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00:00And away we go!
00:08We're moving!
00:11They were the machines that made Britain great.
00:14Fast, revolutionary and sometimes downright dangerous.
00:19These are the stories of our engineering masterpieces
00:22that shook the world and drive the way we live today.
00:30This is a decade of great leaps in technology.
00:39An era of new wonders.
00:42The evolution of engines, electricity and communications
00:46changed people's lives and produced landmark historic triumphs.
00:51But overshadowing it all was tragedy.
00:54Back in the 1910s, the combination of new machines
00:58and human incompetence all too often led to disaster.
01:02The Titanic, the largest ship the world had ever seen, sunk.
01:07Efficient new weapons.
01:1016 million dead.
01:13But at the start of the First World War, there was still hope.
01:18Don't worry, they said. It will all be over by Christmas.
01:27In the 1910s, people worked up to 80 hours a week.
01:31So time off was precious.
01:34But thanks to the rapid evolution of the petrol engine,
01:37there was now a new way to enjoy it.
01:40This is a 1914 Leyland Torpedo Charabang.
01:46The word charabang comes from the French charabon,
01:49which means carriage with wooden benches.
01:52Fabulous.
01:55Based on earlier horse-drawn vehicles,
01:57this machine was the forerunner of the coach,
02:00the booze crews, even low-cost airliners.
02:03What makes this vehicle so great is its size.
02:08In the days of the horse,
02:10a large carriage could maybe carry 12 people.
02:13This carried 32.
02:16All thanks to huge increases in the power of petrol engines.
02:22Powering this machine,
02:23we have a magnificent four-cylinder,
02:2536-horsepower Leyland S4 petrol engine.
02:28And it's the 36-horsepower motor that makes this vehicle possible.
02:33You can't tether 36 horses to the front of a coach,
02:36and if you could,
02:37you'd have a spot of bother controlling them.
02:41For the first time,
02:42a coach could compete with the trains
02:44and carry groups of people to places the railways didn't reach.
02:49And it carried them in style.
02:54When we hear the word Leyland,
02:56we tend to think of the troubled carmaker of the 1970s and 80s.
03:01But look at this.
03:02By royal appointment.
03:04In the 1910s,
03:05Leyland was the Rolls-Royce of commercial vehicles.
03:10This machine has been beautifully restored.
03:14With its hand-painted coachwork and plush leather seats,
03:17this majestic vehicle offered people a taste of luxury and excitement
03:21they had never experienced before.
03:24The Charabang kicked off motorised tourism,
03:28and they must have been popular.
03:30In all the photographs,
03:31the vehicles are crammed with people.
03:35You could hire them by the day,
03:36and companies used them to give their workers a grand day out.
03:42Early in the morning at the village hall or the company works,
03:45the excited holidaymakers would get on board.
03:49And away we go.
03:55For many workers, this would have been their first experience of a holiday.
03:58These were cheery outings to local attractions,
04:01a picnic in the country, a town fair, or a trip to the seaside.
04:06By all accounts, the passengers could get pretty rowdy.
04:10Some Charabangs were like travelling pubs with their own barrels of beer at the back.
04:17Cheers!
04:18People sang, played musical instruments, and were even known to fall off drunk.
04:30The Charabang often left a trail of chaos in its wake.
04:37So with a large vehicle to control,
04:39and a bunch of noisy high-spirited holiday goers in the back,
04:42it made for a tricky drive.
04:45Just like a coach driver nowadays, eh?
04:47To the uninitiated, driving one of these machines presents a few challenges.
04:54Not least, trying to apply the brakes.
04:58You have this lever here, which acts only on the back wheels.
05:02But instead of pulling it the conventional way,
05:05it's slightly unconventional, and you've got to push it away from you.
05:09In severe cases, you would use the foot brake, which acts on the gearbox.
05:13If you're on a very steep hill with a very heavy load,
05:15you've got a water tank over there where you can drip water onto that brake of the gearbox to keep it cool.
05:24Once of their destination, the tourists would indulge in the pleasures of the time,
05:29swimming in the daring new bathing dresses,
05:32having their photos snapped,
05:34watching vaudeville shows,
05:36and of course, plenty more drinking.
05:38Fortunately, when the time came to go home, the driver had a not-too-subtle way to get the passengers out of the pub.
05:49The old bulb horn wasn't any good, far too quiet, so some sharabangs were fitted with what's known as an exhaust whistle.
06:00If I pull this ring here, it opens a valve on the cylinder head, and the rising piston pushes the gases out.
06:07If I increase revs, the piston's moving faster, we get more frequency.
06:20Hold on a sec! Hold on a sec!
06:36Wait!
06:38Wait!
06:39A great British machine that brought joy to a generation.
06:46The 1910s was a decade of new wonders.
06:50Electric light advertising appeared for the first time in London.
06:55Music halls gave way to cinema, creating the world's first international star, Charlie Chaplin.
07:02It was an age of heroes.
07:05Daring young men took to the skies in fragile machines held together by canvas and wire.
07:12Ernest Shackleton explored Antarctica.
07:16Captain Scott made it to the South Pole.
07:21And back home, thanks to new technology, thousands of ordinary people were embracing the spirit of adventure.
07:28Is it a car? Is it a bike?
07:34This is in fact a cycle car.
07:38This has to be one of the smallest cars I've ever driven.
07:42In fact, it's barely a car, because it only has three wheels.
07:49It may be small, but this ingenious British vehicle changed motoring forever.
07:53Before the cycle car, the few cars on the roads were mainly large limousines, built for the wealthy and driven by their chauffeurs.
08:03In the early 1900s, or so the story goes, the finance people at Daimler estimated that the worldwide demand for cars would never reach more than one million.
08:17Ever.
08:18The limiting factor, they declared, was that you would never be able to recruit a million chauffeurs.
08:26The arrival of cycle cars blew those calculations away.
08:30They were cheaper, more popular, and arguably more revolutionary even than Henry Ford's mass-produced Model T.
08:36Dozens of small manufacturers began to attach motorcycle engines to home-built frames.
08:44One of them was based here, in Malvern.
08:51Today, we think of Morgans as elegant, expensive and traditional.
08:55But in the early days, under the leadership of Harry Morgan, they were radical innovators.
09:04Morgan didn't see why ordinary folks should be limited to where the charabangs and trains could take them.
09:10So he set out to design and build a car for the people.
09:14To go wherever they wanted, whenever they wanted.
09:16At his factory in Malvern, he and his team came up with their three-wheeled revolution.
09:23And in 1911, he launched the aptly named Runabout.
09:28Costing just £90, equivalent to the price of today's cheapest cars, it sold like hotcakes.
09:36If you drove one of these, you probably couldn't afford a chauffeur.
09:41You probably didn't want one.
09:44Instead, you did something radical.
09:47Something fun.
09:49You drove yourself.
09:52So what were the secrets to this cycle car's success?
09:56Let's take a closer look at this fantastic runabout.
09:59High-tech bonnets, you'll notice.
10:02Let's hope it doesn't fail me, or I'm in trouble.
10:05Right, independent front suspension.
10:07Petrol tank up here.
10:10964cc V-twin air-cooled side-valve Jap engine.
10:15No leaky radiator to worry about here.
10:18Now this unit powered the vehicle via a prop shaft and a two-speed chain transmission.
10:26Nice and simple, which of course keeps maintenance costs down.
10:30But best of all, you've got a proper steering wheel.
10:33And room for a passenger, just.
10:36And all this for less than 90 quid.
10:39Morgan knew that being cheap to buy wasn't enough.
10:43It needed to be cheap to run as well.
10:46In those days, you would fill your car up from one of the new two-gallon petrol cans,
10:51bought at your local chemist or bicycle shop.
10:53So how far can this little delight go on a tankful?
10:59Let's find out.
11:09Chris Booth, the owner, is coming along to make sure I don't wreck what is now an extremely valuable original.
11:15Ah, yes!
11:18Despite its small engine, and because it's so light, this really is a very nifty vehicle.
11:28It can cruise comfortably at 30 to 35 miles an hour.
11:32Might not sound much.
11:34But back in those days, it was enough to scare the natives.
11:37In 1913, the official speed limit was an eye-watering 20 miles an hour.
11:44With its three-gallon tank driven sensibly, you could get about 150 miles between stops.
11:51Which is just as well, because in the 1910s, there were no petrol stations.
11:56The cycle car craze swept the country.
12:03By 1914, it was reckoned that for every big, luxurious chauffeur-driven car on the road,
12:09there were a hundred smaller cars like the Runabout.
12:14People raced them in speed trials, hill climbs and long-distance reliability tests.
12:20There was even an international Grand Prix won by a Morgan Three-Wheeler.
12:26Britain's roads filled up with little runabouts.
12:31And for the first time in history, powerful machines moved out of the hands of experts
12:36and into the hands of the masses.
12:39Transforming Britain into a nation of motorists.
12:43And so was born the Traffic Jam.
12:51In the early 1910s, the peace and prosperity of the British people was under threat.
12:56The German Kaiser Wilhelm II was building up his army and the shadow of war loomed over the country.
13:04Britain began pouring money into manufacturing arms.
13:09To make them, she needed steel.
13:12And to help produce it efficiently, the country built one of its greatest and most iconic machines.
13:17With dozens of moving parts, it certainly looks like a machine.
13:23But in fact, it's a moving bridge.
13:26All 2,600 tonnes of it.
13:30The Middlesbrough transporter bridge spans the River Tees.
13:35And it's not just your normal bridge.
13:37It's far more radical than that.
13:39It's a cross between a bridge and a ferry.
13:42And it's the longest operating transporter bridge in the world.
13:45In the 19th century, Middlesbrough had grown from a small hamlet to one of the largest manufacturers of iron and steel in the world.
13:55The problem was that the city was separated from most of the ironworks by the River Tees.
14:01They depended on a ferry to get the workers to work on time.
14:05But in bad weather, the ferry was often late or didn't run at all.
14:11Losing serious amounts of productivity, the factory owners demanded a bridge.
14:17But to build a conventional bridge tall enough for the sailing ships that had to pass underneath would have been prohibitively expensive.
14:24A Hartlepool engineer by the name of Charles Smith came up with a solution.
14:29He called it a ferry bridge.
14:31Smith's quirky idea was to carry people and vehicles on a gondola slung below a tall steel bridge at ground level.
14:41In 1910, construction began.
14:45This extraordinary feat of engineering was completed in less than two years.
14:50And in October 1811, it was unveiled to the world with great ceremony.
14:55Almost 100 years later, this amazing machine is still working exactly as it did on the day they turned the power on.
15:06I'm 165 feet above the river.
15:10And below me, attached to 60 wheels, runs the upper carriage.
15:15Attached to this are 30 steel cables which carry the gondola below.
15:22They are cleverly cross-wired to stop the 65-ton gondola blowing around in the wind as it makes the crossing in just 90 seconds.
15:31It's a bit like an upside-down railway, with the railway bit up here and the transport bit underneath.
15:47Back in 1911, when they'd finished building the bridge, they tested it by driving a steamroller onto the gondola.
15:53Let's see if it's still up to the job, shall we?
16:00This 1916 Aveling & Porter steamroller weighs 14 tonnes, and it's not easy to drive.
16:07Tricky steering, and you don't stop it with a brake, you have to put it into reverse.
16:14If I get this wrong, the gondola's barrier isn't going to stop me and this beautiful machine crashing into the tees.
16:21Concentrate!
16:24I said concentrate, Barry.
16:35Yes, the gondola can still take it.
16:38And look at this, two masterpieces of 1910's British technology reunited.
16:43Now, to get it across the river.
16:45The gondola is operated from a control room up on its roof.
16:55Alan Murray, the bridge master, is going to show me how to drive it.
17:00Right, Alan, nice to meet you.
17:01The transporter bridge is powered by electricity.
17:06Now, back in 1911, electricity was a relatively new technology, but it had one big advantage.
17:12It meant the driver could control the gondola in the same way he would a tram.
17:16So, we're going to go to there to drive, and there to brake.
17:21So, that's our first notch, but before you do that, you have to stand on our dead man panel.
17:28That will give you the power.
17:30So, foot in there?
17:32Now, we need to go to that notch to make it go.
17:35Okay, up we go.
17:43The lever control gives me three speeds in both directions.
17:47I can increase the speed.
17:48You can indeed, by just notching up.
17:51Like a tram, the electricity goes up through contacts to overhead wires strung across the bridge.
17:57The wires run to the engine house on the south side of the river.
18:02So, I'm directly controlling two 500 volt DC Westinghouse electric motors.
18:09Together, they produce up to 60 horsepower to precisely control the cable winch,
18:15which in turn, pulls the gondola backwards and forwards across the bridge.
18:19All the motors, controls, and even the switchboard are original.
18:30In the last 98 years, they have driven the gondola nearly one million miles.
18:36And when we come in to dock, you've got to watch for our state-of-the-art docking mechanism.
18:44Right.
18:45Come off power, and then you go in.
18:47Now, if you come into the brake now...
18:49Okay.
18:50And just hold it there for the first notch.
18:53Because we're docking so slowly, that brake will hold it all the way in.
18:56Okay.
18:57There we go.
18:58We've got a high-tech system of lining up the red tape on the windows with a bit of wood nailed to the bridge.
19:12There it is.
19:13Yep.
19:14Right between those two.
19:15Look at that.
19:16Fabulous.
19:17And that's it.
19:18Foot off the pedal now.
19:20There we go.
19:21There we go.
19:22I've driven the Middlesbrough Transporter bridge gondola.
19:24One steamroller safely delivered, just as it was in 1911.
19:31This wonderful, quirky machine played its part in the growth of British industry.
19:36And the steelworkers never had an excuse to be late for work again.
19:41In the 1910s, Britain was an industrial powerhouse.
19:44We exported goods to every corner of the globe.
19:47Over a third of the world's ships were British.
19:50And throughout the land, estuaries rang to the sound of shipbuilding.
19:55But there was one ship that was to become more famous than any other.
20:00Yes.
20:01RMS Titanic.
20:02Launched in Belfast in 1911, it was the largest ship in the world.
20:09And a great British machine.
20:11Until the captain, with great British incompetence, sailed it into an iceberg.
20:18Fortunately, inside Titanic, there was another great British machine.
20:24The device which made rescue possible, and saved 700 lives, was the ship's radio.
20:29As Titanic began to sink with 2,200 people on board, it sent out a distress call.
20:42To hear what the Titanic's distress signal sounded like, Tony Constable here is going to reproduce part of it.
20:48Go ahead, Tony.
20:49Coming through loud and clear.
20:54What did you actually say there?
20:56S-O-S.
20:58Ah.
20:59Help.
21:02In the 1910s, radio was as revolutionary as the internet is today.
21:09Not all ships carried sets, but those that did mainly used British equipment like this, similar to the one on Titanic.
21:16In these early days of radio, you sent your messages using this key here as dots and dashes of Morse code.
21:30This controlled the device at the heart of the Titanic's transmitter, the spark generator.
21:36Every time the operator tapped a key, it created a short burst for a dot,
21:43and a long burst for a dash.
21:46The spark sent a voltage pulse up to the ship's aerial, where it was transmitted as radio waves.
21:53Generating radio waves like this was easy.
21:57The hard part was detecting them.
22:00To pick up Titanic's distress call, radio operators on nearby ships relied on a device called a magnetic detector.
22:07There were other radio receivers at this time, but the magnetic detector was the first one that was robust enough to work at sea.
22:18It's this device that made ship's radio possible.
22:21It was based on a discovery made in Cambridge by the great physicist Ernest Rutherford.
22:28He discovered that a magnetically charged iron wire subjected to radio waves became demagnetized.
22:35At his Chelmsford factory in Essex, Guglielmo Marconi turned Rutherford's discovery into a working machine.
22:42Marconi's genius was coming up with this constantly moving loop of wire that automatically re-magnetizes every time it passes these magnets.
22:52An incoming radio signal demagnetizes the wire which is immediately re-magnetized by the magnets so it can receive another signal.
23:03This constantly changing magnetism creates an electric current which the operator's headphones then transform into sound.
23:11Simple really.
23:15And totally reliable, as long as you kept the clockwork mechanism wound up.
23:22When Titanic sent out her distress signal just after midnight, it was picked up by another passenger steamship, RMS Carpathia.
23:32But Carpathia was three and a half hours away, and by the time it arrived, it was too late to save most of the people on board.
23:42The sad part of this story is that another ship, the Californian, was even closer to the Titanic.
23:49However, the radio operator on the Californian had gone to bed for the night.
23:55And when the third officer popped into the radio room just when Titanic was sending out her SOS signal, there was silence.
24:04He didn't notice that the clockwork drive of the magnetic detector had run down, and so he never heard Titanic's distress call.
24:15If he had only wound up the clockwork mechanism, he could have saved all 2,000 people on board.
24:22As it was, Rutherford's discovery of the magnetic detector and Marconi's use of it in the ship's wireless saved 700 lives.
24:34The dramatic rescue alerted the world to the importance of radio, and soon every ship would have one.
24:42The Titanic tragedy shocked a nation that, in the 1910s, convulsed with social unrest.
24:51Workers repeatedly went on strike for decent conditions.
24:54In London's Sydney Street, a gang of anarchists fired on the Home Secretary Winston Churchill.
25:02And suffragettes fought to win women the vote.
25:05However, in 1914, the country suspended its internal struggles and united to fight the Hun.
25:21In August 1914, the First World War shattered Britain's peace and prosperity.
25:27At first, people remained optimistic.
25:35Don't worry, they said. It will all be over by Christmas.
25:39It wasn't. By Christmas, the British Army were bogged down in the trenches.
25:46The Allies had stopped the German advance, but thanks to the ingenuity of new weapons, they now faced a deadly stalemate.
25:57For the infantry, there was one weapon that outperformed all others. The machine gun.
26:06For the British, that meant the Vickers machine gun.
26:11Capable of firing 600 rounds a minute, the Vickers perfected an automatic reloading system dreamed up many years before.
26:19In the early 1880s, Hiram Maxim, an American inventor living in London, had a eureka moment.
26:30Whilst firing a rifle, he developed a sore shoulder from the recoil of the gun.
26:34He realised that with a bit of clever engineering, he could use the energy of the recoil to throw out the spent cartridge and load the next.
26:44The result was the world's first automatic machine gun, the Maxim gun.
26:58In 1896, the British company Vickers bought Maxim's company and set about improving the weapon.
27:05They reduced its weight by taking out all unnecessary parts and devised an ingenious mechanism to improve its reliability.
27:14This muzzle booster on the front increased the gun's recoil and helped it reload automatically.
27:20As the bullet passes through this hole, it's blocked for a fraction of a second.
27:23The expanding gases created by the firing of a bullet now have nowhere to go.
27:30They force this plunger back, which cocks the mechanism in readiness for the next round.
27:40Well, let's give it a try, shall we?
27:44Even firing blanks, I get a sense of the awesome power of this weapon.
27:48It could fire as many rounds in a minute as 40 men with rifles.
27:58Don't think I'd like to be on the receiving end.
28:02In just 20 seconds, I've fired 200 rounds, enough to kill 200 people.
28:09With a range of two and a half miles, this was one of the most lethal weapons on the fields of Flanders.
28:18In fact, it was so efficient that in 1914, the Vickers machine gun and its German equivalent
28:26made it almost impossible for infantry to cross no man's land unscathed.
28:33It helped create the deadlock of trench warfare.
28:36The stalemate that lengthened the war and cost millions of lives.
28:40In 1915, Winston Churchill, the first Lord of the Admiralty, was looking for a mechanical way to break the deadlock on the Western Front.
28:55Churchill wanted a machine that could cross the muddy, cratered terrain of no man's land,
29:00while also being able to withstand the onslaught of machine gun fire.
29:03We must crush the trenches in, he said. We must crush them in. That is the only way.
29:11So he set up a committee to build what he called land ships.
29:18Attention quickly turned to a curious prototype from 10 years earlier.
29:23Back in 1904, Grantham engineer David Roberts had devised a brilliant off-road alternative to wheels for a new tractor.
29:34His chain or caterpillar tracks.
29:36This is a one-third scale model of his steam-powered, Hornsby chain-track tractor.
29:54The original weighed 40 tonnes, but the tracks spread the weight over a large area of ground,
30:01so it didn't get bogged down in the mud.
30:07The vehicle looked like a winner, and the version was offered to the army as an artillery tractor to pull heavy guns.
30:14The army hardly leapt up and down with excitement at the idea.
30:18They bought a petrol version as a try-out, but one Royal Artillery officer declared,
30:23Its noise and smell are abominable. A team of eight horses is far superior under every condition.
30:29And they dropped the order.
30:30But a few years later, Churchill's land ship committee would turn Roberts' idea into a revolutionary new weapon.
30:40The plan was to combine caterpillar tracks with the armour of armoured cars
30:46to make a machine that could withstand bullets and go over trenches.
30:51The brains came in particular from two men.
30:53Walter Wilson was an engineering genius working in the British Army.
30:58While William Tritton was the general manager of Foster's, a small Lincoln engineering company.
31:04After trying many ideas, this is the vehicle they came up with.
31:09Little Willie, the world's first tank.
31:11It weighed 14 tonnes, carried a crew of three, and had a top speed of a little over three miles an hour.
31:21In trials, the new caterpillar track worked well, and little Willie would be able to cross a muddy, bumpy stretch of no man's land without difficulty.
31:30But there was a flaw.
31:31So here we are, across no man's land, approaching enemy trench.
31:38Whoops!
31:40If a particular trench was too wide, little Willie simply couldn't bridge the gap.
31:44And her caterpillar tracks couldn't pull her out of the trench.
31:48It was back to the drawing board.
31:50The new tank was much bigger, long enough to cross trenches.
31:54But as soon as you see it, the thing that makes it immediately different is that the tracks were wrapped all the way around the hull.
31:59And here's the clever bit.
32:02The rhomboid shape of the tank gives this shallow angle of track at the front.
32:07So as the tank dips into the trench, this shallow angle of track pulls the tank out of the trench, like so. No problem.
32:20And it really did work in practice.
32:23The design became the standard for the classic tanks of the First World War.
32:27Churchill had got his land ship.
32:32And it evolved rapidly.
32:34This is the famous Mark IV version.
32:38At 28 tons, it's twice the weight of Little Willie and its 105 horsepower Daimler engine powered it along at the slightly higher speed of 4 miles an hour.
32:47It's this version, more than any other, that changed the face of modern warfare.
32:54In 1917, British munitions factories went into overdrive to produce over 1,000 Mark IV tanks.
33:01The Mark IV tank carried an eight-man crew, squeezed in here for hours at a time.
33:08Tank historian David Fletcher is an authority on these pioneering machines.
33:13What was it like inside this tank for the crews going into battle?
33:20All the time you're going along in this thing, the tank is being impacted by machine gun bullets.
33:25It's actually continually spattering like can be rain all around the sides of it.
33:29Right.
33:30The engines in here are horrifying.
33:32When that engine's running, the noise is so loud, you can't hear yourself think, never mind anybody else speak.
33:38It's generating heat through the exhaust on a tremendous scale.
33:42Be about the same as a turkey in the oven for Christmas.
33:45And there are fumes coming off the thing, great clouds of carbon monoxide.
33:48So a lot of the people in the tank are sort of half useless.
33:54The crew needed all their powers of concentration just to drive this machine.
33:59To turn it, you had to slow down one track more than the other.
34:03And it took four people to operate all the brakes and gears, a terrible waste of manpower.
34:10In battle, the hail of machine gun fire was so intense that even inside the tank, the crew were far from safe.
34:19The only thing they had by way of personal protection is this, which is a leather face mask with a chain mail bit at the bottom.
34:26But these things were issued in order to protect the eyes and face from tiny droplets of lead which would come in through the cracks in the armour,
34:35or even bits of armour flaking off the inside when there was impact on the outside.
34:40Just try it on the sides, have a quick look through, and you'll see the view is better than you'd think.
34:44Yeah, you can see more than you think you're going to see through those slits.
34:51But yeah, I suppose after a while, once you perspire, they just slip down the front of the face.
34:56It just slides down your face, and then you can't see anything.
34:58In November 1917, the British deployed 476 Mark IV tanks at the Battle of Cambrai in France.
35:08They broke through the German lines, crossed two sets of trenches, and advanced three miles into enemy territory.
35:18It was a great breakthrough.
35:20When news reached Britain, the church bells rang in celebration.
35:28But by 1918, the Mark IV tank was last year's model.
35:33This is the Mark V, and behind its boiler-plated exterior, it's a whole new beast.
35:40A four-speed manual gearbox and a hand-operated brake for each track meant that this was the first tank that could be driven by one person.
35:48Which freed up the rest of the crew to fight the enemy.
35:54And at the heart of this machine, created by brilliant young engineer Harry Ricardo, is the first engine designed specifically for tanks.
36:02And it's a monster.
36:03This 19-litre, six-cylinder, four-stroke powerhouse delivers 150 horsepower to the twin tracks.
36:14But for me, the best thing about this fantastic 90-year-old engine is that it still runs.
36:19And they've allowed me to start it up.
36:23So here we go, there's the starter motor solenoid.
36:25Boy!
36:26Yes!
36:27Yes!
36:28Yes!
36:29Yes!
36:30Gone are the sleeve valves that created all the smoke.
36:32In are overhead valves and crosshead pistons.
36:33Sounds absolutely gorgeous, this engine!
36:34The tank didn't win the first world war on its own.
36:35But by breaking the deadlock of trench warfare, it tipped the balance in our favour.
36:41For the first time we had a weapon that was technologically more advanced than anything the Germans had.
36:53didn't win the First World War on its own,
36:56but by breaking the deadlock of trench warfare,
36:58it tipped the balance in our favour.
37:04For the first time, we had a weapon
37:06that was technologically more advanced
37:08than anything the Germans had.
37:10It boosted British morale and struck terror
37:13into the hearts of the enemy.
37:14It was, and still is, a great British machine.
37:19In November 1918, the end of the war
37:22brought rejoicing on the streets.
37:26During the conflict, British engineers
37:28had pushed back the frontiers of technology
37:31and created a formidable array of new weapons and vehicles.
37:35Some of the most extraordinary advances
37:38were in the development of flight.
37:41And this decade of triumph and tragedy
37:44would end with a British aircraft
37:45making an heroic voyage
37:47that would transform air travel forever.
37:50The person who would make it happen
37:53was a young pilot called John Alcock.
37:57While flying for the British during the war,
37:59Alcock's aircraft crashed,
38:01and he found himself stuck in a prisoner of war camp.
38:04While he was there,
38:06he dreamed of achieving something extraordinary.
38:09He knew that no one had ever flown a plane
38:11across the Atlantic,
38:12and he knew that the Daily Mail
38:13were offering a £10,000 prize
38:15to the first person to do it.
38:17Alcock became determined to win that prize.
38:21Back in Britain, after the war,
38:23he approached the Vickers Aircraft Company at Brooklands.
38:26Fired by his enthusiasm,
38:28they agreed to let him pilot one of their planes.
38:31And this is a replica of that aircraft,
38:35the Vickers Vimy.
38:36It's absolutely extraordinary
38:37that anyone would even dream
38:39of flying across the Atlantic in this.
38:40It's a giant biplane, for goodness sake.
38:42It's got an open cockpit and canvas wings.
38:49This is the world's largest flying biplane.
38:52It has a 70-foot wingspan
38:54and stands over 15 feet high.
39:00The Vimy was developed during the war
39:02as a bomber to carry out night raids over Germany.
39:07It was made possible by massive increases
39:10in the power of petrol engines.
39:13Alcock's original was equipped
39:15with two Rolls-Royce Eagle 8 engines,
39:18each capable of delivering
39:20a thumping 360 horsepower.
39:25And just 16 years into the development of aircraft,
39:29a lot of thought was going into aerodynamics.
39:33Wherever possible, the aircraft is streamlined
39:35to reduce wind resistance.
39:37And if you look at the struts and wires,
39:39they're not round,
39:40but they're shaped like aerofoils.
39:44The undercarriage doesn't retract like a modern aircraft.
39:47The best they could do with the original
39:49was to cover the wheel with canvas
39:50to cut down turbulence from the spokes.
39:57This replica was built in the 1990s,
40:00but the maintenance costs are so high
40:02that it's heading for retirement
40:04in the Brooklands Museum.
40:06At least that's the plan.
40:07So the first exercise, it seems, here is to actually get the aircraft out of the hangar.
40:16Today, it's due to make its last ever flight.
40:19There's a few experts here who are lending their wisdom to this initial task.
40:24What we really need is a giant pair of scissors to cut off those flaps there and then it will come out easily.
40:34It's a bit of geometry and physics and coordinated team power.
40:39We are only inches to spare this side, so any uncoordinated pull could cause a problem.
40:48This magnificent replica is historic in its own right.
40:55It has flown thousands of miles along the pioneering routes the original flew 90 years ago.
41:01The Vimy is released from the hangar.
41:05Well, here I am at last in the Vimy cockpit.
41:10My first impressions are that you'd have to be very friendly with the person you're sitting next to.
41:28Because if you're going to fly the Atlantic in this machine you're going to be close quarters for quite a long time.
41:35And inside here the most distinctive feature is this two-thirds of a steering wheel to steer them across the Atlantic.
41:44Everything on this aircraft is controlled by wires.
41:48The elevator flaps which point the plane up and down.
41:52The ailerons that roll the aircraft from side to side.
41:57Quite sort of low gearing on those actually.
42:02And the rudder for turning.
42:05And instead of bomb bays the fuselage is filled with petrol tanks.
42:11It all feels very vulnerable.
42:14In 1919 Alcock and his navigator Arthur Brown needed to move fast.
42:23Several other teams were hoping to grab the transatlantic prize.
42:27Everyone realised that the best way to get across the Atlantic was to fly with the strong prevailing winds from west to east.
42:35So first they had to take the aircraft to pieces and ship it to Newfoundland.
42:40By the time Alcock and Brown arrived attempts by two other teams had ended in failure with their aircraft ditching into the Atlantic.
42:49Their chance of success looked slim.
42:53So here we are all fuelled up.
43:02All the preliminaries done.
43:04Nice weather to fly in.
43:06The Vimy is about to take off.
43:08Excellent.
43:09Very exciting.
43:10On Saturday the 14th of June 1919 Alcock pushed the throttle on the twin Rolls-Royce Eagle engines and powered the Vimy into the sky.
43:27And so the Vimy takes to the skies.
43:31It may look fragile and archaic today.
43:33But back in 1919 this was cutting edge technology.
43:42Laden with 865 gallons of fuel, sandwiches and beer, the plane only just lifted off the ground.
43:52Alcock turned the Vimy and headed out over the Atlantic for Europe.
43:561,890 miles away.
44:02In the open cockpit the crew were exposed to the noise of the engines and the full force of the elements.
44:09Flying as high as 12,000 feet they had to wear electrically heated suits to keep themselves warm.
44:19Early on they lost radio contact.
44:22They hit fog and sleet and for four hours the aircraft was covered with a sheet of ice.
44:34At one point they flew into such a heavy cloud that Alcock completely lost his bearings.
44:39The plane went into a spinning nosedive and only straightened up 50 feet above the sea.
44:52Brown said later,
44:53it appeared as if we could stretch downwards and almost touch the great white caps that crested the surface.
44:59It was an epic flight.
45:13On the 15th of June 1919, after 16 hours of flying, much of it through the night, Alcock and Brown crossed the coast of Ireland.
45:25They brought the plane down on what they thought was a field.
45:30It turned out to be a bog.
45:42It wasn't the most elegant of landings, but they'd made it.
45:45To the small crowd of locals who greeted them, Alcock announced,
45:50yesterday I was in America.
45:52I'm the first person in Europe who can say that.
45:55On June the 14th, 1919, man was Admiral of the Ocean Air.
46:00Five days later, Winston Churchill presented Alcock and Brown with the £10,000 prize.
46:09They were the first people to fly non-stop across the Atlantic.
46:13The nation was ecstatic.
46:15On a triumphant tour of London, crowds mobbed the two heroes.
46:21But there was a third British hero, the Vimy, the aircraft that made it all possible.
46:26It would be eight years before another aircraft crossed the Atlantic,
46:31and another 20 before the first commercial flight.
46:34But the Vicar's Vimy had paved the way.
46:38The Vimy was the crowning achievement of a decade of triumph and tragedy.
46:43For the first time, large numbers of people got to handle powerful machines.
46:51The destructive power of some of them unleashed unprecedented horrors.
46:56But in the hands of the people, the latest mechanical wonders also promised a world of new opportunities.
47:04The century of the machine was underway.
47:07...
47:20...
47:22...
47:26...
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