Original subtitles

(dynamic orchestral music)

- [Narrator] The world's greatest structures

push the boundaries of engineering,

all fueled by a constant desire to innovate.

- Without engineering, there would be no modern world.

- [Narrator] Gigantic buildings...

complex infrastructure...

and ingenious inventions.

- Engineering is the key that turns dreams it's reality.

- [Narrator] Many of today's incredible achievements

rely on breakthrough technologies

first devised by ancient engineers.

- It's astounding how they achieve this.

- [Narrator] Early civilizations

built on an unimaginable scale

and with incredible precision.

- They raised the bar for engineering

in a way that no one thought possible.

- These are some of the finest engineers in history.

- [Narrator] Redefining the known laws of physics

and dreaming up the impossible.

They constructed engineering wonders, from colossal stadiums

to mighty waterways, and complex machines,

all with the simplest of tools.

- You cannot imagine the skills

people would've needed to build like this.

- [Narrator] By unearthing the mysteries left

by these ancient engineers, we can now decode their secrets.

- That so many of their creations still survive

is testament to their engineering prowess.

- [Narrator] And ultimately reveal how they're genius

laid the foundations for everything we build today.

(dynamic orchestral music)

(gentle orchestral music) (birds chirping)

Sophisticated engineering...

lies at the heart of technology

that drives the modern world.

- Technology is ubiquitous.

Wherever we go today, there are gadgets and devices

that have all been designed to make our lives easier.

- [Narrator] Data has now become one

of the most valuable resources on the planet.

- Amazon, Google, Facebook, and now Meta

are managing petabytes of this data.

The amount that we produce is unimaginable.

- [Narrator] This digital revolution

has led to an era of almost instantaneous communication

and hyperconnectivity.

(typing)

Integral to this revolution

has been one of the most transformative tools

humankind has ever produced:

the smartphone.

(device beeps)

- Today, we hold immense technological power

literally in the palm of our hands.

- The modern smartphone is more powerful

than even the guidance computers

that landed Apollo 11 on the moon.

That's one powerful phone. (laughs)

(thrilling orchestral music)

- I genuinely find it difficult to imagine

how anything got done without computers,

GPS, and smart phones.

- [Narrator] But even the most technologically sophisticated

device traces its lineage back to the simplest implement

our Stone Age ancestors could hold in their hands.

(paper rustling)

(intriguing instrumental music)

- The first handheld device two and a half million years ago

was just a simple rock,

but it was actually incredibly important

to all of human development.

- Stone tools were indispensable to early humans.

They were functional and practical.

But they were also objects of prestige, too.

- Today we have the Swiss army knife, the phone,

but back then, all those millions of years ago,

they still needed one thing that had multiple uses,

and that was the stone tool.

- [Narrator] In the 1930s,

British archeologist Dr. Lewis Leakey

discovered primitive stone implements

in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania.

Olduvai tools are thought to represent

the earliest human technology;

not merely a rock, but a tool fashioned from a rock,

using a process called alternate flaking.

- Alternate flaking is where I take the core,

I hold it in my hand, and I have a hammer stone,

and with the hammer stone, I would strike the core.

A flake would come off.

- [Narrator] The stone would then be worked

with great dexterity on alternate faces

to form a sharp edge.

(rocks scraping)

- What we see in the Olduvai tools is clear evidence

that the stones themselves are being worked

in order to create that face

and to create a meaningful tool,

so this is a purposeful act.

- Without it, all the technological evolution that we see

later on simply would not occur.

This is the beginning of engineering.

These are the first engineers.

- [Narrator] Archeologists believe these first engineers

were an early human species called homo habilis.

Humans have evolved over seven million years

from quadrupedal arboreal primates

via homo habilis and homo erectus

to the upright, bipedal homo sapiens of today.

- We have to be careful

about creating a sort of direct linear ancestry

between ourselves and homo habilis,

but homo habilis is almost certainly

part of the human story.

These are bipeds, shorter in stature

than modern human beings,

and maybe even partially arboreal.

But this is a species that we see

developing the cognitive processes,

and we definitely see that in the size of brain increasing.

- Many people have argued that stone tool use itself

has driven brain expansion,

because the need to be more dextrous,

the need to be more flexible in lifestyles.

So, which comes first, cognitive evolution

or brain size allowing it?

It's a big question.

- So, as human beings have evolved,

so have tools and tech evolved.

It's that symbiotic relationship with humans and technology

that have allowed the advancement of both over millennia.

- [Narrator] Human development was underway,

and as societies gradually became more sophisticated,

so a need for organization and counting was growing.

- Think about it like this.

So, millions of years ago, a primate picks up a rock,

and then it's half a millennial later

homo habilis takes a few chips off the rock.

Another half a millennial later, it's homo erectors

who make something that we would recognize as a tool.

And every single one of those leaps

is tens of thousands of years.

- [Narrator] But as humans evolved, progress gained pace.

In the 1970s, a discovery in a remote cave

in the mountains of then Swaziland, in southern Africa,

would completely rewrite our understanding

of what early humans were capable of.

(light percussion music)

What they discovered was a bone

with incisions along its length.

- When we get these kind of marks on long bones,

there's a tendency to interpret them

as evidence of an attack,

'cause one of the things you do immediately

to protect yourself is put your arm up,

and you often get marks on long bones.

But that wasn't the case with these marks.

They were too regular, too ordered.

They suggested something else was going on.

- [Narrator] The bone was not an artifact of battle,

but a baboon's leg bone

bearing deliberate marks along its length.

It's what's known as a tally stick,

a rudimentary device for recording information.

- A tally stick is a way of keeping count.

What you would do is you would score that tally stick.

You would make a mark on it.

- [Narrator] Found in the Lebombo Mountains,

the artifact has become known as the Lebombo Bone.

The tally stick is made from a baboon's fibula

and has marks incised into its length.

The 29 carefully defined notches

have been interpreted to be a lunar phase counter,

used to keep track of the passage of time.

A break to the end of the bone

could indicate more marks were once present.

Radio carbon dating has found the Lebombo Bone

to be over 40,000 years old.

- Over 40,000 years before the iPhone,

we have this first handheld data recording device.

- The most important thing about this find

is not necessarily that it's evidence

of prehistoric societies being able to count;

it's the fact that they're recording that counting

and that that record has some kind of social

and economic function in society.

That's exciting.

- [Narrator] Others have suggested the 29 notches

indicate that the Lebombo Bone

was used by our ancient female ancestors

to track their monthly cycle.

- Women were the first people to need to keep records

and maybe our world's first mathematicians,

because we're always ahead of the curve;

we just don't always get the credit for it.

- [Narrator] Though so simple,

even the tally stick offered potential

for radical improvement.

- There's only been one major refinement of the tally,

and that's the split tally

that was used in exchanging of money to keep a record

that you could then refer back to

to make sure that everyone was clear

on the transaction that took place.

(curious instrumental music)

- [Narrator] The split tally was a stick

marked width-ways with notches, and then split lengthwise.

This ensured that the two halves of the stick

both recorded the same pattern of indentations.

The short part was the foil. The longer part was the stock.

If they aligned perfectly when reunited,

it provided physical proof that the holders

of the two portions were the parties to the contract.

As societies grew, trade needed to be documented,

and for centuries throughout the Holy Roman Empire

and in Medieval England, tally sticks became a record

of transactions, debts, and credits.

- So, the notches on the tally stick

would represent sums of money.

And, essentially, once you split that,

that created the invoice and the receipt.

- The thing is when you split that tally stick

into its stock and its foil,

the grain inside that willow, it's like a fingerprint,

it simply can't be replicated.

- There's even a linguistic legacy

that has survived here from Medieval England.

The debtor received part of the stick called the foil,

and the creditor kept a part of the stick called the stock.

And even today, British bankers use the word stocks

to refer to debts of the British government.

- [Narrator] It also remains the common term

for financial shares held in companies

that are traded on the stock market.

The ability to create two identical records

for a transaction meant that, in Britain,

the split tally became an indispensable tool

from the 12th century until 1826,

when the treasury finally adopted paper ledgers.

- The British government had decided

to do away with the tally system.

But what do you do with two cartloads

of small wooden sticks?

- [Narrator] It was decided to burn the redundant tallies

in the coal furnaces under the House of Lords.

But centuries of British financial history

weren't the only thing that went up and spoke

on October 16th, 1834.

(moving orchestral music)

With the fires out of control,

Britain's Medieval parliament did too.

- There is a certain irony that the tally stick

had been so central to Britain's financial constitution,

and yet its passing shot was to bring it all down in flames.

- If the Lebombo Bone was the first aid to mental arithmetic

and tally sticks the second,

ancient engineers took the next steps

with another simple, but ingenious device.

(impressive orchestral music)

The Sumerians flourished

in the fourth and third millenniums BC,

and their civilization is responsible

for some of humankind's most significant innovations.

- Justifiably, the Sumerians are seen

as the first great civilization.

They invented writing, codified law.

They invented the wheel. They even invented beer.

So, I think we owe a lot to the Sumerians,

the sort of breakthrough civilization.

- [Narrator] Sumerian civilization sprung up

in a fertile area between the great rivers

Tigris and Euphrates in what is today Southern Iraq.

- The Sumerians were an incredibly successful

agricultural community.

They produced so much livestock and so much barley

that they simply couldn't keep track of it all,

and they needed an accounting device to help them.

- [Narrator] The solution to deal

with this information overload?

The Sumerian abacus.

- The Sumerian abacus is effectively

the first handheld computing device.

- [Narrator] What the Sumerians developed

over 4,000 years ago was a sophisticated calculation tablet

which was the iPad of its day.

But unlike its 21st century successor,

there were no complex, high-tech components.

It was made from clay.

- Unlike our decimal system, based on 10,

the Sumerian system was based on 60,

which may seem unhelpfully complicated

until you realize that there are 60 seconds in a minute,

there are 60 minutes in an hour,

and there are 360 degrees in a circle.

- [Narrator] The Sumerian Abacus had five columns,

which denoted factors and multiples of 60

from one, 10, 60, 600, 3,600.

(counters clicking)

Counters were placed into the columns

to represent different quantities.

The amount reflected in this example would total 4,944.

This simple tool allowed the Sumerians to add and subtract,

making it one of the earliest known calculators.

- The Abacus plays a really important role

in speeding up the number of transactions

and the scale of those transactions.

- [Narrator] Primitive technology was already helping

impel the progress and pace of civilization.

(electronic whirring)

From the creation of the Lebombo Bone,

humans have been striving to create devices and technology

that could be used as an adjunct

to the human brain's calculative

and data retention capabilities.

It was long thought that no device

would ever be able to outperform

the brain's unrivaled cognition.

One of the first contests to challenge this notion

was when Russian world chess champion Gary Kasparov

took on IBM's supercomputer, Deep Blue,

in an intellectual showdown between man and machine.

- This is really a test of human intelligence.

It's this incredibly intellectual Russian chess player

against the might of American technological advancement.

- [Narrator] Chess requires focus, memory, intuition,

and enormous strategic awareness.

Kasparov off had it all, but would his intellectual might

be able to compete against a supercomputer?

- It could process a hundred million moves a second.

How on earth can a human beat that?

- [Narrator] In the first series of six games in 1996,

the final score was four to two...

but it was Gary Kasparov who emerged the winner.

- He outwitted Deep Blue by repeatedly changing his tactics.

- The IBM Deep Blue was incredibly fast

at crunching numbers,

but the one thing that Gary did have over this computer

was his human intuition.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- [Narrator] The following year,

IBM sent Deep Blue into battle against Kasparov again.

This time, with its computational power having doubled,

it could now process 200 million chess moves per second.

- This computer made a move

that Kasparov off couldn't comprehend.

He thought that this doubly powerful computer

was working at levels that he could never understand.

- [Narrator] Kasparov off lost and accused IBM of cheating.

It was the only way he could explain

the computer's perplexing gameplay.

But was this really a humiliation for human intellect

or a seminal moment in computer science?

(audience applauding)

- What we found out later on

was that this move from Deep Blue

was actually a glitch in the algorithm,

and it wasn't a planned tactic.

- Kasparov misinterpreted that random move,

and that threw him off for the rest of his game.

- Some may say that machine won over man in this situation,

but the fact that it was so close

really shows us that the human brain is so capable.

This should be considered a triumph of humanity.

- [Narrator] Processing power had delivered

a close run victory, but perhaps it was less a triumph

of a digital brain and more a failure of human intuition.

(chess piece clatters)

(solemn orchestral music)

Ancient engineers had created tally sticks and abaci

to facilitate faster and more efficient mental calculation.

The next step would be to create devices

that could actually provide the answers for us.

(waves lapping)

Off the Greek island of Antikythera,

the highly corroded remains

of a mysterious device were uncovered.

- It was actually discovered in a shipwreck in 1901,

but it was more than 100 years

before anyone actually worked out what it was capable of.

- [Narrator] It was to become known

as the Antikythera mechanism

and would turn modern understanding

of early engineering on its head.

- Divers found bronze and marble statues

and jewelry and coins and pottery

and the normal kinds of things you find

in an ancient shipwreck,

and also some corroded lumps of bronze.

- [Narrator] The detective story began.

- It wasn't until 2006 that modern CT scans

carried out at Cardiff University

began to reveal just how complex this object was.

- [Narrator] And at that point, jaws began to drop.

- When the detailed x-rays came through,

what it exposed was a series of cogs, wheels,

a drive mechanism, and inscriptions

that suggested a really very complex machine.

- Carbon dating revealed that it was

at least 2,000 years old.

So, what on earth had they discovered?

- [Narrator] The intriguing artifact

was deduced to be an orrery, a mechanical device

for tracking the movement of celestial bodies.

- What they were looking at was the earliest

analog calculating machine ever discovered,

and it wasn't from Silicon Valley;

it was from ancient Greece.

- What makes it so fascinating

is that you could input some kind of date into this,

your input information.

By turning the handle, you were processing that machine,

and you then had an output as well,

so this is a very early form of computer.

- The Antikythera Mechanism was housed in a wooden case

with bronze dials on both sides.

The front dial displayed a solar calendar

divided into 365 days.

Turning a handle showed the positions of the sun and moon

for any given day of the year.

This information was conveyed mechanically

to the rear dials.

The top dial displayed a long-range lunar

and solar forecast spanning a cycle of 19 years.

The bottom dial depicted eclipses of the sun and moon.

The Antikythera Mechanism was so advanced

that it enabled the Greeks to track the solar system

over an almost 500-year period,

by some estimates to within one degree of accuracy.

- I don't think, until we found this thing,

we had any idea they could model it physically

in bronze gear wheels

to anything like this degree of sophistication.

- This represents a key step in the history of computing,

because it's a machine providing the answer

to a complex question, not the human brain.

- [Narrator] Another 2,000 years would pass

before the concept of a programmable computer was conceived,

but these developments would rely on a future technology

which revolutionized a completely unrelated industry.

(wheel chugging)

(intriguing instrumental music)

From the birth of humanity, our ancestors' survival

has depended upon finding food, water, and shelter.

But almost as important has been the age-old need

to secure protection for the human body's largest organ:

the skin.

- Clothing people has probably been

one of the most basic requirements there's been in society,

short of actually feeding people.

- [Narrator] It's presumed that early humans

had observed how birds built nests

and had borrowed the technique

to create simple baskets, ropes and nets by hand.

The creation of textiles was a progression

from this early technology

and evolved into manual weaving on simple looms.

- Like many technologies,

it seems that the Egyptians got there first,

and we know that they use simple looms to weave clothing.

- Weaving is the intertwining of two separate threads,

the warp and the weft, at right angles to form cloth.

- Ancient pottery from Egypt dating back 6,400 years

clearly shows that they were using looms.

These early textiles would've been made out of wool or flax,

and they disintegrate over time,

so there's very little physical evidence

of ancient clothing.

- [Narrator] However, in 2015,

solid evidence of Egyptian weaving was established

when Oxford university confirmed the date

of an incomplete garment found nearly 100 years earlier.

- This became known as the Tarkhan Dress.

It was the top half of a linen garment

found at a burial ground in Tarkhan,

30 miles to the south of Cairo.

- It's made with flax, so it's a form of linen,

and it's incredibly sophisticated.

- When it was eventually radio carbonated,

it was found to be 5,000 years old,

the oldest woven garment known to humanity.

(impressive orchestral music)

- [Narrator] Looms became essential

to cultures all over the world,

but they had a significance far beyond

the manufacturer of cloth.

- The important thing to realize about the loom

is that it changed the way that we made clothing

and materials,

but it went on to have much further implications

for the industrial revolution,

and then the digital revolution beyond.

(exciting orchestral music)

- It should come as no surprise

that one of the first industries

to adopt factory processes of production is clothing,

it's the weaving industry.

- [Narrator] And in 1804,

that industry was transformed by a groundbreaking device

introduced by a Frenchman called Joseph Jacquard.

- So what Jacquard did is he created a machine

that would sit on top of a loom

and, by means of punch cards, which he would lace together,

he could program the pattern within the loom.

- Prior to this, complex patterns were all made by hand.

It was time-consuming. It required immense skill.

But this loom changed everything,

because it could be done automatically.

- [Narrator] The Jacquard loom was based

on complicated engineering,

but at its heart were two very simple binary settings

which controlled the loom's mechanical action.

The pattern to be woven is represented by a series of holes,

or the absence of holes, in the punch cards

fed into the machine.

The perforated cards are pressed

against a bundle of horizontal rods,

which move the machine's vertical rods into a position

where they are lifted or not lifted.

A hole in the card allowed rods to lift warp threads,

directing the weft threads to pass under.

No hole meant the warps stayed where they were,

and the wefts passed over.

- The mechanization and automation of weaving

suddenly made patterned cloth cheaper, more accessible,

and the weaving of it became a global industry.

- Mass manufacturer means that we are moving materials

all over the world, and, to a certain extent,

Britain becomes a heartland, certainly Northern England,

of fabric production.

- Jacquard looms are still in use today,

but they're controlled by computers,

not by binary punched cards.

It might seem that these Jacquard looms

are being given life support by modern technology,

but actually it's the other way around;

modern computers owe everything to those looms.

(exciting orchestral music)

(gentle piano music)

- [Narrator] Modern computers may be a world away

from 19th century Jacquard looms,

but both share the same DNA, binary code,

and it took a pioneering figure to tie the threads together.

- Before you have a technological innovation,

you need someone to have a leap of imagination,

to imagine what is possible.

With the loom, it was Jacquard.

With the computer, it was Charles Babbage.

- [Narrator] In an era of horse-drawn carriages,

Babbage designed what he called the Difference Engine No. 1.

- The Difference Engine was a mechanical device

used for the computation of mathematical tables.

- [Narrator] But what may seem

like an unremarkable concept today

was astonishing two centuries ago.

(impressive orchestral music)

- I think the thing that's most remarkable about all of this

is these ideas were coming about in the Georgian period.

We were at the beginning of the 19th century.

I mean, people are still using candle light.

- [Narrator] And computers were definitely not machines.

- In the 19th century, a computer was a person

sitting at a desk doing calculations.

- [Narrator] And like any human endeavor,

mistakes inevitably crept in.

- I think Babbage's real project

was that he wanted to eradicate human error

from the calculation process.

- [Narrator] Babbage designed multiple iterations

of his Difference Engines,

each specifying thousands of parts.

The most advanced Difference Engine was his second design.

- This wasn't something you could keep in your pocket.

It was the size of a small truck.

And yet, it was the cutting edge of modern technology.

- [Narrator] It was intended to be driven

by precision gearing,

and was designed to perform calculations

using multiple, numbered cog wheels.

The Difference Engine No. 2 was a highly complex machine.

A small portion of the mechanism

illustrates a simple calculation using just two wheels.

To calculate four plus three,

the accumulator wheel is turned to three,

the addition wheel to the right is turned to four,

the wheels are meshed, and the answer, seven,

is presented on the accumulator wheel.

(moving choral music)

- The irony of this invention

is that it was created to remove human error,

and yet it failed because of human weakness.

He overspent, he fell out

with the people he was working with,

and so Babbage never finished his invention.

- [Narrator] But what was perhaps Babbage's

most ambitious design for a computer

was the Analytical Engine,

a development of his first Difference Engine

that was built upon a past invention.

(dramatic string music)

- Where the Analytical Engine was a development

on from the Difference Engine

is that it was capable of a much greater range

of mathematical operations.

- What's remarkable is it basically had

the same workflow as a modern computer.

- You have an input value that goes into the machine,

you have a mechanical memory,

it has a sort of central processor,

and you then have an output as well.

- [Narrator] Babbage repurposed

Jacquard's punched card system,

which provided a simple mechanical means

to input instructions to a machine in a pre-electric age.

His collaborator, the pioneering mathematician Ada Lovelace,

was quick to sense how new technology

was synthesizing change in Georgian society.

- She makes a very interesting connection, actually,

between the Jacquard loom and the Analytical Engine

when she writes, "The Analytical Engine

weaves algebraic patterns,

just as the Jacquard loom weaves flowers and leaves."

- And that beautifully sums up

how these contemporary technologies cross-pollinated.

- [Narrator] Punched guards created the foundation

of all later computer programming languages,

which, like Jacquard's mechanism,

would also be based on the binary counting system.

(cards shuffling)

In the 1830s, few could possibly have imagined

how computing would change the world,

and yet perhaps Ada Lovelace did.

- She was the first person to recognize that this invention

had applications beyond pure calculation.

She published the first algorithm

to be carried out by the machine.

So she was, in essence, the very first computer programmer.

- [Narrator] However, as with the Difference Engine,

neither Babbage nor Lovelace ever saw

the Analytical Engine complete in their lifetimes.

- Babbage was a genius.

But with that genius came an attitude and a disposition

that actually put off both his engineer

and some of his funders.

- [Narrator] But despite Babbage's shortcomings,

his contribution to technological development

can't be underestimated.

Incremental development in binary computation continued,

including American Herman Hollerith's breakthrough

in the 1880s with his tabulating machine.

But it would take over a century

after Babbage's pioneering work

for the first modern computer to be fully realized.

(dramatic orchestral music)

By that time, however, the world was a very different place.

- [Radio Announcer] This country is at war with Germany.

(fire crackling)

- Computing took a great leap forward during World War II...

(landmine explodes)

when technological superiority became a matter of survival.

(somber orchestral music) (soldiers marching)

Part of the battle centered upon the interception

of the enemy's encrypted messages.

(telegraph beeping)

- In the Second World War, military communications

were routinely encoded

to prevent them being read by the enemy.

- Code breaking was essential

to the outcome of the Second World War.

- [Narrator] But secrecy has ensured some stories

are less well-known than they should be.

- Many people are familiar with the Enigma code,

but very few people have heard about

a far more sophisticated cipher

used by the Germans, called the Lorenz cipher.

(soft orchestral music)

- [Narrator] The Lorenz code was created

by a device of true genius.

The Lorenz SZ rotor stream cipher machine.

(machine tapping)

- The German Lorenz encryption machine

was used for sending the most sensitive messages

from Hitler to his high command,

and it was considered completely unbreakable.

- It performed the encryption

using incredibly complicated maths

that turned the letters in a message into binary code.

Enigma could create 159 million million million

possible code combinations.

- [Narrator] Unless the code could be broken every day,

the Nazi's top secret messages couldn't be read,

and a war-winning advantage would be lost.

(torpedo explodes)

(dramatic orchestral music)

- With 1.6 quadrillion possible settings,

all of which changed daily, it's unsurprising that the Nazis

thought that they really did have an unbreakable code.

- [Narrator] The Lorenz machine encoded messages

using a complex process

which passed each individual letter of the message

through a two-stage encryption

generated by 12 rotary wheels.

- The code breakers' brains were brilliant,

but the real issue here is the speed

with which these messages are being deciphered.

- [Narrator] In war, time is of the essence,

and codes were still being decoded with pencils and paper.

- The question was, how do you speed up the process?

And the answer was Colossus.

- Colossus was the first electronic

programmable digital computer.

Yes, it was important for changing the course of the war,

but it was perhaps even more important

for the history of technology.

- [Narrator] Colossus really did live up to its name,

being seven feet high, 17 feet wide, and 11 feet deep.

And, critically, it was fast.

- It could process 5,000 characters per second,

providing the speed needed to take advantage

of that intelligence in real time.

- [Narrator] It was not long before Colossus

proved it's worth.

- Imagine the scene.

It's June the 5th, the day before D-Day,

in Eisenhower's headquarters,

and Colossus provides information

which proves that Hitler has fallen

for the Allies' deception campaign.

Hitler thinks the Allies are gonna land in Calais.

- [Narrator] He consequently ordered

that no further German reinforcements be sent to Normandy,

where the real invasion was poised to take place.

(dramatic orchestral music)

- Eisenhower reads the decrypted message

and then delivers the statement

which changes the course of World War II: "We go tomorrow."

(planes buzzing)

- [Narrator] On the 6th of June, 1944,

computing came of age, as the legacy of ancient engineers

helped launch the biggest seaborne invasion of all time.

(chanting in foreign language)

If engineering endeavors during World War II

had been devoted to creating mechanisms

to mathematically unlock secrets,

ancient engineers had laid the foundations

by doing the opposite, in trying to create devices

to lock valuable information away.

- Innovation is about pioneering personalities

really pushing the boundaries of what's possible,

and al-Jazari was exactly that type of person.

- Ismail al-Jazari was a intellectual scholar,

an engineer of the late 12th, early 13th century.

Most people know about the Renaissance

or other great moments in world history,

but they often don't think about the achievements

of the classical Islamic world.

- [Narrator] Al-Jazari created designs

from everything from clocks and automata

to engineering mechanisms such as cranks,

cam shafts, and pumps.

- Al-Jazari was a genius,

the pioneer that most of us have never heard of.

You really could consider him as the da Vinci

of the ancient Islamic world.

- [Narrator] Yet his place in engineering history is secure,

thanks to the survival

of his intricately illustrated compendium,

the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices.

- Amongst his many ingenious inventions,

he designed a combination lock.

- Al-Jazari's lock would definitely

have been a prestige object.

It is something particularly unusual and special.

- Al-Jazari's combination lock had four composite dials.

Each dial was composed of three concentric rings

with 16 optional settings per ring.

The settings were indicated by Arabic letters.

To unlock the box, you would need to enter the three letters

correctly on each of the four dials.

The correct setting would align a series of notched discs

within the box and allow the lid to open.

(lively Middle Eastern music)

- Not only is this an incredible piece

of precision engineering design;

it was also a really advanced security device

with 281 trillion possible combinations.

I mean, imagine trying to crack that.

- [Narrator] Al-Jazari's lock applied mathematics

and precision engineering to keep physical objects safe.

But today, in our digital world,

not everything of value is physical.

- What is Bitcoin?

Well, some people call it digital gold,

probably when it's value is quite high,

and then others will call it a scam,

maybe when the value is quite low.

(electronic beeping)

- [Narrator] But behind the debates

which always accompany innovation

lay some straightforward concepts.

- Essentially it's a peer-to-peer,

decentralized way of transacting.

Whereas before, I'd need to go to a bank

to send money to someone,

what Bitcoin does is it takes away the middleman,

takes away the bank.

- [Narrator] Like paper money,

cryptocurrencies have no intrinsic value,

but rather than being backed by governments,

it's backed by ordinary investors.

- Bitcoin is a purely digital asset.

So where does its value come from?

Well, just like gold, there's a finite supply.

In Bitcoin's code,

there's only ever programmed to be 21 million of them.

- [Narrator] Bitcoin was created

by an anonymous developer

with the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.

- It's an engineered solution to a global problem.

You've gotta remember, at that time, in 2008,

the world banking system was in turmoil,

so this was an attempt to revolutionize a broken system.

- [Narrator] The value of Bitcoin is volatile,

but like any commodity, ways had to be found

to secure it from fraud and theft.

Blockchain was the solution.

- And what that is is essentially a distributed ledger,

a record of transactions which is shared across a network,

and no one person or one entity is in charge of the ledger.

- [Narrator] No one can dispute a transaction,

because millions of computers have a copy.

Like the medieval tally stick,

it represents an undeniable record of an undertaking.

And as the tally once did, Blockchain and cryptocurrencies

could well facilitate a revolution in global finance.

- The pace of change has been mind blowing.

It's exponential growth

in terms of technological advancement

from the 20th to the 21st century.

As the saying goes, the pace of change

has never been this fast,

and it will never be this slow again.

(solemn orchestral music)

- [Narrator] But none of the contemporary devices

we're so reliant upon today

could function without an innovation

first created by ancient engineers: the battery.

(camels growling)

In 1938, a German archeologist named Wilhelm Konig

studied a small clay jar found

near the ancient city of Ctesiphon, southeast of Baghdad.

He determined it to be over 2,000 years old.

- What was inside led Konig to believe

that he'd found something truly remarkable.

- [Narrator] Within the terracotta jar was an iron rod

surrounded by a copper cylinder.

The iron rod was insulated

from the copper top and bottom by asphalt.

Within the jar was residue of an acidic solution

thought to be an electrolyte,

or electrically conducted liquid, such as vinegar.

All these features led Konig to believe

he'd found a 2,000-year-old battery.

- In theory, this object could have produced

a small amount of electricity,

because it had all the elements

that you need to make a battery.

- Debate still surrounds the purpose of the jar,

but it has been proven that it could create

a charge of around one volt.

- [Narrator] Although tiny, such a charge

would be enough to be used

in an ancient type of electro acupuncture.

But has Konig's 1930s theory stood the test of time?

- Today, there's some debate about what it really was.

Was it a battery?

Or, the more common thought now

is that it was used to store ancient Papyrus scrolls,

so it was actually an ancient data storage device.

- [Narrator] However, the greatest mystery today

is not what the Baghdad battery actually was

but where it is now.

- The really sad thing about the Baghdad battery

is we're not gonna get a chance to go back

and really test it scientifically,

because, in the invasion of Iraq, 2003, it's unfortunate,

the battery was stolen from the Baghdad Museum.

- [Narrator] Meaning the question surrounding

this ancient artifact may never be answered.

(exciting orchestral music)

Today, Iraq sits on oil reserves

worth tens of trillions of dollars.

But the value of oil is mostly due to one invention:

the internal combustion engine.

It completely revolutionized transport

but had a disastrous impact on the environment.

- The world is now moving towards green energy

as quickly as possible

to avoid environmental disaster,

and electric vehicles are key to that process.

- [Narrator] But could the world have started on this course

over a century earlier?

- Throughout history, we've had glimpses

of an understanding of electricity,

with the Greeks with static electricity, for example,

but it wasn't until the 19th century,

with people like Volta,

when we get a real deeper understanding

of electrical energy and electrical engineering.

- [Narrator] Before mains power was available

at the flick of a switch,

the first device that could provide

continuous electrical power was the battery.

- It was Benjamin Franklin

who coined the term battery in 1749,

but actually the invention of the battery

is credited to Alexandra Volta.

- [Narrator] In 1800, Volta created

what's come to be known as the voltaic pile.

Consisting of cloth discs soaked in salt water

layered between alternating zinc and copper disks,

it created a difference in potential,

which, in a closed circuit, produced an electric current.

Science acknowledges this invention

as the first modern battery, and it quickly made an impact.

- The battery was then used in experiments by Humphry Davy

and went on to then be used in other inventions,

like the electric telegraph.

So, really, one invention led to another invention,

and this is the development of science and engineering.

- [Narrator] A century after Volta,

Thomas Edison enters the story.

For around a decade,

he'd been developing an alkaline battery.

He wanted to make batteries lighter,

safer, and more powerful

than the cumbersome lead acid batteries then in use.

That would allow him to corner an emerging market:

the motor car.

- It might be really surprising to people today.

When you think of the earliest cars,

you think of combustion engines.

But actually, between 1900 and 1912,

a third of the motor cars in America were electric vehicles.

- [Narrator] Steam-powered cars were also popular,

so the battle for the road was on,

and Edison felt confident that electricity

was in pole position.

- Edison eventually got the patent

for his alkaline nickel ion battery,

which he claimed was efficient and rechargeable.

- People flocked to buy Edison's battery,

but unfortunately it didn't live up to its claims.

It was unreliable, it leaked,

and it only had a range of about 25 miles.

- [Narrator] By 1910, his new, improved battery

was in production.

It could be recharged almost indefinitely

and had a range of around 50 to 75 miles.

It was also more efficient, and Edison felt ready to try

and revolutionize the electric car market.

- Unfortunately for Edison,

something else revolutionary had been launched a year before

by another visionary engineer, Henry Ford.

- [Narrator] Combustion engine technology roared ahead,

and the electric car was left behind in a cloud of fuse.

(intense orchestral music)

- 15 Million Model Ts had been built by 1927.

By this point, the electric vehicle was history,

and the gas-guzzling combustion engine

was now king of the road for the next century.

- [Narrator] But today, a revolution is gathering pace.

(upbeat electronic music)

- Today, it's back to the future,

where the climate emergency is forcing us

back into that starting point where we were

at the end of the 19th century.

- Car makers all across the globe, including Ford,

who set the wheels in motion in the first place,

are phasing out their combustion engine vehicles.

So it sort of is the end of an era

but a beginning of a new one.

- [Narrator] Low-emission electric cars

are now at the cutting edge of technology.

But like all our contemporary tech,

they rely on one key asset.

- So think about any piece of portable technology,

a phone, a tablet, a laptop,

and, to an increasing degree nowadays, an electric vehicle.

What do they all need? A battery.

- We're facing exactly the same issues and challenges

with electric vehicles as Edison was

at the end of the 19th century.

Fast-charging, reliable and long-range.

That's what we need to make these electric vehicles

the solution for the future.

- [Narrator] The challenge that Edison wrestled with

100 years ago has been taken up by new hands today.

- There's one person that really led the charge

in manufacturing electric vehicles, and that's Elon Musk.

- As the market for electric vehicles dramatically grows,

we are gonna need a lot more batteries

to supply these vehicles, and what Elon Musk sees

is that we need batteries to be produced on a mega scale.

- [Narrator] But Tesla and other manufacturers

haven't settled for mega.

They're going giga.

(intense orchestral music)

- Gigafactories.

Massive factories with open-ended infrastructure,

which means they can grow exponentially,

just as the demand probably will.

- Musk's first Gigafactory, in Nevada,

was a response to the age-old equation

of supply versus demand.

It's currently over 4.5 million square feet

of manufacturing space, with a workforce of around 10,000.

- He plans to produce 60%

of the world's supply of EV batteries,

which is obviously an enormously ambitious undertaking.

- [Narrator] Tesla is leading the charge

in developing Gigafactories all over the world.

And, given Musk is now operating in space,

who knows where the next will be?

(dramatic orchestral music)

From the first stone tool used by our earliest ancestors,

technology has evolved in concert

with the evolution of humans themselves.

The hand ax Lebombo Bone began the millennia-long journey

on the road to the digital age.

To a world of boundless technology

that our ancestors may have believed was magic.

Yet none of the modern tools and devices would exist

without the breakthroughs made over centuries

by pioneers of mathematics, calculation, and computing.

Tools and technology enabled our ancestors

to survive and thrive,

and to hand down a legacy of innovation

which has been built upon

by successive generations worldwide.

From the stone chip to the computer chip,

inventiveness and ingenuity never ceases.

Extraordinary inventions and incredible innovation,

it all stems from our earliest ancient engineers.

(dynamic orchestral music)