Power The Genius of Invention

Good evening and welcome to The Genius Of Invention.

Tonight from Drax, the largest power station in Britain!

Every day, seven million of us rely on this place.

The screen you're looking at, the lights in your house,

the cup of tea in your hand

none of that would be possible

without what's happening right here, right now.

And because of the enormous contribution

made by a handful of brilliant minds

who unlocked the key to power itself.

Tonight, we'll be celebrating Britain's amazing history of inventiveness,

getting to grips with the very nature of the invention

and taking a glimpse into the future.

Just what does it take to change the world?

Hello, I'm Michael Mosley.

In this series,

we're exploring some of the greatest inventions in history

and the geniuses behind them.

I'm joined by industrial archaeologist Dr Cassie Newland.

-Nerdy but nice.

-Hello!

-And colourful Professor of Engineering Mark Miodownik.

-Hello.

We three will be uncovering the story of invention,

from the Industrial Revolution to the present day.

From conquering power to the transport revolution,

telecommunication and the moving image.

Tonight, we are concentrating on power -

how we learned to produce it, control it and consume it!

Until a few centuries ago,

we had to rely on wind, water or muscle for power.

Then, we learned to make our own.

From the steam engine

to the electrical generator

and finally, the steam turbine.

Tonight's inventions represent pivotal moments

in our growing love affair with power.

From a machine that could replace six horses

to today's vast power stations

that do the work of six million horses.

300 years ago, a blacksmith from Devon

built the first practical working steam engine.

I'll be looking at why the story of steam

is the story of invention itself.

This allowed Watt to build steam engines that were more powerful

than anything that had been seen before.

This drove the Industrial Revolution and made Britain rich.

A century later, the brilliant Michael Faraday

uncovered the mysteries of electromagnetism.

The age of electricity had arrived.

Power was separated from its source and free to travel everywhere.

But what's happening is quite amazing - the light is lighting up.

And that means electricity is being generated in the coil.

What Faraday had created here is the world's first electricity generator.

Now, we had power, but we wanted more!

The aristocratic Charles Algernon Parsons

discovered how to produce it in huge quantities.

We still rely on his compound turbine.

Cassie will be finding out

how these three inventions are crucial

to the way we generate power today,

here, at Britain's biggest power station.

This is the turbine hall at Drax,

where they actually generate the electricity

on a scale far greater than Faraday's lab equipment

but the principle is exactly the same.

All the inventions we are looking at tonight are about finding ways

to put energy in and get useful energy out in the form of work.

That is what power is and that's why we are here at Drax,

where they do it on a truly gigantic scale.

Now, this is the maintenance store

and in here, there are just enormous bits of metal

because these bits form the guts of a power station.

And, as I said, everything here is huge, including Andy who runs it.

-Hi, Andy.

-Hi.

What sort of stuff have you got here? What's this, for example?

Basically, this is one of our main steam valves

that admits steam into our turbine

and it has to do it accurately

so that we can maintain a shaft speed of 3,000 rpm.

OK, because I'm used to heart valves and they are about this size,

-so this is a good million times bigger.

-Sure, yeah.

-But it does much the same thing, yeah?

-Absolutely.

And these, I guess, are nuts and bolts Drax style, aren't they?

Yeah, yeah, a typical turbine bolt, basically.

HE LAUGHS

That's a good thousand times heavier

than anything I've handled before.

Oh, wow!

And this is just for holding bits together?

Yes, a nut that fits round the fastener. Yeah.

Thank you, Andy.

Now, everything here at Drax has to be so huge,

because they generate such vast amounts of power.

But how do our three inventions fit in?

-Hi, Cassie.

-Hiya!

-What have you been finding out, then?

Well, I'm going to take it right from the top,

from the beginning, from our very first invention of the night -

the steam engine, the first time

anyone takes heat energy

and turns it into usable useful power.

Now, you might not know this, but 75% of power stations worldwide,

including nuclear ones, use steam to generate electricity.

So to create steam, you need to heat water,

which means you need a primary source of power

and just as with steam engines 300 years ago,

here, at Drax, that primary source of power is coal.

Take a look at this.

Drax uses so much coal that it has its very own railway.

Each day, 30 trains bring in over a thousand tonnes.

And every year, Drax burns an astonishing ten million tonnes.

Once the coal is unloaded, it comes here the pulverisers.

60 grinding machines, each containing ten giant metal balls

that pulverise the coal to a fine combustible powder.

All that coal provides the energy to heat the water in six giant boilers,

each the height of a 15-storey building.

'The temperature inside is 568 degrees.'

Wow!

Drax has to be so big

to provide the enormous amounts of power we demand every day.

But the way it makes that power is rooted in the past.

The world's first ever practical power source, the steam engine,

burned coal to make steam to provide work energy.

And, 300 years later, Drax is still doing that.

The pictures are very impressive, but what was it actually like being there?

Oh, it's violently noisy!

The whole place is covered with a fine powder of coal dust

and you're like a hamster in one of those space-age cages -

it's all mesh floors and ladders.

And vast! It's not a building,

it's like a machine with a hat on.

But that's only half of it - look at this place.

This is the turbine hall

and, in here, you can really see how a long history of British invention

still informs the way we generate power today.

Steam comes from the boilers and feeds six giant turbines,

all based on Charles Parsons' original invention of 1884.

These, in turn, power six electrical generators,

based on the discoveries of Michael Faraday.

It's here that heat energy is finally converted to work energy usable power.

Enough to create electricity for six million homes,

24 hours a day, seven days a week.

The thing that strikes me

is that, although this is all incredibly modern,

it clearly has its roots in the past.

Yeah. I mean, the principles are exactly the same,

it's just vastly scaled up. It's an amazing place.

It is and what's really impressive is not just the physical environment,

but the ideas that underpin it.

After all, humans had to dream up everything that is around us

and, throughout tonight's show, we are going to be tracing

how, together, our inventions made it possible.

And it all started about 300 years ago,

when we finally cracked the mystery of power itself.

Mark is going to introduce us

to the universal forces that we used to do it.

This is a working model of the first ever steam engine.

The engine that changed the world

and, quite rightly, the first invention in our series.

Now, in the 18th and 19th century,

when people were thinking about using steam,

they thought, "Well, just get a lot of steam and get it to rotate something."

But when that's metal and heavy - you had to have very high pressure.

But, when they tried working on those principles,

what they found is that when you get a very high-pressure steam, it blows everything up.

They didn't have the materials to make it work and people died left, right and centre.

So that was a dead end and they didn't really know where to go forward

until there was a bit of genius.

The first ever practical engine was powered by steam,

but not in the way you might expect.

It uses steam the wrong way.

When you heat water,

it turns from a liquid into a vapour,

which will expand

to replace the air in a vessel.

But if you seal that vessel

and add cold water to condense the steam,

it will return to liquid form

and leave behind a vacuum.

What happens next is the force behind all early steam engines.

I want to show you a demo

-showing how using steam the wrong way was actually the right way.

-OK.

This is a normal oil drum

and we filled it with steam. And I'm going to destroy it

to show you the principle behind the steam engine.

I have read about this but I've never seen it before.

Is going to be dangerous?

It's moderately dangerous for the drum at least,

but for us, it should be fine.

We've got steam in here but, though it's coming out at quite a rate there,

inside here is the pressure around us, it's the same pressure as air.

But that isn't such an unappreciable pressure.

You've got a sky full of air on your shoulders.

That's like having a tonne pushing down on you.

Why when you've got a tonne of weight hanging on your shoulders, don't you crush?

Yeah, OK. Well, that's true.

But it's also in your lungs pushing out, it's also around you pushing up.

So you've got it from all directions and so it all equilibrates out.

Now, what we're going to try is say,

if you've got the pressure of the steam inside and the air outside,

what if you mess around with that equilibrium,

how much force does that generate?

That is a lot, presumably.

A lot!

-Now, your job is to turn off the steam.

-OK.

And, Cassie, your job is to turn on a spray of water

-which is going to cool the steam.

-OK.

And my job is to direct you from over here.

From way back there, OK... Have you ever done this before?

I've done this before, but on a small scale, on a tin can

and it works beautifully.

How quickly?

-In quick succession. OK, ready?

-Yeah.

-GO!

THEY CHUCKLE

Right.

SHE YELLS

THEY LAUGH

That was good!

It made a really big noise.

-That was very, very good. Well done!

-It was!

-Brilliant!

Oh, my goodness!

THEY LAUGH

Now, that is absolutely astonishing.

I really wasn't expecting the force to be that great

it just crumpled this steel as if it was just a toy.

And that's atmospheric pressure?

Yeah, this is just the pressure of the room crumpling in,

so we created a vacuum in there by putting the steam in there,

then turning off the valve and then Cassie spurted some water in there

and that condensed the steam, creating a vacuum

and the rest of the room did the rest. Incredible.

SHE LAUGHS

That demonstrates it's exactly the same force

that was harnessed in the first steam engine.

Now, its full name was the Atmospheric Steam Engine

and it was invented in 1712 by a blacksmith from Dartmouth

called Thomas Newcomen.

For thousands of years,

people had looked for a reliable source of power

and this giant machine is the engine that finally cracked it.

All it needed was heat from coal,

which created steam,

which condensed to leave a vacuum

and the weight of the atmosphere did the rest.

Finally, we had a mechanical process

where you could put energy in and get work out.

The world was about to change more in the next 200 years

than it had in the previous thousand.

But not initially that fast.

Now, you might imagine

that once somebody had designed and built a working steam engine

that lots of other people would come in, tinker, try and improve it

and, in fact, dream up all sorts of other uses for it.

But, for over 50 years,

there was only one type of steam engine in the world

and it did one deeply unglamorous, albeit useful, thing -

pumping water out of mines.

They say necessity is the mother of invention

and, in the case of the steam engine,

necessity wasn't some grand dream of bringing power to the world,

it was the result of a simple economic desire

to extract coal and ores from deeper and deeper mines.

To do that, they needed a really good pump.

I must admit I have never been down a mine

as wet as this.

It's literally pouring out of the ceiling.

How deep are we at the moment?

Uh... We must be about 100-150 feet now.

And when you get down further, you get more water?

You get more and more water, yes.

You can absolutely see the problem they had. What did they do about it?

They actually had to bail it out or wind it out,

so a very labour-intensive process.

But manpower and horses could not drain all this water fast enough.

Enter local blacksmith Thomas Newcomen.

You may not have heard of him

and there are no existing pictures,

yet he built the world's first practical steam engine.

I just find it unbelievable

that somebody goes from appreciating that there is this stuff, atmospheric pressure,

to actually building a machine that can utilise it.

It was an amazing step, no doubt about that.

There were people before him that...sort of paved the way,

but it was getting the engineering expertise,

being able to rivet things and join things together comfortably,

which, really, Newcomen did.

The water was such a problem

and when he came up with his atmospheric engine,

everyone was extremely happy.

I guess they made it possible to go deeper

and, therefore, make the Cornish a bit richer for a bit longer.

Very much so, yes.

The better the engines got, the deeper the Cornish could go.

Newcomen saw first-hand the problems in the tin mines of Cornwall,

but he knew nationally there was an even bigger market.

His first engine was installed at a coal mine near Birmingham in 1712.

It completed 12 strokes a minute,

each stroke lifting ten gallons of water.

Within 20 years, over 100 of his engines had been installed

at mines all over the country.

Now, the Newcomen engine allowed miners

to go deeper and deeper underground,

but the trouble was it was monstrously inefficient -

it consumed a huge amount of coal.

And coal was very difficult and expensive to transport.

It transformed the mining industry,

but it was never going to power an industrial revolution.

The story of how the Atmospheric Steam Engine

came to drive a revolution

is the story of inventiveness itself

a profound desire to make things work better.

The atmospheric engine was nothing like anything that had come before.

And Newcomen's version of it reigned supreme for decades.

When it was replaced, it was by an innovation that was so radical

it was almost like a completely different machine.

And the man behind this innovation was James Gaius Watt.

In 1763, James Watt,

a mechanical instrument maker in Glasgow,

was asked to repair a model of the by now world-famous Newcomen engine

that was being used in the university to instruct students.

He first thought of it as just a model,

almost like a plaything toy.

But, gradually, by investigating the different elements of it in more and more detail,

taking it apart, creating alternatives to the various aspects of the model,

he began almost to think of it as a kind of scientific experiment,

a composite scientific experiment.

Something that could perhaps be developed

in order to create power from steam in a better way.

We have Watt as part of a strident,

quite severe Scottish Presbyterian culture,

so, for example, coal was something

that had been provided by God for man's use

and it was up to humanity to make the best of that.

So burning it fruitlessly was considered to be a waste

of something which had been divinely given,

and, therefore, morally abhorrent as well as economically inadvisable.

This drive to make the engine more efficient obsessed Watt.

Finally, in 1765, he had a simple, but brilliant idea.

Now, this is an extract from a letter he wrote

describing his eureka moment.

"I was thinking upon the engine at the time,

"and had gone as far as the Herd's house,

"when the idea came into my mind that if a communication were made

"between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel,

"steam would rush into it,

"and might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder."

I like this bit.

"I had not walked further than the golf house

"when the whole thing was arranged in my mind."

It was as easy as that.

With the idea burning brightly in his mind,

Watt went off and had this made

it's a separate condenser

and this is actually the first, the original.

Now, this allowed Watt

to build steam engines that were more powerful, more efficient,

more portable than anything that had been seen before.

This allowed Watt to unleash power

in a way that was previously unimaginable.

THIS drove the Industrial Revolution

and made Britain rich.

Mark, I really enjoyed holding Watt's condenser,

just because it was a piece of history,

but I'm not utterly convinced in the cold light of day

I know how it works.

Talk me through it.

It might be helpful to talk about what Watt was trying to improve,

which is the Newcomen engine, this is a working model of that.

And here is the heat, the boiler,

so you get steam that comes out through here,

it goes into the cylinder

and this is the bit like the oil barrel,

this is where the steam is going to be condensed by cold water

and it's going to pull down a piston.

And that piston pulls this down, which pulls this up.

And this, over here, can be water in a mine which you pump out.

-So you do work, and it works!

-OK, OK.

So the key bit is what's happening in there?

That is the crucial bit

and, in fact, we've got a mock-up of it over here,

so you can actually see what's going on.

So, you know, the steam has to come from the boiler,

so if this is the boiler and that's steam,

-you can put some steam into the cylinder. Do you want to have a go?

-Certainly.

So I just whack this button down here? Excellent.

Yeah, steam coming into it.

All very nice.

All we now need to do is condense it

so I now open the vent for the water pressure.

Yes!

OK, that's neat.

And that's being dragged down by the atmospheric pressure?

Exactly, the atmospheric pressure in this room is pushing that down,

because we created a vacuum by condensing the steam.

-Right.

-But that means, of course,

that you have to heat and cool this one cylinder, which is inefficient.

And Watt looked at that and he thought,

"Mmm, I can do better, I can improve that."

And that really is the hallmark of an engineer,

someone who doesn't just say, "Oh, it works, I can make some money out if it."

But who thinks, "Mmm, I can do it a bit better than that. I have an idea."

And that is where the separate condenser comes in.

If you get the steam out and condense it in a separate vessel,

you don't have to keep heating and cooling this one

-and that saves you, it turns out, a hell of a lot of energy.

-Right.

An obsession with efficiency is still at the heart of invention.

Cassie has been exploring Drax

to find out why it is the single most important factor

when it comes to making power.

This is the enormous coalfield at Drax.

hundreds of thousands of tonnes of coal are stored here

to make sure the station never runs out.

And this machine over here has a really important job to do -

it compacts the coal in the coalfield

to make sure it doesn't just spontaneously combust.

Now, when you are talking about the enormous amounts used at Drax,

a 1% improvement in efficiency is actually 100,000 tonnes of coal a year.

-Now, I'm joined by Peter Emery. He's Production Director at Drax.

-Hi.

Peter, how important is efficiency here?

Efficiency drives everything we do on site.

We grind the coal so it's very, very small, almost like a powder

and that gives us 100% combustion.

Another good example is the cold water coming in the boiler

is also heated up with a bit of steam

that's bled off from the turbines.

Again, an efficient use of the heat.

So the water going in is already warm

before it gets into the furnace.

Now, I understand you've recently put new turbines in?

It's a £100 million project,

but it saves us just under 5% of our coal.

Now, 5% doesn't sound like much.

No, 5% might not sound a lot,

but in an operation this size, every percentage counts.

We're working 24/7 and that 5% for us

is 10,000 tonnes of coal every week,

and 10,000 tonnes of coal every week

is three-quarters of a million pounds.

-That's a lot!

-That's a big deal.

Peter, thank you ever so much.

-OK, nice to meet you.

-See you soon.

Now, efficiency is nothing new -

it's the reason the Watt engine is so successful

but it's Matthew Boulton, his business partner,

who really understands the importance of it.

He came up with a scheme

where he would sell you an engine quite cheaply,

but you would have to pay royalties on the efficiency savings you make.

So if you imagine that this is the amount of coal that a Newcomen engine would use in a week,

whereas this pile here is how much coal

a Boulton and Watt's engine uses in the same period.

That is a massive efficiency saving.

So for every three pieces of coal you save,

you have to pay Boulton and Watt one in royalties.

Now, by 1800, they had sold over 500 of their engines

and they were very rich men indeed.

So Boulton and Watt were pretty smart operators, weren't they?

Yeah. One of the reasons they made so much money was they really understood the power of patents.

This is a copy of the original patent

for the Watt engine with a separate condenser.

And they didn't just get a standard patent.

Boulton was pretty influential

and he managed to get it extended right through to 1800.

Basically, any steam engine that used a separate condenser was protected by this patent,

so if you didn't have that condenser,

you'd use four times as much coal.

So why would anyone buy a steam engine from you, if you were,

you know, having to use four times much coal?

So they pretty much controlled all of the steam power at that time.

So that's one of the significant downsides, presumably?

Yeah. I mean, the pros are

that, you know, you did all that effort making your invention,

so why shouldn't you benefit from it?

And that seems totally fair.

The cons are, well, while you've got a monopoly over the technology,

no-one else is going to innovate.

And in this case, it was particularly problematic,

because, from 1786 to 1800,

there were no significant improvements in steam technology at all.

And so, basically, innovation stopped.

OK, well, Watt's patent may have stifled innovation in the steam engine,

but it certainly led to a period of intense innovation

in new technology that developed around it.

Power was now available in a way it had never been before

and it inspired a generation of inventors.

Now, Cassie has been to Lancashire to find out

how the ability to put a steam engine almost anywhere

transformed an entire way of life.

Newcomen's engine used so much coal

it was only really cost-effective at a coal mine.

But once Watt started improving his engine,

making it much more efficient

and increasing the type of work it could do,

it was poised to radicalise industry.

Now, for the first time, we could use it to power OTHER machines.

This is Queen Street Mill, in Burnley.

It's home to over 300 power looms

and it's one of the first factories in the world.

They may seem noisy and antiquated

but, in the 19th century,

these machines powered a revolution in Lancashire,

transforming it into one of the greatest industrial centres on the planet.

Until the late 18th century, weaving was a cottage industry.

Men, women and children, all working from home

or in small groups using hand-powered equipment.

All that changed with the advent of powered machinery.

Huge numbers of machines could be tethered to the same engine.

Power had finally brought us industrialisation.

-SHOUTING ABOVE MACHINE NOISE:

-What part of the handloom weavers' actions

are taken over by the machines?

Well, basically everything they would have done by hand.

The passing of the shuttle through the warp,

the operation of the heddles.

-Right.

-The treadles on the floor, so all that's taken away.

And is there just one machine or was one weaver doing a lot?

One weaver would look after between six and eight looms.

Right, can I have a go?

Yes, if you feel confident, you certainly can.

People were no longer the providers of energy.

Instead, they now operated the machines

that could do it far more efficiently.

By 1860, Lancashire produced half the cotton in the world.

But the steam engine did more

than just boost profits and increase production.

For the first time, it took work outside of the family home.

It effectively invented the job.

So what are conditions like for the handloom weavers

arriving in these factories?

Women and children who'd worked together before,

but as family units in the factory,

become just parts of a labour force.

Also, there's a much greater division of labour,

so the whole of the work process becomes routinised.

On a wider scale, steam must have brought more benefits?

All the products that are pouring out of these factories are cheaper

and working people can afford to buy them.

And, of course, all the time, their pay does go up

and there's regular work as well

and people are able to buy all kinds of new products.

The wider impact of steam power is that it powers a factory system

that is delivering cheaper products

that can be sold all around the world.

By 1870, Britain is the richest, most powerful country

the world has ever known.

The workshop of the world.

Britain's worldwide success was thanks to its heroes of invention.

For all the early hardships, steam still leaves us a lasting legacy.

From the genius of Watt's steam condenser,

we get engines which not only drive an industrial revolution

but a social revolution too.

With me is Professor Christine MacLeod,

author of Heroes Of Invention.

So Christine, why do some people like Watt become heroes?

It's largely thanks to the Victorians that inventors became heroes,

because, until round about 1820,

inventors were generally seen in quite a bad light.

-Really?

-Yes! In fact, in the 17th century,

an inventor was very much seen

in the company of cutpurses and pick-pockets,

as somebody who'd come along with a big idea and steal your money

and ask to invest in it.

So it's really a huge turnaround

that inventors become heroes in the 19th century

and the first one to do so was James Watt.

Really? I didn't realise. He's the first kind of hero of modern times?

-Well, he's the first hero of invention.

-Yeah.

And he becomes a hero thanks to his supporters,

who were some personal supporters, his family and his friends,

but also thanks to a lot of politicians and scientists

who, in the 1820s, decided that he'd make a very good hero

for the new middle classes

and he was set up as a hero against the great military heroes

who'd just won the Napoleonic Wars,

obviously Nelson and Wellington.

And, at this time,

a lot of middle-class people were campaigning for the vote

and it looked as though they'd taken a big step backwards

with the Napoleonic Wars because Nelson and Wellington were now seen

-as these great military heroes, great aristocratic heroes.

-Ah...

-And so...

-So if Watt had been an aristocrat,

they would have probably not been pushing him quite so enthusiastically?

Well, it's the fact that they're now developing a new explanation

of what made Great Britain great.

And they want to say it isn't that we were great soldiers,

it's not that we were so successful on the battlefield,

but it's that we had the industry that paid for these great battles.

So Watt is then cast as the great hero who invented the steam engine

and they forget about Newcomen

-and all the people that have gone before.

-Thank you, Christine.

Now, no-one these days can underestimate the importance of the steam engine in changing the world,

but it has its limits.

If power was going to become more accessible to all of us,

not just industrial factories,

we needed to find a way

to separate the engine from where the power is used.

Now, I don't want a steam engine in my basement

and that is what electricity has given us.

But first, we needed a genius of invention to tame it.

Newcomen and Watt were both engineers.

They achieved incredible things

because they understood machinery -

how to make large pieces of metal move and create work.

Our next inventor couldn't be more different.

His speciality was pure science

and he was about to uncover the mysteries of a universal force

that would radicalise our relationship with power.

I'm at the Royal Institution, in London

and this is its most celebrated member - Michael Faraday.

In the 1820s,

he carried out a series of revolutionary experiments here.

It was around this time that he started experimenting

in the area that would define his career - electricity.

But just as Watt had been inspired by Newcomen's ground-breaking work,

Faraday's incredible discoveries could never have happened

without the work of others.

This is the world's first battery

and it was invented by Alessandro Giuseppe Volta, in 1800.

This is a model of the original battery

and it consists of discs of copper and zinc alternately spaced,

separated by paper which has been dipped in acid.

And we've assembled some of these alternate plates here.

And If I put this top plate on of zinc,

it should produce an electric current because of the reaction

between the metals and the acid.

And that we've wired up to this little electric hamster,

and that hamster should go.

If all goes to plan.

HE CHUCKLES

It stuttered along.

And that was the problem with these early batteries.

The power only lasted for as long as the reaction was sustained.

Across Europe, scientists were experimenting with Volta's battery

and, in 1821, Hans Christian Oersted uncovered some very unusual behaviour.

While preparing for a lecture,

Oersted noticed that when he connected a copper wire to a battery

and held it near a compass, the needle moves.

That may not seem much now,

but that's the beginning of electromagnetism.

The first demonstration that electricity and magnetism can create motion.

Faraday used these two critical discoveries

to tap into the universe's very own power system.

Here, in his workshop, at the Royal Institution,

Faraday showed that electricity, magnetism and motion are all firmly linked.

Just a year after Oersted's discovery, Faraday designed this.

There's a wire that goes into a pool of mercury

to which a magnet's attached.

Now, when you pass a current through that wire watch what happens.

Believe it or not, this is the world's first electric motor.

Ten years passed

and, with proof that magnetism and electricity could drive motion,

Faraday made an incredible intellectual leap.

If electricity and magnetism can create motion, Faraday thought,

could the reverse be true?

Could motion and magnetism create electricity?

Well, he answered that emphatically with this rudimentary device.

This pole in the middle is a magnet.

And there's a tube here in which he's wrapped round copper wire

and covered it with cloth.

And attached two small lights.

Now, watch what happens when I move the coil though the magnetic field.

HE LAUGHS

I know it looks ridiculous, but what's happening is quite amazing -

the light is lighting up!

And that means electricity is being generated in the coil

by just moving through the magnetic field.

What Faraday had created here is the world's first electricity generator.

Where work was once created by physical force of cylinders, gears and pistons,

now all we had to do was move a magnet.

And from that process, out flowed the incredible force of electricity.

And while we owe a huge debt to Faraday and his eureka moment,

spare a thought for Volta and Oersted,

without whose building blocks we might be living in a very different world now.

They did for Faraday what Thomas Newcomen did for James Watt -

provided the foundation for some truly genius inventions.

Faraday went on to discover some of the most important laws about the universe,

which show the relationship between electricity, motion and magnetism.

Basically, he worked out that if you have a big coil

and you rotate it very fast, you get a lot of electricity.

But this machine, Michael, is going to show us that, actually,

that isn't so straightforward.

Here is his dynamo,

so this is a coil with...so you're going to generate electricity from it.

And we've rigged it up to some bulbs. And you're lighting up one?

-Can you light up two?

-I think I can.

Oh-hoo! OK!

And do you feel strong enough to light up three?

It's actually getting surprisingly hard.

So you can feel... That's what extraordinary, isn't it? And four?

-Right.

-So there's actually communication going back and forth.

That's good, keep that up. Nice one!

I am just going to read my book at night while I'm trying to learn something and...

This is surprisingly hard work!

Could you just keep going for a bit, because I've just got a few more pages to get through.

I can't help feeling I would probably be doing better if I was cycling.

I'm finding it very hard to concentrate with you shouting like that, I have to say.

I can keep it up for hours.

It's really difficult, isn't it?

You are displaying a third of a horse power. Of course, not using your legs but your arms.

HE LAUGHS

What's incredible about Faraday's dynamo

is that you turn rotation, you turn effort into two wires

that just give you power which you can do anything you want with.

These don't have to be right next to it, they can be 100 miles away.

He really makes electricity a thing that everybody can use.

THEY LAUGH

I am knackered. I can completely understand now why,

if you want to produce an awful lot of electricity,

you're going to need something which is a lot stronger

and moves a lot faster than I can.

This is the turbine hall at Drax,

where they actually generate the electricity.

It's incredibly noisy!

Under this blue cover is an electrical generator

and you can see five others stretching down the hall behind me.

Now, these beasts are on a scale far greater

than Faraday's lab equipment,

but the principle is exactly the same.

A generator doesn't CREATE electricity.

It uses the mechanical energy supplied to it to INDUCE it.

As the magnet spins,

it forces negatively charged electrons in the copper

to move into a flow that can be harnessed an electric current.

This is Sean. He's the maintenance manager for the whole of Drax.

So no pressure there, then.

He's brought me to this shed, which is crammed full

with this massive piece of equipment. What exactly is it?

This is a stator, which is one half of the machine that generates the electricity.

-So this is what's under those blue covers in the turbine hall?

-That's right, yes.

-Excellent!

This doesn't look like Faraday's invention. How different is it?

It's very similar indeed.

The only detailed difference is that with the Faraday model,

the magnet was static and the generator rotated.

In this case,

the magnet spins and the conductor is static.

So down the shaft were rotating magnets and all of these bits, the white stripy bits, presumably...

This, this is the copper.

So, basically, this is the conductor.

The magnet spins around in this at 3,000 rpm, so 50 times per second,

the magnet spinning around inside this machine.

What kind of power does that generate?

This is one of six units that we have

and each unit generates 660 MW,

which is enough to power one million homes.

Across all six units, we can generate enough electricity

to supply Northern Ireland and Wales combined.

-That is vast!

-It's amazing.

It's really hard to think that Faraday could ever have imagined

his handheld equipment would end up as something as vast as this.

So how did we get from Faraday's laboratory equipment

to a power station like Drax?

The ability to put energy in and get work out had transformed industry -

we could have power whenever we wanted it

as long as the engine came with it.

But Faraday's experiments eventually made it possible

to separate the power from the engine.

Electricity can travel hundreds of miles from where it is first generated.

Power can be released at the flick of a switch

and using it in huge quantities has become part of our daily lives.

But wind back the clock, 130 years to, say, the 1880s

and it is a very different world.

There are no slick electronic gadgets or big screens.

So what on earth do the Victorians need electricity for?

It all started in the rather unlikely surroundings of the Savoy Theatre.

Going to the theatre in the 19th century was not a particularly enjoyable experience.

Because the whole thing was lit by gas lamps it was hot,

it was stuffy and it was incredibly smelly.

On the 10th of October 1881,

the audience came to see

a new production of Gilbert and Sullivan's opera - Patience.

It was a ground-breaking evening in more ways than one. Lights on!

As the actors strode out on to the stage that evening,

they were lit for the first time ever by electric power.

The Savoy Theatre, in London,

became the first public building in the world

to fully exploit the wonders of electricity.

The light bulb was invented by Joseph Swan and Thomas Edison.

This basic human need for light

created the world's first electricity-hungry product.

Edison was a better businessman than Swan

and he realised there was serious money to be made,

not just from producing light bulbs

but also selling the electricity needed to power the light bulbs.

Now, the Savoy Theatre had its own generators,

but this was hardly a practical solution for most people.

Edison's brilliant idea

was to remove the need for a personal generator

and centralise the source of power.

He proclaimed, "We will make electricity so cheap

"that only the rich will burn candles."

In 1882, Holborn Viaduct, in London,

became the site of the world's first public power station.

The Holborn Viaduct is currently having something of a makeover,

but back in 1881, when they were putting in the power station,

you would barely have noticed.

They didn't have to dig up the roads,

they just slung some cables along at rooftop height.

And the generating plant itself,

well, that was assembled in the basement of Edison's London office.

Edison's power station owed a huge debt to both Watt and Faraday.

A 125-horsepower steam engine drove a 27-ton generator called Jumbo.

Finally, the work out had been separated from the energy in.

Domestic demand for power could now take off.

It was a modest beginning and there were serious problems ahead,

but the days of flickering gas light were clearly numbered

and a golden age of electricity had begun.

The bicycle is one of my favourite inventions of all time,

but, for the purposes of this programme,

I'm not actually riding on a bicycle, am I, Mark?

No, we've been through this, Michael. It's a reciprocating engine.

It's turning the up and down motion of your legs into rotary motion.

And the first ever working version wasn't a bike,

it was a type of steam engine invented by James Watt.

Watt is obviously most famous for his separate condenser,

but it was his ability to produce rotary motion

that he was most proud.

Yeah, and rightly so,

because rotary motion is incredibly useful and incredibly efficient.

Being able to move things round and round instead of just up and down,

it seems simple, but it's one of those important things in the history of power invention.

So I'll expect you're wondering, what has this got to do with electricity generation?

Well, the early versions of power stations,

including the one at Holborn Viaduct,

were powered by reciprocating engines -

steam providing the power to make a piston go up and down

and that would then convert it using gears into rotary motion.

And that's what Watt made possible in 1781.

This rotary motion would make the magnet spin inside the copper coils

to produce the electricity.

But, as we showed you before, you need to put in a lot of energy

to get electricity out.

Exactly, and that was the problem.

The demand for electricity was increasing so fast

and we needed to make a lot more of it.

Faraday's electrical dynamo was a pioneering breakthrough,

but it was limited by the engines that powered it.

Early steam engines vibrated violently

and broke down on an almost daily basis.

It was clear that what was needed was a better, more reliable engine.

In 1883, Charles Parsons was in charge of the electrical generators

at Clarke, Chapman and Co.

Like every generator in the world,

they were powered by a reciprocating steam engine -

vertical motion converted into rotary motion.

To Parsons, the inefficiencies of this two-step engine were obvious

he wanted a one-step version.

Parsons knew it wouldn't be with a steam-driven piston engine.

He needed a pure rotary motion

without the vibration that would damage and shake

the windows of the buildings surrounding

he turned to the turbine.

The essential theory of a turbine is thousands of years old.

In a windmill, the energy of the wind works directly on the rotating parts

to create useful mechanical work.

Parsons' plan was to replace wind with high-pressure steam.

He was going to blast steam at the turbine,

causing it to rotate and spin an electrical dynamo.

There was scope to produce a lot of power.

Existing turbine designs were not powerful or fast enough

to generate electricity.

The obvious solution was to increase the amount of energy in,

but the metals available couldn't withstand the increased force.

So just adding more steam wasn't going to work.

It took a genius of invention to think differently.

This is Charles Parsons' original factory in Newcastle,

now run by Siemens and they still make turbines here.

So, Geoff, what did Parsons do?

The energy that is available in steam

is much higher than you have with windmill and air,

so we had to somehow control the efficiency

and control the stresses of the whole process.

So what he did was, rather than just use a single set of blades,

he decided, if you had more than one wheel,

you could share the energy out between the two,

and the process would be more efficient

without the danger of overloading.

'But there was a problem any additional blades don't spin.'

So what actually happened was,

as we put the air on to the first blades,

it's certainly pushed those,

but the air actually came out of the blade at the angle of the blade,

edge on to the second wheel.

So it wasn't able to push on the second wheel as well.

So he invented the stator.

Parsons realised that you had to put something between the two wheels

to make the air direction change so it approached the second wheel

at the same angle as it approached the first.

Yeah, let's see if it works.

That's it!

So now we've got the second wheel

working just as well as the first wheel.

What you've done is you've created a turbine now, not a windmill,

and it's extracting energy.

The simple idea of compounding rows of blades,

each row designed to work with ever-decreasing pressures,

meant Parsons' turbine was able to extract far more energy

from the same volume of steam.

But when it comes to generating electricity,

if you want to make more, you have to go faster,

and Parsons' next problem was speed.

If we look at the blades on a real turbine,

we're going to see it's very similar to our model,

but the blades are now curved.

And the gap between the blades, where the steam passes,

is getting narrower.

So to go through a narrow gap, the steam has to go at a higher speed.

-I brought one of these along.

-All right, OK!

-If I blow with an open mouth...

-Yes.

..I can get it to go around a little bit.

But if I just narrow my mouth, same lung capacity...

So yeah, it goes around much faster,

so that's the same as happening in the turbine blades.

As the gap narrows, the speed of the steam goes faster.

That's exactly right.

Nearly 130 years later,

we're still making turbines using exactly the same principles.

Before Parsons, power stations were operating under 500 revs per minute.

His turbo generator could rotate at 4,800 revs per minute.

Finally, we could produce far more electricity.

He'd cracked it!

In 1884, just a year after he started working on the problem,

Parsons patented the compound turbine,

and the first one was installed just up the road from here,

lighting the streets and homes of Newcastle.

He'd succeeded in creating a small, efficient, powerful rotary motion

for the electrical dynamo,

and it's that turbine design

that's still in use today in power stations across the globe.

And if you come with me now,

you can see just how impressive turbines are.

There's one over there, hanging up,

looking like an enormous Christmas decoration in this huge space,

which is just filled with turbines.

-Hi, Andy!

-Hi.

It is beautiful, I have to say, it is enormous and gorgeous.

-Are you in love with turbines?

-Not exactly in love,

but they are a marvellous piece of engineering, yes.

It is fantastic, when you think this sprang out of the mind

of a sort of 20-something-year-old so long ago.

How fast does this spin?

This spins at 3,000 rpm, 50 times a second.

Oh, blimey! And how heavy is it?

This particular one weighs 63 tonnes or thereabouts.

Right, and there's a metal casing here, is there?

Yes, there's a metal casing that this all is housed in.

Right, so presumably the risk is if you've got a metal housing here,

this is going to hit it.

Yes, yeah, that is our biggest concern,

and obviously we take great care and attention to detail

to make sure that these bits don't clash, basically, in service.

Yes, imagine! What sort of clearance are you aiming at?

-Roughly 40 thousandths of an inch.

-That is close, isn't it?!

Presumably if it hits the metal, then that's complete carnage.

It is, it just strips the rotor, all the blades come off,

and basically you're left with a mess.

-Right, which has to be cleared up.

-Yeah.

But if you leave too much space, presumably it's inefficient.

The steam tends to come round the outside of the blade,

rather than through it, and the efficiency is affected.

And the steam comes in there, spins all that around,

and the giant magnet is on the end there.

The giant coupling on the end turns the generator,

which obviously in turn generates electricity.

How much power does that generate?

When the station is generating at full capacity,

it's 4,000 megawatts,

which is getting on towards six million horsepower, basically.

Six million horsepower, so multiply by ten to get human power,

and you're up near 60 million humans.

This is doing the work of 60 million humans,

the entire population of the UK on exercise bikes

could perhaps produce as much power as your turbine.

-It's phenomenal, isn't it?

-It is, absolutely, yeah.

Thank you, Andy.

Now, the turbine is the last of our great inventions,

but it is not the end of the story of power.

This place, Drax, produces six million horsepower.

What happens to it next?

And this is it, the end of the line.

All that power generated by the boilers and the turbines

and the generators ends up here, in tiny, skinny little cables.

Now, these are at 400,000 volts,

and this cable set has enough power to power Liverpool or Birmingham.

And it's just one of six sets of cables

coming out of the turbine hall.

Our modern world is all about access to power,

but we know our resources are finite,

so nowadays invention isn't just about making more power,

it's about using it more cleverly.

I'm here with Dr Colin Brown

from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

So how do you think our relationship with power is affecting invention?

I think what inventors have realised now

is that the more people we've got,

the higher standard of living that we want,

the more power we are consuming,

so the more efficient the devices have got to be.

-Such as?

-Well, the modern version would be something like a light bulb,

where historically we would have heated something up

so it glowed red-hot, or white-hot,

and we're heating it up in order to get light,

it's a funny way of getting light.

So what you do is come up with things that give off light,

like fluorescent lights, or now we have light-emitting diodes.

Right, and I must admit, I still quite like the old lightbulbs,

but you can't get them any more, can you?

You can't, because they are six times less efficient

than having other ways of generating light.

I guess there's something beautiful about efficiency, isn't there?

There is as an engineer, you've got to take delight in elegant solutions,

and you're wondering, "How on earth did the engineer manage to do that?"

You're dying to take it apart and look inside,

but it's because it's an efficient design,

it's because it's the best way of doing something,

it's the one that wins through in the end and we all use.

And that's sort of true as well of the mobile phone,

that most people would rather have something small and neat

than something enormous.

We can all remember a mobile phone you could hardly pick up,

the battery was much larger.

But particularly the electronics consumed huge amounts of power.

Now, with the reduction in the size of electronics,

the amount of power you need has gone down

by around about a factor of 40 since the original phones were made.

So is efficiency just about cost?

I think efficiency used to be just about cost,

but now it's about a grim realisation

that we're on a finite planet and there are finite resources here,

so if we're setting fire to certain things to get energy out of them,

we know they're going to run out at some time,

and that's true of all of our energy sources,

maybe apart from when we talk about using the sun,

which has got four billion years.

But apart from that, we are on a finite planet with finite resources,

and that's becoming ever more evident.

And you can see those pressures operating here at Drax.

If it wants to stay in the game,

it can't continue to rely simply on coal.

Pollution costs, and Drax is Britain's biggest polluter.

Its sheer size means it produces more CO2 than anywhere else.

So what are they doing about it?

Coal provides around 90% of the fuel burned at Drax.

The rest is biomass.

For the past few years,

Drax has been preparing to convert to this new fuel.

This giant dome is where they'll store it.

This is Nigel Burdett. He's head of environment at Drax.

Nigel, what exactly is biomass?

Biomass is a term which covers a lot of things,

so that's miscanthus, which we use some of,

and that's pieces of willow, the ordinary tree that we're using.

We use an awful lot of wood pellets as well,

which is wood finally ground

and pelletised into that sort of material.

Does it burn as hot as coal?

It burns at the same temperature and efficiency of coal, yes.

And how are wood pellets better?

Coal is very polluting, it produces a large amount of carbon dioxide,

so what we're trying to do is replace coal

with biomass as far as we can.

Like coal, burning biomass still releases CO2 into the atmosphere.

But its supporters say growing the plants required cancels this out.

So what's the future for biomass at Drax?

What we're aiming to do is fully convert a boiler,

so it'll be on 100% biomass, and the year after that another one,

so eventually the aim is to have three boilers

fully converted to biomass.

Biomass is just the latest chapter in the story of power.

Newcomen brought us the first working engine.

Watt made it efficient and adaptable.

Faraday's genius unlocked electricity.

And finally, Parsons found a way to provide it in vast quantities.

In just 300 years, we jumped from six horsepower to six million

thanks to British invention.

Our lives are far easier and more fun

than our ancestors could ever have dreamt of.

Inventors are still driven by the same desire

to give us more power, more efficiently,

wherever and whenever we want it.

But now the overwhelming challenge for all of us

is to do it more sustainably.

So there you can see the Newcomen engine to biomass in just 300 years.

300 years - fast, slow?

What are you going to compare it with?!

I think we dawdled at the beginning, then we got the hang of power,

and we got really addicted to it, and now we love it.

You know, TVs, computers, what's not to love?

And then we kind of sped up, then we got addicted.

Do you think biomass is the answer?

Well, I mean, it's... it's not exactly carbon neutral,

because you've always got to transport it,

but it is a lot better than coal.

I think the answer is solar power, to be honest.

I think biomass is cool, I like it, a step in the right direction,

but there's energy raining down from the sky in the form of sunshine,

more than enough for everybody - just turn it into electricity.

All we need is a bit more invention and we'll be there.

So why aren't we doing it? Why haven't we tapped it?

I think we sort of got a bit lazy and we think, you know,

"All these great inventions around, someone else will do it."

-But no, we should do it. Let's get out, use solar power.

-Do you agree?

I do, we've got that wealth of understanding of engineering,

we've built this amazing modern world full of stuff.

We just need to find a new way of feeding that addiction.

Whatever the future, our inventions tonight

certainly show the immense resourcefulness of the human race,

and we are going to bring you more of these moments of genius

in the next programme.

We will be at Rolls-Royce in Derby

to tell the story of movement and speed

from the earliest steam train

to the internal combustion engine

to the jet engine.

I'll be finding out how all steam engines are not the same.

The arrival of an engine

that could work with forces of high-pressure steam

revolutionised our relationship with travel.

Cassie will be exploring what happened

when the internal-combustion engine finally met the chassis.

And Mark will be revealing

the extraordinary and British technology that goes into making

one of the fastest and most complex machines in the world.

It's going to be great.

For now, however, it's good night from Drax.

-Thank you for watching. Good night!

-Good night.

-Good night.

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