June 1897.
Queen Victoria, now near the end of her life,
takes a carriage ride through the streets of London
to celebrate her Diamond Jubilee.
Captured in the brand-new medium of film,
these images suggest order and stability.
But the forces of invention and progress that have powered
Victoria's reign are entering a new phase.
The modern world is erupting.
The 1890s are the decade that electrifies Britain.
This is when science, entertainment, morality and art collide to create
some very 21st-century anxieties about where technology is leading
us, and just who is in control.
Now, in three films, Philippa Perry, Paul McGann
and I are time travelling to an era when anything seems possible.
Electricity flies through the air and X-rays race through our bodies
as science gives the Victorians superpowers.
When culture and convention become a battle ground...
Fear of degeneration, and imperial decline sends shock
waves through art and society.
And when radio waves promise communication between this world
and the next.
An obsession with spirits and psychic phenomena fuels
a new mass media age.
Drawing on newly restored footage from the archives of the British
Film Institute, and the technical wonders of the 1890s,
we'll find out how it felt to be part of this anarchic,
terrifying and thrilling moment.
Very impressive.
Welcome to the decade the future landed.
It's February 3rd, 1892.
In the hallowed lecture hall of the Royal Institution,
the world's finest scientific minds take their seats.
The air is ablaze with excitement at what they are about to witness.
The audience are here to see a demonstration by a maverick
electrical scientist, and it's standing room only.
Anyone who is anyone in British science is in this room
and, at the front, is Nikola Tesla.
He is part visionary, part showman and he is here to prove
that the power of electricity has limitless potential.
Tesla has created the Tesla coil, an electrical device made with wound
copper and iron.
His invention enables him to control and manipulate electricity
in entirely new ways.
He switches on the machine and, as the crowd applauds,
he begins to demonstrate how electrical energy
can be transmitted without wires.
Tesla's display completely wows his audience.
He's really pushing the boundaries here of what his peers thought
was possible, and it's not just electrical sparks
that are flying.
Intellectual sparks are, too.
Tesla channels thousands of volts of electricity through his own body,
illuminates bulbs in his bare hands, and draws sparks through the air.
His lecture is a superhuman display, a theatrical performance designed
to excite and tantalise about the possibilities of electricity.
No-one leaves with a clear idea of how Tesla's ideas
will change the world, but they're quite sure they will.
The 1890s are a decade of such rapid discovery that the innovations
are constantly outpacing understanding.
The Victorians are playing catch up, trying to get to grips
with what these discoveries mean, and the impact that they are going
to have on society.
Tesla's ecstatic crowd know that a new stage in human history,
the electric age, has dawned.
Unlike steam and gas which have driven the 19th century
up until now, electricity promises clean power for all and progress
on an unprecedented scale.
Electricity courses through the collective imagination.
Already, cities are being physically transformed,
ready for the nation to plug in.
And when the first horseless taxis hit London in the 1890s,
they aren't petrol but electric motorcars.
The new energy is connecting all areas of life - from the streets
to the home.
This is the decade when the modern house is born.
Electric power is the ultimate mod con, if you can afford it.
In 1892, the Beale family begin work on one of the very first homes
in Britain designed specifically around electricity.
Their architect is darling of the Arts and Crafts movement
Philip Webb.
Planning the interior with Webb is family matriarch Margaret Beale.
It's women like her that are driving the take-up of electric power.
Is this one of the original lights that Mrs Beale had installed?
Absolutely.
It shows us, one, how it was worked into a whole room setting,
so we've got a sunflower theme in here.
We've got the Morris wallpaper, all brought into a scheme
that is about nature.
But then when we look at the light itself,
what we see here the way that Webb
has designed it, it is using the materials and the design
to celebrate the new energy, the new lighting form.
For example, the metals chosen is a brilliant metal for reflecting
light into the room.
Oh. Not only does this hang down, it celebrates the process
of hanging down, so even down to the way
that the design emphasises wires.
I quite like the way that the sort of petals around the light
there reflect it back to you. It is very pretty.
It is a type of glass called Vaseline glass and actually,
the effect on the light is, in the dark, it sort of almost
flickers, and so it almost replicates the light of a candle.
Very beautiful in here.
And very good taste.
What we're seeing in the period is women much more involved
in formal decision-making about how you decorate the home,
and really controlling this domestic sphere and being encouraged
that it is their moral duty to provide the best possible home
for their husband, who's out working.
But not everyone is as excited about electricity as Mrs Beale.
For many, many years women and men have been lit by candlelight,
and you put a candle next to your face, we all look lovely.
That is why we have romantic meals in front of a candle.
Suddenly, when you turn on the electricity light,
it is shining down upon you, and women
were the first who were horrified by the fact that suddenly,
everybody could see all their lines and wrinkles.
You know, there was no hiding.
And we have a lot of wonderful cartoons from magazines like Punch,
of women literally using umbrellas and parasols, you know,
they were protecting themselves.
And we have these wonderful letters where women are talking
about the horror of these...
They describe as bull's-eyes of light shining upon them.
As I say, if you go into a bathroom in the morning and you shine light
on your face you go... Ugh!
And it was the first time they'd seen themselves like that.
I think we've all experienced that at some point or another,
being slightly disappointed at what we look like in electric light.
Absolutely. And what's really interesting in these spaces
is you start to see designers and house owners start to reflect the
way that they designed interiors, because of this new lighting form.
Because, of course, electricity literally shined a light
in the corners.
So where there was dust, suddenly you could see it all.
Everyone's house is dirty. Everyone's house is dirty,
and however much your housemaid cleans up, you could start to see
it. So we started to see a much more open design to the space.
And in the Beales selecting this new technology into the house,
we see a whole set of ideas around progression,
about modernism, about new roles for women in the home.
And about a new idea about what design does
and why it matters.
In the future, homes will be brighter and cleaner.
At Standen, electricity is transforming daily life
through careful design and planning, but in other
respects, this new electric age is an unregulated free-for-all.
Where enthusiasm still exceeds understanding.
Many imagine that this same energy that lights a lamp or powers a tram
naturally courses through their own body,
and this presents the canny 1890s entrepreneur
with a great opportunity to cash
in on the Victorian obsession with health.
The theory is that you have a limited amount of nervous energy,
which you can recharge like a battery.
Which means that, with the right treatment,
electricity should be a wonder cure where you can walk off the street
and plug yourself in.
The king of the electric health market is a man called
Cornelius B Harness, the founder of the Medical Battery Company.
Harness is a bit less doctor and a bit more Del Boy,
but he has got a flair for sales, and a keen eye
for a business opportunity.
And in the entrepreneurial spirit of the day,
he calls himself a consulting medical electrician,
and his range of electropathic remedies are flying off the shelves.
Harness' HQ is the Electropathic Institute on Oxford Street.
It is part surgery, part theatre.
What kind of an impression was a place like this designed to give
the customers that walked through the door?
They are not walking into a doctor's surgery,
they are not walking into a hospital, they are walking
into a place that looks like a plush, comfortable,
luxurious middle class drawing room.
It is a way of telling them, "You deserve the very best.
"So you deserve Harness' electropathic belt."
Comfortingly expensive. Yes, I think that is the basic idea.
What kind of things were people coming here complaining about,
what sort of things did they want to be cured
with electricity?
They claimed be able to cure a range of diseases,
ailments, conditions around and about nervousness.
There is a culture of nervousness, if you like.
And it is a culture that is associated with the busy,
industrial, overworked middle classes.
And being nervous, in a certain sense,
is a sign of class.
Well, Ewan, actually, I don't like to talk about this very often,
but I have got a terrible case of debility, so I'd
like to enquire about one of those treatments.
Could you show me how they work?
If you'd care to step over to the consulting area.
OK.
Let me introduce you to Harness' electropathic belt.
It is a very simple piece of technology.
On the inside of the belt here you can see a number of zinc
and copper discs.
Your sweat, not to put too fine a point on it,
when it's in contact with these discs, is meant
to produce a small current of electricity that will then course
through your body and revitalise you, it will kind of hit
all those parts that...
..that other treatments can't quite reach.
So if this belt is meant to just generally restore
your vitality, are people coming here with ailments
that they wouldn't normally go to their doctors about?
Electropathic belts are meant, for example, to be a cure for impotence
and that's certainly something that the middle class gent
wouldn't necessarily want to discuss with their usual practitioner.
Really, why not?
Because impotence is associated with practises that you might not
necessarily want to admit to in public,
excessive masturbation, for example.
Imagine the impropriety!
You've lost your energy because you have been overdoing
it and overdoing it in improper ways.
I'm quite keen to have my own electropathic belt.
Is there one that I can try on?
Yes, in fact, there is an electropathic corset
that you can try on for size. Even better.
Well, Ewan, I don't know about you, but I'm feeling extremely
electropathically charged right now.
It looks good on you. They are quite dashing, aren't they?
Apart from looking quite good, though, do they actually
work, these things? No.
Harness is a charlatan.
He is a quack, he's a fraud.
There's nothing electrical going on with the electropathic
belts. He is surfing the electrical zeitgeist, if you like,
of the end of the 19th century. He's preying on their desire
to be the sorts of sophisticated, educated, knowledgeable people
who know about electricity and the body and the future.
And he is raking in the cash, and he's making a killing.
But Harness has underestimated the public, and he's heading
for a fall.
In one of the biggest disgraces of the decade.
For all of his showmanship, Harness is not pulling the wool
over everyone's eyes.
His shady practises are earning him enemies as increasing
numbers of people realise that this electropathic belt
they have spent up to hundred shillings on is basically worthless.
And one of his disgruntled customers, Mr Jefferies,
refuses to pay, and so Harness takes him to court.
Big mistake.
Once in court, Harness' methods come under close scrutiny.
The engineering profession has been closely following Harness'
claims for a number of years, but now they have the chance to test
the electropathic belt in front of an open court.
It's proven that Harness' employees aren't medically
qualified, and the belt simply does not work.
The judge rules against him.
Having lost in court, it was open season on
Cornelius B Harness.
Exposing bad science becomes front-page news.
Harness is finished.
What with all the legal costs and the lost business,
the medical electricity empire that he has spent years taking
to the top of the market, goes into liquidation.
The art of quackery is losing out to science, and the British
are becoming tech savvy.
Electrical technology is still in its Wild West phase,
with quacks like Harness who think they are untouchable.
But enlightened forces have begun to rein them in.
There is a nagging anxiety around this invisible energy
being piped into people's homes and bodies.
Rumours swirl amongst the working class of domestic
staff being killed by dodgy Victorian wiring.
In 1890, news arrived from across the Atlantic
that confirms electricity's dark side.
In New York, a murderer called William Kemmler becomes the first
man to be executed by electric chair.
But rather than a quick modern death, it was a botched
and bloody affair.
A few years later, the electric chair arrives in Britain.
Dr Walford Bodie, supervises a young woman
as she's strapped into the device.
At the flick of a switch, thousands of volts of electricity
were passed through her body.
But don't worry, Dr Walford Bodie is a magician
and the electric chair is his latest stage act.
Bodie's shocking routine makes him one of the biggest entertainers
of the age, performing to crowds of thousands.
Bodie is one of the very first people to use electricity
as entertainment, for which he becomes known
as the Electrical Wizard of the North.
To keep particularly easily offended people from complaining,
he says that the reason why he is doing this electrical chair
act is to demonstrate his own distaste for the barbaric method
of American execution.
In the 1890s, science becomes box office,
with star acts like Bodie performing in the music halls
that the Victorians love dearly.
Tim Cockerill has replicated Bodie's stage act.
Bodie is doing something similar to Tesla.
They were both showmen.
They were both demonstrating these brand-new, modern pieces
of technology and they, of course, were using those ingredients
of showmanship - how to whip up an audience into a frenzy,
and how to really sell what they were doing.
This is basically a miniature version of the kind of equipment
that Walford Bodie might've used.
When we turn this machine on, there is actually so much
electricity in that plate, that it is going to jump out.
So we are going to see a spark and it will illuminate this tube.
Is this version slightly more akin to modern health and safety
than Bodie might have had? It is a bit more compatible with that.
It basically is a bit less likely to kill anybody.
OK, right, flick the switch.
Oh, wow! Look at that!
Mini lightning.
That's not something you would like to put your finger in.
Exactly not. This is not static electricity.
This is basically the stuff that's coming out of the mains.
The general rule is that one centimetre of spark roughly equals
about 10,000 volts.
And you have got what? A couple of centimetres there?
So 20,000 volts are running through that plate, then?
Exactly. Walford Bodie, and other electrical performers would,
as long as they were insulated from the air,
they would be able to stand on top of an electrified plate
like this and have all of that electricity coursing
through their body.
It could still be very painful. Do you do this trick, then?
I do, I perform this.
You know what I'm going to ask you now, don't you, right?
Of course, we can try it. OK, cool, let's do it.
What's going to happen is I'll stand on top of this plate,
we'll flick the switch, I will have about 20,000 volts
of electricity going through my body.
I'm holding this thing here,
which is a fire torch with some fuel on the end,
so the electricity is going to go through me,
through my arm, all the way down the fire torch
and then over there we've got a glass of water.
Now, the electricity is looking for a place to go, so I'm hoping
it will jump from the end of the torch to the glass of water.
We'll see a spark, and it should set the fire torch on fire.
Amazing. OK.
I've got my shoes off so that I'm not insulated,
so I am directly in contact with the electricity.
Right, here we go. 20,000 volts in your body.
That's it. Go on, then.
Right, flick the switch.
SHE LAUGHS
Very impressive.
And of course, the grand finale...
Very good. I mean, why not?
Why not finish it in that way? Amazing.
In his own way, Bodie is just as influential as Tesla
in spreading the gospel of electricity.
Through stage acts like his, even if you can't afford a light
bulb, you can still be part of the new electric age.
But just as the Victorians are starting to wrap their heads
around electricity, through lighting, quackery
and showmanship,
a miraculous discovery arrives that takes everyone by surprise.
And gives us a real superhuman power.
At his laboratory in Germany, physicist Wilhelm Rontgen
is obsessed with a mysterious type of light ray.
There's something strange about his work.
He's been locking himself away inside his laboratory for weeks,
and behind those closed doors, Rontgen realises that his rays
will pass through all but the densest of materials.
He doesn't realise it yet, but he's about to change the world.
Rontgen places his wife Anna's hand on a photographic plate
positioned under his electrical device.
When he develops the glass plate his wife gets a shock.
What Anna sees no-one has ever seen before,
because captured on that glass plate is an image of her skeletal hand
complete with a wedding ring.
Anna is quite disturbed by this image, she is heard
to exclaim, "I have seen my own death."
Wilhelm Rontgen has discovered the X-ray.
Within days, word spreads across the globe of the
revelatory development.
The image of Anna's hand lodges firmly in the popular imagination.
This is a technological breakthrough that came from nowhere.
It's making the invisible visible, it's revealing the inner
workings of things through these ghostly echoes.
X-rays are a Victorian sensation,
popular with everyone from amateur enthusiasts to stage performers.
Typically, their entertainment value was spotted as quickly
as their medical one.
It's the whole theatre of the equipment, the X-ray
apparatus and the act of having an X-ray taken,
so the machines would have sparked and smelt of ozone.
So it would have been a really sort of dramatic event.
It was an absolute culture shock and, you know,
a break in the way that people could sort of see the world
and understand themselves.
This is in an age where the Victorian world is very demure,
lots of people are sort of covering their bodies
in really sort of ornate fabrics, and then this photography that comes
out of nowhere can show your most, sort of, inner private areas.
It really sort of echoed those ideas of death and the body as well.
There was a young woman who wanted to check how healthy the innards
of her new fiance were before she married him,
so she wanted to find out if he could have an X-ray without him
knowing just so she could check him out. Quite a difficult thing
to do, presumably. Absolutely, very difficult.
But it's interesting to see how people are sort of trying to use
X-rays for these new purposes.
And tell me about this X-ray kit that we have here.
This is one of the word's oldest X-ray kits, and it was built
just a few months after those first images were published,
by Russell Reynolds, who was 15 years old at the time.
And his father John.
A 15-year-old?
Did it actually work, then?
A home built kit by a 15-year-old?
Yes, and they put it together with an acid battery,
the transformer and glass vacuum tube, and hey,
presto, producing X-rays, imaging peoples bodies and hands.
Well, I can tell you for sure that I wasn't doing stuff
like this when I was 15.
What became of this man? What became of Russell?
What did he go on to be?
I think he was just so inspired
by this new way of seeing, he became one of the first
radiologists who sort of grew up with X-rays, and became
a professional X-ray user, you know, a job that hadn't existed
a few years prior to him.
The invisible light causes a medical revolution.
Just a few weeks after Rontgen's discovery is publicised,
Birmingham GP Dr John Hall-Edwards makes the world's first clinical
X-ray, producing an image of a sterilised needle placed
under a colleague's skin.
The very next day he has a real patient sent to him by a local
hospital, a woman has had a needle break off in her hand,
and it's causing her incredible pain.
And although she knows where the needle went in,
it now can't be found.
So Hall-Edwards uses his X-ray to locate the needle,
so that a surgeon can remove it, and it is thought
to be the very first time in history that an X-ray
has guided an operation.
But an opportunity soon comes for X-rays to be tested
on an altogether bigger scale.
In 1899, war breaks out in South Africa.
The Boer War sees hundreds of thousands of troops mobilised.
Now, if you want to try and find a bullet in a gunshot wound,
you have to poke around inside the hole with a probe,
thus massively increasing the risk of an untreatable infection.
But with X-rays, all that changes.
Hall-Edwards sees his calling and volunteers for the war.
He's got his work cut out to keep delicate equipment
going in a war zone.
And there are more human difficulties.
His colleagues report that patients, quite understandably,
jump when shells land near hospitals, ruining the picture.
But the X-ray is an unqualified success.
In one case, a major had been shot in the spine and left paralysed.
But Hall-Edwards managed to locate the bullet and a little piece
of bone that had been pressing against the spinal-cord,
and the soldier was able to walk again.
And there were lots of cases like this - finding bullets
in the head, in the chest, in the neck. In amongst
all of the carnage that was going on, in those moments of despair,
these invisible rays were bringing hope.
But just as X-rays were transforming the possibilities
of Victorian medicine, a darker side to the invisible light
began to emerge.
More and more pioneers started to develop what they called
X-ray dermatitis.
The first symptoms resemble sunburn, but then progressed to the skin
blistering and falling off.
Warts and open sores form and, to their horror, many X-ray
operators find the symptoms don't go away.
As John Hall-Edwards returns from the war,
he realises that something is very wrong -
that constant exposure to radiation has really taken its toll,
and now his hands are showing signs of cancer.
As the condition gets worse, he starts to describe it
as though there are rats gnawing at his bones.
Now, eventually, he will have to have his entire left arm
amputated as well as all of the fingers on his right hand.
This is the man who has dedicated his life to improving medicine,
and now he is being slowly killed by the very technology
that he has done so much to establish.
Despite his personal sacrifice, Hall-Edwards was right
to put his faith in X-rays.
In the century that followed, they went on to revolutionise not
just medicine, but industry, archaeology and our very
understanding of the universe.
But for the Victorians, the progress promised by X-rays
is accompanied by social anxieties.
For all of their popular appeal, there is also something deeply
unsettling about Rontgen's rays -
a hint of scandal, a feeling of being exposed.
In fact, within a couple of months of the discovery,
a particularly enterprising London company starts manufacturing
X-ray-proof underwear.
Sure, X-rays can reveal your bones, but what else can they reveal?
Can they reveal your soul?
X-ray technology lays the Victorians' most
deeply-held fears bare.
They worry that those cheeky forces of physics are an assault
on privacy - worse still, that they might expose some dirty
little secrets and thoughts - as seen in this 1897 film.
X-rays get underneath the Victorians' skin,
revealing not just their bones and the odd unwanted bullet,
but their fear of losing control over technology.
Despite their impact, X-ray machines are in the hands
of a small number of people.
But just like the smartphone revolution of the 21st century,
new technologies have the greatest impact when they are
adopted en masse.
And in the 1890s, it isn't an electrical device,
but a simple mechanical machine that seems to threaten
the whole social order.
The safety bicycle was a technological bombshell.
It's a relatively simple self-propelled machine, but not
since the horse had transport been so personal and so immediate.
You don't have to wait around any more for taxis
or trams or trains, you had the power to go wherever
you wanted at your fingertips.
And with that power came a whole new level
of mental and physical freedom.
The most popular models of the cycling boom are known as safety
bicycles, because it is safer to fall off one of these
than the old-style penny farthings.
Their lower risk design gives cycling mass appeal for women.
The cycling boom sees thousands hitch up their long skirts,
and give it a go.
Like all new technology, the new machine threatened
to challenge the social order.
Bicycles were an extension of the body and women's bodies,
well, they were particularly troubling.
Some men find the very movement of cycling to be disgracefully sexual.
To be known as a "scorcher" implies that you are a fast rider,
and a fast woman.
And what was all that speed doing to women's brains?
There were a number of health concerns that society was worried
about when it came to cycling.
These range from problems with childbirth and fertility
to the dreaded bicycle face.
Now, bicycle face was diagnosed as an intense stare,
a reddened complexion, a hard-clenched jaw
and bulging eyes.
It could be temporary, or it could be permanent,
but, of course, women were more susceptible than men.
But it isn't concerns about health that are the main objection to women
cycling, it's what they wear that makes the critics' blood boil.
It quite quickly becomes clear that long skirts are not exactly
the ideal attire for riding a bike.
The alternative is to wear bloomers, tightly wrapped at the ankle
and teamed with a nice short jacket.
But those women who choose to dress to make cycling easier
are committing the most transgressive act of all -
daring to dress like a man.
But clever Victorian inventors come up with ways to avoid
causing moral outrage.
It hasn't escaped my notice that you are dressed in full
Victorian regalia but would you actually be able to cycle
while wearing that?
I'm wearing a Victorian convertible cycling garment that was patented
by a woman called Alice Louisa Bygrave.
She was from Brixton, a dressmaker from South London.
So, she clearly thought, you know, here I am wearing an A-line,
you know, long, floor-length skirt, but I really want to cycle
and this is kind of difficult.
So she decided that what her skirt needed was a dual pulley system sewn
into the infrastructure of this.
You wouldn't know about this, that I was a cyclist,
until I got close to my bicycle and then I would reach
to the waistband and I would pull out some chords that are here,
and I would just ruche the front of it up... No way!
Kind of like...
Look at that! ..like a curtain. Oh, my goodness, this is so clever.
And then she very cleverly...
So it reveals a bit of your bloomers, but not too much.
It's OK. We can deal with that.
The back, she has threaded through the front, so you're not
flapping around, then you would do the same at the back,
ruching it up very cleverly out of the way of the wheels.
But it created what she called a festooning effect,
which was still quite aesthetic.
So when you're on your bicycle, not too much is revealed,
but it clearly is much safer.
Well, from the side perspective, if you were zooming past me,
I would barely know that you had it all tucked up.
It looks like you've got your skirt kind of folded.
And then you would loosen this off and then drop it,
very cleverly, and then tuck these all back in again
and nobody would know.
So what was the objection to cycling, specifically?
I mean, why did people look down on it as an activity for women?
The fact that women were suddenly kind of looking like they weren't
abiding by the kind of Victorian roles, norms and codes that
were expected of them.
And this was really a kind of fiercely gendered society.
And if you stepped outside that, then there was kind of
fierce repercussions.
And how did this manifest itself? How did people react?
There are so many reports of women who had sticks and stones
thrown at them.
They had incredibly nasty remarks yelled while they were riding
in the street by passers-by.
They were denied entry into places, and they were
terribly gossiped about.
And yet people still did choose to cycle.
What was it that these women were gaining from it?
The bicycle became this kind of emblem of women not only
challenging but potentially rejecting what was considered
their natural role, you know, in Victorian society,
with the home and family and the bearing and carrying
of children.
Cycling provided for women so many vast and exciting freedoms
in the form of social and independent mobility,
and new connections.
So they had new adventures, they had new experiences,
they made new friendships and for some, probably, they had,
for the first time, personal private lives.
By shaking off the social shackles and the chaperone,
cyclists can explore what they can get away with.
Not least when it comes to romance.
Bicycles themselves can provide an excellent opportunity
for a spot of flirting.
This could be chatting to other riders on the road, or something
more serendipitous, because some women draw the line at learning
how to repair a puncture themselves, in the hope that a chivalrous man
will offer to do it for them,
thus providing all kinds of opportunities.
HG Wells, who was a keen cyclist, writes a short story
around this phenomenon.
A chaste tale called A Perfect Gentleman on Wheels.
"She had a charmingly cut costume, and her hair was a pleasant brown,
"and her ear, as one came riding up behind her,
"was noticeably pretty.
"She had punctured the tyre of her hind wheel.
"It ran flat and flaccid.
"Now, this is the secret desire of all lone men who go
"down into the country on wheels.
"The proffered help, the charming talk, the idyllic incident.
"Who knows what delightful developments?"
On the face of it, cycling might seem like an odd
subject for HG Wells, writer of War Of The Worlds.
But Wells is fascinated by how an invention as simple
as the safety bicycle can foster new freedoms,
while simultaneously disrupting the old British order.
If something so benign can make such an impact,
what about more dangerous technology?
In the 1890s, Wells becomes fascinated by the invisible
world of disease.
The spectre of deadly contagious illnesses stalks Victorian cities,
thriving on the cramped and dirty conditions.
The study of the relationship between bacteria and disease,
bacteriology, is a relatively new science, little understood
by the general public.
Yet researchers have already made a cholera vaccine and will shortly
create one for typhoid.
But Britain also has a very vocal anti-vaccination movement who think
that messing with any of this bacteria in the first place
is something that outrages nature.
Bacteriology might be turning the tide against disease,
but they are losing the battle with the public.
For some, this kind of science is going too far and Wells
understands their fears.
Sure, bacteriology might be able to cure us, but is there a price
to be paid?
In 1894, Wells writes a short story that captures people's fears.
In The Stolen Bacillus, Wells rails against the era's
cult of progress -
this assumption that science and technology will inevitably lead
us towards an amazing utopia.
He argues that unless you're careful, the very same
discoveries that could be used to help society can also be used
against it, and this story is about
a new and totally terrifying threat -
bio-terrorism.
It begins in the laboratory of a bacteriologist,
demonstrating his work to a visitor,
a man described as a pale stranger.
The conversation turns to a vial of deadly cholera.
"Only break such a little tube as this into a supply of
"drinking water and death, mysterious, untraceable death,
"death, swift and terrible, death, full of pain and indignity,
"would be released upon this city."
As he leaves the laboratory, the pale stranger slips a vial
of cholera into his pocket.
It turns out he's an anarchist hell-bent
on infecting London's water supply.
Now, this story perfectly plays in to the country's fears
at the time.
Britain had been bombarded by story after story about extremists,
waiting to launch a lone wolf attack.
And bombing campaigns by Irish nationalists had really put
the population on edge.
The pale stranger is the perfect bogeyman.
When the scientist realises what's happened,
a chase across London ensues in horse-drawn taxis.
In the chase, the stranger realises that the vial has broken,
and the deadly liquid is leaking all over his skin.
So he decides to drink the rest of it, turning his body
into a weapon of mass destruction.
The stranger runs through the streets,
touching as many members of the public as he can
to spread the disease,
before escaping into the night.
At the end of the story, there's a twist.
It turns out that the anarchist hadn't swallowed a vial of cholera
at all, but a disease that turns your skin blue.
And on one level, this is a bit of a copout -
London is spared -
but for Wells, the point was that there is very little
difference between a reckless scientist and a murderous stranger.
Both can pose a very real danger to the public.
Wells is in the vanguard of an 1890s explosion in popular fiction
that asked questions about where science is leading us,
drawing on deep fears in the Victorian psyche.
As with today, it is not just about what the technology does,
but who owns it, who controls it and whether it might be used
against us, and Wells isn't alone in his fears.
One aspect of the technological future particularly haunts
the Victorians' imagination.
Although they have conquered the seas and land,
the skies remained tantalisingly out of reach.
But flying machines are a deeply troubling idea.
To some writers, the implication of powered flight is clear -
whichever country gets there first will have terrifying
military superiority.
The Victorians, used to war being something
which happens abroad,
fear that maybe one day even London, at the very
heart of the Empire, could be attacked.
In 1893, George Griffith writes a story called
The Angel Of The Revolution, that brings the idea of
Pax Aeronautica to the British public.
Griffith paints an apocalyptic vision of flying machines
as military weapons that are so far above everything else that nothing
can stand in their way.
He tells the story of a brilliant but embittered scientist who teams
up with a secret brotherhood of anarchists to create
flying machines that conquer the world.
"A blaze of intense light shone for an instant upon the Earth.
"Then this burst into a thousand fragments which leapt into the air
"and spread themselves far and wide in all directions,
"burning with inextinguishable fury for several minutes,
"driving men and horses mad with agony and terror.
"In the new warfare people will not merely be killed,
"they will be annihilated."
Griffith's follow-up, Outlaws Of The Air,
takes the possibility of air power to its chilling conclusion.
This time, it isn't just military forces facing annihilation
but the civilian population, as aerial warfare is used
to devastate British cities.
Westminster itself is obliterated in a firestorm.
For now, the concept of mass death from the air brought about by
flying machines is just a fantasy.
But it's one that rubs shoulders with reality.
Because inventors are now trying to make the dream
of flight come true.
You can see the strange reality of Victorian flying machines
at the Shuttleworth Collection in Bedfordshire.
This is a flying machine called the Hawk.
It was designed in the 1890s,
and gliders like this one were the first tentative steps towards
the big ambition for the age -
to create powered flight.
It's made of a light but strong and flexible bamboo frame.
The wings are covered in 170 feet of canvas,
supported by delicate-looking wires.
So, Eric, you restored this?
Yes. Have you been in it? Have you flown it?
No, never. No, I just did the reconstruction.
How do you actually get in this?
Perhaps the easiest way might be to walk around the back
and step over the lines.
Duck under these. Mind that cable there.
This one? These two? Yes.
Slide your arms through these leather sockets
and hold the handles.
Like that? Like that, yeah.
OK, so now you have to step forward in front of the shoulder rests.
Shoulder rests? Yes.
If the glider went into a stall, the front of the aircraft comes up
and you need to get your body weight forwards,
and that's why those shoulder stands are there, to stop you sliding
too far back.
And if you could get your head behind these wires...
You need to be a gymnast.
It's like a torture device. It is.
So, how do you get it down the hill, then?
Well, basically, you've got to run with it.
Oh, bloody hell. It's quite heavy. It is heavy.
Once you get some lift, the glider will take your weight,
and then you can rest your whole body weight on your forearm.
You need to be very, very strong to be able to control
it from that position. Yeah.
In fact, you would not be able to fly it for very long
for those reasons.
How do you actually control it when you are in the air?
You basically fling your legs around to try to control the centre
of gravity of the aircraft.
It's not easy.
You haven't got very many safety mechanisms?
Not at all. There is no in-flight entertainment either.
You would have to have nerves of steel to go up in
the air in one of these things.
But one man did.
His name was Percy Pilcher, and with his Hawk he became
one of the world's leading aviators.
Now, today, most people have never heard of him,
but to the Victorians
he was the man that they thought stood the greatest chance of making
a breakthrough in flying technology.
Percy Pilcher was part of an international scene
of adventurers reaching for the skies.
Victorian aviation is a hair-raising mix of educated guesses,
trial and error.
And the failures far outweigh the successes.
The ultimate goal of this very small but committed bunch of pioneers
is a motorised flying machine, something capable
of sustained flight.
But the risks involved are clear to everyone.
And many people think of them as a group of madmen.
Pilcher is convinced that heavier than air flight is possible,
and despite being well aware of the dangers,
dedicates himself to finding the answer.
His mentor is the world's leading flying expert,
Otto Lilienthal.
In 1891, he'd been the first person ever to repeatedly fly a glider,
and he is making hundreds of flights a year.
Pilcher visits him and strikes up a close working relationship.
Pilcher studies Lilienthal's ideas closely.
His work shows that shaping a glider's wings like a bird
could create greater lift.
Back home, Pilcher experiments with different designs,
towed by a cable, and eventually gets off the ground.
But just as he gets going, there's an ominous development.
In August, Pilcher receives some bad news.
His mentor, Otto Lilienthal, has been killed
in a glider accident.
During a demonstration, a sudden gust of wind caused
the glider to stall, and Lilienthal broke his back
in the resulting crash.
And in some ways, Lilienthal was the flying world's first martyr,
but his death really brought home just how dangerous
Pilcher's quest was going to be.
Pilcher's work with Lilienthal is fruitful.
He ploughed everything he'd learned from the master and his
own experiments into a new design.
He called it the Hawk, and it was his best flying machine yet.
On the 20th of June in 1897,
Pilcher gave the first public
demonstration of his Hawk in front of a crowd of onlookers
and a journalist from the Pall Mall Gazette.
Here is what they had to say.
"Mr Pilcher started the machine directly towards the wind,
"which was blowing gently up the hill.
"After a preliminary hop, skip and a jump, the man and machine
"rose gracefully into the air from the side of the hill...
"..until a height of full 70 feet in altitude had been reached,
"when they described a gradually descending curve towards the valley.
"Given a few more enthusiasts like Mr Pilcher, we ought to be able
"to fly before the dawn of the 20th century."
But Pilcher's moment of triumph isn't solely his own.
When you have a look through these photos, there's one
face that keeps cropping up.
And this is Ella, Percy's sister.
She's with him every step of the way.
But she is not just there for moral support,
she was helping to build these gliders.
She was cutting and hand-stitching the canvas,
and that means that Percy's successes were also hers.
But Ella didn't just help to build these machines.
She is also known to have flown them.
And we can't be sure for certain, but it is likely
that she was the first ever woman to pilot a heavier than air machine.
With the success of the Hawk, it's time to attempt
a motorised flying machine.
So they build a triplane design complete with engine.
And if this one worked,
they would go down in history.
In September 1899, Pilcher arrives here
at Stamford Hall to show his triplane for the first time in front
of a select audience.
Working with engines is expensive and he needs investors.
But just a few days before the big launch,
and part of the engine has broken.
His moment of triumph is slipping away.
Anxious not to disappoint, Pilcher decides to demonstrate
the Hawk instead.
The weather is stormy and wet,
and his first tries fail.
Pilcher complains the glider is too heavy from the rain,
but then on his third and final attempt he climbs to around 40 feet
in the sky, and just as it looks as though it's going to be another
awe-inspiring flight, disaster strikes.
Witnesses see the tail section break, and the wings snap in half.
There is nothing that Pilcher can do.
The Hawk drops out of the sky
and hits the ground with a sickening thud.
Pilcher is taken back to the house,
but never regains consciousness.
Two days later, Britain's best hope for achieving powered flight dies,
aged just 32.
For the Victorians, the motorised flying machine
isn't to be.
The triplane that carried Pilcher's dreams of being the first to conquer
the skies will never be flown.
Pilcher's triplane remains this tantalising what-if.
We'll never know for sure whether it could have flown that day,
but even if it couldn't, he still would have had years
to develop it before the Wright brothers came along.
For me, the great tragedy is that Pilcher never knew
he was part of a revolution in transport
that would eventually allow people to travel around the world
in a matter of hours.
From X-rays to the humble bicycle, technology transformed Britain
in the 1890s, dragging it into the modern age -
but sometimes at great personal cost.
Pilcher knew the risks that he was taking,
but for him and his fellow pioneers,
progress was worth it.
They believed that the future would be shaped by science
and technology, and that nothing was off-limits,
even the most fantastical of dreams.
Next time, Paul McGann sees how fears of moral degeneration
and imperial decline rock late Victorian art and society.
I mean, if you look across the bottom here you can see
the candlesticks are all quite clearly indecent little penises.
Well, I'm shocked.
Think how shocked they were in the 1890s!