Away Everyday Miracles: The Genius of Sofas, Stockings and Scanners

Every day our lives collide with thousands of things.

Some seem rather simple, others, we take for granted.

'But the trappings of modern life and the materials they're made from

'have transformed the way we live.

'Giving us comfort, pleasure

'and power.

'Behind them is a story of hidden transformations,

'proof that we live in an age of miracles...'

This is nothing less than levitation.

'..where the weak and fragile can become the super strong...'

'..where parts of the human body can be built by machines.'

I mean, that feels like science fiction.

'These are the innovations that have transformed our world...'

I mean, it's just so audacious!

I can't believe they actually did it.

'..the materials that have allowed us to create a world we enjoy.'

It's already feeling comfy.

'The visionaries who made it happen

'turned new materials into miracles of mass production...'

Look, baby seals!

'..that define the modern world.'

Look at that, weow weow weow!

'I'll be recreating their genius in the lab,

'and investigating the properties of the remarkable things they created,

'the everyday miracles that have transformed our homes,

'our world, and ourselves.'

Last time, I discovered how advances in modern production

have transformed our homes.

This time, I'll be stepping out of the home and exploring

the everyday miracles that have transformed our experience

of the world.

Helping us travel further and faster, to have fun,

to discover the secrets of the universe,

and even to better understand ourselves.

The minute you step outside a whole new world

of exciting possibilities opens up.

There's something very human about wanting to know what's over

the next hill or out to sea, over that horizon.

And not just to know what's there but to go there yourself,

to explore.

My own exploration of the world started in 1986

when I set off for France on my bike.

The whole world seemed in reach back then,

all we had to do was keep pedalling.

We didn't though, we got the ferry back to Dover

where I got arrested because I'd lost my passport.

Looking back, I can see how much I took for granted in my teens.

Like my bike, an amazing machine that could, in theory,

take me anywhere in the world.

What I hadn't realised at the time was how much of the human journey,

our ability to explore this planet and other planets,

is down to our ability to transform materials that this planet provides.

I still love riding my bike today, especially

because it's packed full of material science innovation which all

came about relatively recently, which is odd because the bicycle

seems to me like something that should've been around forever.

Of course the bicycle hasn't always been with us.

In fact it hasn't been with us for very long.

It was this man,

Baron Karl von Drais, who set the ball rolling in 1820,

and he invented something called the laufmaschine and this is it.

It has two wheels, a frame, handles,

and it was designed to help you get around, but you had to run.

Hence the word laufmaschine, because lauf is the German for run.

Designed to support a fully-grown baron,

the laufmaschine was little more than a wooden bench on wheels.

It's sturdy frame took the bulk of your weight,

but you could still only travel at running speed.

It was nearly half a century before that was bettered, by this,

the boneshaker.

In 1870 this was the cutting edge of bicycle design.

It's made of wrought iron and wood, but critically has pedals.

The bonus is more speed, but now stopping's the issue,

so I'm pleased they added at least some rudimentary brakes.

But it was still far removed from the modern bicycle.

Although the boneshaker is so much better than what came before it,

essentially it's still pretty hopeless.

I mean, it's really heavy! I'm not putting that on, it weighs a tonne!

It's slow, it's cumbersome, it's difficult to manoeuvre.

It's just... It looks beautiful but it's not really the thing you want.

What you want is this...

..the kind of bike people were riding just 18 years

after the boneshaker was invented.

I've got one, it's light, stiff and strong, it's essentially

a modern bike, but its basic design dates back to the 1880s.

And the reason it is light, stiff and strong is

because of the steel tubing and the pneumatic tyres,

and what made those possible is not so much an innovation

in engineering or design, it's the emergence of new materials.

In the mid 1800s, Henry Bessemer discovered how to turn

iron into high-strength steel on a massive scale.

That transformed industry and launched a new era of tools

and machinery.

Unlike iron, steel could easily be made into tubes,

though at first they had welded seams and weren't very strong.

Then, in 1886, a way to make tubes without the seam was invented,

and so the bicycle had its frame.

It also had its chain.

In 1880, industrial steel was used to make a revolutionary

roller-chain, which also made gears possible.

But the best was yet to come, the bicycle tyre.

John Dunlop invented his pneumatic tyre in 1888 to give his son's

tricycle a comfier ride than its traditional solid wheels did.

He took rubber,

made rigid by the process of vulcanisation with sulphur,

and he used it in a brilliant way

to create a semi-rigid, air-filled tyre.

It was an ingenious idea that's been used on pretty much every bike

made since, and almost anything else with wheels.

What's amazing is how those simple materials innovations

utterly transformed the bicycle.

To show just what a revolution in design the 1880s bike was

compared to its predecessor, the boneshaker,

I've brought them both here to Herne Hill velodrome

for a rather unusual race.

These racing cyclists are going to help me out...

..by comparing the boneshaker to its successor.

Wow, that was impressive, very, very, very speedy.

So I've got a challenge for you guys.

I'm just wondering what kind of lap times could you do on this?

LAUGHTER

I think you'd be looking at days, rather than seconds.

Well, if it takes 30 or 40 seconds to do a lap on one of these

machines it's going to take at least double if not triple,

maybe more, you know, two or three minutes?

Trying to set the bar high so that you can then come underneath that

-and really impress.

-LAUGHTER

Club-racer Nigel is going to ride the boneshaker in a head-to-head

pursuit against me.

I'll be on the post-1880s bicycle.

So we've got a super fit athlete on a boneshaker,

and me on a bike designed just a few years later but featuring

pneumatic tyres and tubular steel, not to mention the roller-chain.

We're starting on opposite sides of the track,

and we'll try to catch each other up.

-Are you ready, Nige?

-Yeah.

-Tony?

-Ready.

Go, Nige! Come on! Come on, Nige!

He's getting up big speed now, getting stability.

Yeah, it touch more than a minute, guys.

CLASSICAL MUSIC

DRAMATIC MUSIC

CLASSICAL MUSIC

DRAMATIC MUSIC

Here he comes.

It's the most difficult machine I've ever cycled on,

without a shadow of a doubt.

-I wouldn't be swapping it for my road bike any time soon.

-No.

Sadly, I can't claim any credit for my victory.

I owe it all to the revolution in materials that transformed

the bicycle from a cumbersome novelty to a genuine speed machine.

With its squishy tyres

and tubular steel frame, the bicycle was no longer difficult to ride.

Where just a few years earlier you needed huge thighs

and a death wish, now anyone could be a cyclist.

Heavily marketed to Victorian women, it's sometimes argued

the bicycle played a crucial role in female emancipation.

In truth, they offered us all new-found freedom.

Suddenly our social circles increased,

we could travel three or four times faster,

and three or four times further than we could by foot,

and as our horizons expanded we met and married people

from further afield.

With the advent of pneumatic tyres and tubular-steel frames

the nation's gene pool got a major mix up.

The bicycle was a good idea but it was waiting for the right

materials to come along, and when they did it took off in a big way.

I mean, you only have to look at the Dunlop tyre company, right,

that exploded from nowhere into a global, multimillion pound

business just on the back of bicycle tyres.

So the story of the bicycle is good design meeting new materials

and making history.

It's a story that plays out

time and time again in the history of transport.

When motorcars came along they promised unimaginable freedom,

even compared to the bicycle.

This is a Sunbeam motorcar, it was built in 1903 in Wolverhampton.

It's liberation!

But, just as with bicycles, there was something missing from the first

cars that meant they suffered from a rather grave limitation.

It's quite slow.

One of the things that limited the speed

and success of cars like this was the lack of comfort.

Completely open to the elements, you have to cope with a face

full of wind, rain, dirt and insects.

And any faster than 30mph feels like being punched in the face.

To reach their full potential cars relied on the evolution

of a material that's often overlooked,

possibly because you're not really supposed to see it at all.

Glass.

Because of glass' transparency and its hardness

and strength it's the perfect material for a windscreen.

I mean, look, I can speed along here, I'm not buffeted by the wind,

I don't have to care about the rain.

Although, apart from all those great characteristics, it does have

rather one unpleasant one.

It shatters.

So although the first glass windscreens did keep out

the wind, in an accident they also produced flying shards of glass

that sliced through motorists like daggers...

..which wasn't ideal.

To make viable windscreens we needed a way to transform glass,

to keep all its benefits, but ditch the lethal hazard.

There are a couple of ways of making glass safer,

one is to toughen the outside by rapidly cooling it.

That's how these were made, they're called Prince Rupert's drops.

Named after the Bavarian prince who first brought them

to Britain in the 17th century.

They're made by dropping molten glass into water.

And that gives you this sort of droplet shape,

and does something very interesting to the outside because

the outside immediately solidifies while the inside is still molten.

This sets up a series of internal forces

because as the molten interior solidifies

it pulls the outside in,

and that creates compression forces on the outside

which can withstand quite large forces, including a hammer blow.

And if you don't believe me,

and in some senses I don't believe it either because it seems

so ridiculous that you should hit a piece of glass with a hammer

and it would survive, but let's give it a go anyway.

Glass drop, meet hammer.

It's impressive, but not indestructible.

If I can disturb the balance between the internal tension forces

and the external compression forces it'll set up a chain reaction,

an explosion, and the whole thing will disintegrate.

So let's see if that works, by just snapping the tail off.

Oh, yeah, it works!

As the stress is released countless fractures spread through the drop

in an instant, creating a cloud of tiny fragments.

The key thing is that these tiny pieces are nowhere near

as lethal as the long blades of glass

that breaking the first windscreens produced.

There you have it, safety glass.

For hundreds of years this remarkable form of glass

had little practical use.

That is until the age of the car.

This glass is toughened in much the same way as a Prince Rupert's drop.

So how it works is that the pane of glass is cooled rapidly

as it's solidifying.

But when it does go...

..all of that in-built tension

is released in one go and you get this multiple shattering effect.

And the advantage to that is that the glass turns into tiny

little shards and each one of them, yeah, could scratch you but

it isn't a shard of glass that's going to go through an artery

and so this kind of glass has made car crashes much more safe.

The windscreen is toughened in a different way.

Now there's a sheet of plastic sandwiched between two pieces

of glass in this windscreen,

and it's that plastic that's holding all the shards of glass together.

This is the essence of bullet proof glass,

although in bullet proof glass there's four or five different layers.

Glass windscreens are an everyday miracle

that's revolutionised travel around the planet for all of us.

But that's not the only way glass has helped us

explore further from home.

It has also helped us to travel in another sense,

to reach out further from home than any other material has

allowed us to do, by exploring the entire universe.

But once again these great leaps were only made possible

by manipulating glass, by exploiting its properties

in numerous ways to drive the evolution of the telescope.

The power of simple glass lenses was realised 500 years ago.

In 16th century Venice, Galileo used the light-bending

properties of glass to make telescope lenses, and with them

confirmed that the planets all orbit the sun, rather than the Earth.

He'd revealed our planet was not the centre of all things,

which made the Catholic Church pretty cross.

In Holland, shortly after, Antoni Van Leeuwenhoek made

glass microscope lenses and by examining pond water, pepper,

and even his own sperm, discovered an unknown miniature world.

These remarkable properties of glass launched us on a new journey

of exploration that would eventually overturn our sense of scale and

give us a totally new perspective on our place in the universe.

Glass lenses meant the universe was no longer limited

to what the naked eye could see.

But to begin with astronomers struggled to make big lenses,

glass was often tinted and full of bubbles,

while primitive grinding techniques made it hard to get them the right shape.

It wasn't until the 19th century that lens technology

had improved enough to make telescopes that were seriously big.

But, even as they were being built,

they'd reached the end of their potential.

This is the Northumberland Telescope at Cambridge University

and was once the biggest telescope in the world.

And despite all this enormous engineering complexity

it's actually quite a simple object, it's got a large magnifying lens

at one end and an eyepiece at the other.

You simply point it where you want to see in the night sky.

It was a must-have piece of equipment for the gentleman scientist of the day.

The glass lens at the top of this telescope is huge

and that's what makes it so sensitive,

able to peer into the dim distance better than any before.

But sadly, this is pretty much the size limit for a refracting telescope,

and what limits it are the properties of the glass lens.

First, glass is heavy.

All this engineering stuff around it

is to support this huge weight, and also to allow you to

manipulate it so you can point to different parts of the sky.

But worse still, as the size of the lens increases,

so does the effect of another unfortunate property of glass.

Lenses work by bending light, and it's the bending that gives you

the magnification, but when you bend white light it splits it up into

its many colours, as Newton showed with his famous prism experiment.

Look, you can create all the colours of the rainbow,

and Newton explained why, it's because different colours

of light travel at different speeds through the glass.

In a lens this blurring and distorting of colour is called chromatic aberration.

The bigger the lens, the bigger the problem,

and the worse the telescope.

It became clear that although glass had given astronomers

so much in the form of this telescope,

to go any further they would have to get rid of glass lenses altogether.

They turned instead to metal, although glass would

eventually return to play quite a different role in telescopes.

There are two ways to magnify an image, one uses a convex lens,

and the other uses a concave mirror, like this.

The glass in a mirror like this is only there to give it shape,

it's the silvered backing that reflects,

and as it's curved like a spoon, also magnifies.

For astronomy you can use a polished metal mirror that has

no glass on top, which means no chromatic aberration.

This is a reflecting telescope, in which all the magnification

is done by a polished metal mirror mounted at the bottom.

This telescope is much more powerful than the one next door

and that's because its magnifying element, in this case a mirror,

is much bigger, so it's collecting more light.

And as well as being free from chromatic aberration

a big metal mirror is much lighter than a big glass lens.

And also it's much easier to support down here

so that gives you the capacity of making bigger telescopes

with more magnification that can see further.

With a metal mirror it seemed at first that telescopes could be

any size you wanted, and by the 20th century some mirrors were up to

2.5 metres across, but at that size a new problem arose,

it became increasingly hard to keep the mirror in shape.

For a telescope reflector to work properly it mustn't distort.

The problem is that most materials expand or contract with

temperature and deform under their own weight.

Things get worse as the mirror gets bigger.

Astronomers' mirrors were made from huge blocks of quartz rock,

with a reflective layer of metal on top.

Not even the worst temperature swings could deform solid quartz.

But in 1928 astronomer George Hale set about building

the biggest ever telescope mirror, twice the size of any before.

The trouble was, no-one could make a quartz mirror that big.

So the race was on to find a material to build

the record-breaking five metre reflector.

In the end the answer was glass.

But this glass didn't come from an optics lab,

it came from the kitchen.

In 1915 American cooks had been amazed at the arrival

of see-through saucepans.

They'd been invented by the Corning Glass Company

of New York, using a new weather-proof glass

they'd developed for railway lanterns, called Pyrex.

It was made heat-proof by adding a metalloid element called boron.

Easier to work with than quartz

and with excellent thermal properties,

this was just the stuff for Hale's telescope mirror.

Scaling up operations from their normal kitchenware production,

the Corning Glass Company took on the task of making

the monolithic Pyrex mirror using 20 tonnes of borosilicate glass.

After months of cooling the mirror set off on its 3,000 mile journey

to California, at a very safe 25mph all the way.

It took another 13 years to grind into shape,

briefly interrupted by World War II,

then in 1949, polished smooth to within two millionths of an inch,

it was finally winched into position in the giant telescope dome.

For 30 years the glass mirror coated with metal remained the biggest

and the most powerful in the world.

With it astronomers measured the distance to our nearest galaxy

and discovered quasars, the oldest and most distant objects ever seen.

Thanks to glass the size of the known universe had grown

almost beyond human comprehension.

Glass has allowed us to discover more about ourselves,

our world, our universe than almost any other material.

From the lenses of our microscopes,

to the reflectors of our giant telescopes,

glass has expanded our horizons more than we had any right to hope for.

Meanwhile, back in the world of everyday materials our horizons

had been expanded in a different way by a new material that many describe

as among the greatest innovations to emerge from the 20th century.

There's a long history of combining materials to create completely new

ones, they're called composites, for example wattle and daub, concrete,

plywood, as well as more exotic combinations of metals and plastics.

But there's a spectacular new composite which is allowing

industrial designers to completely reinvent some objects,

and even change lives.

It's called carbon fibre composite.

Nicky Maxwell is 17 and has his sights set on Paralympic glory.

Nicky has a single below-the-knee amputation.

His athletic career has been transformed by carbon fibre composite

in the form of his remarkable,

high performance running blade.

But it's not just in athletics where carbon fibre's had an impact on prosthetics.

This is the first prosthetic that I had,

you'll notice obviously it doesn't have a foot on it of any kind.

-Here's one with a foot, though.

-This was World Cup 2006.

-Oh, right.

The ankle here is still rigid

but the foot is made of a rubber that does have

a bit of flex in it, so it's making your gait a bit more fluid.

I guess the first time that I got a non-rigid ankle would've been this,

and inside this foot there are a few different C-shaped curves of carbon

which enable the foot to compress and bend in different directions.

-So this has got carbon fibre in it?

-So this has got a little bit in it, yeah.

Nicky's racing leg is made entirely of carbon fibre composite.

It has boosted his performance beyond all recognition

with its winning formula of lightness, strength and rigidity,

all tuned to put the perfect amount of spring in Nicky's step.

So what does that blade give you that other prosthetics don't?

Well, fundamentally what you have to appreciate is how much work

your lower leg, particularly your calf, does when you're walking

or running, so your calf really, it generates a lot of power.

So a blade like this, which is effectively a spring,

it really helps to simulate that.

So that movement of landing on your foot

and really pushing off the spring will compress and take in

that energy and then push back and it gives it back out again.

With his blade Nicky can look forward to enjoying athletics

in a way that only a few years ago would have been impossible.

But this is only one in a long line of applications.

Carbon fibre composite has become the material of choice

wherever weight, strength and performance are important.

Whether that's snowboards,

tennis racquets,

or golf clubs.

And carbon fibre has completely replaced steel in the bodywork of racing cars.

When the Bloodhound Supersonic car attempts to rocket to a 1000mph land-speed record...

..the driver will sit in a carbon fibre cockpit.

And in aeronautical engineering the future's carbon, too.

The latest airliners use carbon fibre to reduce weight

and save fuel.

So what's the secret to carbon fibre's success,

its light weight and strength?

This is the stuff that makes carbon fibre composite strong,

it's individual strands of carbon filaments, incredibly fine.

Finer than hair, but per weight ten times stronger that steel.

Doesn't look it, I know, but I've taken a length of it here

and I'll show you what I mean.

Let's see if I can get it to take my weight.

So there's a small strand of it, got a little swing here, here we go.

Attach that there. Get through there.

I know what you're thinking,

I don't weigh very much, but actually I do, surprisingly enough.

Right, now the lifting legs off the ground, here we go.

Yes! No problem at all.

So that's pretty impressive, isn't it?

I mean, tiny little threads of carbon, finer than my hair,

holding my whole weight.

It's incredibly strong, but it does have one defect.

It is after all a thread which means that although it's very strong in

this direction as we've seen, if you push it, well,

it just bends all over the place,

so if you really want to replace steel and metals

to make engineering objects out of it,

you need to find a way of stopping those fibres from bending,

and the way to do that is to cover it in plastic.

And a particular kind of plastic works really well called an epoxy,

and that's what it looks like,

and we just take a bit of epoxy, and epoxy in itself isn't that strong.

In fact it's very brittle, unless you reinforce it with carbon fibre.

You can really have a go at this.

Take my word for it, it is the business.

Making a composite component is pretty straightforward.

This tape has thousands of carbon fibres running along its length,

once I've wound it around this cardboard tube all

I have to do is coat it with a layer of epoxy plastic.

And when that epoxy sets we get this...

..a tube that's light

and very stiff.

But it's not yet strong.

And the reason for that is because as we wrapped it round

the mandrill all of the fibres are aligned in one direction,

so it's strong across the circumference

but it's not strong in tension which is what happens when I bent this.

So the way to sort that out is to come back to this.

If I add another layer of carbon but wrap it in the other direction,

now the tube is encased in a crisscross of fibres.

So, when you do that several times back and forth

you can build up strength in many different directions.

And in fact that is the key to carbon fibre composites,

is to work out where your stresses are

and to align the fibres to withstand the stress in that direction only.

So you're only putting the material in where you need it.

And once you've done that several times you end up with

something like this which is a bit heavier,

still incredibly stiff, but this time...

..really strong.

I think we need to do the standard weight test.

Let's see if this can take my weight. Yep, no problem.

That gives designers almost complete flexibility, building in extra

strength where it's needed but saving on weight where it's not.

One perfect illustration of that is the new generation of

high performance racing bikes.

This is the latest carbon fibre bicycle frame as used

by professional cyclists in races like the Tour De France.

It's incredibly light, weighs only 800 grams.

It's hard to get a sense of what 800 grams is,

it's sort of the weight of a bunch of bananas,

so let's see if it's...yeah.

So that's how light it is, it's head-scratchingly amazing,

and what the material allows you to do is pare the whole thing down.

So down here these struts, they look flimsy but they're not,

they're stiff, they're strong, along here where

you don't need so much strength you can actually physically deform it.

It's a wonderful material which gives industrial designers complete flexibility.

Carbon fibre is fast becoming the ultimate construction material in the everyday world.

But there are also miracles made possible by much more exotic

and unusual materials, and one of those is MRI scanning.

MRI is now a standard diagnostic technique,

an everyday miracle, but we couldn't have MRI without huge

magnetic fields, and we couldn't have huge magnetic fields

without strange materials that allow you to do this.

This is nothing less than levitation,

I mean, it's a delight to watch, you'd never get tired of it.

What makes this levitate are these little grey discs.

They are known as superconductors

and it is superconductivity that allows us

to make the kind of huge magnetic fields required for MRI scanning.

Superconductivity is all about cooling things down.

Let me show you what I mean.

I've got a very long coil of wire here, a light, and some batteries,

when I connect the whole circuit up have a look what happens.

When I connect the battery the bulb hardly lights,

and that's because the resistance of the long coil is so high,

very little electricity flows.

But, over here, I have a flask of liquid nitrogen

and I can cool that coil of wire down.

As it cools down the light's getting brighter and brighter

and brighter so the resistance

to the flow of electricity in the wire is decreasing.

This lowering of resistance happens in all conductors,

but get a superconductor cool enough

and electricity can flow completely freely.

That's the definition of a superconductor,

something with no electrical resistance.

And that makes some very odd things possible, like levitation.

Inside here are some superconductors

and they're being cooled by this liquid nitrogen.

It's about minus 200 degrees in there so it is very cold.

The track below is magnetic, and that magnetic field

makes electricity flow on the surface of the superconductor.

And what that's doing is creating small currents that then create

a magnetic field, and that magnetic field's

repelled by this magnetic field on the bottom here.

So this is a very special effect and it only happens when it's very cold.

But while it is cold, it will defy gravity forever.

The current that is created on the surface of the grey disk

generates a magnetic field,

and that magnetic field is exactly the same one in the track,

so they repel each other perfectly, and because it's a superconductor

with no electrical resistance this will happen indefinitely.

It's this lack of resistance in superconductors

that also allows us to make ultra efficient electromagnets.

Making an electromagnet is pretty easy.

You just need to wrap wire around something iron,

this nail will do, and connect the wire to a battery.

But if I put a current through it, then I magically get one,

and take it away, and put it back on again, and away.

To get a really powerful magnet you need more coils of wire,

but the more coils of wire you use the less electricity will flow,

like in the bulb, but if the wire was superconducting there would be

no resistance and really huge magnetic fields could be produced.

And that's what you find in MRI scanners.

The coils in these electromagnets are cooled

to four degrees above absolute zero by bathing them in liquid helium.

The magnetic field produced is so strong that it's able to

align aspects of a hydrogen atom in living tissue in the same direction.

Hydrogen atoms in different tissues will return

to their magnetised positions at different rates when they're

briefly disturbed by a secondary field, and by measuring that rate of

change it's possible to build up a picture of where they are in

the body, and ultimately to produce a picture of the body itself.

Our understanding of the stuff our world is made from

has helped us understand ourselves at the very smallest level,

and detailed knowledge of how things are put together

and how they can be imaged, recorded and replayed,

has started to change the way we can reproduce and manufacture objects.

For the entire history of making things,

there have been two key challenges.

Whether it's a bicycle or a telescope mirror

you need to find the right material for the job,

but you also have to work out how to fashion it into the shape you want.

From striking flint or carving stone or wood,

or machining and casting metals, that final stage, manufacture,

has always limited the possibilities of practical design.

But imagine if you could dream up an object of any shape

and make it materialise in front of you at the push of a button.

Well, that idea isn't a fantasy,

it's what I think will be tomorrow's everyday miracle.

It's with us now and it's called 3D printing.

With it comes the promise of a new era in design where we'll be limited

only by our imagination.

These are 3D printers, they're rather disappointing-looking

boxes of various sizes, but what they do is anything but boring.

What they allow you to do is print objects,

and how that works is this -

you create the object digitally on a computer, so here's an example of

an object created, it's got a three-dimensional form, it's hollow.

Something like this would be very pretty much impossible to make using

a mould, but all I have to do here is load the file onto the system.

And then you press print, and then out it comes, it's marvellous.

How it works is that the computer will divide this object

up into different layers,

and each one of those layers is printed on this printer.

It doesn't work so differently from a normal 2D printer

but instead of printing ink it prints plastic.

I've got some things here which have been made using a 3D printer

to show you what you can do.

Have a look at this.

Now this, it seems like an almost impossibly complex mechanism.

If you were to try to make this another way, let's say carve it out

of wood or machine it out of metal, you'd have to be extremely skilled.

But with 3D printing all you need is the digital file,

and you press print. And because the printing is

so precise it can produce almost impossibly intricate shapes, too.

Or take a look at this.

This was printed in one piece, it's a piece of chain mail,

it's got fabric-like qualities, it's exquisite, there are no joins.

And it's not just plastic, you can print in metal,

you can print in ceramic, you can print electronics.

I mean, the possibilities for this technology are really endless.

3D printing is a powerful new technology which has

the potential to radically change manufacturing,

but here in Nottingham University there's a group of scientists

who are using it for something quite different.

3D printing is no less than the ultimate manipulator of materials,

the ultimate manufacturing tool

that can be applied to almost anything.

'Kevin Shakesheff...'

-Hello.

-Hey, nice to see you.

-Yeah, you too.

'..is perhaps the most unusual manufacturer I've met.

'He's a materials scientist, just like me.'

Yeah, this definitely looks like a materials science lab.

-There's a mechanical tester, it must be one.

-Yeah, yeah.

But unlike me his specialism is human flesh.

Yeah, I feel very envious of biology

because it has this one Lego block called the cell

and it can turn into bone, or it can turn into your skin, or it can turn

into something transparent like an eye, that seems to me sort of magic.

Yeah, I think that's what really drew me into the subject.

The key to 3D printing human body parts are a particular

type of cell called stem cells.

These cells are in the first stage of development

and can grow into all different types of tissue in the body.

The first stage of Kevin's process is to tell stem cells

which tissue to grow into, and to dictate what shape they form.

The secret is the physical properties of the material

the stem cells are growing on.

What a cell becomes is determined by its environment around it,

so if we think of a very soft tissue like skin tissue or brain tissue,

we use something very soft, so we've got materials which

can mimic the mechanical properties of these tissues.

And what is that?

This is actually a material called alginate which

comes from seaweed, good for growing tissues like...

Yeah, I love this stuff. Lovely gel.

Tissues like cartilage grow quite well in that environment,

but it's not right for bone, it's completely different to bone.

So then we use a different material type which is much harder,

if you want to have that,

and the material itself acts as what we call a scaffold.

This means that if you make a replacement body part

out of the right material and lace it with stem cells,

those cells can become the type of tissue required.

So we'll go and have a look at the printer which is through in this room.

Using a 3D printer Kevin can make any shape

required in the right material.

The plastic this printer is using makes stem cells want to

grow into the right type of tissue, in this case for a replacement nose.

So you're printing things that cells are going to live in,

for implants in the body,

and the shape is determined presumably by the patient?

There are patients who have a tumour in the nose

and that entire nose structure has to be removed surgically.

So the idea is you can take a scan of that structure.

That's the file there?

This a file that's been created from scanning them.

So those are the nostrils, right?

So this is the bottom of the nose.

Yeah, it's starting from the bottom and working its way up,

-and that takes a couple of hours to form the final structure.

-Wow, yeah.

But you have that sort of structure there.

The printed nose is temporary, it provides a scaffold into

which stem cells can be injected, and because the scaffold has

the right properties, the stem cells will turn into the right tissue.

That is quite impressive.

I mean, that feels like science fiction, I mean,

so where could we go, I mean how far, like, kidneys, livers, hearts?

The interesting thing with all of those tissues is you grew them

yourself when you were an embryo so the cells are there

and have some instructions to know how to do it.

The printers are getting very close to being able to achieve

the overall structure, so if we combine those two together,

I'm optimistic that we could print all of those structures,

or certainly components of them, to help patients.

This gives a whole new meaning to the nose job, doesn't it?

For me this is one of the most beguiling things about materials,

you never know what they're going to turn into.

It's inconceivable that

when plastics burst onto the scene 100 years ago that anyone would

have predicted they would lead to printed organs.

Or that tubular steel would provide the bicycle, or that telescopes

and the key to the universe would emerge from glass.

But time and again these everyday miracles impact our lives and our world.

Sometimes they pop up apparently overnight,

but sometimes they evolve so slowly that it's only with

the benefit of hindsight that their impact can be seen clearly.

My final miracle is just that, something that has evolved,

drawing in new materials and changing the way that old ones are used.

This is the river that separates Edinburgh from the north of Scotland,

from the great cities of Perth, Dundee and Aberdeen.

For more than 900 years people have been ferried across this river,

but you don't need a boat now.

This is the Forth bridge,

it was opened in 1890 to take trains across the river.

It still does.

54,000 passenger trains

and ten million tonnes of freight cross here every year.

It's absolutely magnificent.

I mean, it's just so audacious, I can't really believe...

I can't believe they actually did it.

It was a wonder of its age, made possible only

because of new technology producing high quality steel.

The huge tubular trapeziums of its structure are made from

thousands of individual steel plates held together by millions of rivets.

The steel bridge across the River Forth transformed the Victorian

transport network, but soon the train wasn't the only way to travel.

Motorcars were just around the corner

and people started agitating for a road bridge.

And this is what they got.

The Forth road crossing. It's a suspension bridge,

a completely different type of bridge design.

The central span is more than 1,000 meters long

and the road is 50 meters above the water level.

It's an extraordinary structure, it's so elegant.

Much of that elegance comes from the material.

It wouldn't have been possible without advanced steel making methods.

Our understanding of how to make steel that was both stronger

but more reliably uniform.

This bridge is made of steel just like the railway bridge,

but construction techniques have moved on,

much larger pieces of steel can now be made.

It's a wonderful example of how improved materials can give

designers new opportunities.

The higher quality steel used in a new bridge made the design possible,

and weighing in at 40,000 tonnes it uses less steel to the tune of 10,000 tonnes.

And it took a much reduced workforce a year less to build than the first one.

Now they're building a new bridge, they're still using steel

but they're using it in a different way, and they're adding in

a totally different material - concrete, in vast quantities.

The incredible thing about this bridge is that they've

created a mould...

..and they're pouring in concrete.

And up it rises from the river bed.

The third Forth crossing is a completely new design to the other two.

It's a cable stay bridge, which means that instead of being

suspended from wires the road section will be

hung from steel cables attached directly to the concrete towers.

This is easier to build and means that

if a cable fails it can be easily replaced,

whereas if a suspension cable fails the whole bridge is compromised.

But before the cables go in the towers themselves must be poured,

a mammoth task overseen by engineer, Jaime Castro.

So how much concrete are you going to be pouring here?

Well this tower, and then in each of these towers will be

9,000 cubic metres of concrete.

Of course concrete itself is nothing new, but you can see here

how it's being poured around a skeleton of reinforcing steel rods.

It's a technique that has made concrete the ultimate

and most-used construction material in the world.

Reinforced concrete has revolutionised

the way our homes are built and how our infrastructure is constructed.

Its versatility comes from combining the huge tensile strength

of steel with the enormous compression strength of concrete.

-What's this?

-So, that's the concrete barge,

that's how we get the concrete here, and we pump it through the tower

until the concrete is actually in centre, until it goes in the top.

-Nice, nice, can we have a look?

-Yes.

The concrete, mixed on the shore-side and brought out by barge,

is pumped continuously into the latest section of the mould,

day and night, until the section is full and can be left to cure,

when the process is repeated.

When they're finished the towers will stand

over 200 meters above the water.

So we're in a unique position here cos we can see the first bridge

over there, built more than 100 years ago, and here's

the second bridge, and now you're building the third bridge.

-Is this as good as it gets in building technology?

-Well, it is now.

In the future, in 100 years, materials will change,

innovation will come along, who knows?

Of course he's right, and even if the same building

materials are used, the way they're used will doubtless move on.

The steel that's being used for the bridge deck here is a far cry

from the steel that's riveted together in the railway bridge.

So how does this differ to the previous bridges

in terms of its construction materials and techniques?

I mean, first of all it's a much higher grade of steel.

I would say almost 100% stronger than what we have used in the other bridges.

And I guess you're benefiting as a professional from 100 years

or more of bridge-building, you can really pare down where you need

the material, and that reduces costs but also makes it more elegant.

Yes, it is.

I mean, if you look at this steel section, we have 12mm steel

out here, there in the middle you can have up to 100mm, before

they didn't have those kind of tools in order to differentiate like that.

If you compare it to other bridges in the world we are stepping up.

Every single time we do a new bridge we are increasing the quality

and increasing the strength of it.

And that's what these bridges show us,

the everyday miracle that is progress through materials.

The bare facts reveal a lot.

The first Forth bridge took eight years to build, the second six,

the last one will take five.

At its peak, 4,500 men worked on the first bridge.

In the latest version the most people working on site

at any one time is just 1,200.

And another advance is safety.

On the first bridge the 98 worker deaths were considered almost inevitable.

No serious injuries have occurred or are anticipated on this latest build.

It's astonishing to think that over the past 100 years or so

our understanding of materials, of what our planet provides for us,

has not just changed the way we live our lives, but has also

fundamentally changed the way we see our home, and ultimately ourselves.

We're a curious species and our mastery of materials has meant that

we've been able to take our curiosity to hitherto unimagined

heights, providing unthought-of solutions to age-old problems.

This bridge across the Firth of Forth is emblematic of the human spirit.

In a way it tells you all you need to know about who we are.

We make this stuff and it's hugely impressive.

Faced with the engineering challenge of crossing a huge swathe

of water, we've had to understand how to transform materials, and

that's allowed us not just to build bridges but to explore the world,

the solar system, the universe, and even inside our own brains.

It's those brains of course that've conceived new materials to

make a new bridge, and I can't wait to drive over it.

I'm so excited, it's going to be beautiful.

Of course, 30 years ago it wouldn't have been possible to build it, and

that's the thing about materials, we keep inventing new ones.

And that allows us to reinvent the future, to go new places,

to discover new things.

Who knows where they'll take us next.

If you would like to explore some of the everyday miracles of engineering and materials

have a look at the free learning activities on the Open University website.

Go to...

..and follow the links to the Open University.