Original subtitles

[intense music]

- We've all heard this advice, don't reinvent the wheel.

Well, what if reinventing it turns the world upside down?

Because sometimes a new machine can change the whole game.

Tonight, the super structure

that makes our survival in space possible.

- They're in zero gravity.

They're working out with the equivalent

of 600 pounds of weight.

- How about the garage-born tech

that cracks the code on computers?

- We have 21-year-old Steve Jobs

and his buddy Steve Wozniak in Jobs's parents' garage

building what Wozniak considers to be his masterpiece.

- And Henry Ford

revolutionizes the idea of what a car can be.

- By 1925, every single person that's working on the line

to build the Model T can also afford one.

This is a game changer.

- I'm Dolph Lundgren.

On screen, I'm all about the action.

But off screen, I have degrees in engineering.

I even studied at MIT.

I learned that machines and the people behind them

can transform the world.

Join me as I explore the gears, grit, and genius

beyond history's greatest machines.

[graphics whooshing]

In the 15th century, knowledge is closely guarded,

kept in handwritten manuscripts,

controlled by those in power.

Until a single invention

breaks their stranglehold on information

and allows ideas to suddenly spread like wildfire.

- Back in medieval Europe,

reading is basically a privilege,

belonging to the aristocracy and the clergy.

Literacy rates across Europe are not even 10%.

- What illiteracy does

is maintain a centuries-long power dynamic,

creates a hierarchy that puts the nobility

and religious leaders at the very top.

- [Don] When the peasantry can't read,

they can't communicate opposition.

That means they can't share ideas of reform far and wide.

This makes them much easier to control

and preserves the status quo.

- [Dolph] There's a reason most people don't read.

They can't afford to.

- If you're a standard laborer,

a single book could cost as much as your wages

for an entire year.

- The price is so expensive because

every book means

painstakingly copying it by hand.

Even the Bible is a luxury.

It is too expensive for an average person to own.

[intense music]

- [Dolph] In 1440,

one man invents a machine that will change all this.

A German craftsman you've probably heard of,

Johannes Gutenberg.

- [Lance] Gutenberg comes from a well off merchant family

in Mainz, Germany,

and their primary business is minting coins for the church.

- By 1428,

social unrest strikes Mainz and the surrounding areas.

- Craftsman's guilds are tired

of the economic and political inequality

at the hands of the ruling class,

so they lead a revolt

that sends the Gutenberg's into exile in France.

- [Don] Gutenberg is stripped of his status and wealth.

He gets a taste of what it's like to be on the other side.

- [Lance] He sees firsthand, how knowledge and books

are tightly controlled by the church and the ruling elite,

and he becomes deeply resentful

that knowledge belongs to only those with power.

- [Hakeem] So Gutenberg gets an idea.

What's the barrier to reading?

It's cost and accessibility,

and that's tied to how books are made.

- [Dolph] Gutenberg's answer is bold,

to print books on mass using a press.

- Crude printing presses exist at the time,

but they're not how we think of it these days.

You would have to handcarve from wood

each individual page.

Furthermore, the wood wears out over time.

[intense music]

- [Dolph] Gutenberg's printing press

is the size of a workbench,

but weighs over 300 pounds.

You need even pressure to print clearly,

so he adapts the same kind of screw press to use at the time

to squeeze olives and make olive oil.

- The real magic though, is in the metal letters.

- These metal letters can be placed into a plate

in whatever configuration is needed.

- [Hakeem] The type is assembled line by line

to create an entire page layout.

Combined these metal letters with ink,

and the page is loaded onto a heavy plate

which presses evenly on the paper

delivering the ink type to the paper.

- It's rapid, it's reliable,

and most importantly, for mass media, it's cheap.

- [Lance] The full process

takes about two to three minutes per page,

and that means that a skilled group of workers

can print 250 to 300 pages in a day.

- [Don] Gutenberg's first project is of course, the Bible.

It's over 1200 pages long.

Now at that pace, it would take about five to six days

to complete a copy.

At that time,

it would take a writer around a year

to hand ink a full copy of the Bible.

- Gutenberg's Bibles are printed

in this beautiful, black, gothic typeface.

When they get released,

they look so close to the original handwritten versions,

people can't tell the difference.

- [Dolph] But unfortunately for Gutenberg,

there's no way to protect his IP.

- His idea is so innovative, people are eager to steal it.

This was a time before patents,

so pretty much has no protection

as other people move in

to build on what he's done and steal his invention.

- [Don] So Gutenberg doesn't profit and dies poor.

But if his goal was to change the way books are made,

and enable people to read more

and share ideas far and wide,

it's a huge success.

- [Lance] In the decades that follow, literacy rates soar.

Once less than 10%, they nearly triple

in some urban areas.

Books are affordable and widely available

for the first time.

- [Austin] Knowledge can spread throughout Europe.

It begins with religious tracks

like Martin Luther's "Ninety-five Theses,"

moves on to scientific documents

like the works of Copernicus and Galileo.

Pamphlets like Thomas Paine's "Common Sense,"

help cause the American Revolution.

- Knowledge equals power,

and it's all possible because of this machine.

- The printing press brought ideas to the masses.

Fast forward over 500 years

to the mid 20th century in Silicon Valley.

The revolution is no longer about sharing ideas.

It's about creating your own.

[intense music]

- [Don] It's 1967 in Palo Alto, California.

Bill Hewlett, the co-founder of Hewlett-Packard,

hears his home phone ring,

and on the other end is a 12-year-old boy

who is really excited to talk to him.

- This kid is asking these extremely specific questions

about frequency counters

for some school project that he's working on.

The kid really knows his stuff,

and Bill is charmed by him

because he has so much obvious enthusiasm

for what he's doing.

- He hears in the kid's voice something special.

Hewlett tells the kid, "When you're of age and you're ready,

I've got a summer job waiting for you at my factory."

- [Dolph] That 12-year-old kid is Steve Jobs,

a computer whiz,

already showing business smarts that will make him famous.

- [Sami] Less than 10 years after his call to Bill Hewlett,

we have 21-year-old Steve Jobs and his buddy Steve Wozniak

in Jobs's parents' garage,

building what Wozniak considers to be his masterpiece,

a personal computer.

- At this point,

computers have been enormous mainframe monsters

that take up an entire floor,

like the IBM used by NASA to put man on the moon.

They were for calculating the enormous amounts of data

that any large company needs to process.

- [John] But Jobs has this idea that he wants to appeal

to more than just hobbyists.

He envisions a society

where everybody has a computer in their home.

- [Sami] Typically, when you're creating a product,

what you're doing is you're trying to fulfill a need,

but this is a market that doesn't exist yet,

and Steve Jobs wants to will it into existence.

- Just gonna be very gradual and very human,

and we'll seduce you into learning how to use it.

- Essentially, he's following the "Field of Dreams" rule,

"If you build it, they will come."

- [Austin] Wozniak works nights

engineering the new computer basically by himself.

He builds the circuit board by hand

with no budget and minimal parts,

always thinking to optimize for cost and simplicity.

[intense music]

- [Dolph] The result is the Apple II.

Forget computer stuff fill a room.

This one's just 15 inches wide,

weighing 11-1/2 pounds.

But the real genius is inside.

- [Don] Inside, Apple II comes

with a built-in software called Basic.

This is simple programming language,

and it allows users to create their own programs

or run commercial software right out of the box.

It's a big edge.

- [Dolph] This other innovation, it's built to evolve.

Inside are eight open slots ready for action.

- [Sami] You can drop in a printer,

you can drop in a modem,

you can use floppy discs for extra memory.

It's not just a machine, it's a foundation.

Woz has essentially created something

that can grow with you.

- But the real coup de gras,

Woz devises a way to produce full color graphics.

- [Dolph] The Apple II does

what feels like a magic trick at the time.

It generates patterns of black and white dots,

and then the circuitry already in all color TVs

interprets these patterns as color.

[intense music]

In June 1977, the Apple II hits the market.

Computer buffs rush to buy it,

and the inventors get an assist

that helps Apple II go mainstream.

- Because anyone can develop software for Apple II,

another company takes a run at it

and they invent VisiCalc, the spreadsheet software

and it becomes the Apple II's killer app.

- [Don] A spreadsheet program seems so normal to us now,

but it wasn't back then.

It's what changes Apple II

from being something that sits in the home of a hobbyist,

into something that's sitting on the desk in every office.

- [Sami] The Apple II still retails

anywhere from 1,300 to $2,600

depending on how much memory is put into the computer.

In today's money, that'd be equivalent to about

anywhere from 6 to $13,000.

- [Dolph] Expensive? Maybe.

But that doesn't stop people from opening their wallets.

By the end of 1980,

Apple sells over 100,000 Apple II units.

In the coming years, that number climbs to 6 million.

- [Sami] The Apple II is more than a computer.

It is essentially the tip of the spear

for a brand new technological revolution,

which is personal computers.

- If Gutenberg's Press made the world literate,

then Apple II helps make the world computer literate.

It takes this massive intimidating device

and turns it into something friendly and accessible.

- In combat, time is the real enemy,

especially during the Civil War,

when it takes forever to reload your musket after firing it.

But what if there is something that could change all that,

a rifle that could fire again and again,

could it change the rules of engagement?

Thanks to one young gunsmith,

that's just what happens.

[intense music]

- [Hakeem] It's April 6, 1862,

thousands of Confederate soldiers

are creeping through the dense Tennessee woods.

They sneak up on Ulysses S. Grant's army,

and the forest explodes with fire and fury.

- [Dolph] The Battle of Shiloh is about to begin.

- It's a brutal surprise attack.

Grant is struggling to bring order out of the chaos.

- [John] Grant's troops are armed

with a front-loading rifle musket.

The problem with a rifle musket is,

each time a volley is fired,

it takes something like 20 to 30 seconds to reload it.

- [Don] In the time it takes you to reload and fire,

your enemy can close the distance

and you end up with a bayonet in the chest.

[intense music]

- [Hakeem] The battle lasts for two days.

And after he receives reinforcements,

Grant is finally able to beat the Confederates back.

But the death toll is astonishing.

- [Dolph] 23,000 are dead or missing.

The carnage teaches both Confederate and Union leadership

that they need a faster rifle.

Turns out one exists.

- [John] Two years before the Battle of Shiloh,

Christopher Miner Spencer, the 27-year-old gunsmith,

patents a rifle that he thinks

is going to change the nature of warfare.

[intense music]

- [Dolph] The Spencer repeating rifle holds seven rounds

in a spring-loaded magazine.

Every time the shooter fires,

all he needs to do is the hammer

then pull down the lever to advance the next round.

[intense music] [gunshot fires]

- Spencer's rifle uses preloaded cartridges

that contain the gun powder as well as the round,

and you load it into the back of the rifle

- [Hakeem] In the 20 seconds it takes

for an expert with a muzzle loader to reload,

Spencer's rifle can fire seven times.

That's a huge tactical advantage.

[intense music]

- [Don] By 1861, the Civil War breaks out,

so he figures the Union Army's gonna be super excited

to scoop up his new rifle.

- [Dolph] He's wrong.

The Union Army's bureaucracy moves slowly.

So Spencer takes his rifle on the road,

demonstrating it personally to Yankee commanders.

One Colonel John T. Wilder of Indiana is intrigued.

- [John] Colonel Wilder has seen

what the Spencer repeating rifle can do,

and he wants it for his unit.

But the army isn't supplying these weapons,

so he gets his men together and they pay for it themselves.

[intense music] [cannons booming]

- [Dolph] In June 1863, 14 months after Shiloh,

Wilder and his men put the Spencer to the ultimate test

at the Battle of Hoover's Gap.

- [Don] The Confederates are expecting standard muskets

and small arms.

So they are absolutely stunned

by the rapid firepower of Wilder's troops.

- [John] Colonel Wilder's unit

armed with the Spencer repeating rifle

is charged with advancing into the Gap.

Not only do they do that,

but they manage to advance another 2 miles

beyond what they were supposed to.

- One Confederate general estimates Wilder's brigade

to be five times larger than his forces.

When in fact,

Wilder's brigade is actually outnumbered, four to one.

- In the aftermath of the battle,

Wilder's force now becomes known as the Lightning Brigade

because they move like lightning across the battlefield,

and they fight like lions

because they're armed with the Spencer carbine.

- [MJ] After this dramatic demonstration

of the effectiveness and the advantage of the Spencer rifle,

Union officers began demanding these things

for their own units.

- [Dolph] And yet the rifle

still doesn't gain much traction.

Union brass worries it's too expensive,

plus they just ordered thousands more single-shot rifles.

Spencer can't believe it, and hatches a plan.

- [Hakeem] In his frustration,

Spencer decides to just go over all the military's heads

and write directly to their boss, Abraham Lincoln.

- [Martin] The President is a veteran.

The President knows how to handle a firearm,

and Spencer is thinking, "If I can just get the President

to see what my rifle is capable of,

well then the Army will adopt it."

And Lincoln eventually agrees to see Spencer.

[intense music]

- [Don] On August 18, 1863,

carrying one of his repeating rifles

and plenty of ammunition,

Spencer arrives at the White House

and walks straight into the President's office,

and Lincoln likes what he sees.

- [John] The next day,

Spencer takes Lincoln to this cornfield,

which is roughly where the Washington Monument is today,

and they take turns firing his model 1860 rifle

at a marked piece of wood as target practice.

- [Martin] After firing the weapon himself,

the President realizes that this is a unique design,

that this offers a capability to Union fighting forces

that the Confederate military does not have and cannot have.

Lincoln instructs the ordinance department

to move quickly in adoption of this weapon.

- The war department ignores the President's recommendation

because they're concerned that Spencer's repeating rifle

is gonna lead to unprecedented demands on ammunition.

- Less than a year later, after Abraham Lincoln fires

and replaces his head of procurement,

well, the US Navy puts in a large order for those rifles,

and the US Army quickly follows.

- [Dolph] Finally, the Spencer repeating rifle company

ramps up production,

delivering over 100,000 rifles for the US military

over the course of the war.

For mounted cavalry units,

this repeater is a match made in heaven.

- [MJ] With seven rounds ready to go,

this gives cavalry troops a major advantage.

They can ride into battle and not have to stop to reload.

They can keep moving. They can keep firing.

They can keep their enemy on their toes.

- [John] Union Major General James H. Wilson says

there is no doubt that the Spencer rifle

is the most effective firearm

ever placed into the hands of a soldier.

One man armed with this weapon

is as effective as three with any other arm.

- [Don] In a final bit of irony,

assassin John Wilkes Booth

is armed with a Spencer carbine rifle

when he is captured and killed.

The very same weapon

Lincoln himself helped make a wartime standard.

- In the late 1700,

cotton is a problematic crop for farmers

in the American South.

It's so tough to clean,

that turning a profit is challenging.

Then the young inventor comes up with a simple machine

that turns cotton and the country upside down.

His name, Eli Whitney.

[intense music]

- [MJ] It's 1793, and Eli Whitney is a guest

at the Mulberry Grove Plantation in Georgia.

He was traveling south for a tutor job

that unfortunately fell through.

So when his friend invites him to stay at a plantation,

he jumps at the idea.

- [Dolph] Whitney notices right away

that harvesting cotton is brutally hard work.

- He sees enslaved people

working to separate the cotton seeds from the fiber.

It's just incredibly time consuming.

- [MJ] The main cotton grown in the south

is called short staple cotton.

It's really easy to grow,

but it has these really sticky seeds

that are really tough to pull out off the fibers.

You have to do it one by one.

- [Natalia] It could take a worker one full day

to clean 1 pound of cotton.

His friend, whose family owns the plantation,

tells him that this inefficiency is the reason

that cotton will never be a major crop for the south.

It just takes too long to process.

- [Austin] He is walking the grounds,

and then as the story goes,

he sees a cat attacking a chicken.

[chickens clucking]

- [Hakeem] The chicken is in a coop that's fenced in,

so the cat is trying in vain

to get at the chicken through the fence,

but all this cat can get is a few feathers.

The rest of the chicken is staying safe in the coop.

[chickens clucking] [intense music]

- [Dolph] For an inventor,

moments like this can lead to big things.

- [Hakeem] As Whitney watches the cat

pulling feathers out of the coop,

he thinks to himself,

"What if a machine could do the same thing for cotton?"

[intense music]

- [Dolph] Whitney's machine is the cotton gin,

and he keeps the design simple

so it's easy to operate and mass produce.

- [Hakeem] He designs a system of rotating wire teeth

that can pull cotton through a mesh.

The seeds can't pass through, so they're left behind.

- [Austin] After the seeds are separated,

a cleaning brush separates the fiber from the mesh.

- [Dolph] The machine itself is just a small wooden box

about the size of a footlocker.

Whitney wants the gins to be compact

so you can easily get them to customers.

- [Hakeem] After perfecting this prototype,

Eli Whitney forms a partnership with Phineas Miller,

and together, they patent the world's first cotton gin.

- [Natalia] Instead of selling the cotton gins outright,

Whitney and Miller decide that what they'll do

is install them and then charge a processing fee.

So Whitney and Miller are the ones who own the machines.

- [Dolph] It sounds great, but there's one big problem.

- [Austin] Farmers don't wanna pay

to subscribe to someone else's machine.

They wanna own the device themselves.

- [Dolph] Whitney and Miller's business is a bust,

but as imitators flood the market

with their own cotton gins,

cotton production explodes.

- [Hakeem] It's impossible to overstate

how much cotton production soars.

The agricultural landscape of America's deep south

is transformed,

and it positions cotton as a dominant export of America.

- [Austin] Before the cotton gin,

the country produces around 3,000 bales of cotton per year.

By 1860, it produces over 4 million.

- [Dolph] And all this success,

it comes with a horrible consequence.

- Usually, when an industry is mechanized in this way,

you see a reduction in need for manpower.

With the cotton gin, the reverse happens.

- As more land is clear to make way for growing cotton,

more manpower is needed to plant it,

maintain it, and pick it.

- [Natalia] The crop becomes so profitable

that it just drives up demand for cotton.

This in turn, expands the institution of slavery.

So the cotton industry and the abolitionists

are now at odds with one another.

- [Hakeem] In a way, Eli Whitney could have never predicted

that his simple invention would have this butterfly effect

that would lead to the increase in American slavery,

and ultimately, to America's Civil War.

- In the early 1940s,

as Hitler tightens his grip on Europe in World War II,

one question looms over the fighting,

"How do you feed millions in a world decimated by conflict?"

[plane engines revving]

- By the end of 1941, the Nazi Empire is at its apex.

It has troops at the gates of Moscow.

It has troops up at northern Norway near the Arctic Circle.

It has troops in the desert in North Africa,

and of course, all along Hitler's Atlantic wall

in France, Belgium, and Holland.

So this is Germany at its most powerful.

It controls all the food sources in this area.

- [Martin] This means that agriculturally productive

areas of Europe that had once functioned

as Europe's breadbasket,

are now under Adolf Hitler's direct control.

- [John] During World War II,

people in much of the world are starving

in cities under siege like Leningrad.

And even in unoccupied countries like the United Kingdom,

there's heavy rationing going on.

- [Martin] This produces two crises.

One, is a civilian crisis

where you have to feed all of the civilians

who are under occupation.

And then the second part is, a military crisis,

where you have to feed

all of the millions of women and men in uniform.

- By the time we get to the end of 1941 and into '42,

the United States of America is now into the war,

and this is a huge game changer

because the United States is not under direct threat.

And as such, American farmers have the luxury

of still being able to grow their crops, particularly wheat.

- [Dolph] But it's not as easy as just growing more food.

You need the manpower to harvest it.

- Harvesting wheat has always been a logistical nightmare.

I mean, you could have equipment that you pull along,

but the really fine detailed stuff

like separating the wheat from the chaff,

that has to be done by hand.

It takes days, even weeks, to clear a single field.

- [Martin] Timing is critical when it

comes to harvesting wheat.

There is only a brief window of time

during which wheat can be harvested,

after which, it is no longer useful

to even go through the effort of harvesting it.

- On top of everything else, because of the war,

a lot of the men are off fighting somewhere

or they're working in a factory,

so there's a serious lack of manpower.

- [Dolph] What the Allies need

is a machine called the Combine Harvester.

- It's not just a clever name.

It combines multiple processes that were once done by hand.

- Combines cut the wheat, they separate it, they store it,

and get rid of the waste, all in one operation.

- [John] Combine harvesters are not a new idea.

The first combine harvester

was built by an engineer named Hiram Moore in 1835.

The problem is, these things are absolutely huge.

They take teams of like 20 horses or tractors to pull,

and they have to be accompanied

by whole teams of farm workers.

[intense music]

- [Dolph] Then in 1941,

a Canadian company, Massey-Harris,

comes up with a radical idea, "Who needs horses or men?"

They introduce an entirely new version of a harvester.

It's called the Model 21.

It cut, separates, and store's wheat like previous combines.

The difference, this one is self-propelled

and needs only one driver.

- The number 21 is not towed by horses.

It's not towed by a tractor.

It is tractor and harvester all in one.

It's its own beast, and it's fast.

- [Martin] Model 21 is so efficient

that with one pass across a field

that's ripe and ready for cultivation,

it can bring in the entire harvest.

- [Dolph] Under the hood,

the 21 packs a six cylinder industrial engine

that pumps out up to 60 horsepower.

Those old combines that needed 20 horses,

this engine triples that.

- [David] It can do eight acres in just an hour.

Three times what human beings can do.

This is a revolutionary game changer.

- [Dolph] But there's one problem.

There are wartime restrictions on steel use.

How are they gonna build a fleet to combines

when most of the steels being used to build tanks,

planes, and ships?

- Joe Tucker, sales manager for Massey-Harris USA

has a bold idea.

He has the audacity to go to the war department

and ask them for a release of steel

in order to finance the building

of 500 new combine harvesters.

- [John] He sells them hard.

Tucker tells the war production board

that the Massey-Harris Model number 21

is capable of harvesting more wheat than any other machine

and with less fuel and less manpower.

- [David] So the war production board,

they have a decision to make.

What he's asking, it's gonna require a lot of steel,

but they realize that their armies move on their stomachs

and they need food.

And as a result,

they agree to going with the Massey-Harvester 21.

- [Dolph] Farmers get to buy the 21 for a discount

with one condition.

They have to bring in 2,000 acres of grain

for the war effort.

- [Martin] Tucker calls it the Harvest Brigade.

This fleet of self-contained harvesters

go out across the country

following the harvest like a military mission.

- They send scouts out by car, by airplane,

to find wheat fields just as they're about to ripen,

and then they go out and harvest it.

- [David] The combines are deployed everywhere,

like an army onto a battlefield.

These machines start invading

almost every single wheat field

between the Dakotas and Texas.

And while you have the shooting war going on in Europe,

you got the grain war going on in America.

- [Austin] By the time the harvest is done,

the brigade brings in over 1 million acres of grain.

That's 25 million bushels of wheat and other grains

that weren't available before to feed soldiers,

to feed the starving of Europe.

It is a massive success.

- [Dolph] The war production board is so impressed,

it orders 750 more harvesters.

They stay in circulation for decades,

changing farming and cementing the machine's legacy.

- [David] When you think about World War II,

you think about all these incredible sexy machines

that win the war.

The Sherman Tank, the P-51.

So at the end of the war,

who would've believed

that one of the most decisive of all machines,

is the Massey-Harris 21.

- For many machines,

progress means making things more complicated,

and a whole lot more expensive.

But in 1908, Henry Ford turns that idea on its head.

He decides to build a car that's simple and cheap.

His gamble does more than reinvent autos,

it builds a new way of life.

- [Lance] At the beginning of the 20th century,

getting around America is still a challenge.

If you wanna get around locally,

you're still talking about horses and carriages.

If you live in a city, there might be a trolley

that's only useful for getting around town.

- [Hakeem] There are automobiles,

but really, it's the wealthy that own them.

By 1908, only 1% of households

own or have access to an automobile.

So automobile owners are literally the 1%.

- Because cars are so expensive

and so few people can afford them,

the ability to own a car,

it's like telling people you own a spaceship.

You are next-level wealthy if you have one of these.

So the manufacturers just start making nicer and nicer cars.

So they just figure we'll just make it more expensive,

we'll make less of them, and we'll make more money.

- Models like the Cadillac Model G,

the Packard Model 30,

have luxury features like hand-tufted seats,

woodgrain interiors, electric starters,

and custom paint jobs.

- [Lance] These cars almost had the opulence

of a Gilded-Aged parlor room,

and they were status symbols

that might cost up to 4 to $5,000 a piece.

That's up to 10 years salary for an average worker.

- [Dolph] One man thinks differently.

When he looks at a car,

he doesn't see a luxury machine,

he sees the opportunity for a revolution.

That man of course, is Henry Ford.

- [Lance] Car manufacturing is a risky business.

By 1908, Henry Ford has already gone out of business twice.

Ford's first company fails in 1901,

really because he's more an engineer than a businessman.

- [Hakeem] His second company,

the Henry Ford Company, crumbles in 1902,

when he battles with his investors

over the company direction.

He wants to focus on affordability,

but they want luxury.

- When Ford leaves,

his former partners decide to rename the company, Cadillac.

[intense music]

- [Dolph] For Henry Ford,

there would be no sweeter revenge

than building the ultimate affordable car for the masses,

and dominating the entire car industry with it.

- [Lance] By 1908, Ford makes his big swing with the Model T.

[intense music]

Ford designs the Model T for practicality first.

That's his no Packard or Cadillac.

It uses a crank start

to save on the cost of the electric starter.

- The Model T is simple. It's just utilitarian.

Basic seating, it's got a 20 horsepower,

four-cylinder engine,

and it runs on gasoline,

which is widely available at the time.

- Fewer than 10% of roads are paved in America in 1908.

So Ford designs the Model T

to have sufficient ground clearance

as well as reliable suspension

that can handle all of the bumps and potholes

of the roads of that time.

- [Rutledge] In a world of luxury cars

that you really need to be a specialist to work on,

the Model T is designed to be simple,

that anyone could work on it.

If you can operate your tractor at home,

you can take the cylinder head off of this car

to get out the carbon deposits

that build up pretty easily on there.

- With all his cost-cutting features,

Ford is able to introduce his two-seater Model T

for just $825.

It's aggressive, and he sells 10,000 of them.

But he realized it has to be even cheaper

if he wants to start his revolution.

- [Dolph] To reach his goal,

Ford focuses on efficiency,

and unveils arguably his biggest innovation,

the moving assembly line.

- This means that now, the workers can stay put

and do the one job they've been trained in

over and over again as the cars move past them.

This results in an increase in efficiency

and a massive drop in accidents.

- [Kavitha] Custom features drive up

the cost of manufacturing,

so Ford aims to keep the parts as standardized

and interchangeable as possible.

- Ford realizes that black paint dries faster,

and it takes fewer coats and less buffing.

So he announces

that his customers can have any color car they want

as long as it's black.

- [Lance] By 1914, the Model T goes

from taking 12-and-a-half hours to make, to just 93 minutes,

all by using less manpower.

- [Rutledge] The result of all of this efficiency,

is that Ford continues to drop the price

on the Model T as time goes on.

- [Dolph] The Model T drops to $550.

And by the time Ford makes his ten millionth car,

half the cars in the world are Fords,

and they're still getting cheaper.

- [Rutledge] By 1925, the price of the Model T had come down

to just $260 for a car.

This is amazing, right?

It also means that every single person

that's working on the line to build the Model T

can also afford one.

This is a game changer.

- [Dolph] Over 15 million model T's are built and sold

during its 19-year production run.

- In the end, Henry Ford did get his revolution.

Not just because he dominated the competition,

but because in making cars so accessible,

he took what was once a luxury, and made it a necessity.

- By the early 1970s,

machines carry Americans to the moon

and to victory in the space race.

So NASA turns to a new goal.

What if their engineers could build a machine

that lets us not just visit space, but actually live there?

[intense music]

- [Lance] It's March of 1973,

and America watches as NASA counts down

the launch of its first space laboratory.

It's called Skylab.

- If NASA wants to look way forward to longer moon missions

and to missions to other planets like Mars,

it needs to understand the long-term health effects

of space travel on the human body.

- [Dolph] A towering Saturn V rocket,

the same one that put man on the moon,

launched a Skylab into orbit.

- [Natalia] Minutes after takeoff, Skylab is crippled.

Its shield and panels are torn off,

causing the station to overheat.

- [Dolph] The crew recovers and keeps Skylab in orbit,

but the problems persist, and six years later,

it crashes back to Earth.

[intense music] [crowd cheering]

In 1993, president Bill Clinton

sees an opportunity to take the baton.

The US teams with other countries, including Russia,

for a new project,

the International Space Station.

[intense music]

- [Lance] In November of 1998,

the first module, Russia's Zarya,

launches successfully,

[person speaking indistinctly]

followed a few weeks later by America's Unity module,

delivered by the Space Shuttle.

- [Dr. Sutter] The ISS will be built modularly

in low Earth orbit,

like the world's greatest Lego set.

Astronaut Ross, and colleague, Jim Newman,

performed the painstaking task

of connecting the Unity and Zarya modules

over three grueling spacewalks, totaling 21 hours.

[upbeat music]

- [Dolph] It takes over 30 missions

and a decade of space walks to finish the ISS.

It is substantially complete by July 2011.

- [Nehemiah] Today, the International Space Station

looks like an enormous metallic dragonfly,

and its solar arrays stretch 240 feet across.

- [Don] When you first see images of the ISS,

it doesn't look real.

I mean, it looks like it's out of a movie.

As reality sets in, you begin to realize

people are living in that thing

all the time.

- [Dolph] The station itself

is roughly 357 feet end to end,

about the length of a US football field,

and weighs nearly 420 tons.

This is the largest structure

humans have ever assembled in space.

- [Dr. Sutter] The ISS looks like a modular spy.

It's this central long truss

that supports these vast solar arrays

that converts sunlight into electricity

for powering the station.

- [Lance] They rotate like sunflower petals

towards the sun, and there are backup batteries

for the time when the station is in the Earth's shadow,

which blocks out solar power.

- [Dolph] Branching off the main section

are pressurized modules,

thus serve as living spaces, science labs,

and control areas.

The ISS orbits Earth so fast

astronauts see a new sunrise every 90 minutes.

- [Natalia] One major challenge

is keeping this massive space station in orbit,

and not having it suffer the same fate as Skylab.

- [Don] The station exists in a continuous state of free fall.

So every so often,

a thruster has to kick in to maintain altitude.

Otherwise, it's gonna fall straight back to Earth.

- This free fall creates a near weightless environment.

Everything inside the ISS,

astronauts, tools, droplets of water,

are affected by microgravity,

and that's why you can see astronauts floating so easily

from compartment to compartment.

- [Dolph] But that lack of gravity causes issues.

- [Nehemiah] Tests show that astronauts

lose up to 20% of their muscle mass

after being in space for just weeks.

- [Dr. Sutter] They've come up with diet and vitamin regimens,

but the most critical component

is two hours of exercise a day

done with resistance training.

And since they're in zero gravity,

they're working out with the equivalent

of 600 pounds of weight.

But they don't know if this protocol will be enough

to solve the problem.

- [Dolph] In 2015,

NASA launches its most ambitious study

of a long-term space flight,

using identical twin astronauts.

- They call it the Twin program.

Astronauts Scott Kelly spends 340 days

at the space station orbiting in space.

His twin brother Mark, remains on Earth as a control.

The results are astonishing.

- [Don] Despite the exercise regimen and the countermeasures,

Scott experiences a loss of bone density

and muscle breakdown.

He arrives back on Earth two inches taller

because his spinal discs have expanded.

- [Lance] What is most astonishing

is that he has changed genetically.

His genes, in terms of bone formation,

DNA repair, and oxygen are actually different.

Long-term space travel affects the human body

on the cellular genetic level,

and some of these changes are permanent.

And without the International Space Station,

science would never have known that.

- Whether it's the first pages

rolling off the printing press,

or the ISS charting a course to our future in space,

through our time,

trailblazers have invented new machines

to reshape the world.

These change agents didn't wait for permission.

They kick down the door.

[intense music]