Dick and Dom's Tech Absolute Genius Super Tech with Dick & Dom

-This is... BOTH:

-Absolute Genius.

Aaagghh!

Love technology? Love gadgets?

Love this.

'In this explosive series of Absolute Genius...'

EXPLOSIONS AND CHEERING

'..we've looked at some of the most incredible technology...'

This is mind-blowing!

'..from the past, present and future.'

Stop!

'But in this show, it's our turn to choose the tech.

'We're going to travel back to the dawn of technology

'to look at our favourite tech innovations.

'To see how they work

'and find out how they changed our lives at home.

'We've got the help of tech experts...'

Think Star Wars, basically.

You're looking at your phone but this image comes out of it

and you can talk to it, maybe interact with it.

'..our celeb friends...'

-Everyone was like...

-HE GASPS

They're bringing a new channel, there's now five channels!

'..and our science buddy, Fran.'

True genius.

It's genius.

Absolute genius.

Technology is everywhere.

There are gadgets to clean your room. Ooh!

Apps where you can stream your favourite music.

And some amazing ways to help you spend your spare time.

Got it, ha! There is barely any time in the day

when we're not using some form of technology.

But not so long ago, some of our favourite tech didn't exist at all.

So, we're going to take you on a journey through time and space.

On this epic journey, we're going back in time to explore

five of the greatest technological innovations that have

transformed our lives at home and meet the geniuses behind them.

From the origins of telecommunications,

to the birth of the World Wide Web.

OK, shall we do a bit of TV time travel?

-Go on, then.

-Here we go.

The first on our list of tech breakthroughs happened

well over 100 years ago.

But we still use it every single day today.

-Ah!

-So, look, here we are, our first stop in 1876.

But what happened in 1876?

Well, Queen Victoria was on the throne.

This tune was the top song of the year.

CRACKLY MUSIC PLAYS

And this thing made its first appearance.

-Yes - the telephone.

-Hello?

In the 21st century, there are more phones than people,

but, in 1876, there is just one,

and the genius that invented it was Alexander Graham Bell.

He created a device that turned the voice into an electrical signal

and for the first time ever, people could speak

to one another from a distance.

'Hello?'

But Mr Bell didn't want people to greet each other on the phone

by saying... IN POSH VOICE: Hello?

He wanted them to say... IN POSH VOICE: Ahoy!

That didn't catch on, but the telephone certainly did.

PHONE RINGS

Ahoy?

The telephone certainly was a genius invention, but how did it work?

How did it work, Belly?

Please leave a message after the beep. Beep!

Oh, how very helpful.

Well, if only we had a piece of tech

that could explain how all this tech works.

-We have.

-What?

-The Fran App.

-The Fran App?

-The Fran App.

Fran tells us all about technology.

Brilliant. Extend your digit. Press it.

Oi! Are you ready?

This is Fran.

She's our scientist friend who can explain stuff

in a way that even we can understand.

-Here's the magnet.

-Yes.

-Oh.

And in this show, she's going to explain how our favourite tech works.

Exactly.

Believe it or not,

the telephone that Bell invented was not unlike my telephone here.

It's a bit more complicated than that, Fran.

You talk into this cup

and the vibrations from the sound of your voice travel along

the string and then make the cup at the other end vibrate

and act like a speaker.

Bell's genius idea was to turn the vibrations from the sound

of his voice into an electrical signal.

So instead of just travelling along a short string, the signal could

travel for miles, and then at the other end,

be converted back into vibrations and played out of a speaker.

-That's absolute genius.

-I know!

Bell's telephone was an incredible invention.

And without him, we wouldn't have one of these.

-What's that?

-It's my mobile.

-No, it's not.

-Yes, it is.

HE MAKES BEEPING SOUNDS See?

-No, it's not!

-Yes, it is!

-No, it's not, it's mine, give it back!

The first ever call on a mobile was made in 1973,

But back then, they only worked for 30 minutes

and took ten hours to charge.

When mobiles first came out, the handsets were huge.

Nearly as big as their cost -

early models could cost around £3,000.

But what were our celebrity friends' first mobile phones like?

My first mobile phone was about this big,

had an aerial about this big that you could pull out.

My first phone was that simple,

it couldn't even keep track of the time.

It would take hours to charge up

and then the battery lasted about three minutes.

I can't tell you how excited I was when I got my first mobile phone,

it was huge!

Over time, the size of handsets began to shrink...

..whilst their power increased.

And phones stopped being all about...

phone calls.

And in 1992, text messages first appeared on our phones.

My first mobile phone, there was a feature, I remember, on it

that said 'text message'.

And you could only hold ten text messages, so once you got to nine

or ten, you had to delete one before you could get another one in!

I think it was 10p a text so I used to be able to send about

one per day, my mum allowed me.

Basically, all you could do was either...phone call,

text and play Snake.

And Snake was...I mean Snake was the bomb!

Everybody played Snake.

The legend goes that you can actually complete Snake.

You can eat so many of the little... I don't know what they're called...

Pixelated apple things and your Snake can end up getting so long

that you just complete the game,

but no-one's ever actually seen it so...

A mate of mine says he did it once. No-one else saw it,

I think he's lying, to be honest with you.

The question is, what will our phones be like in the future?

We asked some tech experts

and what they have to say might blow your mind.

Telephones will become kind of seamless.

They'll be in our clothing,

they might even be kind of hard-wired in our bodies.

Your mobile phone will look nothing like it looks today,

in five to ten years' time.

It'll be a wearable product.

There seems to be a lot of excitement

around holographic technology, you know, think Star Wars, basically.

You're looking at your phone but this image comes out of it

and you can talk to it, maybe interact with it.

Thanks to the genius of Bell, you can now speak to who you want,

when you want.

The phone is one true genius idea, but throughout history

there have been one or two not so genius tech ideas.

It's the Not So Genius Idea.

Mobiles were a genius idea,

but some early phone networks - not so much.

One network, called Rabbit, opened for business in 1989

and the phones worked great -

just as long as you were stood in a specific area

marked by a Rabbit sign.

Great if you're in the city, but not so much in the countryside.

Not so surprisingly, Rabbit Phone only attracted

10,000 subscribers, most of whom were huddled

around a Rabbit sign together.

And the network closed.

Definitely not so genius.

One genius invention down - four to go.

Our next genius tech idea revolutionised

how we're entertained in our homes.

It's the TV and we watch nearly four hours of it every day.

You can watch TV on your phones, your tablet, computer console,

-on demand, even on your...

-What?

-..TV.

You can watch TV anywhere and at any time.

But TV didn't always used to be this great.

-Shall we have a look?

-Why not? Press that button.

Next stop on our Tech Time Tour is the 1920s.

IN POSH VOICE: Back then, things were very different.

Why are you talking like that?

IN POSH VOICE: Because back in the olden days,

-everyone talked like this.

-Right. Well, stop it.

-OK.

In the 1920s,

home entertainment was all about the radio.

That was until tech genius John Logie Baird came along.

Back in the 1920s, the only way to watch any kind of moving pictures

was to go to the cinema.

So, lots of people were trying to bring the big screen to our homes,

and the person that did it first was Scotsman John Logie Baird.

Baird's television was an incredible mechanical system.

And very, very complex.

The first ever TV involved... knitting needles.

The lid from a hatbox.

A cotton bobbin.

The lamp from a bicycle.

And for good measure, a coffin lid.

Somehow, Baird put all of these elements together to create

a spinning disc-based scanning system,

which actually made a working television picture.

But how did this random collection of junk actually make a TV?

-Hey, less of the junk, you!

-Sorry!

-Well, lucky for you lot, the Fran App's back.

-Hey!

Look, there it is! Go on, extend your digit. Press it.

John Logie Baird's invention was incredible.

There was a spinning disc with lots of holes in

and each of these holes was in a slightly different place,

so each of them had a slightly different view

of what was being filmed.

Correct so far!

If the part the hole was looking at was light,

then a lot of light would come through.

The light was then converted into an electric pulse.

This electric pulse was then sent on to a second disc

and this disc would make the picture.

And that is the genius of John Logie Baird.

Logie Baird's television was the first ever to transmit pictures.

And a picture looked a little bit like this.

-Not exactly brilliant, is it?

-Nah.

That's better.

But you're probably wondering what this is all about

and what this is all about.

Well, if you appeared on Logie Baird's format of television,

you'd have to wear yellow and blue make-up, just to be seen.

-Don't think it's going to catch on, really.

-No.

I mean, you look like Kevin the Minion.

Well, you look like a banana!

This is direct television from the studios at Alexandra Palace.

In the end, a different way of broadcasting pictures

overtook Baird and a new system was developed with a far better picture.

Early TV sets looked like this - not much bigger than

the size of your phone screen now.

Back then, some people used to try and make their screen look bigger,

using a magnifying glass.

But what were our celebrity friends' first TVs like?

My first TV was black and white

and you had to get up off your chair or wherever you were,

to go and press the button if you wanted to change the channel.

Can you believe that?

Get up and press the button to change the channel?

I got quite adept at throwing a tennis ball in the general

direction of the telly to try and change the channel.

We didn't have any choice. We had a couple of channels.

I think back when I was growing up, there were only four channels.

And I remember Channel 5 coming out.

-Everyone was like...

-HE GASPS

They're bringing a new channel, there's now five channels!

If you wanted to watch something on a Friday at nine o'clock,

you had to sit in, Friday at nine o'clock.

Imagine - you had to race home to watch a programme,

and if you missed it, that was it, you missed it.

Sometimes it was a choice between,

do I go in the shop after school and get a bar of chocolate

or do I get home to watch my favourite show?

That's a decision no-one should have to make

and thankfully, now, we don't have to.

TV has changed massively since Logie Baird's contraption

but what will it be like in the future?

We asked our tech experts.

I think, in the future,

we're going to move towards really detailed content.

You're going to be able to see every blade of grass, every raindrop,

even in more detail than you can see it now.

We might actually be able to have things beamed small onto glasses

or even onto the retina,

so you can watch things as well as interacting with other people.

TV is genius and it's all thanks to Logie Baird.

Time for our next genius tech invention.

For our next innovation, we're in the '50s.

Now, in this decade,

people looked to the skies.

Our next innovation takes us to space.

Believe it or not,

so much of the technology we use today is reliant on being in space.

Right now there are about 1,100 satellites working

above our heads, bringing us GPS, internet connections and TV shows.

But we wouldn't have any of that, had genius space pioneer,

Sergei Korolev, not sent the first satellite into space -

the Sputnik 1.

After that, the world went space wild and technology changed forever.

I love space, I do. Just to think there are all those satellites

orbiting around above our heads.

But how do they work?

It's all thanks to me.

-Well, I don't know how it works.

-Neither do I.

Fran it.

Good idea.

Satellites are genius, though how they work is actually quite simple.

They're like giant mirrors in space.

Information is beamed up to them from Earth,

which could be a telephone call or a TV show that's being broadcast,

or in this case, my laser light.

Put that away, Fran, you will blind someone!

As the satellite is way up in space,

it can see a lot more of Earth than we can,

so information is simply reflected off them,

back down to Earth.

With one satellite covering a lot of ground.

So this means we can not only easily communicate over the entire globe,

but we can also see and monitor the Earth from high above.

I'm a genius, innit?

As people, we don't realise how vital satellites are -

for phones, for navigation.

They're being used so much without us even taking a second thought

about them, really.

If you've got a satellite on the outside of your house,

that's facing a satellite in the sky that is directly above Britain

all of the time.

Satellites are amazing,

but with so many of them orbiting the Earth, it can cause problems.

They do collide, they do crash into each other sometimes.

About two years ago, an American satellite and a Russian satellite

crashed into each other. They were instantly vaporised

because they were both travelling at ridiculously fast speeds.

Satellites have given us some top tech right now on Earth

but what about technology in the future?

Here's our genius top five future tech.

At five - ever wanted to grow your own meat?

Because scientists have already artificially grown

a burger in a lab, but it cost a quarter of a million pounds to make!

-TILL RINGS

-Oof!

At four - it's Nanobatteries.

These mini batteries are set to be smaller than a human hair

and offer three times the charge capacity of current batteries.

At three - it's telepathy.

Facebook's big boss Mark Zuckerberg

reckons in the future, we'll be ditching the keyboard

and thinking our messages from our brains.

Good thinking, Mark.

At two - it's graphene.

It already exists and is the strongest material in the world.

In the future, it could be used to make super-thin, super-strong TVs.

And at one - it's bioprinting.

It will soon be possible to print parts of the human body.

Scientists are working on tech to print fully-working human organs.

I just hope one day they can print me a new co-host.

Watch it!

Next stop on our Tech Time Tour is...

..the '80s.

It was a decade of dodgy music...

# Never gonna give you up... #

..dodgy fashion...

# Never gonna let you down... #

And a decade where the genius invention of computer games

went massive.

It was all the way back in 1966 when gaming genius Ralph Baer

began to look at ways of creating computer games that you could

play on your home TV.

A year later, he created the first ever gaming console prototypes.

Fast forward to the 1980s and gaming is big news

and there is an explosion in home computer companies

who all wanted to get in on the game.

Sega and Nintendo came from Japan.

Commodore and Atari came from North America.

And here in the UK, we were making our own games machines, too.

Yes, in the UK, it was all about the ZX Spectrum,

complete with games like Stunt Car Racer.

Throughout the 1980s, gaming technology changed

beyond all recognition, but why?

-Well, I'm not going to tell you.

-Who is?

-The Frapp!

Game over.

This is a computer's RAM, which stands for Random Access Memory.

And it's a bit like the notebook of the computer world.

It's where the computer temporarily stores information.

At the beginning of the 1980s, the RAM could hold just 128 bytes

and that meant, the games you could play looked like this.

Oh!

But ten years on, the RAM could hold more than 60,000 bytes

and that meant the games looked like this.

Better!

Nowadays, we can fit more than eight billion bytes on to the RAM,

which is why we've got such awesome games.

I love RAM!

Cheers, Franny, but what kind of gaming tech did our celebrities have?

I used to love computer games.

I had the Super Nintendo which we called the SNES.

I had the Megadrive with Sonic on it. Loved Sonic.

I never had a first video console.

I had a computer.

It was called a Dragon.

You couldn't buy games for it, you bought magazines, and the magazines

would have all the coding, line by line in basic,

and then once you'd typed it and saved it, you had a game.

Back then, it was a massive computer, on a table,

and you'd have to go upstairs into that special room

and fight your little brother to play on it.

The thing is, with a lot of those old consoles,

you didn't have any save function.

I know it sounds mad to say it now, you weren't able to save.

So, say, for example, if I got up extra early to play a couple of

computer games before school, and I got to a really far level,

I'd hit pause, turn off my TV, go to school, come back and carry on

playing cos I didn't want to lose the point that I was on in my game.

My mum started to get suspicious

when the electricity bills would come in, but I never told her

anything. I suppose the truth's kind of out there now, though, isn't it?

Today, gaming has become an immersive experience

and in the future, virtual reality technology will take the gamer

off their sofa and into the game.

By the time it comes to the mainstream, gaming is just going to

blow people's minds. It's just going to be unbelievable.

It's gaming that we've never experienced before, I think.

You will be able to transport yourself into a different world

and all your senses...

..will start to think it's a different world.

I think the future of computer games,

it's going to get to the point where people can actually step

into the computer game and battle aliens themselves.

Imagine that, cocker, it'd be great, wouldn't it?

On our tech time-travelling journey, we've seen some of the biggest

innovations that have changed our home lives forever.

But our last genius technological breakthrough

is perhaps the biggest of them all.

Welcome to Switzerland, 1989.

There's chocolate, there's skiing, but there's no World Wide Web.

Where did the World Wide Web come from?

Oh, sorry. Couldn't help myself.

-The chocolate was for us, not just for you.

-Have that bit.

Anyway, here's how the World Wide Web began.

Get off.

Back in 1954, 12 European countries began to work together

in Switzerland on a project to find about the physics of the universe.

'This is CERN.

'The European organisation for nuclear research in Geneva,

'only yards from the French frontier.'

CERN was a big success and by 1989, the team were uncovering

so much information, that storing all the data was becoming a big problem.

So, in stepped genius computer scientist, Tim Berners-Lee,

who had a brilliant plan on how to share the data.

And this is that plan right here.

It might not look like much,

but this was the basic plan for the World Wide Web.

Look at this -

Information Management: A Proposal.

But Tim Berners-Lee's boss wrote at the top, "Vague but exciting."

And from this vague but exciting proposal,

Tim Berners-Lee went on to create the World Wide Web.

And in 1991, the first website went live and this was it.

It looks pretty basic,

but it went on to be something truly massive.

The problem is, no-one really actually knows what the difference

between the World Wide Web and the internet actually is.

-Fran? Fran?

-Pardon?

-Fran it!

Tim Berners-Lee was a true genius for creating the World Wide Web

in 1989, but the four parts that make up the World Wide Web,

actually existed before then.

Firstly - the internet.

This allowed computers to connect to other computers.

Second - hypertext.

This allowed you to click on a certain word

and then get taken through to another page of information.

Thirdly - Universal Resource Locator, or URL.

This was just used to name sites.

Fourth - HTML.

Now this was a computer programming language,

which allowed pages to display fonts of different sizes

and to display colours and pictures.

What Tim Berners-Lee did was bring these four components together,

to give us the World Wide Web.

After the invention of the World Wide Web in 1989, it was still

years until it became widely available in people's homes.

And even when it did, things were pretty slow.

I remember really clearly, getting the internet

and I remember us having a go at the internet for the first time.

Ha! So slow.

So slow.

Back then it was just, right, if you were trying to get on the internet,

nothing else goes on, you just focus on that.

You didn't just switch on your computer

and get up your web browser, you had, like, connects.

I remember the internet used to make a weird, weird noise.

DIAL TONE BLEEPS

INTERNET CONNECTION BEEPS

THEY MIMIC THE INTERNET CONNECTION NOISE

HACKER MAKES HIGH-PITCHED SQUEAKING SOUNDS

THEY MIMIC THE INTERNET CONNECTION NOISE

I've no idea what that noise was, what it was for,

but for some reason, it happened and there you were -

connected to the internet.

And then, this kind of new world popped up onto your screen.

Then, it would take about ten minutes for the page to load.

And this is the worst thing, right, if your mum picked up the phone

to speak to your Auntie Sandra, it cut you off the internet.

Oh, it was a nightmare.

Nowadays, the web is huge.

Every minute, there are a massive four million searches on Google.

And - get this - every day, there are 1.8 billion photos

uploaded or shared on the Web.

If you took all of those photos and printed them out onto a picture,

and then stacked them on top of each other...

..then, that stack of photos

would actually be five times higher than Mount Everest!

We just take the internet so much for granted.

I can't think of a single thing that I do in my day,

that doesn't involve the internet.

The internet and me, we're like that.

There's no breaking us.

What a bizarre thing, to have all of human knowledge

in the palm of your hand.

On my phone, I have access to anything I want to know.

Who built Stonehenge? Who built the Pyramids?

What year was the moon landing?

I can find all of this out in an instant.

And what do we...? We like looking at cat videos.

The World Wide Web and the internet have come a long way,

but what will it be like in the future?

I think the next step of the internet

is what they say is called the internet of things.

So not just the connectivity of computer to computer,

but everything.

Essentially, it means, taking bog-standard appliances

and everyday items and connecting those things to the internet.

This could be something as simple as your light bulbs.

They're internet-connected light bulbs which you can control

from anywhere in the world.

We're seeing refrigerators, ovens, washing machines,

all these things connected to the internet.

Ultimately, to make life a bit more easier for you.

So, there we have it.

From surprising origins came a truly genius idea

that has transformed our lives.

In this episode, we've learnt about five geniuses

whose genius technology has transformed the way we live.

And in the next episode, it's your turn.

In September 2015, we made a massive announcement.

We are looking for an absolute tech genius.

We want you to design a piece of tech for the future.

-This is a contest like no other.

-Oh, my life!

Eight tech fans have been chosen to take part,

and like us in this series,

they'll have to face their own genius tech challenges.

Is this his brain?

From those eight, only three will get to be the first ever kids

to go to CES in Las Vegas -

the world's largest tech show.

Not only that, they will then travel to Silicon Valley to go inside

the headquarters of the largest tech company on the planet - Apple!

There, they will get to meet Apple's Chief Design Officer -

the one and only, Sir Jonathan Ive.

But, only one will be crowned the Absolute Tech Genius.

LAUGHTER

Where's Rich gone?

-It's stopped!

-Aaaaggghh!

Along the line is a... HE MAKES A BURBLING NOISE

Wow! His head's fallen off!

How did you find that? 'Blew my head off.'

You can't end it like that!