Have you noticed what’s happened to plastic in the last ten years? It’s become something in its own right. I mean, early on, if you made something in plastic, you had to make it look exactly like what it was replacing—I mean, particularly, leather—or people wouldn’t buy it. It’s not so long since the word “plastic” was an insult. “Cheap and nasty,” remember? Not anymore. It’s as if we suddenly changed our attitude to what real meant and recognized plastic for what it is: something that permits us to own objects that we couldn’t possibly afford if they had to be made in the so-called real thing. So now it’s everywhere. I mean, look at this office. That plastic. So is that. So are these. So is this, and especially what it’s inside it. There’s plastic paint on the wall, there’s plastic wood on this desk, my shirt is plastic. And now there’s a new generation of objects that can only be made in plastic, like that cassette. It’s a plastic world.

And because of plastic, it’s a plastic world in a different sense, in the original sense of the word: it changes its shape easily. So now we no longer buy the thing we want, we buy the shape of that thing that we prefer. And when the shapes change regularly, which they do, we begin to want them to change regularly.

And the plastics industry is ready and willing to satisfy our demand—or do they create it? So our plastic world changes quicker every year. We live in a world of fast turnover, built-in obsolescence, novelty, thanks to plastics. You can mold it, preform it, blow it, extrude it, or—most meaningfully of all—you can cut it into little rectangles.

This shape is the shape of our future, because the only way the money can move around fast enough to keep up with trade is electronically, from bank to bank through computers or, in the case of you and me, through this: the credit card. This is you, coded into that magnetic tape. See? In there is the world’s newest virtue: creditworthiness. Are you a good risk or not? And what people need to know about you before you can become a coded signal on that stripe makes this much more than a substitute for money. It’s a judgment on you. And that’s why here, where they make credit cards, the security is so tight.

Because you steal one truckload of credit cards, and you’ve practically got the key to, oh, every bank in a country. The question is: is any security tight enough? As the data on you and your credit flows from bank to shop to employer to police to tax inspector, what happens to privacy? And if you don’t want credit, how do you live in a world where they don’t take cash? What will happen when being in debt all the time is the normal way to live? The first time that opportunity came up to live on credit on a major scale happened when the banks opened about 600 years ago. And when it did, the behavior of the people involved might remind you of yourself under similar circumstances. Look what it did to them.

The big spenders in question were the fourteenth-century dukes of Burgundy. And what they did with the money they borrowed raised every eyebrow in Europe. Oh, the overindulgent excesses they got up to looked very elegant to us. But behind all the courtly dancing, duchess swapping? There were only four dukes of Burgundy, and the whole dynasty only lasted 94 years from 1383. But what a time they had! It was a crafty Italian banker who kicked it all off by lending the first duke enough money to buy a dukedom. Now, he knew he’d get his money back because the new duke included half the manufacturing centers of Flanders and places like Bruges. The second duke picked up his father’s debts, pawned his jewels, assassinated a few friends, and generally kept the party moving right along. The third duke kept four mistresses in every castle, ruled a country stretching from Holland to the Swiss border, and drank.

The last of the dukes was a real weirdo. They called him Charles the Bold. He was an egomaniac and he saw himself as a sort of second Julius Caesar. Didn’t go for women much, wore more jewels in more places than anybody else in Europe, and he was so convinced he was going to be made emperor that he chased the real emperor around with a crown on his saddlebags so that the emperor could proclaim him heir to the throne. Of course, the emperor kept dodging the crucial meeting. He also went on long military campaigns to increase his territory and lost them all.

Of course, Charles was up to his neck in hock thanks to an ambitious bank manager called Tommaso Portinari. He worked for a bunch of Florentine bankers, the Medici’s, ran their local office in Bruges. And the deal he made with Charles was that Portinari collected the rent on Charles’ property—places like this. And Charles got to borrow money whenever he needed it—at nice fat interest rates, of course. The first modern nation ran on tech.

Well, in 1470 Portinari got a letter from no less than the president of his bank—who also happened to be running Florence at the time, a man called Lorenzo the Magnificent—saying: watch it when you’re dealing with Charles the Burgundy, won’t you? Of course Portinari ignored this advice. And when Charles went off on new military disasters Portinari would write a letter to his friends who had a bank near the battle, and they would turn up on the spot with bags full of loot. All of which, naturally enough, tended to make Charles an admirer of things Italian, especially their soldiers. He was bringing them in to train his own men in new tactics.

And it was the Italian connection that finally blew it for Charles. Because in 1476 he decided to strengthen his lines of communication with Italy by moving into an area south of him. Now, that was going to bump him up against the Swiss. Still, who were a bunch of mountain louts to stand up against Charles the Burgundy, the greatest thing since sliced venison? So off he set, and in doing so triggered off a series of events that were to end 500 years later with the landing on the moon.

Now, the Swiss economy—timber, a bit of dairy, produce—couldn’t pay for a real army, so Charles reckoned the whole thing would be a pushover. Wrong. Waiting for him in the woods was a Swiss secret weapon. But even if he’d known, Charles would have laughed because at Granson in Switzerland, on March the 2nd 1476, this was what he bought on credit. Fully armored mercenaries. And what could a few Swiss pikes do against that? Well, this. Charles’s army was routed. A year later it happened again. Charles was killed, and that was the end of his family tree.

It was how the Swiss used the pike that did it in a formation called the pike square. You get a feel for its power with these modern soldiers. Any cavalry idiot enough to charge this lot got itself skewered on the four-foot steel tips. But the real magic was the way the pike square moved. You see, the way they could come to a sudden stop and turn in any direction instantly in attack, or open out like a porcupine in defense? That’s why a bunch of mountain louts whipped the cream of Burgundian chivalry. The way the pikes had clobbered the mounted knights changed the battle plans of every military commander in Europe. For the next 40 years the pike was it, and the army’s got bigger because they were cheaper.

And then, on April the 28th, 1503, at Ceregniola in southern Italy, things changed again. A new weapon had arrived. It was a gun, the arquebus. In skilled hands it could kill at 60 yards. Used the new miracle ingredient, gunpowder. An S-shaped trigger brought the smoldering cord down on the powder, fired a one-pound ball. At Ceregniola the Spanish commander de Córdoba lined his outnumbered men up like this. 5,000 arquebusiers backed by pikes and cavalry facing the French, who were still using the traditional pike square.

Okay here’s the battle. This is the French. The arquebusiers are dug in behind a ditch at the bottom of a hill which is covered in vines, so that when the French come down the hill they get snarled up on the vines and they are cut to pieces by the bullets. Total involved on both sides: 18,000 men.

Over 100 years later, and another battle at which the arquebus has been replaced by a weapon that was to change the face of war yet again. This time it was the flintlock musket. In general service by 1590. Fired a two-pound ball 100 yards. The trigger released a spring> It snapped the flint down against the hammer, made sparks, powder ignited. The pikes were still needed—for protection. This was the new trick. Several ranks, front row firing, rest reloading like this, in stages. As each rank fired, it countermarched to the rear and the next rank stepped forward ready for action.

On the 7th of September, 1631, at Brighton Felt just outside Leipzig, the Swedish king Gustavus took the technology to its logical conclusion. Look how he set out his men. You see how both the pikes and the muskets are in this forward attack position, and they’re set out muskets, pikes, muskets, pikes, to cover each other? Gustavus had also shortened the length of the pike and made the musket lighter. Opposing him in the Imperial Army they were still using the old fashioned defensive mode for the pikes back here, with relatively fewer musketeers. And a few years before the Dutch had started producing books like this to make firing muskets easier. They divided up the business between firing a musket, reloading it, and getting it ready to fire again into nearly 45 separate maneuvers, each one of them illustrated like that. And Gustavus had taught his men from those illustrations.

That meant that on the field he could do with five ranks—two firing, three reloading—what it took the other side ten ranks to do. And what’s more, his rate of fire was three times theirs. So whatever they did, however they moved, his men were able to wheel and turn and reposition themselves as necessary, constantly keeping up a murderous rate of fire that, in the end, blew the Imperial Army right off the field. Total number of men involved: 70,000.

Another hundred years and another development. This time the shape of war was changed by the arrival of two new bits of weaponry: the bayonet and the paper cartridge. You bit the end of the paper cartridge and then poured a measured amount of powder into the gun very fast. And as for the bayonet, well, when it was put on top of the musket you got musket and pike in the same weapon. So on the 9th of May, 1745, at the Battle of Fontenoy, as you can see from the British lines, no pikes. And because of the fast reloading they were able to get by with only three ranks, whereas the French were still using five ranks and they were less well drilled.

Now, on the battlefield—because of the need to get where you could see the whites of their eyes before you fired, and then on in with the bayonet—that brought the armies within 30 yards of each other. First of all, the English pushed the French back up into their ground, and then, beaten by superior numbers, the English retreated. But the days of the uniformed disciplined regular armies had arrived. Total number involved: over 100,000.

Less than 50 years later came the first signs of mass modern warfare, thanks to the French Revolution. You see, with most of their aristocratic officers either guillotined or in exile, there wasn’t much that the Republic could do except conscript every able-bodied man in the country. And in 1793 that’s just what they did. But sending out royal recruits against the the disciplined armies of the allies meant you had to send them in large numbers. And they looked something like this: a vast rabble of badly-trained, ill-equipped recruits, and in front a few professionals firing individually for maximum effect to try and break the enemy line, so that the mob could then roll over them and win by sheer force of numbers—whatever the cost.

To give you an idea of what those numbers were, take a look at that: that is not a battle line you’re looking at. You see, it starts at the channel and it ends in Switzerland. More than one million men stretched in armies all the way along the frontier. Now, arming and supplying that number of men and feeding them was bad enough when they were just sitting there. Try doing that and moving them. Because in 1797, that was the task Napoleon took on when he started to move his armies around Europe—anywhere from 350,000 to half a million men at a time.

And suddenly, feeding huge armies was the big new problem, and one that almost blew it for Napoleon, at a little-known spot in northern Italy. It’s one of those places, you know, by the time you notice that you’ve passed it? Which is what most people do. So they never notice the statue. Or indeed, the restaurant, where they do a rather nice line of chicken. And if you’ve got a pencil handy, you might care for the recipe. Cut up the chicken and flour it well. Put the chicken parts to brown in oil with just a touch of garlic. While the chicken’s browning, prepare the other ingredients for simmering. One or two mushrooms. Half a cup fresh tomatoes. Add a quarter cup of brandy and water and simmer. Steam a quarter cup of crayfish. Garnish with fried eggs and potatoes to taste. Total cooking time: one hour. Absolutely awful.

It’s not often that a dish of food plays a deeply meaningful role in history, but this one did. You see, the ingredients that went to make up this little culinary work of art illustrate a fundamental problem that Napoleon had with his army, because this is Chicken Marengo—thank you. So-called after the place it was first served, here in Marengo. It’s a village, not much more than a cluster of farmhouses, outside the town of Alessandria in northern Italy. And it’s the site of a battle against the Austrians that nearly finished Napoleon before he started. It was his first battle since becoming head of state, and so you could say he cared about it. A lot hung on it.

Anyway, about dawn on June the 14th, 1800, Napoleon was jumped by virtue of the entire Austrian army, outnumbered in terms of men and artillery. Trouble was, the rest of his giant army were out doing what you do when there are hundreds of thousands of you. They were off separate groups, out foraging for food. So Napoleon was caught with his pants down. Anyway, he started fighting desperately, and he sent out riders to the other groups, saying: for God’s sake, get here if you can. And by three in the afternoon, after nine hours of slaughter, with the French retreating all the way, it looked as if all was lost. And then, over the hill, like the U.S. cavalry coming to the rescue, came one of the foraging columns, and the boot was on the other foot. By six o’clock, the Austrians had surrendered.

That night, Napoleon’s chef gave him Chicken Marengo for dinner. Cooked (he said apologetically) with all he could find: some tomatoes, some crayfish, little oil, garlic, eggs, and of course chicken. But then he said, the whole army was eating like that, eating what he could find, if anything. And Napoleon recognized that he had two major problems to solve. He had to find a way of feeding an army that was on the move very fast. And in this particular case his men couldn’t even buy the food they needed, because the local Italians wouldn’t accept their money. (A) because it was paper money, and (B) because of the inflation back in France, it was worthless paper money. It was how Napoleon solved these problems relating to food that brings us, ironically, to his favorite drink, champagne.

When Napoleon got back home to France, he did several things to get the country out of the mess it was in. For instance, he set up the Bank of France and only let it issue notes that it could back with gold. And he set up the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry, offering prizes for any idea that could be put to profitable, manufacturing use. One of the prize winners was a Mr. Nicolas Appert, ex-cook and bottle washer. And what he did for National Economic Recovery was this. Now, I know it will seem odd that a country—thank you—with great gastronomic traditions like France should shower fame and money on an ex-cook and bottle washer for stuffing soup and bits of food into a bottle. But Appert’s soup and bits of food went into the bottle and stayed fresh for nearly six years. At the time Napoleon was doing his thing in Marengo, Appert already had a little shop in Paris, and his catalogue was offering things like asparagus, beans, meat stew, apricots and so on.

But it was the French navy who first caught on to the possibilities of Appert’s idea. They were at war with England, the British fleet was blockading all the supply ports, and suddenly this appeared to be a marvelous way of keeping French ships independently provisioned. So in 1803 they took some vegetable soup, some peas and beans, and they went off on a three-month trip on the sea, at the end of which they ate the stuff, and then wrote back to Monsieur Appert and said: marvelous, marvelous! In 1805 the newspapers got hold of the story, and they were raving poetically about Monsieur Appert who brings the spring to table in winter. And all of a sudden vintage boiled beef and carrots was all the rage.

Then it was the turn of the army, who after all marched on their stomach. And, by chance, the minister for the army was also the secretary for the Society for the Encouragement of National Industry. And that’s why Appert ended up getting one of their prizes for 12,000 francs—provided he made his technique public, which he did in 1810 by publishing a small bestseller excitingly entitled The Art of Preserving for a Number of Years All Animal and Vegetable Substances. In the book he says: take a champagne bottle and empty it. And you’ll notice that, in those days, the champagne bottles were the same shape they are now. Now, he chose a champagne bottle because he had worked as a bottler here in Épernay, the home of champagne, and he knew that the glass was very strong. Okay, once you’ve emptied it you put the food in, and then you bang the cork home with one of these. I won’t do that because this is a collector’s item. In order to keep the cork in position, he used the same technique they do today: he used a little wire cage. At that point you put the bottle with the food in it into a steam bath, where you leave it for a number of hours at 100 degrees, after which you let it cool, and then you leave it as long as you like, and the food won’t spoil.

Now, although they didn’t know it at the time, what this humble ex-cook and bottle washer had discovered was something for which the great scientist Pasteur was to get all the credit years later: the fact that heat sterilizes food. So, back in the first place, partly because the Italians wouldn’t take Napoleon’s worthless paper money, Appert presented his invention to the world. And by the most extraordinary trick of fortune, the reason his invention ended up in the form it takes on your supermarket shelves today, packed in tin, has also to do with that worthless paper money.

The notes the French government issued, called assignat—by this time not worth the paper they were printed on—were mostly made at a paper mill south of Paris, at a place called Esson. Now, what with the fact that most of the labor force was off fighting with Napoleon, and there was general inflation, the fellow running this paper mill, called Didot, was having a lot of trouble with his production. So he wrote to his brother-in-law in Paris, and said: send somebody down here to help me, will you? The man who turned up was called Nicolas Robert, a clerk with a mechanical turn of mind. And he arrived with a remark: well, look, if you had yourself a machine that made paper, all your troubles would be over. So, Didot said: OK, I’ll back you. You invent it.

And in 1799, Robert did. And this is it. Here is a big vat full of paper pulp. Inside here, there’s a wheel with slats on it, and as you turn the wheel, the slats scoop up the pulp and dump it onto that slide. Slides down onto this moving mesh belt. Now, as the belt moves, it’s shaken so that the water in the pulp can drain away through the mesh, and what water is left is squeezed out by that roller. That leaves the paper to be wound onto this roller here. The entire machine operates on one handle like this.

Okay, I hear you say, but what’s that got to do with putting preserved food in cans? Well, it has, but why? It’s like one of those French Fast stories where you have people rushing in and out of everywhere, and it’s wives and people’s brother-in-laws, and they’re all going in all sorts of directions. So, if you’re ready for a rather nutty story, here goes.

You remember how it all began with Didot and Trouble at Mill, and how he wrote to his sister’s husband and said: send me somebody down to sort the problem out, and they sent Nicolas Robert, who in 1799 invented this machine. Well, after a while, things weren’t going too well, and Dido said: I wonder how it would go in England? So he wrote to his other sister’s husband, a fellow called John Gamble, who was working in an office in Paris for a Royal Navy captain called Coates. Now, Coates was in charge of prisoner of war exchange. In 1800, Coates got Gamble (and his letters and bits and pieces) across the channel to Dover with an introduction to the mayor of Dover, who promptly invited Gamble to dinner, where he met another fellow called Millican. Now, when Millican heard what Gamble was up to, he said: oh, I know the people you should meet, and he took him up to London, where he met two more people, two brothers called Fordrinia, who were stationers. They said: this is a great machine, we’ve got to make some. So they told their millwright, John Hall, to get on with the job. Now, he was a bit busy, so he gave the job to his wife’s sister’s husband, a fellow called Brian Donkin. And in 1803, Donkin made the machine. Well, by 1809, things were going really badly—there were people pirating the idea, legal costs, and so on—and the Fordrinias went bankrupt. Gamble, who had got everybody into this mess, was so worried he was looking around for an idea to save face, and he met a fellow called Peter Durand, who was a merchant, and who had just finished reading a book translated from French. This was in 1810. He’d copied everything down in that book, and got himself a patent on the contents of the book, and he sold that patent to Messer’s, Gamble, Donkin, and Hall, for £1,000. Guess whose book it was? Appert’s book, the one about preserving food. And that is what you call a chain of events.

Anyway, the partners went into the business immediately in the food preservation line. Only, since they knew all about how to handle metal, they chose not to put the food into the bottles, but to put it into the form that we all know and love today, the tin can. Well, in 1813, after three years of experiment, the partners finally got their product to Kensington Palace, where the Prince Regent and the Queen and various other knobs pronounced the contents absolutely delicious, and could they have some more? Well, with backing like that, how can you fail? So they began to get their product onto the Royal Navy ships, where they went over very big.

Around this time, the 1820s, the Arctic explorations were going on. And as the explorers sailed away with their decks filled up with canned food, it began to look as if canning was a quick way to become a millionaire. Around 1830, the cans began to appear in the shops. And then, along came the Crimean War, with all those troops to feed. And then it happened. On the dockside in the Crimea, somebody opened one of the new jumbo-sized cans of meat, and what did they find? Rotten meat. The market took a nosedive. Everybody—but everybody—was trying to find out why it happened. The cans had been sealed, they said. The water had been at the right temperature for long enough to kill the bugs, they said. So what was it?

They hadn’t heated the cans long enough—though they didn’t know that. They thought the culprit was this: the kind of air that comes off rotting vegetation, heat, and stagnant water. Very fashionable at the time, this rot. Everybody thought all disease was due to it. Which is why our story brings us to this pleasant little holiday spot. Because if you ever wanted to see miles and miles of hot rot, come here to the Florida Swamps.

At the same time the meat packers in London were going bananas about what bad air was doing to their success rate, somebody else here in Florida was doing just the same thing for just the same reason. Only, his success rate depended on keeping people healthy. He was a doctor, a fellow called John Gorrie. And in 1833 he had come to a small cotton port on the Gulf of Mexico called Apalachicola, surrounded on three sides by this creepy stuff, full of alligators and snakes that dropped from the trees and other goodies, including malaria, which was John Gorrie’s problem. You see, every year, people went down with it by the hundreds. And Gorrie reckoned, just like everybody else, that malaria was caused by an invisible disease-ridden gas seeping in from these swamps and made, just like the air in the London cans, from a mixture of rotting vegetation, stagnant water, and heat.

So when, not long after he got to Apalachicola, Gorrie became bank manager, postmaster, chief of the Masonic Lodge, a city treasurer, and mayor, he thought he’d try to stamp the disease out by draining wetlands, filling in ponds, building in brick instead of wood that would rot. Great! Everybody still got malaria. So, defeated by the rotting muck and the stagnant water, Gorrie turned to the one ingredient that he reckoned he could control: the heat. You see, back in those days, there were regular shipments of ice down here to the southern states from Boston, where they used to hack it out of the frozen rivers and ponds during the winter, and store it for shipment right through the summer. Went as far as Calcutta. Now, Gorrie reckoned that since people didn’t get malaria in the winter, he’d crack the problem if he could use the ice to help his patients keep their cool right through the summer. What he didn’t know, and what he couldn’t have known in 1837, because nobody had discovered that malaria was caused by an insect, was that here, he was surrounded by a giant mosquito menagerie.

As far as Gorrie was concerned, the billions of mosquitoes here were just an annoyance. So Gorrie set up a chilly fever room, where you could very easily put yourself a cold. And for a few years, Appalachicola murmured to the chattering teeth of Gorrie’s victims—I mean, patients—as he proceeded with his grand design. His idea was quite brilliant, and of course totally wrong. But Gorrie was indefatigable in bending the ear of any visitors on the subject. Me, too. So: the hanging bucket is filled with ice. Above, a pipe bringing in air from outside. The ice chills the air, and if you block up the fireplace the only place the air can get out is down, through a pipe in the skirting board. Alas, poor Gorrie, he so nearly got it right. Gore’s curtains help, he said, because they keep out the vapours that bring him the disease. His only problem, he thought, was a way of getting cheap ice.

Sometime after 1845, he found it—with this machine. May not look much, but if you’ve got a cool house on a hot day, thank that. Gorrie built it using an idea that had been around for some time, but that nobody had put into practice. The idea was that if you compress air, it gets hot. If you then let it expand, it gets cold, and it draws heat from its surroundings. Look, here’s a steam-driven wheel, driving a force pump that compresses the air. Here comes the compressed air through that coil in a bath of cold water into this chamber, where it expands. And as it expands it gets very cold. Okay, the cold air then comes up through tubes in this container, which is full of brine, and the cold air draws heat from the brine. Now, on every cycle, the air draws heat from the brine until the brine is the same temperature as the cold air. And from then on, as the air comes out of the top here, it’s cold. Air conditioning. Invented by a man very few people have ever heard of. I mean, had you?

One more trick. If you run the cold air tube up here through a reservoir of water, the cold air chills the water down, and the chilled water drips down into a container which is immersed in the super-cooled brine. And that causes it to make something that looked as if it was going to make John Gorrie a very rich man in a very hot climate. Ice.

On Bastille Day, 1850, Gorrie made his invention public. The occasion was a boozy get-together in the home of Appalachicola’s French consul, who was holding a little soiree in honor of the anniversary of the French Revolution, with more French red wine and French champagne than you could shake a stick out. Now, unfortunately, the ice boat from Boston hadn’t come, and snide remarks were passed about what a social gaffe it was for a Frenchman to offer warm champagne. In spite of the snickering, however, the host displayed all the symptoms of a man utterly confident in his savoir faire. You see, our hero had previously shown him his magic machine, and both men were looking forward to their little moment of triumph. It was, sad to say, to be Gorrie’s only moment of triumph.

It was at the Port of New Orleans in 1869, 14 years after Gorrie had died, broken by his failure to get him any backing for his machine, that his idea suddenly turned up again. It was the end of a steamboat race along the coast of Texas. The winner, the good ship Agnes, had beaten the other boat with a cargo of chilled beef—the first in history and long since forgotten.

So here we are on the New Orleans waterfront in the summer of 1869 because Charles of Burgundy got clobbered by Swiss pikemen, who then made infantry fashionable, and because the armies got so big, Napoleon desperately needed provisions for them, Appert invented preserved food, which Duncan put in cans because his paper-making venture failed. And the rot that spoiled the meat and also maybe gave people malaria, which Gorrie tried curing with cold air that chilled the beef that the Agnes bought for the great New Orleans beef race. Remember?

Now, by an extraordinary coincidence, as the flower of New Orleans’ upper crust were tucking into their beef, a fellow called Mr. J. D. Possel was chilling his first beef, also with cold air—only he was doing it in a place where interest in the idea ran very high. Because Possel lives in Australia. See, unlike here in New Orleans, these were the years of the great British starvation scare. As the country became more industrialized and the population shot up, the government decided that if some new way of getting lots of fresh meat from Australia and New Zealand wasn’t found, well, I mean, the old country was finished. Spurred on by patriotism and profit, the Australians did it.

They had a few horrendous goes at it first, though. In 1873, a ship left Melbourne with a cargo of meat covered in ice and salt. It leaked. In London, the smell was described as indescribable. They had another go in 1876 with a load of mutton, and a rather more sophisticated cooling system. It leaked before it left; ended up in Sydney Harbour. Finally, in 1880, the SS Strathlevin docked in London with a cargo frozen solid to be sold here at Smithfield. Britain was saved. Queen Victoria enjoyed the beef. Refrigeration was a success.

What happens next has to do with the drinking habits of the people who live here, in and around the city of Munich in southern Germany, and especially what’s going on right now about 50 feet above my head: the annual Munich beer festival. Hundreds of thousands of people come here and get totally looped, in spite of the fact that it was a German who said, way back, “Beer spoils the blood, burns it up, causes great thirst, horrible red faces, also leprosy, swelling of the body, injury to the head, and all internal parts of the intestines.” You’d think that would put them off. It doesn’t.

Now, one of the things that that mob out there are doing is drinking beer the way the French, the Italians, the Greeks, the Australians, the Americans—practically everybody—drinks it: cold. Whereas we English, we prefer our beer at room temperature or warm. Now, the reason for the difference is that English beer is fermented using a yeast that does its fermentation on the surface of the beer in the vats. And it prefers to do it at slightly warmer temperatures, which is why it also drinks slightly warmer. Some people think it’s an acquired taste. Yeast in German beer vats does its fermentation at the bottom of the vats. It’s called bottom fermented beer. And it takes anything up to three months to do that. And it needs to be kept just above freezing point for the whole thing to work.

That’s why, since about the sixteenth century, there have been laws all over Germany saying you can’t brew beer in the summer, because it will go bad. Now, that’s not very good news, because if you can’t brew in the summer, that’s half the year gone when you could be brewing and making profit. Because—especially here in Bavaria—if you make beer, they’ll drink it.

So, in about 1870, one of the biggest brewers in Munich—this man, head of the Sedlmayr Brewery—went to one of his friends who was a locomotive engineer called Carl von Linde, and asked him if he could come up with something that would keep this place cool enough in summer to brew right through the year. So Linde went off and basically used John Gorrie’s system. Do you remember? It used the idea of compressing air—except that von Linde used compressed ammonia gas, because it does its thing at much lower temperatures. What he did was he got a piston and he squashed the ammonia gas until it became liquid, and then he released it into an area of much lower pressure, and as the pressure dropped, the ammonia evaporated. Now, you know the way perfume or aftershave cools your skin? Well, that’s because as it evaporates, to do so it needs energy, and it takes that energy in the form of heat from the surrounding area. So it takes the heat from your skin, cooling it down. In Linde’s case, the ammonia took its heat from its surroundings, which was a water tank through which the pipes containing the ammonia ran. So the water cooled down. Since the water tank was all around the beer vat, when the water cooled down, so did the beer. And why von Linde should mean anything to you or me is because, in the back of our domestic refrigerators, we have his basic system at work. Thanks, initially, to German lager beer.

So towards the end of the last century, as the refrigeration processes got better and they could go to lower and lower temperatures, people started trying to liquefy gases that would only liquefy very low temperatures indeed—like hydrogen and oxygen—because there was a ready market. The limelight business, for example: you make limelight by burning hydrogen and oxygen and lime, and you get a very brilliant light. Or small-scale welding, like jewelers. The trouble was: what do you do with a load of liquid hydrogen when it evaporates away all the time? Which it does if you don’t have an efficient container to keep it in. And they didn’t.

Well, they didn’t until this idea came along. It’s supposed to have been the brainchild of the great Scottish scientist James Dewar. In fact, an obscure Frenchman thought of it first. The flask with a sealed vacuum between two layers of silver glass kept things cold or hot. Revolutionized the great Edwardian picnic in 1904. So the story takes one more twist and we’ve reached the end.

You remember how it all began with credit and the Swiss beating Charles the Bold? And the race for bigger armies until they got really big. So Napoleon had trouble feeding his men in battle. And so Appert used his champagne-bottling experience to invent food preservation in bottles. And how, by a complicated series of events, the bottled food idea got to England. Which was where Duncan put it in cans instead. And then they went rotten, and John Gorrie thought that it was the rot that caused malaria, and invented air conditioning to try and cure it. And how refrigeration and liquid gas followed, kept in the thermos flask, marketed by a German called Reinhold Burger.

It would be difficult to overestimate the effect Burger had on life at the beginning of this century. The thermos flask didn’t only go to picnics. It changed the working man’s lunch break, it provided airborne drinks for people on zeppelins, it went to the south pole and to central Africa both to sustain the intrepid explorers and to bring back hot and cold specimens, and it saved countless people’s lives because it stopped their insulin from going bad. But it was in the form behind me, here, that the thermos flask probably made its greatest impact on the twentieth century—and I use the word “impact” advisedly.

It took that form principally because of two men whose work was virtually ignored, and a third who did his work in a way that nobody could ignore. The first was a Russian called Tsiolkovsky, and he literally thought everything out, and his work lay buried in Russian disinterest until after his death. The second was an American called Robert Goddard, who did most of his best work on his aunt’s farm in Massachusetts, and all he got for his pains was some rather lukewarm interest from American weather forecasters. The third man was called Hermann Oberth, and people noticed what he did, because in 1944 what he was trying to do was destroy London. His particular version of the thermos flask became known as Vengeance Weapon Two, and before the war was over it had killed thousands of allied troops and civilians.

You see all three men had understood that certain gases ignite, and that the thermos flask permits you to store vast quantities of those gases safely in the frozen liquid form until you want to ignite them—at which point you take the top off the flask, the gases evaporate, you apply light, and boom. Now, two gases do that better than any other. And it was Oberth’s assistant who put them together most efficiently. His name was Wernher von Braun, and the two gases that he released from his particular version of a thermos flask—the one lying on its side behind me now—were hydrogen and oxygen. If you release those two gases into a confined space with a hole at the other end of it, and mix them as you do so, and then set light to them you get—that. Destination: the moon—or Moscow. The planets, or Peking.