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Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity

The very first scientists who started to unlock the mysteries of electricity - people like Francis Hauksbee, Stephen Grey and Benjamin Franklin -  studied its curious link to life, built strange and powerful instruments to create it, and even tamed lightning itself. It was these men who truly laid the foundations of the modern world.

Electricity was without doubt a fantastical wonder – a platform for showmanship and ‘electrickery’. This is the story about what happened when the first real concerted effort was made to understand it; how we learned to create and store it, before finally creating something that enabled us to make it at will.

In this episode Professor Jim Al-Khalili also shows what electricity actually is: a force created by the movement of charged particles like electrons.

We’ll see how science learned to harness the power of electricity to build the modern world. As England and the rest of Europe went electricity crazy, and the experiments grew bigger, scientists started to ask more profound questions…how can we control this amazing power?

As science developed new and ingenious ways to produce electricity were devised. But there was still one major problem. There seemed to be no way to capture and store the electricity. Such a breakthrough would catalyse one of the greatest technological and scientific revolutions in history, and with the promise of such a grand prize, it wasn’t long before a solution was invented.

A bitter and rival battle between Luigi Galvani and Alessandro Volta led to one of mankinds most useful inventions. The battery. Mankind had truly learnt to harness the very force of life – it was a sign of our dominion over nature and our growing control of the forces that surround us.

In episode two we travel back to a world full of excitement at the discovery of electricity. Jim will see how scientists finally realised that ‘electricity’ and ‘magnetism’ were linked.

Scientists like Michael Faraday worked out how electromagnetism could be used to generate electricity but it would take another breakthrough, in how we could actually use electricity before the modern world was truly created. This would be the first device that really brought electricity out of the laboratory and into the hands of ordinary people - the telegraph.

This leap in understanding – that electricity could be sent over long distances was critical in one of the most intriguing stories in the history of electricity. Electrical distribution.

Until fairly recently, electricity was seen as a magical power, but it is now the lifeblood of the modern world and underpins every aspect of our technological advancements.

Without electricity, we would be lost. This series tells of dazzling leaps of imagination and extraordinary experiments - a story of maverick geniuses who used electricity to light our cities, to communicate across the seas and through the air, to create modern industry and to give us the digital revolution.

Electricity is not just something that creates heat and light, it connects the world through networks and broadcasting. After centuries of man's experiments with electricity, the final episode tells the story of how a new age of real understanding dawned - how we discovered electric fields and electromagnetic waves.

Today we can hardly imagine life without electricity - it defines our era. As our understanding of it has increased so has our reliance upon it, and today we're on the brink of a new breakthrough, because if we can understand the secret of electrical superconductivity we could once again transform the world.