Vacuum Cleaner • 2023 • episode "S2E2" • The Secret Genius of Modern Life

Category: Technology | Subtitle:

Hannah takes a look at the vacuum cleaner, going behind the scenes with Dyson and discovering how the motor in their latest vacuum spins nine times faster than that of a Formula One race car.

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The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2022 - 2025 • 17 episodes •

Bank Card

Hannah Fry takes a look at the bank card, the digital key to accessing cash, and finds out how its extraordinary innovations have some surprising and sinister origins.

2022 • Technology

Food Delivery App

Food Delivery App

Hannah Fry tucks into the tech behind food delivery apps, which are now used by 24 million people in the UK. Hannah finds out how pizza made us fall in love with the internet.

2022 • Technology

Virtual Assistant

Virtual Assistant

Hannah Fry delves into the inner workings of virtual assistants, such as Amazon’s Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri, which are now found in almost half of all UK homes.

2022 • Technology

Electric Car

Hannah Fry discovers why innovations in meat packing almost derailed the electric car revolution and how a breakthrough in camcorder batteries led to Elon Musk’s electric empire, as well as demonstrating how not to drive a multimillion dollar prototype car of the future.

2022 • Technology

Fitness Tracker

Fitness Tracker

Hannah Fry finds out how 1970s car crashes helped us to count our steps, why WWII dogfights led to a crucial health monitor and how fitness trackers are even being used to catch killers.

2022 • Technology

Trainer

Hannah Fry visits eBay’s authentication centre, where they are waging war against fake high-value trainers. She discovers how American breakfast waffles transformed our trainer soles and how an 18th-century tea set led to the use of celebrity endorsement.

2022 • Technology

Passport

Hannah gains access to a top-secret site where anonymous staff and the latest tech work to make the British passport one of the most secure documents on the planet.

2023 • Technology

Vacuum Cleaner

Hannah takes a look at the vacuum cleaner, going behind the scenes with Dyson and discovering how the motor in their latest vacuum spins nine times faster than that of a Formula One race car.

2023 • Technology

Smartphone

With rare access to electronics giant Samsung, Hannah uncovers the technological game changers that have made the smartphone a reality.

2023 • Technology

Microwave

Hannah Fry discovers the hidden WWII radar technology that heats up baked beans, learns the legend of the melted candy bar in an engineer’s pocket that kick-started a kitchen revolution and puts her life on the line to demonstrate why microwaves zap food but not people!

2023 • Technology

Headphones

Headphones: these marvels of miniaturisation are worn by 30 million people in the UK. Hannah Fry visits Bose to find out how the teeny earbud tech works and meets the human testers with ‘golden ears’.

2023 • Technology

Lift

Hannah goes behind the scenes to look at the technology behind the lift, entering a 246m high lift shaft to test everything from the brakes to her own fear of heights.

2023 • Technology

Aif Fryer

Hannah takes a look at the air fryer – a device that is rapidly taking over people's kitchens, cooking up everything from bread rolls to baked Alaska and almost making ovens obsolete.

2025 • Technology

Fridge

Hannah hits the production line with appliance giants Bosch to find the lifeblood at the heart of every fridge and gets a lesson in carrot droop.

2025 • Technology

Rollercoaster

Hannah uncovers the wild origins of the modern-day rollercoaster and gets the inside story on the UK’s newest, tallest and fastest coaster – Thorpe Park's Hyperia.

2025 • Technology

Doorbell

The rise of the smart doorbell is one of the great tech success stories of the 21st century. Hannah heads to Los Angeles to take a deep dive into doorbell history and talk to market leaders Ring.

2025 • Technology

Motorway

Hannah takes a drive to the National Highways control centre for the UK’s busiest motorway to meet the team that keep the motorways running 24/7.

2025 • Technology

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Space Force Declassified

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GPS

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Bank Card

Hannah Fry takes a look at the bank card, the digital key to accessing cash, and finds out how its extraordinary innovations have some surprising and sinister origins.

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Metal

From the Stone Age to the Silicon Age, materials have helped drive forward our civilisation. By manipulating materials we have been able to transform our world and our lives - and never more so than in the past century when we have discovered and designed more materials than at any other time in human history. (Part 1: Metal) Professor Mark Miodownik travels to Israel to trace the history of our love affair with gleaming, lustrous metal. He learns how we first extracted glinting copper from dull rock and used it to shape our world and reveals how our eternal quest for lighter, stronger metals led us to forge hard, sharp steel from malleable iron and to create complex alloys in order to conquer the skies. He investigates metals at the atomic level to reveal mysterious properties such as why they get stronger when they are hit, and he discovers how metal crystals can be grown to survive inside one of our most extreme environments - the jet engine.

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