Andy stone meets me in front of a small building in Manchester, Vermont, a Green Mountain hamlet known for factory outlets and maple syrup. He's wearing busted Carhartts, a flannel shirt, and a thick backwoods beard. As he guides me to the industrial freezer around back, Stone is so excited that I'm starting to fantasize about what's inside (gallons of Ben & Jerry's?). The door opens, and I see a shelf stacked with what appears to be rolls of black paper towels.

"I know it doesn't look like much," he says, "but that stuff is worth several hundred thousand dollars." The "stuff" is unidirectional carbon fiber — not the ubiquitous carbon mesh found everywhere from dashboards to tennis racquets, but a new superlight variety that was, until recently, a highly classified concoction. I start to copy information from a label when Stone barks, "Don't write down the manufacturer's name," and slams the door shut.

It's not just trade secrets he's protecting — it's national security. The composite is used in Predator drones and spy satellites for the US military. Stone, along with colleagues at the outdoors supplier Orvis, use it to build a fly-fishing rod. Called Helios, its story began nearly three years ago when Stone, Jim Lepage, and another man — so entrenched in top-secret contracts that nobody would even tell me his name (we'll call him Deep Trout) — set out to build the ultimate rod: lighter than anything ever made but strong enough to land the big one.

Through his network of black-ops eggheads, Deep Trout learned about a new type of composite the military was using. Traditional sheets of carbon fiber are woven to create a matrix that's strong in every direction. The advanced brew's tapered pieces of graphite employ a high-temperature epoxy and eliminate the need for a grid, decreasing the number of fibers and cutting weight by up to 25 percent.

It's a long cast from bamboo, which until recently was the preferred material for top-shelf poles. No synthetic could surpass its light touch and ability to maneuver a tiny fly. But bamboo is a total pain in the ass to work with: It can take 80 hours to craft a single rod. And because of all that labor, fine bamboo rigs sell for around $1,500.

As early as the 1940s, rod makers started experimenting with fiberglass, but it couldn't match the mighty grass. In the '70s, they looked to graphite, but it felt dead. Then, as government aerospace contracts started drying up in the mid-'80s, "guys who had been developing military systems started sending us their resumes," Lepage says. They brought with them the secrets of carbon fiber. "We realized that if we could perfect carbon fiber," he says, "it would make bamboo obsolete." But though the new composite could outcast bamboo, it lacked the feel.

They worked for years with composite, never quite matching nature. Finally last year, Orvis rolled a tube from the unidirectional material. It was less than half the weight of bamboo, just as bendy, and substantially stronger: The Helios was born. It's so light — 2.1 ounces for a 9-foot rod — it's even more precise than the panda food. Bamboo was bested — especially considering that a Helios costs only about $750.

Of course, engineers now have another problem: The Iraq war makes it tough to get their secret stuff. "Since we're using the raw materials of Apache helicopter blades, it's not easy to secure an order for fishing rods," Lepage says. If the carbon-fiber supply does dry up, there's a riverbank not far from the shop where bamboo grows like crazy.

1908: A British company strikes oil in Persia (now Iran). It's the first big petroleum find in the Middle East, and it sets off a wave of exploration, extraction and exploitation that will change the region's -- and the world's -- history.

Englishman William D'Arcy had obtained a license to explore for oil in Persia in 1901. He sent explorer George Reynolds, who searched fruitlessly for seven years.

Fresh investment from the Burmah Oil Co. had rescued the expedition financially in 1904, but with no results and D'Arcy's personal fortune completely run out, he risked losing his two country houses and his London mansion. In Persia, staff was already being dismissed. Reynolds received orders from London for his last-chance well: Drill to 1,600 feet and then stop.

Why all the fuss? The automobile was in its infancy, and few people could foresee its future. How did an investor expect to get rich off an oil strike? Well -- and we really do mean well -- you could run an electric-power plant with oil, you could run factory machinery on oil and, perhaps most importantly, the world's powerful navies were converting their ships from coal to oil. Almost anything that had run on coal -- especially coal that heated water to create steam -- could run on oil.

Exactly 100 years ago today, the smell of sulfur hovered in the air at Masjid-i-Suleiman. That was a good sign for an experienced oil hand like Reynolds. At 4 in the morning, the drill reached 1,180 feet below the desert and struck oil. A huge gusher shot 75 feet into the air.

The site was so remote that it took five days before D'Arcy got word by telegram in England. "If this is true," he replied, "all our troubles are over." It was indeed true, and more wells hit oil elsewhere in Persia, including a huge one in September.

D'Arcy and Burmah reorganized their holdings in 1909 as the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. (which became the Anglo-Iranian Oil Co. in 1935, British Petroleum in 1954 and BP in 2000.) Its initial public offering of stock shares sold out in 30 minutes in London. People stood five deep around the tellers' cages to buy shares in Glasgow. The race for oil accelerated throughout the Middle East.

At the instigation of First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill, the British government became a majority (and at-first secret) shareholder of Anglo-Persian during World War I. Britain soon became a dominant power in Persian and later Iranian politics. British and American political operations in that nation shaped the developments that led to the Iranian revolution in 1979 and the current Middle Eastern power situation.

Source: Various

15 years of Wired Fetish. That's 442 pages of obsessive gear lust. We were bound to make a few bad selections...

Andy stone meets me in front of a small building in Manchester, Vermont, a Green Mountain hamlet known for factory outlets and maple syrup. He's wearing busted Carhartts, a flannel shirt, and a thick backwoods beard. As he guides me to the industrial freezer around back, Stone is so excited that I'm starting to fantasize about what's inside (gallons of Ben & Jerry's?). The door opens, and I see a shelf stacked with what appears to be rolls of black paper towels.

"I know it doesn't look like much," he says, "but that stuff is worth several hundred thousand dollars." The "stuff" is unidirectional carbon fiber — not the ubiquitous carbon mesh found everywhere from dashboards to tennis racquets, but a new superlight variety that was, until recently, a highly classified concoction. I start to copy information from a label when Stone barks, "Don't write down the manufacturer's name," and slams the door shut.

It's not just trade secrets he's protecting — it's national security. The composite is used in Predator drones and spy satellites for the US military. Stone, along with colleagues at the outdoors supplier Orvis, use it to build a fly-fishing rod. Called Helios, its story began nearly three years ago when Stone, Jim Lepage, and another man — so entrenched in top-secret contracts that nobody would even tell me his name (we'll call him Deep Trout) — set out to build the ultimate rod: lighter than anything ever made but strong enough to land the big one.

Through his network of black-ops eggheads, Deep Trout learned about a new type of composite the military was using. Traditional sheets of carbon fiber are woven to create a matrix that's strong in every direction. The advanced brew's tapered pieces of graphite employ a high-temperature epoxy and eliminate the need for a grid, decreasing the number of fibers and cutting weight by up to 25 percent.

It's a long cast from bamboo, which until recently was the preferred material for top-shelf poles. No synthetic could surpass its light touch and ability to maneuver a tiny fly. But bamboo is a total pain in the ass to work with: It can take 80 hours to craft a single rod. And because of all that labor, fine bamboo rigs sell for around $1,500.

As early as the 1940s, rod makers started experimenting with fiberglass, but it couldn't match the mighty grass. In the '70s, they looked to graphite, but it felt dead. Then, as government aerospace contracts started drying up in the mid-'80s, "guys who had been developing military systems started sending us their resumes," Lepage says. They brought with them the secrets of carbon fiber. "We realized that if we could perfect carbon fiber," he says, "it would make bamboo obsolete." But though the new composite could outcast bamboo, it lacked the feel.

They worked for years with composite, never quite matching nature. Finally last year, Orvis rolled a tube from the unidirectional material. It was less than half the weight of bamboo, just as bendy, and substantially stronger: The Helios was born. It's so light — 2.1 ounces for a 9-foot rod — it's even more precise than the panda food. Bamboo was bested — especially considering that a Helios costs only about $750.

Of course, engineers now have another problem: The Iraq war makes it tough to get their secret stuff. "Since we're using the raw materials of Apache helicopter blades, it's not easy to secure an order for fishing rods," Lepage says. If the carbon-fiber supply does dry up, there's a riverbank not far from the shop where bamboo grows like crazy.

15 years of Wired Fetish. That's 442 pages of obsessive gear lust. We were bound to make a few bad selections...