Take one.
Shall we?
Take a minute...
..look around you.
You probably never think about it,
but we are living in a time of incredible ingenuity.
Our lives are filled with fiendishly clever bits of tech that basically
make the modern world tick.
The problem is, we're now so used to these devices
that we have forgotten to remember how clever they are.
I don't have an answer for that.
I'm Professor Hannah Fry, your hammer-wielding
tech-curious tour guide...
Woo! ..to the secret genius of everyday objects.
There is one law of physics that you need to know.
In each episode...
Whoa!
..I will take one seemingly ordinary item...
Woo! Immediately smoking.
..and I'll look at it in frankly... Yeah! ..obscene detail...
Two googly eyes.
It has 180 degree view.
..meet the people who helped make it...
This is the very first air fryer.
..and follow the twisty-turny journey through the history
of its invention.
If you overshoot the turning point, don't try to do this.
It's wobbly, Johnny! Yeah, it's just wind.
Buckle up, folks, this time it's the motorway.
OK, I know that motorways get a bit of a bad rep.
They're boring, they're frustrating.
But if you put aside the road rage...
What's he doing in that lane?! Do you know what I mean?!
..roadworks and roadside rescues,
you have to admit that they have also made our lives so much easier.
They are the backbone of the country,
a way to get from A to B as fast as possible,
and without them, I mean, the whole country would just grind to a halt.
Love them or hate them, without them we'd probably be lost.
So, how did some wild swimming in the 1950s...
It's cold!
OK, I'm in!
..a Formula 1 legend...
I'm off the ground completely,
probably doing 180 mile an hour and there's no barrier.
..and a 1960s road sign revolution...
The signs that existed, they were absolutely chaotic.
They just wouldn't have worked.
..give us the modern motorway.
You know how people really hate it when people sit in the middle
lane of the motorway? Yep...
Guilty.
The best way to see our motorways in action is from the air.
"We're going to look at motorways from above," they said.
"Great," I said, "from a helicopter?" "No, from a drone."
Andrew Marr got a helicopter!
Given the eco-impact of our traffic-laden motorways,
maybe I can do without a chopper.
From up here, you can see just how much we rely
on these high-speed roads.
Have a look here...
Can you see how the traffic's starting to build up?
And if you look at the volume of traffic and trucks and caravans,
I mean, everything running along this road, all of those trucks
carrying all these goods...
From the almost 200 billion tonnes
of goods they carry each year to the four million journeys
we make on them every day.
This is not just a road, this is the artery of Britain.
We're going to pull apart the motorway and look at everything
from crash barriers to cat's eyes.
But we're starting with the bit that can make your daily commute
pure pleasure or total Carmageddon. It's the road.
There are 2,300 miles of this stuff,
layers of tarmac, gravel and great history that have helped
shape our motorway system and the people who built it,
including this one, the M25.
It's quite an Irish history to the M25.
A lot of the tarmac was laid by Irish workers,
including Bob Geldof.
I think he tries to claim that where the M25 meets the M23
is Geldof's Corner.
I'll let you decide if you want to call it that.
I'll tell you why I don't like Mondays, Bob.
Rush hour in your motorway for a start.
But since Bob's days, our motorways have gone super high-tech
to try and ease our road rage.
There is an enormous amount of completely invisible technology
that's going on behind the scenes
that is essential to keep everybody moving.
Take these innocuous-looking squares.
They are actually induction loops, quietly monitoring traffic levels.
When you drive over one, it disturbs the magnetic field of a copper coil
buried below and pings a signal to these guys.
They're holding traffic.
The whole lane? Wow!
They closed the whole motorway!
They've closed the whole motorway!
Hidden off Junction 6 is the National Highways control room
for the M25, our busiest motorway.
These officers use any means necessary to fight the jams,
like the MI5 of the M25.
It looks like that's going to be cleared fairly soon though.
Running the place today is Jules Thompson.
We do Junction 30, around Junction 14 on the M25,
what we call the smiley side of the M25. The smiley side.
Smiley side... Is the north the unhappy side?
I couldn't comment!
Sensors and radar systems
tell them the volume and flow of traffic, and CCTV gives them eyes
on the road to pinpoint the problem.
It's all part of a system known as MIDAS.
MIDAS is our Motorway Incident Detection Automated System.
And rolls off the tongue, doesn't it? Absolutely.
Yeah. Think I'll stick to the acronym.
Now, before you ask, there is one area that Jules and the MIDAS system
don't get involved in.
We get information on speed, but not speed
camera-ey-type information.
So you can't tell if people are speeding.
No, no, no. That's a police matter.
Does that mean that sometimes you speed on the motorway?
No. Never speed on the motorway. Absolutely not.
What's going on there?
That's our stationary vehicle detection system going off.
Third RTC in that roadworks section.
So where the ambulance is side on,
there's a car just in front of it in the central rez.
MIDAS has alerted them to a crash that has blocked a lane
and slowed traffic to a crawl.
That's quite a big queue now. How far back is that going?
It's about 1.5km. Five minutes in and we're at 1.5km.
It's really astonishing just how quickly
this is causing problems.
Jules sends an officer to clear the crash site.
Stopped traffic costs the UK economy tens of millions of pounds a day,
so every minute counts.
Traffic officers on scene.
These are the people that are out of the vehicle.
Now being cleared,
and you can see the traffic's moving through in all lanes.
With the car cleared, you'd think that would be problem
solved, wouldn't you?
But stalled traffic takes a while to move,
so the tailback is still growing.
MIDAS steps in, lowering the speed limit to 50 for the cars
behind that aren't yet caught in the jam.
It's detecting the queue forming. It is setting the signs for us.
I mean, it feels like it shouldn't work, right?
Slow things down to get them through faster?
Well, let's see.
I have a nice model version of a motorway.
The key thing that you need to know about traffic is that it's all
about the relationship between speed and density.
Speed? That's how fast the cars are going.
And density is if you took a photograph
from above a stretch of motorway,
the density would be
how many cars would be pictured in that that image.
OK, it's early morning before rush hour.
Everyone's travelling at 70mph.
This is like ideal motorway driving conditions.
Bit of 6 Music. Delightful!
Now, when there aren't many cars on the roads, there's lots of space
between them and they rarely affect each other.
Density is low. Traffic can flow well.
Now imagine it gets a little bit later on in the morning.
The dreaded rush hour has begun.
There are more and more cars that are joining the motorway.
But there comes a critical point,
when the density of cars is so high that traffic
can no longer flow freely.
Too many cars and they can get in each other's way...
All right, mate, calm down.
..slowing up everyone behind them.
This can quickly escalate into a full blown traffic jam.
By this point, it's game over, you know?
There's not really anything that you can do.
Everybody's just got to wait their turn to get out of it.
But for these vehicles yet to approach, we can stop the jam
from spreading to them.
And the way that you can do that is by using those gantries
over the motorway.
If you change the speed limit for the cars back there,
just knock it back a little bit to 50...
At this slower speed, everyone has a bit more time and space to pass
through without getting in the way of cars around them.
Traffic can again flow smoothly.
Counterintuitively, because you have reduced the speed,
you've also increased the flow,
which means that more cars
can get through than before.
The challenge of keeping us all moving began with the mass
production of the motorcar.
By the early 20th century, the age of the automobile
is clogging our roads with cars,
and so a new kind of road starts to appear.
In Italy, Mussolini builds 500 miles of fascist fast lanes to show
off his modern regime.
The Germans follow with the first autobahns,
finished just in time to invade Austria.
Not to be outdone, the Yanks build 40,000 miles of high-speed roads
they call highways, a symbol of their love affair with the car
and cheap oil.
ADVERT: This is the American dream of freedom on wheels.
And the first UK motorway...
Well, we get the exotically named Preston Bypass.
Lucky us!
But despite the new roads, the jams didn't stop, much to the despair
of the authorities.
If only motorists will just take the trouble and drive at the right
speed for their particular vehicle.
This is known as Braess's paradox, after German
mathematician Dietrich Brace.
He theorised that as new lanes opened, human nature
being what it was, more people will choose these faster roads,
eventually clogging them up too and increasing
overall journey times.
Luckily, another mathematician was about to come up with a theory
on traffic that was way ahead of its time.
The year is 1955, and a mathematician by the name
of James Lighthill is out on one of his regular wild swims.
I don't belong in this environment!
This is outside of my natural habitat!
Oh, my God, it's cold!
It's cold!
It's cold.
OK, I'm in.
Unlike me, he took pleasure in plunging into cold water.
You might not have heard of him, but he's a bit of a legend
in the maths world...
Yes, I think that would be going a bit far
..because he was
one of the best people who's ever lived at understanding
the equations of how fluids flow.
And he was so good at this at, like, intuitively knowing what fluids
would do as they went through bottlenecks or cracks and gullies.
Can you give me an example of a differential equation in words?
Well, quite a good example is the well-known wave equation
(d2y/dx2) = (1/c2)(d2y/dt2)
Oh, steady on, James.
You're getting me all Pi R2.
So one day, he had this brainwave.
He was like, "Maybe we've been thinking about traffic in completely
"the wrong way, because traffic flows like fluids do
"and, OK, traffic might be made of cars, but fluids
"are made of particles.
"So, if they are similar,
"can you use the equations of fluid flow
"to predict how traffic will move and maybe stop traffic jams?"
That was really obvious that I was standing there, wasn't it? I mean...
In the same way, just one pebble can ripple outwards
to affect water far away.
Maybe the same thing was happening on our roads.
It became clear that most traffic jams aren't caused by people
having crashes or breaking down.
They're caused by really trivial things.
Like a driver braking or changing lanes.
Even in the absence of a clear cause
like an accident or roadworks...
All of those little things put together, they add
up and they ripple outwards exactly like a water wave.
Allow me to demonstrate in real time and not in a wet suit.
Remember that drone's eye view of the M25 earlier?
Let's take another look at it.
OK, do you see this?
So, on the traffic that's coming this way, it's slowed
right down almost to a crawl, and there's no obstruction anywhere.
This is just people braking and then people behind them braking
and people behind them braking and so on, and so on, and so on.
It's like this ripple effect that travels backwards
through the field of traffic, and it's like...
They've actually stopped! They've stopped!
That's extraordinary!
And it's for no reason other than the cumulative effect
of human error.
This is a phantom traffic jam.
This is cars that are stopping without there ever
being an obstruction.
Lighthill realised that if everyone drove at a constant speed,
these phantom jams would disappear and we'd get places quicker.
And so the traffic flow problem was solved, right?
Wrong.
Look out, there, you with the ladder!
Those policy makers don't listen to maths,
even excellent maths.
And so road building was seen as the fix to the flow problem.
By the 1960s, the UK had entered a motorway building frenzy.
This motorway starts a new era in road travel.
We were tarmacking the countryside faster than you could say
Braess's paradox.
And by the 1970s, the network stretched to over 1,000 miles.
By the 1990s, our roads were clogged with more cars than ever.
NEWS REPORT: The motorway is already a victim of its own success,
because of the problems of severe congestion.
But over in the world of academia, new research was bringing
Lighthill's work back into the spotlight.
Chaos theory looked at how trivial actions can have big consequences.
A butterfly flapping its wings in Outer Mongolia this month
could affect the weather patterns that we experience
over Britain next month.
There were clear parallels with Lighthill's work on traffic jams
and now advances in supercomputers and early AI
meant they could model his theories and prove that slowing
traffic down to keep it flowing worked.
And so in the mid-1990s, his calculations were woven
into a new intelligent traffic flow system...
..which brings us back to where we started - MIDAS.
It works.
By slowing the traffic down on approach,
it just helps to keep it moving and to avoid getting
to that stop-start, stop-start scenario.
It feels like there's a lesson here. Always trust the mathematicians.
Motorways let us travel fast, but with speed comes danger.
Our next component is the part of the motorway that could
save your life in an accident.
It's the crash barrier.
This is designed to absorb the impact and engine of the car
and keep the occupants safe.
That is Matt Harriman from crash barrier experts
Hill and Smith.
Wow... Wow!
I mean, that whole thing is over in about two seconds.
He spends his time crashing vehicles, so you don't have to...
..to test the crash barrier used on most motorways.
If that hadn't been there, I mean, that's really serious,
across three lanes of traffic. Exactly, yes.
It's all about saving the drivers.
It's called an Armco barrier,
after the American Rolling Mill Company that invented it,
and it has to withstand everything our motorways can throw at it.
We test a small car, so 900kg,
like a Mini, all the way up to kind of coaches and lorries.
So they need to be tough.
So, this is basically a big toilet roll of steel.
Toilet roll of steel, I love it.
Definitely not something you'd want to wipe your bum with though.
And then that's what it becomes? That's what it turns into, yes.
Can I pick it up? You pick it up if you want, yes.
I mean, it's actually lighter than I was expecting it to be... Yes, yeah.
..given that this has to stop a car.
It's how thin it is which is extraordinary.
Three millimetres, that's all it is.
The key to getting something this thin to be so strong
is its shape.
It starts off like a piece of paper, has no strength to it at all.
So if this was like a barrier like this... Yes.
..what would happen if you went into it?
It's just flopping and bend over and break. Oh, right.
OK. Just tear in half.
So we put the folds in it, and it makes it nice and rigid.
But not so rigid that it stops the vehicle instantly.
Humans don't react well to sudden stops or sudden change of direction.
So it slows them down gradually.
You can really see that it almost, like, takes on the properties
of like an elastic band. Exactly, yes.
Like an unbreakable cushion.
An unbreakable cushion, definitely, yes.
I suddenly feel so much safer. Good.
Maybe I'll go up to 55mph.
Maybe go slightly faster!
To find out why that W is the ideal shape,
I've sneaked into the back of the factory to try
out my own barrier.
First I need a crash test dummy, and I have an eggs-ellent candidate.
I'm going to draw a face on it just to really get
that emotional investment.
Let's call him Egbert.
He's looking a little worried, and for good reason,
because I have here Egbert's car...
..and a solid wall that he is going to crash into.
This is unforgiving.
There is no flex in this thing at all.
This is going to be a very abrupt stop.
But, um, to allow Egbert to build up some speed,
I've got something you don't find too often on motorways,
um, a big old ramp.
OK, Egbert is belted in and ready.
Go!
OK, now, that's quite an impact.
As the car comes down the ramp, it builds up all this momentum,
it has lots of energy,
and then when it hits the wall, it stops dead and all that energy
has to go somewhere, which means that the forces inside the car
are very high.
Those forces are felt by the surface of Egbert's shell.
Omelette, anyone?
Now, if this was a real car, the car would be in shatters, right?
The front would be crumpled, it'd be an absolute disaster.
But watch what happens when I install my expertly-crafted,
flexible cardboard crash barrier.
It's got a W shape to it, so let's just pop this in front.
Maybe this time I'm going to do an Egbert that's just slightly
more confident, a little bit more cocky, bit of a daredevil.
So, now, everything else is the same, right?
The ramp's the same, the egg's the same, the car's the same,
but look at what happens when you let go instead.
Ooh! How you doing there, little guy?
He's fine!
You can see, though, the barrier ends up being quite dented,
quite a big old dent there.
And there's a clue in that - some of the energy of stopping
has dissipated through the crash barrier itself.
The W-shaped barrier is designed to deform when hit by a vehicle.
As it bends and crumples, it absorbs much of the force
that would have gone into the car.
By allowing some cushioning on the impact,
Egbert has got away scot-free.
The wiggly W barrier is a crucial motorway safety feature,
but how did we get them?
The first crash barriers were simple walls or fences.
Sadly, they tended to make injuries worse.
In 1933, the corrugated Armco barrier arrived.
It proved so good, it quickly became standard across the US.
This test on a W section was at 60mph at an angle
of 25 degrees.
But when the M1, the UK's first full motorway, opened in 1959,
they decided to rely on something else for safety.
It will bring immense benefits if drivers use discipline
and obey the rules.
Yes. No crash barriers, just some nice firm rules.
If you overshoot the turning point, don't try to do this.
Unsurprisingly, this did not prevent serious accidents,
and so a solution was urgently needed.
It would come from a speedy Scotsman.
So many of our friends died that something
had to be done about it.
That is Formula 1 legend Sir Jackie Stewart.
He started racing in 1961 at just 22 years old,
and quickly found success.
Racing ace Jackie Stewart.
It was a kind of magic ride, actually. A big magic ride.
But the world of Formula 1 was also a deathtrap,
with few safety precautions.
In almost every circuit, there were no safety barriers.
As Jackie discovered during a pivotal championship race in 1966.
It was pouring with rain.
Got to the part of the racetrack that's famous for its speed.
There was a huge river of water.
I got it full blown and I dropped off a telegraph pole,
I dropped off a woodcutter's hut.
Jackie lay badly injured in his car for almost half an hour.
Finally got me out of the car, took me into the barn of a farmhouse
and I was burning, you know.
So I got... I was coming in and out of consciousness.
It was during his recovery from the accident that Jackie
realised things had to change.
He'd had a lucky escape compared to many.
It was a strange world at that time,
because we were losing friends all of the time.
And the lack of safety precautions were clearly to blame.
I'm off the ground completely,
there, probably doing 180mph and there's no run-off area,
there's no barrier. That's what we were racing against.
Jackie knew he was one of the few people who might be able
to bring about change.
Something had to be done about it,
by which time I had won a couple of World Championships or so,
and therefore, I had power.
He started to campaign for improved safety and racetrack barriers,
even persuading other drivers to boycott a big race.
I closed the Nurburgring, because I was then chairman
of the Grand Prix Drivers Association.
But not everyone was on board.
The changes would cost big money, and critics thought that safer
tracks could detract from the sport's excitement.
I mean, I got a lot of threats for my life and abuse
from the organisers,
but I was also winning and that was very difficult
for them to forget.
Eventually, the sport's governing body agreed to install crash
barriers at the 1969 Spanish Grand Prix.
Soon after, they appeared on all major race circuits.
I'm forever proud that I was able, against incredible odds...
..to close down some of the biggest racetracks in the world
because they wouldn't put their house in order.
And yet, the UK's motorways were still barrier-free,
with British MPs more keen to debate the benefits of rose bushes
as a form of safety barrier.
The big problem is the narrowness of the central reservation.
There isn't really enough width to be able to grow bushes
that can form a natural barrier.
But with their success in Formula 1, Jackie had bought Armco
barriers to prominence.
When you're at the top of an international sport,
you're dealing with heads of state.
You're talking sometimes to governments,
you're talking to track owners, you're talking to team owners.
Finally, in the early 1970s, Armco barriers were installed on the M1,
and by the 1980s they were standard on British motorways,
ultimately saving thousands of lives.
When I'm no longer here, will probably be my participation
in changing the level of removing danger from our sport,
because if Formula 1 gets put into shape, it's a domino effect
to every other.
Today, our motorways are the safest roads we have,
carrying over 20% of all traffic but with only 5% of fatalities.
Driving is a dangerous business, but in the dark
it can be even more treacherous.
Thankfully, there is a clever piece of tech keeping an eye
on you and lighting the road ahead.
It's our next component, the cat's eye.
OK, sorry. Can you just...?
Oh, sorry.
Excuse me.
Oh!
Oh.
There are over 12 million cat's eyes -
sorry, reflective road studs as they're known in the industry -
scattered across our roads.
Despite using only the light from our headlights,
they are incredibly effective.
So how do they work?
So if we can just turn the lights off for a second...
Because it doesn't matter what direction you shine
the light at...
..it shines straight back at you...
..regardless of how you move around.
And that means that when you are hurtling down the motorway,
you will always be able to see these things reflecting back at you.
And when you think about it, there is something quite
incredible about that.
This is a design that has no batteries, almost no
real moving parts.
And to see how it manages to do that, um, I think it requires
a little bit of cat surgery.
Not you, Moggy. You're OK.
CAT MIAOWS
HANNAH LAUGHS
What a scaredy cat.
Cat's eyes are remarkably uncomplicated things.
You've got the heavy base. Then you've got this rubber insert.
And inside here are the cat's eyes themselves.
I'm going to just pop one of these out using some pliers.
There you go.
I think it's time for my trusty hacksaw.
And once you get down to the centre of it, it's almost laughably simple.
This is a glass bead with a reflective surface on the back.
And it is what makes cat's eyes work.
Hold it there.
In case you're wondering, it's also how the eye works in an actual cat.
So at the back of a cat's eye, they have a layer of cells called
the tapetum lucidum, which acts like a reflective surface.
And it means that they have much better vision in low-light
conditions, but it's also why their eyes glow in the dark.
But it's the angle of reflection that is key here.
Let me show you what I mean with this laser pen and a mirror.
Now, you might imagine that a reflective surface
on its own would be enough. Just pop mirrors into the road surface.
It will reflect your headlights back at you.
Well, viewer, you'd be wrong.
Watch what happens when I shine the laser into the mirror.
Now, for this eye,
I'm going to have to wear a pair of glasses, partly
because it protects my eyes from the laser, but mostly
because it makes me look cool.
Now, you can see with this, with this laser, that I'm pointing
at the mirror from this direction over here. This is your headlights.
You're kind of sitting up here.
This is where you want the light to be reflected back to you,
but instead it's hitting the mirror and then bouncing off somewhere
over in the back with...where the cats can play with it.
I think...
Mirrors reflect light based on the angle it hits them.
Most of the time scattering the light in different directions,
which is not ideal on the road.
But the cat's eyes bring a clever solution.
Watch what happens when you add in the glass bead, in this case
represented by a beautiful glass orb.
If you place that in front of the mirror and then do the exact
same thing, you'll notice something very different.
Oh, yeah.
Can you see that?
Look, it's shining right back at me.
So there's no longer this bounce that's going off over there
in the distance. It's shining right back onto my hand
the position where the light beam is coming from.
As the laser passes through the glass ball, it bends the light
perfectly towards the exact centre of this curved mirror,
and at that point it can reflect straight back in the direction
that it came from, rather than being bounced off in loads
of different directions.
And so it doesn't matter what angle you're at, it doesn't matter
how fast you're going, what lane you're in, you are always
going to be able to see these cat's eyes twinkling
from the road beneath you.
I mean, that is very cool.
The trusty cat's eye is a simple and brilliant way to light
up the road and keep us safe.
But where did they come from?
Early roads had no markings at all...
..until one day in 1911,
American road official Edward Hines was out cycling and got stuck
behind a leaky milk wagon.
He noticed it leaving a trail of white and had a genius idea.
Why not use paint to mark out the road lanes and maybe stop people
smashing into each other?
White road lines kept us on the straight and narrow,
but they had one big flaw.
They were pretty tricky to see at night.
It would take a Yorkshireman, a cat and a head lamp
to solve that problem.
Let's take a drive to 1930s Boothtown,
home to road worker Percy Shaw.
He was a great one for enjoying his beer, and the whole invention
occurred because he had to get to the pub and back
on a regular basis.
That is Glenda Shaw, our Percy's great-granddaughter.
Percy was an early adopter of the motorcar and drove
to the pub each night.
Clearly a different attitude to drink-driving back then.
But he often struggled to see the dark road on his way home.
One of the tricks he used to have was to follow the tramlines,
because on your headlights of your car, it would pick
up the metal and just glimmer back at you.
But in 1930, buses were brought in, the tramlines were removed,
and Percy was left with a treacherous drive home,
until one night...
He were coming home down a very steep road, with a precipice
on the right-hand side that looked down into the valley.
I mean, it really was steep.
And he suddenly glimpsed a reflection on the side of the road.
Yep, you guessed it.
CAT MIAOWS
The headlights picked up the cat's eyes and it stopped within inches
of falling over this precipice.
And that's when he got his eureka moment.
Percy realised if he could replicate the special surface of a cat's eye
to reflect his head lamps, he'd be on to a life-saving
and money-spinning winner.
Well, it was sort of trial and error.
I mean, the first one he made, he had the eyes sort of stuck up.
He realised that was wrong.
You've got to bring the eyes in line with your headlights hitting them.
Eventually, Percy cracked it.
His feat of feline engineering had a cast-iron base with the now
familiar rubber case and glass reflector beads.
They don't need maintenance.
They don't need batteries changing, nothing.
It's just a really simple, brilliant idea.
In 1935, Percy patented the invention and started his company
Reflecting Roadstuds Ltd.
By the 1960s,
Percy's company was making 2,000 cat's eyes a day,
and he could finally afford some of life's finer things.
It didn't change his life.
He didn't move house.
His big luxury was he...
He bought a Rolls-Royce.
It was the most expensive Rolls-Royce that they made.
Percy died in 1976 at the age of 86.
But Glenda's family still run the company, and his life-saving
cat's eyes are still on roads all over the world today.
We're just very proud, really, just to think that this young lad
who left school at only 13 years old could do that.
The Prime Minister, James Callaghan, on his retirement from
the House of Commons, said that the thing that he was proudest
of was he sanctioned putting cat's eyes in the road.
Motorways are great at getting us from A to B fast and efficiently,
but without our next component, you might struggle to make it to B
at all.
Guiding us where we want to go,
it's motorway signs.
OK, so what does it actually say?
I'm trying to guess what it is.
Oh, is that the other half of that word? That is, yeah.
Oh. So, "Darling."
"Darling." Darling-ton, that'll be.
HANNAH LAUGHS
Yeah. So that's half the sign.
This is only this little section of this...?
That is. Yeah. The top-left hand corner of the sign. Yeah.
This is much bigger than it looks when you're driving past it.
Yeah. This is like the size of a house.
Yeah, well, it's 4m x 4m, roughly.
A small house. A small house. Yes, exactly.
That is David Church, operations manager
for Royal British Legion Industries, builders of motorway signs.
We've done some bigger signs than this.
I mean, this one is about 16 square metres.
We've done a sign that's 100 square metres.
Yeah. It went over four lanes of the motorway.
OK. Now he's just showing off.
At 70mph, you travel over 100ft per second.
So big signs and big typeface are the order of the day,
as is attention to detail.
There was once a sign in Wales.
Now they have it in English and Welsh.
Yeah. And they'd obviously sent it off to a translator and printed
what came back.
But unfortunately, it was just the out-of-office for the translator
that they had printed on this...
And it was in Welsh? In Welsh.
So he didn't realise. No-one realised. Oh, dear. Yeah.
So after David does a final spell check, it's time to make
sure his gargantuan sign fits together.
Beautiful.
Making us do manual labour. I'm not OK with this.
THEY LAUGH
I mean, that is massive, isn't it?
It's big, isn't it? Yeah. And this is one of your dinky ones?
This is one of the smaller ones.
This bit over here, it's like the size of a single bed.
CONTENTED SIGHS
THEY LAUGH
Today's iconic motorway signs are so well-designed, we take
them for granted.
But the road to clear signage was long, bumpy and littered
with accident-prone cyclists.
Early road signs were just rocks with distances carved into them.
But as the bicycle took off in the 1880s, cyclists struggled
to read them at speed, leading to frequent crashes.
And so they started putting up danger boards to warn
of hazards ahead.
A few decades later, motor cars were tearing up the tarmac, bringing
new hazards and even more signs.
Soon, the roadside was littered with a mind-boggling array of signs
in all different sizes and colours and fonts.
Exasperating, isn't it?
But the arrival of high-speed motorways in the 1950s made sorting
out this sign anarchy a matter of urgency.
I mean, the signs were appalling and I think quite dangerous.
That's Margaret Calvert OBE, queen of the modern road sign.
She was close to dropping out of the prestigious Chelsea School
of Art when graphic designer Jock Kinnear came to the college.
So he came in one day a week to give us some idea of what graphic
design was about.
He set projects which involved a bit of lettering.
I mean, I didn't know anything about typefaces then.
The other students weren't in the slightest bit interested,
but I immediately latched on to it.
I would take work home and I always looked forward to Mondays.
Jock was so impressed, he offered Margaret a job, and his firm
had just landed the contract to design signs
for the UK's first motorway.
Well, the signs that existed, they were absolutely chaotic.
They just wouldn't have worked.
Not to mention impossible to read at motorway speeds.
The government had helpfully instructed the pair to use the same
typeface as the new German autobahns.
And, of course, we completely ignored it.
We just went ahead with our own version based
on a typeface called Akzidenz-Grotesk.
Interesting choice for a road sign, Margaret.
And I can remember changing it completely, and eventually that's
what we used.
Their newly designed typeface was simply called Motorway,
and it was unique in that it used lowercase lettering.
Well, lowercase, simply because if you read a place name
like, say, Birmingham, it's got a shape to it, because you've got
the capital B, the H and the G.
So that gives you a word shape.
But if it's all in capitals, there's no shape to it.
The shape didn't just make the sign look elegant, it also made it much
easier to read at speed.
At the right decision-making moment,
the place name is formed and you can read it instantly,
or very quickly.
Alongside the new typeface, Margaret was also developing the colour
of the new motorway signs.
The actual colour of the signs was important
from a point of legibility.
White letters reflect light, so they are stronger.
So your eye goes to the actual place names.
And I thought they looked good in the English countryside,
which is all greens and blues, and sometimes grey when it rains.
The radical redesign provoked strong reactions from the public.
Opponents called them "crudely coloured",
"overpoweringly large" and even "designed for lunatic drivers".
And rival topographer David Kindersley was so outraged
by their signs, he tried to get them replaced with his own design.
We just felt he was interfering.
He wasn't commissioned to do the job, so that was that.
But we never felt threatened by it.
This topographer war eventually hit a full stop in 1958, when Jock
and Margaret's signs were installed on the Preston Bypass...
..and then rolled out to every motorway across the country.
Remarkably, their design has changed very little since.
I think the signs don't date.
That's the important thing.
They've got a timeless feature about them.
I think I'm just very lucky to have worked on things
that have proved life for people in the public realm.
So just how easy is it to speed read Margaret's signs?
I'm heading to this service station car park to find out.
Oh, gosh. I genuinely feel like a spy.
Yeah. They suit you. They look good.
That is Professor Polly Dalton from Royal Holloway,
University of London.
She's given me these fetching glasses with special cameras
inside to track my eye movements.
That red circle there is your eye movements, and so you can see them
as they move around the scenes. Very clever.
Motorway signs are cleverly designed to be read in a maximum
of four seconds.
Let's see how long it takes me.
We're going to be looking at your eye movements as you drive,
to get a sense of how often and for how long you're looking
at the motorway signage. OK.
Using just the road signs, I have to loop around and find my way
back to these services, because who doesn't want to spend
more time in motorway services?
Am I not allowed to use sat nav?
No. This is all about the motorway signage.
So, yeah. Old school.
Yeah, exactly.
So I am going to come off at the next junction.
Let's have a look. Where are we?
Now, there's a bit of roadworks going on here.
There's a lane closed.
Yeah. This is a really good example of how much information
there is for us to process when we're driving.
On top of that are all the other distractions crying out
for our attention, like the traffic...
This is the thing about the M25, there's, like, trucks to your right,
which I detest.
..or the weather.
These kinds of driving conditions, they just put even more demand
on the driver. Mm.
It'll be really interesting to see what the data says, because it feels
like I'm not actually looking at the signs too much.
The end of the test is in sight.
OK. Clacket Lane services. One mile.
I'm going to linger for that four seconds to think
about the service burger that I'm
going to have for lunch.
THEY LAUGH
And the results are in.
We can have a look at where your eyes are going on the scene.
You're spending most of your time looking roughly in the middle
of the road, which is giving you the good sense of awareness
for the road around you.
You're doing some looking over at your mirrors.
And then we have seen a few movements over there to the signs
as you go past them. Let's see. Yes. There you go.
You have a look at that one over there.
The data shows I spent an average of 2.3 seconds looking
at each road sign.
Well inside the four seconds.
Thanks, Margaret.
Our motorways are marvels of ingenuity, but we can't ignore
the impact our need for speed has on the planet.
Instead of the end of the road, though,
maybe motorways are the fork
in the road leading us to a greener future.
Driving creates around a tenth of global CO2 emissions.
Electric vehicles offer hope, but the challenges of charging
are a big problem.
And so I am in Milan to try out a new kind of road.
One that could be the answer.
Next time around, I will get a Ferrari for you.
Unbelievable.
That is Gilad Sharon of tech company Electreon.
He thinks that their new self-charging road could make range
anxiety a thing of the past.
HANNAH LAUGHS
Triple clap!
GILAD LAUGHS
And, of course, I want to drive.
Have they, um...
Have they told you that I'm a terrible driver?
I'll hang on.
Do.
GILAD LAUGHS
The 35-degree heat and broken aircon are also not going to help,
but at least my mission is simple.
Just follow the blue lines.
So, Hannah, you know what's special about this car?
Besides being nice and...nice and cosy?
Cosy is one word for it.
What's happening on the background is that every time we are driving
over this specific lane, we are wirelessly charging
the vehicle while we're driving.
Yes, it charges as you drive with no wires or charge points.
Show me. OK. So here, you see this? It's charging. It's charging.
So if I come off...
And...
Oh. Wait. It diminishes to zero.
Yeah. Go back on. And if I go back on...
Amazing. Look at that!
So what is the secret to those blue lines?
Spill the beans, Gilad.
Just look, those toys we had when we were kids and they had those
little cars that went on the electrified road.
Like Scalextric kind of thing? Yeah. It's the same principle.
OK. But those toy cars have got, like, the little wire brushes
that hang down from underneath.
If I turn this car upside down, will I see the same thing under here?
No. What you will see is basically a receiver.
The receiver is a 40cm-wide electromagnetic coil linked
to the car's battery.
Another coil in the road transfers power to the car.
This is the bit in the road.
This is the coil segment. It's super-simple.
It's basically rubber with copper in it.
Buried 20cm below the surface,
the coil segments are linked together in a row.
When high-voltage electricity passes through them, it creates
an invisible magnetic field.
When the car's receiver passes through this field, it converts
it back into electricity, charging the battery quicker
than the vehicle uses it.
You could just carry on driving without ever
having to stop to charge? Never.
Wow.
Gilad's next step is to get this tech onto a motorway
for real.
Like all new technology, right now it's expensive.
£1.6 million a mile expensive.
But Electreon hope to halve that once it's scaled up.
And then they'll recoup their costs from the vehicles that use it.
The whole idea eventually is to install this is where the buses
and the trucks go.
They need a lot of energy and they will sell them the charge.
And once it's in the road, you don't need to touch it any more.
No maintenance needed.
Electreon plans to build longer stretches of electric road
in Italy, Sweden and France.
But don't get too excited.
The fully wireless motorway is still a few years off.
Nobody quite knows what lies ahead for motorways
in a cleaner, greener world.
A symbol of progress and future, they have been adapting for over
70 years and will need to keep evolving.
Just as long as no-one changes Tebay services.
I think it's really notable that all of those decades
ago, when motorways were first conceived, that world
sort of doesn't really exist any more.
So many more cars on the roads now than there ever were.
And that means that all those invisible bits are going to become
ever more important for motorways to remain fit
for purpose going forwards.
The Open University has produced a free poster exploring what lies
behind the genius of some everyday objects.
To order a copy, call...
..scan the QR code, or go to...
..and follow the links to the Open University.