1919 Rochester Jeffersons season

Transcription

ANDREW LITTELL: Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Andrew Littell. And it is my distinct pleasure to welcome to Google, Simon Winchester. Mr. Winchester, welcome to Google. SIMON WINCHESTER: Thank you very much, Andrew. ANDREW LITTELL: I'd like to start out today by asking you about your latest book, "The Men Who United the States." What drove you to write about this particular aspect of American history? SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, I'd become a citizen on Independence Day. ANDREW LITTELL: Congratulations. SIMON WINCHESTER: Thank you very much, indeed-- in 2011. And because of that, it is a very emotional thing to be inducted into this great amalgam of people. And I was very proud and happy. And because I'd been fascinated with America ever since I hitchhiked around it in 1962, when I was 17. So once I'd become a citizen, I thought I would love to have a bash at writing a book. But I didn't really know how to. I mean it's an enormous subject. And it's also a subject which has been written about by thousands of people, academics, and explorers, and journalist. And it was a question of trying to write it in a way that was fresh and different, but nonetheless told a story that I thought was compelling. And I came up with a variety of ideas, none of which initially piqued my interest or, more importantly, my editor's interest. But the fourth one, it wasn't three is a charm. It was four is charm in this case. I was just ruminating one day on the name of the country, the United States of America, and looking specifically at this adjective, "United," and how did that happen to come about? Not merely come about, but to remain a coherent aspect of this country for most of its existence, with obviously the single exception of the 1960s and the terrible events of the Civil War. Because it occurred to me that the other great entities on the world's surface, Canada let's say, Russia, Europe, none of them had seriously achieved total and lasting unity. I mean dear old Canada, we love it. But the fact of the matter is that there is this great Francophone block in the middle, Quebec, which is forever threatening, sometimes loudly, sometimes less so, to split the country into three. The Soviet Union, we've seen what's happened in the aftermath of the breakup of the Soviet Union, dozens of little states, often hostile to one another. And Europe, where I'm from, I mean despite the best efforts of idealists, politicians, since the 1950s, we can't really rightly say that it's achieved total unity. Well, I made at a serious level, here's England. We don't use the euro. We're at the moment when thinking about splitting apart from Scotland. That's coming up for discussion in 18 months or so. Within Europe itself, I mean Switzerland is not a part of the European Union. If you try and plug your electric razor in in Stockholm, you'll need a different plug from the one you use in Madrid. And everyone is speaking in different languages and there is no common language in Europe. And yet America, which is this great mongrel amalgam of peoples of every imaginable ethnic background, and religious affiliation, and political viewpoint, does manage to hang together. And I thought, let's ruminate on this word, "united." And then it was a question of how to structure a book. And that was in a way, the more difficult thing. But we can talk about that-- ANDREW LITTELL: Sure. SIMON WINCHESTER: --as we move along, I dare say. ANDREW LITTELL: Well, the thing that immediately, even before I picked up the book and was just looking at the title, I was really captivated by this idea of regionalism as a part of being united and so looking at the wide variety of regions that are represented within this United States. And I think it's a very delicate balance between allowing differences and regional characteristics to flourish, but also being part of a greater whole. SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, it is. The variation that you speak of, I've become somewhat involved in a project related to that as well, which is for the last 50 years in Madison, Wisconsin, they've been preparing a dictionary, which they've at last finished, which you probably know about, DARE, the "Dictionary of American Regional English. It's a very long story, but basically when it was initiated in the 1960s by people that believed there was huge variation within this country linguistically and dialectically, let's record it before it all effervesces and America, everyone speaks exactly the same, which hasn't happened of course. ANDREW LITTELL: Yeah. SIMON WINCHESTER: And they sent these people to the furthest reaches of this country and what were called Word Wagons. And they went down to little villages in Louisiana, or up in Alaska, or up in Maine and found the oldest person that had lived there for decades and asked them-- they had a huge 350-page questionnaire. And it must been a daunting prospect to see these two young students turn up on your doorstep and ask you the same questions every time, what do you call the insect that bites you on the neck in the summertime, what do you call the strip of grass between the front of your house and the curb? And they built up from this, this immense dictionary. It's six volumes. It was just finished-- ANDREW LITTELL: Wow. SIMON WINCHESTER: --last year, which displays majestically the variation that you talk about. So when we drive down the interstate and we're just confronted by Walgreen's, and McDonald's, and everything looks the same, once you get off the interstates it really isn't. And what you say is so true that out of this astonishing variety, which still exists, nonetheless connective tissue, which makes everyone able to say, I am an American, which allows me to say that nowadays of course, is something that I wanted to write about. ANDREW LITTELL: Well, let's talk about the structure a little bit. Because when you talk about the men who united the states, it could very easily be a list of men in alphabetical order, with very long entries for some and shorter entries for another. But that wouldn't make very good reading. And so that the device or the technique I think that you've stumbled upon is really interesting. And if you could talk a little about it? SIMON WINCHESTER: Yes. I mean you're absolutely right. I've always maintained that in writing nonfiction, there are three crucial elements. There's the idea, which is king. Good writing helps. But it's not in my view, the second most important thing. I think the second most important thing is the structure of the book. You can write lyrically about a wonderful idea. But if the structure is off, the reader will be turned away. You're absolutely right, I was preparing a list of the people. And it has to be said at the outset, that most of them were men who actually created the physical links that bind this country together. And looking at this list, which was 100 and 120-odd people, many of them well known, but most of them very little known, how to organize it? Yes, of course, it could have been alphabetical order. That would have been just like looking through an encyclopedia. [INAUDIBLE] It could have been in a chronological order, which does have a sort of narrative logic to it. But their achievements and their interests were all over the map. And so the reader would be reading of a 19th century person involved in electricity and then another one involved in canal making and would find the same thing in the 20th century. So that would be very, very confusing. And so one day, I was writing to a friend of mine in China. And I had lived in China for a long while. And he was reminding me about Eastern philosophies, essentially all those east of India, where I'd also lived for a while, having at the base of many of their philosophical beliefs four or five classical elements, and particularly in China. And these elements sort of underpin everything and the interaction between these elements. And they're wood, earth, water, fire, and metal. And it suddenly seemed to me, looking at these five categories and looking at this list of 120 names, that you could actually and quite logically and quite reasonably shoehorn these names into these categories and it would all sort of work. So all the early explorers, because they were essentially hacking their way through forests, they were in birch bark and wooden canoes, they were building palisades of wood to protect themselves, they were burning log fires to keep away the wolves, and so forth, you could say early American explorers could be put under a rubric of "wood." And similarly, once the country, as the extent had been defined by these early explorers, of whom, of course, Lewis and Clark were the most famous-- ANDREW LITTELL: Sure. SIMON WINCHESTER: --then it would be the early geologists and surveyors, who were trying to work out what America was made of. Well, that's all to do with earth, because the geologists and rock hounds, hitting things with hammers and examining through a magnifying glass. So "earth" seemed to they cover those people and those achievements. And then water, the third of these elements-- well, the early explorers, the early settlers would, if not exploring it, venturing into the country, they would do so in the rivers, the Rappahannock, and the James, and the Susquehanna, and the Potomac, and the Hudson. And that when they got to about 50 or 60 miles upstream, they suddenly found that they couldn't go any further, because there was a line of waterfalls, because that's where the Appalachians became the coastal plain. And so they settled there, initially in settlements that would eventually evolve into places like Richmond, and Fredericksburg, and Washington, DC, and Albany. And then they would begin trading with people, perhaps upstream of them. And to get around the rapids, they would build very primitive canals. And once they learned how to do that, then they would build canals elsewhere in the country, and famous ones like the Manchester Canal, which effectively gave birth to Boston as a major mercantile center and the Erie Canal, the most famous of all, which essentially made New York a mercantile center. So that all worked under the rubric of "water." And then fire, well, it seemed to me that it was all very well to travel behind a horse on a canal. But that's not very rapidly crossing the country. And America, in the 1850s and 1860s, it was picking up speed. Speed was a necessary possibly of commerce and moving people hither and yon. And this had coincided with James Watts' invention of the steam engine. And so suddenly, fire-based machinery was brought into play, to drive initially railway trains, and then early cars. And then other forms of fire were used to power the internal combustion engine. And so we get roads, and we get highways, and then we get airplanes. So that all worked under the rubric of "fire. And then the fifth and final of these Chinese classical elements was "metal." And that seemed to me was the metal of the telegraph wire, and the metal of electricity distribution. And then of the telephone, and then radio, and then television, and then what we're doing today, all the internet and everything that Google stands for. So it did seem that these five categories not only worked, but also where themselves in chronological order because wood comes earth, comes before water. ANDREW LITTELL: Yeah. It's nice too that it does fall in somewhat chronological order. But you don't feel confined to-- it's not like at the beginning of each section, it's a certain set of years necessarily. There's a ballpark. But you don't confine yourself to say, well, I can't talk about airplanes in this chapter because we haven't gotten there yet. SIMON WINCHESTER: Yes. I mean someone else, reasonably the other day, well, there is the sixth element, which is occasionally brought into play, which is "air." So why didn't you talk about airplanes and air? As I said well, this book, this is 150,000 word book. I mean America is a gigantic subject. I could have put a sixth category in. But my editor, I think he were saying, wait a minute. ANDREW LITTELL: It's got a nice length to it. SIMON WINCHESTER: It's got heft to it. So we don't want to turn it into an encyclopedia or a Sears catalog, right? ANDREW LITTELL: Well, I thought it was a really-- I mean it allows you as a writer I think to try new things as well. It gives you a construct in which to work in. But really let you take your imagination, which perhaps as a historian, and you might not get to use as much as-- SIMON WINCHESTER: Right. I mean I must say, I think of all the books I've done recently, this was the most fun. I was initially thinking how will Americans-- but then I'm an American-- ANDREW LITTELL: Right. SIMON WINCHESTER: -- so I join you-- feel about being examined through the prism of Chinese philosophy? But it's not really. Because these five elements are essential really to all of our lives. It's not that it's just the Chinese had classified things like that, as you said, two millennia ago. ANDREW LITTELL: Switching topics slightly, the publication of your book almost coincided with the shutdown of the US government. It happened a couple weeks later I think. I'd love to hear-- without getting too political-- SIMON WINCHESTER: Exactly. I'm well aware of that, very hard to. ANDREW LITTELL: I'd love to hear your thoughts, not only as someone who has just written about uniting the states, but also as a newly minted-- I know it's 2011 I think-- SIMON WINCHESTER: It still feels pretty new to me. ANDREW LITTELL: --but as a newly minted American citizen, your thoughts on that process. And I think it strikes some of us as exactly contradictory to what you highlight in your book. SIMON WINCHESTER: It has a lot of people. So I mean this too began when the shutdown was going on. And they would say, how on earth can you write a book called "The Men Who United the States," when the United States is so apparently disunited? Well, I mean I had a number of things to say about that. I think America is a great deal better than her politicians, quite honestly. ANDREW LITTELL: This might be true around Google. SIMON WINCHESTER: Right. But America has survived a lot of extraordinary and terrible national experiences, I mean not least of course the Civil War in 1860s. And yet America bounced back from that and it took a long time. But it survived. And the guiding principles of this country survived Lincoln's assassination. It survived the Great Depression. It survived lunacies like Prohibition, I mean for God's sake. I don't want to offend any die-hard people that are temperance adherents. But it seems pretty astonishing to me that that could be not only legislation, but in the Constitution, that you're not allowed to buy or liquor. It survived the Dust Bowl. It survived, as I said, the Depression. It survived Millard Fillmore, the Know-Nothing party, all sorts of extraordinary political parties and subparties. And it survived 9/11. As a nation, it survived and recovered itself. It's surviving, it seems, the current recession, which we're climbing out of. And it will survive the nonsense that seems to be going on in Washington these days. This is just aberrant behavior. And America just sort of shrugs it off. Is wounded by it, but bounces back. And that's one of the things that I so like about this country, that nonetheless it dusts itself off, and thought, well, that was pretty idiotic. But I have to say that-- I mean one of the things that I go on about in the second part of the book is the early geologists. And there are four great surveys in the 1860s. And two of the were a man called Hayden, who essentially mapped Yellowstone, and John Wesley Powell, who despite only having one arm, the earlier one being shot off in the battle of Shiloh-- ANDREW LITTELL: Amazing story. SIMON WINCHESTER: --mapped and went down the Grand Canyon. Those two, I think, great heroes of mine, would have been spinning in their graves I think if they knew that the national parks that they had essentially discovered, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon, were shut down, that the public couldn't see them because of some trivial ideological dispute in Washington, DC. I think they would have thought that was madness. But we survived it nonetheless. ANDREW LITTELL: Yeah. It was interesting reading this book, just having come out of that experience. And you only hope that the wonderful characters, both known and somewhat forgotten I would say, might serve as a reference point for some of our-- SIMON WINCHESTER: Right. I don't know-- the one political point that sort of shines out of one of the chapters of this book relates to, well, big government. I mean big government is very important in this book, as perhaps we can talk about. But if I could just talk about one little thing, which was rural electrification. I mean in the fifth part, which is devoted in part to how electricity was brought to the farms in America in the 1930s, there was a British-- and I say this wearing my former hat as a Britain-- so a man called Samuel Insull, who essentially controlled most of the Midwestern electric utility companies in the 1930s. And he thought it was a complete waste of time, and more importantly a waste of money, to wire the farms in the middle of America They're expensive beyond belief to string poles and copper wire to them. And yet, the farms-- there were 800,000 of them, and producing food at an enormous pace because America was getting hungry and more prosperous. But they were left without electricity. Well, Roosevelt, when he came to power in the 1930s and had this gigantic government apparatus, one aspect of it was the REA, the Rural Electrification Administration. And the stories of how it brought electric power to people, I think they're wonderfully touching stories-- the night the lights came on in rural communities all over America. But the political point that I think is worth making is that first community in America to benefit from FDR's rural electrification was in Western Ohio, in 1935, a little town called Miami, Ohio-- actually, a little town outside Miami-- where the farms got electricity. They were the first ones in the country to feel the largesse of the federal government at its biggest. Well, that town is in the 8th congressional district in Ohio, which is a congressional district represented in Congress today by John Boehner. So John Boehner, the man who is the archetype foe of big government, his people benefited mightily from the biggest big government America has ever known. So take that, Mr. Boehner, I want to say. AUDIENCE: ANDREW LITTELL: And as a citizen and a voter, I am sure that you can take actual action. SIMON WINCHESTER: I would like to write to him and say-- but unfortunately, I don't live in Miami, Ohio. ANDREW LITTELL: Of Ohio, yeah. But it is interesting to think about-- I mean from Lewis and Clark, who were funded by Thomas Jefferson and the government, to the Transcontinental Railroad, to the electrical projects of the Depression, so much of that was, if not completely funded, it was certainly driven by big government. SIMON WINCHESTER: But it also-- I mean this sort of is about the professions that the two of us are in today. The guidebooks that I took with me when I visited-- because I must have visited I think all of the states, the contiguous 48 anyway, to do research for this book-- I collected all of the WPA guides that had been made in the 1930s because they were stellar pieces of literature. You get the guide for Iowa or the guide for Oregon, made in the 1930s and the early 1940s, financed by the government, to give work to unemployed writers, and photographers, and editors, who were all out of work because of the Great Depression. And you get the California guide, which has essays on California written by John Steinbeck, who didn't have work at the time and accepted a government check. So I mean that's-- I, believe you me, despite coming from Britain and despite "socialized medicine" and all those things which we're supposed to have, I think government needs to be controlled of course. But when government works well-- the REA, the WPA guides, the Boulder Dam, the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Moon shot-- government can be extremely effective. And it shouldn't in my view be tossed overboard in the way that some politicians are threatening to do. ANDREW LITTELL: Well, it be interesting to see how the next couple months in Washington-- SIMON WINCHESTER: It will indeed. ANDREW LITTELL: I do want to make sure we get to Google and the internet and your opinion there. But I would like to talk a little bit about geology. And you were a geology major at university, I believe? SIMON WINCHESTER: Yes. ANDREW LITTELL: And I think you were a geologist by trade for a few years-- SIMON WINCHESTER: For a year, yes. ANDREW LITTELL: --before coming into journalism. It's been wonderful to see the books that you've written over, at last the past couple of years, have this very passionate focus on what's beneath the surface and beneath the Earth. And some of the most interesting characters I think that came out of this book were some of the old geologists, the original geologists for the United States. So I'm interested in what appealed to you originally about geology and how you maintain that interest in the science over the past years? SIMON WINCHESTER: I wish I could tell you that my entry into geology was because of a passionate schoolboy love of ammonites or rocks. But it wasn't. I initially wanted to be a sailor. I wanted to wander around the world. And I took all my exams and everything to go to Dartmouth, which is the equivalent of Annapolis in Britain, and passed all the exams, until I came to do the medical. And then, he showed me, the doctor, a loose leaf book with circles, with dots on it. And he said, what number do you see in that circle? And I said 47. And he looked at me and he said, are you serious? And I said yes. He suddenly turned to another one, they were red, green, and blue dots and I said 23. And he shut the book with this terrible finality and said, Mr. Winchester, I'm terribly sorry to have to tell you that Her Majesty, the Queen, takes a rather dim view of people driving her very expensive warships around the world who can't tell red from green, and therefore left from right. So I'm afraid another career will-- So then there was an advert-- in the school, sort of career's office, there was a picture of a man in shorts, with a hammer, standing on some mountain in Africa saying, see the world, be a geologist. And I thought well, if I can't tell red from green, maybe I can tell ammonites from graptolites. And so I took an O-level, which is an exam you take at 16, and passed it. And then went up to Oxford to study it. And loved it, but wasn't terribly good at it. And so was shipped off to Uganda and worked in the mountains between Uganda and Congo, looking for copper. Didn't find a microgram of copper. And then worked on an oil rig in the North Sea for a while. And actually did quite a lot of-- it was gas in those days. But then, through a rather complicated set of circumstances, drifted away from geology and into journalism. But still have this affection for the science and so write about it whenever I can. ANDREW LITTELL: And it's nice that now that you're able to perhaps select the topics that you'd like to write about, you can return to those roots as it were. SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, and indeed, the book I'm working on now is quite a big book about the Pacific Ocean. And there's heaps of geology there because there's the whole ring of fire. And so I'll have great fun with that. ANDREW LITTELL: That's nice. So you've gone from the Atlantic, to focusing on the continental-- SIMON WINCHESTER: US, yeah. ANDREW LITTELL: And now on to the Pacific. SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, HarperCollins, my publishers, who I'm enormously fond of, of course, I keep saying trilogy, trilogy, trilogy. Whether it will ever a be boxed set, I don't know. But it does seem to have a logic to it-- ANDREW LITTELL: It does. Yeah. SIMON WINCHESTER: --Atlantic America, Pacific. We'll see. ANDREW LITTELL: So you end the book by discussing the internet, and its power to connect not only the US, but also the world, whether as a dream or as a nightmare. SIMON WINCHESTER: Yes. And incidentally, I should say that of the one the places that I lingered at, but wasn't able to get into, was Council Bluffs in Iowa, where the old drive-in movie theater is now a great big Google server farm. Very impressive, I must say. I went to server farms. But Google was rather private about their own. So-- ANDREW LITTELL: Too many. SIMON WINCHESTER: --I stood outside, like a boy, sort of in a zoo, and looked through. But I think I know more or less what's in there. But yes, the thing that I think interests me about whether the internet is a unifying thing or not, I think goes back to my feelings about radio. I think radio is the great national and cultural unifier, the image you have of the walnut-paneled behemoth in the living room, with the family gathered around it, mother, father, children, dogs, cats, all listening to a program that's the NBC Symphony Orchestra being beamed in from New York City, or a comedy program coming in from Los Angeles, or a drama being sent down from Chicago, is an image both of sort of national unity and also familial unity. But then came television, which preserved this unity for a while. Everyone watched Johnny Carson. Everyone watch Jack Paar. But then came cable television. And cable television, which came about initially in West Virginia in the 1970s, then had, and unconsciously at first, it started dividing people. So that dad was in the den watching ESPN. And mom, I don't want to be sexist about this, was watching another kind of program. And then soon, the internet exacerbated this. And everyone in the family was doing something different. Seldom now, unless they're big news events, like the Moon landing, or 9/11, or the killing of a president, few electronically transmitted events bring everyone together. They tend to divide people into their little interest groups. And I'm afraid, with my belief that unity in a country like this is terribly important, that splitting it into intellectual subgroups, which is something the internet seems to be doing, is inimical to that basically, idea. I think society will deal with it. But at the moment, I think it's an open question as to how it will deal with it. So, of course, I think the internet is wonderful. But I think it has social aspects to disunity, which are somewhat troubling. ANDREW LITTELL: Yeah. And it's interesting to think about-- I mean all of your book focuses on unifying the US, where the internet is certainly a more global phenomenon. SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, certainly. Yeah. ANDREW LITTELL: Being able to-- if the railroad started, the US was the first country with a transcontinental railroad and being able to explain that to the world. There's certainly some parallels there. But the internet I think is the first mode to be able to-- SIMON WINCHESTER: Expand the world. ANDREW LITTELL: --expand the world. Which is-- in some ways I agree with you-- which is a frightening, but also very liberating idea. SIMON WINCHESTER: It is. And if I'm silent, it's just that I don't know how to deal with it. It's a social enigma to me at the moment. And the experience of cable television and the internet in dealing with the United States tends to run counter to my hope and thesis that's in the book. ANDREW LITTELL: Yup. SIMON WINCHESTER: But as I say, this book I think, and I hope you feel it, radiates optimism. ANDREW LITTELL: Definitely. SIMON WINCHESTER: The fact that the country has survived all these ills and come up smiling every time. I'm not saying the internet is an ill, but I think the country-- society-- will deal with it in a sensible and pragmatic way. ANDREW LITTELL: And in the same way that-- I mean when radio first came out, there were tons of fears about what this influence could be on the hitherto other-- or uneducated populace of the US. And did you want that demon box sitting in your living room speaking to you? And so I see similar reactions to other previous mass communication inventions. SIMON WINCHESTER: Yes. I mean almost everything is in this-- I mean starting with the telegraph and Samuel Morse's invention, everyone was hostile initially. I mean look at the trouble that Morse had to get Congress to agree to any kind of experiment, any kind of funding for it. But then of course, suddenly, they embraced it and realized what Morse had realized for some years. So many of these people are people pounding on the door and saying look, believe me, this is a great, great idea. But it's interesting, of course, that the internet grew out of the government sponsored idea. The ARPAnet after all was a government idea. I wonder whether it would ruin the technology here to play you the first-- I don't it will-- the first voice that was ever transmitted over the radio. Because getting back to what we were talking about a few moments ago about how the radio is a great unifying medium, well, of course, when radio was invented, it was all Morse code. What Marconi sent and received from Signal Hill in Newfoundland was Morse. But it took this extraordinary and forgotten man called Reginald Fessenden to come up with AM and FM, that we know all about, a wonderful name, Reginald Aubrey Fessenden. And he was the first person ever to broadcast human voice over the radio, which began the national conversation. And this was the voice. And I think I got to queued up. So if I'm anywhere near the microphone, I think you should be able to hear it. And this was sent out to all the ships at sea working for the United Fruit Company. He send a message by Morse, just before Christmas, 1906, telling these operators to listen out at one minute at midnight on Christmas Eve, for a special broadcast. And so it happened to be a dark and stormy night. And off Cape Cod, there was a huge blizzard blowing. And the ships that were bringing bananas up from places like Juticalpa in Honduras, to Boston, and Baltimore, and New York City, tuned in their radios and listened through the static and the Morse chatter of other ships. But instead of Morse, they had this. [MUSIC, EMMI LEISNER, "OMBR MAI FU"] Now, that's a singer called Emmi Leisner, singing "Ombr mai fu," which has nothing to do with America. It's all to do with a Persian king and a shade tree. And after that was over, then Fessenden himself, who was a big, burly man, with a wonderful bass voice, came and said the Lord's Prayer. And then said a very happy Christmas to you all. And the first voice broadcast, ever broadcast to the public, ended. But within a week, over in Pasadena, a radio station opened above Sherman's, a musical instrument store, which still exists, selling-- or playing music. And then three months, are a cornfield in Madison, Wisconsin, an area was built, and the first ever radio station, which became WHA, which still exists. And then the national conversation began. But I love the thought that that beautiful piece of music was the beginning of the conversation, all to do with bananas as well. ANDREW LITTELL: Yeah. Right. Yeah. And that story right there is one of the things that also appealed to me about the book is that you intersperse within a lot of the biography or history parts, your own personal experiences of visiting some of these places. At first, reading the first person in a nonfiction book or a history book sometimes can have a jarring effect. But I found this to be very, very natural. SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, thank you. ANDREW LITTELL: And being able to visualize those places today I thought was a fascinating look at how we've forgotten some of these very important markers for example. SIMON WINCHESTER: One of the journeys that I really enjoyed for this book was discovering the origins of the interstate highway system. Conventionally, we believe it's known as the Eisenhower system of interstate and defense highways because Eisenhower saw the autobahns in Germany in 1945. Well, he did. But that's not the reason the system has got that name. It's because he was an observer, as a young major, on an expedition run by the Army in 1919, to cross the country in military vehicles from the South Lawn of the White House to San Francisco, as rapidly as possible, to thwart a theoretical Japanese invasion of California. The generals at the National War College thought what if the Japanese, who were getting somewhat restless, even prior to the last century, what would happen if they invaded California? How quickly could we get troops from the big bases in the East, by road, across to defend the West Coast. So they assembled this convoy, about three miles long, of tanks, and armored vehicles, and commissary wagons, and hospitals, and jeeps, and things, with the young-- he's in his 20s-- Major Eisenhower, as an observer, and to keep a diary. It was a complete shambles. I mean it took 58 days. They went an average speed of six miles an hour. And believe you me, if the Japanese had invaded, they would have swallowed up California, and Arizona, and New Mexico, and probably, and possibly for the benefit of us all, would have taken most of West Texas as well. But Eisenhower's diary-- I got a copy of it, thanks to the internet, of course-- and decided to follow and go to each of the places that these soldiers had been on. And one of them was a place that I had wanted to go to since I was at 15-year-old, and that was the town of Dennison, Iowa. And not too far actually from the Google complex in Council Bluffs. Dennison, I had wanted to go to because it was the birthplace of the woman that I as a 15-year-old, thought was the most beautiful woman in the world. And the Army team had been there in 1919. They had played I think baseball, had lost to the citizens of Dennison. They had watched films in the Dennison opera house. I mean how wonderful that there's an opera house in a little town in western Iowa. But two years later-- completely, obviously, unconnected with the soldier's visit, a child was born called Donna Mullenger. And she grew up. She was wanting to become a teacher. But her parents didn't have the money to send her to school. And so she got on the Union Pacific train at Omaha and went to Hollywood. Her attractiveness allowed her to be signed by MGM. And initially, she was called Donna Adams. But because the two As, didn't allow her name to be said very easily, they changed her name to Donna Reed. And Donna Reed, when I saw that movie, the "Wonderful Life," when she played Mrs. George Bailey, I thought she, in Bedford Falls, was just the apotheosis of American beauty. And so I wanted to go to where she was born. And so, I went there. And the old opera house is now the Donna Reed Performing Art Center. And the Oscar she won for "From Here to Eternity,"-- she, for some reason, didn't win it for "It's a Wonderful Life"-- is there. And Fat Mo's in Chicago had donated a soda fountain counter. So that's there, which is where young George Bailey got hit in the ear. So you remember, he was deaf in the movie or half deaf. But the extraordinary thing about it is that attractive a town though it may be, it absolutely stinks. And it stinks because two miles away, to the west of the town, is a gigantic feedlot, in which 200,000 cattle are standing all the time, providing beef for the hungry people of the East Coast. But when the wind is in the wrong direction, this terrible miasma of cattle and with all their products, sweeps over Dennison and makes it less beautiful place that I Imagined it would be. ANDREW LITTELL: Yeah. Yeah. I mean I think-- and I see this through many of your books-- is you're more of a storyteller I see than a historian. And there's such easy books to read I find, not to make it too simple. But, they're so engaging. And its stories like that I think move you through the book. SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, it's very nice for you to say. But I'm pleased that the reviews thus far, a number of them have been by academics. And then I'm always wary and thinking academics might not like a book that is, as you say, more stories than perhaps classical history. But, they've said nice things. ANDREW LITTELL: So you've very productive. And since-- I guess I look at 1998, when you really started being an author full time, let's say. SIMON WINCHESTER: Yes. ANDREW LITTELL: 10 books, I think in 15 years and five "New York Times" best sellers. So we at Google have certainly looked at a lot of metrics and done a lot of research on how productive people are. SIMON WINCHESTER: I'm now getting terrified about what you're going to tell me. ANDREW LITTELL: We've certainly looked at what makes people productive, and not only quality, but quantity. Any tips that you can provide on how to maintain such a high level of work, but certainly have been so productive over the past? SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, I remember when I was small, my father's the preferred newspaper in our house was "The Daily Telegraph." And they ran an advertisement every day, I think on the front page, for some course called Pelmanism. I have no idea what Pelmanism was. But the question at the top was, do you have a grasshopper mind? If you have a grasshopper mind, then you should take a course in Pelmanism. My father had threatening. He said, you just keep-- everything's all over the map with you. You're going to be a dilettante. You're going to know nothing at all well. I'm going to sign up for a course on Pelmanism. And I'm jolly glad he didn't. So my first piece of advice is do not take a course on Pelmanism. ANDREW LITTELL: Right. SIMON WINCHESTER: But, no. And I think if you're got a grasshopper mind, encourage it. But, I mean you've got to be very focused. And I think I am. I live on this farm in Western Massachusetts. And I've got a study. And I just bury myself away for months at a time and get it done. But I love every aspect. I love the research. And who wouldn't? ANDREW LITTELL: And I know you do all your own-- SIMON WINCHESTER: I do. ANDREW LITTELL: --research as well. SIMON WINCHESTER: And then the writing is nice. The editing, when you have to slash away things that the editor-- like, "you're not allowed to put airplanes in the air" chapter. In fact, get rid of the air chapter. And that's a bit frustrating. But that aside, the process is great fun. So, enjoy it. ANDREW LITTELL: And in my imagination, you have a book of like 500 book ideas that you've been collecting over the past 50 years. Is that accurate? You just jot down some-- SIMON WINCHESTER: Sort of. There are all sorts of things I want to do. And now, of course, I'm just coming up to 70. There is the feeling that, you know, so many books to write and not enough time to do them. ANDREW LITTELL: So little time. SIMON WINCHESTER: But at least, I've got three or four sort of waiting in the wings. ANDREW LITTELL: Yeah. SIMON WINCHESTER: The Pacific is next. And that's what I'm concentrating on now, yeah. ANDREW LITTELL: OK. Great. So I would like to point out one-- I have one part of your book that I took issue with. SIMON WINCHESTER: Oh, right. ANDREW LITTELL: So we're here at Google's New York office, in the middle of Manhattan, state-of-the-art building, with sun-filled offices and communal work spaces. Does being here change at all your view of employees at technology companies? One of the last lines of your book is "The new pioneers of unification will be technical men, hidden quietly out of sight in their blue-lit warehouses, surrounded by silent frenzies of blinking server lights." And I'm not sure if we should be flattered or offended by that. SIMON WINCHESTER: [INAUDIBLE]. I have been to your establishment a number of times now. I've eaten in your wonderful cafeteria. I've ridden on your Razor scooters. I've been to Apple. I've been to-- yes. The place where the connections, the connective tissue-- is-- of these cages of servers, with these silent guardians, in Mountain View, and in Cupertino, and in Council Bluffs, Iowa-- those are the people I'm writing about here. Not the creative people like myself. So forgive me. And in the paperback, I'll amend it accordingly. ANDREW LITTELL: No. No, need to. And, as we were talking about before this, I think there are a lot of still open questions that we're working to solve here, not only here at Google, but anybody working in technology. And information is a powerful thing. SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, if you think my metrics are impressive, I think you metrics are astonishing. ANDREW LITTELL: Thank you very much. If anybody has any questions from the audience, feel free to ask them now. AUDIENCE: As a historian, which other historians from the past do you find particularly interesting? SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, oddly enough, there's an English historian, who probably you won't be familiar with, called Arthur Bryant, who did a series of books, the history of Britain and the history of Europe, in the 1930s and '40s. And became wildly popular because he told history through human stories. I mean I like Mayhew, for instance, who wrote the history of London, once again through-- not through so much through theses or social movements, but the history of ordinary people, and told stories. Narrative social history is what I'm interested in. And those are the kind of people that I like. But I mean of course, David McCullough, I think is absolutely wonderful. Plus, he drives the same kind of Land Rover that I drove, a nice old Land Rover. And he lives in Maine. So he's a good guy, as far as I'm concerned. But he's the sort of chap I like. And Arthur Bryant, in the past too. ANDREW LITTELL: Another question I had is you've written about all these different periods in your book, here in the US. If you could return and live during one of those ages, do you have a favorite? SIMON WINCHESTER: I do really. And expanding this beyond the United States, I love the time when there were polymaths around, people that knew everything or that had an interest in just about everything and a huge level of competence. And my great hero is James Murray, the editor of "The Oxford English Dictionary." I mean he-- Latin, and Greek, and chemistry, and physics, and philosophy, the tendrils rules of his imagination spread everywhere. And there was such people in the United States, of course. I mean, Jefferson. I mean, good god, I mean what an amazing man Thomas Jefferson was. So to live in a period which fostered the Jeffersons in the James Murrays suggests to me-- because such people are now either nonexistent, or not revered, or they're just jabbering on the street corners in Manhattan. I don't know where they are. But I'd like to live in a society-- I'm very happy to live nowadays-- but I would like to revisit a time when such people were cherished and revered. ANDREW LITTELL: Certainly. Well, thank you very much for your time. SIMON WINCHESTER: Thank you very much, indeed. This has been great. Thank you.