My high school chemistry teacher – who, I hasten to add, was no “captain video” – had us watch an old BBS series called “Connections.” It was terrific. Every episode traced the unpredictable paths leading to technological innovations that changed the world.
As an example: efficient trade ships encouraged the mushrooming Atlantic trade in the age of sail, and increased demand for pitch to protect all those boats. English forests could not support the demand, and one inventor turned to coal tar as a substitute. In development, the boiler he was using to make the coal tar exploded, and another inventor was inspired to use the explosive vapors to power gas lighting. Gas lighting was such a success that waste products of coal gas got out of hand. Collecting these wastes cheaply, a third inventor turned them to dissolving rubber and creating the rubber industry out of the easily molded solution. He pressed for more rubber plantations in the British colonies, but was hampered by the treat of malaria to colonizers. Seeking an artificial medicine to treat it, a fourth inventor instead accidentally discovered artificial dye. German chemists pounced on the discovery, and the German industrial revolution was powered in large part by its chemical works. Industrial growth created a food shortage, since Germany was dependent on foreign nitrates for fertilizer, but chemists found a way to synthesize nitrates – just in time to fuel World War I, since those same nitrates made high explosives, and Germany could not fight for long without a native supply of explosives. A byproduct of this nitrate process was acetylene, and attempts to make something useful from the acetylene led directly to plastic.
So ships made gas lights made rubber made aspirin made dye made large-scale farming made war made plastic. Got all that?
There are ten episodes to the series: one introduction to the notion of how dependent we are upon capricious technological changes, and how vulnerable we are to breakdowns of our technological systems; eight historical analyses like the one above; and a final exploration of what to do about our dependence and vulnerability regarding technology. The deep questions of episodes one and ten stand in sharp contrast to the wit of the intervening stories of invention. And, while James Burke’s fashion sense may be horribly dated, the show remains very current.
The show was successful enough to elicit three sequels, none of them very good. “The Day the Universe Changed” treats philosophical landmarks instead, and feels more nebulous than “Connections.” “Connections II” reduces the show from sixty minutes to thirty, leaving almost no time between introduction and conclusion for a chain of inventions. “Connections III” returns to a one-hour format, but is the weakest of the lot, because the connections are no longer causal. Sometimes, the connection is as weak as two important figures living in the same city.
What I can’t understand is why all these later titles are readily available to the public, in PBS catalogs and the like, while the original is not. Local libraries may have it, but often only part of the whole series; repeated viewing destroys the VHS tapes, and “Connections” predates DVD. If you can get your hands on a copy, do so; it’s worth the investment. Then tell me where I can get mine.