Original subtitles

- [Narrator] This is the story of how the greatest detective

who never lived changed the world.

Sherlock Holmes.

- Elementary, my dear Watson. Elementary.

- [Narrator] And how he did it happened

in ways few could ever imagine.

Space science.

- The science we're doing here at NASA

is really Holmes, 21st century.

- [Narrator] Popular culture.

- Of course, Sherlock Holmes has to be Batman,

because Sherlock Holmes is Batman.

There would be no Batman without Sherlock Holmes.

- Holmes haunts a lot of the popular

culture of the 20th century.

- [Narrator] Espionage.

- Sherlock Holmes is the patron saint

of intelligence analysis.

- [Narrator] Forensic science.

- The theory should fit the data,

not the data fitting the theory.

It's very Holmes, yeah.

- [Narrator] We live in a universe where Sherlock Holmes

has left his mark, everywhere.

- [Man] 326, take 12.

- [Narrator] Every few years, a fictional character

re-emerges and captures the imagination of a new generation.

- The name's Sherlock Holmes,

and the address is 221B Baker Street. (clicks tongue)

- [Narrator] Mark Gatiss is co-creator

of the BBC series Sherlock.

- He has a Victorian superpower,

which still works in the modern day.

I think essentially it comes down the fact

that he is the smartest man in the room.

He can make the connections nobody else can,

and that is timeless.

(piano music)

- When you read A Study in Scarlet, and Holmes

is introduced to Watson, and he says:

- Afghanistan or Iraq?

- And Watson's...

How the devil did you know that?

Holmes said, by the way you're limping.

- I knew you were an Army doctor and you've been

invalided from Afghanistan.

- Like Iraqi, I'm afraid.

- Well, of course that's insane.

There are hundreds of ways that somebody could limp,

but the thing that strikes you about Holmes

is that he takes common sense events

and finds explanations for them.

Well, anyway...

- It must speak of a kind of need we have

to be saved, I think, or to believe

there is something slightly higher than us,

which is going to come and get us out

of this terrible mess we're all in.

- It seems that Holmes shines a little brighter for people

when things aren't going very well.

And things are going wrong in the world.

- Banks do not have sufficient capital to make loans.

- [Steven] So, I need somebody who can re-assure me

that there are people out there who can make things right.

And right now, we're in a sort of renaissance of Holmes.

- [Narrator] The Sherlock Holmes stories

have never been out of print since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

created the character in 1887.

Holmes first appeared in a minor

Christmas penny press magazine.

The story, A Study in Scarlet.

- At first, I think they attracted very little attention,

but after a time, when I began the short adventures,

people began to recognize that

it was different to the old detective.

- He wrote 60 stories, four novels, and 56 short stories.

- They began to write the magazine.

It was murder, so I may say, did I.

- American publishers were paying

Conan Doyle a dollar a word.

Now, in the 1920s, that is very, very big money indeed.

- [Narrator] After the Bible, the Holmes stories

are the most widely circulated

and translated books in the world.

- It's often said that he's the most

depicted fictional character,

certainly the most filmed fictional character.

I think it's because of the strange

sort of glamor that he possesses.

It's a rather uneasy sort of glamor,

because he is a glacial and frightening character.

- Oh, Professor Moriarty.

- But he's rather like a character from Gothic fiction.

- How fresh?

- Just in. Used to work here.

I knew him, he was nice.

- He's rather like a vampire.

- [Narrator] Dark glamor is just one aspect

of Holmes that has left its

permanent mark on popular culture.

- So, bad day, was it?

- [Narrator] Another is fandom.

Nowadays, millions of people live in a fantasy world

of their favorite TV and film heroes.

- The Klingon universe is really no different

than any other universe.

- [Narrator] The fictional Sherlock Holmes started it all.

Prior to Doyle's creation, there had never been

a pop culture character more famous than its creator.

People got confused.

Was Sherlock Holmes a real person?

- The curious thing is how many people around the world

are perfectly convinced that he is a living human being.

- That idea of understanding the character as real

began even as the stories were being written.

- I'll bet you if you go down Baker Street,

and stop around in 10 people, and ask them a question

like, did you know that Sherlock Holmes lived here?

I'll bet you that six or seven out of those ten

will say yes, I did.

- I get letters addressed to him.

I get letters asking for his autograph.

I get letters addressed to his other stupid friend, Watson.

- Would you like to hear old uncle make a noise like a duck?

(Watson quacks)

Well, sorry. Huh.

- [Narrator] Sherlock Holmes was the first

fictional figure who inspired role playing among his fans.

Today, fan fantasy is a part of popular culture.

- Before there were all of these little niches

and little pop culture tribes, and little pockets

of fandom, there was this incredibly potent character

that just reached out and shaped all of these other things.

The same people who watch Law and Order today

are not the same people who are dressing up as Klingons

at Star Trek conventions, but they all owe a debt to Holmes.

- There are Sherlock Holmes groups in Britain,

many in the United States, Japan is mad for Sherlock Holmes.

Doyle sort of hit something universal.

- We all know it's not real.

- I do know that it isn't real.

- But it made all that genre escapism legitimate,

and it's a nice, enjoyable intellectual exercise.

- [Narrator] When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

had enough of Holmes, he decided to kill him.

Holmes, and his arch nemesis Moriarty, fell over a waterfall

in the 1891 classic, The Final Problem.

The public outcry was off the scale.

- There was an outrage, and people in the city of London

went around wearing black arm bands, mourning arm bands.

A woman allegedly wrote to Conan Doyle, saying "You brute!"

- I written a good deal more about him than I ever

intended to do, but my hand has been

rather forced by fine friends who

continually wanted to know more.

- Slowly, slowly he was able to usher him back in.

(gunshot)

- He killed Holmes! He killed Sherlock!

- Watson.

- You!

- There's something Christlike about Holmes

He's the man who dies and rises again.

He falls quite a long way, but he comes back,

and I think that's one of the reasons

why he inspires that kind of following.

- [Narrator] Holmes has survived through to the 21st century

in ways his creator could never have imagined.

- It cannot be contained now.

It's out in the culture, like a kind of disease, or a germ,

and he'll go on infecting the culture, I'm sure, forever.

- There is nothing nicer than to start a Sherlock Holmes

story, and the wind was blowing a storm down Baker Street,

and the fire was crackling in the hearth,

and Sherlock Holmes cast aside a newspaper

and took his first pipe of the day,

and said "I'm bored, Watson", and then you hear

the quiet foot upon the stair, and you know

that they're going to be off and racing and running.

- You know, I owe you an apology.

You come here for adventure, and I've none to offer you.

- Very soon out of London's teeming millions,

some obsessed person will step up to the door and knock.

- Ring, Watson.

The knocker doesn't function, you should have noticed that.

- [Narrator] First stop on planet Holmes.

(gunshot)

The crime lab.

Sherlock Holmes' most critical contribution

to the modern world unfolds in crime labs

and morgues all over the planet.

When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote his Holmes stories,

there was no such thing as forensic science.

E.J. Wagner is the author

of The Science of Sherlock Holmes.

- It wasn't called forensic science,

it was called, usually, medical jurisprudence.

Originally, this was the area of physicians,

who would call in various experts who knew something

about shoes, or fine wines, and sort of use their knowledge.

There was no organization for it at all

at the Metropolitan police, which was itself very new.

- The impertinence. She called us policemen.

- And what's wrong with being a policeman?

- The late Victorian era, late 1800s, policing

in London left a lot to be desired.

- The crime scenes in those days was simply chaotic.

A crime like Jack the Ripper, for instance.

The bodies were not sketched properly in situ.

Evidence disappeared. Evidence was never collected.

Evidence was deliberately destroyed,

because they were afraid of causing riots,

which was very well meant, but it didn't

get anywhere toward solving the crime.

Sherlock Holmes says in one of the stories,

"a greater mess could not have been made

"if a herd of elephants had blundered through."

Well, that is pretty much what happened.

They had no method.

- One of the first principles in solving crime

is never to disregard anything, no matter how trivial.

- If Sherlock Holmes had been running the investigation,

each of those bodies would have been examined

very, very carefully, as they lay, as they were found.

Not after they were removed to the morgue,

where things fell off, dropped off.

Evidence was lost.

- Holmes made people realize that forensics

and deductive reasoning, these are methods

that we need to use.

Even today, police forces around the world,

universities who teach forensic crime scene

investigation, use Sherlock Holmes,

and quote Sherlock Holmes in lessons, as the model.

- Cleanly, expertly severed.

The work of a skilled surgeon.

- He helped lay the foundation for this kind

of modern crime scene investigation.

- It always annoyed me how, in the old fashioned

detective story, the detective always seemed

to get at his results by some sort of lucky chance or fluke.

- Let's leave jumping to conclusions

to the professional detectives.

- Conan Doyle was a physician, and there's a great

deal in forensic science which

is really based on medical procedures.

- And I used, as a student, to have an old professor,

whose name was Bell, who was

extraordinarily quick with deductive work.

- Joseph Bell would very often bring before his class

some unfortunate sufferer of a mysterious, complex disease.

- But he would make his diagnosis of the disease

entirely by his power of observation.

- He certainly had a tremendous influence on Conan Doyle,

and therefore on Sherlock Holmes.

- So naturally, I thought to myself,

well, if a scientific man like Bell

was to come into the detective business,

he wouldn't do these things by chance,

he'd get the thing by building it up, scientifically.

- Proof, my dear fellow. We must have proof.

- [Narrator] The Sherlock Holmes stories caught the

attention of a French doctor, Edmond Locard, in the 1920s.

Locard worked with police to solve crimes,

and developed a theory that all things leave a trace.

Forensic science was born.

He wrote that Sherlock Holmes inspired his

ground-breaking theories on trace evidence,

and he set the course for the next century's CSIs.

- Sherlock Holmes taught them.

Locard said he thought everyone studying forensic science

should read Sherlock Holmes, especially the Sign of Four.

- In the first place, it's been bleached and soaked

by long immersion in salt water.

Would you like to taste it, Watson?

- No, no thanks.

- [Narrator] The Holmes stories featured

an array of forensic tools.

Chemical analysis, microscopic inspection,

footprint identification, ballistics,

(gunshot)

handwriting analysis, gunpowder residue,

typography, photographic enlargements.

All of these devices appeared in fiction

before any were actually used by real CSIs.

And today, many forensic scientists admit

Holmes' love of the lab is only half of their job.

The other half is his love for intrigue.

- I love puzzles, and this is a puzzle.

You're trying to figure out what happened.

(gunshot)

- My mind rebels at stagnation.

- I grew up on mystery novels as a kid.

Getting the answer has always been something.

I love information.

- Give me the most abstruse cryptogram, the most

intricate analysis, and I'm in my proper atmosphere.

- I just love it.

When I was seven, I wrote stories about people

getting murdered, and me solving the crimes.

- [Narrator] Holmes' love for cutting edge science

inspires the current generation of forensic analysts,

who specialize in fields Doyle could never have imagined.

- This is the typical condition

that we'll get a cell phone in.

- [Narrator] This expert retrieves data from cell phones

that have been smashed by criminals trying

to erase electronic evidence of their whereabouts.

It's the kind of data collection that Doyle

invented with the fictional Holmes.

- It was method, he said.

You collect all these small facts.

Data, data, data, and then I will put it together,

and I will come out with a satisfactory conclusion.

- All we need to do at this point is press read.

It's reading all of the information from the chip.

The word voicemail is in here, so we know

that there's probably some kind of voicemail.

- [Sherlock] Look inside, this appears darker

than the rest of the paper, and is therefore visible.

- Splendid, Holmes.

- I believe Dr. Cobel meant to communicate

with us by that means.

- [Narrator] In 1893, Doyle wrote about

the unique character of handwriting,

15 years before it was ever used in a real case.

Today, that tradition continues in this CSI's lab.

- This is called the video spectral comparator,

or VSC for short, and basically this just uses

different wavelengths of light to distinguish between inks.

- The message was written in ink with a pen.

- No, he used the pink one, this one.

- Thank you.

- [Jackie] So in this case, we have an individual

who's found dead, and a bunch of things

have been obliterated in the day timer.

- Immerse the sheet in a solution of fluorescent salts.

The fibers broken by the writing will absorb

less of the solution than other parts of the paper.

- And so you can see here that we're seeing lunch with Sue

underneath the scribble, and that's because

under this infrared light, the lunch with sue ink

is absorbing the infrared.

- Watson, I'm beginning to see the plan.

- [Narrator] Holmes believed that data

could be proved useful, no matter how obscure.

He collected hundreds of types of tobacco,

so that no matter what the criminal smoked,

Holmes would know how to narrow his search.

That premise drives 21st century forensics.

- What Holmes did, he really was saying, collect your data,

and don't form your theory until you have it.

Know a lot about a lot of different things.

He was sort of a one person, walking crime laboratory.

He even beat corpses to see where the bruises would form,

because that's another very big problem to this day.

Did this bruising take place post-mortem or ante-mortem?

How did this happen?

- [Narrator] Dr. Joseph Bell inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

to use the autopsy as a crime solving tool.

Doyle popularized it in fiction long

before it was put into practice.

And today, the autopsy is the universal standard.

- At the end of the day, we are death investigators.

This individual who is deceased is our patient, so to speak,

and we are the last people who are ever going to examine

that individual, and get as close

to the truth as we possibly can.

- [Narrator] Modern tools make the autopsy even more

powerful than Conan Doyle could ever have imagined.

- Traditionally, the autopsy looks at the organs

in the chest and abdominal area.

However, when you start using a CT scan,

you can start seeing parts of the body,

such as the internal portions of the extremities,

the muscles, the bones.

So having this technology then provides

a huge amount of additional information, and in some cases,

has eliminated the need to do an autopsy, as long as

the pertinent questions were answered by the scan.

- [Narrator] But with all the advancements,

old school Sherlockian forensics are still going strong.

In the Adventure of the Reigate Squire, Doyle

introduced the notion of ballistics analysis

(gunshot)

to determine which gun fired a bullet.

(gunshot)

That practice continues, and today's forensic experts

agree with Sherlock Holmes that no two weapons are the same.

- We're constantly trying to disprove our theory.

Where we are taking consecutively manufactured firearms.

We are test firing them, trying to compare them

to each other, trying to make

the firearm that was made first match

with the firearm that was made second.

And to this date, it has still not been done.

So we can still prove and have been proving,

over and over again, that we can in fact identify

fired bullets and fired cartridge cases back to a firearm.

- [Narrator] In 1887's A Study in Scarlet,

Sherlock Holmes analyzed blood

to determine who it came from.

13 years pass before this technique is put into practice.

And almost a century goes by

before the advent of DNA testing.

- A DNA profile's tests for hair color, eye color,

ethnicity, height, weight, and other physical traits.

It just continues to grow and grow.

The techniques are so robust and reliable,

and they just keep improving,

and the discriminatory power keeps improving.

- [Narrator] Sherlock's influence on criminologists

and their methods runs deeper than

any other real historical figure.

That says a lot for a man who never lived.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes

had an unusual talent: hiding in plain sight.

- Holmes was a master of disguise.

- Hands up, you brute!

- Oh, why it's Mr. Holmes.

- Holmes!

- You put that thing away now, Watson.

- Watson said that the stage lost an actor

when Holmes decided to become a detective.

- An admirable disguise, I must say.

It fooled him completely.

Of course, it didn't fool me.

- I never intended that it should.

- He would immerse himself in he character.

He had several bolt-holes around London

that were equipped with makeup and costume,

that he could retire to and emerge as somebody else.

A completely different identity.

Whether it was a drunken groom or an Italian priest,

or an up and coming plumber,

Holmes actually became the character.

His mastery of that technique was really a pioneering thing.

- Sherlock Holmes.

Improvement on the other makeup. I think this will do well.

- [Narrator] The tradition of going under cover

lives on in police forces around the world.

- I think some of them are slightly embarrassed,

to tell you the truth, about how much

they are influenced by what they read when they were 14.

- Dragon Milanovich, 52 years old.

A multi-disciplinary organized crime

figure with massive connections.

- [Narrator] A team of former undercover cops

now runs a top private investigation firm in Candada.

The team is about to close in on a deadly drug dealer,

using techniques straight from the pages of Sherlock Holmes.

- Just so you know, this guy's got

a record dating back to 1983.

Assault convictions, and assault causing.

- Milanovich is six one, 320 pounds.

He has been involved in martial arts for about 40 years.

He's an excellent bone crusher.

He does a lot of dirty work for the Hell's Angels,

and he's hurt a lot of people.

I will be posing as the boss of a mock

criminal organization this afternoon.

- [Narrator] To complete his risky job,

Fred Pinnock dons a simple but effective disguise.

- There are many occasions where deception and trickery

have to be used, to have people responsible

for criminal acts divulge long-held evidence, or admissions.

- My dear Watson, if we're going to catch our fishes,

we must use the bait they'll bite on.

- On this surveillance, Julia, you're going to be wired,

so I need you to let your hair down to cover that earpiece.

Jake, you're going to ride with Len.

Julia, you ride with me.

- Make no mistake, Watson.

This is our greatest antagonist, Professor Moriarty.

- We've got to beat him.

- Dragon is a dangerous guy.

He has a history of violence.

Having said that, I've gained his trust over the past year.

He's aware of the deal.

He's, you know, here to make it happen,

and I'm confident that he believes it's legitimate.

- [Narrator] General Samuel Wilson is a career spy.

A master of deception.

- Sherlock Holmes was one of the early

practitioners of deception.

Deception is engaging in acts that mislead, confuse,

discombobulate an opponent.

Cause him to take actions that are not

in his best interests, but may be in yours.

Or, not to act when he should act.

- Come on D, you're here to get it going.

We're just waiting for his call,

so he'll be calling in a couple minutes.

(phone beeps)

Hello?

- [Scot] Once you get your phone call from Fred

that they're in place, then get him

in the car and drive him over there.

- [Narrator] The criminal steps straight into the trap.

- Holmes had a way of smoking people out.

Holmes confused, misled people the way they suddenly

appeared, and he had them in their grasp.

- I would say you were wrong

and Mr. Sherlock Holmes was correct.

- Good evening, Professor Moriarty.

- [Narrator] A single slip-up, and the undercover agents

could find themselves in a deadly situation.

- You will meet and greet our subject.

Before he gets in the car, I want you to check him out,

make sure he's got nothing on him that he shouldn't have.

Okay, then let him in the car.

- [Narrator] Now, the moment of greatest danger.

- Who do we have here?

- How are you?

- I'm doing fine.

- [Narrator] It's a moment that echoes Holmes.

- Who's this bloke?

- He's a bloodthirsty heathen,

but has good money to spend for information.

- I recognize Sherlock Holmes, as we would say,

fine Italian hand in the business of deception,

of which he was a master.

- [Fred] Can you get 6,000 units?

- Approximately, yes.

It will cost you $40 per unit.

- $40 per unit? Yes.

How fast can this happen?

- As soon as you get me the money, within about,

I would say, within 24 hours.

- [Fred] Okay, Will has the cash right now.

- Good.

I think maybe at some time we will become good friends.

Good friends do good business.

- Yeah.

- I never did think much of this dressing up business.

- It was necessary, I assure you.

- [Narrator] Another violent criminal is caught

in the snare, thanks to the art of disguise

inspired by Sherlock Holmes.

But his undercover influence doesn't end there.

Others consider Holmes the master spy.

The model for the 21st century's

high stakes game of espionage.

General Sam Wilson is one

of the United States' most decorated spies.

For what exactly, he will never say.

But he will admit that it all started

reading Sherlock Holmes' stories as a boy.

- I found so much that was deep and substantive,

meaningful and rich in Holmes as a figure,

and in the intellectual feats that he was able to achieve.

I simply found myself fascinated with it.

- [Narrator] Wilson worked for 10 US presidents

as a secret agent, never revealing his own secret.

Sherlock Holmes was his silent protector.

- I absorbed Holmes and his life, and was aware

of his thesis that the human mind is a most powerful

tool, if it is finely honed and educated,

and concentrated on solving problems.

Holmes to me was a problem solver.

The intricacies of his mind simply appealed to me

very, very greatly, and I think they were a benefit to me,

as I moved into intelligence as a career.

- [Narrator] Spies never retire,

they just work in the shadows.

And General Wilson now imagines what might have happened

if intelligence officials had used Sherlock Holmes

as their model to catch Osama Bin Laden.

- Sherlock Holmes would've found Osama Bin Laden

for us much sooner.

We can't keep secrets these days.

One of the things that we always preached

was how to avoid the spotlight at the end of the action.

Where you just fade away.

Holmes was good at this.

Give the credit and the publicity to someone else.

Let's fade away into the shadows,

so we can work again another day.

- They left this satchel behind, it's probably of no value.

- No value!

Well, it's full of sparklers!

You amateurs always overlook the important things.

- [Narrator] Sherlock Holmes set the stage

for the dangerous world of modern undercover operations.

Master of the art of being invisible in plain sight.

Every day, human hunters stalk the streets,

looking for opportunities to commit violent crimes.

In the late 20th century, criminologists realized

that most of these predators follow recognizable patterns.

Police call it behavioral science.

Or, more simply, profiling.

And in 1887's Study in Scarlet, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

anticipated profiling by almost 100 years.

- This makes four, inspector.

Poor, defenseless women here in the heart of London.

- [Narrator] Lee Rainbow is the UK's top criminal profiler.

A modern Sherlock.

- I think certainly in terms of crime scene assessment,

what we do is very similar to the Holmes approach,

in gathering data, using the data

to drive the theory, rather than vice versa,

and hypothesis generation and testing.

The search for further data to support or refute those

hypotheses, and then coming up with the best fit

for the known information, which is

essentially what Holmes was using.

One of our roles is to very much recognize

that the theory should fit the data,

not the data fitting the theory,

and that's very much what we do.

- The truth is only arrived at by the painstaking

process of eliminating the untrue.

We're not able to do that in this case without further data.

- Everything we do is driven by data. Everything.

- There's a tendency to glamorize and romanticize

the intelligence operator, with James Bond.

That is the exciting arena.

That's where the headlines are.

There's a tendency to ignore faceless analysts

laboring, putting bits and pieces of evidence together

and trying to figure out what they mean.

And that's Sherlock Holmes.

Sherlock Holmes spanned pretty much the field

of deception, collection operations and so on.

But when I stop to think about who and what he was,

I would say first and foremost,

the world's greatest intelligence analyst.

- [Narrator] One cutting edge technique owes

its inspiration to the Holmesian method.

It's called geographic profiling,

and it's proven to narrow down where a violent

offender hunts, and even where he lives.

Ian Laverty is one of the creators

of a geo-profiling program, inspired by Sherlock Holmes.

- Well, to start with in geographic profiling,

you need a series of connected locations.

Just like the old pin maps that the police

used to put on the wall, stick little pins in the map,

and then they'd stare at the pattern

and say hmm, I wonder what this means.

So what we do is enter the crime locations into the program,

and it does the very complicated calculation, actually,

where it runs thought he entire city.

If the criminal lived here, and he traveled

to all of these crime sites, how long would it take him?

And it moves all over a little bit,

and as you do that, you're building up a probability map

that shows you where the criminal is

more likely to live over the entire city.

- We thought we were the hunters,

instead of which we're the hunted.

- [Narrator] Scot Filer is a profiler

and private investigator in Canada.

- People commit crimes for a reason.

People think it's random. It's really not a random process.

There are reasons that people choose to do things

the way they do, and that's the premise behind the software.

It takes all those scientific considerations into play.

When the algorithm behind the software is working,

these maps allow us to prioritize

the search area for the suspect.

- Sherlock Holmes was all about applying his knowledge,

with a little bit of intuition.

He was a very smart guy.

But what we have that he didn't have

is a whole lot of information.

He had the kids that ran around the streets

gathering information for him, but we have

the modern equivalent in the computer tools that we use,

and they have a whole lot more information to go on.

If Sherlock Holmes is around today, he'd have apps like ours

on his smartphone, and he'd be using them all the time.

- [Narrator] But Lee Rainbow points out that,

despite computers, the data still needs

a detective like Holmes to make sense of it.

- You still need that human aspect to it,

to identify which are the important variables.

Those things can't be done by computer.

- [Holmes] There's something in that bag

she wants to show me.

- [Watson] What makes you say that?

- The bag doesn't match her dress.

I think it was picked for size rather than style.

To accommodate some bulky object.

- You amaze me, Holmes.

- Elementary, my dear fellow.

- Anybody can get in front of a computer and punch keys

and make something come out of it.

What goes into that is the human factor.

Holmes was an expert in logic, reasoning out explanations,

looking at the evidence that remains, and putting

the puzzle together, so at the end of the day

what comes out of it is an informed hypothesis

about what you think happened between

the victim and the suspect.

That's the critical piece.

It's about the analyst and the skills

and knowledge that the analyst brings

to the process that makes it successful.

(jazz music)

- [Narrator] Sometimes, when the profilers hit a dead end,

old school lie detection comes into play.

Theo Hollamby is one of the world's

top polygraphic analysts.

- I feel that Holmes probably would have appreciated

the instrument like that, to be very honest with you,

because he used the powers of observation

to see if somebody was sweating,

or that his heart was beating faster than normal.

- I was studying the faces of our fellow passengers.

Fascinating hobby, and sometimes most enlightening.

- We can actually see that his body is reacting

when you ask him that certain type of question.

- [Narrator] The polygraph has been a forensic

tool since Conan Doyle's time, and it's still going strong.

- At the moment, it's still the best tool

to use in any investigation, according to me.

There's a lot of other scientific ways to investigate.

Statement analysis, or the reading of the body.

But with a polygraph, you can

actually put something on paper.

You can say that the body reacted to a certain question

at that time, and this is what the body did.

(machine beeps)

Did you steal that watch?

- No.

- [Narrator] Many profilers admit their model

was Sherlock Holmes, a fictional character

who used deduction to close in on criminals

that were too elusive for standard police methods.

- It's very Holmes.

I'd make it akin to doing a crossword puzzle.

You know, you get one piece of data,

and that starts giving you the clue for the next.

You slowly build up this picture,

which is very intellectually challenging, like a crossword.

But the completion of that crossword is you catch a bad guy.

For me, it's the perfect role, the perfect job.

I love it, I really do. Yeah.

- [Watson] What are you thinking of?

- I'm thinking of all the women who can come and go

in safety in the streets of London tonight.

- [Narrator] Sherlock Holmes is known all over the planet,

but his influence also reaches into space,

inspiring NASA scientist, Dr. James Garvin.

- Science operates in a lot of different ways.

But perhaps at the most visceral level, it's very forensic.

All of us who are fans of that 221B Baker Street idea

recognized, in reading those stories

of more than 100 plus years ago, that this

is science applied to understanding.

- [Narrator] Garvin was an intern when NASA first put

a camera on Mars, in 1975.

He's now the agency's top scientist.

He's defined NASA's direction for space exploration,

and owes it all to reading Sherlock Holmes a little boy.

- Sherlock Holmes. I might have known.

- I really came into science by being curious,

as all young people probably are.

They may not realize it, but they are.

You know, I liked rocks and bugs,

but other kids liked beating up

their neighborhood kid or sister, whatever it is.

It's that curiosity.

But, once you read the Sherlock Holmes stories,

and you see the interplay between thinking, evidence,

solving something that matters, you know.

Deaths of people kind of does.

You realize, that's what science is.

We're crime solvers, but the crimes

are the problem you're solving.

Ocean heat flow, climate stories on earth,

why Venus is so weird, whether life exists on Mars,

or in the bigger universe, are we alone?

I read Holmes before I became a scientist.

- [Narrator] What Garvin learned from the Sherlock Holmes

stories is that data comes first, theories follow.

- Nothing but an ordinary match folder.

- [Gregson] Where does that lead us?

- I imagine to something very important, Gregson.

- [Narrator] And with that, a generation of scientists

regard space as a Holmesian mystery that needs to be solved.

- How do we figure these things out?

How do we make it into that puzzle-solving

forensic science that Sherlock Holmes

demonstrated in these great stories?

And we do so with data, with information.

And we increase that information in ways

that is like increasing the pool of evidence you would have

in a mystery, in a crime story.

What's the puzzle of water on Mars?

Well, we went to Mars.

We saw a dry, alien, apparently sterile desert.

We landed, we sat there for years,

nothing really much happened.

And then, revolution!

The forensic puzzle changed.

We got a little more information, as Holmes did

in the stories by Sir Conan Doyle.

You put the extra piece of information in,

and even though it might seem small, kaboom!

We now have the wet warm Mars, the Mars

where following the water makes sense.

Today, following the carbon.

It's so Holmesian, and I think that's what

is attractive to some of us scientists.

We kind of operate like Sherlock Holmes did,

you know, 140 or 50 years ago, but with new pieces of data.

- [Narrator] NASA's role has evolved.

The agency now studies scientific mysteries

on Earth as much as the stars.

But Garvin says Sherlock Holmes'

methods still ruled his vision.

Listen to the facts.

Then, make your analysis.

- The 19th key of a keyboard

is the 19th letter of the alphabet.

- [Narrator] Garvin and his team went back

to the moon missions, and found new evidence in old data.

- Seemingly a dead world, we visited

with astronauts 40 years ago.

Been there, done that.

In fact, that's not the case.

The moon is actually a repository of information

about the whole solar system,

and we've just come to realize that,

from the new evidence we're getting, from new missions.

So it's all about the information,

and we get it from every perspective we can.

That's very Holmesian.

Those pieces of evidence give us the story

where we can play the Holmesian game,

and that's what's so beautiful.

We're discovering our own future, and our future questions.

- [Narrator] From the moon to the stars,

Sherlock Holmes' influence stretches deep

into space exploration, but back on Earth,

it's driven popular culture in ways that cannot be measured.

Sherlock Holmes has been imitated and adapted

more than any other fictional character in history.

- Mr. Holmes? Mr. Sherlock Holmes?

- Good morning, Mr. Holmes.

- [Man] Mr. Holmes?

- [Woman] Good night, Mr. Sherlock Holmes.

- [Narrator] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created a character

who exploded onto the world of fiction,

and has left his mark on three centuries.

- We are living in Sherlock Holmes' world.

There are just so many creators of fictional universes

who are inspired by Holmes.

You could go back and say that Holmes was the Model T

of all modern science fiction,

mystery fiction, genre fiction.

- All right, Kato.

We're going to introduce Mr. Grant

and the world to the Green Hornet.

- Marks that are on every mystery novel,

every detective figure, and every conflict

between the rational and the irrational,

from the X Files to Lost, to the police procedurals.

- I want to report a murder.

- Who was murdered?

- I was.

- It all comes back to Holmes.

It's hard to find something in modern entertainment

that Sherlock Holmes did not touch, in one way or another.

- Holmes is a character who conjured something so powerful,

and so vital that that character just escaped

and went running through the culture,

and it had a power that Doyle couldn't tame.

- A lot of people have written pastiche of Holmes stories.

The new Sherlock Holmes series

of the BBC was a startling success.

- [Narrator] But why has Sherlock Holmes

remained so popular?

- The great Sherlock Holmes himself.

- [Narrator] Many believe it's all

about his relationship with Dr. Watson.

- Watson, Watson? I've never heard--

Who, me?

- I think the real allure is the duo

of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

Their relationship, the milieu that they inhabit.

- How are you, old boy? I haven't seen you for years.

I want you to meet my old friend, Sherlock Holmes.

Holmes, this is Stinky.

- Sherlock Holmes had become so much about trappings,

about fog, about the top hats, about the handsome cabs,

that at a stroke by modernizing it, it becomes

about them again, which is the friendship

between these two men.

- [Narrator] The buddy film genre began

with Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

- Watson!

- Coming, Holmes!

- Buddy films owe a tremendous amount

to Sherlock Holmes, obviously.

And you'll notice that these duos tend to kind of have

the same sort of interplay that Holmes and Watson had.

- I think the idea of a pairing of two men,

one of whom is rather distant and unknowable,

and one of whom is much more like us.

I think this is terribly important.

- You don't mind breaking the law?

- Not in a good cause.

- Oh, the cause is excellent.

- Well, then I am your man.

- Splendid.

- It's like, he's crazy, but he's crazy

because he sees everything as it is.

That is what makes him crazy,

and it's also what makes him great.

That's pure Holmes.

You can see it in Lethal Weapon.

You can see it in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

You can see it in Star Trek, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock.

Before all of them, though, there was

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson.

That's the prototype.

- And action!

- [Narrator] In the 21st century,

the Holmes-Watson relationship has taken on a new dimension.

- The homo-erotic buddy cop combination

as we know it today owes just about everything

to Holmes and Watson.

Holmes himself was extremely ambiguous.

Didn't show a whole lot of interest in women.

Irene Adler was the only woman who fascinated him.

- What the relationship between Holmes and Watson captures

is a kind of intimate male relationship

that in a way pre-dates those categories of sexuality

that we're all stuck with now.

- Holmes, I think your visitor will want me out of the way.

- Not a bit, Doctor. Stay where you are.

I am lost without my Boswell.

- There was a very definite homo-erotic vibe

to the relationship depicted in the Grenada TV series.

Largely thanks to Jeremy Brett's performance, I think.

And it's now a running gag in the new BBC Sherlock series,

because all of the people they meet, of course,

assume that they're rather more than flatmates.

- There's another bedroom upstairs,

if you'll be needing two bedrooms.

- Of course we'll be needing two.

- [Narrator] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

would have denied the implication.

Male relationships in his era were different.

But there is one thing in the stories

that was not ambiguous.

Sherlock Holmes was a cocaine addict.

His favorite method:

injecting what he called the 7% solution.

- The fact that he was a drug addict.

The fact that he's a bit of a sociopath.

That's an incredibly potent thing in fiction.

The hero who is also potentially a demon,

or has something demonic inside him,

that both gives him his power, and makes him a liability.

That's incredibly powerful.

- [Narrator] Addicted.

Super heroic.

Sociopathic.

Scientific.

Genius.

Sherlock Holmes anticipated the future.

A complex, flawed character so worshiped,

some people forget that he never existed.

- We're going to be having a gathering of Sherlock Holmes

people in the city where I live, in Oxford.

There is a pub there, where Sherlock Holmes

undoubtedly stayed, because

of internal evidence in the story.

And you know, I've just been writing a chronology

of what guests are going to do, and I'm going to say,

just think, when you actually go in there,

Sherlock Holmes really did stay here, exclamation mark.

- I'm talking about him like he's real.

We can't help ourselves.

You know, it's...

We're not saying Arthur Conan Doyle did it, are we?

We're saying that Sherlock Holmes did it.

- I mean, I do know that he isn't real.

- [Narrator] Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

dropped a fictional character on our planet,

and he hit like a bomb.

The ripple effect of Sherlock Holmes

shows no sign of stopping, over a century later.

In a world that doesn't often make sense,

cold, calculated reason gives people

a feeling of safety and strength.

Holmes appears in the strangest of places

because we need him.

- Good work, Mr. Holmes.

Perhaps I underestimated you.

- I've written a great deal more about him

than I ever intended to do, but my hand

has been rather forced by fine friends,

who continually wanted to know more,

and so it is that this monstrous growth has come out

of what was really a comparatively small seed.

Oh, goodbye.

Come on, lovely.

(jazzy spy music)