Original subtitles

The 20th century was a time

of incredible change.

(shouting in a foreign language)

Unspeakable horrors.

And amazing leaps of scientific discovery.

It was a century marked by events

that united and divided us,

from great feats to great wars.

(booming)

With advancements and setbacks

that showed us that power of many, the power of one.

I have a dream.

A century of revolutions,

evolutions,

and retributions.

He's been shot!

A century made by conflicts and crimes,

inventions and entertainment,

politics,

protests,

discoveries,

and disasters.

Oh the humanity!

We will count down

the 101 events of the 20th century.

Their stories form the tapestries of our history

and shape the world in which we live.

(dramatic music)

In this episode ...

It's the first time, really, the whole of the population

were drawn into the business of war.

But it created also a broader accessibility to culture.

It created an early form of our information society.

It completely transformed our understanding

and expectations of life and death.

(delicate music)

1960s America was a new Camelot,

a time of regeneration and expansion,

a nation looking with hope to the future,

and out to the stars.

But that dream will be shattered

on a sunny afternoon in Dallas.

(sobbing)

My fellow citizens of the world,

ask not what America will do for you

but what together we can do for the freedom of man.

(crowd applauding)

John Fitzgerald Kennedy was young, smart,

charming, and he had a young family of his own.

He brought the American people a sense

that they were being listened to

and represented in his short presidential term.

Firstly, of course, he is a very charismatic president.

He succeeds Eisenhower, who was the oldest man

to have held office at that time.

And he himself is the youngest elected president.

So it's a symbolic passing of the torch between generations.

Kennedy promises a kind of new leadership.

Everywhere he went,

crowds gathered to see the man

who held a world's weight lightly on young soldiers.

The events on the 22nd of November, 1963

left the American people reeling.

They lost their president in a very public shooting.

During a motorcade through Dallas,

the local residents were filming the excitement

as John and Jacqueline Kennedy drove through the streets.

They caught the action on film.

Its bumpy nature depicts the shocked reaction

of the one holding the camera. (gun popping)

Kennedy falls forward in the convertible.

And his panicked wife tries to help her fallen husband.

Taken to hospital, the president

was pronounced dead 30 minutes later.

A shocked nation weeps.

Across the country, around the world,

disbelief was the first reaction,

then a great outpouring of grief, shock, and revulsion.

90 minutes after the attack,

in a movie theater a few blocks from the scene,

Lee Harvey Oswald was arrested.

Against the wall.

These people have given me a hearing

without legal representation or anything.

Did you shoot the president?

I didn't shoot anybody.

No, sir.

Oswald worked in the book depository

on the cavalcade route from which the shot had come.

Equally as fast, aboard the jet leaving Dallas,

Vice President Lyndon Johnson,

standing beside Jackie Kennedy, in her blood-stained dress,

was sworn in as president.

America was still in shock about the day's events

when Oswald was shot dead on live television.

(gun firing)

He's been shot!

He's been shot!

Lee Oswald has been shot!

48 hours and seven minutes

after the president's death, his accused slayer is dead.

The killer, a dance hall owner named Jack Ruby,

was arrested, tried, sentenced to death, and died in prison.

Americans stayed home to watch

the blanket television coverage

on a national day of mourning following the tragedy,

feeling the death of their leader and the loss of hope

he had represented for their nation.

How 'bout you, sir?

What is your reaction?

He's the best man we ever had.

Believe me.

And I'm very sorry.

What was your reaction?

Well we were just completely shocked.

I think that the American people

have just suffered a great loss.

It was just such a terrible thing.

Their grieving was shared by much of the world.

Less than three years after taking office,

his body was brought back to Washington to lie in state,

and the world mourned for a man

who had given the world new hope.

The confusion that swept over the nation

as America tried to understand

each piece of the news in this short period

has fueled conspiracy theories ever since.

This man, Mark Lane,

has been asking for a fresh inquiry.

He's always claimed that five bullets were fired,

at least two of which came from the front,

which means at least two gunmen, and therefore a conspiracy.

The more we know now, the more likely it was

that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone.

But 50 years of less than conclusive evidence

breeds conspiracy ideas, and there are always books

and films to be made on who killed JFK.

Shock waves from the Kennedy assassination

continued throughout the 20th century.

The feeling that something was being hidden,

the mystique of the Kennedy clan,

the allure of Jackie all remain prominent.

Whether John F. Kennedy, as a president,

would have defined the age in which he lived

will never be known.

But his death is one of the great

punctuation points of this century.

(cheering)

(dramatic music)

On a June morning in 1914, a shot was fired.

It will begin a chain of events that would lead

to one of the bloodiest conflicts in human history.

(dramatic music)

At the start of 1914, much of the globe

was divided into spheres of influence.

In each sphere was one of the great empires

supported by a complex system of alliances.

On the morning of the 28th of June,

Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne

of the great Austro-Hungarian Empire,

was visiting the Bosnian capital, Sarajevo.

It was not a popular visit.

A Serbian-backed Bosnian independence group,

the Black Hand, planned an attack.

When the Archduke's car paused to change gear

outside a cafe, a Bosnian nationalist, Gavrilo Princip,

stepped from the crowd and fired shots

that killed the archduke and his wife Sophie.

From a pistol shot at Sarajevo,

the first of the great modern world wars exploded.

The first thing that the assassination did, of course,

is force Austria's hand; Austria needed to react.

The intention is to punish Serbia.

The question is how do you do it,

and if you do it, there's a danger that Russia,

who is allied to Serbia, will respond,

and so they needed German support.

The went to Germany and they said,

"Look, we're planning to take action.

"Will you support us?"

German gave effectively a blank check,

saying whatever happens, even if Russia

goes to war with you as a result of this, we'll support you.

Austria declared war on Serbia,

who called on Russia's support,

and the old system of alliances came to life.

(dramatic music)

Russia called on its ally, France.

Germany, to confront France, invaded Belgium,

whose neutrality had been pledged by Britain.

And she and her empire entered the conflict

on August the 4th.

The world was at war.

The Great War, the war to end all wars,

unleashed a scale of conflict and devastation

unprecedented in human history.

War.

It seemed as though the whole earth

had gone mad with the spirit of blood-lust.

Human life seemed as nothing, the cheapest thing

with which to satisfy the insatiable hunger

of the gods of war.

It was also the first war that civilians

were actually targeted behind the lines by bombers.

This was the first war where you had airplanes.

Cities were bombed in the UK.

London was bombed by zeppelins.

We bombed German cities.

And so it was the first time, really,

the whole of the population

were drawn into the business of war.

Or since history began, the gods of Mars

had never given humans such incredible power.

Never had war taken such a devastating toll.

The war that had happened

in such a sudden and seemingly careless way

that a century later historians

still argue about its causes,

it did much more than change military tactics;

it changed the map of the world and the balance of power.

Permanently.

In 1917, the United States of America entered the war.

And when the war was over, it having impoverished

the great states of Europe, the USA found itself

the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth.

Russia imploded after disastrous campaigns

on the eastern front.

The Romanovs, who had ruled

for hundreds of years, were gone.

The revolutionary government

was overthrown by the Bolsheviks.

And they made peace with Germany

so they could focus on the civil war

out of which would come the USSR.

The Ottoman Empire fell.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire was dismantled.

And Germany was defeated.

Kaiser Wilhelm abdicated, an armistice was signed,

and the guns finally fell silent

on the 11th hour of the 11th of November, 1918.

German troops were still on foreign soil,

and they were unwittingly setting the scene

for the rise of the dictators barely a decade later.

Could all that be because a teenager named Gavrilo Princip

emptied his revolver on a Sarajevo side street?

You could argue that the First World War

and the conditions of peace in the 1920s and 1930s

led directly to the Second World War,

and that of course led to the Cold War,

and ultimately, really, a lot of the situation,

geopolitical situation we find in the world today

you can trace all the way back to the First World War

and the assassination that caused it.

(upbeat electronic music)

From a prototype built in a garage

would come one of the greatest

technological revolutions in human history.

The rise of a device and a company

that would forever change the way we communicate.

The word "computer" was first used in the 17th century

to refer to someone who performed calculations.

By the Second World War, machines like Colossus

were being used to break enemy code

and read encrypted messages.

2,000 electronic tubes,

several thousand relays, 150 motors,

and about 200 miles of wire

are contained in this intricate apparatus.

These were large, static machines

that weighed tons and occupied entire rooms or buildings.

First transistors, and then microchips

saw the development of smaller,

faster, more productive machines.

In the '70s, the silicon chip

became the basis of a new generation of computerized devices

that looked sure to create a social

and industrial revolution as profound

as that of the first machine age nearly 200 years ago.

Photocopier company Xerox

created a prototype in 1973.

An individual unit that had mouse control,

a graphic user interface, and an ethernet connection.

Xerox Alto, that's the computer that Steve Jobs

and Bill Gates saw to get their idea,

their visions for Apple and Microsoft.

Just before the release of the Apple I,

personal computing was essentially a hobby activity

for a group of kind of dedicated electronic hobbyists.

And the Apple I really changed

that aspect of personal computing.

First demonstrated in May 1976,

the Apple company sold the Apple I for $666.66,

before replacing it in 1977 with the more practical

and user-friendly Apple II.

And when you look at an Apple II,

what you're seeing is a fully finished example

of industrial design.

It is a packaged, commercial product

ready to go to the consumer.

It's got a built-in interface, keyboard.

It could be hooked up to a color monitor.

And that actually became an industry standard then

for a lot of business applications

and really set the tone for personal

and business computing afterwards.

By the 1980s, computers

were sophisticated enough to hid their complex

technical aspects behind a user-friendly interface.

Individuals could afford and understand computers,

and the revolution was reaching every town,

home, school, and workplace.

Now, when I was a boy, an apple

was something you brought the teacher.

Today, you learn on an Apple.

The computer essentially took

all of the communications technologies and revolutions

that had occurred in the 19th and 20th century,

and bundled them together in one box.

And I think it's really difficult to fully understand

just what a great impact that's had on people's lives.

But certainly in terms of the internet

and the World Wide Web, that's had an enormous impact

on society that we are still living today.

The stage was set for computers

and digital technology to become completely mobile.

Work being conducted in the last few years of the 1990s

at Apple created small, light devices with all the functions

of the gigantic computers form the 1950s.

We arrive at the age of the smart device.

We see how a 20th century revolution

set up the dominant image of the 21st century.

(dramatic electronic music)

Almost a century after the end of the Civil War,

inequality and racial segregation persisted in America.

The Civil Rights Movement needed a voice,

one strong enough to make people listen.

[Martin Luther King, Jr] I have a dream today!

(crowd cheering)

At the March on Washington in 1963,

protesters from all over America came together

against discrimination and segregation.

They come by train.

They come by bus and by air.

They come from the north, the south, the east and west.

Few realize that, in a sense,

they are participants in an historical day.

16 speakers address the crowd,

but it was the words of the last to speak

that would resonate then and through the years.

He was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Well I think, first of all, that was his largest audience.

I was among the people who were there, by the way, in 1963.

So it was the biggest demonstration yet

of the civil rights struggle.

And Martin Luther King delivered the concluding speech.

And the fact that he was selected for that role

says something about his reputation as an orator.

And there's a great swell of cheers

to welcome Martin Luther King to the speaker's podium,

a man who stands as a symbol of all they are fighting for.

When he started to speak,

King read from his notes.

They were important words about the need for change.

The prepared speech was really about the American ideals

expressed in the Declaration of Independence:

life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,

that that should be the right of all people.

His question, then, is have we lived up to that?

Then something changed.

King all but abandoned his notes.

He started to preach.

When he finished that prepared remarks,

then I think he felt this needed to be something more,

and that something more was,

if we do live up to that promise, he envisioned a world

that was quite different from the world in 1963.

I have a dream ...

that one day ...

this nation will rise up ...

and live out the true meaning of his creeds.

We hold these truths to be self-evident,

that all men are created equal.

(cheering)

King's intensity revitalized the sleepy crowd.

His words infected them with his dream

and brought new fervor to the cause.

'Cause I have a dream ...

my poor little children ...

will one day live in a nation

where they will not be judged by the color of their skin

but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

(cheering and applauding)

But I think what made the speech really special

was that it, you needed to express a vision

for what might happen if we did live up to those ideals

and give that dream, that vision,

substance by describing an America beyond race.

Free at last, free at last!

Thank God almighty we are free at last!

(cheering)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

was speaking of discrimination against African Americans,

but the spirit of the speech endures

because it can be used to defend human rights

and the fight against any injustice anywhere.

King's galvanizing speech influenced the passing

of the Civil Rights Act of 1964

and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Many of us who were there

thought that the march was about getting

the Kennedy civil rights bill through Congress.

And he's saying, yeah, that's important,

but what's really important is realizing

the basic ideals on which this nation was based.

And his last book, Where Do We Go From Here?,

is written in 1967, so it's after the passage

of major civil rights legislation,

but he's still asking where do we go from here,

and I think we still need to ask that question.

Where do we go from here?

(dramatic music)

In the early 1900s, scientists and inventors

were looking for faster ways of communicating

across long distances.

The result would usher in the age of broadcasting,

bringing the world into people's homes,

from sitcoms and soap operas to news on the hour.

(radio crackling)

Inventor Guglielmo Marconi was fascinated by invisible waves

and how they could travel.

Guglielmo Marconi was a founding father of radio.

He was an Italian inventor.

He didn't invent radio.

You could say that James Clark Maxwell invented radio

by postulating that there were electromagnetic waves

that traveled at the speed of light,

and it was Marconi and others who learnt how to put signals

on those electromagnetic waves.

He was soon able to broadcast the waves

up to several hundred meters.

In December 1901, his team in Cornwall

transmitted an S in morse code hundreds of kilometers

to the St. John's Signal Hill.

Radio was born and quickly became a standard

in seafaring vessels.

It famously made news when a radio transmission

alerted shipping to the fate of the Titanic,

which meant saving 703 lives.

Guglielmo Marconi, his famous signal CQD

was the first used for distress calls.

The Titanic was one of the earliest tragedies

to be mitigated by his invention.

As radio became established

as in-home entertainment, audiences grew.

Advertisers and more broadcasters followed.

In the radio studios of America,

the technicians, the entertainers, the commentators,

the administrative personnel daily unite their efforts

in the creation of programs to please

and entertain a vast radio public.

It was the first mass medium

that came into people's homes.

It allowed people to hear events with far quicker lead times

than the old days of newspapers.

The King arrives at broadcasting house,

and alone in a small studio makes his pronouncement

in these memorable words.

As more broadcasters took up their microphones,

frequencies had to be allocated.

Interference decreased further

as innovation modulated the airwaves.

Scientific progression created

a more user-friendly experience for the variety show,

the discussion, and the radio play.

Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater Company

dramatized the classics, until their broadcast,

the night before Halloween in 1938.

The company performed an adaptation of War of the Worlds.

The War of the Worlds broadcast became very famous

because it created a sense of panic,

allegedly, among large numbers of its radio audience.

It was a radio enactment of H.G. Wells's famous book,

done with voice and sound effect.

(overlapping shouts)

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the most terrifying thing

I've ever witnessed.

Eyes are black and they gleam like a serpent.

The mouth is kind of V-shaped

with saliva dripping from its limbless lips

that seem to ooze, quiver, and pulsate,

and the monster, or whatever it is, can hardly move!

The probability is that reaction

to the broadcast was grossly overstated by the newspapers.

That indicates that the growing popularity of the radio

was threatening the press, which hoped

that publicizing such a sensation may provoke

stricter government control of the airwaves.

But it was too late.

Radio was profitable, and it was here to stay.

By 1925, you could buy ready-made sets.

You just plugged them in or used batteries,

switched the dial, put some earphones on

or then a loudspeaker, and you could hear the radio.

But it created also a broader accessibility to culture,

to information, to news, to weather.

It created an early form of our information society.

Radio evolved over many years

with the work of many inventors.

From morse code to radio plays

to presidential fireside chats

to news broadcasts, Marconi's invention

became an enormous influence on the 20th century.

(lively string music)

Bacteria was once the scourge of mankind.

Left unchecked, ti would multiply

until the human body could no longer fight back,

until a fateful discovery in a messy lab

changed the course of modern medicine.

The beginning of the story of antibiotics is disputed.

It can arguably attributed to the work

of a man named Alexander Fleming,

its discovery a result of his belief

that lab cleanliness was a choice rather than a necessity.

In 1928, Fleming's desk was a mess.

Petri dishes spilled into each other,

cross-contaminating their samples.

He was working and looking at them,

and he'd been sick that week

and he sneezed into his Petri dish,

and so that plate's ruined.

He puts it to the side, and he went off on holiday.

And he came back from holidays and looked at that plate,

and it was growing a whole bunch of mold.

But around some of those colonies of mold

there was this blank space where no bacteria was growing,

because that mold was killing the bacteria.

Fleming published a paper

about separating samples and moved on.

Like many discoveries, what Fleming noted

lay dormant for 10 years, until Howard Florey,

with fellow scientist Ernst Chain and their team,

worked to develop the miracle mold

so that it could be put to medical use.

What he knew was that he couldn't solve it alone,

and so he did something that was really

quite uncommon at the time: he pulled together

people's expertise and information from this wide net

of science and housed them under one roof.

He had biologists, bacteriologists, pathologists,

clinical doctors, all different styles of scientists

working on the one problem and then coming together

and discussing all of their different parts

of that problem together.

And it was that collaboration that really created

this world-first antibiotic.

Unfortunately, Britain was not equipped

for the necessarily high yield,

as their labs were tied up in the war effort.

So Florey took it to the U.S.

In June 1941, there was brought

to the United States a tiny flask of the living mold.

The altruistic men of science

did not even patent their work

before taking it across the sea.

The Americans successfully improved its productivity.

Through mass production methods,

America is continually increasing its output of Penicillin,

the new drug the affects almost miraculous cures.

The first trial, on the infected cheek

of Albert Alexander, was a partial success.

But unfortunately, the limited supply ran out

and the 43-year-old policeman died from his wounds.

Supply was still growing, but the war restricted its use

to the masses of injured soldiers

and cases where the treatment had failed.

By the war's end in 1945, supply vastly improved

and restrictions were dropped.

By the end of the century, the class of drugs

had become so widespread that most people

in the developed world will have been prescribed

an antibiotic during childhood.

Penicillin changed the world.

It completely transformed our understanding

and expectations of life and death.

Women and children often died in childbirth.

People who got pneumonia, a third of them would die.

80% of common infections that people got

from scratches in their day-to-day lives

went to quite serious infections and often death.

So, Penicillin, antibiotics, revolutionized the way

that people dealt with their day-to-day lives

and their relationship with infections.

Other discoveries to come out

of the original research had led to the development

of more than 60 kinds of antibiotics,

able to fight stronger strains of bacteria.

As resistant strains evolve and mutate,

the research continues in an unbroken line

from Alexander Fleming's Petri dish.

(curious music)

A nation divided by the color of its citizens' skin.

A blatant government policy of racial discrimination

reviled and protested around the world.

A change that many fought hard to achieve.

One that was long overdue.

South Africa's apartheid policy divided families,

communities, and the country into fragments.

The word "apartheid" means apartness.

In the context of South Africa,

it was fused with this ideology

of white purity and supremacy.

The apartheid laws had been set up

on the 1948 program of racial registration.

The African National Congress,

and then the Pan Africanist Congress

initially protested peacefully,

but were met with rifle fire and imprisonment,

notably in the infamous Sharpeville massacre of 1960.

Apartheid remains rigidly enforced.

There are over 12 million Africans

to two-and-a-half million white people.

The shooting at Sharpeville,

in which many Africans died, shocked the world

as evidence of the dangers of the situation.

Soon, protestors became

more active in their fight.

Nelson Mandela led the armed wing Spear of the Nation

at the African National Congress.

There are many people who feel that it is useless

and futile for us to continue talking peace

and non-violence against a government

whose reply is all these savage attacks

on an unarmed and defenseless people.

He was involved in every protest

and was an outspoken critic,

and for this reason was charged with high treason.

Mandela would spend 27 years in prison,

receiving worse treatment than the white inmates.

His plight spurred the anti-apartheid feeling

within the country and around the world,

putting pressure on the South African government.

Nelson Mandela in prison

became a much more globally known figure ...

than Nelson Mandela outside prison.

And he was a very powerful contributing factor

when it came to the downfall of apartheid.

As the attitude of the rest of the world changed,

policies toward South Africa hardened,

both in trade and in sports.

In Sydney, a force of 600 police

prepare for a massive anti-apartheid demonstration

at the South African Springboks rugby match.

In 1989, the newly-elected leader

of South Africa, F.W. de Klerk recognized that change

was needed or the republic would collapse.

De Klerk was saying, look, we can't carry on

the way we are; otherwise, we will implode.

His government negotiated with Mandela

through house arrest to his eventual freedom in 1990.

There's Mr. Mandela, Mr. Neslon Mandela,

a free man, taking his first steps into a new South Africa.

Mandela lost no time

in renewing his efforts to end apartheid.

By this time, the South African government recognized

that its policy was no longer tenable

in the international climate.

De Klerk began repealing the laws behind apartheid.

The South African statute book

will be devoid within months of the remnants

of the racially discriminatory legislation

which have become known as the cornerstones of apartheid.

The immediate impact of the end of apartheid

was, I think, one of relief.

The rest the the world went, "Phew!

"That's the end of that."

This is a country that has pockmarked

the entire 20th century.

It's flown in the face of global opinion

and stuck to its guns with this vicious,

oppressive, irrational system

that is at odds with the rest of the world.

The end of apartheid

was also an end of a way of thinking

synonymous with the empires of the past centuries.

In July 1993, the nationalist government

agreed to an election including all races.

You hold the future in your hands.

In 1994, the republic elected

its first black president, Nelson Mandela.

A new constitution came into effect in that year,

finally ending the policy of apartheid.

This is one of the most important moments

in the life of our country.

I stand before you filled with deep pride and joy.

(cheering)

(somber music)

In 1917, two revolutions

would bring down the Russian empire in a matter of months.

In its wake would emerge a completely new political system

and a new global superpower.

Imperial Russia, the champion of Slavdom,

had entered the First World War in 1914.

(booming)

Success in battle was short-lived,

and military disasters were catastrophic

and weakened the empire.

By the start of 1917, Russia was gripped

with severe shortages.

If not teetering on the edge of starvation,

so there was a loss of faith in the capacity

of the tsarist government and the Tsar himself

to actually continue prosecuting a war

that was coming at such extraordinary social cost.

On the 8th of March,

female Petrograd factory workers finished their shift

and were forced to queue for bread that wasn't available.

Their street protest attracted others,

and by the evening, 100,000 workers were protesting

and declaring a strike of their labor.

1917.

A demonstration is St. Petersburg starts

over a simple demand for a higher bread ration,

gets out of hand, includes a new demand:

transfer of power from the Tsar to an elected parliament.

The Tsar reacts in customary fashion,

turns his troops loose on the demonstrators.

But something goes wrong.

As the crisis escalated,

Tsar Nicholas was forced to abdicate.

The unexpected, accidental revolution created a vacuum,

which an ill-prepared provisional government tried to fill.

The inability of that provisional government

to actually address the concerns that had brought about

the fall of the autocracy in the first place

actually sees the deepening radicalization ...

of the ordinary people on the streets, in the countryside.

Conditions were right

for another political group to challenge for power.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, observing events

from exile in Switzerland, began to encourage

his Bolshevik supporters to take advantage of the chaos.

On the 7th of November, armed Bolsheviks stormed

the Winter Palace, arresting the provisional government.

They ousted it by virtually a bloodless insurrection.

There's a very famous image, of course, and paintings

and films about the taking of the Winter Palace,

but in fact it wasn't quite as dramatic as all that.

In fact, more people were killed

during Sergei Eisenstein's filmed reenactment of the event.

But it was an event that installed

the new Bolshevik government,

which began peace negotiations with Germany.

Fearing the former Tsar and his family

will be a rallying point for opposing factions,

Lenin ordered the deaths of the royal family.

By 1921, the Red Army had occupied

all the independent republics of the defunct Russian empire.

In 1922, Moscow proclaimed the creation

of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,

with the Russian communist party the center of power.

I would say almost all of the major events

in 20th century history have been, in one way or other,

defined by what started out as a revolution

in the city of Petrograd in 1917.

Although Lenin had led his supporters

to victory and created a new system of government,

his growing incapacity from 1922 created an opportunity

for someone to step up and assume the mantle.

Not quite out of the shadows stepped Joseph Stalin,

the one man Lenin had warned against.

(clapping)

Lenin died in 19124.

Under Stalin, the USSR would be transformed

into one of the world's superpowers,

through the sacrifices of collectivization,

the famines of the Great Leap Forward,

and above all through the war against Hitler,

in which Stalin led them from disaster to triumph.

(somber music)

The Second World War ended in Europe in May 1945.

But it was still being waged on land and at sea

in the Asia pacific.

(booming)

Until a weapon of unprecedented power

would be used against a civilian population,

bringing the war to an abrupt and shocking end.

The Manhattan Project began in 1940 with a deadly purpose.

The Allies were pooling their resources

to unlock the destructive power of the atom.

Nuclear fission as a process was discovered in 1938.

And just around the time that war

was starting to break out in Europe,

Albert Einstein and others drew the attention

of President Roosevelt to the idea that the fission process

might be used to produce a highly destructive weapon.

After feasibility studies studies had been conducted,

in 1941 Roosevelt signed off on the idea

of a program to develop an atomic bomb.

As the Japanese fought on,

it was estimated that an American invasion

of the home islands would cost

more than a million American lives.

Now the war in the Far East

is by now means an easy affair.

The cost in human lives is appallingly heavy.

So the order was given,

and on August 6th, 1945 and atomic bomb

was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.

As they approach the target area,

the weapon is checked for the last time.

(dial clicking)

(rumbling)

The bomb, nicknamed Little Boy,

missed its civilian target, the Aioi Bridge,

by approximately 300 meters,

but it wiped out approximately 80,000 people instantly

and destroyed most of the city.

The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor.

They have been repaid manyfold.

With this bomb we have now added

a new and revolutionary increase in destruction.

Those close to the epicenter

of the blast were obliterated.

In some cases, all that was left was a shadow

burned into the wall and ground behind them.

In stone etched by heat

which reached thousands of degrees,

a monument recorded the passage of the blast,

and burned into the pavement was the silhouette

of one of the many who perished on that fateful day.

The death toll included 90%

of the city's doctors and nurses,

limiting the medical response to this new weapon.

Another 60,000 people would die within months

from radiation-related diseases.

Three days after Hiroshima, the Japanese government,

having failed to offer unconditional surrender,

a second plane flew past cloud-covered Kakara

to a clearer target.

A few days later, a second atomic terror

was loosed on Nagasaki.

Although the end of Japan's aggression

was in sight before atomic bombings,

it was this terrific force

that finally signed her death warrant.

Six days after the bombings, on August 15th,

the emperor Hirohito announced

Japan's unconditional surrender.

Almost instantaneously people realized

that this is a very, very different weapon,

and there is a realization that,

although people are of course happy

that after the bomb has been dropped

on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that the war is ended,

there is also an understanding that,

if the Japanese surrendered as a result of this weapon,

it must have been a very terrible weapon.

Though the atomic bomb ended the Pacific War,

it also graphically demonstrated

the power of this new weapon.

The power of the atom bomb was not theoretical.

What had been made visible contributed

to the deterrent effect that kept the peace

between the world's two superpowers.

Many people think that the development of atomic weapons

and subsequently nuclear weapons

has had a effect of actually insuring against

great power conflict or superpower conflict.

It's certainly the case that Kennedy and Khrushchev,

during the Cuban Missile Crisis,

were led and influenced very much

towards the idea that a solution

would be better than warfare

because they both had a quite strong impression

of what nuclear warfare would be like.

The leaders of the two superpowers

came close to the brink in 1962's nuclear standoff.

But they didn't want to push the button

on missiles being deployed.

The bomb was never meant to be used again.

You only really get to be unlucky once.

And as we know, an awful lot of damage

can result from nuclear emissions

of the sort that would see a result

from the use of nuclear weapons.

Fear remains of the deadly effect

of the atomic bomb.

Its capacity to unleash such devastation

has created the idea of mutually assured destruction.

With the spread of nuclear power to other volatile powers,

that threat has not diminished.

(dramatic electronic music)

It began with a pledge that symbolized

all the great hopes of the early 1960s,

an idea that would take almost a decade to make reality,

an achievement that would redefine our science,

our technology, and our place

in the universe. We have a liftoff!

32 minutes past the hour.

Liftoff on Apollo 11.

"Man is not made

"to go about safe and comfortable.

"He is constantly being driven to do unreasonable things.

"Some force impels him, and go he must,"

H.G. Wells, author of The First Men in the Moon.

Humans have always wanted this desire

to conquest and explore new territories.

This is why we do science, right?

It is to understand the things we don't understand.

I believe that this nation should commit itself,

to achieving the goal, before this decade is out,

of landing a man on the moon

and returning him safely to the Earth.

When Kennedy made his pledge to reach the moon,

America was the underdog in the space race.

They would recruit 400,000 scientists and technicians

in an effort to be the first to reach

this important milestone, work that culminated

in the launch of Apollo 11 in 1969.

The Apollo preparations

have been the most comprehensive

of any one enterprise in the history of man.

The world watched as multi-stage Apollo 11

launched from platform 39A at Cape Canaveral.

Three, two, one, zero.

Liftoff!

What may be significant about the Apollo 11 moon landing

is that it's an event that the world watched together.

The international satellite system

had been put into place just beforehand,

and the whole world, wherever you were,

as long as you had access to a television,

could tune in and see this event happening

all at the same time.

Almost everyone who could

gathered around television sets in schools,

homes, workplaces, and public spaces

to see Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin

leave the Eagle lander to walk on the moon.

Okay, Neil,

we can see you coming down the ladder now.

I think to think about the Apollo landing,

you also have to think about the world at the time.

You have the Cold War going on.

In the U.S. you have civil rights movements.

You have quite a bit of turmoil.

And here the whole world paused and was saying

this is something humanity has done.

Armstrong and Aldrin were on the surface

for about two hours, taking measurements

and collecting samples.

Hello Neil and Buzz.

I'm talking to you by telephone

from the Oval room at the White House.

Because of what you have done,

the heavens have become a part of man's world.

Besides being an inspirational moment

in landing humans on the moon,

it did have actually profound scientific impacts.

But we now know the moon is drifting away.

We now know our days are getting longer.

We have to fundamentally correct for this in our time.

The understanding that the moon probably came from the Earth

with an early collision between Mars

or something like Mars and the Earth

was because we had lunar rocks.

The moon landing had given mankind

the understanding it needed for future innovation.

Many breakthroughs followed in the Apollo program.

The technology involved, while the computer power

is less than a modern-day iPhone,

it was a distinct change in how we analyze data,

communicated with space.

So the knockoffs and the provocations

of all of these scientific questions and discoveries,

because we did something we never thought possible,

opened up a new world,

so it was a marvel of the 20th century.

The science of Apollo is not merely concerned

with samples from past milestones, yesterday's missions.

In a special room in Houston, men sit at consoles

and command instruments on the moon

to send them today's data.

One could argue that the real significance

of space exploration is the perspective

it's given us back on our own planet.

It's the astronauts who travel to the moon,

who take photographs of this small, fragile,

rather beautiful-looking planet.

And in some senses, it's that perspective

that people are more attached to.

The moon landing demonstrated

momentous advances in science and engineering

which continue to propel us into the 21st century.

It was an unparalleled feat of human achievement

that brought the world together.

When people try and say, "Do you remember that moment?"

they say it's like the Apollo 11 landing.

This is a moment that people use as a measuring stick.

I think that in itself is the answer of

to where we view this as, and it will be.

People are gonna be like,

"Oh, this is our generation's moon landing."

That's what someone's gonna say:

this is like what they experienced in 1969.

It is the measuring stick to all other events,

and that by itself has to say

it's one of the most influential events of the 20th century.

The moon landing changed

our sense of ourselves and of our planet,

who we are, where we are, and what we can do.

It was ...

as the first man famously observed ...

That's one small step for man,

one giant leap for mankind.

(rousing music)