"Ah, the thrill of the open road, the romance of foreign places, the excitement of travel." "Know where we are?" "Want to take a look?" "France." "South of France." "MarseiIIes." "Béziers." "So why are we here?" "Because of a sick english lawyer called Jethro tull, who came to this part of the world 300 years ago for his health." "TuII is enjoying a little medicinal tippIe in among the vines when he notices how it's all done or, rather, hoe it's all done." "Because, yes, this is a hoe." "And Jethro's had just enough of the local pIunk to get him all excited about what he could do to life down on the farm back in england with some of these things." "As a result of which, I'm here." "And thanks to Jethro tull and whiskey heiresses and radio and sunspots and a few other things," "I also know where I'm going." "Because, Iike the hoe, history is all about finding your routes." "The story begins when Jethro tull gets back to england and his hoe kicks english agriculture into high gear, triples the yield, and makes english farmers a Iot of dough and, incidentally, triggers a chain of events" "that will end up leading to nothing less than the French revolution." "So here we are, where the revolution really begins, the home of every true lover of French food, a bakery." "Bonjour, madame." "Un baguette, s'iI vous plaît." "Think about it." "Where are we?" "1760 or so?" "The lunatic in charge is Louis XV and, Iike, england," "French agribusiness is in deep doo-doo." "I mean, the price of a loaf is insane." "C'est combien, madame?" "10F80." "Merci, monsieur." "The national economy is not too hot either and nor is Madame du Pompadour." "She's the king's mistress, and she's frigid." "But her in-house doctor, a certain François Quesnay, fixes that." "And then, around 1768, the good doctor comes up with the modest suggestion for, well, total national economic recovery based on his entirely erroneous understanding of english farming techniques." "Run France like a giant english estate." "Which Quesnay takes wrongly to mean..." "leave nature and everything else alone to do its thing." "Okay, time for a very brief word about economic theory." "Quesnay's idea about leaving things alone to do their thing became knows as Iaissez-faire" ""free trade," we'd call it-- the reason I can buy this Japanese car anywhere, for instance." "Back then, what Quesnay meant was that if the French government introduced free trade, that would stimulate the economy and stop the place from generally going down the tubes." "well, they didn't, so it did." "Laissez-faire--Ieaving things alone and not interfering-- got people wanting the government to do the same thing for them." ""If the government don't give us more personal freedoms,"" "shouted the mob, "life will get really savage."" "well, they didn't." "So it did." "That word, savage, is why we're in switzerland with Jean-Jacque Rousseau, nature lover, philosopher, and a general ladies' man, as you can see." "Rousseau's busy stirring things up about "going savage," by which he means the simple life, society living together by democratic consent with commonly agreed laws, no private property, freedom of speech, governments that were voted in" "so they could be voted out." "Above all, real social equality... the whole caboodle running according to a social contract everybody signed up for." "Good, eh?" "Except remember where and when we are: 1770-odd." "And this lunatic Rousseau is badmouthing a king by divine right and military muscle, aristocrats who've owned serfs for centuries, and giant corrupt government bureaucracies running on kickbacks." "And worst of all, he comes from this place:" "Geneva, a republic." "well, the French royal Army invades Geneva, for a start." "Too little too late." "Because, basically, the French revolution is just around the next corner." "The was the world the revolution destroyed." "You can tell what it must have been like:" "formal, everything in its place, including you;" "classified:" "lower class, middle class, upper class;" "a universe that science said was a machine with people just cogs in the machine, the triumph of order." "small wonder when the French revolution hit, things went to the opposite extreme." "The obedient, impersonal masses were out." "The caring, emotional individual was in." "The new Romantic art of the period says it all:" "individuals turning their back on society to explore their feelings." "So what were feelings?" "well, to the keen medical eye, the real question was much bigger." "What was the physiology of feeling?" "How did your senses work?" "Let's see, shall we?" "Open your eyes wide, please." "Thank you." "Hmm." "Now I'd Iike you to concentrate on something." "This is berlin, where the next bit happened." "Now, I'd Iike you and everybody watching the program to close your eyes and not open them until I say so, mmm?" "Okay, close your eyes." "Now, unless there's something wrong with your eyes, rub lightly on your closed eyelids." "See those images happening?" "Okay, open your eyes, please." "Did you see anything?" "Good." "That's the kind of thing a doctor called MüIIer got up to in berlin around 1840." "Thing was, where were those images you saw on your eyelids?" "Not anywhere here, hmm?" "AII right, another test." "please turn your ear towards this light and shut your eyes again." "Go ahead." "And now turn back to me and open your eyes again, please." "could your ear see the light?" "Good." "Now, please hold up a hand." "Can you feel this color?" "Good." "That'II be all;" "thank you." "well, that's what MüIIer found out-- that each sense does a different job, that we don't perceive the world;" "we only feel different sensations coming in through each different sense." "And then we put it all together," ""we" being what MüIIer called "the nervous system."" "And that was the first time anybody'd thought of the nervous system like that, as an active rather than a passive thing." "But enough of my voice for the moment." "In 1854, MüIIer's pupil HeImhoItz investigated hearing." "Sound made something in your ear vibrate, so was it like singers making piano strings vibrate?" "Did different bits of your ear vibrate to different sound wave frequencies?" "Did sound travel at different frequencies?" "But it was when HeImhoItz's pupil went on to see if electricity did the same thing that he kind of changed the world." "What he wanted to know was does electricity move?" "And if so, how?" "And if so, what does it do?" "So thank you." "please observe: here we have a big spark jumping this gap." "Thank you." "Here I have a small wire loop almost completely joined." "Now, I walk out precisely this distance." "Now please observe this time there will be a big spark and a little spark." "Thank you." "Once more, a big spark and a little spark." "Thank you." "exactly the same distance once again." "please observe a big spark and a little spark." "Thank you." "Once more precisely the same distance." "Thank you." "Heinrich Hertz, who did all this, found out that electricity goes out like ripples from the big spark, and the little sparks happen only at the crest of each of the ripples." "In other words... once every wavelength." "I said he changed the world with all this." "actually he didn't." "Whiskey did, thanks to a beautiful Irish whiskey heiress called Annie Jameson-- you may recognize the brand-- who eloped with an italian and ended up here outside bologna at the villa Grifone." "The villa, you'II note, sits on top of what is perhaps the least attractive mausoleum in the history of mausoIea, designed by that weII-known architect Benito MussoIini for our hero, Annie's clever son william," "who was inspired by a local physics prof to try sending electrical wave ripples across the valley here to his brother" "AII william really did was to take Hertz's little trick and make it go further." "Okay, here's the other end of the experiment:" "getting into position at the top of a hill across the valley and setting up the receiver to receive." "well, that's what we all hope." "He rigs up a tall aerial because that makes long waves that go further, and then he turns the current on and off three times." "That's "S" in Morse code." "Okay, you get the point." "Now for the big one." "Look." "Here's the receiver disappearing over the hill with his gun." "Now here's the receiver waiting behind the hill with his gun." "And that was the point of the gun:" "to tell william the incredible news that his little electrical "Ss" have gone over a hill." "well, after this, there's no holding william Marconi." "In 1901 , he gets more "Ss"" "to go around something a little bigger... the Earth." "From cornwall in england to St. John's, newfoundland with the aerials held up by kites." "So by 1912, radio was kind of science fiction come true." "There was a transatlantic radio telegraph service, the first signal from a plane to the ground, and somebody nearly saved the "Titanic."" "And all the while, Marconi's little "Ss" went further and further round the worId-- on one occasion, from Britain all the way to Buenos Aires-- and all without bothering Marconi as to why." "But why?" "well, the BBC helped." "well, almost as soon as Marconi had done the newfoundland thing, researchers were announcing that there might be some great radio wave reflector in the sky bouncing the signals around the Earth." "And the more they beamed BBC radio programs upwards" "PS:" "Note the mode of dress in the BBC studios at the time-- the more they recognized that some of the radio programs came back down and some did not and that this changed with the season, day, night, even the weather." "Now, they know radio goes 186,000 miles a second." "So the returning signals tell them there are several reflecting layers" "60 to 300 miles up." "But only atoms of air missing some eIectrons-- ionized air-- would reflect radio waves or, if the air weren't ionized, Iet them through." "So what can be knocking electrons out of air atoms?" "Some Austrian called Hess discovers that ionization is four times up there what it is down here and says it's all being caused by what he modestly calls" "Hess rays." "Turned out one source of the mystery rays was this:" "solar flares that spewed out billions of particles that hit the Earth a couple of days later and ionized the atmosphere." "But ionization still happened even when the sun wasn't having solar flares." "So there had to be a source beyond the sun." "Oh, well, now we're into the big time." "They changed the name from Hess rays to cosmic rays." "Which is, of course, why I'm here in the redwoods." "Looking for tree rings." "Ah." "You see how each ring is a year's growth." "But look at that fat ring there." "That means a Iot of growth that year." "That means a Iot of rain." "And again and again and again and again every 1 1 years." "And guess what." "They find out that the sun has flares and spots and such in the same 1 1-year cycle." "So in the 1930s, a weather expert called MauchIy decides to take a closer look at this sunspot-weather relationship." "Now, this is going to involve a humungous amount of calculation." "And right next to him are some people counting cosmic ray particles with these:" "vacuum tubes." "Turns on and off when the particles hit it." "So MauchIy tries it with electrical signals instead." "And it works." "They turn it on and off too." "" Bingo," says MauchIy." ""That means"" "At which point enter world War II and before he knows what's hit him, his great idea has been taken over by the army but not for weather forecasting." "The army needed an adding machine." "See, calculating artillery tables to tell gunners how to aim their guns accurately was a nightmare." "There were so many variables, it took hotshot mathematicians 24 hours to calculate one shell trajectory." "So in 1942, either we found a quicker way to do arithmetic or we lost the war." "And we didn't." "So you know we did." "And anyway, I'm near the end of the show." "It was MauchIy and weather forecasting that did the trick." "Remember the vacuum tube and how those signals turned it on and off?" "well, here's what MauchIy did with that." "I'II show you with wine bottles since we're back at that French vineyard." "Okay, sets of ten vacuum tubes." "Ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, and so on." "Now, say you want to add 21 and 101 ." "You send in a signal to the ones to turn one tube on and then two signals into the tens... 21 ." "101's the same." "One signal into the ones and one signal into the 100s." "Now, to add it all up, you just send the number of signals in that will turn everything off." "Two." "22." "122." "And keep on adding sets of ten, and you can add sums in the trillions in a split second." "solve the artillery problem, won the war, end the show." "Because that's how I know where I am with this little gizmo." "Remember?" "Because that wartime artillery adding machine was called ENIAC, and it was the first computer." "So, as I said at the beginning about finding your roots, history is what tells you where you're going next." "Because you only know where you're going if you know where you've been."