What's in a Name

Connections • Season 3 • Episode 2

About this episode

Remember the cornflakes from last episode? Because corncobs make adhesives to bond carborundum discovered by Edward Goodrich Acheson, otherwise known as silicon carbide, to grinding wheels used to grind lightbulbs, silicon carbide is also then used as protection against armour-piercing shells developed to hit tanks that start life as American tractors, which use diesel engines developed from funding from Krupp, who inspired Bismarck's welfare scheme based on Quetelet's statistics that inspired the Charles Babbage's difference engine, whose punch cards were used to rivet the SS Great Eastern, the monster ship that laid the transatlantic cable insulated with gutta-percha used to manufacture golf balls for factory managers in industrial Scotland, where James Watt had a run-in with Cavendish, whose protegee was James Macie, also called James Smithson, who caused all the row in the capitol building, so the money got used to set up a world-renowned institution named after James Macie's new f