Buffalo Bill: in 1883 Bill hits the big-time all around the world with his all-star wild-west show. ibid.
By 1440 Tomas Torquemada is top Spanish torturer – when he is on a winning streak he can burn 13,000 in one year. ibid.
Meet the Knights of Malta and their new home the island of Malta. By 1565 these guys have made so much trouble for the Turks, they decide enough is enough and send in a humungous military force to wipe them out. And fail. ibid.
World War II and that’s when the instant idea really took off and all because of this – coffee. World War II makes instant coffee a real flier. James Burke, Connections s3e5, Life is No Picnic
The molecules make what DuPont calls nylon. There’s never been anything like nylons. In the first four days DuPont sells four million pairs. ibid.
This guy’s only interested in creepy crawlies, and he’s obsessed with how they got to be so local ... Wherever you go, the little beetles seemed to have worked out how to adapt to the amazing variety of habitats in the world ... He let some other guy who has the same idea publish first and he blows everybody away ... After you, Mr [Charles] Darwin ... [Alfred Russel] Wallace you can tell is a noble spirit. James Burke, Connections s3e6: Elementary Stuff
All this tourist-brochure stuff about Scotland is introduced by the English after they’ve invaded the country and destroyed the Clans and ‘pacified’ the place. ibid.
This is what [Professor Sir] Alec Jeffreys [Leicester University] comes up with in 1984: The DNA profile. James Burke, Connections s3e7: A Special Place
Chorography and Chorology: Ferdinand von Richthofen’s contribution to the sum of human knowledge. ibid.
Garrick improves the lighting ... Drury Lane Theatre is the first to try a new form of lighting ... Argon’s lamp. ibid.
With his new skepticism – lots of ripples, because Montaigne pulls the rug out from every form of authority. What you see is not what you get. ibid.
Hales reckons the source of all disease is foul or putrid air found mostly in closed spaces. ibid.
In 1796 Jenner hits the headlines when he deliberately infects the healthy son of one of his labourers with liquid from a cow pox pustule, and then he deliberately infects the kid with smallpox – and he survives ... Vaccinated, from Vanga, the Latin for cow. ibid.
[Alfred] Wegener’s crackpot idea is the continental drift theory; thinks it all up in 1912 when he‘s out here in Iceland. James Burke, Connections s3e8: Fire from the Sky
The other thing Wegener’s crazy about is mirages. ibid.
Kabbalists – and for them the secret of the universe is numbers. ibid.
In 1942 the Japanese captured the Allied rubber plantations. The solution to this crisis produces one of the most controversial weapons of all time ... Napalm is the name; interdiction is the game. James Burke, Connections s3e9: Hit the Water
Palm oil is better and cheaper than suet [margarine], oh and incidentally it’s the key ingredient in napalm. ibid.
Factors that put blood into identifiable groups: A B AB & O. ibid.
This is the result: ex-experimental fusion reactor. If we can get fusion to work you could power Los Angeles for a month on a bucket of sea-water which contains the kind of atoms you need for the fusion process. James Burke, Connections s3e10: In Touch
And that’s the catch – you’ve got to make the plasma hotter than anything that ever existed on the planet. The problem with that is it’ll vaporize everything in sight. Except there’s one thing that won’t vaporize everything – a magnetic field to hold the plasma in. ibid.
That young women who writes that poem for the Statue of Liberty – she’s Emma Lazarus, she’s Jewish and it’s she who really kicks off Zionism, the call for Jews to set off a Jewish state. ibid.
We call the current Franklin charts the Gulf Stream. Franklin’s work kind of kicks off modern oceanography. ibid.
We end where we started – in a third world village, in touch, where we’re all going to be in the twenty-first century – on the net, and like it or not, connected. ibid.
The Forbidden City in Beijing, built by the Ming dynasty in the early fifteenth century – these awe-inspiring buildings are a reminder of the last time China was a global leader. They remain as relics of one of the greatest civilisations in all history. But they are also a reminder that no civilisation lasts for ever. Within a century of their construction the decline of the East and the rise of the West had begun. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: Is the West History? I: Competition, Channel 4 2011
The birth of the nation state and the rise of capitalism would lead to a remarkable reversal of fortunes. This is history’s greatest revelation. How it was that Europeans, not Chinese, came to run the world. ibid.
Violence was endemic ... Without any proper sewage system medieval London stank to high heaven ... Dick Whittington had to watch where he put his feet because the streets of London were paved with something very different from gold. And England was probably the most prosperous European country. Life was even nastier and more brutal and shorter in France. No, six-hundred years ago the idea of a civilised West would have seemed absurd. ibid.
By 1506 the Portuguese had a near monopoly on shipping along the east African coast. ibid.
The birth of the nation state and the rise of capitalism would lead to a remarkable reversal of fortunes ... How it was that Europeans, not Chinese, came to run the world? ibid.
When the intrepid Venetian Marco Polo had visited China in the 1270s he had been astonished by the volume of traffic on the Yangtze. ibid.
China’s failure to exploit its advantages left the path of overseas expansion wide open for the West. ibid.
The Forbidden City in Beijing is just one vast monument to the unity of imperial power. ibid.
Harmony harmony harmony – it’s a kind of code-word for undivided imperial authority. ibid.
In China imperial rule was implemented by a Confucian bureaucracy. ibid.
The Ming Dynasty had been born in 1368. And as we’ve seen for a century after that China was the most sophisticated civilisation by almost any measure. But then in the mid-seventeenth century the wheels came flying off. Political factionalism, fiscal crisis, and famine opened the door to rebellion and invasion. The results were devastating: conflict and disease reduced the Chinese population by as much as 40%. In 1644 the last Ming emperor hanged himself out of shame. This dramatic transition from Confucian equipoise to anarchy had taken little more than a decade. ibid.
Competition, markets, profits, capitalism. These are the things China once turned its back on. Well not any more. ibid.
It would have seemed equally fantastic in 1420 to have predicted western ascendancy. The point is that in the course of the fifteenth century Europeans discovered the joys of competition both economic and political. And in a competition for control of the Asian spice trade capitalism was born. And with it the foundation for a world dominated by western civilisation. ibid.
Could the West be consigned to history? Without superior science there would be no Western superpower today. But it wasn’t always like this. A thousand years ago it was the Muslim world that was at the cutting edge of science. Niall Ferguson, Civilisation: Is the West History? II: Science
For the Ottoman empire it was the beginning of the end. A moment of imperial overstretch with disastrous consequences. It was actually the first time the Ottomans had had to accept a peace treaty from victorious Christian adversities. ibid.
In stark contrast the Ottomans’ progress was severely hampered by religion. In the words of one Muslim cleric: ‘It is rare that someone becomes absorbed in this foreign science without renouncing religion and letting go the reigns of piety within him.’ ibid.
Muslim scientists could not even access the latest research from Europe. Because their religion now prevented them from reading printed books. For the Ottomans, script was sacred. ibid.
In Ottoman schools science yielded to narrowly religious study. ibid.
Abdul [Hamid] was determined to emulate Western civilisation in every respect. ibid.
Fourteen tons of gold leaf were used to guild the palace ceilings, from which hung a grand total of thirty-six chandeliers ... This place is so wildly over the top it’s a like a cross between Grand Central Station and the Grand Paris Opera. But it shows just how far the Ottomans were prepared to go to imitate the ways of the West. ibid.
The Ottomans still didn’t really get it. Because if they were serious with catching up with the West they needed so much more than just a Western-style palace. They needed a new constitution. A new alphabet. A whole new state. And the fact they ended up getting all of these things was thanks in very large part to one man: his name was Kemal Ataturk. His mission was to be Turkey’s Frederick the Great. ibid.
For six centuries the Christian West and the Ottoman empire in the Muslim east had been locked in conflict. Now under the rule of Kemal Ataturk in the early twentieth century that conflict would finally come to an end. For centuries, Ataturk argued, Turks had been walking from the East in the direction of the West. Now under his leadership they would finally reach their destination. Here on the banks of the Bosporus, East would meet West. Not just geographically but culturally. Central to the Western orientation of Turkey was the introduction of a secular form of government. No longer would religion be allowed to dominate the political arena. There would be secular laws for a secular state. ibid.
In the West science and enlightened government worked in tandem. And no monarch understood this better than Frederick the Great who offered scientists cash prizes for solutions to unsolved problems. Yet rulers like Frederick were interested in science for more than intellectual reasons. ibid.