this book they read the whole thing and what what have i done with my life? [laughter] this guy is so accomplished. so, he had gotten a deed as a minister in a church in leeds and the minister's house wasn't ready saddam often temporarily to this house adjacent to a brewery and ever inquisitive priestley kind of walked over and started investigating and i noticed they had giant vats of the year that were brewing and he saw this kind of gas coming off of the liquid and fought this is going to be a great place to do experiments so he asked the proprietor is it would be all right if he could do a little work over there appear to and i love that image of this kind of eccentric minister from

next door comes over to the brewery, can i open a little lab over your be here? so one of the things he does is, one of the early experiments is he starts pouring water back and forth over this brewing beer and accidentally and vince soda water. he passes it back and forth and realizes it creates a nice little carbonated flavor and instantly sends off letters to everyone about it and says i invented this wonderful beverage and was delightful and if you put a little jews it is tasty. he almost invented the wine cooler. [laughter] and he thought for a while that it was actually going to fight scurvy but it didn't have anything to do with scurvy so that was a false lead but there was typical of franklin, too, to share his ideas and innovation with anyone interested in listening to them. he had almost to a fault no interest making any money or keeping anything proprietary in anything he did which put him in

the situation he was constantly trying to find support for his work. a few years later actually a certain johann shleps patented hid a tonic water and did better with it since we are still paying royalties on it to this day any time you have a gin and tonic so priestley was very much about the kind of open flow of ideas and he and franklin share that value and at a certain point it leads in 1771 she got interested in this problem of air and plants and he had known for a long time and everyone knew for a long time if you take an organism, a mouse as priestley did many times and put it in a sealed vessel of some kind at a certain point the creature would run out of air and go into convulsions and eventually die if you didn't open it up. they didn't quite understand why that was happening if the mouse

was somehow poisoning the environment for the limited space they didn't understand entirely but they knew that what happened and priestley's brother of an 11-year-old trotting spiders and watching them by which nowadays would give you put into some kind of remedial for troubled children were killing spiders in jars but back in the day it was a sign of a budding genius. and so he had long known about this and everyone had known about this and he had this idea no one seems to have had before that which is what would happen if you put a plant in a similar situation and so he took a little mint plant from his garden and pretty much everything he did was stuff that you could do in your own kitchen. he did these experiments pretty much in a laundry sink that he had stolen from his wife and he would go to the kitchen and steel pier glass is and there's a lot of beer and coffee in this book and he would pull these plants out of the garden so he isolated this plant, sealed it

up and then went away and wait for it to donley and would come back day after day week after week and it kept growing so he thought that's puzzling. so then he had this idea he thought well what would happen, he knew from the negative experiments if you lit a candle in a sealed vessel which you would do with a little lens or concentrate the raise, light the candle inside the vessel and then durham the oxygen out of the vessel and almost instantly the mouse would die because there's nothing to breed and at that point i would be impossible to light the candle again because there is no air so he thought i'm going to try that again with a plant instead of a mouse and so he isolated the little bit of mant and lit the candle from the outside, burned the oxygen and put them down and waited to see what would happen and days passed and the plant seemed fine and continued to grow and year and two weeks later he went back and tried to

light the candle and the candle lit. a little flame appeared so there had been no compostable erbe for all that had been burned out and somehow without any new air coming in error had been created. somehow the plant was creating that compostable air. and in that little dessel that little glow with this little plant was a clue to how our whole planet evil in the history of life on the planet because the natural levels of oxygen on earth before the plants evolved was something like less than 1%. we do not have a big bubble of oxygen around us because that's the kind of in a state of earth. we have that because billions of years ago plants ebal, the strategy of extracting energy from the sun called photosynthesis had a waste product called oxygen and over time that oxygen built up as good as in this is became so successful in so many organisms spread around the globe over

time that bubble grew on till they reached a point of remarkable stabilization which is a whole other scientific story of about 20% and this was initially the world's greatest pollution crisis. oxygen is a deadly chemical in many ways, so there were all these organisms that died in contact with oxygen as a terrible early bacterial holocaust. over time organisms evolve that made a living off the oxygen and figured out ways to extract energy from oxygen and we are there descendants to read you live because this invention of error many years ago as an accidental byproduct of voters in this is and that is what joseph priestley was seeing here. what is wonderful about the stories he didn't fully realize it. he knew there was something interesting happenings what he did was starting a writing letters to his friends and one of the first people he wrote to was benjamin franklin. and one of the things that's great about doing research for

this book and i hope this comes across and reading it is so much of the conversations are preserved in the correspondence between these people. and because he was an leeds and franklin was most of the time in london a lot of the important conversations took place in the forms we can see the actual original words of. and franklin wrote back to priestley after he got word of this experiment and he took it to kind of the next level basically. he said that sounds like a rational system. it sounds like probably a system that happens on a kind of global level. all around the world we've seen things like fire will purify water and it probably makes sense the earth needs a major needs a mechanism for purifying the air so it would make sense plants are doing it. and so right there you see this collaboration between the man or a priest and his half of an idea and franklin has the other half that completes it and when you have the two ideas to get there what you have is one of the

corps' beginning moments of the ecosystem's view of the world. the idea we live in a connected web of life and energy and all these forces we exist because other organisms or creating an atmosphere that we are able to thrive in and that it is incumbent on us to recognize the connection and preserve it and safeguard in many ways. in fact franklin in that letter to get to the next step beyond from ecosystems almost to the beginning of the green politics which is a wonderful line where he says i hope this will temper the reach of fleet of people cutting down trees because trees are seduced make the air unwholesome. in america we have lots of trees and we are the healthiest people that ever lived, something like that. so right there you can see him saying not only is there a connect web of life on earth but we have to be careful about it and not just chop it all down. so, right there is this extraordinary little exchange. i heard about this and the more i kind of read into it i thought this is a great story and the

more i read about priestley the more i realize he was bound up in all of these wonderful ways with the american founding fathers. and in some ways as i describe in the book it was kind of this zoellick of early american history he keeps showing up at all of these unusual points and get in most accounts of this period he isn't talked about very much or is almost a kind of a footnote and what it is happening is he develops a number of other controversies ideas that are influential but also got a lot of people angry with him over the years. he moved up to birmingham, became a part of the wonderful society up there and played a role in a kind of formation of the industrial revolution. he was friends with people like james watt, become a little bit more politicized and was one of the major supporters of the american cause, probably one of the two or three most vocal supporters in britain of the american cause in the revolutionary war and was a supporter of the french revolution which also made an enemy of the number of folks in

england at that time and he co-founded the unitarian church in england just as a kind of side thing. so, and he had a number of kind of radical religious views that were three controversy what the time. he had a kind of interest approach to history of the church. he believed it was a fascinating conversation of a very devout man who was a christian to the end of his life but believe that his vision of christianity was about the original words of jesus and the original message of jesus that had been kind of compromise by leader scholars overtime introduced all these supernatural distortions as he said to the christian tradition and he wrote a number of books about this including a very influential what about the corruption of christianity which had huge impact on thomas jefferson. and in fact the final kind of tipping point in my own head of deciding to write this book is reading that jefferson had ultimately credited priestley with keeping him a christian and

all the challenges in the complicated faith jefferson had when he read priestley's books about the christianity he said this is mine. this is my face. this man understands us better than anyone else. that is when i thought this is an to be a really interesting party to go on. so, he is doing all these things he basically offended a lot of people and by the early 1790 he became in some ways the most hated man in all of england and it got so intense and old-fashioned in fremont came and burned his house down and really set out to try to kill him and in the up in the birmingham riots burning down about a dozen houses in birmingham. he managed to reese cates but never really felt safe again in england, and so and 1794 he set sail for america. and in doing that he inaugurated

one of the great amazing traditions in the american experience which was he was kind of power of great scientist exile. he was the first great dissident scientist who decided to come to america to find a country where his ideas would be allowed to develop unfettered by angry mobs and the state and the king said he got here and was greeted as a hero. he developed a friendship with adams when he was in london and spent quite a bit of time. there's a funny little slight note where all the major founders kind of fight to get priestley to move to their part of the country. adams was like all the intellectuals live in boston. and jefferson was like monticello, the climate is wonderful and they go back and forth and eventually he decides to live in rural pennsylvania which is an odd choice. and there was a utopian societies was going to build in pennsylvania did did not pan

out. but he did spend a lifetime in philadelphia and initially was very close to adams, but he and adams had a little falling out and then he got close to jefferson, had a wonderful correspondence with jefferson and when adams got elected president while jefferson was vice president when the rift develops between adams and jefferson over a number of things but largely over france, priestley decides to pretty much through his lot in with jefferson and he starts writing having come to america to come stay out of trouble he wasn't quite able to do that so he starts writing some pamphlets kind of fan support of jefferson and more explicitly very critical lot adams and he had a colleague named thomas cooper who grew even more vitriolic attacks on adams. and so, when the alien and sedition acts are passed, thomas cooper is actually arrested as one of the few people arrested in alien and sedition and priestley is put on the hit list of people who should be deported

for their criticism of the adams administration. and it is an extraordinary turning point in the country's history because right there you have this important question what kind of country are we going to be building? what do we do without were dissenting intellectuals in this country. priestly at that point was the most prominent scientific and theologian alive in the united states and had the audacity to criticize the adams administration and we know from various forms how things stand -- thin-skinned could be. are we going to incarcerate people like joseph priestley or are we going to let them write their pamphlets and argue it in the public's fear? so she was probably the biggest kind of test of adams true feelings about alien and sedition and his true feelings about priestly tvd priestley and while he was compostable and thin-skinned adams at this one

point decided to blink and he advised his people to not do anything with priestley. he said he's an old man in the woods and his influence is not an adamant in this world, which if you look at the evidence is clear that was not true. he was enormously influential writer and figure in had the year of the vice president who was at that point pretty much adams nemesis so the whole question of why adams scared priestley is a very interesting one. my assessment based on what i've read and what i've looked at is it was a case of just the kind of personal connection he couldn't bring himself to bring the force of law on his old friend but it's a hard one to call. so, priestley is scared. he dodges this bullet and then several years later jefferson is elected president and one of the first things he does is he whites joseph priestley a letter to read he gets word priestley has been quite seriously ill in

pennsylvania's one of his first written acts is to write a letter and he writes an amazing letter you should read it in its entirety. i won't do that, but it effectively would initially say i've heard you were ill and i'm glad you are recovered. yours is one of the great lives all thinking people want to see continue. you are one of my great heroes. then he goes on to talk about how horrible the adams administration is and basically to apologize for priestley's treatment and he talks about how the adams administration was all about looking backward and forward and it was against the innovation of science that he and priestley understood that this was a forward looking country and was not about the education of ancestors whereas adams was all about that old stuff and they were about new stuff and it is a great kind of trashing of atoms and embracing

of priestly that goes on for awhile and then he has this amazing kind of stirring passage, one of the beautiful optimistic things he wrote which i want to read briefly. he was talking about how he feels now that the country has weathered the storm and survived it and hasn't chosen the path of deporting somebody like priestley. so he wrote this extraordinary passage. as the storm is subsiding and i'm not going to assume too much about politics in this room but i think there's maybe some relevant today. as the storm is now subsiding and the horizon is becoming circassian it is pleasant to consider the phenomenon with attention. we can no longer say there's nothing new under the sun. for this whole chapter in the history of man is new. the great extent of the republic is new. its sparse habitation is new. the mighty wave of public opinion which is lil' bo for it is new but the most pleasing to novelty is it is quietly subsiding over such extent of service to its true level again. the order and good sense displayed in this recovery from

delusion and in the momentous crisis that lately rhodes to speak of the strength of character in the nation which augurs well for the duration of the public and i am much better satisfied now that stability than i was before it was tried. and that is the world politics view from enlightenment rationalist that in a sense of the american experiment is literally an experiment in on some level you have to run the data and see what happens and tested contest its resilience and internal stability to see if it really works. and so he writes this letter amazing plater, priestley who buys about three years later and one of his last messages he sense of to jefferson city and tell mr. jefferson that i am not going to last much longer but am about to die in the administration where i finally feel at home and in peace the why and going somewhere better. and then years pass.

18 years pass and through this period adams and jefferson don't talk to each other and it was cold, artery and friendship that has broken apart over things like alien and sedition and things like priestly. they don't speak and then all of a sudden that terse start to appear going back and forth between currency and monticello and it's the beginning of the famous correspondence with the first letters if you go back and read them they are very kind of delicate and tiptoe. they don't get into anything of substance. it's too old lions who got into a fight and we are figuring out a way to talk to each other so they do it by talking about how many grandchildren and a half. like where is the weather down there and it's like they are always going to have the mail, that letter got here in 11 days, that was passed. how long did my letter take? and they are all kind of birds. they are a founding mertz quality to this book and so they

start this delicate conversation and then a book is published in england and it is a book of the reverend mincy's letters from who was the guy that co-founded the humanitarian church in england with priestley and it is his correspondence and includes a letter written from jefferson to priestley from 1801 and somehow this book travels across the atlantic and finds its way to quincy massachusetts into the hands of john adams who reads this letter that jefferson had written to priestley, talking this trash about his administration and making him sound incredibly backwards and opposed to science in all these ways and you can imagine the response adams has said he fires dismissive to monticello basically saying what is this letter he says do you know of this letter and its distance? i have more things to say but for now acknowledge this letter.

but of course it takes 14 days for the letter to get down and adams can't sit around so he fires off like six more letters every day and each one of them takes a little bit of the letter that jefferson had written, takes a little paragraph four quote and says how dare you say that. that is ridiculous and the first thing he starts with and this is one of the important lessons of the book of all the critiques jefferson has leveled against adams the first thing he fires is how dare you say i am resistant to the innovation of science. i've never said anything like that in my life. it goes against everything i believed and high demand proof i said anything like that while i was president. you think right there all the accusations he made the thing that hurt the most was this idea that he was an antiscience president. so, eventually jefferson writes back this wonderful calling, soothing note saying my dear friend that was so long ago but

he holds its own. however i did have a point and there were many abuses and mostly directed at my people and not your people and it is through the exchange that's the point the real conversation begins between the two men. and they start talking about what the revolution meant, what the constitution meant, what the american experiment should shoot for, why science had progressed so much faster than civil society and forms of government and with the world of technology was in this, the religious values priestley has brought and he's mentioned 52 times in the jefferson adams letters whereas franklin and washington and hamilton are mentioned between them less than ten times so you can see the impact he had and in some ways he was the catalyst although he had been done to the cadet for eight years getting these men to talk together in this amazing way and this turns into the great american political conversation we are still going back and reading to this day. so she's everywhere. he's not true story in all these

unusual ways and i think what i want to do in this book is go back and revise them a little bit. but also to look at the founders through this kind of outside ankle of priestley's values and when you look at particularly at franklin and jefferson and some extent adams in the context of collaborations with priestley and french with priestley i think it's a couple of things. first call all of these men had a unified world view the did not believe it was possible or responsible to kind of compartmentalize inside of science and advances of technology and new experiment in political life and religious life that these things all existed like ecosystems in a kind of connected web and one had to be first in all of them and reach out and find connections and that the informed white, educated life was about making those connections. and i start the book with a quote from an unnamed political

candidate that i will mean for you which is mike huckabee. and in one of the dates from a year and a half ago he was asked about his believe in evolution and he said a very telling thing it was a classic huckabee line that it was very funny. but it had a kind of telling subtext which is i find it amusing i'm being asked this question. i'm asking to be your president, not to write and a great science textbook. and it was the kind of remark that to be funny you had to go into with a thick sick assumption that the world of science is irrelevant to the world of being present and on some level if you had said if he said i can't believe you're asking about foreign policy i am not here to write a textbook about international affairs i just want to be president it wouldn't have been funny are made sense that somehow it worked as a joke because we have this kind of believe for some of us have this believe that science is just for the guys in the lab coats and politics is

somewhere else but if you think about all the issues that confront us today all the energy issues and environmental issues that come out of the tremendous changes that have come from computer science and in the form of the internet stem cell research, genomics, everything we are starting to understand about the human brain it's not that we need to have scientists present but on some basic level when you look at the story from this angle you have to say that taking that kind of attitude is not just a responsible, and it's not just antiintellectual. it is on a fundamental level on american. and so what i want to do with this book is go back to this period and say these are our roots. this is the essence of what this country came out of and we need to return to them because these are the values that made these people so inspiring and i hope they continue to inspire us in this way today. that's my shield. [applause] thank you. thank you.

so there are a lot of themes here and a lot of things i didn't talk about, so i would love to get into any of this so please, come up and ask your question in to the microphone so that it will play on for ever on television. >> picking up exactly where you left off. it's not only science and politics that makes, and there are many examples of that like einstein's politics and science but also church and state specifically using huckabee as your example. what is your take where priestley, jefferson, franklin on the stage, what is your take on the evolution of the problem? >> it is a good question.

i think there were all believed in the separation of those to. i think one of the things that comes out of this story is how each in their own way they were very eclectic religious thinkers in their time and it would be very hard for franklin or jefferson probably to run for president today with an open expression of their religious beliefs. franklin was -- on of the things priestley says about franklin after he died he wrote in his journal hockey was a wonderful man, one of my great friends. it's too bad he was a nonbeliever. and you've got to love him. priestley is maybe the most optimistic man who ever lived and he was always seeing the dustin people even as he was causing this controversy so he said i think his problem was the reason he never really saw the wisdom of being religious was that he just didn't have enough

time to read some of the books that i recommended and kept giving him books like you should read my volume on this. he was too busy with other stuff. and, you know, jefferson famously called himself sector one or whenever that quote is, so they were very unusual thinkers and so what they brought was assumption that it's not that science and politics and kind of experimental method if empiricism and all the things that started to happen with enlightenment were incompatible with faith but a was clear faith like politics was going to have to be reinvented. it could and just pretend as if nothing was happening over here. and so, despite an immense amount of time particularly jefferson and priestley trying to figure out how to make it work given all the knowledge coming out of the sciences and that was part of priestley's kind of intellectual world where he brought over this idea of there's some kind of early hour original truth to the christian tradition that's their that's been covered over with these

lawyers. so it's not that -- it's not that you want to have a state religion and they clearly wanted some kind of separation of church and state built into the structures that were there, but they did believe the kind of intellectual tools that had developed out of science and empirical studies had to be directed towards people's religious beliefs as well and that was going to cause change and they would have to come up with new ways to think about god and priestley ultimately just decided that the best expression god's will on earth wasn't a holy ghost or resurrection the brother of a widening of understanding and that god was kind of manifest in the world in the sense that humans were getting to understand more and more of his creation through the march of science and understanding and that is what one should worship more than an icon or st.. so they were radicals in these different ways but i think they did believe in the separation

and i think they would be -- it would be very hard all these studies about what people would vote for, different religious people would vote for and it's gotten much more progressive and now people would be willing to elect a jewish president or they wouldn't have been and we've gotten over the catholic king and all that kind of stuff but to this day most americans would not vote for an atheist. and so that is by far the most forbidding thing. it's the kind of last thing the majority of the country feels comfortable saying no way to an atheist which is a striking fact. so franklin would have had a hard time fortunately he is not running today. >> i was struck by something in your authors note about your talking about connecting social history chemistry media theory ecosystems and its geology in this connected since a bloody running against the dream of specialized intellectual culture it would have been second nature to priestley. that is exactly how y -- it struck me because that's how i

found out about priestley was eighth grade in the class that was canceled it was called core science where we had a social studies, english and science together and the teacher was a chemist and he told us the great stories about priestley and we did things like reticle verse travels and looked at it from the scientific viewpoint as impossible it could exist and not just the satire in the english and historical park. but i'm just wondering is that because your interest in science and education i think is getting so specialized in all these tests with no child left behind is there a way in the way that you envision it that children can get exposure to larger and more integrated kind of things? >> that's five good questions in there. and i will answer all of them. so, one of the things i tried to

do in the book that we didn't really talk about is there is a method in the book that's a little bit different in the sense this is what i've called in various contexts long assumed approach is when one of the questions of the book tries to ask why do intellectual breakthroughs happen. why do we have to read by shifts in society and why is somebody like priestley involved in so many of them at one given time? and so, there is part of the storytelling here which is, you know, this happened and this happened and this and then it ended and there's kind of the narrative to it but there's also this equally important may be more important question of why did it happen and my argument here and this was the argument and post map and everything good for you as well is to answer the question of why you have to work across different scales of experience. so the individual genius, a great man theory of history is not sufficient although priestley was undoubtedly a great man and genius and we should celebrate that and not throw it away but we also have to look at lots of other different parts of the society

and in fact parts of the society that often work in different time skills. so one big theme of the book is how intellectual activity at any given time is shaped by the larger macroflow of energy for society. so, priestley literally lived off of the stored energy that was being on least with the industrial revolution. he moved to birmingham, lived off the kind of excess profits of these early industrialists and that was energy that actually had been trucked 300 million years ago during the carboniferous age, which was actually caused in part by the buildup of oxygen in the atmosphere created by the plants that priestley was the first person to understand. and so, to really explain why priestley at that moment, we have to talk about his life and biography of france and information network and postal system and you have to talk about the carboniferous era because if you don't talk about all the different levels you haven't told the whole story. so, part of what i try to do with my work is to make those

connections and make them fun and interesting so people do like that kind of a widening perspective. i think for kids this is the connection to the video games book is that way of thinking about the world is actually wonderfully taught in some very popular games out there. so the game score that cannot last year is one of the big hits of this year where as a kid a seven-year-old plays this game and they start as a single cell organism and then he falls into a creature and build a tried and then a city and come up and apologize a plan that and developed technology that lets them go to other planets and so they are thinking pleading this came across these different skills and experience comes that is the exercise, the kind of mental exercise a seven year old is getting for fun. as opposed to what i was doing when i was seven which was watching the love boat on tv. [laughter] so i think there's opportunity to use tools like that to teach people to think across disciplines and across skills. so i'm hopeful that. the other day i have a seven-year-old, fighter and two-year-old. the seven year old was off playing soccer and i sat down

with the five-year old and was like your brother is playing soccer and i know you're jealous. what do you want to do? he thought about it and said i think i'd like to do a science experiment. i felt okay. we are on the right track. this is good. but i made him play games anyway. [laughter] >> even in the late 18th century science was often expensive and easier i suppose if you were an aristocrat and i wonder if it is known what priestley thought of the guillotine and whether he regarded this as not working in mysterious ways? >> that's a great question. it was priestly's rival who get kind fully identify and name oxygen who in the two different tests of how societies deal with their scientists we pass buy not departing priestley and french revolution didn't do quite as well by executing. i don't know. i don't remember him actually ever talking about the fact that

he was -- he'd been a great supporter and during that period there was the kind of missed volume question of what was happening in france. and there is a famous exchange that priestley had with adams over breakfast i do talk about in the book a little bit where adams asked priestley what his assessment was of the french revolution and was it really being derailed and was priestley as optimistic about it and priestley was quite old at this point, this was done to my five or 96, apparently went on this kind of brambly apocalyptic discussion that drew upon the book of revelation and few other things and adams was kind of like okay, that's a weird explanation. [laughter] and it may be related to why he scared priestley in the alien and sedition controversy. in part he might have thought that god has lost his mind a little bit. we don't need to address him. so, but she had in his conversation with adams like it was going to work out fine and because these predictions he

thought was going to work out kind so he was optimistic at that point but i don't know how he connected. i don't know the answer to that. yeah. >> i wish i could say i purchased your book and read it thoroughly but i did hear you on npr. [laughter] and you touched on something that may have fueled priestley and how productive he was and the difference of where things were germinated instead of a pub it was a coffeehouse. >> exactly. i'm glad you brought that up. .. ways. the coffee house was kind of an intellectual melting pot where

people from various intellectual background would come together in trade ideas and hangnail and talk, and so franklin had a group called the club of modest whigs who would get together and talk anything they were interested in go on for hours and hours and hours. a remarkable number of keat kind of innovations in greater society during that period come out of coffee the whole insurance business was invented in lloyd's coffee house, which became lloyds of london because it was a place where ship captains could come together with emerging businessmen that work thinking about insuring. the coffee house cults certification as a place of vitter bonus mary thinking and political for it was important but there's another important fact which is the actual drug caffeine that was being conveyed by this coffee because up until really a century before, by far and away the dominate daytime drawed of choice for both mass

and the lead in england was alcohol. connecting to my last book, the water just wasn't really safe to drink so it was the helped decision, and lifestyle decision that was a smart one given the options, you just drank booze all day and people would wake up at 9:00 in the start drinking beer, so think about how your life would be different and i hope this would be different for most of you, if you woke up every morning and were like alright, that was a good night's sleep and i'm going to have my first per se had an entire culture that for many centuries was just drunk all day. so when tea and coffee first came over and were incredibly expensive and exotic things but there were such a demand for them that the price dropped over about 100 years and it becomes a mass beverage and so it is not an accident that the enlightenment happened at scopic that introduced to this culture. you change the culture from the present to a stimulant and

everybody changes over you are going to get smarter, more alert people ledbetter empirical science. it is just going to happen so it is a funny little theme and those of you who know me personally know how much coffee a drink my things perhaps i'm justifying i have it but i think there is really some evidence here. >> i think one buffett owns more coca-colas than anyone else in drinks about six today. you kept mentioning a polluting byproduct or an accidental byproduct of photosynthesis was oxygen but the accidental partisan what i don't understand. i know that need their theology nor science would call that accidental. i mean einstein said the harmony of natural law repeals intelligence of such superiority that compared with that of a systematic thinking and acting of mankind is but an utterly insignificant reflection. he thought it all made sense. we had to discover this sense. theology at its highest level would say the same thing.

it isn't accidental. oxygen isn't accidental and as you describe the linkage, the linkage of the progress is and accidental. i have a scientists only recently that a problem with most people's world view is that they do not consider the future, they consider that the future is something that happens to them, not something that they create. just focusing on that accidental part, what do you think? >> no, i think there's a lot to what you say. the way i would phrase it is that, that in the long run, that nature has a way of turning accidents into non-accidents, into useful things and into making it seem like it had a purpose though yeah, if you give it enough evolutionary time, that someone will figure out a way to make this substance

useful. we have skeletons because ourselves was great calcium as a waste product. wasn't particularly useful and over evolutionary time organisms said hey i can build a backbone of that and that would be really useful so the beauty of looking at live this way, the majesty of looking at live this way is the pollution and the accident turns into a way of making a living for other organisms down the line so i think in that long scale, perspective i agree that all of these things come around but on the other hand it didn't have an adaptive purpose for the organism at that particular time. it was expelling oxygen and the important thing was what it was doing with sunlight and water. >> it was too short. it is chaotic and accidental from a very limited perspective which is the whole ecosystems story. love your book, love deerbrook. >> thank you very much. it looks like we of time for two more questions if that is what we have right here.

that would be perfect and i am looking at my clock here, not checking my mail. >> i'm curious about priestly's invention of unitarianism in england. having been a practicing unitarian for many years i'm amazed that i never read anything about him, never studied him, never been in any kind of study group and i'm just wondering what you came across in your own studies and why there isn't this connection or if there is a connection why is it more universally known? i have been a unitarian since i lived in massachusetts. i was a member in the old church of boston in cape cod so i consider myself will not in unitarianism and i'm just amazed i haven't heard of him. >> really good question and that is one that has come up once or twice. can i ask you a question? have you heard of lyndsey, who was the guy who started the

church with him? write, so i think the proper way to describe it is lindsay was the one that really founded the english unitarian church and priestly helped him and rode about it in publicized it's a lindsay probably is the central figure with priestly kind of helping him, but i think part of the point here is what you are saying about the history of unitarianism is a true lot of things about priestly. it is amazing how really he is mentioned in a lot of the kind of classic reason accounts of the fellman fathers, and he is barely mentioned in mccullough's book about adams. if fabulous book but the impact of those letters is just an extraordinary thing, and i think part of a problem with priestly is that because he was so diverse in his interest and because he played a role in so many things, he paid the cost of

specialization. when you specialize in one thing you get famous ford and become a renowned expert in this one thing where is priestly was spread across a lot of discipline solis historical legacies suffered because he had a hand in so many things. i need to look a little bit more to that question and i think it is a really interesting one. >> okay, last question. >> thanks very much for a great book and a great discussion. the question i have goes to something you brought up earlier and that is an addition. several weeks we had an author here who said some innovators don't deserve a lot of credit because they are standing on the shoulders of everybody that went before. he used bill gates as an example. >> was this gladwell? >> so, the question for you is in your book you talk about thomas kuhn and his book on paradigm shifts and it seemed to me that you were leaning towards the idea that there are spark

plug people in paradigm shifts really happen and that somehow maybe people like priestly really do deserve to be seen in a life that is different than just simply following on step-by-step and what went before them. >> yeah, i think i would say that. i think there's a lot of, so it is interesting. i don't know it was malcolm gladwell who said this but there is an interesting overlap in our approaches to this book and i think that malcolm is, there is some commonality in the way that we approach things on a number of levels. in my mind, what happens is when you have periods of radical change would often happens is that you think of the metaphor in these different scales and everything from accidents of biography, i need genius all the way down to carboniferous blair of coal deposits sitting and your society. my hunch is and i've only applied this approach and a couple of case studies but my hunch is when we have periods of

brick fresen this is certainly true in the case of cholera in 1854, in a sense all of those layers are stacking up in the lining in some way so you do have the great genius. you have priestly, you have john snowe can you do have the right moment in technological history when priestly needed the tools who is using. if we hadn't had an air pump, if an air pump hadn't been invented 100 years ago he would have been able to do what he was doing. giffi had had carboniferous later fueling unfunded its innovations you would have had a hard time doing what he was doing so it is not the the great man, the great genius and the great women are irrelevant. i hope it is one of the things that comes across in the book that priestly is just an amazing guy, but it is also more than that so does not to discount the genius but to say there these kind of historical errors that

support is that this area and to understand why pick things up and we have to be able to understand all of them. i think that is an idea that priestly would have appreciated. alright, thank you very much. thank you for coming out. appreciate it. [applause]

>> and 1925, a british explorer percy fawcett began an expedition into the amazon jungle searching for el dorado, the legendary city of cult. he was never seen again. next author david grann on his book about faucet's final expedition, "the last city of z" a tale of deadly obsession in the amazon. this is an hour and 15 minutes. >> it is especially meaningful for me to be here at the national geographical society. my grandfather is no longer living, actually took photographs of this society about half a century ago from such places as india and afghanistan and i was actually looking at those old

black-and-white stills when i was a little boy. offers the me some sense that there was a world beyond my little town in connecticut. but i should also say from the outset that i am not an explorer. i'm not an adventure. i don't hi, i don't can't, i hate snakes. [laughter] i have a degenerative eye condition and that makes it hard for me to see it tonight. i tend to get lost even riding the subway to work in manhattan. so, the question some of the mite be wondering, indeed the question, my lovely wife who is probably still wondering, is how did it reporter like me and up in the middle of the amazon trying to solve what has been described is the greatest exploration mystery of the 20th-century? what happened to legendary british explorer percy harrison

fawcett when in 1925 disappeared in amazon looking for an ancient civilization, a place yet called simply and rather cryptically the city of z. i had first heard about the mystery of walleye was doing that story on the death of the world's greatest sherlock holmes and cone in the oil expert and i came across a reference that said that percy fawcett had helped inspire the novel "the lost world" and i'm just going to show a very quick little clip from the movie adaptation of the book just to give you some sense. where is my little clicker here? here is a picture of percy who is rather iconic and that is the most iconic picture of him. and now i'm going to show you this clip from "the lost world."

>> propose a new expedition consisting of professor too many and myself together with two impartial and acceptable members of this audience, preceded ones to the amazon to investigate my claim of the existence of a lost world. >> well said, yes. >> well, i had read "the lost world" and it piqued my curiosity, who was percy fawcett and plug his name into an newspaper database, and it came these rather crazy headlines, fawcett expedition disappears into the unknown, another fawcett search party vanishes. here is one of the mark crazy headlines from "the washington post." you get a sense of the racist attitudes even in the 1930's, savageness sis movie actors seeking to rescue fawcett and you get a picture of the poor chap. the thing about these newspaper articles that came up is that

they warned the small articles and obscure or tabloid papers. as you can see them in "the washington post" these were banner headlines in "the new york times." there were headlines all over the world, the british papers and i soon discovered that fawcett was the last of the great territorial explorers. that is to say man who ventured into blank spots on the map with a little more than the machete, a compass and a divine since the purpose. believe in 44 he disappeared stories of his adventures among captivated public imagination, how we would survive years for without contacting the wilbon is how he would make contact tribes that had never before seen a white man halvey immerged from a region which no expedition had never come back from with maps and here you can see one of the maps he gets gets himself from the motto grosso region in the brazilian amazon. a lot of the maps which looked

at and found in the archives are much more detailed than this and actually look like paintings. their actually quite beautiful. fawcett had such powers of endurance that some people even claim, some of his colleagues that he was immune to death. one american explorers said he get out what, out heiniken out explorer anybody else. in 1953 the world geographical society journal said quote fawcett mark the end of an age. one might almost call them the last of the individual six floors, the day of the airplane, the radio and heavily financed expedition had not arrived. with him it was that rode story of man against the forest. fawcett first train to become an explorer at the turn of the century and he went to the world geographical society in london which at the time was trying to

fulfill one of its great ambitions which was to map the entire globe and come back with explorations and hard and fast points from all over the world. one of the things that surprised me was the royal geographic society had served as a finishing school for scores and helped launch its critics force as livingston and burton and fawcett, who had grown up worshiping these sorts had gone to the royal geographical society to train. this fellow here, e.a. reeves, was in charge of turning mr. fawcett in toy gentleman explore. not just for learning how to map and figure out where he was at any point on the globe. it also meant reading of these survivalist manuals in their bread many of the manuals that fawcett himself that read, and you get a sense of the timeframe with which he occupied.

it would say things like well, if you are suddenly bitten by poisonous snake, pack the wound with gunpowder and ignite it. [laughter] well, if you are hit by a poisonous arrow and the wound is hemorrhaging, get boiling grease as quickly as possible and pour it into the wound. [laughter] well, fawcett finished his training, and he was quickly recruited to become a spy, and this was actually very common for the british empire. they would go commonly to the royal geographical society in recruit its members and graduates become spies because being an exporter was the perfect cover. you could wander anywhere into other countries in the ostensibly you are supposed to be poking around anyways, and spine. they used it as a cover and fawcett was actually sent to africa as a spy.

he did this for a period but then in 1906 he turned his attention fully to the amazon and strictly to exploration. at the time, the amazon really remained one of the lost large blank spaces on the map, and you should have come of this picture gives you some sense of this size but just to give you a greater am mencia, the amazonian wilderness is the size of the continents were united states. and back then, it remained larger than explored because the impenetrable jungle. kelsey who was the secretary of the royal geographics decided the time one of the most acclaimed geographers said what is there? no one knows. and the area remain so on explored that peru, bolivia and

brazil didn't even know where their borders were in the interior of the amazon so they needed somebody to come in and try to figure out where they were, so they ask the royal geographical society of the heather representative, and they sent percy fawcett. fawcett quickly agreed saying it was his destiny and of the went to this area. for the next several years, he mapped rather an enormous amount of space and hopefully this can give you some sense of the area in which he was exploring. this traces various expeditions. over here is the livia. peru is up here and over here is brazil and this is just a vast territory. his first expedition, what they would do is take pack animals and come over the andes, often

their pack animals with a falloff of the ravines. they would come from severe cold. they would go to 17,000 feet up and slowly descend deeper into the jungle. the first exhibition heading out from la paz went all the way up here. here is a picture of him from 1908. he was still a rather young man at the time. that was one of his early expeditions and there you can see him serving the jungle with his equipment. these exhibitions were really pretty extraordinary in their own rights. they were back in the areas where i mentioned before were expeditions did not come back, one expedition of 1,000 men vanished into the region. they have almost no protections against the assault of the jungle. they would be accosted by vampire bats and wake up in the morning and describe having blood streaking down their skin from vampire bats who would peck of them as they slept.

there were flies which would plant large eggs and eggs with hatch and little warms wood burrough into their skin. one poor biologist had his body fully taken over from microscopic creatures that he had only study. fawcett had encountered an anacondas, and here you get some sense of the lore around as early expeditions. this drawing interestingly enough is drawn by fawcett's young this on. this was his young son imagining his father's greeting counter with a great snake is the headlights and the london papers when the story came out that fought that had shot a giant anacondas. even fraud could be deadly to the touch. this little guy here is only about the size of the coin and has enough toxins in it to kill 100 people.

nothing though was more lethal or deadly then mosquitoes. they transported everything from malaria yellow fever to elephantiasis, to bone crusher fever and back then there were no communities. they did not take malaria pills and they didn't have shot for yellow fever. fawcett would take these expeditions and usually half of his expedition would die of disease. one of the more interesting things i was reading again the diary, tracked down a lot of the diaries of fawcett's companions and they describe for example if yellow fever they fear the most was the black, which meant the end was near and if it were malaria of which about 80% of the people was estimated working in the amazon contracted they would often experience hallucinations, slipped into a coma and die and basa described

women-- men being beared vaughn the river. as i read these diaries of his companions often they would start off with great romance about the jungle and the great aspirations, to conquerer them by the ferry and they would be sick and delirious and starving and their diaries became almost documents of madness. this poor little guy here, this fellow, earnest hold had a great aspiration of the next darwin. he went with fawcett hoping to catalog all the fauna and by the end of his diary he catalogs the bugs that are biting him and i'm going to read a few days from his diary to keep the u.s. sense of holt and what it was like for these men. november 20th, attacked in hammocks by tiny gnat not over 110 dench in length. mosquitoes nets, no protection. gnats bite all night olarn knows, november 21st another

sleepless night, a count of bloodsucking gnats. november 22nd my body massive bombs from insect bites, wrists and hands swollen from bites of tiny gnats, two nights with almost no sleep, simply terrible. november 23rd, horrible night, worse fighting gnats. november 24th, more than half the night from-- december 3rd, beeson gnats worse than ever, truly there is no rest for the weary. december feth, my first encounter with a flashy eating. >> , biting gnats in clouds, the very worst we have encountered rendering what is palatable by filling it with their filthy bodies and bellies red and disgustingly distended with one's own blood. and finally, days of toil,

nights of torture. and explores life. where is the romance now? fawcett was conducted these expeditions during the bloody era of the amazon rubber boom and rubber had become huge land demand with the development of cars. robert was captain the jungle but because of the brutal conditions labor was always in short supply, and so robber barons would send in men to enslave the indians in amazonian tribes. those indians that try to resist were often massacred. because of this body contact one historian said the violence in amazon at this time made the american west seem as comparison as peaceful as a prayer meeting. because of this violence it made expeditions and exploring any of this area utterly treacherous because even once friendly tribes with him bush any interlopers or trespassers.

and fawcett in a very counterintuitive thing only would take a few men. early on, almost all the amazon excavations would come into the jungle, the first amazon expedition had over 4,000 men and they literally pour armor which was probably not the smartest thing in a jungle but up until phos apostate it was a big expedition come armed parties were seen as the only way to survive, and fawcett believed in taking only small parties. he would take five to ten, sometimes 12 men and he believed it was the only way you could find enough food to sustain your party but more important he believed it was the only way to persuade the amazonian tribes of his peaceful intentions. and, in somewhat, what was very uncommon in fawcett's the and unlike many of his colleagues and certainly many of the rubber tappers heading in the refuse to let this man fire on any of the

indians even if they were being ambushed and in a mad victorian fashion he would sometimes order his men to sing, first he would order them to drop their weapons, then he would order them to sing, like any good victorian, god save the queen and then he would take of a handkerchief. they always wore handkerchiefs. they didn't want to have their skin exposed to the bugs. he would take office handkerchief, march into the fuselage of arrows waiting is handkerchief above his head. if one of his men were wounded or if they were too sick to carry on their sister crew within the party, the person had to be abandoned. that would be too difficult and risk the welfare of the entire party to try to carry the person out there thousands of miles of jungle. i want to read you just a few passages from the book, and it is going to describe, to give you a sense of these journeys and it is going to describe an expedition which fawcett won in

1908 over here round their real verde. real verde was a river in brazil along the border there and the source of it was on non. it invokes the mother romance for the search of the nile and fawcett was determined to find it. he took with him nine men including his second-in-command, a man named fisher. despite cutting, chopping, pulling and pushing through jungle from morning to night they usually advance no more than half a mile per day. their legs sank in mud, their shoes disintegrated, there eyes burt from a tiny species of bee that is drawn to sweat in invaded their pupils. they called the bees ilec kurds. fawcett encountered the paces and crawled up banks to better see the stars and fix the position as if producing the wilderness to figures in diagrams might enable him to

overcome it. his men did not need such sun's. they knew exactly where they were, the green hell. the men were supposed to conserve their rations but most broke down and can send them quickly. within days the granada fig pirg of the men wanted to turn back but fawcett was determined to find verde source. they stumbled forward mao also been trying to capture every drop of rain some of the night chill swept to their bodies and poisonous and they can cause vomiting and intense fever had infected fisher and a tree had fallen on the leg of another member of the party so his load had to be dispersed among the others. fisher muttered that they were going to leave the bones there. others prayed for salvation. they had gone nearly a month with no food. their blood pressure plummeted then their bodies consumed its own tissue. quote the voices of the others and the sounds of the forests seem to come from a vast

distance as though through long tube fawcett rode in his diary. isaias tanker drone many of the men and year to their faith no longer tried to swap, to slap at the mosquitoes, petulant mosquitoes barkeeps watch against indians. "an ambush in spite of its moment of terror and the agony is quickly over and if we were regarding these matters any reasonable way, it would be considered merciful, fawcett wrote. finally, the men reached what appeared to be the source of the river, fawcett took measurements even though he was so defeated that the trouble moving his limbs. the party paused momentarily photic "-- photographs. they look like dedman, their cheeks whittled to the bomb, their beards matted to their faces. here's the picture of them. you can see there stating

condition and on the chipalone war than half of fawcett's part of, five of his men died of starvation and disease and one fawcett returned to la paz a virtual skillets and he quit the son of a telegram to the rough geographical society that said el verde, concord. it was during these deadly tracks that fawcett began to develop his radical theory that the amazon might contain the remnants of an advanced civilization. ever since francisco or rihanna and his army of spanish conquistadores had ascended the amazon river in 1542 perhaps no place on the planet heads the united the imagination or lured meant to their death. sir walter raleigh had described the indians with their heads between their shoulders and here you can say a picture. it is a 16th century drawings depicting bad vision of what people thought the tribes might look like, and it gives you some

sense of what it fantastical place this was in the european imagination and how this plays really was like it dreamscape. what was true about the region, snakes that could be long as school buses, rats that were the size of pigs. it was so incredible that no embellishment seems to fanciful. the most entrancing vision of all had always been el dorado. the conquistadores had heard about this from the indians when they first arrived in peru, and sir walter raleigh said that the kingdom was supposed to be so rich in gold that the inhabitants literally ground the metal into powder and then wed letter hollow canes upon the naked bodies until they would be shining from the head to the foot. here again is another 16 century drawings depicting that and there you can see the king being

anointed with school. in each expedition that that search for the el dorado ended in disaster. the first el dorado expedition had some 4,000 men and some 4,000 men died of starvation, disease and from tribes defending their territory with arrows tipton poison. many el dorado expeditions would begin to starve and descend into cannibalism. others maya mad and after a toll of death and suffering pretty much worthy of joseph conrad most people find the concluded el dorado was no more than a delusion. indeed mose modern scientists assumed no complex society could it ever developed and amazon because of the poor conditions. in 1971 betty makers was perhaps the most influential archeologists, famously summed up the region has appeared as a place that is an interval to human life because of rains and floods and founding son

comminute transfer leach from the soil and the soil becomes depleted and you can't grow crops. because of that she argued and other scientists are giddy could never develop a larger population which are a precursor for any kind of complex society. enough people for you have divisions of labor and political hierarchies with chieftains and kingdoms. in fact meggars argued that the conditions were so difficult that even if a tribe of hunter-gatherer's was able to sustain its population it could lead as population growth to much income up with other ways to basically purges down through blood prevents, through infanticide, abandoning the sick and the wilderness. in the 1970's, claudio villalobos was one of the great defenders of the amazonian indians. he told a reporter, quote this

is the jungle and to abandon the man without family can be essential for the survival of the tribe. is only now that the jungle is vanishing and it is losing its meaning that were shocked. but phos said during his expeditions began to believe that these assumptions about the jungle and its people were wrong and incorrect. he began to venture deeper into the jungle where no one else had gone and the deeper he went, he found that the tribes were more robust. their populations were larger because they hadn't been decimated by disease. here, here are some of the earlier pictures. this is an indian fishing with bow and arrow. this that the scene said there wasn't enough food. again this said filled the idea of paradise but fawcett made contact with various tribes that had been contacted before in this was his longtime assistant. these were with the issue be

indians as fawcett classified them and the mission of the's never seen whitesman before. fawcett was struck when he encountered these tribes that while he and his men would come stumbling into these parties time grand dessa-- this for for food they i said plenty of food and they found ingenious ways to adapt to their environment. they would use the amazonian floodplains to grow crops. they have ingenious ways of hunting and fishing using various poisons, so food never seem to be a problem for them fawcett noted. he was also struck by a specially the tribes that had not yet been decimated by the contact and especially from the seas but a sophistication of cultures, the riches other ours was particularly struck with the music when he stayed with them. all of these things gave him a sense that perhaps the general assumptions that had been passed down for generations about the amazon was incorrect.

he began a steady, the early el dorado texting here you can see a picture of one of the old el dorado texted actually visit picture write-up. i found this in a brazilian archive. it is actually the same document that fawcett found as well and is eaten through by moths and coming apart. fawcett began to study these documents and in these documents even though the early el dorado hunters never found a great golden kingdom at least the early hunters the first ones that went to the amazon, they all described large populations along the banks of the amazon river and they describe large towns and cities that listen and wide. they describe dreamlike causeways. they describe bridges and pottery that was refined is anything from greece or rum. later settlers went to come later exports of going to the amazon area never find any of

these things so most historians, all of this misfeasor account, they seem they were products of the conquistadores furtive imagination than they were just like calderotta, an illusion and in this case to justify to the monarchs the disastrous nature and they want to embellish them. fawcett thought that their worst to much similarity to dismiss. he wondered also had disease perhaps decimated these population and was a possible the jungle had simply consume the remnants of the settlements. at one time when he was in the bolivian floodplains he was climbing in large earth mound and when they look down on the ground he saw something sticking up. he bent down and picked it up and it was a shard of pottery. every where he began to scratch on the surface of this large earth mound in the believe in floodplain to begin to find pieces of broken paulk-- pottery. this was a period before carbon

dating so there's no way to find its age. it also looked as refined as anything he had seen from old creek pottery. that was not all. he began to look in the bolivian floodplains and saw larger earth mounds, not just the one that he was on but throughout this area and when he looked at them, connecting them, it almost looked as though buried under glow over growth from the jungle floor in the floodplains book like straight wines is that they were causeways are roads. they wondered if these could be like the roads and causeways that the conquistadores had described. most thought then fawcett was gnats and he battled skeptics for many years to persuade them to prevail upon them. finally in 1925 he set out to find this place that he had called the city of z.

he took with him only two men, his son, jack who was his oldest son, and jack really worshiped his father. he looked very dashing, as you can see. he looks a lot like a movie star and in fact he had aspirations to become one when he returned from this great expedition as the famed explorer. and the other companion was raleigh reindel. jack was 21 at the time. brawley reindel who was his child the best friend, that had grown up in england and were pretty much inseparable. justice jack worship his father, raleigh looked intensely up to jack. now, fa said was very secretive about where he was going. at the time there was a race among various floors to possibly

find such an ancient civilization in the jungle, this kind of el dorado and because of all of these rivals fawcett to it maintain the paranoia of these buy all of this life, was very clandestine and even in his letters he would use codes and ciphers exactly where he was going in the jungle, but here is this map which i showed you before, and he did give some sense of where he was going. he was going in the motto crosso region and here's the shing sioux-- xingu river. he came from the sol palo and took a train somewhere down here which is a place called or bunning came up by boat recappable of motto crosso. motto crosso is in the dense forests and for here, he is going to head up into this territory here. hesitancy on this map everywhere up here it says on explored.

here is a picture of jack on his get up as they were setting out in the motto crosso reason and he has got a pack animal. they would take pack animals with them, but they would only take them usually, in this mistruth fawcett's earlier expeditions, they would take pack animals for three weeks once they got into denser jungle in the animals will die because of the conditions for their reading in it diaries of the animals is often disconcerting. one of the only clues to where fawcett actually went in this motto crosso region is a place called dead horse camp for they had to shoot a horse and fawcett had released those so people knew dead horse camp a kind this iconoclast someplace in this region. here is a picture of fawcett on that trip, one of his guides.

there were only three members of the expedition, fawcett, raleigh and jack for most of the expedition that early on they did take to guides. there were more like quarters, who helped them with equipment as they progressed into the jungle but once they got into the deeper jungle the guides became afraid, understandably and they were sent back. one of the really interesting things is that, fawcett's was sponsored by scientific but it was also sponsored by an organization called the north american newspaper alliance which was a big send it at the time and fawcett would write dispatches on the trip, describing what was happening and then these dispatches were carried out. they would give the dispatchers for example to these men but they would also give them to indian runners in these indeed runners with literally carried these crumpled dispatches and they would arrive weeks later, avenge the make it to the city

where they would be typed up on a telegraph machine almost like a feat of magic and broadcast from the world, so everybody and it is hard to imagine today but everybody was following this event as it was going on and it literally hold the whole world spell band as they went deeper and deeper into the jungle. these dispatches appeared for about five months and then suddenly the seas. fossett wanted might be out of contact for a period of time but when you went by, then two years went by, and the fascination grew. had they been kidnapped by a tribe? were they starving? were they to entranced with the z to return? and all sorts of lore began to develop around this mystery. there were stands, museum exhibits, there were novels, there were documentary's. there were comic books. here you can see one of the

adventure novels of was written about it. you see bob moran and the fawcett mystery. henry verne was a popular novelist. he was french. i don't know anybody remembers the tin tin serious bed and even made a cameo in the tin tin series. here we can see fawcett appearing in the jungle is an old man and there was great supplies. he said they never really want to go back to civilization. that is why they never came back and when they disappeared. fawcett was imputed to be a role model for ndn a jones to help inspired and there is even a book that was tied into the movie. this is a book and fawcett appears in the book in the indiana jones and fawcett escape from the river of death. now fawcett had warned that no one should follow in his wake to to the danger but despite his warnings, scores of adventures,

scientists and explorers plunged into the wilderness determined to recover the party live or dead or find evidence of z. many of them died from disease or starvation. others were killed by tribesmen and then there were those who simply disappeared along with fawcett and his son and raleigh. in 1928, the one of the first major rescue efforts, and this is commander george die who led the expedition, and he went into the jungle hoping to solve the mystery and was actually later a movie was made about his adventure trying to say fawcett. he was actually also sponsoring -- any actually had bought one of-- broad when the first movie cameras of the film part of it. this movie which was made in 1958 about his trip actually slice is an old black-and-white

footage from his actual turpen at wilcha show you a clip of that movie. you will get a sense of a little bit of the melodrama. >> the north american newspaper alliance said me off to form an expedition to search for the export. i export most of the countries in the world, but now my mission had an added meaning of urgency. i was heading up the river, destination quianjo, gateway to the motto crosso. beyond a lot of savage country forge notes four hever attends it. that is where i recalled-- i met him once. he was a veteran explore. one of the vanishing breed of men the world could never afford to lose. there was the mystery of the lost city. what i find him there a live amid the distance of some

forgotten race living in splendor? these were my thoughts as we passed the native villages never change for 100 years. >> mr. did eventually make it out of the jungle, though barely. he came up with clues to solve the mystery of though his theory eventually collapsed. here is one of the british consoles on the right to actually new fawcett for good they were good friends and had always held out hope that his friend who seemed invincible, would come back. this man on the left was that trapper who believed he had found evidence that fawcett was alive and was determined to find him. here they are looking at a map and a trapper, mr. bratton, eventually went to find fawcett and he was never seen again. here is our movie star, albert.

heat too was never seen again. one of the things that really interested me when i was doing my research into this was that the search parties and his fascination with the mystery didn't just go on in the 20's, '30's and 40's or even just the '50s. it continues into the presence. in fact in 1996 allard skill present expedition led by james lynch and his son james jr. who was only 16 of the time, and they took was a party of a dozen men determined to try to solve the mystery and they were old smiley kidnapped by a tribe and held hostage and eventually escaped after several days. when i began my part, i really saw it much more as the way reporter was, a biographical quest for a guy wanted to tell the story to people like wenge.

i want to tell this kind of crazy story of fawcett, what had happened to him, could the city of z really have existed? i began to do it much more in a way that i'm comfortable with which is basically going to libraries and crowding around and in dimly lit rooms which was the height of my adventure, and looking at old manuscripts. eventually i tracked down fawcett's granddaughter. she invited me to her house and we chatted for a while and eventually she said to me well, do you really want to know what happened to my grandfather? i said if it is possible, of course. she led me into a backroom and in the backroom was an old chest. she open that cheston inside for these books. they were crumbling, the bindings for breaking apart. they were covered with dust and

i said, what are they? she said my grandfather's diaries and law books. for me, this was the equivalent of my z, finding these gems to go through and they held on president clinton's two fawcett, to his life into what happened to him. as i was going to these diaries looking for clues from 1921 i came across the words dead horse camp which was believed to be the last known campo fawcett. all the previous expeditions relied on those korte nets to base where they would go to try to trace fawcett's route. when i was looking in the diary i saw in his handwriting, i saw dead horse camp and it gave korte its. i checked disgorgements against accordance that had been released and they were significantly different. this astounded me. here you can see the dead horse

camp where most people were thought had always been in here was the dead horse camp based on his diaries. and with the granddaughter confirmed and what this meant was that fawcett release those and they really were reuss to throw his rivals off the path. this astounded me because what it meant was many expeditions that headed off fatally in the wrong direction. once i have this information as well as other matsen things i had found, clues, that everly became consumed with the mystery and with possession of this information i thought well, i know where he went. why don't i do it? [laughter] what was interesting was, so i decided to do it. and, i came up here and followed fawcett's path through various

dispatches and i was able to piece together the accurate route that he had taken. what was interesting was both expeditions' headed north. you have to understand this is a huge discrepancy dealing with solis jumbo. eustis can do with this kind of train. i have found various clues in his own riding specifying where he was going. and so, in a moment of foolishness i decided to try to do this, and even today, the amazon remains in many places unknown. the brazilian government estimates there 60 tribes that remain and contacted. in 2006, a tribe, members of a nomadic tribe called the new copp to emerge from the amazon to announce that they are ready

to join the modern world though they were unaware colombia was a country and asked if the planes overhead were on in invisible wrote. here's a picture of the tribe. the regions where fawcett disappeared or in the xingu area. here you can see in aerial shot of the xingu river and this territory is on their indian control, and it is about the size of belgium. it is one of the largest swaths of territory of the entire planet that is under indian control. andy cange accenture these territories, as i described earlier, because of the bloody history of the context. these areas function as a country within the country. they have their own councils and their own laws so i needed to find a guide the could help me make contact with the tribe so i could enter that territory where fawcett disappeared. now when i first learned to call

around-- many of them in brazil had heard of fawcett and i said well i want to follow his-- there was a long pause and they all said, a polite way of saying you are out of your mind. it took awhile to find somebody but i eventually did and i found my friend here, paulo pinochet. the funny thing about paulo is when i met him, here he is in the house, but hollow look like that before we started out as if he were returning from an expedition rather than embarking on one. he was a professional samba dancer and yet a wonderful sense of humor. he had also worked for the government agency set up to protect indigenous populations in brazil, so he could really help make contact with various tribes. so we mapped out our route and we try to follow fawcett's route as precisely as possible and here you can see a braver porter

with his pen in hand crossing a bridge on the trail of colonel fawcett with some indians who are helping show is the way. here we are pushing a boat through some of the wilderness. i had fawcett's letters with me. along with the dispatches they had ridden private letters to the family home that had been carried out so i could read these personal letters of fawcett's descriptions and try to go to the same place, and and fawcett had described this river and there was a big thunderstorm and they were afraid to get across and jacketed volunteered to swim across. fawcett was extremely proud of his son in the moment. we cross the river by boat. it was very tranquil and there we are again trying to get as closely as possible to fawcett's route. inligan manatt the more