Original subtitles

Imagine a world without glass.

We'd be living in dark, windowless homes.

Those of us who need spectacles would spend our lives

struggling to see the world in focus.

There's be no microscopes, no telescopes,

no movie cameras, and worst of all

for me right now, no TV screens.

It's kind of crazy that something as ordinary as glass

has been instrumental

in the greatest revolutions in science.

It's thanks to people like the British physics teacher

who liked to fire crossbows...

The strange physical properties of glass

would open up a whole new world of possibilities.

and the electrician who used glass

to bring a vision to the whole of humanity.

The existing technologies were useless

on the surface of the moon.

Neil Armstrong: Tranquility Base here.

The Eagle has landed.

These are classic examples of the kind of people

who actually made the modern world.

People you've probably never heard of.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

These were hobbyists, garage inventors,

and obsessive tinkerers.

Ordinary people doing extraordinary things.

The discovery of the amazing properties of glass

set in motion a surprising chain reaction of ideas.

From art and our understanding of the universe,

to food production, combating disease,

and global communication,

I'm going to show

how all these apparently unconnected worlds are linked

through the inventions of the unsung heroes of glass.

I'm Steven Johnson.

I write about ideas and innovation,

and this is the untold story of How We Got to Now.

How We Got to Now was made possible in part by

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

and by contributions to your PBS station from...

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Glass is so familiar to us today

we might not realize it performs

a million different roles.

It's on our laptops, inside our phones,

on our faces, and we drive around in it.

We have such a love affair with glass,

we encase ourselves in it.

Over 50 million tons a year are produced

of this kind of flat glass, most of it for construction.

And a building like this is basically 40 stories of glass.

It's a nightmare to keep clean.

Oh, did you guys think I was actually outside?

No, I've got this harness on

in case I trip and accidentally spill my drink.

Glass is resistant to heat, cold, water, and high winds

and can withstand extreme pressure,

as much as that created by 100,000 elephants.

[ elephant trumpets ]

Glass is a beautiful and robust material.

It's the ultimate architectural decoration.

And because of its extraordinary properties,

we now live in these cathedrals of glass.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Our lives are completely dependent

on this wonder material,

yet it's made from one of the most simple

and common resources on our planet: sand.

Thousands of years ago, our ancestors figured out

that if you heated sand at extremely high temperatures,

it would cause the individual grains

to fuse together, creating glass.

Many people at the time thought that glass

had magical properties.

Many ancient civilizations had the ability

to make ornate glass items, but it came out opaque,

often colored, and you could barely see through it.

But figuring out how to make truly clear transparent glass

would change the course of history.

It's a story whose roots lie in a time of extreme violence.

And it played out here: Venice, Italy.

From the early 13th century,

a whole generation of glassmakers arrive here,

fleeing from the battles being fought in Turkey

during the time of the Crusades.

While the Venetians like the promise

of exquisite glassware, there's a problem.

The city is overpopulated, and its buildings

are almost entirely made out of wood,

which turns out to be a little bit of an issue

when your business revolves around blazing furnaces.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

So in 1291, the local authorities force

all the glassmakers onto the nearby island of Murano.

While the Venetians want the furnaces

away from their wooden homes,

the glass brings money into the city.

[ cash register chimes ]

They're keen to keep any trade secrets from escaping,

so the government passes a second, more shocking law.

In a pretty Draconian turn,

the new law forbids the glassmakers

from ever leaving Venice,

threatening them with the death penalty if they do.

All the master glassmakers are forced to live

and work together on Murano,

unable to leave for fear of their lives.

This inadvertently creates a cluster of expertise,

turning Murano into a center of innovation.

When we think about invention, we tend to talk about it

in terms of the single heroic inventor --

Graham Bell with his telephone,

Edison with the phonograph or the light bulb --

but the truth is the most important innovations

are collaborative in nature.

Ideas are shared and discussed and built upon.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Economists call this information spillover.

Pack people together,

and ideas have a natural tendency

to flow from mind to mind.

It's in this innovation hothouse

that a maverick glassmaker

called Angelo Barovier enters the story.

He would create a brand-new type of glass,

and, in doing so, change the world forever.

I've managed to track down one of his descendants,

Rosa Barovier.

Your family has been here

an incredibly long amount of time.

Certainly, the Baroviers were living and working in Murano

in the beginning of the 14th century.

Do you think there was an advantage in clustering

all of the glassmakers together in this small space?

Yes, every new idea very quickly spread

all over the town.

You have this mix of competition between the individuals;

there's a lot of sharing and collaboration at the same time.

They all are relatives,

so they exchange knowledge, ideas,

but in the same time, they want to be the best.

[ tower bells chiming ]

Barovier is a tinkerer and a perfectionist,

and like many of us, he likes experimenting with stuff.

He doesn't want to make the usual cloudy glass.

He wants to make the clearest glass possible.

And so he devotes his life to doing just that.

Before, there was the so-called "white glass,"

but it was not pure,

so Angelo attended some lessons of a famous philosopher.

He meant more like as a scientist at that point.

If you're trying to be an innovator,

you don't go to philosophy classes.

An alchemist, eh?

So he learned the methods of alchemists

to prepare raw materials.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Inspired by the alchemist, Barovier starts to experiment.

Now, it might sound strange, but glassmakers

would often add burnt plants to the molten sand mix

to try to remove impurities.

Barovier tries out a plant called saltwort

that he imports from Syria, hundreds of miles away.

Barovier takes the plant, burns it,

and purifies the ashes to extract minerals fromt,

and when he mixethis into the molten mix of the glass,

it creates this:

the clearest glass the world has ever seen.

He calls it "cristallo" because it resembles

the clearest of quartz crystals.

It's the birth of modern glass.

It might seem like a small improvement,

but Barovier's transparent, colorless glass

triggers a revolution that spreads around the world.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

[ exhaling ]

It makes greenhouses possible.

Transparent glass houses allowed fruit and vegetables

from the Mediterranean to be grown in colder climates.

That revolutionizes our diet,

saving many from malnourishment.

But there's more.

With the creation of glass flasks and test tubes,

our understanding of chemistry explodes,

and that drives a revolution in science.

And then there's the production of giant windows.

The immense glass skyscrapers of the modern city

owe a debt of gratitude to Barovier

and the glassmakers of Murano.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

With ideas and techniques passed down

through the generations,

today, Murano is still an innovation powerhouse.

Davide Salvadore is a 12th-generation

master glassmaker.

So how long have you been doing this?

[ speaking in Italian ]

TRANSLATOR: I started working in a furnace

when I was 10 years old,

so I think I've got quite used to glass.

We love each other.

How much do you -- do you learn

from other people on Murano who are your competitors?

Do you share techniques,

or are you pretty much competitive with them?

I have probably learned more in the evenings

drinking a glass of wine with the old masters

and chatting to them than actually working.

I love thinking about that there's 1,000 years

of expertise that's been built up.

The kind of craftsmanship that's been stored here

in this space on Murano, we get to see it at work.

How long does it take to become a master glassmaker?

A lifetime.

And maybe it is not enough.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

The creation of crystal-clear glass

wasn't just to make fancy chandeliers or vases.

By looking through this magical material,

innovators would revolutionize the way we see the world

and our understanding of our place in the universe.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

It all starts with a cry for help.

In the churches and monasteries of medieval Europe,

aging clergymen are finding it hard to read

their sacred scriptures.

It's glass that comes to their aid.

Now, at the time, curved chunks of glass

were known for their magical ability to magnify the world.

People would take these glass orbs

and run them along the page to enlarge the words.

And it actually does work!

That's amazing.

Unfortunately, I can't read Latin.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Depending on its shape and thickness,

glass has a natural ability to bend light

and magnify the world.

While these glass orbs helped the poor-sighted clerics

with their reading, they aren't that practical

when walking around.

What was needed was a new innovation.

We don't know exactly when or where it happened,

but at some point, glassmakers started experimenting

with shaping the glass into these small discs,

and they called them, in Italian,

"discs for the eyes."

And they would put them in these two frames,

and they would join the frames together at the top,

and the result would be the world's first spectacles.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Now, while you might imagine people would be crying out

for these new eyesight accessories, for some time,

spectacles remain a bit of a secret.

By the turn of the 14th century, talk of spectacles

is all the rage in the corridors of cathedrals and monasteries

throughout Europe,

but your average medieval villager

hasn't even heard of this newfangled device,

much less tried on a pair.

Life for them is still mostly a blur,

particularly in old age.

It's one of those cases where a technology exists,

it just isn't widely distributed yet.

For spectacles to explode onto the global mass market,

it would take an innovation

in a completely unrelated field.

It may sound odd -- and bear with me here --

but the story of how spectacles go mainstream

actually kicks off in the vineyards and wineries

of medieval Europe.

In the mid-1400s, there's a guy in Germany

who has what he thinks is a really great idea.

He wants to explore a completely new use

for an ancient piece of technology, the grape press,

used by winemakers for thousands of years.

Only he's got a problem: he's a bit strapped for cash,

but he manages to persuade some investors

to back his project,

kind of like the start-up funding we have today.

But the idea still sounds strange.

He wants to take a machine designed to press grapes,

modify it a little, and start printing bibles.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

That man is Johannes Gutenberg.

This is a great example of someone

adapting an existing technology to create a new innovation

in a totally different field.

Gutenberg takes the basic architecture

of the grape press, breaks it down,

adds in moveable typefaces, and creates a printing machine,

one of the greatest inventions in the history of humanity.

Suddenly we are able to mass-produce books,

and that opens doors to the spread of knowledge

across a wide audience,

not just of religion, but of brand-new ideas,

from political manifestos and scientific theories

to fiction, poetry, and even pornography.

But Gutenberg's printing press

has an additional unexpected consequence

that's crucial to the story of how glass changed our lives.

As reading becomes widespread,

people suddenly start realizing that their vision

isn't all that good.

I mean, up until that point, you didn't have that many times

in your life when you had to stare at something

that close to your eyes.

But with the appearance of books and pamphlets,

all of a sudden, all over Europe,

people are staring at tiny letters on a page.

The invention of the printed book

creates a surge in demand for spectacles.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Glasses immediately improve the lives of millions.

Literacy levels go up, empowering people

to think for themselves.

And failing eyesight could now be remedied,

allowing people to work well into old age.

With the addition of bars that hooked your spectacles

over your ears, today glasses have become

a way of expressing your identity.

[ laughs ]

Gai Gherardi is one of Hollywood's most celebrated

eyewear designers.

Was there a point in more recent times

when glasses really became part of fashion?

The classic story is that men don't make passes

at girls who wear glasses, so something happened there

to bring glasses into a comfort level

that they could somehow be an accessory to your beauty

rather than this sort of deterrent.

Not only they take away all of your sex appeal,

but they would give you some!

Now it's become this space -- a sense of kind of playfulness,

of creativity where you're expressing yourself

by the design of these glasses.

It has the ability to transform a face more than anything.

You can have, instantly, a little facelift,

you can be given a hairline if you don't have hair,

you can elongate your nose

you can give yourself full lips by putting on a pair of glasses.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Ironically, glasses today are actually more likely

to be made of plastic,

but the iginal glass spectacle lenses

play another significant role in our lives

and sit at the heart

of a completely different set of innovations.

Back in the 16th century,

something profound is about to happen.

The convergence of quality glass,

the printing press, books,

and a growing expertise in making lenses

will unlock a new door in the history of ideas.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Spectacle makers across Europe

start experimenting with their lenses.

They stumble upon brand-new uses

that would extend our vision

to see previously invisible worlds.

In the 1590s, in a small town

called Middelburg in the Netherlands,

a father and son team of lens makers

called Hans and Zacharias Janssen

start playing around with their lenses.

Only instead of putting them side by side

the way you would with a pair of glasses,

they line them up like this.

And when you do that, they discover

that they can see tiny objects much larger than you would

with an unaided eye.

They invent the microscope.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Thanks to the Janssens

and the magnifying properties of glass lenses,

we could now see down into the world of the very small:

the discovery of microscopic animals,

individual cells, single-celled organisms,

and the smallest life on earth, bacteria.

According to microbiologist Professor Steven Ruzin,

the microscope played a significant role

in our understanding of disease.

Science is really driven by our instruments,

and prior to this, the scientists at the time

were limited by what they can see.

Microscopes for about 100 years were really difficult to use.

They saw the bacteria, but they were blurry,

and they didn't know what they were.

At this point here, from, say, 1820s or so on,

scientists could see bacteria really well,

and then that's when the great study

of the cell theory, the bacterial cause of diseases --

So effectively the ability to see these invisible creatures

with real clarity then sets up whole new ways

- of understanding the world. - Exactly.

Microscopes like this allowed the scientists

to look at bacteria

and to now start really moving forward

in the actual science of studying bacteria

and, of course, the bacterial cause of diseases

and so on and so forth.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

The invention of the microscope opens the door

to the creation of antiseptics, antibiotics, and vaccines,

completely transforming our ability to combat disease.

But simple glass lenses had more to offer

those curious enough to tinker with them.

They would help extend our vision

to see further than ever before.

About 20 years after the invention of the microscope,

just down the road, in the same small Dutch town,

another spectacle maker called Hans Lippershey

is watching kids play with his lenses.

They claim to see something magical in them,

and when he looks through the lenses,

he sees faraway objects appear to be so close

you can almost touch them.

The telescope is born.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

[ squeaking ]

So both the microscope and telescope are invented

by two different lens makers from the same town.

Glass now opens our eyes to worlds beyond our world.

As inventions go,

glass is one of the most transformative materials

ever created,

and it helps us understand the unpredictable

yet wonderful way that innovation works.

Someone uses a grape press to publish bibles,

which makes people realize that they have poor eyesight.

That in turn opens the door for a market for lenses,

which opens the door to a scientific revolution

that not only saves lives,

it transforms our understanding of the universe.

In the 19th and 20th centuries,

the lens would once again take a giant leap

in changing society.

And as with so many innovations,

it revolved around a simple idea:

you take a lens, you bolt it onto a box,

and you use the lens to focus an image

on light-sensitive material.

It's the invention of the camera.

[ clicks ]

[ ♪♪♪ ]

With cameras, we could now capture a moment in time.

By capturing a series of images, we create a movie.

And with innovations in electronics,

we could now transmit a live image,

giving birth to television.

In the late 1960s, one man would create

a new kind of camera

to share the most astonishing vision

with the whole of humanity,

and it all hinged on the humble glass lens.

MAN OVER RADIO: Okay, all flight controllers,

going to go for landing.

- Retro? - Go.

- Guidance? - Go.

NEIL ARMSTRONG: Tranquility Base here.

- The Eagle has landed. - MAN: Roger, Tranquility.

Landing Neil and Buzz on the surface of the moon

was an amazing technological achievement, obviously.

But I'm interested in something else.

How in the world did NASA share that moment live

with 600 million people,

a fifth of the population of the planet at that point?

The answer to that question

involves a network of innovators

and one of history's great unsung heroes.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

For the first time, man is about to set foot

on the moon's surface.

Electrical engineer Stan Lebar

leads the Apollo TV Lunar Camera Project.

He's asked to create a TV camera

that would broadcast live pictures from the moon,

but he faces many challenges.

In the late '60s there were small cameras,

but they all used film, which had to be developed.

You couldn't shoot a live image with it.

And the video cameras that were used for live television

were huge -- they were the size of a fridge.

So the existing technologies were useless

on the surface of the moon.

Lebar would have to invent something completely new.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Lebar and his team pioneer new integrated circuitry

to help shrink the electronic.

The camera itself is made to run

on just 7 watts of power,

the same as a single Christmas tree light bulb.

The team add state-of-the-art thermal shielding

to withstand extreme temperatures

on the lunar surface,

and they invent a new mechanim

to cope with the massive change in lighting conditions.

But at the heart of it all is a simple glass lens.

It's fitting, really, that this amazing material

that had extended our vision in so many ways

would give us our first live image

from another heavenly body.

MAN: The opening I ought to have on the camera...

At 0239 Universal Time, Armstrong opens the hatch

and activates the camera.

ARMSTRONG: Roger, TV circuit breakers in...

At Mission Control,

Lebar is nervously watching the monitor.

He later wrote about it:

"Two seconds after the turn-on command was given,

I saw a pulse on the monitor, and I thought,

'It looks like it's going to work.'"

ARMSTRONG: That's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

All over the planet, people stare at their TVs

as this moment in history plays out live

in their living rooms.

The image quality isn't quite as good

as they had hoped, but no one really cares.

At this defining moment,

thanks to Stan Lebar and his team of innovators,

we watch a live transmission from another heavenly body.

For the first time, the whole world

simultaneously shares a single vision.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Glass may have begun as an ancient curiosity,

but through the innovation of clear glass

and the glass lens,

it brought our lives into focus and extended our vision.

This was the moment humanity stopped and stared,

and it was only possible rough a glass lens.

But the story of glass doesn't end there.

While glass's magical properties

allowed us to bend and focus light,

glass turned out to have another transformative power.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Stepping back in time again to 16th-century Italy,

a separate innovation in glass

ran parallel to the widespread use of the lens.

Using new techniques in metalwork,

another simple glass device is created,

one with wide-reaching emotional

and psychological effects.

Mirrors have been around for thousands of years,

but they suffered from a distorted, colored image.

But then glassmakers hit upon a way of radically improving

their quality, and this changed the way we see ourselves.

They work out how to coat their crystal-clear glass

with a shiny mixture of tin and mercury.

Today, the toxic mercury has been replaced with silver,

but at the time, it creates a bright, clear mirror

unlike any seen before.

Imagine being able to see your own reflection

for the very first time.

People became obsessed with it,

especially the artists of the Renaissance.

The great Leonardo da Vinci mentions mirrors

several times in his notebooks.

Fittingly, he wrote backwards using mirror writing:

"The mirror ought to be taken as a guide," he writes.

"If you know how to compose your picture,

it will also seem a natural thing seen in a great mirror."

The bright, clear mirrors open the artists' eyes

to new ways of understanding their bodies

and the world around them.

Aided by the mirror, for the first time,

artists are able to paint

incredibly detailed paintings of themselves.

Six hundred years before the invention of the camera phone,

Renaissance masters invent the selfie,

and art and philosophy during this time

takes a dramatic turn inward.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

At Cambridge University, Professor Alan MacFarlane

has been studying the role mirrors played

in radically changing humanit.

Well, the mirror invented the Renaissance.

I mean, Leonardo said,

"The mirror is the master of painters."

Leonardo himself couldn't have painted his paintings

without the mirror, and the invention

of modern perspective was done on the steps

of the Duomo in Florence by Brunelleschi using a mirror

and seeing what he had to paint looking in the mirror,

not looking at the thing he was painting.

Without that accuracy and reality of seeing the world,

you then couldn't have had modern science.

So the mirror is the basis.

It doesn't force any of these things, but it allows them.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Outside of the painters' studios,

ordinary people could now see themselves for the first time,

to see what they looked like as individuals.

The impact on society couldn't be more profound.

When you have an artistic transformation like that,

what are the psychological effects?

You could see yourself away from other people.

You began to psychologically have yourself

as the center of the universe.

It changes politics, for example:

a much more individualistic, democratic idea

of us as in charge of our destiny.

And so you thought of yourself as the center of the universe

in relation to God, the state, law, economics;

you were the ruler of your own world.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Glass mirrors may have been the catalyst

for our rational sense of self, but back in the 1500s,

they were such an amazing innovation,

some people believed they possessed magical powers.

They even get used in a curious religious escapade.

During a holy pilgrimage, well-to-do pilgrims

would bring a mirror with them,

and they would try and see a reflection of a sacred relic.

Then they would bring the mirror back home

and boast to their friends and relatives

that they had captured an image of the sacred scene.

Centuries later, the use of mirrors

to capture wondrous visions

will prove to have a much more scientific application.

To see what it is, I've come

to one of the most exceptional places on our planet

Up here, the glass mirror sits at the zenith

of human innovation and plays a critical role

in pushing the boundaries of science.

This is Mauna Kea on Hawaii's Big Island.

Rising over 13,700 feet from sea level,

it's a place of incredible volcanic landscapes

and splendid isolation.

You really feel as if you've left Earth.

This does not seem like a familiar landscape at all.

It looks more like you're on Mars.

It's incredible up here.

It really takes your breath away.

I mean, it literally takes your breath away.

I mean, the air is very thin, it's very hard to breathe.

But what a vista!

I mean, I'm here because, in a lot of ways,

this is the culmination of the journey

that started 500 years ago.

A journey that began when artisans first created

those clear, bright glass mirrors.

This is really the pinnacle

of the extension of human vision.

And I'm here to see these guys.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

These are the famous Keck telescopes,

the largest pair of optical telescopes on the planet.

These leviathans are helping scientists

unravel the mysteries of the universe.

But they're different from those first telescopes invented

in a Dutch spectacle shop.

Telescopes had always relied on glass lenses to do their magic,

but as the lenses got bigger, they ran into their limitations.

Big lenses are hard to support

and they introduce distortions in the light,

and so to extend our vision,

we had to come up with a new technique,

that old standby of magicians everywhere:

the mirror.

It doesn't even look like a telescope, right?

I mean, it looks like a death ray or something.

It's amazing.

Most people think about telescopes

as this tube-like thing, you know,

that has an eye piece on one end,

maybe a lens on the other end, and you look through it.

In fact, virtually no research is done in that way anymore.

If you want to learn something

about stars or galaxies or whatever,

so many of these things are so faint,

you need to collect as much starlight as possible.

So this thing, as you can see, is immense.

Each telescope has 36 giant hexagonal mirrors

that work together

as a single vast 32-foot reflective canvas.

Incoming starlight is bounced up to a second mirror,

then focused down to be captured

in a set of instruments.

These huge, precisely engineered mirrors

allow scientists to probe and explore the universe

with their feet safely on terra firma.

But despite their size, on some nights

the performance of the telescope

to capture pin-sharp images can be less than optimal.

When light comes down from distant stars,

as it passes through the atmosphere,

distortions can appear in the image,

making it blurrier than it should be.

So the question is, how can you fix that?

The solution once again revolves around a mirror.

It's called adaptive optics.

In a scene straight out of Star Wars,

laser beams are fired into the sky

to measure the air turbulence

that can distort incoming starlight.

Any distortion is then corrected

using a computer controlled flexible mirror.

So once you've figured the turbulence out,

how do you actually then correct the image?

So that's done with a deformable mirror,

which is exactly what it sounds like.

It's a mirror that the surface of it changes shape.

- It's kind of a bendy glass. - Yes, exactly.

- That's amazing. - Yeah.

And when you get the end result, how much clearer is it?

I mean, is it a really distinct difference?

It's an astonishing difference, actually.

It's sort of like if you have --

if you're really nearsighted, and so everything's all blurry,

and then you put on a pair of glasses,

and then everything becomes crisp.

It's like that.

So what you're basically saying is

this is like putting a pair of spectacles

on that giant telescope there.

More or less, yeah.

These giant telescopes can now capture

the sharpest, clearest images seen from Earth,

and it's all thanks to mirror.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Watching those shutters open,

it almost feels like a sacred ritual, right?

The sun sets, and we open our eyes slowly to the cosmos.

But of course, this is a temple of science.

I mean, think of all the technological innovations,

thousands of them, that had to come together

to make this incredible machine possible.

People flock here from all over the world

to worship at these sentinels to scientific innovation.

And like all truly transformative inventions,

these telescopes are not built from the ideas of one person,

but show the power of group collaboration,

ideas built on ideas that have gone before.

When human beings first started exploring

the power of mirrors to capture an image,

that power seemed almost supernatural.

And standing here looking at these telescopes,

it's not hard to have the same feeling,

because the light traveling from the stars

that these telescopes capture,

that light has traveled for billions of years,

which means that when we gaze through these telescopes,

we are looking into the distant past.

We've not just extended our vision into space,

we've also extended our vision back through time.

From clear glass to lenses to mirrors,

glass has completely transformed

the way we see the world around us,

but the story doesn't end there.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Glass has such diverse properties,

it provides a wide platform for diverse innovations.

One extraordinary creation

that would go on to transform the construction industry

came about through the most unlikely set of circumstances.

In the 19th century, scientists and engineers

are investigating new techniques to harness

the amazing properties of glass.

One of these pioneers is a slightly crazy physicist

named Charles Vernon Boys.

He's interested in some of glass's more subtle properties,

but unlike the other scientists, in his experiments,

the primary tool he uses is a crossbow.

Charles Vernon Boys was apparently

a pretty lousy physics teache.

One of his pupils was sci-fi author H.G. Wells,

who said Boys was, quote, "one of the worst teachers

who ever turned his back on a restive audience."

What Boys lacked in teaching ability

he made up for in his gift

for designing scientific instruments.

This would lead him to harness

a peculiar attribute of glass.

In 1887, as part of his physics experiments,

Boys wants to use a fine shard of glass

to measure the effects of delicate physical forces

on objects.

He has this idea that he can use a thin glass fiber

as a balance arm, but first he has to make one.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Boys builds a special crossbow and creates lightweight bolts.

To one end of a bolt he attaches a glass rod

with sealing wax.

The glass rod is then heated until it softens...

and then he fires the crossbow.

As the bolt flies across the room,

it pulls out a thin strand from the blob of molten glass.

These narrow glass fibers e perfect for Boys' experiments,

but they would also be used

for a completely different purpose.

Once again, the strange physical properties of glass

would open up a whole new world of possibilities.

The fact that glass could be made

into these long, thin, durable fibers

would have a dramatic impact on our lives.

would be used to create a revolutionary new material:

fiberglass.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

By mixing the fibers of glass with plastic resin,

fiberglass provides a bendy yet strong material

to build with, and this unleashes

a world of innovations.

Fiberglass revolutionizes the boating industry.

It's used to make everything from dinghies to surfboards

to multimillion-dollar yachts.

It's also shaped into the blades of wind turbines,

driving the rise of wind powe,

which changes the face of alternative energy.

And without fiberglass,

we wouldn't have computer circuit boards,

which sit at the heart of every computer

and mobile phone we use today.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Now, in the final chapter of glass,

it's a different property of those ultrathin glass fibers

that would radically transform the 21st century

by helping to create the global village.

The innovation I'm talking about

lies mostly hidden from view.

To see it, I'm being taken to a secret location

in the English Channel.

Out here at sea, deep below us on the ocean floor,

information is flowing:

email, phone calls, financial data

connecting continents and countries.

And all of that information flows through glass.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

In the mid-1960s, the global telephone network

was failing under increasing demand.

Engineers in the UK wanted to replace

the old copper wire system

with a brand-new way to send and receive phone calls.

Two British-based scientists, Charles Kao and George Hockham,

come up with an idea

that data could be sent as pulses of light,

but what they needed was a vessel

for the light to travel through.

And that's what an American company

called Corning comes up with:

a new type of freakishly clear glass

that cou carry light for miles.

It's a match made in heaven.

This is what they came up with: fiber optics.

They basically took the ultra-clear glass

that Corning had developed, and they spun it out

into these long fibers.

And they could take pulses of light

and send them down the fibers, encoding information

that would travel immense distances at immense speeds

with almost no data loss.

To keep these systems operational 24/7,

ships like this are always on standby

to maintain and repair the cables.

But it's not an easy job.

So what's the plan for today?

Okay, so we've got this fault on the cable

which has been caused by something,

we're not quite sure what,

so we need to send the remote operated vehicle, the ROV,

down onto the seabed to try and locate that fault

so we can later pick it up.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

The repair company has detailed maps

of where the cables should be lying on the sea floor,

but cables can move, particularly if caught

by a trawler net or a ship's anchor.

We've launched the ROV,

and now we're going to go and track the cable

and check out where the fault in the cable is.

So we need to use the ROV to unbury the cable,

and then it has manipulators on it

which can cut and hold the cable

and then pass that line back to the ship

so we can recover the cable onboard.

So you can bring it back up and do a little surgery on it,

get things going --

We've got a few things to do on that cable

before it goes back in.

The faulty cable is recovered,

and they cut through the outer armored sheath

to get at the fiber optics inside.

To repair a fault,

they simply splice in a new leng of glass fiber.

CONNOR: So we're currently preparing the fibers

by cleaning them in an ultrasonic bath

to get r of any contaminants,

and then following that process, it goes into a cleaver.

So the cleaver is to give a 90-degree cut,

so a very fine cut to the end of the fiber.

And once it's cleaved,

it's ready to go into the fusion splicer.

So if you'd like to carry on the splice?

I get to try the fusion splicing?

That sounds dangerous, doesn't it?

Okay, so hit the "set" button, always the green button.

Okay, "set" button, yeah.

The fusion splicer is making the alignments

on the two fibers...

- That's it. - That's done?

I just pressed one button.

[ Johnson chuckles ]

I could do this all day long!

All right, now we can see there's the fiber,

and it's perfectly fused together there.

I did an extremely good job.

Now, this thing is incredibly thin.

How much data could this carry?

Well, in terms of voice calls on a system like this,

a fiber pair -- so that and its partner --

about 15 to 20 million voice calls.

This tiny little thread.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

The old copper cables have all but been replaced

by fiber optics, fueling a telecommunications industry

now worth $2.1 trillion.

What began by heating sand to create a brand-new material

now lies at the heart of global communications.

Think about it: every time you send an email

or do a web search, it ultimately takes the form

of light traveling through glass.

This may be the most unlikely chapter

in the history of this amazing material.

The global village is woven together by threads of glass.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Before fiber optics, the Internet couldn't handle

large amounts of data -- it was all based on text.

But once glass opened the door to fast and fat data sharing,

it drove a cultural shift so great

it would define the modern world.

A key player in that transformation

was Caterina Fake.

In 2004, Fake's pioneering Internet company

was developing an online multiplayer game.

Little did she know where it would lead.

We had built a game, it was called Game Neverending.

The development on that failed -- we ran out of money --

and so we had this late-night, harebrained idea

to start a photo-sharing site.

So what we did was we took all of our knowledge

and everything that we understood

about how people shared and how they interact

and all of the connections and sociality

that happened on the platform and applied photos.

They come up with the first interactive

online photo sharing site: Flickr.

So we're all familia with social networks today

with Facebook, et cetera, but in those days,

those were not associated with imagery.

The magic ingredient was photographs,

because photographs are --

they're easy to take, they're easy to share,

they cross language barriers, they are -- they tell a story.

So when you add a social network to photographs,

this whole other thing happens.

Fake's innovation did more

than just give us the ability to share images.

It changed the way we now share our lives with others.

The assumption that ideas or images want to be shared,

that was a profound moment.

There are a lot of reasons for sharing.

Some of them are what I call social peacocking,

where you're like, "Oh, check me out,

I'm living a cool life, I'm an impressive person."

But I think that there's much more altruistic reasons

for sharing, and I think that

it's very much built into, you know, who we are as people.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Flickr popularizes the idea

of instantly sharing photos over the Internet.

And in the last decade, a perfect storm

of glass innovations has come together.

By placing a glass lens in our Internet-linked smartphones,

sharing photos has now become second nature.

I can take a picture with my camera phone here in Venice,

[ shutter clicks ]

upload it to Twitter, ask my friends to pass it along,

and watch what happens.

Within seconds, my photo of Italy is seen by people

all over the world.

An image taken through a glass lens,

transmitted by glass fibers, viewed on glass screens.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

This ability has once again

changed the way we see and experience the world.

Camera phones are central

to the rise of citizen journalism,

they've been used to instigate political uprisings,

to document life, drive the news headlines,

or simply to say, "I was there."

The ability to share images, share a vision of the world,

used to belong almost exclusively

to the big media companies and the newspapers

and the television networks.

But now it belongs to all of us.

[ ♪♪♪ ]

Glass has transformed the way we see

and understand the world.

It has broadened our experience of humanity.

Someone invents a new way to manipulate light using glass,

and then someone tinkers with it to turn it into spectacles,

and someone tinkers with that to turn it into a telescope

or a photograph, and all of those inventions

stack up and combine and take new forms.

We are now able to see in focus, to see ourselves,

to see the invisible, to see beyond our world,

and to share our vision with others.

All these ideas build on each other,

and along the way, we invent a whole new way of seeing.

In the next episode, I explore how artificial light

came from the craziest of sources.

They put a kid inside the whale's head?

Right.

From a social reformer

who illuminates the plight of the poor

to a sci-fi fan's experiment with gases...

He decides to pass a current of electricity through them.

illuminating our world revolutionized how we live

in ways we would never expect.

How We Got to Now was made possible in part by

the Corporation for Public Broadcasting

and by contributions to your PBS station from...

[ ♪♪♪ ]

To learn more about How We Got to Now,

visit us on the web at...

How We Got to Now is available on DVD.

A companion book is also available.

To order, visit shoppbs.org, or call 1-800-PLAY-PBS.

Captions by LNS Captioning Portland, Oregon www.LNScaptioning.com