Over the last 100 years, we have done something truly incredible to this planet.
We've made it much, much smaller.
What did most to shrink the world in the 20th century?
The aeroplane?
And we're off.
Was it the car? I've just forgotten what everything does, hold on.
Or was it television? WOMAN: Cue James.
Is that your final answer?
Well, let's see.
Let's say it's 1900 and I want to speak to a very good friend of mine in New York.
I can't pick the telephone up because there isn't one yet.
In fact, the only way of getting a message to him quickly is by Morse code.
But what if I actually want to speak to him?
I now have no choice but actually to go to New York.
And that was going to be tricky, because there were no aeroplanes flying the Atlantic yet.
Probably I'd just give up at that. In fact, millions of people did.
The world was just far, far too big so they stayed at home.
But that wasn't going to last.
Because in 1919, these two places suddenly became a lot closer together...
when a couple of British blokes got their hands on one of these.
A Vickers Vinny, an out-of-work World War I bomber.
It was not much more than a piece of old military surplus, but this is how long-haul travel began.
On a cold evening in Newfoundland in June 1919, two British chaps,
and they really were British chaps -
John Alcock, Arthur Whitten-Brown - set out to attempt something
that had so far never been achieved,
a non-stop crossing of the Atlantic Ocean in an aeroplane.
More specifically, in that aeroplane. Look at it!
This is a replica Vinny, but a faithful one,
and the prospect of flying anywhere in it is pretty terrifying.
For a start, you have to sit outside and Alcock and Brown faced 2,000 miles of freezing ocean.
But they were prepared for anything.
They had a couple of ham sandwiches and a flask of Oxo broth.
It is said that fortune favours the brave, and as it happens, Alcock and Brown realised
that they could make a bob or two out of this great adventure
because the Daily Mail newspaper had put up a prize equal to about one and a half million pounds
in today's money for the first people to make the crossing successfully.
And by the time Alcock here and Brown were fuelling up their aeroplane, the competition
had already been running for six years and quite a few people had already fallen into the drink.
They didn't let that put them off, because they were men
and they were British, and they were a bit hard up.
After struggling for nearly 16 hours to remain in the air,
Alcock and Brown landed in Ireland on 15th June, 1919.
It wasn't exactly a textbook landing but any landing you walk away from is a good one.
Transatlantic flight in an aeroplane was now a reality.
But many thought the aeroplane was not the best way to fly.
It faced competition from a monster which had been commanding the skies since the start of the century.
A monster that lived here - the airship.
In the '20s and '30s, Cardington in Bedfordshire was home to Britain's airship industry.
But to be honest, our best efforts had always lagged behind Germany's zeppelins.
And the greatest zeppelin of them all was the Hindenburg.
As late as 1937, it was regularly taking passengers between Germany and New York.
Indeed, zeppelins might still be shrinking the world today
had it not been for one fatal flaw - the hydrogen that held them up.
There is my balloon full of hydrogen.
This is a crossbow and that is a fiery bolt...
or it will be in a second, hang on!
Ready? Fire!
Obviously the Germans weren't completely stupid and they knew that
this stuff was hazardous, and so they took some precautions.
They provided a smoking room but they did line it with asbestos.
There was also only one lighter allowed on board.
It was this one and it was chained to the smoking room table.
Also, they used garlic to odourise the gas in the envelope of the airship itself so that if it leaked,
people would smell it, and the big advantage of this
was that it meant there was no garlic bread on the menu.
But no matter what precautions were taken,
airships were an accident waiting to happen, and happen it did, near New York.
A spark set fire to the largest balloon of hydrogen ever filled,
and newsreels captured the event.
Amazingly, 62 of the Hindenburg's 97 passengers survived.
Airships didn't. May 6th, 1937, marked the end of the airship era.
Aeroplanes alone would now own the sky,
aeroplanes like the De Havilland Dragon Rapide.
This 1930s aeroplane may have been made out of fabric and wood
but the concept behind it was cutting edge.
If you want to know where the romantic mini-break to Paris began,
or the stag weekend in Amsterdam, well, it was in this.
Scheduled, dependable and made in their hundreds, the Rapide really was the easyJet of the day.
Except travelling in it wasn't actually that easy and there are no jets.
It'll just take a couple of moments while we warm the engines up.
It seems to me a lot of people must have got into one of these
having never been in an aeroplane before, and been terrified.
You can see the metal tubes, few bits of Perspex.
That's how it's built, that's the technology of the First World War.
We're right at the nub end of it and they must have thought, "Aeroplane?
"It's more like a caravan."
And we're off!
The Dragon Rapide ushered in popular air travel but it was strictly short haul.
Yes, this aeroplane took Britons to all corners of the UK and even right across the Channel to France,
but the shopping trip to New York was still some way off.
It is fantastically noisy.
No pressurisation, could be freezing cold, could be very choppy.
You could be very sick, there's no food, there's no film, there's no drinks,
there's no flatbed sleeping arrangements, but it is a real flying experience.
It's a vibrating, living aeroplane.
You can sense the rush of air over the wings rewarding us with this new and novel gift of flight.
This is a traditional landing on the grass as it would have been back in the 1930s.
Very few people who go on one of those realise that it started
on something like this, and it wasn't that long ago.
There's only 35 years between them.
Written into the DNA of today's 747 is the long distance ambition
of the Vinny and the market appeal of the Dragon Rapide.
Now the 747 carries thousands of duty-free items and their owners
across the Atlantic every single day.
It's been so successful that transatlantic travel is starting to seem, well, something of a chore.
At the beginning of the 20th century, long-distance travel was for the conscripted,
the uprooted and the seriously rich,
but these three aeroplanes changed all that for ever.
The people who flew in that one were worried that they might not make it.
The people who flew in that one were worried that they might not make it without being sick,
or being diverted to another airfield.
And the people who fly in that one are worried that they won't be showing the latest James Bond film.
The aeroplane means that nowhere in the world need be more than a day away.
It truly has crushed continents.
But what about a more immediate concern?
Crossing counties?
The world must have seemed very, very big
and everywhere very, very, very distant
when it was very difficult just to leave the village where you happened to live.
The idea of a day trip was something still quite exotic,
something quite complicated to do,
so on the whole, most people just stayed at home and watched TV.
Except TV hadn't been invented yet.
Morris dancing, then!
Then in 1908, came the Ford Model T, the first car to be mass produced for a mass market,
and the theory was that anyone could throw a picnic hamper in the boot and set off for a day trip.
So, let's start the old bus up.
First we make sure this lever is fully back. That means it's in neutral and the handbrake is on.
We shall put the ignition advance roughly in the middle,
give it a crack of throttle there
and make sure the mixture is set to fully rich.
That's that brass knob down there.
Under here, check that the leads are on, the cap's on and we turn the petrol on down there.
Lovely.
And now we prime the engine, take that cover off.
This is the choke, pull that out, give it a turn just to suck some fuel through.
The switches are off so this can't start now.
So, that's pulled some fuel through, choke is off, go and turn the switches on.
Turn it to battery - the coil, not the magneto side, otherwise it won't work - and here we go.
The important thing is to keep your thumb out of the way
so that if it backfires or kicks back, it won't break it off.
So, like that, engage.
I'm just going to be absolutely sure
that I've got this lever in the right position.
That's fully back. That's neutral and the handbrake is on.
If you've got it in the wrong position, when you start the engine,
the car runs over you,
and that used to happen quite a lot in the early days of motoring.
Here we go!
ENGINE STARTS Yeah!
This might look quite slow and dignified and Edwardian,
but it's not quite as easy as it looks, because there is some control confusion.
The pedal on the right is the brake, the one in the middle makes it go backwards
and the one on the left changes gear between first and second.
Unless you've got the lever...
I've forgotten everything, hold on!
..Unless you have the lever in the middle position, in which case it's first and neutral.
But it isn't like the clutch, because when you press it
like I'm doing now, you select the gear, you don't disengage it.
And if you forget that when you come up to a junction,
well, you could have a problem.
I'm absolutely amazed that this car driving idea ever caught on.
Oh, crikey! No, throttle back.
You can tell this isn't really quite ready for the casual day-tripper yet, this new car thing.
It's...sort of more suited to people who used to drive traction engines.
That's almost enough to put you off travelling any further than the village pub, and it could be worse.
There could be a hill.
The problem is that the fuel tank is underneath the seat.
It feeds the engine by gravity through a small pipe in one corner down there somewhere,
so when you get to a hill and you're slightly low on petrol, as I am now,
it all sloshes into the back, it doesn't go down the hole and the engine cuts out.
So the only solution is to turn the car around, re-start the engine and reverse up the hill.
Actually, I can't be bothered.
The hassle-free day trip was still some way off, then, but the idea
that lots of us could own and run cars was starting to make sense.
Personally, I think it all came good in 1962,
because that's when my dad brought home one of these.
You might think that the Mark I Ford Cortina of 1962 was just a boring mid-sized family car.
I, on the other hand, think that it was much, much more than that.
I think that for the average British family back then,
this car, this car specifically, was a ticket to ride.
Now, car bores out there might have spotted
that this is the rather special Lotus Cortina,
but even the humble standard model took Britain by storm.
What was great about this car, I think, is perfectly encapsulated in its name,
because prior to this, British cars were named after sleepy university towns or seats of government.
There was the Oxford, the Cambridge, the Westminster but this was called Cortina.
It was named after an Italian resort where people were eating ice cream in the sunshine.
This wasn't a car that you used to drive to your job at the bank.
This was a car that you'd go and drive for the pleasure of it.
This was a car that encouraged people to say, "Let's go for a spin."
And Britons did in their thousands.
The Cortina quickly became the most popular car in the country.
But behind this glamorous facade beat a simple and reliable engine.
So, if you fancied taking a day trip one morning,
you stood a decent chance of actually making it back that night.
But the arrival of cars like the Cortina is only one part of the story.
For the day trip to take off, the landscape of Britain had to change.
Which gets me onto the M1. Today it doesn't get your pulse racing.
It barely gets your car moving.
Not so in 1959, when the first 72 miles of it opened.
Back then, the place was so exciting that people drove on it
just for the experience of... driving on it.
And in the beginning, there was one aspect of motorway driving
which was particularly thrilling.
It's just a pity I was too young to appreciate it.
The M1 was like a public drag strip. There was no speed limit.
You could go as fast as you liked, and people did.
And obviously, that wasn't going to last,
because eventually somebody tested a Le Mans racing car,
an AC Cobra, on the M1 at an alleged 183 miles per hour.
It even made it to the front page of the Daily Mirror.
There were questions asked in the House, there was an inquiry,
and the following year the speed limit was applied.
So, from then on, your day tripper had to go everywhere at a maximum of 70.
What a pillock!
All this driving and flying was all very well, but there was another way to shrink the world.
Why not bring it to us?
We had a motive too - our love of gossip.
..I mean, for news of the latest political and sporting events.
Joe!
'But capturing the world outside was never going to be easy
'and where better than Walthamstow dog track to see how it was done.'
So, this is the first news moving camera?
It's a first...one of the first film cameras to actually...
They were used to record events at that time,
because actually, photographic news hadn't really been invented.
They would have filmed things they knew were going to happen?
Absolutely - coronations, or main football matches,
sometimes dog racing, so it was just historically recording events.
If they had the idea of cinema newsreels then,
there's no reason why you couldn't film news with this?
It takes a bit of time cos it's a heavy machine,
so you'd have to stage that event.
Well, it's only wood, isn't it?
It's wood and there's some metal, and that's the difference of today.
It's made of pig iron!
There's a dog race about to start, we've got about a minute before...
We won't catch this race, I don't think. Let's try.
So you take it to pieces. You take the camera and I'll take the tripod.
Right, come on.
We'll have to get them for the second lap.
Come on!
Just balance it.
I'm gonna roll anyway because they're coming round that bit.
Oh, it's too low. Too low.
Up! Hang on.
I'll try and do it. Lift it, lift it. No, it's gone.
I've made a very, very good 15 second newsreel of that sign and the fence and your arm.
It's not good for spontaneous newsgathering.
Not so much shrink the world as shrink the camera with this one.
So, this is a later camera now, a newer camera.
There you go. Ah, now that looks more like it.
Oh, God, it's still quite heavy.
Yes. But it does have a handle.
This now is a clockwork version. We've got two clockwork mechanisms.
It's like two clockwork batteries you've got there? That's right.
Then you've got the reflex to look through. So I can actually look...
That's actually through the lens. That's right.
Is this the sort of camera that made them realise
that they could make news rather than just film events
because it's portable, handheld? That's right.
Has this got film in it? That's got 200 feet of black and white film
as it would have been in the day,
and you're ready to go. Two minutes? Two minutes.
Could I try and make a short Pathe newsreel about this dog race? We could try.
These cameras brought news to millions in the first half of the century.
But with only 200 copies of a newsreel serving around 4,500 cinemas,
it could be weeks before you knew what had happened at Walthamstow.
Act normally. Now, how about a shot of the winning dog and his owner?
Sort of smile and look victorious.
I'm out of film. Thank you very much.
That's going to be a brilliant film, but it has shown me what the limitations were of the time.
You don't get much film in the camera - two minutes -
so you have to be very disciplined about what you shoot before it runs out.
The other is there's no sound on location,
so there are no interviews and there are no sound bites,
which is why you get a lot of people going...at the end of the films,
whether they've just won a dog race or sunk the Bismarck.
So, this first attempt to shrink the world through the news media
was very much limited by the technology of the time.
It's a start.
Television changed everything.
It introduced the radical idea that everyone could watch the same newsreel at the same time.
It's 9.30 on a Monday night, and this studio will be going on air in about an hour.
But I've been given a few minutes to bring you my history of television in three short clips.
WOMAN: Cue James!
The first television programme broadcast was in 1936.
There was only one channel but two completely different formats,
and because no-one could decide which was best, they broadcast both formats but on alternate weeks.
MAN: Vision and sound are on. The station goes on the air.
One format used a mechanical spinning disc to scan and capture the image.
Everyone who appeared on this format, and I haven't made this up, had to wear blue and yellow make-up
just so that their faces were visible on the screen.
It was no wonder, then, that the other system, the one which was electronic, won out.
Truth be said, TV got off to a shaky start.
Events didn't help either.
During the biggest news event of the century, World War II,
all TV transmitters were switched off for the duration.
The screens just went blank and everyone cheerfully dusted off their old wirelesses.
After the war, it would take a big event, a live event, to kick-start things again.
That event was a decent bit of reality television from a big house - Windsor.
The Queen's Coronation in 1953 was the must-see event.
In just two months, a million TV sets were sold.
From here on, the nation was hooked on watching the world through the box in the corner,
and with television's technological advances came a great variety of new programmes to watch.
So, the effect of all this going out into the world
and bringing it back to us was that our entire mindset was changing.
In 1969, however, both ways of shrinking the world were poised to make a quantum leap.
The first proposition - Concorde.
MAN: She flies, Concorde flies at last.
The idea? To cut journey times in half.
The second proposition - computers that could talk to each other across the globe.
Say you wanted to invest your hard-earned cash in the one that was most likely to catch on?
In 1969, the future was supersonic.
Four Rolls-Royce engines with reheat delivering enough thrust
to take this aeroplane to a top speed of over Mach Two,
or 1,350 miles per hour,
and it flies at an altitude of 60,000 feet,
or close to the edge of space -
much higher than that and all the passengers would qualify as astronauts.
This would fly you from London or Paris to New York in under three hours.
Well, sadly not any more.
Concorde's now just a history lesson on a school trip.
Once upon a time, this aeroplane flew across the Atlantic.
This is how the aeroplane flew in service...
Like the technology in this cockpit, Concorde stagnated, and died in 2003.
Supersonic never went mass market.
Concorde was too noisy and way too expensive.
A return ticket cost around £6,000.
Yes, time was money, but not that much money.
So what about our other proposition?
Well, back in 1969, computers spent their time performing calculations of mind-numbing tedium.
OK, and maybe they played the odd game of chess, but on the whole, they led lonely, insular lives.
But within a few months of Concorde's first flight, something remarkable happened.
On the 29th October, 1969, at the University College of Los Angeles,
a computer specialist typed the words "log in"
into his machine,
and he expected those to be read by a similar man
at a similar machine hundreds of miles away
at the Stamford Research Institute in San Francisco.
The experiment didn't actually go that well.
By the time the Stamford computer
had lumbered its way through to the "G" of "log", it had crashed,
but that wasn't important.
It wasn't what was said that mattered,
what mattered was that one computer had spoken to another one remotely.
I even have here a copy of the hand-written record of the event.
Here you can see it says, 22:30, talk to SRI - the Stamford Research Institute - host to host."
If computers could talk to one another, perhaps we didn't need to.
Potentially, these jumped-up abacuses could chat non-stop about anything and everything,
but only if we could find a way to carry such a massive amount of information.
This problem of bandwidth dogged communication for the first three-quarters of the 20th century.
In 1900 there were means of sending a message over a long distance
but they were all distinctly narrowband.
There was, for example, the homing pigeon, like this fellow here.
Very, very fast, up to 100 miles an hour with a decent tail wind,
but your message was restricted to whatever you could fit on a small piece of paper like that.
Off you go, mate!
There was a transatlantic telegraph cable for the...stuff,
but that would only handle two words a minute.
The first transatlantic telephone cable would handle 36 phone lines, that's all.
BUSY TONE And they're all busy.
The solution to the problem lay in light.
Light straight out of the world of science fiction.
Laser light.
Lasers are great fun, but more importantly,
they can also be switched on and off millions of times a second to carry a stream of digital data.
Trouble is, they have a habit of going in straight lines.
But put them in a glass fibre... and you can steer them wherever you like.
Round bends, across continents, all over the world.
Just one optical fibre can carry six million telephone calls at once,
so you can see how this disco light is responsible for a revolution.
We can run a business in India from a sofa in Slough, find a soul mate in South Africa,
invest in a villa in Cyprus, or watch home videos of total strangers as if they were our best mates.
Maybe we should get out more.
Here's a thought.
Don't you think it's weird that when it comes to shrinking the world,
this piece of glorified bunting has completely triumphed
over that magnificent supersonic airliner?
It seems to me we spent the first three-quarters of the 20th century
going out into the world, trying to see more and more of it,
and then in the last few decades
we've realised that, actually,
we can bring quite a lot of it to us down this optical string thing.
PHONE RINGS Is that necessarily a good thing, I was going to say,
but I've left my phone on, I'm sorry.
Sorry, that's really unprofessional. ..Hello!
Hello, buddy. Now that is ironic.
I've been talking to this film crew about shrinking the world
and here you are, ringing me from the other side of it.
What time is it there, anyway?
Well, good morning from dark Britain.
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd sync by Frozen
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk