Revolutions: The Ideas that Changed the World

The aeroplane gave us a great superpower - the ability to fly. But how we got it is a story full of passion, danger and death. We start with a Moorish scholar jumping off a cliff 11 centuries ago, with feathers on his arms. A modern wing-suit flyer illustrates the feat. The key to flight is to master the air. That starts even earlier with the Chinese, who invent the kite. It proves that a heavier-than-air object can fly by producing lift. Enter Leonardo da Vinci, who deduces that humans are unlikely to be able to generate the forces required to fly like a bird. So, he imagines a machine flapping its wings. Unfortunately, he never gets one to work. To find out why requires modern analysis. At MIT in California, scientists explain that we now know that the flapping of wings is only one part of flight. It would take an obscure British nobleman to unpick the puzzle. Sir George Cayley lives near the sea in England. He wonders how seagulls glide without flapping their wings. He discovers how lift depends on the angle at which a wing is set, and not on flapping. Then, with the invention of the rubber band, Frenchman Alphonse Penaud spots its potential to drive a propeller. In 1871, he designs a remarkable toy that looks just like a modern aircraft. Next, he designs a full-size machine decades ahead of its time. Sadly, Penaud cannot fund his idea. Aged just 30, he kills himself. But Penaud’s legacy endures. In Iowa, a man buys a toy based on Penaud’s design for his two sons, Wilbur and Orville. Meanwhile, in Germany, a young entrepreneur has begun his own experiments. Otto Lilienthal is also obsessed with gliding birds and builds his own glider. However, he crashes and dies. On hearing of Otto’s death, Wilbur and Orville Wright determine to solve the problem of flight for themselves. Inspired by the flexibility of a thin box for the inner tube of a bicycle, they invent a method for twisting the wings of a plane to maintain control. In 1902, they begin tests at Kitty Hawk. We recreate the flights using an exact replica. A year later, the brothers return with a powered aircraft using a lightweight gasoline motor, possible because of the recent boom in automobiles. The modern aeroplane becomes a reality and, driven by the needs of World War I, progress is rapid. But now a major danger is losing orientation in cloud or fog. The answer to that lies in a machine that is already obsolete, mighty iron ship the SS Great Britain. Unfortunately, the iron hull interferes with her compass, leading her to run aground. The solution is the invention of the gyrocompass, which, when adapted in the late 1920s for use in aircraft, allows planes to fly in almost any weather. Now commercial aviation can begin, but it is still low, slow and dangerous. In 1929, a plane crashes into Mt Taylor in Arizona, becoming the first airline disaster. A better way is needed. One man thinks the answer is higher and faster. Wiley Post is a record-breaking pioneer aviator of the 1930s. He knows that to go faster he will have to fly higher, where the air is thin and there is less bad weather. But he also knows that altitude is dangerous. Inspired by a diving suit, he creates the world’s first pressure suit, the forerunner of the space suit. Post’s experiments show the advantages of high-altitude flight, and the modern, pressurised, high-altitude plane swiftly follows. However, propeller engines are not well suited to thin air either. The solution had already been worked out by a 21-year-old student in 1921. The problem had been finding someone to pay for it. Frank Whittle knew that a better method of propulsion would be to compress high-altitude air until it was thicker, burn fuel in this air and use the expanding gas to shoot itself backwards in a jet. This would produce a forward force at any altitude. We demonstrate the advantage this engine has using a modern-day Iron Man jet-suit. Funding is eventually found, and the jet age begins. Without any one of these revolutionaries, we might never have left the ground.

'Like it or not, the car defines not just what we are able to do, but in many cases who we think we are.' Jim Al-Khalili investigates how our innate drive to explore mobilised humanity and gave us the ultimate freedom machine, the car. Based on new research, he peers inside the original notebooks and sketches of the visionaries who, whether knowingly or not, risked death, poverty and ridicule to advance our species’ progression, bringing these stories to life using state of the art experiments, breathtaking drama and CGI. It begins with a 9,000-year-old human settlement, 200 miles north of Siberia, where archaeologists have uncovered the earliest evidence of dogs. Those hunter-settlers had domesticated the European grey wolf in order to survive, breeding them to pull their sleds. Dog sleds marked the beginning of powered transportation 6,000 years before the wheeled cart mobilised the rest of humankind, but that next step was not down to the invention of the wheel. We learn that it was to a revolution in metalwork and the introduction of the bronze chisel, which made the wheel and axle possible. The car’s story is one of necessity, opportunity and survival. We experience biblical floods and the destruction of English mines. We recreate experiments that went horribly wrong. There are backfiring cannons and mutilated sailors. And there is the story of an obsessive Scottish genius who made the first precision man-made machine. All this leads us to the disastrous story of Carl Benz, regarded as the inventor of the motor car. Only, he could not sell a single one and plunged into depression. That is until his wife Bertha went on a secret expedition and transformed the motor car into something people wanted.

'The rocket has changed us into a species that is no longer confined to Earth.' - Jim Al-Khalili The rocket will revolutionise our species, expanding our future into space, but its origins are surprisingly old. Jim Al-Khalili explores the story of humanity’s greatest adventure and our grandest dreams. He peers inside the minds of the visionaries who made it possible, using new research and their original notebooks and sketches, bringing these stories to life using state of the art experiments, breathtaking drama and CGI. He discovers how an explosive exorcism in ancient China gave birth to the first rocket and that French author Jules Verne was the first writer to imagine firing a spaceship to the moon (he used a giant cannon). By chance, Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon' ended up in the hands of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, who decided to do the mathematical calculations for firing a ship into space and reasons the only way to get to space is with a ‘reaction engine’ or rocket. But to actually create a rocket with the power to break free from Earth’s gravity and hurl us towards other worlds will take a leap in technologies for fighting fire, the mechanization of dairy farms and some elaborate Soviet subterfuge. Today rockets of all types are flying (and some are even landing), but the future holds even more promise with a new kind of rocket, called an ion drive. Running on solar power, ion drives could help us make good on that original dream: to make humans a multi-planetary species.

Jim Al-Khalili and a team of experts investigate the fascinating story of the smartphone. It took a Hollywood star, a missed holiday and a Roman siege to give us the device that connects us all. In 133BC, Greek tutor Polybius updates the method the Roman army uses to communicate. His system uses fire to spell out words. It is the world’s first encrypted communications system. In 1825, Samuel Morse is far away from home when he receives a letter telling him that his wife is dying. By the time he gets back, she is already buried. Determined to find a faster way to communicate, Morse learns about electricity. His invention sends pulses of current down a wire and records them at the other end - in morse code. But how do you send the human voice along a wire? We trace the legal shenanigans surrounding the invention of the telephone, including the courts that finally decide in Alexander Graham Bell’s favour. In 1894, Guglielmo Marconi hears how electrical sparks can cause something to travel invisibly through thin air. Marconi uses this principle to send ‘radio’ messages. During World War Two, the need for secure communications leads to the forerunner of the first digital communication system, but it is not until the invention of the microchip by a bored employee at Texas Instruments that the device can be made small enough to carry in a pocket. The cell phone’s success triggers a new problem – a lack of network capacity. Enter a system conceived by 1940s Hollwood actress Hedy Lamarr. Inspired by a pianola, her design sends information over several frequencies called spread spectrum. In the 1990s, the idea increases network capacity 20-fold. It is called 2G. Then, with the internet, phones are used for more than just voice calls; they can send messages and pictures too. A new generation of smartphones will soon connect us just by thinking - the ultimate interface with the world.

'The telescope gave us what might be the greatest discovery of all – the universe itself.' - Jim Al-Khalili Jim Al-Khalili and a team of experts explore the fascinating story of one of our greatest inventions, the telescope, using original notebooks, stylish visualisations and sophisticated computer graphics. It is a tale full of twists and turns, involving a seashore plant, a New York property boom and a spilt bottle of mercury. Thanks to these events, the telescope allowed us to discover not just our place in the cosmos, but our origins too. Jim travels to eighth-century Baghdad to witness the first experiments in optics. Many regard this as the birth of science itself, culminating in Ibn al-Haytham’s extraordinary book explaining how light can be manipulated. In 12th-century Venice, a secret process using a seashore plant allows the manufacture of clear glass and with that, the first precision lenses. 250 years later a Dutch optician makes a chance observation: a particular arrangement of lenses magnifies distant objects. Months later, an Italian mathematics teacher, Galileo, constructs his own version and points it into the night sky. It is a revolution not just in astronomy but also in humanity’s perception of itself. In Paris, an accident with mercury allows Louis Daguerre to make highly sensitive photographic plates. Now cameras are attached to telescopes allowing celestial images to be analysed with mathematical precision. Later, a New York property boom allows a wealthy donor to fund a full-sky survey. Working on this project, Henrietta Leavitt notices that some stars undergo regular changes in brightness, which allows astronomers to measure their distance from the Earth. Edwin Hubble, using Leavitt’s discovery, measures the vast distances of entire galaxies. Hubble also discovers that the universe is expanding, implying that before the Big Bang, it must all have been in the same place. With the Hubble Space Telescope, we have reached the limits of our vision, but a new generation of telescope is about to be launched. The James Webb Space Telescope will see as far as it is possible to see, revealing new features of the vast universe we call ‘home’.