Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity

Episode one tells the story of the very first "natural philosophers" who started to unlock the mysteries of electricity. They 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. This is the story about what happened when the first real concerted effort was made to understand electricity; how we learned to create and store it, before finally creating something that enabled us to make it at will: the battery.

Electricity is not just something that creates heat and light, it connects the world through networks and broadcasting. After centuries of mans 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 were on the brink of a new breakthrough, because if we can understand the secret of electrical superconductivity we could once again transform the world.