All language subtitles for DB85FB3754FBB1E20261CB921D4E4BD4_eng

Can you see me?

Can you hear me?

How?

I could be thousands of miles away...

and yet when you turn on whatever device
is bringing my image and voice to you...

I'm there.

Instantaneously.

How is that possible?

To our ancestors,
it would've seemed like sorcery.

For them, speed of communication...

was only as fast
as the swiftest horse or sailing ships.

Our messages travel invisibly
at the speed of light.

How did we attain such mythic powers?

It all began in the mind of one person.

A child of poverty
of whom nothing was expected.

In fact, if this man had not lived...

the world we know might not exist today.

Sooner or later, someone would've likely
figured out some of his discoveries.

But if Michael Faraday had never lived...

we might still be living
as our ancestors did in the 17th century.

Unaware of the armies of invisible servants
awaiting our commands.

This is the story of how we learned
to make electrons do our bidding.

In a way, it begins with the
greatest genius who ever lived...

Isaac Newton.

This is Woolsthorpe,
Newton's ancestral home.

He walked these fields,
tormented by mystery.

Newton, the man who
figured out the formula for

the motions of the
planets around the sun...

wanted to know, how does the sun
make the planets act that way...

without touching them?

How do all the apples know how to fall?

Another genius was puzzled
by another aspect of the same mystery.

You see, son?

No matter how I turn the compass,
the needle always points the same way.

Except.

But how? They do not touch.

I didn't hear
a "thank you," Albert.

I can still remember this.

The experience made a deep
and lasting impression on me.

Something deeply hidden
had to be behind things.

Between the lifetimes
of Einstein and Newton...

there lived another genius,
one of equal stature.

The man who solved the mystery
that stumped Newton...

also laid the foundation
for Einstein's revolutionary insights.

And for the way we live now.

In 1791, in a squalid slum
in the suburbs of London...

Michael Faraday was born.

He showed little promise at school.

Pray tell us a word
that begins with the letter R.

Well?

Wabbit?

The word is "rabbit."
Once again, and correctly this time.

Wabbit?

Do you mock me?

Have I not told you
how to pronounce the letter R?

Surely you can at least tell us your name?

Michael Fawaday, ma'am.

Take this ha'penny
and buy me a cane...

so that I may give your insolent brother
a proper flogging.

History does not record that
Michael Faraday ever attended school again.

Faraday took his family's fundamentalist
Christian faith to heart.

It would always remain a source of
strength, comfort and humility for him.

He was sent to work at a bookbindery
at the age of 13.

By day, he bound the books,
and by night, he read them.

It was the beginning of a
lifelong fascination with electricity.

After years of working in
the bookbindery, Faraday, now 21

yearned to escape to a larger world.

His big break came
when a customer gave him a ticket...

to a sensational new kind
of entertainment, science for the public.

And it started right here
at London's Royal Institution.

Humphry Davy was not only one
of the leading scientists of his day...

he discovered several chemical elements,
including calcium and sodium.

He was also a consummate showman...

and primitive demonstrations of electricity
never failed as a crowd pleaser.

May we have the lights lowered, please?

I am about to unleash the might
of the 2000 massive chemical batteries...

stored in the cellar beneath our feet.

And now, behold the power
of the mysterious force...

of electrical fluid to
illuminate our future.

Faraday was too busy taking notes
to applaud.

Faraday created a transcript
of Davy's lecture.

Using the skills he had learned
as an apprentice...

he bound them into this book.

Perhaps such a gift would bring him
to the attention of the great man.

Maybe this gesture could be a means
of escape to a much larger universe.

Good day, sir.

I wish you to deliver this parcel
to Sir Humphry.

It was a long shot, anyway.

But Faraday hoped something
would come of it.

And it did.

The experiment is ready for you now, sir.

Ampere tells me that poor Dulong lost
an eye and three fingers working with this.

My eyes!

My eyes!

When a chemical experiment
blew up in the face...

of the world-renowned scientist
Humphry Davy...

he remembered Michael Faraday...

the lad who had gone
through such lengths...

to copy down and bind the transcript
of his lecture.

You have a first-rate memory,
young man.

And I shall have temporary need
of a secretary.

Sir, I dream of a life in service
to science.

I would advise you
to stick to the bookbinding.

Science is a harsh mistress.

Surely, a person of your station
and modest means must have a trade.

Trade is vicious and selfish.

Men of science are amiable
and morally superior.

Heh. I take it I'm the first man
of science you've ever met.

Faraday made himself indispensable
to Davy.

The temporary job
became a permanent one...

and the Royal Institution
became his lifelong home.

By day, he assisted Davy in the lab.

At day's end, he climbed the stairs
to the little apartment...

where his beloved bride Sarah
was waiting.

Humphry Davy
and the chemist William Wollaston...

were experimenting
with a mysterious phenomenon...

one with potentially
far-reaching implications.

This is the identical setup
to Oersted's.

Now close the circuit, Davy,
and watch closely.

What could be driving the needle away
from the wire?

Damned if I know.

But it's as if the electric current...

makes the wire behave
like some kind of magnet.

Electricity must have something
to do with magnetism.

Now, if we could only get it
to turn continuously...

imagine what might be accomplished
if we could put these forces to work.

After you tidy up, Faraday...

you might see what you can
make of it. Huh? Heh-heh-heh.

Davy may have been having a bit of fun
at the expense of his young assistant...

but Faraday was on fire.

Up to now, electricity had been nothing
more than an entertaining novelty toy.

It could make a light flash for an instant
or turn a compass needle briefly...

but it had no practical application.

Faraday immediately set about
designing the experiment...

devoting every moment of his
spare time to the problem.

If Faraday succeeded, he would be
putting an infinitely large, invisible...

and as-yet-undiscovered army of electrons
at the command of human whim.

How does a revolution begin?

Sometimes it doesn't take much.

A piece of metal, a bowl of mercury,
a bit of cork.

Sarah, dear,
send your little brother down.

I'm about to try something new,
and I want him to see it.

Why don't you
do the honors, Georgie?

There she goes. There she goes!
Whoo-hoo!

This was the first motor...

converting electric current
into continuous mechanical motion.

Looks pretty feeble, right?

But that turning spindle
is the beginning of a revolution...

one that dwarfs all the shots fired
and bombs ever detonated...

in the sheer magnitude
of its effect on our civilization.

Try to imagine all the businesses,
industries, technologies...

transformations of the way we live
that have their beginnings...

in that ecstatic moment
in Michael Faraday's laboratory.

News of Faraday's invention
spread quickly...

and suddenly, Davy's assistant
was the toast of London.

Davy didn't take it well.

He had, after all,
discovered all those elements.

Now people were saying
that his greatest discovery...

was Michael Faraday.

Davy made sure that Faraday wouldn't
be making any more headlines anytime soon.

You sent for me, sir?

I have a new challenge for you.

I want you to take over
our efforts...

to improve the quality
of British optical glass.

Those damned Bavarians
are running circles around us.

Glass?

With all due respect, sir,
I know nothing at all of glassmaking.

Then you will learn, Faraday.

We all know what a quick study you are.

Just analyze the chemical
composition of their glass...

and work backwards
to see how they made it.

It shouldn't take you long.

But Faraday struggled for four years
without any success.

This is even worse than the last batch.

No matter how hard he tried,
Faraday could not figure out...

what Joseph Fraunhofer
had discovered years before.

What Faraday failed to grasp...

was that casting perfect optical glass
for telescopes...

was a craft as well as a science...

and the masters in Bavaria
kept their secrets under lock and key.

Faraday never did learn their secret.

He kept a single glass brick
as a souvenir of this failure.

Years later,
it would change the course of his life...

and ours.

Davy's death finally brought an end
to this fruitless project...

and Faraday, the boy from the slums...

succeeded him
as director of the laboratory.

Faraday used his new authority
to do something unprecedented:

a series of annual Christmas lectures
on science for the young...

beginning in 1825
and continuing to this day.

At one of the first Christmas lectures...

Faraday enchanted his audience...

with displays of the new powers
that were at his disposal.

Suppose I want to fire a portion
of gunpowder.

I can readily do it
with the power of electricity.

If I receive electricity
through this conducting wire...

I can then give it to anything I touch.

But I must stand
on these insulating glass legs...

to prevent the electricity
from going away into the floor.

Now I am electrified.

Do you think I could light this gas jet
just by touching it with my finger?

No.
No, don't do it. No.

No. Don't.

Now, mind you, don't try this at home.

And now, my children,
you have seen for yourselves...

how this invisible force of electricity
can be made to serve new purposes...

utterly unattainable
by the powers we have now.

The invention of a motor
that could work continuously...

eliminating countless human hours
of drudgery...

would be more than enough
to make you a fortune...

and land you in the history books.

That's not how Michael Faraday saw it.

He had absolutely no interest
in patenting his ideas...

or personally profiting from them.

And as for the history books...

he had only written the first sentence
of an entry that would be many pages long.

Mr. Anderson, may I ask you
to dim the lights, please?

Gentlemen, I am about to induce a current
of electricity merely by moving a magnet.

Please observe what happens in the gap
between the wires when I do so.

Do you see how the current only flows
when the magnet is moving?

This is the conversion of motion
into electricity.

This was the first generator.

From here, electricity would become
available on demand.

Faraday was continuing to change
the world and the way people lived...

and then, suddenly...

an illness attacked
his incomparable mind.

My dear Schoenbein...

I would be very grateful to have
your opinion...

regarding...

Regarding...

Dear Schoenbein...
Regarding...

My dear husband,
whatever is the matter?

I began a letter to Schoenbein and
could not remember what I meant to say.

This is no cause for alarm.

You work too hard.
You're exhausted.

No. Sarah, this is different.
Horribly different.

It's the third time my memory
has failed me in as many days.

I fear I'm losing my mind.

And what would I be without that?

Why, my darling husband, of course.

When Faraday was 49...

he began to battle severe
memory loss and depression.

His work came to a standstill.

And although he never fully recovered,
his greatest achievements still lay ahead.

Faraday had immersed himself so deeply
in electrical and magnetic experiments...

that he came to visualize
the space around a magnet...

as filled with invisible lines of force.

A magnet was not simply the magnetized
bar of iron that you could see.

It was also the unseen "something"
in the space around the bar.

And that something he called a "field."

A magnetic field.

Faraday believed in the unity of nature.

Having demonstrated the connections
between electricity and magnetism...

he wondered, were these two forces...

also connected to a third: light?

If he could only show a connection
among these three invisible phenomena...

one of nature's most intimate secrets
would at last be revealed.

So, what did he do?

He designed an experiment.

Faraday knew that light
can travel as a wave.

Waves of light vibrate randomly
in all directions.

But there's a way to isolate
a single wave of light.

It's called polarization.

When light bounces
off a reflective surface,

like a mirror, it
becomes polarized.

Faraday wanted to see if that
single ray of light could be manipulated...

by the invisible magnetic field.

The eyepiece contained a crystal that
acted as a kind of picket fence for light.

Light could only pass through it
if it was somehow moved by the magnet.

He placed a lantern before a mirror.

One that he would only see
through the eyepiece if its reflection...

could pass through the picket fence.

If this is hard to
understand, don't feel bad.

Scientists could not explain this
phenomenon for another hundred years.

Faraday knew that magnetism had no effect
on light that was moving through air.

But what about when it was moving
through other materials?

So, what kind of material could he use
to help the magnet move the light?

He tried hundreds of different
transparent chemicals and objects...

but saw nothing through the eyepiece.

The light was not twisted by the magnet.

He tried crystals of calcite,
sodium carbonate...

calcium sulfate...

and still, he saw nothing.

He tried acids:
sulfuric acid, muriatic acid...

carbonic acid.

He tried gasses:
oxygen, nitrogen, hydrogen...

with no success.

The magnetic field
induced in these substances...

could not twist the light from his lamp
back into view.

Damn!

In desperation...

he decided to try the glass brick.

The souvenir
of his years of bondage to Davy.

It did the trick.

The force of the magnet twisted the light
so that it could pass through the crystal.

So, what's the big deal?

Faraday had demonstrated the existence of
the physical reality that surrounds us...

but which no one
had ever been able to detect.

It was as dramatic a breakthrough...

as seeing the cosmos for the
very first time through a telescope.

By showing that an electromagnetic force
could manipulate light...

Faraday had discovered
a deeper unity of nature.

He had opened a door for Einstein...

and all the physicists
who came after him...

to glimpse the interplay of hidden,
primal forces in the universe.

Even as he approached
the summit of his genius...

he was plagued by depression...

and doubts about his ability to retain
even the simplest thoughts.

My dear friend...

I find a difficulty in
answering or even

acknowledging properly
a scientific letter...

for I cannot now hold it at once
in my mind.

The memory of the parts fail me.

P. S. You will be sorry to see
the tone of this short note...

but my dearest husband
is not quite so well as usual...

but I hope he will improve.

Yours very truly, S. Faraday.

As a young man,
Faraday had risen from poverty...

in one of the most
class-conscious societies...

the world has ever known...

to become the most celebrated
scientist of his time.

By age 40...

he had invented the electric motor,
the transformer, the generator.

Machines that would change everything
about the home, the farm, the factory.

Now at 60...

decades after the fertile periods
of the greatest physicists...

plagued by memory loss
and melancholy...

he fearlessly probed deeper
into the mysterious invisible forces.

The world thought
that Michael Faraday was a has-been.

Despite his depression...

he remained
as passionately curious as ever.

Having discovered the unity of electricity,
magnetism and light...

Faraday needed to know...

how this trinity of natural forces
work together.

This is the way the ladies walk.

This was nothing new.

Children had been playing with magnets
and iron filings for centuries.

Everyone had always assumed
that this lovely pattern...

was just something that iron did.

Faraday knew that electric current
turns a wire into a magnet...

so he expected to find
related patterns in iron filings...

around a wire carrying electricity.

But where others saw
merely lovely shapes...

Faraday saw something profound.

The patterns were not
simply a quirk of iron filings.

They existed in the
space around a magnet...

or an electric current,
even in the absence of iron filings.

The patterns were the traces, the
footprints of invisible fields of force...

that reached out into the space
around anything magnetic.

The compass needle that people wondered
at for a thousand years...

was not reacting to some
faraway magnetic North Pole.

It was detecting a continuous force field
that stretched all the way there.

Earth itself is a giant magnet.

And like any other magnet,
its lines of force...

extend far out into the space
surrounding it.

They're everywhere, all around us.

They've always been.

But nobody had ever
noticed them before.

Nobody human, that is.

Birds are the last living descendants
of the dinosaurs.

Pigeons and other birds are remarkably good
at finding their way around.

They can migrate thousands of miles
without getting lost.

How? Partly by recognizing familiar
landmarks: rivers, mountains, stars.

Even certain smells can serve
as signposts for migrating birds.

But birds also have an inner compass.

They can actually sense
the Earth's magnetic field.

Their brains process magnetic data...

in much the same way
ours process visual data.

By sensing the direction of the field,
birds can tell north from south.

That's one way North American birds...

know which way to go
when they head south for the winter.

The field is stronger near the poles
than it is at the equator...

a fact that birds use
to figure out their latitude.

There are also small irregularities
in the field.

Locations where the field
is a little weaker or stronger.

Just like a distinctive
mountain or river...

these magnetic anomalies
can serve as landmarks.

For thousands of years...

humans have used carrier pigeons
to send messages to distant locations.

It was a crucial method
of communication...

as recently as World War II.

When you think about it,
we've been using magnetic fields...

to communicate for a long time.

We just didn't know it.

So why does our planet
have a magnetic field at all?

What causes it?

The answer lies deep inside the Earth.

Liquid iron, circulating around
the solid part of the core...

as Earth rotates, acts like a wire
carrying an electric current.

And as Faraday showed us,
electric currents produce magnetic fields.

And that's a good thing.

Our magnetic field protects us
from the onslaught of cosmic rays...

which would be very damaging
to our biosphere.

Cosmic rays can rip through DNA.

Without our magnetic field...

the rate of mutation in living organisms
would be much higher.

Fortunately, most of this cosmic shrapnel
gets trapped in the Van Allen belts...

donut-shaped zones of charged particles
corralled by our magnetic shield.

Knowing that the Earth itself
is like a giant bar magnet...

explains one of the most beautiful
sights in the sky, the aurora.

Charged particles from the sun,
the solar wind...

are constantly bombarding the Earth.

You can think of the solar wind
as a kind of electric current.

Our planet's magnetic field
channels that current...

towards the north and south poles.

When it hits our atmosphere...

the oxygen and nitrogen
molecules in the air...

glow like giant fluorescent
light bulbs.

When Faraday pursued his last
and most profound discovery...

the poverty of his childhood
stymied him as it never had before.

He needed help and found it in one...

who had come from another world.

Michael Faraday had solved the mystery
that baffled Isaac Newton.

This was how the sun told the planets
how to move without touching them.

The sun does touch the planets
with its gravitational field.

And Earth's gravitational field
tells the apples how to fall.

All this is a dream.

Unfortunately, that was the prevailing view
among his fellow scientists:

Faraday was dreaming.

They admired his inventiveness
and his genius for experimentation...

but they regarded his
invisible lines of force...

and his ideas about light and gravity
as hand-waving...

meaning there was nothing solid
to back it up.

Some openly ridiculed his theories.

They needed to see
his ideas expressed...

in the language of modern physics:
precise equations.

This was the one area
where Faraday's childhood poverty...

and lack of formal education
actually held him back.

He couldn't do the math.

Faraday had finally hit a wall
that he could not overcome.

And then, the greatest theoretical
physicist of the 19th century came along.

James Clerk Maxwell was born
into a world of wealth and privilege...

an only child of doting
middle-aged parents.

By his early 20s, he had made a name
for himself as a mathematician.

While other scientists had come to think
of Faraday as old-fashioned...

A great figure of the past
but no part of the future of physics.

James Clerk Maxwell knew better.

He began by reading everything
Faraday had written on electricity.

He became convinced
that Faraday's fields of force were real...

and he set out to give them
a precise mathematical formulation.

An equation in physics
is just a shorthand description...

of something that can be
represented in space and time.

For instance, the equation
describing the arc of a pendulum...

shows that it can never swing higher
than its initial height.

When Maxwell translated
Faraday's experimental observations...

on electromagnetic fields into equations...

he discovered an asymmetry.

See that bottom one?

It cries out for something else.

Great mathematician that he was,
Maxwell added a single term to balance it.

This tweaking of the equation changed
Faraday's static field into waves...

that spread outward at the speed of light.

It wasn't long before we found a way
to turn those waves...

into couriers...

for our messages.

Can you see me?

Can you hear me?

This is how.

This technology has transformed
human civilization...

from a patchwork of cities,
towns and villages...

into an intercommunicating organism.

Linking us at light speed...

to each other...

and to the cosmos.

Nothing is too wonderful to be true...

if it be consistent
with the laws of nature.