(thundering music)
(engine roaring)
We live in an exciting time in human history,
a time when the world has never been smaller.
A time when we can drive,
sail, and fly to almost anywhere.
We can even leave our planet. Three, two, one.
Lift off. (rumbling)
How did this happen?
This is the incredible story
of our civilization's ceaseless desire to move.
(laughing)
I'm Sean Riley.
I've always been fascinated by speed.
Come with me on a journey
to better understand the game-changing engineering,
(grunts)
courageous innovators.
Oh God, it really fights ya.
And the machines that take us further, higher,
and, above all, faster.
(intense music)
(horns honking) (sirens wailing)
You ever notice something?
Human beings aren't spread evenly across the planet.
We tend to cluster together.
Today, more than half the world's population live in cities.
It's a point that becomes very clear
if you view the world from a unique perspective, up there.
(gentle orchestral music)
Orbiting 250 miles above the Earth,
a striking pattern of civilization emerges.
Giant hubs of human activity,
cities and mega-cities.
Our communities are connected.
Laced together over vast distances
by sophisticated transport networks,
some as old as civilization itself.
How we live has been shaped by speed,
humanity's relentless desire to move faster.
So what jump-starts this modern pattern of human movement
back and forth across the continents?
Well, this is County Cornwall in England,
and a pivotal moment in engineering happens right here
over 200 years ago.
It's a moment that changes the way we all move forever.
It's 1801, the Age of Steam.
Cornish copper mines are booming,
thanks to steam-driven water pumps preventing flooding.
Inventor Richard Trevithick, son of a mining manager,
can barely read or write,
but he's about to have a radical idea
that changes the course of history.
So Trevithick is no stranger to steam engines.
He grows up around them,
but he's a bit of a rebel and he wants to try something new.
It's something that the people around him
are telling him is, at best, a bad idea,
and, at worst, impossible.
But he's about to do it anyway.
He's gonna make a steam engine with a difference.
(upbeat orchestral music)
Until now, steam is produced by fires lit
under large domed water boilers,
but the design loses a lot of heat,
only producing low pressure steam.
Creating higher pressure steam is the challenge,
but it's risky, with engines potentially exploding.
Trevithick is a risk taker.
He designs a cylindrical boiler,
surrounding the heat source.
He figures his innovation will increase steam pressure
without catastrophic failure,
producing what's called strong steam.
Trevithick has a flash of inspiration,
an entirely novel application
for his smaller strong steam engine,
one that lights the fuse for an explosion in speed.
Look at this, this is great.
There's certain pieces of technology,
certain machines that, when they show up,
they send us off on a new direction in history.
But often when, once they're obsolete,
they're forgotten, they're destroyed.
We don't have them around anymore.
That's why it's so cool that we still have this one.
Hello, I'm Sean Riley.
Hello, Sean.
What am I looking at here?
Well, we're looking at a replica
of the world's first successful self-propelled vehicle.
We call it the Puffing Devil.
Trevithick, the Cornish engineer,
came up with this fresh concept of how to raise steam.
It's essentially a tube and then within it
we have another tube, half the diameter.
And within that middle tube is the fire.
So the fire is totally surrounded by water.
And this was an amazing leap forward.
Trevithick saw a future where
you could get more energy out of a smaller package,
and maybe, just maybe, if you could get enough energy
from a small enough engine,
then the engine could move itself, right.
(imitates explosion) That's this mind blowing idea,
and this is where he achieved it.
So, the question is, what's it like to drive?
Ready? -: Yeah.
As ready as I'm gonna get, let's give it go.
(steam hissing)
I gotcha. (man talking indistinctly)
Uh huh, oh God, it really fights ya.
I see.
Yeah.
There we go.
Not exactly precise steering.
You just kind of head in a general direction
and hope it goes there.
There we go, oh yeah, coming back over.
With the Puffing Devil, Trevithick makes
steam powered transport a reality.
And in 1801 that is mind blowing.
Wow, man that is a beast of a steering, it's so heavy.
That is not easy to drive, man.
It takes a lot of strength and you can't really
tell it what to do, you kind of have to
just keep it within a range,
and point it down the road,
and hope it goes where you want it to.
Woo, it's a handful.
(steam hissing) (gentle music)
A few years after rolling out his Puffing Devil,
Trevithick builds the world's first steam railway.
(horn whistling)
And a familiar sight and sound begins to fade
into the background of history.
You see, up until this point,
if you wanted to get anywhere
quicker than you could walk,
or if you wanted to haul a heavy load,
this is what you used.
A big, beautiful horse.
That's what you'd use, that's what your father used,
that's what your father's father before him used,
as far back as anyone can remember.
That's what makes Trevithick's idea so revolutionary.
With his very first test drive
he does away with thousands of years of tradition.
He's swapping horse power for steam power.
(majestic music)
Even so, the legacy of my four-legged friend lives on.
The steam locomotive is dubbed the Iron Horse.
And the standard unit of engine strength
is forever more measured as horsepower.
Now that I've had a chance to ride on the Puffing Devil
I have a much better sense of how this story begins.
You see, Trevithick's innovation
ignites a revolution in steam locomotion.
It helps to turn fledgling countries
into giant nations with the power
to move faster and further.
But there's one nation in particular
that really benefits from the full force
of the steam locomotive.
(western music)
America.
In the early 1800s most of the country
is still virgin territory.
Only the brave, the foolish, or the desperate
risk the slow trek across this vast,
unforgiving land.
(bluesy country music)
But with the arrival of the Iron Horse,
America embarks on one of its greatest
engineering projects.
Linking east and west by rail.
Between Omaha and Sacramento
thousands of men set to work.
Over flat ground, they lay up to 10 miles of track a day.
But crossing the Rocky Mountains
proves more formidable.
And progress slows to less than two feet a day.
Finally, in 1869, after six grueling years,
almost 2,000 miles of railroad meet
at Promontory Summit, Utah.
It's life changing for 19th century America,
and it allows the wild west to join
the rest of the country.
(uptempo music)
The railroads move more people than ever before.
Now crossing America is not only safer,
it's much faster.
And the place these life changing journeys begin
will play a defining role in the way we move.
This is Grand Central Terminal.
It's a magnificent piece of architecture,
and it's also a testament to the importance
of the railroads.
Over 150 years old, it's still the largest
railroad station on the planet.
By the mid-20th century, Grand Central
is an established starting point
for fast long distance travel
to cities across America.
Today, its rail network connects
over 500 destinations.
With 150,000 miles of track.
More than any other nation.
It could circle the globe six times.
The growth of the railroads changes the face of America.
They play a pivotal role not just in establishing
cities like New York,
but in supersizing them into giant urban centers.
But it's not just America.
(uptempo dramatic music)
This revolution in human motion continues today.
Innovations in rail technology
carry more of us further and faster
than ever before.
Maybe the best place to experience this
is in a nation that's led the world
in train engineering, Japan.
For over 50 years Japan has been at the cutting edge
of speed on rails.
(train whizzing)
(dramatic music)
I'm on a Japanese bullet train
traveling at 175 miles an hour.
And it is smooth as silk.
The Tokaido Shinkansen line connects Tokyo with Osaka,
Japan's two biggest cities.
Since its opening on October 1, 1964,
this 320 mile long track alone
has shuttled almost six billion people.
On that morning, the Hikari Number One pulls out
from Tokyo Station's platform 19,
and arrives at Shin Osaka Station
exactly on time four hours later.
Just the day before, that same journey
would have taken six and a half hours.
It's an amazing increase in speed and efficiency.
But it's one that almost didn't happen.
(suspenseful music)
In the 1950s trains are topping out
at almost 70 miles an hour.
One Japanese engineer, Hideo Shima,
dreams of a revolutionary high speed rail network,
the Shinkansen, that will smash
the 100 mile an hour barrier.
In 1958 a committee led by Shima develops the concept.
His first idea is each carriage should have
individual electrified motors to move them,
rather than one locomotive pulling the lot.
Next, he designs the train to use compressed air
as shock absorbers to minimize vibrations.
Finally, Shima and his team will engineer rail routes
where gradients and bends will be kept to a minimum
to maintain high speeds.
It's a bold engineering vision.
It's one that comes with an estimated price tag
that runs into the hundreds of millions.
It turns out, it's a little too bold,
and his home country won't risk the funding.
(suspenseful music)
So, Shima travels to Washington, D.C.
to ask the World Bank to finance his revolutionary vision.
The bank's policy is not to loan to experimental projects.
But Shima argues that his designs
are robust and dependable.
The bank agrees to fund his bold vision.
Six decades on, and today Shinkansen bullet trains
are famed for their speed and their appearance.
They owe both to Hideo Shima's original design.
His determination, his original engineering,
lives on in these bullet trains.
It makes them not only remarkably fast,
but it also makes them, I think,
very beautiful machines.
There you go, the legacy of Hideo Shima.
The man who saw the future, and propelled us into it.
(dramatic music)
Fast forward to today, and Japanese engineers
are developing an even faster form of rail transport.
One which could make wheels
a thing of the past.
Now this is one of a kind.
I'm in the Yamanashi maglev train station.
And here Japanese engineers are working on perfecting
the fastest train on the planet.
It's designed to carry passengers
at up to 300 miles an hour.
This is the L0.
It holds the record as the fastest in the world.
An incredible 374 miles an hour.
Whoa, that thing is booking, man.
It's just flying.
I mean, it's not really flying 'cause it doesn't have wings,
but it's going airplane speeds,
and I guess technically it's not touching the ground.
The truth is I don't know what to call it,
but it is very cool and very fast.
There's one other thing, too.
Did you hear how the only thing we hear
is the wind whooshing past the outside?
That's because there's no engines on board.
And that is because of an inspiration that happened
in New York in the 1960s.
(jazz music)
Stuck behind the wheel, American physicist James Powell
has a thought that we've all had.
What if we could just rise above the traffic?
Powell's idea might sound crazy,
but it's actually grounded
in very well understood science.
Magnetism, it's an invisible force of nature
that surrounds us, you can't see it.
But if you've ever played with a set of magnets
you might have felt it.
Now, magnetic fields have a polarity.
And if you oppose them, plus to minus, minus to plus,
they attract.
But, if you align them plus to plus, minus to minus,
they repel each other.
It's this idea that gets Powell excited.
He thinks to himself,
what if you could scale that up and put it to work.
Powell takes this magnetic principle and thinks big.
Really big.
He figures by using repelling poles
of super powerful magnets he can levitate
the entire weight of a carriage above the tracks.
But how does he get it to move?
Powell has an answer for that, too.
Use another set of strong magnets built into the track,
whose polarity alternates,
constantly creating forces that push and pull.
The result is magnetic levitation, or maglev for short.
Powell is the first to think of it in terms of motion.
But can magnets really levitate a train?
(suspenseful music)
Enlightened engineers across the globe
embraced the concept.
Developing a range of maglev transport designs.
And the Japanese see the potential
for record breaking speed.
The new bullet train.
Yes. -: Yeah.
I'm interested to know how far
does the train float above the ground?
Amazing, yeah.
Has this been a difficult technology to develop?
So I'm about to take my first ride on a maglev train.
I'm about to take off, leave the station?
I don't know what to call it, but, it's pretty cool.
(gentle music)
So whenever the train's at rest or at lower speeds
we're actually riding on wheels sitting on top of the track.
And right now we're just starting to speed up,
and the wheels are still underneath us,
we're rolling along on the ground.
When we get to a certain speed we'll actually
engage the super conduction magnets,
levitate up off the ground, and disengage the wheels.
And that should happen any minute, here we go.
You can feel the whole thing lift off.
It's starting to levitate now, floating along,
cushioned by superconducting magnets.
Pretty nice way to travel.
Everything outside is just whizzing along.
It's just zipping by so quick you can't see anything.
This really is like flying on the ground.
490, she's telling us we're coming up to our maximum.
498, 500 kilometers an hour.
That's over 300 miles an hour.
That is a personal record for me,
that's as fast as I have ever gone over the land.
And I'll tell you what, I can guarantee
it's a personal record for all of them too
because that's as fast as anyone can go on the ground.
Here we go, this is it man.
This is the height of technology.
The real question is, in the future, can we go faster?
(uptempo funky music)
What's inside this steel tube
is straight out of science fiction.
And it could take us into a future
of moving at incredible speed.
This sealed cylinder is over 10 feet wide
and 500 yards long.
Inside is a unique piece of engineering.
A test track in a tube
with almost all of the air extracted.
Virgin's hyperloop one promises to carry us faster
than ever before.
What are we about to see?
So, this is it right here, this is the pod.
The star of all of our testing.
This test pod is a prototype.
It can't carry people yet.
But soon larger versions could whisk up to 15 of us
across entire continents.
And this is the one and only.
Yep, nothing else like it.
It kind of looks like an airplane fuselage
without wings. Yeah, exactly.
Like normal maglevs,
the hyperloop one uses
a powerful series of magnets to accelerate.
As it picks up speed, the wheels retract.
And magnetism levitates the pod
over a central aluminum track.
But cocooned in its vacuum-sealed tube
the hyperloop one has a distinct advantage
when it comes to speed.
So we have no resistance from wheels,
we have no resistance from air.
You've got no friction, nothing to slow you down.
We get ourselves up to speed, we're levitating,
we're sailing along.
We don't need to constantly feed energy to this system.
Even on this short track,
the test pod accelerates to almost 250 miles an hour.
But the real thing will be much, much faster.
What kind of speeds are we talking about?
We're talking 700 miles an hour.
700 miles an hour.
Oh yeah, super fast.
So we're going faster than a jet plane.
Yeah, faster than any commercial transportation
that's out there right now.
Cool. -: Yeah.
Yeah, so you're riding along inside,
you've got air in there, you have power,
you're charging your cell phone, you're having a drink,
what do you think it's gonna feel like to ride this?
As comfortable as an airplane.
So although we can accelerate and decelerate very quickly,
and we can move you around with crazy turns,
we're not going to.
It's not a roller coaster,
it's something you take every day.
So it's a very comfortable ride,
and a very smooth ride.
Any chance for a roller coaster version?
Um, probably not, but nice try.
All right, moving on.
This offers a new and exciting era in human speed.
In hyperloop one, traveling the 2,500 miles
between New York and Los Angeles
could take just three and a half hours.
Faster, cleaner, and more efficient than a jet plane.
And you can forget about turbulence.
The hyperloop really is engineering
out on the bleeding edge.
It uses some technologies borrowed from other applications
mixed with some fresh innovations.
And all of it put together in a brand new way.
This really is a new form of transportation.
(uptempo music)
Railroads have transformed the way we travel.
But in our quest to speed across continents,
one invention has driven us further than any other.
It's the early 1880s.
The son of a train driver wrestles
with a life long obsession.
The audacious dream of Karl Benz
is to build a powered moving machine
that doesn't use steam or run on tracks.
An automobile.
But his engineering challenges are daunting.
Benz has no precedents or prototypes.
How many wheels?
How can he steer it?
How will the engine be attached to the carriage?
The list goes on.
Against the odds, and against great criticism,
in 1885 Karl Benz unveils his masterpiece.
The world's first practical motor car.
Now to really understand how bold Benz's vision is,
I gotta drive it for myself, right.
So I've come here to Somerset, England
to the Haynes International Motor Museum
because they have an exact replica of the original.
And they tell me it even runs.
Matt, is it?
It is, hello Sean.
Hi, nice to meet you. Nice to meet you.
This is it, huh,
look at this beauty. It is indeed.
It doesn't seem like much,
but this really the start of something
very important, right?
Yeah, it was the start of motoring as we know it,
because there is a bloodline from this car
to every other car that you see on the roads
through motoring history, they are all related.
I mean up until now, too,
a lot of the road going vehicles
had been steam powered or they'd been design around
basically a horseless cart,
these giant wood frames and big static wood wheels.
And here we're starting to see bicycle technology.
We are indeed, because Benz was
a fan of the bicycle,
and he was riding one at the time.
So yes, you do see that kind of technology creeping in.
So give me the quick tour, front to back.
Starting with the wheel.
Yeah, one wheel. -: One wheel.
Unsprung, and the steering is very basic.
You operate just by turning this lever here.
Which might seem funny, but you gotta think about it.
It's way easier to make mechanical linkage
for one wheel steering than it is
to try to build two wheels that steer together.
So this is just a quick down and dirty way of doing it.
Well, exactly, yes.
And then you have the single cylinder engine at the back,
giving a top speed of around 10 miles an hour,
and the capacity of the engine is just under one liter.
One liter, and what's the horsepower?
Just under one.
One liter, one horsepower. -: Yes, yes, just under.
Yeah, wow. -: Yeah.
So to put it in some context, the car that I drove the work
in this morning has a two liter engine
with about 150 brake horsepower,
and could fall probably about 135 miles and hour.
Yeah, so clearly we've come a long way,
but this is where it starts.
Absolutely, it does indeed.
Amazing. (fanciful music)
In 1886, Benz obtains a patent for his invention.
Woo, look at that.
The original car is ready to roll.
Well, as far as vintage cars go,
it doesn't get much more vintage than this.
But it's pretty exciting to think
that this is what is was like
to really try this whole technology out for the first time.
I mean, it's all unprecedented.
Not sure if it's gonna work.
Just put it down and go.
(car engine chuffing)
(laughing) Yes!
Man, whoever took the first test drive on this,
they were brave.
Ah, this is amazing.
I mean once you get it going it just purrs along.
Of course there's no brakes,
so you gotta keep feathering the throttle
if you want to turn.
Oh yeah, now I'm starting to get the hang of this thing.
(car engine chuffing)
So the Benz car works, but the whole world
doesn't really take notice until one brave
audacious woman gets behind the wheel.
(fanciful music) (car engine chuffing)
Critics of the car believe it's a novelty item,
incapable of long journeys.
But Benz's wife Bertha thinks otherwise.
On August 5, 1888, without her husband's knowledge,
she and her two sons set off in the automobile
to visit her mother in Pforzheim, over 50 miles away.
But it's no easy ride.
The car doesn't have gears.
So whenever they encounter a hill, they push.
And then a belt fails.
So Bertha takes off her garter
and uses it as impromptu replacement.
Bertha's initiative to take that first trip
proves the potential of the motor car.
Bertha makes it to her destination,
and she telegrams home to say that she's arrive safely.
Now, with that first test drive
she silences all the critics.
Because of her determination to drive to her mother's house,
she changes the course of human history.
It is perhaps the single biggest revolution
in transportation, ever.
But motoring doesn't come cheap.
A Benz car costs $1,000.
About twice the annual income
of the average American at the time.
Only the very rich can afford one.
Fast forward to today, and there are about
a billion cars driving around the world.
So how does that happen?
Well, this is what happened.
The Ford Model T.
It's the first car to be produced on an assembly line,
out of standardized parts,
and they're built in huge numbers.
That's the genius of Henry Ford.
(playful music)
At the beginning of the 20th century,
Henry Ford's assembly line sparks
a revolution in car manufacturing.
His streamlined construction method accelerates production.
The time it takes to assemble a single car
shrinks from 12 hours to just 2 1/2.
And as everyone knows, time is money.
The production line slashes the price of a car
from $850 down to about 300.
And that puts this revolutionary invention
within reach of almost anyone who wants one.
And boy do they want one.
Within 20 years, there are 15 million Model Ts on the road.
(bright music) (engines revving)
What's amazing to me is the impact of the automobile.
It's profound, right, it alters landscapes.
It changes cultures.
And it powers mobility in a way
that was unimaginable before Benz.
I mean, just look at what happens.
It's the early 1900s and our Ford Model T
is tearing through town at an incredible
40 miles per hour.
Our newfound speed will demand change.
Like our first stoplight in 1914.
Soon roads reach out of town,
but a car can only carry so much gas.
We need some good old American enterprise.
By the 1920s the U.S. is spending over a billion a year
building roads like Route 66
connecting L.A. to Chicago.
Now our car can make the trip, but we are beat.
We need a hotel for motorists.
And in 1925, we get the first of many.
In the 1940s innovations like the automatic transmission
of the Buick Special make driving fun.
So much fun, that we don't want to get out of our cars.
Even to eat or watch a movie.
It's the American dream.
Cars like the Cadillac increase our cruising speeds
through the 50s and 60s along the nation's new
interstate highways.
Now cars can change how and where we live.
By the 70s and 80s, millions of us
are speeding through new commuter belts
in satellite towns, which eventually merge
into the metropolises of today.
(uptempo music)
Along with railroads, cars drive the single greatest
movement in human history.
Ah, but, with this many people moving,
none of us are going anywhere.
The freedom the car promised
is now strangling our towns and cities.
Incredibly, the average speed here in New York City
is about five miles an hour.
You could almost get out and walk faster.
So, is that the end of the road?
I mean, is there any hope of getting things
back on track and getting back up to speed?
Come on.
(horns honking)
(dramatic music)
well, maybe the answer lies with cars
designed to be smarter than us.
2,000 miles from the congested streets of Manhattan
engineers are putting the theory
of driverless vehicles to the test.
Well, driverless car, here we go.
I've heard the hype, I've seen all the tech,
I know this should work,
but for a control freak like me,
it's pretty hard to let go.
(suspenseful music)
(chuckling) It's driving itself.
This is weird, the car is just driving
through the parking lot,
and it's seeing the fence and the telephone poles.
At least I hope it's seeing all that,
it seems to be steering itself through,
and I am just riding in the car
letting the computer drive.
And I guess this is the wave of the future,
but it feels pretty weird.
So, computers can navigate a slow moving car
around a parking lot perfectly.
But can they cope with rapidly changing speeds
on a highway?
All right, I survived my first ride in a robot car.
I don't think I'm ready to let it drive my kids around,
but I do trust it enough
to take part in today's experiment.
(dramatic music)
I'll be riding second from last in a convoy of cars
all of which have ACC.
Adaptive cruise control.
Monitored by an onboard computer.
For the test I'll be steering,
but the computer will control my speed,
by adjusting the adaptive cruise control.
And should keep me a safe distance
from the car in front.
But can a computer driven car cope
with a sharp braking event?
I'm setting my adaptive cruise control
at 55 miles an hour.
We'll run up against the car in front of us,
and when the radar detects that car in front of us,
it'll just keeps us right there.
When the lead car starts to slow down,
each subsequent car will have to slow down as well.
The cars drive themselves independently.
With their exact position monitored via GPS.
If the test is successful, each car will brake
in a way that keeps the traffic at a constant speed.
And more importantly, avoids a collision.
Right now I'm changing the setting
on the adaptive cruise control down to one bar.
That will keep the least amount of distance
between the car in front of us and us.
This is more nerve wracking, right.
I mean, I'm still letting the computer drive,
but we are a lot closer,
which means the reaction time
is gonna be much shorter.
I hope this computer knows what it's doing.
I need to stay alert.
If my car's ACC can't keep me at a safe distance,
I'll have to take control to avoid a crash.
(dramatic music)
Okay, hear that, here comes the test event.
All right, here we go.
I see the lights coming.
Come on car, slow down, slow down, slow down, slow down.
40, ooh.
Oh, brake, brake, brake, brake, brake, brake.
Yeah, brake, brake, brake, brake, brake.
Suddenly, my white car finally brakes.
But so quickly it forces the last car
behind me to swerve.
Okay, adaptive cruise control slowed us down
but it also disengaged.
So I was told if this happened I need to pull over
and let the GPS zero out.
So that the experimenters know
that my adaptive cruise control
couldn't handle that much.
And the experiment is over.
So any surprises today?
Yeah, of course there were.
You experienced it yourself.
Yeah, the adaptive cruise control kicked out
and it gave manual control back to me.
Can we look at that one to see what happened?
The steep lines indicate each car's drop in speed.
The steeper the line the harder the braking.
As the computer tries to keep distance.
So here you see lead vehicle,
five mile an hour slow down.
Right, we're all tracking along together,
then the lead vehicle starts to slow down,
and then look how steep they get.
Every one of those cars had to slow down
more than the car in front.
That means a small braking event in the front
created a complete stop and go traffic jam.
Until you get to my car in the orange,
and it just drops off
like almost as a wall-- It's like a cliff.
That slow down was so extreme,
by the time it got to you,
your adaptive cruise control kicked out.
So you're still really learning stuff
while you're doing these experiments?
This is just the beginning.
We're gonna allow these cars to start to talk to each other,
so they can coordinate
and actually smooth out these traffic jams.
Meaning traffic congestion could become
a thing of the past.
Do we have the technology to make
driverless cars a reality?
Well the answer might lie with a discovery
made by two NASA engineers
back at the beginning of the space race.
(suspenseful music)
It's 1964.
Incredibly, six years after the launch
of the first U.S. satellite, Explorer I,
those on the ground still can't precisely
determine its orbit.
Enter physicist Henry Plotkin.
Plotkin believes that the answer lies
with a recent invention, the laser.
What if they fire a laser from the ground,
aimed at a satellite covered with mirrors,
and measure the time it takes for the laser
to travel up and reflect back to them?
The laser travels at the speed of light.
So if they can precisely measure
the time delay of the beam,
they can calculate the satellite's distance.
But will it work?
On Halloween night, 1964,
Plotkin and his team put their theory into practice.
They aim their laser at a test satellite, Explorer 22.
Timing the delay of the reflection
pinpoints the position of the satellite
to within 10 feet.
Plotkin demonstrates light detection and ranging,
better known as LIDAR.
At the time, it's a key piece of technology
in space exploration.
But today, it might hold the key to autonomous driving.
(bright music)
I'm here in Silicon Valley to look at
a key piece of tech that promises
to get the driverless cars of the future up to speed.
Hi Michael, how you doing?
Hi, Sean, welcome to Velodyne.
Thank you so much man, this is very cool.
What do you have going here?
Let me show you our latest technology.
Please.
On the stand over there is the VLS 128 sensor.
It's a LIDAR sensor.
It has 128 lasers inside a spinning apparatus,
able to scan 360 degrees.
Is that what I'm seeing here?
Yes, it's scanning at five to 20 times per second,
and out to 300 meters.
Right, so this sensor is sending out laser pulses,
bouncing off of all the objects in this room here,
including us, including the back wall,
and its then measuring how long
it takes those pulses to come back to the sensor.
And then it gets not only just a picture of the room,
but also a measurement for where everything is.
Pretty precise?
Yes, 2.4 million times per second.
(suspenseful music)
These computer screens visualize how the sensor
interprets its environment.
They allow you to enter LIDAR's world.
This is so cool.
So I can really navigate within this 3D world
that's built by the sensor.
In real time. -: In real time.
Look, there's someone walking by.
I can see the lasers hitting them,
and the information that's bouncing back
to the sensors from those lasers.
How is the LIDAR sensor better than the human eye?
The human relies on the available light.
Our LIDAR sensors provide their own light.
It doesn't rely on visible light, this is infrared.
Right, so it can see 360 degrees,
it never blinks, it knows exactly how far things are away,
and it can see in the dark.
Those are four things we can't do.
(suspenseful music)
In a brightly lit office environment
LIDAR is impressive.
But is it really practical out on the road?
Drivers and pedestrians are most vulnerable at night.
There's less traffic, but hazards like dazzling headlights,
and pitch black backgrounds
means a high percentage of fatal accidents
occur in the dark.
This car has a human driver.
But on the roof is a LIDAR sensor.
And Michael has set up an experiment
to show me how we might be safer
if a LIDAR linked computer is in control.
All right now look at this, this is amazing.
With this bird's eye view, you can actually see
360 degrees all around the car,
and I can see all through the neighborhood.
I mean I see the parked cars,
I see the tops of the houses, the roofs,
the landscaping, the trees.
This is amazing, look at this intersection.
I'm seeing way down the street in both directions,
deep into the pitch black I can see what's down there,
it's open, it's clear.
Can we zoom down now into the car?
Sure.
Whoa!
Feeling like I'm center stage in a sci-fi movie
is a lot of fun,
but LIDAR could be a life saver.
Whoa! (brakes squealing)
Heads up. Who is that?
Look at that guy, he's wearing all black,
couldn't see him at all in the nighttime.
He just jumped out. -: Yeah.
You could see him clearly on the LIDAR display.
As soon as he came out from between the parked cars
he just jumped out on the screen.
But here in the darkness I couldn't see him for real at all.
(dramatic music)
A situation just like this where you have
a person walking the dark wearing all black,
this is when you want LIDAR onboard.
Both to keep the people in the car safe
and to keep the pedestrian safe.
(Sean grunts)
This is a phenomenal technology.
And it's only getting better every day.
Clearly, self driving cars are coming.
But will they solve the problems of congestion?
Do they really hold the key
to the future of how we move.
I don't know, there are some who say
the ultimate answer is to rise above it all.
(gentle music)
So what does the vehicle of the future look like?
Well it could look something like this.
It's kind of a cross between
the family SUV and a helicopter.
It's VTOL, vertical take off and landing.
That means it can come and go in a small footprint.
It can land in a parking space,
on top of a building, in your backyard.
It's got multiple rotors on it.
That gives it precision and stability.
But it also means that it has redundancy, so it's safer.
It can afford to lose a motor or two
and still fly just fine.
VTOLs are coming sooner than you might think.
Unmanned test flights are already under way.
Refining the technology needed
to lift us into the skies
above our congested cities.
Is this the answer to the traffic jam?
Is this the way we get everybody moving again?
Is this the way we get back up to speed?
Maybe.
And the truth is you probably won't be flying it.
It'll be autonomous, flying via robot.
Getting across town will be a breeze.
Soaring above all the stop lights,
gridlock, and stop and go traffic of the past.
It's easy to imagine a future with swarms
of VTOLs flying through highways in the sky,
taking us anywhere we want to go.
Looking back at where we've been,
and looking ahead to where we're going.
I can be sure of this.
Revolutionary technology will accelerate
our next leap in speed.
(dramatic music)