None of these guys did anything by themselves; they borrowed from other people’s work. And how could you ever when a golden age of anything started and stopped? ibid.
A lot of really big things happen by accident. ibid.
Edison tried six thousand different materials before settling on the right one for that filament. ibid.
The easier you can communicate the faster change happens. ibid.
It was lack of understanding of the scientific reasoning behind Apollo that killed it. That and the desire we all seem to have developed for novelty. ibid.
It looks like the rate of change is going to become even more confusing. ibid.
So it is a case then of never have so many people understood so little about so much? Or maybe I’m wrong. ibid.
Now we don’t even know if we can go on expecting a rising standing of living. ibid.
Gut reaction: and it’s almost always dangerously wrong. ibid.
The factors for change have become more and more theoretical. ibid.
The key to why things change is the key to everything. How easy is it for knowledge to spread? ibid.
Scientific knowledge is hard to take because it removes the reassuring crutches of opinion and ideology. ibid.
Garbage all that, nasty, brutish, and short – that’s what life was all about. And dirty and boring, and it had been like that for thousands of years. And then suddenly the whole complex polluted over-populated frenetic non-stop stressful high-tech rat race that is the modern world. Life was suddenly no longer as simple as it had been. And the extraordinary thing is none of that was planned. James Burke, Connections s2e1: Revolutions, BBC 1994
The Industrial Revolution; and it created another problem – the population went up so far there was a real risk of starvation from lack of food. ibid.
Think about what all those people moving around did to the gene pool ibid.
We may be the last generation shaped only by accident at birth, crafted only by nature. ibid.
Vienna is where Sigmund Freud changed the way we think about the way we think about the way we think. ibid.
Now the chronological social reformer could actually study the bumps on criminal heads. ibid.
According to one Italian phrenology freak called Lombroso in the case of criminals distantly was hardly the word; Lombroso was convinced criminals were a good deal closer to apes than law-abiding folk. ibid.
The synod of the Russian Orthodox Church – who reckoned that syphilis was heavenly punishment for doing what you weren't supposed to, and as such shouldn’t be cured by any medicine, thank you very much. James Burke, Connections s2e2: Sentimental Journeys
In 1783 two French brothers called Montgolfier amazed the world with the first human flight. James Burke, Connections s2e3: Getting it Together
Aspirin – from 1899 when Aspirin first went on the market – headaches would never be dynamite again. ibid.
Copper was so valuable because it helped to make the renaissance equivalent of the man who had everything: the bronze cannon. James Burke, Connections s2e4: Whodunit?
Galton studied funeral records and death certificates and came to the conclusion that the data backed him up: it showed, he said, eminent men came from eminent families, and imbeciles came from imbeciles. He called it eugenics. ibid.
This is a programme about nothing. James Burke: Connections s2e5: Something for Nothing
In the middle of the seventeenth century if you were in earshot of the Pope here in Rome you could not talk about nothing. A sort of double nothing ... The Pope said there was no such thing. ibid.
The miners’ problem was that their suction pumps wouldn’t suck water further than thirty feet up a tube. But the deeper they dug the more it flooded. ibid.
The barometer became a protestant project given the religious climate here in Rome. ibid.
1854 during the Crimean War ... The entire British army supply fleet had been sunk by a hurricane ... so thousands died. ibid.
Nineteenth century forecasting couldn’t have come at a better time for the English. ibid.
The English only spent that money because they were desperate for any form of sanitation. Because of a terrifying disease they had imported from India: Cholera. Terrifying because by the mid-nineteenth century it had killed 100,000 people in England and they hadn’t the faintest idea what caused it or how to stop it. ibid.
The new thing to have was a lavatory. Everyone wanted one. ibid.
Back in the seventeenth century the vacuum rapidly became a hot-shot experimental tool. ibid.
Tesler who solved the problem by designing the world’s first hydro-electric power station under a waterfall. ibid.
Tesler also came up with a brilliant idea to use electricity for more than just lights and railway signals. ibid.
The battery is the last of those something for nothing inventions. ibid.
In the seventeenth century when the first Dutch traders arrived out here they found all the locals from the Emperor down sitting around drinking tea ... At the same time asking questions ... The Zen Buddhist tea ceremony was supposed to help you find infinite oneness and universal understanding. James Burke, Connections s2e6: Echoes of the Past
Porcelain. People went potty about it. ibid.
Delph: and it’s really very nice. Delph was a seventeenth century import. ibid.
The Delph potters can up with an imitation so good only a Chinese could tell the difference. ibid.
By the eighteenth century Delph had pretty much cornered the whole European pottery market ... [Josiah] Wedgwood got his start in life ... Queensware he called it ... ‘If the queen uses it, so should you’. ibid.
Deeply into a new fashion craze called neo-classical. ibid.
A kind of vulture trip around the sites called the Grand Tour. ibid.
Robert Adam who promptly took neo-classicism back to Britain and churned out country houses more suitable to Mount Olympus than to Oxfordshire. ibid.
Eastman Kodak Co.’s Brownie Cameras $1. James Burke, Connections s2e7: Photo Finish
England alone took one million pounds of ivory a year. ibid.
A good billiard ball was hard to find. ibid.
The ivory substitute was celluloid. ibid.
Light was a wave everybody thought. Till Einstein. Light, he said ... was a wave. And a particle. ibid.
Gaslight changed everybody’s life. People started going out in the evenings for the first time. ibid.
Any time from 1500 to 1807 if you wanted to get seriously rich, you went into the people-moving business. Demand for slaves in the Caribbean started astronomically and went up – just too good an opportunity for British investors to miss. James Burke, Connections s2e8: Separate Ways
The latest scientific miracle at the time was electroplating. ibid.
Polythene: by the time they got it into production it was just what air defence staff here needed. James Burke, Connections s2e9: High Times
In the early part of the eighteenth century the hot stuff for doing up your house was anything from the far east. ibid.
Arctic whaling lasted three hundred years. ibid.
With a little prodding from Rome, Jesuit missionaries destroyed thousands of primitive temples and idols ... They moved people out of their villages and into security compounds. James Burke, Connections s2e10: Deja Vu
What all that Inca silver had done was turn Western life into the money-go-round it is today. ibid.
Pirates – most of whom were quietly under rob, pillage and plunder contracts to the English government in return for 50%. ibid.