Episode list

How pioneers unlocked electricity's mysteries and built strange instruments to create it.

Just under 200 years ago scientists discovered something profound, that electricity is connected to another of nature's most fundamental forces - magnetism. In the second 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.

From radio waves bigger than a house to gamma rays smaller than the nucleus of an atom, the electromagnetic spectrum is buzzing around us, and is harnessed into our everyday lives in ways often never seen, heard or imagined.