The Original 100 Objects

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0:41Generations of families have trusted our must-haves for babies, toddlers, and kids. Designed to shine season after season. Visit carters.com to shop the latest styles or find a Carter's store near you. This is 99 % Invisible. I'm Roman Mars. In 2010, A History of the World in 100 Objects, hosted by Neil McGregor, premiered on BBC Radio 4 to great acclaim. It was a groundbreaking series that told a complex and interconnected history of the world through 100 objects housed in the British Museum collection. For 2026, BBC Studios decided they wanted to revamp and reimagine that ambitious series, this time focusing on the history of the United States, coinciding with the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

1:31To the great credit of the BBC, they thought that maybe British broadcasters weren't the best equipped to take on the curation of 100 objects that told the history of the United States. So that's when they reached out to me, lifelong American, Roman Mars. With our 100 Objects series, we knew we wanted to get out of the museum and focus on objects that were overlooked, thrown away, mass-produced, and misunderstood. Not priceless museum pieces, but the everyday things that provide a portal into stories about what America means to itself and to the world at large. But from the beginning, I knew I needed sage advice to do the job right.

2:10And so I sought the counsel of the original 100 Objects host, Neil McGregor. Here's our conversation.

2:23What I was hoping you could do to begin with is take me back to January 2010. A History of the World in 100 Objects is launching. It starts with a mummy that you saw as a boy. Were you aware of the phenomenon that this was going to be when you started? No, absolutely not. Absolutely not. I was intimidated. We were all intimidated by the fact that the BBC had committed to a series of 100 programs. We had no idea how it was going to be received at all. And in a strange way, the project began really almost as an internal project in the British Museum. What's interested me, having come from the National Gallery, a paintings collection, to a museum, the ambition of which was to show really the history of humanity through things.

3:15So not an art museum, but to try to explore what it meant to put objects from all over the world into one building. So it really began as a way of exploring what happens when you think of a museum as a place where different objects are exploring the same kind of human experience. And of all the things in the building, how did you choose the hundred? Well, this was the greatest fun. Yeah. The British Museum is created in the middle of the 18th century, really at that moment of the Enlightenment, when people begin to have a totally different notion of what humanity means. It's the physical expression of that Enlightenment notion that there is one humanity.

4:01So what we decided to do was to try to organize the 100 objects. Well, the BBC decided that there would be five programs a week and there needed to be a theme for each week. and we wanted to go effectively from the beginning, the earliest hand tools made by anything that can roughly be called human right up to today. So that gave us the format and that in each week we would go around the world. So you take, let's say, you know, 1000 BCE and look at a theme, let's say power. I mean, how do different societies represent power at 1000 BCE? But what it meant internally was that for every week, I would sit down with a curator from the Chinese collection, the Indian collection, the Egyptian collection, the Americas collection, and we would have to think of what objects might speak to each other.

5:00Of course, for academics in particular discipline, this is a totally new way of thinking. There was no connection between ancient Egypt and ancient China. So no Egyptologist was likely to have asked what in my collection might relate to something that's happening at the same time in China. Because there's no connection. It's an anthropological question asked to people who are historical scholars. And they found that completely thrilling because it's allowed them all really to look at familiar objects and ask a totally new kind of question and suggest the commonalities of human behavior. Wherever we are, we all behave roughly equally badly, equally well, and surprisingly, more or less in the same way.

5:52Were there heated arguments? Was there table pounding when people were deciding which artifacts to select? Curators don't normally pound the table. There was a certain amount of shrill advocacy for my particular piece and a certain amount of sulking that others didn't make it. But it was normally extremely good timidant because it was a new kind of conversation for all of them. Very, very exciting. And because what we were looking at was not the history of the world, but our history, a very peculiar one. And one of the histories we wanted to tell almost unspoken through it, because every object came from the museum, was how did it happen that every one of these objects ultimately wound up in London?

6:43Yeah. Was there a sense that you had to present a variety of objects? Because you could certainly do a history of the world in 100 coins. The joy of a collection at the British Museum is that you have so many different media in which humans articulate what matters to them, which is what all these things are about. But the main purpose of doing history through objects was we wanted to allow people who don't have a voice to be heard. History is on the whole, used to mean, of course, just written history. that limits you immediately to that small bit of humanity that wrote. And it also limits you normally to the people that were in control because they were the ones that wrote the history and they made sure it survived.

7:36So part of our project was to have a history told by the people that had never been able to tell their story through the things they're made. And that, I think, is really important. How do you give a voice to the voiceless of the past? Yeah, yeah. And particularly when you're talking about indigenous histories, then the objects become of huge importance as carrying the stories that weren't written and may not have survived in song or myth. So around the same time in 2010, I launched my show called 99 % Invisible, and it's about architecture and design. and there was a certain kind of perversity to doing a radio show about architecture and design because there's hugely visual things and you made the same choice to do a radio series on these things that most people take in with their eyes why did you do that what did you get out of that well it at one level it is totally counterintuitive isn't it that we're talking about things the materiality of things how they're made the skill with which they made and yet You can't see it.

8:47This is where I think the BBC radio, they know how to do this. They know what they're doing, yeah. But it's not just that. BBC has, I think, understood very profoundly and built on the fact that if you can only hear something, then you have to imagine what it is. And you can take possession of something you imagine much more fully than something you just see reproduced in front of you. is why I think we're nearly always disappointed when we see a film of a book. Because in reading the book, we've imagined the character of the place and they've become ours, the part of the way we live and think.

9:28And the same with objects. If you have to do the mental imaginative work of creating the object for yourself, you are invested in it, you possess it in a way that is not really possible, I think, with just an image. I find that if you lead with the story of an object, you fall in love with it in a different way. Whereas like your visual reaction to maybe seeing Rosetta Stone is like, um, I was expecting something more impressive or something like this. But you can tell the sort of the import of it, what it meant, all the story of how it was created and, you know, even the mundane way which it existed.

10:04That's right, because what we were really trying to tell was 100 biographies of an object. And because we only have one life, but objects have many, many lives. And what we got very interested in was the changing role of the object through time. In ways, nobody, when the people carve the Rosetta Stone, this is a tax decree. It's a bit of tax law. And it's so boring, beyond boring. And nobody carving that tax law in the three languages for administrative purposes had any idea what it would one day come to mean. And there is something wonderful about that in an object, that the object can play a role that nobody could have guessed.

10:51Yeah, yeah. It makes their biographies much more engaging, much more alive, I think, than our own dull little predictable lives. Totally. So when you wrote and conceived of the series and produced it, you know, you were the head director of this august institution, the British Museum, as people hold it in great esteem. And I wondered if you noticed your relationship with the public changed when you weren't director, Neil McGregor. You were my pal, Neil McGregor, who I'm inviting into my home to tell me a story about a cool thing. I think everybody's discovered that if you speak a lot on the radio, people feel they know you.

11:32And you must have said the same thing. Very disconcerting experience of actually being recognized in a lift by your voice. Yeah, yeah. is the first time it happens, it's very, very peculiar. And one of the things that I think is interesting about it is that it allowed us to reaffirm that the public collections in Britain, as in the United States, are not the collections of the state, but the collections of the people. The people, yeah. I mean, when the British Museum was created in the 1750s, the idea is that it should be the private collection of every citizen, not the collection of the king open to everybody.

12:13Completely different conception from the continental European model. So the idea of speaking directly into people's houses about their collection, their things, I mean, everything I was talking about belonged to the people listening to it. Why did you choose to examine the 100 objects chronologically? And what problems did that cause? Or what solutions did it provide? I think it has to be chronological. Because one of the things that happens across human history is that we create a technology, and then it helps us do something, and then we become completely dependent on it. We can't live without it.

12:53The hand axe, the simple stone-scraping hand axe, is what lets us, as humans, live anywhere in the world. But then, once you're there, you can't live without it. We've seen the same with mobile phones in the last 20 years. It opens something and then it creates what can be a very dangerous dependency. So that was one strand. And one of the key meta-narratives, I think, of any museum is the growing connectedness of the world. The fact that you can't tell a single story, to use Chimamanda Adichie's phrase. The story of the world is an interconnected story. So if you like, why we wanted to do it chronologically was to show that constantly intensifying power of exchange, curiosity about other places, trade, greed, war, whatever.

13:49But that has intensified steadily across the millennia until you can't really tell a single narrative of a national story. And that was one of the points we wanted to make. The idea of a national history, I'm sorry to say that somebody was writing the history of the United States, but the idea of a national history is unthinkable without situating that nation in the global context. We are in agreement for sure. But it does present this problem is like the beginning set of objects are all objects that are prehistorical. There's not written records about them. Like you have to sort of conceive of the story differently because there isn't a record of how it was made or why it was made.

14:33And so your set of stories really gets sort of limited and then it opens up as you go along. So what was that like? I disagree. I disagree. It narrows down the more we know about the object. I guess that's true. I mean, the whole point of, seems to be the central point of any kind of historical investigation is your poetic involvement with somebody else. That you have to think, what is it like to be somebody else? Because that's the basis of all tolerance. I mean, if you like, the whole venture was really Gulliver's Travels. You go off around the world, you find these astonishing things, wild things.

15:10But the point of Gulliver's Travels is not that the people in Brobdingnag are huge and Lilliput tiny. The point is that when you come back to England, you realize we're pretty peculiar. We're the odd ones. And to de-normalize, to remove yourself as the norm is the precondition of tolerance. And that's what Gulliver's about. It's what the British Museum's about. And it's what the series was meant to be about. Yeah, that's interesting. I love that approach. One of the things that I marveled at in the series is you're touching everything. You're always describing it as a first-hand experience. And for one reason you do that, it's a little more radiophonic.

15:48It allows you to have something happening as you're talking, so it's not just a lecture. But the other part of it is it puts you in the first-person narrative of this object. It does. The difficult thing about that, which I found very hard to know how to manage, is where the object has for the people who made it, and possibly for people today as well, its own kind of sacred existence, its own life. And how one ought then with proper reverence, proper respect, hold or touch this object without having those beliefs. And that took us into very interesting areas of the extent to which you study, can study, objects in ways which are contrary to the belief patterns, belief assumptions of those who made them.

16:49How do we address an Australian original object which may have sacred resonances in a respectful way? Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. So one of the things I found, there's this moment in the series quite late into it, where you talk to David Hockney, which is the first person you talk to who made the object that you're talking about, which is, it's such a change compared to the rest of the series. What was that like? Well, it was very thrilling. We had been waiting to get to an object made by somebody where we could speak to the maker. The very first object was one and a half million years ago on the stone chopping tools.

17:30Obviously, but we had David Attenborough instead. Yeah, well, that's pretty good. Which is almost due to tell us what's going on, how this fits into the animal-human differentiation. But it was wonderful with David Hockney because the objects we were talking about were a series of prints he'd made really about gay life in Egypt. The poems of Cavafy. And we chose the objects for several reasons. In the 20th century, we wanted to choose objects that would address the questions of new kinds of freedom. So we had votes for women was one, gay rights another. We wanted to, of course, to present what it was like to make the objects and why David himself, obviously very committed to gay rights, what it meant to him to read the poems above all, and then to make the prints.

18:28and then what it would mean to him to have the prints used, looked at, and spread the campaign, advance the campaign for gay rights internationally. But as you say, it was a real turning point to be able to speak to the maker for the first time. There was a lot of excitement for the choice of the final 100th object. You deliberately didn't reveal it until the last minute. You invited listeners to suggest it. What was it? Why did you choose it? And how did people react to it? It was an enormous fun trying to decide what was the last object to choose. We wanted to choose an object that spoke to a totally globalized world.

19:15We also wanted to end, of course, on a note that would be hopeful. Yeah. So we eventually came down to two objects. One was a football shirt. Okay. A football shirt of a West African, a footballer Drogba, a Francophone West African who was the great star of Chelsea. Yeah. And Chelsea was owned by a Russian oligarch. Perfect. And the football shirt had been made illegally in China, but bought in Latin America. So that object seemed to us to pull together quite a lot of the world as it now is. What we ultimately went for was slightly more serious. It was a solar panel rechargeable mobile phone. Because the mobile phone seemed to us to be the equivalent of the hand axe, the chopping tool.

20:13The first technology that had enabled humans to move around the world, and this latest one that enabled humans to communicate around the world. We were interested in it because it's become, of course, in so many areas, an element of emancipation, particularly women, enabling women to bank, enabling women to trade. And, of course, the other dimension of solar power, which we wanted to bring in, is that in political terms, this has become a very important thing. Because in large areas of Africa and Asia, the electric currents, cables to areas, could be controlled by political bosses. And areas could either be not cabled or have cables removed or whatever.

21:09But the solar power, at a stroke, removes that power, removes that political control. So it seemed to us to be in many, many ways an emblem of liberation, an emblem of the growing technologies which change our lives and then we become dependent on them. It's also about talking. And, of course, many people listen to the BBC on their mobile phone. So it was also a nod to a patron. Absolutely. Radio is the most important thing. BBC. Of course, you know where your bread is buttered. That makes sense. Exactly. But it was also the solar-powered lamp, which also extended the day. It's all about this sort of individualized freedom and the ability that this technology frees you for all kinds of things.

22:01That's what we wanted to, again, finish on, how these technologies do unquestionably make life better. Yeah. Because the solar panel will give you the lamp, which means you can work at home if you're a student, without interest, whatever. And it also means you don't need to burn for your lighting materials which are likely to cause you lung problems and health difficulties. So in every way, it's potentially a good thing. And we wanted to end on a good hundred thing. I'm interested in what you think of the series Legacy Now. It's an early example of podcasting being really successful. I think it had more listeners globally than it did inside of the UK.

22:45What do you think of the legacy of the show? Well, we've been as surprised by the legacy as we were by the response initially. I think it has definitely had an impact in terms of reminding people that the everyday object has its own biography, its own history. and that takes you back to the dignity of the maker and the user. So what it does as a history is it takes away the great moments that we're taught. You don't have the Battle of Waterloo. Yes. Why would it figure? Absolutely. Because that's not the kind of history. So it opens the way to other histories told by other people. Yeah. Yeah. And that's why a history versus the history.

23:35A history. Exactly. And that was very important. One of the slightly, it's been translated into a lot of languages, the book. One of the vexing things is in some countries, some translations, the publisher insisted on making it the history. So that's maybe in translation, the and our mean different things in different languages. Yeah.

24:00You know, this idea of a history and the fact that objects mean different things to different people, this came up a lot, as you've alluded to already. You would talk to folks who would differ from even designation of it being an object at all. What is that like navigating that in the storytelling? It is difficult, of course. And it's quite useful to be able to say, well, the BBC only gave us 13 and a half minutes for this.

24:30So you can point to the controversy. You don't have to fully adjudicate it. But it's a very real one. And it's very central to museum experience. And that's one of the differences clearly between the series we were doing, your series. we were talking very much about objects in a museum to be presented to the public but in a museum the question for instance should some objects be shown at all when it will cause offence to members of a community from which in the past they came that's a very delicate thing because what you're really talking about there are putting limits on the quest for knowledge am I not to be allowed to pursue certain lines of inquiry because it might offend your beliefs?

25:22That's a huge question. It is, yeah. The 18th century was very brisk about this. Yeah. Partly because it was really about the constraints of the churches and it was saying that the constraints put on academic scientific research by the churches were simply unacceptable. And that you had to go on pursuing the questions, even if the faithful were distressed. We can't take that position with the same confidence, or we might choose not to take it at all today, in relation to other beliefs outside the European experience particularly. It's, I think, a very big philosophical question. Yeah, yeah. And I don't know the answer.

26:08Yeah. But it's a question that comes again and again, particularly, of course, in areas of the natural world and of human history. Yeah, yeah. Because even like putting a date on a Clovis, the spear point of Clovis spear point, people don't want to hear a date associated with it. They don't want to hear, you know, that people arrived. This was a very interesting discussion because, as I understand it, the archaeological evidence and the DNA evidence points to the fact that the Americas are peopled from Northeast Asia sometime around 15 ,000 years ago. That, of course, is a historical account that is at odds with the traditional beliefs of many indigenous Americans.

26:58how one presents the one without offending the other is a very serious question. We decided simply to allude to it, but not to explore it, but to present what we believe the thing tells us. Yeah, yeah. But it's a very, I don't know whether that was the right decision. Well, I don't know what other decision you could quite make, honestly. Like, I don't know. because you have two irreconcilable understandings of the relationship between the people in the place and the story of the world. Yeah. And we have different views of, you know, how reverent to sort of treat that object. I mean, like you treated the object with great reverence.

27:44Like it was super important. But Clovis Point is there. That meant, you know, 80 % of the megafauna was gone. It's death to the mammoth. You know, it's all, you know, interesting and important stuff, but they are at odds. And so you just have to do your best to present the signs of it, I'm sure. I think that's as much as one can do in this kind of format. Yeah. So we're now making a history of the U.S. and 100 objects. If you had an advice for like things that you would think I must, you must include. First of all, we're not going chronological. I decided this from the very beginning because I needed the freedom to jump around.

28:23And we also were open. We've sort of conceived of 25 or 30. And we have it open and we're trying to solicit responses from people. So what is the type of thing that you think, from your experience in the first 100 Objects series, is important to include? You're talking about the history from... It's kind of 1776. You know, it could be things that lead into it. I think what would be interesting is an outsider. We all know the things that came from the Europeans settling into America. But the things that came from America, for instance, tobacco. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, there is something that America gave the world that changed the world.

29:05Absolutely, absolutely. And smoking tobacco appears almost to have begun in the territory of the United States. What object you would choose, I don't know, but that's how it's completely changed the world. That's a good point. And certainly in my childhood, in the 50s and 60s, I mean, you couldn't be a credible teenager without a cigarette. And it could be a French one, but it could just easily be a lucky strike or whatever. But even the French ones were, of course, American derived. So that kind of notion. And the same with blue jeans. Why did blue jeans represent a kind of freedom? I mean, when we were talking about the new freedoms, political and economic and sexual, we read objects that told those stories.

29:52I mean, the coins for votes for women, Hockley's Prince, whatever. Blue jeans and cigarettes mean something the same. It does. But what are they about and how does that happen? I mean, that seems to me something that's where the history of the US is the history of the world. And I hope some of your objects will be chosen really to make that point. That's right. I mean, you've heard a couple of the early episodes. One of the ones that's sort of like the cigarettes and blue jeans, but maybe like not quite as known, is this 60 degree threaded screw, which is an object that has very little outward significance to people, but really dominated and changed the world.