My Impertinent Connection with James Burke

A great IDEA, like a great song, has persistence and will come back around, will live, and evolve in new applications and accoutrements.

Such is the "Human Business" of Innovation...

After Discovery Channel acquired TLC and began to invest in first-run programming, we knew that Connections, with James Burke was a knockout concept, had been a winner in the PBS system in the late 70's, and still had a core of devoted fans.  We resurrected it, made a hit of it on cable and in home video.  Then we set out to do it justice as a Discovery Multimedia interactive "real world game."

JB: The Encyclopaedia Wore a Leisure Suit

The CD-ROM game would follow the promise of the series: James would dive in and hop-scotch through time across scientific-historical steppingstones from one madcap innovation to another, weaving a verbal string of ingeniously-related anecdotes based on relations - some solid, others coincidental, a priori, or downright tenuous.  One or two of the most entertaining examples were quite rococo, yet so glib and charming was James that he could pull it off.

I recall thinking, of some examples, that perhaps it was all a bit of a parlo(u)r trick, and I said as much in our very first meeting. Mistake - the audacity!  He could - and should - have cut me to the quick, but...

All that was missing was the yad

Instead, high-brow James unfurled a huge scroll of parchment - 15 feet long by 30 inches wide - across the 20-foot executive conference room table.  On it were hundreds of constellations, each with 5 or 6 to 20+ pencil-written "nodes," each node a pivotal event that capitalized on applied learning to introduce a solution that not only solved a problem but also led to successive innovation.

The ersatz map of the night sky depicted what Burke called the "web of knowledge," and even included extra leaves that he would fold under to link across levels and conjoin multiple constellations with one or more shared nodes.  James had painstakingly hand-made this work of cartography, and he'd clutched and carried it like a precious Torah scroll during the pitch meetings at the network. Its existence was legendary; to have him unfurl it for our team was a huge honor.

Understand that we were seeing this in 1993 and early 1994, only months before getting a first peek at Hypertext Markup Language and the eventual/true wwweb.  Lo and behold, that Burkeian "web of knowledge" now has new life as an interactive application for personal exploration, creativity and corporate development from the James Burke Institute.

See knowledge web 'Mystery Tour' examples such as "King Frederick to the Bottle Cap (via Voltaire)," or "Cornflakes to Communism."


James was game for making Connections interactive, and very involved in the concept and development.  He joined the team for several planning meetings, and we reviewed the software shoulder to shoulder as the project came together (we commissioned SF-based developer Luminaria who'd produced the most excellent mythology title Wrath of the Gods).

At our direction, Luminaria shamelessly patterned Connections on Myst, which my QA team were playing when they weren't playing networked DOOM.  James was genuinely pleased with the way that Connections came out, and promoted it with vigor.  The title became Discovery's first seven-figure seller.

Without modesty I'll assert that our little "It's A Mind Game" effort, in more ways than one, was a CD-ROM approximation - a tiny bi-sect - of what would emerge shortly as the consumer-oriented and media-rich Internet.  It used the medium to go well beyond what had been possible in the linear television format.

Rob Bole: "The show was smart, interesting and really underscored how all ideas and objects are built upon the accretion of human knowledge, insight and innovation.

"You fool, you!"

When I first understood what a URL was - meaning when I first experienced linking I immediately thought that promise of James Burke's Connections was finally at my fingertips. Through the magic of linking I could wander off through the vast store of human knowledge; sometimes following determined paths, but others through luck or fancy that would lead to new insights and appreciation for our world.

Amazing! The World Wide Web was going to be my encyclopedia, teacher and exploration portal all in one. While I did not appreciate or understand it then this was the potential to index the knowledge of the world through a commonly-understood metadata; the accretion of thousands of individual decisions about context that would help build a vast human store of experience.

However, the web has never really lived up to this promise." (read more at PublicPurposeMedia)

We Drank Deeply, & with Satisfaction

James really took care as we built the title together, and afterward.  An old hand at the book tour game, and a veteran huckster from his days as on-air talent for BBC covering the Apollo lunar excursions and other science topics, he gamely went on the road with us and nailed the endless interviews, demonstrations, and promotions with style, wit and class.

In this mad rush, to share a pint with Sir James on La Croisette in Cannes, captivated by his knowledge and drawn in warmly by his passionate love for people and their ideas, was my unique and lasting joy.

Thankfully, but not surprisingly, he was way too well-bred to be-head me over the parlo(u)r-trick jibe....