(upbeat music)
Did you know the surprising number of objects
that you use every day are thanks to accidents?
(metal clanking) (glass breaking)
Let me show you what I mean?
On this episode, we learn how messing around
with a scientific toy leads to the X-ray.
Oh, you can see inside me.
Find out the bold truth
behind the cure for hair loss.
This poor woman has hair all over her face.
And discover how an invention
to keep people cool ends up making a lot of them very hot.
You get a crazy situation where
motorists in the United States
would keep their windows rolled up
to pretend they had air con.
(cars honking)
(logo exploding) (upbeat theme music)
"Oops I Changed The World".
This is the story of the X-ray, a life-changing,
and for many people, life-saving innovation
invented by this guy, Wilhelm Rontgen.
More about him later.
For most of human history,
the only way to find out what's inside the human body
was to open it up and have a look.
(gentle music)
It's the golden age of Greek civilization,
and with that comes new heights in architecture,
in science, and also anatomy.
Herophilus in the third century BC
is generally considered to be the father of anatomy,
at least in the Western tradition.
He was the first one that we know of
who very carefully did systematic dissections
of the human body to see how it functioned.
He sets up a medical school in Alexandria
and sets about looking at cadavers,
but his methods are not always hugely popular.
(dramatic music)
The ancient Greeks don't believe
in needing the body in the afterlife
like the ancient Egyptians and their mummies,
but opening up corpses is still seen as dirty
and a source of pollution.
Herophilus however, isn't dissuaded by these taboos.
He learns a lot through his dissections,
taking very careful notes on the brain, the eye, the liver.
He even identifies a difference
between nerves and arteries,
which is a hugely important step in understanding
how the human body works.
But before you sign up to the Herophilus fan club,
there's something you should know.
Herophilus experimented on live candidates
against their will, 600 prisoners.
Possibly because of this dark legacy,
when Herophilus dies,
so does his science of human dissection.
(stone grinding)
And when Christianity sweeps across Europe
in the Middle Ages, dissection goes from being unpopular
to downright blasphemous.
The Christians believe that the human body
will one day resurrect on judgment day,
and so anatomy is a definite no, no.
The only acceptable reason to cut someone open
was to do life-saving surgery.
This was performed without anesthetic
and often without knowing what the problem was inside
until you got there.
(man grunting in pain)
When we think of surgery now,
the first thing that comes to mind
is a very clean, careful environment,
but it wasn't always this way.
For most of human history
surgery was a barbaric risky procedure
and always a last resort.
Which makes even more sense when the person cutting you open
is also your hairdresser.
Throughout Europe in the Middle Ages,
it was quite common to have barber surgeons.
So it was a person who would not only give you a haircut,
but would also perform operations like amputations
or removing your teeth.
That's the sort of portfolio career
you just don't see nowadays.
(joyful dance music)
(electric current buzzing)
It wasn't until the 1800s that we would have
a revolutionary new way to look inside ourselves
without going under the knife.
Oh, you can see inside me.
There's my heart.
Oh dear, I think my liver's a bit knackered.
That's too much wine in the liver there.
Which of course brings us back to this guy.
Wilhelm Rontgen is a professor of physics
living in Germany
and he's studying the brand new science of cathode rays.
He's got what's called a Crookes tube.
It's essentially a tube of glass
that when he runs electricity through it
beams of electrons stream from the negative end,
the cathode, to the anode.
(switch snapping)
(box squeaking)
(switch snapping)
Wilhelm is fascinated by these glowing tubes
when he notices something strange.
He's darkened the room so he can see things well,
and he's got the Crookes tube going,
but it's inside of a box,
and he notices a little cardboard sheet starts to glow.
And this really intrigues him because there's no way
that any light can get from the Crookes tube
all the way over there to affect it.
(switch snapping)
So Wilhelm uses the age-old, highly accurate
experimental procedure that we all know of as
the switch it off, switch it on again method.
He's able to confirm that the glowing sheet
is being produced by something invisible
coming out from the Crookes tube, but what?
Like any good scientist, he starts to play.
He realizes it can pass through all sorts of things.
He puts things in the way.
It can pass through walls, yet he or nobody else can see it.
So he's got this mysterious beam
that he decides to just label X,
'cause he doesn't know what it is,
and it becomes known as the X-ray.
Now, what happens next is a little unclear
because when Wilhelm Rontgen dies in 1923,
he has all of his lab notes destroyed.
Though we think it happened something like this.
Rontgen is so excited
that he just can't leave his own laboratory.
He ends up sleeping there, eating there,
experimenting with this brand new ray
that he's accidentally discovered.
He soon works out that his new ray
can pass through the tissues of the body,
but not bones or metal objects.
He finds that by using
the right kind of photographic film,
he can actually use the ray to take an image.
And he brings his wife Anna in to basically take a photo
of the inside of her hand.
And so what we get
is her bones in her hand,
an X-ray with the wedding ring showing as well.
And she is so shocked, she says, "I have seen my own death."
(upbeat music)
It's only a few months later that Wilhelm gives
his first public speech to the medical society,
performing a live X-ray.
The crowd is astounded, and news spreads rapidly.
This is a brand new phenomenon
and it immediately becomes popularized
at things like traveling fairs,
where people will set up these crude X-ray machines
and folks come over and can stand in front of it
and get pictures taken of their bones.
The public is captivated
and Rontgen's discovery spreads like wildfire.
Soon it's being shown off for entertainment in the US,
Europe and across the globe.
The medical community starts to cotton onto the idea
that there is this device that can see through tissues,
and this starts to really become interesting to them.
The impact of Rontgen's
accidentally discovered X-rays on medical treatment is huge.
Within a month of his lecture,
medical radiographs, as they were then called,
had been made in Europe and the United States
by surgeons to guide their work.
X-ray motion pictures
show that as we step down on the ball of the foot,
the ankle acts as a movable pivot.
(upbeat piano music)
Marie Curie is studying at the University of Paris
when she first hears about Wilhelm's discovery.
Although the mechanism behind X-rays production is unknown,
she's fascinated by them and recognizes their link
to her work on a new concept
that she's coined radioactivity.
(electric current buzzing)
In 1898, Marie Curie using an electrometer
devised by her husband, Pierre,
began to examine all the elements then known
for traces of radiation.
(bombs exploding)
By World War I, the medical community
has definitely cottoned onto the idea that X-rays are useful
and hospitals have these X-ray machines,
but they're huge and they're cumbersome.
Madam Curie gets in there and says,
"Okay, we need to be able to take these to the front lines,
"to places where soldiers need them immediately."
Along the coast,
close to the beaches and ports in each receiving area,
there would be holding hospitals
fully equipped for emergency surgery.
So she designs these little Curie wagons, petite Curie,
where she actually puts these small mobile X-ray machines
onto trucks, and designs a dynamo that can go in them
so that the thing is charged by the movement of the vehicle.
Absolutely extraordinarily ahead of its time.
Along with the little Curies, these vehicles,
she's responsible for the creation of 200 semipermanent
X-ray tents at military bases.
Those vehicles and tents save countless lives.
Now, X-rays in themselves are really great,
however, they've also led to other incredible inventions,
such as CT scans,
which are kinda like an extension of X-ray,
but allow you to see even more detail into the human body.
So thanks to X-rays, we've made a brave new medical world.
But the impact of Wilhelm's accidental discovery
extends far beyond looking inside ourselves.
We do have a few tiles-
We started to turn X-rays to the skies above.
There's a brand new field in astronomy
called X-ray astronomy,
and it's allowed us to peer deeper into the universe
and be able to understand new things about our cosmos.
July 23rd, 1999,
NASA launches the most powerful X-ray telescope ever built.
The Chandra X-ray Observatory,
a really brilliant telescope
that was able to observe parts of the universe
that we hadn't really understood before.
Welcome home Columbia.
Beautiful. Beautiful.
The Earth's atmosphere blocks most X-rays
coming from space.
By having an orbiting telescope,
we're able to see very faint X-ray emissions.
The resolution is so good on this telescope
that it's like reading a stop sign from 12 miles away.
This remarkable clarity allows us to explore
the very hot regions of our universe.
Being able to detect X-rays in space
has led to so many more understandings about our universe,
such as detecting exploding stars,
different parts of galaxies and even black holes.
(ominous humming)
I just think that's really cool.
I love how X-rays can be used at sort of on the micro scale
and the macro scale.
So we're able to learn about the structure of DNA
and the structure of the universe.
I just think there's something poetic about that.
(logo exploding) (joyful theme music)
Still to come.
How an attempt to stop paper curling up
changes America's political landscape.
The population shifts in the deep South
caused by air conditioning
means that anybody running for president
in the United States has to get those Southern states.
And how a kids' toy helps save lives.
They were able to get reception through the canopy
and able to communicate from the jungle.
(helicopter whirling) But first,
(gentle music)
men have been balding since we were apes.
And we've tried almost everything
to avoid losing our precious hair.
(crowd cheering)
After a long day of ruling the Roman empire,
Julius Caesar has some honeyed apricots,
drinks a little wine, takes off his toupee and goes to bed.
Caesar was one of millions, possibly billions of people
affected by hair loss and hiding it with a signature wreath.
Turn left. Dwayne look back
to the left. Show us that smile
there, Dwayne.
Nowadays, a hairless head is quite cool.
Maybe that's because we now have a choice,
a proven chemical formula that can keep hair on your head.
But the road to that solution
has been a long, twisted and naughty one.
The most common type of hair loss
is male-pattern baldness.
95% of people who start to lose their hair,
they have this kind of hair loss.
It's caused by a combination of genetics, hormones,
and environmental factors like stress.
It took almost 2,000 years after Caesar
for us to find a chemical cure.
But to understand how it works,
you need to know why we go bald in the first place.
Every day around 10% of the testosterone in a male body
is converted into a hormone known as DHT.
But when too much of this DHT is produced,
it can cause hair follicles to become smaller,
which then causes the hairs that are growing from them
to become shorter and thinner.
Eventually the follicles can shrink completely
and stop producing hair.
Women who also have testosterone in their bodies
can also be affected.
In fact, it's thought that 70% of men and 40% of women
will experience hair loss in their lifetime.
People have lost hair
and tried to find ways to keep it throughout history.
(eerie music)
Now, according to one ancient Egyptian document,
the Ebers Papyrus that dates back to 1150 BC,
the best way to cure baldness is to use fat
from either a lion or a serpent or an ibex
or better still, a hippopotamus.
(hippopotamus grunts)
It's thought that these remedies came from ancient advice
thousands of years before they were even written down.
It might seem strange to fight against
such a natural process for so long,
but for many religions and cultures across the world,
hair has deep significance.
Sikhism is the world's fifth leading religion
with about 25 million followers.
And many Sikhs don't cut their hair.
They let it grow long, very long
as a sign of respect for God's creation.
(upbeat music)
Much of Native American culture centers around
nature and the earth, with some traditions saying that
long hair is kinda symbolic connecting them to Mother Earth
who's hair is long grasses.
I like that idea of the long swaying grasses
being the hair of Mother Earth.
(upbeat music)
Away from religion, hair still carries meaning.
It was such a big deal in 17th century Europe,
that wigs became fashionable
even for those with a luxurious barnet.
King Louis XIV of France, he was extremely vain.
I mean he commissioned 300 portraits of himself,
which is like the modern equivalent
of taking a ton of selfies.
Man, that's self-absorbed.
But Poor King Louis had a problem with his crown.
He had started to go bald at the age of 17
and he felt like it was not appropriate for the king,
a king to be balding.
So he hired 48 wig makers to create
a wonderful selection of hair pieces.
Louis's new updo starts a fashion trend
on the other side of the English channel.
King Charles II had spent a long period of exile in France
while Cromwell was running England.
And he picked up this French taste for wigs,
not at least because his own hair was graying.
So when he came back to England, as the Merry Monarch,
you see in his portraits
he's there with this beautiful long brown wig.
Wow.
Whatever the king does, everybody else had to do.
The king and the queen were the leaders of fashion.
So when Charles starts to wear a wig,
everybody else has to wear big, long wigs.
Thing away.
(dramatic music)
That continues into the 20th century.
It's a scalp treatment
that female collaborationists have been getting
in many countries: Norway, Denmark, Corsica, and now France.
(upbeat country music)
Let's fast forward to 1950s America,
there's another king around
and an accidental cure for baldness
is just around the corner.
Upjohn is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies
in America in the 1950s.
Now it's developed a new drug to treat ulcers,
but it's a complete flunk.
During animal trials the researchers find
that the compound didn't actually cure ulcers,
but they did however notice a side effect
which could prove very interesting.
The drug appears to lower blood pressure.
And hypertension is really common.
If you can address that, you can make a lot of money.
So Upjohn creates 200 variants of this new drug,
each slightly different from the next.
They're trying to find an effective treatment
for hypertension, that is blood pressure
that if left untreated will cause heart disease.
Among variations is one called minoxidil.
During the trials at a medical school in Colorado,
two dermatologists are called in: Dr. Kahn and Dr. Grant,
because one of the patients
is having a rather strange side effect.
(man exclaims in astonishment)
So they walk in to meet a woman in her mid-40s
who is perfectly normal,
except she's like the hairiest woman they've ever seen.
And this poor woman has hair all over her face.
This heart drug has an unforeseen side effect,
a very noticeable unforeseen side effect.
It promotes hair growth.
The patient is distraught, but the doctors are delighted.
Dr. Kahn and Dr. Grant are well aware of how hard humans
have tried to find a treatment for balding.
But it seems that is exactly
what they've stumbled upon.
They instantly know that, hey, if they can create
the right formula that you can just apply to the skin,
man, they're gonna make it big.
They're gonna hit that jackpot.
They get to work testing minoxidil immediately.
Woo-hoo.
Grant starts applying this stuff
to the skin on his forearm every day for months
trying different combinations of liquids and concentrations.
One day he looks at a section of his arm
where he's been applying the lotion
and it's grown new thick hairs, and he's ecstatic.
Well, he does look quite pleased.
Sure enough, there's an unmistakable one-inch square
of new hairs growing on his forearm.
So how has this failed hypertension drug
suddenly made growing back hair a possibility?
Minoxidil is a vasodilator, which means that it causes
the veins in the body to expand,
allowing more blood to flow more freely.
(blood gurgling)
By increasing the blood flow around the hair follicles,
Dr. Grant is able to increase the amount of oxygen
and the amount of nutrients
that are getting to the hair follicle,
and that encourages the hair to grow thicker and faster.
The two of them, Grant and Kahn,
go back to the Upjohn pharmaceutical company
and declare, "We've got a gold mine."
And they were right.
Within a few years, doctors are prescribing minoxidil,
now trademarked as Rogaine, to their bald patients,
and the money starts pouring in.
The medication can help
some people with hair loss to grow new hair.
We now know that minoxidil works
on somewhere between 40 and 60% of men.
So this accidental discovery could potentially benefit
around 2.2 billion people worldwide.
The Rogaine revolution has changed people's lives
just by giving them a thatch up top.
And it's also of course a drug
that you can buy over the counter.
You don't use it every day
then you're gonna see a drop in the effect.
If you quit using it, you can pretty well plan
that whatever hair you've gained
over time you're gonna lose again.
Currently the value of the minoxidil market
is $880 million,
and it's expected to rise by a third by 2024.
Researchers believe that the number of people going bald
is going to increase over the years
because of lifestyle factors like smoking more
or drinking more or stress.
On top of that, the fact that in many countries
we have aging populations, means that more people
are going to be using such products for longer,
which means that the market's only going one way, up.
(upbeat music)
There's no doubt that hair loss is a journey,
and it's either a journey
to the sunny uplands of bearded bald glory,
or it's a dissent into hell for some people.
They want to reverse it.
It can even affect their career, their relationships.
Luckily for me, over the last 20 years,
it's actually become reasonably fashionable
to be bold and bearded.
(cartoon laughing)
If I'd been born 20, 30, 40, 100 years earlier,
yes, it might have been a grim experience.
So it's thanks to a faulty drug trial
and an unexpectedly hairy woman
that millions of people now have the option
to stop baldness in its tracks, that is if they want to.
For men in particular, I think you kinda have to decide
what kind of a person are you going to be
going into middle age?
Are you relaxed about it, chilled?
Do you like that kind of distinguished, bold look
like I have?
Or do you decide you're gonna fight it,
that you wanna keep your youthfulness?
It's really a statement about you,
whether or not you walk into the chemist and buy Rogaine.
(joyful theme music)
Coming up.
How a child's toy has changed the face of communications.
It's really the next stage of satellites.
But first this.
It's hot, (bells jingling)
too hot.
The air is dry.
The sun is beating down.
It feels almost too much to bear, until.
(water splashing) (David sighs in relief)
You know the refreshing feeling when it's just so hot out,
but then you get instant relief from say,
like jumping in a pool or drinking a cold drink?
Yeah, that is the best feeling in the world.
For centuries, humans have been searching
for relief from the heat,
but the journey to air conditioning is a long one.
Even in ancient Egypt, people had ways of dealing with it.
They would take a mat or a piece of clothing,
dip it in water, hang it on the doorway
so that when a breeze came this air, this cooled air
would come towards them and cool them down.
It was a sort of early air conditioning
and the Egyptians weren't the only ones
to try and find a solution.
One of the madder more megalomaniac emperors
of the Roman empire, Elagabalus,
would order slaves up into the mountains
to go and collect loads of snow, which were then piled up.
And as the snow melted,
it carried cool air through the palace rooms.
That doesn't sound crazy, just labor intensive.
(crowd cheering)
2,000 miles east in Persepolis,
they'd found a much more accessible way of keeping cool.
So let's go back two and a half thousand years,
and the Persian empire is ruling the Middle East,
but they've got a problem.
A lot of the empire is far away from the sea,
far away from sources of cooling wind.
And so they have to address this.
They have to find a way to make life bearable
for their people.
The Persians come up with an ingenious,
technological innovation.
They construct these tall and broad wind towers
on buildings that captures air at a higher level
and channels it down through the building,
and it runs down over underground channels of cooling water
and then cools the rooms above.
Like I said, ingenious.
But this is the story of how we got modern air conditioning,
so let's hit the fast forward button.
(cassette tape winding up)
(country music)
Whoa-whoa-whoa, far too far.
(cassette tape winding up) That's better.
So it's 1902 in the United States, and for several decades
there's been an industrial revolution in that country
with factories opening everywhere,
making all sorts of things.
It's Midsummer in Brooklyn and it's sticky.
(upbeat music)
Now there's a printing press making a top selling magazine
and they've got a problem because the ink is running,
the workers are sweating and the paper is curling.
It's not the heat that's the problem,
it's the moisture.
(celestial music)
Enter Willis Haviland Carrier.
He's just graduated Cornell with a masters in engineering.
Clever chap.
Willis now gets an opportunity
to work in the printing room.
He is hired to try and come up with a solution
for the humidity that is causing so many problems
in the printing press.
"How does he do this?" You ask.
Well, weirdly enough, it all starts on a train platform.
(upbeat dramatic music)
So Willis Carrier is standing on a train station
in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and he sees this fog.
Willis on seeing the fog thinks,
"What if I can make the water vapor in the air
"condense to become a liquid,
"that way I can make the air dryer
"and stop those newspaper presses from smudging?"
When there's water molecules zooming through the air
like on a humid day and they come in contact
with a cold glass of water,
they lose energy and go into their liquid form,
hence causing the condensation on your glass of water.
Willis creates a mechanism of coils
that mimics what we are gonna call
the cold glass of water on a hot day effect.
And then passes air over them.
And what happens is in turn the air that was humid
now starts to become dry
because the moisture is attracted to the coils
and the air all around it is now becoming dry and less damp.
(upbeat jazz music)
His dehumidifying machine is a success.
Willis' system of chilled coils maintains a constant
and comfortable humidity of 55%.
This solves the problem of smudged ink and curling paper.
But the machine also has a pleasant side effect.
As well as drying the air, it also cools it.
So Willis has invented the first modern air conditioning,
but let's be clear about this,
factory bosses weren't putting it in
for love of the workers.
They were putting it in to protect their product
and to be more efficient.
While Carrier's machine
keeps the workers cool at work,
a sweltering shack still a awaits them back at home.
So what happens ironically is that workers
want to spend more time in the workplace,
which is great news for bosses.
Thanks to air conditioning, factories and offices
can remain at a constant cool temperature,
thereby increasing productivity and profit.
(upbeat music)
"Who's this?" I hear you ask.
This is Margaret Ingels
and she plays a crucial role in Willis' company.
Margaret Ingels was no ordinary woman.
At a time that few women attended university at all,
she graduated from the University of Kentucky
with an engineering degree.
The second woman in the entire United States to do so.
Willis and Margaret worked together
to develop the air con machine,
making it smaller and more powerful.
Soon comfort air conditioning is turning up in theaters
department stores and banks, not to make them drier,
but exclusively to make them cooler.
Margaret crisscrosses the country
installing the virtues of the air conditioner
and making clear that it's not just something
that big factories should have.
It's something that the ordinary American
could have in their home.
Do you know what this is?
An air conditioner.
That's right.
Air con became a signifier of social mobility
pretty early on.
And you get a crazy situation where motorists
in the United States would keep their windows rolled up
to pretend they had air con in their vehicles,
that they were rich enough to have it.
Air conditioners changed America.
Now you could buy chocolate in June
or sit comfortably inside a cinema in August.
Right around this time, public perception begins to shift.
And it goes from being this sort of luxury item
to being almost a must have in homes.
In 1938, only about one in every 400 homes
had an air conditioning unit.
And today it's closer to nine out of 10.
This popularity results in the US using
as much electricity for air conditioning alone each year
as the United Kingdom uses in total.
It's sadly one of the ironies of life today
that with global warming, of course,
there's more and more demand for air conditioners.
There's about a billion of them out there.
Willis' accidental cooling machine
has impacted people's lives
in ways that he could never have imagined.
(upbeat music)
There was a time in America if you walked down the street,
the chatter was on the porches,
people were sitting outside their homes
in order to keep cool.
But with air con from the 1950s onwards,
the chatter moved indoors.
People in a way became more private.
The impact doesn't stop there.
Air conditioning causes a huge population shift
across America in a way that will change politics forever.
(upbeat dramatic music)
In the early 1900s most people were located
in more Northern states of the US,
such as New York and other areas,
mainly because of the temperature.
It was a lot cooler
and where the Southern states were just really hot.
With the air conditioner that completely changed
where people lived.
More people started moving further South.
Within 10 years of air cons becoming really popular,
Tucson, sees a boost in its population by about 400%.
Phoenix by about 300%.
And other cities in the Midwest
and the deep South grow massively.
The sun belt is born.
First coined as a term in the early 1970s.
In just 50 years, the US population concentrated there
increases from 28% to 40%.
The population shifts in the deep South
caused by air conditioning, means that anybody running
for president in the United States
has to get those Southern states.
And the first president who did that was Ronald Reagan.
He turned the whole of the South red Republican.
Wow, so air conditioning affected politics.
I never knew that.
(upbeat undulating music)
But what I do know is that this accidental invention
has changed our world.
We wouldn't have cities like Las Vegas or Dubai.
And Singapore's founding father, Lee Kuan Yew,
has said that air conditioning was the most important
innovation in his country's development.
Singapore is a beautiful country
within 100 miles of the equator,
with amazing food and a mix of cultures,
but temperatures do regularly hit 90 degrees Fahrenheit.
Shops couldn't stay open long in Singapore
because of the heat.
In fact, they would close at around 11:30 AM
just so people could go shelter from that heat.
So most of the time you can only work during dawn and dusk.
As well as allowing workers
to work longer hours through the day,
air conditioning also allowed businesses
to put in place big, super computers.
(eerie music)
And it's big powerful computers
that can do the kind of financial trading
that Singapore is famous for today.
(crowd rumbling)
Share trading can be a pretty heated business as it is,
but you don't want your computers to overheat.
And air con is what you need to keep them cool.
Today, Singapore is a global center
for financial trading.
Singapore is the wealthiest country in Asia
with a per capita income of $54,000.
And it also ranks highly in terms of health,
education, social welfare.
And also of course it has very fast internet connection.
And you can thank air con for a lot of that.
Standing on that train platform in Pittsburgh
Willis could never have imagined that his invention
for drying out newspaper printing presses
would cool the world, shift a political landscape
and even transform entire economies.
(logo exploding) (joyful theme music)
You might be surprised to learn
that some of our favorite childhood toys
were not actually designed with children in mind.
December, 1941, Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Hawaii.
(plane engine whirling)
Since the unprovoked
and dastardly attack by Japan,
a state of war
has existed between the United States
and the Japanese empire.
Life in the Navy is tough.
The crew have to keep looking out for enemy ships,
but that's really hard to do when the sea is surging,
gales raging, waves crashing.
You're practically walking on the walls
because everything's so topsy-turvy,
and nothing's pinned so everything's moving about.
This problem consumes
naval engineer, Richard James.
Sensitive instruments are constantly breaking
in the swelling seas.
And by 1943, he's convinced that suspending them
with torsion springs is the answer.
Richard is working away in his lab
when he has a little bit of a clumsy moment
and knocks one of his springs off a bench.
But rather than it just flumping on the floor,
it did something slightly different.
It ends up stepping over itself in arches,
where it goes from the books to the table
to eventually the floor.
Richard is surprised by what the spring does,
and like any good inventor, he uses his lateral thinking
to see whether there may be a different use
for this kind of spring and its weird behavior.
But who would possibly be interested
in a weird spring with no practical uses?
♪ It's Slinky, it's Slinky, how fun it's a wonderful toy ♪
♪ It's Slinky, it's Slinky, it's fun for a girl and a boy ♪
♪ Everyone wants a Slinky ♪
♪ You have to get the Slinky ♪
Kids, of course.
♪ What walks downstairs, alone or in pairs ♪
♪ And makes a slinkedy sound ♪
♪ A spring, a spring, a marvelous thing ♪
♪ Everyone knows it's Slinky ♪
♪ It's Slinky, it's Slinky ♪
Richard and his wife, Betty,
are convinced that this silly spring
will be a hit with children.
They get a $500 loan to make 400 units,
and they sell none of them.
But they manage to convince a leading department store
to let them do an in-store Christmas demonstration.
(Christmas jingles)
Richard and Betty built a ramp
and set the Slinky on its Merry way,
much to the delight of onlooking customers.
What was a disaster becomes a sensation.
They were able to sell 400 in just two hours.
And that is a sign of things to come in.
In just two years, they sell 100 million toys.
There were so many children in 50s, in the 60s,
in the 70s, even in the 80s
who had a Slinky or wanted a Slinky.
I still remember getting my first Slinky.
It was from a gift shop of the Science Museum in London,
and I was thrilled.
I spent days, if not weeks,
trying to get that thing to walk down the stairs
in one uninterrupted go.
♪ What walks the stair without a care ♪
♪ And makes the happiest sound ♪
♪ Up, up and down just like a cloud ♪
♪ Everyone knows it's Slinky ♪
The company creates a really popular jingle
for this incredibly popular toy.
In fact, it's so enduring that it's actually
the longest running jingle in advertising history.
♪ It's Slinky, it's Slinky ♪
The catchy song first airs in 1962.
28 years later, 90% of American adults knew the jingle.
Part of its appeal at the time was the fact that
Slinky could be advertised to boys and girls.
♪ It's Slinky, how fun it's a wonderful toy ♪
♪ It's Slinky, it's Slinky ♪
Not many toys can stand the test of time,
but the Slinky remains a firm family favorite
all over the world for around 75 years.
Giving the company a profit of $3 billion.
But away from the playground,
the Slinky found another role,
one that was much closer to its roots,
back in war.
(helicopter whirling)
During the Vietnam War,
soldiers were fighting through the jungle,
so communication here was key.
But getting a signal in the middle of the jungle
before the invention of the mobile phone
is just as hard as it sounds.
Soldiers would have to carry
a huge communications unit on their back.
The radio system weighed 54 pounds
and had a huge antenna sticking out of the back.
We'll have to go down and see if we can stake out
this VC village down here.
A lot of booby traps in there, a lot of underbrush.
It's good concealment for these booby traps.
You wanna keep your eyes open, keep spread out.
Any questions?
Okay, men, let's move out.
To get a signal in to communicate,
they'd have to go up a hill
and raise a 10-foot radio antenna.
(upbeat dramatic music)
Now, of course, this is a bit like waving a flag
to your enemies because the enemy could see
exactly where they were.
The soldiers come up with a brilliant solution.
Rather than having a really big, heavy backpack
with a long antenna to communicate with one another,
you can actually use a Slinky which is super compressed
and you can throw it over a branch, which would extend it
and make it basically like an antenna.
(bombs exploding)
They were able to get reception through the canopy
and able to communicate from the jungle.
George Juliet, this is Iron Head Two, roger out.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that the Slinky
played a huge part in the war.
It certainly massively improved communications.
(bomb exploding)
As America fights the Vietnam War,
across the globe in Hungary, a curious professor
peacefully tinkers away with some blocks,
unaware that he's about to accidentally invent
another childhood favorite.
Rubik is a professor on interior design in Hungary,
and he wants to find a way to explain 3D modeling
and geometric design to his students.
He wants to create a structure
through which each individual block can be moved
without the whole structure falling apart.
He's messing around with wooden blocks and rubber bands
and paperclips to try and create this structure
until finally he creates something that he calls
the Magic Cube.
He's thrilled because he finds
the geometry of the cube very exciting,
but it's not until he scrambles the blocks
that he realizes he stumbled upon something
far more magical than he imagined.
After he rearranges it a few times,
he finds it quite difficult
to get it back to how it first started.
Quite difficult?
In fact, it took him over a month to solve it.
His reason for taking so long,
"Because I was the first to try it," he said,
which is fair enough.
This is when he realized
that he's created a puzzle.
And not just any puzzle.
It's a very difficult puzzle.
It's very hard to overstate its difficulty.
In fact, the difficulty probably adds to the fascination.
I was just about ready to
throw it through the window or something,
and they really are just addictive.
The Rubik's Cube has 43 quintillion different combinations
all aiming to get back to one very special configuration.
So no wonder people get addicted to the challenge of it.
(upbeat drum music)
It does not succumb to wishful thinking,
trying hard or intuition.
It did take me four and a half hours the first time.
My hands were so tired I couldn't write afterwards.
Much like the Slinky,
it takes a while for the toy to take off.
In 1980 sales of Rubik's Magic Cube are pretty modest,
but all that is about to change.
Erno Rubik licenses the cube to an American toy company
and they actually name it after him, the Rubik's Cube.
Yeah, I think we got that.
(upbeat music)
A successful ad campaign puts it into everyone's minds.
The toy wins awards in Europe and in the USA,
and all of this kick starts the 1980s craze.
The Rubik's Cube becomes the best selling toy in history.
By the mid-80s, it's thought that as many as
one in five people on the planet
have played with the toy themselves.
If I give the cube to anybody anywhere
speaking on any languages,
he understands what to do.
Since Rubik invented it,
it's sold about 450 million worldwide.
While the 80s craze has passed,
it's had such an impact on our lives
that it's entered into every aspect of popular culture.
It's appeared in tons of music videos.
It's inspired hundreds of artists
for paintings and sculptures.
There are even buildings across the world
that have been inspired by the Rubik's Cube.
(upbeat music)
Cubing competitions have also become a big deal.
Speed cubing becomes an incredibly popular competition
where people try and solve the Rubik's Cube
in the quickest possible time.
Oh!
The World Cube Organization holds 700 competitions
across the world each year,
everywhere from Guatemala to Algeria to Mongolia.
The current world record
for solving a Rubik's Cube is less than four seconds.
That's roughly one month faster than it took Erno.
The youngest person to solve a Rubik's Cube
was three years old.
Let's see what you got.
Are you ready?
Three, two, one, go.
(Suze screeches) (joyful jingles)
Solving it with two hands
while sat in a comfortable chair
is almost cheating these days.
Now there's blind cubing, juggling,
robots that can solve the puzzle,
and even extreme cubing.
Oh no, no, no, no, no, no, yes.
But the Rubik's Cube could be so much more
than an idle distraction.
The Rubik's Cube has played a huge part
in managing mental health issues like ADHD.
There's something very tactile about the sensory feedback
that you get when playing with one of these,
the clicking and the spinning.
A little bit like a fidget spinner.
The sensory stimulation can be used to help with anxiety
and other disorders.
So what does the future hold
for the humble Rubik's Cube?
(engines whirling)
Space?
Satellites play a big part in our everyday lives,
helping us communicate, helping us find our way,
and so much more.
You're missing one fantastic site.
Satellites can weigh as much as a school bus
or maybe sometimes even more.
And so that makes it pretty heavy and expensive
to launch to space.
I guess, being some kind of rookie-
Enter the CubeSat
inspired by none other than Erno's Magic Cube.
CubeSats are cube satellites.
They're a lot smaller, only about 20 pounds,
and they can be about the size of say the Rubik's Cube here.
These tiny satellites are made up of multiple
cubic modules that can open up in orbit.
Their tiny size makes them a thousand times cheaper
than a traditional larger satellite.
So far more than 1,600 have been put into orbit.
It's really the next stage of satellites.
From communications in the jungle
to reaching out to outer space,
the Slinky and Rubik's Cube
show how even the most playful inventions
can have a far-reaching impact.
So just looking at a wide range of toys in general,
they have made such a huge impact on human history,
on our life, on science, and of course our childhood.
I give up (laughing).
(joyful theme music)
(logo whooshing)