Did you know
that a surprising number
of objects you use every day are
thanks to accidents?
Let me show you what I mean.
On this episode, we discover the lengths
people will go to
for a sweet treat.
People were risking jail time
for a sugar substitute.
Learn how renegade
scientists saved the planet.
They even threatened to fire him.
And find out the way
that mold juice protects humanity.
Mold juice?
"Oops I Changed the World."
Sweet treats,
chocolate,
Gobstoppers,
cookies,
donuts,
pie,
sugar, sugar, sugar.
We humans can't get
enough of the good stuff.
Chocolate ice cream, you know,
a tub of chocolate ice cream.
New York cheesecake, ah, man,
it's like love on a plate.
We know too much is unhealthy
but sugar is in almost everything we eat.
A 2013 survey revealed
that some 74% of food products
in the U.S. contain added sugar
and it's being added in for good reason.
When sugar hits your tongue,
it sends a telephone message
up to your brain which releases dopamine,
which says I'm happy.
So we love sugar
but sugar's bad for us.
That sounds like a problem
for which we need a solution.
We may already have one, Suze.
The answer comes from a small Maryland laboratory
more than a hundred years ago
with the accidental discovery of the world's
first artificial sweetener, saccharin.
The first artificial sweetener is
over a century old.
How come we're still drowning in sugar?
Good question.
The story of saccharin
and its impact on us is
one of highs and lows.
Influenced by taxation, dodgy scientific opinion,
smugglers, and the all powerful sugar barons.
But let's start at the beginning
when the sugar cane migrated
from New Guinea up to India.
India first refined sugar
thousands of years ago,
and it makes a long,
slow journey towards Europe,
addicting people along the way.
The Romans use it for medicinal purposes.
And then...
We can thank the Knight's Templar
for bringing it into the heart
of Europe as a new addiction.
To begin with,
it's only the rich
that can eat this new delight.
And the poor are so envious
and wanting to be in on the act
that they'll even blacken their teeth
to pretend that they've been eating sugar.
Such is the allure of sugar
that there's some serious money to be made.
Expeditions are sent out
to the new world
to create new sugar plantations.
Sugar is seen as white gold.
British colonies produce over a million tons
which sells for a premium back home
where the high society laps it up.
While the rich get their sweet treats,
it's the vulnerable who pay the price.
Sugar production drives the slave trade.
The European trans-Atlantic slave trade transports
as many as 12 million enslaved Africans
just to maintain these enterprises.
The Caribbean much as South America
and the Southern United States are
all shaped by sugar cane plantations.
The slaves were the
absolute property of their masters.
The next seismic shift
in the sugar story happens
in the 19th century.
The center of it was
this diminutive Frenchman, Napoleon,
who was terrorizing the whole of Europe.
Now the problem for him was
that he wasn't able
to get sugar supplies
out of the Caribbean
while he was fighting Britain,
Russia, and everybody else.
So what he started to do was
to grow a crop called sugar beet.
It's a root vegetable like a turnip.
It grows in the ground.
It doesn't need tropical conditions.
It doesn't look very appetizing
but it's surprisingly sweet.
And what Napoleon was able
to do was effectively flood the market
with this new homegrown sugar.
And it meant that working class people
and the peasantry were able
to enjoy sugary treats
for the first time.
And so it's
against this sugary background
that a young Russian scientist,
Constantin Fahlberg, is about to change
everything all over again.
In Baltimore, a shipment of 712 sacks
of sugar has just been impounded
by the U.S. government
over questions of purity.
The U.S. government thought
that the Demerara sugar was
actually higher in quality
than they had actually disclosed.
So the company gets
a German chemist involved, Constantin Fahlberg.
Which is how Fahlberg finds
himself sharing a lab
with another chemist, Professor Ira Remsen.
The two become fascinated
by coal tar derivatives.
Coal tar, it sounds pretty disgusting
and it kind of is.
It's this like dark black liquid
remnants from processing coal.
But who among us can truly say
that they aren't fascinated
by coal tar derivatives, eh?
All right, please yourselves.
It's actually got a lot of medicinal properties,
antifungal, anti-inflammatory, antiparasitic.
It's even listed as an essential medicine
by the World Health Organization.
This weird mixture of chemicals
fascinates Remsen and Fahlberg.
Together they work on a specific derivative
called O-toluenesulfonic acid.
One of the key things
that chemists do is react and change molecules.
It's kind of like Lego
and swapping bits and pieces around.
He adds ammonia to the reaction
and that's where things get interesting.
Fahlberg is so absorbed
in his work tinkering around with chemicals
that one evening he nearly misses dinner.
But he dashes back
after a cursory wash of his hands
and he's eating bread at the table
when he thinks, gosh,
this is really sweet.
Has my housekeeper, you know,
put sugar in the bread or something?
It just tastes very odd.
And he accuses her
of putting sugar into his food.
When she denies it,
there's only one logical explanation.
He starts thinking that the unexpected taste
must have come from one
of the experiments that he was running.
So what does he do?
He does what any good scientists would do,
gather data.
He goes back to the lab
and tastes every single substance
that was out in a beaker.
That's definitely not
what every good scientist would do.
Kids, don't try this at home.
This isn't just reckless.
It's desperate.
Fahlberg needs to know
where the sweet taste has come from.
He figures out that the reaction
with the O-toluenesulfonic acid is
what's created this taste.
Fahlberg realizes that
this new compound is incredibly sweet.
It's 500 times sweeter than sugar.
So it seems appropriate when Fahlberg decides
to take the Latin word for sugar
to name the new product, saccharin.
Fahlberg decides he needs
to test this new saccharin scientifically.
So he takes about 1/3
of an ounce himself.
That's the taste equivalent
of 11 pounds of sugar.
Which was probably a bit too sweet
but there's some very good news.
He discovers that it
all passes through his body unchanged.
He was able to collect it from his urine.
This is really important
because if the body doesn't metabolize it
then it's probably safe to eat.
Which means of course,
that it doesn't have any calorific value.
Saccharine literally shoves through you
giving you all the pleasure of sugar
and none of the guilt.
Fahlberg knows he's onto something
because the applications are vast,
helping diabetics, making bitter medicines more palatable,
the food packing and preservation industry,
making sugary food healthy,
and losing weight.
By 1879, Fahlberg is almost ready
to bring the new wonder product to market.
Saccharin is a co-discovery
between Remsen and Fahlberg.
And nobody doubts that.
But Fahlberg is, shall we say the
more entrepreneurial of the two gentlemen.
And he goes and registers patents
in the United States and Europe.
And somehow he neglects
to mention this to Remsen who finds out
and is absolutely hopping mad.
I'm hopping mad.
Remsen calls Fahlberg a scoundrel.
The two never make up
but Fahlberg is making
too much money to care.
Saccharin goes into mass production
and it's a big success.
While saccharin's more expensive
to produce than sugar,
it's 500 times sweeter
so you need a lot less of it
to get the same effect.
This makes it hugely profitable
which doesn't go down well
with the sugar barons.
Sugar producers are in a great spot.
They control a valuable commodity
that has a huge market.
The last thing they want is a new product
like saccharin coming in
and disrupting their trade
and taking away their customers.
So they lobby governments hard
first of all, to get it restricted
to purely medicinal purposes
sold through pharmacies.
And then when that doesn't seem to work,
they just go for an outright ban.
Governments bend
to the demands of big sugar.
Saccharin becomes almost impossible
to manufacture and trade.
And even though governments
all over Europe are moving against saccharin,
Europeans, the public want it.
And we all know that
if you ban something the public wants,
the public finds a way.
Huge smuggling operations find ingenious means
of concealing the sweet white gold.
as it passes through Customs.
They find a way
of incorporating saccharin into holy candles
which are duly consecrated by priests,
taken out of the country
past border guards who suspect nothing.
And then those candles are melted down
and the saccharine extracted for sale.
I mean, it sounds ridiculous.
People were risking jail time
for a sugar substitute.
And over in America,
things aren't going much better for saccharin.
There's growing concern in the United States
in the early 20th century over food adulteration
and it leads to legislation,
the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906.
And there's a government chemist, Harvey Wiley,
and he really takes against saccharin.
Wiley believes that anything derived
from coal tar just can't be good
especially if it has no nutritional value
which saccharin of course doesn't.
But the food processing industry
loves saccharin.
It allows them to enhance flavor
in their tin products on the cheap.
Wiley and the food industry
then are completely at loggerheads
and they take their argument
to the president to Theodore
or Teddy Roosevelt who is not a slim man
by any stretch of the imagination.
What Wiley doesn't know is
that Roosevelt has been prescribed saccharin
by his doctor to help
with his expanding waistline.
And when he's presented with the arguments,
Roosevelt rounds at Wiley
and says anybody who opposes saccharine is an idiot.
That told him.
During World War I,
the farmers had to switch their crops
from sugar beets to wheat and potatoes.
With war comes rationing.
This business of ration stamps
and price ceilings is no cinch for him.
And a cheap,
easy to produce sweetener is
seen as a candle in the dark.
So from vilifying saccharine,
politicians now endorse its production
and it goes from
practically 0 to 250 tons.
And the same happens
again in World War II.
It's saccharine to the rescue.
From the 1950s onwards,
America grows rich.
Access to sugary foods is suddenly easy
and most people have
to do less hard physical labor.
Served in good generous slices.
The masses start
to grow quite literally
and it's saccharine
to the rescue yet again.
In 1963, Weight Watchers is founded
and sees immediate and rapid growth.
Within two years,
the owner Jean Nidetch is a millionaire.
I thought fat men were
supposed to be jolly.
They are jolly, they're jolly on the outside.
For once, I took a picture
of what I really felt like.
Now over 140 years
after Fahlberg's accidental discovery,
saccharin remains one of the
most popular artificial sweeteners on the planet.
You'll find it in those
little Sweet 'N Low single serve packets
in cafes and restaurants.
Over 500 billion packets have
been produced to date.
Coming up the plan
to take over the planet.
If we can create a laser,
we could fire Soviet nukes
out of the sky.
And the world's worst sales tactic.
He aims the gun at his stomach
and pulls the trigger.
But first this,
planet Earth from all the way out here,
it's hard to see the humans' impact
on this pale blue dot in space.
But as the sun dips below the horizon,
billions of pinpoints of light switch on
revealing our modern illuminated world.
This planet is covered with intelligent life
that has harnessed electricity
and used it to power the world.
From the bright city centers of New York,
to the nighttime fishing
in the South China Sea.
It's almost like a map
of technological progress.
You can see cities,
you can see civilizations clustering together
in places like the Eastern seaboard in America
and in Western Europe.
You can see where humanity
butts up against geography
like in the foothills of the Himalayas.
You can see in an image like this,
that there's no doubt about it.
We love light.
The spread of artificial light
across the globe is possible
because of a brilliant new technology
that revolutionizes how we make light,
the light emitting diode.
That's also known
as the LED to you and me.
Now, we all know that
there were electronic lights before LEDs.
You've probably heard of their inventor,
a gentleman called Thomas Edison.
There were light bulbs before Edison,
but his genius was the fact
that he made it commercially viable.
And he did this
with a year of hard work.
He went through 6,000 different materials
for the filament of the bulb
before he found one
that he could sell
at a reasonable price.
Edison's inventions spread light
and electricity across the world.
It may seem like a small thing
but the light bulb
changed the course of humanity.
They have made us independent of the seasons.
We now don't go to bed
when the sun goes down.
We go to bed when we want
and facilitated the electrical revolution.
Because when you run wires
in for electricity for lighting,
that means there's electricity available
for all manner of gadgets and gizmos.
Say there sport,
what are you gonna do with all of it?
Do with it?
Honey, there's no limit.
The incandescent light bulb
remains the dominant light source
for the rest of the century.
I really admire the way you
never cast harsh shadows.
But light bulbs are far from perfect.
An electrical current is passed
through a very thin wire
known as a filament.
The filament heats up
glowing bright white, lighting up a room.
A pound and 1/2 of tungsten
in this lamp would make filaments
for 21 million grain of wheat lamps.
It's unfortunately 97% of the energy
that goes through the wire is converted to heat
with only 3% left for light.
This is incredibly inefficient.
The more light bulbs we use,
the more energy we waste.
It's a pretty big deal to work out
if we can do this more efficiently.
And that is where tie hating,
Nick Holonyak comes into our story.
Holonyak's born in 1928
in Southern Illinois in a small community.
His parents have emigrated to the U.S.
from what's now the Ukraine.
His father's working
in the mining industry.
It's a typical blue-collar story
where he could have very easily ended up
in the same job
going underground and mining
instead of which he sets
his sites much, much higher.
At the end of World War II,
universities across the U.S. start rapidly growing.
It's the opportunity
that Holonyak's been waiting for.
Holonyak studies electrical engineering
at the University of Illinois,
and ends up working
with none other than John Bardeen,
the co-inventor of the semiconductor transistor
and the winner of not one
but two Nobel Prizes.
Two, that's just showing off.
Anyway, Holonyak graduates, gets a job,
joins the military, and eventually finds
himself working for General Electric.
Onto General Electric progress land.
This is the era of the Cold War.
It's when the United States
and the Soviet Union are
matching up to each other,
the Cuban Missile Crisis, huge paranoia.
People are starting to think, well,
if we can create a laser,
we could fire Soviet nukes
out of the sky.
Holonyak's colleagues are experimenting
with semiconductor diodes
to create a miniaturized laser.
A laser is really the secret ray
of science fiction come true.
It's an invisible beam
of very high energy.
The problem is the team
are producing lasers that emit
only infrared wavelengths of light,
which is longer than the wavelengths of light
that we can see with our eyes
whereas Holonyak wants to make a laser
that produces visible light.
Holonyak thinks that his best bet
for making a visible laser lies
in the research of
another group at General Electric.
They're working with compounds
that can give off red light,
crystals made from gallium and arsenide.
His bosses try and persuade him
to stick to the classic silicon
rather than his obsession with gallium crystals.
They even threaten to fire him.
But Holonyak ignores this.
He's convinced that he's on to something
and eventually becomes the first person
in the world to grow crystals
mixing gallium, arsenide,
and gallium phosphide.
Holonyak uses
his new crystals in a laser.
He's expecting a powerful red beam
to blast out of his experiment.
And it works, kind of.
It's not the powerful, coherent light
that you would get from a laser
but instead, well kind
of more regular light.
In fact, what Holonyak's made is
accidentally the world's first
commercially viable red LED.
Okay,
it's not the laser he was expecting,
but this is a totally
new way of making light.
And it's all down
to how diodes are constructed.
Strap yourselves in for some exciting science.
So you have two materials,
the N and the P,
the N is what's referred
to as negatively charged.
It has an excess of electrons.
The P side has a dearth of electrons.
It doesn't have enough of them.
Okay, it's not really
as exciting as we hoped,
but if you zap the diode with some volts,
the electrons travel from the N material
to the P material, releasing energy.
This energy is released
in the form of a photon
or a little bit of light.
This process is incredibly efficient,
just a small amount of electricity makes lots of light.
And that's not the only thing.
Due to their solid state structure,
LEDs last about 25 times longer
than incandescent bulbs.
Like the divine creator,
Thomas Edison said, let there be light.
And there was light.
The trouble was, it was energy inefficient.
Holonyak comes along and he says,
let there be light.
but this time it's energy efficient.
Doesn't quite have the same ring to it.
Anyway, General Electric immediately sees
the potential of Holonyak's red LED
calling his experiment, the magic one.
And within a year, it's on the market.
Trouble is it's a tiny little light
that costs $260.
Now in today's money,
that's over $2,000 and there's not a lot
of demand for a little light
that costs that amount of money.
But over the next few years,
that cost comes tumbling down.
This red light LED technology soon
becomes an incredible way
to display numerical data
wherever numbers have to be displayed.
And what uses numbers?
Calculators and watches.
And why wouldn't you wanna have a watch
that has LEDs?
The technology is amazing,
but if it's going to be practically
used in everyday life
then red isn't enough.
If you wanna replace the incandescent light bulb,
we need white light.
It takes another 20 years
for Japanese scientists to find the
right combination of crystals
to emit that elusive blue light.
They've cracked the holy grail of LED lights.
So we now have small red lights
and small blue lights.
While they're examining
their new invention more closely,
something unexpected happens.
The team wants to take a closer look
at their LED.
And so they use an electron microscope,
which is a highly powerful microscope to examine it.
The LED suddenly starts
to shine even more brightly.
Of course, when you're making an LED
that's exactly what you want.
The problem is the team
have no idea why it happened.
The team from the east
look west for their answer,
but just 150 miles west
to Shikoku Island where a scientist
called Shuji Nakamura tackles the problem.
Nakamura realized that the electron microscope
was making the LED shine much brighter
by removing hydrogen atoms
from the top of the P time crystal.
I'm not really sure
what that means either,
but I do know
that when he fine tunes the process,
Nakamura manages to make
the blue LED 100 times brighter.
So finally, we can produce white light
and replace incandescent bulbs.
It only took 30 years of development.
But hang on there, Simon.
This is still a huge moment
that stems from an accident.
LED screens are rapidly developed
and adopted in all kinds of everyday technology.
We take for granted, you know,
video and amazing images
on our smartphones, on our laptops,
on our tablets.
But you know, only just 10 years ago,
15 years ago, that wasn't possible.
Edison's light bulb lit the 20th century
but LED light bulbs are dominating the 21st.
In 2019, about half
of all light sources were LED.
Now by 2030, it's predicted
that will be 85%.
That's absolutely staggering
for a technology that's relatively new.
And that's
how an immigrant's son
from Illinois lit up the world.
I guess this story proves
that no matter how humble your beginnings,
if you're truly dedicated,
you can affect real technological change
by using this thing up here.
And that's what Holonyak did.
He really changed the world.
Still to come.
How a hard-nosed pizza shop owner
helped save thousands of lives.
This time he goes packing a piece.
But first,
let's take a moment
to consider that ever
since humans have walked the earth,
we've waged a deadly war
against a formidable foe.
Natural disasters?
No.
Is it wooly mammoths?
Nope.
What about hunger?
Good guess.
But I'm talking about bacteria.
Ew.
When these microscopic invaders get inside,
they take hold of your body
and multiply...
and multiply,
sending your immune system haywire
until finally you turn into a zombie.
Actually you'd most likely just die.
Probably couldn't name one bacteria,
but what you could name are
all of the diseases that bacteria causes
things like the bubonic plague.
You get tetanus, cholera,
things that have ravaged humanity
for thousands of years.
And over the years,
humans have come up with
some pretty gruesome ways to fight infection.
In ancient Egypt,
doctors believe that bloodletting's
the magic weapon against bacterial infection,
a practice lasting into the 20th century.
So back in the day,
doctors thought that if we were sick,
our humors were out of balance.
There were these four humors,
blood, black bile, yellow bile, and phlegm.
What was needed was a doctor,
a physician to come along,
make an incision and bleed you
to get your humors rebalanced.
Fast forward to the 1920s
and humans still have no suitable treatment
in their fight against bacteria.
Each year the lung infection,
tuberculosis, devastates populations.
Millions are killed.
Just gone.
The treatment for TB
at the time was fresh air.
Fresh air?
I mean, seriously, you don't stand a chance.
You have this ancient war
between bacteria and humanity,
and frankly, bacteria was winning
for most of history.
It was something of a massacre.
But all that
is about to change
with an untidy scientist,
a watermelon obsessed woman,
and some lucky guinea pigs.
No, your ears aren't deceiving you.
Stay with me on this one.
Story starts in 1922, London, England
and with this guy, Alexander Fleming.
For Alexander Fleming
of St. Mary's Hospital, London,
a miracle out of mold.
Born in Scotland,
Fleming moves south to study medicine
at St. Mary's Hospital
where he soon becomes fascinated
with the emerging field of bacteriology.
That's the study of bacteria.
Yeah, they knew that one.
He's looking for new ways to kill bacteria.
And he's basically adding anything
that he can to bacterial cultures.
The story goes that he has
an absolutely rotten cold.
He accidentally sneezes on a Petri dish
not exactly scientific, you would think.
But what he observes is really interesting.
Hmm, interesting.
Because where the mucus has landed,
the bacteria die.
Fleming realizes that it's
an enzyme in saliva called lysozyme
that's killing the bacteria
which sounds great but
while it works in a Petri dish,
it doesn't work as well inside the body.
Despite six more years of promising research,
Fleming hits a wall.
He decides it's time for a vacation.
Returning two weeks later,
rested and ready to work again.
And when he comes back,
he notices something weird
growing in his lab.
On one of the plates,
there's a big blob
of a mysterious fungus.
Fleming's lab it seems was a bit of a mess.
It's mold basically,
disgusting mold from his dirty lab.
Normally, if you're doing an experiment
and it becomes contaminated with fungus,
you would throw it away.
But Fleming ever the curious scientist
sees something funny that's really quite small
and subtle where the fungus meets bacteria.
That's funny.
What he notices will change the world forever.
The bacteria around the fungus are all dead.
Now, given that staphylococcus is a deadly bacteria,
whatever this mold is producing
has managed to kill it.
This is a huge discovery.
Fleming immediately sets
to work isolating the fungus
and producing samples of mold juice,
Mold juice?
Yes, mold juice.
It's not the white layer
you see on the top,
but the liquid beneath it.
And it turns out this isn't
any old mold juice.
Mold juice?
Yes, Tony, but this is mighty mold juice.
Not only does it kill staphylococcus,
but it's effective
against other harmful bacteria,
including meningococcus and diptheria bacillus.
As you can see here,
see quite well with the naked eye
here are some of them.
Fleming names, the active ingredient penicillin.
He needs to extract it
and to purify it before he can test it
in animals and humans
to see whether it works.
So it turns out isolating the penicillin
from this moldy broth is
easier said than done.
Despite their best efforts,
Fleming and his team
could extract barely any penicillin
and abandon their work.
It's so frustrating because Fleming
knows penicillin's in there
but he just can't get his hands on it.
And so nothing happens for another decade.
It's 1939 and there's
a war on don't you know?
Pathologist, Howard Florey,
and biochemist, Ernst Chain
are in Oxford University
searching for antibacterial substances.
Chain stumbles onto Fleming's work
and immediately they start
to try to extract this penicillin substance.
By May 1940,
after months of hard graft,
they've managed what Fleming couldn't
and extracted a small amount of brown powder.
That brown powder contains the active ingredient.
This is the first successful attempt
at extracting the penicillin.
Now, of course, you can't
take this new drug
and just start injecting it into humans.
You gotta test it
on some other organism.
And what better animal
to use as a guinea pig
than a guinea pig.
However, they have such a tiny amount
that they decide to use a proportionally
smaller test subject, mice.
Oh, okay, then mice.
They inoculate eight mice
with a lethal dose to streptococci bacteria
and then inject four of them with penicillin.
Twenty four hours later, the results are astonishing.
There's only four mice who are alive
and they all had penicillin.
That is a 100% success rate.
It's another stroke of luck
that they tested it on mice.
As later it's discovered that penicillin
is toxic to guinea pigs.
If they had tested on guinea pigs
and they had dropped dead so quickly,
the entire project probably
would have been halted.
Good for guinea pigs
and good for the future of mankind.
The next step is to test it in humans.
But there's a problem.
So far, the team have barely managed
to purify enough to test on mice.
Florey and Chain end up using
anything to hand to grow mold in.
And that might be the bath
or a bed pan or a jam jar
or any vessel that they can get.
And it's all looked after
by this group of women
who are called the "penicillin girls."
They're filling bottles
with the medium in which we'll
grow the mold that produces penicillin.
Eventually they think they have
enough to test on a human subject.
So they're a little bit nervous
about whether or not this is going
to be poisonous to people.
They pick a patient
who's in such a bad way
that penicillin is their only hope.
Police constable, Albert Alexander's
been severely wounded in an air raid
by the Luftwaffe.
And basically there's swelling in his head.
He's already lost one eye.
The other one has been lanced
so he's pretty much blind
but he's in terrible agony,
desperate for some kind of cure.
They administer the penicillin.
Within 24 hours, there's a dramatic improvement.
The swelling has gone down.
They're making great headway
treating the police officer,
but the problem is they don't have
enough penicillin to finish the course
and sadly he passes away.
So if one entire laboratory can't make
enough penicillin to treat just one patient,
how are we going
to treat the whole world?
Well, Suze with
a little something called teamwork.
Florey comes to America
to petition four big pharmaceutical companies
to pool their resources
and to help manufacture penicillin.
But even the combined
might of Big Pharma
find penicillin hard to produce.
One of the lead scientists
in the United States is completely exasperated.
He has a big outburst.
He just says the mold is
as temperamental as an opera singer.
So it takes over 400 gallons
of culture medium to make
enough penicillin to treat just one patient.
That's over five bath tubs full.
So what they actually need
is a different strain that likes
growing submerged in these baths.
Enter Mary Hunt,
a woman with the unenviable
nickname of "moldy Mary."
With an eagle eye
for spotting novel fungi in the wild,
she's tasked with finding a
more productive strain of penicillium.
On her travels, Moldy Mary comes
across a fruit and vegetable store.
She spies a cantaloupe melon
which has a particularly
virulent mold on it
with a kind of goldy tinge.
The shop owner doesn't
want to give up this moldy melon
because they might get a reputation
for selling bad food.
But moldy Mary in the end gets her way.
The golden mold proves
to be the golden ticket.
It produces 1,000 times
more penicillin than Fleming's original strain.
And it's not a moment too soon.
The Allied forces are gathering
for the invasion and recapture of Europe.
Over 150,000 troops are about
to put their lives
on the line for D-Day.
The Allies are expecting huge casualties
so this is the first real big test
for this new drug.
They produce 2 million doses
and it's shipped to the front line.
All penicillin produced is used
by the Allied fighting forces.
The liquid now charged with penicillin is
poured from the bottles,
turned into a powder.
It is ready for use.
The rollout of penicillin
into the battlefield is a huge success.
Thousands of lives are saved.
You will see some of the men
who've been meeting the enemy direct,
this fighter pilot, for instance.
So much so it gives medics a
new problem to solve.
Soldiers who would've
previously, basically died of their injuries
are now surviving.
But for doctors that presents a new challenge,
how to effectively rebuild them,
you know, with the terrible injuries
that they've suffered.
Now is the advent of plastic surgery.
After the war,
penicillin manufacture is expanded further,
driving down the cost
from $20 per 100,000 units
to less than 10 cents.
Everybody wants penicillin because
now a bacterial infection
that could have meant death
could lead to a miracle recovery.
Penicillin kicks off a medical revolution
that completely transforms the fortunes
of the human race.
Scientists across the globe are
now racing to find
all kinds of new antibiotics.
The period between the 1950s and 1970s is
like the golden era of antibiotic discoveries.
The tide is turning against bacteria.
These deadly diseases like tuberculosis
can now be cured
and we're saving millions of lives.
Humans finally have a super weapon
in their fight against bacteria,
but like in any arm's race,
the opposition is fighting back.
It's up to us to carry that torch
that Fleming and Florey and Chain lit
all those years ago and carry the legacy
of antibiotics into the future.
July 20th, 1969,
Neil Armstrong is the first person
to set foot on the surface of the moon.
Roger, the EVA
is progressing beautifully.
I guess you're about
the only person around
that doesn't have TV coverage of the scene.
It's such an iconic moment in human history,
a triumph of human ingenuity.
It's taken hundreds of innovations
to make this moment possible.
Advances in rocket engineering,
planetary physics, and one chance discovery
that's literally woven into the fabric
of Armstrong's space suit.
The Apollo space suits
much like today's space suits are
made of more than
20 layers of different materials.
They create a protective shell for the astronauts.
An incredibly reliable,
custom-tailored, hand-assembled life support system.
NASA engineers need to make sure
these space suits are impregnable,
unbreakable, and completely puncture proof.
The material they turn to is Kevlar.
Wait a minute.
You mean to say Kevlar was an accident?
Yes, but the story
of Kevlar isn't a straightforward one.
This indestructible material was
accidentally created while scientists were trying
to make lighter road tires.
Let's start at the beginning.
It's the middle of the 1960s
and Lyndon Johnson is president.
"Mary Poppins" is smashing the box office.
And Pontiac has just released the GTO,
America's first commercially available muscle car.
You can just imagine the roar
of the V8 engines.
It kind of was like the soundtrack
of America in that time.
The muscle car embodies
that sense of American freedom and power.
The problem is that cars
around this time are gas guzzlers,
averaging just 10 miles per gallon.
And America's use of gas
is climbing year-on-year.
From 1950 to 1970,
U.S. gasoline consumption more than doubles
from 40 billion gallons to nearly 90.
So to try and make cars more efficient,
Du Pont set themselves the task,
of replacing the wire inside tires
with a synthetic fiber
that will make cars lighter
and therefore use less fuel.
At the heart of the team is
an amazing chemist named Stephanie Kwolek.
It was a fraternity of excellence.
Which is how Kwolek finds herself
looking for new synthetic fibers made from polymers.
To turn your polymer into a fiber,
you push it through
a series of tiny tubes,
less than a thousandth
of an inch across called spinnerets.
Once you've done that,
you can then collect those onto bobbins
and that collects them into threads
which can be woven into a fabric.
Kwolek's busy dissolving
the chemical ingredients of a brand
new polymer in solvent
when something unexpected happens.
Typically speaking, polymerization products are
usually clear and a little bit gloopy.
But what Kwolek has created is opaque,
milky, and actually really quite runny.
You'd expect that a solution
like this would be thrown out immediately
because it looks like a reaction
that has gone quite wrong.
But while it looks wrong,
Kwolek is sure her chemistry's solid.
She was determined to try
and put her new substance
through the spinnerets and see
if she could make something.
But the spinneret technicians
don't want to risk running
such a wrong looking solution
through their precision machinery.
Nevertheless, Kwolek eventually gets her way.
Please, please?
They load it up into the machine,
get the machine spinning
and low and behold strong,
stiff fibers start to get released.
It's a surprise
that it makes a material at all,
but there's even better news.
And this isn't any fiber.
Tests show that it is the strongest fiber
they've ever seen,
five times stronger than steel.
But it's not just strong,
it's light and it's highly heat resistant.
It doesn't get brittle at low temperatures.
And it also doesn't melt
until 800 degrees Fahrenheit.
It's basically the wonder material
that they've been looking for.
It looks like Kwolek's mistake could
be the perfect material for lighter tires.
Its chemical name is
poly-para-phenylene terephthalamide,
which is a bit of a mouthful
so they trademark it as Kevlar.
The secret of why Kevlar's
so strong is in its molecular makeup.
The amazing thing about Kevlar is
that it's made up of these individual polymers,
that themselves are quite pliable
and really quite weak.
But if you take lots of them together,
combine them, then it becomes very strong.
Du Pont, starts
to roll out their Kevlar tires
but there are bigger things ahead.
This wonder material is about
to become a lifesaver.
It just so happens
a troubling crime trend
is spreading across America.
Take cover, a basic rule
for survival against hostile fire.
From 1966 to 1971,
annual police officer fatalities double
from 57 to 129.
The majority of these homicides
are inflicted by handguns.
The National Institute of Law Enforcement
and Criminal Justice initiates a program
to find a suitable,
lightweight body armor.
On the back of this program,
an entrepreneurial civilian called
Richard Davis is about to get
into the bulletproof vest business.
Davis, a former U.S. Marine,
owns a pizza shop
in a dodgy part of Detroit.
One evening running a delivery,
he's robbed at gunpoint by three men.
A week later,
Davis gets a call
to deliver to the same address.
This time he goes packing a piece.
He was right to.
The robbers try again
and a gunfight breaks out.
He wounds his attackers
but gets hit himself.
While recovering from his injuries,
his pizza shop is burned down.
Davis only has $70 to his name
but he's heard of Du Pont's new Kevlar
and buys enough fabric
to fashion his own bulletproof vest.
Davis' challenge is figuring out
how to market his new product.
Davis isn't the first person
to make a bulletproof vest.
And he certainly isn't an established name
in the arms trade
but what he does have
on his side is a flair for marketing.
He sets up a demo
for local police departments,
his key clientele,
and starts by shooting his vest
with various weapons.
The vest works.
It captures the bullets.
Which is fine,
but Davis is about
to pull out the show-stopper.
He puts the vest on
and he aims the gun at his stomach
and pulls the trigger.
Easy as pie, guys.
Luckily he's okay
apart from a massive bruise.
Davis' stunt works.
He secures lucrative contracts
to supply his vests
to the local police departments.
He goes on the road, selling his vest,
using the same high risk party trick.
Davis went on to say
that the first time he shot himself,
it was for science,
subsequent 200 times were just showmanship.
Today a Kevlar vest is
standard issue for police officers
and over 3,000 lives have been saved.
Over the decades, Kevlar technology has matured
and found hundreds of different uses.
The uses of Kevlar now seem limitless
and it's used in for example,
competitive sports where people are
always looking for new materials
to get a competitive edge.
Kevlar is used in tennis rackets,
sailing boat's sails,
canoes, even running shoes.
The aerospace industry has also
enthusiastically taken up Kevlar
because of its combination of being lightweight
and incredibly strong.
As well as being
used in space suits,
Kevlar finds its way
into a whole host of other space tech.
Bulletproofing the entire international space station
against tiny, fast moving pieces of debris,
Kevlar is basically used everywhere.
In 1986, Stephanie Kwolek
finally retires from Du Pont
after 40 years of loyal service.
Kwolek's no one-trick pony
because when it comes to fibers,
she is the queen.
She's created fire retardant, Nomex,
and also the super stretchy lycra
that we all love from yoga to running.
But it's still her
accidental invention of Kevlar
that's had the greatest impact on the world.
(quirky upbeat music)