S4 E1 • England: South Sea Bubble - The Sharp Mind of John Blunt

When Robert Harley steps in as England's new Chancellor of the Exchequer, he discovers that not only is the government deeply in debt, but no one knows quite how much debt it owes. Because vicious political infighting between the Tory and Whig politic parties made it difficult to pass new tax laws, Harley turned to a private financier named John Blunt to help find enough money for England to keep up with its expenses for the year. Using Harley's government resources, Blunt instigated a series of get-rich schemes that drove artificial demand for unsustainable land and lottery investments with tremendous short term gains. Before the year was done, Blunt had successfully covered the shortfall for the government that year - albeit at the cost of driving England's already outrageous debt even higher.

Première diffusion : 28 février 2015

S4 E2 • England: South Sea Bubble - Too Big to Fail

Frustrated at every turn by the Whig-controlled Bank of England, Harley and Blunt decide to start their own instution: a trading company that will exchange government debt for stock shares. This new South Sea Company will have a monopoly on trade in the rich new lands of South America, but all the ports there are controlled by Spain, with whom Britain is at war. So Blunt pushes the country into a premature and unfavorable peace with Spain, enlisting famous authors to write his propaganda and convincing Queen Anne herself to tip the balance of Parliament in his favor. After the queen dies and the government changes hands, Blunt kicks Harley and his Tory leaders out of the company. He manages to bring King George I himself on board as a ceremonial leader, linking the success of the South Sea Company with the reputation of the monarchy. But while his maneuvering inflates the value of his company's stock, it's never produced anything close to the amount of money he's convinced people to invest in it.

Première diffusion : 14 mars 2015

S4 E3 • England: South Sea Bubble - Buying Out Britain

The time has come for Blunt to enact the final act of his scheme: taking on the 31 million pound British debt. When Parliament initially balks at transferring responsibility for that much money to Blunt's insolvent South Sea Company, he bribes them with special deals on his own stock. Despite a legal clause that should have locked the stock price until the company began paying off the debt, Blunt keeps introducing new plans to inflate the stock price and pocket the money for himself. He does everything from selling stocks on layaway to loaning people money so they could buy more stocks from him, creating an artificial demand for South Sea Company stock that drives the company's worth up to 300 million pounds: a staggering ten times the initial value of the already stunning debt it had assumed. His success, founded entirely on speculation with no actual revenue from trade, not only starves out other businesses across Britain but exceeds the total amount of money in the country's entire economy. This bubble can not last.

Première diffusion : 28 mars 2015

S4 E4 • England: South Sea Bubble - The Bubble Pops

With the South Sea Company's value dangerously inflated, Blunt drives one more scheme to raise stock prices - and it finally backfires on him. Early investors (including the famous politician Robert Walpole) seize the opportunity to sell their stock while the value is high, and the general public finally realizes that the South Sea Company has no actual worth. Everyone who didn't sell their stock in the first round finds themselves suddenly bankrupt as the stock value plummets. Even King George, on vacation when disaster strikes, loses a large amount of the royal fortune. Robert Walpole, however, sees this as an opportunity to make himself a hero of the public. Hiding his own involvement in the South Sea Swindle, he cancels all debts owed for the company's stock to help put its public investors back on their feet. Despite this, the public demands an inquiry and Walpole must walk a thin line between his facade as defender of the people and the reality of his, his party, and the King's blatant corruption.

Première diffusion : 11 avril 2015

S4 E5 • England: South Sea Bubble - It Was Walpole

Robert Walpole's attempts to use the South Sea Company scandal to enhance his own ambitions are threatened by the appearance of Robert Knight, a former South Sea employee whose records of corporate bribery implicate Walpole and his friends in Parliament. But faced with threats of retribution if he ever shares these records, Knight flees the country rather than face a public inquiry. Although he gets caught and sent to prison in Antwerp, Walpole deftly engineers his release and escape. With Knight finally gone, Walpole teams up with John Blunt to pin the blame for the South Sea stock bubble on his political opponents, conveniently clearing the way for himself to become essentially the first Prime Minister of England. He also makes sure that all of his own supporters get off easy (if not scot free) for their involvement, and even Blunt walks away from the South Sea Bubble with more money than he started with.

Première diffusion : 25 avril 2015

S4 E9 • Episode 9

S4 E1 • England - The Broad Street Pump - You Know Nothing, John Snow

Thanks to his mother's support, John Snow rose from humble beginnings as a coal miner's son and apprenticed to a doctor in Newcastle. As a young man, he treated many patients during the cholera epidemic that struck Newcastle. He noticed that the traditional explanation for cholera's spread - miasma from graveyards and swamps - could not explain its appearance in Newcastle where he treated patients. He took that knowledge with him to London, where he formally studied medicine and achieved the highest honors in his profession in only a year. His formal study of anesthesia earned him such great recognition that on two occasions he was trusted to work on the Queen. But then cholera broke out in London again. Snow wanted to prove miasma didn't cause it and find the real cause, so he interviewed patients and doctors across the city. He theorized that the diarrhea which came from cholera also helped to spread it. He even wrote up a case study where one street whose well water mixed with sewage had a huge infection rate while across the street their neighbors with pure well water barely suffered at all. Confident that he had found the cause, he published his findings, but the medical community was not thoroughly convinced.

Première diffusion : 14 novembre 2015

S4 E2 • England - The Broad Street Pump - Epidemiology Begins!

John Snow's single case study was not enough to convince the medical community that cholera was spread through the water, but he did not give up. He founded the Epidemiological Society of London in 1850, the first organization dedicated to studying not just cures for disease, but also their causes. And so when cholera returned in 1854, John Snow saw a chance to finally prove his theory and set about studying the patterns of disease. The disease appeared to strike randomly, both rich and poor, but he realized that in his district were two different water companies, one of which he theorized might be contaminated. Finding evidence proved more difficult than he anticipated: going to door to door, he was often met by people who didn't even know what water company supplied their building. He tracked down landlords and even developed a water test to help him identify which water source each house had, but before he had the time to compile and analyze his findings, another terrible outbreak struck in Broad Street.

Première diffusion : 21 novembre 2015

S4 E3 • England - The Broad Street Pump - Map of the Blue Death

John Snow raced to discover the causes of the cholera epidemic that swept Broad Street. He went door-to-door talking to the locals, then surveyed government records for extra clues. He began to craft a map of deaths, and drew the first Voronoi Diagram to assess the victims' proximity to the pump. All but 8 of the 84 victims were closer to the Broad Street Pump (and hence more likely to use it) than any other pump, and most of the remainder had daily commutes that took them past the pump. He also noticed that a local workhouse and a tavern were conspicuously cholera-free despite their proximity to the pump, and found that they had access to their own drinking supplies which unbeknownst to them had kept them safe. With his evidence in hand, he met with the local health commission and convinced them to deactivate the Broad Street Pump. But his theory was still not widely accepted, and after the epidemic passed everything returned to normal. At last, a local pastor named Henry Whitehead set out to debunk the wild theories about what had caused the epidemic in his parish. He doubted Snow's results, but as he investigated, he found more evidence that backed them up. His relationship with the neighborhood also meant he could get information Snow couldn't, and it was thus that he found Patient Zero: a baby who died two days before the epidemic, and whose mother had been throwing her dirty diapers in a cesspit under the house. The government investigated and found that the poorly-built cesspit had begun leaking into the Broad Street Pump's water supply, infecting all who drank from it with cholera passed along in the baby's diapers. It would take many years before John Snow's theory became accepted fact, but his research paved the way for the modern medical field of epidemiology.

Première diffusion : 28 novembre 2015