Original subtitles

[narrator] A freakish skull, half human and half ape.

Could it be Darwin's missing link?

This was a, kind of, physical, anthropological Holy Grail.

[narrator] Did this tiny piece of metal

change the course of the Cold War?

The Americans had no idea what they were looking at.

They had no idea how it worked.

[narrator] And could a steam powered maths engine actually work?

He thinks, "Maybe I can make steam do the job the brains do."

Nobody else had come even close to that thought.

[narrator] These are the most remarkable

and mysterious objects on Earth,

hidden away in museums, laboratories and storage rooms.

Now, new research and technology

can get under their skin like never before.

We can rebuild them, pull them apart

and zoom in to reveal the unbelievable,

the ancient and the truly bizarre.

These are the world's strangest things.

At the beginning of the 20th century,

this strange-looking skull

is the most sensational discovery

in the archaeological world,

but it falls victim to a shocking controversy.

For 100 years, it's been locked away

at the Natural History Museum in London.

Now, using cutting edge digital technology,

we can examine it in forensic detail.

This is Piltdown man,

a human ancestor unlike anything ever discovered.

With a skull like ours,

but with a huge jaw and teeth of an ape.

When it's revealed in 1912,

it is exactly what scientists are searching for,

solid evidence for Darwin's controversial theory on human evolution.

This was concrete proof of a connection between apes and humans.

A perfect missing link.

[narrator] But look much closer,

and there's something not quite right about this find.

The molar teeth in the ape-like jaw

have microscopic abrasion marks

not seen on any other fossil.

And hidden in the cavities around the skull

is some kind of artificial material.

All this evidence points to one scandalous conclusion.

Piltdown man was not the missing link,

it was a forgery.

[narrator] Since the fake was uncovered, there have been many suspects,

but the true identity of the forger has eluded experts.

Now, new research can definitively name him.

Who is he?

What is the truth behind this strange hybrid skull?

And how does it fool the world for almost half a century?

This story of scientific fraud begins in the English county of Sussex,

in a quiet village called Piltdown.

The discoverer of Piltdown man was Charles Dawson,

a solicitor from around Hastings, in the south of England.

[narrator] Dawson is an amateur archaeologist with a stellar track record

for unearthing unusual artefacts.

It's earned him the nickname the Wizard of Sussex.

In a gravel pit in Piltdown, he uncovers his greatest find.

In 1912, Dawson writes to Arthur Smith Woodward,

at the Natural History Museum in London,

explaining that he had found a series of interesting flints

and a fragment of a human skull.

[narrator] Smith Woodward is a big wheel in the world of paleontology.

He knows the discovery of a genuine human skull

in this context would be big news.

[MacDonald] The gravel was thought to be half a million years old.

If this was true, then these bones, if human,

would be the oldest yet known

not only in England but in the world.

[narrator] Smith Woodward heads to Piltdown,

and over the following months,

he and Dawson appear to hit the jackpot.

They find more skull fragments, a fragment of jaw bone

and a canine.

[narrator] The dark brown staining of all the finds

seems to confirm that they've been buried

in the ground together for a very long time.

Smith Woodward hurries back to London with the finds.

[Elliot] He's got this collection of fragments of skull and jaw.

And he embarks on putting these pieces back together to completing this puzzle

and reconstructing what this skull and jaw might have looked like.

[narrator] He fills in the gaps between the fossil fragments

using imagination and plaster molds.

What he ends up with is unlike any ancient human remains ever discovered.

The rear of the skull looked very much like a modern human skull,

whereas the jaw looked like it belonged to an ape.

[narrator] This find sends shockwaves through the scientific world.

And it's all because of this man, Charles Darwin.

He claims humans and apes are close relatives with a common ancestor.

But 50 years after Darwin publishes his theory,

there's very little evidence to back it up.

That's when Charles Dawson and Piltdown man

ride to the rescue of science.

Half man, half ape was exactly what scholars were looking for

to substantiate Darwin's theory.

[narrator] Piltdown man is the smoking gun that proves Darwin right.

Unfortunately, there's one very big problem with this.

The Piltdown man could not be the missing link.

It was a forgery.

[narrator] What gives this audaciously fake skull away?

While Piltdown man is locked away

in the Natural History Museum,

archeologists begin turning up ancient humans that looked nothing like it.

It was becoming apparent that the ancestors of humanity

had started out small brained and upright

rather than large brained.

This is the complete opposite of Piltdown man.

[narrator] So, behind the scenes at the Natural History Museum,

alarm bells are ringing.

In 1949, they date Piltdown man

using the best available techniques.

The first results are alarming.

This seemed to show that these remains

were certainly no older than 50,000 years.

[narrator] Fifty thousand years ago,

modern humans have already been around for a very long time.

Piltdown man cannot be the missing link.

Maybe it was all just a simple mistake.

In 1953, the skull is retested using a new technology.

Further dating, as radiocarbon dating became possible,

showed that we were looking at a medieval human skull

coupled with a 500-year-old orangutan jaw fragment.

[narrator] There is no time in history

when orangutans have been native to Britain.

This isn't simply an error, it's a deliberate fake.

How has the forger got away with it for four decades?

How is this skull of an ancient human faked so well

that it fools the expert world?

This was a carefully planned, if somewhat clumsy, forgery.

[narrator] One thing that convinces experts

is the brown coloring of the buried finds.

In real fossils, color this dark

results from very long term exposure

to minerals in the ground water.

But under chemical analysis, Piltdown man's coloring falls apart.

The forger had stained all of the bone remains

as well as associated stone tools

and bone implements with sodium dichromate,

a solution which produced a brown stain,

making them look associated with one another.

[narrator] And there are other devious tricks.

When bones fossilize,

they mineralize and they become heavier, stone like.

This was a problem which confronted the forger,

how to make the bones heavier?

[narrator] The Piltdown bones

are too young to be fossilized, yet they are heavy.

Detailed examination reveals something extraordinary.

[MacDonald] The forger used natural crevices in the bones

to hide away bits of stone, to give them greater weight.

[narrator] The deeper they dig, the worse it gets.

The canine tooth is definitely from an orangutan,

yet the molars appear remarkably human.

But extreme magnification

reveals rows of tiny linear abrasions.

Under microscopic examination, it was clear that the molars had been filed down

in order to make them look more human.

[narrator] And there are some glaring mistakes.

[Elliot] When the forger makes the fake,

he uses putty to seal in stones

into the jaw in teeth cavities to give it this weight.

But it would have been quite obvious to people looking at those...

Those cavities had been sealed in that way.

[narrator] Why isn't this obvious evidence of fraud spotted by experts?

It's all because Piltdown man is considered too important to be handled.

What happens is a series of casts are produced.

And this is really crucial because the casting process

masks all the differences in materials,

but also many of the differences in textures

that would have given some of those signs of forgery

away to researchers looking at them.

[narrator] And the forger has one more vital tool in his arsenal...

national pride.

[MacDonald] If we go back to 1912,

there had not yet been any human fossil finds of importance in Britain.

[narrator] Meanwhile, the French have found Cro-Magnon man,

and the Germans have Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis.

One French archaeologist

apparently describes the British as pebble hunters.

Piltdown man puts those continentals right in their place.

This is exactly what people want to find, in exactly the right place,

being made by exactly the right kinds of people

for the British academic establishment.

I think that plays a big role into how readily

the fake is accepted by British academics.

[narrator] Which leaves just one question, "Who did it?"

Now, after 100 years,

new research can finally uncover the forger's identity.

Suspicion has fallen on several individuals,

the celebrated academic, the charismatic lawyer and the famous author.

It's straight out of the pages of an Agatha Christie whodunit,

or perhaps a Sherlock Holmes novel,

which leads rather neatly to the first possibility.

One of the suspects for the forger was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories.

He was a man who had an interest in science,

and, in fact, he belonged to the same archaeological society as Dawson himself.

And he sometimes played golf in Piltdown.

[narrator] But what is his motive?

He had become increasingly involved in spiritualism,

and was an object of mockery by the scientific community.

[narrator] Spiritualists claim they can communicate with the dead.

But by 1912,

spiritualism has been widely debunked

and ridiculed by scientists.

[Ball] So he developed something

of a, kind of, defensive attitude against science.

And the theory was

that this might have been his way of getting his own back.

[narrator] But there's one big hole in the theory.

He never tells anyone.

If Conan Doyle had done this

to embarrass the paleo anthropological community,

he would have sprung the trap in his lifetime, and he didn't.

So I think this alone allows us to eliminate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

[narrator] Another obvious suspect is Arthur Smith Woodward,

the paleontologist who pieces the skull together.

He had the expertise to create a hoax of this sort,

he had access to the materials.

[MacDonald] Someone who stood to gain a great deal,

in terms of their own career, from such a famous discovery.

[narrator] But if the forgery is discovered,

it would destroy his hard won international reputation.

He had everything to lose.

I, personally, I just can't see it.

[narrator] Last but most definitely not least, Charles Dawson.

He was the only one who ever claimed to make these particular finds.

Um, he clearly had ambitions.

And after he died, these finds just stopped.

[narrator] For a century, suspicion has shifted from one suspect to another.

Now, the latest research has finally cracked the case.

The key is another artefact hidden away in a back room at the Natural History Museum.

Piltdown man two.

Dawson has this other site, Piltdown two,

which is about a mile away from the original Piltdown site.

And at that site, he makes a discovery,

another Homininae cranium

with exactly the same kinds of staining

observed at Piltdown one.

[narrator] In 2016, a new study throws

every modern scientific technique available

at both Piltdown specimens.

The results are conclusive.

The teeth from Piltdown two had come from exactly

the same orangutan as Piltdown one.

Also, there's a similar technique in terms of sealing stones

into the jaw using putty, and that is, chemically,

the same kind of putty that was used at Piltdown one.

[narrator] So whoever created Piltdown man

must have created Piltdown man two as well.

Of all the suspects, only one of them knew about Piltdown two,

and that's Charles Dawson.

[narrator] Charles Dawson faked Piltdown man.

And a new examination of his other astonishing finds,

the ones that earned him the title Wizard of Sussex,

is the final nail in his coffin.

Almost every single one is a fake.

It turns out Dawson is already an old hand at forgery

long before Piltdown man turns up.

After more than a century,

the case of the Piltdown man finally closed.

The United Nations Security Council, May 1960.

The world gets its first sight

of an object that has sent shockwaves

through the shady world of American espionage.

A Soviet bug unlike anything ever seen before.

It's been listening in to the US Ambassador's office in Moscow.

Imagine if during the most dangerous period

of your country's history,

your most dangerous enemy

was listening to your every word.

[narrator] What terrifies American spies is that it's evaded detection

for seven years.

[Auerbach] The Americans knew what to expect from the Soviets.

The issue was they were dealing with a device

that they never expected and had no means of detecting.

[narrator] And they just can't figure it out.

The Americans had no idea what they were looking at,

they had no idea how it worked.

It was so bizarre to them that they simply called it The Thing.

[narrator] If they can't make sense of it, the Russians can just do

do the same thing over and over again.

Now, to unlock its secrets, we've brought it back.

A carved wooden plaque of the Great American Seal.

Inside, nothing but a few pieces of metal work.

It was just a metal cylinder with a little bit of metal attached to it.

It looks completely innocuous.

That was all there was to it.

[narrator] An electronic listening bug with no electronics.

It hasn't got batteries, it hasn't got wires,

it doesn't have a huge radio antenna dangling at the back.

It's, basically, completely undetectable.

[narrator] How does it work?

Who is the Soviet genius who dreams it up?

Why did it baffle American experts for so long?

The Thing,

a Soviet listening device made from a few pieces of bent metal.

It eavesdrops on top secret conversations

of the US Ambassador to Moscow for seven years.

How does it escape detection for so long?

After the end of World War II,

spying becomes an essential tool

in the new Cold War battle

between Russia and its former ally, America.

Spaso House, the US Ambassador's residence in Moscow,

is an obvious Soviet target.

So 1945, the US Ambassador

is given a ceremonial presentation

of a wooden version of the Great Seal of the United States,

and it's delivered to him by the Young Pioneers,

this is the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scouts.

What the ambassador didn't realize

is that the bug was already in it.

[narrator] It's hung proudly on the wall

in the ambassador's private office.

The US has been duped, and it doesn't even know it.

[Auerbach] This is not cloak and dagger.

This is not a man in a fedora and a trench coat.

The most powerful country in the world

was hoodwinked by the equivalent of a bunch of Boy Scouts.

[narrator] How did the Americans miss it?

Everything entering the residence gets a detailed security check,

but The Thing is not spotted.

It passed all the security screening in the American Embassy

because they X-rayed it, and there was just nothing there.

It really is beautifully innocuous.

[narrator] After years eavesdropping US secrets,

radio transmissions from The Thing are detected purely by chance.

The way that this was discovered...

Some of that information is still classified.

It was either an American or a British radio operator

heard something that was coming out

of the ambassador's office in Spaso House.

[narrator] These radio transmissions can only mean one thing,

a bug.

Once they know it's there, it doesn't take long to find.

But at this point, it's already been in there for seven years.

[narrator] How has The Thing evaded

the most technologically sophisticated country on Earth?

When this carved Seal was inspected,

within it was found a very innocuous little object.

So it was basically just a metal cylinder

with a little bit of metal attached to it.

There was almost literally... There was nothing to it.

[narrator] No one can make sense of it.

For the life of them, they can't figure out how it works.

It doesn't conform to any conventional specifications for a listening device.

[narrator] The inexplicable bug finally ends up

on the desk of a technical expert at British Intelligence.

[Auerbach] So they send it to Peter Wright at MI5,

and his job is to figure out how this bug actually works.

[narrator] It takes Wright ten weeks to crack The Thing's secret.

What he finds is a work of genius.

The principle behind The Thing

is a phenomenon called resonance.

[narrator] One of the best known examples of resonance

is a wine glass partially filled with water.

[Steele] If you wet your finger,

then move it slowly around the rim of a wine glass,

you're causing it to vibrate very slightly,

and you can play a musical note.

[narrator] This resonance effect happens

because the length of that particular sound wave

fits into the space above the liquid.

A metal container has exactly the same effect on radio waves

that a wine glass does on sound waves,

and that is the secret of The Thing.

[Steele] The Thing is a tiny cylinder of metal,

and that cylinder has a particular

resonant frequency for radio waves.

So, if you shine waves at it

at exactly that frequency,

it will send that same frequency back at you.

[narrator] Turning the bug on is child's play for the Soviets.

[Ball] Outside the ambassador's residence,

there was a van that was broadcasting

an intense radio frequency beam into the room,

and that radio frequency signal

would set the cavity vibrating.

[Steele] The genius was then to put a tiny, thin layer of silver foil

on one end of the cylinder.

[narrator] Sound from speech in the room

makes the foil move in and out,

very slightly changing the size of the space inside the cylinder,

and that changes the radio waves re-transmitted by it.

[Ball] So, really, the people in the van

just had to put on a pair of headphones

and listen with a radio receiver,

and they could hear what was going on inside the room.

[narrator] No wonder it takes so many years to spot the bug.

If you're not transmitting radio waves to it,

it does absolutely nothing. It is completely undetectable.

Unless you happen to catch them in the act,

when they're outside in their van, transmitting radio waves.

Then you're just not going to find anything.

[narrator] The Thing is a work of genius.

But the mastermind behind it is not some shadowy spy.

In fact, he's world famous.

Not for espionage, but, incredibly,

for pop music and horror movies.

Who on earth is he?

The Thing is the ultimate undetectable bug.

Who had the genius to come up with such a perfect device?

[Auerbach] He was a kind of scientific superstar.

Hey was a physicist by training,

he was from a family of musicians,

but his real genius was electronics.

[narrator] His name is Lev Sergeyevich Termen,

better known in the West as Leon Theremin.

And his claim to fame up to that point

was he'd invented something called the ether phone.

[narrator] The ether phone is the world's first electronic musical instrument.

It's now better known simply as the Theremin.

And it's an incredibly beautiful thing.

A sort of wailing, plaintive, wonderful sound.

[narrator] It's played by two hands waved in the air above it.

This was such a marvelous device that the Soviet government

actually had him going on tour to show off Soviet technology.

Theremin goes to Paris, London, New York

to show off this marvelous new object.

[narrator] By the time Theremin returns to Russia in 1938,

it's a very different place.

[Auerbach] Stalin is the dictator in charge of the Soviet Union.

His secret police are everywhere.

[narrator] Because of his time in the West,

Theremin is falsely accused of being a counter revolutionary

and sentenced to eight years hard labor in a gulag.

But he catches a lucky break.

Oddly enough, the man who saves Theremin from his fate in the gulag

is absolutely one of the most dangerous,

frightening people in the Soviet government, Beria.

[narrator] Lavrentiy Beria is head

of the Soviet secret police, the KGB.

He offers Theremin a deal, freedom from the gulag

in exchange for an undetectable bug.

Theremin delivers in spades.

His genius invention, The Thing,

eavesdrops on seven years of US intelligence.

The Soviets knew they were going to get

amazing information out of this bug,

but how could they have predicted how much would be going on

in that seven years, from '45 to '52?

[narrator] In those seven years,

America drops two atom bombs on Japan.

Post-war Europe is carved up between Russia and the West.

NATO is formed.

The Berlin Airlift happens.

The US goes to war in Korea.

And The Thing listens to it all.

A lot of the information that was gained from Theremin's Thing,

it's been worked into Soviet policies and decisions,

but we'll never be able to trace it back to exactly where it came from.

[narrator] But the story of The Thing does not end with its discovery.

Russia may be spying on America,

but America has been busy returning the favor.

They create the U-2 spy plane,

the most technologically sophisticated aircraft in the world.

It photographs Russia whilst flying so high,

Russia can't hit it with their missiles.

But in 1960, it all goes wrong.

It turns out that the Soviets do have a weapon

that can reach the U-2 spy plane,

and they probably shoot one down.

[narrator] Russia accuses the US of illegal spying.

US Ambassador to the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge,

faces humiliation.

He falls back on a classic political defense,

"They started it."

"Okay, yes, we were spying on them.

But you know what? They were spying on us."

And that's when he brings out The Thing.

[Auerbach] I can only imagine that Theremin was incredibly flattered

because on the one hand you have the most sophisticated piece

of aerospace engineering ever developed until this time.

And then, on the other hand, you have a bit of metal.

I mean, that's a great little comparison to have

if you're the guy that invented the second one.

[narrator] Despite The Thing's fame,

its connection to Theremin is obscured by the Soviets.

It is decades before his name is finally connected

to one of the most bizarre spy gadgets in history,

The Thing.

[narrator] Locked away in a store room at London Science Museum

is a genuine 19th century miracle machine,

a 180-year-old mechanical engine

that solves complex mathematical equations.

Built more than 100 years before the first electronic computer,

it was the only one of its kind in the world.

It's hard now with all our modern computers

to think about just how ridiculous an idea

this must have seemed at the time.

[narrator] Now, brought out of the shadows

and painstakingly reconstructed,

this is Difference Engine No. 1.

It's a problem solving machine.

[narrator] Standing 28 inches high and 24 inches wide,

two thousand precision parts of bronze, steel and iron.

Its cogs and levers are designed to solve equations

previously only managed by thinking human minds.

It's meant to transform science and engineering

by eliminating lethal calculation errors.

Nothing like it has ever been seen before.

It was utterly out of the blue

and seemingly impossible.

[narrator] It is designed to change the world.

Who invents it? How does it work?

And how exactly is this machine going to start a revolution?

Built in 1832,

this bizarre contraption is a calculation engine,

and it's the only one of its kind in the world.

But why is it created?

[Ruth Goodman] The early 19th century is an exceedingly

exciting time within Britain.

Steam power is on the rise.

People are beginning to see how it can be exploited.

Now, instead of human labor, you would use some kind of mechanized labor

to do weaving, to do construction, to do mining.

So that was really the notion,

that you were replacing a human with the machine.

[narrator] But this revolution depends increasingly on mathematics.

And in an age before electronic calculators,

these sums rely on printed mathematical tables to assist them.

All of the calculations that went into mathematical tables

in the 19th century were done by computers,

but not computers as we understand them today.

By human computers, people who'd sit down

and do all the mathematics longhand.

[narrator] In 1820,

The Royal Astronomical Society appoints mathematician Charles Babbage

to investigate concerns about errors creeping into these tables.

The consequences could be enormous.

You could have bridges collapsing,

you could have railways that stop short.

All of this engineering, all of this expansion, all of this finance

is reliant upon truly accurate maths.

Small mistake, big consequences.

[narrator] Babbage is horrified by what he finds.

There was huge scope for error.

There'd be the person doing the calculations,

then someone would have to copy it out into a table,

then someone would have to try and typeset it for printing.

So every stage of this process

has scope to introduce mistakes.

Babbage looked at this and, out of frustration, actually stated,

"I wish I could construct these tables out of steam."

And he thinks, "Maybe I can make steam do the job

the brains do."

[narrator] This idea is so far ahead of its time, it seems crazy.

Nobody else had come even close to that thought.

[narrator] But if anyone can pull it off, it's Babbage.

He has a long track record in unorthodox ideas.

[Steele] Babbage was already showing signs of brilliance and a love of invention

even as a child.

He developed a device which he hoped would cause him

to walk on water, and nearly drowned in the process.

So perhaps it's not so surprising

that somebody with this adventurous mind

would be the sort of person to think adventurous thoughts.

[narrator] Babbage imagines a machine unlike any built before.

Eight feet high, weighing four tons

and made of more than twenty-five thousand parts.

This was going to be a true computational machine,

not just an addition, subtraction device.

[narrator] It will solve an equation called a polynomial,

from which key tables, such as logarithms, are calculated.

And it will do this using a mathematical approach

called the method of differences,

so he calls it the difference engine.

In 1823, Babbage persuades the British government

that he can solve all their human computer problems,

and they believe him.

It's important to remember that this experimentation

wasn't just a bit of random tinkering.

This is a bloke who became perhaps the most eminent maths professor of his age.

[narrator] The government advance him £1,500,

the equivalent of $250,000 today.

And in 1832, Babbage produces this,

Difference Engine No. 1,

a prototype for Babbage's ultimate dream.

Babbage's prototype was only about a third of the width and height

of the machine that he eventually had planned.

This was already an impressive machine,

two thousand different brass and steel parts.

[Ball] And it works.

It can reliably calculate the squares of numbers, or the cubes of numbers,

or solve simple quadratic equations.

Babbage's idea not only works,

but can be made to work in reality.

[narrator] It seems Babbage's self-belief is actually justified.

But how does this astonishing machine actually work?

Difference Engine No. 1,

an incredible mechanical contraption

designed to replace the human mind

in solving complex mathematical problems.

[Ball] He'd set it up to carry out what we now call an algorithm.

So a set of steps, um, that will automatically then give you your result.

[narrator] But in an era long before electronics,

all he has to do it with are metal cogs and levers.

Difference Engine No.1 uses a series

of numbered toothed drums arranged one above the other.

The actual arrangement of the numbers

are going up in columns.

[narrator] So each number drum up a column

represents units, then tens, hundreds, thousands and so on.

If a drum moves beyond nine and back to zero,

a carry mechanism adds one to the drum above.

At the start, all the drums are set to particular numbers,

depending on the planned calculation.

[Denison] You can think about this as an arrangement of columns

all turning in synchrony to do the computation itself.

[narrator] First, the middle column

adds its values to the right column,

then the left column adds to the middle column.

And the final answer is revealed on the rightmost column,

and it really works.

Difference Engine No. 1 is a work of genius.

The perfect solution to one of the most pressing problems

of the new industrial age.

Truly accurate mathematics.

But this prototype difference engine

is as far as Babbage's grand design ever gets.

The full machine is never built.

What goes wrong?

The full size difference engine requires 25,000 parts,

and these must all mesh perfectly with each other.

So every single one must be made

to an astonishing level of precision

or the machine will not work.

So one of the things that Babbage had to deal with was tolerance.

You know, any machine system is not perfect,

so you have to decide how much inaccuracy

is going to be acceptable in the design.

Because if your tolerance was too large,

with 25,000 mechanisms going, the machine could jam.

[narrator] In the early 19th century,

this level of precision is the equivalent of a moon shot.

Babbage promises the government

a finished machine in three years,

but Difference Engine No. 1, which is just the prototype, takes nine.

As well as the challenge of precision engineering,

Babbage faces more personal hurdles

because diplomacy is not his greatest strength.

[Goodman] He could be a bit abrasive at times.

He would complain about the noise of children

playing in the street, the noise of a barrel organ,

and be really quite forceful about it,

which didn't always play very well.

[narrator] By 1832, Babbage's forceful style

becomes too much for his engineer, Joseph Clement.

[Goodman] He and Clement fall out big time.

And after that, of course, the whole project begins to grind to a halt.

Without an engineer on board,

it's not really going anywhere.

[narrator] By 1833, the government has paid Babbage

the equivalent of $2.6 million and got almost nothing.

They pull the plug.

[Ball] Babbage's difference engine

was never actually made during his lifetime.

It never got beyond that small prototype.

[narrator] But Babbage is already thinking bigger.

He conjures up a version of the difference engine's calculator

bent around into a circle,

so that it can feed itself with its own numbers.

He calls it the analytical engine.

[Denison] The analytic engine had a property

that Babbage called eating its own tail.

It would cycle through its calculations,

and then it would make a decision

based on those calculations on what it was going to do next.

[Steele] It was basically a programmable computer.

You could tell it what you wanted to do.

You could change the task.

It could alter its own memory

during the process of the calculations.

It was everything that we imagine a modern computer can do.

[narrator] But no one will stump up the cash

for another grand Babbage project.

Difference Engine No. 1 is as far as he ever gets.

But in 1991, 100 years after Babbage's death,

Difference Engine No. 2, based on an improved design he drew up, is born.

[Ball] So these many thousands of metal components

were put together, assembled into this gigantic block of metal,

and it worked.

It worked perfectly since they switched it on.

[narrator] Babbage's ideas are centuries ahead of their time.

Difference Engine No. 1 helps him conceive

of a thinking machine for the very first time.

So although Babbage doesn't end up inventing the modern world,

he's the first person to imagine it.