"Confirming your mark's crossing up through." "I suppose one of the secrets of success in war has always been preparedness, anticipating the threat and knowing how to react to it and where and when and then doing what you had to do with surgical precision." "The story of how we came to be able to use all this massive firepower to such deadly effect, as usual, links the strangest things." "Sheep and canals and breakfast food and department stores, for instance." "And just this once, the story starts with the medieval equivalent of this Tornado bomber and the thing that makes them both unique in war, the supreme capability both of them have for one thing above all:" ""flexible response."" "Now, that's flexibility." "And back in the 13th century, the famous english longbow put the fear of God into anybody you pointed it at." "The longbow was called long because it was six foot long, and it was a medieval terror weapon." "It could skewer a knight to his horse at 400 yards or put an arrow through a six-inch-thick oak door." "Longbowmen were top-gun superstars, and anything they wanted, they got." "I mean, you were in a tight spot, and you said, "I am an english Iongbowman,"" "they'd even let you out of jail." "unless you were lying, which, of course, you were, because this wasn't english." "That's a myth." "This was welsh." "And speaking of myths, what about the greatest bowman of all, Robin Hood?" "In spite of the fact that Robin Hood is the stuff of song and legend, the truth is, he was real." "Not hollywood real." "No band of merry men, nothing to do with King Richard or the sheriff of Nottingham or Sherwood Forest." "But he was a real outlaw in Yorkshire, so no myth." "The one who was was Maid Marian." "She certainly never existed." "Maid Marian is a character invented in 1285 by a song-and-dance man from FIanders called Adam de Ia halle, who is down here in italy with his boss and his boss's army, which is helping out the boss's cousin, the king of naples." "But like all troops, the army is homesick and misses its girlfriends." "So Adam raises morale with a little show all about some very slightly naughty goings-on back in flanders and staring Maid Marian." "It's one of those IittIe-girI- goes-to-big-city stories that goes something like this." "Act One: "Don't Speak to Strange Men."" "Into the life of an innocent shepherdess comes a smoothie from the bright lights who in no time at all works his oily charm on the unsuspecting maiden, and before she knows it, Marian's in Act Two," ""Some Things a girl ShouIdn't Do."" "Having persuaded Marian to leave home, this devious creep inveigIes her into trying a little nighttime naughtiness." "This is shocking stuff for a poor peasant girl who's never even heard of a bare midriff, never mind all these people jumping around, drinking booze, and whooping it up to the strains of the 13th-century equivalent of some very heavy rock." "As the night wears on, the spell wears off." "finally, Act Three of our cautionary tale," ""Marian Gets the Point."" "realizing in the nick of time how close she has come to a fate worse than death," "Marian decides to hightail it back to home and her faithful boyfriend named Robin." "And that's how Maid Marian came into existence." "Nothing to do with Robin Hood at all." "Just a soft-porn burlesque with a plot really based on social problems back in flanders between homespun villagers who raised the sheep and smooth city types who made all the profits from the wool." "This is FIanders." "flat, isn't it?" "Which is why back in the middle Ages, this was where all the action was if you were in the business of making a bit of money." "well, look at the place." "On the edge of the North Sea, rivers everywhere, so ships could get in and out easily all the way from the Mediterranean one way to the baltic the other." "You unload their cargos, and then you ship the stuff all over Europe, which is a piece of cake, because it's flat." "So FIanders was flat and also rich." "trouble with being flat, of course, was that every winter, the place flooded, and hundreds of people drowned." "And, more to the point, so did hundreds of sheep, and wool was by far the country's biggest export, which is why FIanders was keen to become less wet and why hydraulic engineers like this guy, Simon Stevin," "got busy in the 16th century designing systems to drain the land and keep it drained with windmills." "Stevin did so well, there were soon more sheep than people and a booming economy and the kind of problem you get when the country's made enough money to lend, which is when compound interest enters your life." "Now, I know you didn't switch on to see a program about compound interest, but bear with me, because it'II only take a minute." "See, compound interest's always about fractions of an amount and never the whole thing, right?" "But adding and subtracting fractions is so complicated, it's a load of double Dutch to most people." "Quite a problem, even for people like Stevin." "So one day, he went home and solved the problem." "basically, what he did was this:" "See this sum of fractions adds up to 1 4 43/1000?" "Stevin changed the way you wrote fractions, so 1 4 43/1000 became the decimal fraction 1 4.043." "Made compound interest a snip and life easier for accountants and changed America, because I know it's obvious if you think about it, but when you have revolutions and set up a new country and a new government," "what do you do with all the old stuff?" "Okay, old government, you chuck out." "But what, for instance, about old money?" "I mean, in 1782, American money was this:" "well, ours." "english guineas, shillings, and pence and French sous, French livres," "Spanish doubloons, Portuguese modoires, or anything else anybody would take." "And each one of them was worth something different if you went from New York to South carolina to Georgia to pennsylvania." "There was no such thing as American money in 1782, which was the year a one-Iegged, fun-Ioving New York socialite called Gouverneur Morris took up Simon Stevin's suggestion that everybody else had ignored for the first ever decimal coinage." "By the time President Jefferson had finished fiddling around with Morris' idea, it had become dollars and cents, written with the symbol for Spanish pesos and centavos." "still took Americans 50 years to give up using their english shillings." "Of course, once Jefferson got involved, everybody forgot it was Morris who started it, and that might have been that for him, except eventually, Morris did make his mark on history in an "Erie" way." "In 1825 at the grand opening ceremony when they poured a keg of Great Lakes water into the atlantic to symbolize the joining of the two, the Erie canal was all thanks to Morris, who'd headed the commission to build it." "Greatest transportation system in America till they built this right next to the canal, which drove it out of business, because trains changed the way business was done." "Of course, it made good sense to run the railroad tracks alongside the canal, because canal land is flat." "But look at the tracks." "single tracks." "So how do you pass a train going the other way?" "well, you sit in a siding till the other train comes by." "How do you know it's coming?" "well, that's why you sit so long; you don't." "Which is why the trains back then were never on time." "And then in 1851 , the Erie railroad changed the world when it got itself organized with this." "The telegraph solved the singIe-track problem at a stroke." "Now trains knew they didn't have to wait around, so they ran more trains, so the price of freight went down, so the American economy went up." "The telegraph got the railroad people so well organized, everybody in business started copying their methods." "The railroad is where all this stuff started-- waybiIIs, line managers, departments-- because running the railroads was really complicated, with hundreds of points of sale and hundreds of thousands of customers." "An organizational nightmare." "Which is why one of the people running the Erie, a fellow called McCaIIum-- thank you-- organized the whole thing with the first management chart." "Areas of responsibility, lines of communication, data flow, personnel breakdown, all that." "By the late 19th century, the railroads were running trains right up to the door of American factories to bring in fuel and raw materials and take away whatever they produced to be sold, which left only one minor problem:" "sold where?" "The question was, what outlet was ever going to be big enough to handle what American industry was churning out?" "Everything from soup to nuts." "Answer: the department store, that's what, the place that changed the meaning of the word "shopping."" "I mean, this wasn't just a place for getting everything you needed, although getting everything you needed in one place was a new idea." "No, this wasn't shopping;" "this was an experience." "It was gIamor, chandeliers, plush carpets, marble, beauty salons, day nurseries, charge accounts." "This wasn't buying;" "this was consuming." "And it was big." "By 1877, the department stores were everywhere, persuading people to buy things they never knew they needed." "And speaking of persuading people to buy, that was the year some people in Ravenna, Ohio, started persuading consumers to eat something that up until then only horses and poverty-stricken Scotsmen had eaten." "It was a product that brought together everything happening in American industry:" "railroads, management, consumerism, raw materials in one end, finished goods out the other, and one new vital ingredient:" "merchandising." "This was the product." "Quaker came up with most of the persuaders you see everywhere today." "They gave away free gifts." "They appealed to the housewife on a limited budget." "They even made a vaguely coIoniaIist appeal to patriotism." "Quaker also invented the idea of box-top coupons and endorsements from consumers and stars like shirley temple." "So with all this persuasion to consume, about all there was left to do was persuade the workers to produce." "Watch the closing gates." "At this time, please remove your hands from the harness so it may be checked for you." "Motivation, it's called, and it's the only thing that could get me to do what I'm about to do." "The idea of motivation all started with an experiment run at the Western electric Hawthorne plant in Cicero, illinois, between 1924 and 1927." "And the best way to appreciate the surprising results of the experiment is for you to be the psychologist." "Okay, here's what you're trying to do:" "find out what you have to do to get workers to produce more." "So you explain carefully that you're going to try upping the light levels." "Production goes up." "Then you explain carefully you're going to lower the light levels." "Production stays up." "So you explain carefully you're going to change everything at random:" "the heat, the working day, the length of the lunch break, rest periods." "You do that for five years, and production goes up again." "Then you explain carefully you're going to put everything back where it was." "Production stays up." "Then you get the point:" "explaining carefully made workers happy and more productive." "Now, for some people, that fact was pretty hard to swallow." "Watch the closing gates." "But it was right up the street of a fellow called Cannon, who spent years looking at what happens when you get hungry." "He invented the barium meal, you know, that shows up on X-rays, to look at what happens when you eat something, discovered that the foods moved along inside your stomach by a series of waves and that the waves and a dry mouth" "are the sign that you're hungry." "And then he discovered that when you get excited or scared, as I'm about to, the stomach waves stop." "And a Iot more happens." "Sit back and relax." "The blood leaves your stomach and goes to your heart, your lungs, and your muscles." "You hyperventiIate." "Your blood pressure shoots up." "Energy-suppIied sugar pours out of your liver." "Cannon realized that those were just the things your body needed when it was under extreme stress," "like I am now, so that you could be ready to handle anything." "Cannon also discovered what happens to make you stop feeling all shook up, the way, after moments of extreme stress," "like we're going through now, the body uses feedback to check if the environment is still dangerous, and if it isn't, it pumps up the necessary chemicals to bring all the levels back to normal." "And you know what?" "Cannon was right." "I can feel it happening." "20 years later, Cannon's feedback concept was transferred from biology to engineering with deadly results." "In the 1940s, feedback went into machines with the first early forms of automation in artillery that used feedback from radar data to track the targets." "Then in the 1960s, the principle was used to operate robots in factories." "Today the most spectacular form of feedback in action happens when this Tornado does what it does best." "It's feedback from the aircraft's altimeter to the onboard computer that lets the pilot concentrate on the mission while the plane flies itself just above the ground." "Feedback and flexible response could be the key to everything in the fast-changing world of the 21st century in the world of technology, the world of business, maybe the world of individual survival." "And, most particularly, in the post cold War political world of constantly shifting allegiances and threats and saber rattling, perhaps none of it holds together for long enough for cease-fires or negotiations or peace plans without the aid of one special kind of flexible response."