"This is a program you'll find ludicrously simple to follow." "Here's how simple." "Seguimos siendo la moda como Tommy Hilfiger." "And you look at me and say yes, yo, that's the niga que te puso a bailar y gritaron: "Aleluya."" "Yo bailo con tu hueva y yo bailo con la suya." "Yo en el homenaje a Selena grité: "Vivi bamba."" "La gente que no baila entonces que se salgan para fuera Para dónde?" "Para la calle, sí cotorra." "Moviendo la cadera Yo te mando palá." "See what I mean?" "It's going to be "Elementary Stuff."" "Que en este concierto yo se que a ti te pilla y ya se comprobó la sobreventa de taquilla, ¿qué dice?" "You know the great thing about history?" "You don't need to have a PhD to make your mark." "For instance, in the 19th century, there's this guy who comes up with only the explanation for Life with a capital L." "And what is he?" "An unqualified, self-educated property surveyor who happens to have a bee in his bonnet about bees." "Well, insects." "Well, creepy crawlies of all kinds." "Ends up collecting 145,000 species." "That's species, right, not individual creepy crawlies." "And he does it all on his own measly savings." "And he does it all in the Amazon... and on tropical islands, getting himself all worked up about how local the locals are." "That's creepy-crawly locals, you understand." "This guy's only interested in creepy crawlies." "And he's obsessed about how they got to be so local." "I mean, there are so many variations." "Beetles on one side of a river are a different variety from beetles on the other side, for instance." "Wherever you go, the little beetles seem to have worked out how to adapt to the amazing variety of habitats in the world." "When he answers his own question... why do all these varieties get so varied and how?" "... with his own answer... you survive if you fit the local conditions, in other words, the survival of the fittest... he blows everybody away." "Well, he would have, except he lets some other guy who has the same idea publish first, and HE blows everybody away." "A frightfully polite, frightfully British case of "after you, Mr. Darwin."" "Matter of fact, there's a nasty rumor that our creepy-crawly guy sent a letter with the key data in it to the great man, who said he'd only received it "After some considerable delay."" "Like after he'd published." "Which is why it's not "Origin of Species" by Alfred Wallace." "Wallace, you can tell, is a noble spirit... with which, by the way, he is also obsessed." "Spirits, that is." "And ghosts, mediums, trances, that stuff." "No problem." "Spiritualism is on the minds of some of the greatest scientists of the day and maybe transferring to other minds, hmm?" "Telepathy is the obsession of another spiritualist, an eminent British physicist named Lodge, who invents those cards you see in all the telepathy tests with squares and stuff on them." "In 1883, he's asked to investigate two saleswomen in Liverpool, England, who seem to be able to communicate with each other by transmitting thought waves." "Not surprisingly, Lodge is interested in other kinds of transmission..." "in this case, with the mysterious new electrical signals." "Problem is, they're even harder to detect than thought waves." "So Lodge comes up with a little gizmo that reacts to even the tiniest electrical signals, so simple it's brilliant." "Lodge's idea is to use a telegraph key to send electrical signals when it triggers an electric spark that produces the signal." "Usually, it's too faint to detect." "Lodge fills a tube with iron filings that react to the tiniest incoming signal by sticking together." "Then an automatic tapper breaks the filings apart, ready to receive again." "Lodge's experiment shows his gizmo is working, because the signal moves a needle and rings a bell." "So yippee, Lodge has now shown you can send dots and dashes through the air with a spark." "Big deal." "Until along comes a Canadian bright spark by the name of Reginald Aubrey Fessenden." "This is Fessenden." "No, not the car; this." "Arrollando, implacable." "Con sabor latino," "El salto en el camino, con todos los poderes vacilando en esta radio." "Vacilando, voy a bailar." "Instead of using that spark that Hertz and Marconi and everybody else has been using," "Fessenden, who was working for the U.S. government on an amazing new thing called radio weather forecasting, has the idea of using not dots and dashes but continuous waves." "Now how you do that." "Get ready for some gobbledygook about transmission and such." "Hey, mon." "In 1906, the dude Fessenden makes electricity with an electricity maker..." "you know, magnets spin round in a copper wire and make electricity." "Okay, this electricity goes up a big antenna and out into the atmosphere in the electric waves you know about." "Now here's Fessenden talking at the microphone." "And that turns what he says into little waves." "And they go on the big wave on what they call modularity, yeah." "At the other end, you just unscramble it all, and you get the first radio, with talking and music and all that jazz." "Cool, man." "Oh, yeah." "Now, there are those, including some of Fessenden's backers, who think he's gone totally bananas." "Except for one bunch of people, who have... gone totally bananas." "Now, you might wonder why a bunch of banana people would freak out over long-distance radio." "Well, take a closer look at the fruits of their labors." "The thing about bananas is, they grow so fast." "And what that means is, in places like here, in the Dominican Republic, you can pick your bananas all year round." "And then the clock starts to tick, because the second you pick your banana, it starts to ripen." "So you've got to get it to market fast." "That's where radio comes in..." "to organize long-distance, get your trains and your ships to the same port at the same time, avoid trainloads of rotting bananas going nowhere." "And all this happens because the amazing growth of the banana is only matched by the amazing growth of the banana market." "I mean, in America, you can make anything up to 500% profit." "Well, quicker than you can say "United Fruit,"" "certain Americans with interests in growing investments, like bananas, split to Central America, where they end up owning large bits of these countries and owning large bits of their governments, thus giving the language a new term, "banana republics,"" "and a new international musical smash hit to go on the new international radio waves." "I'll just play you a couple of bars." "Yes, we have no bananas." "We have no bananas today." "We've broad beans like bunions, cabbages, and onions and all kinds of fruit, and, say, we have old-fashioned tomatoes, nice Jersey potatoes." "But, yes, we have no bananas." "We have no bananas today." "Now, if the reason you have no bananas happens to have something to do with their state of health and such, well, there's only one thing to do:" "Send a postcard explaining your problem to Switzerland." "Okay, hold it." "We started with beetle-freak Wallace, who's a spiritualist, like Lodge, who invents a way to make it possible for Fessenden to go on and develop proper radio around 1910, grabbed by the United Fruit Company to help organize their banana business." "And if your bananas get sick, the place to write to is Switzerland." "Which, guess what, is where we go next." "See, back then, top banana in bananas is a terminally boring Swiss botanist living here in Geneva." "Okay, let's see how long I can hold your attention." "This guy is the second in what will turn out to be a long line of family botanists." "His name is Candolle, and he's a professor at Geneva Academy." "In 1882, he comes out with a book in which there's the first detailed botanical description and anything you might ever want to know about bananas." "Look." "Okay, had enough?" "Candolle also produces other books you can't pick up." "Gripping stuff... the age of trees, how to give a plant a name, the lesser-known diseases of grapevines... and all this described by fellow botanists quite seriously as "classics in the field."" "Still awake?" "Okay, how about this:" "Take a look at Candolle's research notes." "How's this for the obsessive noodler's mind at work, eh?" "Now, the reason this Swiss scientist, so exciting he would cure your insomnia, is in this show at all is because Candolle does one other thing." "He persuades the Geneva authorities here to start using an amazing recent invention, a thing called a postage stamp." "By 1874, so many other countries have followed the Swiss example and started mail services that there is a critical postal problem to be licked." "Not the stamp, what happens after you stick it on the letter and send it off to foreign parts, wherever they may be... which, back then, is anybody's guess." "So in 1874 here in Switzerland, everybody gets together to standardize everything:" "Rates, types of mail, that stuff." "At the same meeting, they also okay the use of a weird new postal gizmo recently invented in Austria for expressing the sentiment "Wish you were here."" "A postcard." "In Britain, early on, postcards are all saucy, kiss-me-quick stuff about naughty goings-on at the beach drawn by artists who start out in politics." "See, these cartoonists get their start in life thanks to a satirical magazine called "Punch"" "that kicks off back in 1841 and specializes in targeting public figures like fat-cat politicians who are doing nothing about the terrible social conditions and corruption among government officials." "In 1843, the magazine turns its attention from political problems like speculators and such to art and a national public competition to design some giant frescoes." "The theme is "heroic thoughts,"" "and the winners are so abysmal, "Punch" does its own." "Here's one, titled "Capital and Labor,"" "with the line "Just as well there are the rich" ""to enjoy the profits from what the miners get up to down below."" "The reason there's a fresco competition in the first place is this, the bare walls of the new Houses of Parliament, the old ones having burnt down a few years before." "As it happens, in spite of "Punch,"" "some of those awful frescoes actually get painted and then, intelligently, covered over." "Meanwhile, the Parliament building itself." "The word that floats to mind is, I suppose, "fake."" "Well, take a look." "I mean, it's 1840, and they're building something more like 1340, mostly to designs by August Pugin, who sounds a bit of a weirdo." "I mean, he actually writes a book with the serious title of "The True Principals of Pointed Architecture."" "Now, Pugin doesn't build this place, but he puts in most of the design." "And there's more fancy detail here than a wedding cake." "Pugin's a total freak for imitation Gothic curlicues with everything." "But where he goes architecturally ape is with the interior of the House of Lords, the greatest fake of all time." "Mind you, all this historical ceremony and people dressing up is, if you think about it, entirely fake." "I mean, none of them dresses like this at home, do they?" "Main thing is, it's all great for tourist revenue." "My government intends to govern for the benefit of the whole nation." "But the whole point of surrounding your fake pageantry with all this fake medieval Gothic is that Pugin and everybody else regards Gothic as true-blue Brit, mother of parliaments, home of democracy, and all that." "No devious influences from devious foreign parts." "Ironic, really, given where the mania for this Gothic revival actually comes from in the first place:" "Devious foreign parts." "Well, Germany." "Well, 18th-century Germany." "Today the Baltic republic of Latvia, where a whole Western cultural movement started with a chip on the shoulder." "This is the shoulder in question, a teacher called Herder you may not have heard of, because everybody snitches his ideas and becomes more famous than him... famous like Byron, Schubert, and Goethe." "But that chip..." "Put it this way:" "You're a German in 1770." "A bit embarrassing, that, because there's really no such thing." "Germany's about 300 different little tin-pot, independent states, in one of which Herder is when he has these brilliant thoughts." "Here in the ancient city of Riga." "So there's no German national anything, right?" "The real reason for that chip on Herder's shoulder is that the French reckon Germans have no style." "So he starts churning out books by the yard on everything from music to history, philosophy, literature, poetry, art, and, above all, a shocking new concept:" "German culture, one great example of which is, of course, the architecture Herder reckons was invented by Germans:" "Gothic." "So Herder kicks off the great German Gothic revival that ends up giving the Brits the Houses of Parliament, remember?" "So now it'll be fashionable to be German." "And you can forget all that French age-of-enlightenment stuff about order and logic that has the rest of Europe by the short and curlies at the time." "Ha!" "Order is out." "Anarchy is in." "This idea rapidly turns into the back-to-nature thing we now call the Romantic movement." "Okay, that's enough of that." "Let's take one last look at the business of that chip on Herder's shoulder... which also gets Herder all excited about ancient Germanic folklore back in the mists of times when Germans were, he thinks, the original human race," "an idea which will get some other people excited a couple of hundred years later." "Now, a key element of any ancient culture and all that is language." "If you could find the ancient, original language, you'd be that bit closer to knowing what those ancient Germans were like and why, as Herder says, they were so superior." "So for Herder, it is like dying and going to heaven when he gets to hear of a newly discovered poem dating from... wait for it..." "the 3rd century." "It's in translation, of course, point being, the original text is so old, it's in a lingo nearly nobody talks anymore." "Because here we're talking ancient tales and legends from the Highlands of Scotland in Gaelic." "Now, the reason Herder gets to know about all this ancient Gaelic stuff is because back in 1760, a Scotsman called James Macpherson is riding all round the Scottish Highlands" "looking for peasants who'll stand outside their cottages and spout Gaelic poetry for him to write down." "If you'll just bear with me till they're settled," "I'll get to the point, okay?" "James Macpherson is behaving in this weird manner for the very simple reason that he doesn't want to see his country Disneyfied, by which I mean letting the English do this to it:" "See, all this tourist-brochure stuff about Scotland is introduced by the English after they've invaded the country and destroyed the clans and "pacified the place,"" "which they do by making it illegal to wear the tartan or speak Gaelic or carry a sword and by evicting Scottish Highlanders from their lands and burning their homes." "So all this unpleasantness is why our friend James Macpherson is scribbling furiously, because he can see the writing on the wall for Celtic culture." "Macpherson hopes to stop the rot by publishing a great 3rd-century epic poem he's discovered in the Highlands all about the Celtic hero Ossian." "And it's the Ossian epic that blows away that German guy Herder, remember, and starts the whole Romantic movement." "Thing is, the whole epic is an epic fake." "Macpherson makes it all up out of bits and pieces he picks up on this tour of the Scottish Highlands and a lot of stuff he writes himself." "And Ossian fools everybody else besides Herder too." "I mean, we're talking an international best-seller in 26 languages." "Well, if you're going to fake it, make it a royal fake, right?" "Okay, where are we?" "That banana scientist, you recall, persuades the Swiss to use stamps on naughty postcards drawn by British cartoonists who ridicule the way their new Parliament is fake Gothic thanks to the Romantic movement, inspired by the great Ossian epic" "that fools everybody because it's a royal fake, speaking of which..." "Welcome to the battle of Culloden in 1746, where the English inflict a great defeat on the Scots and which gives them the excuse for those terrible atrocities in Scotland later on." "And the reason I said "royal fake"" "is because that's who starts all this mess, a royal fake called Charles Stuart, a.k.a. Bonnie Prince Charlie, who wants to be king of England instead of the king of England and who's a fake because he was born in Rome" "and has never set foot in Scotland till now and never does again after this little disaster." "After the defeat at Culloden, Charlie bums around Europe and in 1770 ends up here in Florence, where he rents the Corsini palace, where he falls down in a drunken stupor every night after playing himself to sleep with this old Scottish tune" "and crying over spilt whiskey and the Highlanders he'd led to their deaths and the women he'd let down and the promises he'd broken, being an international laughingstock and a lousy cello player and maybe remembering a woman called Flora MacDonald," "Flora being a loyal fan who risks her life for this has-been after the great defeat." "She disguises him as a woman and gets him to the ship waiting to smuggle him out of the country so he can run away." "And, you know, to this day, there are still Scotsmen all over the world who raise their glasses to Prince Charles Stuart and toast the "king over the water,"" "conveniently forgetting the drunken old sot ending his days here in Italy ignored by everybody and covered in ulcers." "Unlike Flora MacDonald, who makes her own escape to somewhere altogether better for the health:" "North Carolina." "These are the great pine forests along the Cape Fear river in North Carolina, and they're where most of those runaway Highlanders end up, because it's a long way from the English, and the American colonists here welcome them with open arms," "and most of all because these trees are what you might call a license to print money." "These trees are vital to national security for the same reason that all North Carolina people are called Tarheels, because what you do to keep your navy floating and fighting fit is chop up the trees and then cook them in an underground kiln," "and what comes out of them is a black tar." "Makes any ship waterproof for life." "The other money-making product that comes from these trees is just as easy to get at." "Make this kind of cut in the tree, and resin oozes out." "Put your resin in a still, boil it up, condense the vapors that come out of the still, and you've got yourself every navy doctor's dream, turpentine." "Today we use it for paint thinner." "Back then, they drink it or rub it on, because it's supposed to cure pretty much any disease that you could ever catch." "So in 1775, you're doing all this in North Carolina, you're one of the people helping the British navy rule the waves..." "and North Carolina." "But not for much longer." "One of the reasons" "American independence is such a pain for the Brits is, they lose their North Carolina turpentine." "And now here's a really weird connection." "North Carolina was originally named after King Charles II, who was also crazy about turpentine but for a very different reason." "Back in the 1670s, Charles is nuts for anything Chinese, especially lacquerware." "And one ingredient of lacquer is turpentine." "Mind you, by the time European royals like Charles II are collecting this stuff, only royals can afford it... like 100 thou apiece back then." "Lacquerware costs an arm and a leg because there's a craze for it in the West and because no Chinese will tell the round-eyes how to make it." "So the secret puts the price up and sets the fashion for Chinese bad taste." "Eventually, the crafty Westerners work out that turpentine's involved with lacquer in some way." "Around 1720, some Welsh genius comes up with a fake lacquer recipe." "He calls what it does "japanning."" "Well, Japan, China... nobody in Europe knows the difference." "Okay, here's the Welshman's recipe:" "Take one part linseed oil." "Mix with one part umber and one part iron oxide." "Strain the mixture after heating it up." "And then boil the whole thing up until it's thick like tar." "Here's one I prepared earlier." "Dilute with turpentine, and you have yourself a varnish that's close enough to the real thing to pass for Chinese." "Or Japanese..." "what do they care?" "This trick makes a small Welsh town famous all over nowhere for what becomes known as..." "Pontypool... name of town..." "japanning... name of lacquer." "Now, you'll have seen Pontypool japanning before if your great-grandmother put her tea in a tin like this, because the other thing" "Pontypool is famous for back then is the very thin sheet metal they make... at the first really good iron-rolling mills in Britain." "So that Welsh lacquer isn't developed for use on wood, which is expensive, but for use on tinplate, which is cheap." "And tinplate's another trade secret, only this time, the secretive ones are not Chinese." "They're Germans, which is why this guy," "French secretary of state Colbert, is making overtures to them and any other foreign craftsmen to come to France and get French industry out of the ash can, where it's been since the king spent all the country's money." "Well, the German tinplate people won't come, but lots of others do, and Colbert sets up factories so France can make luxury goods like these instead of importing them all." "Colbert floats of a lot of ideas for economic recovery so France can become a superpower." "Some fail, but the one that floats the best is the reason why Colbert has a modern missile cruiser named after him." "Today's French navy is only there because back in 1665, when Colbert arrives on the scene, there is no French navy worth talking about... a few rotting hulks, all chiefs and no Indians." "And as for the mariners' morale, well, sinking fast." "Colbert himself gets particularly ticked off when he finds out that one day, when they need a spare mast, there isn't one to be found in the entire country." "So he pumps in money up the naval ying yang and turns the whole situation around." "He opens new training schools, new arsenals for weapons development, and, above all, new shipyards here, here, and here." "And it all works brilliantly." "In no time at all, there are 120 new French warships backed up by everything else navies are supposed to have... guns, ammo, that stuff... thus putting France back into the superpower league." "Matter of fact, Colbert and his grand plan for France is why today all over the world they still speak French in much of southeast Asia, Africa, the Caribbean, and of course Canada." "Ex-colonies thanks, ultimately, to Colbert." "Now, Colbert can't do miracles, so all those new French ships he orders are well-equipped... with Swedish cannon, Prussian naval stores," "Dutch ammunition," "Italian masts made of Polish timber designed by English naval architects and built by Dutch carpenters." "This is the kind of thing all those foreigners make for Colbert." "Well, to be fair, there are one or two Frenchmen involved, and one of them's a guy called Pierre Puget." "Puget is called... an interesting job description for a navy man, you'll think... artistic director." "Well, this is France." "And his main job is to make and paint ships' figureheads, as well as covering various bits of the ship with scrollwork, gold leaf, and fancy designs." "And fancy is the right word." "As one government bureaucrat remarks," "Puget's decor makes his ships look more like palaces." "Not surprising, really, considering Puget gets his start in what can only be described as palatial circumstances." "Not here in France;" "more's the pity." "As it happens, Pitti is the name of that palace I was talking about where Puget gets his first break as a painter... the Pitti Palace in Florence, the grand ducal palace of the grand dukes of Tuscany," "which we'll get to in a minute." "Meanwhile, time for another catch-up." "After helping Bonnie Prince Charlie to escape," "Flora MacDonald heads for North Carolina, where they produce naval supplies like tar for waterproofing ships and turpentine that helps to make Chinese lacquer that a Welshman puts on tinplate that Colbert wants France to produce as part of an economic recovery package" "which includes a new navy with ships decorated by Puget, who gets his artistic start at the Pitti Palace in Florence, where we go next." "In 1650, the Pitti's being refurbished because it doesn't look grand enough for the grand duke, who brings in some of the hottest interior decorators he can find from all over Italy." "One of these home improvement types," "Pietro da Cortona, brings in an assistant, that ship painter, Pierre Puget, and sets about covering various ceilings." "The art world calls the apartments Cortona does up the "planetary rooms" because he puts stars and planets and stuff on the ceilings." "Back then, they must have felt something like this." "The point of all this heavenly decor is, the duke is crazy for the new astronomy, coming from his favorite egghead, Galileo." "In 1657, the duke and his brother start an academy of science so they can network with other nerds." "This gives his dukeship the chance to pick up on the latest amazing discovery by Galileo's assistant, Torricelli, who plays with a tube of mercury and discovers the space at the top of the tube, nothing less than the thing the Pope says doesn't exist," "the vacuum." "Now, if you ask anybody who worked on the vacuum after this and discovered you could compress air and what it did when you did, they'd say Boyle, of Boyle's law." "Nobody remembers, except every French person, that in France and only in France, it's called Mariotte's law." "One other thing Mariotte gets up to is looking at how fountains work." "Now, this involves a water supply, and Mariotte works out with astonishing perspicacity that most of the water supply around almost certainly comes from the sky." "So Mariotte moves on to weather forecasting, sets up a reporting network all over France." "Of course, by the time the reports get to him, they're a little out of date." "As usual with Mariotte, somebody else has done all the work, a guy named Pierre Perrault, who's another perspicacious genius." "He reckons that if rainfall is the source of supply for fountains, it's probably what fills up rivers too." "So he spends a year measuring the total rainfall on the river Seine and announces that the river Seine is unlikely to dry up." "Well, since it never has," "Perrault's astonishing scientific revelation doesn't make much of a splash." "Still, he perseveres." "Zut alors!" "Not much else ever happens to poor, old Pierre Perrault." "All in all, Pierre never goes anywhere and never does anything much." "Bit of a Cinderella, I suppose." "Funny, that." "His brother, Charles Perrault, writes it..." ""Cinderella," I mean." "And "Puss in Boots" and "Sleeping Beauty"" "and all those other stories in the first-ever kids' storybook, called "Mother Goose,"" "a whole world of make-believe where nothing is what it appears to be, which is the reason I'm telling you this in the French Disneyland, because apart from storybooks," "Charles Perrault gets into deep doo-doo with the French literary establishment when, in 1697, he mounts an attack on the classics... you know, Greek and Roman literature." "And then he goes totally off the rails by describing everybody's big hero, the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, as boring and then making remarks like, "Who gives a rat's ass anyway" ""about all that ancient Greek and Roman stuff?" "We know far more than they did about everything."" "Well, all this goes over like a lead balloon with the French Academy, of which Perrault happens to be a member." "I mean, everything hits the fan." "And quicker than you can say "Everything hits the fan,"" "the rumpus spreads across the Channel to England, where it tickles the fancy of this guy," "Jonathan Swift, world's greatest satirist, who drags the Brits into the fight." "Now, Swift, who writes "Gulliver's Travels" and all that, is a churchman, but he's just a bit too good at the verbal vitriol, so he tends to get up the nose of very important people," "so you can guess what that does to his clerical career prospects." "See, back then, the way to a comfortable life... lots of food and wine and not too much work... is to become a bishop." "Well, Swift doesn't." "But he does get to know one." "Bishop George Berkeley, after whom Berkeley, California, is named." "And " Barkeley," or " Berkeley," is the guy who comes up with a totally and radically new way of looking at looking, so far out that his contemporaries reckon he's gone way over the top." "Berkeley's new thing is about training yourself to recognize that nothing is ever what it appears to be... like all this is." "Okay, here's Berkeley's idea about how we look at things and recognize them." "Here's how he reckons your brain does it." "Okay, here comes something." "And it's got legs." "Okay, it's also got arms and a head." "Okay, legs." "Chicken?" "No." "Table?" "No." "Giraffe?" "No." "Human?" "Okay." "Arms:" "Chicken?" "No." "Military?" "No." "Gorilla?" "No." "Human?" "Right." "Okay, head." "Chicken?" "No." "Elephant?" "No." "Human?" "Yes." "Okay, got it." "It's a human being." "Berkeley reckons you recognize features because they're stored in your brain." "Everybody reckons he's nuts." "This guy, Thomas Young, doesn't." "Young is a baby genius." "Learns to read at two." "By the age of four, he's read the Bible twice." "An 18th-century propellerhead." "In 1793 in London," "Young takes a candle, a lens, and a prism and picks up where Berkeley left off." "Young reckons, like Berkeley, that color is processed in your brain too." "All that hits your retina are the primary colors in the spectrum:" "Red, green, and blue." "And he proves it like this." "Shine a light through a prism, and split the light into primary colors." "Then slide in another prism and see if you can split up one of the primary colors." "No deal; can't be done." "So Young reckons if you see colors that aren't primary colors, you're mixing the colors in your brain." "Everybody reckons he's nuts." "Doesn't phase him one bit." "Goes on to discover light waves." "Can you imagine what a genius like this does with his spare time, eh?" "Matter of fact, this:" "Young's the reason I know what my job description would have been in ancient Egypt." "One who reports what is seen and heard from afar." "And we know this stuff because that's what Young does in his spare time." "He cracks the ancient Egyptian language, no less." "Okay, where have we got?" "Cortona paints astronomical ceilings in the Pitti Palace for the duke, who's turned on by Torricelli's discovery of the vacuum at the top of a tube of mercury." "Barometers and weather forecasts excite Perrault, whose brother starts the literary revolt that also involves Swift, whose pal Bishop Berkeley thinks up a new theory of vision confirmed by Young, who then gets deeply into ancient Egyptian." "Young cracks the ancient Egyptian language because quite by accident, he gets involved with an ancient Egyptian stone covered in writing." "One day, when he had nothing better to do, somebody lent him the Rosetta Stone to play with." "Here it is in the British Museum, snitched by the Brits in Egypt, spoils of war." "The same text in three different scripts:" "Greek and two different ways of writing ancient Egyptian." "Young takes a closer look at this kind." "After a while, Young decides that the little groups of signs that repeat all over the place must be common words like "and"" "and that bigger groups that appear regularly could be some kind of title, like "king" maybe." "Then he finds names he knows in the Greek writing, like Ptolemy, and locates where they are in the Egyptian." "And sure enough, it all starts to make sense." "Once you've done that with this kind of Egyptian writing, you just repeat the trick for hieroglyphs." "All this, you can do thanks to this giant book, produced by Napoleon's scientists after they invade Egypt in 1799, where, as I mentioned, the Brits clobber Napoleon and then grab the Rosetta Stone." "Thing is, the book's got a zillion drawings of what they all saw up the Nile, including a load more inscriptions for the hieroglyph code breakers to work on." "And there are all these drawings because of the speed those Frenchmen were working at up the Nile, getting the lead out in more senses than one, because France has just solved zee great French pencil crisis." "See, because of the war with England and everybody else," "French imports have been blocked, so pencils, which they have always imported, are in short supply." "By 1795, things are so desperate, they're licking their stubs." "And then French genius solves zee problem." "Fellow called Nicolas Conté invents a mixture of graphite and clay, and, voila, an amazing new artificial pencil lead." "That's why that giant pencil sketchbook got done up the Nile and then published by that pencil inventor," "Nicolas Conté." "Successful guy." "Bit of a high flyer, really." "Conté's previous job has been chief of military balloons for Napoleon, so he's going up in the world." "With the aid of telescopes, battles are orchestrated by French generals." "They win... often." "Because up here, it's easier to see what they're up to down there." "However, for some strange reason," "Napoleon takes against the idea, and that's the end of French hot air." "Well, kind of." "Meanwhile, ballooning takes off elsewhere." "By 1861, there's an American civil war going on, and ballooning freak Professor Thaddeus Lowe gets up to all kinds of tricks, like hovering above the battle of Chickahominy on June the first, 1862, and sending telegraph messages down a wire" "to the Union general below about what the Confederate army is doing." "The general in question is George McClellan, who's running the Army of the Potomac and is one of the few people to realize you can spy with a balloon." "Bright guy." "Mind you, the general's had some experience at skullduggery before the war when he's president of the Illinois Central and hires a detective to run railroad security." "This detective is then conscripted by McClellan during the war to become a master spy." "Bad news after the war for Butch Cassidy." "He's among the more famous criminals, like Jesse James, caught by McClellan's now very experienced spy once he gets out of the army and opens the greatest detective agency in the history of the United States and named after him, the Pinkerton." "And then Pinkerton's casebook looks like the who's who of crookery." "He's the first to recognize that criminals have an M.O." "He's a master of disguises and has a great collection of wigs, false mustaches, et cetera." "But it's this that turns out to be Pinkerton's most famous case." "Here in the Pennsylvania coalfields in the 1870s." "The case involves a bunch of Irish anarchists who were causing all kinds of mayhem:" "Arson, murder, blowing up trains, and other such political statements." "This bunch of fun-Ioving fellows becomes known as the Molly Maguires." "Pinkerton decides to infiltrate the gang." "Fortunately for him, he has just the right guy for the job." "His name is James McParlan..." "Irish, Catholic, and tough... who gets a job as a miner and starts to act Irish, Catholic, and tough." "For two years, he sends Pinkerton secret reports and avoids killing the people he's been ordered to by taking to whiskey so the Mollies will think he's a hopeless drunk... and becomes a hopeless drunk." "Finally, just as the Mollies are getting wise to him, he gets out by the skin of his teeth with enough evidence to bring the Mollies to justice." "They hang 13 of them." "McParlan goes off to Denver to recover from the booze and dies a broken man." "Still, he does become famous..." "in England." "This is where McParlan would have become famous... if this place had ever really existed, or the fellow who's supposed to have lived here, neither of which ever happened." "But you try telling that to the fans, who've been making the pilgrimage to this place for the last 100 years... and who, 100 years ago, learn all about McParlan in a novel called "The Valley of Fear,"" "based on McParlan's adventures with the Molly Maguires but not starring McParlan." "Oh, no, starring the guy who never existed, who didn't live here at 221 B Baker Street or wear a deerstalker or play the violin or smoke a pipe or have a physician sidekick or take dope." "Because here is where my story ends." "So let me review the clues and see if you can guess who never lived here." "Beetle freak Wallace, Lodge and telegraphy," "Fessenden's radio, used by banana growers, top banana in banana science Candolle, who gets the Swiss into stamps used on postcards with cartoons of the Gothic Houses of Parliament, inspired by Herder's Romantic movement," "inspired by fake Scottish poems." "The exiled Scots escape to North Carolina, making turpentine, used for making Chinese lacquer on tinplate Colbert wants." "French navy decorator Puget, who paints places where they play with barometers." "The weather freak, whose brother's writing turns on Swift, whose pal Berkeley has visual theories that Young confirms while decoding ancient Egyptian from examples sketched by pencils invented by French balloonists." "The American balloons by Pinkerton and his intrepid agent McParlan, who becomes famous in England." "Phew." "Got it?" "Detective McParlan is made famous in England by the greatest detective of them all, because "The Valley of Fear" is the last Sherlock Holmes story" "Conan Doyle ever writes." "And that's the end of my whodunit." "But if you got the clues as we went along, you got there ahead of me." "As Sherlock himself might have said..." ""It was elementary, my dear Watson.""