It was in constant jeopardy of losing it matters. And i think in part that has something to do with how the town began. It began as an idea on a piece of paper. There were not People Living here when it was actually proposed that it would become the state capital. First the territorial capital and the state capital and it was this guy, he was a land speculator and he had invested in this land. The only people that were really living here or those around the lake shores and there were for traders that occasionally set up shop. But on the whole no one was living here. He comes through and he sees this land and says i think this can be a great town. So he hired someone to draw the boundaries of the town and presented it to the Territorial Legislature and said that this is it, this should be the capital of the New Territory and he really had to convince a lot of people because theres nobody living here at this time. So i think that has a lot to do with how he grew and hang on to his status because there were other places in a state that had more People Living in them, larger industries. So selecting a state or territory capital is really about convincing other legislatures and it you put forth a case as to why this should be the center of government for your state. At the time the major population was in the southwest of the state where people were doing lead mining. Some suggested thats where the capital should be because that is where the people were. There were a number of people there in the green bay area, for traders and others, there was heavy concentration of people there as well. One of his arguments is that madison was kind of centrally located. It would be easy for people all over the territory to get there if they want to be in touch with their government. So its mostly just a marketing job to actually be selected as the territorial capital. So when he went to the Territorial Legislature to present his idea that matteson should be the capital, of course it wasnt the only city competing to be the capital of this New Territory. The legislatures job of the territory was to pick a capital city. So they met in belmont, which is in the southwest part of the state. So he brings this kind of extravagant plan and hes a little bit manipulative trade i say he has a financial stake in that sense and he names that matteson after the president , james madison, who had just died, he was trying to play on national sympathies of this love the president we had just lost. He named the city streets again trying to show that its a patriotic place. So he brings it over where this Territorial Legislature is meeting and he presents 19 other cities competing to be the capital and he basically starts biting people. The building they were meeting and was a little bit chilly. They found lots of people complaining about the poor quality of the building and how cold they are and he knows this and hes very smart. So he brings with him his plan your madison and buffalo robes that he starts to hand out, saying would you like to hear about my city in madison and oh, if youre cold, here is a buffalo robe. And he offers these legislators land for a discounted price. So goes through quite a number of votes until he is successful. And he had been in wisconsin for quite some time and he was probably the only person who had actually been to all of the cities that were under consideration. He had come to wisconsin in 1820s and hes a very prominent figure here. So he said that you were bound to listen to him and they did end up after many votes selected matteson as the capital and surprisingly dodi made a mint off of that decision. So by the early 1840s experienced a lot of immigration. And those are kind of the two main immigrant streams and by the 1840s wisconsin has not people to qualify for statehood and you need 60,000 people. They had way more than that. There were various groups that were trying to push forward in the legislation to move wisconsin toward statehood. So it took a while for it where they can move forward in drafting a state constitution. The democrats are finally successful in 1846 and they go to work trying to write this new constitution and they think it will be an easy endeavor getting to the point. But no one thought that the constitution would be problematic. But the constitution they wrote was a little radical for the people who are living here at the time. They had such uncommercial things as allowing africanamericans to vote. They also outlawed all bands. People were very mistrustful at the time and they sought by outlining its that they wouldnt have to worry about fraudulent activities among employees. In another controversial measure that they took as they allowed married women to own property. Pretty much at every other state of married women could own property. These were radical provisions that were included in the constitution all over the state about how they were going to move forward and how they could stand for this. It was eventually overturned because we couldnt agree on a radical constitution and we sent our legislators back to the drawing board and he grew up a new constitution that was finally approved and got rid of those controversial measures that were in the original constitution. That one was finally passed so that wisconsin could become a state in may 1848. To so by the time we get to the early 20th century, theres a man that is hired who is a Landscape Architect and city planner and his name is john nolan and hes hired to come up with a plan in madison and he kind of delivers a shocking message and he says that matteson has the potential to be a worldclass city. And he also sees and presents very specific plans for what the city can do to become in paris and new york. And they have this potential, that someone from outside saw them as a fantastic place filled with possibility. So that is where the subtitle comes from. He really called madison a model city. Some of the things he suggested never came to fruition. But a lot of the things he suggested in 1911 came through throughout the 20th century and i think that that helps them build the confidence. One of the things that he suggested was that there should be an arboretum. He thought there should be more green space in the city. When he suggested this we didnt end up getting an intolerable decades later. And that includes and he thought that needed to be a place where people can gather together. That didnt happen until the 80s. And today its only open for buses and mostly a pedestrian thruway. But that was really part of his vision for the city and he suggested that the building downtown should not be taller than the capital. And he proposed several parks, one of the things is that we are completely surrounded by water and up until recently, it was hard to enjoy it and there is a lack of restaurants and things on the water where you think that they would be. They had kind of turn their back on the lakes and he said no, these are beautiful, we need to protect them and i think that thats something thats definitely becoming much more important to the city ever since then and i wanted people reading my book to understand how mattesons history is connected to the history of our country. And so often local history is really diminished and people see it as not being very important or being kind of parochial if you are only interested in that. But knowing the history tells you so much about the world. So i really wanted people to understand that part of it. And really think Something Else that is important is how we got that way today. For more information to madison, wisconsin, and other cities located, go to cspan. Org global content. Heres a look at upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country. Booktv will be attending the National Press club annual book fair and offer night. And then booktv is live on cspan2 at the National Book awards from new york city. On november 22 and 23rd, booktv will be live from the Miami Book Fair international. Many people who were infected with ebola could not remember making any mistakes at all. They thought that the decontamination process was concise but they got it anyway. In any event, one day one individual didnt come to work and they found out that he was keeping himself a home and he had isolated him till and he was feeling ill. A notice for a few days previously that he had been taken off alone uncharacteristically and sitting in a plastic chair and smoking a cigarette and looking into space. He never smoked in the ward but he was now. Later they thought that he knew he was coming down with ebola and he wanted to protect him self and the staff. When they send someone to his house, they took a blood sample and he was positive for ebola. About when he decided that he needed to get himself away because his presence as a patient would be too demoralizing to the remaining staff. So he climbed into an ambulance and was taken for four or five hours over these terrible dirt roads to another clinic where he became sicker and sicker in isolation in the ebola ward. And there he was finding that they had a freezer. They had a human remain in their and the sierra leone government regarded the onus is a National Crisis and they called it an International Expert asking for help in the expert became aware of the fact that the drug was there in the freezer 25 feet away from the doctor. They debated for three days whether to give him the drug, zmapp, or not. The considerations were difficult work their way through and this was an experimental drug. He was an african doctor and a National Hero and if you give him the drug, and he died, than he would be an african doctor who would he kill by an experimental drug administered by doctors from the developed world. And the drug might have no effect on him, but if he died, he would be blamed on the drug. On the other hand the drug might save his life and then it would be, if he got the job, why cant anyone else have the drug. And meanwhile he didnt seem to be that sick. And to be hanging in there and so there was hope that he would at least have a good chance of just coming through natural you. And the thing about ebola is that patients can often look like theyre doing all right, but then can suddenly go into what some experts call the crash, where all of a sudden you go into a startling decline and it can happen in a matter of hours where you just lose Blood Pressure and you have organ failure and you die very fast. In the end, thats what happened to the doctor. The zmapp drug eventually ended up with the two people working for christian medical organization for doctor Kent Brantley and nancy writebol. Both survived. They split to dose of transport and in particular doctor bramley , his symptoms seem to be at the point of death when the drug was administered to him and he turned around in a period of about three to four hours on the night of july 31 of this year. When i was researching the article, i discovered that at the very moment that he was apparently being saved by the drug was the moment that it may finish digging the grave and very name the other doctor early on. You can watch this and other programs online at booktv. Org. This weekend on booktv we are featuring new releases by Karen Armstrong on religion and other topics, including george w. Bush and john mccain on our unsung military heroes. Other books include Aaron David Miller in the end of greatness as well as books about afghanistan, winston churchill, and others. Booktv is television for serious readers. Steven johnson, author of how we got to now talked about innovations on world history. Clocks, lenses, recorded sound, and artificial light among others. He spoke in portland. This is one hour. Its so great to be in portland. I think ive done an event for all nine of my books now. From the very beginning i have come here when the whole city was reading my book and i made everyone read a book about cholera in the 19th century and i apologize for that. I feel like this is a very special place and its kind of a special day for me as an author. I got word that this book is going to be number four on the times bestseller list next week. And it just came out, ive never been in the top 10 before. So im really excited and its great kind of celebrate it. The one thing thats different from all of the other books that i had done before and another reason why its kind of appropriate to be here in portland is that i had this Great Television series that either accompanied the book where the book accompanied the Television Series depending on who youre talking to. They were developed together in tandem and its going to be airing next week on pbs and running for four or five weeks after that. And the same title as well. We have a clip from the show to give you a more information about it. So here we go. Imagine observing earth from a distance for the last 100,000 years. So how did we get to todays world . Who were the people that took us out of the dark . People who actually made the modern world and people that youve probably never heard of. Obsessive tinkerers, ordinary people doing extraordinary things. Im Steven Johnson and i write about ideas and innovation. This is the untold story of how we got to now. Sonoma company. Unopposed and spontaneous as this propels. You can see how it was dangerous work. It takes is previously invisible group of people and makes them visible, triggering one of the great movements of social reform in american history. Its an appalling mix that you have to wade through on your way out to dinner. If you cant dig down, with the city up. We want to be the best we stop with a brilliant idea. Its the first ever means of secure radiocommunication. Those two things coming together are beyond understanding. Here we have the beginning of an idea that will turn out to be one of the most transformative ones of the 20th century. I had a hunch that it will take decades to finally pay off. The modern world does not get any more crazy then thats. Its the idea behind this that is important. It was an epic achievement. We make our ideas, and they make us in return. So there it is. [applause] can you tell how fun that was to make the map i hope so because it wants. We shot it all over the world. And we went skiing in the middle of the Arabian Desert which shows how insane we are. And i went into the sewers in San Francisco as well, which was literally the worst thing ive ever done in my entire life. Have these experiences where youre like, that was a tough thing, but boy, im glad i did it now that its over. [laughter] and of course i have to see these clips over and over again and so i have boater stress disorder from watching this. But what we were trying to do in this book is to take these facets of modern life and we no longer think of them as innovations wanting to technology in a sense of reawakening the sense of wonder and amazement these things work at all. So in this chapter is a basic idea of a clean glass of Drinking Water, that we would live in a world for the most part here in the developed world are you go to this fossett and you get water and you dont ever think about dying of cholera 48 hours later. Thats an incredible achievement that you can live in a city of 10 Million People and have that security. That took a history of invention and ingenuity and great Engineering Products just to make that possible. Yet while we celebrate innovation in our society all the time, Everyone Wants to talk about Silicon Valley and the next apple gadget and thats great i love those things in there worth celebrating, but we dont spend enough time talking about the people who made that class of Drinking Water part of our lives. So we are stopping to look at these objects and tell the stories and also as to talk about the unexpected places that this technology lets us. This is the idea of the hummingbird effect. We have these hummingbirds in our garden and we have success with how they work with their crazy anatomy and how they are able to hover like that. So we have flowers and plants and insects that developed a complicated dance. They have paralleled over years. But it doesnt really have anything to do with words and then all of a sudden they figure theres a way to get in on the action. It has to evolve this wing structure to hover. What seems to be this turned out to transform the anatomy of a bird. Turns out that history has a pattern. And that includes transforming the world and all of these predictable ways and thats the kind of effect that i talked about. In the history of things we end that episode and in the chapter we have a visit in austin, texas and i briefly dressed up in a spacesuit. And this is one of the cleanest environments on the face of the earth and thats where they make microchips. We generally assume youre being protected from something. In her room they have to protect the chimps from you. Soap is too dirty and it will set off little particles. And it turned out one of the things that is essential are these chips of what they call ultraclean water, which is water that is just pure h2o and in fact, its so clean that human beings cant always drink it. Normal Drinking Water has a lot of minerals and they wouldnt even let me taste it. But required do this final part of these microchips and to an extent this technology is making our water clean that we can come in terms of Drinking Water and being able to take a shower or a bath or Something Like that and it also makes the digital revolution possible that we have phones and computers and all of these amazing gadgets. The book takes you on these different journeys and in this sense it is a different way of telling history and so until much of the history that we tell is centered around president ial figures, great political figures come out military conflicts, and this is really history to give you the ideas about