In this spectacular series, James Burke guides us through the development of technology in various field. There's no single theme -- like, say, cartography -- for each episode. He jumps from subject to subject with a speed that bewildered some of my students.
Here he leaps from India to Freud's Vienna, to London, to Golgi in Russia, back to London, then back to India.
It's impossible not to learn something new with each new episode. In a class in physiological psychology I learned that Golgi bodies were sensitive to pressure and were found in the mesentery. The professor pronounced the name "Gol-jee" and I thought it was Italian. Burke pronounces it correctly as Russian "Gol-gee". And Burke explains that Golgi was responsible for the first tissue staining. How the sensory cells in the gut got their name I don't know.
In the 19th century there were essayists and critics like Ruskin and Carlisle who promoted the Great Man theory of history. If we hadn't had one great genius we wouldn't have everything that followed from his achievement. Anthropologists and historians have long since put that theory to rest. Most inventions and discoveries are inevitable, which accounts for so many independent inventions -- like Newton and Leibnitz who independently discovered calculus, curse them. Burke takes the broad evolutionary view for granted. There are still great men but their inventions are a patchwork of previous developments.
