Original subtitles

Narrator: You dream of freedom

Strive for progress

Old world swept away

Now a potential unbound

New Horizons and new dangers

That propel us towards the lives we live today

Amidst the chaos of a unforgiving planet

Most species will fail

But for one all the pieces will fall into place

And a set of keys will unlock a path for Mankind to triumph

This is our story. The story of all of us

Narrator: October 1781

The back woods of Pennsylvania

Alone rider with a document that will change the world

The day before Yorktown Virgina

Rebelled troops rub the British Army

Taking seven thousand prisoner's, the end of a six year struggle

Rag tag Revolutionary forces defeat the greatest military power on the planet

Williams: They'd had beaten the man, They had beaten the British Empire

Um it was the original grassroots campaign

Men,Women,from back yards to front yards to city streets

we had been born out of Revolution

Machowicz: There is no doubt that the seed of that victory

was inspired by the though of individual freedom and personal liberty

Those ideas drove the men forward

Narrator: Lieutenant Colonel Tench Tilghman

Hand picked by George Washington for a critical mission

To deliver news of the British Surrender to the Continental Congress in Philadelphia

The Beginning of the the end of Britain's colonial rule in North America

A new kind of nation is born

Government for the people by the people, Democracy

An ideal that will shape the future of mankind

Brand: When they American Revolution succeeded

it put abroad the idea that people didn't have to except the governments

the political regime that they were born into

They could take matters into their own hands

Wunderlich: You should be in charge of your destiny. You should be the one to determine who you are and who you will become

That's what the America Revolution really means when it spreads beyond our own borders

Narrator: Revolution erupts in France

Greece,Poland,Belgium, drive out Imperial Rulers

In Hatti former slaves cast off their chains

In Bolivia,Columbia, and Peru, rebels over throw the Spanish Empire

At the very same time another Revolution is in the making

Which will change the lives of every human being on the planet

The Industrial Revolution

For a 100 thousand years mankind has made tools to overcome the limits of the human body

And extend our control over the natural world

But they rely on muscle power

Now mankind develops a tool with potentially unlimited power

The key to the modern world,The machine

Russell: This is a Revolutionary transformation that changed the way people lived

Meigs: Today we live in a world that is so full of products

it's hard for us to imaging what life was like before there machines

Narrator: The North of England 1768, Richard Arkwright

Self taught, ambitious a natural entrepreneur

Russell: The root of civilization is the driving motivation

of certain people at certain times, to create something new

Something drives certain people

It's not in most of us

Narrator: Arkwright's goal is to create the machine to stretch and spin cotton perfectly

John K, clockmaker brings the skills of the precision engineer

The two men work at night and in secret

Neighbors suspect they are practicing witch craft

[whispering]

Narrator: But the devise there making will give birth

to the age of industry

and the consumer society

Meigs: Now you begin to get a whole group of people who can afford

to get products that once upon a time were really only available to the wealthy

Russell: We can now enjoy things that we could never have before

We can eat things wear things play with things

We can produce so much more stuff

and almost all the stuff is what people actually want

Narrator: Arkwright's machine turns raw cotton into thread

more efficiently than any human being

He becomes the worlds first industrial tycoon

And creates a new kind of work place

The factory

[music]

Narrator: Giant water powered factories rise across the county side

Cotton production in England sky rockets in 20 years

From 227 thousand pounds spun by hand to 7.2 million pounds spun by machine

Russell: The invention of the factory industrial capitalism were

the most revolutionary transformation's in the history of civilization

Narrator: By 1850 England has four thousand factories

[sounds of cotton machines]

Narrator: Factories build our world

all made possible by a natural resource millions of years in the making

Lock in strata deep underground

Coal ancient rain forest compacted into peat and compressed

Buried for 300 million years the suns energy trapped in every piece

Frauenfelder: Coal is this magical stuff it just looks like a black hunk of greasy dirt

But there is so much energy embedded that

That is really its as precious as, as a jewel

Narrator: Now life accelerants

[sound of train]

Narrator: Coal turns to steam

It opens the age of mass transportation

Frauenfelder: Steam changed everything

Before we had our own muscles we had animals muscles we had fire

Now we have this incredible compressive force of steam

Narrator: Steam drives the railroad

Mankind conquers time and space

And the rail road drives one of the greatest engineering challenges we have ever faced

[loud explosion]

1852, West Virginia

Mankind pushes through mountains

A railroad linking Baltimore the Mid West

across 380 miles of mountainous terrain

America transformed

[sound of train]

Coal, steam and a new sensation

speed

We have always strived to go further faster.

5,000 years ago the horse triples the distance we can cover in a day

By train we travel 10 times farther

Meigs: Imagine your first trip on a steam railroad

You climb this character behind this belching vast smoking machine

Traveling so fast they thought your lungs might explode or your eyes might pop out

Brands: The idea of traveling 20 miles an hour, it was mind boggling

They would comment on how fast they were traveling

and they weren't at all sure that the human body could sustain this.

Narrator: The Baltimore Ohio railroad is Americas most ambitious tunneling project

the man in charge Benjamin Lotrobe Jr.

The son of a architect he's become one of the leading engineers in the U.S.

The obstacle he faces the Appalachian mountains.

A towering wall of slate and limestone between the east coast and the rest of the continent

Latrobe, will have to tunnel through rock, four thousand feet thick

McNichol: Even today tunneling is a remarkable engineering feat

Back in the mid 1800's it was unthinkable

if you want to get to the other side of that range by rail you had to go through it

you had to think big you had to be audacious.

Narrator: The explosive force gun powder

the muscle from a new kind of pioneer Irish immigrants.

43 percent of Americans foreign born population

they flee the potato famine in Ireland

in search of a new life.

Here they earn less than a dollar a day but, they are praised as pioneers of civilization.

A New York newspaper proclaims:

"There are many new kinds of power working at the fabric of this republic. Steam power,Horse power and Irish power. The last works hardest of all."

[loud explosion]

speaker: Who be said of immigrants you rarely see one with one with gray hair.

A worker was lucky to live long enough to have gray hair.

Narrator: To speed construction Latrobe divides the men into two teams.

Digging from opposite ends,racing to meet in the middle.

300 hundred men each shifting 600 tons of rock.

Just a few feet of rock separate. Just a final blast of gun powder and the two tunnels will be one.

[sound of flint being lit]

But nobody sounds the warning signal.

[expolosion]

A man is killed others badly injured.

Americas most challenging railroad projects

cost one workers life for every mile of track.

Two and half years after construction begins the line opens.

People can travel further in hours then the previous generation did in a life time.

Camarillo: Nothing to that time has profound a impact as the railroads.

It connected hinterland to city. It allowed for the demographic explosion of a population to move in all directions

were the rail was heading. It created new towns,it created new cities.

Narrator: Now factories and railroads launched the fastest migration in the story of man kind.

And give birth to the modern mega city. The key to our future lives.

In the western world in 50 years the number of city dwellers triples.

From 50 to more than 150 million

But, the industrial mega city is chaotic over crowded and filthy

A perfect breading ground for disease

Through out history mans kind biggest killer

In the fourteenth century the plague sweeps through Asia and Europe

Killing one fifth of all people on the planet

The city becomes a threat to the survival of man kind

Oz: Poor sanitation was a number one cause of death in the world

Humans have always face a loosing battle with bacteria

And only through our ingenuity and the ability to look for different clues to what allows this bacteria to thrive

can we ultimately beat them. That has been the battle man kind has waged on bacteria throughout our known existence.

Narrator: 1854 London

The largest city in the industrial world

Population two and a half million

A third living in slums. Up to eight to a room

Forty to a house

Twice as crowded as Mumbai in India today

Speaker: The entire city of London the most advanced metropolitan area in the world was really a open sewer.

Narrator: Number forty Broad street

[screaming]

the first victim

Sarah Lewis' five month old daughter, dying of cholera

Vibrio cholera a strain of bacteria that doubles in number every thirteen minutes

attacking the stomach and intestines

killing a healthy adult in hours

In just three days a 127 dead in London

No one knows whats causing the disease

and there is no cure

But one man is determined to stop it, Physician John Snow

The son of a coal worker he is no stranger to urban poverty.

A man of science with a deductive powers of a detective he will enter the heart of the outbreak risking his life to find its source

[knocking on the door]

(Snow) "Good day ma'am, Dr. John snow"

Most doctors believe cholera is carried by foul air

Snow has studied previous outlets

hes convinced cholera is in the water

A revolutionary insight that will turn the industrial city from a death trap to the engine of our world

1854 London the industrial age has turn the city into man kinds enemy

A killer stalks the streets, cholera

heading for the epicenter determined to the epidemic physician John Snow

OZ: Cholera was this plague that would ravish through Russian society that everyone ran from

He went right into it, he embraced the fear that so many had

Narrator: For 300 hundred years cholera has been contained in India

but as people travel farther by train and sea the disease moves with them

Every Russian city overwhelmed one million dead

as it spreads west it grows more virulent

people fear its the new black death

Poland,Germany 19 thousand dead in Paris alone

150,000 across America

In less than half a square mile of London six hundred dead in just two weeks

The first victim Sarah Lewis' baby daughter now her husband

Racked by stomach cramps desperate thirst vomiting,diarrhea

McNichol: Cholera brings on death like dehydration its one of the most brutal deaths you can imagine

you loose your ability to think you loose your ability to function its a painful miserable death.

Narrator: Snow searches for a pattern of behavior in its victims

OZ: What he did was to look at information analyze the data that he had in front of him and than make a miraculous discovery that change the course of human history

(Snow) "Is anybody sick here"

Narrator: At a near by factory Eley's munition's

18 workers dead

Snow plots his findings on a map

a map of the dead 578 in one small neighborhood

He list the water pumps they use

to see if there is a pattern

(Snow) "I found that nearly all the deaths had taken place within a short distance to the broad street pump."

Narrator: 2,800 people live within 100 yards of the broad street pump

Most drink its water

The authorities refuse to shut it down

Than a new victim who doesn't fit the pattern

She's from north London no where near the broad street pump

Could his hypothesis be wrong?

But he recognizes her name, Susanna Eley

The same name as the factory where 18 men died

Snow: "I am sorry to disturb you, a Suzanna Eley do, you know her"

(Eley) "She, she was my mom"

Narrator: Eley's Mother moved from the area a few years ago

Snow: " Could you tell me Mr. Eley did she drink the water from the broad street pump?"

Narrator: But, she preferred the water from central London

So, her son sent a daily supply from the broad street pump

Snow: "Mr. Eley I am sorry to tell you this but I think that water is poison, I think the water carries the Cholera."

Narrator: It's the proof Snow's been searching for

that the authorities can't ignore

The broad street pump is the killer

Just 3 feet from a open sewer

Through cracks and crevices deadly sewerage leaks into the water supply

(Snow) "Please don't this water is dangerous."

Narrator: When the authorities remove the handle from the pump

the outbreak stops

John Snow's method of mapping the spread of disease is still used today

OZ: It was a very clear scientific approach to taking information connecting

the dots and making sense of what was happening

All the information was out there but until John Snow

we hadn't put the pieces together yet

Narrator: But the stench of open sewers makes life in London unbearable

They call it the great stink

The British Parliament takes action

In a age of industry engineering is the key to cities in the future

The London sewer system, 1,300 miles of tunnels beneath the city

260 million specially fired bricks

In the next forty years new sewer systems in Europe's cities

will help reduce deaths from water born diseases by a quarter

Speaker: Sewage systems really are the foundation of any major city today

And with out them we wouldn't be able to exist

there would be disease there would be death

Sewer systems allowed us to develop into multimillion person cities

Narrator: Engineering Innovation and new resources

The Industrial age makes Britain the richest nation on earth

A small Island nation of 17 million people

Projects it's power across the planet

Triggering a global struggle between the old order and the new

The Industrial age turns Britain into a world power

It produces half of the worlds coal four fifths of the cotton goods

London's banks hold more money than all other

financial centers of the world combined

Britain dominates global trade

it becomes a empire

Powerful enough to challenge a nation 40 times it size

A nation that shunned the advances of the Industrial age

China, population 300 million a third of the people on earth

A ancient culture the worlds largest economy

Yet closed to outsiders for centuries

Those barriers will soon be brought down by a flower

December 12,1838

Panton southern China

A dead man walking

sentenced to die by strangulation

British merchants look on

What they do next will help trigger a war

and bring a seismic shift in the balance of power

from east to west

A war fought over the most lucrative commodity on the planet

Opium

Extracted from the poppy seed pod

it activates a natural substance in the brain

Dopamine that controls feelings of pleasure and reward

Generating a sense of euphoria

and a physical addiction

Ho Lao Chin, runs a lucrative opium den

He gets the drug from the British

They grow it in India

For the British traders it's like printing money

For the Chinese it's devastating

Dolin: This one drug opium, has such a powerful impact on people's minds

that it became the single largest commodity traded world wide

in the early 19th century

Narrator: 12 million Chinese are addicted 15 times more

than the number of heroin addicts in the U.S. today

Draining China's silver reserves and tearing the country apart

Hsu: The addiction to opium was so wide spread

than we have about 30 percent of court officials addicted

It really was a disease that will cripple a great empire

Narrator: The emperor's drug czar writes to Britain's Queen Victoria

[Emperor] "By what right do they use this poisonous drug to injure

the Chinese people, incoveting profit they have no regard for

harming others, where is your conscience!"

Narrator: The Emperor bands the drug, despite using it himself

The government raid shut down opium dens across the country

Over 2,000 Chinese dealers imprisoned or executed

Narrator: Ho Lao Chin, sentenced to death

The Emperor is sending a message to China's British supply

James Ennis

Tough, volatile, drug trafficker

Determined to save a prize customer

[Yelling]

[Ennis] "Suddenly they began to beat about the head

of executioner's and any china men within reach"

Narrator: The brawl ends in a stand off

the battle lines are drawn

The British refuse to give up their most profitable trade

Speaker: It supplied them with as much as one sixth

of all revenue's coming into the British treasury

So the opium trade was incredibly important to the British

Narrator: Within a year British war ships from barred China's coast line

China has 26 times the man power of Britain

But, Britain the world's leading Industrial nation has ten times the fire power

[Loud explosions]

Narrator: The old order gives way to the new

For the next four decades Britain's opium sales

to China reach 10 million pounds a year

Over 1 Billion dollars today

[Gun shooting]

Narrator: Industry and Commerce make Britain a super power

Soon the largest empire in the story of man kind

From South Africa to Australia, Hong Kong to Canada

A global empire on which the sun never set's

Across the Atlantic another conflict between past and future

[Gun shooting]

America, a nation divided

The Industrial north

verses the agrarian south

States grown rich from farming

but a economy based on a labor of 4 million slaves

Wunderlich: In America were now going to see a clash between North and

south between an Industrialized non slave portion of country

and a portion of the country that supports an agrarian

slave economy and those two things stood in the way of the free thinking

which is what we were based on

Brands: If you think of it as a marriage the marriage

had fallen apart the difference's had become irreconcilable

Narrator: The South succeeds

American's new President Abraham Lincoln

will do anything to keep the nation united

The power of Industry will be the key to a new age of warfare

Across the globe mankind faces a struggle

between industrial might in a older world

Launching a new age of warfare

America is divided

The North fighting to preserve the union

The South to break away

to preserve its economy based on slave labor

Machowicz: Once these two ideas clash

Hell is on earth

Narrator: July 1863, Gettysburg Pennsylvania

After two years of civil war the confederate army invades the north

At blockers knoll they have union forces on the run

But private Rubin Ruke stands his ground

22 years old, idealist , patriot

He writes in his diary...

"Bullets were whistling about like hail

A man behind be was shot,at that same moment

the man on my left was killed he, fell with half his lent ahead of him

the thought occurred that I might be next."

Narrator: This will be the bloodiest battle ever fought in U.S. soil

Industry in the north gives union troops a edge

the latest military technology the .52 caliber sharps carbine

90,000 of them produced in factories in the north

they fire 13 rounds per minute

four times faster than rubber muskets

Ruke's riffle has five times the kill range of older models

made deadlier by what's inside

An arrow dynamic lead bullet

the mini ball

four hundred million of them supplied by northern factories

day one, rebel troops push through union lines

towards the town of Gettysburg

by dusk 9,000 soldiers dead or wounded

Machowicz: It's the first time you get to truly see industrialized warfare

up close and personal

the body counts are ridiculous the level of devastation is staggering

Wunderlich: The stench must of been incredible

the very disagreeable odors of blood

the screams of the horses going down

the screams of the men who were falling

physically it's almost unthinkable of what kept them going

Narrator: with a bullet in his leg Ruke is caught in the cross fire

[people trying to tell others what to do]

[shooting]

[sounds of flies buzzing around bodies]

In this war 600,000 will loose there lives

"There must of been 10 or 12 amputations in this room

the doctor's had their sleeves rolled up

and were covered in blood

Narrator: But the carnage brings medical progress

field hospitals on the front line

professional doctor's

anesthetic's mainly chloroform are pioneered

used in 95 percent of all surgical operations

through the war

The introduction in female nurses

greatly improves hygiene and patient care

survival rates sky rocket by 60 percent

Ruke will survive his wounds

and return to his life as a farmer

Union troops are forced back

but the North superior infrastruture

will turn the battle in their favor

modern communication's

linking headquarters to the battle field

more factories, producing better weapons

and more railroads bringing

reinforcement's weapons and supplies

to troops in battle

Wunderlich: During the civil war were going

to see the union turning out train

after train, after train

being able to produce incredibly

complicated weapons maintain them

deliver them at high speed

using industrial methodology's

all along the way it's world changing

Narrator: 15 thousand tons of supplies

arrive at Gettysburg by train in just one day

The confederate advance falters

the battle turns

the north's industrial might secures them ultimate victory

Four months later

Abraham Lincoln consecrates the battle field

as a cemetery with the Gettysburg address

[Lincoln] "Four score and seven years ago

our fathers brought fourth on

this continent a new nation concieved

in liberty and dedicated to the

proposition that all men are

created equal."

Narrator: America four million slaves

gain their freedom

the union wins the civil war

the nation, united once more

[Lincoln] "We hear highly resolve that these dead shall

not have died in vein, that this nation

under God shall have a new birth of freedom

and that government of the people

by the people, for the people

shall not perish from the earth."

Narrator: In three generations mankind has

won new freedoms and harnessed

new powers, now the spread of industry

will transform our world

and excelerate the pace of life

creating new dangers, by pushing us

to greater heights