The Nature of Things - Season 9

Thomas Edison wasn't merely a lone inventful genius. He invented modern research team makes possible technology shaping our world.

TMDB has not published a written overview for this episode yet.

A review of history of man's oldest materials: wood, stone, iron, bronze and glass.

Defying force of gravity, man has strewn his structures across earth. This program looks at some of them.

Much of this program deals with basic communications problem of getting a signal through noise.

The great engineers of past - men like DE Lesseps of Suez fame and Panama infamy and Bradley - whose canals were arteries of industrial revolution, sacrificed health and fortune, and sometimes lives.

One test of civilization is ability to organize sources of energy. Central power was something new in 1876.

The Greek inventor, Alexander Hero, first defined five basic devices which make all machines possible: lever, wedge, wheel, pulley and screw.

This program shows how man changes his environment by shaping land he lives on, reclaiming land from sea, making new lakes and rivers.

This film looks, sometimes whimsically, at examples of old and modern flying machines.

Man's first "portable power" device was part of his own body, energy from contraction of long molecules in presence of sugar: muscle power.

Are problems of urban transportation insurmountable? The traffic jams which are a regular feature of city life make it appear so.

A system, according to Oxford dictionary, is a whole composed of parts in orderly arrangement, according to some scheme or plan.

A study of life and work of Jean Jacques Audubon, great painter-naturalist who captured beauty of American wildlife on canvas.