99% Invisible - 348- Three Things That Made the Modern Economy

Episode Date: April 3, 2019

50 Things That Made The Modern Economy is a podcast that explores the fascinating histories of a number of powerful inventions and their far-reaching consequences. This week, 99% Invisible is featuring three episodes that explain how the s-bend pipe revolutionized indoor plumbing, how high-tech ‘death ray’ led to the invention of radar, and the impact of bricks. Subscribe to *50 Things That Made The Modern Economy *on iTunes and RadioPublic

This is 99% Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Tim Hartford is a master at picking out the perfect little story that explains some huge economic principle. In his long-running Financial Times column called The Undercover Economist and in his books and in his radio shows, he's been my go-to guy for learning about the economics and math behind the world at large. His latest radio series for the BBC is called 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy,

and with this project, Tim has made a podcast almost perfectly crafted to light up the pleasure centers of my nerd brain. After he produced 50 fascinating stories about 50 everyday objects, he decided to come back for another season that premiered last month with another 50 many documentaries of inventions that are so basic but so fundamental to how we live. We have three of the 50 things on our show today, Radar, which I'm sure you know about, but you have no idea how fascinating its origins actually are. The S-Bend, the crucial innovation in pipes that made indoor plumbing possible, and bricks.

You know what bricks are, bricks are cool. You're in for a treat. Up first, the story of Radar. In Kenya's Rift Valley, Samson Kamau sat at home, wondering when he'd be able to get back to work. He should have been in a greenhouse on the shores of Lake Nivasha as usual,

packing roses for exports to Europe. But the outbound cargo flights were grounded. Because the Icelandic volcano, A.F.Yatler-Yurkuk, had, without sparing the slightest thought for Samsung, spewed a cloud of dangerous ash into Europe's airspace. Nobody knew how long the disruption might last. Workers like Samsung feared for their jobs. airspace. Nobody knew how long the disruption might last. Workers like Samson feared for their jobs. Business owners had to throw away tons of flowers that were wilting in crates at Nairobi Airport.

As it happened, flights was yomed within a few days, but the interruption dramatically illustrated just how much of the modern economy relies on flying beyond the 10 million passengers who get on flights every day. AFYATLA YURKWIC reduced global output by nearly 5 billion dollars. You could trace the extent of our reliance on air travel to many inventions. The jet engine perhaps, or the aeroplane itself. But sometimes one invention needs another to unlock its full potential. For the aviation industry that story starts with the development of the death ray. Now wait, it starts with an attempt to develop the death ray. This was back in 1935. Officials in the British

Air Ministry were worried about falling behind Nazi Germany in the technological arms race. The Death Ray idea intrigued them. They'd been offering a thousand-pound prize for anyone who could zap a sheep at a hundred paces. So far nobody had claimed it, but should they fund more active research? Was it death ray even possible? Unefficiently they sounded out Robert Watson Wat of the Radio Research Station. And he posed an abstract maths question to his colleague Skip Wilkins. Suppose, just suppose, said Watson Wat to Wilkins, that you had eight points of water, one

kilometre above the ground, and suppose that water was at 98 degreeskins, that you had eight points of water, one kilometre above the ground, and suppose that water was at 98 degrees Fahrenheit and you wanted to heat it to 105 degrees. How much radio frequency power would you require from a distance of 5 kilometres? Well skip Wilkins was no fool. He knew that eight points was the amount of blood in an adult human. 98 degrees was normal body temperature. 105 degrees was warm enough to kill you, or at least make you pass out, which if you're behind the controls of an aeroplane amounts to much the same thing. So Wilkins and Watson what understood each other, and they quickly agreed that the death ray was hopeless, it would take too much power.

But they also saw an opportunity. and they quickly agreed that the death ray was hopeless. It would take too much power. But they also saw an opportunity. Clearly the ministry had some cash to spend on research. Perhaps Watson, Watten Wilkins could propose some alternative way for them to spend it. Wilkins pondered. It might be possible, he suggested, to transmit radio waves and detect from the echoes the location of oncoming aircraft long before they could be seen. Watson watched, dashed off a memo to the Air Ministry's newly formed committee for the scientific survey of air defence. Would they be interested in pursuing such an idea?

They would indeed. What Skip Wilkins was describing became known as radio detection and ranging, and then as radar. The Germans, the Japanese, and the Americans all independently started work on it too, but by 1940 it was the Brits who'd made a spectacular breakthrough. The resident cavity magnetron,ed our transmitter far more powerful than its predecessors. Pounded by German bombers, Britain's factories would struggle to put the device into production, but America's factories could. For months, British leaders plotted to use the magnetron as a bargaining chip for American secrets in other fields. Then Winston

Churchill took power and decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. Britain would simply tell the Americans what they had and ask for help. The Magna-Chon stunned the Americans. Their research was years off the pace. President Roosevelt approved funds for a new laboratory at MIT.

Uniquely uniquely for the American War effort administered not by the military but by a civilian agency. By any measure, Rad Lab was a resounding success. It spawned 10 Nobel laureates. The radar it developed, detecting planes and submarines, helped to win the war. But urgency in times of war can quickly be lost in times of peace. It might have been obvious if you thought about it that civilian aviation needed radar, given how quickly it was expanding.

In 1945 at the war's end, U.S. domestic airlines carried 7 million passengers. By 1955, it was 38 million, and the busy of the skies the more useful radar would be at preventing collisions. But rollout was slow and patchy. Some airports installed it, many didn't. In most airspace planes weren't tracked at all. Pilots submitted their flight plans in advance, which should in theory ensure that no two planes were going to be in the same place at the same time. But avoiding collisions ultimately came down to a four-word protocol.

See and be seen. On June 30th, 1956, two passenger flights departed Los Angeles Airport, three minutes apart. One was bound for Kansas City, one for Chicago. Their planned flight paths intersected above the Grand Canyon, but at different heights. Then Thunderclouds developed. One planes kept in radio to ask permission to fly above the storm. The air traffic controller cleared him to go a thousand on top, a thousand feet above cloud cover.

See and be seen. Nobody knows for sure what happened. Plains then had no black boxes, and there were no survivors. But just before 1031, air traffic control heard a garbled radio transmission. Hold up, hold up, we are going in. From the pattern of the wreckage, strewn for miles across the canyon floor,

the planes seemed to have approached each other at a 25 degree angle, presumably through a cloud. Investigators speculated that both pilots were distracted by trying to find gaps in the clouds, so passengers could enjoy the scenery. Accidents happen. The question is what risks we're willing to run for the economic benefits? That question's becoming pertinent again with respect to crowded skies. Many people have high hopes for unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. They're already being used for everything, from moviemaking to crop spraying.

Companies like Amazon expect the skies of our cities soon to be buzzing with grocery deliveries. Civil aviation authorities are grappling with what to approve. Drones have sense and avoid technology, and it's pretty good. But is it good enough? The crash over the Grand Canyon certainly concentrated mines. If technology existed to prevent things like this, shouldn't we make more effort to use it? Within two years, what's now known as The world's biggest airports now see planes taking off and landing at an average of nearly two a minute. Collisions are absurdly rare, no matter how cloudy the conditions.

That's thanks to many things, but it's largely thanks to radar. You're listening to my personally curated selection of stories from Tim Harford's 50 Things That Made The Modern Economy. Up next, the S-Bend. Gentility of speech is at an end. Thundered an editorial in London's city press. It stinks. The stink in question was partly metaphorical.

Politicians were failing to tackle an obvious problem. As its population grew, London's system for disposing of human waste became woefully inadequate. To relieve pressure on cesspit, which were prone to leaking, overflowing and belching explosive methane, the authorities had instead started encouraging sewage into gullies. However, this created a different issue. The gullies were originally intended only for rainwater, and they emptied directly into the river Thames. So that was the literal stink. The Thames became an open sewer. The distinguished scientist, Michael Faraday,

was moved by a boat journey to write to the Times newspaper. He described the river water as an opaque pale brown fluid. Near the bridges, the feculents rolled up in clouds, so dense that they were visible at the surface. Colourer was rife. One outbreak killed 14,000 Londoners, nearly one in every hundred. Civil engineer Joseph Baseljet drew up plans for new, closed sewers to pump the waste far from the city.

It was this project that politicians came under pressure to approve. politicians came under pressure to approve. Michael Faraday ended his letter by pleading with those who exercise power or have responsibility to stop neglecting the problem, lest a hot season gives a sad proof of the folly of our carelessness. And three years later, that's exactly what happened. The sweltering hot summer of 1858 made London's malodorous river impossible to politely ignore or to discuss obliquely with gentility of speech. The heat wave became popularly known as the Great Stink.

If you live in a city with modern sanitation, it's hard to imagine daily life being permeated with a suffocating stench of human excrement. For that, we have a number of people to thank, but perhaps none more so than the unlikely figure of Alexander coming. A watchmaker in London, a century before the Great Stink, coming one renowned for his mastery of intricate mechanics. King George III commissioned him to make an elaborate instrument for recording atmospheric pressure, and he pioneered the

microtome, a device for cutting ultra-fine slivers of wood for microscopic analysis. But Cummings' world-changing invention owed nothing to precision engineering. It was a bit of pipe with a curve in it. In 1775, coming, patented, the S-bend. This became the missing ingredient to create the flushing toilet, and with it, public sanitation as we know it. Flushing toilets had previously founded on the problem of smell. The pipe that connects the toilet to the sewer, allowing urine and feces to be flushed away, will also let sewer odors wafth back up, unless you can create some kind of airtight seal. Coming solution was simplicity itself. Bend the pipe. Water settles in the dip, stopping smells coming up.

Flushing the toilet replenishes the water. While we've moved on alphabetically from the S-bend to the U-bend, flushing toilets still deploy the same insight. Rollout, however, came slowly. By 1851, a lifetime after Cummings Payton, flushing toilets remain novel enough in London to cause mass excitement when introduced at the Great Exhibition in Crystal Palace. Use of the facilities cost one penny, giving the English language one of its enduring euphemisms

for emptying one's bladder to spend a penny. If the Great Exhibition gave London as a vision of how public sanitation could be, clean and smell-free, no doubt that added to the weight of popular discontent, as politicians dragged their heels over finding the funds for Joseph Basilgette's planned sewers. We still haven't reliably managed to solve the problem of collective action, how to get those who exercise power or have responsibility as Faraday put it to organise themselves. There's been a great deal of progress. According to the World Health Organization, the proportion of the world's people who have access to what's called improved sanitation,

is increased from around a quarter in 1980 to around two thirds today. That's a big step forward. But still, two and a half billion people remain without improved sanitation, and improved sanitation itself is a low bar. It hygienically separates human excreta from human contact, but it doesn't necessarily treat the sewage itself. Fewer than half the world's people have access to sanitation systems that do that. The economic costs of this ongoing failure to roll out proper sanitation are many and varied,

from healthcare for diarrheal diseases to foregone revenue from hygiene conscious tourists. ongoing failure to roll out proper sanitation and many and varied, from health care for dioriel diseases to foregone revenue from hygiene conscious tourists. The World Bank's Economics of Sanitation Initiative has tried to tot up the price tag. Across various African countries, for example, it reckons inadequate sanitation lobs one or two percentage points off GDP. In India and Bangladesh, over 6% in Cambodia, 7%. That soon adds up. The challenge is that public sanitation isn't something the market necessarily provides.

Toilets cost money but defecating in the street is free. If I install a toilet, I bear all the costs, while the benefits of the cleaner street are felt by everyone. In economic parlance, that's a positive externality, and goods which have positive externalities tend to be bought at a slower pace than society as a whole would prefer. Contrast, say, the mobile phone. That also costs money, but as long as there's somebody else I can phone, it benefits a crew largely to me. And that's one reason why, although the S-Bend has been around for 10 times as long as the mobile phone, many more people already

own a mobile phone than a flushing toilet. If you want to buy a flushing toilet, it also helps if there's a system of sewers to plummet into, and creating that system is a major undertaking, financially and logistically. When Joseph Basiljet finally got the cash to build London sewers, they took 10 years to complete and necessitated digging up 2.5 million cubic metres of earth. Because of the externality problem, such a project might not appeal to private investors. It tends to require determined politicians, willing taxpayers and well-functioning municipal governments.

And those, it seems, are in short supply. London's lawmakers prevaricated. But when they finally acted acted they didn't hang about. It took just 18 days to rush through the necessary legislation for Baseljet's plans. What explains this sudden, impressive aliquity? A quirk of geography. London's parliament building is located right next to the River Thames. Officials tried to shield lawmakers from the great stink, soaking the curtains in chloride of lime in a bid to mask the stench. But it was no use. Try as they might, the politicians couldn't ignore it. The Times described, with a note of grim

satisfaction, how members of Parliament had been seen abandoning the building's library. Each gentleman with a handkerchief to his nose, if only concentrating politicians' minds were always that easy. We have one more story from season two of 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford. After this, you're listening to Tim Harford's 50 things that made the modern economy with Tim Harford after this. You're listening to Tim Harford's 50 things that made the modern economy on 99% invisible. I found Rome, a city of bricks,

and left it, a city of marble. That's supposed to have been the boast of Caesar Augustus, the first Roman emperor, just over 2000 years ago. If it was, he was exaggerating. Ancient Rome is a city of brick, no less glorious for that. Augustus was also joining a long tradition of denigrating or overlooking one of the most ancient and versatile of building materials. The great Roman architectural writer Vitruvius mentions them only in passing. Denis Diderot's great French encyclopedia of the sciences, arts and crafts published in 1751 and an inspiration for Adam Smith's famous description of the pin factory.

Well, Diderot doesn't trouble himself to include any images of brick making at all. That's because a brick is such an intuitive thing. People have been teaching themselves to build simple structures out of brick for many thousands of years, and Grandwons too. The hanging gardens of Babylon were made of brick for many thousands of years and grand ones too. The hanging gardens of Babylon were made of brick, so was the biblical tower of Babel. Come, let's make bricks and bake them thoroughly. That's Genesis 11, verse 3. They used brick instead of stone. They used brick instead of stone. By verse 5, the Lord is on the scene, and things aren't looking too good for the brick-loving citizens of Bable.

As James Campbell and Will Price point out in their magisterial history of bricks, the humble cuboid is everywhere. The biggest man-made structure on the planet, the Ming Dynasty Great Wall of China, is largely constructed of brick. The astonishing temples of Bagan and Myanmar, the Taj Mahal in India, mighty Malbork Castle in Poland, Siena's Palazzo and Florence's Duomo, the bridges of Isfahan in Iran, Hampton Court Palace in West London, all brick. So is the best church in the world, Ayasafir in Istanbul, the best bridge, Clifton suspension

bridge in Bristol, and the best skyscraper, the Chrysler building in Manhattan. Brick, brick, brick. The architect, Frank Lloyd Wright, once posted that he could make a brick worth its weight in gold. This all started a long time ago. Bricks seemed to have been with us since the very dawn of civilization.

The oldest were found in Jericho, in Jordan, by the archaeologist Kathleen Kenyon in 1952. There's something between 9,600 and 10,300 years old, and a simply loaves of mud baked dry in the sun then stacked up and glued together with more mud. stacked up and glued together with more mud. The next big step forward was the simple brick mold. Also originating from Mesopotamia, at least 7,000 years old, and depicted with great clarity on a tomb painting in Thebes Egypt.

The brick mold is a wooden rectangle with four sides, but no top or bottom into which clay and straw could be packed to make bricks faster and more precisely. These molds can't have been easy to make, they predate the use of metal itself, but once constructed they made mud bricks much cheaper and better. Even in a dry climate, sun-dried mud bricks do not usually last. Fired bricks are much more durable, they're stronger and waterproof. Making such bricks by heating clay and sand at a temperature of about a thousand degrees centigrade has been possible for many thousands of years, but at a price.

Accounts from the third dynasty of Er, dating back just over 4,000 years, note that you could get 14,400 mud bricks for the price of a piece of silver, but only 504 fired clay bricks. An exchange rate of nearly 29 mud bricks for a single clay one. 15 hundred years later, by Babylonian times, Kyln technologist had improved, and the price of fired clay bricks had fallen to between two and five mud bricks. That's still too much for many people. Cheap and easy mud bricks are still perhaps the most popular

material in the world for building houses. But as the economist's abigit-banagy and estadou flow observe, fired bricks can be an effective way for a very poor household to save. If you have a little money, buy a brick or two. Slowly, slowly, slowly, you'll have a better house. The brick is one of those old technologists like the wheel or paper that seems to be basically unimprovable. The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made. shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made. That's Edward Dobson in the 14th edition of his rudimentary treaties on the manufacture of bricks and tiles. There's a simple reason for the size, it has to fit in a human hand.

As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length. That's why if you get your nose close up to some buildings that seem vibrantly distinctive to their culture, the minaret of Kalan Mosk in Uzbekistan, Hors-Monsokaslin, England, and the twin pagodas of Suzhou in China, you'll find the bricks are all much the same. It's precisely the uniformity of the brick that makes it so versatile. Many medieval buildings, such as St. Holborn's Cathedral in England, simply reused Roman bricks. Why not? Brick production still uses traditional methods in many parts of the world, but automation is gradually nosing its way in. Hydraulic shovels dig the clay, slow conveyor belts carry bricks through long tunnel kilns, four cliff trucks shift precision

stack pallets of bricks. All this makes the brick itself cheaper. Building sites have resisted automation. The weather and the unique demands of each site require well-trained workers. The Bricklayer has long been celebrated as a symbol of the honest dignity of skilled manual labour, and bricklaying tools have barely changed since the 17th century. But as in so many other professions, there are signs that the robots may be coming to bricklaying. A human bricklayer can lay 300 to 600 bricks a day. The designers of SAM, the semi-automated Mason, claim it can do 3000. What are the brick itself?

Various designs of interlocking brick, much like Lego, are catching on across the developing world. The result tends to be less strong and waterproof than bricks and water, but they're quicker and cheaper to lay. And if you have robot brick layers, why not give them bigger hands, so you can make bigger bricks? Hadrian X is a robot arm which lays gigantic bricks that no human bricklayer could wield. Maybe we shouldn't get too excited though. Sam, the semi-automated Mason, has a predecessor, the motor Mason, for which similar claims were made back in 1967. The machine spreads the mortar as evenly as a skilled man who's been half a lifetime doing it.

In fact, it lays bricks five to ten times faster than by the ordinary method. Perhaps the brick layer will last a little longer yet. The brick certainly will. Search for 50 things that made the modern economy in your favorite podcast app or click the link in the show notes. You can download all 50 of them right now, and just shotgun them, just go for it. Downtown, Oakland, California. We are a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting.

Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show and join discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99PI org. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. Our home for the wayward, beautiful nerds of the world is 99pi.org. Radio Tepi. From PRX. Video til the end. From PRX.