Hacker Cinema
Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity
2011 · TV series · documentary · 45 min episodes · 1 season
Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the electrifying story of our quest to master nature's most mysterious force - electricity. Until fairly recently, electricity was seen as a magical power, but it is now the lifeblood of the modern world and underpins every aspect of our technological advancements. Without electricity, we would be lost. This series tells of dazzling leaps of imagination and extraordinary experiments - a story of maverick geniuses who used electricity to light our cities, to communicate across the seas and through the air, to create modern industry and to give us the digital revolution.
3 positivefrom 3 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
3 comments on Hacker News
The BBC's Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity [0] documentary really made it click for me. The historical development and the conceptual development are woven together nicely.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shock_and_Awe:_The_Story_of_Electricity
I watched "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity" by Jim Al-Khalili (it's available to stream on Amazon Prime Video), and enjoyed it. In fact, Jim Al-Khalili has produced excellent documentaries about other topics of scientific interest as well.
Great documentary. I can heartily recommend all of Al-Khalili's documentaries: "Atom", "The End of the Universe", "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity" and "Chemistry: A Volatile History" are all excellent. The last two are my favorites; while his documentaries on physics and quantum mechanics are good, they describe scientific phenomena that are pretty difficult to understand, let alone visualize, and it ends up having to be a little over-simplified, or explained with unsatisfying visual analogies. The ones on chemistry and electricity are a lot more (no pun intended) grounded, and include some fun demonstrations.