(bright bouncy music)
Did you know
that a surprising number of objects you use every day
are thanks to accidents?
(metallic banging) (glass breaking)
Let me show you what I mean.
On this episode, we learn how a failed gun sight
leads to the invention of Super Glue.
No! (explosion booming)
Find out how an explosive accident
opens up a whole new branch of science.
Not only does he just get up and starts walking,
he's also talking.
And learn how a sewing machine lubricant
connects to civil rights. (crowd shouting)
He's accidentally discovered
the world's first hair-straightening cream.
(explosion booms)
"Oops I Changed The World!"
(metallic clicking)
Sit back and get ready
because this is the story of super glue,
and it starts with a bang.
Pew. (explosion banging)
That's not quite what I meant.
(gunshots ringing)
Anyway, not many people know
that the discovery of super glue is tied to the rifle.
Modern guns have incredible range,
but without being able to accurately aim them,
the range is pretty much useless.
The eyepiece on the top of the gun is crucial
and provides some amazing advantages on modern weaponry.
There are sniper rifles with telescopic sights
that allow you to fire an object miles away.
In fact,
the record for shooting something completely accurately
is 2.2 miles away.
I mean, that's amazing.
It's the surge
to create these telescopic sights
that leads to the invention of the sticky stuff, glue.
(fighters shouting)
Firearms are first used in 10th century China
when various dynasties are fighting for control.
And the weapon that emerges at this time
is something called a spear of fire.
It's a bamboo shoot into which gunpowder is put,
and that allows spears, or even bits of pottery shard,
kind of 10th century shrapnel, to be fired at the enemy.
(fighters shouting) (explosions booming)
By the 12th century,
this technology has advanced to being a thick bronze pipe
which you can pretty much hold in your hands,
and you still put gunpowder in,
but now the projectile is a small metal ball.
What you have, in effect, is the first handgun.
The ammunition would be loose in the barrel,
bouncing off the sides as it's fired.
Shooters would struggle to hit water from a pier.
You would just fill it with gunpowder,
pack some wadding and a ball in the end
and hope for the best.
That is until 1498,
when a German armourer invents rifling,
which makes the projectile spin as it leaves the barrel,
making it much more predictable.
For the first time, you really need to aim your weapon.
The first gun sight may look primitive to us.
It were little beads on top of the gun
that you looked through at your target,
but it really was a game changer.
For hundreds of years
there's a steady increase in the accuracy of weaponry
and the optics that go with them.
(dramatic music) (gunshots ringing)
Until the early 20th century,
when sights hit a stumbling block.
In the lead up to World War II,
there's a really crucial need
to develop even better gun sights,
and especially ones that aren't made out of glass,
which keep shattering.
(glass cracking) (intense music)
Enter Harry Coover.
Harry is working for a company called Kodak.
Yes, that Kodak.
(breezy music)
Back then, Kodak was contracted by the government
to do many things for the war effort,
including providing spies with these teeny tiny cameras
they would fit in a matchbox.
As Kodak were experts in optics for cameras,
it makes sense that they would use their expertise
to develop new gun sights.
Harry is looking for a substance
that can replace breakable glass
because if you have a broken sight,
it's not a very useful weapon.
Harry tries to develop a new type of plastic
that's both clear and virtually indestructible.
(industrious music)
Harry is working in his lab,
trying lots of different formulas.
Now, Harry stumbles upon this formula called cyanoacrylate
and the difficulty he's having
is that it sticks to everything.
This new plastic is fine in anything airtight,
but as soon as it comes into contact with any moisture,
it becomes very sticky,
which is something you don't want out of a gun sight.
Now, sticking to everything
isn't something they're trying to do,
so the project is deemed a failure
and the government pulls out.
So Harry gets a new job.
He's looking for a transparent material
to replace the glass in fighter jet canopies.
I know, I know, bear with us,
we're almost at the invention of super glue.
In their search for the right substance,
Harry and his team,
they're studying various different materials
and they're looking at their properties,
and to help them do this,
they're using a lot of fancy equipment, like refractometers.
A refractometer is an instrument
that allows you to characterize a material
based on how lights interacts with it.
What Harry needs this time
is a substance that can withstand
the extreme heat and pressure a jet is put under.
(jet engine roaring)
One day Harry decides, for whatever reason,
to show one of his younger colleagues that cyanoacrylate.
If you remember,
that's the sticky, failed, gun sight material,
and that colleague is a man named Fred Joyner.
Now we don't have any photographs of Fred
so we're using a picture
of "Wonder Years" star, Fred Savage, instead.
I love that guy.
Harry says, hey, whatever you do,
do not put it in the refractometer
because it's probably gonna ruin it.
What does Fred go and do?
(elastic twanging)
Fred don't do it.
(elastic twanging)
(liquid sloshes)
He goes, he sticks it in a refractometer,
and the prisms inside the machine stick together,
wrecking it completely.
(intense music)
No!
$30,000 worth of equipment,
in today's money, ruined.
Damn you Fred Savage. I mean Fred Joyner.
Man, that must have been a rough day.
This accident gets Harry thinking.
This material is no good for gun sights,
it's no good for cockpits,
but it's really, really good at being sticky.
(air hissing)
He decides to go ahead
and start grabbing other things in the lab
and sticking those together,
and it seems to stick to everything.
(guitar twanging) (liquid squelching)
The glue that he seems to have accidentally discovered
is super.
See what I did there.
Okay, Tony, try not to give the game away,
but you do make a point
because Harry has accidentally created
an incredibly strong glue
that transforms from a liquid to a solid adhesive
extremely quickly.
The substance in the bottle stays gloopy,
but the moment that you expose it to air,
you kickstart a chain reaction.
The hydroxyl ions in the air
encourage the monomers in the cyanoacrylate
to join together.
The more they join together,
the more the others want to join together
in a serious case of FOMO.
In doing this,
the bonds that they form are incredibly strong.
Polymer chains form in all the
tiny little cracks and pores of any object
and this is how it's formed such a strong bond.
Harry and the team
tweak the formula for commercial use and name it Super Glue.
So in fact, Tony did give it away earlier.
And by 1959, they've developed this glue
to the point that it's shown on television.
Super Glue band.
We let the thing swing long enough
to assure ourselves the adhesive power would remain strong.
It did. Only Super Glue was strong enough to hold a car.
Previous glues
worked by the liquid they've been dissolved in evaporating,
which could take minutes or even hours.
(smooth music)
(plastic tapping) (piano keys gliding)
Suddenly here you have this glue,
it would set in as little as 45 seconds
so you can just imagine everyone's astonishment
at this new super glue.
People rush into the shops
to get their hands on this new wonder product.
Look, just a few drops of Permabond adhesive
make a bond strong enough to move a 10 room house
that weighs nearly 70 tons.
Permabond, no mixing, no clamping, no mess.
Use Permabond, the house-holding, household adhesive.
Super glue became the new must have,
and people went out in their millions and bought it
and, of course, were able to repair those old broken mugs,
broken teapots, and even articles of clothing like shoes.
But super glue
can repair more than just precious crockery,
as Harry Coover's son is about to discover.
He's just sitting at home, he's making some kind of model.
What happens is he accidentally cuts his finger
and he just happens to have a sample
of his dad's super glue just hanging around from the lab,
and for whatever reason, he decides to reach for that
and seals the cut in seconds.
Now Harry starts to become intrigued
by the medical possibilities of this super glue.
And it's a good thing he does.
By the 1960s,
Harry Coover is on TV advertising his super glue,
but at the same time the United States
has become drawn into the conflict in Vietnam.
(dramatic music)
One of the generals of the Vietnam War
has heard of Harry's new glue
and thinks that this could be a useful solution
for quickly treating injuries on the battlefield.
He approaches Harry
and says, I want some of this glue for my men.
Harry developed this, actually, into a spray
so that it can be sprayed across a wound
covering a large area for traumatic injuries.
It worked so well at closing cuts and wounds
that nowadays,
super glue isn't just found in a medic's army pack,
it's also in your local doctor's bag.
Formulas evolved since the Vietnam War
but it's still has a medical application,
so it's used when there are small, deep wounds
that need to be put back together,
where stitches might be painful,
and they still need, of course, a barrier to infection.
The impact of super glue doesn't end there.
As well as sticking together, people and plates,
the super substance can also help stick together clues
to help nab criminals.
(siren wailing)
Thanks to super glue,
we're able to pick up old fingerprints
that have been left on a crime scene from many years ago.
Oils and moisture occur naturally on the skin
so when we touch things,
we leave the unique print of the tiny ridges
on each of our fingers.
These delicate prints can be hard to dust
and too fragile to take more than once,
that is before super glue.
They flood the chamber with super glue vapor.
Now, as this can only react
when it's in the presence of moisture,
the leftover moisture and oils from the fingerprint
react with the super glue.
This forms a kind of cast of the fingerprint,
which can be lifted away and used for identification.
By using super glue,
the fingerprint can be made semi-permanent,
allowing it to be dusted and lifted many times.
Now this technique can also be used to get fingerprints
that would be otherwise really difficult to get,
like on uneven surfaces.
So here's to Harry Coover,
not only catching criminals
but saving countless lives and mugs around the world,
not bad for a gun sight designer who was well off target.
(dramatic music) (bullet zinging)
(bright music)
Coming up, how an unintentional dog groomer
changed the world.
Magically the dog's hair goes completely straight,
so he tries it on himself.
Makes sense.
And the story
behind the planet's poshest drink.
Now at the time people looked at this
as simply badly made wine.
But first this, the human brain,
the most complex thing in the known universe,
well, some of them.
Three pounds of pure processing power,
but while it only takes up about 2% of our body weight,
it uses an incredible 20% of our energy.
It needs all this energy
because, of course, your brain is always working,
always keeping your body going,
and keeping your thoughts going, even when you sleep.
The brain is made up of tiny little neurons,
billions of them.
The neuron is a special cell for communication.
It can receive information on one end
and pass that along through its cell body,
sending it out to other cells on the other end.
It's thought that these intricate connections
and the way they interact with each other
is what creates thoughts, movement, and memories.
A single note on a piano, it doesn't mean much by itself
but if you take a lot of those notes
and you put them together in a pattern,
suddenly you get something magical.
(soft piano music)
Your brain is kind of like this,
by creating a combination of neurons
that are triggered like the notes, we get meaning.
With so much complexity,
the human brain remains somewhat of a mystery.
Some call it the last and greatest biological frontier,
but it hasn't always been thought of with such reverence.
Ancient Egyptians believed
that the center of emotion and intelligence was the heart,
and so during the mummification process,
they discarded all other organs, including the brain.
Even Aristotle, the great philosopher
and, in many ways, great biologist,
thought that the brain was just a radiator,
allowing the heart not to overheat.
(heartbeat thumping)
It's not until the early 19th century
that we start to think with our heads and not our hearts.
Guided by Viennese physician Franz Joseph Gall
and his science of phrenology.
From a young age,
Franz is really interested in how the brain works.
He's really fascinated
by the differences between himself and his siblings.
Whilst at medical school,
Franz notices that some of the most intelligent students
have got protruding eye sockets,
and he starts thinking, could there be a relationship
between intelligence and the shape of our skulls?
He comes up with a theory
that will revolutionize
Western medicine's understanding of the brain.
Franz was one of the first to actually suggest
that the brain, that was the organ of the mind,
rather than the heart as the center of personality.
So by assessing their skulls
and looking at the different bumps and lumps,
he believed that you could determine how kind someone was,
their personality, and even how intelligent they were.
There's a little bit of a bump here,
I think my personality is awesome.
We now know that the bumps, dents,
and shape of your skull form during infancy,
(bright music)
and Franz rockets to fame,
touring the world with his new theory.
Franz then writes books on the science of phrenology,
which sells hundreds of thousands of copies.
By the 19th century, phrenology's so widespread
that getting your head measured is a popular activity.
Queen Victoria even had her own children's heads examined,
but of course, the way our skulls develop
is affected by our hair and our muscles.
Phrenology isn't based on any real science,
so in reality, it's like checking your horoscope.
(train whistle blowing)
But then a humble railroad man
called Phineas Gage,
would reshape the way we thought about thought forever.
The fateful day was September 13th, 1848.
It was a Wednesday.
Phineas sets off for work,
blissfully unaware that he's about to go down in history.
(guitar vibrating)
Phineas Gage is working on building a railroad
near Cavendish, Vermont,
and is in charge of a team of people
who are blasting through the rock
just to build this rail network.
(brooding music)
(electronic whistling) (stones hissing)
He's working away, doing what he does every day on the job.
He places a dynamite in a hole in a rock,
fills the hole with clay.
He's out, tamping down some dynamite
that they're going to use to blow apart some rock
to lay the rail line, and something goes wrong.
Boom.
(wooden thumping) (explosion booming)
The spark ignites the gunpowder
and the tampering rod blows out of the hole
and goes straight through, actually up through his orbit
and out the top of his skull,
and lands 100 meters away, or about 30 meters away.
Something ridiculous.
The rod weighs 13 pounds and is 1 1/2 inch thick,
so it lands with a few fragments of his skull.
That's gross.
Well, I guess that's it for him then, isn't it,
what's next?
(explosion rustling) Uh-oh.
Hang on,
people were made of sterner stuff back then.
Like the T-1000 he gets up and says, have you seen this boy?
Okay. Not quite.
(dramatic music)
He gets up and walked up to an oxcart
and says, take me into town.
His colleagues, man, they are shocked,
they've never seen anything like it before.
Not only does he just get up and starts walking,
he's also talking.
He gets himself home, but he does see the doctor,
tells him what happens and the doctor doesn't believe him.
Phineas drifts in and out of consciousness.
His family and friends think it's just a matter of time
so they start paying their respects.
They even have his clothes and coffin ready for him,
but miraculously, he pulls through.
Phineas Gage
appears to have come away with a hole in his head
but otherwise fine.
Or is he?
He can walk. He can talk.
He can do everything that he used to be able to,
but something's radically different.
Before the accident, he was very energetic.
He was a motivated person and also very friendly.
But after the accident, he becomes an aggressive alcoholic
who is unable to hold down a job.
His personality is so changed
that many of his friends describe him
as being a completely different person.
This drastic change in personality
excites every doctor and neuroscientist
who hears about his story.
Here is this living, breathing, walking experiment
that no researcher would ever dare to recreate.
Phineas's accidental lobotomy
gives scientists the case study they need
to better understand how the brain works.
So if this is the face and this is the back of the head,
the tamping rod came up through here
and severely damaged Phineas Gage's frontal lobe,
and they realized that this is the part, now,
that they can associate with personality,
which is why Phineas Gage had changed
from being an affable, lovely, generous person,
to an absolute grump.
This part of the brain is particularly big in humans,
suggesting that it's important to what makes us, us.
Phineas Gage's accident
gives scientists the idea that different parts of the brain
are responsible for different functions.
The emerging understanding that the frontal lobe
plays such a huge part in shaping personality,
it sparks a field of psychiatry
that attempts to cure patients
through the targeted surgery of the brain.
Schizophrenia is a terrible disorder
that affects up to 20 million people worldwide right now,
and we still don't really know what causes it.
It can be incredibly distressing for the patient
because they often have hallucinations and delusions
about the real world.
40 years after Phineas,
Swiss psychiatrist Gottlieb Burkhardt
thinks that a psychosurgical operation
could help with the condition.
Gottlieb puts this theory into practice
and performs open brain surgery on some of his patients
who haven't responded to other forms of treatment.
Did it work?
Well, they weren't cured, if that's what you're asking.
His results range from successfully quieting the patient
to one who died from complications from the procedure.
Gottlieb's research is initially rejected
for being too disturbing and not effective enough.
But medical history is filled with ineffective treatments
that stand the test of time.
The first lobotomy is performed in America in 1936.
Dr. Freeman develops this technique further
and really popularizes it,
to the point where he's able to simply take a probe,
a metal sharp stick, and lift up the patient's eyelid,
punch it up into their brain, and separate the frontal lobe.
Oh man, my eyes, just thinking about it.
Gradually, lobotomies were replaced
with more effective treatments,
like psychoactive drugs and psychotherapy.
Today, America's psychiatrists
have long waiting lists of such maladjusted people.
But why do I keep getting so depressed, doctor,
that's what I can figure out?
Let's go over what you've already told me.
But lobotomies
still have a place in modern medicine.
Epilepsy is a relatively common condition.
There are up to 50 million people worldwide
who suffer from this.
It can be as mild
as somebody staring for a while, straight forward,
to suffering from convulsions on the ground.
In extreme cases
these seizures can cause severe brain damage,
but the treatment
inspired by Phineas Gage's bolt through the brain
can actually help some patients.
There's the case, for example, of Ben Tondelier
who is suffering from severe epilepsy,
so much that he really couldn't go on with a normal life.
In 2021,
doctors perform a lobotomy inspired surgery
that would change his life forever.
Just to be clear, this was a world away from Frank's
stick it in the eye and give it a good wiggle technique.
It was incredibly precise.
With the help of imaging techniques,
surgeons were able to remove a pea-sized area of the brain
that was causing the seizures,
and since then, Ben has lived seizure free
and says his life is transformed.
Not only did Phineas Gage's accident
provide us with a fundamental understanding of our brains,
it also inspired a school of science that eventually led
to a whole new realm of medical developments
that changed lives around the world.
(bright music)
Coming up, super monk versus the devil's wine.
Bottles start to explode everywhere.
(explosions booming)
But first, this.
Hair, we've all got it on our heads.
Well, most of us.
And unless your Chewbacca, chances are you style it
and try to keep up with the latest trends.
Guess my personal hate is mullets from the 80s, early 90s,
the decked up here, down over the ears,
and then down the back.
I mean, just horrible.
But hair is more than just bowl cuts and bangs,
low fades and Afros.
Hair has always been really important
in cultures all around the world.
In Africa, it was a marker of family status, social status,
marital status, what tribe you're in, and so on.
The Himba tribe in Namibia has a particular hairstyle
that denotes someone's availability.
Young teenage girls will wear their hair
in short braids that cover their face,
but once they're ready to marry,
they would sweep this back, showing their faces.
Men, on the other hand,
have a single braid to show they're available.
Once they're married, they have a head covering.
It's kind of like a wedding ring in Western culture.
Then came the Age of Discovery,
the dawn of the New World.
If we transport ourselves back to the 1700s in America
and we go to the huge plantations,
the owners there are living in massive luxury.
They're wearing fine silk,
they're eating splendid meals with silver cutlery
and beautifully, ornately carved furniture.
Life has never been better for them.
The aristocratic class are the landowners
who had wealth and privileges.
And what makes this possible
is the fact that there are ships that are going to Africa
and kidnapping people into slavery, brutalizing them,
bringing them back to America
where they work for free for their entire lives,
and they don't have what they had at home.
The African people, at home, had a way of living,
they had a way of taking care of themselves,
but when they come to America,
all of that is taken away from them,
and in particular, black hair care is not looked after
the way it was back home.
In fact, when they're sold in the slavery,
they're made to shave their heads in a humiliating way.
The laboring class of the slaves
who had little wealth and few privileges.
As a growing number of slaves
were able to earn their freedom,
they began to dress as they wanted to
and to style their hair as they wished.
This created a panic among the elite in Louisiana,
who were fearful that white men and black women would marry
and raise families,
so they wanted to ensure that the separation,
the racial separation continued.
The governor of Louisiana passes a law
that requires black women,
whether they're enslaved or free, to cover up their hair
to indicate that they belong to the lower class.
But guess who got the last laugh?
(woman laughing)
Black women know how to do style,
so when they had to cover their hair,
they used these elaborate cloths,
some of them put jewels on them,
and they made themselves look good
even while wearing these hair dresses.
Fast forward to 1877,
where we meet a trailblazing, life-changing inventor,
Garrett Morgan.
(upbeat music)
Garrett is born in Kentucky to a huge family,
he was one of 11 children.
That's a lot of kids, I only have two and that's a lot.
This guy, he's smart,
he's an inventor and he's an entrepreneur.
His mother has a mixed heritage,
his father is a recently freed slave,
and that background is going to play a huge role
in his life.
After leaving elementary school,
Garrett moves to Cleveland
and lands a job as a sewing machine mechanic.
Cleveland is one of the countries leading hubs
for producing clothes.
The city is full of sewing factories, and around this time,
one in seven people who lived in Cleveland
worked in the garment industry.
He lands a job
at fixing sewing machines in the Garment District,
and travels from place to place
fixing all kinds of problems,
learning a huge amount about the machinery in the process.
He comes up with an idea
that will improve the sewing machines, he patents it,
and then he quits.
He sets up his own business.
This is the beginning of his financial freedom
and this is what would allow him to start a life
as an inventor.
His wife, Mary, has tailoring experience
so they decide to open a shop
that basically does sewing machine repair and tailoring.
Now he's repairing a sewing machine one day
that he notices
the problem is that it's scorching woolen fabric.
As the sewing machine is being used,
the needle is moving in and out of the material
incredibly quickly.
This high speed generates a lot of friction,
which in turn generates a huge amount of heat,
so much so that the material can actually become scorched.
Morgan does what any good inventor would do
and chucks some chemicals together to create a lubricant.
He puts it on, wipes his hands on a piece of cloth
and walks away.
When Garrett returns to his work table,
he noticed the fabric that he wiped his hands on
is now different.
It's made from curly animal hair,
except now the curls are all gone.
It's like smooth and straight.
Intrigued, Garrett experiments
on the nearest, unsuspecting test subject.
Now Garrett's neighbor just happens to have a dog
that has curly hair.
Guess what he did next?
Magically, the dog's hair goes completely straight,
so he tries it on himself.
Makes sense. (dog whines)
And it works.
He's accidentally discovered
the world's first hair-straightening cream.
Garrett's chemical mixture remains a secret,
but modern hair-straightening cream, or relaxer,
works the same way.
Here's Suze to explain how.
Hair is made of a protein called keratin
and keratin has lots of sulfur on the outside of it.
If the hair grows out of a round follicle,
that keratin doesn't really have a chance
to come into contact
with any of the rest of the strand of hair,
and that's why it stays straight.
However, when the follicle is oval,
the hair is growing out at a bit of an angle,
and as it grows out, it tilts, folding back in on itself
that actually turn the hair from being straight
into being much, much curlier.
Garrett's invention works
by breaking down the disulfide bond
that's created in the keratin.
As you break those bonds down, the hair becomes straight.
Thanks, Suze.
Garrett's hair-straightening cream arrived at a time
where racist notions of what made good hair were evolving.
With slavery only just being abolished in 1865,
black people were finally free to start working their way up
from the bottom of American society,
but they face a lot of racism.
(smooth music)
There was an expectation in the workplace
that hair would be tidy, and that meant sleek and straight,
which is not what African hair is like.
Basically, natural African hair was a huge disadvantage
and could be the difference between getting a job
and not getting one.
Garrett's hair cream provided a solution
for many African-Americans.
All of a sudden,
here's this wonder product that is so easy to use
and it keeps your hair straight for days.
Garrett's success
gave him the freedom to continue inventing,
and he puts his mind to saving lives.
First, he comes up with an emergency safety hood
for use in fires.
(explosion booming)
It encompasses the head
but has tubes that run to the floor,
on the ends of the tubes are some wet sponges,
which not only filter the air but also cool the air down.
So, what, in effect, he's done
is created the world's first gas mask.
It's so good, the US military start using it,
but Garrett isn't done saving lives.
After witnessing a fatal car accident,
he develops a T-shaped signaling system with moving arms
which warns drivers when a signal's about to change.
This was a much needed life saving tool
because America really was going through a car boom.
In 1909, there were 200,000 motorized cars
in the United States.
Seven years later, in 1916, there were more than 2 million.
(dramatic music) (Wooden thumping)
Meanwhile, Garrett's hair-straightening cream
is flying off the shelves.
The early 1900s,
now that this hair-straightening cream was around,
black people in America wanted to straighten their hair.
Why?
Well in the slavery system,
there was also a psychological component
and one element of that was,
hate yourself and worship the people who have enslaved you.
And what characterized them more than anything
was skin color and hair texture,
so black people in America wanted to lighten their skin
and straighten their hair.
Many felt the social pressures
to just fit in with mainstream white society,
so they would adjust their hair to fit in.
♪ Freedom ♪
What do we want now? ♪ Freedom ♪
Then came the civil rights movement.
♪ Freedom ♪
The 1960s sees the civil rights movement take off
with Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X,
but also female figures like Angela Davis
and, of course, the Black Panthers.
And there is a much more strident tone
with black people saying, you know what?
This is our hair, this is our identity, you can get lost.
And so what do you see in the 60s?
You see big Angela Davis Afros,
and you see people standing up for their kinky hair,
men and women.
Malcolm X went from having a perm, straightened hair,
to having nappy hair like me.
Some people
still call straight hair, good hair,
because it looks like white hair.
These days, many young black men
find the whole process demeaning.
It's going out of fashion even in the ghetto.
It takes pain to become like a white man
and more pain when you know you can't make it.
Black people start to rebel
and reclaim their natural hair as an identity.
They start embracing it
as a symbol of freedom and empowerment.
Through the decades,
there have been shifts towards and away from hair relaxers
like Garrett Morgan first invented.
I also straightened my hair when I was a kid in the 70s,
you did it as a family.
And back then we used a thing called a conch
where you took lye, yes, the harsh, basic chemical lye,
and you used potatoes to serve as a base,
and you put this on your hair
and it took out all the texture and straightened it.
Many African-Americans
still feel pressure to adhere to racist beauty standards.
In a survey that was done in 2019, 50% of black women
said that they knew someone who had been sent home from work
because of their hairstyle.
Until 2016, a Google image search
for the term, unprofessional hairstyles,
yielded only pictures of black women with natural hair,
or wearing braids or twists.
The battle for equality continues
and slowly, positive changes are happening.
In recent years, many states across the USA
have started to ban any policies in the workplace
that discriminate people from wearing their hair
showcasing their heritage and their natural style.
Creating a better working environment
for everyone.
Research shows that companies
which have diversity in their teams
significantly outperform their rivals.
Garrett's accidental hair-straightening cream
played a part in giving black people
the opportunity to get a job,
empowering them to fight for freedom.
It's not just hair, it's tied up in identity,
race, discrimination, emotion.
I mean, there's so much more to it
than a few kinks or curls.
♪ Freedom ♪
(bright music)
Hey. (liquid fizzing)
Beer, glorious cold beer.
As the philosopher Homer once said,
alcohol, the cause of and solution to
all of life's problems.
This story begins in a truly dark time, a time before beer.
(woman screaming)
10,000 years ago.
For thousands of years
humans have roamed the Earth looking for food and shelter,
but it was only when they discovered agriculture
that they started to settle.
The first place they did so was in Mesopotamia,
which we now call the Middle East.
Agriculture was probably
one of the most revolutionary inventions in human history,
because rather than having to go out and search for food,
you can literally make it, and create it, and survive.
Tending to crops
means that you have to give up that nomadic lifestyle,
stay in one place, and create a settlement.
People started growing wheat and barley,
and in fact, bread has been part of humanities diet
for thousands of years.
There was actually a piece of bread found in Jordan
that dates back to about 14,000 years ago,
which was actually just before agriculture was invented
and people settled down.
How does bread lead to the discovery of beer?
Well, no one's exactly sure.
It did happen over 10,000 years ago,
but it was something like this.
Someone is outside making bread,
they've got their dough nice and ready to go,
but suddenly, (lightning crashes)
a little thunderstorm comes in.
Now, trying to avoid the rain,
they run inside and forget about their dough.
Several days pass, and then they remember,
oh gosh, better go and check on that outside.
So off they go
to find this kind of gloopy, soupy, almost porridgey mess.
And probably the initial reaction
is, oh, crud, we just ruined a good bunch of bread,
but then when they taste it,
they realize that it's got some interesting other effects.
(light music)
And thus beer was born.
(people cheering) (glasses clinking)
When grain is left in water,
it starts to germinate.
This produces lots of enzymes,
which convert the natural starches into sugar.
The water from the rain
helps the grains release their starch
and convert those complex sugars
into simple sugars like glucose.
The glucose is then further broken down by yeast,
which occurs naturally in the air.
The yeast breaks the sugar down
and converts it into both ethanol, which is alcohol,
and carbon dioxide,
which is where you get delicious boozy bubbles.
Some anthropologists
say that it was actually wheat grains left in storage
that got damp and fermented to produce beer,
but until someone accidentally invents time travel,
we'll never know for sure.
Well, how'd you like that, huh?
Humans thought that this boozy beverage
was a gift from the goddess Ninkasi
to promote health and happiness.
Cheers to her.
Drunk throughout history
in almost all civilizations, this accidental discovery
shapes our collective human history.
Beer was a great supplement
for a diet that was perhaps lower in calories
than it needed to be.
It was also rich in proteins, vitamins, and minerals,
more so than bread.
People used to drink it as a safe alternative to water,
which at the time had lots of bacteria in it
and was potentially unsafe to drink.
In Ancient Egypt, beer was a form of payment.
Some of the people who built the pyramids
were actually paid in beer.
But beer provides more than just sustenance,
it holds cultural and religious significance.
Now the Incas from South America
would actually brew Chicha beer,
and they would then pour it
through these really cool carved altars.
Whereas the Ethiopians would pour beer onto the ground
to try and feed their ancestors
and with hopes of bringing good harvest and good health.
Today, beer is by far
the most popular alcoholic drink in the world,
both in terms of volume drunk and value.
Many could argue,
it's one of man's greatest accidental inventions.
It's currently
the third most popular alternative as a beverage
behind water and tea.
In fact, up to a quarter
of all the grains grown in Sub-Saharan Africa
are actually made for beer production.
Beer isn't just a drink,
it's a proud statement of the communities that drink it.
You'd be hard pushed to go to a country,
arrive at a local bar, and not be greeted by the locals
that want to share their special beer with you
(crowd cheering)
whether it's a national beer
or a local brewery close to them.
It's one of my favorite things to do when I travel,
and a really exciting way
to learn not just about the culture of the country,
but to share something with them
that they're really proud of.
(glass clinking) (accordion music)
One country
that's particularly proud of their beer, is Germany.
Germany is Europe's biggest beer producing nation.
In 2018, it made a whopping 9 billion liters of it.
This is extremely important for the German economy
because they raise as much as €7 billion a year,
just because of beer.
And they celebrate this golden nectar
every year at Oktoberfest,
the world's biggest beer festival.
Oktoberfest has been running for 200 years,
and each year over 6 million people flock to it
from across the world.
While we're in Europe
and on the subject of alcohol,
we may as well talk about another drink
that came to us by accident.
First of all, let's change the music,
(light music)
skip across the border to France, and head northeast
to a small remote village called Champagne.
Champagne is a beautiful region,
about a hundred miles from Paris.
In the 17th century, monks are trying to create a wine
that can compete with their rivals in Burgundy.
The alcohol in champagne
is made in a very similar way to beer,
except instead of using barley, or wheat,
or some kind of grain as the sugar source, we use grapes.
This area high in the mountains
experiences a long succession of unprecedented cold winters.
The big freeze spells big trouble for the region's wine
as it's left to ferment over winter.
Fermentation stops as the temperature drops.
When spring comes around again, the yeast start to wake up
in the slightly warmer temperatures
and the whole wine goes through a second fermentation.
It's in this second fermentation
that carbon dioxide is produced.
The wine is now filled
with little bubbles of carbon dioxide,
which is how we get the bubbles in champagne.
Now at the time,
people looked at this as simply badly made wine.
The Champagne vineyards
are left with batches of bubbly booze to try and sell.
It could prove they're ruin, and that's not the only thing.
As the carbon dioxide builds up in the bottle,
so does the pressure.
Bottles start to explode everywhere.
(explosion booming)
In fact, it's such a risky business
being involved in any of this wine,
that they call it le vin du diable, the wine of the devil.
(devil laughing evilly)
Think about if you've ever had a can of soda
and you shake it and you go to open it, it explodes.
(can hissing)
These bubbles are basically air pockets
and they're getting pushed up against each other,
it's causing an outward pressure
and it wants to just escape.
But if your bottle is not strong enough
and not sealed tightly, not thick enough glass,
it can be enough pressure to explode.
(explosion booming)
(monk humming)
The Catholic Church
wants to put a stop to this exploding devil wine
as soon as possible.
They need a super monk and find one in Dom Pierre Perignon.
He tries to stop this second fermentation
so that the wine tastes good,
and also so that the bottles stop exploding.
(rousing music)
But he doesn't get very far and this peculiar fizzy wine
begins getting drunk by some people in very high places.
The royal courts of Versailles
start serving this sparkling wine
during official dinners at the royal palace,
and whatever the royalty does, the rest follow.
Demand for an even bubblier wine emerges,
and so, Dom Perignon gets to work, slowly.
("The Prince of Denmark's March" by Jeremiah Clarke)
Then a couple of decades later.
(bell clanging)
Dom finally perfects his wine,
creating something that he deems so delicious
that he calls to the other monks
saying, come quickly, I am tasting the stars.
Dom's new formula
gets tongues bubbling with excitement
and every who's who of 18th century Europe
wants in on the action.
Legend has it, it was Napoleon and his troops
who started the trend of taking a sword
and chopping off the top of a champagne bottle.
(metallic clanging)
They would do this in celebration of a victory,
right after a battle.
It's possible that Napoleon influenced
the way that we now associate champagne with celebration,
whether it's a birthday, or wedding, even a new job.
Soon champagne features
at all the royal weddings and coronations across Europe,
its popularity is spreading.
(upbeat music)
By the turn of the 20th century,
almost 30 million bottles of champagne are being exported.
It seems like everyone's falling over themselves
to taste the stars,
as well as literally falling out themselves
from the alcohol.
As the champagne craze takes hold,
it moves from silver service to the silver screen.
You really mean you pay $8 for that?
Hollywood is soaked in the stuff. Literally.
It's actually reported
that Marilyn Monroe once bathed in 350 bottles of champagne.
Now, whether it's true or not,
Marilyn is the epitome of Hollywood glamor
and so it's no wonder
that champagne was her drink of choice.
Champagne becomes the go-to guzzle
for all types of celebrations.
Then in the 1960s, someone really shakes things up.
An auto driver named Dan Gurney
was doing the Le Mans race and he won,
and at the end they gave him a bottle of champagne,
which was traditional,
but instead of drinking it, he decided to shake it up
and spray it all over the crowd
because he was just so excited to have won.
And of course it caught on,
and it is done today at the end of nearly every race,
and it's all thanks to him.
And while the champagne
keeps flowing and spraying everywhere,
it means big bucks for this little village in France.
("Can Can" by Jacques Offenbach)
The current global market price is about €4.2 billion,
and the biggest consumers of champagne are the US,
followed by the UK, and just after that is Japan.
Champagne has conquered the globe,
all thanks to cold winters in France, exploding bottles,
and an innovative monk.
(jaunty music)
(logo chiming)