Connections – the companion volume to the BBC television series –
is James Burke’s new examination of the ideas, inventions and coincidences
that have culminated in the major technological achievements of today.
Connections takes eight innovations on which we now depend
and which may prove most influential for this and future generations:
the computer, the telephone, the production line, the aeroplane,
the atomic bomb, plastics, the guided rocket and television.
It untangles the pattern of interconnecting events,
the accidents of time, circumstance and place that have given rise
to each of these innovations and to a host of others on the way.
In doing so James Burke shows how and why change takes place.
Abandoning convention, he demonstrates that history is less
a matter of great men and lonely geniuses,
more a process involving every member of society –
the ploughmen, the carpenters, the metalworkers, the weavers,
without whose skills the instruments of invention would not have been available.
The background to each event is seen to be 'a fascinating mixture of craftsmanship,
climatic change, observation, ambition, deceit, greed, religious belief and war.
All have proved vital to the major inventions that have changed the course of history and
contributed to the man-made world of today.
This is the book of the TV documentary series written and presented by James Burke, and follows it quite closely.
I am actually here reviewing the brilliant TV series here.
I watched it on TV when it originally aired in 1978,
and then again just recently, 40 years later, on DVD.
Each episode follows a chain of historical events and inventions, from the ancient past,
exposes their connections, and demonstrates how they led to a specific technology today.
Of course, the events also led to other things today,
and other events we necessary to produce the specific technology today:
this shows just one thread in a vast complex carpet of events.
However, it provides a novel approach to describing history,
allows a wide range of technological, political, and economic events to be included,
as opposed to the more traditional simple linear view of the inventions that led to a technology.
Burke picks out and describes several fascinating threads from that overall weave.
This series has stood the test of those 40 intervening years remarkably well.
Some of the target technologies do have a clunky 70s look, obviously,
but many of the themes, directions, and dangers Burke covers are still relevant today.
The amount and variety of events and technologies covered is wonderful.
And the end of Episode Eight
(but not in the book, obviously), has what must be one of
the best timed scenes in television history.
What a professional!
