Connections 2

Flexible Response is a whimsical look at the myth of the English longbow, Robin Hood, sheep, the need to drain land with windmills, the effect of compound interest, decimal fractions (wrongly pointing to the USA not Russia as the first country with decimal currency, in fact USA did not exist at the time of Russian decimalization in 1704), increased productivity, the Erie Canal, railroads, telegraphs, department stores, Quaker Oats, X-ray diagnostics, biofeedback, and servo control systems in a Panavia Tornado aircraft.

Murphy's Law says you need insurance from Lloyd's of London, so pack your bags to study international law and protect yourself from piracy by calculating the probability. You better study Pascal's math for that, but you might find yourself jailed for free thinking. While you are in jail, study some sign language, or at least learn to speak better than Eliza Doolittle. Henry Higgins's waveform recordings lead you to the telephone, the invention of shorthand, the radiometer, gas flow, the Wright brothers' aeroplane, lubrication, ball bearings and a ballpoint pen so you can "Sign Here".

Jethro Tull, a sick English lawyer, recuperates sipping wine and contributes the hoe to help fix farming problems. Farm production is not going so well in France, either. François Quesnay (doctor of King Louis XV's mistress) suggests a solution based on his complete misunderstanding of English farming techniques. Laissez-faire was his erroneous idea. It also got the people to demand social laissez-faire. His inciting the public's rebellion against the monarchy led to France's invasion of Geneva. The French Revolution led to personal exploration of the senses. Berlin doctor Müller reasoned that each sense does a different job and the nervous system analyses what the senses are telling one. Helmholtz's pupil, Hertz, discovered that sound and electricity have a wave-like nature in common. Guglielmo Marconi takes this a step further by sending and receiving signals very long distances across the earth. The BBC realised that the radio waves were reflected by the ionosphere, and Hess was the first to suggest that the ionization was due to "Hess rays" later related to solar activity. But World War II started and adding machines were needed to aim artillery, so digital computing was invented. Thus was enabled the GPS which tells travelers their "Routes".

Gin and tonic was invented to combat malaria in British colonies like Java, which leads us to Geneva, where cleanliness is an obsession. Here, tonic water was sealed with a disposable bottle cap, and razors became disposable, leading us to Huntsman's steel, invaluable for making clock springs. We take a little trip through lighthouses, the education of orphans, psycho-physics, the law of the just noticeable difference, which is the idea behind stellar magnitudes, which leads us to discovering the size of the universe.

Burke starts out in a spice market in Istanbul where you can find hot pickle, recounts the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, follows the trail of pepper, tea, and opium and the exploitation of addicts, moves to the jungles of Java, then to zoos, the use of canaries as carbon monoxide detectors, how George Stephenson used his consolation prize to build a locomotive, which led to the battle between the Monitor and the Merrimack. Next we visit a sea island off the coast of South Carolina, where children of slaves are schooled. By the way, they picked cotton, which leads us to gaslight and air conditioning. Georgia Cayvan's glass dress leads to the neodymium glass laser, (which was used in the Gulf War). And the armed switch for firing a missile is also called a "hot pickle".

James Burke provides evidence that history does repeat itself by examining the likes of black and white movies, conquistadors, Peruvian Incas, small pox, settlements that look like Spain's cities, the gold abundance ending up in Belgium, Antwerp, colony exploitation, the practice of burying treasure to avoid pirates, Port Royal's pirates, earthquakes, the College of William and Mary, military discipline, Alexander Humboldt's observation on the environment, Ratzel's superstate Lebensraum, and Haushofer's world domination.

Burke shows how to get from sugar to atomic weapons by two totally independent paths. The first involves African slaves, Abolitionist societies, Sampson Lloyd II, wire, suspension bridges, galvanised wire, settlement of the Wild West, barbed wire, canned corn, and cadmium. The second path involves sweet tea, rum, a double boiler, the steam engine, Matthew Boulton, English currency, the pantograph, electroplating, and cathode ray tubes.

The past in this case starts with the tea in Dutch-ruled India, examines the Japanese tea ceremony, Zen Buddhism, porcelain, the architecture of Florence, Delftware, Wedgwood, Free Masons, secret codes, radio-telephones, cosmic background radiation and—finally – radio astronomy, which listens to "Echoes of the Past".

This episode starts with a billiard ball and ends with a billiard ball. Along the way, Burke examines Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica, how mining supported war, the role of money, the Spanish Armada, large ships, problems posed by a wood shortage, glass making, coal, plate glass, mirrors, the sextant, the discovery of granite, and seashells in the mountains, which enabled a new view of the age of the earth, and Darwin's theory of evolution, Francis Galton's Eugenics, and the forensic use of fingerprints.

What do these have in common – Freud, lifestyle crisis, electric shock therapy, hypnotherapy, magnetism, phrenology, penology, physiology, synthetic dyes, the Bunsen burner, absorption, Fraunhofer lines, astronomical telescopes, chromatic aberrations, and surveying? Follow James Burke on the trail of discovering the connections between these and others in "Sentimental Journeys".