Visual Image The Genius of Invention

Hello, and welcome to The Genius of Invention,

tonight from BBC Broadcasting House.

Now, the fact that you are able to watch us

is thanks to some brilliant and eccentric inventors.

Among them are many British giants of innovation

who had the vision to freeze time through photography

and pioneered the magic of the moving image.

They've made the world smaller, faster and more vivid.

And they've brought faraway worlds to our homes.

How and why did that happen?

We're going to explore the very nature of invention.

How blind luck, stubbornness and flashes of genius

combined to build our glorious, technicolour world.

Hello, I'm Michael Mosley.

-As usual, I'm joined by Doctor Cassie Newland.

-Hello.

-And Professor Mark Miodownik.

-Hello.

Now, there are so many people around the world

vying for a position in tonight's hall of fame,

but we're going to focus on three pivotal inventions

that changed how we saw the world.

We'll follow a trail of invention born out of our desire

to record and share our life stories.

From fixing the shadows through photography

to moving pictures and then sending them across the airwaves.

Television.

They all have the capacity to reproduce and reflect our world.

They have the power to capture our imagination

in unique and unforgettable ways.

200 years ago, it took eight hours to create a single photograph.

Today, we can conjure up

an infinite number of worlds through virtual reality.

Tonight, we celebrate the inventors and inventions

that changed our perspective.

Our timeline begins with photography.

And it was William Henry Fox Talbot

who succeeded where others had failed.

But his breakthrough was at risk

from the occupational hazard of all inventors. Competition.

Fox Talbot had been working on

his own photographic technique for five years.

And he had no idea that Daguerre was about to unleash this bombshell.

It was an invention from a different field

that overcame the barriers to capturing motion.

And it was, of course, a substance, not a technology,

that created the movie industry in the first place.

Although it wasn't just what was on the screen that proved inflammatory.

The next challenge, transmitting pictures at a distance,

was resolved by a fiery showdown between a corporate giant

and maverick inventor John Logie Baird.

At the end of the contest,

the best system would be awarded the coveted contract

to broadcast to the nation.

The loser would go home with nothing.

And one of our most successful inventors, Sir James Dyson,

shares his thoughts on Britain's role in shaping the modern world.

Part of the reason is we like being eccentric.

We're an island race who likes to be different.

And we're quite grand in our thought.

Conquering the world and ruling the seas and so on.

That's deep in our history.

So, Cassie, why do you think these three inventions are so important?

Oh, they're just wonderfully descriptive

of how we came to be the modern people we are.

Visual image is so primary in the way we view our world.

It's about becoming critically self-reflective, all those things.

Is this nonsense you expect from a social scientist?

I'm not sure I really agree.

Visual image has always been about the material fact.

First it was cave paintings, then it was drawings on canvas and paper,

and then it was photography.

Chemistry made photography possible.

And then it was plastics made the cinema possible.

We get more and more materials, so it's a materials story.

I think you're both wrong. I think it's down to personalities.

You've got Fox Talbot, he's got something brilliant,

but he hasn't got the personality to sell it,

whereas Logie Baird has something which frankly is not that brilliant,

and yet he had the personality, which makes it happen.

Anyway, this building

has been at the heart of the story for the last 80 years.

I've been taking a quick look around.

Broadcasting House is better known as the home of radio.

But it was here that the first faint flickers of television

were fanned into life.

In 1932, from the basement here,

John Logie Baird, the father of mechanical television,

first began broadcasting experimental television pictures.

It was the year Broadcasting House opened -

the first purpose-built broadcast centre in Britain.

In the 80 years since,

it has expanded to a network of radio, television, internet

that now reaches over 240 million people worldwide.

But it's not just the BBC that's changed.

Other national and independent companies

have combined to help make British broadcasting

amongst the best in the world.

And as the number of channels has grown,

so, too, have the ways we can access them.

But news remains at the heart of broadcasting.

When the BBC first moved into Broadcasting House,

newscasters were exquisitely attired

and spoke in RP, received pronunciation.

Now, these days, the BBC has gone from dinner jackets to digital,

and stays in contact with the world

via an extensive network of cable and satellite.

When Broadcasting House opened, it was a feat of audio engineering.

22 radio studios and 50 miles of electrical wiring.

Eight decades later, John Logie Baird's vision

of a fully-fledged television service has finally been realised.

The studios here are very buzzy places.

And they are the product of decades of technological development.

From topical discussion programmes like this one

to virtual-reality studios where sets appear

and change at the touch of a button.

Today, the only real limit is imagination.

But none of this technology would be possible

without understanding our first invention - photography.

And it seems to be an invention whose time had come.

Loads of people were involved in the inventions that paved the way for it.

The camera obscura is at least 1,000 years old.

But it was a device that only captured a temporary image

while the sun was out.

But this is more of an aid for artists.

Because you can draw around the projected image

and know that you've got everything right.

And the 18th century was all about the mastery of nature,

the scientific enlightenment.

Optics and perspective were rational ways of understanding

and representing the world.

If only there was a way to fix the pictures.

For me, the father of photography is this man, Nicephore Niepce.

All images, videos, films, internet, TV,

everything can be traced back to this heliograph.

Now, heliograph literally means sun writing.

This is a view from Niepce's house in France taken in 1826.

It's made using a camera obscura

and the exposure took eight hours.

It changed everything.

It's quite hard for us to appreciate what a huge technical achievement this was.

So we set historical photographer Terry King a challenge.

For those who appreciated the natural world,

photography was an invention born of necessity.

Before the 1820s,

the only way to permanently record people and places was through art.

And with a background in lithography,

Niepce overcame his poor draughtsmanship

by using a camera obscura

and obsessively trying to fix the images he obtained with it.

He did all sorts of strange things, like trying to introduce new gases

like hydrogen, actually into the camera obscura.

It didn't make a difference, but he tried anything to see if it worked.

I think it was a matter of money -

just finding something that was industrially more efficient.

Others had already tried and failed to fix images.

In the 1790s, the British scientist Thomas Wedgwood

used an earlier discovery

that silver nitrate and silver chloride darken

when exposed to light to make sun prints.

But he couldn't fix them, and his images turned black.

Niepce's knowledge of light-sensitive chemicals from his printmaking days

had shown that asphalt, which hardens when exposed to sunlight,

might hold the secret to permanent pictures.

And after six years of trial and error, his persistence paid off.

He finally cracked the formula.

Essentially, asphaltum, which is the stuff we get on the roads,

it was called at the time, Bitumen of Judea,

is dissolved in a thinner - lavender oil or turpentine -

and you get exactly the right consistency.

That is then coated onto a piece of metal

and then exposed to light in a camera obscura.

And that produces the image on the plate.

Niepce discovered that the areas where the paste was exposed to light turned hard

and the dark areas stayed soft and could be washed away,

leaving a permanent image directly from nature.

But Niepce took the first ever photograph in the south of France,

not during an English winter.

So Terry's exposing his plate for several days

in the hope of his own eureka moment.

Just leave it there to see what happens.

And Terry will be joining us later

to show us the results of his experiment.

I must admit, Mark, this is not what you expect to, er...

-Lavender, yeah?

-Yeah.

-Goodness!

What's incredible is if you look at these ingredients,

they're all readily available.

They're kind of mundane - lavender, bitumen, pewter.

And he's creating something really extraordinary -

a photosensitive chemical that can create the first photographic image.

That is very marvellous.

But his story does not end well.

To find out how his discoveries were soon to be overshadowed,

I visited Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire.

Like most breakthroughs, the birth of photography

reveals as much about the inventors as their inventions.

Niepce's was secretive, and for years, guarded his process.

It might have stayed that way, but for the persistence

of a flamboyant lighting designer called Louis Daguerre.

Daguerre persuaded a reluctant Niepce to share his secrets.

And in 1829, they signed a formal agreement to work together.

Unfortunately, Niepce then died.

Now, this left Daguerre,

who had no scientific training, to go on working alone.

But Daguerre continued experimenting.

This time using silver-coated copper plates

sensitised with iodine which were exposed in his camera.

The story goes that having broken a thermometer,

the mercury vapour caused a beautiful, sharp image

to develop on the plate, which he fixed with salt solution.

Daguerre had finally achieved what so many before him had failed to do.

He'd captured and permanently fixed an image.

The announcement that Daguerre had perfected a process

came in January 1839.

And, of course, with typical brashness,

he named the method after himself.

The French government rewarded Daguerre with a pension for life

and made the process free across France.

Daguerre from day one was the centre of the universe.

The Daguerreotype, Daguerromania.

You know, it took hold of the world.

But in a small corner of Britain,

this announcement was unhappily received.

News of Daguerre's breakthrough was a horrible shock

to the owner of this place, Lacock Abbey in Wiltshire.

I imagine gentleman scholar William Henry Fox Talbot

pacing around agitatedly

as he read about it in a French newspaper.

This was such a shock because Fox Talbot

had been working on his own photographic technique for five years

and he had no idea that Daguerre was about to unleash this bombshell.

Unlike his rival, Talbot was a keen scientist

and had produced an entirely different method,

using paper instead of metal plates.

Will you take your coat off, sir?

It's important that you remain completely motionless.

With just a minute's exposure,

small particles formed a faint image on the paper

which could be developed and fixed.

One, two, three.

He named his process the Calotype.

But Talbot, a perfectionist,

thought his invention wasn't ready to be unveiled.

So he kept it to himself.

-So you have these two great rivals.

-Yes.

And what is the critical difference between their processes?

They're almost like day and night.

I mean, a Calotype, you hold it up and you look

and you see that dark is light and light is dark.

It's obviously reversed, it's a negative.

From that, you can make as many prints that look exactly like this as possible.

You can make 100, you can make 1,000.

With a Daguerreotype, it's on a metal plate.

The plate that goes in the camera is the plate you take home.

And it's a one-off, direct, positive image.

Do you think it's because of their different personalities

that their inventions kind of emerged in different ways?

Daguerre was a well-known man about town.

He loved going to parties,

he loved entering parties walking on his hands.

He was an artist who came late to science.

Talbot, on the other hand, was awkward in crowds,

awkward in public situations.

He was the scientist who took a scientific approach

to the invention of photography.

Although Talbot couldn't match his rival's quality one-offs,

he had moved photography into the world of printing and reproduction -

a huge step forward.

There you go. So that's the paper.

Thank you.

But instead of being celebrated,

Talbot was condemned for being too slow off the mark.

Under pressure to make up for his earlier mistake,

he quickly published and slapped a tight patent on his invention.

Now, that is rather good, actually.

I'm beginning to see it now.

The issue was about priority.

He wanted to show that he had also perfected a method

at the same time, if not before.

That was all purely a matter for him of his scientific integrity,

of how his colleagues in the scientific world viewed him.

But vociferous opponents claimed Talbot was trying to profit

from a process that was not even his own invention,

merely an advance on the work of others.

He was vilified and received nothing but abuse.

That's the irony of history.

Sometimes, the real heroes of invention

aren't necessarily the ones who are celebrated.

There are so many heroes in that wonderful fertile period

of exploration in photographic methods who are still unsung.

Daguerre became rich and famous.

And when he died in 1851,

his technique was still the most popular.

Talbot, well, he got terrible press

and was always seen somehow as second rate.

And that is terribly unfair.

Because it's his invention of the negative

which would form the backbone of photography up to the digital age.

-Would you like to see your picture?

-I would love to.

Are you ready?

HE LAUGHS

Oh, dear! My first reaction is that I look about 120, don't I?

150, actually!

It looks like it was kind of an original taken there.

Do you think that looks like me at all?

It looks like you will be in about...yeah.

-It looks like your grandad.

-THEY LAUGH

Can you print that off? I want to take that home.

I do think that is an extraordinary photograph

taken using Talbot's method.

And it makes you wonder why didn't Talbot get more recognition?

Was it really just down to his personality?

With me is Professor Brian Winston, who is a historian of the media.

So, is it about personality?

I think personality does play a role in this,

but not, I think, in ways that are generally accepted.

I think the last thing personality has any effect on

is the actual device, the technology.

That seems to me that's a very much hit-and-miss affair.

But the effectiveness

with which a thing

acquires the name

of a person

is really a bit like becoming a star actor.

You know, it's more luck than anything else,

coupled with a great deal of commercial acumen.

How much of a motivator do you think fame is for an inventor?

I'm not sure that fame is as big a motivator

as making a buck, frankly.

I think a lot of these guys were trying to make a living.

You look at some of the things we've got on the table here, Rubik's Cube.

I mean, the man's an architect.

Presumably, there weren't that many buildings going up in Hungary!

There's no question that people would benefit enormously

if their name was attached.

How important is public relations in this -

having a good PR machine, a good story to tell?

There's no question about that.

Edison once said invention is 99-percent perspiration,

one-percent inspiration.

Actually, I think it's probably 97-percent perspiration

and one-percent inspiration and two-percent PR.

There's all that national competition, personal competition,

show business, luck, etcetera, etcetera.

All of this comes into that two percent.

Thank you very much, Brian.

And thank you, Michael. Thank you.

So perhaps all Talbot needed was better PR.

But fantastic though his method was,

it still lacked the magic ingredient

that could bring photography in from the dark,

as Mark's about to find out.

I'm outside for this part because I don't want to be responsible

for burning down one of the BBC buildings.

And I'm joined by Andrea Sella, Professor of Chemistry at UCL.

He's going to take us through some demos involved in early photography.

Well, the big problem in photography in the 19th century

was really doing things indoors.

Sometime around 1830,

someone discovered

that if you took carbon disulfide

and you mixed it with nitric oxide,

then you could get a really quite amazing mixture.

-Now, put your specs on.

-Yeah.

Terrible stuff!

It does stink, I agree.

So...open it up at the top. You ready?

-Yeah.

-Pour it in.

And now it's going to build up some pressure.

-Oooh!

-I can feel that. I can smell that.

-Yeah. Well, you're downwind.

-Yeah, yeah.

Bad place to stand.

OK. And now I've just got to mix it.

Just to make sure that everything is...well mixed in the tube.

OK. So we're kind of ready to go.

-OK.

-Now, I'll just release the last of the pressure.

OK. And now we're going to light it up at the top.

Um...

this always makes me just a little nervous.

-You ready?

-Yeah. Go on.

Whoa! LAUGHTER

-So you can imagine...

-That's what I call a flash!

Well, you can just imagine, you know, why it is

that some of those 19th-century photographs,

-they look kind of shell-shocked.

-Yeah, their expressions!

OK. Now it all makes sense.

Photography had two huge effects.

Firstly, it allowed everybody to create images of themselves

that would outlive them.

And that was previously only available to the rich and powerful.

And secondly, it shrunk the world.

And Michael's been finding out

how photography is still at the heart of the modern news-gathering machine.

As photographic equipment became ever more portable,

photography moved from capturing portraits and landscapes

to documenting events across the globe.

Photographic journalists began using pictures

to tell news stories more vividly than any headline.

The appeal of photographs to news organisations

is they can deliver a real emotional punch.

They make you feel happy, sad, outraged.

And when you get the right picture with the right story,

then the effect is really potent.

Today, the BBC News picture desk

receives a stream of 10,000 photographs a day

from journalists and agencies around the world.

The Royal Wedding, for instance, pictures were arriving,

so the kiss on the balcony,

the pictures arrived within two minutes of it actually happening.

Because they were all set up to transmit, and, bang, they come in.

Go back 20 years, 30 pictures a day would come in on the wires.

They were printed out on various machines

which were a bit like photocopiers or fax machines almost.

The fact that it took 10 minutes for a picture to arrive didn't matter.

-This one here, what's this?

-This is the assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan.

It's a wire photo that was transmitted in black and white.

Talk me through it.

These would come across as a yellow and a blue and a red.

And then you'd reconstitute them by putting them under a copy camera,

then you'd photograph them with the appropriate filter one after the other.

And as long as you didn't jog them, you ended up

with a perfectly registered colour picture at the end of it.

It's curious how driven we are by pictures.

Yeah. I mean, the demand for pictures now is much, much higher.

It's not always drama you're after, sometimes it's the human side of things.

And...and people are always the strongest.

It's getting that...that connection with the people in the picture.

The rise of user-generated content, readers sending in pictures,

has made a lot of difference to us.

It's often said, but everyone's a photographer now.

Most people have that in their pocket these days with their phone.

I guess the change now that you've got user-generated content

is almost as profound as the original photographic revolution.

It's kind of been called the second revolution of photography,

from the one 100 or so years ago when the Box Brownie put photography

in the hands of the masses.

And now it's once again in the hands of the masses,

but not just the ability to take pictures,

it's also the ability to publish them and share them

and not just with your mates down the pub

or your friends from a shoebox under the bed.

You can put them up there and obviously, the world is there to view them.

The thing that strikes me is how quickly it all happened.

Because 20 years ago, I was a director on Tomorrow's World,

I was in Japan, I had these new prototype digital cameras.

I told the world, "The digital camera is coming." It cost £10,000 then.

And I had no idea it was going to take off like that.

That's the thing, isn't it? You can't know which inventions

are going to be the future and which ones are going to be history.

You can see it with photography.

No-one could have really predicted the evolution of that technology.

And our next invention is similarly so.

A new material comes in from left field

and completely revolutionises the way we see ourselves.

The motion picture has its origins in the 19th century

with scientists who were far more interested

in understanding movement, rather than in trying to create it.

And it begins with this man, Eadweard Muybridge,

the father of cinematography.

Now, Muybridge had been charged with discovering whether a horse's feet

all left the ground at the same time when it was trotting and galloping,

and he did it in a very clever way.

This is his machinery.

It's a row of cameras all operated by tripwires.

And what happens is the horse gallops towards the tripwires

and as it hits them, every camera in the row takes a tiny picture.

The tripwires operate a shutter, click, click, click,

and that is the fundamental part of this invention.

What it produces is a set of photographs

which quite clearly demonstrate

that a horse's feet do leave the ground,

but more importantly, when you project them

at the magic rate of at least 12 frames per second,

fool the human brain into thinking that it's seeing motion.

Yes, but the pictures were exposed on glass plates

and this had an obvious disadvantage.

It severely limited the number of photos

that could be taken in a sequence.

And his work was scientific, anyway.

He wasn't trying to create motion pictures as we know them.

It was a dead end.

There was a flurry of breakthroughs

in the second half of the 19th century.

By the 1880s, experimenters understood

the principles of moving pictures.

They understood lenses, movement and projection.

But it would take the invention of an important new material

for cinematography itself to take off.

'Although early experimenters had made great strides studying

'movement they could go no further with the existing materials.

'Glass plates were heavy and fragile and paper tore easily.

'Neither met the demands of capturing the moving image.'

As a scientist and a massive film fan, I've always been

fascinated by the role of materials in the making of movies.

And it was of course a substance, not a technology, that created

the movie industry in the first place.

And that substance is this - celluloid.

'And like many wonder materials, celluloid was originally

'conceived for a very different purpose.

'It was developed in 1870 as a substitute for ivory

'in billiard balls by American John Wesley Hyatt.

'But it was its versatility that ensured its continued use.'

Throughout the 1870s, it was used widely for a whole range

of applications.

You could buy celluloid shirt collars,

shirt cuffs, even celluloid false teeth.

It was the British manufacturer John Carbutt who

discovered that this colourless, light,

durable plastic had a more illuminating purpose - photography.

He coated thin sheets with photographic emulsion

and used them instead of glass plates.

But it was only when Kodak boss George Eastman produced

celluloid in rolls for his new stills camera

that its potential for film-makers was unleashed.

'They had seen how roll film revolutionised stills photography

'and realised it might also unlock

'the secrets of capturing motion.'

And celluloid rolls drove

early film pioneers to design new camera technology that

took advantage of this wonderful flexible plastic.

'It would influence the design of the film camera for years to come.

'The perforations and sprocket rollers enabled the film to

'flow through the camera. A spinning shutter allowed for rapid

'exposures, and a claw mechanism ensured the film could be moved

'and stopped for each frame up to 20 times a second.'

The claw, which was really the Lumieres' contribution,

was inspired by the sewing machine.

It's interesting that you are taking an idea from one application

and using it in another and this is the way that advances happen.

In 1895, the film-making pioneers Auguste and Louis Lumiere introduced

their Cinematographe - a camera and projector in one, and unveiled

the world's first cinema performance of moving pictures on celluloid.

It's to a paying audience, of only about 30, 35 people,

but within a week or so,

they're having 2,000 people a day coming through the doors.

As other experimenters rushed to exploit the union of machines

and materials, the film industry was born.

'Some of the results of those pioneering experiments are housed

'in the British Film Institute's master film store in Warwickshire.'

At this former nuclear defence facility, they have

one of the largest collections of early celluloid nitrate films

in the world.

-Hello.

-Do you want to come this way?

What would it have been like going to an early cinema, what would we have seen?

You're talking about minute or less for most films.

They kind of slowly build up in length,

so by 1905, our most popular film hit was Rescued By Rover,

that ran to 6½ marvellous minutes.

It was so popular that the negatives were worn out,

because so many prints had to be struck from it.

What happened at the end of the life of these films?

Most of them were simply chucked out.

I think it's important to remember that then

they were not seen as art or culture in any way, shape or form,

they were purely product, and, actually, a lot of them

were just melted down to get the silver content out of them.

'It's not just their historical value that demands such high security.

'There was a dangerous flaw in the properties of early celluloid film -

'flammability.

'And this demonstration reveals why the invention of cinema itself

'was under threat.'

We're getting there.

Are you ready? Let's go for it!

It's the sense that that's a tiny bit of a reel, just imagine a whole archive.

Reports of cinema fires ignited fears about public safety,

and in 1909, the Cinematograph Act was passed, requiring the careful handling of film.

But it would take another 40 years before the development

of non-flammable celluloid, appropriately called "safety film".

Celluloid reigned supreme for over 100 years, and even in our

digital age, it remains a symbol for the magic of the moving image.

At its heart, cinema consisted of images that were projected

onto a screen.

And you need a material, and that material was celluloid.

So, without the invention of celluloid there would have

been no moving pictures and no cinema as we know it today.

And cinema in the UK was introduced just down the road from here

by the Lumiere brothers.

Now surprisingly enough, Louis Lumiere said,

"Ze cinema is an invention without any future..." He got that

wrong, didn't he? And that raises an interesting question.

How long do inventions take to really catch on?

Or the diffusion rate, to use the jargon.

I'm joined by Dr Jonathan Liebenau from the London School of Economics.

Well, Jonathan, I have a graph here

and it shows years

to reach 50% household ownership.

And here we go...it's electricity 40 years, 50 years,

and the telephone has taken an impressive 71 years.

What are the most significant factors which

determine whether something takes off?

Well, first of all, whether people appreciate the invention.

Whether it fits into what they understand about their needs

and aspirations.

It also needs to be affordable and it has to be legal.

And legal doesn't just mean that it's not illegal.

But that it's governed by a system where people can feel that they

trust the way in which their money is spent, their time is spent, and

the tools that they use are going to be properly fitting in together.

Do you think it's predictable?

Now it depends on whether you're talking about really novel changes,

in which case it's very difficult to tell,

or whether it's an incremental change,

where it fits into a system that is in place.

The telephone needed a whole new system, not only a system

of telephone connections, but a system of ways to use the telephone

and it also fitted in pretty quickly to a government-regulated form.

Whereas the internet was built on top of the telephone system,

it already was in place, and there was an opportunity for it to diffuse

very quickly, once people had an idea of what its utility would be.

What sort of technology out there should I be putting my money into?

I'm not going to give you financial guidance.

But I think the electric car is something,

if you had patient capital, that it would be a good thing to invest in.

How patient?

Perhaps 15 years or so,

in terms of paying off your investment.

I'll have you on the sofa in 15 years' time and we'll find out.

Thank you, Jonathan.

Now, with all the technological elements for cinema in place,

it was time to turn to what was actually being shown, and to whom.

We asked film historian and broadcaster Matthew Sweet

to investigate the murky world of early film censorship.

'The extraordinary power of the cinematic moving images to enthral,

'amaze and move the audience meant its popularity, particularly among

'the urban poor, could no longer be ignored by the authorities.'

And with the introduction of the 1909 Cinematograph Act,

the film business became official.

Regulated. Out went screenings in tents and converted shops.

In came purpose-built legitimate picture houses.

With usherettes. And drinks on sticks.

And a whole lot of official opinions about disgraceful

things going on in the auditorium.

'Like many new inventions, cinema came with its own army of naysayers

'and doom-mongers.

'Chief constables and teachers' groups blamed the movies

'for poor eyesight, headaches, and an increase in the suicide rate.

'The Catholic Church even banned its priests from attending.'

So what was it about cinemas that people felt was so awful?

Well, obviously they were dark, dirty, smelly places,

places where you could catch diseases.

There was this general kind of patrician's sense that working-class

people would sit there in the dark and they'd get up to stuff.

-What kind of stuff?

-Well, er, sex, basically.

Kissing, er, general sort of immoral activity.

'But while you could sanitise a cinema,

'and its audience, with a jolly good spray of cleaning fluid,

'upon the screen was something beyond the reach of disinfectant.'

There WERE a lot of films being made which had sexual content,

but we're not talking about hardcore pornography in any way, shape or form.

What we're talking about is a mild form of titillation, at best.

The other thing that we're talking about is petty crime,

and there was this worry about people sort of seeing what kind of

crimes could be done and saying, "Ah, that's a good idea, let's try that."

It's a familiar argument. The impressionable,

who are generally never the people who want to censor things,

had to be protected from what they saw in the cinema.

It was all too inflammatory.

So local councils got together to impose

certain conditions about what could be shown in their area.

That didn't go down too well with the people who were putting

this stuff on the screen.

'The film companies suspected state censorship was on its way.

'So, in 1912, to pre-empt any government meddling,

they founded the British Board of Film Censors.'

In the very beginning, the BBFC only had two real problems.

One was nudity and the other was the realistic portrayal of Christ.

At the time, it was seen as a real issue.

It was a question of taste and not offending churchgoers,

which was most people.

'But soon the list of objections grew.'

In these ledgers are recorded all the titles of the films that

were put out and the ones that were censored.

A film called The Baboon's Knife has had its title changed to

The Baboon's Revenge On The Conscience Of The Great Unknown.

The ways of the censor are strange.

'But the BBFC soon came under fire for its seemingly heavy-handed

'responses, so in 1916, it published a 43-point list

'explaining exactly when content would get the chop.'

"Excessively passionate love scenes.

"Bathing scenes passing the limits of propriety.

"Scenes tending to disparage public characters or institutions."

It's like an all-you-can-eat menu of early 20th-century anxiety.

We have a kind of image of the censor as a man with a big

pair of scissors cutting bits out of films, so we imagine that

somewhere all these lovely little bits of films will exist.

Er, but there isn't, er, regrettably a lovely archive of little

clips of naughty scenes taken out of films. Wouldn't it be lovely?

'By 1917, anxiety about cinema had become so great that

'a special commission was set up to examine its impact.

'After months of investigation, they delivered their verdict -

'tighten censorship and turn up the lights.'

But here's the most important conclusion they reached.

The cinema couldn't be reformed out of existence.

The machine couldn't be un-invented, despite the flea-biting, snogging, and the copycat crime.

The movies were more powerful than moralism.

And they still are.

I love the fact that, as we've seen right across the series,

new inventions can set off some sort of moral panic.

When the steam engine first came along, people thought it would

make their heads explode or their wombs fly out.

Now, do you think all inventions create this moral panic?

Well, sometimes.

The thing is about inventions, we're talking about things

which revolutionise the world, and sometimes a moral panic is justified.

Much as I like cars, they are the biggest killer of young people worldwide.

But they don't actually produce moral panic, do they?

Well, they should, that's my point.

But we see that with ALL of the visual innovations.

You know, computer games, video nasties, social networking sites.

"We must look after children, we must look after

"the working classes in the cinemas in the dark."

And I see here, "TV is to blame."

-And that is our final invention.

-The television.

'Few things could shrink the world as much as the ability to see

'live images in our own homes.

'Celluloid had given us moving images at the cinema.

'The next step was to discover a way

'of transmitting them live over distance.'

By the 1930s, there had been over 50 serious proposals for television.

The competition was international,

with inventors working in 11 different countries.

Right from the start, the ideas for how a television would work

broadly fitted into two camps - mechanical techniques, using

a spinning Nipkow disc, and electronic techniques.

And this was a fight that would last for decades to come.

Mechanical television was first out of the blocks,

thanks to an obsessive Scottish engineer, John Logie Baird.

Baird had been a prolific, largely unsuccessful, inventor

since childhood.

But it was here in Hastings that he had the idea that would

change his life. Why not convert pictures into signals

and send them through the air?

Baird actually didn't invent any of the component parts that went

together to make television, but his strength lay in the fact

that as an inventor, he could look at these disparate inventions

and pluck together the bits that he needed to get what he wanted.

'Baird created his first prototype using a combination

'of recycled parts and four key inventions from other people.'

So this is what he started with.

He got a hatbox, he cut some holes in it,

made it spin to scan the image.

The thing he made it spin with was this, an adapted fan engine.

And then he wanted to focus the image,

so he used the lens from a bicycle lamp.

Next, he takes that image and he passes it through this,

this is a selenium cell which he got from a local army surplus store,

and that creates an electrical signal.

Electrical signal goes into this, which he also bought from an army surplus store, this is

an amplifier and that creates a bigger signal...which then passes

into this, a neon lamp which glows, depending on the signal it gets.

And that, in turn, is projected through another spinning disc.

He mounts the whole ramshackle device onto what's called

a "coffin board", which was used by local undertakers to carry

dead bodies on.

'Despite appearances,

'this homespun equipment was about to make history.'

-Hi there.

-Hi. Good to meet you.

So I've got this idea that he's got all these bits of apparatus...

Did it really work?

Originally, he could show just basically a black cross,

a bit flickery and a bit wobbly, and he could just about, with some

special focusing, just about get a white blob of a face,

with a blob for each of the eyes and a third blob for the mouth.

He said if the person spoke, you could just see the bottom blob

wiggling a little bit but he knew, "This is going to work."

But as a lone inventor, Baird needed support.

He placed an advert in The Times and later met businessman

Wilfred Day, who sent him funds and equipment.

He rented a studio in this Hastings arcade

and threw himself into achieving that elusive clear picture.

On one occasion, he actually blows himself up.

He's joining all these batteries up,

not a good idea, and he gets a 1,200-volt shock.

And he's found, with burns, on the other side of the lab.

So the landlord here, not very happy,

and eventually tells Baird he's got to go.

So, in 1924, Baird moved to London

and set up a lab in an attic studio in Soho.

He was using better amplifiers, better valves.

He was putting more light on the subject, in fact he was putting

so much light on the subject that he actually set fire to

someone's hair and after that no-one would sit in front of his camera.

So he bought an old ventriloquist's dummy's head which

he called Stooky Bill, and Stooky Bill would sit under these very hot

bright lights for hours on end without complaining.

'But finally, after months of frustration, his hard work paid off.'

On 2nd October, 1925, he finally managed to get

the image of Stooky Bill transmitted across the room.

It was blurry, it was out of focus,

but it was a recognisable face.

In 1926, John Logie Baird demonstrated his mechanical

television for the first time,

and we've got a reconstruction of that here.

He invited members of the Royal Institution but we've invited Cassie,

who's just as good, I think, if not better, and this is how it worked.

So you had a model who could be seen to be moving in real time,

and you had a camera with a spinning disc in it, and that has 30 holes.

Now those 30 holes, by spinning around, they scan Cassie's

face into 30 lines of dark and light, which are captured

on a photosensitive cell here at the back.

That's turned into electricity, and that electric signal of dark

and light is recreated over here in the receiver,

which is essentially just the opposite of the camera.

A light is turned on and off due to that signal,

and this spinning disc has 30 holes, and if those two are synched together in the right way,

you get lines, and actually a full picture,

and that is television for the first time.

At the time, it must have been an absolutely marvellously

extraordinary moment to see.

The Baird company was really taking off.

They could transmit across a room, they could transmit

down the 400 miles of telephone cable between London and Glasgow.

But what they really wanted to do was broadcast on the airwaves.

They needed a transmitter.

So the next move was to take the system to the only official

broadcaster in the UK, the BBC.

All inventions if they are to change our lives,

need to find supporters beyond the workshop.

For television, that meant attracting an audience.

In 1932, Baird began test transmissions from Broadcasting House.

But he soon had competition from a rival system -

electronic television, led by the powerful corporation EMI.

'The government had to select the best invention.'

They asked the BBC to conduct an extraordinary experiment in which

mechanical and electronic television would compete head-to-head.

And this is the site of the battle -

Alexandra Palace in North London, which, in November, 1936,

would play host to the world's first television talent contest.

'A former Victorian entertainment venue, the site had the height

'and range for the transmitter and space for two separate studios.

'Baird Television Ltd's mechanical system was given Studio B,

'while in Studio A were the newcomers, now called Marconi- EMI.

'Their system employed electronic technology, which had been

'proposed by Scottish scientist AA Campbell-Swinton in 1908,

'based on the recently invented cathode ray tube.'

76 years ago, this studio would have been full of people

and equipment from the Marconi-EMI team.

Both teams were given six months to prove themselves.

At the end of the contest, the best system would be awarded -

the coveted contract to broadcast to the nation.

The loser would go home with nothing.

'Transmission started on 2nd November, 1936.

'The opening ceremony was broadcast twice, first with the Baird cameras,

'and then again on the Marconi-EMI system.

'To the viewer at home, the picture quality was evenly matched,

'but Baird knew he had a battle on his hands.'

The mechanical systems Baird was using had been refined

over 10, 12 years and had got as far as they could possibly go,

whereas the EMI electronic system was still in its infancy.

Despite this, EMI's Emitron camera showcased the latest advances

in electronics.

The camera pointed towards the host and the picture

focused onto a light-sensitive plate inside a cathode ray tube.

The plate was then scanned using a beam of electrons,

which was directed in lines across the image by electromagnets.

This produced a series of electrical signals which were sent to a transmitter.

The brighter the area on the picture, the stronger the signal.

At the other end, another cathode ray tube converted the signal

back into an electron stream.

This was directed in parallel lines onto a fluorescent TV screen,

and the successive scans built up as a picture.

EMI had three cameras in the studio and you could take a picture

from any one of the three cameras. You could put the camera on wheels,

it was relatively light, and you could wheel it around the studio.

It was television as we understand it today.

Under pressure to match the quality of this slick new system,

Baird devised an incredibly complicated technology

based on celluloid.

They filmed what happened in the studio on film.

The film came straight out of the bottom of the camera,

into developer,

into fixer, and then into water, and while still wet and underwater,

about 54 seconds later, it was scanned to produce a television picture.

'Baird's system, while offering good picture quality, was flawed.

'The cameras couldn't move, the developing process required

'dangerous chemicals, and it wasn't live.'

It soon became clear that Baird's mechanical system had reached the end of the road,

while, for electronic television, it was just the beginning.

Marconi-EMI offered superior performance

and were improving every day.

As one of the producers said, "It was like using Morse code in one room

"when you knew that next door you could telephone."

It is in the nature of invention that first is not always best.

The incremental improvements and adaptations of rival systems

can take an invention further than the original inventor ever could.

After three months, Marconi-EMI was declared the winner.

Baird had lost out.

In defence of Baird, to say that his system failed is

rather like saying that Trevithick's first steam

locomotive in the streets of Cornwall failed and therefore

he has nothing to do with the history of the motorised vehicle.

If you go back to the beginning of any invention,

it bears no resemblance to the state it's now in.

That shouldn't really

detract from the fact

that he was the person who proved to everyone it could be done.

I'm joined by Iain Baird, who's curator of broadcast at the National

Media Museum in Bradford and is the grandson of John Logie Baird.

Your grandfather must have been very disappointed with

the outcome of those trials.

He was very upset, he was much more upset

than people in his company were,

because they thought, "We can make

"money by selling television sets."

But he didn't get too discouraged by it and he did move forward.

Not only did he invent the first working prototype, but

he championed it. In a sense, that's part of why he's so great, isn't it?

He was a champion of television,

he believed in it, and he could see it being used in a broadcast

application, whereas a lot of people at the time didn't see a use

for it. They said, "We have radio, we have the cinema," and so he took

it from being a scientific, almost a science fiction sort of Wellsian

device to being something that by the '50s, it had become commonplace.

So what set your grandfather apart from other inventors?

On the surface, he didn't appear to be completely scientific.

He was quite personable, he had a good sense of humour,

which he'd learned from his father.

He had people skills and he was an inventor?! Amazing.

At the beginning, he seemed a little quiet, but was actually quite humorous,

so he would very often work late at night to develop an idea

and it was his technical enthusiasm which was quite contagious.

Yeah, I think he was a man of the people in a lot of ways,

a champion of coming from poverty, which was definitely

a condition that he had to face during his career,

to develop something that would change the world.

Thanks, Iain.

Now, you'll remember that earlier in the programme,

we set photographer Terry King the task of reproducing

the technique Niepce used back in 1826.

It's time to find out how he got on.

Having been inspired by Niepce's experiments with turpentine,

asphalt and lavender oil, Terry hopes to have perfected the formula

used to make the world's first photograph.

Like his predecessor, Terry's camera's been set to capture

the view from a window onto a pewter plate.

I think I have actually got windows coming through.

This is the wishful-thinking bit.

But can our inventions enthusiast achieve the same success?

So, Terry, how did it go?

Well, because there wasn't much light and there was mist and fog...

Is this a lot of excuses?

It's a lot of excuses to say that in fact there wasn't enough

light to harden the asphaltum to make it work for us.

We had a very faint impression on there,

but as we tried to develop it in turpentine, it all just washed away.

-Ah.

-Apart from anything else, this process shows us

quite what an achievement it was for Niepce.

Well, I think it certainly was an achievement.

It took him, in fact, six years of hard work,

and then it took everybody else

another 30 years to achieve what Niepce wanted to achieve.

But he set the whole thing in motion.

And there's a beautiful moment when he cracks it

and he writes a letter home to his brother, and it says...

Well, I'm sure it was.

But we have to remember that the first photograph was really what it was.

He had nothing to compare it with.

And I know how difficult it was to produce an image, simply

because it took me months and months and months to find out what

dilution the asphalt should be and how long the exposure should be.

In fact, I've got one here which was done using Niepce's process.

Ah, but it's obviously not a view out of a window?

No, this is a contact print which I made

putting a leaf on the asphaltum under a UV light.

We had hindsight, poor old Niepce certainly didn't.

And that makes him the kind of person that, in my view,

we can reasonably call him a genius.

Terry, thank you so much for coming.

-It's been a very great pleasure.

-Thank you.

So that concludes our story of 12 inventions

that shape all our lives.

It's a tale of how the work of a handful of brilliant minds,

together with the discoveries of countless lesser-known inventors

and the institutions that supported them combined to make our modern world.

We have seen how critical invention has been

in transforming our relationship with power,

how a transport revolution brought us closer together,

how cabled and wireless communication shrank our planet,

and how still and moving images allowed us to record and share the world.

'Together, they all show The Genius Of Invention.'

The truth is that quite a lot of the inventions

we have focused on have British roots.

Do you think we are being incredibly xenophobic or do you

think there's actually something peculiarly inventive about the British?

There is something peculiar about Britain, in inventiveness.

I think it's a very creative culture, and it's quite unusual for that.

You can see it in our humour, and I think you can see it in our engineering.

I think we're terrible at making money out of that.

And we weren't in the 19th century, but we've somehow lost

the knack of turning that great inventiveness into some bucks.

Which brings me neatly onto our final film.

I went to meet Sir James Dyson, one of our more successful

inventors, to see what he thinks about the nature of British

inventiveness and what lies ahead.

Like many inventors, Sir James Dyson struggled for years before

he launched the product that would make his name

and fortune - the bagless vacuum cleaner.

'Since then, he's filed over 3,500 patents and played

'a significant role in keeping Britain's inventive spirit alive.'

So, do you think the British are particularly inventive?

Yes, part of the reason is we like being eccentric.

We're an island race, we like to be different.

And we're quite grand

in our thought, you know, conquering

the world, ruling the seas and so on, that's deep in our history.

And that's given us this independence of spirit,

and a desire to create things that we can ship to the world.

Do you have hero inventors?

Whittle was incredibly inspirational.

I love his story, this uneducated person who built model

aeroplanes, and ended up getting a double First at Cambridge,

while at the same time building the world's first jet engine.

I mean, it was the most extraordinary invention.

'Sir James believes we can keep our place as a world leader

'in design and innovation.'

Do you think that everything that can be invented has been invented?

Oh, now is an absolutely wonderful moment where we've got to stop using

all these resources, so engineering now is very, very exciting.

You don't build the biggest and the fastest, you have to build something that uses

less electricity, less water, fewer materials, that lasts longer.

So I think a lot of the inventions will come in materials,

materials that answer that call, and then engineers and scientists

will be able to use that to create really interesting products.

So I think now,

we're just at the start of what I think will be a glorious age.

If we were to come back in 20 years' time, what do you imagine

we would be talking about?

I would like to think we have cracked the power problem.

So, you know, your family sunshine holiday becomes a civic duty.

Formula One becomes an eco sport.

I would love to hear that that's what we're doing.

-OK. I'd love to hear it, too. I'm not optimistic. And you?

-I am!

I also think we'll have cracked self-healing materials.

I think we'll be making bridges that heal themselves.

And in doing so, we will have sort of blurred the boundary

between this inanimate world, this stuff, and the animate world.

And that will be a blurred region.

I think that will be tremendously exciting.

In the same spirit, I'm quite optimistic about 3D printing.

They've already created a trachea which

they put into a human being and I can imagine in the future

that we will be printing lungs, livers, maybe even hearts.

That's it from us. Thank you, Mark, thank you, Cassie.

Now, I personally feel better informed

and more optimistic about the future having made this series.

We have learnt an awful lot about inventions

but we have also discovered something about ourselves.

We make inventions, but they also make us.

-That's The Genius Of Invention. Goodbye.

-Goodbye.

-Goodbye.

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