if you're ready for a truly cosmic revelation, here goes." "First, you nest the shapes inside each other." "Then you draw circles around each shape, so you get five circles." "Big deal." "Except astronomy types like Kepler think there are only five planets out there in space." "Get it?" "This is clearly God's cosmic design we're dealing with here." "Except Kepler finds a bit of a glitch when he checks out the astronomical data." "The planetary orbits aren't, in fact, circles." "They really look more like this." "But why?" "Kepler crunches the numbers and realizes that the sun's attracting the planets when they're close, so their orbits are really elliptical, not circular." "You think he's going to call the attraction gravity?" "Nope." "Holy Spirit force." "But whatever it's called, Kepler's discovery is one more proof that the Earth, Terra, is not the center of the universe but just a planet around the sun like all the others." "This amazing breakthrough is so much of a shock, it affects even the scientifically illiterate." "I mean people like poets, whom I will get to after a quick check on where the story has taken us so far." "You recall the Caribbean coast guards that start the War of Jenkins' Ear and how in that war, Anson's sailors die of scurvy, the cure for which is lime juice, discovered by the pupil of Alexander Monro," "who writes a skeleton book with no pictures because his old boss is doing one with pictures using the same camera obscura gizmo that Kepler draws eclipses with before he proves that the Earth is orbiting the Sun, scientific news that blows away absolutely everything" "everybody everywhere believes in, because, well, look at it from their point of view." "If the Earth isn't the center of the universe anymore but the Church says it is but now it isn't so the Church is wrong, in that case, which way is up?" "Or as poet John Donne puts it:" ""The new philosophy calls all in doubt." ""The element of fire is quite put out." ""The sun is lost, and the Earth," ""and no man's wit can well direct him where to look for it." ""And freely men confess that this world's spent," ""when in the planets and the firmament" ""they seek so many new;" ""they see all this is crumbled out again to his atomies." "'Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone."" ""All coherence gone."" "Makes the end of the Cold War feel like "See Spot Run," doesn't it?" "You get a feel for how they must have felt with people like Kepler pulling the cosmic rug out from under them." "I mean, with all the new astronomical data coming in, all bets are off." "In 1619, Donne bumps into Kepler in Austria, and Kepler gives him a copy of his new book about his new discovery... you remember, the stuff that turns out to be gravity... to bring home and give to the king here in England." "Never gets to him." "Well, there's no record of it." "Fishy, hmm?" "Not half as fishy as the guy who writes the whole story up." "Donne's biographer is a Brit name Izaak Walton, who, in 1653, writes the definitive book on how to fish," ""The Compleat Angler,"" "all about what stuff you need with you on the river." "You know, flies, waders, how to cast your line in different kinds of water, what pubs to go to with your pals, best time of day to catch whatever fish you're after, everything any fishing freak might ever want to know," "including hints on how to tell stories about the one that got away." "Now, Walton gets a lot of material for his book while fishing with an aristocratic young friend of his, Charles Cotton, who builds this little stone cottage for both of them to use." "Here's when, and below it, the initials I.W., Izaak Walton, and C.C., Charles Cotton." "Cotton himself is a dab hand at fly-fishing and is also filthy rich." "He doesn't have what you and I would call a job, so he spends his time fishing, drinking fine wines, and dabbling in a bit of poetry." "Tough life, right?" "Where was I?" "Oh, yes, Cotton doing poetry and drinking fine wines, which is where this delectable liquid comes in," "Chateau d'Yquem, possible the best dessert wine only in the entire world." "Point being, Cotton translates poetry, in this case from French, and in this case the writer, Michel Eyquem, is always said to come from the same family as that," "Chateau d'Yquem." "Well, the two names are similar." "But frankly, like the people here at Chateau d'Yquem, as regards the link with Monsieur Eyquem the writer," "I'm skeptical." "Speaking of which..." "skepticism." "You know, don't believe everything you read?" "That stuff?" "Well, back in the early 17th century, being skeptical is something new and dangerous." "I mean, there are Protestants and Catholics and Utopians and Puritans and astrologers and who knows what else all telling you theirs is the only true way to salvation." "So it's a wise man who takes it all with a pinch of salt." "Like Monsieur Eyquem, whom you may know by his pen name," "Montaigne." "Okay, a few words on the subject of ripples, which Montaigne makes with his new skepticism, lots of ripples, because Montaigne pulls the rug out from under every form of authority." "What you see is not what you get." "Don't trust anybody or anything." "That kind of stuff." "Anyway, all this gets into the papers because one of Montaigne's fans is an editor." "And what he does pretty much causes everything to hit the fan, when he publishes a piece by another Montaigne fan, a guy called Fontenelle, who comes up with what you and I would describe as the first bit of science journalism." "This is him, and this is his story." "In 1680, Halley's Comet appears, and so Fontenelle decides the best thing to do for his next column is something on space, right?" "Wrong." "Well, wrong the way he does it, because what Fonentelle's piece says is," ""Hey, maybe there's millions of planets out there" ""with other civilizations and people like us and towns and roads and shopping malls and all that."" "Okay, why not?" "Except this is the 17th century we're in, remember?" "And Fontenelle is Catholic, and Rome's authority rests on what the Church says about us humans being the center of everything, unique in the universe, made specially in God's own image, all that." "A one-off exclusive." "So what's all this about more of us out there?" "Maybe they're the center of the universe, eh?" "And if that is true, Rome is wrong." "Well, you just know that as far as the Pope's concerned," "Fontenelle's number is up." "Still, he was never any good at math anyway." "It's a boring Swiss mathematician named Johann Bernoulli who called Fontanelle's math second-rate." "Bernoulli comes from Basel." "He's one of eight mathematicians from the same family, and he's the guy who is said to have made calculus understandable to the average person." "Well, you could have fooled me." "Here's something Bernoulli isn't able to explain." "What happens when you shake up mercury in a tube and it glows?" "Something that people at the time call mercurial electricity and one of the obsessions of an English weirdo, Francis Hauksbee, who, being obsessed with electricity, invents the world's first static electricity machine." "Just crank a glass container with a vacuum inside, rest your hand or any other part of you against the turning glass surface, count to several hundred, count to another several hundred... hey, what can I tell you;" "this stuff took forever, and besides, what else did Francis Hauksbee have to do?" "... then you go anywhere near metal." "So Hauksbee starts rubbing anything else he can get his hands on." "Hauksbee attracts the attention of no less a person than Sir Isaac Newton when he comes up with his next trick." "Watch carefully." "What you're about to see is what's called capillary action." "See the two upright glass tubes?" "The red liquid goes higher up the narrow tube on the right." "Now, Hauksbee reckons this must have something to do with the liquid being more attracted up the narrow tube, which is why Newton gets interested, because since he's the man who works out what gravity is," "attraction, for obvious reasons, is Isaac Newton's middle name." "So he writes about Hauksbee's experiments in one of his heavier volumes on scientific matters, which I'll get to after we use his book to illustrate the scientific matters this program has been dealing with for the last few minutes." "Okay, the poet John Donne, whose biographer is a fishing freak called Izaak Walton, whose pal Cotton translates the skeptical Montaigne, whose science writer fan Fontanelle does a newspaper column all about space and whose math is clobbered by Bernoulli," "who is mystified by mercurial electricity, investigated by Hauksbee, whose capillary work is published by Newton and read by a vicar." "Here's the vicar, name of Stephen Hales." "In 1727, Hales plants a few capillary thoughts in a new book of his all about how plants suck up water the capillary way Hauksbee discovered, through tiny capillary tubes in the plant's structure." "This study of tubes takes Hale on to breathing and respiratory medicine and public health, which Hales may well have seen as something of a musical matter." "A musical matter because Hales reckons the source of all disease is foul or putrid air, found mostly in enclosed spaces, and what that has to do with public health is the way a church organ works." "See, it takes two to play the organ;" "one to play up front and one to work round the back, pumping for all he's worth, making it all possible with the organ bellows, which are not exactly high-tech." "You use hinged wooden flaps moving up and down, drawing air in and pushing it out of a wooden box." "It's not totally airtight, but I suspect the congregation doesn't care." "Hales tries it out as a ventilator in a granary down the road from the church." "Knockout." "Then he offers it to the navy and various prisons." "Boffo." "Then he tries it in a smallpox hospital at which he's a governor." "Dismal failure." "Well, foul and putrid air isn't the cause of smallpox any more than any other disease, but funnily enough, the problem of smallpox is about to be solved anyway... by a country doctor who's never been near an organ" "and who, in the end, you could say, goes completely cuckoo." "Country doctor Edward Jenner lives in Deepest Nowhere, England, after doing something that saves the lives of millions of people all over the planet." "It all happens because of something very strange happening to the local milkmaids." "Jenner gets to hear about a disease milkmaids are catching when they milk the cows." "It's called cowpox, and it makes horrible pustules on the hands." "Now, cowpox is no big deal, but what Jenner discovers is, it gives you immunity to a killer disease called smallpox." "In 1796, Jenner hits the headlines when he deliberately infects the healthy son of one of his laborers with liquid from a cowpox pustule, and then he deliberately infects the kid with smallpox." "And he survives." "And that's why we're all survivors today of smallpox, because we all get what the boy got:" "Vaccinated." "From "vacca," the Latin word for cow." "12 years later, everybody else has worked up enough nerve to to try it, with a reaction in the press not all that different from the reaction to genetic engineering today." "Now, in case you're wondering if all that money and publicity goes to Jenner's head and that's why I said he goes cuckoo, no." "See, the other thing besides vaccination about which Jenner is cuckoo is cuckoos, on which he writes the definitive paper and gets elected to the Royal Society for services to ornithology." "And then dies, just in time to miss the guy who, you might say, turns bird-watching into an art." "Meet J.J. Audubon, the first real painter of birds and the man whose name has become synonymous with bird lovers everywhere." "Audubon and his feathered friends become world-famous after he fails in about five careers and settles for painting." "In 1821, he's here, near St. Francisville, Louisiana, where he gets a job at the Oakley plantation teaching basic painting techniques to the daughter of the family." "Painting birds is a piece of cake here, since the woods and bayous of this part of Louisiana are stiff with birds." "Well, they're stiff when J.J. paints them." "By the time he's finished, if it's got feathers and a beak," "J.J. has done its portrait." "J.J.'s thing is realistic detail, as you can see, and when he puts all his paintings into a giant book, called " Birds of America,"" "he starts a whole new fashion for bird-watching... and chocolate-box art, some people say." "Well, you may not like it much, but you gotta admit it's accurate." "If photography had been invented at the time, you'd have said these were snapshots, right?" "Now, J. J has only one other obsession besides painting birds." "It's painting all of them." "So when some young kid writes to him one day to say he's found a new kind of yellow-bellied flycatcher that J.J. has missed," "J.J.'s language gets positively foul." "Detailed correspondence with the aforementioned kid follows." "The offending bird is tracked down, stuffed and mounted, and its picture done before you can say "St. Petersburg."" "So guess where we are now." "Okay, imperial Russian architecture is all very beautiful and historic and all that, but building this stuff to the greater glory of the czar is expensive." "What you're looking at here is conspicuous consumption." "So why are we looking at it?" "Well, it's all to do with that kid Audubon hears from." "You know, the one with the yellow-bellied flycatcher..." "Spencer Fullerton Baird, who goes on to become secretary to the Smithsonian, no less." "And gets involved in a very shady deal being brokered by some top-level Russians." "Okay, here's the plot." "If you're living a lifestyle like this, just for the upkeep, you need three things:" "Money, money, and more money." "So you're the czar of all the Russias." "The last thing you want is your government bureaucrats coming at you for more cash, especially if it's for some tin-pot colony you've never heard of out in the middle of nowhere that isn't even paying its way." "Which is just what happens." "The prime minister drops a note about this tin-pot colony to the czar's brother, who then drops a note to the great man Himself." "Anyway, in no time at all... in czarist Russia, that's several months later... various bigwigs are summoned to an audience with You Know Who." "Now, where did you say this place is?" "There?" "There?" "Oh, way over there." "Well, get rid of it." "No, wait." "Wait." "Who would be sucker enough to take it?" "Who?" "They would?" "How much?" "5 million bucks?" "Tell you what." "Play hard to get." "Say 71/2 and see if they blink." "Oh, and wait." "It's got to look as if they're pushing for the deal, right?" "As the plot thickens, the sting moves to the foreign office, and some back-channel, totally deniable discussions with the potential buyers are held behind closed doors, and the Russians pull it off." "Good." "That's one problem solved, leaving one other minor matter." "Of the original 71/2 million bucks, only 5 million ever turns up in Russia." "The other 21/2?" "Well, that's what you get when you conduct international diplomacy behind closed doors." "Oh, I nearly forgot:" "Where that kid Fullerton Baird fits into the scam." "Well, at one point, he commissions a survey of that colonial dump the Russians are trying to off-Ioad, persuades the U.S. secretary of state that the place is worth buying, and the Russians are laughing all the way to the bank." "Mind you, 100 years later, when the North Slope oil fields come on stream who's the sucker then, hmm?" "Anyway, all this is why, in 1869, the map of America changes when they add this little bit." "Not that they need the space." "America is still practically uninhabited, especially here." "In 1871, this is this." "And that kid Fullerton Baird does it again." "He sends a surveyor called Ferdinand Hayden to check the place out." "Hayden turns up with a photographer called William Henry Jackson, and Jackson's photographs blow everybody away." "This was America over 100 years ago." "I said Jackson's photographs blow everybody away, especially the U.S. Congress, because what that kid, now secretary to the Smithsonian, does with the pictures is one of history's greatest bits of P.R." "I mean, think about it." "They've only just finished the transcontinental railroad." "You can get lost out here and never return." "In some places, Native Americans are still at war with the government in Washington." "It can be fatally dangerous to go anywhere west of the Mississippi." "But thanks to Fullerton Baird," "Congress designates this place a wilderness... in the wilderness?" "Well, that's just what they do, which is why today you can't own property here or do much of anything without a permit, except visit, which people do in the thousands." "And like them, we end our journey here too, because thanks to all the connections we've made between the DNA profile and the work on aerodynamics and machine guns and the Red Baron and geography and Romantic ideas that start in Italy" "and paintings of actors and lighthouses and Spanish gold and skeleton drawings and astronomical poetry by friends of fishing freaks who write books and skeptical wine-drinkers called Eyquem and the cure for smallpox and American bird painters and devious Russian real estate deals," "because of all that, in 1872, America gets a special place, the first national park, Yellowstone."