Cotton changed the world … The fearless team of engineers and industrialists brought the sea to landlocked Manchester. How the Victorians Built Britain s1e4: The Birth of the Machines
Manchester: It was packed full of dark Satanic mills, churning out cotton by the millions of square metres. ibid.
Cotton could now be transported from Liverpool docks to Manchester in two hours … The world’s first intercity railway. ibid.
Huge feats of engineering were needed to conquer an unforgiving route. The Manchester to Liverpool railway was the first to tunnel beneath the city, the first to have signals, the first to have a timetable, the first to carry mail … It had to transport all that cotton to and from Manchester’s factories and mills. ibid.
At its peak, the Lancashire cotton industry had over 250,000 powered looms. ibid.
The mill workers lived a grim life. ibid.
They built one of the wonders of the modern world … the Manchester Ship Canal. ibid.
Duncan’s engines are huge: they generate enough electricity to power over 18,000 homes. Warship: Life at Sea, Channel 5 2018
She is one of Britain’s biggest and most secretive engineering projects costing over £1 billion. And it took more than 5,000 people 14 years to build her. How to Build … a Nuclear Submarine, BBC 2010
‘There’s an extraordinary amount of expertise in putting one of these submarines together.’ ibid. navy geezer
It’s a wet and windy weekend in the middle of November. And the first new British submarine to be built for ten years is now preparing to sail out into the open sea for the very first time. ibid.
She is one of the most technologically advanced machines in the world. ibid.
The current owner of the shipyard is British defence company BAE Systems. ibid.
The surface of the boat is covered with around 40,000 rubber tiles designed to make te boat almost invisible. ibid.
The submarine’s nuclear reactor will need to be switched on. ibid.
The Astute is almost four years late on its delivery and estimated to be overspend by around £800 million. ibid.
It will take an unlikely alliance with a dangerous predator, devastating floods, a nineteenth century publicity stunt, an avalanche of horse manure, exploding cannons and a trip to the slaughterhouse to get the ultimate freedom machine – the car. Jim Al-Khalili, Revolutions: The Ideas that Changed the World II: Car, BBC 2019
Today around 1.2 billion automobiles transport us from place to place on some 32 billion kilometres of road. ibid.
Dogs were humankind’s first engine. ibid.
Horse-powered vehicles dominated transportation for the next five thousand years. ibid.
Thomas Newcomen: An engine that harnessed a new type of power – steam. ibid.
But building a piston that fits so precisely within a cylinder that could contain that steam under high pressure was really tricky for eighteenth-century engineers. ibid.
In 1886 German inventor and engineer Karl Benz had his patent accepted for what is regarded as the world’s first automobile. ibid.
A must-have play thing for the rich and famous. ibid.
By 1900 one-third of all cars were powered by electricity. ibid.
Ford’s second revolution was to mass-produce the parts. ibid.
The car has revolutionised almost every aspect of our lives and it’s reshaped our world. ibid.
It’s a spirit which has carried us off the planet to new frontiers which one day may make us a multi-planetary species … To create a machine with the power to break free from Earth’s gravity and hurl us towards other worlds. Jim Al-Khalili, Revolutions III: Rocket
A rocket revolution is upon us with more companies building and launching their own rockets than at any other time in human history. ibid.
This is the story of humanity’s greatest adventure. And our grandest dreams. And who knows what effect this will have on society. ibid.
If the gunpowder is confined into a tiny place, the gas that’s released provides thrust that pushes the bamboo shoots in this case in the opposite direction. And this is the principle of the rocket: a force in one direction producing a force in the other direction. ibid.
His name Jules Verne, and his stories the grandest adventures imaginable. ibid.
A way to turn fiction into fact, and his name was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky … A young man with the time and the ability to carefully work through the possibility of space flight using first principles and the laws of physics. ibid.
That speed turns out to be very large indeed: 7.8 kilometres per second or 17,210 miles per hour. ibid.
His passion for building rockets was ignited: he would become America’s greatest rocket pioneer and his name was Robert Goddard. ibid.
March 16 1926: Humanity’s [Goddard’s] first liquid-fuelled rocket makes it from the Earth into the sky. ibid.
In 1930 a young engineer joins a Berlin science club – the Society for Space Travel – His name is Wernher Magnus Maximilian Freiherr von Braun. ibid.
1944: A pump that can make the magic twenty-five tons of thrust possible for the rocket now called the V-2. ibid.
Each superpower soon realised the potential for rockets to deliver their new weapons of mass destruction. ibid.
Sergei Korolev got a remarkable promotion: from political prisoner to Colonel in the Red Army. The reason is simple: Korolev is a brilliant rocket scientist. ibid.
Korolev drew up plans for a massive new rocket known as the R7. It will be the world’s first multi-stage design. ibid.
A new surge in rocket development: no expense was too great. ibid.
This idea – to use hydrogen to power rockets – was as profound a breakthrough – as a discovery of other worlds beyond Earth. ibid.
Rockets need a new revolution. ibid.
Today nearly two-thirds of humanity use a smartphone. It connects billions of people in a way that’s not been possible before. I always say that the smartphone is one of the most transformative technologies ever invented and we’ve only just got going. Jim Al-Khalili, Revolutions: The Ideas that Changed the World IV, Smartphone
The telephone’s invention was one of the great milestones in the history of technology. ibid.
It would take Marconi to see what use these waves could be put to. ibid.
SIGSALY was the world’s first encrypted wireless telephone … SIGSALY was never cracked. ibid.
‘[Jack] Kilby’s innovation [integrated circuit] really changed the world.’ ibid. scientist
Since the dawn of humankind we’ve looked to the stars and wondered, what’s up there? What lies beyond this small blue planet we call home? If only, our ancestors thought, there was a way to bring the night sky closer, to really see the stars. Just how humanity managed to do that is quite a tale. It would take crystals forged inside the Earth, a plant that grows by the sea, a chance alignment of two small pieces of glass, a property boom in New York, and an accident of chemistry and light, to create the device that would reveal the heavens in all their glory: the telescope. Jim Al-Khalili, Revolutions: The Ideas that Changed the World V: Telescope
Giant telescopes are being built all over the world which scientists hope will answer some of the oldest and most profound questions humans have ever asked. ibid.
Baghdad (9th century) in this period was like Florence during the Renaissance or Silicon Valley in the age of the Internet. ibid.
The secrets of the spy-glass was unleashed. ibid.
Galileo’s most powerful telescope pushed the limits of our seeing to the moon of Jupiter, the rings of Saturn, and ultimately to far beyond what had ever been seen with the naked eye. ibid.
Lenses grew bigger and more powerful. ibid.