CONNECTIONS 2 EPISODE REVIEW The following is a school paper written by a recent acquaintence, Cheryl Behrends, commenting on one of the Connections 2 episodes. - - - - - - - - - - H330P UMKC The Works of Western Man Cheryl Behrends October 4, 2000 Media Review - Video #2 Title: WHODUNIT? - Connections 2 - James Burke Viewed 10/1/00 Produced by Richard Sattin for PBS James Burke begins this segment of the imaginative series, Connections 2, holding a notebook filled with portraits. The first is Steve Davis, snooker champion. We watch Davis shoot, then Burke picks up the que ball, and we're off on another Connections voyage. Burke connects this que ball, through the twists and turns of history, to a series of technological innovations finally resulting in the first criminal conviction based on the new technology of fingerprint identification. Connections and Connections 2 are video series which give the viewer an exhilarating and often amusing romp through the labyrinths of days past; a fantastic view of the technological trail of evidence from one event to another and from one idea to another - we get to see at one sitting a stretch of the illogical paths of our of history. In The Wealth and Poverty of Nations, Landes repeatedly points out that the development of technology in Western Europe and elsewhere is marked by its unevenness. Industrialization did not by any means spread like a blanket, smoothly rolling over the countryside. Our histories sometimes turn on fluke events; more often they are moved by the power of one - the personality of an individual. Burke continues his story with a stroll into the courtyard of the University of Bologna - the same institution where Galileo once exasperated his teachers - and the medical career of Dr. George Bauer. Dr. Bauer obtained his medical degree and returned home to a life of general practice. But how does he connect to this story? As Volti points out, technological innovations sometimes have unforeseen applications. Dr. Bauer had an interest in mining, so in his spare time he wrote a book - the first technological bestseller - on mining technique and theory. In his native England, this mining technology was soon turned to the application of colonization - everywhere that mercantilism and colonialism thrived, cannons and all the weaponry of war were required. From Bauer's interest in mining the technologies of war grew more refined - a consequence undoubtedly unforeseen by Dr. Bauer himself. Most aggressive of all the colonizers was Spain, who had depleted her many spoils in useless luxury, and put King Charles V on the verge of bankruptcy. So to the rescue sailed his son, Phillip, who sent a fleet of ships to conquer Elizabeth of England and confidently named the fleet The Spanish Armada. The heavily armed but large and lumbering Spanish fleet met with a nasty surprise in the seas off Britain's shores, for by this year of 1588, England had already modernized the design of her seagoing vessels and made them much more swift and maneuverable. Instead of huge galleys powered by the labor of oarsmen, Britain used the caravel design, with its rounded bottom, lateen sails, tiller and rudder. The British ships darted in and out of the Armada, shooting at will from close quarters, ducking under cannon fire, and dealing Spain a stunning defeat. At the end of the battle, Elizabeth's losses stood at Spain -- 164 ships; England - 0 ships. So, victorious over the Spanish, the brewing industrialization of England was free to continue apace. Faced with overpopulation and the threat of deforestation, the colonizing British turned to coal. From the refinement of coal technologies, it soon became possible to make plate glass, and then - mirrors. Louis IV of France, the egomaniac who called himself "The Sun King", lined his great rooms with mirrors. This same glass plate and mirror technology was then put to use by James Hadley, who invented the sextant and hence made navigation significantly safer through the application of geometry to calculate position and distances at sea. From our current perspective, it is obvious that the coal workers who refined their processes could not have foreseen this eventual application. But technological developments never occur in a vacuum, and in the social and cultural context of Britain, this dramatic improvement in the safety of sea travel and the accuracy of navigation undoubtedly encouraged even more efforts at British colonization of other lands, for the purposes of Christianizing natives, solving British overpopulation problems, and above all - profits for the powerful British chartered companies throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. In 1787, a man named De Saussure adapted this same navigational technology to his own personal quest - measuring the height of mountains -- specifically, Mont Blanc, which he did with respectable accuracy. On one of his many mountain hikes in this pursuit, he discovered sea shell fossils embedded in granite. De Saussure theorized from this evidence that the earth must be very old - millions and millions of years old, and this fact, in turn, found its way into the sphere of influence of a young man named Charles Darwin. If the earth were millions and millions of years old, Darwin thought, there had been enough time for species to change and adapt. So from this particular application of technology sprang a radical new world view - and Darwin's theories of the history of the planet and its inhabitants are still provoking heated debates today. Volti's theories on technology are proven once more, as Hadley and De Saussure could not have foreseen the cultural, sociological and religious implications of what they probably considered their "pure" scientific research. Darwin had a cousin named Gaulton, who believed each individual had a unique genetic mix, which could be deciphered and coded. His ideas about what he called Eugenics attracted the attention, unhappily, of the Nazi party in Germany, who turned the fledgling science to their own twisted sociological ends. The scientific theories Gaulton espoused thus led, through the lens of those with power and a cultural ideal in mind, to one of the great and tragic injustices of recent times. But Gaulton's work also resulted in the technology which Scotland Yard first used in 1902 - when they arrested a man based on his fingerprints identified on a que ball. And so we are brought full circle back to the que ball in Burke's hand. The twists and turns of Burke's tales in the Connections and Connections 2 series are a marvelous fit with Landes, Jacob, Cowan and Volti, who all repeatedly stress that the history of industrialization is messy. They warn us to refrain from sweeping assumptions and broad generalizations. Just as the life-changing events of our personal lives are influenced by chance encounters as well as long term plans, the uniqueness of a single person's vision can change the world in unforeseen ways. "Tug at one thing in nature," said John Muir, "and you find it connected to everything else." In just the same way, if we study one item in the industrial development of Western Europe, we find it connected to everything else that came before - and everything that came after, as well. - - - - - - - - - -