SPEAKER_00: 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.
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SPEAKER_07: 50 Things That Made the Modern Economy with Tim Harford
SPEAKER_05: Robert Fortune was much annoyed when his Chinese servant returned to the ship with a pathetically small collection of plants. Clearly, rather than trekking into the hills, the servant had barely ventured beyond the shore. Fortune assumed he'd been lazy.
SPEAKER_06: Like most of the Chinese, he was rather remarkable for this propensity. The servant protested. He had been told that the people who lived in the hills in that
SPEAKER_05: part of southeast China were dangerous. Nonsense, said Fortune. They'd go together. The ship's captain offered to send some crew members for protection. No need, said Fortune. Doubts started to creep in when the locals, seeing him stride off towards the hills, attempted to dissuade me from going by intimating that I was sure to be attacked by the Chinchu
SPEAKER_06: men and robbed or murdered.
SPEAKER_05: Then he noticed the locals were armed. Self-defence, explained his servant. Well, it was too late now.
SPEAKER_06: I determined to put a bold face on the matter and proceed.
SPEAKER_05: At first, all went smoothly. Foreigners were a rare sight, and Fortune drew quite a crowd, but they were generally civil. He filled his specimen boxes with...
SPEAKER_06: ..three or four hundred of the Chinese of both sexes and all ages, looking down upon us with wonder.
SPEAKER_05: Soon, however, Fortune had been deftly pickpocketed, and his servant, pale with fright, was surrounded by knife-wielding robbers.
SPEAKER_06: My poor plants, collected with so much care, were flying about in all directions.
SPEAKER_05: This episode doesn't appear to have affected the young Scotsman's confidence. Later in the trip, he was warned that an area he wanted to sail to was swarming with pirates.
SPEAKER_06: Nonsense, I exclaimed. No pirates will attack us.
SPEAKER_05: You can probably guess what happened. But Fortune made it back to Shanghai, where he... ..dispatched eight glazed cases of living plants for England.
SPEAKER_05: He concludes his 400-page memoir of the expedition by noting with satisfaction...
SPEAKER_06: The Anemone Japonica is in full bloom in the garden of the Society at Chiswick.
SPEAKER_05: Fortune was a plant hunter employed by those people in Chiswick, the Horticultural Society of London, now the Royal Horticultural Society, and those glazed cases were making it a whole lot easier to plant hunt. They were called Wardian cases, and they'd been developed in the previous decade, the 1830s. Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward was a doctor in London's East End. He was also a fern enthusiast, but he struggled to grow ferns because the city air was so polluted. Ward's invention was simple and, in retrospect, obvious. Glass, timber, putty, paint. It was essentially a sealed mini-greenhouse. It let the light in, it kept the soot and smoke out. And it kept the moisture in, so there was no need to water the plants. This was no feat of technology, but the result of a questioning mind. It was commonly assumed that plants needed the open air. Ward wondered, what if they don't? His ferns thrived. And Ward soon realised he might have solved a problem that vexed plant hunters. How to keep their plants alive on a long sea journey. Put them below deck and they suffered from lack of light. Put them above deck and they suffered from salty spray. Ward arranged an experiment. He shipped two cases of plants to Australia. Several months later came a letter from the ship's captain offering warm congratulations. Most ferns were alive and vigorous and the grasses were attempting to push the top of the box off. The ship returned with Ward's cases packed with Australian plants. Again, perfectly healthy. Ward wrote a book on the growth of plants in closely glazed cases. He was sure his invention would have far-reaching impacts. And he was right. But not in the way he expected. He thought humans, like ferns, would benefit from being out of the polluted London air. And he envisaged large sealed greenhouses in which people could convalesce from measles or consumption. He didn't foresee that his case was about to reshape global agriculture, politics and trade. Perhaps he should have. Because plant hunting had never been only about herbaceous perennials. The father of modern plant hunting, Sir Joseph Banks, was keenly aware of the economic potential of moving crops from one colonial outpost to another. In the late 1700s, he turned London's Kew Gardens into a kind of imperial clearinghouse for flora. It was Banks who caused Captain William Bligh to embark on his ill-fated voyage on HMS Bounty, a voyage which was to end in an infamous mutiny. Bligh was supposed to deliver breadfruit plants to the West Indies. Banks hoped they'd become a cheap way of feeding slaves. Thanks to the Wardian case, the process of transplanting, well, plants, now had wind in its sails. Before, said one commercial importer, they expected 19 out of 20 plants to die at sea. In Ward's cases, they found, 19 out of 20 were surviving. It was Wardian cases, for example, that spread the Cavendish banana around the world. That's the variety you see in shops today. William Cavendish was the president of the horticultural society. Wardian cases destroyed Brazil's rubber industry. With prices high, the British Foreign Office sent an enterprising amateur botanist to the Amazon to sneak out some rubber seeds. They germinated in Kew and seedlings were shipped to East Asia. Brazil couldn't compete with colonial plantations. And Wardian cases helped break China's grip on the tea market. Ward published his book in the year Britain won the first opium war. When the Chinese decided to stop accepting Indian-grown opium in exchange for their tea, the British sent in gunboats to change their minds. You can see why. Taxes on tea accounted for nearly a tenth of the British government's income. Now the East India Company, which virtually governed the subcontinent on Britain's behalf, decided they needed a back-up approach. Grow more tea in India. That meant they needed to smuggle tea plants out of China. And there was only one man for that job. Robert Fortune had learned on his first expedition that if he shaved his head and wore a wig and Chinese clothes, he could just about pass unnoticed. Suitably disguised, he eventually shipped nearly 20,000 tea plants for his new employers. But perhaps the most significant impact of the Wardian case wasn't bringing plants to Europe from more far-flung places. It was enabling more people from Europe to go to far-flung places. Wardian cases allowed the cinchona tree to be shipped from South America to India and Sri Lanka. From its bark came quinine, which helped ward off malaria. That made it less scary for Europeans to venture to the tropics. Some historians think Africa might not have been colonised without it. After all, not every traveller was as blithely impervious to risk as Robert Fortune.
SPEAKER_07: Robert Fortune recounts his adventures in Three Years' Wanderings in the Northern Provinces of China. For a full list of our sources, please see bbcworldservice.com slash 50things.
SPEAKER_03: What do our most successful innovators think about the inventions they unleashed upon the world?
SPEAKER_04: A thousand songs in your pocket. No one ever had that experience before.
SPEAKER_03: Do they like the way it turned out? Do you use GPS? Oh, absolutely. But it dismays me because people are losing their capacity to read maps.
SPEAKER_01: And are they proud of what it's become?
SPEAKER_03: I looked over at the next table and there was a family and all four of them were sitting there looking at their cell phones.
SPEAKER_01: I thought that was terrible. In our podcast, WorldWiseWeb, teenagers like me get to question the people who invented the tech we take for granted.
SPEAKER_03: When did you come up with the idea and what were you doing whenever you thought of it? That's WorldWiseWeb from the BBC World Service. Are you kidding me? All this math, science and code I've been learning can come together to create worlds and characters and tell stories.
SPEAKER_02: And that is like absolutely the coolest thing I've ever heard in my whole life. Search for WorldWiseWeb wherever you get your podcasts.
SPEAKER_03: That is the most thrilling experience that a human being could ever have.
