[Gear noises]
Would you do me favor?
I'd like to stop talking, and when I do
take a look at the room you're in and above all, at the man-made objects
in that room that surround you,
the television set, the lights, the phone, and so on,
and ask yourself what those objects do to your life
just because they're there.
Go ahead.
Well, that is what this series is going to be all about.
It's about the things that surround you
in the modern world
and just because they're there,
shaped the way you think and behave, and why they exist in the form they do.
And who or what was responsible for them
existing at all.
The search for those clues will take us all over the world
and 12,000 years into the past,
because it's in those strange places,
and in those long gone centuries
that the secret of the modern world lies.
And you'd never believe the extraordinary things
that led to us being the way we are today.
Things like, for instance, why a 16th century doctor
at the court of Queen Elizabeth
did something that made possible for you
To watch this screen, now.
Or the fact, that, because 18th century merchants
Were worried about ship's bottoms you have nylon to wear.
Or why a group of french monks
And their involvement with sheep rearing
helped to give the modern world, the computer.
Or what medieval europeans did with their fire in winter,
that led to motorcar manufacture.
[Prayer]
The story of the events and the people who over centuries
came together to bring us in from the cold,
and to wrap us in a warm blanket of technology,
is a matter of vital importance!
Since more and more of that technology
infiltrates every aspect of our lives.
It's become a life support system
without which we can't survive.
And yet, how much of it do we understand?
Do I bother myself with the reality of what happens when I get into a big steel box,
press a button, and rise into the sky?
Of course, i don't.
I take going up in the world like that, for granted
We all do,
and as the years of the 20th century have gone by
the things we take for granted have multiplied way beyond the ability of any individual
to understand in a lifetime.
The things around us
the man made inventions we provide ourselves with,
are like a vast network, each part of which is interdependent with all the others.
I mean, cross the road.
Whether or not a car coming around the corner knocks you down may have something to do
with a person you've never met fitting the brakes correctly.
Change anything in that network and the effects spread like ripples on a pond.
And all the things in that network have become so specialized
that only the people involved in making them
understand them.
I don't mean use them - anybody can use them.
Down there, is one of the biggest,
most complex cities in the world;
Full of people, using things *as if* they understood them
and sometimes
not even knowing they're doing it.
New york city
like all the other major high-Density population centers, scattered across the earth
Is a technology island.
It can neither feed, nor clothe, nor house, nor warm its inhabitants
Without supplies from outside.
Without those supplies, the entire massive structure
and the teeming millions it encloses,
would die.
And yet, in cities everywhere
We act as if that were not so.
We have no choice.
The pace of life in New York is set by the pace of the technology that serve it.
You just have to hope it will stay that way.
I'd like you to meet a few people who were in or near New York City
on a November evening, over a decade ago.
And the reason I'd like to meet them is because they all have one thing in common.
They were all brought to a sudden and catastrophic realization of how vulnerable they were...
...how dependent on one aspect
of that technological network I was talking about.
Because of what this did to their lives.
Now, until i was told what *this* is,
I was no more able to recognize what it is that you are now.
But watch what it did to those people.
And, if you look very carefully,
you'll see evidence of what this does in every second of what follows... ...now
It's one minute past 5:00 in the evening.
Rush-hour in downtown Manhattan.
800.000 people crowd onto subways
looking forward to home - to the end of this journey.
For most of them, the technology carrying them
Doesn't exist.
They take it for granted.
Two minutes past 5, Kennedy airport;
The usual evening departure rate.
Passengers with appointments in New Delhi, London, Tokyo.
Appointments they expect to keep.
And 200 planes due to arrive in the next 5 hours.
[Announcement]
No delays expected.
Three minutes past 5.
At the energy control center, downtown,
nothing special is happening.
It's the standard rush-hour condition in the main control room.
The time of day, when power consumption
starts to come up to a maximum,
as people head for home and meals get cooked.
It's cool outside, after a high of 58
the temperature's falling to an expected low of 39
with a predicted wind chill fact starts of 5 degrees.
The energy levels are more than enough to cope,
even on a chilly November evening.
Ten past 5:00, Mount Sinai hospital.
The patient, Mrs. Marconna, is expecting twins.
[Banging hammer]
(James Burke) 12 minutes past 5:00
The UN General Assembly in session
The speaker is President Roosevelt's son.
In their boxes, the interpreters.
The invisible support structure of the debate, whatever the language.
At the U.N., that's taked for granted.
(James Burke) In the subway,
Herbert Friedman, a lawyer, reads his paper on his way home to suburban Jamaica.
Al Haydock works for a publisher on 5th Avenue.
He passes the time doing a crossword.
Marjorie O'Shaughnessy also works for a publisher looking forward to spending a quiet evening at home.
Steve Boetty, late, been to a movie.
Bruce Singer, works iin Greenwich Village.
Bill Palmer is a student, Just been playing basketball.
And Hans Kramer: Insurance broker.
All these people take the subway every evening,
they expect to get home, they always do.
5:15, Kennedy Airport. At one of the international terminals on the board, Scandinavian Airlines 911.
Scandinavian 911 is on its way into Kennedy.
The pilot is veteran captain Carl Lustet.
Kennedy airport control, scandinavian 911
Weather information, Jenkins
5,000 feet, approaching riverhead.
Scandinavian 911, ROGER
1221 radio back to the final runway, four right
(James Burke) A clear moonlight night,
the flight manifests lists 89 passengers.
(James Burke) The descent into Kennedy is so far, uneventful.
It's now 15 minutes and 30 seconds past 5.
Announcement on public system
Please fasten your seatbelts.
The runaway lights appeared, two apart. Okay, nice feeling.
With the next contraction there,
You'll take a deep breath and push real hard, okay?.
The big one's about to start.
Take a deep breath and
Push, Okay?
(James Burke) At Mount Sinai hospital,
Ms. Markana is in labor.
Okay Peter, I think you can put her to sleep. (James Burke): The anesthetic being used at the time
Is a mixture of gases,
Including one called cyclopropane.
It's potentially explosive,
but everybody know that.
Okay, she's fairly sleep now. Okay, with the next contraction
we'll have a little bit of pressure.
All right, look; she's starting contraction now.
Just a little bit more.
Okay.
[Baby crying]
Okay guys, we've now got a baby.
(James burke) It's now exactly 16 minutes and 10 seconds past 5
one second later, several hundred miles
north west of the New York City THIS did what it was built to do.
with disastrous consequences.
You may have already guessed what kind of
technological network this is part of;
It's a bit of a Power Station.
The Power Station known as Adam Beck 2,
here at Niagara,
where electricity is generated
by the tremendous power of falling water.
The water turns turbine blades that make a shaft spin.
At the top of the shaft are magnets,
and they spin inside a cylinder up there,
that has copper wire coils on its inner wall.
The interaction between the spinning magnets
and the copper coils, makes electricity,
that's where THIS comes in.
It's a relay, and its job is to detect changes
in power going on to a transmission line; These up here.
Power flows north along these lines,
and on the particular evening in question,
this relay detected an increase in power on one of those lines,
that was above a pre-set limit
when that happened, magnets set around this metal cup
caused it to rotate, and that brought this on
to make a contact like this.
[Bang]
That contact was made
on the evening of november 9th, 1965,
at 16 minutes and 11 seconds past 5.
The effect was to cascade power off the overloaded line
and on to another, which overload
and tripped the next, until all five lines going north
had tripped out, dumping their entire load
onto lines going south.
Within seven seconds, the tremendous overload
began to take out generating stations all over northeastern America,
from Boston to New York,
as the network fell apart.
As each area went, it overloaded the next.
Within 10 seconds, the only major system left
was the great energy island of New York.
As the network fell apart,
links between one energy center and another, broke,
instead of 300,000 kilowatts coming into New York
to help meet demand, 1.5 million kilowatts
were draining out of the city to supply areas now cutt off from the network,
but still connected. Like Leeches, to the New York Generators.
As the overload hit the New York generators,
they too began to trip out.
[Siren]
As the lifeblood of the city drained, it went into spasm.
At the U.N, chaos,
the power to keep the lights on also served the interpreters.
[Interpreters at work]
And without interpreters,
trapped in their darkened boxes, deprived of access to the ears of the delegates,
the United Nations was suddenly and totally disunited,
as completely as if at war.
[Female interpreter]
The city's elevators stopped.
Perhaps the subways were the only technology
that people expected to fail. Here we go again.
(James Burke) 800.000 people were now deep in the ground,
under New York, caught in a technology trap,
most of them had never thought twice about.
As light went, so did the one
in Ms. Markana's operating field.
(Female nurse) Okay, i've got her.
(Male doctor) What the hell's going on?
(James Burke) It was now only ten minutes
since the crisis have been triggered
by the relay at Niagara, more than 500 miles away.
The generators continued to trip out,
and at the Kennedy airport, the radar screens went blank,
and flight 911 was in trouble.
Flag warning; Switch number 22 ILA
Okay.
Kennedy airport - yeah, who've we got?
Yeah, John, can you hold it? i'll take 200 if I can. What time did it go off?
Started at 2131 out, they can't hold on.
(James Burke) By 5:28, the time had come to protect the system
by deliberately switching what was left, off.
We shut down those lights in Broocklyn
it's the only thing left going ought to kill the supply in Broocklyn.
Shall we leave that in or shut down it down?
We've got to shut it down, i guess.
The system operator recommends shutting down Staten Island
[Roar of vehicles]
(James Burke) Over an area of 18 million square miles,
30 million people were now in darkness.
John, i've goton the phone.
[Roar of traffic]
(James Burke) Isolated from each other in small groups,
millions of people were still unaware
of the extent of the blackout, in the subway especially.
(Male voice) people started chatting -- But for the most part,
No one really got into it yet, because we thought
It was just another typical rush hour delay,
but it was dark, and that was kind of uncertain to be in such a crowd
but not to be able to to see anybody,
so one of the women had candles in her bag.
(Female voice) You know, i have some candles; maybe we can light them.
(James Burke) This abnormal business of actually talking
to anybody on the subway,
caught on briefly, all over New York.
(Female voice) Let's put some light on the situation. It's my birthday anyway.
Anybody feel like singing 'Happy Birthday' to me?. [Laughter]
Make a happy situation out of a terrible one.
(James Burke) But, while this journey had taken on a meaning
nobody expected so too at the hospital,
at ms. Markana's delivery of twins,
thanks to the anesthetic.
(Male doctor) There was then, a general scurry around to find flashlights
and I immediately commanded one,
so i can see what was happening.
One of the nurses whom i shall never forget,
Walked into the room, carrying a lighted candle.
Put the candle out. Get out of here.
What's going on? Get out of here,
I'm scared out of my mind, but especially with
the anesthetic agent, i had visions of all of us,
the whole place blowing up in one great conflagration.
(James Burke) The phone system was the only thing working,
if you could get a number.
[Conversation in french]
I can't see the runway.
(James Burke) And captain Lustet
Was learning the full extent of his predicament.
ILS, the landing aid that guided him in,
wasn't there anymore.
-- And needs to check the radio.
Kennedy airport control Scandinavian 911,
The ils went
(James Burke) The extraordinary thing in the subways
was that a full hour into the crisis,
nobody was trying to escape from the trap.
[Multiple voices]
(Male passenger) I just assumed that something went wrong
with the particular train that i was riding on.
There was a feeling of "it's being something to wait out together".
There was nothing anybody could do about it,
no one knew anything about anything.
(James Burke) Put yourself in this position,
would you do any different?
Here they were, one hour into a major disaster,
and still trying to laugh their way out of it.
[Laughing and chatting]
(Male voice) People began to be very jovial, and began to sing
"Show me the way to go home" and everything
that people could think of,
that related to our plight.
At the hospital, darkness made no difference.
[Multiple voices]
(Male doctor) Well, the baby was delivered without the lights, because you didn't need the light for the delivery.
That's manipulative, remember, you're reaching up
into the uterus, grabbing a foot,
which is strictly by feel,
erupting the membranes and you bring the foot down.
The second baby was vigorous, and we prepared the babies.
(Female nurse) There you go, you're such a pretty girl, yes.
(James Burke) Captain Lustet had only a few second left
to make his decision.
He was at 2.000 feet, past the airport, and heading straight for Manhattan in the darkness.
[Roar of plane]
There was only one thing he could do: Lustet and 200 other jets that night,
landed with the help of radio working on planes sitting on the ground.
In the subway, people were still coping.
(Male passenger) About half an hour or an hour and a half,
people became very restless.
It was not, not pleasant; it was not very congenial,
but everybody felt scared.
Never been this late before.
you sit here and wonder and wonder,
And sent nobody down to help us.
[Multiple voices] Somebody knocked on the window
After about an hour and a half of thiss train employees would pass outside,
but not look at us and not asnwer us.
When we were banging on the windows and called out, they just ignored us.
I think he's a conductor from a train,
but i'm not sure.
(James Burke) Gradually, finally,
people began to realize where they were,
lost under the ground, helpless unless help came.
(Male voice) Well, we have a major power blackout,
it's at least hit the entire city.
Let's all relax; We'll be trying to get you off
As soon as possible, okay.
[Multiple voices] I don't knok how long this will take,
It's con edison
And it affects the entire city.
We have people coming by, evacuating the trains now, please relax
(James Burke) Ms. Markana found out what had happened to her,
though not the way she expected.
(Ms. Markana) How's that? When i woke up and i saw hall the candles
lit around the room, I thought I was dead.
And where was a priest standing nearby,
and for a minute there, I thought he had come to give me my latest rites,
and i was afraid that all my family when knew that I was --
and they came to light candles for me.
Don't be frightened now; you're going to be okay.
(James burke) And finally, as in all good faity stories, it was over.
(Male voice) And exactly 5 hours after the train stopped,
about 10:30 the train began to empty
by having all the passengers walk out
singly upon the catwalk.
(James Burke) A few days later, people were back
at their daily routine as if it had never happened,
the night New York became a trap, forgotten.
This is one of the more perfect examples
of the kind of technological trap that we set for ourselves.
The lift, the elevator; I mean, what is this?
It's a steel box with some buttons in it,
and, maybe, a trapdoor for emergency.
But whoever looks that close, Except when this happens, where is it?
and even in this situation, closed in,
with an escape route that we can't handle,
we behave like many of those new yorkers did.
We strike a light and we look around to see how badly things are.
And, if we find in this case, an emergency button,
absolutely great; we sit back,
and, we wait for help to come.
We wait for technology to come back and save our lives,
because it's inconceivable that it won't, isn't it?
I mean, if you admit that, you've got to admit
that every single day of your life,
in some form or other,
you unconsciously walk youself into a technology trap,
because that's the only way to live in the modern world.
So, you don't admit it, you say,
oh well, in the situation, we'll cope. But, what happens when the effects become
widespread, irreversible, devastating?
What happens when, what little resources
you have to help you cope, give up. Then what?
Well, in all the disaster scenarios you read,
what happens is that without power,
technologically based civilisation cracks up rapidly.
Without enough auxiliary power,
and most major cities don't have it,
organisation is imposible.
It's every man for himself, looting and arson follow,
and in a city not prepared to be a fortress,
supplies run out, fast. And, however frightening the thought
of leaving your technological room,
soon or later, there is no way to go
but out, away from the danger.
The minute you decide to move you're on your own,
in a way that no modern 20th century city dweller
has ever been, in his life.
And then the traps begin to close. To start with,
do you even know where to go in order to survive?
Did you manage to get a map before you left? And if you did, how do you get out?
Walk, drive until you run out of fuel?
Are you ahead of the millions of other people pouring down these roads, trying to do
just what you're trying to do?
And if they catch up with you,
have you got something they need?
And if you have, can you protect yourself?
Did you bring enough food and drink to last as long as necessary,
and if you didn't, where will you get, steal?
How far out will you have to push on,
until you're far enough out to be safe? And can you be sure that's far enough?
And even, if by some miracle, you finally make it,
do you know enough to recognize a place to stop when you see it?
I mean, what does survival without technology look like?
There'd be no signs up.
So, let's say that finally,
somewhere far out into the country,
you come across a place that looks right.
and, let's say that you've had the good sense,
and the good luck, to look for a farm,
because that's where food comes from, isn't it?
Okay, so it's a farm, so you decide to stop.
Has anybody got there first?
Or, are the owner still here?
Because you're going to need shelter
and people don't give their homes away,
they barricade themselves in.
So, sooner or later, exhausted and desperate,
you may have to make the decision to give up
and die or, to make somebody else give up and die
because they won't accept you in their home, voluntarily.
And, what in your comfortable urban life
has ever prepared you for that decision?
Okay, let's say by some miracle,
the place is empty and it's all yours. Is there enough food in the house?
How long would it last?
How would you cook it?
Wood fires; are you fit enough
to chop all the wood you need before winter comes?
If you're lucky, you've got livestock on the farm.
Great: meat, but can you slaughter
and bleed and butcheires,
Okay, supposing you manage that,
you've got enough meat to eat until you've eaten all the cows,
but at least you can, start running a farm. But, it's a modern farm, remember?
It's mechanized.
There's a gasoline pump, but it's empty.
So, you can't use -- The tractor.
What you need is horse and cart.
But, when did you last see a horse and cart on a modern farm?
And everything else here, the saw, the power drills,
the light, the sterilizer, the water supply,
the sewage system, the hoist, the milking parlor,
the pumps, and everything on this control panel
demands the one thing you don't have - electric power.
Everything on this farm that you found,
doesn't work.
The place is a trap.
But, there's nowhere else to go.
The only way you're going to survive is
if you find the one thing you need,
to keep on providing the food you're going to have,
and you don't need a mechanized version of that thing.
You need the kind,
people haven't used in a 100 years.
Ah, you need that kind of plough; you're saved.
Or are you, because What it comes down to
at this point is this, can you use a plough?
It's taken a series of miracles just to get you this far,
and here you are, with the biggest miracle of all,
a plough, and animals to pull it.
So, maybe after few days of fumbling around
with the harnesses and the bits and pieces,
you manage to yoke up the oxen and plough the land.
And then, and only then, can you say
that you have succeesully escaped the wreckage
of technological civilization, and lived off the land and survived.
if you know how to use the furrow, you plough,
I mean, can you tell the difference between an ear of corn and a geranium seed?
Do you know when to sow, ehatever it is you think it is?
Do you know when to harvest it,
and eat the bit that you think isn't poisonous.
I mean, it's no accident that the chain of events,
triggered off by that relay in the power station, back there in Niagara Falls ends here with the plough.
The relay itself doesn't matter, i mean,
any one of a million things could fail and cause
our complex civilization to colapse for an hour,
for a day, however long,
because that's when you find out the extent to which you are reliant on technology, and don't even know it.
That's when you see that, it's so interdependent,
you take one thing away and the whole thing falls down,
leaves you with nothing,
unless you can plough and survive,
and start the whole process off again, from scratch.
And, it's no accident that to do that, you have to have a plough.
Because it was the plough you that triggered everything off,
a long way back in the past,
After a different set of people also found out
that their comfortable life was falling apart --
-- in a world where events came to a point
where a fundamentally new way of life had to be found.
That's exactly what happened about 12,000 years ago
in maybe four places on the earth, Nothert India, Syria, Egypt and Central America.
It stopped raining and got very hot.
The result of that change in the weather was to lead an invention, that would trigger
the development of a civilization, that ends with us in the modern world.
Let me explain that.
You see, the high grasslands started to dry out,
became like this place, and the plants and the animals
that had sustained the wandering tribes, started to disappear.
People began to die.
There was only thing that survivors could do,
head for water, and so, down they came, into the great river valleys.
Here in Egypt, that river was the Nile
and the Nile was an extraordinary river.
It rose in two places,
from one, it brought rotting vegetation, and from the other, potash.
and any gardener will tell you what that means.
When it flooded every year, it dumped compost
and fertilizer onto the land, and the land bloomed.
Too well.
With easy flood, the population grew to where Not even the Nile could support it without help.
Faced with starvation, the river dwellers
tried planting grain by hand.
Not enough.
What solved their problem was an invention that triggered off a series of events,
because that invention was to trigger the beginnings of civilization.
This is the first great man-made trigger of change,
the plough, because with it,
you know how much harvest you're going to get next year,
and because of that, you know you're going to be here next year.
And after a while, when you can produce surplus food,
then, that's when things really start to move,
in the tiny settlements.
With regular food supplies, the population explodes. The village expands.
There are more buildings, and they're bigger
for bigger families, and they're more permanent. You domesticate animals for their milk
and their meat and their skin, because they're not there to hunt anymore.
and, basket weaving and the twisting of grass to do it,
teaches you how to spin flax, and that makes linen.
But, it's the grain that causes the fundamental change,
because with it, you can bake the bread
that is the staple diet on which everybody lives,
and you learn about ovens, and about the effects of heat on mus and brick.
But, above all, you have to have somewhere
to store the grain surplus, in pots.
But, there's so much surplus by now,
you need the posts to be made faster, and you need them to last longer.
So, the potter's wheel happens,
then comes the problem of, who does it belong to?
And the only answer to that is this, writing.
And the very first writing takes that form,
a name and a symbol for what's inside this pot,
or a lot of pots or an entire village granary. And so, the little villages grew with their huts
and their granary and then, almost out of nowhere,
it seems, that happened.
The oldest stone building in the world,
the step pyramid of king Zoser at Saqqara near Cairo,
built around 2700 B.C.
Instant sophisticated architecture
from mud huts, in one jump.
How did they do it?
Because of what they'd had to do to feed themselves,
irrigate.
Because the river flooded every year,
and destroyed landmarks and then, retreated, leaving the soil to dry out, they had to do two things:
find a way of measuring lands, so the farmer got his own fields back,
and a way of channeling the water away for use after the flood had gone.
The kind of measurement you need, to do those things,
involves geometry and the type of mathematics
a civil engineer uses,
and building canals teaches you to work stone.
[Hitting stone]
If you know stonework and geometry and mathematics,
you can build pyramids,
especially if a strong central government,
that was developed to run the irrigation schemes
in the first place, tells you to.
If the pharaoh said he wanted a pointed stone monument,
that's what he got.
Funny thing is, the same drough that drove everybody
down to the Nile, also preserved the things
they built, like their tombs, for thousands of years.
The stuff on the walls in this tomb for example,
is 4.500 years old, a kind of cartoon view of the civilizations the plough created.
I mean, look, here's the irrigation,
here are these people carrying water pots, you see them?
And, they carry them across and they pour the water
into a garden that has wall around it.
And then, over here, look, there's a fellow
doing a bit of weeding.
There's the plough, they domesticated oxen,
They tried to domesticate any animal that they can get their hand on.
I mean, take a look at this, animal flat on its back,
tie its back legs, hang on its front legs, stuff food down its throat,
and hope it'll learn to love you.
Didn't get too far with that one,
it was a hyena.
Well, you've got a growing community,
and plenty of spare food,
And you'll need to protect yourself.
So, making weapons becomes very important.
And here, on this wall, is the whole thing
about handling metals.
Look, here are the "Weights and Measure" people
checking on how much metal's going to be used.
Next to them, the furnace men,
You see the way they're raising the temperature?
They're blowing on these tubes to create a draft
in the furnace, to get the temperature high.
Next to them, here's the molten metal
being poured into a mold,
and here, a fellow's beating it flat.
Okay, you get yourself a kingdom,
you get what you deserve.
You get bureaucrats, here they are,
the scribes writing everything down. See the pens behind their ears?
In this case, they're noting taxes.
Here the people coming in to pay their taxes,
led persuasively by the local police.
Here's a policeman, with the rod of office,
more policemen, here's an egyptian scruff of the neck,
he obviously doesn't want pay. If you end uo not paying
they get out their whips, and they tie you to a pole.
And that's what you get for not coming up with the money.
So, you have a busy sophisticated society,
You have to have peopel at the top, in charge.
This is the tomb of one of them.
He was a kind of egyptian chancellor,
responsible directly to the king. There he is: his name was Miraluka.
By sometime around 3200 B.C.,
the entire 700-mile length of the Nile,
from the Mediterranean to Aswan,
was united and administered by officials like Miraluka,
each one running what was called a water province,
a section of the irrigation network,
and of the river, under his command.
What held it all togheter was the king's magic ability
as a god, to come up year after year,
with an inundation of the Nile,
and to know exactly how high the waters would do go,
of course, it wasn't magic, it was his astronomers.
They observed that one particular star, Sirius,
rises just before dawn on one particular day,
the 17th of july, every year,
and that day is one day before the flood begins.
They also saw that on average,
the flood itself came once every 365 days.
Now, you put those two facts together,
the star before dawn and the flood, and you've got yourself a calendar.
Under the calendar you can organize people, you can give them a date to do something on.
and for the King's ability to predict
how high the water would go,
well, you record the level of the flood every year
with a scratch on the wall.
And after a while, your experience will tell you,
early on, how high the water's going to be later.
Now in Egypt, where water is life,
that kind of knowledge and the ability to control,
gives you the power to build empires.
These are the great ancient temples of Karnak,
on the edge of the Nile, about 450 miles south of Cairo.
They were the center of egyptian religion build in the imperial of city of Thebes,
when the egyptian empire was at its height,
the greatest power in the world,
this was the New York of the time.
The temples were built over a period of about 2.000 years,
Each pharaoh adding his bit, living his name in stone to last forever.
Inside the temple domain, there were 65 towns, 433 gardens and orchards, 400.000 animals,
and it took 80.000 people just to run the place.
Small wonder that centuries afterwards,
the greeks and the romans came here, and gawked like peasants, at a civilization
that made their efforts look like well-dressed mud huts.
It still has that effect today.
You come here, from the great modern cities,
full of the immense power of modern technology
At your fingertips: press a button,
turn a switch,
and this place -- stops you dead.
And then, just when you think
you've got the measure of Karnak,
you come here at dawn, to the hall of columns,
one of the most massive structure ever built,
and anything i was going to say,
isn't enough.
Look at it.
[Dramatic music]
The egyptian built an empire,
and ran it with a handful of technology,
the wheel, the irrigation canals,
the loom, the calendar, pen and ink, some cutting tools, simple metallurgy,
and the plough, the invention that triggered it all off.
And yet, look hoe complex and sophisticated their civilization was, and how soon it happened
After that first man-made harvest, the egyptian plough,
and those of the few other civilizations that sprang up around the world
at the same time,
gave us control over nature,
and at the same time, tide us for good to the things that we invent,
so that tomorrow will be better than today.
The egyptians knew that, that's why they had gods,
to make sure that their systems didn't fail.
Karnak was the first great statement
of what technology could do with unlimited manpower,
and the approval of the gods.
Ironically, the modern equivalent lies again, in the desert.
This time, the nomads also settled by a river,
a river of oil.
But, what it took the pharaohs 4.000 years to build,
took the kuwaitis 4.000 days.
What's happened in Kuwait,
the change from a nomadic existence to being able to buy and use everything
modern technology has to offer,
has come in much less than one generation.
[Arabian music]
Kuwait represents the immense power of technology
used in a way most of us have never experienced,
because we've lived with a kind of change
it can bring, for more than a 100 years.
Here, it's been focused.
Change has been instant and total.
[Arabic language]
Kuwait has suddenly become like New York,
or any other of the great urban island of technology,
totally dependent on that technology, like them, without it,
Kuwait would return to the desert.
Hello, how are you?
Hey listen, I'm coming to spend my Christmas in New York, okay?
(James Burke) You see how increasingly,
the only way we, in the advanced industrial nations,
with our bewildering technology network can survive,
is by selling bewilderment and dependence on technology
to the rest of the world. Or is it not bewilderment and depence,
but a healthier, wealthier, better way of living,
than the old way?
And yet, whether or not you dress up technology
to look local, the technology network is the same.
And as it spreads, will it spread the ability
to use machines as we do, without understanding them.
Somebody said, a few years ago,
about the way our modern world affects us all,
"If you understand something today,
that means it must already be obsolete."
or, to put it in another way, never have so many people understood so little about so much.
So, why are we in this position? Why is our modern industrialized world
the way it is, and not some different way with different technology,
doing different things to us?
Well, that's what the rest of this series is going to look at.
You saw, just now, the plough and irrigation
kicked us all off.
And, that an invention acts rather like a trigger,
because once it's there, it changes the way things are.
And that change stimulates the production
of another invention,
which in turn, causes change and so on.
Why those inventions happened between 6.000 years ago
and now, where they happened and where they happened is a fascinating blend
of accident, genius, craftsmanship, geography,
religion, war, money, ambition.
Above all, at some point everybody is involved
in a business of change, not just the so-called great men,
given what they knew at the time and a moderate amount of what's up here
I hope to show you that you or I could have done
just what they did, or come close to it,
because at no time, did an invention
come out of thin air into somebody's head, like that.
You just had to put a number of bits and peices
that were already there, together, in the right way.
Following the trail of events, from some point in the past,
to a piece of modern technology,
is rather like a detective story
with you as the detective,
knowing only as much as the people in the past do,
and like them, having to guess
at what was likely to happen next.
So, the trigger that sets off the first
of those detective stories -- is that.
And i'd like to leave you with one question
before next time: why does a modern invention that fundamentally affects the lives
of every single human being on this planet,
begin 2.600 years ago,
with somebody doing this: [rubbing stone]?