James Burke : Connections, Episode 7, "The Long Chain", 5 of 5 (CC)

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Episode 7 of James Burke's most well-known series "Connections" which explores the surprising and unexpected ways that our modern technological world came into existence. Each episode investigates the background of usually one particular modern invention and how it came into being. These explorations are an attempt to locate the "connections" between various historical figures who seemingly had nothing to do with each other in their own times, however once connected, these same figures combined to produce some of the most profound impacts on our modern day world; in a "1+1=3" type of way.

It is this type of investigation that is the core idea behind the Knowledge Web project, whereby sophisticated software is being developed to attempt to discover these subtle interconnections automatically. See http://k-web.org.

See channel page for purchase options.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• James
• Burke
• Connections
• Science
• History
• The
• Long
• Chain
• Slavery
• Rubber
• Chemistry
• Sugar
• Plantation
• Far
• East
• Spices
• British
• Empire
• Imperial
• Color
• Dyes
• Perkins
• Handkerchief
• Acetylene
• Fertilizer
• Sodium
• Nitrate
• Expensive
• Bosh
• Germany
• Calcium
• Carbide
• Cheap
• Polymers
• Dupont
• Nylon
• Plastic
• JamesBurkeFan

[stupidjoinrequiremen]

thanks so much for posting these!

[JamesBurkeWeb]

None required. My pleasure.

[hdtwoodsman]

Thanks for posting. It's amazing how much history Burke packs in this hour.

[JamesBurkeWeb]

You're very welcome. I love this episode too. A real gem!

[LiqnLag]

@largefry The gist of the link is that to really scale up rubber production, Macintosh was trying to get The English colonies to grow Rubber Trees on their plantations' fringe. The problem was that when they pushed that angle, all the colonies were wanting to use that bit of open plantation space for was to grow a substitute for the costly quinine (in order to treat the wide spread malaria problem).

Endlessly amazing show.

[TheZorch]

@Willldragon Graphene, a form of carbon, will eventually replace silicon in micro-electronics. This will exponentially increase the speed processors, which will be able to run at very high speeds with very little heat and require far less power. Small hand-held devices will be as powerful as desktop computers. PC likely won't ever go away, but they'll become more modular than they are now. Wen you want to upgrade a computer just replace one of the plugin modules.

[Willldragon]

@TheZorch Plastic gave us a world where every product could be replacated as a "cheap artificial material copy" making it so that anyone who could afford cheap plastic could have all the random crap they wanted.

Now, in the digial age with silicon, many product exists as a digital application within a product. A camera can now exist as simple app on a phone (which at this point really shouldn't be called a phone!) rather than an actual physical camera.

What will happen next?

[phpwebber]

So happy these are online. Thanks

[aikigeorge3]

@PennnSmith nobody understands satire anymore pity

[TheZorch]

The ending of each episode makes the hairs on the back of your head stand up, because as James Burke goes through each chain in the link (ha ha) it dawns on you how absolutely right he is. And, how a serious of accidents and seemingly unrelated discoveries all came together to help make the world we have today. Its mind blowing! Plastic has changed our modern world more than almost anything else, except for silicon of course.

[monobryn64]

I like how the episode titles often reveal the ending.

In this case "The Long Chain" is the polymer, of course.

[luridplanet]

Fritz Haber and Einstein were good friends until Haber started work on poison gas weapons

[largefry]

Absolutely fantastic! But I have one problem:

I can't quite figure out what the causal relationship between Macintosh's inability to get rubber and the search for a quinine substitute is. It seems to me that the Imperial Administration would have been interested in artificial quinine with or without Macintosh trying to get rubber from the Far East. This is the only episode so far where I have been unable to connect every dot along with Burke. Can someone help me out?

[GatorVicki1]

I just found these because of a link a friend posted on FB. Thank you so much for making these programs available again. i loved this show when it was on the first time around and I am watching all of them again. Thank you!