Discovering Treasure
Hal and I watched another episode of James Burke's BBC series Connections last night. Wow this is fascinating stuff! I never watched the series when it aired in the late 1970s, but it holds up surprisingly well for television that's three decades old. Burke is a science historian, and each episode traces the scientific and technological breakthroughs that were stepping stones to some modern technological necessity. The path through the intervening history is always complex and circuitous and each individual stop is a story in itself. The show skips lightly from exotic location to historical re-enactment, guided along by Burke's puckish narration, and inevitably draws connections that I had no previous idea of. For instance (and this will sound mega-dorky) I had simply no idea how interesting and varied is the history of coal tar. The damn' stuff turns out to be crucial to everything from artificial dyes (mauve!) to oxy-acetylene welding to the illumination of London to the invention of artificial fertilizers. And there I thought it was just good for dandruff shampoos... For anyone who means to write alternate history or alternate technology fiction, this series seems like an absolutely invaluable grounding. For that matter, for anyone doing home schooling, they could do a lot worse than getting this series for their charges. If, like me, you've somehow managed to miss it up 'til now, by all means go forth and seek it.