The Joy of Tech Britain on Film

Every day is another step into the press-button age.

The pushing of buttons regulates your water supply.

You can even water your garden automatically.

Almost everything you want done, in fact,

can be performed at the turn of a knob or the push of a button,

inside the home or out of it.

Whether it's an improvement on yesterday's iron

or a pocket radio with valves the size of shirt buttons,

almost everything we touch

is another manifestation of the automatic era.

BIG BAND MUSIC PLAYS

Today's new gadget is tomorrow's commonplace,

soon to be taken as much for granted, say, as our daily milk.

Milk is now another highly mechanised industry,

operating at the touch of a switch,

right through to its delivery to your door.

As for the biscuit you take with your morning tea,

now, that really is a press-button product.

It starts its life in this huge automatic mixer,

which signals when it's ready to make a fresh batch

and a mechanical brain sets to work

piping the precise amount of every ingredient to the mixer.

It's conveyed, rolled, cut into shapes,

baked, coated, cooled, wrapped and weighed again,

all automatically, in a vast factory

where machinery seems to have taken over from man almost entirely.

But the industry we take most for granted of all

is the one behind that ordinary light switch - electricity itself,

the lifeblood of the press-button age.

It feeds our automatic brains, works the projector showing this film,

spreads light in our darkening streets.

It has to keep working all the time, adjusting its supply

to the varying calls of a whole country busily pushing buttons.

The Berkeley Nuclear Power Station, on the banks of the River Severn,

is one of the world's first two generating stations

to produce commercial power from nuclear energy.

With its sister station Bradwell in Essex,

Berkeley takes the everyday business of generating electricity

into the strange, awesome world of atomic physics.

Uranium rods do the job that coal or oil do in an ordinary power station.

Here are the turbine generators, all perfectly conventional -

only the source of the heat is different.

All the while, stringent precautions go on to protect the staff

and to protect the reactor from the outside world.

This sensitive giant, a sun imprisoned in steel and concrete.

This man has the simplest and safest of jobs -

he handles uranium in bulk, all perfectly harmless

until the elements challenge each other deep down in the reactor,

and the broiling chain reaction starts.

From the store to the fuel preparation room.

Here is a uranium rod covered in magnesium.

It's an inch thick. It's less than two feet long.

It's the key to the miracle of the world we live in.

And off it goes to the loading machine,

and so on its way to one of the station's two reactors.

The rods can stay down in the reactor for up to three years,

and all the time, they're being steadily replaced.

These rods are not just too hot to handle -

that would be the understatement of the century.

They are first to be plunged into a cooling bath called a pond,

where they will languish for about three months,

during which time they will be studied.

The modern nuclear power station worker

goes through his precautionary cleansing routines.

If he'd had a dose of radiation,

this Geiger counter would really rouse the whole department

with the sound of bells. It doesn't.

A big thermonuclear reactor is at least as safe as an Atlantic liner

but regulations demand that the check and double check never cease.

500 people look after the whole operation,

from doorman to chief scientist.

There is a great surge upwards in the demand for power.

More and more stations will be built to meet the demand.

Seven of them will be nuclear.

Not cheap, costly to lay down,

but carrying in them, bedded down in deep layers of protective concrete,

the very sun in fury.

The forces of law and order are continually devising new weapons.

The watchman in this Bond Street store, armed only with a truncheon,

may look no match for an armed bandit.

But watch that switch.

It operates radio waves that set off the shop's alarm system.

Modern science is making life harder

for lawbreakers of every description.

That dome on the left sends out sound waves that cannot be heard,

but if anyone interrupted them, they'd send out a signal.

This projector puts out invisible rays that do the same thing

if anyone crosses them.

Recognise that number, 999?

When the call goes through, this is what they'll hear at the other end.

'Police, Scotland Yard. Calling Scotland Yard.

'Burglars have entered the premises of J Smith and Son.'

Alpha Lima 3 from 794,

can I have the assistance of traffic control at Kensington High Street, junction with Old Church Street?

The Ministry of Transport's traffic experiment,

which uses closed circuit cameras at six strategic points,

relies on the radio link with the police on the spot.

The Greater London Council is extending this scheme to the whole of London.

This is ERNIE,

the computer who selects the prize-winning premium savings bonds.

ERNIE is a masterpiece of scientific random,

the most impartial picker of numbers out of a hat in existence.

And if you have the luck to hear from ERNIE,

it's said to be quite an enjoyable experience.

In this electronic age,

computers are rapidly becoming man's best friend.

To look at, they're about as exciting as filing cabinets.

Inside, a jungle of circuits, along which eager electric pulses

can solve mathematical problems at the speed of light.

Computer simply means reckoner.

Since the beginning of time, nature's built-in computers have

played a vital part in reckoning with life and solving its problems.

This little animal has a problem - he wants a meal.

His computer's answer?

Over there, quick! Steady, got it!

From chameleon to car driver.

What goes on in his computer?

The experts would say that a steady visual feedback

is being reviewed against background of the driver's experience,

and reissued as adjustments to his performance.

Are those people going to board that bus?

Yes, so he brakes.

Early in life, he meets his first supplementary computer -

the simplest form of adding machine.

But later, he may need something like this

to enable him to work out the complex calculations in his job,

some of which no human brain could tackle.

You have to put information in before you can get any out,

and it goes in in the form of figures and instructions.

They're coded onto punched tape or punched cards,

which are fed into what is called the memory unit.

It can take hours, days, or even months,

according to the size of the problem,

to work out all the instructions to be fed into the computer,

but once this has been done, it can produce in a flash

the answers to the calculations it's asked to make.

The skill and precision which go into building a computer

explain its high cost.

How much does it cost?

Well, Manchester University has installed

a British-made monster costing over £2 million.

It's said to be the world's most advanced.

It can take half a million instructions per second.

Yesterday, the valve-operated computer was cumbersome.

Today, it shares with the radio the transistor look.

Tomorrow, especially in space machinery,

where every cubic inch is vital,

computers and their component parts will shrink still more.

This shows the shrinking process of one particular component

from man-size to electronic jewellery.

But that's almost big by comparison.

For here are nine transistors mounted on a pin's head.

This is a world where sizes can be compared with

the thickness of a human hair.

These are the telephone girls,

the operators with the pretty, faceless voices

that are such an important part of daily life,

the girls we never see.

20 years ago, there were 35,000 of them in Britain.

They handled 200 million calls a month.

Today, there are nearly three times as many calls,

but nothing like three times as many operators.

For, month by month, Britain's telephone service

becomes more and more automatic.

The latest triumph of the skills of the design engineers

is the Post Office Tower in central London.

This ultra-modern stalagmite

is the main telephone and TV junction of the country.

Its feelers are its microwave aerials, precisely positioned

to pick up signals from the linking stations in the national network.

This 85-foot diameter dish aerial at Goonhilly Down near Land's End

is the British end of the system by which television pictures

can be sent across the Atlantic via the satellite Telstar.

Information giving the exact position of the 170lb satellite,

as it orbits the globe 500 to 2,000 miles high,

is fed into Goonhilly from the United States.

A computer, or electrical brain,

converts this data into angles and rate of passing,

and automatically positions the dish aerial

for the arrival of Telstar over the horizon.

The satellite will take 30 minutes to pass.

Its position must be tracked to one 50th of a second

to get the best reception.

Zero second approaches,

when picture and sound come through simultaneously.

The satellite has been picked up,

slowly the aerial starts tracking it, and the picture comes through.

Goonhilly then relays it to London

for television viewers in Britain and throughout Europe.

At the tower itself, the country's main television switchboard

looks very different from the rows of plugs on the boards of old.

Here, the programmes are monitored before being beamed

to various parts of the BBC and commercial networks.

This sort of work goes on ceaselessly,

and the traffic gets heavier year by year.

Maybe, years from now, the laser beam may be able to carry

far more traffic than can be contained even at the tower today.

The future of telecommunications may belong to it.

When that day comes, the signal box, with its head in the clouds,

will be there, ready to cope.

It's no longer a matter of eating out, but eating high,

and, for background, a constantly shifting view of London

and its surrounding counties.

Here, you satisfy your appetite 520 feet high,

with a pigeon's eye view of the capital that's a revelation,

even to Londoners who thought they knew their own city.

Crossing from the stationary to the moving part of the restaurant

presents no problems,

but for waiters it's sometimes puzzle find-the-customers,

whose table has moved since the waiter took their order.

Orders are transferred to the restaurant two floors down

in miniature high-speed lifts set in the central area of the Tower.

On average, 4,500 people a day take the vertical ride

to the three observation galleries just beneath the restaurant.

There's priority in the lifts

for diners on the way up to the restaurant,

and if the attendants' specially designed uniform caps make them look like space flight conductors,

well, that's just what they are!

These high-speed lifts climb at 1,000 feet a minute,

and if you're not used to vertical take-off,

there's always a first time.

Up here in this world of panorama,

the clear view depends as much on these men as on the weather.

Keeping the Tower's windows clean is a big job,

with 50,000 square feet of glass to look after,

and the window cleaner turns the restaurant's rotation to advantage.

He has the triple-glazed windows come round to him.

The hovercraft shook the world when it made its first public appearance.

And for the inventor, ex-boat builder Christopher Cockerell,

part of a dream had come true.

I started working on the idea in my boat yard on the Norfolk Broads.

Messing about with boats soon made me think that there must be

some less wasteful way than just pushing them through the water.

A motorboat creates a lot of wash,

and this all represents power going to waste.

I tried various methods of achieving a film of air between

the bottom of the boat and the water,

so that the boat could glide on air.

In the end I thought of a solution,

and I made up a simple model out of a couple of tins.

It worked, and showed that one could get a thrust using the tins,

much greater than the thrust from an ordinary jet.

At last, it was taken up by the National Research Development Corporation

and things began to happen.

In short time, Saunders Roe were hard at it,

designing an experimental craft with everyone working at top speed.

Soon, models began to appear.

These were tested in the tanks and over grass.

These models led to the four-tonne experimental hovercraft.

Well, this is the hovercraft.

I'm Peter Lamb, chief test pilot for Saunders Roe, who built her.

It's quite a simple machine.

A fan in the chimney on top is driven by an engine,

and blows air out of the jets underneath.

To drive the car forward, the air is blown out backwards,

and to drive the craft backwards, or to act as a brake,

the air is blown out forwards.

I operate it like this.

The rudders are in the jets.

There are little flaps which are moved to keep her level.

The first flight was certainly an experience.

A crowd of press photographers came along to watch.

They didn't know what to expect at first, but they soon got used to

the idea of four tonnes of ironmongery floating on air.

We went the whole hog that day, and later,

tried her in the water for the first time.

Would she rise?

I started the engine and, a moment later, we were poised,

hovering 15 inches above the sea.

At first, I couldn't see much from the cockpit

but, under way, vision improved.

Since our first test,

I've been putting the hovercraft through her paces almost every day.

Come aboard, we'll go for a trip.

The engine makes a Dickens of a row, so I won't say much more.

To us, the hovercraft is sure to come,

but you mustn't think it will all come in a minute.

There's a lot of work to be done.

We started with two tins and now we have the Saunders Roe craft,

and, one of these days,

you'll be crossing the Channel on a cushion of air.

Saturday the 25th of July, 1959 was the day on which

Christopher Cockerell's prophecy began to come true.

On this day, the hovercraft made its first successful crossing of the English Channel,

skimming in a cloud of spray through the entrance to Dover harbour shortly after dawn.

Holidaymakers had got up early to welcome the arrival.

Here was a Channel crossing that had made history

and perhaps opened the way to a new form of travel.

And the spray flies!

At 70 miles an hour, the VA3 rides three feet clear of the water,

like a low-flying aeroplane.

But compared with an aeroplane of the same weight,

the hovercraft needs only a quarter of the power for the same speed.

Ideal for sea trips up to 100 miles,

the larger hovercraft of today

would make excellent long-distance ferries.

Passenger fares would work out at about thruppence a mile,

the same as a bus.

The hovercraft principle of lifting a vehicle on a cushion of air

can be used in hundreds of different ways.

One company has fitted it to a conventional vehicle

for use over rough ground.

If the going gets too rough or boggy,

a fan is switched on to build up an air cushion underneath,

so taking weight off the wheels.

And here's the latest thing in wheelbarrows - the hover barrow.

Just the slightest push,

and it glides at a height of a few inches

over mud, sand, snow or slush.

Then, for family use, there's the hover scooter.

This one was built for his own use by Mr Don Robertson

at his Surrey home for as little as £250.

If you feel like piloting a hovercraft yourself,

you can always join the fast-growing amateur hovercraft movement,

one of the enthusiasts of which is Lord Brassey.

There's nothing like a hovercraft for avoiding traffic jams,

and women drivers are welcome.

Looking ahead to the future,

we can expect to find hover rail trains like this,

linking city centres to airports.

The train lifts itself onto a cushion of air produced from jets,

and then a rear thrust pushes it forward.

Here's a plane that can do what no aircraft

has ever been able to do before.

It's as manoeuvrable as a fighter

and can fly above the speed of sound at more than 700 miles per hour.

Yet it can land and take off vertically just like a helicopter.

It can even hover in flight,

an astonishing performance by an aircraft which has

introduced a new concept into flying.

It's called the Kestrel,

after the bird that can hover for minutes

before swooping to attack its prey.

This all-British plane is so revolutionary that

a special international squadron was formed to assess its capabilities.

While hovering, the Kestrel can turn in any direction

and even go backwards,

and yet it can climb faster than the modern jet fighter.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd