(upbeat music)
Did you know
that a surprising number of objects
that you use every day
are thanks to accidents?
(metal crashing)
(glass breaking)
Let me show you what I mean.
On this episode,
we discover how today's household staple
started life as something quite different.
And their million dollar idea is...
Plastic wallpaper?
Learn how a failed painkiller
led to rave culture.
I suppose the fact that it didn't kill him is a bonus.
And find out how a kitchen spill...
Whoops, someone's in trouble.
Has explosive consequences.
(large explosion)
Whoosh!
"Oops, I Changed the World".
(slow carefree music) Do you ever feel like
you've got the world on your shoulders?
Like, if you don't get a break
you're gonna explode?
When all you wanna do is just...
(fast-paced drumline) (woman laughing)
Pop some Bubble Wrap.
Yay.
(bubbles popping)
Oh sorry, did you need this or something?
(child giggling) (upbeat music)
This versatile packing material
was never meant to be a stress relieving play thing.
But then, it was never meant to pack things either.
Would you believe that Bubble Wrap
was originally
a plan for wallpaper?
('50s music)
You heard that right.
The story begins in the 1950's
in the bustling town of Hawthorne, New Jersey.
Tucked away in the industrial quarter of the town,
engineer Alfred Fielding has his modest workshop.
And he meets all kinds of people in his job every day,
but one day he meets somebody
that will help him change the world.
That man is Swiss inventor, and snappy dresser,
Marc Chavannes.
The pair immediately hit it off.
Chavannes' creative mind is a good match
for Fielding's engineering skill,
and the two decide to begin working together.
(dramatic music)
So in 1957,
they set about trying to invent a new product
that they hope will bring in a little extra cash.
And their million dollar idea is,
drum roll, please,
wallpaper.
But we already have wallpaper.
Not just any wallpaper though,
a brand new kind of plasticized textured wallpaper
that would appeal to the up and coming beat generation.
(smooth jazz music)
At this time, the so-called beat culture
was developing all over America,
but was particularly centered
on the Bohemian artist's community
of San Francisco's North Beach,
Los Angeles, Venice West, and New York's Greenwich Village.
They came up with the term beat
as they would be beat tired with society's norms.
The beat generation took psychedelic drugs,
experimented sexually,
but for the large part they rejected material wealth.
It seems like a foolproof plan.
What better way to make your millions
than by creating a product targeted at a subculture
that specifically rejects materialism.
Cool cats reject materialism, baby.
(fingers clicking)
Nevertheless, Fielding and Chavannes
persist with their plastic wallpaper.
Plastic wallpaper?
Yeah, plastic wallpaper.
Well, certainly goes against the conventional.
(bouncy funky music)
Starting with two plastic shower curtains,
they ran them through the machine,
which heated them and sealed them together.
But things don't go exactly to plan.
All this specially developed machine accomplished
was creating a slightly thicker piece of plastic
with lots of air bubbles trapped in the middle.
It's not actually clear whether this was something
that the pair intended to do.
After all they were going for the textured look,
and maybe they thought the rogue air bubbles
would be the kind of texture
those Bohemian beats would like.
You've probably already guessed this,
but it turns out no amount of liberation's enough
to make you want plastic air bubbles on your walls.
As a wallpaper, this new material was a flop.
Who could have predicted it?
Oh I don't know, maybe everyone?
But strangely, they don't seem put off.
Never one to miss an opportunity,
Fielding and Chavannes still got themselves several patents
for the equipment and the process used
to make this unsightly stuff.
And then they set about trying to think for a use for it.
(dramatic music)
They brainstorm
more than 400 potential applications.
I wonder what they considered?
Bubble plastic clothing?
bubble plastic bedding?
Bubble plastic houses?
Actually that last one isn't that far off the mark.
The one idea that the pair really ended up pursuing
was using the new substance as insulation in greenhouses.
When there is no sun,
a greenhouse will lose its heat quite rapidly.
So by installing insulation,
you can slow the rate of heat loss.
Well there you go,
maybe there is a use for their failed wallpaper after all.
Unfortunately when the pair
tried to use Bubble Wrap for this,
it didn't work at all.
It was another flop.
(Narrator sighs)
(energetic rock music) Undeterred,
but with absolute and frankly irrational faith
in this seemingly useless product,
the pair call in the help of marketing.
They've heard a little company called IBM
is about to ship out their latest product.
The Model T of the computing world.
You know what I'm talking about,
we all had posters of it on our walls growing up.
The 1401 decimal computer.
This wasn't a computer as we would recognize it today.
It was about the size of two refrigerators.
They're big and cumbersome,
and yet also delicate and incredibly expensive.
Sort of like a jewel-encrusted ostrich egg.
The computers were bought by large organizations like NASA
to crunch huge amounts of data.
And companies weren't even buying these computers,
they were just renting them.
It was $2,500 a month in 1960.
That's about $22,000 a month in modern money.
If you're spending that much money on a device,
you want to make sure that it's arriving
at your office intact.
Fielding and Chavannes think
that they failed wallpaper could provide a solution.
And so in 1960,
the Sealed Air Corporation is born.
And they end up trademarking the name Bubble Wrap.
(single guitar string)
(single bubble pop)
(upbeat music) Up to this point,
protection for shipped goods
has been a lot more rudimentary.
Sawdust, balled up newspaper, and horse hair
were common packaging materials in the past.
Bubble Wrap was the packaging protection for the future.
It turns out that lots of self-contained bubbles of air
are ideal for absorbing the energy from impacts.
(package crashing)
Didn't hear a crack?
(ukulele music) Maybe not,
but if you throw eggs in the studio again,
I'll have to get HR involved.
Anyway in 1960,
IBM would take their oversized decimal computers
and wrap them up in lots of Bubble Wrap.
It was the big break, or the pop,
that Bubble Wrap needed.
(banjo music)
Once the computing giant had endorsed their product,
other manufacturers started to follow suit.
The plastic sheet quickly becomes a shipping sensation.
With Bubble Wrap reaching the homes and hands
of thousands around the world,
something starts to happen.
(bubbles popping)
(slow tinkering music) The first person
to pop Bubble Wrap was Fielding's five year old son.
He remembers being able to feel all of these air bubbles
and not being able to resist the urge
to just pop them all.
And he's not the only one.
Let's be honest,
popping Bubble Wrap is one of life's greatest pleasures.
In 2012, a poll sponsored by Bubble Wrap itself
found that one minute of popping
could provide stress relief
equivalent to a 33 minute massage.
(man groaning)
Which is nice, but also weirdly specific.
Like, 33 minutes?
Yeah, I'll take the bubbles,
but if it's 34,
well, you can oil me right up.
Well now HR definitely are involved.
Inappropriate.
Some researchers say
that it goes back to our ape ancestors.
What the sensation was like
when crushing ticks and other bugs
that would get in the fur.
(apes howling)
(ape screaming) (upbeat music)
Bubble wrap captures the fidgeting hands
of people around the world.
So much so,
there's even a Bubble Wrap Appreciation Day,
which I'm sure you don't need me to tell you,
is the last Monday in January.
So when it's still cold, and dark, and wet,
with no sign of the end of winter,
we can all collectively go and pop some bubbles
to make ourselves feel better.
(single bubble pops)
(disco music) Today,
in the UK alone,
enough Bubble Wrap's made each year
to wrap around the earth 10 times.
And the manufacturer has moved on a bit
from sticking two shower curtains together.
Bubble Wrap starts life as tiny resin beads,
which are melted at 450 degrees Celsius,
or 840 degrees Fahrenheit,
to form a thin resin sheet.
That sheet is then flattened to the required thickness
and fed through rollers that have holes
and air is blown through the holes to form the bubbles,
and then the air is sealed
by applying a second sheet behind the Bubble Wrap.
Oh, I always wondered how they did it.
(upbeat music)
The sound of popping Bubble Wrap
booms around Denver in 2015,
when the Guinness World Record
for the most people popping Bubble Wrap is attempted.
2,681 Boy Scouts all got together from around Denver
to pop the Bubble Wrap simultaneously.
Each was given their own section of Bubble Wrap,
and when the whistle blew
they used their hands and feet
to pop the bubbles for two minutes.
At the end of the time the record was theirs,
more than doubling the previous record
set a year earlier.
(slow piano music) Now Bubble Wrap is available
in a wide range of different shapes,
sizes, strengths, and thicknesses.
You can get big and little bubbles,
wide and short sheets,
and large and small roles.
Sealed Air is a Fortune 500 company.
From their humble beginnings in the '60s,
they employ 15,000 people
and serve customers in 122 different countries.
But Bubble Wrap's success
is not such good news for the environment.
And we have to remember
that that's not gonna degrade over time,
and an awful lot of that is gonna end up
in the natural environments,
like in the oceans.
The company's worth has actually dropped a little
from its peak net worth of $11 billion in 2015.
Perhaps that could be a result of the world
gradually moving away from plastics in packaging.
Nevertheless,
Bubble Wrap has been a shipping institution
for the last 60 years,
and it's helped give birth
to an entirely new era of human consumption
that's reshaping our town centers: E-commerce.
(rhythmic music)
E-commerce is really a phenomenon of the last 25 years.
Shops no longer need to have a physical presence in towns
if they can ship their goods all over the country.
With the launch of Amazon and eBay,
you suddenly have an explosion of products
that have to be packaged and shipped individually
rather than in bulk on a pallet.
And the perfect thing to protect those packages?
Bubble Wrap.
Jeff Bezos for example, the founder of Amazon,
who prepared the shipments in his early days,
he'd definitely have popped some bubbles here and there.
What started in 1960 with a five ton computer
is now repeated in millions of homes every day.
Clothes, furniture, tools,
anything that you can think of,
all delivered from the great merchant in the sky.
(energetic rock music)
And all those packages
have helped make a handful of companies
very, very rich.
This is private enterprise on a vast scale.
The profits from Amazon being funneled into other
sometimes quite esoteric enterprises.
(techno music) Most notably
the Blue Origins private space flights,
that offer to take normal people,
who just happen to be worth millions, into space.
So if Amazon's E-commerce empire
owes its success to the shipping institution
that is Bubble Wrap,
then in a way it's Bubble Wrap
that's taking us to the stars.
That's a bit of a stretch,
but let's run with it.
While you're sitting on your
private space flight to the moon,
maybe they'll give you some Bubble Wrap
to help calm your nerves.
(cheerful theme music)
(whimsical instrumental) Coming up,
the story of the kids who help beat Hitler.
Explosives don't get much more homegrown
than guncotton from wood pulp,
and acetone from conkers.
And how searching the cosmos
becomes a lifesaver.
This was huge.
The new technique was life-changingly better.
But first this.
(fast-paced dance music) Nightlife.
A place where you can lose all of your inhibitions,
often aided by a drug of choice.
Be it alcohol,
or perhaps something a little stronger.
And while this scene can feel new and exciting,
well, it isn't.
(whimsical instrumental) Humans have been taking
mind-altering drugs for thousands of years.
Incredibly, the first recorded use
of psychoactive substances
was found in cave paintings
that probably date to
around 4,000 BC.
That was psilocybin, or magic mushrooms.
Which means the drug taking predates
tattoos, writing, and even the wheel.
And we believe that the indigenous cultures
of North and South America
were using the psychoactive peyote cactus
around this time, too.
Spanish Conquistadors found the Aztecs
taking magic mushrooms and having the resulting trips.
The Aztecs call this the flesh of the gods.
As for peyote, when that got to Europe,
it was considered as witchcraft.
(Irish flute music)
Which is a bit of fun backstory,
but let's return to those nightclubs.
(record pausing)
(record rewinding) Because this
(dance club music) is a story about
the drug of choice for many ravers,
ecstasy.
Sorry everyone, (record pausing)
we just need to stop for a bit of a disclaimer.
This is a stock shot.
This person's probably eating a mint
or something equally benign.
There are other stock shots in this film
over us talking about ecstasy.
We're not saying they're drug users.
They may well be drug users,
but we don't know that.
And you should make no assumptions either way.
Okay, on with the show. (dance club music resumes)
Ecstasy's origin story
has become something of a legend.
The story goes that the German company Merck
synthesized a drug back in 1912,
with the intention of developing
an appetite suppressant for German soldiers.
We can only speculate on why they wanted to do this.
Perhaps they wanted a way to make
Army food rations stretch further,
but appetite suppressant or not,
soldiers do still need to eat.
In fact,
the Army famously marches on it's stomach.
But something strange begins to happen
to the first soldiers who try
this appetite suppressant. (whistle blowing)
The soldiers whipped off their shirts
and started dancing to the marching band.
To be fair to them,
who amongst us hasn't whipped off their shirt
for a marching band?
Rousing stuff.
Apparently the soldiers who took the drug became too calm,
which is presumably not a good thing on the battlefield.
What a great story.
Shame is a load of rubbish.
(upbeat music) In the early 2000's,
in true German fashion,
Merck go to great efforts to set the record straight.
They go through lab reports,
annual reports, patents, letters,
interview records, and memoirs
in search of any and all mentions
of the contentious chemical.
That chemical is of course
3,4-Methylenedioxymethamphetamine.
Try to say that three times quickly.
I mean if only there was a handy acronym for this.
Oh yes, there is.
MDMA.
(slow piano music)
The historical review
reveals the true origins of MDMA.
And that's the story we're gonna tell you now.
The first mention of MDMA did come in 1912,
but not as an appetite suppressant.
Merck were trying to get around
an existing blood clotting patent,
owned by medical giant Bayer.
So they found out a way to synthesize a new chemical
that was different enough to warrant a patent of its own.
So Merck made their
slightly different blood clotting drug,
and patent both the new chemical
and the various ways they found to make it.
One of the intermediate compounds,
the chemicals you need to make
on your way to the final compound,
was methylenedioxymethamphetamine.
So MDMA a was never meant
to be an appetite suppressant,
and it was never trialed on German soldiers.
It was just a stepping stone in another process.
Nobody really cares about it
beyond how it can be used to make something else.
So how did MDMA
go from a step in making a,
let's be honest, fairly dull blood clotting agent,
to being every ravers favorite nightclub stimulant?
(old country music) Enter a man
who will later be known as the godfather of ecstasy,
Dr. Alexander Shulgin.
Alexander has an insatiable interest in chemistry.
When he was just seven years old,
he would ride his bicycle to the local chemical supply
and ask for chemicals like
sodium bicarbonate or magnesium sulfate.
The druggists would put the chemicals in the paper bag
and give them to the curious child,
free of charge.
That's definitely not something
you'd be allowed to do these days.
(upbeat music)
After a failed attempt at Harvard,
a spell in the Navy,
and a successful stint at UC Berkeley,
Shulgin ends up at Dow Chemical.
Shulgin meets with ready success
in the industrial chemistry world.
He invents Zectran,
which is the world's first biodegradable insecticide.
This becomes one of the
go-to insecticides of the 1960's.
It makes the company millions
and it makes Shulgin indispensable.
But Shulgin is really interested
in a different kind of drug.
The kind that alters your perception of reality.
While he was in the Navy during World War II,
Shulgin was injured and he was treated with morphine.
Now he said it didn't actually take away the pain,
it just made him very, very indifferent to it.
(slow pop music)
So Shulgin takes every opportunity
to tinker with the molecular structures of existing drugs,
often making new ones in the process.
You can imagine Dow Chemical isn't too happy
with this strand of research,
but given how successful Zectran has been
they grudgingly grant him time
to work on his own psychedelic projects from home.
Dow apparently said, "Do as you wish."
They probably should have
worded that more carefully.
So Shulgin did as he wished.
He did psychedelics.
(somber piano music)
In September, 1976,
Shulgin's tipped off by an undergraduate
that a little heard of chemical compound
could be worth his expert attention.
At this time methylenedioxyamphetamine, or MDA,
was a pretty popular drug on the psychedelic scene.
It was nicknamed a mellow drug of America.
The student mentioned to Shulgin
that they had heard of a methylated version of MDA,
although nobody knew for sure what it did.
(rhythmic strings music)
Alexander Shulgin goes home and experiments,
synthesizing his own methylated version of MDA, making MDMA.
And then he took it.
Of course he did.
First he tried swallowing a 16 milligram dose,
but it has no effect.
I suppose the fact that it didn't kill him is a bonus.
And what do you do
if you have an unknown psychoactive drug
that doesn't seem to be having any effect?
Well if you're Shulgin,
you take increasingly higher doses of it.
Brave or stupid, it's hard to tell.
But eventually at 81 milligrams,
Shulgin gets his eureka moment.
After 35 minutes,
he reports a smooth and nice feeling.
At 45 minutes,
he says the effects are still developing,
but easy to assimilate.
And at 50 minutes he found himself getting quite deep,
but still keeping pace.
(slow instrumental music)
I'm not really sure what that means,
but I do know that we know all this
as Shulgin's wife, Ann, would take notes,
as well as participating herself
in his experimental drug taking.
You know what they say,
couples who take together stay together.
Okay, wait. No, they don't say that.
That's a terrible principle to live by.
Kids don't do drugs.
That's unusually good advice.
Alexander introduces the drug
to a psychologist friend, Leo Zeff.
And that's when things really start to pick up for MDMA.
Zeff commonly guided his patients through therapy
while they were high on various drugs.
He saw them as a path to enlightenment.
Follow the path to enlightenment.
By the mid 1980's,
MDMA is being used widely in experimental therapy.
(energetic dance music) But elsewhere,
a very different use for this drug is emerging.
People start to realize that the euphoric effect of MDMA
could be a lot more fun
if they weren't lying on a therapist's couch.
It's given the much catchier name ecstasy by a drug dealer
who's keen to cash in on its potential.
Before long MDMA is being sold at nightclubs,
right alongside the beers and spirits.
Remember, this is still totally legal
and very popular.
Clubbers in Dallas, Texas
consume 30,000 hits of ecstasy a month.
(dance music stops) And a misuse of the drug
has killed at least five people.
(siren wails)
In April, 1985,
the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency
moves to make ecstasy a Schedule One drug.
(rave music)
But making it illegal
doesn't seem to make much difference
to its growth and popularity.
It becomes the drug of choice in the emerging rave scene.
(electronic dance music)
It's electronic dance music,
it's flashing lights.
It's MDMA. It's the ultimate escapism.
And as Dow's accidental stimulant
becomes the drug of choice for this emerging scene,
it becomes known by a whole host about other names.
E, Eve, Molly for the powdered stuff,
Hug Drug, Beans, Biscuit.
I'm fairly sure
you're making Beans and Biscuit up.
Peace, X, Disco Biscuit, Clarity.
(slow techno music)
Whatever it's called
or however it's taken,
MDMA has the same effects
on the way it messes around with our brains.
MDMA causes a sudden release
of three specific neurotransmitters in the brain.
The neurotransmitters targeted by ecstasy are serotonin,
and to a lesser extent, dopamine and norepinephrine.
They play an important role in regulating our mood,
pain levels, sleep, and appetite.
The release of huge amounts of serotonin in the brain
leads to widespread mood elevation,
euphoria, ecstasy if you will.
(somber piano music) But what goes up,
must come down.
And the come downs from E can be crushing.
Lots of serotonin makes for happy users,
but the problem is there's no serotonin
left over for the day after.
And people often would refer to suicide Tuesday,
you know, as the come down got really vicious
in the days after a weekend spent taking a lot of E.
And if that isn't enough
to put you off taking a handful of pills
and dancing the weekend away,
then maybe this will be.
There's evidence that prolonged use of ecstasy
can damage the brain.
Studies in primates and rodents
show that the long-term binging of MDMA
ends up damaging the nerve cells that contain serotonin.
And that nerve damage persists for many years.
Which is interesting,
and a little worrying.
But it does prompt an obvious question:
who is it giving drugs to monkeys?
(slow techno music) The answer of course,
is scientists.
And after years in the medical wilderness,
MDMA is finding its way back into the treatment rooms, too.
In recent years there's been renewed interest
in trying to use psychedelic drugs
to treat certain mental disorders.
This is intended to speed up
the development and review of promising new treatments.
This is a treatment for particularly intractable
and unpleasant forms of PTSD.
The kind that might be suffered by soldiers
on a bloody battlefield.
As the drug opens the patient's mind,
two therapists guide them through
an eight hour therapy session.
More than half of the patients treated this way
improve to the point
that they no longer fit a PTSD diagnosis.
And the beneficial effects continue to increase over time.
A year later,
the number of people who no longer had PTSD
had risen to 68%.
(heavy bass dance music) So there you go.
That's the story of
how the precursor to a blood clotting agent
accidentally became a party drug,
and then a potential wonder cure
for diseases like depression and alcohol addiction.
It's been a tumultuous hundred year history for MDMA.
It's been full of urban legends,
half-truths, and questionable medical ethics.
So who knows where the journey for ecstasy
is going to go next.
(whistle blowing)
(cheerful theme music)
(upbeat music) Still to come,
an astronomical era...
The press jumped on this straight away,
branding the Hubble the $1.5 billion blunder.
But first this.
The story of explosives is one full of danger and accidents.
But did you know
that a whole bunch of other materials have been created
in the pursuit of trying to blow things up?
Let me set you on a journey
that's a real blast. (large explosion)
Sorry, couldn't resist.
(horse neighing) (dramatic battle music)
We are in 13th century Mongolia,
and the sons of Genghis Khan
have really taken to the family business.
His children have led the Mongolian armies on horseback
all the way from the east coast of Russia
right through to Poland,
and nothing stood in their way.
Historians think that up to 40 million people
may have been killed during these campaigns.
As they turn their sights east
to the Song Dynasty in China,
they face a fight like none they've ever seen before.
(gunpowder crackles)
All because of an accidental discovery
made 400 years earlier in the 9th century: gunpowder.
Chinese alchemists had figured out
that if they mixed charcoal, sulfur, and saltpetre,
a compound that we know of as potassium nitrate,
they could create a deadly powder that burned unstoppably.
This powder's burning, and we can't stop it.
Don't ask me, but somehow Chinese monks
discovered gunpowder while looking for the elixir of life.
So somehow while looking for the secret of eternal life,
they actually found out how to kill a lot of people.
(weapons firing) (man screaming)
So when the Mongols take up arms against the Song,
the Song returned the favor with fire.
They had all kinds of weapons that made use of gunpowder.
There were fire arrows,
and fire lancers that propelled themselves,
burning across enemy lines.
The Chinese had developed a method
of lowering these kind of deadly iron bombs
into the Mongolian trenches from above.
And these were loaded with gunpowder.
When they exploded, (large explosion)
it was absolutely horrific.
(man screaming)
The immovable force of gunpowder
held back the unstoppable might of the Khans for 40 years,
before finally the lines broke.
(horse whinnying)
Despite everything,
the Song Dynasty did eventually fall to the Mongols.
(fire crackling)
The Mongols took gunpowder to India,
and from there it burned a trail to the Middle East,
just in time for The Crusades.
Gunpowder really democratizes warfare
because before gunpowder,
wars were all about aristocratic knights on horseback
being the most powerful people on the battlefield.
Now anybody with a bit of gunpowder,
a gunpowder-fired weapon,
could basically bring them down in seconds.
(gunshot) (armor crashing)
(smoke whooshes) (slow dramatic music)
But for all its destructive wonder,
black gunpowder isn't without its drawbacks.
Gunpowder's revolutionizing warfare,
but of course there has to be a downside.
And the thing about gunpowder is
it leaves lots of smoke everywhere.
Hello? Anybody there?
Hello? Anyone?
(cannon booms)
This causes a whole host of issues,
from not being able to see the enemy,
to difficulties in giving orders.
And gun powder is notoriously temperamental.
If the ingredients aren't mixed
in exactly the right ratios,
you'll end up with something that won't burn.
(trumpet wah-wah)
Despite trying to improve the recipe,
warring nations continued to grapple
with the black powder for 500 years.
And then in 1845 in Switzerland...
(man yodeling)
Very nice.
(banjo music) A new and improved explosive
that revolutionizes the battlefield
is accidentally discovered.
It's name? Guncotton.
All through the early 19th century
you've got a new generation of experimental chemists
that are trying all kinds of stuff out for the first time.
They're combining new chemicals,
they're making new substances.
One of those scientists,
a certain Christian Schonbine,
is knocking a little something up in the kitchen.
Making a delicious meal?
Not unless you consider
nitric and sulfuric acid a delicious meal.
Ah.
So dear old Christian is boiling up
a heady cocktail of nitric and sulfuric acid
on the stove when...
(glass shattering)
(peaceful music) Whoops,
someone's in trouble.
That's not something you want in a lab,
let alone in a kitchen.
Not wishing to anger his wife,
Schonbine quickly mops up his mess.
He grabs the nearest thing to mop up the spill
which happens to be his wife's cotton apron.
And the fabric soaks up the acid,
and Christian just hangs it by the stove through dry.
Good as new. She'll never know.
Yeah, house and safety manual here.
Now I can't see anything about
mopping up cocktails of acid with your clothing.
Oh, I think you're looking at the new edition.
I'm sure it used to be on page 36.
Well either way, Christian Schonbine
is relieved that a domestic crisis has been averted.
His relief is very short lived.
(fire roars)
Whoosh.
Without warning,
the apron actually explodes in a sudden flash.
(fire roars) Wow.
That is gonna be tricky to explain.
Domestic crisis not averted.
With his quick but shoddy cleanup efforts,
Schonbine has accidentally created a brand new material,
which today we know is nitrocellulose.
(upbeat music)
The cotton in the apron
is a natural fiber made from cellulose.
Now cellulose is sometimes known as a biopolymer,
because it's a really long molecule
made up of chains of more than 10,000 glucose molecules
all joined together.
All plants make cellulose.
It's to strengthen the walls of their individual cells.
And it's estimated that at least a hundred billion tons
of the stuff are made by plants every year.
So when Schonbine uses
the cellulose-rich cotton of his wife's apron
to mop up those spilled acids,
something special happens.
When the cellulose is exposed to hot nitric acid,
the highly reactive nitrate groups
attach themselves along the cellulose chain
to make a reactive, but stable, compound: nitrocellulose.
Christian had accidentally discovered
the perfect formula for producing a highly flammable,
but otherwise inert material.
Christian Schonbine may be clumsy,
but he's no fool.
He realizes the potential of his accidental discovery
and sends samples to his colleagues,
boasting of how he's found a way to transform cotton
into a powerful explosive.
I wouldn't wanna be the mailman carrying that parcel.
Schonbine carries on experimenting,
refining the formula and the technique
so it no longer needs spills or aprons.
So what you get at the end of the manufacturing process
is something that looks a lot like cotton wool,
but is way more dangerous.
(fire roars)
Schonbine's deadly cotton wool
is more powerful than gun powder,
but it also has another benefit.
(somber music)
(cannon blasting)
It's smokeless,
which is quite handy when you're trying to stay hidden.
(cannons blasting)
Warmongers everywhere seize
Christian's invention with gusto,
and they call it guncotton.
It is an immediate success.
Within a year there are factories
making gun cotton for artillery shells across Europe,
including this one in England.
Unfortunately in 1847,
less than a year into the new guncotton venture,
the factory explodes, (large explosion)
destroying two buildings and killing 21 people.
That doesn't stop people
trying to make guncotton at a huge scale,
but I'm afraid to say like the first factory,
a lot of them go...
(multiple explosions)
(slow banjo music)
Schonbine's new material
is about to be put to the test.
When the American Civil War erupts,
the Confederate shells are being powered by guncotton.
(slow flute music)
But the Union Army still sees guncotton as too unpredictable
and sticks with the less explosive black powder.
(cannons blasting)
By the time Christian dies in 1868,
gunpowder is still the go-to propellant for firearms.
His invention is still a bit too dangerous.
(large explosion)
An explosive that's too explosive.
Go figure.
It takes 20 years before someone finds a way
to make guncotton less likely to explode
while still maintaining its explosive power.
(upbeat music) A British duo,
English explosives expert Frederick Abel,
and Scottish scientist James Dewar,
find a way to process guncotton
without it exploding.
Which is great. Problem solved.
But then the guys have an even better idea.
Abel and Dewar figure out
that if they combine guncotton with nitroglycerin
and a little bit of petroleum jelly,
they could make a powerful
and reliable smokeless propellant.
They call it cordite.
But to make it,
this mixture needs one more ingredient: acetone.
That's right, nail polish remover.
Together this gives shells and munitions
all the power of nitroglycerin
combined with the smokeless advantages
of Schonbine's kitchen discovery.
This was the breakthrough the military world needed.
Cordite is quickly adopted by the British Army and the Navy
as their standard propellant.
The discovery of cordite was no accident,
which is a good thing
because those working in the explosives industry
could do with a break from things accidentally exploding.
(large explosion)
Anyway, back to the story.
When the Great War kicks off in 1914,
it's cordite that rules the battlefields.
It's used in guns, and torpedo warheads, and grenades.
And even in blasting explosives
for use with bridges and mines.
(large explosion)
New Naval cordite factories
are opening all over the country.
Remember the nail polish remover?
Well before long,
the raw materials used to make this crucial ingredient
begin to run short.
The British have got plenty of guns,
but they're running out of acetone
which they need in order to fire stuff out of them.
Now acetone comes from fermented wood
and it takes a hundred tons of
birch, beech, or maple
to create one single ton of this stuff.
The problem is they need to get this wood
largely from the United States,
but there's a Naval blockade,
so they can't get the wood.
So they can't create the acetone.
They need a solution and fast.
First, manufacturers try making acetone from maize,
but this crop has a more urgent purpose: to feed people.
(slow piano music) Feeding people
is more important than killing them after all.
The Army is forced to call in a secret weapon: kids.
Notices appear in classrooms across the United Kingdom,
urging kids to collect acorns and horse chestnuts,
or conkers to us Brits,
which contain acetone.
So they earned seven Shillings and six Pence
for every hundred weight of these
they handed into the War Office.
That works out at about 22 British Pounds
or $30 for every 50 kilos of these they handed in.
(dramatic music)
3000 tons of the nuts are converted to acetone
to mix with the guncotton
to make the cordite
to get the British guns firing again.
Explosives don't get much more homegrown
than guncotton from wood pulp
and acetone from conkers.
The impact of explosives
isn't just seen on the battlefield.
Throughout the years
scientists have tinkered with this accidental explosive
to create new materials,
including plastics and even clothes.
Depending on how much nitrogen is added to the cellulose,
the properties of nitrocellulose can vary a lot.
By mixing guncotton
with ether and alcohol,
you get another new material: collodion.
This collodion is a thick, clearish liquid
that dries to make a flexible, plasticy solid.
This is all happening at the same time
that photography is taking off,
and collodion is seen as a replacement for albumen
in the fixing and development of images.
It worked well,
but there was one minor drawback.
Collodion is still guncotton,
so the photos would be prone to going up in flames.
Whoosh.
This didn't seem to put people off, though.
And when movies were invented,
the film was made from collodion, too.
The collodion film was semi-transparent
and flexible enough to be wound into reels,
but under the heat of the projector lamps
this nitrocellulose plastic did occasionally...
Whoosh.
Yeah.
And it was around this time
that a French Count called Hilaire de Chardonnet
found a way of squeezing the diluted guncotton
through narrow holes to make a silk like thread,
which, perhaps unwisely, he then made into clothes.
Somewhat unoriginally,
it becomes known as Chardonnet silk.
This synthetic silk was actually
pretty popular for a year or so,
with cloaks and gowns being made of the fibers.
Chardonnet even exhibited it
at the Paris Exhibition in 1889.
Clothes made from guncotton?
I think you can guess where this is going.
Whoosh.
Exactly.
But while these descendants
of Schonbine's original mixture had their issues,
they herald in era of chemical discovery
that would give rise to true plastics
and synthetic fabrics that...
(feigns whooshing)
Don't explode.
And more than a century on,
nitrocellulose still has an important place
in our modern world.
You find it in inks, adhesives,
varnishes, and resins.
So it's even used to make fake pearls and patent leather.
Have you been in my wardrobe again?
Without mankind's determination
to find new and more efficient ways to blow stuff up,
we'd never have had some of these amazing products.
But none of this might have come about
if it hadn't been for a guilty husband
trying to make amends in the kitchen.
(cheerful theme music)
(techno music)
For the last half-century,
the American taxpayer has contributed
around $17 billion a year to NASA.
So here's a quick question: is it worth it?
And the short answer is yes,
for some very good reasons.
When NASA scientists and engineers
are creating new hardware for use in space,
they've always got a part of their brain that's asking,
"How can we use this here on Earth?"
If say you pop on your wireless headphones,
clean your house,
and then have a quick run on your anti-gravity treadmill,
then all of these things have started in a NASA lab.
We can thank the ongoing space program for things like
cordless tools, memory foam,
and even cochlear implants.
(rocket engines roaring)
But not many people know
that the technology developed to enable us
to see into the depths of space
is now being used in the fight against breast cancer.
Whoa, that's a bit of a big leap.
(slide whistle extends) It is,
and also it isn't. (slide whistle retracts)
The core principle in any form of cancer treatment,
the fact that the sooner you can
cotton on to cancer being in the body,
the faster you can treat it,
the better.
(slow soothing music)
And how does the satellite do that?
Well it's all down to the technology of imaging.
In essence, seeing things that you couldn't see before.
But first, let's understand the treatment of cancer.
Ancient Egyptian and Greek scholars
were among the first to describe cancers,
but they suggested no cure.
In the Middle East, the Islamic Golden Age
brings huge developments in all forms of science,
but in this case,
anatomy and physiology.
And in fact, medicine in general.
By the time the Scientific Revolution happens in the West,
surgical techniques and our knowledge of the human body
are far more advanced than they were previously.
(upbeat music)
For centuries,
the best that medicine could offer breast cancer victims
was digging into their flesh
and cutting out anything that looked strange.
By the 1960's
the first breast cancers were being detected by mammograms.
Although these only typically show up
the so-called suspicious masses.
Which is better,
but still not digging-free.
It takes a biopsy,
a physical sampling of the suspicious tissue,
to even figure out whether it's cancerous or not.
What's needed
is a whole new way of detecting cancer.
And that brings us neatly back to a very special satellite.
(techno music) At 8:33 A.M.
on April 24th, 1919,
the Space Shuttle Discovery ascends gracefully
into the skies above the Kennedy Space Center.
Space launches always give me the chills.
I mean just watching these gigantic rockets,
they weigh something like 2 1/2 thousand tons altogether,
and they're heading straight up
almost as if they're floating.
This is the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope,
which was the most complicated piece of equipment
that had ever been launched into space before.
But it's so small.
(record pausing)
Oh, right. That's a model, isn't it?
Yep. Yeah, I can see that now.
(techno music resumes)
Telescopes on the Earth's surface
are fighting a constant battle with our atmosphere
because whilst it may look transparent to our eyes,
it's actually very wibbly wobbly.
It's like a nobbled glass.
(lightning striking)
Even if you can minimize atmospheric distortions,
you've still got to contend with the weather.
You've gotta contend with cloud.
(techno music slows)
The launch of the Hubble Telescope
would give NASA astronomers an unobstructed view
of the cosmos 24 hours a day.
It's set to orbit the Earth
at about 540 kilometers above the surface,
or about 330 miles.
That puts your average home telescope to shame.
It's like taking a full scale
observatory from Earth, (dramatic music)
and throwing it up above the atmosphere.
The telescope,
named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble,
is heralded as the next generation in space exploration.
This was a huge undertaking, even for NASA.
There weren't gonna be people on the telescope,
so the telescope itself has to stabilize itself,
(robotic movements)
take an image over a long period of time,
(camera clicking)
and then transfer that information
back to Earth for processing.
Hubble is about the size of a school bus
(horn honking)
and it orbits the Earth every 95 minutes.
(metallic whooshing)
The project costs
a whopping $1.5 billion. (slow techno music)
Just a few weeks after its launch,
Hubble begins to send back the pictures
that everyone's been waiting decades to see.
(camera clicking) But there's a problem.
(trumpet wah-wah)
The photos are just awful.
(dramatic music)
The stars which should have looked to Hubble
like crisp points of light
are surrounded by a fuzzy halo.
Hubble's mirror is one of the most precisely engineered,
precisely ground mirrors ever created.
It's so flat
that if the mirror were the size of the Atlantic Ocean,
then no wave will be more than three inches tall.
However, it just wasn't polished to be the right shape.
In order to get a super sharp image
it had to have a specific curvature,
and it was ever so slightly too flat.
(upbeat music)
In fact it's just 2,200 nanometers too flat.
An error just 1/50th the size of a human hair
threatens the whole $1.5 billion enterprise.
It was this small mistake
that put so much of Hubble's science on hold.
Extra, extra. Read all about it.
It's little wonder that the press
jumped on this straight away,
branding the Hubble the $1.5 billion blunder.
(metallic whooshing)
But every cloud has a silver lining,
and the experts at NASA use this time to improve the design
of their image sensor.
(dramatic music)
So this is now the cutting edge of this technology.
Thinner, higher resolution that can detect
all different wavelengths of visible light.
And it has a really high dynamic range,
which means that in one image
it can detect things that are really bright and really dim.
Now this is the crucial bit,
because it's this improved image sensor,
otherwise known as a CCD,
that revolutionizes breast cancer treatment.
With this new CCD chip,
images can be taken at two different angles
at the same time of the breast,
which is then fed directly into the computer.
Using the NASA chips,
the new technique automatically triangulates the position
of a suspicious mass in real time.
With having such a precise location,
surgeons are able to go in with a needle
to potentially remove this area of mass,
rather than having to go in and dig
and try and find this part.
This was huge.
Compared to what they had to do before,
the new technique was life-changingly better.
For a start, it can be done in a radiologist's office
rather than an operating theater.
What's more, going in with just a needle
results in a tiny pinprick scar
rather than a disfiguring scar
that took place under the previous procedure.
And it can spot smaller masses in the breast
allowing potential cancers to be caught earlier,
significantly earlier.
It's really hard to overstate
the impact that this new technology has had
on breast cancer treatment and diagnoses
since the late 1990's.
It's turned what used to be a traumatic and lengthy process
into a minor procedure with a lot less to worry about.
(cheerful upbeat music)
Not only has this technology
helped the fight against breast cancer,
Hubble can also finally live up to its promise.
The images that the Hubble Space Telescope
has sent back now are absolutely astonishing.
(camera shutter clicks)
We've seen galaxies that are about
10 billion light years away.
(camera shutter clicks)
We've seen glorious towers of nebula,
where there are (camera shutter clicks)
newborn stars forming and where old stars have died.
Hubble has really shown us
what a beautiful and diverse universe we truly live in.
The success of this
accidental medical breakthrough is a revelation to NASA,
who decide that maybe more of their tech
could be usefully repurposed.
NASA now makes a thing about
offering its technological breakthroughs
to other industries outside of space travel.
And they may have found one in an instrument
designed to detect caves and volcanoes or Mars.
(metallic whooshing) (dramatic music)
This is a really sensitive instrument
that's able to pick up infrared radiation,
which we can essentially think of as heat.
It's so sensitive that it's able to detect
a temperature variation of about 0.15 degrees Celsius.
That means that when it's used on the breast,
it can detect tiny changes in heat throughout the tissue,
which is caused by changing blood flow.
It's known that cancer cells emit a specific compound
that alters blood flow,
and blood flow usually affects temperature.
And so if you're able to detect the temperature variations,
you can probably detect where there might be
a cancer cell located.
So in effect,
NASA's blunder has accidentally invented not one
but two different technologies
that are saving lives around the world.
It's the ultimate feel good story.
Rather than being the $1.5 billion blunder,
The Hubble Space Telescope ended up saving
tens of billions of dollars and millions of lives.
Now if that doesn't give you the warm fuzzies,
you must be as cold and dead as space itself.
(metallic whooshing)
(upbeat music)