Speed The Genius of Invention

Hello, and welcome back to The Genius Of Invention,

which tonight comes from Rolls-Royce in Derby.

Now, did you travel anywhere today?

I'm going to guess the answer is yes, because we are a restless lot.

In fact we travel an average of 20 miles a day -

that's more than half a million miles in our lifetimes,

and the reason we can do that is because of a series of inventions

that changed the world - like the jet engines all around us.

We're looking at the British geniuses that brought

the unimaginable shock of speed and the ability to travel

anywhere in the world into our daily lives.

Almost overnight the option to go anywhere redefined how we live.

How and why did that happen?

In this series we're unlocking the very nature of invention -

the rare Eureka moments knitted together by thousands of tiny

improvements which together made the amazing world we live in.

Hello, I'm Michael Mosely. As ever,

-I'm joined by Professor of Engineering, the lovely Mark Miodownik.

-Hello.

-And self-confessed geek, industrial archaeologist, Dr Cassie Newland.

-Hello.

And tonight we're going to focus on three pivotal inventions

that transformed our relationship with place and time.

We will be following the trail of invention

that sprang from humanity's drive to go faster.

From the first ever locomotive, to the internal combustion engine

and finally the jet engine.

All are linked by a vast family of invention

borne from a common principle -

the conversion of heat energy to forward motion.

But the engines tonight are a radical departure

from the normal incremental improvement.

These are the transformative machines that re-defined

how fast and how far we could travel.

Since Ancient Greece, inventors had been trying to use

high-pressure steam to create movement.

Where others failed, Cornishman Richard Trevithick succeeded.

His steam locomotive led to the emergence of rapid, mass transport.

On Christmas Eve 1801, the Puffing Devil had its first ever outing -

the age of steam locomotion had begun.

Nearly a century later, the Internal Combustion Engine turned its back on steam.

Smaller, faster and far more efficient,

it made transport personal, and 130 years on, it still reigns supreme.

It's called the Benz patent Motorwagen

and the engine behind me gives you an average speed of 9 mph

which from up here feels more like 90!

And finally in 1941, Frank Whittle invented the jet engine

and turned the world of aviation upside down.

The modern commercial jet engines weigh in at just a few kilos more

than Trevithick's original Puffing Devil, but they're 15,000% faster.

It's inventions like these that make the impossible possible!

Now, all of these inventions convert chemical energy into motion -

but they do so in very different ways.

And the very different stories of how they came to be

tell a profound story of the nature of invention itself.

But before we come to that, I'd like to introduce you to this space, because it is quite extraordinary.

This is not a museum, these are all working jet engines -

they are big and they are beautiful.

Normally they wouldn't let cameras within a million miles

of here because it is pristine, it is precise

and so we are very privileged to be allowed in here.

I can see Cassie over there, so I'll find out what she is up to.

You're with a couple of apprentices, is that right?

Yes, this is Lotte and Neeraj.

Hello. So is it difficult to be an apprentice?

It's quite difficult to get in.

This year there were 300 out of 5,000 applicants,

so massive figures. For me, it's exciting

because I actually get to work on jet engines

and not many people can say they can do that at this age, so it's impressive.

They take their apprentices really seriously here -

-go and touch the end of that nose cone.

-OK.

It's rubber - I was expecting aluminium, so what?

The reason why it's rubber is because on the front of the engine

they used to have a lot of problems with ice crystals forming.

We don't want that, we don't want them to form on

the front of the engine - so a young apprentice came up with the idea

of having rubber on the front,

the rubber deflects the ice off the front.

Ah. So it goes wobble, wobble, wobble. The ice drops off.

Absolutely - it's a very simple idea but very cheap and very effective.

That is really, really neat.

Clearly innovation is alive and well here in Derby

and Mark has been off finding out more.

Engineering and invention are intrinsically linked.

An innovative mind can come with a new idea

but it takes an engineer to design, make and build it,

and Derby has more engineering jobs than anywhere else in the UK.

All three of our inventions are represented in Derby.

Toyota build cars, and the UK's only remaining train manufacturer,

Bombardier, make rolling stock.

But the biggest employer by far, makes jet engines.

Here at Rolls-Royce, 12,000 people work on a site that covers half a million square metres,

inventing, designing and building some of the fastest machines on the planet.

Rolls Royce came to Derby in 1908, but none of these companies came here by chance.

They came here because of this - the steam train,

the greatest single invention in transportation since the wheel.

In the 19th century,

Derby was one of Britain's most important railway towns

and that meant a huge number

of inventors and engineers were concentrated here.

By the early 20th century, there were over 40,000 people

working in the railway workshops,

not just building trains, but innovating

and improving the engines to be even faster and safer than ever before.

It was the perfect place for Charles Rolls and Henry Royce

to set up their manufacturing plant devoted to a brand new technology -

the car.

Hundreds of engineers, who had honed their skills building steam engines,

were now trying to invent the most reliable internal combustion engine in the world.

Rolls-Royce no longer build cars,

today they're the second biggest jet engine manufacturer

after American company General Electric. Thriving on 150 years

of invention - borne from the train, the car, and now the jet engine.

And this is where they build them now - the jet engine production floor.

Hundreds of years of invention,

thousands of people focusing on one question -

how to build the best engine in the world.

Right now, over 1 million people are high above the Earth's surface,

depending on this technology to get where they want to be, and to get there safely.

From the train, to the car, to the jet,

Derby has played an integral role in a world-wide transport revolution

and it's still at the beating heart of British invention.

So Derby is this invention hotspot. Why?

Well, wherever I've been in Derby, I've found people in workshops,

with machines making stuff - that makes you inventive.

That is human nature - you want to fiddle with stuff, make new stuff.

So inventiveness is simply tinkering?

If you want to break it down, we can define three main motivations for invention.

First of all, necessity - you need something. Take Newcomen's engine.

You needed something to drain the mines.

You didn't need a steam engine per se but that invention did the job.

Or you need toast - a simpler example,

but you need toast in the morning.

But if I wanted toast back in the old days I'd get a peasant with a pitchfork and a fire.

That doesn't work, it burns half the time, you waste bread.

-You have to toast both sides.

-OK, I buy necessity.

Secondly there's aspiration - the "wouldn't it be great if we could".

So wouldn't it be great if we could talk to someone in the next room - the telephone.

Or that the toast jumps up

when it's done - that is a real joy in the morning, you have to admit.

OK, I would like to be able to teleport over there, that would be great, but I can't do so.

No, but we have lots of examples where we have discovery,

we've got this new thing, this new material, what can we do with it?

This happens time and time again, where a new material gets invented

and people have no idea what it's for and it takes 50 years sometimes.

Like electricity - we find this amazing new phenomenon,

and millions of applications come from it.

And then you get the telephone.

OK, but I think you are missing one thing - the human dimension,

which is personality and the spark we call genius.

Genius is something very hard to define,

but you know it when you see it.

Now, my personal hero is a man called Richard Trevithick,

a giant in every way, a tragic hero,

but he was also an undisputed genius, and this is why.

This is the atmospheric steam engine -

the invention that kick-started the industrial revolution.

And this is a steam locomotive - the invention that allowed that revolution to explode

by transforming our ability to move people and things.

They're both called steam engines, but they're utterly different machines

and rely on entirely different technology.

Railway locomotion required the taming of a dangerous power source

that people had been trying to master for quite some time.

The breakthrough, when it occurred,

did not come out of one of our fine universities,

but emerged from the mind of a maverick who was living here,

in one of the more remote parts of the United Kingdom.

In the late 18th century, the Cornish countryside was dotted with

steam engines used to pump water from copper and tin mines.

They don't work the way modern steam does.

In these machines, water is boiled,

and when it condenses, creates a vacuum

that harnesses the power of atmospheric pressure,

to pull down a giant beam.

Atmospheric steam engines

transformed mining,

but were enormous and only supplied a limited amount of power.

Most of these engines were built by inventor James Watt

and his business partner, Matthew Boulton.

Their machines all contained

something called a separate condenser

which was protected by a strict patent.

An engine with a separate condenser burnt much less coal

and in a county like Cornwall, with no coal resources,

this was absolutely critical.

The trouble was if you used this engine, you had to pay

a monthly royalty to Boulton and Watt.

At one time there were 45 Boulton & Watt engines in this area alone.

And the owners all paying royalties which they deeply resented.

So Cornwall became a place of inventive resistance.

Or, if you were Boulton and Watt,

a place that was awash with piratical plagiarisers.

If they could invent a new type of steam engine that didn't infringe

Watt's patent, they could avoid paying royalties.

A young engineer called Richard Trevithick set out to do just this.

Richard Trevithick's school report was amusingly awful.

"A disobedient, slow, obstinate, spoilt boy,

"frequently absent and very inattentive."

They also noticed however that he was good at arithmetic

and arrived at solutions in an unusual way.

And it was this desire to do things unconventionally that meant

Richard Trevithick achieved great things.

Trevithick's plan was to build an engine

that worked in an entirely new way,

one that did not rely on atmospheric pressure and instead used

high-pressure steam to physically drive a piston.

This type of engine wouldn't need a separate condenser.

There was just one problem - everyone thought it was impossible.

Why hadn't people built high-pressure steam engines before?

The public and even engineers like Watt thought that this was

too dangerous to continue with.

He'd never managed to conquer high-pressure steam himself

and he'd failed.

He knew that high-pressure steam would blow up the containers

it was in and he thought that Trevithick was going down

that track as well and it was only going to end up in a disaster

and somebody was going to be killed.

Undaunted, Trevithick set out to build

a high-pressure steam engine that wouldn't blow up.

His first challenge was the boiler.

No-one had managed to build one that could withstand

the massive pressures required - but he had a secret weapon -

his father-in-law was a master blacksmith.

With his help, Trevithick was able to build a new shape of boiler,

a cylindrical version,

robust enough to contain steam at dangerous pressures.

So what's the main difference between this and Boulton & Watt's steam engine?

Trevithick went for high pressure

and it was pushing on the pistons directly.

In this case a double-sided piston,

so it was pressure on the top and bottom,

and it drove the piston as opposed to the atmospheric pressure.

And there are other innovations here as well, aren't there?

Yes, he's pre-heated the boiler feed water

and most importantly he's put the fire actually inside the boiler.

Before, they were kettles with a fire underneath,

but by putting it inside,

you're extracting the maximum amount of heat.

And that produced so much more power, it allowed him

to make it far more compact, which in turn made it portable.

It's like building a spaceship compared to a modern car.

A really extraordinary achievement.

-Almost everything about this is original.

-That's it!

An invention driven by economic need to get round a costly patent

ended up achieving something that other inventors had been trying to do for centuries.

Trevithick's engine was more powerful than Watt's

and a fraction of the size.

And so he could put it on wheels.

The age of steam locomotion had begun!

This is a man who invented a machine that changed the world.

From there onwards, every engine that ran on railways followed

the design of his in 1804.

Once Trevithick had shown how to use high-pressure steam,

other inventors were able to use the knowledge he had given them

to build even stronger, faster, more efficient engines, creating

something that previously could only be imagined - powered travel.

Trevithick did not make a lot of money or achieve great fame.

But he did have the soul of an inventor.

Just before he died, he wrote to a friend,

"I have been branded with follies and madness

"but I have the secret satisfaction of knowing that what I did was new,

"useful, and valuable. And to me, that is worth far more than any riches."

Richard Trevithick's high-pressure steam engine required

a couple of really clever innovations, and since they all

involve water, fire and the threat of explosions - we thought

it would be better to go outside despite the fact that it is raining and very cold.

OK, Mark, demo number one, what's going on?

I'm multi-tasking - making us a cup of tea which is much needed

and I'm also going to show you

how Trevithick made his boilers much more efficient.

So here's kettle number 1, a totally normal kettle, water in it.

Here's kettle number 2, but with a fire tube in it - which is

a tube that goes from bottom to top

and it's one of Trevithick's best inventions!

It's incredibly banal - you stick in a bit of metal.

You say that, it but will make it boil so much faster

and actually made his boilers revolutionary.

It seemed obvious, but all great ideas are like that - they seem obvious in retrospect.

So what happens is because you have a tube down the middle

the hot air from the flame gets into contact with much more water

so you have a much faster boiler.

So your prediction is that one is going to boil before that one.

It's not just a prediction - come on!

It is going to happen! OK, Cassie, what have you got for me?

The other really major innovation in Trevithick's boilers

is the shape of the boiler itself.

If you can imagine, high-pressure water wants to get to

a spherical shape. So the ideal shape for a boiler is spherical,

but it's almost impossible to make,

so the next best thing is make a cylinder.

So imagine this is a Boulton & Watt shaped boiler.

This is Trevithick's new cylindrical boiler

and this is high-pressure steam - get pumping!

-OK. So I represent the hot burning flames, do I?

-Yeah.

This is dangerous is it?

-It could blow up in our faces?

-It's a high-pressure experiment!

OK. As you add extra pressure to this box - we are putting it under a pressure test.

-So both are under equal pressure?

-Yeah, same thickness, same capacity,

-same amount of water going in.

-So something should happen.

If you imagine trying to do high-pressure steam

with Boulton and Watt's box, this is what would happen.

-OK.

-All the water is trying to be a sphere in a cube,

so the sides begin to bulge,

-the welds round the edge begin to crack.

-Oooh, it's beginning to hiss.

God! Is it safe? Don't get too close! It's beginning to go.

If that was high-pressure steam, you can imagine it jetting out -

basically broiling you! This is why...

There it goes, you can see it squirt! It's absolutely spraying out here

and the other one is looking good.

-Do I dare do another one? Ah!

-There it goes!

-And that's the problem.

-This is basically steam

just pouring out - fortunately this is cold,

but if that was hot steam, I'd be scalded alive.

This is really very impressive. This one is spraying away,

this one, the Trevithick boiler is completely intact

and good old James Watt is leaking like...

I've got some steam over here too. Tea's ready.

-Very good. Like that.

-We like tea.

-That worked.

-Look!

Really impressively. I love it when...

This one's going, that isn't - you were right, Mark.

It wasn't me, to be honest.

Cup of tea?

-One for me, one for you.

-One for Mark.

-There it goes.

All the other people who followed him after this

all used these fire tubes. They stuffed their boilers with them,

Stephenson, the lot of them - they loved this invention.

Richard Trevithick - what a guy!

Now Trevithick may have built the prototype

but it is Stephenson who really made it into something practical

as Cassie has been finding out.

This is Skerne Bridge in County Durham.

It might not look very important

but it holds a pivotal place in world transport history.

If you'd been stood here on 27th September 1825,

you'd have witnessed one of the most remarkable spectacles of the Georgian era.

It was the first time the public took a trip by steam railway.

Like many great inventors, Stephenson was an improver.

His engine was based on Richard Trevithick's original,

but where Trevithick had one fire tube,

Stephenson had the brilliant idea of filling the boiler with them.

This created much more power, and Stephenson was convinced

this finally meant the steam train was viable.

By the early 18th century, Britain was dependent on coal

and County Durham had plenty of it.

But moving it to our fast-growing cities was expensive and slow.

As demand grew, the pit owners around Darlington knew

a quicker method had to be found.

In 1820, the promoters of the new line met here.

They believed an iron road was needed for horses to pull

wagons of coal to the river at Stockton.

They employed local engineer, George Stephenson,

to build their new wagon way, but his ideas were more ambitious.

So, this is Stephenson's line

but he's just an engineer at a colliery, so how does he get involved?

George Stephenson is a notable local character -

he's from the area,

he likes the idea of steam locomotives.

He has been developing them for a few years,

he's improving their design and he realises

that horses are not the future for railways,

that steam locomotives are.

But they're, of course, heavier than coaches that horses pull

so he needs a better-condition track,

it needs better foundations, better sleepers and so on.

And so he improves the track

in order to facilitate the use of locomotives.

Stephenson's real genius was to see

the entire railway as one vast, complex entity.

He didn't just improve engine efficiency -

he brought in new construction methods

and developed brand new materials.

Stephenson's rails were made of malleable wrought iron

instead of brittle cast iron, and this meant the heavy weight

of the locomotive could be supported without cracking the rails.

But Stephenson didn't just face technical challenges -

like many innovators, he also had to overcome society's fear of change.

Locomotives let out steam from everywhere,

they're quite frightening.

There's worries that, for example, they'll make cows' udders dry up,

it would turn the local sheep black because of the smoke

and it would scare the horses, which it probably did.

But the more far-sighted people realised that they are the future.

On September 27th 1825,

the new line opened with Stephenson's Locomotion No 1

pulling 30 wagons, most for coal, but a select few reserved for people.

Stephenson saw the opening day of the line as an opportunity

to prove that steam was superior to horsepower.

Some accounts say that 600 people piled into the wagons

pulled by Locomotion No 1.

It would have been bumpy and uncomfortable,

but just imagine seeing it for the first time - what a way to travel!

Stephenson's train was an enormous success.

Within a decade, a million tonnes of coal

was being transported along the line every year.

The future of the steam locomotive was no longer up for debate.

The Stockton and Darlington Railway

had a far greater impact than just lowering the price of coal.

By marrying the train to the tracks,

George Stephenson not only developed a better way of moving goods,

he established a revolutionary new method of travel

which transformed the British landscape.

So what happened next?

To find out, I'm with historian Doctor Lawrence Goldman

of Oxford University.

So, the railways - what becomes of them?

Well, in 1830, the Liverpool and Manchester Railway is opened.

That does something very special -

it becomes commonplace for people to move as passengers

and as they move, so space changes, it constricts.

Time changes, one doesn't have to devote

so much time to moving around.

And it also changes Britain. It changes the national culture.

Indeed, one can use that term, "national culture" really for the first time.

It allows us to have a national postal service from 1840

and from the 1850s, we have, for example,

national newspapers for the first time.

So I could get a copy of the Times not two weeks out of date,

but something that was actually printed the previous day.

The previous day. And Victorians would be able to read these newspapers at their breakfast table.

They'd been printed in London the night before and been delivered

and you get the news from Westminster, from the centre of the Empire, with your breakfast.

So, what you see in this period is a very intimate relationship

between invention, social change, leading to greater innovation.

-Is that right?

-Absolutely.

The invention comes and it changes in so many ways

the way people think and then the way people behave.

And those changes come really quite rapidly.

The railway comes and immediately,

people start to change where they live, the pattern of how they live,

their leisure changes, the way they interact with other people changes

and all of those things then set up new demands, new unfulfilled wants

and more entrepreneurs begin to think of new ideas

and more innovations and new inventions follow.

It's a kind of virtuous circle of change producing change.

When does it all go wrong?

Because Britain is at the top of its game, but soon it isn't?

From the 1820s to the 1870s, we're often called the Workshop of the World.

But from the 1870s,

historians begin to talk about entrepreneurial failure.

It looks as if we become complacent -

we've done it so well in one way that we don't continue to innovate.

We stick with technologies and the business organisations

and the markets that we already have.

And in the later 19th century,

there's a second Industrial Revolution,

dependent not on coal and iron

but on new technologies - on chemicals, on electricals -

and that new Industrial Revolution is taken on elsewhere in Europe,

particularly in Germany.

It's there that the technological impulse and the innovative impulse seems to reside later.

That's why when the next great invention comes along,

it is not a British one.

The steam locomotive started the transport revolution

but it had its limitations.

The engines were enormous and highly inefficient.

Trevithick had increased efficiency ten-fold

by putting the furnace inside the boiler.

But what would happen if you took that thought one step further

and removed the boiler altogether?

By the mid-19th century,

inventors all across Europe were trying to do just this.

The race was on to build a working internal combustion engine.

This proved incredibly difficult until 1876,

when Nicholas Otto designed the four-stroke engine.

It creates movement from fuel combustion

acting directly on the moving parts.

Most engines today are still based on this model

and it led to the most popular form of transport ever - the car.

But why did it take so many people so long to succeed?

When we talk about inventions,

it's important to find out who was the inventor.

But with the internal combustion engine, that's a bit of a problem,

because by the time Otto got round to putting in a patent application for his four-stroke engine,

lots of other people were working the technology and it was refused.

It was thought to be universal technology.

Instead, we can talk about a figure who, undeniably,

was pivotal in the design of engines.

It's this guy, Nicholas Carnot.

What he did is he scratched his head

and he thought, "What's the theory of engines?

"How do we get the most out of them? What determines their efficiency?"

And over here, I've got a rig-up of his theory of heat engines.

-So, this is supposed to be Carnot's perfect engine, is it?

-You don't like it?

-What's wrong with it?

-It's a little Heath Robinson for a professor of materials.

Just bear with me. This is about to show its genius, even though it looks a bit ramshackle.

Over here, what we have is the heat.

-This could be coal, oil, petrol, whatever.

-Red for heat, and...?

This, down here, is going to be the work we get out of the engine.

Carnot said, "Look, if you get out the same amount of energy as you put in,

"if you get that out in terms of work, that's the perfect engine."

-Hooray!

-100% efficiency.

-100% efficiency.

But he said that's very unlikely to happen. In fact, impossible.

He said the reason is this -

and if you pull that lever I'm going to show you why.

-Yes, exactly!

-It works!

And what he identified was,

there are so many ways in an engine that it could dissipate energy.

So, this is like a steam engine that was running at the time?

Exactly. So, things like the waste heat from the boiler,

the bearings, the friction, down here, the noise,

every single part of the engine is using up some of your valuable energy

and instead of turning it into useful work or speed,

it's getting wasted.

Here's the weird thing

that his analysis showed everybody in the field,

which was that here's the perfect engine.

You should get this much out.

Here's what you actually get out of a steam engine

which is terrible - 5% at best.

-And all of that is waste.

-Yeah.

Internal combustion is about five times more efficient

than external combustion.

It works by mixing fuel and air

to create an explosion that physically moves the piston.

But you can't do that with coal, it burns too unevenly

and leaves too much residue.

The internal combustion engine took so long to get right

because inventors like Otto had to wait for chemical engineers

to discover how to distil new liquid fuels from oil.

Once we had kerosene, diesel and petrol,

internal combustion could finally work.

I'm going to demonstrate how explosive these liquids are.

In here I have a single teaspoon of petrol. Give it a shake because it is

incredibly volatile, which means the liquid readily turns to gas.

I've also got an igniter which is a bit like a spark plug,

and I am armed and ready to go.

And you can see why petrol is

such a fabulous fuel for an internal combustion engine because it blew up

lots of energy and there is absolutely no residue.

It was a big step going from this to creating the car,

as Cassie has been finding out.

Long-distance travel may have been transformed by the train

but inside Britain's cities,

it was millions of working horses that provided transport.

But this was all about to change when, in 1886,

a German engineer invented a controversial new machine.

This is the world's first motor car.

It's called The Benz Patent Motorwagen.

It was built by Karl Benz, the son of an engine driver.

It's got three wheels. This kind of tiller arrangement for steering.

And the engine behind me gives an average of nine miles per hour,

which from up here feels more like 90.

But Benz could never have built the car without Otto's innovative

engine design. It was all to do with how the fuel burned.

The crux of it is this.

You have a cylinder with a piston just like any other working engine, but these cams very carefully control

how the fuel and air mixture is let into and out of the cylinder.

The 4-stroke cycle.

So what he manages to do is smooth out all those bumps

and harness the explosive power of the fuel within the engine and turn

that into a drive, a machine that doesn't just shake itself to bits.

And it was so successful it was named the Otto Silent Engine.

HEAVY CLUNKING Well, it's pretty silent!

Otto's engine was designed to be stationary.

It was Benz that made it move.

And you've got everything you need here, all the things you get in a car.

You've got spark plugs and HT leads.

You've got your drive belt. You've got a very early

form of clutch that allows you to disengage the engine.

You've got a battery in a box, you've got a tubular steel frame

which is exactly the same as on a Ferrari.

It's everything you need to turn the dream of a car into reality.

The problem was no-one wanted to buy one.

It was a surprise outing by Benz's wife, Bertha,

that changed public opinion.

She borrowed her husband's prototype

and embarked on a 66-mile trip to her mother's house.

She sounds quite a practical lady.

She had an ignition failure. The ignition lead parted.

So she took a hat pin or hair grip, I'm not sure which,

but she put it inside the wire and then insulated it with a garter.

Ooh. Handy thing to have on you.

As one does.

And also she had to go into a town and get some fuel.

Ah, yes, the invention of the petrol station has to go with it, doesn't it?

Yeah, because there was nowhere to buy the fuel.

Early petrol was actually used for treating head lice.

-Nit medicine.

-Absolutely. But they found it burnt and it worked well in this.

Bertha's journey soon became famous,

proving to the world the car could replace the horse.

Benz's invention finally took off.

In 1900, horses pulled almost all vehicles on London's streets.

15 years later, horse-drawn transport has virtually disappeared.

And now, we have more than a billion cars on our roads worldwide.

Otto's genius and Benz's vision led to one of the most

extraordinary transformations of the 20th century.

I thought it was really funny seeing you driving in a motorised pram,

particularly when you think that only 20 years later

they are building this.

We're in the Heritage Centre at Rolls Royce

sitting in probably the most famous car in the world.

This is the original Rolls Royce Silver Ghost,

and although it looks fantastic, it was the most reliable car of its time.

It could go 1,000 miles without repair.

That was unusual at the time, it was called the best car in the world.

This was the car that put British car manufacture back in the international race.

Why was it so reliable, what has he done?

The heart of this beating engine is Otto's four-stroke cycle

Royce is one of those incremental inventors and you can see all the tweaks -

the radiator, the oil system and the precision engineering that make this a modern car engine.

The thing I've been thinking since I got here is how much?

If you have to ask, you can't afford it

I am asking and I can't afford it.

In the region of 40 or 50 million it's worth it, it is.

Back in 1907, when this car was built, it was a luxury item,

only the really rich could afford it.

If the car was going to change the world, it had to come down in price.

Sometimes it's not the invention that makes the difference,

it's how you build it.

The explosion of invention during the Industrial Revolution

transformed consumer demand - whatever the product,

we wanted more of it and we wanted it quicker.

This meant we had to change the way we made things,

and it was the car that paved the way.

While the car companies of Europe were building a small amount

of vehicles by hand, American Henry Ford

decided to do things a little differently.

He saw the potential of this new invention and decided everyone,

given the chance, would want to own one.

He had to find a way to make it cheaper.

In 1913, Ford opened the world's first continuous moving assembly line.

It built only one model, the Model T.

Ford's innovation was that assembly workers remained stationary

while the car was moved by a system of pulleys and conveyor belts.

The process was divided into 84 steps

and the same worker repeated the same step as each car moved through.

With hundreds of workers all repeating one task on hundreds

of cars, building time was slashed from a few days to an hour a half.

The rest is history an affordable car became the most popular

form of transport ever.

Now, 60 million are produced every year.

Ford's methods have changed the way we make everything, from cars to jet engines.

Once upon a time, Rolls Royce just made car engines

but I was quite surprised by how quickly that changed. In fact,

in 1919 they were already making more plane engines than car engines.

I'm with Professor Saul David, who is a military historian

and I'm guessing the reason they do so has something to do with the First World War?

By end of the First World War, Britain has the biggest air force in world,

the RAF just came into being at the start of 1918

and anyone who is anyone making engines in Britain

is going to be making plane engines.

That is why Rolls Royce are in the game as well.

Is this because the money is there, the demand? What's driving it?

It's money, it's demand, military purposes -

we need to defeat the German Air Force.

One of the great drivers of military innovation, and innovation in general,

is because a state is determined to not let someone else beat them in wartime.

Money becomes no object and for a brief window you have almost unlimited funds,

and for people involved in technology this is like Christmas.

Some of the key innovations, some of the greatest inventions

are made for military purposes first and foremost.

And is there an opportunity cost?

All this money is going there, is it not going somewhere else?

The great question with military innovation is,

could we be using that technology for civilian purposes

that would be of more use to humanity?

It is an open question because the other side of the argument

is that this technology often can be used afterwards for civilian purposes. Occasionally it can't.

I think machine gun bullets or ordnance in general, how do you use that?

But we know more obvious things, like GPS,

the world wide web, there can be great advantages.

Even nuclear power if you want to go there and say, actually it's not a bad thing.

So what the military gave to us,

from a medical background I can think of the ambulance,

penicillin, arguably DNA. Do you have any more?

I have a few, some unusual ones too.

The humble tin can was started in the Napoleonic Wars.

If you can preserve food over any length of time,

you can fight during winter, something they could never do before,

you could only fight in summer when there was grain available, when food was available.

The problem with the tin can, they didn't have a tin opener

for another 60 years - they had to use their bayonets.

Moving on to the First World War, you've got the first detergents,

developed by the synthetic chemical industry in Germany,

which was the most advanced in world.

They were having problems with getting animal fat to make soap,

which, of course, would have been the constituent before that.

Moving on beyond the Second World War -

radar, actually, is the basis for the microwave oven.

Whenever we cook something today,

we should be thinking about this extraordinary development that,

of course, helped keep Britain safe in the Second World War.

Which is one last point about innovation - in some ways,

it's considered to be a slightly dodgy thing to talk about -

military innovation being a good thing.

But one thing that's kept in my mind is this -

if you don't develop engines like these, the Rolls-Royces that

powered the Spitfires, we don't win the Battle of Britain, and if

we don't win that, we're knocked out of the war.

-It's as simple as that.

-OK. It's very convincing.

Now, what's interesting is all the engines around me

are essentially modified car engines.

The next big step would take a man of genius,

as Mark has been finding out.

This is a propeller.

Until 1941, if you wanted a plane that flew, you had to have one.

The Wright brothers had achieved flight in 1903,

by adding propellers to a basic internal combustion engine.

It worked by converting the up and down motion of the piston

to a rotary motion to create propulsive force.

Rolls-Royce made some of the fastest in the world -

the Merlin could fly at 374 miles per hour

But at this factory in Coventry,

a young RAF pilot was about to revolutionise aviation completely.

Frank Whittle believed his jet engine would take flight

higher and faster than ever before.

Born in 1907, Whittle was obsessed with planes from an early age.

After joining the RAF,

he gained a reputation as a daring fighter pilot.

I met up with one of Whittle's original apprentices.

The idea is a pilot in the RAF was to shoot down the opposition

as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Two things you needed to do as a pilot was to get high,

because it gave you a big advantage over the enemy

and the second thing was speed.

Whittle's experience as a pilot directly inspired his invention.

'The only way you could combine high-speed

'and long-range was by flying very high.'

Your piston engine and propeller wouldn't,

because the thin air affected the power to such an extent

that at 40,000 feet, a piston engine wouldn't even turn itself round.

Whittle knew a propeller engine limited flight.

He had to find a new form of propulsive power.

In 1930, he patented his design for the world's first jet engine.

This is an original blueprint of Frank Whittle's jet engine.

Anyone looking at it at the time would have been amazed,

because there's no propeller and no pistons. Instead, there's a turbine.

And the turbine's in here

and what that's doing is compressing the air.

It's then mixed with the fuel and ignited,

and out of the back comes a huge thrust, like a rocket.

And this was a quantum leap in aircraft engine design.

The enormous compression created by the turbine meant that

Whittle's engine could generate far more thrust

than a propeller and piston system, and that meant a lot more power.

No propeller also meant the plane could fly at much higher altitudes.

But the design was so radical

that not even the military believed it could work.

This is so revolutionary for its time

and you're a manufacturer

and what he's asking is something that seems out of this world.

But, like all great inventors, Whittle refused to give up.

He founded his own company, Power Jets.

By 1937, he'd built a prototype, and tests could finally begin.

During early experiments, the jet engine

was attached to this post.

It ran at speeds of up to 16,500 revs per minute.

In later years, Whittle re-enacted those same tests for the cameras.

ENGINE ROARS

Whittle modifies his engine for two years,

and it became not just powerful and efficient, but also reliable.

At last, the Air Ministry were impressed.

RAF Cranwell, Lincolnshire.

The 15th of May 1941.

The 17-minute flight is one of the most remarkable occasions

in the history of aviation, comparable only to

the Wright brothers' first flight in its significance.

Finally, Whittle's engine took to the skies.

The jet age was upon us.

PLANE ROARS

-WOMAN:

-'I heard a whistling noise, couldn't think what it was.

'When it got overhead,'

I noticed there wasn't a propeller.

So I downed tools and ran in the house to tell everybody

I'd seen an aeroplane without a propeller.

Of course, nobody believed me.

Well, people, of course, thought that it was a very great thrill for me when it took off,

but I can't honestly say there was a very great thrill attached to it.

We just knew that it would fly. There was no reason why it shouldn't.

'I think he was a genius, but it came in a natural way.'

As he got more and more interested in a project,

the more and more knowledgeable he became.

And, of course, he was a very determined person -

you give him something to do and he would do it.

In 1945, just a few years after that first test,

the jet engine smashed the world speed record

by flying at 606 miles per hour.

Today it's hard to imagine a world without

the convenience of jet-powered flight.

By allowing us to fly higher and faster and over longer distances,

Frank Whittle's remarkable invention has shrunk the globe.

But I'm still amazed at the audacity of the man.

I mean, to put a turbine in the sky,

that must have seemed madness at the time.

But today, it's obvious, and that surely is the essence of genius.

Now, I do think they are absolutely lovely machines

and I appreciate the fact they can whiz me off to exotic locations

but I don't think I've really ever properly understood

how a jet engine works.

It's all about thrust - equal and opposite action.

If you thrust something out of the back of a plane,

the whole plane has to move in the opposite direction.

OK, I get that much. I need more detail.

Oh, you're going to love this bit.

You can break it down into four words, OK?

Suck, squeeze, bang, blow. OK?

Now, suck - the fan at the front sucks the air in

and that's like a squash court of air every second.

It's compressed by the blades in the air compressor.

It's ignited - bang - in the burner

-and then - blow - it's thrust out of the back.

-OK.

Right. So, in this thing over here,

translating that diagram into reality?

Right at the front, these beautiful blades that everyone sees

when they get on a plane, these are the fan blades.

-That's what sucks the air in.

-Yep.

Then, when you move round behind,

this is where the real thrust is generated.

That's where the compressor is.

Separate blades all lined up,

packing the air into smaller and smaller space.

-Why do you need a compressor?

-You need a compressor

because you need to have lots of air for your explosion.

-Lots of oxygen to fuel it.

-OK.

-And that happens in this part here.

These are basically your injectors.

That's where fuel is sent into the middle of the engine - bang -

and then blown out the back here...

What sort of temperature... you're hurrying off, there. Come back.

What sort of temperatures are you getting in there?

Amazingly, the temperature in there is about a third of the surface of the sun.

-About 1,600 degrees.

-Seriously hot.

-Yeah.

So, what makes the fans go round and suck in all the air?

That is the most beautiful bit.

Some of that thrust coming out of the back to move the plane

is sent back through the engine and used to turn the blades.

It runs itself. It's so elegant.

If I was standing there, or preferably you were standing there, and there was a big blast of thrust,

presumably you'd get whacked against the wall there.

Yes, cos the thrust here carries

the whole weight of the plane forward.

So, if you're standing here, you're like a leaf.

Now, I've never been quite so close to the back end of an engine before

and it does make you appreciate just how beautiful,

but also how complicated, it is.

Mark has been off finding out how much technology is required

to create something like this.

This is a high-pressure turbine blade, and it may just look like

any old piece of metal, but it's an extraordinary piece of engineering.

It's engineered to 40 microns

and that's half the width of a human hair.

And they're made here, at the precision casting facility.

The modern jet engine contains thousands of parts,

every single one the result of 70 years

of incremental improvement on Whittle's original design.

The high-pressure blade is an extraordinary invention.

It can withstand centrifugal loads of ten tonnes.

But, just as crucial,

was the invention of the manufacturing process itself.

A turbine blade starts life as a piece of wax, would you believe.

Hot wax is injected into the mould and then finished by hand.

The wax templates are dipped into a special liquid containing

ceramic powder and then they're coated with aluminium oxide

and then dried and this is repeated several times

until the wax has a strong ceramic coating.

This cast is heated up and the wax is melted out of the inside of it,

creating a hollow space.

That's what I love about this,

it's a modern factory using a very ancient technique.

This is the next stage along and you can see the metal is now

solidified into the mould and you have a turbine blade, here.

But this is not just any metal turbine blade.

This is a very special one.

What happens is, as the metal came down the middle here and solidified,

it was forced up a little helical tube in here.

And what that means is that as the alloy cools, it's forced to

re-solidify into the mould as a single crystalline form.

It's that that gives it the high-temperature strength

that is absolutely vital to a jet engine.

The moulded blades are weighed, measured

and even checked with an endoscope,

each one scrutinised for the slightest defect.

This is the end of the process that creates these turbine blades

that operate at temperatures 200 degrees above their melting point.

That's crazy.

That's like making an engine out of ice

and operating it at 200 or 300 degrees.

And yet, it is possible, because of this white layer, which is

a thermal protective layer, created here

and also these tiny little holes.

Each one is individually machined. Each one's a different shape.

And, together, they create a layer of air

that protects the metal from melting.

It's inventions like these that make the impossible possible.

The high-pressure blade may be one of the most complex parts

of the engine, but it's far from the only one.

Components are made all over the world

and they all come here for assembly.

It owes a clear debt to Henry Ford's assembly-line,

but what they make here is rather more complex.

This is where Rolls-Royce builds their Trent engines,

producing over 300 each year.

So, this is David who's head of production, testing and improvement.

-That's right.

-How does this all work?

So, we're standing in front of one of our fan cases,

here on our fan case flow line.

We incrementally move the fan cases once a day

and we're fitting predefined parts -

brackets, pipes and harnesses -

so one and then two of many thousands of parts that make up

a gas turbine, on this workstation and then later workstations.

It's just the sheer number of parts

that really does your head in, isn't it?

I mean, how do you kind of keep track of them all?

The fitters who are fitting these parts have individual

identification stamps that are recorded against each operation,

so we can work out who fitted the part and what time on what day.

See for every single one of these parts,

-you know who fitted it and at what time of day?

-That's right.

-That's great, isn't it?

-It's even more controlled than that.

These parts have individual part numbers and serial numbers,

so they're uniquely identified,

and when the engines go into service, we know where that part is

and what engine at any point in time through our bill of material.

But how do you work out where all these parts go?

This is a three-dimensional, very intricate object.

What do the plans look like?

Well, these days, parts like this are fully described electronically.

The part we've just been looking at is here,

so the fitter can interrogate this system.

If he's not certain where a part fits,

-he can check out the model...

-That's beautiful, isn't it?

And confirm precisely what operation he needs to do when.

That's very clever. That's cool. Can I have a go at doing that?

Unfortunately not. I can't show you anything else in the model.

There's too much of our technology

and intellectual property within this.

-So that's your secrets, there.

-There are some secrets there.

But, I suppose that's the point, isn't it,

is that the process of making a jet engine itself is

valuable intellectual property, it is an invention in its own right,

-the process of making a jet engine.

-It is.

And we spend as much time and effort developing our manufacturing

and build and test activities

and sequences as we do the product itself.

So, day on day, week on week in this factory,

we're advancing how we produce gas turbines

to add in to the overall integrity and safety of the product.

So, Ric, you're head of R&D at Rolls-Royce.

You've got so much intellectual property, which distinguishes you

as one of the most innovative companies in the world.

How do you manage that process?

A combination of two things.

We patent a lot, so 475 patents last year,

or patent applications last year, from Rolls-Royce.

We also look at keeping certain key processes secret,

so there are trade secrets in the company.

If it's not a secret, when would you patent and when wouldn't you patent?

It's partly for obvious things. If it's something someone else can go to an engine, pick up,

measure and work out how to do it from that

and why it has its properties, then you need to patent it,

cos anybody can get hold of a part of our engine and copy it.

If it's deep in the manufacturing process,

making the insides of that turbine blade

you were looking at earlier,

then it's not obvious, even if you got hold of a blade, how somebody did that.

So, that's the sort of thing we would try and keep as a trade secret.

How do you allow people to be creative and inventive,

as well as getting everyone to work as a team?

I think invention's very much a contact sport.

The idea of a lone inventor in his garden shed coming up with ideas

is really a thing of the past.

So, it comes from people sparking off each other.

The engine behind us is full of many, many new ideas,

even since the one that preceded it.

So, here it is. All that amazing effort,

years of research, thousands of people, millions of pounds.

You've seen all the detail, you've seen all the invention

but then, suddenly, it becomes just that magic thing

that takes you to the place you want to go.

TURBINE WHIRRS

And there it goes.

Fantastic.

It's incredible to think that it's just been born as an engine,

but it will still be in service in 25 years' time.

The technology inside this engine is hugely complex,

but we could never have got here

without the vast network of invention that came before it.

Together, they've given us the incredible gift of locomotion.

This is one of the most sophisticated pieces of metal on the planet.

-Should you really have that?

-I didn't nick it.

It failed quality control, so I was allowed to take it out.

-It's not very sexy looking, I have to say.

-Come on.

It delivers the power of a Formula One car

and there are 70 of those in the jet engine it comes from.

And that's really extraordinary.

OK, so what have you sort of learnt, if you like, from coming here?

Apart from nicking this stuff?

I think I've learnt that we haven't had enough of speed yet.

We want more. We want to get faster and faster.

-That's what's driving the engineering.

-No, no.

There is a far bigger picture here.

This is about the nature of invention.

So, you've got the incremental changes,

that tinkering that we know lies behind everything, but also you've got

those breathtaking shifts that guys like Trevithick and Otto and Whittle,

whose ideas are completely revolutionary,

and that's the real insight into the nature of genius.

Right, I think we're all agreed, anyway,

that we chose the best three inventions.

And in case you're worried that Britain's best inventing days

are over, take a look at this lot.

They are the latest intake of the Rolls-Royce apprentice scheme.

Who knows what they will come up with in the future?

Now, the inventions we've seen tonight have made the world a smaller place.

But, in the next programme, we're going to be focusing

on inventions that shrank it even further -

the inventions that enabled us to speak across the globe.

We will be at the BT National Network Centre in Shropshire,

where they process millions and millions

of telephone calls every day.

Many of your calls will have gone through this system.

From there, we will bring you the stories of three extraordinary

inventions that shaped the way we communicate today.

Cooke and Wheatstone's needle telegraph -

texting, 19th-century style.

So good, it brought a murderer to justice.

The telephone.

We'll be revealing how it went from drawing room novelty

to everyday essential.

And Marconi's wireless system, the invention that enabled us

to send messages through the air. It paved the way for

the instant global communication we rely on today.

There are fantastic stories

and it features my favourite invention of all time.

-It's my favourite, too! Bye!

-See you then!

-OK, so I'm going to pocket this one?

-No.

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