Communication The Genius of Invention

Welcome back to The Genius Of Invention,

tonight from BT Control Room,

the National Network Centre in Shropshire.

From the screens behind me, we can keep track of the 200 million

phone calls which go to, from and around the UK every single day.

We are a chatty lot.

We take this instant worldwide contact for granted,

but it relies on an extraordinary network of connections.

And this network can be traced back to a number of engineering breakthroughs, many of them British.

In this series, we're exploring the colourful inventors,

inventions, and Britain's role in shaping the modern world,

because nothing has shrunk the globe more than our subject tonight -

instant communication.

So far in the series,

we've discovered how heavy machinery gave us power.

And the quest for efficient engines enabled us

to travel further...and faster.

But tonight, it's the invisible world of electricity that drove

something even more fundamental to us - connecting with others.

I'm Michael Mosley, and as ever, I'm joined by my own lovely

geniuses - Prof Mark Miodownik and Dr Cassie Newland.

-Hi.

-Together, we're going to unravel the great stories

behind the communications revolution that allowed us

to move from a world of handwritten notes, pigeons

and waving flags to the instant digital world we see around us.

We will follow a trail of invention,

born out of our innate desire for social contact.

From the electric telegraph to the telephone

and, finally, wireless communication.

All three harness the seemingly magical power

of electromagnetism to send messages over a distance,

with each scientific advance creating new ways to interact.

Our timeline begins almost 200 years ago,

with Cooke and Wheatstone's electric telegraph,

an invention that launched the first information superhighway

and led to a wired-up globe.

The dream of an interconnected world bound by telegraph wires

was one step closer.

40 years later came the transmission of the human voice...

with Bell's telephone. We could now talk across oceans and continents.

But this most personal of technological revolutions

required a social revolution too.

Victorian society was governed by all kinds of rules

and rituals and masses of etiquette.

The telephone cut across it all, and people found it awkward

and uncomfortable.

Finally, in the 1890s, the problem of how to transmit messages

without wires was overcome by the controversial entrepreneur

Marconi and his magic box.

This was the start of the wireless age.

Marconi had increased the range, introduced aerials and an earth return,

and shown that wireless could be used to communicate.

But the question remained, had he actually invented anything?

These breakthroughs led directly to our digital world of fibre-optics

and satellites.

Billions of messages transmitted instantly, everywhere, all the time.

Tonight's inventions represent pivotal moments on that journey.

OK. We've only picked three out of many possible contenders,

so are they the right three?

Absolutely. They are the perfect examples of the massive social impacts

that telecommunications technologies have.

The telegraph, for example.

In 1840, a letter to India takes two years to get a response.

By 1850, using the telegraph, it takes four minutes.

I'm not sure you could think of anything which has a bigger impact than that.

The phone is this instant communication of the human voice,

and that's an incredible moment -

suddenly there's wires with dots and dashes, then you suddenly have the whole voice.

And Alexander Graham Bell is the guy everyone thinks invented the telephone, but did he?

And then, of course, Marconi comes along.

He takes a whole lot of existing technologies, puts them together,

gets rid of the cable altogether, and you get radio.

It's not quite like that. Marconi's technologies that he's drawing on are doing

entirely different jobs in other fields of engineering.

-And, actually...

-Anyway, enough of this for the moment.

What I like about Marconi and the wireless is it leads obviously

to the mobile phone, which is my favourite invention, what I own.

Which is ironic also, because I hate talking on the telephone.

Now, there would be no point in having a phone without

the infrastructure to support it,

And as well as this place, BT has a connected site,

a satellite uplink centre, down the road.

Cassie went there to see how they keep us all in touch.

In the peaceful valley between the Malvern Hills

and the Black Mountains of Wales

lies one of the most advanced communication hubs in Britain.

Welcome to Madley, the largest earth station in the world.

It's the beating heart of telecommunications.

65 satellite dishes and a network of fibre-optic cables provide

a gateway from Britain to almost every corner of the globe.

They carry hundreds of thousands of telephone calls, texts, faxes,

internet and TV links every day.

And the chances are, if you've called abroad, it will have been routed through here.

When the dish Madley 1 was built in 1978,

it had the initial capacity to send 2,000 international phone calls

via a satellite 22,000 miles above the Indian Ocean

to 34 countries in less than a second.

But today, two-thirds of Madley's communications

are carried along a network of fibre-optic cables which can

deal with 20 million phone calls at any time.

And it's thanks to these two technologies from the communications satellites

high above the Earth's surface to the miles of cables below the ground

that mean we live in an invisible world of connectivity, which

enables us to communicate across the globe at the speed of light,

and all at the touch of a button.

What is amazing is that when you make a phone call, you do not

think how it gets from A to B.

Well, there are about a million calls going on in the UK

right at this moment, and quite a few of them are being monitored

from here, because this place doesn't just deal with BT customers.

OK, Tony. So who is talking to whom?

There's a lot of activity going on between Wolverhampton, Birmingham,

up towards Manchester, as an example.

So that's a very busy route at the moment.

Now, the difference between this and traffic is,

if I have to go between Wolverhampton and Birmingham, I have to choose a route,

whereas you can basically, on the telephone, bung me via Delhi.

It's very much like the motorway network that

if there is some congestion or a route that's very busy,

then we'll just divert you round another route anywhere

in the UK or worldwide, and you will have no idea that it's happened.

So the people in Birmingham and Manchester are obviously very chatty. Thank you.

Steve, you are international, aren't you?

-That's correct.

-So who's talking to whom?

At the minute,

we're looking at some congestion going out to our Asia region.

-So that's to Hong Kong?

-That's correct.

So we're looking at our transatlantic sub-sea cables,

and we can see all of those at any one time.

What this map here is showing me is that there is some congestion on the route out to Hong Kong.

OK. It's fantastic, isn't it?

200 years ago, if you wanted to send a message to Hong Kong and get

it back again, you would have to wait an extraordinary two years.

-Cassie?

-Yes, and if we look at the centuries before electricity,

communication systems rely on line of sight.

So that's things like flaming beacons on hilltops, and smoke signals.

But actually, by the 1790s, these systems have got quite sophisticated.

This is the Murray telegraph.

It communicates with a system of coded shutters,

and the Admiralty could send a message down the 200 miles

of line between London and Plymouth in ten minutes.

Now, the trouble with line-of-sight systems is you have to be able to see them.

So fog, rain, any bad weather - and they don't function,

and at night time, they're none too clever either.

What was needed was a reliable communication system that

could overcome the constraints of sight, time and distance.

A technology that could function in all weathers, day and night,

all year round.

And it was advances in early 19th-century physics,

particularly our understanding of electricity, that started

a chain of events that led to our first invention - the telegraph.

Yes, the electric telegraph was borne out of a series of incremental steps,

one of which was the science of electromagnetism,

and the big leap forward was in 1820, a Danish scientist

called Orsted discovered something by accident when he was

mucking about in his lab one day,

and he had a battery connected to a wire,

and he noticed that if the electric current was flowing near the compass, this happened.

MICHAEL LAUGHS

There's a magnetic field being generated around an electric wire.

Now, this was completely new. They understood that you had electric currents,

and they understood about magnetism, but they didn't know the two were related,

and this is the birth of electromagnetism.

The two are related. And in fact, all of this around us hinges on this discovery.

And although the scientists took a long time to work out exactly

what that relationship was, inventors just took this

discovery and started making gadgets out of it.

And we've got one here. A British scientist called Sturgeon,

he realised that, actually, if you didn't have just a single wire, but you wrapped it thousands

of times round an iron core, you got a much stronger magnetic effect.

You got what's called an electromagnet.

-So I close the circuit?

-Yes.

BELL RINGS

-OK.

-It seems trivial, but the thing is, actually you create a magnet

can control with a switch, so you can turn the magnet on or off.

Now this obviously is useful

if you want to summon your servant to bring you a cup of tea.

But did they have any idea that this was a form of communication?

No. For that the electric telegraph had to be invented.

This is an early example of one of the electric telegraphs.

It was invented by Cooke and Wheatstone,

and it's an example of a five-needle telegraph, which is

using the same principle we just saw earlier,

which is communicating signals via electromagnetism.

And it's very ingenious. Can I send you a message using it?

-Please do.

-Right, hold on a minute. Let me just get the controls. OK.

OK. Two needles pointing to the O, so that's O.

Yeah.

-M?

-Right.

And they're pointing up along those lines, so that means G. So O-M-G.

This is the perfect gift for a young Victorian texter.

Yeah, but it wasn't just a toy, and that's because Cooke was a businessman,

and he had the brilliant insight that one invention can

feed off the success of a totally unconnected invention,

and in this case, that was the railways,

as Cassie's been finding out.

Like many new inventions,

the telegraph began life as a novelty rather than a necessity.

But one event in 1845 showed

the benefits that fast electric communication over distance could bring.

It began on New Year's Day, with a man standing on a platform at Slough.

His name was John Tawell, a wealthy chemist who'd made his money in

Australia before returning to England with his wife, family and fortune.

At 7.42, he boarded the train bound for London.

But as the train pulled away, adrenaline was coursing through his veins.

Minutes before, Tawell had murdered his mistress, Sarah Hart,

poisoning her with a phial of prussic acid.

The train was to be his getaway.

Unbeknown to him, Tawell was spotted fleeing the scene of the crime

and followed to the station,

and it was now that Cooke and Wheatstone's telegraph could show its practical potential.

Tawell thought he was going on a train,

the fastest known means of transport.

He was going to get to London well ahead of any chase,

and he was going to disappear before anybody could find him.

But there happened to be a telegraph line between Slough

and Paddington, so the police were able to send a message down the line

giving his description and asking for him to be arrested.

The message is one of the most famous telegrams ever sent.

"A murder has just been committed at Salt Hill.

"The suspected murderer was seen to take a first-class ticket to London.

"He is in the garb of a Kwaker."

With only 23 letters, the telegraph operator had to think

quickly about how to spell "Quaker", using a K-W instead of a Q-U.

As he sat on the train, the unsuspecting Tawell must

literally have thought he'd got away with murder.

And as the train pulled into the station, the police were ready.

Tawell was followed to his lodgings and arrested.

And on 28 March, he was hanged

in front of a crowd of over 2,000 people.

But Cooke was a visionary inventor, not a scientist,

and recognised that, at last, his device had found an audience.

His telegraph publicity machine went into overdrive.

"By its powerful agency, murderers have been apprehended, thieves detected.

"Any further allusion here to its merits would be superfluous."

With a new technology, you often need

a hook, a story, that gets it...

that gets it above the everyday life, and the capture of a criminal,

or a murderer, or something - it was a story that people could say, "Ah!

"New technology being used here."

The telegraph wires became known as "the cords that hanged John Tawell".

That really made it clear to everyone what was going on,

that this was a system that allowed you to send messages faster

than a train could travel.

In the early years, Cooke and Wheatstone had difficulty attracting investment.

The Tawell case was exactly the kind of publicity they needed.

Like so many inventions, just demonstrating that they work

doesn't guarantee that they'll take the world by storm.

With its new-found popularity, the telegraph

capitalised on the railway mania that was sweeping Britain.

In 1838, there were 500 miles of railway.

But by 1851, 7,000 miles had been built.

Travel and telegraphy were inextricably linked.

4,000 miles of overhead lines were strung alongside railway tracks

in six years, sending messages at 186,000 miles a second.

If you only have two or three lines, it's only of use to a few people.

When you have every town and city in the land linked up,

then it's really, really useful. You could see there was a very different world in terms of communication.

This actually speeds up life generally.

Now the telegraph could really begin to feed the public appetite to

communicate electrically.

Charles Dickens describes the telegraph as "the most wonderful of all our modern wonders".

It had won over the railways and, thanks to stories like Tawell's,

public imagination, too. Its potential was limitless.

There is absolutely nothing like a good old murder to rouse British interest.

But around the same time,

a rival system threatened to steal Cooke and Wheatstone's thunder.

It's a name we are far more familiar with - the American, Samuel Morse.

To tell us more about him, I'm joined by Charlotte Connelly,

-from the Science Museum in London. Hello.

-Hi.

Now, is it a coincidence that Morse comes in the scene around this time?

Well, what you need to remember about inventors is that they

are human beings who live in society, just like everyone else.

And so, society has certain needs -

there's lots of electrical stuff going on,

people thinking about it,

and a couple of people put two and two together and think,

"We can use electricity to communicate."

So, no, I don't think it's a coincidence that it was all happening at the same time.

How did Morse's system differ from Cooke and Wheatstone's?

Cooke and Wheatstone used this needle system,

which I've seen a really nice description of as "bifocal gymnastics".

So you need to really have some skills to read the signals,

whereas the Morse system used a key, like the ones in front of us,

and by tapping, it sent a signal along

and then it made a tap at the other end.

But he actually came up with this system where you have an alphabet,

and each letter is assigned a particular code.

It sends a signal along your single cable,

and at the far end - from the very outset, actually - it recorded,

so it used a paper tape and it marked the signal that it had received.

So that was also a massive improvement on Cooke and Wheatstone's system.

-So it's just simpler?

-It's simpler, and it's cheaper as well.

It only uses one line, whereas the two-needle telegraph requires two lines.

And is Morse really the person who comes up with Morse code?

There is some idea that it might have been his assistant, Alfred Vail.

He made lots of adjustments and improvements to the Morse system,

but Vail himself wrote home and wrote to friends, saying,

"No, it's all Morse's work," so...

-It could just be that Morse was his boss!

-It could be,

and he wouldn't be the first assistant to defer to his boss,

but my feeling is that it was all down to Morse.

But it's up in the air. It's certainly not definite.

Why do you think Morse gets all the glory?

He built on the work of various people in the United States

and in Europe, and kind of drew all the strands together.

And he was a brilliant publicist, so a bit of showmanship certainly goes a long way.

Thank you, Charlotte.

Now, importantly, Morse was one of the first people to imagine a wired,

interconnected world.

And in the 1850s, his vision came a step closer,

but it was not an easy journey.

Our resident materials boffin Mark went to see

how failure can be as instructive as success.

By the 1850s, Morse's single-wire system was gaining ground in Europe,

but to connect continents electrically involved overcoming a more hostile environment...

..the sea.

And after several attempts,

the first underwater cable linking Britain and America was laid.

On 16 August 1858, Queen Victoria sent the first transatlantic

telegraph message to President James Buchanan in the US.

It said, "The Queen desires to congratulate the President

"upon successful completion of this great international work."

A telegram may have taken 16 hours to send by Morse code,

but the dream of an interconnected world bound by telegraph wires was one step closer.

To celebrate what became known as the great feat of the century,

there were carnivals and street parades.

The 1858 transatlantic cable was a remarkable achievement.

1,200 miles of open sea, 20,000 feet deep, huge waves,

unpredictable weather - the audacity to even propose such a project,

let alone pull it off, that really typifies the Victorian age.

But the celebrations were short-lived.

Within a month, the signal was lost,

and the cable had catastrophically failed.

The collapse of such a monumental milestone in communications

exposed the flawed scientific understanding of the materials,

specifically the component at the heart of the cable - copper.

In the mid-19th century, Britain was a copper-cable-making machine.

The Victorians knew the importance of producing high-purity copper,

but there was little quality control.

With a cable long enough to span the Atlantic,

the effect of even tiny variations in the copper's purity

severely reduced how well it would work.

And in addition to that, no-one understood what the effect of the

sea water would be on a signal sent through 1,200 miles of copper cable.

So, this is our model of the Atlantic Ocean,

and here is the Atlantic telegraph cable,

and at this end we have Ireland, that end we have America,

and once you've got it all connected up...

instant communication!

It must have been a really delightful thing.

However, there were some problems, one of which was that the cable's going through water.

Now, that's doesn't just mean it's a huge body of water to get through.

The water, actually, is interacting with the signal.

Although the copper was insulated from the water to prevent this,

it wasn't insulated well enough.

The further a signal passed along the cable, the weaker it became.

Over such a long distance, by the time it reached America,

the signal was almost non-existent.

To make matters worse, the engineer in charge of the project

thought that using a higher voltage would force the signal through.

But all that did was fry the cable's insulation

and expose its copper core.

With the salty seawater now able to react with the copper,

another problem accelerated the cable's deterioration.

And when we try to send a signal through...

You see? It starts to stop getting through.

That's because the electric signal, as it comes through the cable,

hits the part where it is exposed to this very conductive form of water,

and it leaks away, essentially.

It doesn't make it to the final destination.

But the problems didn't end there.

Where the copper wire is exposed, it produces tiny bubbles in the water.

This is quite impressive.

This was the final reason for the cable's eventual failure.

They show you that electrolysis is happening,

and that means the copper is dissolving into the seawater.

Pretty soon, there won't be any copper left,

and the cable will be severed.

Some people claimed the wonder was not that the cable failed,

but that it had ever worked at all.

The dream of a wired-up world had already cost £460,000,

leaving the team low on funds, and the public short on hope.

But the failure was a catalyst for change.

It highlighted the need for a better understanding of the electrical and mechanical properties of copper,

but it would be another eight years

before the science caught up with the ambition,

and a successful transatlantic cable was laid.

It's astonishing how much time, effort

and money was put into the laying of that first transatlantic table.

To talk about money and invention,

I'm joined by Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineers

and a highly successful entrepreneur, Dr David Cleevely.

Now, would you have put money into that project?

Absolutely not! It's barking.

The risks involved in laying all that cable

and knowing whether it was going to work,

and if it worked, whether it would work for any length of time, were far too great

given the amount of revenue you were likely to get out of it.

So how do you ever get a big project like that off the ground?

You have enthusiasts who convince other people that this time around,

it's to be different, and they sink a lot of money into it.

-And, historically, they've tended to lose their shirts, have they?

-Yes.

The definition of a pioneer is somebody who is

face down in a field with an arrow in their back.

That's the way it works.

So do you think you can be a successful inventor without money behind you?

Having money behind you is a good piece of evidence that,

actually, YOU are not barking mad.

That's not to say that somebody without money doesn't have a good idea,

but you also have to be able to convince other people.

Most of this technology is not delivered by a single person -

it's delivered by a team -

and so that money is part of that building-the-team.

The transatlantic cable was a hugely ambitious project,

but it was done without real scientific understanding.

Do you think many inventions come out of academic

and deep-thought processes, or is it really trial and error?

Most of it is trial and error. You've got to start with something that's viable,

but when it hits reality, you're normally into business plan version four

before it actually sees any traction.

And you've got to be very clear about this, that no matter

how good an idea it actually is, to actually get it to market

-and make money out of it is a very long process.

-Thank you, David.

The eventual success of the transatlantic cable spawned

a growing network of cables under other seas.

By 1900, 150,000 miles had been laid.

Telegraphy led to rapid global communication,

which profoundly changed our relationship with time,

space and, most significantly, each other.

The information age with its army of skilled operators was born.

The telegraph network alerted the world to the benefits

and opportunities of global communication,

but the technology had gone as far as it could.

If we were to be truly connected, what was needed was a form of

telegraph which could do more than just transmit dots and dashes.

We needed something that could carry the full majesty of the human voice.

We needed the telephone.

Yes, the telephone - an invention cloaked in controversy.

We're going to look at the work of the man most famously associated with it,

Alexander Graham Bell.

Now, in the 1870s, electricity was cutting-edge technology,

and Bell and his assistant Watson were young men in their 20s

and they wanted in on this cool new technology.

The telegraph was here - that could send messages -

so what else could they send via this new technology?

Well, they thought - human speech. Why not? But how would you do it?

You've got to turn the human speech patterns

into an electrical pattern

that exactly matches it, and nothing existed at the day

that could do that, so they knew they had to invent it.

And they weren't the only ones working on this.

In the end, this contraption here which looks very odd,

is a replica of one of their first goes at the problem.

It's called a liquid telephone, and it involves a cone,

which goes down to a membrane.

Now, when you speak down the cone, the membrane vibrates,

and that's connected to a needle, which is dipped in acid.

When the parchment vibrates to the sound of your voice,

that changes the depth of the needle in the liquid,

and changes the current being transmitted.

So in theory, it should be able to give you that continuous

variation in current that you need in order to mirror the human voice.

So we've connected this up to an oscilloscope to see if that actually does work. Let's see.

-MUFFLED:

-Hello. Hello.

-MUFFLED:

-Hello. Hello.

It's actually not bad, and you get something out of it.

And that first recognition must have been really promising,

but although it looks like an electrical signal,

it doesn't... Perhaps we haven't proved that it sounds like one,

so now what we need to do is connect this into our sound system,

and Paul, our sound guy, is doing that right now.

So if I speak through this system, the question is, can he hear it?

You ready?

Hello? Hello?

-MUFFLED:

-Hello, Paul. Can you hear me?

I can definitely hear something. It's not very clear.

That is just incredible,

that something so rudimentary like this can do that.

It was crazy, it was weird, but it worked,

and it was the start of the telephone.

Now, that is a seriously clever demo.

But it's not practical to have a liquid transmitter having acid

just sort of sloshing around in containers. It's dangerous.

So Bell did what good inventors do - he tinkered

and he made incremental improvements until that prototype had been turned

into a fully functioning system for transmitting voice over a wire.

It was called the centennial phone. And this is how it works.

Now, the sound waves travel in through the mouthpiece,

hit the diaphragm, which vibrates and makes contact with

an electromagnet inside an iron cylinder.

This turns the vocal vibrations into a changing electrical signal which

flows through the wire to be turned back into sounds at the other end.

This formed the basis for how telephones would

work for the next hundred years and introduced one of the greatest

revolutions in communications history.

People could now talk directly to each other over distances

without needing someone to translate a coded message.

Communication was quicker, easier,

and, most importantly, more intimate than it had ever been.

The world would never be the same again.

Bell patented his work under the bracket "improvement in telegraphy",

and although the phone itself would take years of refinement,

a little over a year later, the Bell Telephone Company was born.

To discuss what the truly extraordinary

story of the telephone's development tells us about invention,

inventors and their patents,

I'm joined by Dr Richard Noakes of the University of Exeter.

Right, we have a very clear story which goes that Bell invents

the telephone, but it's a great deal murkier than that, isn't it?

It certainly is.

One thing to point out about the history of the telephone

is that, like so many inventions in history,

there are many more inventors than we think.

Bell was surrounded by people who claimed exactly the same

thing about telephony, and there were people who were a lot older

than him who, years before he claimed to have invented the telephone,

said, "I've done exactly the same thing."

There is a particular battle, isn't there, around the Patent Office?

That's right. In 1876, Bell and an American inventor

called Elisha Gray submitted a patent for the liquid transmitter telephone,

and this was the beginning of a very long controversy

over who invented the telephone.

So why doesn't Gray end up the father of the telephone?

There are many ways in which we can define invention.

First of all, the United States patent law from 1870

specifies it is not who got in there first,

it's to what extent this is a new invention.

So you could get in there really early, in the patent office, before Mr Bell,

but you could maybe make a pretty shoddy job of the specification.

But Bell was much more successful because

he simply spelt out in more detail what exactly this would look like.

And so he was able to persuade the lawyers who were running this case,

that he had a greater claim on the invention.

But you see when someone like James Watt,

he gets immortalised mainly because there are forces out there in society

which want a middle-class hero.

You think that is true at all of Bell?

Every age gets the hero it wants, OK?

So for some reason, the 19th century American and British and British-speaking audiences

want inventors to be of a particular type.

They have to be solitary individuals,

they have to have had eureka moments in their workshops, and sheds.

Why do you think we love the idea of the eureka moment so much?

It's kind of romantic.

What we don't like is the other story,

which is of one man - usually a man - in a big company surrounded by his minions,

and they're all beavering away at this one idea.

That's too complicated.

It's too mechanical, and messy.

And it doesn't feel like us.

Thank you very much, Richard.

Now, despite its potential,

initially the phone struggled to make an impact.

Why was that?

Well, there were really two reasons. First, financial.

The vested interest of existing technology,

in the shape of telegraph companies, used their clout

to try and stifle the new kid on the block.

And, secondly, the public had to catch up

with the possibilities that the phone offered.

We sent historian Lucy Worsley to discover how one early adopter

was at the forefront of a cultural revolution.

The telephone entered a world where rapid industrialisation was underway.

But unlike other new gadgets - gas lighting and running tap water -

the phone didn't just mark an technological change,

but an entire shift in social behaviour.

And its arrival was felt particularly keenly

at one of Britain's pioneering houses, Cragside, Northumberland.

The whole place is the epitome of Victorian elegance and eccentricity.

It was work of the one of the 19th century's most creative figures -

William Armstrong.

Armstrong was an inventor and engineer

who was fascinated by new technologies.

Cragside had its own hydroelectric power -

a water-powered spit.

And even a dishwasher.

So it's little wonder, that he was among the first

to embrace this latest labour-saving device in 1884.

So whereabouts were the phones installed across the estate?

-In the butler's pantry here in the house.

-This one?

-This very one. Here.

But he had the estate manager who lived the other side of the valley,

and the head gardener, also at the other side of the valley

and up to the stables for the head groom.

-So he couldn't really operate without the telephone?

-No.

It was vital to the whole system.

Hello, is there anybody there?

At first, the phone was only taken up by the wealthy.

But those without Armstrong's initiative could buy a metaphone

to help with issuing orders to staff.

The metaphone enabled you to ring down to your servant,

rather than having to press a bell wait for the servant to come up,

and tell them what you wanted.

Telephone systems, like the metaphone,

were sold as a way to save time, worry and servants!

Not for chatting to friends.

And early telephones also had another elitist application.

One designed more for opera than for orders.

This contraption here is a riff on telephone technology

called the electrophone.

It works like this. You invite friends around to your house

and you're probably all dressed in evening dress,

because this is quite an occasion.

And you use the little mouthpiece to call the operator, to say

"Put me through, please, to... I don't know... the Savoy Theatre. I want to hear their play tonight."

And once you've been connected,

you and your friends get your headsets, put them on, relax,

and enjoy the show.

# La donna e mobile

# Qual piuma al vento...#

Public electrophone salons were opened in hotels and clubs.

Here listeners could pay to enjoy the technology,

and show the world they were embracing modern living.

# E di pensier...#

APPLAUSE

Beyond the smart metropolitan salons though,

society at large, still remained sceptical about using the phone.

Victorian society was governed by all kinds of rules and rituals

and matters of etiquette that we would find ridiculous today.

A lot of this was around socialising -

when to pay a call, who to speak to, how to speak to them,

had you been introduced - all that kind of thing.

The telephone cut across it all.

And people found it awkward and uncomfortable.

The Victorians were hysterical about

the fact that you couldn't see people.

In a deeply hierarchicised society,

where there were all these instant clues,

now on the telephone all you had was the voice.

And if you dissembled the voice, you had no idea who you were talking to.

You had worries about who was at the other end,

who's my daughter talking to,

how do you talk to people if you don't really know who they are, if you can't see them.

Despite anxiety about social disorder

and catching diseases down the wire,

Cragside's telephone directories

reveal that Armstrong was determined to exploit the telephone's potential.

So here's Sir WG Armstrong, and it says here he has seven lines!

-Seven lines.

-That's like his own little private network.

-Yes.

So it's going to his Elswick Works,

there's one to Captain Noble's residence, who is a friend and partner in the business.

But Armstrong's unusual because he can phone a friend.

Yes, he's phoning residences rather than companies.

-He's like a man from the 20th century, living in the 19th.

-He is.

Armstrong was clearly decades ahead of his time.

He could see the potential that the phone had for work

and for play, just as we use it today.

But the rest of society would have to catch up with him,

before the phone could really catch on.

And we have caught up, at an extraordinary pace.

In the 1880s there were 30,000 telephones across the world,

now there are over six billion

and with them we send over six trillion texts every year.

To help me make sense of some of these figures I have

Dr Nicola Millard who is a social media expert from BT.

Nicola, what am I looking at behind me?

What you can see there is Monday to Friday.

What we do is we call in a very predictable pattern.

We are creatures of habit.

So the first peak is, what, early morning?

-And then afternoon, and then evening. Is that right?

-Absolutely.

The first phone calls when we get into the office,

dies down over lunch, grows again in the afternoon,

dies down late in the evening.

And it's always exactly the same?

Every week, Monday to Friday, absolutely predictable.

That's funny. In terms of my predictability and social media

would you care to make a few guesses?

Social media is an interesting one,

because what we find is that there are gender differences between social media.

-So, Twitter - overwhelmingly male.

-OK, yep, that's me.

Facebook 50:50 sign up.

-But actually the interactions are often women.

-Yes.

I hardly ever go to Facebook.

My theory behind this is that Twitter is all about showing off,

and, frankly, that's what men like to do.

OK, fair enough. Fair cop.

Now I want you to help me with these statistics here.

This is disasters.

This is all about shared experience.

So a global disaster goes on, we all want to talk about it.

So we're seeing a distinct call peek here.

And this isn't just people involved in it, it's people going "Did you see?"

"How terrible is that?" So it's all about shared experience.

And again we're going back to primitive human behaviour.

We love to talk. We're social creatures.

And actually, with the telecommunications we have, it's getting richer and richer.

It's enabling us to talk in richer mechanisms,

so that's audio, we're starting, as we get bigger bandwidth -

we get fibre, broadband -

we're starting to see developments

where technology is starting to get absorbed into things like our eyeglasses.

So, literally, I can start to transmit to you what I'm seeing

and broadcast it to all my friends and family.

That's quite a scary prospect. Thank you very much Nicola.

Thank you.

But the very fact that my phone, my tablet,

this video wall, can all communicate with one another

without being joined by cables, marks the culmination of our story.

And how this came about is one of the most significant steps in history -

wireless communication.

Finally the shackles were broken.

The idea of a wireless world

required a huge leap of imagination for the Victorians.

The idea of easy long-distance communication without wires or cables,

was akin to magic or the occult.

But it was actually grounded in some pretty serious world changing science.

Yes, there were two major breakthroughs which I want to demonstrate.

Over here I have a piece of electrical apparatus

called a transmitter.

And over there I have another piece,

which is called a receiver.

And in-between there are no wires. Just air.

But watch what happens when I do this.

ELECTRICAL CRACKLE

Now that is amazing!

We turn on a light at a distance, with no wires in-between.

That's a piece of magic!

Well, how does it work?

In 1864, James Clerk Maxwell, a physicist,

theorised that there must be these invisible waves

called electromagnetic waves.

And they are created where you have an oscillating current.

But he died before he could be proved right.

It took another physicist, Heinrich Hertz

to prove him right with this apparatus.

Now this is a high voltage between two bits of an antennae

and when you connect them up you get a spark

which creates a current that oscillates at a very high frequency,

and creates these invisible waves.

This was a big deal,

because it meant there was all this invisible stuff going on

all around us that we could perhaps tap into and create and use.

Now, how could you use it? Well, you need a receiver.

And that was essentially the same kind of apparatus -

two antennae - which would receive these electromagnetic waves

and create small currents.

But you needed something else that could use the power.

Because these were tiny currents.

And this where something else called the coherer comes in.

A guy called Branly realises

that if you connect two bolts with some metal powder,

when the current runs across them

they stick together and sort of act as a switch.

And they allow a much bigger current to be used

to turn the light on. And off.

Of course, the "off" bit was difficult too.

And that's a guy called Lodge, who manages to get that to work.

Together they are creating some lab experiments, but it would take

the intervention of another visionary mind

to turn this science into an invention

capable of profoundly changing the way we communicate.

As with many breakthroughs the study of electromagnetic waves

needed to travel out of the laboratory and into the real world to prove its potential.

And it began with an experiment on a grand scale.

In March, 1897, a 22-year-old man stood on Salisbury Plain in front

of a crowd of high-ranking officers from the army and navy.

His name was Guglielmo Marconi

and he had promised to show them communication without wires.

Marconi was determined to demonstrate that technology could send messages

over long distances with a few modifications.

So I've teamed up with the Royal Corps of Signals to recreate his attempt

to turn wireless communication from a scientific idea into a workable system.

Born into an aristocratic family,

Marconi showed little interest in school and had failed to get into university.

But from an early age he'd been a fanatical experimenter.

He would never regard himself as a scientist at all.

He didn't understand science, he was a practical inventor

who wanted to be commercially successful

and to be known for having achieved something practical.

To make wireless into a product he could sell, Marconi first needed to improve its range.

His masterstroke was that with the addition of an aerial held up by a balloon

the signal could be transmitted further than ever before.

If he could show his audience of top brass on Salisbury Plain he was right,

then the military would be an obvious customer.

I'm getting really excited now.

Why exactly are the military so interested in wireless?

Any commander in the field needs to know

what is happening at his frontline.

So the attraction of being able to get a message back instantly

without having to lay tens or hundreds even of miles of wire is very important to him.

So how is this going to do it? What is our kit essentially?

What we have here is a replica of what Marconi had.

We're using more modern components but it does exactly the same function.

Now, to control this he has a key which can be operated,

a Morse key, which starts the process.

ELECTRICITY CRACKLES SHE LAUGHS

-And when you press the key -

-A big spark!

-It is quite a big spark.

And he used even bigger ones.

ELECTRICITY CRACKLES

When that spark happens that energy is then connected via this wire

all the way up the antenna.

And it radiates into space.

-In all directions?

-In all directions.

Marconi knew if he could pick up that radiated energy several miles away, he'd have cracked it.

We're going to try to do the same over a distance of 500 metres.

This balloon holds up a second aerial which is connected to the receiver.

The longer the wire we have up, the stronger the signal we get at the receiver.

As the signal runs down the aerial it passes across the coherer

completing the circuit and triggering the bell.

With all of the elements in place the Royal Signals are poised to begin.

OK, we're all set up and we're ready for test run.

'Can you press the button, please.'

Roger.

Have you pressed it?

ELECTRICITY CRACKLES

BELL RINGS

-Yes! SHE LAUGHS

-It's working. Yeah.

Fantastic! It does work! Do it again.

ELECTRICITY CRACKLES

-BELL RINGS

-There we go.

Thank you very much.

That is so cool! Just to see it working is amazing!

Now, that is the fundamental basis of all radio communication that's taken place ever since.

With the proof that his system worked, Marconi immediately protected it with a patent.

He continued to conduct experiments, refining his equipment and increasing its range...

..until on December 12th, 1901, he achieved the unthinkable,

sending a message over 2,000 miles across the Atlantic.

'From my earliest experiments, I had always held the belief

'that the day would come

'when mankind could be able to send messages without wires and between the furthermost ends of the earth.'

Marconi's decision to protect his invention with a patent was controversial.

Marconi was remarkably secretive about his apparatus.

The Times referred to it as his "magic box".

But it makes sense, because if any scientist had looked inside the box,

they'd have recognised pretty much every piece of apparatus in it.

When the world finally got a glimpse inside the "magic box" there were batteries providing power,

filings in a tube to complete the circuit and a bell on top.

The parts were not new but the combination was.

And Marconi patented it all.

Marconi had increased the range, introduced aerials and an earth return,

and shown that wireless could be used to communicate,

but the question remained, had he actually invented anything?

He didn't invent the coherer

and he didn't really invent the transmitter.

If you looked at the individual parts of it, other people could say, "Well, I did that."

Marconi, to give him his credit, was using the work of others and was patenting the work of others,

but no-one else had patented in the field.

So, essentially, as he was advised by his lawyer, "Claim everything." And he did.

Marconi wasn't a scientist, but he was an engineer and a brilliant businessman.

But he also had the personality and drive to make things happen.

And for me that is an equally important part of the process of invention.

So how do you think wireless changed the world?

Well, in practical ways, you can mount a wireless on a ship

and if that's ship gets into trouble they can radio for help and get rescued.

Or you can mount it on an aeroplane

and that can fly over enemy lines and radio back the positions you want to bomb.

But, actually, on a far bigger thought, it's the death of geography,

it's the mastery of people over the planet.

-Time is no object, distance is no object. We're the winners.

-OK.

-So mastery of the planet, top that.

-I think it's more personal than that.

Yes, it's a beautiful box of electronics

and it sits in your home and tells you the news around the world,

but how many people wake up every morning to the radio and go to sleep with the radio.

It connects you in a way that no other bit of technology does,

it reduces loneliness and reduces isolation.

-I never knew you were such a warm cuddly guy.

-THEY LAUGH

Now obviously what I think is that Marconi and the wireless,

it's the mobile phone, that's the direct link.

-You're obsessed!

-I am obsessed.

Now guess when the first mobile phone was invented, if you like?

-'40s? '50s?

-1960s?

-No!

-1960s? Let me show you this.

This remarkable piece of footage from 1922

It's Eve's portable wireless phone.

And she's wiring it up rather ingeniously to her umbrella.

-Oh, it's an aerial.

-Yes. Brilliant.

And now she's ringing in to pick up...

-It's a gramophone.

-A request show.

-An early request show.

-It's an early version of Shazam.

-OK. So this is possibly the first mobile phone.

But for wireless communication to become an everyday accessory it had to leave the planet.

And that took the development of shortwave technology and the satellite.

Cassie's been nosing around the giant dishes of Madley.

In 1945 the science fiction writer Arthur C Clark

predicted it would take satellites positioned high above the earth

to overcome the limits of communicating with wireless over long distances.

And his vision was amazingly prescient,

because just 17 years later Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station was built in Cornwall

and became part of a joint British, French and American project

to transmit live satellite pictures across the Atlantic.

On the 10th of July, 1962, NASA launched the first active communications satellite, Telstar 1.

-And after a shaky start...

-'That's a man's face!'

'There it is! There it is!'

Two weeks later, 200 million people tuned in to watch the first broadcast live via satellite.

Telstar also made long-distance phone calls an everyday reality,

including the first call to Britain via space.

'Hello there. How does it sound to you?'

'Relatively good. You're very clear.'

Although it could only carry 600 phone calls, Telstar had shrunk the wireless world a little bit more.

In the end when there are more satellites still,

you'll have televisions and telephones all over the globe. A shattering thought.

The original Telstar 1 only lasted about six months, but now there are over 900 active satellites in orbit

and two thirds of these are helping with communications.

Unlike Telstar 1, which circled the Earth once every two and a half hours,

modern communication satellites are geo-stationary,

which means their orbit keeps them in a fixed point above the surface of the Earth.

Communication satellites act as relay stations.

They receive high-frequency radio waves from an earth station like Madley

and retransmit them to a different location.

And dishes like these are where the signals begin and end their journey.

This is Madley 1, it weighs 290 tons, it's 32 metres in diameter

and moves less than a few millimetres a day

as it tracks a satellite above the Indian Ocean.

So this is where the magic happens.

When I make a phone call, what happens to the signal?

When you make your phone call it goes through BT's national network,

is routed then if it's going to go internationally to here at Madley,

where it goes through electronic processing in the main building

before being fed across to here, the antenna building,

where it goes through this wave guide.

From here it is combined, fed up to the antenna, beamed out to the satellite 36,000 kilometres away

at the speed of light.

So is the size of the dish important?

Yes, it is, because the size of the dish determines how much amplification we provide

and how much we can amplify the signal being received.

If you think of the dish as a car headlight,

the bigger the dish, the wider the beam being provided by the car headlight.

Obviously nowadays dishes can be smaller because satellites have got laser technology,

so we can focus energy a lot more accurately.

So what are the advantages of this kind of system over fibre optics?

Satellite is global, you can reach anywhere with it now. It will happen.

Imagine a situation where you want to reach a desert in a war zone.

You can't run a fibre out but satellite will reach it.

Wherever you can see the sky satellite communication is possible.

But it's underground where most of today's communication takes place.

Over the last 150 years the globe has been circled in over one billion kilometres of cables.

It's incredible to think about the changes that cable technology

has undergone since the first copper cables were laid.

Now telecommunication cables unseen and mostly unremarked upon

provide the web that binds our interconnected world together.

Since the 1980s, copper cables have been replaced by fibre optics,

carrying data as light rather than electricity.

Today these cables carry 95% of global communication,

much of which travels through Madley Earth Station.

From this transmission room telephone, fax, internet and TV signals

are sent down cables underground to either the BT Tower or to the coast

where the cables disappear under the sea to almost everywhere in the world.

And to make sure the signal definitely arrives,

they send it by two different routes to the same destination.

This is what a fibre-optic cable looks like.

It's covered in a sort of durable polyurethane

which not only protects it but is an excellent insulator.

And inside this is the optic fibre.

Now that's only 8 microns across, so that's thinner than a human hair but it's tougher than steel.

A fibre-optic cable has a core of ultra-fine glass threads coated in a reflective material.

An electric signal is converted into pulses of light

billions of times a second

and transmitted by a laser beam.

Within the light are digitised videos, voices and computer signals.

The outer walls act like mirrors reflecting the light onwards to its destination

where the digital information is converted back into electrical signals.

-So is this your fibre-optic cable?

-Yes, it is.

You can fit on this cable here up to half a million telephone calls onto a single fibre.

My goodness! How does that compare with satellite technology?

It's a much greater bandwidth.

Newer technology will also increase that.

Some equipment here, we're looking at tens of millions

of telephone calls per second on an optical fibre.

-Down one single wire?

-On a single fibre, yes.

-It's very impressive.

-It's sounds pretty revolutionary.

-Yeah.

When you think we've gone from 100 years ago from a single copper cable encased in thick rubber

going through to coaxial cables carrying analogue signals, to the latest fibres carrying digital,

it's amazing how things have progressed.

I guess that's the thing, the whole way through whether it's 1850 or 2013,

-it's a linear technology, isn't it.

-Definitely.

This particular wire, where does this go?

This is connected to our back-hall equipment, so there'll be a switch somewhere on site

which will then connect it to the rest of the national network.

-And it zooms out.

-Zooms out to eventually wherever it is in the world,

India, Europe, America, anywhere.

-Like a giant telephone exchange plugging wires all over.

-That's it.

-It's an invisible network.

-All at the speed of light.

-Very, very fast indeed.

-Excellent!

Despite the merits of communicating without wires, we have largely remained a cabled world.

But it's the combination of fibre optics, underwater cables and satellites

that provides the vital infrastructure that binds us all together.

Today, we communicate in ways we would never have dreamed of 50 years ago.

And, importantly, we don't know which of the technologies we're currently developing

are the ones that are going to revolutionise our future.

So that completes our journey from the telegraph, through to the telephone,

and on to wireless and our digital world of satellites and fibre optics.

All are linked by a common desire to make it possible to communicate regardless of time and distance.

What other technological advance has done so much to bring us all together?

So we have whizzed through 200 years of history. Any final thoughts?

What strikes me about the inventions we've considered is they're not driven by popular demand,

it's more the inventor themselves creating a crazy world that they want to see happen.

They're turning science fiction into engineering reality.

And that's the point, it's not about what you make as an object, it's about that twist in consciousness

that makes it popular enough to happen, like the communications networks.

Thank you, Cassie. Thank you, Mark. Next time, we're moving from sound to pictures.

We'll be showing how the birth of photography

-shed light on the world around us.

-HE LAUGHS

How cinema changed our understanding of motion and morality.

And why it took a battle between two rival inventions to get television on air.

It's a story full of surprises, extraordinary characters and, of course, genius.

But until then it's goodbye from everyone here.

-Bye.

-Bye.

-Goodbye.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd