This giant metal box is one of the reasons why the modern world changes as fast as it does. Because of this, people living in Lima or Birmingham or Chicago or anywhere can as easily all have the same Japanese model calculator, dress 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 hair dryers. “Okay,” you say, “what’s new about that?” Anybody can fill a box. But this box will take its one hundred tons of anything anywhere in the world within 24 hours because it’s got wings and a big hole in front.

It’s a 747 air freighter, 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 600 miles an hour. It’s the rate at which they bring change to places. I mean, with one of these you can deliver the guts of an entire factory in one day, and come back the next day with another factory. High technology door to door. 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 transport has changed things. The 747 is uncannily like another freighter built to do exactly the same job 400 years ago. And anything you can say about the 747, you could say about it. Built by the richest nation in the world, to operate on international routes, to bring in bulk cargo that could be split up and re-exported. Nothing radically new about its design, just very efficient, low operating costs, automated control systems, a very small crew working in a very small cabin, high up above the hold. And yet, that first freighter 400 years ago, built with those same characteristics, changed the world.

You see, if you’re sitting drinking coffee with sugar in it, smoking, and you’ve got a bank account or a mortgage on your house and you’re insured, thank that other freighter 400 years ago: this little ship, called a fluyt, that helped to make Holland the richest country in the world. By the mid seventeenth century, these Dutch merchants were bringing shiploads of tobacco, sugar, pepper, silks, you name it, into Europe by the ton, because they were trading from Arkhangelsk to Cape Town, Brazil to Nagasaki. Holland was the warehouse of Europe and everybody wanted some of the goodies. Putting your money in Amsterdam is like having a Swiss bank account today. Of course, the Dutch made it easy to get credit, save for investment, big profits, and above all, you made a deal with the Dutch and you knew they’d deliver—literally.

This is Hoorn, a little port in Northern Holland where the Dutch developed that first regular express service to almost anywhere in Europe. See, back in 1595, these shipbuilders here had realized, unlike anybody else, that nobody was going to get very rich out of cargo delivery unless they solved one basic problem. Look at this Bruegel: see the problem? That galleon. Everybody used them. Great for fighting, otherwise useless. I mean, just to put the sails up and down, you needed dozens of people—and they cost. So, get rid of them. Okay, look at that deck: all that crew accommodation taking valuable deck space you could pile up with cargo. And if you’re not a warship, what do you need the gun decks for? In terms of cargo space, that’s what the galleon gave you. Ludicrous! So here’s what they did. They built as near a square hull as they could for maximum space—remember the 747? 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 747, nothing radical about the design. Just the most efficient cargo ship in the world.

The fluyt made the Dutch rich because it took imports from across the oceans and delivered them all around Europe, practically door to door. And with that kind of service, how could you lose? This little ship went over very big with everybody, except the English. Everywhere they went, they bumped into these guys: the Dutch East India Company, who got everywhere the English wanted to go and got there first. So the English decided to take over by going Dutch. 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 piece of the action. And to handle the money: the Bank of England. That started literally over a cup of coffee. In these places, you could trade anything from ships to girls to land in America.

But the deal that made England great was this idea. Kidnap Africans, sell them in Barbados for sugar, sell that in America for tobacco, and make yourself a million. With this amount of stuff pouring into the country, and more and more ships spending up to a year away from home on voyages to India or Africa or America, it was inevitable that somebody should turn to the business of insurance. Because, after all, what’s the point of putting all your money into a venture if a ship goes down and you lose the lot? So in 1688, 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 in the world, Lloyds of London.

Lloyds made more and more voyages possible because they regularized the business of insurance and because they paid up promptly, even on mystery losses like that one. They were able to do that because of the system they introduced right from the start of categorizing ships. Look: this is one of their earliest secret books. And in here, they include details of the ship, and they classify the hull according to its soundness by the letters A, E, I, O, or U, and its equipment as either G (good), M (middling) or B (bad). Take a look at this little ship which must have cost a bit to ensure. She’s the Maria, Captain Nicholas Toknefs, leaving Hull for Norway, 140 tons, single deck, built in Norway, hull U (dreadful), equipment B (bad). Wonder how long she lasted.

But it was this business of ships’ hulls that was to lead to a major invention that you very probably have in your house today. Let me tell you why. As the ships traveled more and more in tropical waters, their wooden hulls were attacked more and more by a tiny worm that lived in those waters, and the only protection against that worm was to cover the bottom of the hull with a mixture of pitch and tar. Okay—except that, in 1700, in the Baltic, where most of the pitch and tar came from, Sweden and Finland got themselves into a war, and the price of the stuff went through the roof. Fortunately, there was one other source of supply available, and the English owned it. But it was 4,000 miles away.

The plan was to offer the American colonists prize money to make tar and pitch. So (A) you’d get what you needed, and (B) keep them so busy they wouldn’t have time to set up industries to compete with Britain. And especially in the southern states, like the Carolinas, they’d need extra manpower to produce the stuff. So you’d also be able to sell them what they needed to chop trees down: 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 wood bubbled out, and so did turpentine. Run off the turpentine into barrels, shovel the tar out of the pits later on, and you’re in business.

So the British fleet was saved. 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 1776, tired of being ripped off like this, they did. And so…. And that, disastrously, was the end of cheap American pitch. Which is why our story takes us next to a picturesque little village in Scotland just outside Edinburgh.

This is Culross, or to the locals, Cyros. And at the time of the pitch crisis it belonged to the Cochrane family, Earls of Dundonald. Anyway, by the time of American independence, the next in line to rule the local peasants was a character called Archibald Cochrane, ninth Earl and dismal failure. For about a hundred years, the previous earls had backed the wrong king, or the wrong horse. So that when Archibald inherited the title in 1778, there wasn’t much left except the very small estate here at Culross and a couple of tin pot coal mines. Still, you’ve got to give him his due. Archibald Cochrane was a real trier. He decided to recoup the family fortunes by going into the invention business. All he needed was a little cash. He threw himself enthusiastically into everything—like three marriages and seven children. The trouble was he tended to throw himself enthusiastically in the wrong direction, because although Archibald was very long on bright ideas, he was rather short on business sense, and everything he tried—like new ways of making sailcloth, new ways of making gum, new ways of making bread from 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 had tried before, but oddly enough with Archibald, it actually worked. This was his prototype. The idea was you’d put coal inside a copper kettle, and you heat up the coal, and vapors come out. And you distill the vapors, and the condensation that you end up with turns out as coal tar. Well, Archibald begged and borrowed and practically stole to finance a number of ovens like this one here on the estate at Culross in order to produce the stuff on a commercial scale. And in 1781, he hightailed it down to London, and he said to the Royal Navy, “Yes, you can now paint 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: copper.” That’s when the “copper bottom” came to mean what it does today: a safe investment.

But the saddest thing about the [???] of Dundonald was something that happened here that might have made him a millionaire instead of going off as he did to die in poverty in a slum in Paris. It was something about which typically he entirely missed the point. It was something he told his friend James Watt about, and James Watt was apparently uninterested—apparently uninterested. Because what Archibald told him was that, one day, one of his ovens 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 were the days of the great British cotton factory boom. Working day and night they were. And at night, if you put cotton and candlelight together, you got more illumination than the factory needed. Cotton mills were going up in flames everywhere, and the owners were desperate for some kind of safer lighting. In 1792, a Scotsman called Murdoch said he’d invented it. You heat coal up, he said, and set light to the vapors the coal gives off, and you get this. Idea sounds familiar? It’s what Dundonald told James Watt—who wasn’t interested, remember? Guess who Murdoch worked for? James Watt. Murdoch’s factory gas lamps made him illumination’s leading light.

But not for long. Most mortals on Earth with smoke live in strife, and many a beauty is smothered alive. Great London itself, the emporium of the world, with clouds of black smoke is constantly furled. Smoke begot chimneys, chimneys beget smoke. Soot, fires and filth all prevented by coal. If you turned up to the London Lyceum Theatre Lectures in 1803, that’s the kind of garbage you got. Written by one of the more ludicrous promoters of technology ever known: the flashy, the incompetent, the semi-illiterate, Mr Friedrich Albrecht Winzer, a German gent who turned up in England with a plan to light the entire country by gas, and who changed his name to Fred Albert Winsor the better to mingle with the business community. His English never did improve too much. He used to say that the idea of lighting England by 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 Patriotic National Light and Heat Company. Put fifty pounds in, and you get 6,000 pounds out. Mind you, all most of his audience got was a headache from the escaping gas as he turned on his amazing burners of varying shapes, sizes, and designs, and dazzled the onlookers. All (he claimed) invented by himself, and my Murdoch.

Mind you, behind the showbiz chicanery, he had seen something that Murdoch hadn’t. Look. This is the kiln where the coal gets cooked. Down here is where the tar condenses. And the gas is contained in here. Recognize it? It’s a gasometer, because Windsor recognised that if you’re going to do it, do it big. Supply a whole town, not just an individual factory, and that’s why he got his money. So in 1812 the company got its charter, and away they went. But Windsor’s greatest hour was supposed to be the great Chinese gas pagoda show. Now, you won’t believe this, but here’s the pagoda with 10,000 leaky gas jets, right? So what do they do? They lit fireworks. Wanna guess what happened next? Well, with the crown heads of Europe watching this fiasco, Windsor got a bit of a royal roasting.

But gas had (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’ institutes, where poor people who’d never gone to school were taught to read and write. All because of the original need to cover ship’s bottoms with tar.

Now, gas-making produced a lot of tar, and as you’ll recall, nobody wanted that for ship’s bottoms anymore, because they’d switched to copper bottoming. So in London, they conveniently got rid of the muck by nipping out at night and pouring it into the Thames. And since there was a lot of ammonia in among the coal tar, and ammonia stinks, the Thames was suddenly short on fish and long on pong. Now, so is Glasgow—but smelly, I mean. They had a gasworks too, and tons of useless muck. Until in 1819, enter an alchemist looking for useless muck.

Our mysterious muck hunter made colors, and as part of his ingredients he needed the ammonia which was mixed with the coal tar, which the gas-makers needed like a hole in the head. He was welcomed with all the delirium we reserve for somebody who comes to unblock your toilet. The more he saw of the process that made the sticky tar, the more he realized he had a fortune on his hands—as long as he didn’t get it on his hands. Now, although he didn’t realize it, as he gazed entranced at the gallons of free, liquid money that would be all his, once he’d extracted his ammonia from the tar, what was he going to do with the leftovers? Never mind. He had to have the magic muck.

Well, when he’d got his ammonia out, he fiddled around a bit and extracted another liquid called naphtha. And it was while dropping things in naphtha that he made the discovery for which he’s remembered today every time it rains. Because in 1819, he found that it would dissolve something that was just beginning to come into the country from South America: rubber. By 1823, he’d worked out what to do with the rubber solution. Spread it on a layer of cloth, and stick another layer of cloth on top. Made the cloth waterproof. Called it after his own name. Yes, the Macintosh.

In 1826, Macintosh joined up with another guy who was into rubber called Hancock. And together they began delivering waterproof everything all over the country. And in Britain, where it rains a lot, how could he lose? Well, they could if they had to go on relying on South America. Hancock wanted British rubber plantations, so he started cultivating the right people. If anybody was able to grow rubber seeds and organize plantations in the British Far Eastern colonies, Kew Botanical Gardens in London was. The matter was vital to Britain. All Hancock wanted was that they understand the critical connection between patriotism and rubber goods.

Unfortunately, the middle of the nineteenth century was the wrongest possible time to interest these guys in rubber. They had something far more important in mind for the Far East. See, at a time when a lot of people were being sent to the ends of the Earth, when the average Brit got to a place like this—the island of Penang off the coast of Malaya—he really cared a good deal less about culture and things like that temple of the 10,000 Buddhas, than he did about the stuff that surrounded it. The jungle, out of which the British were hacking themselves an empire, and getting themselves in quite a sweat—and not just because of the steamy clothes.

Let me explain. See, this place is absolutely full of nutmeg plantations. Here’s a nutmeg tree. See? Nutmegs were one of the reasons why Europeans came out here to the Far East in the first place: to look for spices. Oh, nutmeg, cinnamon, ginger, pepper, that stuff. And by 1852, the Brits out here were doing really rather well thanks to cheap local labor and all those raw materials lying around places like India, and Ceylon, and Malaya, and various other imperial hotspots.

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 first: you’ve got to hack the jungle down. Now, what that gives you, apart from a heart attack, is a lot of clear ground to do your planting, and a lot of water exposed to sunlight. So you get your sugar or your cotton plantation going, and the Anopheles mosquito gets a warm and wonderful place to do its reproductive thing—because its babies love warm water, and that’s just what you’ve given them. Now, the Anopheles mosquito is a simple soul. The most it wants out of life is to be able to give you and me malaria, and the feverish sweats that go with it. And by 1852, 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, or keeping the army on its feet, or the thousand and one other things that the imperial administration demands 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 malaria, it’ll weaken you to the point where you’ll die from practically anything else. So the stiff upper lip, the colonial service chaps, are dropping like flies—if that’s the right phrase to use.

Now, about all you could do to help to prevent malaria was to try to get down out of the jungle to get regular supplies of a rather nasty white powder like that, made from the bark of a tree called the cinchona. Now, rather unfortunately, the cinchona was only grown in South America and Java, neither of which belonged to the British. So the British colonial government was paying through the nose for this stuff. Very bad form.

Still, every cloud has a silver lining, and at least one good thing was to come out of the mess. You see, they used to put the powder into water that had a bit of sugar in it for taste, and they got themselves quinine water, because the white powder was quinine. Still tasted pretty foul, until somebody had the bright idea of putting a drop of gin in it. And that’s why the gin and tonic was invented: medicinal purposes.

Well, back to the problem. In 1852, the governor general of India sent a rather stiff note back home saying, now look here, why are botanists telling me that we ought to be able to grow cinchona here? And that’s why the experts at Kew Gardens in London turned down the rubber plantation idea, remember? They were working themselves into a lather about the feverish Far East, and the fact that if they didn’t manage to come up with a healthy cinchona 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, in the manure.

The trouble was, the more they learned about cinchona, the less likely it looked to survive a transplant. Heart failure all round. And then, out of the blue, the new Royal College of Chemistry suggested having a go at making quinine artificially. So a young 18-year-old called William Perkin was asked to get on with it. And in 1856 he was playing around with a byproduct of our old friend coal tar when he came up with a load of muck that very definitely wasn’t the quinine 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 chucked this muck away into some water, he got very rich. And the world got the first artificial dye.

Perkin’s new mauve was an instant and raving success. By the great exhibition of 1862, most of the huffing and puffing wasn’t coming from the machines on show, it was from the reporters who had seen the new color miracle from coal tar. They and the thousands of others who came to the show went away harrumphing pompously about how Britain was going to become the greatest color-exporting country in the world. In 1862 most of these well-fed complacent little-class Victorians regarded themselves and their country as the rightful guardians of anybody on Earth they could muscle in on, militarily or economically—to save them from themselves, of course. The new artificial dye was just one more example of how British genius was that much better than any other variety. That’s what made Great Britain great.

Unfortunately, when it came to putting money into the new color chemistry, the investors preferred the easier profits to be had from the colonies. There was no point in taking risks with the new infant science nobody knew about. Most of the investors didn’t even know what chemistry was. And as for actually training chemists, well, I mean, that was quite out of the question. I mean, a chap who went to university just didn’t do that sort of thing. To have actually trained for a career would have been unspeakably lower class. That’s why Perkin’s teacher in London had been a German. See, they were awfully good at the rather sordid business of opening universities and technical schools, and actually letting anybody in on merit, never mind their family background. And they actually encouraged links between university and industry, the kind of thing that made the early Victorian intellectual mind boggle. So let me ask you what you think the British did with that head start that William Perkin had given them in color chemistry ahead of all their rivals. A clear opportunity to grab and hang on to a lead in one of the most profitable new industries for a hundred years. Yes, they blew it! And you know who put them in the shade? The wrong kind. The Germans did.

By 1870, in color chemistry, the Germans were calling the tune, and the great German chemical industries were going full blast. The ASF, Höchst, Agfa, Bayer. Thanks to their university contacts they were turning out dozens of colors a year. Suddenly it was a colorful world, and every time they looked at coal tar there was another color to write home about—on color postcards. See, the Germans had realized what the British hadn’t: that there was a great deal more to color than color. There was all that chemical knowledge you learned from making orange or blue or green or whatever. So by the 1870s they were selling color everywhere—and 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 but a true dyed-in-the-wool German. Their composers even wrote colorful tunes. Here’s a catchy little number that I think you’ll find will set your feet tapping, or your fingers itching, or your head throbbing, or something. I can’t think why this piece isn’t better known in the concert repertoire. Well, maybe I can.

Well, back to the story. One of the Germans’ biggest hits was this particular green, which a crafty French silk dyer got the Empress Eugenie to wear to the opera. Knockout success. Everybody wanted it. And if this program is giving you a headache, thank the German color industry. Painkillers came out of their labs, too. Success after success. And then out of nowhere came something that looked as if it would stop the German industrial machine dead.

This is one of those stories that doesn’t make sense even when you’ve heard it twice. Let me try it on you. Combine harvester: invented by an American, McCormick, a few years before that German color business. Because of it, by the 1870s, America’s got wheat coming out of its ears. So the price drops. They’re practically giving bread away. Good idea, no? No. See, in Germany they eat this: black rye bread, grown in Prussia by a bunch of aristocrats called the Junkers. Very big deal people, the Junkers. They’ve got the government in their pocket. So none of that cheap American wheat gets into Germany, where the population is rocketing and they need food. Okay, everybody can eat rye. Nuh-uh. The Junkers are exporting it all 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, so you’re short of food. Never mind, foreign wheat is cheap, 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 slap bang into a brick wall. No fertilizer. They had to bring it in from Chile at colossal expense. And they just didn’t have that kind of bread. What am I saying? They didn’t have any kind of bread!

What happens next involves the curious way things sometimes get kind of half done 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 she got no fertilizer. By the 1890s, down on the farm, things were pretty desperate. Industry might be making loads of money, but all of it was going on imported food and especially fertilizer. The way the fertilizer problem got licked, and because of that caused many more things to happen than just increased 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 1900, thanks to their experience making all those fantastic colors, German chemists were among the best in the world. And one of them was a fellow called Fritz Haber who decided quite consciously to try and make fertilizer. And this is what he ended up with, although in reality would be on a vast industrial scale. This is what he did. In that long vessel there he made very high pressure, 200 times normal air pressure, and a temperature of about 600 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 that caused the gases to react and produce ammonia. And that’s what comes out the bottom end. Now, all the rest of this equipment is for cleaning and filtering and making the ammonia pure.

Okay, there’s one more stage to go. You make the ammonia a gas, and you put it into another hot oven, this one. Only this time you put it in with air. And as the gases come through once again, they go through wire mesh. Here’s some. And that causes the gases to react. And this time what goes out the other end is nitrous oxide. Now, if you mix nitrous 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 1909 Fritz Haber and a colleague he worked on this with called Bosch—which is why it’s called the Haber-Bosch process. Well they were in a position to build factories that would produce thousands of tons of fertilizer a year. Great idea, the Haber-Bosch process. Never got anywhere, of course. Because this is one of those galling moments in history when some other fellow, working somewhere else on something totally unconnected with this, has himself an accident and ruins everything.

The accident happened here in gay Paris, which is where the other fellow was at the time, where everybody was whooping it up having themselves the gay nineties. Then—as now, of course—diamonds were a girl’s best insurance. Not that our boring friend Henri Moissan is interested in girls. Though, like them, he is interested in the sparklers. 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, Moissan is throwing various chemicals into an electric furnace. Things are getting very hot, but Moissan is obliged to announce: sorry, no diamonds. Still, he perseveres, and one day in 1895, back in his lab, he throws in some lime and carbon and what does he get? Calcium carbide. This material here.

Now, okay, he says: what can I do with that? And he starts fiddling around with this. Nothing much happens until one day he drops some water on it. Look what happens. Watch what comes out the other end. That is acetylene gas burning. Now, you put yourself in their position: it’s 1898, the price of electricity is very high, town gas isn’t very bright. Naturally, they thought this was the new light of the future. A lot of people put a lot of money into it, and by 1899 there were about a quarter of a million acetylene gas jets all over Germany alone. And then in 1900 the price of electricity dropped, and somebody came along with a gas mantle to make town gas much brighter, and the bottom dropped right out of the acetylene market. About all that came out of the mess was the invention of oxyacetylene welding by a couple of Frenchmen.

However, all over Europe there was now tons of the calcium carbide that started the whole thing lying around worthless. Until along came two chemists, two dying chemists, called Caro and Frank who decided they’d try to see what they could make of this calcium carbide, and they did lots of things to it. And in one particular case they passed nitrogen gas over it in a very hot oven, and when they took it back out again the nitrogen had gone into the calcium carbide, and that was the result. Now that contains 20% nitrogen, and you can put it straight onto the fields and feed the plants. It’s a fertilizer. The fertilizer that Germany needed had a price Germany could afford to pay. And that was what knocked the Haber–Bosch process right on the head. So now everybody could eat again. And the Haber–Bosch 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 in metals she’d always had early on making silly toys and clocks. Now, thanks to the coal fields in the Ruhr, she was moving into the major league—with steel for weapons. In thirty years Germany went from being a backward agricultural country to being able to build projects like this: the monorail in the industrial town of Wuppertal. When the monorail opened in 1900 it symbolized the nationalist ambitions of the man who’d ruled Germany through her years of growth, Kaiser Wilhelm, who now saw his country on the edge of greatness thanks in part to coal tar and the way German color chemists had used it. How could poor old Dundonald all those years before have foreseen what cooking bits of coal in a kettle would lead to? And you recall I said the Haber–Bosch fertilizer attempt would come back?

Now, the same year the Kaiser opened the Wuppertal monorail, he also signed a bill that was 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 her place in world markets, if she was to use her industrial potential to her own advantage, then she, like the other major powers, had to have colonies. Now, the only thing that stood in the way of those colonies was the British navy. So the Germans built ships. Then so did the British. And an arms race began that was to end with the war in 1914.

It’s no accident that the first major battle at sea in that war was off the coast of Chile. You see, for decades the major powers (Germany included) had been using the vast natural deposits of sodium nitrate found on Chile’s west coast. Sodium nitrate’s a fertilizer. But now Germany needed that sodium nitrate for an even more desperate reason: because if you put sodium nitrate together with sulfuric acid, you get nitric acid. And nitric acid is essential for making explosives. And the British had blockaded the Chilean supplies. So the Germans in 1914 had about one year in stock; one years’ supply. More had to be found very urgently. Where else but in the Haber–Bosch process? The process that ended by making sodium nitrate. Money was poured into building the factories that 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 four years when it might well have ended in less than one.

That leaves only one thread hanging in our story. What happened to the acetylene? You remember? That was a bit of a flop, except for this? Oxi-acetylene welding? Well, that turned out to be the most extraordinary thing of all. In 1912 an obstinate German chemist called Fritz Klatte was still trying to do things with acetylene. And one day, one of his mixtures was sitting on a sunny window shelf, when it gradually went thick and milky. Now, whatever it was, it wasn’t what Klatte was looking for. And being the kind of guy who didn’t like things to be left lying around, down the drain it went. Poor old Klatte! You know what he said afterwards? He said, “I didn’t think it was much use to anyone.” How wrong can you get?

27 years after Fritz Klatte had flushed away his useless sludge, at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, millions came to see what other people had done with that muck. You’ve already seen clues to why Fritz Klatte had booed in this film shot in color by a Lithuanian visitor to the fair and never screened till now, showing the world on the first day of a new era. The fair was the first big public display of something we today cannot do without. One of the real crowd stoppers at the fair was the DuPont Pavilion, a place where people stepped into the future; into a Flash Gordon world where chemistry made scientific magic. And one of the most magical things came from the stuff that Fritz Klatte 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.

Now, 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 1938, DuPont came up with the most famous substitute of all, itself made of super giant molecules, that their man Wallace Carruthers had found. You know where? In our old friend coal tar. And that’s why DuPont stopped the crowds. Everybody was high on substitutes.

It was inevitable that it was America that would take the lead in making and using the new substitutes. There more than anywhere else, novelty meant progress. And at the rate these new materials were coming out from the test tube, paradoxically, novelty was here to stay. You see what a strange trail has brought us to the 1939 DuPont Pavilion. It started around 1600 with the fluyt, the Dutch super ship that put fat profits into overseas trade, and sent the English hurrying across the oceans to build an empire on ships that had to be insured. And how Lloyds of London wouldn’t insure those ships unless their hulls were covered with a protective coating of tar. Tar that came from America, until the American War of Independence stopped supply, forcing people like the Earl of Dundunald to look for the tar in coal, and accidentally note gas. And how the coal tar sludge that the gas makers were throwing away was picked up by Macintosh for his rubber products, that he couldn’t get from the Far East because the Imperial administration was too interested in making quinine in order to fight malaria. And how Perkin, looking for artificial quinine, ended up with artificial dye, and boosted the German economy and its industries to the point where the population rose so high it could only be fed with the help of fertilizers produced through the acetylene process. And how the other fertilizer they tried made all the explosives necessary to keep their artillery shells firing right through World War I. A war which caused the kind of shortages that forced them back to acetylene for substitutes. And how finally DuPont came up with the greatest substitute of all. Initially they thought of calling it DuPeru. That stands for: DuPont pulls a rabbit out of a hat. Finally, though, they settled on nylon.

And nylon opened the door to our modern world. A world full of substitute materials without which we cannot survive. A world which, because of those substitute materials, changes every day. A world of plastic. Because of plastic that rate of change accelerates every year. It’s fun, but can we keep it up?