Richard Hammond reveals the engineering inspirations behind the tallest road bridge in the world – the Millau Viaduct in France.He fires three quarters of a million volts from his fingertips to see how the power of lightning cut the steel structure quickly and accurately. The huge piers – 340 metres high, and which would look down on the Eiffel Tower – were positioned to millimetre accuracy wi
One hundred years ago, the Herero people of Namibia were nearly exterminated by German colonial soldiers in what has become known as the first genocide of the 20th century.In the colonial period, the Herero men, women and children of Namibia were rounded up like cattle and put into Germany’s first ever concentration camps. Four years later, three-quarters of the entire Herero nation had
This is the true story of the scientific feats and failures of Hitler’s Nazi Germany.Germany is portrayed as a nation leading the world in science and technology prior to World War Two.But it squandered this wealth of knowledge, which should have enabled it to win the war, because the high command was selective about those advances they would favor.Examples are provided of technologies that
Hitler's army thundered through Europe from 1939 to 1945 and brought needless death and destruction to the continent. What was it like to serve in this army? What was it like to conduct one of the bloodiest wars in history? What was it like to occupy half of Europe and yet to suffer total defeat?This five-part portrait provides long-awaited answers to questions such as these and sheds light on t
The Auschwitz Album is the only surviving visual evidence of the process of mass murder at Auschwitz-Birkenau. It is a unique document and was donated to Yad Vashem by Lilly Jacob-Zelmanovic Meier. The photos were taken at the end of May or beginning of June 1944, either by Ernst Hofmann or by Bernhard Walter, two SS men whose task was to take ID photos and fingerprints of
Boom Towns to Ghost Towns Historians explain dirtier, less glamorous side of America’s wild west. A great look into what life was really like in the lawless boom towns.
Hollywood portrayed them as the most glamorous outlaws in American history, but the reality of life on the run for Bonnie and Clyde was one of violence, hardship and danger.With unprecedented access to gang members’ memoirs, family archives and recently released police records, Timewatch takes an epic road trip through the heart of depression-era America, in search of the true story of Bonnie an
Sun Ra was born on the planet Saturn some time ago. The best accounts agree that he emerged on Earth as Herman Blount, born in Birmingham, Alabama in 1914, although Sun Ra himself always denied that Blount was his surname. He returned to Saturn in 1993 after creating a stunningly variegated and beautiful assemblage of earthly and interplanetary music, most notably with his fervently loyal Arkestra
Connections is a ten-episode documentary television series created, written and presented by science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science & Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (USA). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific ac