The Idiot's Lantern 3 - Cosmic Zoom and the Powers of Ten

Wow is that the time?

Yes I'm back. It's still probably going to be sporadic blogging for a while but something from my childhood popped into my mind recently and I wanted to share it. Although that title at the top sounds like it's from some obscure 1960s superhero comic - all lurid colours, x-ray specs adverts and checkerboard mastheads - once again this section of the blog is actually going to be about an educational TV program - something small that had a huge impact on my early life.

I went to school in the UK in the 1970s and early 1980s. There were no PC's or tablets. No internet. No mobile phones. Just a succession of  "temporary" pre-fabricated classrooms that had been there for thirty years (the dreaded "demountables"), ramshackle outside toilets, desks like something out of "Just William", playground apparatus made out of cast concrete and teachers that were more frightening than any horror movie (Mrs Fairbrass I'm looking at you). When I moved to 'secondary' school I remember depressing grey buildings that would have been at home in any prison yard, a maze of corridors and wasted hours of sports lessons - all interspersed with a lot of bullying.

I'm being unfair. There were some good times during my school years and some excellent teachers. Mr McCarthy gave me my love of fantastical stories. Mr Keane gave me my interest in science. Mr Wheeler managed to instil a lifelong interest in World War II. Certain things that I learned have stayed with me ever since. More importantly, this was the peak period of ITV and BBC schools’ television programmes.

Most primary and secondary schools were using them in lessons at some point. It was the highlight of the week, in both my schools. My abiding memory is that there was a kind of ritual that had to be observed. The class would be escorted into the tiny "television room" (basically a dour windowless cubicle somewhere in the middle of the school building with the requisite number of grey plastic chairs) and told to sit down and behave. The teacher would then toddle off to the locked store cupboard next door to collect the television (it being a far too precious a commodity to be left out unguarded) - at which point of course the class would do anything except sit quietly and behave (unless it was the deputy head because even the most disruptive pupils were scared of *him*).

Before World War III broke out the teacher would return wheeling in the precious box, replete on its sturdy metal stand and enclosed in a wooden box (why?). With a practiced action they would slide back the folding doors of the cabinet to reveal the behemoth inside. The screen must have been all of twenty inches at its utmost, humming into life with a warm glow from the valves and the ever-present smell of burning dust.

The early days were before the advent of video recorders - although they did arrive eventually when I was around twelve, and you were privileged indeed if you were allowed to push the "play" button. Not yet for us the convenience of watching a program when it suited the school. We had to be there at the time of transmission or not at all. Like a producer at his mixing desk, someone in the mysterious locked room at the back of the library (they'd call it a 'media lab' or something equally grand I expect) would flick a switch to allow the signal through to the darkened room and the screen would sputter into life to show the familiar clock, counting down the sixty seconds til the programme began...

Like junior scientists at NASA Mission Control, we would sometimes be allowed to count down the last ten seconds together out loud. Silence was then meant to descend, but inevitably some jokester would shout out "Blast Off!  - to a groan from his classmates and a stern "Shush!" from Mr Wells. By the way, that's not a random image I've picked there to illustrate ITVs timekeeping - the programme named above is key to the memories I am recalling here.

"Picture Box" was the jewel in ITVs schools programming, running for an astonishing twenty-seven years. Beginning in 1966 it was created by Brian Cosgrove of "Danger Mouse" fame and initially presented by Dorothy Smith. It showed a huge variety of dramatic short films and documentaries in ten minutes slots, designed to stimulate the imagination of children and inspire creativity. This was the show where you learned how they painted the Forth Road Bridge, discovered the Legend of Sleepy Hollow, watched the French classic "The Red Balloon" or slipped into the bizarre world of Czech animation (there seemed to be a lot of that on TV in the 70s).

Of course the golden age of "Picture Box" - and the one that everyone remembers - is when it was presented by the affable Alan Rothwell (an actor who has popped up on both "Coronation Street" and the original Channel 4 soap opera "Brookside") - accompanied by that eerie theme music and an image of a rotating jewellery casket. As far as inducing childhood nightmares goes, that music is up there with white-faced clowns, the "Tales of The Unexpected" opening titles, Noseybonk and "King of the Castle" (well for me anyway). It also made the case of the television resonate for some reason...

For a long time as a youngster I kept getting Alan Rothwell and Doctor Who actor Bernard Holley (Tomb of the Cybermen & Claws of Axos) mixed up, even though they really don't look anything like each other. Similarly for "Mission: Impossible" star Peter Graves and Brit actor John Woodvine. I've also read that some children of my era felt than dear old Alan was "creepy", which I could never work out. It's strange how the mind works...

But I digress. "Picture Box" showed a number of these short films repeatedly throughout the school year (so that everyone could catch them). "Peter and the Wolf" and that damn "Red Balloon" kept cropping up. I have memories of tumbleweed rolling across a desert and a little boy launching a tiny hand-carved boat on a river, along with documentaries about windmills, the cuckoo, and shire horses on stamps (yes really!). However, the one film that I remember above all others is "Cosmic Zoom".

Made by the National Film Board of Canada in 1968 and drawn and directed by the brilliantly named Eva Szasz, it was based on a 1957 essay by renowned Dutch educator Kees Boeke. The original work attempted to illustrate the relative size of everything in the universe from the galactic to the microscopic, and the film does the same thing, through an eight minute long 'animated' sequence.

The film starts with a live-action shot of a boy rowing on a lake in front of some kind of industrial plant - his faithful dog beside him. The image then freezes and turns to animated form and the camera zooms out, revealing more and more of the landscape until we can see the whole lake, then towns and cities and continents and eventually the entire Earth. It then keeps zooming out past the Moon and the planets of the Solar System, past the vast black distances between stars and beyond our Milky Way and the myriad other galaxies - out into the farthest reaches of the universe. Eventually we slow down, stop and then a fast reversal begins, back through the inter-galactic vastness to Earth and to the boy on the boat.

The inwards movement doesn't stop there though. We keep zooming in closer and closer til we see a mosquito on the boys hand. The camera moves past the surface of the insect and under it's skin, through the blood vessels and into the microscopic world. Eventually we reach an atomic nucleus, and the process is reversed once again, so we zoom back to the boy in his boat, where he continues his interrupted rowing.

Look,  as much as I can describe it, there is no substitute for seeing it for yourself -

Admittedly the drawings and animation were crude by the standards of the 1970s. I'm fairly sure that I was aware of the concepts presented within the film at a young age (being the avid SF reader and Doctor Who fan that I was). My memory is a bit blurry, but by the time I first came across "Cosmic Zoom" I think I would have been around eight or nine, so I am sure I must have seen the 1966 movie "Fantastic Voyage" (I *know* I'd watched the wonderful Filmation cartoon series - a blog post about the 'Combined Miniature Defence Force' must be on the list at some point). The delights of Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers, Blake's 7 (and Doctor Who's "The Invisible Enemy") were only just around the corner.

But none of that mattered. Something about this simple little film entranced me. Here was the vast scale of the micro and macro-scopic universes laid out in a way that everyone could understand. My imagination and interest was fired up even more than before and I began to scour the local village library for information. There wasn't a great deal to choose from in such a small resource and it was somewhat limited, but nonetheless I read everything, kept looking for more. I watched all the factual science show on the BBC - "Tomorrow's World" was already a staple in our house but I tuned into "Horizon" and "The Sky At Night" and of course "Connections". I must have driven my parents mad. It was a wonderful time in my childhood.

Then when I was ten I saw a second, almost as influential, film that covered very similar ground to "Cosmic Zoom", but perhaps from a more 'mathematical' slant. "Powers of Ten" began life as a black and white prototype short in 1968, from the minds of Charles Eames and his wife Bernice (known as Ray) - pioneers of modern architecture and furniture (many people will have heard of the Eames lounge chair). It depicted the scale of the universe according to an order of magnitude based on the factor of ten, using that same famous "Cosmic View" book by Kees Boeke as its inspiration. However it was the second revised colour film completed in 1977 that most people became aware of.

Titled "Powers of Ten: A Film Dealing with the Relative Size of Things in the Universe and the Effect of Adding Another Zero", the documentary begins much like "Cosmic Zoom", with a static one metre square view of a scene on Earth  - this time a man and woman picnicking in a Chicago park. Slowly our perspective pulls back to a view ten metres across (10¹ m) and then a hundred metres (10² m), where we see the whole park, and then one kilometre (10³ m) to reveal the whole city. Further and further we recede adding more zeroes to the distance until we reach 10²⁴ m - a hundred million light years from Earth - the size of the observable universe. The process then reserves, smaller and smaller to views at negative powers of ten (10^-1 m being 10 cm for example), into the sub-atomic world and finally the camera stops at 10^-16 m - 0.00001 angstroms - the home of quarks in a proton of a single carbon atom. Wow.

With narration from MIT physics professor Philip Morrison and music by Elmer Bernstein, this was a big advancement on "Cosmic Zoom". Not only were the graphics better but the addition of scientific notation and measurements gave an even greater sense of scale. Once again I was mesmerised. This exuberant fascination with the universe lasted well into my mid-teens, alongside my love of science fiction and - strangely - a growing interest in the paranormal. I sometimes wonder if I missed my calling in life. Perhaps I should have pursued my interest in science and followed my hero Carl Sagan (there will be *much* more on him another time) and become a cosmologist or astro or particle physicist.  Maybe I could have been the one to discover the "Theory of Everything"? Ah well, it was not meant to be...

The Eames film must also have had an impact on many others too, as over the years there have been several more updated and enhanced versions. In 1996, Morgan Freeman narrated "Cosmic Voyage" a loose remake presented in IMAX at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. In 35 minutes it managed to show forty-two orders of magnitude, plus some brief commentary on the Big Bang, black holes and particle acceleration. It was also nominated for an Academy Award. You can watch that one here as it's a bit too large to embed.

Then in 2012, astrophysicist Danail Obreschkow developed a complete remake of Charles and Ray's film using state of the art computer imaging, but this time as an Apple iOS application. "Cosmic Eye" uses real photographs wherever possible taken from telescopes and microscopes and its CGI is based on the latest scientific knowledge. In just a few decades the scale has now been expanded and defined outwards to ten billion light years and inwards to one "femtometre". It's well worth downloading, but if you want to watch a film generated from the App, you can see it here.

Finally I can't leave out the opening sequence of the Jodie Foster-starring "Contact" (that Carl Sagan gets everywhere) which is clearly inspired by "Powers of Ten".

What all these films have in common is a desire to show the scale and wonder of the universe we live in, from the largest supernova to the tiniest atom. The earliest ones inspired me and the latest ones  will hopefully do the same to a new generation.

Let's zoom...

The Idiot's Lantern 2 - The Secret Life Of Machines

It's been a good few months since the first of these TV-related posts, so I thought it was high time I did another. I wasn't going to cover this next programme for a while (there are so many other choices) but thinking about it, it does fit in nicely with the first piece about "Connections". It's also a series which despite being over 25 years old should be required viewing for almost everyone, since we take so may things for granted nowadays and have almost no idea how they actually work. Sure there have been other shows since that try to show you where modern objects come from ("How It's Made" being a prime example) and the rise of the Interweb means that if you want to find something out it's just a few clicks away. But back in the late 80s / early 90s there was nothing quite like this quintessentially British show and it's eccentric presenters.

The Secret Life Of Machines

The series was the brainchild of Tim Hunkin. Hunkin is an engineering graduate from Cambridge who is also a prolific cartoonist, having been published from the early 1970s onwards. He had a regular strip in The Observer newspaper called "The Rudiments of Wisdom" for an incredible 14 years from 1973 to 1987. Each intricately drawn cartoon was a wealth of obscure advice, odd facts and weird and wonderful information, as well as crazy tricks and practical experiments. How does hypnosis work? What is chocolate made of? What do crocodiles eat for lunch? Think of a question, and Tim had probably provided the answer at some point.

Spinning out of his cartoon series, Hunkin came up with the idea of a television version where he  could really get to grips with a variety of everyday machines, pull them apart and explain what made them tick. If James Burke's "Connections" traced the historical connectedness of scientific and technological discoveries, this series would revell in the sheer fun of explaining how things worked.

Tim's co-presenter was special effects guru Rex Garrod, who would later go on to create the radio controlled car that starred in the childrens TV series "Brum", and build several entrants for the early series of technological fight show "Robot Wars" (a series which has just been announced as coming back in 2016).

After touting the idea round a number of broadcasters, it was finally snapped up by Channel 4 and the first episode was broadcast on 15th November 1988. In each packed half-hour episode the pair would record the show from Tim's garden shed and using obsolete technology, giant working models, animation and (sometimes dangerous) experiments, explain the innovations behind the inner workings of the household gadgets we use everyday and that have come to define modern life.

(Rex on the left, Tim on the right)

It was a real labour of love for Tim and Rex, with none of the glossy sheen and slick editing of modern science shows. The topics covered were wide ranging and frequently went off at odd tangents to look at related technologies, with the pair attempting to create their own home-made versions of the device - sometimes with mixed results. If an experiment went wrong (and they often did), they showed it. At the end of many shows they built a giant sculpture / version of the machine under discussion (such as a huge mound of television screens , which they then set fire to).

Across three series and eighteen episodes the presenters looked at a wide array of everyday objects from vacuum cleaners, washing machines and televisions, to the internal combustion engine and the radio to the photocopier and the fax machine. The mixture of homemade Heath Robinson-esque creations, self deprecating humour and sheer infectious charm of the duo made these shows some of the best educational television - and possibly the best television full stop - of the late 80s / early 90s.

Of course a few of the items covered are now obsolete. It's particularly interesting to to see how far we have come with office equipment like word processors and photo copiers in the last 20+ years for example. I remember the days when graphical user interfaces and things like Windows were the stuff of science fairs. We didn't get our first office PC until 1986 and even then it was only a DOS-based green screen system with very little memory.

When I first discovered the show, I fell completely in love with it - but one episode in particular resonated hugely and even when I had recorded over my copies of everything else, this one remained in my collection for many years. It was of course the story of the machine that has made the most impact in my life -  "The Secret Life of the Video Recorder". My favourite part was, when discussing the importance of audio tape which led to the invention of video tape, Tim and Rex showed how they could create their own audio recording out of nothing more than sticky tape and powdered rust. I was astonished at what they had accomplished and how good the quality was.We could all be inventors!

Even now, more than twenty years later there is still an interest in the show, as it is so fondly remembered by so many people. Usually with this kind of niche programme, copies only exist in individuals private off-air collections and VHS or DVD copies would command premium prices on eBay. But Tim Hunkin is a real visionary and encourages people to share everything across the internet. After all, he did this in the first place for the love of science, not for financial gain. Thanks to p2p sharing and some excellent websites by Tim and others, there are are a number of places which have archived lots of information about the show, it's background and the episodes themselves - far more than I could describe in one small blog post. Plus the series is available in it's entirety on YouTube. It's also why I can happily embed my favourite episode right here:

If you want to see more (and I really, really encourage you to do so - it's fascinating stuff) then here are the links you need:

Your first port of call should of course be Tim Hunkin's own website, which has tons of stuff about his work, the machines he has built (and where you can find them) - plus the TV series itself. Tim also has dedicated sites for his "Rudiments of Wisdom" strips and his "Experiments" book. The latter is a lot of fun for kids and adults alike.

The "Secret Life of Machines" website gives even more information plus a list of places you can stream or download the series from, although it hasn't been updated in a while so a few of the links are dead now.

By far the best place I've found for viewing all 18  episodes is www.secretlifeofmachines.net

If you have not seen any of these shows then do have a look for them. You'll be so glad you did.

The Idiot's Lantern 1 - Connections

So this is the part of the blog where I'm going to talk about TV shows that are not Doctor Who. However I couldn't resist using  the name of a David Tennant episode of the series as the overarching umbrella title for this section - it just seemed to fit. The intention is not really to talk about other science fiction or fantasy shows (although they may make the odd appearance) but to focus on the more unusual or important things that have captured my interest over the years.

I alluded to some of these in my "Things To Come" post back in April 2015, so now it's time to start the ball rolling. To begin with let's go all the way back to the 1970s...

There are some TV shows that stick with you because of their characters. Then there are others where the plot is so absorbing that you get lost in the narrative. There are those which make you marvel at the beauty and wonder of the world around us or astound you with their sheet audacity and originality. And there are those  - like the one I'm writing about today - which change the way you think. Possibly forever.

As a child, as much as I loved science fiction and fantasy novels I was also fascinated by real world science and technology. I think the wellspring of this was the BBC series "Tomorrow's World" which my dad watched religiously every week. This was the BBCs premier popular science programme running for a staggering 38 years from 1965 to 2003. Slotted in between the early evening news and the music chart run-down of "Top Of The Pops", the show covered a wide range of new ideas, developing technologies, achievements, failures and down right daft inventions, via studio demonstrations and location films. It also introduced the unsuspecting British publish to technology that would one day become commonplace such as the alcohol breathalyser, the pocket calculator, the digital watch and (in the early 80s) the personal stereo and the compact disc (with presenter Kieran Prendiville memorably spreading jam on a Bee Gees CD to prove its indestructibility!). By the time I guess I was old enough to understand things properly (around the mid 1970s), the series was in what many consider to be its most popular phase, with presenters Raymond Baxter, Michael Rodd, Judith Hann and William Woollard (with Prendiville joining in 1979) and attracting millions of viewers every week. For people of my age, *this* was the definitive set of 1970s opening titles:

The other key ingredient to this story is James Burke. A former English lecturer based in Italy, Burke had been presenting shows on the BBC for many years. He was one of the original Tomorrow's World team alongside Raymond Baxter and was the key BBC anchor for the coverage of the US and Soviet "space race", including the historic moon landing in 1969 (famously broadcasting for up to 30 hours in one stretch). His quietly intense, somewhat eccentric style was very popular with younger audiences of the time. Capitalising on his popularity, Burke left Tomorrow's World in 1969 and went on to present a series of illustrated science lectures in front of a studio audience called "The Burke Specials". Between 1972 and 1976 these shows covered a wide spectrum of topics on modern life and where it might be headed, including ID cards, test tube babies and super-computers, alongside informative but slightly mad studio demonstrations - all presented in Burke's trademark enthusiastic style. He was the Professor Brian Cox of his day. Just with a white safari suit and far less gazing off into the sunset.

By the time 1978 came rolling along,  I was eleven years old and in the first year of senior school. Science fast became my favourite subject (thanks in part to an excellent teacher whose name sadly escapes me - Mr. Keene perhaps?). I have fond memories of being part of one of the after school clubs and building water powered jet rockets and going to technology fairs to marvel at very early Apple machines. My parents bought me electronic project kits and I even had a build your own computer (I so wish I could find a picture of that - it had sliders and a plastic housing with different paper inserts and light bulbs which flashed when you "programmed" it to answer questions by moving the wires around). The teacher even starting lending me his copies of "New Scientist" magazine. Yes, I was that guy.

I'm sure I was too young to watch some of these early episodes of "Tomorrow's World" or "The Burke Special" when they were first transmitted  - or if I did sit there with my dad in front of the TV a lot of it may have gone over my head. The thing is something must have sunk in, because I was well aware of who James Burke was when he returned to television in 1978 after a two year break with what was to be his masterpiece...

Subtitled "An Alternative History Of Change", "Connections" was unlike any science documentary I had ever seen before. This wasn't a staid chronological retelling of the birth of modern science. Instead over ten programmes Burke circled the globe, carving a path through the history of technology to educate the viewer on subjects such as what on earth improvements in medieval castle fortifications and ivory billiard balls had to do with the creation of the movie projector - all through a series of what might seem to be random leaps of logic - the connections of the title. What's more he asserted that you could make these kind of links between just about any two historical discoveries or events if you looked hard enough. The series could be about anything and everything and it all mattered because a cascade of seemingly random events had lead to a major invention that changed our world forever - it was the butterfly effect in technological terms. The whole point was that you couldn't consider one thing in isolation. It's true - Everything *IS* Connected.

Further examples of Burke's genius lectures during the series were:

• how telecommunications exist because Norman soldiers had stirrups for horse riding and scientists tried to stop mine shafts from flooding.
• how you get from Greek astrological manuscripts to the modem day production line
• how the invention of a 16th century Dutch freighter led to the discovery of nylon

Burke also postulated that if new innovations develop because of the connections between past events and discoveries, then as time goes on the number of connections will multiply, and the speed of development of new technology will increase exponentially. Change causes more change. But what happens when this rate of change is too much for a person to handle? How will they cope? This was a concept I'd already come across in comics. The "Judge Dredd" strip in those early issues of 2000 AD had a name for it - "Future Shock" or "Futsie" (although they didn't invent the term - that was futurist Alvin Toffler is his book published in 1970). Hey, comics could be educational too !

To say that this series blew my mind was an understatement. Suddenly I could see that I wasn't an isolated individual, but part of something larger and greater stretching back into history and forward into the years to come. It made the young, innocent me *feel* connected, because what I did with my life might seem mundane or meaningless right then, but an insignificant moment could have potentially massive ramifications in the distant future. What's more this was a TV show that made me want to work hard to understand it because I was so fascinated. It might be a documentary but it was also a detective novel or a puzzle - could I work out what connected these seemingly random things with the final invention before Burke revealed it at the end? To keep viewers like me interested he would lay red-herrings and clues along the way, often questioning his theories, changing his mind mid sentence or memorably suddenly dismissing everything he had been saying for the last five minutes by walking off screen and then ducking back into shot to quip “except, that last bit isn't true at all..." or suddenly declaring “what this programme is *really* about is....”.  What is even more amazing is that you don't realise just how connected the series is until the last few minutes of the last episode, when Burke pulls back the curtain and reveals what linked all the innovations he has talked about together. Just stunning.

The series was incredibly successful both in the UK and overseas and led to an indirect sequel "The Day The Universe Changed" in 1985. This was a more chronological series concerned about the philosophical effects of science and technology and how we "change" the universe around us by altering our perception of it through the acquisition of knowledge. I was older then and just starting my working career, but I still lapped it up. Two further series of "Connections" followed in 1994 and 1997 but I am not sure they were ever shown in the UK as they were made for the American "The Learning Channel". Certainly I've not seen them as yet, but I will be seeking them out.

I can honestly say that there are two series which fundamentally changed the way I think about the world and made such an impression on me as a young man that the memories and reverberations have lasted for over thirty years. One is Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" (and trust me we will get to that in time). The other is "Connections".