Original subtitles

The 20th century was a time

of incredible change,

(speaking in foreign language)

unspeakable horrors,

and amazing leaps of scientific discovery.

It was a century marked by events

that united and divided us.

From great feats to great wars,

(loud explosion)

with advancements and setbacks

that showed us the power of many,

the power of one.

I have a dream.

A century of revolutions,

evolutions, and retributions.

He's been shot.

A century made by conflicts and crimes,

inventions and entertainment,

politics, protests,

discoveries and disasters.

Oh the humanity!

We will count down

the 101 events of the 20th century.

These stories form the tapestry of our history

and shaped the world in which we live.

In this episode.

When the computer arrived, video games arrived with them.

What the US wanted to do was basically to know

what's China are up to, how are we gonna maneuver

in terms of the new situation that's developing.

Really there was no chance for them to escape

and yet we got them away.

We literally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

(soft upbeat music)

The 20th century

was a time of technological innovation.

But as the new millennium drew closer,

fear that an innocent bug could unravel

all electronic systems and communications

gripped the world.

From machines that took up an entire room

to handheld devices,

the 20th century had seen the creation of computers.

And as technology advanced,

they became smaller and more sophisticated.

But just as the world

was preparing to ring in the new century,

wonder at this new technology turned to panic.

Back in the 1960s when memory space

was very much an issue,

one megabyte of data cost millions of dollars,

programmers had essentially set the date

in computer programs to a two-digit number,

so 71 instead of 1971.

And the bug became an issue when people realized

that coming up to the year 2000 this might create problems.

By 1999

computers have reached the saturation point

where they controlled many aspects of everyday life.

It may have been disastrous if computers got so confused

by the date, in particular which century it was,

that they shut down completely.

The fear was that computers that were controlling

critical infrastructure like power plants,

military installations, banks, and financial institutions,

dams, et cetera, the power grid,

potentially could all be affected by this problem

which was not only a software problem

but also a hardware problem embedded into chips.

The media took advantage

of the hysteria spreading across the globe.

I'm seeing a rather dark forecast.

You're gonna lose half the population of the planet.

Some countries prepared themselves,

reprogramming both software and hardware

to be Y2K compliant.

Working together with everyone to create a community plan

on how you would deal with the possibility

that there may be some disruptions

of the services we all take for granted.

But this is a fixable problem.

This isn't a natural disaster.

When midnight of the inevitable date came,

the result was one of history's

most tremendous anticlimaxes.

Obviously there was a lot of hype around this.

Some of the hype was justified.

But in terms of actually fixing the actual bug itself,

that was a serious issue.

And I think the money that was spent

and the programs that were put into place

years in advance to try to fix this problem

resulted in the fact that we only saw very limited problems.

The new year came

and there were a few anomalies

including an equipment fail in a Japanese nuclear plant

which was quickly supplied with backup power

before any damage was done.

I think the major lesson from the Y2K problem

was just to what extent modern society

relies on an extremely complex overlayering

of technical sophisticated computer networks,

and it's important to build resilience

into these critical infrastructure programs

and financial institutions, et cetera,

that rely on this electronic infrastructure,

and in fact we all rely on that

for our day-to-day existence.

More than anything else,

Y2K highlighted that a lack of knowledge

created a tendency to panic.

The real lesson of Y2K was that the system

most susceptible to failure is common sense.

(applause)

(soft music)

In 1953 Britain gathered together to celebrate a new epoch.

Millions gathered in London

or in front of their television sets at home

to see a beloved princess who some years earlier

had not been expected to become a queen.

The final scene,

the royal family assemble together on the palace balcony

to receive the acclamation of their subjects.

Born on the 21st of April 1926,

Princess Elizabeth Alexandra Mary

was third in line to the throne.

When her uncle, Edward VIII,

shocked the world by abdicating in December 1936,

her father was thrust into the limelight as King George VI.

By the 1950s his health was in decline.

While on a state visit to Kenya

with her husband, Prince Philip,

in February 1952,

the 25-year-old Princess Elizabeth

was told her father had died.

The passing of King George VI

came as a sudden and most grievous shock

to his people all over the world

and to all friends of the British Empire and Commonwealth.

Despite national mourning

for the death of a beloved monarch,

the year also marked the end of drab post-war life.

A new young queen offered the chance for celebration.

God save the queen!

Hip hip!

Hooray!

What had marked the coronation in 1937

had been restraint and austerity.

But you needed in '53 to have something

that was spectacular and upbeat but not extravagant.

The country's officials threw themselves

into planning an event to remember.

Preparations for the coronation take over a year.

They started in May '52.

So it's not something that's lightly undertaken.

A thousand years of history and tradition

unroll in London town on coronation day.

On the morning of the 2nd of June 1953,

undeterred by heavy rain,

millions lined the streets

from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey

for a glimpse of the young queen in her golden coach.

The coronation was the world's first major event

to be broadcast live on television.

We have anecdotes of one television in a street

and huge parties being organized

as houses' front rooms were crammed with people

looking at the tiny flickering screens.

The first necessary step in the traditional ritual

is that the queen should be accepted by the people.

An estimated 27 million people in Britain

watched the BBC's coverage on TV

with 11 million listening on radio.

In the following weeks, it was seen across the globe.

Canisters of film being rushed to aeroplanes

and flown to the USA and far corners of the Commonwealth

just hours later.

A surge of emotion built up over the long hours

overflows now as the triumphant procession

heads back to Buckingham Palace.

Very few countries don't want their heads of state

to be able to put on a degree of pomp and ceremony.

And we like the heads of state that seemed to manage it best

while retaining a kind of accessibility.

It's a very difficult balancing act.

I declare before you all

that my whole life,

whether it be long or short,

shall be devoted to your service

and to the service of our great imperial family

to which we all belong.

(ominous music)

Early in the 20th century

it was widely believed that the pyramids of Egypt

had long given up all their secrets,

but one archeological wonder was yet to be discovered.

The Egyptian government

pressing on with its search for the tombs of the pharaohs

buried near the ancient city of Thebes

continue to make new discoveries.

In 1922 archeologist Howard Carter

had been exploring Egypt for more than 30 years.

Although everything of consequence

was thought to have already been discovered

in the Valley of the Kings,

Carter was sure that somewhere a tomb lay undisturbed.

The idea was that he was doing

a complete survey of the Valley,

mapping where the people have worked

and trying to spot areas where they hadn't worked.

And he actually came very close to the tomb's entrance

several years before he found it but just stopped short

and then went through another area.

Towards the end of the 19th century,

a tomb had been discovered

containing some of the royal mummies,

and this was the motivation

to continue the search for others.

And there they actually found the bodies

of most of the kings of the period.

So they could begin to work out who have not been found,

who haven't been rolled or moved out of their tombs,

and so this prompted them.

Digging in the dark,

Carter's team found stairs that led down to a door

of what appeared to be an unmarked tomb.

And then when they cleared the rubble,

they found a sealed door,

and of course that's when

they really got excited and looked in.

And what you actually have in the tomb is,

I mean it's literally was packed from floor to ceiling.

It had been broken into a couple of times

but those robbers hadn't really,

they'd done some damage but not major.

Three weeks later

they uncovered the tomb of the boy king Tutankhamun.

The pharaoh's cause of death was discovered to be

a broken leg which had become gangrenous.

News quickly spread of the discovery.

There was a lot of interest and there had been

for well over half a century and more in Egypt.

And so as soon as something like this was found,

it really made the headlines.

And here's the boy king's golden sarcophagus

lined with plates of solid gold, carved inside and out.

Extensive study of the artifacts,

x-rays, and DNA testing continued for decades

after King Tutankhamun's tomb was found.

These researches revealed a lot about the 12th pharaoh,

and consequently, a lot about the ancient Egyptians.

Tut may have had a short and long-forgotten reign,

but since his rediscovery,

has become one of the most famous pharaohs of Egypt.

It's ironic to think that Tutankhamun

should be more widely known today than 3,000 years ago

when he ruled in the Land of the Pharaohs.

There is this incredible discovery

that's never been equaled in Egypt

for this type of material,

and it's still claimed that it has to be

one of the most spectacular ever made.

After lying hidden for 3,000 years,

Tutankhamun has been on display

and seen by thousands of people everyday.

His tomb remains an example of the world's

fascination for ancient cultures.

Out of the ashes of the Second World War

a new fear emerged in America, communism.

With the onset of the Cold War,

the federal government began to see the Red Terror

in everything from politics to Hollywood movies.

It has been said that some of you are communists.

The United States government feared

that the rising support for communism

would mean America becoming enslaved by the Soviet Union,

two countries with fundamentally different ways of life.

There's another concern

that was sort of ambient at the time

and that's the sort of concern about state capture.

Were there people in positions of power

within the United States who might

hand over or weaken the United States

in such a way that the Soviet Union

could take serious advantage of that?

In response to the perceived threat,

the House of Un-American Activities Committee

set to work putting all perceived Reds on trial.

The Communist Party of the United States

is a fifth column if there ever was one.

Formed in 1945

the Committee was created to investigate

any citizens or organizations

of subversive activity

and suspected communist allegiances.

In early trials they focused on their own government.

The communists are Red fascists.

Later the Committee targeted the film industry

in the prominent trials of 1947.

The new set of trials will be invasive,

examining people's personal lives

and questioning their loyalty to the country.

Members of the film industry were particularly targeted

for their ability to influence public opinion.

California throughout the 1930s

had been a kind of a sight of social and political unrest.

People were concerned about the film industry.

Would they be able to persuade ordinary Americans

for example that capitalism was bad

and that socialism was good.

And so those were genuine concerns.

While many was subpoenaed,

it was the Hollywood Ten,

a group made up of actors, writers, and directors,

that became infamous for refusing to cooperate,

stating their right of free speech.

I don't believe you have the right

to ask and to question of anybody.

Well, it's very apparent,

it's very apparent that you're following

the same line as these other witnesses.

I am following no line--

Which is definitely the communist line.

I'm using my own head which I shall continue to do.

You're excused, and if you wanna make a speech,

go out here under one of the big trees

and sound off. Thank you.

(audience laughing)

Their patriotism cost them.

They all faced prison time and fines of up to $1,000.

They were also put on the Blacklist.

The careers of many film artists, writers, and performers

were tainted by such connections.

The film industry is also an industry

in which contracts are short.

They were very vulnerable to things like rumor, gossip,

to information that you can't control

about yourself and your loyalties.

And so if you were behind the curve

in moving from wartime sympathy with the Soviet Union

to a Cold War hostility,

then it was very easy to get associated

with the wrong sort of political opinion

and to have your career killed as a result.

It wasn't until 1960

that the Blacklist began truly losing its power.

Spartacus was one of the first productions

to name a previously blacklisted member

of the Hollywood Ten,

screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in the credits.

The same year Exodus also listed Trumbo,

and an era came to an end.

The Committee eventually disbanded in 1975,

signaling an end to the decades

of national fear and paranoia.

(applause)

(soft upbeat music)

In the '70s technology had opened up

new ways for people to play games on screens.

Teenagers filled arcades

feeding coins into their favorite machine.

One game amongst all others would prove so popular

that its name lives on to the present day.

In 1978 the video games industry

was struggling to find the right balance

between complicated and simple designs.

The difficult games were unpopular,

the easy layouts quickly imitated by competitors.

One of the earliest examples of a popular simple format

was the table tennis arcade game, Pong, released in 1972.

In the home the chip transformed

an ordinary TV set into a magic box of video games.

At that point Pong had been a major

sort of game changer for the industry.

It had kickstarted this interest in video games

and more broadly this fascination

with playing with the screen.

Pong was easy to copy

so the market was flooded with clones forcing prices down.

There was a real danger that video games

would push themselves into oblivion,

however, a new game saved the day.

Game designer Tomohiro Nishikado

channeled a combination of influences

into his new project, Space Invaders.

It was an instant sensation,

replacing popular Pachinko machines in Japanese arcades.

It was a battle between you and the computer

which increasingly got harder and harder and harder

and just never let up.

One of the most interesting things about the game

is the way that it actually gets faster.

Space invaders was the first Japanese game

to be made with microprocessors.

And it's actually a result of hard work

in that as the aliens get destroyed,

it frees up processing power so the aliens move faster

because the computer can process them more quickly,

but it actually results in this beautiful game play flow.

Space invaders sold an unprecedented

100,000 units in the first year

and more in the following years.

Moving into the home,

the game had a great influence

on the increased sales of the Atari 2600 console.

This was at a point too where there was this real focus

on trying to recreate the arcade experience in the home

because it was expensive to go to the arcades,

and people started to hope that

maybe with consoles like the Atari 2600

you might be able to replicate

that experience in your own environment.

In the early '80s

concern was rising over the influence

Space Invaders and other games

was having on the young minds of its players.

Now that it was available in the home,

players were free to play for as long as they liked.

Despite opposition,

Space Invaders retained its popularity

into the 21st century,

its cultural impact earning it a place

in the Museum of Modern Art.

Video games and video game cultures

were incredibly important to the 20th century.

I think that they were the first creative medium,

the first art form of digital technology.

When the computer arrived,

video games arrived with them

almost from the beginning.

And I think it's impossible to underestimate

how significant that was both for culture,

for leisure culture, popular culture,

but also for society

and technological advancements more broadly.

(soft upbeat music)

As America's involvement

in the Vietnam War drew to an end,

President Richard Nixon turned his attention to a new war,

one that would be fought on the streets of American cities.

America's drug problem.

It's simply too complex and too deep-rooted.

The raid was just one of hundreds

made every year all over America

in an effort to curb one of the nation's

most rapidly growing social problems, drug addiction.

An insidious conflict

was taking hold in the United States.

Societal pressures including the ongoing war,

the draft, and unemployment,

rested heavily on the shoulders of the confused youth

who turned to substance abuse to dull their senses.

Drug use had been rising in the 60s

with the growth of a youth drug culture

and experimentation of conscious expansion.

Instead of focusing on the problems facing America's youth,

Nixon targeted the victims of drug abuse,

setting society against them.

America's public enemy number one

in the United States is drug abuse.

The notion that drug culture was rife on the campuses,

that drug culture was destroying the ghettos

was commonplace in the minds of the White establishment

in the early 1970s,

so Nixon makes war on drugs

part of his drive for law and order.

Nixon increased federal funding

to drug control agencies,

brought in mandatory sentencing,

and created a new department,

the Drug Enforcement Administration.

The new department's budgets

more than doubled over the years.

Future presidents would also take up arms against narcotics.

The Reagan husband and wife team

tackled the problem from two sides.

Ronald focused on law enforcement,

while Nancy campaigned to the young.

I was asked by a group of children what to do

if they were offered drugs.

And I answered just say no.

Well, Reagan took the approach

to lock up the drug traffickers

was the only solution to the problem.

Now that meant that you had a lot of Black youth

who were dealing as the only way to make

a tolerable living in the inner cities

which had now seen massive loss

of jobs, of industry since the 1960s.

And what happened with this lock them up strategy

was that you had the mass incarceration

of African-American youth.

Politicians on both sides

know that there's no single answer

to America's drug problem.

It's simply too complex and too deep-rooted.

Following administrations would take

a similarly negative view of the drug problem.

All of this stemmed from a policy

aimed at keeping Nixon in the White House.

Its negative ramifications

extended more than 30 years in the future,

stigmatizing drug use.

While it is debatable whether drug use

was a large scale problem in mid-century America,

it is sure that the administrations'

harsh response to the situation

has created more harm than good.

(sirens wailing)

(soft music)

A family tragedy in outback Australia

would capture the attention of the world,

creating a media frenzy whose greatest casualty

would be a grieving mother.

On the 17th of August 1980,

Lindy and Michael Chamberlain and their three children

were camping at the ancient monolith Uluru

in the Central Australian desert.

The Chamberlains put their children,

Aidan, Reagan, and nine-week-old Azaria to bed,

and joined other campers.

Many of these would later report seeing dingoes,

Australia's native wild dog nearby.

A baby's cry had Lindy running to the family tent.

There wasn't time to go and tell people.

I just yelled out does anyone got a torch?

A dingo has got baby.

A frantic search by campers

and local indigenous trackers

could not find the baby.

A week later her tiny jumpsuit was recovered

showing incisions around the neck.

The matinee jacket she had been wearing was gone.

In the Uluru area,

it was well-known that dingoes

were starting to come too close to campers.

So in the immediate aftermath of Azaria's being taken,

the view in the local vicinity

was that she had been taken by a dingo.

Sympathy soon turned to suspicion.

Police discounted Lindy's account,

claiming a wild dog could not carry a baby in its mouth.

Six months after Azaria's disappearance,

an inquest ruled the likely cause was a dingo attack.

I further find that neither the parents of the child

nor either of their remaining children

were in any degree whatsoever responsible for this death.

Yet police disputed the finding.

Key evidence were the incision marks on the jumpsuit

and the contentious forensic report

of blood stains in the car.

And that evidence

sparked a second coronial inquest.

And there was a very adversarial approach

that was taken by the Northern Territory Government

at that second coronial inquest.

When that coronial inquest closed,

the coroner recommended that the Chamberlains

be charged with murder.

Lindy was convicted of murder

on the 29th of October 1982.

She was sentenced to life imprisonment.

Michael was found guilty as an accessory

and given an 18-month suspended sentence.

The Chamberlains trial wasn't just

taking place in the law court,

their personal tragedy and how they responded

was being dissected around the country and around the world.

I think it's probably fair to say that the Chamberlains

were unusual characters in the public imagination,

and there was suspicion about whether grieving parents

would behave in the way that they behaved.

Of course today we understand

that there are all different ways

to grieve the loss of a child,

and that the way one performs in public

might be quite different to the way one feels in private.

In early 1986

three years into Lindy's life sentence,

an English tourist died from a fall on Uluru.

As police searched the area,

they discovered a small item of clothing in a dingo lair.

It was identified as Azaria's missing matinee jacket.

Lindy was immediately released and the case reopened.

The real fight for justice is only just starting.

You might think it's nearly finished but believe me,

it's only just beginning.

Two years later

all convictions against the Chamberlains were overturned.

A third inquest in 1995

ruled the cause of Azaria's death was unknown.

And it was only the final inquest in 2012

that found a dingo responsible for her death.

So that is now the legal position.

And the Chamberlains' convictions have been quashed.

The cause of her death was as the result

of being attacked and taken by a dingo.

(applause)

As a result of the case,

more rigorous forensic standards

were introduced in Australia.

In the early days of World War II

with Europe falling before German forces,

close to 400,000 British and Allied troops

were surrounded and trapped in Northern France.

With the outcome of the war hanging in the balance,

Britain needed a miracle.

Germany's Blitzkrieg tactics, the lightning war,

saw Poland, Holland, Denmark, and Luxembourg fall quickly.

The shadow of the conquering German armies

covered Western Europe.

The self-styled master race was riding high.

Hitler and his generals turned their attention

towards invading Belgium and France.

German tanks and troops stormed through,

pushing Allied forces back to the coastline in May 1940

to the town called Dunkerque.

The British and French forces

were very much taken by surprise.

It was a Blitzkrieg that led to German forces

getting to the coast incredibly quickly,

and that meant that effectively

the British and French armies were effectively cut in two,

with the best of those armies

in Belgium completely encircled,

and they had only one option,

either to break out to the south

or to head to the coast and try and evacuate there.

Winston Churchill,

newly appointed as Britain's Prime Minister,

ordered the Royal Navy to evacuate

Allied soldiers in Operation Dynamo.

On the first day around 200,000 soldiers

waited their turn to move on to the Dunkerque Mole,

a long stone and wooden jetty on the edge of the port.

Naval ships would not enter the shallow waters

so help was needed to ferry them in from the beach.

A call was sent out across Britain

for as many vessels as possible to assist,

including small craft that could get close

to the waiting soldiers in the shallow waters.

Every kind of small craft,

destroyers, paddle steamers,

yachts, motorboats, rowing boats

have sped here to the burning ruins of Dunkerque

to bring off the gallant British and French troops.

There's a bit of a myth that everyone

was taken off by these little ships

because the majority were taken off

by the moles, by the Royal Navy,

but these little ships undoubtedly had an effect.

From the 26th of May to the 4th of June

over 900 Royal Navy ships and civilian vessels

evacuated more than 330,000 stranded troops

far above what military authorities had believed possible.

700 civilian boats made multiple trips

to fetch more troops from the beach

often with enemy bombs landing down on them.

Despite evacuating more than 330,000 personnel

including Polish, French, and Belgium nationals,

around 68,000 British troops were captured or killed.

The largest military evacuation in history,

the Dunkirk Spirit came to represent

British endurance in the face of adversity.

There was a wonderful propaganda benefit

from saying, look, the Germans had our troops trapped.

Really there was no chance for them to escape

and yet we got them away.

We literally snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

But there was a much more practical significance,

and that is that the professional British Army,

which was effectively at Dunkerque,

we got back to the UK,

and without their professionalism

and without their knowhow,

the British Army thereafter

for the rest of the Second World War

wouldn't have been anything like as effective.

(soft upbeat music)

(crowd yelling)

In 1979 an enigmatic figure

rose to world prominence

leading a religious revolution in Iran

to depose the secular Shah,

a revolution which would change

the course of that country's history.

Iran had experienced ruling tensions since the 1940s.

The British-backed Shah saw himself as a successor

to the great Persian kings of the ancient world,

living a glamorous and extravagant life.

The Shah's reign became increasingly

at odds with the population.

His lavish lifestyle provoking protests

that economic reforms only benefited the elite

while attempts to Westernize Iranian culture

angered conservative religious leaders.

If you go to Iran and you see

how the royal family had lived before the revolution,

you can kind of understand why there was lots of anger

and why there was support from some people

for that in the first place

because there was a tremendous amount

of corruption of wealth.

A vocal critic

was the exiled Shia cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini,

who broadcast to his supporters from France.

As the Shah's regime became increasingly repressive,

riots in 1978 developed into a state of virtual civil war.

Thousands took to the streets in Tehran,

destroying symbols of Westernization

like banks and liquor stores.

In December soldiers mutinied,

attacking the Shah's security officers.

With his regime in ruins

and Khomeini calling for his arrest,

the Shah fled in January 1979.

I'm terribly delighted.

This is something that Iranians

have been waiting for many many years.

We are very happy, curse Shah in Iran.

(people yelling at the same time)

Khomeini returned to Iran,

and his revolutionary forces seized control of the country,

creating an Islamic republic.

He had an enormous impact on Iran

because he transformed the Iranian Revolution

from an anti-Shah revolution into an Islamic Revolution

and established an Islamic system of governance.

Religious clergies swiftly excluded

their former left wing and intellectual allies from power,

returning the country

to enforced conservative social values.

Ayatollah Khomeini had changed Iran

from a place which had been fairly cosmopolitan

to a place where women had to cover themselves,

and if they didn't do that,

then morality police would come and arrest them.

Anti-Western feeling continued to grow,

erupting when the Shah was given shelter

in the US for cancer treatment.

Thousands protested in the streets each day,

demanding his return to face trial for his crimes.

Khomeini was declared ruler for life at the end of 1979,

and called for his revolution to spread throughout

the Persian Gulf in a single unified state.

This is really the first time

that a leader comes to power

and declares a political Islam,

and for that matter a Shia version

as the ideology of that state.

The Americans had really saw that

as nothing more than fundamentalism.

Tensions with the West escalated.

I think his revolution had an unfortunate effect

on the way that West sees Islam

because what we saw of the revolution and the repression

gives a very bad impression of what Islam is

to a lot of people who don't understand it

and haven't read the Quran themselves.

Iran's 1979 Revolution had lasting effect

with increased tensions between Sunni and Shia Muslims

and anti-Western sentiment

growing ever stronger in the Middle East.

With the invention of the radio,

scientists were keen to see

what else they could do with this new technology.

And by pure accident found a use

that would change the way we cooked.

The microwave was born because self-taught scientist,

Percy Spencer, had a habit of carrying food in his pocket.

Percy had done marvelous work

increasing magnetron production during the war,

and his team were eager to discover

further uses for the machine.

And it's technologically a very interesting gadget,

but basically it's a magnet which bends electrons

so you can shape their path,

and if you get them to bounce around,

you can make waves.

The magnetron is used as the microwave generator.

It was while Percy

was testing the magnetron machine

that he realized it had an effect on him.

The peanut cluster bar in his pocket had melted.

So he thought, hmm, that's interesting.

So they began to play with putting food stuffs

near the magnetron,

and interesting things happened.

And they realized that actually if you've got a box

and put a magnetron outside it,

you could cook things.

Microwave oven.

Percy and his team took out a patent

on October the 8th 1945.

In 1947 the Raytheon team created

the first microwave called the Radarange.

And here's the real breakthrough,

the oven uses radio waves at the frequencies used in radar.

This reheats the meal in an incredibly short time.

And if you decided to buy a Radarange,

you'd have to have a bit of space in your kitchen.

It weighed about 750 pounds and it cost a lot.

It wasn't really till the 1960s,

about 1967, that the kind of box

that we would now recognize began to appear,

and it took the year domestic world by storm.

This was a new gadget.

There were lots of enthusiasm for that.

The convenience of frozen food

began to take off in home cooking with the arrival

of the much smaller countertop model in 1967

at a more manageable price of $495.

A new age of TV dinners and easy cooking was dawning.

What we began to find was that you could do then

prepackaged meals that you could simply heat up

which meant people could lead busier lives,

less time spent in the kitchen cooking.

To some extent it made the cooking

less of a gender-specific task.

It wasn't the housewife in the kitchen anymore.

Anyone can stick a ready-made meal in the microwave,

push a few buttons, and off you go.

The appliance became known as the microwave

for the short form waves used in cooking.

As the appliance gained popularity,

it became an everyday household appliance

for many homes throughout the world.

But I'd have to say for me

as someone who looks at innovation,

it's a classic example of an accident,

but an accident that isn't just, oh, that's funny,

but an accident that you then work on

to see where it takes you.

(soft music)

There were more than two sides to the Cold War.

While the First and Second World countries

were antagonizing each other,

a large group of the remaining nations

chose not to align themselves in the fray,

but to focus optimistically on building a new world.

In the wake of the Second World War,

countries formed new leaderships,

new alliances, and new enemies.

Relationships between America and the Soviet Union

had disintegrated in the years

since the Yalta Conference of 1945

where they had planned to cooperate in creating a new world.

In April 1955 the Third World came together

at the Bandung Conference in Indonesia

to discuss issues that concerned them all.

The idea of the Bandung Conference was that this was

part of the idea of the Third World

that there should be a block

that was outside of what the USSR,

the communist sphere and the USA were doing.

Attendance was made up of 29 countries

from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa.

The aims of the conference were quite complicated

because the big agenda was independence.

So they were campaigning for things like

Algerian independence and the Palestinian cause,

South Africa was also a big part of the agenda.

There was another emphasis

during this conference,

and that was the end of the old order of colonization.

Many countries were gaining their independence

and pushing for others to join them.

The royal palace at Amsterdam,

the transfer of sovereignty

creating a new independent republic,

the United States of Indonesia has been completed.

Colonization was expressly denounced

as the developing Third World

sought to pull itself out from under old regimes.

Deciding the guest list to the conference

was a contentious issue in itself.

Nothing could be decided in Asia without China,

but the other nations were unsure of the stance

China would take as a communist country

when it arrived at the conference.

The United States were tying itself up in strategic knots

over the role communism would play in the conference.

What the US wanted to do

was basically to know what was going on.

They were suspicious.

So the US was really focused on

what's China are up to,

how are we gonna maneuver

in terms of the new situation that's developing.

Ultimately they needn't have worried.

China didn't push its own agenda,

instead promoting unity and cooperation.

The 1955 conference was a charm

for the five sponsoring nations,

Burma, Indonesia, Pakistan, Sri Lanka,

and particularly India.

But within a few decades,

the spirit of Bandung had waned,

and efforts to repeat the event

has met with limited success in the 21st century.

The Bandung Conference was unique

for the scope of its agenda.

It would set a strong direction

for world politics in the years to follow.

Bandung is seen as the starting point

for the Non-Aligned Movement,

but in some ways it's the endpoint of a particular kind of

international socialist agenda,

and that it's the point at which

a number of different countries

split off and go their own way.

The legacy is the idea that you can have a separate agenda,

that you don't just have to follow the Cold War

polarization of USSR versus the West,

that there were other ways to advance

the cause of developing countries.

(applause)

Politics and sex

have been bedfellows throughout history.

But at the end of the 20th century,

a scandal threatened one of the most

powerful figures in the world,

the President of the United States.

In fact it was wrong.

Bill Clinton was elected

the 42nd President of the United States

in 1993 at the age of 46.

The first president from the baby boomers' generation,

he had a high public approval rating

from the beginning of his official term.

Clinton's first term

is very very difficult to characterize.

It's neither a success nor a failure,

but what is happening at the same time

is that the economy is recovering

from the 1991 recession very nicely.

That is largely due to the low interest policies

of the Federal Reserve,

but because Clinton is president,

he can claim credit for a recovering economy,

and he goes into the 1996 election

as the president of prosperity.

We're in the midst of the longest

economic expansion in history.

More than 22 million new jobs,

the lowest unemployment in 30 years,

the lowest female unemployment in 40 years.

Yet Clinton's legacy would be forever linked

with sex scandals from his time in office.

In 1995 President Clinton began an affair

with 22-year-old White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

By 1998 details of the Lewinsky affair

were being reported in the media.

Clinton, standing beside his wife at the White House,

gave a press conference denying the allegations.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Despite the denial,

the rumors refused to die down.

But Lewinsky remained silent.

Speculation began to occur

on whether Clinton will be impeached.

A standing US official could be formerly charged

with treason, bribery, or other high crimes and misdemeanors

under Article II of the United States Constitution.

Clinton by the standards behaved very very foolishly

and very badly for a president still in the office.

Without doubt he lied,

but whether these were grounds for impeachment

is highly questionable.

In July 1998

Lewinsky was given total witness immunity

in exchange for grand jury testimony

about her relationship with Clinton.

The most damning evidence was a stained dress.

The president publicly admitted the affair

a few weeks later.

Indeed I did have a relationship with Ms. Lewinsky

that was not appropriate.

In fact it was wrong.

For her part, Lewinsky was vilified.

The scandal would cling to her forcing her from public life

for more than a decade.

Clinton was now forced to face impeachment proceedings,

the first in 130 years.

It was based on two charges.

One of perjury and one of obstruction of justice

in connection with the sexual affair.

The White House chose to deal with the issue

by going about business as usual.

Clinton in early 1998

delivered the State of the Union address

shortly after the Lewinsky scandal

had become public knowledge,

and in it he glorifies the economy

which is now going into overdrive

in terms of prosperity, job creation, and low inflation.

It was very fortunate for Clinton

that Americans decided that his foibles

were personal ones rather than public ones,

and that Clinton did a kudos for the economy.

On the 12th of February 1999

the country heard the House's ruling.

The motion had failed.

Clinton was acquitted and remained in office,

serving till the end of his second term in 2001.

He left office with the highest approval rating

of any US president since the Second World War.

(soft music)

In the early years of the 20th century,

the terrible effects of alcoholism on American society

fueled the rise of a temperance movement,

one that became so powerful

that it influenced government policy

and ushered in an era defined by its flappers,

gangsters, and speakeasies.

With an amendment to the Constitution,

Article 18 forbade the manufacturing, selling,

and transporting of intoxicating beverages.

Well, when Prohibition came in

after the First World War,

really there had been 100 years at least of concern

about America's drinking problem,

and Americans drank very heavily

and they tended to drink very high rates

of alcoholic concentrations.

Vintners and brewers

were forced to close their doors

as the nation's fifth largest industry was shut overnight.

What it didn't do was outlaw the actual drinking,

so it was quite carefully drafted

to avoid criminalizing the act of drinking.

What that led to was it was perfectly legal

for people to, if they had the money to buy

a cellar full of wine or drink or bourbon

before Prohibition came in,

then they just drink it out,

and that of course was done.

But alcohol didn't disappear.

It just went underground.

Bootleggers became the greatest beneficiaries of the ban

as a sea of alcohol was smuggled into

and sold in speakeasies around the country.

Coordinating the bootlegging

produced one of the era's most enduring legacies.

Public enemy number one,

they don't come any bigger than Alphonse Capone.

In the hands of Al Capone,

Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano,

organized crime reached new and frightening heights.

Newspapers and movies carried stories

of gang warfare and violent crimes.

And while the gangs tightened their strongholds,

law enforcement rose up to fight them.

Meanwhile in the underground and hidden speakeasies,

a social revolution was happening.

Here independent young women,

many freed from traditional domestic employment,

twirled in their flapper dresses

and flirted with dashing men

while sipping cocktails.

But while corruption was rife

and criminals made millions,

it was the onslaught of the Great Depression

that eventually brought down Prohibition.

It was always never utterly popular,

and in it enforcement became more unpopular.

It did have the effect of criminalizing middle class people,

often young people, who simply want to have a drink

and who got caught up in police raids in midst.

And then of course when the Great Depression came,

the loss of alcohol-based taxation revenue and excises

became an even stronger argument.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt

was sworn into office in 1933,

he introduced a series of economic reforms

which included the repeal of Article 18,

and in 1933 the alcohol ban was finally lifted.

As the years rolled on,

it became obvious that Prohibition had to go.

America's joy was unbridled as it fought its way

into the wide open saloons and bars across the country.

It was open house for a parched nation.

Prohibition had been repealed

and almost nobody was sorry.

(upbeat music)