We are innovators, inventors.
We transform the resources of our planet into new powers.
[Music]
But as life accelerates,
new perils and mankind's greatest triumphs.
Amidst the chaos of an unforgiving planet most species will fail.
But for one all the pieces will fall into place.
And a set of keys will unlock a path for mankind to triumph.
This is our story the story of all us.
Richmond Virginia, April 1865.
The climax of the American civil war.
Union troops close in on the confederate capitol.
[screams]
But the confederates decide not to defend their city.
Their plan evacuate, regroup keep fighting.
[screams and gunshots]
The orders passed to young soldiers.
Captain William Herring, Adjunct Linden Kent.
Without knowing it they will help bring the war to a sudden end.
The American civil war, the bloodiest war in U.S. history.
600,000 Americans dead, more than in World Wars one and two combined.
But in the modern age the key to the success of mankind is mass production.
Wars are now won by harnessing the power of industry.
Giving the Union a massive advantage.
Four out of five factories are in the North.
Making 25 more weapons, six times more ammunition.
[music]
Many southener's still live a rural life, based on farming.
Crushed by the industrial might of the north.
They are on the brink of defeat.
Richmond their last stand.
Abandoned.
Herring and Kent are meant to burn the South's most valuable commodity. Tobacco
And to destroy food and supplies, anything that could be of use to union troops.
Richard Machowicz: Wait a second, I was just fighting to protect this city.
And now, you want me to burn it to the ground. Are you insane?
George Wunderlich: The shock and the horror of this idea, must have been the most terrible thing in the world.
And the question comes, do you follow orders and burn what you have defended? Or do you let it be?
Soldiers: Are we really going to do this?
The Confederate's want to destroy the warehouses, but leave Richmond in tact.
Ready for their return.
Richmond is a concept a belief. As long as Richmond exists so does the Confederacy.
But the fire spreads out of control.
A thousand buildings burn.
Munition dumps explode.
The Confederate's lay waste to their own city.
It's apocalyptic, it's the only way to describe it. The Confederate's are leaving a Capitol ablaze, a Capitol in ruin.
An idea in ruin, a political system in ruin. It's the end.
Six days later the South surrenders.
The world's first industrial war ends.
Now the men and machines that fought the war, fight for a new cause.
Progress
An explosion of technology.
Man the tool maker charges into the modern age.
Prof. Henry Gates: The period immediately following the Civil War. Was curiously enough a time of enormous optimism.
A time when people embraced the idea of progress like they had never done before.
People believed everything could be done faster, bigger, better.
Jim Rasenberger: Every other day there would be a newspaper article about some new extraordinary invention.
Some new technology. some new breakthrough that was just on the cusp.
Narrator: In the U.S. alone 400,000 patents in 40 years.
New inventions mass produced.
[music]
Identical parts made separate.
Put together on the assembly line.
High volume, low cost.
Around the world chain reaction.
Industry expands 700 percent.
Mass production sweeps through North America and Europe.
Then spreads east to Asia.
Japan for 200 years cutoff from the rest of the world.
A medieval way of life isolated from Western progress.
[bell rings]
But even here change is coming.
A barber shop in old Tokyo.
One man will help launch Japan into the modern age.
It was Saki Yaterio.
Visionary, reformer, Samurai.
Determined to embrace the future.
He will cut ties to the past.
The Samurai have ruled Japan for 600 years.
A warrior class, who live and die by the sword.
Mike Loades: During the several hundred years that Japan shut its doors to the world,
the cult of the Samurai was elevated to this mystical status and at the heart of it the worship of the sword.
[music]
Narrator: The soul of every warrior and his sword.
Made from hammered steel, 32,000 layers.
Each 100,000th of an inch thick.
Sharp enough to slice thru five human bodies at a time.
But the Samurai's ancient feudal keeps Japan living in the past.
It was Saki from an old Samurai family,
he will reject the old order, by removing his top knot.
Traditionally cut off in defeat, an act of humiliation.
For Saki it was liberation.
He enters the barber shop of Samurai.
He leaves an entrepreneur.
1884 Saki rents an old ship yard the base for his company.
Mitsubishi
The expertise that made swords will make ships, from steel.
An Iron and carbon alloy honed over centuries.
Steel is a man made super metal.
Up to ten times stronger than pure iron.
Today we use 1.3 billion tons of it every year.
Enough to build the Empire State building 20,000 times.
Saki recruits western experts to learn the secrets of modern industry.
By blasting oxygen thru pig iron, its possible to make steel ten times faster.
In just over a century, Mitsubishi becomes the worlds largest corporation.
Building ships planes and cars.
Asia's first industrial nation, develops faster than any country on Earth.
Japan learns in a decade what the West developed in a century.
Today its the planets third richest nation.
6,000 miles away Belfast Ireland.
Workers build a giant steel structure, a monument to the ambition of the age.
2,000 steel plates, 3 million rivets, 900 feet long, 46,000 tons.
The largest moving object on the planet and its unsinkable.
April 14th 1912, RMS Titanic bound for New York.
Mankind puts it faith in technology.
On board a morse code message system, the wireless telegraph.
Operator Jack Phillips, 25 years old a communications expert.
He'll play a part in mankind's most famous disaster.
940 pm, a warning from steamship mesba 8 miles ahead.
So much heavy packed ice and a great number of great large icebergs, also field ice.
Weather good, clear.
An invisible message sent at the speed of light.
Radio waves have been produced by stars and planets for billions of years.
Now physicist use electric currents to produce them at will.
Morse code.
Where once we communicated face to face, now we can send messages across the planet.
On board the Titanic, 1,316 passengers.
More than half crammed into third class cabins.
Men like Thoedore Demold, a peasant farmer dreaming of a new life in a new world.
He left his wife and children in Europe, his ticket the equivalent of a years income.
James Meigis: The amazing thing about humans that we are never satisfied, we are incredible risk takers, we are always exploring, no matter how good life is there is always some effort to see sort of effort to see whats around the next mountain, next corner.
With mass production comes mass transportation.
Steamships power the greatest migration in human history.
Over half a century more than 1 in 20 people on the planet immigrate.
The most popular destination across the Atlantic, America.
100 ships a week arrive in New York.
26 million people migrate to the USA.
They were leaving home, with very little money in their pocket. Just a dream, a dream that they could come to America and start their lives over make something of themselves and maybe become one of those rich people in first class.
11:40 p.m. while passengers sleep Jack Phillips is busy sending personal messages for those in first class.
The iceberg warning doesn't reach the bridge.
The biggest ship on earth is at 22.5 knots, nearly full speed.
Dan McNichol: It sails at speeds it should not have been traveling at. And its going through a minefield, a naturally made minefield of mountainous ice.
Iceberg straight ahead, engine full stop.
Third class cabins flood first.
The iceberg tears rivets off steel plates in the hull, opening six gaps.
The new international distress signal SOS.
Telegraph operator: SOS SOS Titanic requires immediate assistance come at once struck an iceberg, sinking.
Ten miles away another ship, the Californian close enough to save lives.
But its wireless operator turned off the telegraph and went to sleep 15 minutes earlier.
Six supposedly water tight compartments flooded.
More than ten million gallons of water pour into the Titanic.
To reach the lifeboats, third class passengers must pass thru second and first class decks.
But the doors are locked.
Screams
You were trapped there because you were poor. That's when fear would have combined with rage.
Less than half of those on board will make it to New York.
Screams
April the 15th 1912, 2:28 a.m.
Two and three quarter hours after hitting an ice berg, Titanic the unsinkable ship sinks.
Third class passenger Theodore Demolder clings to the wrckage.
The water is fatally cold three degrees below freezing.
He cold die of hypothermia in just 15 minutes.
But Demolder is one of the lucky ones.
Three days later he arrives in New York. He will go on to land a job at the Ford factory in Detroit, a classic immigrants tale.
1,503 passengers and crew never reach New York.
James Megis: When the Titanic hit that iceberg, it set off a great period reexamination of our faith in technology. I don't think we've ever had quite the same optimism or trust that technology always serves our interest.
Narrator: In New York City one of natures wonders is about to be tamed.
Inventor Charles Goodyear, determined, obsessed and broke.
From a tenement kitchen, he will kick start a transport revolution.
Native Americans in the Amazon have used it for century's , extracting the white sap from trees they call it Kau uchuu. Rubber.
Rubber is one of the most under appreciated miracles of nature.
Its up there with coal, steel, and bronze. Its become this kind of secret juice that has allowed us to expand beyond our limits.
In it's raw state rubber isn't very useful. It melts when hot, cracks when cold.
Goodyear tries to change it's chemical structure. To make it more resilient and useful.
Wunderlich: Goodyear is one of the interesting eccentrics in America, that is absolutely dogged by a single idea.
Narrator: For five years nothing, his debts consign him to jail. His family relies on handouts.
But Goodyear, believes he is divinely inspired.
There is no object so desirable, so important and necessary to the human race, as making rubber for man's use.
Then a breakthrough he adds sulfur.
The result, a material tough like leather, but flexible.
He calls the process vulcanization. After the Roman god of fire.
He lost his fortune several times, went bankrupt a number of times, but never gave up on the idea this something that will change the world, and he was absolutely right.
Almost every machine in the industrial revolution relies on rubber fittings and seals to withstand the pressure of steam.
Hundreds of parts in a model T Ford are made from rubber.
Freeing mankind to travel further and faster than ever before.
Demand for rubber skyrockets.
Six thousand miles from Goodyears tenement, Africa one of the worlds great sources of natural resources.
The Congo, 900,000 square miles, over two billion rubber plants.
Under brutal colonial rule, the heart of darkness.
But one man will make a stand and change Africa's fate.
Insallah, rubber tapper, husband, family man.
Alice Harris, activist, reformer, Baptist missionary from Britan.
Insallah doesn't know her but has no where else to turn. He wants the world to know what he is carrying.
Dog barks.
The severed hand and foot of his daughter.
The previous day his village was attacked, his wife and daughter slaughtered.
Alice Harris: I'm going to help you.
For nineteen years, Belgium's King Leipold has run the Congo as his own private estate.
Millions forced to tap rubber, the profits lined his pockets.
Prof Nell Painter: Since there was no one looking over his shoulder he exploited it and exploited the people as well. Almost anything could happen and anything did unfortunately.
When workers don't make their qouta,