"This is the istanbul spice market, and the reason I'm here is because this is another tale about the extraordinary variety you come across in history and the way it goes." "And, as we all know, variety is the spice of Iife... or, in this case, death, because this particular story looks at the way a whole series of wars was kicked off because back in the middle Ages, people would commit murder" "to get their hands on anything that would blow your head off." "I'm talking about spices, of course." "explosive stuff, Iike this." ""Hot pickle."" "Every year, the Turks commemorate 1 453, when they took istanbul from the Christians and shut down the great watering hole where Crusaders on their way to the middle East had previously stopped over for some fun." "And if you were a knight with a night or two to spare, then this city was the place for a bit of sophisticated RR." "And it was while savoring these local delights that some of those Crusaders developed other tastes here." "I mean food, because once they'd tasted an amazing new thing called spices here, the food back home was never going to be the same again." "The instant craze that happened all over Europe for the Eastern spices you could buy here kicked off the medieval equivalent of today's cartels and drug wars, because you know the way the price of a drug changes between when it leaves a producer and when it hits the street." "well, the same thing happened with medieval pepper and cinnamon and ginger, only for columbia, read southeast Asia, which is where the medieval spices came here from in the first place." "So that Turkish takeover here in 1 453 cut Europe off from the spice supply... which is really why Western colonialism began, because one after the other, the Spanish, Dutch, French, Portuguese, and english" "headed out East to pick up their own spices direct instead of dealing through the new Turkish middlemen." "Because by this time, the European consumer had taken to Eastern herbs and spices with all the abandon of an alcoholic in a brewery." "We were hooked." "And you know what they say about addicts:" "They want everybody to be one, which is eventually what happened." "But by that time, the reason wasn't pepper anymore." "It was tea." "By the late 1800s, we Brits were importing, oh, 18 million pounds of it a year, mostly from China." "The great British teatime was invented," "leaving only the small matter of how to get the money to pay for the 18 million pounds of tea." "solution: drugs." "But this time, real drugs from the poppies grown in India, which we are running at the time." "AII we need is a market for the stuff." "well, given that we're trying to find money to buy China tea, what an ironic surprise that China's already full of illegal opium dens." "So there's all those addicts to supply, and by paying for our tea with their unfortunate habit, these guys will solve the British baIance-of-payments problem, because we're out of cash thanks to spending all our gold reserves" "on a war back home against napoleon." "And the addicts?" "Economic casualties, right?" "So now we have all these profitable smoke-fiIIed opium dens making us lots of lovely money, the trick is to keep the whole scam going." "And to do that, we have to be sure we can keep the China trade route open, and to do that, we need one more thing." "I'II give you a clue." "Barman, could I have another sling, please?" "Thank you." "Okay, here's another clue." "You're looking at it." "This." "This is the famous Long Bar in the hotel named after the chap who got us that one more thing." "There he is down there." "He was one of the few 19th-century British imperial bureaucrats who ever bothered to Iearn the local lingo." "Lived like a local, dressed like a local." "He even ate like a local." "Extraordinary, but it seemed to work." "After a few years out here in the East, he'd made such a good reputation," "London asked him to take Java from the Dutch, so he did." "Became Iieutenant governor." "And it was on his way to Java that he came across a rundown, swamp-ridden dump of a place belonging to some local sultan." "So in exchange for guns and, what else, a little opium, he gets us a Iong lease on the place, which is going to be perfect for keeping an eye on the nearby Straits of MaIacca," "through which our trade with China passes, thereby keeping the whole tea-for-opium thing nice and safe." "Oh, who's our hero?" "Sir Stamford raffles." "And the run-down, swampy dump he did the opium deal for?" "well, it's changed a bit since." "It was Singapore." "meanwhile, raffles and the Java jungle, where he spent most of his time as lieutenant governor administering enlightened British justice and grabbing the Javanese gold, diamonds, coffee, teak, pepper, silk, tea, sugar, tin, and opium" "that the locals didn't seem to want much." "Not to mention the other stuff raffles was crazy about:" "nature in whatever shape or form it happened to be wherever he happened to be." "If it moved, he dried, stuffed, or bottled it." "In just one jungle trip, 30 tons of it." "You name it;" "RaffIes collected it." "And a Iot more you couldn't name." "I suppose he was like most colonial types." "He wanted to take all this exotic stuff back home to england and classify it." "And all because in 1802, Iike everybody else at the time, he had been turned on to nature by an otherwise totally forgettable english vicar called william PaIey, who lived in the middle of northern england nowhere and who had come up with one of those happy thoughts" "that turned into an instant cliche." "He said, "A watch doesn't happen by accident." ""It has a purpose, lots of bits working together," ""designed to do so." ""Same with nature:" ""lots of bits working together, designed to do so by the great designer in the sky."" "This scientific approach of PaIey to religion and creation and such went over very big." "He took nature apart like you would a watch," "looking for God's purpose in the design." "So these webbed feet fitted a waterbird." "A big wing for long flights and a Iong neck for bottom feeding, with a flat bill to scoop aquatic plant food." "When you put all the purpose-buiIt bits together, you get the only design this animal could be:" "a swan." "So people like raffles were out looking for specimens of this designer world PaIey was on about and then collecting all the specimens together in smaII-scaIe versions of God's grand plan." "Modern Noah's arks, if you Iike." "We call them zoos." "That's how zoos started." "In this case, one of the first, the London Zoo, set up for the sole purpose of getting a cIose-up look at nature under controlled conditions and studying God's plan and also, in this case," "somewhere raffles could dump his collection when he retired from the job in Java and got back to england in 1824." "Three years after which, the gates opened-- members only, of course-- on the London ZooIogicaI, or Noah's ark, Society with raffles as its president thanks to an influential pal of his, a very harrumph British scientist called Davy," "whose sole contribution to zoology up to that point was to make the life of the canary a little easier." "See, back then, the only way a miner knew when there was any dangerous methane around him in the mine was when the canary, which he carried in a cage, fell off its perch." "The better way?" "Davy found out that the methane needed quite a high temperature to make it go bang, so he basically designed a lamp that would keep cool." "You got all the light you needed from the burning wick, but he surrounded it with a fine wire gauze that took away the heat of the flame and kept the temperature of the lamp exterior down below what would set off the methane." "They tested this design in two of the most dangerous mines in england, and it worked." "And as Davy was already Sir Humphry Davy, with medals from napoleon and a member of the royal Society, no notice was taken of a mining engineering nobody called Stephenson, who said he'd invented a lamp just as good before Davy." "Stephenson's supporters were so annoyed, they gave him a consolation prize of £1 ,000, fortunately for anybody who likes traveling on trains." "That unknown mining nobody made all this possible." "You remember the way we Brits manipulated the opium trade out East to make enough money to pay for the tea and then had enough left over to fund the war we were fighting against napoleon?" "well, one of the other things that war did was to kick in really high inflation rates." "So the english miners were desperate for a cheaper way to move their coal around than the horse-drawn way, because the price of horse feed had gone up like a rocket, which is what that unknown mining nobody I mentioned," "George Stephenson, invented to solve the problem." "Made the front page." ""Rocket" was what Stephenson called his new wonder machine that would haul coal and change the world." "We call it the locomotive." "To get the most steam pressure he could from the boiler, he turned it into a series of pipes to pick up maximum heat from the fire and produce more steam to drive the pistons in the cylinders, angled so they'd link directly to cranks on the wheels." ""On October the 8th, 1829," it says here," ""at RainhiII on the new Manchester-LiverpooI line, thousands turned out for the great steam engine race."" "They were watching four competing Iocomotives going for the serious prize of what in today's money would be half a million bucks." "well, George Stephenson's "Rocket" won hands down." "interestingly, this article didn't mention what happened to the fellow who designed the engine that came last." "He gave up railroads, left england, went to New York." "His name was John Ericsson, and when the civil war started in 1861 , he wrote to lincoln, saying he knew lincoln wanted to blockade the Southern ports to stop the South exporting cotton to pay for the war" "and that he, Ericsson, could design just the kind of ship that could do that." "It would have a revolving gun turret on top." "It would be so shallow in the water, it wouId nearly be a submarine." "And it wouId be covered in armor plating from stem to stern." "lincoln went for this crazy idea, and Ericsson's "Monitor" made him a household name after it clobbered the South's finest ironcIad ship, the "Merrimack."" "The cast-iron "Monitor" made the blockade of Southern ports a cast-iron certainty once the North grabbed a beachhead behind enemy lines here at Port royal on one of the Sea islands off the coast of South carolina." "Here, Washington set up one of the most unusual social programs in the history of the United States." "It became known as the Port royal Experiment, and it gave blacks ownership of land, voting rights, and the chance to form their own local government." "...times tables that we went over last week." "But the most radical part of the experiment was run by a woman, a teacher who opened the first ever school for the children of slaves to teach them the basic skills of arithmetic, reading, and, above all, writing." "...we know we still have to practice our letters and work on those letters, and today we will do an "M."" "An "M" is a very easy letter;" "it is just two mountains..." "alas, the experiment failed." "After the war, things went back to the way they were, and everybody went back to growing Sea island cotton." "By the late 19th century, Sea island had taken over the luxury cotton market all over Europe, which was going to be just as well for investors in the booming gasIight industry." "Very good." "Now, there was only one thing that could spoil the party for investors in 19th-century gasIight shares, and that was the invention of electric light." "But fortunately for this program, that's not how history always goes." "It isn't always new lamps for old." "GasIight manufacturers are saved from electricity by an Austrian called WeIsbach, who gets an aristocratic title for his work and takes as his family motto "More light."" "Want to guess why?" "Right, WeIsbach made gasIight a Iot brighter with a trick we still use in the camping lights like these ones here." "In 1885, WeIsbach surrounded the gas flame with a mantle made of Sea island cotton impregnated with stuff that would glow incandescent, just like all these do." "But WeIsbach's mantle still wasn't bright enough to compete with lightbulbs." "And then he tried mantIes made of various minerals that would do the same thing-- minerals called rare earths." "Made the mantle brighter even than electric light." "And it was while WeIsbach was fiddling around with his rare earths that he discovered a new one." "called it neodymium, which is a Iot less underwheIming than you might think and which I'II get back to after a short theatrical break." "Meet Miss Georgia Cayvan, the hot Broadway star of the 1880s." "Hot in more senses than one, as were her summertime audiences." "The theater management did their best with fans blowing air across ice blocks to control the temperature, just like the cotton manufacturers were doing." "The factories called it "conditioning,"" "and the name of their game was to get the temperature and humidity just right for cotton spinning." "Miss Cayvan kind of solved both problems at once." "well, her dress did." "As far as I know, only two were ever made-- one for Miss Cayvan and the other for a Spanish princess-- by a company in toledo." "That's toledo, Ohio, not toledo, Spain." "And just this once, the company didn't have to worry about getting the right kind of air conditioning for these fibers, because the dress was made of glass." "Now, one of the guys in the toledo glass factory at the time was a fellow called michael Owens, who went on to found one of the biggest glass companies in America and then helped to make hot days in holiday places" "a bit more bearable, because in 1935, he was into the next stage of spun glass: fiberglass." "Which turned out to be ideal for keeping things cooI--mersi-- or hot, because fiberglass would take anything from plus 500 to minus 300 Fahrenheit." "So that solved air conditioning and insulation problems of all kinds, which leaves, as I said before, neodymium." "Remember WeIsbach and all those mantIes?" "well, thanks to him and his neodymium, there was now something else you could do with glass fiber:" "make war." "By the 1960s, everybody's military was turned on by very pure glass and what it wouId do if you put neodymium in it." "A magnetic field excites neodymium atoms, so when you shine a light at them, they kind of overload and shoot out their excess energy in an incredibly intense beam of light so narrow and powerful, it'II reach all the way to the moon" "or do Iong-distance damage like this." "By the late '80s, the laser was doing things that looked like Buck Rogers." "During the gulf War, pilots could illuminate a target with a laser beam and then guide a smart bomb all the way down the beam with spectacular results." "And that's why I started here in the istanbul spice market, because a Iot of those gulf War aerial assets took off from air bases here in Turkey, and when they'd got to where they were headed," "they armed their laser bombs and got ready to do what they had come for, which was to flick a switch and release the bombs." "And you know what they call that switch when it's armed and your ordnance is ready to go?" "A hot pickle."