大象传媒

By Hannah Fry

...The posh way to describe it is that it's about the philosophy of innovation, but really it's about everyday objects and the incredible stories that brought them into being, only told in a fun way…

I’m Hannah Fry and that’s how I’ve been describing my new series of The Secret Genius of Modern Life.

We often forget, that we are surrounded by incredible technology – our homes, our bags, our offices – they’re all packed with ingenious devices that have been designed to make our lives easier. And yet we barely give these things a second thought. And so, in this series, I wanted to uncover the stories behind these objects - the remarkable human ingenuity, and luck and happenstance that have built our modern world.

Okay – buckle up – time for six extraordinary stories I learnt while making the new series of The Secret Genius of Modern Life…

Watch The Secret Genius of Modern life on 大象传媒 Two and 大象传媒 iPlayer from 8pm on Wednesday November 8th.

It may not be top of your mind when you’re heating up some baked beans, but inside your microwave oven is a very clever bit of WWII radar tech. The Cavity Magnetron (that’s the thing that actually produces the microwaves) was originally invented during the war as a system for spotting enemy planes and ships from the air.

But it turned into the kitchen staple - and leftover saviour of today - when Percy Spencer, an engineer working with microwave technology in the 1940s, realised (legend has it) that the microwave radiation had melted a candy bar in his pocket!

This is one of my favourites because it involves a lot of excellent maths. You probably appreciate your noise cancelling earbuds when you’re sitting on the tube next to an avid TikTok fan, but how do they actually cancel out unwanted noise?

A microphone inside the earbud collects the sound wave of the noise coming in, and what follows is a race between the speed of sound and the speed of maths. Your earbud takes that sound wave, inverts it, adds it to whatever you're listening to, and gets it to hit your eardrum at precisely the same speed that the original sound gets there. I mean this is just some phenomenal mind-bending stuff…

The vacuums of today are filled with an array of high-tech electronic wizardry. But what they also contain – is technology that was developed for a top-secret atomic bomb research project in the 1940s. The HEPA filter in your vac – an intricate mesh with microscopic pores that traps some of the tiniest particles - was originally developed to protect workers on The Manhattan Project from dangerous radioactive materials.

Did you know that your super smart smartphone screen started life in air traffic control towers in the 1960s? The first finger friendly touchscreen was created to help busy controllers manage planes (and avoid mid-air collisions!) in the skies during the golden age of air travel. This fancy new screen meant they could quickly adjust the flight plans of nearby planes.

Today’s chip-embedded passports may seem super high-tech… But the origins of biometric passports actually lie with a frustrated 19th century police clerk - Alphonse Bertillon. Working in a Paris police station in the 1880s, he realised that because there was no consistent way of recording the details of criminals, repeat offenders were getting off the hook by simply pretending to be someone else!

But Bertillon knew that the structure of the adult body doesn’t change over time, and so devised a system of body measurements combined with a mug shot – that became the perfect way to record criminals’ details and spot repeat offenders.

His innovations even helped identify notorious French serial killer Joseph Vacher. His system was later superseded by fingerprinting, but was reborn in the 1960s as the very beginnings of today’s facial recognition and biometric systems.

Did you know that the tech that helps propel your lift upwards was used in a 12th century weapon of war? The Counterweight Trebuchet was a giant catapult-like device that used a counterweight to hurl massive projectiles incredible distances, allowing crafty invaders to crush enemy defences in double quick time…

And today, in your lift the same kind of counterweight makes it much easier to hoist the heavy weight of the lift cab upwards.