Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity

In this episode, host Jim Al-Khalili shows what electricity actually is: a force created by the movement of charged particles like electrons. We'll also show how life creates and uses it, and tell the story of mankind's epic quest to do the same. We'll see how science learned to harness the power of electricity to build the modern world.

In episode two we travel back to a world full of excitement at the discovery of electricity. Jim will see how scientists finally realized that the almost supernatural phenomena of 'electricity' and 'magnetism' were linked. We'll show that by wielding the awesome new power of electromagnetism, Victorian scientists created the modern world.

From radio waves bigger than a house, to gamma rays smaller than the nucleus of an atom, the electromagnetic spectrum is buzzing around us - but until recently we have only been aware of the tiny visual part of the spectrum. Jim shows in this episode that the discovery of the light spectrum drove some of the great names of modern physics - Curie, Faraday, Planck and Einstein.