- 24 minutes ago
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:03In the 1890s, the last decade of Queen Victoria's life, the forces of progress that have powered
00:10her reign enter a new phase. And the modern world erupts. In this series, Dr. Hannah Fry,
00:25Paul McGann, and I, Philippa Perry, are time-travelling back to an era when anything seemed possible.
00:35We've seen how advances in technology gave the Victorians superhuman powers.
00:42But what if science could go further, opening the door to other worlds, even the afterlife itself?
00:54I'm a psychotherapist, and I want to understand the strangest aspect of the late Victorian mind,
01:01how their love of science coexists with their deep belief in the paranormal.
01:07If you can hear me, I'm already dead.
01:10And I'll see how the 1890s boom in new media and entertainment brings ghosts into the home,
01:19conjures them in films, lays the foundations of today's connected world,
01:28and culminates in the first global mass media event.
01:34Welcome to the decade the future landed.
01:55In May 1897, the Italian radio pioneer, Guglielmo Marconi, comes to this remote part of the Bristol Channel,
02:04to carry out one of his groundbreaking experiments.
02:11It's here that he sends a wireless telegraph signal across open water for the first time in history.
02:26After two days of frustration and failure, they finally manage it.
02:32And one of Marconi's team writes about it like this.
02:35Five of us stood round the apparatus in a wooden shed, a shelter from the gale,
02:40with eyes and ears directed towards the instruments, with an attention which was almost painful,
02:46and waited for the hoisting of a flag, which was the signal that all was ready.
02:58Instantaneously, we heard the first tick-tack, tick-tack, and saw the morse instrument print the signals,
03:04which came to us silently and invisibly from the island rock.
03:08It came to us dancing on that unknown and mysterious agent, the ether.
03:13PHONE RINGS
03:16The message when it came was rather prosaic.
03:20It said,
03:20Can you hear me?
03:22And the answer joyfully came back,
03:25Yes, loud and clear.
03:27PHONE RINGS
03:28This landmark moment paves the way for radio and Wi-Fi and our networked world.
03:35It's an extraordinary breakthrough, but there's something else that intrigues me.
03:41The late Victorians are also excited about the psychic potential of this unknown and mysterious agent, the ether.
03:50This is a quote from The Spectator.
03:54Why, in fact, if one wire can talk to another without connections saved through ether,
04:00should not mind talk to mind without any wire at all?
04:06PHONE RINGS
04:08In the 1890s, people aren't just interested in telegraphy.
04:13They think science can help them achieve telepathy.
04:17Belief in the ether, an invisible medium thought to fill space, is widespread.
04:25Oliver Lodge is one of the scientists fascinated with the potential of the ether and finding ways to communicate through
04:33it.
04:33He's the professor of physics at University College Liverpool, and his early experiments with radio waves lay the foundation for
04:42Marconi's wireless telegraphy.
04:45In 1894, Lodge begins a series of remarkable demonstrations in London and Oxford.
04:53The crowd of expectant scientists watches as Oliver Lodge sets up his equipment and the experiment begins.
05:02The induction coil sparks into life.
05:07PHONE RINGS
05:11Harnessing electrical surges in the room, sending a signal across it.
05:17PHONE RINGS
05:18For the Victorians, this is an invisible, almost magical force.
05:24PHONE RINGS
05:27It's the first time in Britain that anyone has demonstrated electromagnetic waves
05:33and tracked their movement with a small beam of light on a spot meter.
05:38Lodge even manages to detect this invisible energy from over 50 metres away.
05:44Does this breakthrough mean that now he could detect other unseen energies, even other realms?
05:55Lodge is convinced that the paranormal is the cutting edge of science.
06:00He dreams up a bold plan to explore it, as if it's another land to be conquered by the British
06:06Empire.
06:08Lodge's method is scientific rigour.
06:10However, he has no time for superstition, which he regards as close to savagery.
06:16He describes the world of psychic phenomena as an intermediate region, bounded on the north by psychology, on the south
06:25by physics, on the east by physiology, and on the west by pathology and medicine.
06:31The whole region seems to be inhabited mainly by savages, many of them, so far as we can judge from
06:39a distance, given to gross superstition.
06:41I say it has been left to them long enough.
06:46We prefer to creep slowly from our base of physical knowledge to engineer carefully as we go, establishing forts, making
06:55roads, and thoroughly exploring the country.
07:03Lodge isn't alone in wanting to journey into this paranormal realm.
07:09He's part of a scientific movement spearheaded by the Society for Psychical Research, an organisation that feverishly gathers data into
07:18phenomena such as clairvoyance, hypnosis, and telepathy.
07:23The impressive roll call of members includes William James, the father of psychology, the biologist Alfred Russell Wallace, who developed
07:33theories about evolution in parallel with Charles Darwin, and even the Prime Minister William Gladstone.
07:42The membership of the SPR seems remarkable to us today, as psychical research is seen as a fringe or eccentric
07:49activity.
07:50But back then, it was a new frontier for scientific study.
07:54The 1890s was an age of X-rays, electricity, vaccines, and people thought there must be other invisible energies at
08:05work.
08:10I think the pace of change and the scientific breakthroughs that revolutionise the decade are so extraordinary that even unlocking
08:19the mysteries of the afterlife starts to look tantalisingly possible for the SPR.
08:29And the public share their fascination, attending seances and seeking out communication with the dead via spirit mediums.
08:37When the SPR decides to investigate people who claim they can speak to spirits, Oliver Lodge eagerly joins in.
08:49If you think about it, the idea that if we can talk to dead people, if we can communicate with
08:55these new unseen forces, if that's real, that is one of the most exciting, most major scientific breakthroughs imaginable.
09:02And one of the mediums that first really, really excited him about the possibility was an Italian medium named Eusepia
09:09Palladino.
09:10One of the things Lodge would say about his work with Palladino is he said,
09:14it's best not to think of her effectively as a person, it's better to think of her as a delicate
09:19instrument.
09:20And Lodge actually travelled specifically to a friend's house on an island in France,
09:25made a special trip just to spend several nights watching her in action with a team of other researchers, some
09:30of them from the SPR.
09:31So how did they try to control her during this experiment?
09:36So they came up with a whole bunch of brand new techniques.
09:39So again, this was all very kind of Wild West, scientifically speaking.
09:43One of her best known functions was that she was able to apparently move objects with invisible forces.
09:50So when she would be entering into her trance state, they would have guys sitting to her left and to
09:56her right,
09:57and they would try and hold her arms and hold her legs.
09:59And so allegedly what would happen is that despite all this, despite what they believed were strict controls,
10:06was that she was able to move objects around the room.
10:09Another thing that happened is that they would feel people touching them all over,
10:13people rummaging through their hair and apparently invisible hands.
10:17And sometimes the hands would go visible.
10:19There's reports where the guys would see this whitish substance would come out from her body,
10:25like a supernumerary limb they talked about.
10:28And this is where you hear kind of the Ghostbusters terminology, but it starts the phrase ectoplasm.
10:33So they're making up new scientific terms.
10:36They were, yeah.
10:37And so in addition to the controls we talked about where they would hold her down,
10:41they created this kind of dynameter where it would measure grip strength.
10:45And so the idea was they could get a baseline of what her normal abilities were
10:49and then see if she had special superhuman abilities when she was in her trance state
10:53or possibly being possessed by her spirit controls.
10:56And did she?
10:57She did, in fact, according to them, they measured her with a phenomenally higher grip strength,
11:03way more than like many of the men could grip it, way, way higher up in terms of like the
11:08grip strength.
11:09And so for them, they're like, oh, so clearly something is happening.
11:12This is empirical evidence of something otherworldly, something that we don't have currently
11:17of natural physical explanation for.
11:19So we better start rewriting physics to accommodate the ghost people.
11:31Oh, well, hey!
11:53pursuit of fraudulent mediums. They sit through countless seances, watching every move and
12:00exposing anyone they think is a con artist. But what were the tricks of this lucrative
12:05trade?
12:07People would often hold these in very dark, sometimes pitch black rooms. And the medium
12:13when they got into it, or when they were feeling the forces around them, it would be, I guess
12:17you would describe it today as something quite like a seizure. So the eyes would roll back
12:21into the head in spasmodic motions. There would be the noises, there would be the instruments,
12:27there would be this atmosphere. And the more traditional, of course, was the knocking.
12:34So we're going to walk through one of the old kind of classic tricks from the mediums,
12:39not a super elaborate one. And the idea was the spirits would generate writing on blank
12:45slates. You would take just a teensy piece of chalk and you'd sandwich them together.
12:50Ah. Right?
12:51Yeah.
12:52And so again, you're providing the spirit world with material with which to communicate
12:57was the theoretical foundation. We're going to fast forward this a little bit, but traditionally
13:01you would sometimes do this for hours. It's waiting for something to happen. You want to
13:06just take a look?
13:08Okay. So this is authentic.
13:09Oh, I'm very disappointed. I was hoping my late mother will have told me to brush my hair
13:14or something.
13:15Let's see what we can do. Are you any good with nuts?
13:17Nuts? Not really, no.
13:19Okay. Well, this is one of the kinds of controls. So let's leave these alone for a little bit.
13:24I'll just leave those with you.
13:26Oh, thank you. We'll check back in a moment. I'm sure mum's going to do something with that
13:30in a minute. Fraudulent spirit mediums use magicians' tricks and sleight of hand to swap
13:37objects in and out when clients are distracted.
13:42We can maybe try the slates again.
13:47Come on, slates.
13:49Ah!
13:51Ooh!
13:52Something. What's the type?
13:54Philippa, don't trust this man. That's definitely from my mother.
14:00That's the sort of thing she would always say about all men.
14:04Yeah.
14:05They would collect information about people. And so if there was a particular person that
14:10you wanted to come through, they would note that information and they would have these
14:15little books. They often call them blue books. And different communities of mediums would
14:21all collect information about people that were interested in spiritualism. So if you went
14:25to one medium and wanted to talk to, say, your Aunt Tilly, and maybe Tilly came through,
14:31maybe she didn't. But when you went to the next medium, even if you didn't ask them, Aunt
14:35Tilly might come through because they'd pass the word that you were coming and they know
14:40who you were looking for. And if you didn't know about that little extra communication,
14:44it would seem that they'd somehow divined that from some sort of mysterious external
14:48force, which was actually just passing off the information.
14:53With the spirit of the age all about what are all these invisible forces, we were so ready
14:58to believe. I mean, I wanted to believe that this was magic. I loved it. And I can imagine
15:06myself if I didn't have decades of cynicism on me and I was right back there in the 1890s. I'm
15:16damn
15:16sure I would have believed in that because I would be set up to believe in it.
15:23So why are people, including scientists, so open to the supernatural at the end of the 19th
15:30century? I think some of this is a hangover from Darwin's theory of evolution a generation
15:37before. It's now getting rather difficult to reconcile traditional Christian ideas with
15:44contemporary science. Spiritualism appears to offer palpable proof of an afterlife. This
15:52is a great comfort at a time when your loved ones can be snatched away by cholera, TB, typhoid,
16:00and smallpox. It's easy to underestimate how profoundly this ever-present death must have shaped the way
16:08they saw their world.
16:13The Society for Psychical Research carries out public surveys, compiling an enormous database
16:20in an attempt to properly document paranormal phenomena. Their archives are held here, at the
16:27heart of British academia, the Cambridge University Library, where one of the most incredible
16:34artefacts in the collection is the census of hallucinations. To create this, more than 400 SPR
16:42volunteers scour the country from factory floor to middle-class dinner party, gathering accounts.
16:49The SPR were very methodical and thorough in their research. They did a census to which
16:5617,000 people replied with experiences of a ghostly nature. And they asked, how were you occupied at the
17:05time? Were you in health? Were you suffering from grief or anxiety? What were you in the habit of eating
17:11and
17:11drinking? Who were you in the habit of seeing? Were there any other persons present? So they're very
17:18thorough in all their questions. And people are very serious in how they're filling all these forms in.
17:26And everything is catalogued very precisely. So name, date and conditions. They've listed every account
17:35and they've coded it. INCD. Incompletely developed apparition. REL. Angel or religious phantasm.
17:46FAB. That must sound fabulous, I think. Grotesque, horrible or monstrous apparition. And so on.
17:53I saw her dead husband standing by her bed. She spoke to him. Saw her dead mother. Saw man.
18:04The foot of her bed. Room. Cross room. And disappear through opposite walls. Saw a man with a rope
18:11round his neck. Pass under window at dusk. Saw an elderly man walking in front of him. Saw her father
18:19two years after. Saw the same man. Saw the same man. One of the favourite ones was a crisis apparition.
18:27C.A. This is when a ghost appeared to give notice of their own death before the actual news of
18:37the death
18:37got to them. From the Reverend Matthew Frost. While sitting at tea with my back to the window and
18:45talking with my wife in the usual way, I plainly heard a rap at the window. And looking round I
18:52said
18:53to my wife, why? There's my grandmother. And went to the door. But could not see anyone. And still feeling
19:00sure it was my grandmother. And knowing though 83 years of age, she was very active and fond of a
19:06joke.
19:06I went round the house but could not see anyone. On the following Saturday, I had news that my
19:12grandmother died in Yorkshire about half an hour before the time I heard the rapping.
19:18I did not know that my grandmother was ill.
19:25I feel quite sad after reading all these crisis apparitions one after the other.
19:32And I really believe the people filling in the census were completely genuine. They feel like they are.
19:44It's hardly surprising that people are seeing so many ghosts. In a very real sense, spirits do haunt the
19:52Victorian home. Every innovation from photographs to moving pictures, phonographs to fantasy books has
20:00its own supernatural genre. Take bedtime reading. In the 1890s, popular fiction caters to a newly educated
20:12public with literacy rates now over 90 percent. The occult tales of Marie Corelli, blending mysticism,
20:22religion and psychic phenomena, dominate the bestsellers.
20:27Arthur Conan Doyle's detective fiction and short stories are infused with his love of the ghostly,
20:34from the apparently supernatural hound of the Baskervilles, to tales of possession and hypnosis in
20:41the parasite. And what his readers don't realize was that Conan Doyle was drawing inspiration from his own
20:49experiences as a real-life ghostbuster. In 1893, he took a train down to the Dorset coast to take part
20:58in an investigation for the SPR.
21:02Conan Doyle wasn't here to track down some criminal mastermind like his hyper-rational creation,
21:10Sherlock Holmes. Oh no, he was here with a group of SPR investigators because there'd been reports of a
21:18household tormented by a spirit. Conan Doyle's memoirs take up the story.
21:32We sat up there two nights. On the first, nothing occurred.
21:39We had, of course, taken every precaution to checkmate fraud,
21:44putting worsted threads across the stairs and so on.
21:52In the middle of the night, fearsome uproar broke out.
22:00It was like someone belaboring a resounding table with a heavy cudgel.
22:08So he rushed at once into the kitchen, from where the sound had surely come.
22:19There was nothing there.
22:21Doors were all locked, windows barred, threads unbroken.
22:26Some years later, the skeleton of a child, about 10 years old, was dug up in the garden.
22:35The suggestion was that the child had been done to death there long ago.
22:44The unknown and the marvellous press upon us from all sides.
23:04But could you ever capture the unknown and the marvellous?
23:08I think that for many late Victorians, the key lies in technology.
23:16Photography already seems to catch ghostly figures unawares.
23:20In 1891, Britain is fascinated by an infamous photograph from Coombomere Abbey,
23:27which suggests a spectral presence.
23:31So-called spirit photographers promise the public proof that dead relatives linger on.
23:38After all, if they can see it, they will believe it.
23:47What they do is have the sitter keep very, very still for the long exposure needed,
23:54and surreptitiously get an assistant to waft around behind them, being some sort of apparition.
24:01Photography's pretty spooky anyway.
24:04It captures a moment in time forever.
24:07So it's so perfect for the ghost to get in on the act.
24:13Let's do it.
24:51So, there are two main techniques that pictorians will use in order to create this illusion
24:57of ghosts.
24:59So one of them is a sort of in-camera process, so it will happen in the camera, and you
25:07can
25:07do all very long exposures where one element moves, like the ghost, or a double exposure.
25:13Right.
25:14Where you just expose twice the same scene.
25:17So in this one, what it is, is that the sitter has to stay very still to get exposed.
25:23So in that time, when they're concentrating on being still, someone can creep in behind
25:27them and because they haven't been there very long, they look translucent.
25:32Exactly.
25:33And the other technique is to use two negatives for one same print.
25:39Ah, right.
25:40This is a long exposure with someone playing the ghost just moving around in the same exposure.
25:47And that will create the multiple faces.
25:50And then we have your negatives that I have placed here in this area where it hasn't been
25:55exposed yet because this area has been masked before.
25:58Okay.
25:58Before?
25:59So basically, what you're showing me here is the Victorian version of Photoshop.
26:05Yeah, totally.
26:06I think if you really wanted to believe in ghosts and spirits because you found it a comfort,
26:12you could easily be taken in by this.
26:15And I don't think the Victorians were any more gullible than we are today.
26:20They just wanted to have this comfort.
26:29Ghosts find their way into other machines with a new craze which allows the Victorians
26:35to receive communications from the past.
26:39Invented by Thomas Edison, the phonograph has the ability to capture the human voice
26:45and play it back for the first time.
26:47Known as recording angels, they really take off once wax cylinders are available from the 1890s.
26:58Edison's agents in Britain even hold phonograph parties to promote them.
27:04And by the end of the decade, they're a staple of the middle-class home.
27:11Conan Doyle writes about their unnerving power in the story of the Japan box in which a young man spies
27:19on his employer as he plays back a recording of his dead wife.
27:31These are all phonographs, sometimes called graphophones, of the 1890s.
27:38And there's boxes of records there.
27:40One of the big selling points of the phonograph, of course, was that you could use them for recording at
27:45home.
27:45Oh, really?
27:46And make recordings which you would treasure forever of your family and your young ones as they were growing up.
27:51And in the same way that you would collect their photographs.
27:54It must have been just amazing for the Victorians to hear a living voice coming out of a machine.
28:01They must have thought they'd reached peak technology.
28:05And, of course, to keep a voice is like capturing more than just a moment.
28:11A photograph captures a moment and it's like it's still, where this is living.
28:15They were played on anniversaries and over the intervening century, most of these recordings are very faint.
28:25If you could get 150 plays out of a cylinder, you could listen to a loved one at least twice
28:31a year until you passed yourself.
28:33Absolutely, yes.
28:35You know, what I'd really like to do is make a recording for my loved ones so they can hear
28:40me after I've gone.
28:42What a wonderful idea. Let's do it.
28:45So, do I need a speaking horn?
28:47Yes, you do.
28:48So, this is the wax cylinder on which we're going to record your voice.
28:52And I put it on the machine.
28:56As the cylinder rotates, a sapphire cutter, very similar to the ones used in vinyl,
29:03is going to engrave the vibrations of your voice onto the wax.
29:07OK.
29:08Shall I invite you to sit?
29:09Oh, thank you.
29:11It's ready, once you have the horn on, to take your recording.
29:15You need to have your mouth about two inches from the horn.
29:17OK.
29:17And just speak as you would in a cocktail party.
29:19OK.
29:20So, I'm at a noisy cocktail party.
29:22A noisy cocktail party.
29:23OK.
29:23Got it.
29:26There you go.
29:28Dear ones, if you can hear me, I'm already dead.
29:32I'm so sorry about that.
29:35Remember, my love will live in your hearts forever.
29:38And please don't forget to feed the cat.
29:41Goodbye.
29:44I've nothing else to add.
30:04I have nothing else to add.
30:11I'm sure that will be a great comfort to them.
30:13They can play that and I'll live on forever.
30:16Mm-hmm.
30:17I'm quite convinced of it.
30:20Thomas Edison's agents in Britain also tried to whip up interest in the phonograph by inviting famous celebrities to record
30:28their voices.
30:30Now, here we have Florence Nightingale.
30:33Now, I've heard of her forever, but I've never heard her.
30:40When I am shown that that, even as deadly, shot and day, I hope that voice may take me the
30:58quick brass at my back.
31:06It's powerful stuff.
31:07It's amazing to think that I've heard Florence Nightingale and her voice made the very vibrations in that cylinder so
31:17I can hear it.
31:18Oh, stop it.
31:27Through photographs and phonographs, the Victorians have worked out how to capture reality.
31:33But in 1896, the decade's greatest media innovation almost magically appears.
31:42Moving pictures.
31:47This is one of the great gifts of the Victorian age.
31:50A new art form that blows everyone's mind and forever changes the way we see the world.
31:59I'm amazed by how sophisticated the first filmmakers are and how quickly they adapt the techniques of spirit photography to
32:08make ghosts come alive.
32:14These early short films soon find a place in the existing entertainment world, showing at music halls and theatres all
32:22over the country.
32:25They're a novelty, fighting for the attention of punters alongside funfairs, the magic lantern shows and circus performers.
32:37Alexandra Palace is one of the pioneering venues where these rare films, now restored by the BFI, were first shown.
32:46So when film arrives in the 1890s, it would have been shown in the pre-existing entertainment world.
32:58It could have gone another way, it could have been a scientific thing almost, like a novelty you would see
33:04like a microscope or x-rays or something.
33:07But actually it kind of lived in places like this, Alexandra Palace, you know, these big music halls and theatres.
33:16So what I really love about these little fragments that are left to us, a film from this age, is
33:23their endless creativity and invention.
33:26They were all produced by these very young men, young filmmakers, and they're making them for this very young, vibrant,
33:34youthful, urban audience.
33:37The median age of a Victorian person in 1901 was 24.
33:43Oh, goodness.
33:44The age now?
33:46Yeah.
33:4640 years old.
33:48Yeah.
33:49So they've got this sort of youthful energy about them.
33:53So much illusion in this.
33:55Mm.
33:55A disembodied head with wings.
33:57Exactly.
33:58Quite scary.
34:01They're very rare now.
34:02We've got at the BFI archive, we have, I don't know, just over 500 left of thousands that would have
34:11been made at this time.
34:13And to see them projected in this place where they would originally have been seen 120 years ago is just
34:23fabulous.
34:25It's such a treat.
34:31So this is a film called Upside Down or The Human Flies, and it's a great example of a trick
34:37film.
34:38Very popular because this is what the new moving image does best.
34:42And what the Victorians found fascinating was that intersection between magic and spiritualism and that kind of thing, the unseen
34:54and the mysterious, and the technical.
34:58And what they loved was to be fooled and then to find out how it works.
35:03So they were very, they were very curious and quite sort of scientific minded.
35:08I mean, I can't work out how this is done.
35:10They just turned the scenery upside down and the people are on the floor, but then you just turn the
35:17whole film upside down.
35:18It's very clever.
35:19It's simple.
35:20I'm really surprised that this film is, you know, at the end of the Victorian era because I've got in
35:30my mind a vision of the Victorians being sort of terribly serious.
35:33And this is so fun.
35:35It's so playful.
35:37It's such a good joke.
35:39And it reminds me a little bit of YouTube clips now.
35:43Yeah.
35:44It would be mind expanding, mind altering.
35:47Yeah, they tried everything in the 1890s and in fact the first five years.
35:52So there was this flurry of different genres and different types of films and all the things you could do
35:59with it.
35:59So you had the kind of straight thing like news and you had sort of story films and trick films
36:07and dramas and comedy and animation.
36:13So this is artistic creation.
36:17He set up a kind of magic frame easel and he's drawing a picture of a lady and then she
36:24comes to life.
36:26Yes, he's creating a woman.
36:28That's what men always want to do is create a woman.
36:33It's also, it's this delightful thing where he decides he's going to give her a present, which is a baby.
36:39Yes.
36:39Of course, she's long gone.
36:41She's seen what he's up to and legged it.
36:42It's almost.
36:43Well, he doesn't know what to do.
36:44So he's giving it to us.
36:46It's almost a feminist film.
36:48It is.
36:49It's sort of like, I know what women want.
36:52They want a baby.
36:52So he makes for a baby.
36:54She's out of there.
36:55She doesn't want the baby.
36:56She's a modern young woman.
36:58I'm feeling inspired to create my own amateur trick film in honor of these Victorian pioneers.
37:06The Big Swallow is a film by British director James Williamson.
37:11And it shows an angry tourist who's fed up with his privacy being invaded.
37:17And so he swallows the camera man.
37:36That poor man wouldn't have liked it round here today with all the paparazzi, CCTV, constant surveillance.
37:44He would have had to swallow an awful lot of cameramen.
37:50Capturing people on camera particularly unsettled one early reviewer of these films.
37:55Their smiles are lifeless.
37:58Even though their movements are full of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible.
38:05The grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life.
38:10It is terrifying to see the evil spirits that have cast entire cities into eternal sleep.
38:20Audiences are beguiled though by early films of crashing waves, trains and factory workers.
38:28Even the Pope and the Royal Family let the cameras in and become truly modern icons.
38:36But cinematic techniques soon blur the line between fact and fantasy.
38:43Explosion of a motor car.
38:45I mean, motor cars are sort of, you know, relatively new as well.
38:48Really new?
38:49Wonderful kind of sort of new invention in the streets of London here.
38:54And again, this is a trick film.
38:57So it's relying on sort of shock value.
38:59And how did they do that?
39:02Bang!
39:03So all the passengers have been blown into space as the Bobby sees.
39:09Oh!
39:09Here they come.
39:10They're falling from the sky.
39:12Oh!
39:13Oh!
39:13It's a bit gruesome.
39:14It's incredibly gruesome.
39:16So this is an early example of us wanting to be frightened and shocked and seeing people being blown up.
39:26Absolutely.
39:26We know it's not real.
39:28You know, we know it's comedy, but at the same time there is that yuck factor.
39:32He really doesn't know about leaving the scene untouched to do the evidence, does he?
39:37No, he doesn't.
39:39Can you imagine how you would feel if this particular film was the very first moving image you saw?
39:48You would be so shocked.
39:51So this is another kind of film that's almost unique to a Victorian film, which is the staged reality or
40:02a kind of dramatized version of a topical news event.
40:07This is called Beheading a Chinese Boxer, and it is a film ostensibly about the Boxer Rebellion in China in
40:181900.
40:20It's a very gruesome scene in which a group of Chinese soldiers are beheading a rebel.
40:29We quite soon realize that this has been staged for the cameras.
40:35The first time I saw it, I was really taken aback. I thought it was real.
40:39It's a horrible, gruesome forerunner of the modern execution films we see on the internet, which unfortunately aren't fake like
40:49this one is.
40:50It's absolutely horrific.
40:52Yeah, it is really quite nasty to think about.
40:55I mean, the head on the spike thing is disgusting.
40:57Yeah, isn't it horrid? We think this was shot in France somewhere. We're not quite sure.
41:02It's very early and these are difficult to identify. They've gone to a lot of trouble to stage this story.
41:10You can see on the film repeating that these people aren't actually Chinese, even though they're wearing traditional hats and
41:19the clothes on closer inspection do look more like dressing gowns and belts, but...
41:25It's real enough and certainly when you immediately see it.
41:29Yeah.
41:30Gonna have bloody nightmares about this.
41:33Yeah, it's a shocker.
41:36Dramatic events like the Boxer Rebellion are perfect fodder for this sensationalist treatment.
41:43This is the Wild West for the media, with nobody policing the divide between the real and the fake.
41:51A pioneering decade when all bets are off when it comes to ethics.
41:56And this spirit infuses the new tabloid journalism that emerges in the 1890s, catering to commuters in the industrial cities.
42:07The Daily Mail, set up by Alfred Harmsworth in 1896, is a national newspaper with a global network.
42:16The Mail's overseas offices use the latest high-speed cables to telegraph back stories.
42:23But these long-distance communications were not always reliable.
42:30This is one of the most extraordinary pieces of fake news from the time.
42:35In the summer of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion is sweeping through China.
42:40And it's reported in the Daily Mail that all the British in Peking have been slaughtered.
42:46They write, men, women and children have shared one common fate at the hands of demons in human form.
42:55The obituaries of the British victims are printed.
42:58The memorial service arranged at St Paul's Cathedral.
43:02But the memorial service had to be cancelled when it turns out that the story is completely made up.
43:11The most innovative tabloid journalist of the era is W.T. Stead, who shares Harmsworth's belief in the importance of
43:20fast communication.
43:22He had already conducted the first British newspaper interview and made his name with campaigning investigations into child prostitution.
43:32In the 1890s, he begins to tap into a very different kind of network to obtain a supply of unusual
43:39news stories.
43:41And with his new publications, Stead discovers a thrifty way to reduce his overheads.
43:47By the 1890s, he has become a convinced spiritualist.
43:52And in 1892, he developed an ability in what's called automatic writing.
43:58That is where he sits down at a desk like this one and he starts transcribing things that, as far
44:03as he's concerned, are being sent to him by the dead.
44:07And in particular, there's an American journalist, a woman called Julia Ames, who he meets and he's very taken with
44:13her.
44:14Unfortunately, she dies of pneumonia in the following year.
44:16But suddenly, in 1892, Stead starts receiving messages from her.
44:21At the time, he's editing a journal called The Review of Reviews, which increasingly takes on kind of material about
44:28the spirits.
44:29But he then thinks, well, actually, I need a new journal just about the spirits.
44:33And it's a journal called Borderland.
44:35In fact, we have a copy of the very first edition here.
44:39And one of the main contributors to Borderland is Julia Ames, who by this time has been dead for over
44:45three years.
44:46He doesn't have to pay her very much.
44:48No, no.
44:49He's very good at getting kind of cheap copy.
44:52He also says that he saves money in all of his newspapers in that he doesn't have to spend money
44:58on sending telegrams because he sends messages through telepathy.
45:02So he sees his body, he describes his body as a bifurcated telephone that he can communicate two ways, as
45:10it were.
45:10Now, this becomes important for his editorial practices, particularly on Borderland.
45:15So the co-editor of Borderland is a woman called Ada Goodrich Freer.
45:20And they have many of their editorial meetings actually conducted through telepathy.
45:25So Stead writes down what he says are Freer's ideas for the next monthly issue of Borderland.
45:33Stead, his journalistic career, comes to an end to some extent in April 1912 when he's a passenger on the
45:41Titanic.
45:42Really?
45:42On board the Titanic.
45:43And actually, the Titanic wasn't really the end of his journalistic career.
45:48Lots of people in the spiritualist community, mediums, received messages from Stead after he dies aboard the Titanic.
45:55And he continues to publish items, pamphlets, up until the 1930s.
46:03So Stead dies physically in 1912, but spiritually his journalistic career continues for at least another two decades.
46:11He would have loved that.
46:13He would.
46:14Absolutely.
46:17While Stead was getting stories from across the ether,
46:22fascination is growing with news from another mysterious realm, outer space.
46:28Come on in.
46:29Wow.
46:32Newspapers in the 1890s start to speculate about life on Mars.
46:39Let's open up the dome, get some light in here.
46:43This is the Northumberland telescope.
46:47And if you want to come over here and move the dome over.
46:50I, a little woman, can move this massive dome.
46:54I can as well.
46:57In this networked age of long-distance communication, the ability to reach out beyond Earth inspires prominent thinkers,
47:06including the electrical genius Nikola Tesla and the influential scientist Francis Galton.
47:15We can bring the telescope down just with one, one hand very, very easily moved.
47:22Very likely.
47:22Find our, our slit in the, in the roof.
47:26Please take a seat in the observing chair.
47:28Right.
47:29Without hitting my head.
47:31Ooh.
47:32And then I should be able to see Mars if I just wait for it to go dark.
47:36We've just got to wait for the sun to go down and then we'll be able to have a look.
47:39Yeah.
47:44The press coverage really centered around these moments when Mars, every couple of years,
47:50moves into what's called opposition, when it's in a particularly good position for observation.
47:55And at that moment, the press really, they knew opposition was coming and they would go to these major observatories
48:02with big telescopes and start clamoring for news.
48:06In the weeks and months leading up to Mars moving into this ideal observational position,
48:11there are just so many reports.
48:14And this is a global phenomena.
48:16These newspapers are able to telegraph their reports across the globe.
48:21And so if the Lick Observatory in California makes a new statement about what they might have seen on Mars,
48:27the papers in London and in Paris and in Calcutta, they can be publishing it that evening the next morning.
48:34Wow.
48:35So what made them think that there was intelligent life on Mars?
48:39One of the obvious things that is seen on Mars at this time is a lot of dark straight lines,
48:45which get called canals.
48:47And some people argue that this is evidence of actual built infrastructure on Mars,
48:52that these are genuine canals, that they're irrigation canals.
48:55And that means that Martians are engineers, that they're building really incredible, massive systems
49:02that might span the entire planet.
49:04And of course, at the time that we're talking about, the 1890s, on Earth,
49:09the great technological development of the age, or one of, is wireless telegraphy.
49:15And so the idea that these Martians, who might, remember, be more advanced than humans,
49:21would have a similar system seemed reasonable for a lot of people.
49:25And so given what the amazing technologists have been able to do with wireless telegraphy
49:30in such a short period of time, it didn't actually seem that wild, that crazy,
49:34that, of course, Martians like us might well be sending out messages,
49:40sending out signals in the hopes that we would reciprocate.
49:43Did anyone ever claim to have intercepted a message from Mars?
49:47Nikola Tesla in 1901 actually reported to the astonishment of the world
49:53that he believed that he had possibly received electromagnetic waves from outer space
50:00that might have been what he described as purposeful.
50:04So they might have been messages.
50:06He had a system at his lab in Colorado that could detect distant electromagnetic waves
50:13and turn them into sound, and he heard this repeated bleeping sound one night.
50:17And he then reported to the world that these could be messages from Mars,
50:24the British public intellectual and eugenicist Sir Francis Galton,
50:29Charles Darwin's half-cousin, a very famous scientist.
50:33He publishes an article in 1896 describing what he says
50:39is a method for being able to communicate with Mars.
50:42So he begins by describing the possibility that if we could signal mathematical signals,
50:49if we could start sending things like the value of pi into outer space,
50:53that Martians then might start sending back reciprocal signals,
50:57and through a mathematical language we could build up a system of communication.
51:16The preoccupation with contacting other worlds is reflected in the books of H.G. Wells.
51:23In The War of the Worlds, he hitches imaginative fancy to a journalistic style
51:30to tell the story of an alien invasion from Mars.
51:34But at the same time, he's writing another, more optimistic story
51:38about communication with the red planet.
51:41The crystal egg is set in Mr. Cave's antique shop.
51:47He notices one day a strange light emanating from it.
51:52He peers in and sees something extraordinary.
51:54A species the likes of which he has never seen or heard of before.
52:01Their heads were round and curiously human.
52:05It was the eyes of one of them that had so startled him on his second observation.
52:12They had broad silvery wings, not feathered,
52:15but glistening almost as brilliantly as new-killed fish
52:19and with the same subtle play of colour.
52:22And these wings were not built on the plan of a bird wing or bat,
52:26but supported by curved ribs radiating from the body.
52:34What's fascinating about the story, though,
52:36is that the Martians can also use the egg to watch humanity.
52:43After a time, he aspired to attract the attention of the Martians.
52:48And the next time that the strange eyes of one of them
52:51appeared close to the crystal,
52:54Mr. Cave cried out and sprang away.
52:57And they immediately turned on the light
53:00and began to gesticulate in a manner suggestive of signalling.
53:18H.G. Wells hints at how future media technology will be used
53:24and shows how communications underpin British power.
53:28In 1897, Queen Victoria celebrates her Diamond Jubilee.
53:34The British Empire is still the world's undisputed superpower,
53:39and Victoria decides to use the new medium of film
53:43to send a message around the world.
53:46The British put on the most triumphant display
53:49of imperial strength that the country has ever seen.
53:57On the 22nd of June, 1897, London hosts this extraordinary event
54:04at a cost of £300,000.
54:06Over £20 million today.
54:28The city is scrubbed up and decorated to play host to the largest military force ever assembled in the capital,
54:35with troops from across the empire.
54:42People cram into specially constructed viewing galleries,
54:47or pay to hire rooms with a view of the proceedings.
54:52Three million people come to watch the show as they march along a processional route,
54:57ending in a thanksgiving service at St Paul's Cathedral.
55:04But thanks to 1890s technology, many more people are able to watch this spectacle.
55:15The different film companies compete for the best spots,
55:19from Lumiere to R. W. Paul, Dixon's Biograph Company,
55:23to the French Gaumont and Le Couture.
55:34Within days, the footage has been developed, shipped and distributed around the globe.
55:43This is priceless propaganda, projected around the empire to millions of British subjects.
55:57This is the first modern mass media event,
56:00and it's brought to the world by a small army of film cameras.
56:06It's incredible to think the industry is barely a year old,
56:10and yet there's up to 40 cameramen recording this.
56:33Queen Victoria described it in her journal as a never-to-be-forgotten day.
56:39And we haven't forgotten it,
56:40because this event became a blueprint for every subsequent state occasion.
56:52For me, these films capture the essence of the 1890s.
56:57The old Victorian order, an empire and an empress,
57:02rubbing shoulders with a world we recognise.
57:05A modern one of film cameras and super-fast global communications.
57:29The close of the century signals the end of a feverish decade, full of contradictions.
57:37They've used science to give themselves new powers.
57:41They've challenged traditional views of race, sex and gender.
57:46And they've developed a new media and opened their minds to other worlds.
57:51But the sheer pace of all this change has also revealed their innermost fears.
57:59The British of the 1890s are in so many ways modern and surprising.
58:06They're certainly not the dusty old Victorian cliché.
58:13They're cutting-edge disruptors, decadent artists, frauds and geniuses.
58:19And they sow the seeds for the future.
58:23Our present.
58:32To see more of the remastered Victorian films featured in the programme,
58:35follow the links to the BFI at bbc.co.uk slash victoriansensations.
58:42Those sexy Victorians and their innovations between the sheets next.
58:46A Victorian scandal, the rudest book in Britain, coming up.