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00:00Our lives would be inconceivable without technology, yet machines are also a threat.
00:16Will they replace us? Will their effects destroy our world?
00:23But the present we live in was someone else's future.
00:30These passions and concerns about technology have a fascinating history.
00:37We need to go back to a world, the Victorian world, when machines seemed like angels, and more often, like monsters.
00:53I want to show you some of the greatest engineering wonders of the 19th century.
00:59They were startling, inspiring feats of technology which posed deep philosophical questions.
01:07They were cutting-edge scientific advances which challenged faith in God and undermined our place in the universe.
01:16They ask us, what does it mean to be human?
01:24How was the universe created?
01:28What does the future hold for all of us?
01:31A couple of hundred years ago, building giant machines needed a technological breakthrough, which is why I've come to Colbrookdale in Shropshire.
01:49A couple of hundred years ago, building giant machines needed a technological breakthrough, which is why I've come to Colbrookdale in Shropshire.
02:00Colbrookdale in Shropshire.
02:01It's a quiet, rural scene now, but at the beginning of the 19th century, a painter called Philip de Lowtherberg came here, and this is what he painted.
02:19Lowtherberg's vision made Colbrookdale look like hell.
02:24The 15-mile valley of smoke, brimstone hanging in the air, he was gazing at furnaces, iron foundries, fueled with coke and ironstone.
02:38This painting has become iconic.
02:44It proclaimed the arrival of the mechanical monsters of the 19th century.
02:58Colbrookdale's great furnaces forged the Industrial Revolution.
03:02For Lowtherberg and other visitors to Colbrookdale, what they were seeing was a dramatic combination of a volcanic explosion and the power that engineering and machinery could exert over the forces of nature.
03:22The furnaces were using a new process, harnessing the power of high-energy coke.
03:31They made it possible to construct vast machines.
03:35This great steam hammer, for example, could simultaneously crush a railway sleeper, it could pound iron into fragments, but it could also be controlled so precisely that it could crack the shell of an egg without crushing it.
04:00These new machines could be terrifying.
04:09They had the capacity to rip off workers' arms and legs, and they dwarfed life on a human scale.
04:16In fantastical cartoons of the period, newfangled machines have transformed daily life.
04:25They can help you travel fast.
04:33You can even fly.
04:35A steam-powered engine can give you a shave, but it can also go horribly wrong.
04:49In this strange new world, the distinction between human and machine seems to blur.
04:56Increasingly, humans were seen as machines.
05:06They were treated as though they were engines.
05:09They were cogs in a vast technological system.
05:13And at exactly the same time, machines seemed increasingly capable of everything humans could do.
05:22So there were critical questions right at the heart of Victorian culture.
05:27Are humans no more than machines?
05:30And are machines going to replace humanity itself?
05:35This was the question at the heart of my first mechanical monster.
05:48What does it mean to be human?
05:51It was the creation of Charles Babbage, mathematician, inventor, entrepreneur.
06:04He thought that machines held unlimited potential.
06:09And it was a deeply practical necessity of the time which set him thinking.
06:14Babbage's world was dominated by an avalanche of printed numbers.
06:24Mathematical tables, logarithms, trigonometric functions,
06:29on whose accuracy the commerce and trade and navigation of Britain completely depended.
06:37This is the nautical almanac published each year by the Board of Longitude,
06:44whose mathematical tables instructed mariners on their position.
06:49Each digit in these tables was calculated by human computers.
06:57Any error in their calculations was fatal.
07:02Examining these tables and, to his horror, finding scores of errors, Babbage expostulated,
07:11I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.
07:19Babbage had a keen eye for a commercial opportunity.
07:23He lobbied the British government and obtained thousands of pounds in funding to try to make his ideas a reality.
07:36Babbage's lifetime ambition was to build a series of extraordinary calculating machines.
07:43His plans were exquisite, detailed masterpieces of Victorian science and technology.
07:51First, a difference engine with 8,000 parts that would allegedly make error-free tables.
08:00And then, an even more ambitious analytical engine, a general-purpose computer.
08:08Babbage's great calculating engines were based on the layout of what he understood as the factory.
08:16And to modernise, the reason these machines are remembered is because they look like the ancestor of everyday computers now.
08:28But that's not why I'm interested in them.
08:31They matter to me because they raised fundamental philosophical questions in the great theological crisis of Babbage's own time.
08:42Babbage never managed to build a full-size engine, but parts of it were built.
08:48And one of them is held in Cambridge, in a place very close to my heart.
08:55So we're here in the Whipple Museum, which is where I work.
08:58In fact, my office is just upstairs.
09:00And this is a very special moment for me because this is a fragment of Babbage's difference engine.
09:09It's normally shown behind glass.
09:11This is the first time that I've ever been allowed to touch it.
09:16And that's a real treat.
09:18Every tooth on every wheel represents a number.
09:25As it's cranked by hand, they mesh.
09:28Each interaction represents a new calculation.
09:32Bigger machines had the potential for greater power.
09:37Although Babbage never managed it, the Science Museum in London has built a full-size difference engine based on Babbage's original drawing.
09:52It works perfectly, carrying out calculations to an accuracy of 30 decimal places.
10:00But Babbage dreamt of an even bigger machine.
10:19It would have been capable of memory, of calculation, of prediction.
10:25And it was this which would raise profound and troubling philosophical questions in the decades ahead.
10:34For Victorians, it was the powers of human reason, put into humans by God, that showed the superior status of humankind.
10:47And what Babbage's machine threatened was that these were no longer the prerogative of humans alone.
10:56Rather, any well-programmed machine could, with unerring accuracy, emulate and perhaps even surpass what humans could do.
11:09Could science create a soulless automaton capable of thought, which could perhaps one day even replace human beings?
11:21This was the spectre raised by Babbage's extraordinary technological dreams.
11:28For Victorians, science was challenging their very sense of who they were and where they came from.
11:35My next mechanical monsters were built by men grappling with one of the greatest questions of all.
11:42Creation.
11:47Most Victorians believed that God designed the world, and everything it contains, in just a few days.
11:55Yet real-life monsters were rising up to challenge that idea.
12:01Here in Cambridge's Sedgwick Museum, there's a collection of more than one and a half million fossils and rocks, covering the four billion years of the history of our planet.
12:20The 19th century was the first age to dig up, name, reconstruct and puzzle over dinosaurs.
12:28Dinosaur reconstructions were some of the most remarkable triumphs of Victorian engineering.
12:37Often, Victorians had to work with really very few fossil remains.
12:42And what they achieved, with an amazing combination of historical imagination and technical expertise, easily rivaled the other great mechanical marvels of the 19th century.
12:55These fossilised bones proved that the Earth had a history, and a strange one.
13:06Since they were the relics of beasts no longer alive, somehow these animals had become extinct in dramatic ways.
13:18This was a history that fascinated the Victorians, but it also posed genuinely serious, genuinely dangerous threats.
13:31It was this potent mixture, the fascination and the threat, which drew thousands of people to a park in suburban South London.
13:50Opened in 1854, in the grounds of the Crystal Palace exhibition, it offered unsettling visions of the past.
14:07A mechanical menagerie of monsters, rising up from the waters.
14:13This is a Megalosaurus, gigantic beast that originally roamed southern England in the middle Jurassic period.
14:32This model was built here at the Crystal Palace by Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, one of Victorian England's leading sculptors.
14:42The idea was to show the monstrosity and the nobility, the design and the horror of these ancient beasts.
14:52Creating these monsters was an enormous engineering challenge.
15:11Their construction used hundreds of tiles, bricks, cement, broken stones, iron hooping and central iron columns.
15:21Just as Hawkins dinosaur models were being completed, they staged a dinner inside the mould of this Iguanodon.
15:46About two dozen people huddled together, drinks were taken, songs were sung.
15:53The jolly old beast is not deceased, there's life in him again, they chortled.
16:00According to Hawkins, they made so much noise at the dinner that it was like a herd of Iguanodons released into the Crystal Palace grounds.
16:11The impact of these dinosaurs on the mid-Victorian psyche was immense.
16:18It was like time travel. Monsters like these had once roamed the earth.
16:25Many imagined that the dinosaurs must somehow have lived between the time of the creation and the time of the flood.
16:34According to some visitors, these great beasts have been simply too big to fit on Noah's Ark, and so they've been washed away with the flood.
16:47The men who built this park were convinced that dinosaurs were an example of God's creative power and purpose.
16:55Yet soon, these ideas would be rudely challenged.
17:00Within five years, Charles Darwin would publish his incendiary work on the origin of species.
17:09The story was no longer that dinosaurs like these had become extinct because somehow they'd been too large to fit on Noah's Ark.
17:20They'd been extinguished because of the Darwinian struggle of all against all for scarce resources.
17:28The fight was on between creation and design and evolution and natural law.
17:35Scientific theories like evolution were attempts to explain the miracles of creation.
17:46Just as dinosaurs rose from the ground, so astronomers seemed to be finding strange beasts in space too.
17:56My next mechanical monster became a weapon in a battle to explain their mysteries and answer the question,
18:05How were the stars and planets created?
18:13This is the Orion Nebula as it was sketched by Victorian astronomers looking at this celestial object through their very best telescopes.
18:25And what they drew filled them with horror.
18:29For them, this was a monster with a curling lip, a hideous eye.
18:36The atmosphere around it full of terror, hatred, tyranny, revenge.
18:44The Nebulae were the chief building block of a dangerous new theory we now call evolutionary cosmology.
18:53The Nebulae, so it was argued, were nothing but clouds of luminous gas.
19:00And under the action of natural law, without any divine intervention whatsoever,
19:06these Nebulae were spinning and condensing.
19:10They formed stars and suns, our sun and our earth.
19:17For many, this stank of heresy.
19:20And the idea of this nebulae evolution had to be strangled at birth.
19:27A machine would have to be built, a monster to conquer a monster.
19:37This is Burr Castle in County Offaly, Central Ireland.
19:43The ancestral home of the Earls of Ross.
19:47In its grounds, what looks like a smaller castle.
19:54But in fact, it's a 56 foot high mechanical monster, built to try to resolve the mysteries of the Nebulae.
20:10This is the great telescope that was built here between 1842 and 1845.
20:25It was the largest such instrument in the world.
20:28A status it would maintain right through the rest of the 19th century and well into the 20th.
20:35And it was with this machine that some of the fundamental problems of evolution, of science and belief, of religion and of creation would be resolved.
20:48It soon came to be known as the Leviathan.
20:52And it was built by the third Earl of Ross and paid for with cash from his wife, Mary Ross.
20:59Lady Alicia is their great, great, great granddaughter.
21:05She spent years cataloguing the castle's archives, including some remarkable photographs taken by Mary.
21:13She was a pioneer photographer.
21:15And but for those photographs, we wouldn't have a record of what exactly it looked like because we have no working drawings.
21:22And of course, all the metal work was melted down in the First World War.
21:27The telescope was very complicated mechanically.
21:30It's got underground tunnels in order to get all the pulleys and the counterweights.
21:35And those photographs are incredibly useful when you're trying to restore and rebuild.
21:40And they also include, very often, this is one of the reasons I love them, there's the family.
21:45There's always a family in it.
21:48Mary Ross, on top of supporting her husband in his great project, she also had quite a lot of children.
21:55Sadly, only four survived.
21:57And her kids were all brought up in the workshops.
22:00From an early age, they were tutored in the workshops.
22:03The fact that they're involved in the telescope, I think, is wonderful.
22:07It gives an impression, which I think is really interesting about this heroic engineering achievement,
22:13that it's a domestic achievement.
22:16Absolutely, it was.
22:17And they were very much in the heart of it.
22:22Running the telescope was heavy engineering.
22:25Because of the Irish weather, the mirror tarnished really badly.
22:30So it needed to be re-polished in the workshop up at the castle.
22:34And then after polishing, a team of six would have to bring it on a car all the way from the castle.
22:41It weighed four tons.
22:44And the men would then handle it really carefully, down to the working end of the telescope.
22:54So it was from this platform that the astronomers would make their observations with the giant telescope.
23:01In order to approach the tube, it was necessary to turn a winch and move the platform so that you were in position.
23:10We're in the middle of the bog of Valen in Central Ireland.
23:19Much of the sky would be clouded with peat smoke.
23:23That was the local fuel.
23:25It rains an enormous amount.
23:27And not only that, but the great telescope can barely move east or west.
23:32It relies on the motion of the earth to bring any particular celestial object into its field of view.
23:40And if that happens to be a night when it's cloudy or raining, then you've lost it.
23:45Maybe for months, maybe for years.
23:47So we can see that getting reliable observations out of the telescope was a matter of real difficulty and considerable controversy.
23:59Lord Ross had built the telescope largely to demonstrate the power of Victorian technology.
24:07But there was another equally important figure in the story, in the life of the telescope.
24:13That was Thomas Romney Robinson, priest, master astronomer, very close friend of Lord Ross and frequent visitor to the telescope.
24:24For Robinson, nothing less than the fate of Christianity was at stake.
24:30Robinson loathed evolution.
24:34He loathed the nebula hypothesis.
24:37He thought the idea that there was luminous fluid somewhere in space, from which all planets, all stars, all life, had somehow emerged, was a dangerous, filthy heresy.
24:51And what he set out to do was to use the telescope as a weapon in the fight for the survival of religion itself.
24:58So in February of 1845, Thomas Romney Robinson joined his friend, Lord Ross, here at the telescope.
25:05Over the next few months, they pointed the telescope at nebula after nebula, and Robinson, the first one, the first one, was a man who was in the world.
25:12So in February of 1845, Thomas Romney Robinson joined his friend, Lord Ross, here at the telescope.
25:27telescope over the next few months they pointed the telescope at nebula after nebula and robinson
25:35started making announcements he claimed nebulae were not evolving they were just made up of stars
25:43as he'd always hoped but there was one crucial exception the orion nebula itself
25:55it held out it resisted the attentions of the irish astronomers the weather was terrible
26:04their view was obscured by clouds the nebula was in the wrong position even to be observed by the
26:13monster machine it took more than a year but finally robinson announced a triumph the orion nebula he
26:23said was resolvable it seemed as if the nebula hypothesis all the evidence on which it had
26:32been based the main claim for cosmic evolution had been destroyed in one blow and true religion
26:41and the science of creation saved
26:48it seemed that the nebula hypothesis had been laid to rest perhaps even discredited by the leviathan
26:55telescope but then a tiny david came along to slay a goliath
27:06it happened not in a nobleman's castle but in the much more humble surroundings of tulse hill south
27:14london here a keen astronomer and former draper called william huggins designed his own instruments
27:24and pioneered a new form of astronomy astrospectroscopy the analysis of light itself
27:32dr jen gupta is an astrophysicist at portsmouth university she's an admirer of william huggins
27:42and even more of his wife margaret who worked with him for most of his career
27:48i think for me the fact that they were so devoted to astronomy is what fascinates me about the huggins i
27:54mean there were stories of margaret actually got a spectroscope for her wedding present from a friend
27:58they named their dogs after um famous astronomers from the past and that devotion to the science and
28:04the fact that they pretty much invented this field of astrophysics of taking those observations from
28:09the sky and sort of marrying that with the physics that we're doing here on earth really opened up this
28:14entire window for future astronomers when you pass light through a prism it breaks down into its spectrum
28:22its different wavelengths so william huggins developed instruments you could attach to the end of a
28:29telescope and capture the spectra of distant objects this is a spectroscope designed by william huggins
28:37himself what huggins did here was let the light enter through this slit pass down the tube to a prism
28:47there to split up the light from the celestial object into its spectrum now what chemists knew in the
28:57middle of the 1800s is that there's a fundamental difference between the spectrum of a gas and the
29:05spectrum of a star so this small but exquisite instrument would answer one of the great questions of
29:1719th century science that's the theory at least but it's a hugely complicated challenge in practice
29:26even using modern technology this is clan field observatory in hampshire what we're doing now is
29:35essentially the modern day version of what the huggins would would do so they would have the spectroscope
29:40on the back of their um on their telescope but instead of having a digital camera they would have just
29:45had photographic plates so the light is going to come down this tube here into a prism and a diffraction
29:53grating and then the spectrum will actually be taken with this camera at the back here
30:06the first target is the star arcturus
30:23so what you immediately see is the continuous rainbow going along and this is pretty much exactly
30:27what william huggins would have seen when he pointed his telescope with a spectroscope at a star
30:31the next step is to find a nebula but in typically difficult british conditions there's a huge amount
30:41of atmospheric disturbance we pointed the telescope at the ring nebula for a few minutes to gather light
30:51from this faint object but this is the best we could get we've got a very faint blue line blue emission line
30:58coming through but it's not great because the viewing conditions today weren't optimal and i think this
31:03shows how hard it is still today to do this kind of science to use a telescope even of this size
31:10it's still pretty tricky to get a spectrum fortunately they have this the spectrum of the orion nebula
31:18which they photographed in better conditions and it's clearly very different from a star
31:23the huggins spent decades studying nebulae like this and established that many nebulae were composed of
31:33gas not stars we now know that their star nurseries gas and dust condensing and evolving to form stars and
31:42planets like dinosaurs nebulae had been turned into signs of evolution and this
31:53beautiful but rather humble instrument managed by a retired draper living in south london
32:02had somehow proved that the lessons of the great telescope at burr were misleading and false
32:10lord ross's telescope did go on to make many stunning discoveries such as the spiral nature
32:26of some galaxies but the true nature of nebulae had somehow eluded it
32:32so what had gone wrong here at the great telescope the astronomers in ireland were working right at the
32:41limit of observation in really difficult conditions and as one of them admitted in the wake of huggins
32:51observations the eye may be influenced by the mind you see what you desperately want to see
33:01and mechanical monsters like the great telescope however magnificent can also be really treacherous
33:11when humans take control
33:17my next mechanical monster was built to tackle the fearsome destructive side effects of progress
33:25but this machine will give us profound insights into one of the biggest questions of all the fate of the universe
33:38by the middle of the 19th century the population of london had risen to well over two million people
33:46and with no proper sewage system all their waste drained straight into the river thames
33:53the river became known as monster soup
34:00hello
34:03so i'm here with my friend elizabeth pisani who is uh authority on epidemiology and is fascinated by
34:13the deeds and sufferings of mid-19th century london disease
34:19so if we've been here on the banks of the thames looking out at the palace of westminster
34:24in the 1850s what would it have been like what would we have experienced well first of all
34:29we'd have been doing this um because it was a cesspool essentially and people were dying and people were
34:38dying so there were massive cholera outbreaks every few years the first case of cholera in this country
34:45um arrived in 1831 20 000 deaths within a few months um and then there were periodic outbreaks
34:52uh every few years but at the time it was very firmly believed that cholera was caused by
34:59the stink right not by the water don't forget that at the time these beautiful embankments along the
35:06thames weren't there so it was much shallower it was much flatter it was much muddier and
35:14the the effluent to put it politely was sort of trailing down the sides right up to the houses of
35:22parliament there and actually over the years it got stinkier and stinkier and uh 1858 it was a
35:30particularly hot year so that was the great the great stink of june 1858 tell me about the great
35:37stink i don't know how to describe it better than the people of london described it at the time
35:42the great stink um so there was this absolutely appalling smell rising from the river so appalling
35:49that parliament actually had to shut which something that hadn't happened before and suddenly they were
35:58okay this is coming a bit too close to my people who are coming down from hamstead or who are coming
36:04from their grand palaces in the west end are now actually rather closer to this stink than they
36:09previously had been so it would have been pretty unpleasant place to be now sufficiently motivated
36:17parliament voted to fund an astonishing sewage system it channeled the waste down river towards the sea
36:27half a million gallons of effluent were sent eastwards every day
36:33these vast volumes of sewage were brought down here to irith about 15 miles down river from london
36:45the idea was that the sewage would be pumped up into huge holding tanks and then released at high tide
36:52into the thames and disappear down to the sea the great engines that did the pumping were housed here in one of
37:03the most remarkable buildings of mid-19th century britain
37:23crossness pumping station is an outrageous grab bag of architectural styles
37:30it has arches and pillars reminiscent of a medieval cathedral
37:38it boasts ornamental cast iron work its elaborate designs befitting a byzantine palace
37:46and all of it just to house these giant steam driven pumps
38:05there were originally four engines running in this building one has been restored to give an idea of their
38:12scale and power
38:21the steam engines were the heart and soul of the system
38:25and magnificently each of them was named after a member of the royal family
38:31the queen the prince consort her son albert edward his wife alexandra this monster is the prince consort
38:44the largest surviving rotatative beam engine in the world
38:58the victorians thought that cleanliness was next to godliness and so it was inevitable that a sewerage pumping station will turn into a cathedral
39:15It was inevitable that a sewerage pumping station would turn into a cathedral.
39:22This cathedral, with its amazing designs drawn from medieval architecture, from Venice, from
39:30Byzantium.
39:32The idea was that these vast engines had surpassed all the achievements of past civilizations.
39:43Industrial monsters became the signs of a new modernity.
40:07The cathedral of sewage became something of a party venue for the Victorians.
40:12Dinners were held here in which bread rolls were thrown and slightly too much alcohol
40:20consumed.
40:22But every party ends with a hangover.
40:27Just beneath the surface of this engine house was a vast sea of London's sewage.
40:37Above all, something haunted Victorian technology.
40:42A threat they feared, more than anything else, waste.
40:53It all started with an engineering puzzle.
41:01Scientists at the time were trying to work out how to make steam engines more efficient.
41:16All steam engines, including this amazing, really early experimental locomotive, rely on
41:25one simple principle.
41:27Heat travels from a higher temperature in the boiler to a lower temperature.
41:34As it flows, it's turned into mechanical work.
41:39The locomotive moves.
41:42But even the most efficiently designed machine has a limit on how much work can be extracted
41:51from the heat.
41:53Some of the heat seems just to get lost, the work no longer available.
42:00William Thomson, brilliant young Scottish physicist, later Lord Kelvin, turned this into a universal
42:07principle.
42:08He realized that however ingeniously designed any machine was, there was an absolute limit
42:15on the amount of available work that it could develop.
42:19He called it the universal tendency to dissipate the amount of available work.
42:27Like any good Scotsman, he hated waste.
42:30He loathed dissipation.
42:33But what Victorians of the mid-nineteenth century learned was that the amount of work in the world
42:40from which they could make a profit was inevitably on the decline, and that their world was doomed to decay.
42:52It's known as the principle of entropy, or the second law of thermodynamics.
42:58All processes move inevitably towards chaos, disorder, and waste.
43:10Underneath the great Victorian optimistic vision of progress and a bright future, there was
43:24a deep and dark undercurrent of pessimism.
43:29Living on a planet now revealed as unimaginably old, in a universe extraordinarily vast, with all
43:40sign of divinity gradually being effaced, Victorians confronted the possibility of inevitable decline
43:51and decay.
43:53That on the one hand, their machinery would take them over.
43:59That mechanical monsters would rule the roost.
44:03And yet, on the other hand, that machinery, that technology, that had given them command
44:09of the world, would go to rack and ruin.
44:14Deprived of energy, without any source of work, the nineteenth century confronted its own elimination.
44:27My final mechanical monster embodied all these hopes and fears.
44:33It's perhaps the strangest tale in all of nineteenth century science and technology.
44:39A machine which never existed except in the heads of its creators.
44:45It was the brainchild of one of my favourite writers, a budding genius then at the very beginning of his career.
44:54Herbert George Wells was a young science student who'd made a thorough study of the problems
45:00of evolution and physics.
45:03He was absolutely up to speed with the cutting edge problems of late nineteenth century science.
45:12And he began to think about how to reconcile the problem of progress and the problem of decay.
45:20The future of the world and its end.
45:24And he turned those problems into an extraordinary scientific romance.
45:31The Time Machine, published in 1895, is the story of a man who invents a device that transports
45:38him through time.
45:40It's a meditation on the future of science, civilization and humanity itself.
45:47Wells' story, The Time Machine, with its grim vision of a cosmic and industrial future, made
45:56his reputation.
45:57But what's much less well known is that he became involved in an extraordinary scheme to
46:06build a machine that could convey the experience of travelling through time.
46:18What I want to do now is actually try to reconstruct how this strange machine might have worked.
46:24To do it, I'll need the darkness of a studio and the help of two technological wizards who
46:32know this extraordinary story inside out.
46:36Hi.
46:37Hi.
46:38Good to see you.
46:39Hello.
46:40Now I've invited you here today, your world experts, on the details of that story.
46:48Stephen Herbert and Jeremy Brooker.
46:51In 1895, in the aftermath of Wells' publication of his story, The Time Machine, something absolutely
46:59remarkable happened, something which has always really obsessed me because it's just so dramatic
47:05and exciting, which is there was in London a scheme to build some kind of device that would
47:14evoke, that would conjure the very experience of time travel.
47:19Stephen, I'm really happy that you're with us today because you know so much about one
47:26of the key figures in this story, the man who really collaborated with Wells.
47:31His name was Robert Paul.
47:33Robert Paul was an electrical instrument maker in the really new industry of electrics when
47:38he read The Time Machine and he thought, well, this is perfect, I can integrate…
47:43So he read Wells' story.
47:45He read as it was pretty much when it was published probably, yeah.
47:47So he contacted HG Wells and said, I've got an idea about your story.
47:53What they were interested in, so I understand, was creating the experience of travelling through
47:59time and getting an audience who would pay quite a lot, presumably, to go through that experience.
48:08And the technology that would allow them to do that was the technology of the magic lantern.
48:18The magic lantern was an extraordinarily popular attraction in Victorian Britain.
48:24Lanternists were the entertainment showmen of their day, drawing huge audiences.
48:30And people had them in their homes too.
48:36Jeremy Brooker is chairman of today's Magic Lantern Society.
48:42It looks amazing.
48:43How does it work?
48:44Well, it's a simple device, essentially, there's a wooden box at the back, which has
48:49a very bright light inside it, there's a slide, and the light passes through a tube, through
48:54a lens which you can focus onto a distant screen.
48:58The images are generated by complex moving slides.
49:03This is a model of the solar system.
49:06Jeremy's lantern allows him to project three slides at once.
49:10You have a background image like this one, and then you can add an effect.
49:15So here we've got light coming on in the cottage window.
49:18Oh, that's beautiful.
49:20And then the third lantern is adding another effect, which is snow falling.
49:28And you can imagine with music and perhaps a bit of narration, it can be quite a magical thing
49:38to see.
49:41These were shows that became very absorbing for the audience.
49:45It's an extraordinary combination between engineering, nature, entertainment and science.
49:53And it's also pretty sweaty, I imagine, because this must generate a huge amount of heat.
49:58Tremendous amount of heat.
49:59Nowadays, we use LED bulbs to protect the slides, because in those days it would have been burning
50:04gas, which is why it's got a chimney on the top to take the heat away.
50:08So these were dangerous.
50:09These were basically factory chimneys burning incandescent gases that could easily blow up,
50:16and they were in the middle of the audience.
50:18There are really appalling descriptions of accidents from the gases mixing and exploding
50:24in the middle of the auditorium, because oxyhydrogen is essentially a bomb.
50:28Right.
50:29It's pretty catastrophic.
50:30Right.
50:31So, a monster is as well as fun.
50:36Robert Paul didn't just plan to use a magic lantern, he was busy inventing a brand new form
50:42of technology.
50:44By 1895, it was known that showing consecutive photos could give the impression of movement.
50:51But film was only available in boxes for one person to look into, a so-called kinetoscope.
50:57The race was on to project film onto a screen so a large audience could see it.
51:04Stephen, amazingly, we're very grateful, has built for us a version of the very projector
51:13that Paul must have been working on.
51:15Yeah.
51:16So, talk us through how this device works.
51:19I've got this 1895 lantern, which is basically a magic lantern of the period.
51:24He would have had, we know, an electric arc lamp, so he would have used electric light,
51:28which was actually brighter than the other options at the time.
51:31I've got a German mechanism, which is a star-cross mechanism.
51:35Yeah.
51:36And that's very close, not exactly, but very close to the sort of mechanism that he used
51:40at the time, and it's of the period.
51:42What's that for?
51:43It turns the sprocket intermittently.
51:46If you just roll the film through, it's a blur on the screen.
51:49And then on the other side of that cross would have been this thing, the sprocket, teeth on it,
51:55which pull the film down.
51:56And in fact, if you went to a cinematic before they went digital, it's exactly the same format.
52:00Yeah.
52:01What I've done here is try to give an idea, as you say, exactly where he got to,
52:05which is he hadn't got perfection, it will be a few months yet, but he was getting there.
52:09He knew he could do it.
52:10Shall we give it a whirl and see if anything happens?
52:11Oh, absolutely.
52:12I can't wait.
52:13Yeah.
52:14Well, okay, let's see.
52:30Now, you saw there that it was very out of focus.
52:35Yeah.
52:36So that's one of the things he's got to get right.
52:38But I can see him in his workshop thinking, lots of work to do, another three months, but
52:43we're getting there.
52:44Absolutely worth it.
52:45It's going to happen.
52:46What we're looking at, of course, is the birth pangs of cinema, and Robert Paul is now
52:52considered a technological pioneer.
52:55But there was one final element to the time machine.
52:59Movement.
53:00In putting together a machine that could give the impression of travelling through time,
53:09Wells was thinking about the most advanced technology of his age.
53:14And I think one of the machines that he was thinking about was this, the bicycle.
53:20The bicycle was cutting-edge technology in the 1890s.
53:26It's no coincidence that in the very months that Wells published his story about time travel,
53:33he was learning how to cycle.
53:36I believe Wells must have been inspired by this experience, the world rushing past you.
53:48So I think this is how the final idea for the time machine came together.
53:53It would combine magic lantern images and the new idea of film.
53:59But Wells also described time travel as being disturbingly kinetic.
54:04Excessively unpleasant, he said, headlong motion, a switchback ride, the sense of an imminent smash.
54:16And so their idea was to put the audience in a room with projected images, but seated on moving platforms.
54:28To give them that horrific sense of being shaken forward into the future.
54:35The machine was never actually built, so we can only speculate what an audience might have seen.
54:52Using original magic lantern techniques, Jeremy Brooker has created, especially for us, a journey into the past and future.
55:01In the novel, the time traveller is carried into the future.
55:21Humanity has evolved into two separate species.
55:30The Eloi, descendants of Victorian aristocrats, lazy, ineffectual, effete.
55:41And the Morlocks, descendants of the oppressed working classes, who have devolved into beasts and prey on the Eloi.
55:52Then, the time machine travels even further into the future to find the Earth reduced to a beach with monster crabs crawling everywhere.
56:08And the sun is dying.
56:11Welles' bleak vision was based on his understanding of late Victorian science, the threat of evolution and of universal decay.
56:23Robert Paul never did build his time machine, but he became a central figure in early British cinema, making extraordinarily inventive, rather joyous films.
56:44And the world was based on his understanding of the future.
57:13Our lives today are dominated by technological concerns which started two centuries ago.
57:20Will machines replace us?
57:22Will their effects destroy us?
57:25But our response has to be very different from the Victorians.
57:31For them, faced with a whole series of crises, machines, while they produced those problems,
57:40but also in principle solve them.
57:44We've perhaps lost that optimism and that confidence.
57:49We feel less secure with the technologies that we have inherited.
57:55The crises of our own epoch need to be confronted as we deal with our own mechanical monsters.
58:10And after Victorian innovation, see the £5 billion super sewer as it's constructed under London on iPlayer now.
58:18Here on BBC4, a feat of engineering, brilliance and beauty.
58:23Bridging the gap, how the Severn Bridge was built next.
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