Communication Absolute Genius Super Tech with Dick & Dom

This is...Absolute Genius.

Come with us as we dive into the wonderful world of technology.

This is mind-blowing!

Each show we introduce you

to geniuses whose inventions have changed the world for ever.

We then take their tech

and supersize it in our Genius Tech Challenge.

The question is, can we pull it off?

Is this his brain?

If you love gadgets, then strap yourself in.

-It's Genius.

-Absolute Genius.

Oi!

On this show we're exploring the ways technology

has helped us talk to each other.

From the humble beginnings of the telegram...

-Ba ba ba...

-G!

..to the future technologies that will blow your mind!

Oh, no!

Plus we make history with a quiz like you've never seen before.

Welcome to the world's first ever brain-to-brain quiz!

Today, we're talking about all things communication.

In the past if you wanted to send a message over some distance

you had to go there or send it by carrier pigeon.

Like this. Fly, my pretty one!

These days, 92% of us have one of these - a mobile phone.

But they were invented 40 years ago,

-and back then they looked like this!

-Really heavy - massive battery.

But today we're going to introduce you to three geniuses

who made the art of chat even easier.

Today, we take communication for granted.

And we love to talk,

spending on average over half an hour on the phone

and well over an hour hooked up to the internet every single day!

Thanks to advances in technology, there are now loads of way to chat

and it's never been so easy to keep in touch with people

no matter where they are in the world.

And later in the show we're going to show how much communication

has moved on when we take part in

the world's first brain-to-brain quiz!

Today, there are loads of ways of communicating.

From social media sites like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram...

..face-to-face video calling and e-mails.

But it wasn't always that easy.

No - not until one man came along

and developed a way of communicating over long distances.

All you needed was some wire and an electrical pulse.

May we introduce to you... Samuel Morse.

Beep-beep-beep-beep, beep.

In 1837, two Brits, William Cooke and Charles Wheatstone,

developed the first commercial telegraph.

A telegraph is a way of communicating

by sending electrical pulses along a wire from one point to another.

Genius! But there was a problem.

How can you use it to actually send a message?

Enter Samuel Morse, who invented an ingenious simple code

of short and long beeps that made up the alphabet.

It was known as Morse code

and it meant that messages could be sent easily along the telegraph.

Time to learn about this genius!

We've come here, to the Telegraph Museum in Cornwall.

It looks like a regular building, right?

It's not. In the 1870s, it was the centre of communication

for the British Empire - that's how important that building is!

It was the hub for hi-tech communications

for most of the world, and it even had cables

running all the way to India!

Good place to learn more about our genius.

To explain all things Morse, we've got John.

He's a telecommunications expert

and knows everything there is to know about the code.

John, what was actually Morse's genius?

It was really the simplicity of his code.

You have a dot, you have a dash, there's nothing else.

You don't have half a dash or three-quarters of a dot,

but with those dots and dashes

you could send the whole of Shakespeare to Australia.

It would take you several weeks, but you could do it.

Morse's genius was to develop a simple code

that assigned dots and dashes to each letter of the alphabet.

But what technology was used to send the messages?

John, what is this contraption we see before us?

This magnificent machine is intended to give you an electric shock.

-Oh, great.

-Don't worry - it's really to demonstrate

-that the signal travels instantaneously...

-Of course.

..and this was the important thing to Mr Morse.

-Communications faster than the galloping horse.

-OK.

Right, so we are going to try and send a message to each other.

-Have a go.

-And get a shock while doing it.

Look, look, look.

So A would be bop and then a long line is a boooop.

Bop bop! That's an A.

Excellent, beautiful.

Obviously a real Morse code machine didn't electrocute you,

but it did work on the same principle, and this is better!

-OK.

-My brain is telling my fingers...

Aaah!

-Did it?

-Yeah!

-Did it?

-Yeah!

-Oh, no, I don't want it!

-Yep! It did.

Argh!

LAUGHING

Although it's hilarious to electrocute Dick,

there is a serious side to this.

We are acting like actual Morse code receivers.

Electricity would be sent though miles of wires

to various receiving stations all across the world.

Because of the speed electricity travels,

it meant that messages could be sent almost instantaneously.

It seemed simple enough - let's give it a go.

-Ready? OK?

-BEEPING

F?

-No.

-No?

Dot, dot, dash, dot.

Di-dar-dar dit!

Di dar di dit.

Ba ba ba ba.

Ba ba ba ba.

G!

No!

Maybe it's a bit harder than we first thought.

-Ba ba ba ba!

-Bu, bu, bu, bip.

LAUGHTER

Let's go and do it properly. Let's do it on a bigger scale

from one building to another in the valley.

Good idea, but before we go - Morse, this one's for you!

-BEEP!

-Rude!

The telegraph took the world by storm, and in 1857,

the first of many cables was laid

running from Europe to North America.

This cut down the time it took to get a message across the ocean

from ten days on a ship to a matter of minutes.

John, what brings us here?

Well, this is one end of a working genuine telegraph link.

The other end is in an entirely separate building

and we are going to use this to send a real message.

-One of us is going to send a message to the other?

-That's the idea.

Excellent. You stay here with that

and send me a message, with this, over there.

-Off you go.

-Right. You come with me.

Right. What am I going to send?

I'll think of one word that describes Dom.

Morse Code machines could send messages over huge distances.

Today, we're just 500 metres away.

Come on. Don't take the stairs.

As long as there was electrical wire running between the two points,

you could send messages over any distance.

Right, Dom's in place, so I'm going to send him

a word that best describes him,

and that word is FIDGET.

Right, here we go.

So F.

Dit, dit, deee, dit! So that's definitely an F.

What was that one again? Oh, no.

Right! Let's see what he comes up with.

Did that sound about right?

More or less.

The first letter was feh...

then aah...

Bear with us, everyone, this might take some time!

Fuff.

What you having for tea?

-Sausage.

-Sausage.

Fuffet.

Going away?

-Yes.

-Where?

-Italy, next week.

Next week? Hurry up, Dom!

Fufeet. Fufeet.

-And yourself?

-Yeah, just got back from Ibiza.

-Very nice.

-Mm.

And then there was a definite dee-dit-dit. FID.

Right, I've got it. And I know this is definitely the word!

Ah, what's that I hear? The pitter-patter of tiny feet?

You got a word? It was the word to best describe you.

Is the word...FIDGET?

-Yes!

-Unbelievable.

Result, and that is all thanks to this man.

Morse, you are an absolute genius.

Bip-beep-beep...

Thanks to the invention of Morse code

and the genius of the electrical pulse,

we could chat all across the world almost instantly.

After this, the way we communicate changed for ever.

Still to come we find out how this...

BOOM

..paved the way for Wi-Fi...

And we see how technology might make our brains...

Oh, no!

..the phones of the future.

That is genius.

But not all communication has been so great...

-because now it's time for...

-The Not So Genius Idea...

The year 2000 saw the arrival

of a new hi-tech way for us all to communicate...

..the Amstrad E-mailer!

It was released at a time when we were all discovering the internet.

And this fantastical device allowed us to send texts,

receive e-mails, surf the web and make calls,

all from a landline phone that had a keyboard built into it.

All quite impressive.

But back when it was released,

there were already loads of websites offering free e-mail,

and the Amstrad E-mailer used to charge you every time you sent one.

Ooh!

Definitely not so genius.

We've already witnessed the genius of Morse,

who revolutionised the way we communicated

through the telegraph, but things have moved on a lot since then.

Nowadays we all communicate

using our mobile phones, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

But none of that would have been possible without our next genius,

scientist and Hollywood actor Hedy Lamarr.

You sound as if you disapprove.

During the Second World War,

Hedy Lamarr was married to a man who sold weapons to the Nazis.

Fearing for her life,

Hedy fled Europe to America where she became a Hollywood actor.

And she came up with a secret communications system that allowed

torpedoes to override jamming signals so they hit their target.

-Really?

-Really.

Hedy's system was later adapted

so that messages could be sent by the military secretly.

And later it became crucial in the development of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth,

which is used in loads of communication gadgets

that we use today.

But how on earth does this technology work?

I don't know... Maybe there's some wireless connection

-that's invisible or something?

-I have absolutely no idea.

Oi!

Are you ready?

Meet Fran, our scientist friend

who can explain things in a way even we can understand.

Oh!

And she loves a good experiment.

-Exactly.

-Best of all, she pops up whenever we need her most.

I heard you two want to know how Wi-Fi and Bluetooth works.

-Yes, please.

-Of course they do!

Well, I've got a way to explain it that even you two will understand.

-Even us two?

-Even you two!

-What you trying to say, Franny?

I like the sound of this.

Now this is a radio-controlled car.

-It's not, is it?!

-Ten points.

OK, I'm starting simple with you guys.

But the reason it's a called a radio-controlled car

is because the way the signal gets through from my controller

to the car is via invisible waves of energy called radio waves.

The thing is we don't only use radio waves to control cars -

we also use them to transmit television programmes,

to look at objects in space. We also use them

to exchange information with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

But the fact that we use them for so many different things

does lead to some problems.

-So you mean they crash into each other.

-Exactly.

It's known as interference -

what happens is the signal from one radio wave

can stop another radio wave getting through as it should.

Let me show you, right?

This is your controller, or your transmitter.

-There you go.

-Oh, exciting, hey? Brings back to the school days.

And this is your car!

What's that?!

This is a radio-controlled car with blowtorch on top.

-Of course it is, Fran.

-So that's your car.

Your mission is to drive your car - and blowtorch - to that fuse.

Light the fuse and set the reaction going.

What our Fran is actually getting us to do

is recreate Hedy Lamarr's original genius idea

to get a torpedo to hit its target.

Torpedoes used to use a fixed radio frequency to guide them.

This meant they could easily be intercepted,

which would mean they would miss.

So in this experiment, our remote control car

is the torpedo and the barrel is our submarine.

Bring it on.

So we actually get to do this?

Yeah, I trust you guys, which might be a mistake, to do it.

-I'll light the blowtorch, then.

-No, no, I'll light the blowtorch.

-You don't trust us.

-No. Let's go to our starting point over here.

With us all in place,

it's time to send our remote-controlled torpedo

on its way.

Go!

That's it! Go on, a bit more.

Oh, it's stuck - it's not moving.

Hold on a minute - what's this?

Well, the thing is, I've got a controller, as well,

so what I'm doing is I'm controlling it at the same time.

So my radio waves are interfering with your radio waves.

Your signal can't get through, and you can't control your car.

But this was where Hedy Lamarr's genius was, right?

She thought, instead of just transmitting on the same frequency,

there were loads of radio wave frequencies.

So what you can do it actually hop or jump from frequency to frequency

to frequency, and each one has a little bit of the message.

So then if you get interference

it's only a little bit of your message that gets lost.

And using that method of frequency-hopping,

she could make sure the torpedo could get to its target submarine.

So all you need to do is change the frequency on your transmitter.

-So if you change it to another one...

-Right, ready.

-Let's do it.

-OK.

Right, going towards it.

Left a bit, left a bit.

Right a bit.

That's it!

Oh!

It's going to go! It's going to go!

BOOM

-Bosh!

-Boom!

-Amazing.

-Nice work!

Double bosh!

Torpedo hits submarine.

That's all down to Hedy Lamarr and her frequency-hopping

and by doing that, your signal could get through to your car

and we could get the explosion.

Well done, Hedy.

Explosive stuff, boys.

With Hedy's invention of frequency-hopping,

communications now weren't restricted to using

one radio frequency,

and interference was a thing of the past.

This technology is now used in Wi-Fi to give us

a seamless connection to the internet

as it hops from frequency to frequency without us even knowing!

Now we can even video call the other side of the world

and it's all thanks to Hedy's explosive genius!

BOOM

THEY LAUGH

Still to come!

Dick and I are going to be using our brains in a quiz like no other.

Go on, lad!

We'll only be able to answer using the power of our minds.

Thanks to today's technology, we use electricity to communicate.

And we can connect anywhere in the world, thanks to Wi-Fi.

But how are we going to communicate in the future?

What? have you got it yet?

-I can't read minds!

-Ah, well, you might be able to one day,

thanks to our next genius.

Introducing Giulio Ruffini.

Buenos dias, boys.

What?

I'm having a private chat, with him. Do you mind?

Just concentrate.

Ever since the word "telepathy" was first used to describe

sending thoughts to one another,

it only seemed only possible in science fiction and horror stories.

But with advances in technology,

Ruffini and his team, in 2014,

managed to achieve the impossible.

He managed to get two people,

one in France and one in India,

to communicate by their thoughts alone.

Truly genius!

To explain this futuristic technology

is top brain scientist

Dr Alejandro Riera.

He's got over 10 years' experience working with brains.

Alejandro, lovely to meet you. How you doing?

-Nice to meet you too.

-So, thanks to Ruffini,

you were the first person to send a message

-from your brain to another brain?

-That's right.

How do you do that?

Well, by using this technology,

decoding some information from the brain,

I was thinking some thoughts and

the same information was imputing

from one brain to another brain.

My brain's starting to hurt just thinking about this.

Are we going to be able to communicate

and have whole conversations without talking?

In the future, it will be possible.

Actually, in our case,

we were able to say hello and

we took one hour and a half.

So, at the moment I think it's much faster to send an e-mail.

But everything started somewhere, right?

This sounds like the very beginnings of the future

of how we are going to do things.

-Can we have a go?

-Yeah, sure.

Everything seems a little bit complicated,

but I think it's better if I just show you how it works.

Sounds good.

I think this is going to be a lot of fun!

Right, I am now a human guinea pig, but, Alejandro,

why have I go this attached to my head?

Well, we have attached this system to your head

in order to see your brainwaves and to show

how these brainwaves represent in this nice model.

In which, we can see, for instance,

when a person thinks about moving his feet,

we will have activity in this point, just on top of the head,

and, when thinking about moving the hands,

we will have activity in these two parts of the brain.

So, what you're saying is different thoughts

-cause activity in different parts of the brain?

-Exactly.

And, in this instance, just thinking about his feet

makes this part of his brain active, and hands, here.

So, that means you at home, have a go.

Think about moving your feet now.

You doing it? You're using that bit of your brain!

Think about moving your hands, just think. You're using here.

That's incredible.

By understanding how different parts of the brain are used,

Ruffini's team were able to design a simple bat-and-ball game.

Whenever Dick thinks of his feet,

the ball goes down,

and thinking only of his hands makes the ball go up.

The idea is to hit the target, by the power of your thoughts.

Look! Dick's brain!

By doing this, it's possible to send a two-word message,

or even Morse code!

Whoo-hoo!

To be totally clear, I'm only THINKING about moving my hands

and THINKING about moving my feet -

-I am not actually going to move them.

-Exactly.

-Right.

Service.

-There we go.

-The trick is to not to move, not to speak.

By only thinking of my hands or feet,

I'm actually moving the ball to hit the target -

but it's really difficult and takes a lot of concentration.

See what I mean?

(Yes! That's incredible.)

But with some practice, I start to get the hang of it.

-Hands, hands, hands, hands!

-Good.

It's amazing.

And he's really doing that, just by thinking about his hands?

That's the sending part of communication under control,

but how does someone receive the message in their brain?

Hi, Chris. How are you doing?

What's your job?

So, I'm running the stimulators

that are going to transmit

the information we get from Dick's brain

into Hannah's head.

So, these machines will send an electrical pulse

into Hannah's brain,

which will then tell her to move her hand.

Yep. They're big magnets,

so they work by magnetism

and they make the brain activity change

and that should make her hands twitch.

So, if we stimulate on the right-hand side of her brain,

it should make her left hand twitch.

By sending strong magnetic pulses

to different areas of your brain,

it can make you move different parts of your body -

whether you want to move them or not.

This is truly future tech.

-So, Hannah...

-Yes.

..are you totally fine with this?

I am totally fine with this.

Right, we need to see this.

OK, so...

-ELECTRICAL CLICK

-Oh, no.

Hang on a minute, is that actually hurting you?

It sounds like an electrical shock is making you twitch.

-Is it like a shock?

-No, it doesn't hurt at all.

-It's just stimulating your brain to make your hand move.

-Yes.

THAT is genius.

By using technology that observes

different activities in your brain,

Ruffini has written computer programmes that can send messages

just from your thoughts.

Hands, hands, hands.

And, by using electronic pulses,

the message can then be transferred

into someone else's head.

Oh, no!

I think we need to put this state-of-the-art tech to use

in our genius tech challenge.

Here's the plan.

Using the technology developed by our third genius, Ruffini,

Dick and I are going head-to-head

with brainbox Alejandro Riera,

in the first ever brain-to-brain quiz!

We'll each be given three incredibly easy questions

where we'll try to communicate the answers,

just by the power of thought.

Using the bat-and-ball game, from earlier in the show,

we will have to hit the target if the answer's A

and miss it for B.

The question is, will the power of our brains

be enough to beat Alejandro's?

Time to get this quiz started...

It's that time of the week again,

where we get the old grey matter working.

It's the only show where you don't say the answers,

you think them!

It's The Brain Game!

And here's our very own brain -

-science queen Fran!

-APPLAUSE

Welcome to the world's first ever brain-to-brain quiz.

And our contestants today are...

Alejandro, a pioneer of brain to brain technology.

His PhD is in computational intelligent techniques

applied to electro-physicality data analysis.

APPLAUSE

And, on my left, we have Dick and Dom.

ONE PERSON COUGHS AMID SILENCE

There's going to be three questions each

and the answer will either be A or B.

You've got only the power of your brain to come up with the answer.

Alejandro, please take your seat.

APPLAUSE

This is not your typical quiz,

because it's not about knowing the answer,

it's about being able to send it using just the power of your brain.

Once an answer has been given,

it will be transferred into Hannah's brain

and will make her arms involuntarily twitch.

Twitchy!

Alejandro, are you ready?

Here comes your first question.

In what year was the internet invented?

The first ever bits of information

were sent over the internet back in 1969.

So, Alejandro has to think the right answer

to send it to Hannah.

And his answer is...

A.

Correct.

It's a good start for Alejandro,

but now time for Dick to get his brain into gear.

Go on, Rich.

Here's your first question.

How many words do we speak, on average, in one day?

A billion words is a lot of talking,

so the answer is 13,000,

which Dick has to think up to Hannah -

but does he have the brainpower?

Correct, my old friend!

It's one-all. Alejandro must now try to take the lead.

In what year was the telephone invented?

Alexander Graham Bell made the first telephone back in 1876.

Alejandro must concentrate hard to send the right answer

to Hannah's brain.

Well done!

Alejandro has two answers correct,

the pressure is now well and truly on for Dom

as his brain takes the stage.

Which language has the most words for snow?

There are 50 different words for snow in Inuit!

Dom has to try and send the answer B to Hannah's brain.

That is incorrect, young man!

It's Alejandro's third and final question.

If he gets this right, there's no way back for the boys.

What percentage of the world's population

has access to the internet?

A recently study showed that just over 40% of the world's

population had access to the internet.

If Alejandro can send the answer A to Hannah's brain, he wins.

Yes!

That, of course, means today's winner is Alejandro,

but commiserations to the losers, Dick and Dom.

-Congratulations!

-Congratulations, old boy!

It doesn't surprise me one bit that a doctor of neuro-science

beat Dick and Dom!

On today's show, we've learnt that the way we communicate

has been made much easier, thanks to today's geniuses.

Their genius ideas have made it possible to keep in touch

with everyone almost instantly.

And we've had a glimpse at the communication of the future!

It's amazing!

-They're all...

-Bip-bip-bip-bip-beep.

-BOTH: Absolute Genius!

-Whoo-hoo!

THEY LAUGH

Argh!

THEY LAUGH

Where's Rich gone?

-It's stopped!

-Argh!

The long line is a... Beep!

ARGH!

Wow.

His head's fallen off.

How did you find that?

"Blew my head off."

THEY LAUGH You can't end it like that.