SPEAKER_01: Amazing, fascinating stories of inventions, ideas and innovations. Yes, this is the podcast about the things that have helped to shape our lives. Podcasts from the BBC World Service are supported by advertising.
SPEAKER_02: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford It sounded like cannon fire. But where was it coming from? Pirates, probably. The Benares,
SPEAKER_00: a ship of the British East India Company, was docked at Makassar on the Indonesian island of Sulawesi. Its commander gave the order to set sail and hunt them down. Hundreds of kilometres away, on another Indonesian island, Java, soldiers in Yogyakarta heard the cannon noises too. Their commander assumed the nearest town was under attack. He marched his men there at once. But they found no cannons, just other people wondering what the noise was. Three days later, the Benares still hadn't found any pirates. What they'd heard was the eruption of a volcano called Mount Tambora. When you consider that Mount Tambora is a thousand odd kilometres from Yogyakarta, it's hard to imagine how terrifying the explosions must have been up close. A cocktail of toxic gas and liquefied rock roared down the volcano's slopes at the speed of a hurricane. It killed thousands. Mount Tambora was left 4,000 feet shorter than before. The year was 1815. Slowly, a vast cloud of volcanic ash drifted across the northern hemisphere, blocking the sun. In Europe, 1816 became the year without a cure. Crops failed. Desperate people ate rats, cats and grass. In the German town of Darmstadt, the suffering made a deep impression on a 13-year-old boy. Young Justus von Liebig loved helping out in his father's paint workshop, concocting pigments, paints and polishes for sale. He grew up to be a chemist, among the most brilliant of his age. And he was driven by making discoveries that might help prevent hunger. Von Liebig did some of the earliest research into fertilisers. He pioneered nutritional science, the analysis of food in terms of fats, proteins and carbohydrates. He invented beef extract. Von Liebig invented something else too, infant formula. Launched in 1865, Liebig's Soluble Food for Babies was a powder comprising cow's milk, wheat flour, malt flour and potassium bicarbonate. It was the first commercial substitute for breast milk to come from rigorous scientific study. As von Liebig knew, not every baby has a mother who can breastfeed. Indeed, not every baby has a mother. For modern medicine, about one in a hundred child births killed the mother. It's little better in the poorest countries today. Then there are mothers who just can't make enough milk. The figures are disputed but could be as high as one in 20. What happened to those kids before formula? Some parents used a goat or donkey. Many gave their infants PAP, a bread and water mush from hard-to-clean receptacles that must have teamed with bacteria. No wonder death rates were high. In the early 1800s, only two in three of these babies who weren't breastfed lived to see their first birthday. And parents who could afford it employed wet nurses, a respectable profession for the working girl but an early casualty of von Liebig's invention. Von Liebig's formula hit the market at a propitious time. Germ theory was increasingly well understood. The rubber teat had just been invented too. The appeal of formula quickly spread beyond women who couldn't breastfeed. Liebig's soluble food for babies democratized a lifestyle choice that had previously been open only to the well-to-do. It's a choice that now shapes the modern workplace. For many new mothers who want or need to get back to work, formula is a godsend. And women are right to worry that taking time out might damage their careers. Recently, economists studied the experiences of the high-powered men and women emerging from Chicago University's MBA program, entering the worlds of consulting and high finance. At first, the women had similar experiences to the men, but over time, a huge gap in earnings opened up. The critical moment? It was motherhood. Women took time off and employers paid them less in response. Ironically, the men were more likely than the women to have children, they just didn't change their working patterns when they did. There are both biological and cultural reasons why women are more likely than men to take time off when they start families. We can't change the fact that only women have wombs, but we can try to change workplace culture. More governments are following Scandinavia's lead by giving dads the legal right to take time off. More leaders, like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, are setting the example of encouraging them to take it. And Formula Milk makes it a whole lot easier for dad to take over while mum gets back to work. Sure, there's also the option of the breast pump, but it's a lot more faff than formula. Studies show that the less time mums have off work, the less likely they are to persevere with breastfeeding. That's hardly surprising. There's just one problem. Formula's not all that good for kids. Formula-fed infants get sick more often. That leads to costs for medical treatment and parents taking time off work. It also leads to deaths. About 800,000 a year that breastfeeding would have prevented, most in poor countries. Justus von Liebig wanted to save lives. He'd have been horrified. Consequently, many governments try to promote breastfeeding, but nobody makes a quick profit from that. Selling formula, on the other hand, can be lucrative. Which have you seen more of recently? Public service announcements about breastfeeding or formula ads? Those ads have always been controversial. Not least because formula is arguably more addictive than tobacco or alcohol. When a mother stops breastfeeding, her milk dries up. There's no going back. Von Liebig himself never claimed that his soluble food for babies was better than breast milk. He simply said he'd made it as nutritionally similar as possible. But he quickly inspired imitators who weren't so scrupulous. By the 1890s, adverts for formula routinely portrayed it as state of the art. Meanwhile, paediatricians were starting to notice higher rates of scurvy and rickets among the offspring of mothers whom the advertising swayed. The controversy peaked in 1974, when the campaigning group War on Want published a pamphlet called The Baby Killer, about how Nestle sold infant formula in Africa. The boycotts lasted for years. By 1981, there was an international code of marketing breast milk substitutes, but it's not hard law, and many say it's widely flouted. What if there was a way to get the best of all worlds? Equal career breaks for mums and dads, and breast milk for infants without the faff of breast pumps. Or perhaps there is, if you don't mind taking market forces to their logical conclusion. In Utah, there's a company called Ambrosia Labs. It pays mums in Cambodia to express breast milk, screens it for quality, and sells it on to American mums. It's pricey now, over $100 a litre, but that could come down with scale, and maybe we could tax formula milk too to fund a breast milk market subsidy. Justus von Liebig sounded the death knell for wet nursing as a profession. Perhaps the global supply chain is bringing it back. William H. Brock's biography
SPEAKER_02: of Justus von Liebig is titled The Chemical Gatekeeper. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50 things. If you like what we've been doing on 50 things,
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