In the 1890s, the last decade of Queen Victoria's life,
the forces of progress that have powered her reign
enter a new phase.
And the modern world erupts.
In this series, Dr Hannah Fry,
Paul McGann, and I, Philippa Perry,
are time-travelling back to an era
when anything seemed possible.
APPLAUSE
We've seen how advances in technology gave the Victorians
superhuman powers.
But what if science could go further?
Opening the door to other worlds...
..even the afterlife itself.
I'm a psychotherapist, and I want to understand the strangest aspect
of the late Victorian mind.
How their love of science coexists with their deep belief
in the paranormal.
If you can hear me, I'm already dead!
And I'll see how the 1890s boom in new media and entertainment
brings ghosts into the home...
..conjures them in films...
..lays the foundations of today's connected world...
..and culminates in the first global mass media event.
Welcome to the decade the future landed.
In May 1897, the Italian radio pioneer, Guglielmo Marconi,
comes to this remote part of the Bristol Channel to carry out one of
his ground-breaking experiments.
It's here that he sends a wireless telegraph signal across open water
for the first time in history.
After two days of frustration and failure, they finally manage it.
And one of Marconi's team writes about it like this.
"Five of us stood round the apparatus in a wooden shed,
"sheltered from the gale, with eyes and ears directed towards
"the instruments, with an attention which was almost painful,
"and waited for the hoisting of a flag, which was the signal
"that all was ready.
"Instantaneously we heard the first 'tic tac, tic tac',
"and saw the Morse instrument print the signals which came to us
"silently and invisibly from the island rock.
"It came to us, dancing on the unknown and mysterious agent -
"the ether."
MORSE CODE BEEPS
The message, when it came, was rather prosaic.
It said, "Can you hear me?"
And the answer joyfully came back, "Yes - loud and clear!"
This landmark moment paves the way for radio and Wi-Fi,
and our networked world.
It's an extraordinary breakthrough,
but there's something else that intrigues me.
The late Victorians are also excited about the psychic potential
of this unknown and mysterious agent - the ether.
This is a quote from the spectator.
"Why in fact, if one wire can talk to another without connection,
"save through ether, should not mind talk to mind
"without any wire at all?"
In the 1890s, people aren't just interested in telegraphy -
they think science can help them achieve telepathy.
Belief in the ether, an invisible medium thought to fill space,
is widespread.
Oliver Lodge is one of the scientists fascinated
with the potential of the ether,
and finding ways to communicate through it.
He's the professor of physics at University College, Liverpool,
and his early experiments with radio waves lay the foundation
for Marconi's wireless telegraphy.
In 1894, Lodge begins a series of remarkable demonstrations
in London and Oxford.
The crowd of expectant scientists watches as Oliver Lodge
sets up his equipment, and the experiment begins.
The induction coil sparks into life...
..harnessing electrical surges in the room,
sending a signal across it.
For the Victorians, this is an invisible,
almost magical force.
It's the first time in Britain that anyone has demonstrated
electromagnetic waves, and tracked their movement with a small beam
of light on a spot metre.
Lodge even manages to detect this invisible energy
from over 50 metres away.
Does this breakthrough mean that now he can detect other unseen energies?
Even other realms?
Lodge is convinced that the paranormal is the cutting edge
of science.
He dreams up a bold plan to explore it,
as if it's another land to be conquered by the British Empire.
Lodge's method is scientific rigour.
He has no time for superstition,
which he regards as close to savagery.
He describes the world of psychic phenomena as
"an intermediate region, bounded on the north by psychology,
"on the south by physics, on the east by physiology,
"and on the west by pathology and medicine.
"The whole region seems to be inhabited mainly by savages,
"many of them, so far as we can judge from a distance,
"given to gross superstition.
"I say it has been left to them long enough.
"We prefer to creep slowly from our base of physical knowledge
"to engineer carefully as we go, establishing forts, making roads,
"and thoroughly exploring the country."
Lodge isn't alone in wanting to journey into this paranormal realm.
He's part of a scientific movement spearheaded by the
Society for Psychical Research - an organization that feverishly
gathers data into phenomena such as clairvoyance,
hypnosis, and telepathy.
The impressive roll call of members includes William James,
the father of psychology.
The biologist, Alfred Russell Wallace,
who developed theories about evolution in parallel
with Charles Darwin.
And even the Prime Minister, William Gladstone.
The membership of the SPR seems remarkable to us today,
as psychical research is seen as a fringe or eccentric activity.
But back then, it was a new frontier for scientific study.
The 1890s was an age of X-rays, electricity, vaccines -
and people thought there must be other invisible energies at work.
I think the pace of change and the scientific breakthroughs
that revolutionised the decade are so extraordinary,
that even unlocking the mysteries of the afterlife starts to look
tantalisingly possible for the SPR.
And the public share their fascination -
attending seances and seeking out communication with the dead,
via spirit mediums.
When the SPR decides to investigate people who claim they can speak
to spirits, Oliver Lodge eagerly joins in.
If you think about it, the idea that if we can talk to dead people,
if we can communicate with these new unseen forces - if that's real,
that is one of the most exciting,
most major scientific breakthroughs imaginable.
And one of the mediums that first really, really excited him about
the possibility was an Italian
medium named Eusepia Palladino.
One of the things Lodge would say about his work with Palladino
is he said, "It's best not to think of her, effectively, as a person -
"it's better to think of her as a delicate instrument".
And Lodge actually travelled specifically to a friend's house
on an island in France, made a special trip just to spend several
nights watching her in action with a team of other researchers -
some of them from the SPR.
So, how did they try to control her during this experiment?
So, they came up with a whole bunch of brand-new techniques.
So again, this was all very, kind of, Wild West,
scientifically speaking.
One of her best-known functions was that she was able to apparently
move objects with invisible forces.
So...when she would be entering into her trance state,
they would have guys sitting to her left and to her right,
and they would try and hold her arms and hold her legs.
And so, allegedly what would happen is that despite all this,
despite what they believed were strict controls,
was that she was able to move objects around the room.
Another thing that happened is that they would feel people touching them
all over - people rummaging through their hair,
and apparently invisible hands.
And sometimes the hands would go visible.
There's reports where the guys would see this whitish substance
would come out from her body -
like a supernumerary limb, they talked about.
And this is where you hear, kind of, the Ghostbusters terminology,
but it starts the phrase "ectoplasm".
So, they're making up new scientific terms? They were, yeah.
And so, in addition to the controls we talked about where they would
hold her down, they created this kind of dynameter, where it would
measure grip strength, and so the idea was they could get a baseline
of what her normal abilities were, and then, see if she had special
superhuman abilities when she was in her trance state,
or possibly being possessed by her spirit controls.
And did she? She did, in fact, according to them.
They measured her with a phenomenally higher grip strength -
way more than like many of the men could grip it.
Way, way higher up, in terms of the grip strength.
And so, for them, they're like "Oh, clearly something is happening.
"This is empirical evidence of something otherworldly, something
"that we don't have currently a natural physical explanation for it.
"So, we better start rewriting physics to accommodate
"the ghost people."
Palladino exhibits eerie powers that Oliver Lodge and his team
simply can't explain away.
They leave convinced she's genuine.
But not everyone passes their tests.
The SPR know that this field is full of charlatans.
Eager to protect the reputation of psychical research,
the society investigators are relentless in their pursuit
of fraudulent mediums.
They sit through countless seances - watching every move, and exposing
anyone they think is a con artist.
But what were the tricks of this lucrative trade?
People would often hold these in very dark,
sometimes pitch-black rooms.
And the medium, when they got into it, or when they were feeling
the forces around them, it would be - I guess you'd describe it today
as something quite like a seizure. Mm-hmm.
So their eyes would roll back into their head,
and they'd have spasmodic motions.
There would be the noises, there would be the instruments,
there would be this atmosphere,
and the more traditional, of course, was...the knocking.
LOUD SLAM
So, we're going to walk through one of the old, kind of, classic tricks
from the mediums - not a super elaborate one, and the idea was
the spirits would generate writing on blank slates.
You would take just a teensy piece of chalk, and you'd sandwich
them together. Ohh! Right? Yeah.
And so, again - you're providing the spirit world with material
with which to communicate - was the theoretical foundation. OK.
We'll fast-forward this a little bit, but traditionally, you would
sometimes do this for hours, so waiting for something to happen.
Want to just take a look?
OK. So, this is authentic... Oh! I'm very disappointed.
I was hoping my late mother will have... See?
..told me to brush my hair, or something.
Let's see what we can do. Are you any good with knots?
Knots? Not really, no.
OK, well, this is one of the kinds of controls.
So, let's leave these alone for a little bit.
Let's just leave those with you. Oh, thank you.
We'll check back in a moment, I'm sure Mum's going to...
..do something with that in a minute. Whoa.
Fraudulent spirit mediums use magician's tricks and
sleight-of-hand to swap objects in and out
when the clients are distracted.
We can maybe try the slates again.
Come on, slates.
SHE GASPS
Ooh... Something - what's it say?
"Philippa, don't trust this man."
That's definitely from my mother. It's needlessly hostile.
That's the sort of thing she would always say about all men.
Yeah.
They would collect information about people.
And so, if there was a particular person that you wanted
to come through, they would note that information,
And they would have these little books - they often called them
"blue books" - and different communities of mediums
would all collect information about people that were interested
in spiritualism.
So if you went to one medium, and wanted to talk to say,
your Aunt Tilly - and maybe Tilly came through, maybe she didn't.
But when you went to the next medium, even if you didn't ask them,
Aunt Tilly might come through... HE CHUCKLES
..because they'd passed the word that you were coming, and they know
who you're looking for.
And if you didn't know about that little extra communication,
it would seem that they'd somehow divined that from some sort of
mysterious external force -
which was actually just passing off the information.
With the spirit of the age all about "what are these invisible forces,"
we were so ready to believe!
I mean, I WANTED to believe that this was magic.
I loved it.
And I can imagine myself -
if I didn't have decades of cynicism on me,
and I was right back there in the 1890s -
I'm damn sure I would've believed in that, because I would be
set up to believe in it.
So why are people, including scientists,
so open to the supernatural at the end of the 19th century?
I think some of this is a hangover from Darwin's theory of evolution,
a generation before.
It's now getting rather difficult to reconcile traditional Christian
ideas with contemporary science.
Spiritualism appears to offer palpable proof of an afterlife.
This is a great comfort at a time when your loved ones can be
snatched away by cholera, TB, typhoid, and smallpox.
It's easy to underestimate how profoundly this ever-present death
must have shaped the way they saw their world.
The Society for Psychical Research carries out public surveys,
compiling an enormous database in an attempt to properly document
paranormal phenomena.
Their archives are held here, at the heart of British academia -
the Cambridge University Library -
where one of the most incredible artefacts in the collection
is the Census of Hallucinations.
To create this, more than 400 SPR volunteers scour the country -
from factory floor, to middle-class dinner party - gathering accounts.
The SPR were very methodical and thorough in their research.
They did a census to which 17,000 people replied
with experiences of a ghostly nature.
And they ask, "How were you occupied at the time?
"Were you in health? Were you suffering from grief or anxiety?
"What were you in the habit of eating and drinking?
"Who were you in the habit of seeing?
"Were there any other persons present?
So, they're very thorough in all their questions.
And people are very serious in how they're filling all these forms in.
And everything is catalogued very precisely.
So, name, date, and conditions -
they've listed every account and they've coded it.
"INCD - Incompletely developed apparition."
"Rel - Angel or religious phantasm."
"Fab" - that must stand for "fabulous", I think.
"Grotesque, horrible, or monstrous apparition."
And so on.
"Saw her dead husband standing by her bed.
"She spoke to him..."
"Saw her dead mother..."
"Saw a man..."
"At the foot of her bed... across the room, and disappeared
"through opposite wall."
"Saw a man with a rope round his neck pass under window at dusk..."
"An elderly man walking..."
OVERLAPPING: "The same man in same place..."
"Saw her father... disappeared after."
One of the favourite ones was a crisis apparition - CA.
This is when a ghost appeared to give notice of their own death
before the actual news of the death got to them.
"From the Reverend Matthew Frost.
"While sitting at tea with my back to the window and talking with
"my wife in the usual way, I plainly heard a rap at the window.
"And looking round, I said to my wife, 'Why, there's my grandmother',
"and went to the door, but could not see anyone.
"And still feeling sure it was my grandmother, and knowing -
"though 83 years of age - she was very active and fond of a joke,
"I went round the house, but could not see anyone.
"On the following Saturday, I heard news that my grandmother died in
"Yorkshire about half an hour before the time I heard the rapping.
"I did not know that my grandmother was ill."
I feel quite sad after reading all these crisis apparitions,
one after the other.
And I really believe the people filling in the census
were completely genuine.
They feel like they are.
It's hardly surprising that people are seeing so many ghosts.
In a very real sense, spirits do haunt the Victorian home.
Every innovation - from photographs to moving pictures,
phonographs to fantasy books - has its own supernatural genre.
Take bedtime reading.
In the 1890s, popular fiction caters to a newly-educated public,
with literacy rates now over 90%.
The occult tales of Marie Corelli - blending mysticism, religion,
and psychic phenomena - dominate the bestsellers.
Arthur Conan Doyle's detective fiction and short stories
are infused with his love of the ghostly.
From the apparently supernatural Hound of the Baskervilles,
to tales of possession and hypnosis in The Parasite.
And what his readers don't realise was that Conan Doyle was drawing
inspiration from his own experiences as a real-life ghostbuster.
An 1893, he took a train down to the Dorset coast to take part in
an investigation for the SPR.
Conan Doyle wasn't here to track down some criminal mastermind
like his hyper-rational creation, Sherlock Holmes.
Oh, no - he was here with a group of SPR investigators,
because there'd been reports of a household tormented by a spirit.
Conan Doyle's memoirs take up the story.
"We sat up there two nights.
"On the first, nothing occurred.
"We had, of course, taken every precaution to checkmate fraud,
"putting worsted threads across the stairs, and so on.
"In the middle of the night...
"..a fearsome uproar broke out.
"It was like someone belabouring
"a...
..with a..."
"So we rushed at once into the kitchen,
"from where the sound had surely come.
"There was nothing there.
"Doors were all locked, windows barred, threads unbroken.
"Some years later, the...
"..was dug up in the garden.
"The suggestion was that the child had been...
"The unknown and the marvellous press upon us from all sides."
THUNDER ROLLS
THUNDER CLAPS
But could you ever capture the unknown and the marvellous?
I think that for many late Victorians,
the key lies in technology.
Photography already seems to catch ghostly figures unawares.
In 1891, Britain is fascinated by an infamous photograph from
Combermere Abbey, which suggests a spectral presence.
So-called "spirit photographers" promised the public proof that dead
relatives linger on.
After all - if they can see it, they will believe it.
What they do is have the sitter keep very, very still for the
long exposure needed, and surreptitiously get an assistant
to waft around behind them,
being some sort of apparition.
Photography's pretty spooky, anyway - it captures a moment
in time forever.
So it's so perfect for the ghost to get in on the act.
So, there are two mean techniques that Victorians would use in order
to create this illusion of ghosts.
So, one of them is a, sort of, in-camera process,
so it will happen in the camera.
And...
..you can do all very long exposures, where one element moves,
like the ghost, or a double exposure... Right.
..where you just expose twice the same scene.
So, in this one - what it is, is that the sitter has to stay
very still to get exposed.
So, in that time, when they're concentrating on being still,
someone can creep in behind them, and because they haven't been there
very long, they look translucent. Exactly.
And the other technique is to use two negatives for one same print.
Ah, right.
This is a long exposure with someone playing the ghost -
just moving around on the same exposure. OK.
And that will create the multiple faces.
And then, we have your negatives that I've placed here in this area,
where it hasn't been exposed yet, because this area has been masked...
OK. ..before it.
So basically, what you're showing me here is
the Victorian version of Photoshop?
Yeah, totally.
I think if you really wanted to believe in ghosts and spirits,
cos you've found it's a comfort,
you could easily be taken in by this.
And I don't think the Victorians were any more gullible
than we are today.
They just wanted to have this comfort.
Ghosts find their way into other machines with a new craze,
which allows the Victorians to receive communications
from the past.
Invented by Thomas Edison, the phonograph has the ability to
capture the human voice and play it back for the first time.
Known as "recording angels", they really take off once wax cylinders
are available from the 1890s.
Edison's agents in Britain even hold phonograph parties to promote them.
And by the end of the decade, they're a staple of
the middle class home.
Conan Doyle writes about their unnerving power in the story of
The Japanned Box, in which a young man spies on his employer
as he plays back a recording of his dead wife.
These are all phonographs -
sometimes called graphophones - of 1890s.
And there's boxes of records there.
One of the big selling points of the phonograph, of course,
was that you could use them for recording at home... Oh, really?
..and make recordings - which you would treasure forever -
of your family and your young ones as they were growing up,
and in the same way that you would collect their photographs.
It must have been just amazing for the Victorians to hear a living
voice coming out of a machine.
They must have thought they'd reached peak technology.
And of course, to keep a voice is like capturing more than
just a moment.
A photograph captures a moment, and it's like, it's still.
Whereas this is living.
They were played on anniversaries... and over the intervening century,
most of these recordings are very faint.
If you could get 150 plays out of the cylinder,
you could listen to a loved one at least twice a year
until you passed yourself. Absolutely, yes.
You know, what I'd really like to do is make a recording for
my loved ones, so they can hear me after I've gone.
What a wonderful idea. Let's do it.
So, do I need a speaking horn? Yes, you do.
So, this is the wax cylinder,
on which we're going to record your voice.
And I put it on the machine.
As the cylinder rotates, a sapphire cutter -
very similar to the ones used in vinyl - is going to engrave
the vibrations of your voice onto the wax. OK.
I invite you to sit. Oh, thank you.
It's ready, once you have the horn on, to take your recording.
You need to have your mouth about two inches from the horn,
and you just speak as you would in a cocktail party.
OK, so I'm at a noisy cocktail party... A noisy cocktail party.
OK, got it.
There you go.
Dear ones - if you can hear me, I'm already dead.
I'm so sorry about that.
Remember, my love will live in your hearts forever.
And please don't forget to feed the cat.
Goodbye!
I've nothing else to add.
HE CHUCKLES
PHONOGRAPH: Dear ones - if you can hear me, I'm already dead.
I'm so sorry about that.
Remember, my love will live in your hearts forever.
And please don't forget to feed the cat.
Goodbye!
I have nothing else to add. "I have nothing else to add."
I'm sure that will be a great comfort to them.
They can play that, and I'll live on forever. Mm-hmm.
I'm quite convinced of it.
Thomas Edison's agents in Britain also tried to whip up interest
in the phonograph by inviting famous celebrities to record their voices.
Now, here we have Florence Nightingale.
Now I've heard of her forever, but I've never HEARD her.
It's powerful stuff. It's amazing!
To think that I've heard Florence Nightingale!
And her voice made the very vibrations in that cylinder,
so I can hear it - ooh, stop it.
THEY CHUCKLE
Through photographs and phonographs, the Victorians have worked out
how to capture reality.
But in 1896, the decade's greatest media innovation
almost magically appears.
Moving pictures.
This is one of the great gifts of the Victorian age.
A new art form that blows everyone's mind, and forever changes the way
we see the world.
I'm amazed by how sophisticated the first film-makers are,
and how quickly they adapt the techniques of spirit photography
to make ghosts come alive.
These early short films soon find a place in the existing
entertainment world, showing at music halls and theatres
all over the country.
They're a novelty, fighting for the attention
of punters alongside funfairs, the magic lantern shows,
and circus performers.
Alexandra Palace is one of the pioneering venues
where these rare films, now restored by the BFI,
were first shown.
So when film arrives in the 1890s,
it would have been shown in the kind of pre-existing
kind of entertainment world.
It could have gone another way, could have been this kind of
scientific thing almost, like a novelty you would see
like the microscope or X-rays or something.
But actually it kind of lived in places like this,
like Alexandra Palace, you know, these big music halls
and theatres.
So what I really love about these little fragments
that are left to us, a film from this age,
is their endless creativity and invention.
They were all produced by these very young men,
young film-makers, and they are making them
for this very young, vibrant, youthful, urban audience.
The median age of a Victorian person in 1901 was 24.
Oh, goodness.
The age now, 40 years old. Yeah.
So they've got this sort of youthful energy about them.
So much illusion in this.
A disembodied head with wings.
Exactly, quite scary.
They are very rare now.
We've got, at the BFI archive, we have, I don't know,
just over 500 left of thousands that would've been made
at this time, and to see them projected in this place,
where they would've originally been seen 120 years ago,
it's just fabulous, it's such a treat.
So this is a film called, Upside Down, or The Human Flies,
and it's a great example of a trick film.
Very popular, because this is what the new moving image does best.
And what the Victorians found fascinating was that intersection
between magic and spiritualism, that kind of thing,
the unseen and the mysterious.
And the technical.
And what they loved was to be fooled, and then to find out
how it works.
So they were very, they were very curious and quite
sort of scientific minded.
I mean, I can't work out how this is done.
So they just turn the scenery upside down, and the people
are on the floor, but then you just turn the whole
film upside down. Very clever.
It's simple, but clever.
I'm really surprised that this film is,
you know, at the end of the Victorian era
because I've got in my mind a vision of the Victorians being sort of
terribly serious, and this is so fun,
it's so playful, it's, it's such a good joke.
And it reminds me a little bit of YouTube clips now. Yeah.
It would be mind expanding, mind altering.
Yeah, they tried everything in the 1890s, and in fact the first
five years, so there was this flurry of different genres and different
types of films, and all the things you could do with it.
So you had the kind of straight thing,
like news, and you had sort of story films,
and trick films, and dramas, and comedy, and animation.
So this is Artistic Creation,
who set up a kind of magic frame, easel, and he's drawing a picture
of a lady, and then she comes to life.
Yes, he's, he is creating a woman.
That's what men always want to do, is create, create a woman!
It's also, it's this delightful thing where he decides
he's going to give her a present, which is a baby.
Of course, she's long gone.
She's seen what he's up to, and legged it.
It's almost as if...
Now he doesn't know what to do, so he's giving it to us.
It's almost a feminist film. It is.
It sort of like, "I know what women want, they want a baby"
so he makes her a baby, and she's out of there.
She doesn't want the baby.
And she is a modern young woman.
I'm feeling inspired to create my own amateur trick film
in honour of these Victorian pioneers.
The Big Swallow is a film by British director,
James Williamson, and it shows an angry tourist,
who's fed up with his privacy being invaded,
and so he swallows the cameraman.
That poor man wouldn't have liked it around here today
with all the paparazzi, CCTV, constant surveillance.
He would have had to swallow an awful lot of cameramen.
Capturing people on camera particularly unsettled one early
reviewer of these films.
"Their smiles are lifeless, even though their movements are full
"of living energy and are so swift as to be almost imperceptible.
"The grey, the soundless, the bleak and dismal life,
"it is terrifying to see the evil spirits that have cast entire cities
"into eternal sleep."
Audiences are beguiled though by early films of crashing waves,
trains, and factory workers.
Even the Pope and the royal family let the cameras in and become
truly modern icons.
But cinematic techniques soon blur the line between fact and fantasy.
Explosion of a motorcar, I mean, motorcars are sort
of relatively new as well. Really new.
Wonderful kind of sort of new invention in the streets
of London here.
And again, this is a trick film, so it's relying on sort of shock
value and, how did they do that?
Bang!
So all the passengers have been blown into space,
as the bobby sees, oh, here they come.
They're falling from the sky.
Oh, oh...
It's a bit gruesome. It's incredibly gruesome.
So, this is an early example of us wanting
to be frightened and shocked. Yeah.
And seeing people being blown up. Absolutely.
We know it's not real, you know, we know it's comedy,
but at the same time, there is that yuck factor.
He really doesn't know about leaving the scene untouched,
to do the evidence, does he?
No, he doesn't.
Can you imagine how you would feel if this particular film
was the very first moving image you saw?
You would be so shocked.
So this is another kind of film
that's almost unique to Victorian film.
Which is the staged reality,
or a kind of dramatized version
of a topical news event.
This is called Beheading a Chinese Boxer.
And it is a film ostensibly about the Boxer Rebellion
in China in 1900s.
It's a very gruesome scene, in which a group of Chinese soldiers
are beheading a rebel.
We quite soon realise that this is been staged
for the cameras.
The first time I saw it, I was really taken aback.
I thought it was real.
It's a horrible, gruesome forerunner of the modern execution films we see
on the Internet, which unfortunately aren't fake, like this one is.
It's absolutely horrific. Yeah, it is really quite nasty.
I mean, the head on the spike thing is disgusting.
Yeah, isn't it horrid?
We think this was shot in France somewhere,
we're not quite sure.
It's very early, and these are difficult to identify,
but they, you know, they've gone to a lot of trouble
to stage this story.
You can see on the film repeating that these people aren't actually
Chinese, even though they are wearing traditional hats
and the clothes on closer inspection do look more like dressing gowns
and belts, but...
It's real enough.
And certainly when you immediately see it... Yeah.
I'm going to have bloody nightmares about this.
Yeah, it's a shocker.
Dramatic events like The Boxer Rebellion are perfect fodder
for this sensationalist treatment.
This is the Wild West for the media, with nobody policing the divide
between the real and the fake.
A pioneering decade, when all bets are off,
when it comes to ethics.
And this spirit infuses the new tabloid journalism
that emerges in the 1890s,
catering to commuters in the industrial cities.
The Daily Mail, set up by Alfred Harmsworth in 1896,
is a national newspaper with a global network.
The Mail's overseas offices use the latest high-speed cables
to telegraph back stories, but these long distance
communications were not always reliable.
This is one of the most extraordinary pieces of fake news
from the time.
In the summer of 1900, the Boxer Rebellion is sweeping
through China, and it's reported in the Daily Mail that all
the British in Peking have been slaughtered.
They write, "Men, women, and children, have shared one common
"fate at the hands of demons in human form."
The obituaries of the British victims are printed,
the memorial service arranged at St Paul's Cathedral.
But the memorial service had to be cancelled when it turns out
that the story is completely made up.
The most innovative tabloid journalist of the era is WT Stead,
who shares Harmsworth's belief in the importance
of fast communication.
He had already conducted the first British newspaper interview,
and made his name with campaigning investigations
into child prostitution.
In the 1890s, he begins to tap into a very different kind
of network, to attain a supply of unusual news stories.
And with his new publications, Stead discovers a thrifty way
to reduce his overheads.
By the 1890s, he has become a convinced spiritualist,
and in 1892, he develops an ability
in what's called automatic writing.
That is where he sits down at a desk like this one,
and he starts transcribing things that, as far as he is concerned,
are being sent to him by the dead, and in particular,
there is an American journalist, a woman called Julia Ames,
who he meets, and he's very taken with her.
Unfortunately she dies of pneumonia in the following year,
but suddenly in 1892, Stead starts receiving
messages from her.
At the time, he's editing a journal called the Review of Reviews,
which increasingly takes on kind of material about the spirits,
but he then thinks, "Well, actually I need a new journal
"just about the spirits" and it's a journal called Borderland.
We have a copy of the very first addition here,
and one of the main contributors to Borderland is Julia Ames,
who, by this time, has been dead for over three years.
He doesn't have to pay her very much? No, no!
He is very good at getting kind of cheap copy.
He also says that he saves money in all of his newspapers
in that he doesn't have to spend money on sending telegrams,
because he sends messages through telepathy.
So he sees his body, he describes his body
as a bifurcated telephone that he can communicate two ways,
as it were.
Now this becomes important for his editorial practices,
particularly on Borderland.
So the co-editor of Borderland is a woman called Ada Goodrich Fria,
and they have many of their editorial meetings actually
conducted through telepathy.
So Stead writes down what he says are Fria's ideas for the next
monthly issue of Borderland.
Stead, his journalistic career comes to an end,
to some extent, in April 1912, when he's a passenger
on the Titanic. Really?
On board the Titanic, and actually, the Titanic wasn't really the end
of his journalistic career.
Lots of people in the spiritualist community, mediums,
receive messages from Stead after he dies aboard the Titanic,
and he continues to publish items, pamphlets, up until the 1930s.
So, Stead dies physically in 1912,
but spiritually, his journalistic career continues
for at least another two decades.
He would have loved that. He would, absolutely.
While Stead was getting stories from across the ether,
fascination is growing with news from another mysterious realm.
Outer space.
Come on in. Wow!
Newspapers in the 1890s start to speculate about life on Mars.
Let's open up the dome and get some light in here.
So...
This is the Northumberland Telescope.
And if you want to come over here and move the dome over.
I, a little woman, can move this massive dome.
Well, I can, as well.
In this networked age of long distance communication,
the ability to reach out beyond Earth inspires prominent
thinkers, including the electrical genius,
Nikola Tesla, and the influential scientist, Francis Golton.
We can bring the telescope down just with one, one hand.
And very... Very light.
Very easily moved.
Find our, our slit in the roof.
Please take a seat in the observing chair.
Without hitting my head.
Woo!
And then I should be able to see Mars, if I just wait
for it to go dark.
We've just got to wait for the sun to go down,
and then we'll be able to have a look, yeah.
The press coverage really centred around these moments when Mars,
every couple of years, moves into what's called opposition,
when it's in a particularly good position for observation,
and at that moment, the press really, they knew
opposition was coming, and they would go to these major
observatories with big telescopes and start clamouring for news.
In the weeks and months leading up to Mars moving into this ideal
observational position, there are just so many reports,
and this is a global phenomenon.
These newspapers are able to telegraph their reports
across the globe, and so if the Lick Observatory in California
makes a new statement about what they might have seen on Mars,
the papers in London, and in Paris, and in Calcutta,
they can be publishing it that evening, the next morning.
Wow!
So, what made them think that there was intelligent life on Mars?
One of the obvious things that is seen on Mars at this time
is a lot of dark straight lines, which get called canals,
and some people argue that this is evidence of actual
built infrastructure on Mars.
So these are genuine canals, that they're irrigation canals,
and that means that Martians are engineers,
that they're building really incredible,
massive systems, that might span the entire planet.
And of course, at the time that we're talking about,
the 1890s, on Earth, the great technological development
of the age, or one of, is wireless telegraphy,
and so the idea that these Martians who might, remember,
be more advanced than humans, would have a similar system,
seemed reasonable for a lot of people.
And so, given what the amazing technologists have been able to do
with wireless telegraphy in such a short period of time,
it didn't actually seem that wild, that crazy, that of course,
Martians, like us, might well be sending out messages.
Sending out signals in the hopes that we would reciprocate.
Did anyone ever claim to have intercepted
a message from Mars?
Nikola Tesla in 1901 actually reported,
to the astonishment of the world, that he believed that he had
possibly received electromagnetic waves from outer space
that might have been, what he described as purposeful.
So they might have been messages.
He had a system at his lab in Colorado that could detect
distant electromagnetic waves and turn them into sound,
and he heard this repeated bleeping sound one night.
And he then reported to the world that these
could be messages from Mars.
The British public intellectual and eugenicist,
Sir Francis Golton, Charles Darwin's half cousin,
a very famous scientist, he publishes an article in 1896
describing what he says is a method for being able
to communicate with Mars.
So he begins by describing the possibility that if we could
signal mathematical signals, if we could start sending things
like the value of pi into outer space, that Martians
then might start sending back reciprocal signals,
and through a mathematical language, we could build up a system
of communication.
The preoccupation with contacting other worlds is reflected
in the books of HG Wells.
In The War of the Worlds, he hitches imaginative fancy
to a journalistic style, to tell the story of an alien
invasion from Mars.
But at the same time, he's writing another,
more optimistic story, about communication
with the red planet.
The crystal egg is set in Mr Cave's antique shop.
He notices one day a strange light emanating from it.
He peers in and sees something extraordinary.
A species, the likes of which he has never seen
or heard of before.
"Their heads were around and curiously human,
"and it was the eyes of one of them that had so startled him
"on his second observation.
"They had broad silvery wings, not feathered, but glistening,
"almost as brilliantly as new killed fish,
"and with the same subtle play of colour.
"And these wings were not built on the plan of a bird wing or bat,
"but supported by curved ribs radiating from the body."
What's fascinating about the story though is that the Martians can also
use the egg to watch humanity.
"After a time, he aspired to attract the attention of the Martians,
"and the next time that the strange eyes of one of them appeared close
"to the crystal, Mr Cave cried out and sprang away.
"And they immediately turned on the light and began
"to gesticulate in a manner suggestive of signalling."
HG Wells hints at how future media technology will be used,
and shows how communications underpin British power.
In 1897, Queen Victoria celebrates her Diamond Jubilee.
The British Empire is still the world's undisputed superpower,
and Victoria decides to use the new medium of film to send
a message around the world.
The British put on the most triumphant display of imperial
strength that the country has ever seen.
On the 22nd of June, 1897, London hosts this extraordinary
event at a cost of £300,000.
Over 20 million today.
The city is scrubbed up and decorated to play host
to the largest military force ever assembled in the capital,
with troops from across the Empire.
People cram into specially constructed viewing galleries,
or pay to hire rooms with a view of the proceedings.
3 million people come to watch the show,
as they march along a processional route,
ending in a Thanksgiving service at St Paul's Cathedral.
But thanks to 1890s technology, many more people are able
to watch this spectacle.
The different film companies compete for the best spots from Lumiere
to RW Paul, Dixon's Biograph Company,
to the French Beaumont, and LeCoultre.
Within days, the footage has been developed,
shipped, and distributed around the globe.
This is priceless propaganda, projected around the Empire
to millions of British subjects.
This is the first modern mass media event, and it's brought to the world
by a small army of film cameras.
It's incredible to think the industry is barely a year old,
and yet there's up to 40 cameramen recording this.
Queen Victoria described it in her journal
as "a never to be forgotten day" and we haven't forgotten it.
Because this event became a blueprint for every
subsequent state occasion.
For me, these films capture the essence of the 1890s,
the old Victorian order, an Empire and an Empress,
rubbing shoulders with the world we recognise,
a modern one of film cameras and superfast global communications.
The close of the century signals the end of a feverish decade,
full of contradictions.
They view science to give themselves new powers,
they've challenged traditional views of race,
sex, and gender.
And they've developed a new media, and opened their minds
to other worlds.
But the sheer pace of all this change has also
revealed their innermost fears.
The British of the 1890s are, in so many ways,
modern and surprising.
They're certainly not the dusty old Victorian cliche.
They're cutting-edge disruptors, decadent artists,
frauds and geniuses, and they sow the seeds for the future,
our present.