06 - Elementary Stuff - Connections 3 (1997)

"Elementary Stuff" – Alfred Russel Wallace, who studied beetles, Oliver Lodge and telegraphy, a radio designed by Reginald Fessenden, which was used by banana growers, studied by Augustin Pyramus de Candolle, who got the Swiss to use stamps on postcards with cartoons of Gothic houses of parliament, which in turn had been inspired by Johann Gottfried Herder's Romantic movement, inspired by fake Scottish poems. The exiled Scots escaped to North Carolina, producing turpentine, which helped make Chinese lacquer on tinplate, which is for what Jean-Baptiste Colbert had hoped. French navy decorator Pierre Paul Puget, who paints pictures of locations where barometers are the subject of investigation. The weather experimenter, whose brother's writing turns on Swift, whose pal Berkeley has visual theories that Young confirms while decoding ancient Egyptian from examples sketched by pencils invented by French balloonists. The American balloons are used for spying by Allan Pinkerton and his intrepid agent James McParland, who becomes famous in England because of Conan Doyle.