The evacuation of Tristan da Cunha and Japan surrenders to China at the end of World War Two

27:45Russia joins China. Coinciding with all of this was the growth of what was left of the technology world after the issues involving the financial challenges of the tech sector. Crucially, India becoming a bigger sort of offshoring centre and playing its own role in the global economy in a way that it hadn't even been thought of before. That's China, Russia and India. When I looked at each of the three of those and considered different paths of how they might grow over the subsequent decade, I realised very quickly that they'd become a more significant share of global GDP. This is gross domestic product, which is the most common measure for the size of an economy.

28:28But then I thought, well, I've got sort of Europe and Asia. Who is there, if anybody, in Latin America that I could think of as being the same kind of importance? Maybe Brazil might be an interesting part of this story. China, Russia, India and now Brazil. By complete fluke, I then realised that if I played around with the first letter of each of the four, it came out as brick. I inherently was thinking that if you wanted to be able to manage these kind of potentially global consequential issues better, you needed to have these countries as part of the central part of global policymaking. Jim puts his pen down, his report is finished.

29:11And then it's published with the title... building better economic bricks. Then, not much happened. What is one of the amusing aspects of the brick story is that for quite a while, nobody really paid a lot of attention to it. I would think to myself, well, maybe I haven't really influenced anybody. After a while, Jim's concept began to get recognition. The head of the IKEA family at the time, he'd written a letter saying how this was such an influential paper that it was going to have a major influence on how IKEA thought about its strategy. Although not everyone agreed with this choice of countries.

29:53I remember having specific discussions with Mexican policymakers. The Indonesians certainly would ask and say, what about us? Various African countries and African journalists would often say, why is it not Brica? With so much debate about who was in and who was left out, Jim wrote another paper in 2005 where he identified what he called the next 11, looking at which other countries had potential. The list ranged from Mexico, Turkey, Iran, Egypt, Nigeria, of course, South Korea, the Philippines, Vietnam, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Pakistan. I mean, there's not really an acronym that rolls off your tongue for those ones, though, is there?

30:38It stuck as the next 11. I sometimes joke that the reason why we limited to 11 was a game because of my love of football. I'll briefly interrupt here to mention Jim's love for the English football club Manchester United. In hindsight, we made an error because one of the 11 should have been Ethiopia. I ended up saying soon after that Ethiopia were like the Olly Gunnar-Salkshire of Manchester United, in that he was this famous substitute at the time who would always come onto the pitch and score goals and be a crucial part of Manchester United. While June was exploring the next 11, the Brick Nations were giving his concept a new life, organising their first official summit.

31:21I mean, I was so flattered, but I couldn't resist equally as quickly saying, they can't do that without asking me, it's my idea. On the 16th of June 2009, the leaders of Brazil, India and China met in Yekaterinburg in Russia. I was extremely fascinated as to what they would say. And I had all these sort of lofty expectations as to how they would perpetuate and promote some of the underlying ideas that we touched on. It was hosted by Russia's then-president, Dmitry Mavyedov, who you'll hear in this clip from BBC News.

32:04The most important fact is that we discussed it in a very practical way. We want to make the decision-making process on the world's political and economic issues more fair. A year later, South Africa joined, adding an S to BRIC. But you'll remember it wasn't one of the original four countries. Since then, the group has continued to expand and is currently made up of 11 countries. The annual get-together of the BRIC's countries and the statement they put out is just this welcome reminder that world governance has just not shifted to deal with this much more complex world. The contradictory part comes about because they don't really do much other than this very powerful symbolic stuff.

32:48Jim O 'Neill left Goldman Sachs in 2013. Two years later, he was appointed to the UK's House of Lords, becoming Lord O 'Neill of Gatley. He continues to follow Manchester United and keep a keen eye on Bricks. I don't travel anything like as much to these places I once did, but I do still do it. And when I go, I'm sort of treated a bit... I'm certainly treated as a bit of a celebrity and often like a bit of a pop star. I was in Delhi and after I finished giving a keynote speech, I came off the stage and I must have had about 60 people wanting my autograph and selfies, so it was quite amusing and kind of a bit weird.

33:31The economist Jim O 'Neill was speaking to Megan Jones. For literally centuries, there had been accepted symbols for the pound sterling, the US dollar, and then more recently the euro and the yen. But what about the Indian currency, the rupee? Surya Alango has been speaking to Udaya Kumar Darmalingam, who in 2010 designed the Indian rupee symbol. On the 15th of July 2010, it was directly announced in the national media. The rupee today joined the ranks of the dollar, pound, euro and yen. That's how it was reported by New Delhi Television Limited, known as NDTV, a prominent Indian news network.

34:10The then-broadcasting minister, Mrs Ambika Soni, she announced, she took my design and then she announced to the public that this is going to be used as the rupee symbol. The symbol will standardise the expression for Indian rupee in different languages, both within and outside the country. When this announcement is made, the designer behind the new currency symbol, Udaykumar Darmalingam, is busy planning a move across the country to start his first teaching job. So he has no idea what's just happened, and that he's about to be bombarded by the paparazzi. Suddenly I just got a lot of calls and then there were media who just came into the hostel.

34:51I was just puzzled then. Then somebody told me that, no, your design has been announced on the television. And that's how I got to know about it. Outside of his hostel, a growing crowd of onlookers. Students and staff start gathering. The road were blocked and a lot of things and so many vans were there. They were all cameras everywhere. They were all setting up in different places. Uday Kumar's phone did not stop ringing. Continuously for three days, I should say. There were a lot more from other parts of the country. I also started to kind of call up. I hardly got to speak to my own family. So in fact, then I was using this small mobile phone at the time.

35:28My friends helped me to keep changing the batteries all the time, charging, changing, charging, changing. The media attention was so big. I had to delay my joining date. But the process and the entire thing itself was very much memorable and cherishable. So how did we get here? Let's go back 18 months. The government of India announced a competition. I was actually doing my PhD at Industrial Design Centre, Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay. And I was writing my thesis and completing it. And that's when I got to hear about this competition. And I was very keen to participate. That's how it all actually started.

36:10The Indian government had some guidelines for the competition. They said the symbol should affect our Indian culture and traditional ethos. So that was one of the key focus point for me. And I tried to kind of develop an idea around that. So how do I bring the Indian culture and tradition into this tiny symbol? And that reflects our country. After two and a half months of research and sketching. One of the ideas was I used the form of letter R, which is the basis for RU, which can expand to rupiah. And I also tried to blend the Latin scripts along with the Devnegari script, where you can also see that there's a capital letter R without the vertical stroke.

36:49So the R also expands to rupees. So rupiah and rupees both denote the Indian currency. So that was the fundamental basic philosophy of the design. And from there, I went on to embed a lot more meanings into the design. Udaya Kumar wanted the symbol to be globally recognized. So if you look at many of the currency symbols across the world, so they have this visual grammar where you have a line which kind of cuts across the letter either vertically, horizontally or diagonally. So I wanted to follow the same visual grammar to kind of establish the semantics of what a visual currency should look like.

37:23He also wanted to capture the character of India. India is vast and very diverse in terms of the regions, in terms of the climate, in terms of the geography, in terms of the language, in terms of traditions, rituals, practices, community. So if you take every aspect of life, it's quite different in different parts of the country, right? But it is this diversity that brings us together and creates what we call India. So in that sense, then how do I kind of come up with an identity which will reflect everybody and which will represent a common Indian? So I thought probably the flag is one thing which has no bias or it does not particular or specify to any particular community or a section or a region.

38:01So then that was the concept, right? Integrate the tricolor flag as a part of the symbol, where you can see this top line and also the middle line in between. You have this white space to denote Indian currency and to denote every individual of this country. Udaya Kumar was one of more than 3 ,000 people who entered. For months, he didn't hear a thing. Suddenly, in the month of November 2009, I received a letter from the government of India stating that I've been chosen as one of the five finalists for the Rupee Symbol Design Competition. And we were invited to New Delhi in the Reserve Bank of India quarters and then we were asked to make a 10-minute presentation in front of a seven-member jury.

38:44And so that was slated for December 5th. So then I had to travel there. Then I made my presentation. When Uday Akumar got there, he found the four other finalists all waiting to present their design.

39:20But yeah, it worked out, perhaps. Afterwards, the panel invited the finalists to come together. And we were very curious what is going to happen next. And that's when the chairman of the committee said, we are only a recommending committee. We would be ranking your entries from one to five. And then this will be shared with the parliament. And there they will discuss on it. And then it will move to the cabinet ministry. And then they will also kind of discuss on it. And then finally it goes to the prime minister and the finance minister, Dr. Manmohan Singh and then Pachitam Ramshu. He was the finance minister then.

39:56So they would get to choose the final design and then you would know who has won it. So the pressure was on? Yes. Yes. Yeah, really. Yeah, I was nervous. After seven months, still no word. By now, Udaya Kumar had completed his PhD. He'd been hired as an assistant professor at the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati. But then, the day before he was due to start, the news came that he had won the competition and he was besieged by journalists, including reporters from NDTV. A new rupee that has catapulted the young creator of this symbol to a new high. It's a great honour to be part of the Indian history.

40:45Yeah, I think immediately they wanted to kind of start to implement it. And after probably later on, the coins had the symbols. They were the newly minted coins then. In 2011, I think there were some new coins were introduced. And then the symbols were also part of the coins. And then the currencies came, the currency notes. They also had the symbol. And of course, in various other places also, they started to make use of it. And all the correspondence and communications. And everywhere it was made use. A few months later, riding on the high of designing the new identity of the Indian currency, Udaya Kumar visited a Hindu temple with some friends.

41:22One of my friends regularly visits that temple and he happened to introduce me to the priest stating that this is the person who designed the rupee symbol and he's very well known and popular and things like that. And he was expecting that the priest will congratulate me and appreciate my design but he just looked at me and stared at me and said that what is the big deal about it anybody can do this design there's nothing new about it and he's my friend's face went a little sad but i was really happy yeah so because that was the whole intention right so if you want to design something which is for the common public and if they can understand and relate and see that it belongs to them and that's i believe is the success of the design dr udaya kumar dhamalingam is now a professor at the Department of Design at the Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati.

42:14He was speaking to Suriya Elango. Next, we've got this week's sporting witness. In 1988, the American diver, Greg Louganis, hit his head on the diving board at the Seoul Olympic Games in South Korea. At the time, only he and his coach, Ron O 'Brien, knew he was HIV positive. They had to decide whether to tell officials about the possible health risk, as Greg described in a conversation with Peter Bowes in 2012. The first feeling that I had was, you know, I was, like, totally embarrassed, you know, because this is supposed to be the Olympics, and you're supposed to be pretty good, and you're not supposed to do stupid stuff like that.

42:54So I was trying to figure out, OK, now how do I get out of this pool without anybody seeing me? I got up out of the water, and then I didn't know how bad it was. How painful was it? Well, there's so much adrenaline. I couldn't tell you. I was just trying to deal with the situation. You know, a head trauma like that, it doesn't bleed right away. You know, you get the gash and then... It wasn't until I crossed the three metres in the platform going towards the hot tub and I met my coach, Ron O 'Brien, then that's when he noticed the blood trickling down my hairline. Greg Louganis, already an Olympic gold medal winner, was helped away from the poolside.

43:34What only he and his coach Ron O 'Brien knew was that his blood, trickling from the head wound, carried a risk. Greg was HIV positive. Dr James Puffer, he met us and we went to this little side room, took a look at it, cleaned it up and sewed it up. In those seconds after you hit your head, you said your first thought was of embarrassment. This shouldn't happen to a professional diver in this way. How quickly did you then think HIV? It was pretty quick. When I realized that I was bleeding, I was terrified. I didn't know what my responsibility was, but I knew where I was, and I knew that it would be an issue, a huge issue, and I probably wouldn't have been able to continue.

44:27you. What sort of scenarios were going through your mind? Were you thinking of the potential that other divers could be infected? What people would say? You know, I was concerned about that, but, you know, you're not going to get HIV through in a chlorinated pool. But did you realize that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I wasn't putting, the only one that I was putting at danger at risk was the doctor you know he had direct contact with you know with the blood and it was funny because my coach shook his hand thanking him profusely and as he's shaking his hand he's checking his hands to make sure that there's no abrasions so how could you not tell the doctor you know it's it's in the heat of a competition and like i said i was paralyzed by fear.

45:20I didn't know what my responsibility was. So, you know, in those situations, we don't always make the most rash decisions and choices. So, you know, I was terrified. I, you know, I didn't know if I was going to be continuing. Those were decisions that I had to make in a very short time. I know it's easy to say in this word, hindsight keeps coming up. But in that situation, again, Do you think you could rationalize it better, and you might have been more open with people at the time? No, not in the time. I mean, at that time, as far as a lot of people were concerned, HIV and AIDS was killing the right people.

46:04It was homosexuals, IV drug users, and prostitutes. A few years earlier, they didn't have a name for it. It was the gay cancer. Greg Louganis is gay, but he didn't come out publicly until the 1990s. He says when he was first diagnosed HIV positive six months before the Olympics, he thought he should just give up diving and, as he puts it, go home and wait to die. But his cousin, a doctor, had persuaded him that continuing to train was probably the healthiest thing for him, and he was immediately prescribed antiretroviral drugs. The way that they prescribed it at that time, it was two pills every four hours around the clock.

46:47So you're training for the Olympics, Olympic trials, Olympics, and every four hours you're reminded you have a compromised immune system. In the middle of the night I had to wake up and take my AZT. In the middle of the morning I had to wake up and take my AZT. Despite the drugs, despite the stress, Greg Louganis had managed to make it to his third Olympic Games and he wasn't about to give up because of an injury. My coach, he said, you know, you have a wonderful career to look back on. He said, you don't have to dive. You don't have to get back up on that board. You've accomplished more than any other diver, and you have a tremendous career to look back on.

47:26And my response to him was, because I was paralyzed by fear. I didn't know what to do. And my response to him was, you know, we worked too long and hard to get here, and I didn't want to give up without a fight. and I said, okay, fine, you know, we've got to get ready for the next dive. We went for a walk. We joked, you know, that hockey players get 30 stitches and they go back in the game. They lose teeth and they go back in the game. And this is just a flush room, you know. I mean, we were just, you know, kind of joking about it. But ultimately it was a fluke and I had to move on. It was almost like a mixed blessing.

48:05Yeah, it was horrible that that happened, but it was kind of a wake-up call for myself and Ron O 'Brien. I was the favourite going into that competition and in that split second I became the underdog and it's human nature to root for the underdog. With the crowd behind him, Greg Louganis' next dive earned him the highest score in the entire competition. He went on to win two gold medals in those Seoul Olympics But it wasn't until 1994, just before he published his autobiography, that he finally told the doctor who treated him about his HIV status. Dr Puffer, I have known him for years. I knew his family.

48:48I saw his kids grow up. He was a family practitioner. And I figured as a doctor that you are tested regularly for HIV. So before the book came out, I called him. and I told him, I said, about my HIV status and I said, now I'm assuming that you've been tested for HIV. And he said no. And I was devastated because I knew his wife, I knew his family. I cared about, you know, all of them. I felt so much guilt. When he sewed my head up, there were no latex gloves on the pool deck. And he reassured me. He said, you know, I took every precaution, whether you were HIV positive or not. He got tested, and then a week later he gave me a call, and he told me that he was HIV negative.

49:46Yeah, he lost some sleep. He admitted that. He said, I lost some sleep over it. But once he got the results back, he breathed a lot easier. After retiring from competitive diving, Greg Louganis built a new life as a motivational speaker, actor and dog trainer. But he accepts that no matter what he does, he'll always be remembered for that September day in Seoul. When that happened, I told my coach, I said, that's all anybody's going to remember. Me hitting my head on the board in the Olympics. Fortunately, I came back and I was successful. At least they have some good stuff beyond me just hitting my head on the board.

50:33That you can come back, that it is about picking yourself up. It's not about the falling down, it's about picking yourself up. The American diver Greg Louganis was speaking to Peter Bowes. Finally this week, a key moment in the history of home entertainment. For more than a decade, VHS and Betamax battled over which video recorder would dominate. By 1988, the eventual champion had been decided. Johnny Ianssen has the story.

51:10It was a very bloody, ugly, difficult war. So despite producing what some people consider a far superior quality picture, can Betamax survive? They believed they alone, Sony, had such a big, important name, they would be able to make Betamax succeed. And they were wrong. His Betamax system had a good reputation technically, but was soon outstripped by the more widely available VHS rival. And I can truthfully say home video changed my life.

51:49Mark Wheelodge has worked in the movie business for decades and in the 70s and 80s watched this dramatic tale unfold whilst working for Video Review magazine as its technical editor. The conflict began in 1975 when Sony released the Betamax, a revolutionary home videotape recorder that cost$1 ,200. A year later, JVC, the Japan Victor company, would follow with its rival VHS machine, which cost just under$1 ,000. But it all could have been so different if JVC's parent company had their way. Months before Betamax came out, the head of Matsushita called up Sony and said, we'd like a meeting with Akil Marita, the chairman of the board of Sony.

52:34And the guy said, we know you're working on this thing called Betamax. We want you to know now we have already beat you. We've already got another format called VHS, which is going to have more than twice the running time, and you will never be able to compete with it. I beg of you, for the sake of the industry, please don't come out with Betamax. Join forces with us on VHS. and Akhil Morita, the chairman of the board of Sony, was absolutely incensed. He was insulted, threw the guy out of his office and said never. The fact that VHS started with a longer running time would prove pivotal, as would manufacturing.

53:15Sony were the bigger company, but JVC signed up more people to make their machines. Sony wanted a very high royalty price per machine and to use the word Betamax on the packaging and in the advertisements. But meanwhile, the VHS camp, JVC and Matsushita, made a much better deal with all the other manufacturers, Zenith, RCA, General Electric, and so on, and said, listen, we're going to have a cassette that's twice the playing time of Betamax, and it's going to cost you less. For the most part, I think in the beginning and certainly by the early 80s, maybe there were five companies that made Betamax and then there were 15 companies that made VHS.

54:03To the untutored eye, the difference might seem academic. Betamax cassettes developed by Sony of Japan are smaller and drive the tape faster, which Sony claim means better pictures. Sony relied on the fact that people wanted the best possible picture from their videos, but VHS appealed to the masses with its cost and that impressive runtime. We always picked Betamax as having better picture quality, but the problem is Sony could never overcome the playing time limitation. If you could buy a Betamax for$9.95, the comparable VHS machine would be$6.95. It was always cheaper and eventually that became impossible to compete with.

54:43So Sony was eaten alive by that. But if Sony thought JVC's two-hour tapes were troublesome, in 1977, things were about to get a lot worse.

54:59RCA had meetings with JVC and they said, we like this machine, but we need it to do more so that Americans can record football games. What if we cut the speed in half and made it four hours long instead of two hours long. And JVC was highly offended. They said the picture quality will be horrible if you do that. We won't allow that. JVC means something. We have an image. We can't put out a terrible machine like that. And RCA said, OK. So they went to Matsushita Panasonic, JVC's corporate owner, and said, listen, we just talked to JVC. They won't make us a machine that will do four hours. Would you do it?

55:38And they said, oh, yes. Yes, we will. How many will you buy? And they said, oh, we'll buy 20 ,000. And they said, absolutely, absolutely. You can have them by next month. Hello, and let's start straight away with this week's chart of the top 10 most popular video rentals compiled by Gallup for video. Betamax was struggling, and by 1980, VHS was outselling it by around two to one. But it would get even worse. The movie rental market was exploding, and by the mid-1980s, according to the National Cable TV Association, Americans were spending$1.2 billion on renting videos. The video rental stores were confronted with a physical reality that they only had so much space in their shops.

56:25They couldn't stock every single video format ever made. Eventually, I think it all just became too much, and they looked around and said, what can we do to simplify this and make more money and make it easier for the consumer? and I think they said, heck with it, we're just going to go with VHS. VHS is so much simpler. By 1982, most of the major film studios and video stores went with VHS. And as the war raged, another battle began. Universal sued Sony over Betamax, calling it a copyright threat, and tried to ban the production of all video recorders. Archived from the courts showed just how concerned they were about the popularity of home taping.

57:05I'm not suggesting to the court that an individual Betamax owner in his home is the same as a commercial pirate. But we're not talking in this case about a single individual Betamax owner. We're talking about millions of Betamax owners. And when they get done making their copies, they end up with millions of copies of respondents' copyrighted works. In 1984, after eight years, the Supreme Court backed Sony protecting the entire video industry. Mark testified in the case. The judge decided that, yes, American consumers do have the right to use a video recorder to record a television show or movie off the air.

57:41However, he specifically said, I am only going to say you have the right to time shift the recording so you can watch a show off the air once. And whether or not you keep that tape or give it to a friend, that's for another court to decide. I'm not going to decide that today. By 1986, VHS dominated over 90 % of the sales market. The war was all but over. But Sony co-founder Akio Morita said they certainly weren't losers. But isn't it true that Betamax has been taking a declining share of the market? Of course, as a type of format, but still we are one of the biggest manufacturers of video recorders.

58:20And now we are going to the next generation. Betamax made billions and billions of dollars all over the world. because they had about a 15-year run from 1975 to 1990. One Sony executive who we got to know told me, we've been in pure profit for the last five years. He said, we make so much money on Betamax, it's not even funny. The final nail in the coffin came in 1988, when Sony released the SLV-70HF, its first VHS recorder. This company that invented Betamax had finally joined the format it fought so valiantly against for the past 12 years. They finally realized this is another opportunity to make money.

59:06Betamax's failure actually became part of pop culture, and it sort of symbolized, here's what happens when you invest in a losing format. It was kind of sad to see that, and you realize, oh, everything has a limited lifespan. None of these forms of technology can go on forever. Mark Wheelage was speaking to Johnny Ianssen and remembering the home video war between VHS and Betamax. Time for us to press stop and eject as we've come to the end of this edition of the History Hour. No need to worry about setting a timer to record any of our offerings because all our programmes are available by going to bbc.com slash witnesshistory.

59:48And we'll be back with another collection of first-hand stories from the past next week. Until then, this is Max Pearson from all of us here. Thanks for listening. Goodbye. Imagine being here. Scientists have made the atomic bomb. The first one was dropped on a Japanese city this morning. Here. During the meeting, Mr. Mandela was informed of the government's decision regarding his release. And here. Witnesses have spoken of a wall of water that swept coastlines in Sri Lanka, Indonesia. Hear from the people who were there. He heard me praying while he was shooting and he just stopped. He said, I'm not going to.

1:00:24I'm going to leave you here to tell the story. Knowing that you have a spy and that you're following a spy, it doesn't get any cooler than that. Witness History brings you first-hand accounts. Merkel gets up and says, I'm going. And Tusk says, I'm locking the door. Nobody's leaving. You're reaching a compromise or you're not leaving this room. Was it shopping carts that made you rich? Well, they didn't make me poor. Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

1:01:00There's a magical place where the desert meets the sea. Oh my goodness, it's amazing! Brimming with history and culture. There's no place on earth for art like this. Bursting with flavours. I can smell the spices. And basking in luxury. Nice to have you here in paradise. Abu Dhabi Unwrapped is a sonic guide to a very special destination. Paid and presented by the Department of Culture and Tourism, Abu Dhabi. Listen now wherever you get your podcasts. I want to put all the issues on the table that keep me up at night. The Interview. The best conversations from across the BBC. We're coming up against technology companies that are richer and more powerful than many nation states.

1:01:43With the people shaping our world. There are those that believe that the power of law should be replaced by the law of power. The Interview from the BBC World Service. Listen now wherever you get your BBC podcasts.