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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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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
With rare access to electronics giant Samsung, Hannah uncovers the technological game changers that have made the smartphone a reality.
2023 • Technology
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: 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
Explores the digital afterlife business. What if a person's death did not mean the end of their life? What if their loved ones could still talk to them long after their body has been cremated or is lying lifeless in the ground? What sounds like the scenario of a science fiction movie is already offered by companies today. By using AI, these startups create avatars of deceased people to allow their loved ones to interact with them. Eternal You tells the story of a human experiment: what does it do to people to resurrect their deceased loved ones in order to talk to them? Who takes responsibility for the psychological and ethical consequences? And do we even want all this?
2024 • Technology
What if we could travel not just through space, but through time itself? If you could travel through time, would you change the past or the future? What if you found it couldn’t be changed? What price does the time traveller — and the people they are closest to — pay? This is a journey from H. G. Wells’ The Time Machine through ideas like The Grandfather Paradox and The Butterfly Effect to the professional time traveller that is the ever popular Doctor Who. Steven Moffat, David Tennant, Karen Gillan, and Neil Gaiman offer a unique perspective on the Doctor. Edward James Olmos reveals the hidden meaning of the language he created for the vision of the future that is Blade Runner. Bob Gale and Christopher Lloyd take us behind the scenes of Back to the Future, while Ed Solomon describes the joy of solving a time travel conundrum for Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. But what would be the physical and emotional cost to the time traveller? Audrey Niffenegger explains what inspired her novel The Time Traveller’s Wife. And what if someone from the future tried to travel back in time to warn us? Would we believe them? From the apocalyptic tones of 12 Monkeys to the drama of Quantum Leap and the comedy of Groundhog Day, time travel is a subject that has been irresistible to the creators of every type of science fiction.
Part 4 • The Real History of Science Fiction • 2014 • Technology
Outer space has been transformed from a realm of scientific endeavor to the US military's newest battlefield. From anti-satellite missiles to laser technology, discover the cutting-edge race to build the ultimate space weapon.
S8E7 • Space's Deepest Secrets • 2021 • Technology
Today, GPS is guiding - and following - pretty much anything that moves, all around the world. It's so accurate it can track you down to the head of a pin. But where is GPS leading us? Is it helping us find the way, or lose it?
S2E1 • History 101 • 2022 • Technology
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.
S1E1 • The Secret Genius of Modern Life • 2022 • Technology
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.
S1E1 • How It Works • 2012 • Technology