Key Stages: 2 - 4

Description

PAYU Price Code link:  Price Code M

Episode Length 60 min

Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of our quest to master nature's most mysterious force - electricity. Until fairly recently it was seen as a magical power, but it is now the lifeblood of the modern world and underpins every aspect of our technological advancements. This series tells of dazzling leaps of imagination and extraordinary experiments - a story of maverick geniuses who used electricity to light up cities, to communicate across the seas and through the air, to create modern industry and to give us the digital revolution.

Episode 1: Spark
This episode tells the story of the very first 'natural philosophers' who started to unlock the mysteries of electricity. They studied its curious link to life, built strange and powerful instruments to create it and even tamed lightning. It shows what happened when the first real effort was made to understand electricity; how we learned to create and store it, before finally creating something that enabled us to make it at will - the battery.

Episode 2: The Age Of Invention
Just under 200 years ago scientists discovered something profound - that electricity is connected to another of nature's most fundamental forces, magnetism. In this episode, Jim discovers how harnessing the link between magnetism and electricity would completely transform the world, allowing us to generate a seemingly limitless amount of electric power which we could utilise to drive machines, communicate across continents and light our homes. This is the story of how scientists and engineers unlocked the nature of electricity in an extraordinary century of innovation and invention.

Episode 3:Revelations And Revolutions
Electricity is not just something that creates heat and light, it connects the world through networks and broadcasting. After centuries of man's experiments with electricity, this episode tells the story of how a new age of real understanding dawned - how we discovered electric fields and electromagnetic waves. Today we can hardly imagine life without electricity - it defines our era. As our understanding of it has increased so has our reliance upon it, and today we're on the brink of a new breakthrough, because we can understand the secret of electrical superconductivity we could again transform the world.

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