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Connections 7 -- the Long Chain

by: Burke, James, 1936-; British Broadcasting Corporation; Time-Life Films

Publication date: 1979

Topics: Technology, Technology, Technology

Publisher: Time Life Education / Turner Learning / Time Life Video PO Box 85026 Richmond VA 23285-5026 USA (800)449-2010 (804)261-1300 http://www.timelifeedu.com

Language: English

Connections 7 -- the Long Chain

Search Educational Film Journals at Media History Project for references to this film

Summary

Traces the connection between 17th century mercantile competitio./iahe development of a coal - tar pitch to protect ship hulls, and the creation of waterproofed clothing, gaslight lamps, and nylon. Number 7 of the series.

Addeddate: 2015-07-14 00:27:40

Boxid: IA1130106

Identifier: connections7thelongchainreel1

Lccn: 79706746

Ocr: Thank. The accident happened here in Cape Hatteras which is where the other side I was at the time when everybody was living it up having themselves the get one. Then as now of course. Diamonds were to go back to insurance not that are boring friends only what's always interested me go NO like him he is interested in the spotless he wants to make artificial diamonds for serious chemical reasons. And while everybody else gets up to the things people get up to in Paris was always trying various chemicals into an electric fence. Things are getting very hot. What Paul is obliged to announce Sally you know Diane and. Still he packed the beer than one day and eight hundred ninety five back in his lab he says into mine and carbon and what does he get calcium carbide is but here is here. OK he says that we're going to do that is start fiddling around with this nothing much happens until one day he drops of water on it. Look what happens. What comes out the other end. That is acetylene gas burning but you put yourself in their position it's a hundred ninety eight the price of electricity is very high. Town gas isn't very bright. Naturally they thought this was the new the new light to the future a lot of people put a law. Money into it and buy a two hundred ninety nine there were about a quarter of a million acetylene gas jets all over Germany and low and then in one thousand nine hundred the price of electricity dropped and somebody came along with a gas mantle to make town gets much brighter and the bottom dropped right out of the acetylene market about all that came out of the mess is the invention of. However all over Europe there was now tons of the calcium carbide that started the whole thing lying around. Worthless until along came to commit to dying chemists called Cairo and Frank who decided they'd try to see what they could make of this gap in carbide and they did lots of things to it. Any one particular case they passed nitrogen gas over it in a very quiet album and when they took it back out again the nitrogen had gone into the calcium carbide and that was a result of that contains twenty percent nitrogen and you could put it straight on the field and feed the plants it's a fertilizer the fertilizer that Germany needed at a price. Germany could afford to pay and that was what not to have a budget process right on the head. So now everybody could again and the hub a bus process. Don't worry it'll be back. By now. Germany was on the way to being a superpower with an unbeatable chemical industry and expertise Aleppo should always be on making silly toys and clocks now thanks to the coal fields in the rural she was moving into the. If you leave. With steel for weapons. In so she hears Germany went from being a backward agricultural country to being able to build projects like this. The monorail in the industrial town of robots off. When the monorail opened in one thousand nine hundred some belies the nationalist ambitions of the man who drew Germany through her years of growth. Kaiser Wilhelm you know so his country on the edge of greatness. Thanks in part to coal tar on the way. German color chemists and use. How could pour old Dundonald all those years before a four see what's cooking bits of coal in the capital it was leaked. And you recall I said the harbour bar subsidize or attempts would come back not. The same year the Kaiser opened the book at home on a rail. He also signed up bill that went to bring Germany's destruction the bill was to finance the construction of a bigger and better German navy and the reason was quite simple. If Germany was to take up place in world markets if she was to use her industrial potential to run advantage then she like the other major powers have to have a colony of the only thing that stood in the way of those colonies was a British navy so the Germans built ships and so did the British an arms race began of at the end with the war in one hundred fourteen it's no accident that the first major battle at sea in that war was off the coast of Chile. For decades the major powers Germany included had been using the bomb natural deposits of sodium nitrate found on Chile's West Coast to the nitrate fertilizer but now Germany needed that sodium nitrate for an even more desperate reason because if you put thirty in nitrate together with self your account and you get nitric acid and nitric acid is essential for making explosives and a British blockaded the Chilean supply so the Germans are not in fourteen How about one here in stock one year to apply more have to be found very urgently. Where else but in the harbour Bush process the process that ended by making sodium nitrate money was poured into building the factories and Germany needed if she was to keep on fighting. Which she did as a result then of the original demand for fertilizer the First World War lasted for years when it might well have ended in less than one. That leaves only one thread hanging in our story what happened to the offensive. Remember that was a bit of a flop except for this. Deadly welding will that stand out to be the most extraordinary thing of all in one hundred twelve an obstinate German chemist called Fritz plucked it we're still trying to do things with the settlers and one day one of these mixtures with sitting on a sunny window shelf when it gradually went back and milky. Whatever it was it wasn't what class it was looking for and being the kind of guy who didn't like things to be left lying around down the drain it went. After you know he said after I didn't get much use to anyone. Into seven years off microwave. At the nine hundred fifty nine World Series New York million to see what other people have done. You've already seen clues to wife who's in this film. Never screen still not showing the world on the first day of. The fair was the first big public display of something we today cannot do without. One of the real crowd stop as affair was a Dupont a place where people stepped into the future into a Flash Gordon well where chemistry made scientific magic and one of the most magical things came from the stuff that Fritz had thrown away all those years before. If only he'd had his ingredients a fraction different he would have turned his acetylene muck into a usable polymer that's a bunch of super giant molecules that can be turned into an artificial substance why did that matter. Well. The first world war. Gave both Germany and America a severe rubber shortage and they were desperate for a substitute and they found it and then in one nine hundred thirty eight Dupont came up with the most famous substitutable itself made of supergiant molecules there man. WALLACE Carruthers had found you know where. In our old friend coal tar That's why do point stop the crowds everybody was high on substitute. In a. Home when it comes from it was inevitable that it was a miracle to take the lead in making and using the new substitute there more than anywhere else. Novelty meant to proceed at the rate these new materials were coming up to the test. Paradoxically novelty was good to stick. To strange trail has brought us to the one nine hundred thirty nine two point five million it started round sixteen hundred with the flight the Dutch super ship put France profits of the overseas trade and sent the English how are you cross the oceans to build an empire on ships that had to be insured and how low is of London. Wouldn't insure their ships unless the holes were covered with a protective coating of Ta ta they came from America. Until the American War of Independence. Stop supply forcing people like the Earl of Dundonald to look for the top coat and accidentally make gas and how a coal tar sludge that the gas makers were throwing away. Was picked up by Macintosh for his rubber products but he couldn't get from the Far East because the Imperial administration was too interested in making quitting in order to fight malaria and how Perkins looking for artificial Quiney ended up with artificial die and boost to the German economy and its industries to the point where the population rose so high it could only be fed with the help of fertilizes produced through the acetylene process and how the other fertilizer they tried made all the explosive necessary to keep their artillery shells firing right through World War one. I wore which cause the kind of sought to TJ's and force them back to essentially for substitutes and how finally Dupont came up with the greatest substitutable Initially they thought of calling it to Peru that stands for Dupont pulls a rabbit out of a hat. Finally though they settled on nylon. And nylon opened the door to a modern world. I world full of substitute materials without which we cannot survive a world which because of those substitute few changes every day. Of plastic. Because of plastic. That's rate of change accelerate every here. It's fun but can we keep it out. Because. He has. To do what. He has. Good with. Going to be. At. A time when a lot of people were being sent to the ends of the when the average Brits got to a place like this is the island of conducting off the coast of Malaysia. He really cared a good deal less about culture and things like that temple of the ten thousand voters than he did about the stuff that surrounded. The jungle out of which the British were asking themselves an empire and giving him something quite a sweat and not just because of the steam because this. Let me explain. This place is absolutely full of nuts make plantations hear them not make tree. Say. NOT MAKE YOU were one of the reasons why Europeans came out here to the Far East in the first place to look. By its own up mags. Cinnamon ginger about that stuff and by eighteen fifty two the Brits out here we're doing really rather well thanks to the pleasantly burned all those raw materials lying around places like India and the lawn and lay on various other imperial hot but. Now most of the Imperial goodies came from plantations and if you want to get a plantation going you've got to do one thing for us you've got to hike the jungle down. Now but that gives your profit my heart attack is a lot of clear ground to do your planting and a lot of want to expose sunlight so you get your sugar all your cotton plantation going and the enough Allee's musky toe get the warm and wonderful place to do its reproductive thing because it's babies love warm water and that's just what you've given them. Now you know families mosquito is that simple so the most it wants out of life is to be able to give you an me. Malaria and the fever has swept that go with it and by doing fifty two that's just what it was doing all over the. British Imperial Far East. Now that gave everybody a bit of a problem because you try running the trains on time for keeping the army on its feet Joe the Thousand and One other things that the imperialist ministrations the mom with malaria everywhere and you've got a job. Life expectancy out here was about half what it was back in England because although you may not die from the Larry F. it will weaken you to the point where you die from pressure the anything else so the stiff upper lip the colonial service chaps are dropping like flies. It's up to write crazy years. Now about all you can do to help to prevent malaria was trying to get down out of the jungle to get regular supplies of or rather not see white powder back that made from the bank of a tree called the content. Not rather unfortunate concerto was only grow in South America and Java Nizer whisper along to the British or the British colonial government was playing through the news for the stuff very bad home. Still every cloud has a silver lining and at least one good thing with come out of the mess. Is he. They used to put the tower into the water that had a bit of sugar in it for taste and they got themselves could mean water because a white powder was quitting. Still tasted pretty foul. Until somebody had the bright idea putting a drop of June it. And that's why the gin and tonic was invented you just know purposes. Well back to the problem. In eighteen fifty two the Governor General of India sent a rather stiff no back saying I look at why botanists tell me that we ought to be able to Grace can check that here. And that's why the experts of Q garden that didn't turn down the rubber plantation I do remember they were working themselves into a larger about the feverish Far East and the fact that if they didn't manage to come up with the hills you can churn a plant they could take off to India and stick in the ground so the Governor General would get what he asked for. They'd be so to speak of when you're. Travelling was the more they learned about concerned the less likely it looked to survive a transplant asked very broad road and then out of the blue the new Royal College of chemistry suggested having a go at making Quentin artificial. So young eighteen year old called William in regards to get on with it and eighteen fifty six he was playing around with a by product of our old friend called up when you came up with a load of market very definitely wasn't the queen and he was trying to make it was very close only a few molecules different but everybody should have that kind of accident. Because when William Perkin Chuck vs mark away into some water he got very rich and the world got. The first artificial. Perkins pneumo was an. Instant. And racing success. Exhibition of eight hundred sixty two most of the huffing and puffing wasn't coming from the machines on the show it was from the reporters who have seen the new color miracle from coal tar. And thousands of others who came to the show went away how rampant publicly about how Britain was going to become the greatest color exporting country in the well. And eight hundred sixty two most of these well fed complacent little classic Tory and the God of themselves and their country as a vice or guardians of anybody on earth they could Muslim know militarily or economically to save them from themselves of course the new artificial diet was just one more example of how British genius was that much better than any other that's what made Great Britain great. Unfortunately when it came to putting money into the new comic strip the investors prefer the is your profits to be had from a colony there was a point in taking risks with a new infant science nobody here but most of the investors didn't even know what chemistry. And as for actually training chemists Well I mean that was quite out of the question I mean the chap who went to university just didn't do that sort of thing to have actually trained for a career would have been unspeakable applause steps why Perkins teacher in London had been a German sea they were awfully good at the rather Saudi business of opening universe. Cities and technical schools and actually letting anybody in on marriage stem and their family background and they actually encouraged links between university in industry the kind of thing that many of the early Victorian intellectual mind boggles. So if you ask what do you think the British did with that head start that William Perkin had given them in color chemistry ahead of all the rival a clear opportunity to grab and hang on to a lead in one of the most profitable new industries for a hundred years. I blew it. As you know who put them in the shade of the wrong time. The Germans didn't. Buy a two hundred seventy in colour chemistry that Germans were calling the two and the great German chemical industry for going full blast. Be at their perks. Agfa fire thanks to the universe to contact they were turning up dozens of comedy here. Suddenly it was a colorful world and every time they looked at coal tar some of another color to write home about. OG color postcard. The Germans had realised what the British have that there was a great deal more to colour them color there was all that chemical knowledge you learned from making orange or blue green or whatever by the eight hundred seventy they were selling color everybody when I say color I mean pretty well every color in the rainbow. Now all this success with color went right to the Germans heads suddenly there was nothing to be bought a true died in the world German there are composers even read colorful too. Here's a catchy little number that I think you'll find will set your feet tapping. Well your fingers it you know you and throw me something. Think why this piece isn't better known in the concept repertoire. And maybe I can. Look. Back to the story one of the German biggest hits with this particular agreement which across the French took Dyer got the Emperor's Asia need to with the upper knockouts. Everybody wanted to. And if this program is giving you a headache. Sank the German color industry. Painkillers came out of their labs to success off to success and then out of nowhere came something that looked as if it would stop the German and Dutch true machine death. Put. It is one of those stories that doesn't make sense even when you've heard it twice. We tried on you. Combine harvester invented by an American McCormack a few years before that German color business because of it by the seventy's America. Wait. Coming out of it is so the price drops. Depressed to be giving bread away good idea no sir he in Germany they eat this black RIAA bread grown in pressure by a bunch of Arthur Kratz called the youngers. Very big deal people. The youngers they've got the government in their pocket. So none of that keep American wheat gets into Germany where the population is rocketing in the need food. OK everybody can eat right. The Yorkers are exporting it or to make money. Now let me see if that confuses you as much as it confuses me. You've got lots of rye but you export it you're sort of their mind for and we just eat so you don't import it that's what I thought I said but that's what they did so in desperation. Somebody started trying to boost wheat growing in Germany and when they did they ran last bang into a brick wall. No fertilizer that to bring it in from Chile at colossal expense and they just didn't have that kind of bread when I sang that have any kind of bread. What happens next. Involves the curious way things sometimes get kind of passed on and left hanging in mid air till they're picked up and used later on when the time is right so if you're ready for a bit of that here goes. Germany was in a fix because you've got no fertilized. By the eight hundred ninety S. down the farm things were pretty desperate. Industry might be making loads of money but all of it was going on imported food and especially such a life. The way the subtle as a problem got licked and because of that course and many more things to happen and just increase food production is a bit of a chemistry lesson although it does have a sting in the tail so I hope you'll forgive me if I give it to you rather straight. About one thousand nine hundred six to their experience making all those fantastic colors. German chemists were among the best in the world and one of them is a fellow called Fritz Harbor who decided quite consciously to try and make fertilizer and this is what he ended up with although it's in reality would be on a vast industrial scale this is what he did in that long before there he made very high pressure two hundred times normal Africa and a temperature of about six hundred degrees centigrade and into that vessel he sent a mixture of hydrogen and nitrogen and as the gases went through the vessel they passed through. A mesh made of a particular kind of metal up cause the gases to react and produce a million and that's what comes out the bottom and now all the rest of this equipment is for cleaning and filtering and making the only appeal. OK this one most days to go. He will make the ammonia gas and you put it into another hot on this one only this time he put it in with their And as the gases come through once again they go through why I met here something and that causes the gas reactor this time what goes up the other end is nitric oxide. Now if you mix nitric oxide with water you get nitric acid and if you mix nitric acid then with soda you get sodium nitrate and sodium nitrate is a fertilizer. By nine hundred nine. And a colleague he worked on this with Called ball which is why it's called a hobbled by both. While they were in a position to build factories it would produce thousands of tons of fertilizer year. Great idea to have a budget process. Never got anywhere course because this is one of those going moments in history when some other fellow working somewhere else on something totally unconnected with this as I'm self an accident and ruins everything. The accident happened here in Cape Hatteras which is where the other side I was at the time when everybody was looking it up having themselves the game. Then as now because diamonds were to go back to ensure Not that are boring friends only one. For the at all. On this giant metal box is one of the reasons why the modern world changes as fast as it does that because of the people living in Lima or Birmingham OSHA cargo or anywhere else can as easily all have the same Japanese model calculator dressed in French fashions use a telephone system designed and built in Germany. Get emergency medical equipment when they need it and eat fresh strawberries in the winter and they can do all that because you can put one hundred tons of anything into this metal box. Anything from helicopters to drive. OK you say what's new about that anybody could fill a book but this book will take its one hundred tons of anything anywhere in the world within twenty four hours because it's got a big hole in the front it the. Seven forty seven F. right up the biggest thing like it in the world and they're already talking about building something five times as big. Now it's not so much that these things can move cargo around at six hundred miles an hour it's the rate at which they bring change to places I mean with one of these you can deliver the got for the time a factory one day and come back the next day with another effect for high technology. Total. And what for instance is that going to do to the developing countries and to their relationship with us. This is not the first time a new kind of Tron for just changed things. Seven forty seven if I'm cannily like another afraid to build to do exactly the same job four hundred years ago and anything you can say about the seven forty seven you could say about it. Built by the richest nation in the world. Deliberate on international groups to bring in boats called or they could be split up and react faulted nothing radically new about it. Design just very efficient low operating cost most amazing control system for a very small crew working in a very small cabin high up above the hole. And yet the first phrase F. one hundred years ago built for those same type to receive change the world. You see if your city. Drinking coffee with sugar in it smoking and you've got a bank account or a mortgage on your house and your insured bank that other freighter four hundred years ago. This little ship called a flight that help to make Holland the richest country in the world. By the mid seventeenth century these Dutch much and for bringing shiploads of tobacco sugar pepper silks you name it into Europe by the time because they were trading from Archangel to Cape Town. Brazil to Nagasaki. Holland was the warehouse of your and everybody wanted some of the goodies putting your money and Saddam is like having out Swiss bank account today. Cos the Dutch made it easy to get credit. Essman big profits and above all he made a deal with the Dutch and he was a deliver literally. This is one a little port in northern Holland where the Dutch develop that first regular express service to almost anywhere in Europe see Bakken fifteen ninety five. These ship builders here had realized I'm like anybody else that nobody was going to get very rich out of cargo delivery unless they solve one facing problem Little Miss Broyhill see the problem that Galleon everybody used the Great for fighting otherwise useless I mean just to put the sales up and down you needed dozens of people and they call so get rid of them. OK Look at that deck all that crew accommodation taking valuable deck space you can pile up with cargo and if you're not a warship. What do you need the gun deck for in terms of cargo space that's what the Galleon gave you ludicrous So here's what they did they built. Near a square hole as they could for maximum space remember the seven forty seven and like it they put a very small crew cabin on top running the control surfaces with the help of automation in this case. Block and tackle like the seven forty seven nothing radical about the design just the most efficient cargo ship and we're. Now. The flight made the Dutch rich because it took imports from across the oceans and delivered them all around Europe. Practically daughter thought it was that kind of service I could you do. This little ship went as a very big with everybody except the English. Everywhere they went they bumped into these guys. The Dutch East India Company who's got everywhere the English wanted to go and got there first so the English decided to take over by giving such. They found a way to share the cost of sending out ships to bring home the goodies they set up a way you could register how much land you had get a mortgage on it and then go to one of the new coffee houses in London and buy yourself a priest of the action and to handle the money the Bank of England the started literally over a cup of coffee in these places you could trade anything from ship the girls to land in America. But the deal that meetings and great was the tidy kidnap Africans Silliman Barbados for sugar. Phil Black in America for tobacco I think you know I've lived. With this amount of stuff. Pouring into the come. Trillion more and more ships spending up to a here away from home on voyages to India Africa America it was inevitable that it should turn to the bill insurance because after if the ship goes down and you lose a lot so in sixteen eighty eight a man called Edward Lloyd set up a new coffee house where you could go and get insurance and this is what that coffee house finally became the biggest insurance organization away. Lloyds of London. Lloyds made more and more voice as possible because they regularize the business of insurance because they paid up probably even on Mystery losses like that where. They were able to do that because of the system they introduced right from the start of categorizing ships look this is one of the earliest secrets books and in here they include details of the ship and they classify the whole according to its soundness by the left is a zero or you and it's a quip MN as are the G. Good am meddling will be bad take a look at this as a ship which must have cost a bit to ensure she's the Maria Captain Nicholas talk mess leaving holes for No way. Hundred forty tons. Single deck built in no way how are you. Dreadful equipment being bad on the how long she loved it. But it was just as a ship's hull that was to lead to a major invention that you very probably have in your house today. Let me tell you why. As the ship's traveled more and more in tropical waters there wouldn't How old were attacked more and more by a tiny worm that lived in those courses and the only protection against that worm is a cover the bottom of the how but a mixture of pitching Tom OK except that in seventeen hundred in the Baltic where most of the pits and talk I'm from Sweden and Finland got themselves into a wall and a price. The stuff went through the roof. Fortunately there was one of a source of supply available and the English owned it but it was four thousand miles away. The plan was to offer the American colonists. Prize money to make current pitch so you get what you needed and B. keep themselves busy they wouldn't have time to set up industries to compete with and especially in the tub and states like the Carolinas they need extra manpower to produce the stuff. So you'd also be able to sell them what they needed to chop trees duck. African slaves. Why chop trees Well that's how you make pitch with pine trees which you buried in deep pits and roasted the tar in the word bubble doubt and so did the time run off the top and on into Barrows shovel the tar out of the pits later on and your business. The British papers say a covered in American pitch we sailed on to greater and greater profits at the expense of the American colonies to be sure but who cared about them. Well in seventeen seventy six tired of being ripped off like this. Phases and so. I'm tempted to Dr slate was the end of keep America which is why our story takes us next to a picturesque little village in Scotland just outside Edinburgh. This is cutting off or to the local hero and at the time of the pitch crisis it belonged to the Cochran family owns of Dundonald. Anyway by the time of American independence the next in line to rule the local presence was a character called Archibald Cox nine so and dismal failure. For about a hundred years of previous selves had backed the wrong thing all the wrong horse so that when Archibald inherited the title in seven hundred seventy eight and wasn't much left except a very small estate here at Tom Ross in a couple of tinpot coal mines still you've got to give MS You ensemble Cochran was a real trial he decided to recap the family fortunes by going into the invention as is only gave us a little catch. And through a self and says he has agreed to everything like three marriages and seven children. The trouble was he tended to terms of this is the ethically in the wrong direction because a low Archibald was very long and bright ideas he was rather short on business sense and everything he tried like new ways of making sales last year ways of making dumb new ways of making bread some potatoes either failed disastrously or if they worked it turned out afterwards that he hadn't read the fine print. But the thing that really blew it all was our hero's plan to saving them from the pitch crisis it was an idea that other people have tried before but oddly enough without your bald It actually worked. This was prototype The idea was you put code inside a couple cattle and you heat up to the CO and I've come out and you just still of a purse and the condensation that you end up ways. Turns out as cold top. Well Archibald begged and borrowed on practically stole to finance a number of avenues like this one here on the estate of color us in order to produce the stuff on a commercial scale I mean seventeen eighteen one he high tailed it down to London and he said to the Royal Navy Yes you can now create the bottom of your ships with coal tar and they said no we can't we have just decided to cover the bottom of them with that couple. That's when copper bottom came to mean what it does today a safer investment. But the saddest thing about the cds nine could have done Donald was something that happened here that might have made him a millionaire instead of going off as he did to die of poverty in a slum in Paris it was something about which typically he entirely missed the point it was something he tells his friend James was about and James what was apparently uninterested apparently uninterested because what Archibald told it was that one day one of the governors here sprang a leak and vapors came out and as Archibald approached it with a light to find out what was up. Guess what. Now these are the days of the great British cotton factory boot working day and night they work and at night if you put cotton and candlelight together you've got more illumination of the factory. Needed knows we're going up in flames everywhere and the owners were desperate for some kind of stay for liking in seventeen ninety two a Scotsman called Murdoch said he didn't vented you heat coal up he said and step like to the vapors the coal gives off and you get this. Idea sounds familiar it's what dumb Donald told James Watt who was interested remember this sooner Doc worked for James what Murdoch's factory gas lamps made him human ations leading lights. Along most mortals on earth with smoke live in strife and many a beauty is mother to live great London itself the importing of the world with clouds of black smoke is constantly for smoke Big got Jimmy chimney to get smoke so fire than fill all prevented by. If you don't have to the London Lyceum hear the lectures in eight hundred three that's the kind of garbage you got written by one of the more ludicrous promoters of techno. Logy ever know that flashing really competent semi illiterate Mr Friedrichs. German gentry turned up in England with a plan to light the entire country by gas and you change his name to Fred out but winds up the better to mingle with the business community is English never did improve too much used to say that the idea of lighting and buy gas. Struck him like an electric spark. Anyway. His lectures which amazed the crowds were for the purpose of financing his grand plan to set up the Imperial perhaps the Arctic National light and heat company fifty pounds in and you get six thousand pounds out onto almost everybody's got a headache from the escaping he turned on his amazing bonus of varying shapes sizes and design down so the onlookers all he claimed. Invented by myself and my meadow bunch of behind the shed bishops entering he had seen something. No I don't know. This is the killed where the coal gets cooked down here is where the talk and then says And the gas is contained in here recognize that it's a gas home with her because when to recognize that if you're going to do it do it big supply a whole town not just an individual factory that's why he got his money. Seven eighteen twelve the company got its charter. I know where they went. But when his greatest hour was supposed to be a great Chinese Gaspar go to show. The you know you won't believe it but here's the bigger it with ten thousand leaky guesstimates right and what they do that file. I guess what happened next. Was a crowned heads of Europe watching this B.S. go when I got a bit of a royal roasting but gas hog if you'll forgive the phrase fired the public imagination and within six years the country's major cities had gas lit streets. Suddenly people started going out to parties in the evening. Through brightly lit streets free from crime or to the new workers Institute where poor people who'd never gone to school were taught to read and write her because of the original need to cover ships bottoms with Tom. Now gas making produced a lot of talk and as you'll recall nobody wanted that for ships bottoms anymore because they'd switched to copper bottoming. Both in London they conveniently got rid of a mark by nipping out at night and pointed to the time the system is a lot of ammonia in among the coat off and many think the tennis was suddenly short on fish and long long posts. Now so is Glasgow bit smelly I mean they had a gas works two hundred tons of your stress mark until in eighteen nineteen enter an absolute looking for useless must. Our mysterious Mark Hunter made color and as part of his ingredient he needed the ammonia which was mixed with a cold top which the gas niggas needed like a hole in the head. He was welcomed with all the delirium we retire for somebody who comes to a block of. The more he saw of the process that they just took a toss some more he realized he had a fortune on the facts as long as he didn't get it only says. Now although he didn't realize it as he gazed entranced with the gallons of free liquid money that would be all his. Once he'd expected his a many of the top what was he going to do with the leftovers. Never mind he had to have the magic muck. Track it. Well when he got his ammonium out he fiddled around a bit and extract it another liquid called nothing and it was while dropping thing with enough that he made the discovery for which he's remembered today. Every time it rains because it eighteen nineteen he found that it would dissolve something that was just beginning to come into the country from South America. Rubber spy eighteen twenty three. He'd worked out what to do with the rubber sort of spread it on a layer of cloth and stick another layer of cloth top. Made the clock waterproof called it after his own name. Yes the Macintosh. In eighteen twenty six Macintosh joined up with another guy who was into rubber called Hancock and together they began. Delivering water proof everything all over the country and in Britain where it rains a lot have a clue they could if they had to go on relying on South America. Ten o'clock wanted British rubber plantations so he started cultivating the right people. If anybody was able to grow rather seen that organized plantations in the British far east of colonies. Cuba technical Gardens in London was the matter was vital to Britain all Hancock wanted was that they understand the critical connection between country it is I'm and rubber goods one pair of shoes. One breast bottle. Ever see. Unfortunately the middle of the nineteenth century was the wrong as possible time too interested he's guys in rubber they had something far more important in mind for the Far East.