Connections Season 2

January. 02,1994

Rating：

5.5

Genre：

Documentary

Trailer Synopsis

Sequel series to the 1979 "Connections" where historian James Burke walks the viewer through the tenuous threads of history that link seemingly obscure scientific breakthroughs and the events and products that we have today.

Episode 20 : Flexible Response

August. 14,1994

Episode 19 : Better Than the Real Thing

August. 07,1994

Episode 18 : Sign Here

July. 31,1994

Episode 17 : One Word

July. 24,1994

How one word changed history

Episode 16 : Routes

July. 17,1994

Jethro Tull, a sick English lawyer, recuperates sipping wine and contributes the hoe to help fix farming problems. Farm production is not going so well in France, either. François Quesnay (doctor of King Louis XV's mistress) suggests a solution based on his complete misunderstanding of English farming techniques. Laissez-faire was his erroneous idea. It also got the people to demand social laissez-faire. His inciting the public's rebellion against the monarchy led to France's invasion of Geneva. The French Revolution led to personal exploration of the senses. Berlin doctor Müller reasoned that each sense does a different job and the nervous system analyses what the senses are telling one. Helmholtz's pupil, Hertz, discovered that sound and electricity have a wave-like nature in common. Guglielmo Marconi takes this a step further by sending and receiving signals very long distances across the earth. The BBC realised that the radio waves were reflected by the ionosphere, and Hess was the

Episode 15 : Making Waves

July. 03,1994

A permanent wave in ladies' hair is aided by curlers, and this leads us to explore borax, taking us to Switzerland, Johann Sutter's scam, and Sutter's Mill, and that means the discovery of gold leading to the 1848 California gold rush. Americans then cut into the English tea market with the aide of the Yankee Clipper, which played a big role in the gold rush. A fungus from America created the Irish potato famine, resulting in the importing of corn, but laws prevented the Yankee clippers from being used until it was too late to save Ireland. Finally, the laws were changed, leading to franking fraud, which was overcome by special printing of postage stamps, which gave us wallpaper, and a thickening agent, leading us to the Canal du Midi, the American war for independence, resettlement in Scotland, highlanders in Nova Scotia and—finally—the RMS Queen Elizabeth II.

Episode 14 : Bright Ideas

June. 19,1994

Gin and tonic was invented to combat malaria in British colonies like

Episode 13 : The Big Spin

June. 05,1994

The Big Spin is what California's lottery TV show is called. And lottery being a game of chance, from here Burke takes us through Alexander Fleming's chance discovery of penicillin, to Rudolf Virchow's observation that contaminated water is related to health, to Schliemann's search for the City of Troy, the theft of a discovered treasure, and to Virchow's criminology. From there we proceed to anthropology, the classification of life forms, Francis Bacon, the statistics of mortality, life expectancy, statistical math, Priestley's carbonated water, the soda fountain, petroleum oil, some French fossil hunters, seismology, and impossible-to-predict earthquakes.

Episode 12 : Hot Pickle

June. 05,1994

Burke starts out in a spice market in Istanbul where you can find hot pickle, recounts the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453,

Episode 11 : New Harmony

May. 22,1994

A dream of utopia is followed from microchips to Singapore, from the transistor to its most important element, germanium, to Ming vases and cobalt fakes (which contribute to the blue in blue tiles used in special Islamic places), and mosaics in Byzantium, the donation of Constantine, Portuguese navigation by stars, the "discovery" of Brazil, Holland's tolerance, diamond merchants, optics, microscopes, beasts of science, Frankenstein's monster, and finally New Harmony.

Episode 10 : Deja Vu

May. 22,1994

James Burke provides evidence that history does repeat itself by examining the likes of black and white movies, conquistadors, Peruvian Incas, small pox, settlements that look like Spain's cities, the gold abundance ending up in Belgium, Antwerp, colony exploitation, the practice of burying treasure to avoid pirates, Port Royal's pirates, earthquakes, the College of William and Mary, military discipline, Alexander Humboldt's observation on the environment, Ratzel's superstate Lebensraum, and Haushofer's world domination.

Episode 9 : High Times

May. 08,1994

The connection between polyethylene and Big Ben is a few degrees of separation, so let us recount them: polyethylene, radar, soap, artificial dyes, color perception, tapestries, Far East goods, fake lacquer furniture, search for shorter route to Japan, Hudson in Greenland, the discovery of plentiful whales, printing the Bible, Mercator map, Martin Luther's protest, star tables, Earth as a flattened sphere, and George Graham's clock which of course leads to Big Ben.

Episode 8 : Separate Ways

April. 17,1994

Burke shows how to get from sugar to atomic weapons by two totally independent paths. The first involves African slaves, Abolitionist societies, Sampson Lloyd II, wire, suspension bridges, galvanised wire, settlement of the Wild West, barbed wire, canned corn, and cadmium. The second path involves sweet tea, rum, a double boiler, the steam engine, Matthew Boulton, English currency, the pantograph, electroplating, and cathode ray tubes.

Episode 7 : Photo Finish

April. 03,1994

Another series of discoveries examined by Burke includes Eastman Kodak's Brownie, the disappearing elephant scare of 1867, billiard balls, celluloid as a substitute for ivory, false teeth that explode, gun cotton, double shot sound of a bullet, Mach's shock wave, aerodynamics, nuclear bombs, Einstein's relativity, Einstein's selenium, movie talkies, the vacuum tube amplifier, radio, railroad's use of wood, coal tar, gas lights, creosote, rubber, the Zeppelin, the automobile, and finally how Adeline vulcanises tires.

Episode 6 : Echoes of the Past

March. 20,1994

The past in this case starts with the tea in Dutch-ruled India, examines the Japanese tea ceremony, Zen Buddhism, porcelain, the architecture of Florence, Delftware, Wedgwood, Free Masons, secret codes, radio-telephones, cosmic background radiation and—finally – radio astronomy, which listens to "Echoes of the Past".

Episode 5 : Something for Nothing

March. 06,1994

How do space shuttle landings start with the vacuum which was forbidden by the Church? Burke takes us on an adventure with barometers, weather forecasting, muddy and blacktop roads, rain runoff, sewage, a cholera epidemic, hygiene, plumbing, ceramics, vacuum pumps, compressed-air drills, tunnels in the Alps, train air brakes, hydroelectric power, the electric motor, Galvani's muscle-electricity connection, Volta's battery, and gyroscopes.

Episode 4 : Whodunit?

February. 20,1994

This episode starts with a billiard ball and ends with a billiard ball. Along the way, Burke examines Georgius Agricola's De Re Metallica, how mining supported war, the role of money, the Spanish Armada, large ships, problems posed by a wood shortage, glass making, coal, plate glass, mirrors, the sextant, the discovery of granite, and seashells in the mountains, which enabled a new view of the age of the earth, and Darwin's theory of evolution, Francis Galton's Eugenics, and the forensic use of fingerprints.

Episode 3 : Getting it Together

February. 06,1994

James Burke explains the relationship between hot air balloons and laughing gas, and goes on to surgery, hydraulic-water gardens, hydraulic rams, tunneling through the Alps, the Orient Express, nitroglycerin, heart attacks and headaches, aspirin, carbolic acid, disinfectants, Maybach-Gottlieb Daimler-Mercedes, carburetors, helicopters, typewriters, punch cards, and IBM.

Episode 2 : Sentimental Journeys

January. 16,1994

What do these have in common – Freud, lifestyle crisis, electric shock therapy, hypnotherapy, magnetism, phrenology, penology, physiology, synthetic dyes, the Bunsen burner, absorption, Fraunhofer lines, astronomical telescopes, chromatic aberrations, and surveying? Follow James Burke on the trail of discovering the connections between these and others in "Sentimental Journeys".

Episode 1 : Revolutions

January. 02,1994

What do all these things have in common—three grandfathers' lifetimes, two revolutions, 1750 Cornish steam engines for Cornwall's tin mines, water in mines, pumps, steam engines, Watt's copier, carbon paper, matches, phosphorus fertiliser, trains and gene-pool mixing, travelling salesmen, 24-hour production, educated women, the telephone, high-rise buildings, Damascus's swords, steel, diamond, carborundum, graphite, oscilloscope, television, Apollo space program, X-ray crystallography, DNA and gene therapy? You will learn these things in the first episode of Connections2, "Revolutions".

Seasons

Season 5

Documentary series about the effect of advances in science and technology on western society in its philosophical aspects.

See Detail

Season 5 1985

Season 4

Set in 2050, social journalist James Burke looks back at events of the world from the dawn of civilization and shows how climate change has affected human history. At the point of the Industrial Revolution, humans began to do things to the climate, rather than the other way round. When he brings us up to date (1989), that is when the predictions begin. From Kyoto to the two Gulf Wars, Burke accurately predicts many of the events that have taken place so far. His predictions have been sound, even to the tune of carbon credits and climate change agreements. Using virtual reality computer simulations, Burke traces the Earth's history of ice ages and warming trends and presents several possible scenarios caused by the greenhouse effect during the 1990s to 2050.

See Detail

Season 4 1989

Season 3

In the conclusion to his groundbreaking series, James Burke continues to make incredible connections to history's most important discoveries and inventions.

See Detail

Season 3 1997

Season 2

See Detail

Season 2 1994

Season 1

Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention, Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. To demonstrate this view, Burke begins each episode with a particular event or innovation in the past (usually ancient or medieval) and traces a path from that event through a series of connections to a fundamental and essential aspect of the modern world.

See Detail

Season 1 1978