The little-known tree that revolutionised global communication - BBC REEL
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- čas přidán 26. 07. 2022
- In Singapore, 1842, Dr William Montgomerie was shown a strange latex by his gardener.
This material, when placed in hot water, could be moulded to any shape you wanted, and, on cooling, would set solid. You could do this again, and again and it would happily mould to any shape desired. Unlike rubber, it didn’t crumble in salt water and stayed firm on setting.
This new wonder material was called Gutta Percha, after the tree that it came from, and it would blow Victorian minds.
Video by Archie Crofton
Narration by Emily West
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#bbc #nature #history #science
As a chemist, I was familiar with gutta percha. I did not realize the tree was nearly extinct.
Thank you.
I guess gutta percha can not be harvested the way latex is harvested from a living tree.
@@davidjacobs8558 I just watch on local Indonesia documentary, and as this video said, the tree need to be felled/cut down, because the Gutta Percha extracted not from the wood body/stem, but actually from the leaf, and the tree need to be grow minimally around 10 meter to be considered ready to be harvested. That's why it's considered as ecologically destructive... But one good thing about this tree: they need extremely minimum care... seedling need as tall as teenager to be ready planted on the ground, and after that they not need any care, as long they planted on rainy season. even in the documentary, the worker only need to do weeding if the bushes/weed is growing too dense/big and sometimes they not need weeding at all.
Currently, the only factory that knowingly cultivated the tree and extracted Gutta Percha on the spot is in Tjipetir, Sukabumi; and currently the whole plantation & factory managed by government. The factory only making around 200KG per year or every two year, and all the Gutta Percha is exported for medical need; just like in video said, mostly for dental & orthodontic. Some article said Tjipetir factory & plantation is the last one of this kind in the world, that specialized in Gutta Percha.
In Russian language we have a word ”guttaperchivy” means very flexible, usually it will be used to describe some acrobats. Never knew the origin of it.
wow
As for me, I understood the "guttaperchivy" as a sort of a rubber. Some of our Russian XX century classic writers use it.
Trickyanna, thank you for that bit of knowledge. Interesting, and I wonder how far the concept spread?
Can it be used to describe a politician or let's say a foreign minister?
"Getah percha" in malay literally meaning "Rubber of Percha"
With the percha is the tree's name which native in Malay Archipelago.
This is such a great video in so many ways: You get to the point very directly. You inform the viewer with only facts. You don't fill us with "How the scientist's aunt is proud of her daughter", and your footage is relevant to the narration at all points! 10 out of nine!
Except the narrator leaves us hanging. How is a little piece of Gutta Percha in our mouths?
Plus, I really enjoyed the graphics. Very good video.
@@jz94117 5:21
Well BBC does have quite amount of Poundsterling in their coffer
Gutta Perca came from english pronunciation of Indonesian words "getah" meaning sap, and "Perca" the name of the tree.
So the literal translation is "sap of perca tree"
Mate.. Malay language. Indonesia wasnt even born yet.. the malay language is the lingua Franca of then Areas ..
Indonesia adopted the Malay language as its National Lingua franca, naming it Indonesian
Getah = Rubber Percha = small piece @ patch frm bigger just like kain percha (patchwork , of remnants of cloth)
@@kentershackle1329 are you malaysian?
@@kentershackle1329 that funny if you know that malay language came from Riau area of present day Indonesia.
The reason why malay became lingua franca due to its position, because every sea trader will port at Riau island.
If somehow the traders coma from the east, I bet Macassar language that will be lingua franca.
@@rizkierwin6488
Sooo, got nothin to do with the Melacca Sultanate, the last great Empire before Colonialists came..?
@@kentershackle1329 no, malay language exist far before that, and my point is it came from the present days Indonesia.
My introduction to Gutta Percha was a PBS documentary. I only recall hearing about the telegraph line from London to New York. My 2nd encounter was root canals. My dentist was in disbelief that I knew what he was putting in my mouth! This is however the first time I have learned that the telegraph cables went all over the world...but am not surprised that greed almost wiped out the species.
I would love to know how the overall condition of the original undersea cables have stood the test of time over the last 150 years or so.
I love little nuggets of history like this! I had heard of this tree before. I believe it was here on CZcams years ago. Still loved this story!!!
Fountain pens. You didn’t mention the great gutta percha era of fountain pens! Well, now I have.
Thank you for your video, excellent narration and history of the Gutta Percha tree and the amazing uses it had.
I literally was racking my brain for years about the meaning of my desist screaming "GUTTER PORCHE" during my root canal and that was his pronunciation of this
Dentist
porshe?
Alaska was not British territory in 1850.
Or ever
I would have thought the BBC knew Alaska was not a British possession
or shown the Empire in Red, it was always in Pink when I was at school
Video by Archie Crofton
Narration by Emily West
thank you for this well-produced doco snippet
The were problems with undersea cables that went far beyond the insulation. Arthur Clarke's book "How the World Was One" describes the issues in fair detail.
The main problem was with using DC.
Convolution
This video is exquisitely put together. It's fun and clear. Brings history to life. What a Tree, revolutionised the world. Protect the forests & Nature, think of how many species could revolutionise the world still 💪❤️🌍🙏
My God.. the wonders of mother nature..excellent piece
Seeing how we deplete other ressources equally including those which replaced Gutta Percha, it maybe wise to try to keep this tree alife and well, we just may need it again.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing this with us.
Indian Soldier in Failed Indian Revolt in 1958 said that They were defeated not by British Guns But Telegraph Cables.
4:19 The question should have been
' Why didn't they tried to protect and preserve the tree .'
My great-grandfather, Thomas J. Wilmot, for 20 years Superintendent of the Waterville Cable Station, Co Kerry, Ireland, invented the Wilmot Automatic Transmitter in 1890, which removed the human hand from the telegraph, greatly speeding the rate of transmissions. ...... My late father told me that Thomas was Superintendent, but never mentioned the transmitter - maybe he knew nothing of it. ...... I found it on Google.
I had no idea that so much damage was done to Nature to weaterproof the cables. ...... So sad.
Amazing work
Love these videos.
The map depicting the British Empire erroneously included Alaska. It was still part of Russia at that time, but even after that it came to the US. It was never part of the British Empire. Just sayin
Very well noted
Goodonya mate!…I noted that too.
And when I was educated 1950/60's the world atlas showed the British Empire in pink never red ( as that was seen as a Russian colour ) Any old atlas book with verify it .
Yup, added to the list of errors, exaggerations, and propaganda in thIs little film.
Incredible video thank you
Thank you for sharing
Well executed little piece.
Learned another great fact today! Thanks 😉🥂
Enjoyed your video and I gave it a Thumbs Up
Very interesting and surprising. Thank You for sharing.
Britain was such a great empire!
Knew of the medical uses. Did not know of its uses in undersea cables. My thanks. The observation that synthetic polymers came the rescue was well taken. I've heard that about 1/2 of the planet's physical wealth is because of and manifested in synthetic polymers. Ie: water bottles.
"Oh look how useful that tree is! Let's make it extinct!"
Nice little story😊
Only knew of it watching vids of silk painting where it's used to separate blocks of color.
As a dentist, this just puts a huge smile on my face. And also, some worry that what shall we use after GP is extinct in wild!
Truly fascinating! I wasn't aware that international electronic communications were taking root (route) as underwater telegraph cables starting in the mid 1800's.
here's anudder odd fact: the structure of the internet as we know it from 1995 is old: it began one day in may, 1935, when a switch was thrown and RAF Fighter Command in the Home Ids. went active. it has been so ever since.
@@STScott-qo4pw Not sure that is an equivalent system without the internet protocols developed by DARPA in the 1970's/80,s
This is worth watching.
That’s an eye opener 😳
Wonderful narrator’s voice!
Hail Gutta Percha, so important for Dentists
I had some root-canal work in the 80's, the canals were filled using tiny gutta-percha conical plugs
Very good
Great vid! Another example of British Industry destroying the world, perhaps one day we will learn :)
Very interesting 👍
Interesting story!...
we can still find gutta percha trees in tji petir Sukabumi, Indonesia
Your graphic map at the start of the video... Baffin Island is part of Canada but Alaska was never.
Dang it! I mentioned Alaska, but missed that. I tip my hat to you
4:10 between 1850 and 1903 _ over 300,000 miles of undersea cables were laid around the world.
The map at the beginning of the video did not even bother to include the Philippine Map. I mean the Philippines is an archipelago and its hard to draw but at least put a dot or something to represent it.
Ending left me confused why it would be used in teeth.
Extrusion cable wires for Space
And
So much more
Alaska was british territory? Wow
I don't believe it was.
brilliant script writing!
It's super informative.I appreciate the efforts (๑˙❥˙๑)!!
Brisbane doesn't have droughts.
Getah perca? It is really spelled as ghuttah percha. Getah is sap, in Bahasa Indonesia and Malays.
So if you've had a root canal, you probably have gutta percha in your skull. Wow.
0:16 They have claimed Alaska!
I don't think so .
Well, I'm a bit wiser now.
How was it used in truncheons? Do they just coat wood with it?
The whole thing would be cast of it.
@@xrysoryba oh, it's gutta percha throughout? Must have been expensive back then. I thought they'd do something like with some lacquer items where it'll have a core and then build up with layers.
@@nunyabiznes33 No, gutta percha was actually quite cheap at the time. It was also used to make revolver grips as it was cheaper than wood. I guess that's also why they used it for truncheons.
@@xrysoryba oh, ok. Guess it's cheap since they're practically getting it for free by destroying the rainforest. If only it can be harvested without killing the tree, like rubber and lacquer.
What an excellent, informative, thankfully brief video. Aside from a couple slips, essentially factual.
But the BBC tells us that droughts never happened before 1990.
Never knew the communication network was so large and covered a significant part of the world in 1850s. However, the word geta is nothing but the Sinhalese word 'geta' meaning roundish blob that must have come out of the tree. Similar words are 'hujjan' and 'hutan' meaning falling water and forest but perhaps used long time ago.
So, the Brits have a habit of keeping everything secret, like the ARM!.
"The demand for truncheons". - really ? well, I wouldn't have guessed that little sentence in a literal million years ! 😃 Truncheons indeed, I mean for heavens sake, what the actual flip, you couldn't make it up !
100 million trees destroyed,,,,what a sad thing
No trees were destroyed they were all harvested.
I used to thoughts that rubber tree was only Naturally found w
ild from brazil.
Its called " plunder"...
Dear BBC, the telegraph in Australia landed at Darwin, then Palmerston thence to Adelaide, not into Perth western Australia as your graphic showed, Perth didn't have telegraph communication to to eastern states till much later. Do you research please.
I suspect you are just looking at the map upside down.
yeah therer's some questionable things shown in this one lol. you'd think you'd know a little history when making a doco about history
Can't help but notice that Alaska is an Imperial possession here.
2:18 some things just don't change, huh❓
The British apparently went 'mad' for anything and everything they could use and consume as long as it was cheap , coming from far away places for which they never felt accountable. Lot of apologies are lined up for the Britishers!
Britain never controlled Alaska!
☮️
The nerve of western countries to lecture developing nations over environment problems.
The nerve of fools that think current knowledge can be ignored just because someone did things in the past without that knowledge!
@@thedausthed some nerve of fools dont know about retrospective accountability.
If the British were made to pay for the havoc they caused in the world, the bank of England’s coffers would be emptied quick smart.
Without the innovations and advancements brought on by the British Empire the world would be much less wealthy healthy and free. We can't even imagine the extend of illness and poverty, slavery etc, that would probably still exist without the British influence on the world.
Gutta percha is still around but small pox has been eradicated.
And if the world was to pay Britain for abolishing slavery, building universities and libraries in every corner of its empire (look up the Jaffna Library, largest in Asia once and then destroyed by Sri lankans) and the technology it created, then the worlds' coffers would go dry.
See Shashi Tharoors on you tube
Could they have tapped the trees instead of cutting them down?
Empires and colonialist have a way of discovering something useful and then exterminating it. Their Shortsighted greed is astonishing yet predictable.
Go live in a Cave then.
MALAYSIA
What I like about Brits is at least there are some historical mistakes they acknowledge, and regret - and even apologize on. Also make a lesson out of.
Hi everyone, here's some life saving or health saving important information for you. This tree stuff might be in your root canal, and if you are allergic to latex that might be a problem. Because of this video I have to call the dentist that did my root canal tomorrow who knew I was allergic to latex and I will ask "is there anything from the gutta percha tree" in my tooth. I doubt they'll even know what I am talking about, if you have this tree stuff in your root canal you may want to get it removed. Thanks BBC, when the dentist inevitably says "Gut-what?" I might show them this video.
Usually, when people refer to a latex allergy, they are talking about a *rubber* latex allergy.
Latex is simply the name given to a milky sap. Many trees and other plants have latex, but only the latex from the rubber tree (ficus elastica) is rubber latex.
Gutta percha is the latex from an entirely different tree, so if you have it in your tooth and have not had an allergic reaction to it yet, you probably aren't allergic to gutta percha, even if you know you have a (rubber) latex allergy.
Not all salt is sodium chloride, not all alcohol is ethanol, and not all latex is rubber.
How hard would it have been to learn the proper pronunciation of the Malay name of the tree? I'm so tired of western media outlets not doing their research and giving due respect to non-European languages. It's fucked up in an age of advanced machine translation and widespread internet communication.
They're just Lame
I dont believe that you Racist pronounce foreign Words correct in your Language either.
This is more difficult than one would think, seeing that many languages have or haven't got sounds present in other languages. I always scream when some basic town name from my own country gets mutilated in English. Only they really don't have the sounds in their language; native English speakers don't know how to move their tongues to produce the sound properly. Add to that the fact that if two English speakers want to communicate about that town they probably have to find a way of spelling it so it will be understood by the other English speaker. Some languages, take Japanese for an extreme example, cannot pronounce consonant groups. They need to insert a vowel between most consonants, so for instance the word "strange" would become "su-tu-ren-ji". Or think of Chinese: Are we really able to pronounce Xi Jin-Pings name properly? How do we move our tongue to pronounce the sound they describe as "X"? How do we even transliterate languages that don't use the Latin alphabet? Yes, these days we can use UTF16 if we put our mind to it (and I really agree it should be done universally FFS), but by using a non-Latin alphabet the words will become unreadable for anybody from a country used to another alphabet.
And Yes, this thing would have to be observed from all sides. We write your words as you please; then you also please write our words as we please. So from now on write the big German city on the Rhine as Köln, not as Cologne or whatever.
=> Conclusion: Hardly practicable, isn't it?
That's why it is called english and not some foreign language. Because we speak english!
I'm not quite sure what he's complaining about, but I have been thinking about it, and possibly he's annoyed at the narrator pronouncing gettah perca as "getta perka". I think it would have to be "getta percha" or "getta perja", the same as "kecap manis" is pronounced something like "ketchup manis". (This isn't Malay, as far as I know, but still.) I wrote a lengthy response to his post which was probably totally off his point because I hadn't grasped it 😄
Something sounds uncomfortably annoying with the audio
IN MALAY GETAH PERCA
Oalah getah
it makes me furious to discover once again the ignorance and greed of the British, having no remorse whatsoever
Why the Delhi is Shown as Mosque? It is Hindu majority nation. Respect the Republic of India. It is world's largest Democracy.
I had come across the word gutta percha being used grips on handles and such. Such the gripes on revolver or semi automatic pistol, but did not know the origin. Sounds like a goood source genes for the GMO people to introduced into some readily growable, harvetable plant.
2:23 bruh you cant call it peaceful protests when its 1848 of all times
Yeahhh
I knew I know that
But where and when ?
Racking my brain !
And you mentioned root canal
And voila
Thanks 😊
👌👌
*Colonized. The word you are looking for its colonized, not just "controlled". You colonized and subjected all these territories and stripped them of their wealth.
Whos Walter?
If there is some of this in my tooth that had a root canal and they did not tell me that I will be angry. I am now wondering if there's some of this in my root canal like you said. I expected they'd inform me about what they were putting in my mouth and thought it was all synthetic and now I am very curious to know if anything was from a tree.
Bloody empire.
Screenshot (07-Aug-2022 02:50:24)// Blood Group was still Parental Genealogical, unfortunately The Crimean War Mongers re established Themselves After 1947, Why Bismarck Sea ,after Sinking of The Bismarck by Hood
4 th Generation Bamboo Salts trader from 1908 onwards, as Tunguska 1908 version 3.2 since born on 24101982//
Late Father was a Sailor by Profession and Bookstore Cleark for Bookship still , Proverbial Bismarck of The Seas.
2 nd Generation Bamboo Salts trader on Mother's side, also In Probabilities AKA Bismarck of The Region in Bengal, as An Advocate by profession, but Smokeless Tobacco Connoisseur at heart.
Like Beetlenut Consumer till his last day.
True Tone the Local Noteworthy ride on in the Region. So, Going Back to Ancient Roots, as 3rd Party Guitar Manufacturer from the Region for export, Bearing Unlabed now from last as Fender untill,
Granada was Just like The German Shoe Manufacturing Giants .
So, exports from China are called Dada
// Presently Eagle Valley Scout for Ranger out of Town on School Business as Town Sheriff .
Gates to same reasons, Part Time Park Ranger in the Region.
Fart
How beautifully white washed
White washed like the Situation of untouchables or the Sati Practice in Hindu History?
@@berserk9085 Yes, exactly like how Brits destroyed all the books and re wrote it so that smart people like u can read it.
@@shivarajc7405 What Books? Hindutva Facist usually claim that the Mughals destroyed all Hindu Books. Now Im Confused.
@@berserk9085 ya they did destroy most, but they didn't re write it.
@@shivarajc7405 what they Re wrote specifically?
If u look back in history British behaved like scavengers...
Dorky ahh presenter