This is Stephen Fry's Great Leapiers, the stories behind inventions.

Episode 2 A Fustian Pact.

In the story of the technology behind the information age, there are plotlines and patterns

that keep repeating like musical themes or poetic tropes.

Some of the light motifs, the recurring themes you might listen out for over the next

episodes, include repeated references to crossing continents, to the state of New Jersey,

Patents, Germans, the Santa Clara Valley, California, networks, materials, Italians,

the Big Four, Philanthropy, bewildering speed, inventors who underestimate the impact

of their inventions, prizes.

I shall start today, gosh, where?

History is a long thread, where to go back and where to cut.

I shall go back more than 600 years and snip at somewhere around the year 1400.

What we uncover will give you goose flesh, I guarantee.

Around 1400, much of the world was just recovering from its greatest ever disaster, the Black

Death.

This was a pandemic of bubonic plague that wiped out somewhere between 30% and 60% of the

entire population of Europe and Western Asia.

There were a hundred million people are estimated to have died out of a population of 450

million.

Those who did survive were left to wonder why such a catastrophe had befallen.

This medieval age had no concept of germ theory, of course, nor any understanding of such

vectors of diseases, fleas and rats.

...