You might not think about it very often, but we are living
through a golden age of technology.
Our homes, and our pockets, are full of inventions and gadgets
that 20 years ago would have been the stuff of science fiction.
Alexa, how exactly do you work?
Mm, I don't know that. That's what we're going to find out.
These things have become such an integral part of our everyday lives
that we've forgotten to remember how clever they are.
I'm Professor Hannah Fry, and I want to open your eyes...
I'm having a great time!
..to the secret genius of everyday objects.
The ones that we take for granted,
items that owe their existence to generations
of scientific innovation.
THE Edison drove an electric car? Yeah. This one.
In every episode, I'm going to take one item
and tear it apart...
..bit by bit.
So now there's some stuff that you can see.
Meet the people behind it...
Frankly, I thought many things were impossible.
..and unlock the amazing...
Here is the clandestine listening device.
..and sometimes hilarious stories behind its invention.
Hello! Look at you.
This time, it's the food delivery app on your phone.
It's almost become too easy to order delivery food.
Whatever you like, whatever cuisine,
you can just have it at your door in a matter of minutes
just by pressing a few buttons on your phone.
It's all thanks to some pensioners in Gateshead ordering Greggs
in the 1980s.
It's 20p! Oh, if only!
'Pizza by internet'.
Pizza pioneered online delivery.
We actually got questions of, "Does the pizza come out of the floppy drive?"
Oh, and submarine warfare and Soviet satellites.
They made sure your takeaway doesn't get lost.
'One of the great scientific feats of the age.'
From Deliveroo, to Uber Eats...
..from Food Hub, to Just Eat,
24 million of us now use apps
to order an endless array of takeaways.
Deliveroo, founded in 2013, has conquered every corner
of the globe.
And I'm going to one of their leading innovation hubs...
..in an industrial park in Acton.
What has always been interesting to me is the burger
is always the top selling item everywhere in the UK.
This is the company's founder, Will Shu.
Is that true in other countries? What about in Europe?
Italy was not burgers. I think Italy was actually sushi,
believe it or not. Really?! Yeah. Yeah.
Whether it's delivering Mackie in Milan, or cheeseburgers in Chester,
because Deliveroo's sole route to customers
is via the delivery app,
they can have kitchens cooking food exclusively for delivery.
Think of it as a worldwide buffet that comes to you.
Here you go.
This thing is primed for efficiency, right?
Because you don't have in-house dining.
And so everything is geared towards delivery.
It makes things much faster, more efficient.
Online food delivery apps couldn't exist without some breathtakingly
sophisticated technology.
You can slice the app into four crucial pieces of tech.
From the mapping system...
..to the delivery rider's display.
And it all starts with the first thing that we see
when we open up the app - the order screen.
It might appear simple, but the order screen that you see
is unique to you.
Anyone who's ever ordered Deliveroo on their phone will know
that, as you open up the app, it gives you a delicious array
of potential options. Here's mine. It's nine o'clock in the morning.
I've got pizza, pizza,
um, some pizza, some crips, and, uh, some pizza.
Delicious.
But what you see is going to change depending on how you used
the app before. So if I get Declan - this is our fancy director.
We've got some dim sum, got some Asian noodles,
sushi, and more dim sum.
Eh, you really are part of the metropolitan elite, aren't you, Declan? I can see.
Eh, Laura. Oh, hello! This is what I'm talking about.
We've got Mexican chicken burgers, dripping with sauce.
Lovely. Kebabs, burgers, more burgers!
And a curry, which I think demonstrates
that you're my kind of person. The point here is that what you see
when you open the app is personalised to you,
and the things that you previously have ordered on the app.
Deliveroo is working on the assumption
that if you've like something once, you're probably going
to like it again, even if that includes kebabs at 9am, Laura.
But personalisation isn't the only feature of the order screen.
As soon as we place our order, it shows an estimated delivery time
based on the track record of the kitchen cooking it.
Back to Will.
So, who comes up with the estimate for how long something's going to take to prepare?
We do, based on millions and millions of data points, right?
And so, take a brand like Nando's, we've worked with forever.
We have a very, very good idea of how long it's going to take.
Whereas if you're a newer restaurant, maybe in an area
where we haven't been as long, it's going to take us a longer time
for our machine learning models to figure that out.
If you're saying, this is how long we expect it for you to make
this dish, does that mean that it's like a target
for the kitchen? Yeah, it's a target for the kitchen.
And so, sometimes if they're really busy, it's going to be a little hard
to hit it. We understand that.
If the food's not ready in time, that restaurant
will get bumped down the list of options on your order screen,
which means that over time, they'll get fewer orders
and less money.
And that puts added pressure on the restaurant to hit its targets.
But it means that the choices on your order screen are
constantly updating, to improve average delivery times.
This is, I have to be honest, more sophisticated
than I was expecting. I think I sort of thought,
"Oh," you know, "there's an order, send someone."
I thought it was a bit like... I mean, you know, in a way,
it's pretty easy to sort of like, conceptualise it.
But what's behind all of it is actually very complex.
There's just a lot of maths behind it, basically.
You're talking my language. And I know that's what you're into, so...
Once again, we've got the mathematicians to thank.
You're welcome.
Hiding behind the scenes in every food delivery app
are a series of deliciously sophisticated algorithms.
They might be invisible to you,
but it's these programmes that offer up a variety of dishes
and ordering options that we now take for granted.
They keep track of every customer's previous orders and every kitchen's
cooking time, and translate that into a really simple to use system.
You have the magic going on behind the scenes,
while all you have to do is press a few buttons and seamlessly
have your food appear at your door.
The algorithms powering the order screen on our smartphones
are just the latest in a long tradition of technologies
that we use to get out of cooking dinner.
It all began just over 100 years ago.
The earliest known reference to takeaway ordering technology comes
from a Chinese restaurant in Los Angeles.
In 1922, Kin-Chu Cafe encouraged diners to place their orders
between 11am and one in the morning
- obviously, the perfect time for a chow mein -
by contacting the restaurant using a piece of technology
that had recently taken off in the area.
The telephone.
It was a brilliant idea.
Los Angeles had the largest telephone switchboard in the world
at the time, and so prawn toast by phone was a hit with Angelinos.
Phone ordering transformed customer waiting times, because now
they could order takeaway from home and collect it at their convenience.
So when do you think that food ordering began its move
from old school telephone to a screen?
It was actually about 40 years ago.
And even more surprisingly, the pioneers of this
new online technology were pensioners from Gateshead.
You can get,
there's also a chemist, which is in the scheme,
and also, a bakery. And you can order them as well.
It's 1984, and the marvellous Mrs Jane Snowball
is doing something revolutionary from the comfort
of her own living room.
I think it's wonderful.
The remarkable thing about the order that Jane is placing
is that she's not using the Internet to do it.
This is at least five years before the World Wide Web came along.
Let me give you a nice wave of nostalgia by talking about Teletext.
Of course, I am far too young to remember Teletext properly,
but you might.
And you could use it to get information from your TV,
things like the weather or the news.
There was another version called Video Text, where it wasn't
just about broadcasting information.
You could effectively talk back to it, using your remote.
Let me show you how it might have worked.
So, if I go to the shopping page here...
Oh, here we go!
Look at this. Oh!
It's like going back in time.
Eh, right, so let's go for Greggs, number one.
There we go. Feeling quite peckish.
Um, I think I'm going to try and find the sausage rolls.
So let's go for zero two for hot food, zero two.
OK. Hot food. I mean, this is a retro delight, isn't it?
OK. We have got sausage roll right at the top, zero one.
Oh! OK. So it's got it. I've got like,
my own little running receipt going on.
One there and it's 20p!
Oh, if only!
If only that bit was still true.
Confirm order number one. There we go.
'Thank you for shopping'!
SHE SIGHS
Jane Snowball and her friends managed to get so far ahead
of the curve, thanks to an invention by technology entrepreneur
Michael Aldrich.
Michael Aldrich's kind of special insight was being able to see
that things that were being used for delivering information
on the television, could be used to send requests
for other information.
That is Asha Rospigliosi, an e-commerce expert who worked
with Michael back in the 1980s.
Where did the inspiration for this come from?
I mean, that's quite a leap, isn't it? As he told it to me,
he was out walking his dog in the Sussex countryside with his wife,
and she said, "We need to allow time to go to the supermarket,
"pick up the weekend shop." And he said, "That's a bit of a bore.
"Wouldn't it be nice if...?" And at the same time there was work
going on in Newcastle about the impact of out-of-town superstores
and how that was disadvantaging some people.
Aldrich thought if pensioners couldn't get to the shops,
could he bring the shops to them?
So to do that, he invented a two way interactive system,
using their television screens.
What was different was the TV was connected by a telephone line
to the computer in the supermarket.
It was two way? It was two way.
Not just displaying, but receiving too? Yes.
And that was the vital difference that let people place orders
for their food.
It was a very clever idea, but the order screen was slow
and it was fiddly to use.
If this was ever going to work, the food order screen needed
to be much more user friendly.
And then a few years later, a long way away from Gateshead,
in the research lab Cern in Switzerland,
a man called Tim came up with the idea of the World Wide Web.
Little did Tim Berners-Lee know that one of the first things
his invention would be used to sell was pizza.
We actually got questions of, "Does the pizza come out
"of the floppy drive?"
That is Steph Marr,
and this is Doug Michaels.
They were probably the first people to sell anything
on the World Wide Web, using their imaginatively named website
Pizzanet.
In the early 1990s, they were running a software company
helping businesses with their inventory systems.
Pizza Hut was a major customer of ours.
They had our systems in every one of their stores.
In the manager's office there was a server
that kept track of all their inventory.
How much flour do we have? How much pepperoni do we have?
Unlike most companies at the time, the computers in their system
were all linked together, so they could access any store
in the Pizza Hut chain.
What we figured out is we could call in to the store
through the inventory management system, and pretend to be
one of their cash registers, and inject an order into the system
like they had a mysterious additional cashier.
Steph and Doug could send their orders to any store
and get a response almost instantly.
And that was the inspiration they needed to create probably
the world's first Web-based order system.
This was the front page.
It asked for your name, your street address and a phone number.
Did you do want thin crust or thick crust? Did you want extra cheese?
Did you want mushrooms, did you want sausage? Who knows?
All of the above, please.
I just click, click on any - you know, how many pizzas I want.
You heard right - pizza by internet.
Thanks to Pizza Hut, a division of PepsiCo Incorporated.
We hold a press conference and we were amazed it got picked up
on national news broadcasts, because it was finally a way
to communicate what the Internet was and how it could work.
Pizza Hut is testing the order by Internet system in the university
town of Santa Cruz, California, said to be a hotbed of Internet junkies.
If the idea clicks in California, you can just bet it'll take off
down the information superhighway.
And the idea did well and truly take off
down the information superhighway. With the roll-out of smartphones
in the late 2000s, giving us an internet-enabled order screen
right there in our pockets.
But of course, placing your order is just the start.
It's only worth ordering a cheeky tikka bhuna
if you know that it's going to turn up at the right address.
So here is our second piece of tech,
the mapping technology that the riders depend on
to find their way, using signals from satellites circling the Earth.
It's GPS.
And these kind folks are going to explain how GPS works.
Pre-fast 45. Go 45.
We're at Diego Stream Bravo. I'm SS02.
No time tags, no cif TPs, we're in the window. Good six.
Your IDs are good. Good seven. It's great. Diego on the Bravo
you have both comm ones. Great. No cif TPs, no time tags, good nine.
What just happened?
Each position has a specific list of things that they check
to make sure that everything is as it should be before we make contact
and go live on a satellite.
Given that you're running GPS for the entire world in this room,
there's not that many people here. I was sort of expecting more.
Yep. That is a common thing that people are shocked by.
That is Lieutenant Sydney Lamond,
and this is the Schriever Space Force Base,
where worldwide GPS is controlled.
From this building. Sydney's team controls
the 31 satellites, 12,000 miles above our heads,
that make up GPS.
Sort of like air traffic control on steroids.
Talk me through that then. So on a normal day,
what kind of things are you doing in here?
We generate the commands. Tell the satellite what to do from here.
That information gets sent up to the satellite
via a ground antenna. Satellite takes that in,
does what it's supposed to, and beams down its new signal
to our six billion users worldwide.
OK. How - I mean...!
It sounds like quite a lot for ten people to do.
The satellites are spread out across the planet.
So no matter where you are, you are almost always covered.
They are set in set positions in six orbits around the Earth.
OK, so it's like you have these kind of elliptical bands,
that coat around.
I'm sort of imagining like taking a watermelon and coating it
in elastic. Yes. A lot of elastic bands, correct.
Of course you've got it as a hologram. Of course you do.
But the satellites don't automatically know their location
in orbit around the Earth.
Sydney's team have to tell the satellites where they are.
So we tell it where it is, so that it can tell you guys
where you are on the ground. So, wait - how do you know where it is?
We have a huge algorithm in the background that runs
all kinds of data and crunches numbers to essentially
compute the GPS constellation.
So essentially, in this room then, all these people, every day,
you're telling the satellites where they are so they can tell
everyone else in the world where they are. That is correct. Very good explanation.
Well, it's a system I'm happy to use. Thank you for all the years
when I haven't got lost. I appreciate that. You're welcome.
But how do those satellites help the poor pizza delivery person
cycling around South London, trying to find my house?
So you've got all of these satellites floating around in orbit.
How on earth do they work out your position?
I know what you're thinking. "What is she doing,
"rooting around in the bushes?" But don't worry.
This will all make sense, I promise.
I'm going to need a stick...
..like this one...
..to show you a process called trilateration.
Come this way.
OK, imagine that you've just ordered a pizza and the delivery guy
is out there on his bike, he's got his phone with him.
He's somewhere on the surface of the planet Earth.
But you're not quite sure where. How do you work out his position?
So, for this, I want you to imagine that I am a satellite
and I'm sending out these signals at regular intervals all around me.
When the GPS receiver in the rider's phone detects those signals,
it can work out how far away it is from the satellite
all the way up in space.
And then, just from that, you can start to work out the rider's
location because every possible point on Earth that is a fixed
distance away from the satellite makes a circle, which I'm drawing
with my trusty stick.
I know that this delivery driver has to be lying somewhere
on this line, somewhere on this circle.
And that narrows it down quite nicely, but not enough
to know his exact position, which is why you need
more than one satellite.
So now I'm a new satellite over here,
also sending out signals, one of which is also picked up
by the delivery driver's phone.
And now, using the same logic, we know that the delivery guy
has to be somewhere on this line, but also has to be somewhere
on THIS line, which means you can deduce that where these two
lines intersect, at that point or that point, that is where
the delivery driver must be.
So, with just two satellites, you can work out
the rider must be in one of two possible places.
Now, that's still not quite enough to narrow it down completely,
but if you add in a third satellite, a third fixed distance,
using that same logic, there is now only one possible place
that the delivery guy can be, and that is where all three
of those circles intersect, right in the middle
and just outside your front door.
You actually need four satellites to pinpoint precisely,
but that's not the point here.
Us pizza lovers have been relying on this tech since the early 2000s.
The US military's love affair with GPS, however,
that goes back much further.
In fact, its origins go all the way back to the Cold War.
At that time, there was a SLIGHTLY bigger worry than the pizza guy
not finding your house.
The submarine force is the largest in the world,
approximately 350 undersea craft.
Let me set the scene.
It's the 1950s and tensions between the Soviets and the Americans
have reached fever pitch.
Nuclear weapons are now a reality, and the US are desperately trying
to develop a navigation system so that their own nuclear submarines
can know precisely where they are when they're out at sea,
far away from any landmarks.
At the same time, the two superpowers are also locked
in a race to see who will be the first to conquer
the new frontier -
space.
Ironically, a major breakthrough for the US military's navigation
problem would come from a Soviet space triumph.
ARCHIVE: Today, a new moon is in the sky, a 23-inch metal sphere placed
in orbit by a Russian rocket.
Sputnik, the world's first human-made satellite, was launched
by the Soviet Union on 4th October in 1957.
BEEPING
You are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the Earth-circling
satellite, one of the great scientific feats of the age.
The Americans feared the Soviets would put Sputnik to sinister uses.
The US know that Sputnik has been launched.
No-one knows where it is.
That must have been quite an intimidating thing.
I do think they were intimidated, but they were also determined.
That is Professor Penny Axelrad from the University of Colorado.
She's going to help me understand how trying to track Sputnik
unlocked global navigation.
Presumably, people are doing their best to try and find it.
How are they doing that?
So most people are looking at it with optical telescopes, right,
they're looking at it at night.
But these two young researchers had the idea of listening
to the radio signals.
Those young researchers, George Weiffenbach and William Guier,
listened to Sputnik's beeping radio signal.
And they noticed that it was changing.
And they could measure
the signal coming from Sputnik and measure how its frequency
was shifting as it went by.
You know, the Doppler shift.
Here's the Doppler shift, helpfully demonstrated by our cameraman
standing a bit too close to the kerb.
CAR HORN BEEPS
PITCH LOWERS
That change in pitch that you can hear - that's caused by the sound
waves getting compressed as the car gets closer, which leads
to a higher frequency.
And then the sound waves getting stretched out
as the car moves away, leading to a lower frequency.
You hear this...
IMITATES TONE CHANGING
..kind of sound.
They could use that information to actually figure out the orbit
and then predict it, when it would come up next again.
And so Sputnik's doppler shift could tell them exactly
where it was at any moment.
But it was what happened next that would change the history
of navigation forever.
Well, the next really cool thing was this...
..this guy McClure...
That's Frank McClure.
He was the supervisor of Guier and Weiffenbach,
and he was working with the US Navy
to try and develop a new navigation system.
And he thought maybe, just maybe,
he could turn Sputnik's doppler shift
to the US's advantage.
If you knew the orbit of the transmitter, then you could use
those same measurements to figure out where you are.
OK. Right? Because you do it upside down.
Yeah. So if you know what the motion is and you make those same
measurements on the ground, it can tell you where you're located.
That's quite a big conceptual leap, then, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely.
The doppler shift means that the sound of Sputnik changes
as it goes overhead.
McClure realised that you can use that to work out that moment
when it is right above you.
And if you know where Sputnik is supposed to be in its orbit
at that moment, well, then you can pinpoint your location on Earth.
This was super-important because when you're out in the middle
of the ocean... Like if you're in a nuclear submarine, say.
..there's very few landmarks, there's nothing to use.
And so having the idea that you could use a satellite
to provide navigation information
anywhere on the Earth, right, was huge. Wow.
And yet we were still a long way away from GPS as we know it today.
McClure's prototype system could only pinpoint your position
to within 900m, which is not ideal for finding a street address
for a pizza delivery.
But change was coming, thanks to a new-fangled
tech called computing -
and one woman from rural Virginia.
You know, when I went to college and high school,
the biggest thing we ever had was a calculator that sat
on your desk.
This is Dr Gladys West.
She grew up working on her family's farm
in the 1930s.
And it was always hot.
And then you feel like, "Well, I just can't take this any more!
"I will be leaving here as soon
"as I can get able to... know how to get out!"
Gladys had a talent for mathematics, and her hard work paid off
when, in 1956, she was hired at Dahlgren, a US naval base.
She was just the fourth black employee to be hired on the base,
at a time when racial segregation was still in place.
And so to go into a place completely empty of black people, you know.
So therefore, you got to know how to rise above it and not let them
drag you down.
Don't act like you're black - act like you're Gladys.
Gladys was given access to some of the most powerful computers
of the era.
I came to Dahlgren, and the computer that was so huge.
And that's why they were doing the satellites
and space work, I guess.
So here is the problem that the US Navy had.
If you want to build a GPS system that can really accurately
pinpoint locations on Earth, then you need to know how close
all of your satellites are to the ground.
And that sounds like it should be simple.
Except, unfortunately, the Earth isn't a perfect sphere.
The land is covered in hills and mountains. And the oceans, too -
they're constantly rising and sinking because of the tides.
And that royally messes up the accuracy
of your would-be GPS satellites.
What they needed was a faithful computer model of the Earth
that included all of those bumps and bulges.
And they asked Gladys to build it.
You get excited when you have developed something, a model,
and then you have to check it, check it out, make sure that it works.
Gladys spent 12 years collecting data on tidal changes
and the Earth's irregular shape
and then wrote a series of computer algorithms
to correct the inaccuracies that they created
for satellite signals.
Finally, in 1978, the first experimental version of today's
GPS was launched.
It's amazing, what we have done. It just, it's exciting.
This just makes me feel happy.
Thanks to Gladys's precise modelling of the Earth, GPS was now accurate
to within a few metres.
It quickly became an essential military tool...
..but was still off limits to the likes of you,
me and the pizza delivery guy.
Until 1983,
when tragedy struck.
America has blamed the Russians for shooting down a South Korean
jumbo jet, which is missing with 269 people.
They're all presumed dead.
Without access to the military's GPS system,
the passenger plane had made a navigation error that would
lead to disaster.
It had unknowingly drifted into Soviet airspace
and was shot down.
President Reagan vowed to take action.
Our prayers tonight are with the victims and their families
in their time of terrible grief.
Our hearts go out to them.
Our immediate challenge to this atrocity is to ensure
that we make the skies safer.
To try and avoid similar tragedies,
he announced that GPS would be made available to all.
Ten years, two more US Presidents and $10 billion later,
we got the GPS system used by most sat navs across the world today.
At the roundabout, turn right to join the main road.
Thank you, dear.
She can't hear you, mate.
Here's the thing that I keep noticing about these stories
over and over again is that it's not just that the innovation
happens in isolation.
It's about everything coming together at a moment in time.
So, here, all of the stuff about doppler effect and triangles
and timecodes, all of that had been known for years and years and years
before this system was launched,
but it took the Cold War, the terrifying fear of Sputnik,
that incredible need for innovation, for everything to come together,
and this new technology to be created.
GPS is undoubtedly a little bit of everyday genius on which
food delivery apps completely depend.
But on its own, it's not enough
for that pizza I ordered to actually turn up at my house.
For that, we're going to need more algorithms.
Issuing instructions from back at base,
they are in constant communication with Deliveroo riders to match them
up with orders.
Kind of like Tinder for your takeaway.
It's the algorithms behind the delivery rider's display.
That amazing variety of food and the speed of delivery offered
by the order screen -
all of that only works if there is a system
that can call on a vast pool of freelance delivery riders
that can constantly adapt to a whole range of changing factors.
Do you think about how many moving parts there are?
It's not just that you're at home on a Friday night, on your sofa,
deciding whether or not you're going to have a takeaway,
whether you're going to order a burger or pizza or a curry.
You've got that happening
thousands upon thousands upon thousands of times
simultaneously across an entire city.
You've also got to think about the perspective of the riders.
Do they want to go out to work or not that night?
You've got the restaurants, you've got the weather,
you've got the thousands and thousands of moving parts,
and Deliveroo has to navigate all of them simultaneously to work
as effectively as possible.
And it sounds really difficult.
Luckily, they've got a secret weapon up their sleeve called Frank.
And before you ask,
no, Frank isn't just one really quick guy on a bike.
So first of all, Frank is not a person.
See? Told you.
That's Devesh Mishra, Deliveroo's
chief technology officer.
So Frank is our super-smart machine-learning algorithm
that helps us to ensure each order is delivered
as efficiently as possible.
Their algorithms have given us order screens with almost unlimited
choice, and the system that they've devised to deliver
all of that choice also depends on algorithms.
Can't you just work out who the closest rider is
and just get them to take the order?
If you think about this one order in isolation and you assume
that the customer is very close to the restaurant, then it may make
sense to just assign the closest rider to that order.
But in reality, at any given point of time, we have thousands
and thousands of orders, and the delivery time depends
on a lot of factors, which could be the particular meal
that is being ordered, which could be the vehicle type
of the rider, which could be the road conditions.
All of that complexity behind the scenes pops up as a job offer
on the rider's display.
So this is the rider system which allows each rider to receive
offer of orders from Deliveroo,
and then they can decide
whether to accept or reject the order.
And this is a heat map. So if you are a rider in this particular area,
it will show you whether it is busy.
And then based on that, you can decide whether you want to work
in this area, whether you want to accept the orders or not.
The heat map on the rider's display shows riders
where they're most likely to pick up a job, so they might choose
to travel there from a quieter area,
adding to the pool of riders in those areas that need them the most.
Frank will then offer incoming jobs to the rider that it calculates
will be fastest for each delivery, depending on everything from traffic
conditions to whether you're on a bike or a moped.
That offer is theirs for 100 seconds.
If they don't take it, it goes to the next best-placed rider.
And then Frank takes all of this into account to offer
the order to the right set of riders.
Frank's algorithms can process millions of data points a second...
..but 130 years ago, Indian office workers pioneered a delivery
data management system that was equally robust, just with much
smaller numbers involved.
OK, I want you to imagine that it's the 1890s in India.
Mumbai is absolutely booming.
Thousands and thousands of workers are travelling up to three hours
to get into the centre of the city to work every single day.
That is too far to just nip home for lunch.
But then a visionary entrepreneur called Mahadeo Havaji Bachche saw
an opportunity for a whole new way of getting home-cooked lunches
to the hungry office workers.
Why not just pay somebody to go and pick up the food from your house
and then deliver it to your desk when it's lunchtime?
Pretty smart.
It was the birth of an extraordinary food delivery system known
as dabbawalla.
It's so efficient that they still use it in Mumbai.
Every day, around midday, dabbawallas deliver home-cooked meals
to 200,000 city workers.
Now, I know you're expecting me to travel to Mumbai to see
if these lunches get to the right people.
Unluckily for me, our production budget didn't quite stretch to that,
so there is a small-scale version here in London to show me.
Oh, my gosh. This smells...amazing!
So what have we got here?
So we've got dhal, there's rice,
bhel and paneer.
In India, people think of food as way of showing love.
And I think the dabba system is part of that,
it's the showing of love.
This is food historian Monisha Bharadwaj.
She grew up in Mumbai and knows this delivery system inside out.
So tell me, how does the system work?
The meal is prepared in the morning, usually by the lady of the house,
and then the dabbawalla. Dabbawalla literally means the person
who carries the box.
He picks up this freshly cooked meal and he cycles to the nearest train
station and it's handed over to the next dabbawalla,
who takes the train.
And when they arrive at the destination station, they hand
it to another person who then actually delivers it to the office
and to the desk, even. It's kind of like a relay.
It gets handed over from one person
to the next person to the next person
and then seamlessly arrives at your desk,
still warm.
That means when your husband is at work, he's going to be able
to eat food that was cooked at home. Does it ever happen
the other way around, where you've got the men at home who are doing
the cooking and they send it off to their wives in the city? Not yet.
Maybe one day. Maybe one day.
I mean, it does sound quite complicated, though.
Do they not get mixed up?
They don't because they've got this really wonderful system
of marking the boxes.
Can we do one? Can you show me how it works?
Let's make our own little coding system here.
Let's imagine that my husband has been up cooking
early this morning. Lovely! So the pick-up is my house.
The pick-up is your house. Let's put an H there, for Hannah.
Then let's change colour, where the box is going to.
So the destination train station.
Sometimes I go into the BBC offices.
So let's say, let's imagine that that's Oxford Circus.
Lovely. So that's one for Oxford Circus.
And then we're going to put the building and the desk.
Is it W1A?
Yeah, that's the BBC building.
Which floor are you? I'm on the second floor.
Second.
Desk number? I'm quite low down the pecking order!
So let's say it's nine.
That's your box, and you can expect a hot meal at 11am.
Oh, I hope he's picked my favourite!
Using this coding system,
mistakes are vanishingly rare.
And I think that's why people use the dabbawalla system so much,
because it is seamless,
because it is a no-fail system.
But this is a system that was working way before any technology
or barcodes or anything like that.
True. And also far more reliable.
It works brilliantly when the dabbawallas are going back
to the same handful of locations every day,
but there is a limit to how many data entries you can make
when you're writing on the side of a tin.
Luckily for us, there was that new-fangled invention
from the 1950s.
The computer. Remember? The one that gave us GPS?
Its knack for handling masses of computer data
was also about to revolutionise
how we transport everything from people to pizzas.
And that revolution began in a cafe in Amsterdam.
Back in 1956, there was a 26-year-old Dutchman
called Edsger Dijkstra,
and he'd gone shopping with his fiancee, decided to take
a bit of a breather, stop for coffee, and for 20 minutes,
rather than having a conversation with his best beloved,
he decided instead to set himself a little mathematical puzzle,
which is what you have to expect if you're going to date
a mathematician.
He decided to try and work out how to get from Rotterdam
down here, all the way up to Groningen in the north-east,
in the shortest path possible.
The thing that makes this a tricky problem is that if you're going
to get from here to there, there are lots of different potential routes
that you could go through.
And so finding the quickest one isn't necessarily that simple.
So what Dijkstra did is work out this algorithm in his head.
Dijkstra thought, if a computer knew all of the distances
between neighbouring stations, well, then, by working through
all possible combinations, it should be able to find the shortest route
between any two stations.
To show you what I mean, instead of using a 1950s computer,
I'm going to use an equally cool invention from that era.
Lego.
This is my Lego map of the Dutch railway system.
It's very flat, as you might expect.
We also have all of the cities marked out as the yellow lights
that you can see here,
and the white dots are the train tracks that run between each
of the locations.
So, if we start with a really simple example, let's say that you wanted
to go between Utrecht and Zwolle.
Now, you don't need a computer to solve this one for you,
because even a child could tell you that the shortest path
is just going to be a straight line between the two.
Like this right here.
But where Dijkstra's algorithm really comes into its own
is when you're looking at a much more complicated example.
So, let's imagine, as Dijkstra himself did, that you are trying
to get from Rotterdam over here,
all the way over to Groningen over here.
Suddenly a lot trickier.
So what he did was feed all the distances between neighbouring
stations into a computer, and got it to start adding up the segments.
Now, the algorithm has to search through every possible combination
of stops and add up the distances to get from the origin all the way
to the destination,
while keeping hold in its memory of the shortest
one that it's found so far.
And when it's exhausted all of the possibilities, it knows
for definite that it has the shortest possible path,
namely, in this particular example,
the one that runs through here like this.
When Dijkstra went public with his computer algorithm,
its universal usefulness was immediately obvious.
What Dykstra had done is he'd created something
that could be understood and automated by a computer,
and the core of his idea is so powerful
because it can be applied to any rail network or any road network
in the entire world.
His algorithm is still at the heart of modern-day GPS,
of Google Maps
and even the Deliveroo app.
It's a key part of Frank, that computer brain coordinating
the display used by every Deliveroo rider.
But Frank does a lot more than just remember
the distances between points.
It factors in tonnes of other data that affects delivery time.
So we have a model which also predicts how much time
rider has to wait for that order.
So, for example, if the item only takes three minutes to cook,
you don't want to assign it to a rider who is just two minutes
away from the restaurant, because then they will be waiting.
Right? If you're the rider,
you want to be waiting as little time as possible.
If you're the restaurant, you want to get as many orders in
as possible. And so it sounds like you're having to work to balance
all those different priorities. That's exactly right.
This thing has got layers and layers of little optimizations
that need to all work seamlessly together.
Now, I know I am not allowed to give you my full lecture
on stochastic machine learning models, but believe me when I tell
you that there is an awful lot of maths going on in this building.
Frank and the Deliveroo rider's display
are an extraordinary bit of tech.
But there is one more part of the delivery chain that's missing.
We've arrived at the fourth clever tech that makes the food
delivery app work.
It's more lo-fi than the others, but still crucial.
Because what would be the point in all of this amazing tech
if your dinner turned up cold?
Introducing the humble thermal bag.
So, your takeaway's ready to go...
All right.
..and the best rider for the job - in this case, that's me -
has picked it up...
Thank you.
Just, if you could, like, stay upright, it would be great.
Are you ready? Shall we go?
Yeah.
..and accompanied by my fellow rider, Atlanta.
The only thing that can save your evening from a cold, soggy
takeaway is the thermal bag it's in.
Nice one.
Hi!
There you go.
Enjoy! Thank you. Thanks.
Didn't give me a tip.
What's that about? Only a few do.
So, Hannah, I hear you ask, how does the thermal bag work?
Great question.
My director handed me a script and it's got loads of pages
on it about how clever it is and all of the physics and blah, blah, blah.
But then he said, "If you prefer,
"I can give you a knife,
"and you can just slash it open and see what's inside."
Ooh! Sharp knife.
OK.
I enjoyed that maybe a little bit too much.
OK, so now you can see these layers.
So you've got this very thin layer of foam in the middle.
Now, this foam has quite an important job because, of course,
if you just put your takeaway in a metal box,
metal, as a solid,
and particularly a metallic one, would just steal away
all of the heat from your food really quickly.
On the other end of the spectrum, air is a really good insulator.
So this foam has lots of little air pockets in it to ensure
that your food is wrapped in this nice air bubble blanket.
This silver actually plays a very special role
because if you just had a black inside to the bag,
black is very good at sucking away thermal energy,
which means that your food
would be cold once it arrived at your door.
But the silver reflects it so that your food stays as hot
as possible for as long as possible.
So, on the outside it is covered in a breathable plastic,
and it means that your food will stay waterproof
if it's raining, on the outside.
But this is also breathable,
which means that any of the steam
that's inside with your delicious takeaway is able to escape
so that you end up with warm and not soggy food.
It's pretty neat.
And this unassuming design marvel was born in the decade
that gave us Knight Rider and the A-Team.
The 1980s.
I'm an American, so I love pizza.
That is Ingrid Kosar.
She invented the first mass-produced thermal bag for pizza delivery.
The state of pizza delivery in the '80s was pretty different.
You know, they used a lot of blankets just to wrap
around the pizzas to keep them warm.
Everybody in the pizza business is looking for a way to deliver
oven-fresh pizza!
Some restaurants went to extremes.
There was a company that had an electric heater
that they would dry out the pizzas.
They'd put that on the backseat of the car, but
it would catch on fire a lot.
So there was a need. There was a need for a delivery bag.
So, while working her day job in a construction company, Ingrid
thought outside of the pizza box and began to research
high-tech fabrics.
One of these called Thinsulate was just taking off in ski clothing.
And if it could keep skiers warm, maybe it would be ideal for pizzas.
So she got sewing.
I had taught myself to sew years ago.
Every day I'd go through a box of needles. It was pretty tough.
The pizza pouch is the first bag I made.
This one holds two 16-inch pizzas.
This was made for Papa Johns.
They were thinking of delivering beer with their pizzas.
It was just a sample bag.
And we made it to fit two six-packs of beer, which is really nice
to have on hand, just in case you're going to a party.
Ingrid approached Domino's Pizza chain with her new designs,
and they set her a test.
To pass the test,
Domino's told us the pizza had to be at 140 degrees or higher
after 30 minutes in the bag.
Ingrid started testing her prototypes using a thermometer,
a timer, and, well, far more pizza than she could possibly eat
on her own.
All my neighbours were really happy.
Yeah, they loved me.
BEEPER
And then, in 1983...
We passed the test.
Ingrid's tests succeeded.
She set up a business and filed a patent and, a year later,
persuaded Domino's to take her on.
Oh, my God.
When you get your first good-sized order, there's no feeling like it.
You're just... The joy
just, like, jumps through your body.
And it's...it's a high.
It's a real high. I don't need a drug,
I just need an order.
Ingrid's basic design has stayed with us to this day.
There has been an explosion of these bags in the last ten years
as the food delivery market has grown bigger than ever.
And so, thanks to this plucky thermal bag,
takeaways across the land are successfully reaching
their destinations hot and tasty.
Where technology goes, food follows.
And food delivery might just be about to get even more sci-fi...
..as tech starts to take people out of the equation altogether.
Because the future is automation.
I'm meeting a burger-making bot that has already proven itself
in the cut-throat world of the San Francisco food scene.
I think ultimately flipping a burger over and over every day isn't
the culmination of the human spirit. I can tell you that from experience.
I grew up flipping burgers. I think I've made like 30,000 in my life.
That is Alex Vardakostas, CEO of Creator Burger.
And this is his creation.
This burger-making robot can create a customised burger to your spec
to eat here or be delivered direct to your door.
I have to say, there's a little bit of me that's disappointed
that it's not like a humanoid robot,
like flipping burgers like this.
There are different ways of making robots. All right,
so how does it work, then?
OK, so this thing actually takes chunks of steak
and grinds it to order for you.
Then it uses a whole bunch of sensors and algorithms to cook it.
Our robot cooks the patty at the top and bottom at the same time.
So it saves time. Cooks it about 40% faster.
It also lets us use the smash technique,
which allows you to get a better what's called a Maillard reaction,
a nice crust on the outside. That's the browning, isn't it?
Yeah, it's delicious. OK, you have thought about this.
What are the big advantages of it for you, as the owner?
I would say, with automation typically, you get savings
and efficiencies, but you also get advantages on the quality side, too,
and so that's why automation can be a win-win.
You've described this as essentially the most delicious burger
of all-time. You have to see for yourself. Indeed, I will.
It's time. Moment of truth.
MUFFLED: It's really good!
I need a napkin.
That was a juicy burger.
Let me take one more bite,
because that was a bit of a messy bite.
Actually, when you taste the meat,
I mean, you barely have to chew.
Just falls apart. It does. It just pulls apart.
That's really nice.
I hate to say it, but the machine makes
a much better burger than I do. Oh, really?
Does it make a better burger than ALL humans do?
No, absolutely not. But we can make 120 of them an hour.
Alex needs fewer staff and less kitchen space,
and that brings his gourmet burgers down to around $7 each,
in line with the big burger chains.
Automation, while it makes a very good burger,
it's not universally positive, though, right?
We do employ less people than a normal restaurant.
And so I think if people are saying, "Hey, we need to put people back
"behind a hot griddle," and reduce the quality of food
in doing so, I think we're having the wrong conversation.
If you think about it, we're not going to have a future with
like flying cars and a cure for cancer and some poor guy's
still standing in front of a griddle like, "Still at it!"
For us, I think the important thing is to ride that wave
of inevitability that makes for a better food product for everybody.
I have to say, the science that's gone into that machine
is genuinely impressive.
But when it comes to the conversations
about the benefits of automation,
and I think that actually automation
really can destroy entire communities of people
when it's not handled carefully,
but I also think that we live in a world now where, if something
is technologically possible and it's more profitable
and increases quality, then...
..it's kind of inevitable.
It WAS quite a tasty burger. Can't deny it.
It's clear that food delivery is here to stay, but the technology
to make it happen is forever moving on,
from the dabbawallas of Mumbai
to the arrival of the telephone,
the internet, and the extraordinary
sophistication of the algorithms
behind the most modern apps.
You know, when it came to filming this particular episode,
it was quite a challenge at times.
Unlike all of the other objects
that we are covering in this series,
there's not something that I can...I can get into
and physically show you.
It's a different kind of innovation.
It's an innovation that really belongs in the modern era
of technology, one that has changed the way we work,
but also the way that we eat.
Next time, the virtual assistant...
Alexa, do you mind if I use a screwdriver to open you?
Sorry, I'm not sure about that.
..is the story of secret tech used to hunt U-boats.
A 1940s starlet who pioneered the science behind Wi-Fi...
I could promise you so many things.
..oh, and a 1970s sci-fi villain who inspired today's virtual voices.
I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that.
To explore the interesting dilemmas behind some familiar
pieces of technology, and hear
some of my own thoughts, go to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.