Last time, we saw how the Renaissance turned Europe
from a load of mud and parsnips into a posh resort full of paintings,
and how this awakening led to a string of people-power uprisings
that put the establishment on its arse.
But the revolutions were just beginning.
Humankind was about to leap forward again by taming metal and electricity.
Progress would usher in a new era of convenience and entertainment,
but also threaten the existence of all life on Earth.
So, swings and roundabouts, really.
This week it's the rise of the machines here, on Earth.
And also here on Cunk on Earth.
For centuries, everything in nature, from people to cows,
ran on this…
fresh air.
If you haven't heard of air,
it's an invisible blend of gases so addictive,
we suffer fatal withdrawal symptoms
within minutes of our supply being cut off.
This dependency made air's rival, water, jealous.
Water needed to up its game.
It needed to become more indispensable to us, its natural masters.
It was feeling the heat.
Heat that turned it into something useful.
Steam.
Steam could be harnessed to power all kinds of machines.
And nowhere went steam bonkers quite like America,
where it would change the shape of the country's face forever.
To understand why, I'm afraid we have to look at a map.
At first, settlers had stuck to the edges of America,
leaving the middle untouched, like a frozen pie in a microwave.
But Americans back then weren't the humble, unassuming people
they still aren't today.
They believed in something called Manifest Destiny,
the belief that all the land belonged to them
and that God wanted them to go west
and claim it back from the Native Americans
he'd put there first by mistake.
What is Manifest Destiny?
Manifest Destiny is a ideology
that was in the 1840s and '50s in the United States,
that America had a God-given right to take over the rest of the continent
and sort of spread its values and its virtues from sea to shining sea.
-So it was God's plan? -That was the idea, yes.
Doesn't this make you God's slaves?
Well, I think what the people of the time would say
is that they were God's missionaries on Earth.
And so they felt that they were willingly enacting his policies
rather than being forced to do so.
But at the very least, you're God's bitches.
But manifesting your destiny was dangerous.
You had to trundle across a perilous landscape in a rickety wagon
on the brink of starvation or shitting yourself to death with dysentery,
getting bitten by snakes or butchered by Apaches.
Almost as if God didn't want them to do this after all.
But the invention of the steam train changed all that.
The steam train laughed in the wagon's face.
Not literally. This isn't a children's book.
The Americans released steam engines into the wild,
carving routes across the land and changing the balance of power.
Now, fighting with Native Americans could be conducted at high speed
and with an accompanying buffet car service.
Thanks to the railroads, small towns formed all across the west.
They were tough, lawless places
where summary justice was dispensed down the barrel of a gun,
as cowboys did whatever it took to protect their cows, and their boys.
So can you talk us through what this is here?
This is the Colt single action army revolver, the Colt 45.
And you load it through here,
and you'd have to cock the hammer back for each shot.
Would this only kill people during the olden days?
Or could it kill modern people too?
I'm afraid it definitely could kill modern people.
It's so old. It sort of looks clockwork, doesn't it?
Do the bullets come out slowly? Could you sort of outrun the bullet?
You definitely couldn't outrun the bullet. You're right to say it looks clockwork.
It's very like a clock mechanism, with a ratchet inside.
-Rat shit? -A ratchet.
Where do the bullets come out? Do they come out of that pipe bit?
They do. Yeah, that's the barrel.
Can I hold that up and look down the end of it?
Or will that shoot me in the eye?
It's generally frowned upon.
So would getting shot in the eye actually hurt?
Because it's just a sort of water bag, isn't it, your eye?
I bet it'd just pop and sting a bit,
but you'd basically be able to go about your business.
I don't know, I don't think there's any good place to get shot.
Why does humankind feel the need to invent killing machines like this?
And could you keep your answer to a sort of soundbite length?
Because we're human I suppose?
It seems to be built into us to fight for resources,
other humans.
-Yeah. -Can't seem to get away from it.
I know. I just think we're mental.
Guns played a huge role in shaping America and also in killing people.
Even now, the use of firearms
is an integral part of their national identity.
How come Americans have the right to kill anyone they want with a gun?
Well, they don't.
Murder is illegal in the United States, but they do have the right to own weapons.
-They have the right to bear arms. -Correct.
-But bears don't have arms. -They do, actually.
Do they? I thought they were legs.
Well, I'm not a biologist,
but I suppose that when they stand up, they're probably arms.
With its cowboys and guns and steam train rides,
America became known as the land of the free,
which must have come as a surprise to all the slaves.
The barbaric practice of slavery was still prevalent in America,
particularly in the southern states.
But by finally thinking hard about the subject,
the people of the northern states made a horrifying discovery:
that inside each slave was an actual human person.
The North asked the South what kind of America it wanted to live in:
one where white people leeched off other races
while treating them as inferior
or one where they pretended they didn't?
The argument escalated into a civil war,
a time when America was almost as polarized as it is today.
The Civil War tore America apart, didn't it?
Brother turned on brother.
Did anyone get so conflicted they turned on themselves?
I don't think so.
Uh… There may have been some very strong debates within individuals
of which side to join, and I think that could be what you're perhaps referencing.
How come people say it was the first modern war
when you can see from the photos it was ages ago?
It's interesting you reference the photos
because it's the first war that photography really played a part.
Um, it was something where photographs
were part of the conflict and documenting the violence.
Must have been quite exciting, going to Snappy Snaps afterwards
and seeing which ones had turned out and which ones hadn't.
After four long years of war-related violence,
the North came out on top, which north is anyway.
It was a victory for the undisputed king of the North, Abraham Lincoln.
Who was Abraham Lincoln?
And why did he have all those weird tattoos on his tummy?
I have no idea what you're referring to with the tattoos,
but he is a US president, revered as probably the best US president.
Apparently he had, like, a snowman and a robin tattooed on his tummy
and the robin had a moustache.
I genuinely have no idea what you're referring to.
Now Lincoln was president, at long last slavery was abolished
and replaced with simple racial prejudice.
But Abraham Lincoln's story didn't have a happy ending.
Five days after the North won, a terrible fate befell him.
He was forced to go to the theater to watch a play.
He was put out of his misery by a kindly gunman.
But cruelly, not until the third act.
Abraham Lincoln was shot in the theater box, wasn't he?
Where is that on the body?
I think you're referring to the physical location he was in when he was shot,
which was in the presidential box at Ford's Theater in Washington, D.C.
And why was he shot?
Was it because he wouldn't take his hat off?
Because that's annoying in the theater, when someone's in front of you with a hat.
He was in the presidential box,
so there wasn't anyone behind him, as far as I know.
But he was shot by a man named John Wilkes Booth,
who was a believer in the Confederacy.
How did being shot in the head affect Lincoln's ability to lead?
Well, it ended it, because he died about 12 hours after he was shot.
-So he couldn't carry on. -No, not as a corpse, unfortunately.
Lincoln's light may have been snuffed out,
but America's was about to do the opposite.
Americans had been toying with electricity
ever since Benjamin Franklin put a key on a kite string
to unlock lightning from the sky.
Then, in 1878, Thomas Edison worked out how to use that power
to make something extraordinary.
It's hard to imagine a world where Edison didn't invent the light bulb.
And even if you did imagine it,
it would be too dark to see what was in it.
How did people see during the day before Edison invented light?
Light comes from the sun so people could see during the day because of the sun.
What they needed the light bulb for was during the night when there isn't any sun
and when you can't see.
So what did people use before light bulbs?
Well, they used candles or they used oil.
So we had daylight during the day and we had candles at night.
Yes.
So we didn't need light bulbs. His life's work was meaningless.
Another of Edison's incredible inventions
was the phonograph.
-Can you make it stop? -Yes, of course.
It's incredible, isn't it, that we're here now,
but that voice came from years ago.
If I speak into this trumpet bit,
can I ask the person a question about what it's like where they are?
No, you can't, because the recording was made over a hundred years ago.
But it's a phonograph. Doesn't it work like a phone?
Phonograph means "sound writing" in Greek.
So it doesn't mean "telephone."
So they can hear us but they can't reply.
Uh… I wouldn't say…
They can't hear us. We hear them, we hear their recording.
They can't hear us and they can't reply to us.
-Uh, I would say they can't, no. -So what's the point of it?
Well, it's so we can hear music and voice and sounds.
So can it record sounds that haven't happened yet?
Um…
No.
What about sounds that happened earlier?
If those sounds were recorded at the time.
It can't capture something that's been in the past.
It seems quite limited, to be honest.
Thanks to Edison's pornograph,
classical music could now bore an audience of millions.
You have to play classical music on an orchestra.
How do you play an orchestra?
Do you blow into it
or is it one of those ones where you rub a stick on the strings?
Yeah, so, the orchestra is not one particular instrument.
Yeah.
So an orchestra is the coming together of lots of different types of instruments.
-Right. More than one instrument. -More than one instrument.
So you need both hands and your mouth to play an orchestra.
Well, the conductor would need all of those things,
but the orchestra itself is an entity
that is made up of lots of different instruments.
So you couldn't blow a whole orchestra?
Thanks to Edison, the worlds of light and sound had been beaten into submission,
but another frontier remained stubbornly unconquered:
the world of sky.
People tried for years to build flying machines,
but most early pioneers found it hard to progress
beyond their first experimental death plunge.
But all that changed when Orville and Wilbur Wright brothers
mounted the first successful legal challenge
against the law of gravity.
So how far was the first flight?
Well, on that day when the Wright brothers carried out several flights,
they were typically of the order of just a few hundred feet.
They could have walked that.
Well, they could, but that wasn't the point.
When was the first flight that was long enough to need a toilet?
Once commercial flights developed, those flights became longer distance
and the passengers would have then needed some comforts,
like having a toilet on board.
That must've been a real moment,
the first time someone realized a plane needed a toilet.
That's more impressive than the Wright brothers.
I've never thought of that
as a particularly dramatic or exciting development, I'm afraid.
Why don't bicycles have toilets?
It would save you having to get off.
I might write that down and copyright it.
Even without a toilet, the Wright Brothers' historic flight
changed transportation forever,
in ways that still aren't fully understood.
The Wright Brothers did the first proper flight over a hundred years ago.
How come we're still not any closer to working out how aeroplanes actually work?
But we are. We know how they work today.
But in reality, how do they work?
Well, it's… we have mathematical equations
that describe the way the air flows over the wings of the aircraft.
Can you explain how they work without resorting to science?
It's difficult not to explain the science behind it,
but because of the shape of its wings,
the force upwards is bigger than the force downwards.
So that pushes the plane up into the air.
That's your theory. Do you want to hear my theory?
-Okay. -I think they run on belief.
It's just because we believe planes can fly that they do.
So the media has to keep up the pretense
or they're gonna start dropping out of the sky.
Same with Wi-Fi. There's no way that's real.
We just have to go along with this pantomime
or everything grinds to a halt.
The sky had been tamed. Next it was the road's turn.
It's hard to say who invented the first automobile.
Because so many people had a go,
the Wikipedia page is too long to bother reading.
But luckily it doesn't matter
because in the end, only one man became synonymous with cars,
the man who made the first blockbuster automobile.
He was named Henry Model-T Ford.
And in a stunning coincidence, so was his car.
With its four-cylinder, 2.9-liter engine pumping out 20 horsepower
and a top speed of 45 miles per hour,
the Model-T Ford was a truly terrible car,
even worse than whatever it is your mum drives.
There's nowhere to plug in your phone, no satnav or music system.
It doesn't even have a cup holder.
Nonetheless, it was marginally better than a horse
because it didn't kick you in the head if you went behind it.
And unlike on a train,
you weren't likely to find yourself seated next to a psychopath.
Unless you stopped to pick up a hitchhiker with a screwdriver in their pocket.
But Henry Model-T Ford's biggest masterstroke wasn't his car itself,
but the way it was made.
Instead of employing one person to slowly make a whole car on their own,
Ford employed lots of people to do just one tiny bit of the car each
over and over again.
It was a revolution in workplace tedium and human meaninglessness.
Mass production needed a mass human workforce.
Millions flocked to the USA for a go on the American dream.
The need for bigger vessels led to the invention of the Titan 1C,
the world's first single-use submarine.
For years, man had stared at the ocean, longing to sink like a stone,
and the Titan 1C would make that dream come true.
It was a huge success.
On her maiden voyage, the Titan 1C
sailed straight from Southampton to the bottom of the sea,
where the brave explorers could live in the lap of luxury
for the few moments it took for them to discover
that the atmosphere on the ocean floor was non-breathable.
Having conquered light, sound, the sky, the road and the bottom of the ocean,
humankind was about to discover something it hadn't even heard of before,
courtesy of female scientist and woman "Mary Curry,"
lady father of radiation.
How did Marie Curie realize
that she'd discovered radioactivity if it's invisible?
Marie Curie invented the word "radioactivity."
And radioactivity is when a substance, like radium, polonium, plutonium,
gives off lots of energy and disintegrate naturally.
So it's a real thing, even though it's invisible.
Lots of real things are invisible, yes.
So it's like chakras and energy fields,
you know, like the ones you get on the inside of your face
that connect to your star signs
and affect the way you digest gluten.
They're real, aren't they?
-Well, I don't think that they are real. -I think they are real.
Well, lots of people--
My Aunt Carol realigns people's chakras. She charges 80 quid an hour.
I think if she was earning that kind of money,
it's not nonsense, is it?
Tragically, Curie's curiosity was fatal.
Long-term exposure to radiation is thought to have contributed to her death.
It's not fair, is it?
When a male scientist like Bruce Banner gets exposed to gamma radiation,
he gets to be, like, a superhero, doesn't he?
He gets his own comic book and movie franchise.
Marie Curie just gets killed.
You know, he got to be the Hulk.
That's not fair, is it? Is it the fault of the patriarchy?
Also, what is a patriarchy?
Meanwhile, other less female scientists were working on theories of their own.
Physicist and professional tongue model Albert Einstein
came up with his theory of relativity, E equals McTwo,
which to this day nobody understands.
I'm only mentioning it because it turns out to be important later.
Einstein reckoned nothing is faster than the speed of light,
but shadows go faster than light.
Like, if I shine a light from a torch against that wall
but I hold the torch behind my head,
my shadow gets there before the light does.
How would Einstein explain that?
I think he'd say that it's all happening so quickly that you can't see it properly.
He's always got an answer, hasn't he?
The 20th century got off to a cracking start,
with science shitting out innovation after innovation,
so quickly we can barely edit them together.
But some of these new inventions had a dark side.
They could be used to kill people, and not in a good way.
The First World War was known as "the war to end all wars,"
although some historians now argue it didn't.
But it was the first high-tech war,
with aeroplanes, machine guns and tanks
all rising up to fight the human beings that made them.
Despite having no beliefs or ideology or hearts or souls,
the killing machines were victorious.
The final score was weaponry 20 million, mankind nil.
When humans go to war, it always looks quite chaotic.
Is there a lot of shouting involved?
There tends to be an awful lot of shouting.
It can either be commands being shouted.
It could also be, you know, the screams of people dying.
So probably a risk of tinnitus for anyone standing nearby.
It's a real pity we keep doing it.
I'm not trying to be controversial,
but generally speaking, war does seem a bit of a shame.
Well, it does seem to be a particularly popular human activity.
Maybe it's just in our nature.
What makes us as creatures turn on each other like that?
And could you keep the answer to one short sentence?
Because otherwise they get really pissed off in the edit.
Fear, honor and interest.
Really? Those are the three?
That's it in a nutshell.
I don't know who edits this, but that's going to have to do.
The barbarism of World War I
inspired a wide range of harrowing war poems and pacifist literature,
published decades before the release of unrelated Belgian techno anthem
"Pump Up the Jam."
Millions of young men died during the war,
but fortunately, humankind had discovered a new kind of man:
the woman.
Women had always existed in the background of history,
largely being used as human pets for men,
tolerated for their magical ability to excrete fresh humans
through their front holes.
But in the early 20th century,
social scientists discovered something incredible:
that a woman could do anything a man could do,
without the need to talk about it.
They also got the vote.
Finally, women could choose which man would tell them what to do.
Women began to escape their traditional uniforms,
dressing less like haunted furniture and more like camp young boys.
They drank, smoked and danced at high speed,
at an appalling frame rate.
Meanwhile, in Hollywood,
a whole new kind of entertainment was being invented: movies.
Unlike with a book,
you didn't have to concentrate or use your imagination to enjoy a movie.
Anyone, even very lazy or stupid people, could enjoy themselves
by simply sitting down and staring at a screen, like you're doing now.
Nonetheless, early movies were completely shit, as you can see.
But it's thanks to early films like this
that we can see what life was really like in the olden days.
Everyone moved very quickly and fell over a lot.
Why do people in old films move so fast?
Is it because it was their first time on camera so they were nervous,
or because it was a silent film
so they couldn't hear the director yelling at them to slow down?
It's to do with the frame rate of the cameras
was different then to what it is now.
So it's our fault.
We're playing it back too fast and the actors are having to speed up
to make sure they can get all the story in before the end credits.
They must be panicking. What happens if they can't keep up?
Would the film cut to a room the actors aren't in yet?
Just footage of an empty room?
The actors are going at a regular speed.
It's just the speed of the playback
that makes them look like they're moving very quickly.
Could we communicate with the actors in the film
and tell them that it's all right, that they can calm down?
No. They'd all be dead by now.
Oh.
Early films had subtitles
so people could still watch them on their phones with the sound off.
But before too long, they figured out how to do sounds too.
What was more satisfactory to you?
Reading was redundant at last.
The written word's centuries-long era of tyranny was finally at an end.
But any sense humankind was embarking on a hopeful new era
was about to be shat through a bin bag.
Dark clouds were gathering over Europe
with a reboot of the World War franchise about to be unleashed.
Soon, the world was plunged into another global war,
and since this war run on even more terrible machinery than the previous one,
it seemed there would be no end to the carnage.
Then the Americans had an idea.
Instead of dropping thousands of little bombs on Japan
like they did to Germany,
what if they dropped just one big one?
Using Einstein's theories, which I cleverly mentioned earlier,
they began the Manhattan Project, run by men with hats on,
who came up with something fearsome:
an atomic bomb called Little Boy,
the most powerful and inaccurately named weapon ever used.
How powerful was Little Boy?
Put it this way:
if that bomb had been dropped
on my ex-boyfriend Sean's house in Westhoughton,
everything, from the Chequerbent roundabout on the A58
to the florist next to the Hart Common Golf Club,
would have been totally destroyed.
The initial blast would have vaporized Sean,
while the vintage Pac-Man arcade cabinet
he once spent my entire birthday weekend restoring
would have almost certainly been rendered unplayable
by the raging firestorm that followed.
Everything from Wigan to Bolton would be burnt to a crisp.
I'm talking Middlebrook, gone. Bickershaw, gone.
Hindley Green, forget it.
The unspeakable horror
of the atomic bomb ended World War II.
Everyone had had enough
and the world agreed for the second time in this episode to never have a war again,
a promise it wouldn't break for a full 52 seconds into episode five.
It's comforting, isn't it, to realize we don't have nuclear weapons these days?
Well, it depends who you mean by "we."
The British have got nuclear weapons
and have recently indeed decided to increase
the number of warheads that they possess.
Yeah, but they're blanks, aren't they? They're full of blanks.
No, not at all.
No, no, these are fully capable missile systems with nuclear warheads.
Many other states have them.
I'm afraid that nuclear war and the threat of nuclear destruction
remains very much with us.
Right, can we talk about something a bit more cheerful?
Anything you like.
-Do you like ABBA? -I love ABBA.
-Yeah? -Yeah.
-What's your favorite ABBA song? -"Dancing Queen."
"Dancing Queen," yeah.
Yeah, it's great, isn't it?
Next time we see how a cold war between East and West
paved the way for rock and roll,
which paved the way for countercultural hippies,
who paved the way for Steve Jobs to pave the way for computers and smartphones,
which paved the way for social media,
which would pave the way for undoing
all the progress humankind had made so far.
Social media has been polarizing people, hasn't it?
Like what's already happened to the bears.
-What bears? -Polar bears.