James Burke : Connections, Episode 9, "Countdown", 2 of 5 (CC)

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Episode 9 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.

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[quick, successive drum rolls]

[♪ dramatic, arabic style ♪]
[quick, successive drum rolls]

[!Boom!]
[♫ ♫ ...]

[♫ ♫ ...]

[!!Boom!!]
[♫ ♫ ...]

[♫ ♫ ...]

[!!!BOOM!!!]
[♫ ♫ ...]

Well, so much for the defenders,
what about the attackers out here?

Well they had a much harder time.

They had to try to get those guns on the bastion out

with whatever they were carrying at the time
- the instruments they had

in general that tended to be this:

It's an astronomical instrument called an "astrolabe".
it's a kind of medieval

astronomer's computer that can do all sorts of amazing
things relating to the sky and eclipses and so on.

Fortunately for the illiterate gunners,

on the back it has a very simple star sighting device
which you can also use

to find out how high above you those guns are
that you want to knock out.

You just line up the sights, read off the thing, and it says
7 degrees, so you know how high to elevate your gun.

Ok, how far away are they, that's important.

Well, if you take the astrolabe and turn it
like that, horizontal, you end up with

a device that was called a circumferenta. Here's one,

and that's used for getting
the distance away from you that those guns are.

You line it up north/south 'cause it's got a compass.
Then you use these two sights here

to draw a bead on the guns you want to destroy

and you can see from the scale how many degrees they are
away from north -to one side, as it were, from you here.

You then go down the road
a known distance and do that again.

And that comes down to some very simple geometry.

Which they used to do on their drumheads like this.

We're here. That other observation point, let's say
is down there and we know that's 100 meters away.

We just took a bead on the guns that was
this much off north - if that's north.

Down the road, when we did it, perhaps it would have been
like that so we know the gun we want to hit is there.

If we get a pair of compasses,

and use a scale, that's a 100 meters,
then that's going to be about 110,

and this is going to be about 105 so we know how
far away to shoot if we're going to shoot from here or here.

Fine! That was alright except that
while you were doing all this - they shot you.

So, when Leonard Digges, and Englishman
brought out in about 1560 a thing called a

"theodelite" that did all these jobs in one go
he was a very popular fellow!

This is it.

See? It's got a plumb line, so you can set it up straight,

and a built in compass for pointing north.

Well, the bit for finding the angle of the target
off to one side of you,

works exactly the same way as the circumferenta,

and so does the geometry bit,

that you do afterwards to find out how far away from
the target your guns will be once you've done two sightings.

The new thing
is the part that tells you how high up the target is.

This bit.

With Digges' Theodelitus,
you know all you need fast enough to stay alive.

What you don't know, is whether you're in the right place
or not, because,

in spite of all these sophisticated instruments,
at the time, maps were a joke. Look.

This was all you got.

The rivers you were going to cross

a few bridges - where there was a bridge -

and if there was a town that was going to give you
something to eat...

you got a little box with a steeple on it.
That's all you had.

No wonder so many people got lost.

Anyway, Leonard Digges with his theodelite solved that
map making problem thanks, in the main, to a recent

and rather unsavory divorce case.

[♪ wedding march, discordant ♪]

This is the short but sobering tale of what happened to
monasteries in England because Henry VIII divorced his wife.

And how little Jack Horner - pulled out his plum

[♫ ♫ ...]

See Henry divorced his wife in defiance of the Pope,

turned the country Protestant,

and in 1536 started taking the
lands and properties away from these monasteries.

A.) because they were Catholic, and

B.) because they had twice as much money as he had

and he was a bit short of cash.

[♪ comic ♪]

Now, at some places like Glastonbury
they thought they knew how to buy a little time.

[♪ deranged ♪]

The idea was probably cooked up by the Abbot's steward

a certain "Jack Horner":

Send a pie to the King containing
title deeds to some Abbey properties.

[♪ deranged ♪]

This rich little pie thing was supposed to make the king
conveniently forget *the rest* of the Abbey's property.

Well, on the way to London, little Jack Horner
"pulled out his plum" (one of the property deeds)

and the King got what was left.

Which *wasn't enough*.

[♪ comic, goofy ♪]

So the plan failed.

Henry took everything.

And that's why mapmaking got better.

Because when Henry sold all those monastic lands
he kicked off a surveyor's bonanza!

Because all the buyers wanted their land measured first.

[♪ majestic, baroque ♪]

Christopher Saxton, one of the surveyors,

put his profession on the map in 1584 by producing
the first national atlas in the western world.

Showing almost every river and town
and a rough idea of the terrain.

His maps didn't, of course,

include Scotland,
because it was a separate sovereign state at the time

Strangely enough, John Ogilby left Scotland out of
his maps too nearly a hundred years later

when Scotland was ruled from London.

These were the first systematic surveys
of all main roads in the country.

And, like this one of the road north from London,

they showed: county names, towns, bridges and
distanced marked by the new statute mile.

And yet, Ogilby went only as far as the border
with all this fancy detail.

Up here in the Scottish Highlands,
there wasn't anything like that.

Why bother? said the English,
look at it there's nothing worth bothering about.

Well, the 1715 Rebellion proved that there was.

And still nothing was done.

Until, in 1724,

the Member of Parliament for Bath,
a retired major-general called George Wade,

was sent up here to report on how the

post word pacification of the clans was going.

He wrote back a letter saying that it wasn't

and that they were as ready to revolt as they ever had been

and that what this country needed was: more garrisons,

more troops, and above all
a road to move the troops around on.

So the King said, "Ok, go ahead!"
and they started to work.

The work took 500 men with picks and shovels

and they laid a layer of large stones
and a layer of smaller stones

and then packed the surface with gravel
and, where necessary,

built drainage ditches on either side of the road.

When the military road was finished,

it was one of the best in Europe.

And to this day, its named after the man who built it.

This is called "Wade's Road".

[♪ "God Save The Queen" ♪]

[♪ "God Save The Queen" ♪]

The English were so pleased with Wade that in 1745
when he was using his road to chase Bonny Prince Charlie

They even added a verse to the national anthem!

"God grant that Marshall Wade,
May by thy mighty aid, Victory bring."

"May he sedition hush,
And like a torrent rush, Rebellious Scots to crush!!"

"God save the King!"

[♫ ♫ ↑↑↑]

To a road maker, the road over Corryarrick Pass
must rank as Wade's greatest triumph.

It's ironic, because
he built it for English soldiers going north

And in 1745 Bonnie Prince Charlie used it for
Scottish soldiers going south

on the trip that took them to
- oh, well - 130 miles from London

and the banks collapsed and
everybody panicked and the King packed his bags.

It was the 1745 Rebellion that actually finally convinced
the English they should map Scotland for their generals.

And one of the surveyors on that job was a fellow called Roy
and he kept pushing for a national map of the entire island.

And still nothing was done.

And again it took war -

this time the fear of invasion from France -

to get the English to move.

Finally, in 1791, the Ordnance Survey was set up
and off they went.

In 1820 they decided to map Ireland.

And that decision help to kick off
a new kind of illumination.

Because the very first measurement they wanted to take

was from Divis Mountain, here, outside Belfast,

right the way across over to
that mountain in Donegal called Slieve Snaght

[♪ sad, forlorn ♪]

You remember that business the gunners did of working
out how far away a target was by drawing a triangle?

That's what triangulation is.

Well, Divis and Slieve Snaght were two points of a triangle
with the third on a mountain in Scotland.

In autumn 1824, the problem was, you couldn't see from
Divis to Slieve Snaght because the weather was so bad.

Weeks of fiddling went by and still,
every time the Royal Engineers looked-