Local Heroes
(1996)Streaming Episode Guide
Season 5
East Midlands
Episode 6 - 6-27-2000
In the last instalment of the series, viewers get the chance to show off their ideas for hovercraft, ice lenses, scientific musical instruments and bar-snack separators - all responses to the challenges inspired by the scientific heroes examined by Adam Hart-Davis in the last six weeks. Hart-Davis also heads for the East Midlands, where he turns his bicycle into a spinning machine to demonstrate the invention of Richard Arkwright, whose own version replaced 96 skilled workers with just one operator. George Green, a miller from Nottingham, produced a brilliant and revolutionary mathematical tool that is still used to solve problems in maths and physics today. What was his inspiration? The final hero of the series is Isaac Newton. In his house at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, Hart-Davis wonders if the great man might have invented the cat flap.
Haven't Seen
Episode 5
6-13-2000
Adam Hart-Davis sets his sights further afield with a trip to Italy, where he ascends the Leaning Tower of Pisa in a bid to reproduce Galileo's groundbreaking demonstration of gravity, visits Padua to celebrate some of the anatomical breakthroughs made by Vesalius and looks at the man who invented the rules of perspective, Filippo Brunelleschi.
Haven't Seen
Nobel Prize Winners
Episode 4 - 6-06-2000
In an edition devoted to celebrating Britons who have won the Nobel Prize, Adam Hart-Davis lauds John Cockcroft's work on splitting the atom and Dorothy Hodgkin's discovery of the structure of penicillin. He also visits Ayrshire to explains how the instigator of the award, Alfred Nobel, came to invent dynamite after his brother's death.
Haven't Seen
Episode 3
5-30-2000
Adam Hart-Davis stops off in Yorkshire as he continues his celebration of unsung scientists. In Whitby, he lauds whaling scientist William Scoresby before taking to sea in a soggy bid to re-create the navigation techniques of Captain James Cook. Also acclaimed are William Bateson, inventor of the term "genetics", and Sir Edward Appleton, who discovered the ionosphere region of the Earth's atmosphere.
Haven't Seen
Episode 2
5-23-2000
Adam Hart-Davis continues his bicycle tour of Britain with a visit to England's south coast, where he celebrates the construction of Brighton's West Pier, the work of biologist Thomas Huxley , and the invention of both the shutter telegraph system and the hovercraft.
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London
Episode 1 - 5-16-2000
Cycling boffin Adam Hart-Davis pedals around Britain for a six-part sixth series, hunting out unsung pioneers of scientific ideas. London is the first destination, where he investigates the invention of the lightning conductor, the pressure cooker and the electrocardiogram.
Haven't Seen
Season 4
Royal Institution Special
Episode 6 - 8-09-1999
In the last programme of the series, Adam Hart-Davis celebrates the 200th anniversary of the Royal Institution - made famous by pioneering scientists Michael Faraday and Humphry Davy.
Hart-Davis makes an electric motor from a meat-pie tin and shows how it was proven that when horses gallop there is a point when all four feet are airborne. A new series is planned.
Website: [web address remove
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North of England
Episode 5 - 8-02-1999
Adam Hart-Davis celebrates more pioneers of science, this week in Yorkshire and Lancashire, where he uncovers the steelmaking process that put Sheffield on the map, re-creates the first pollen count, and discovers a working 19th-century aeroplane.
Haven't Seen
London
Episode 4 - 7-26-1999
Adam Hart-Davis visits London as he salutes more pioneers of science. He sees how Brunei tunnelled under the Thames, discovers the inventor of the vacuum cleaner, and follows the trail of a cholera outbreak in Soho. Plus the rector who found how sap gets up trees, and the revolutionary motor that worked without revolving.
Haven't Seen
North of England
Episode 3 - 7-19-1999
Adam Hart-Davis's cycling tour of Britain takes him this week to Yorkshire, where he visits Leeds Bridge, site of the first motion picture by Louis Le Prince.
He also uncovers the inventor of a lock that would deter all but the most persistent criminal and travels to York to pay homage to the inventor of Stephenson's Rocket.
Haven't Seen
East of Scotland
Episode 2 - 7-12-1999
Adam Hart-Davis's cycling tour of Britain takes him to Scotland, where he visits St Andrews to see how backspin helps a golf ball defy gravity and Stonehaven, home of the inventor of pneumatic tyres. Plus he builds his own radar, and uncovers the origins of fibre optics in Edinburgh.
Haven't Seen
Episode 1
7-05-1999
Adam Hart-Davis gets on his bike for another six-part series searching for tales of scientific discovery. This week he reveals the heroes of Bath, Stroud, Dorset and the New Forest, from the inventor of concrete to a pioneer of static electricity. He also demonstrates a way to measure the speed of a bullet.
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Season 3
West of Scotland
Episode 16 - 10-26-1998
Adam Hart-Davis concludes the series by visiting western Scotland. There he learns about John Logie Baird, inventor of the television, Lord Kelvin, who established absolute zero, and Kirkpatrick Macmillan, whose innovations led to the invention of the bicycle.
Haven't Seen
East Midlands
Episode 15 - 10-19-1998
Adam Hart-Davis cycles to Nottinghamshire and Leicestershire to find out about this week's heroes. They include Frank Whittle, who invented the jet engine, and Robert Bakewell, the world's first genetic engineer.
Haven't Seen
Heroines
Episode 14 - 10-12-1998
Haven't Seen
Gloucestershire
Episode 13 - 10-05-1998
Adam Hart-Davis recalls the work of Edwin Beard Budding, who invented the lawnmower, and focuses on William Henry Fox Talbot, the father of modern photography. Plus James Bradley, who was the first to calculate correctly the speed of light; Sir Charles Wheatstone, who invented the concertina; and Jan Ingenhousz, who discovered photosynthesis.
Haven't Seen
North of England
Episode 12 - 9-28-1998
Adam Hart-Davis recalls William Sturgeon's inventing the electric motor and James Nasmyth's steam hammer; he also sees Joseph Paxton's inspiration for Crystal Palace and looks at the Manchester desk at which Ernest Rutherford worked on atomic structure.
Haven't Seen
The Netherlands
Episode 11 - 9-21-1998
In Delft, Hart-Davis profiles the draper who was the first person to see bacteria through a microscope and the book-keeper whose gravity experiments predated Galileo's by four years.
He also celebrates Gabriel Daniel Fahrenheit, inventor of the standard calibrated thermometer, and uses his bike to reconstruct the world's first pendulum clock.
Haven't Seen
Edinburgh
Episode 10 - 9-14-1998
This week Hart-Davis makes the journey to Elgin, re-creating the moment when Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, and to the site where James Watt carried out his work on the steam engine.
He also salutes the inventor of the thermos flask, the man who found a way to fight scurvy with citrus fruits, and thesaurus writer Peter Mark Roget, whose work in optics has been neglected.
Haven't Seen
South of England
Episode 9 - 9-07-1998
Adam Hart Davis begins another cycling tour in search of more tales of pioneering inventors in an eight-part fourth series.
Hart-Davis begins by exploding balloons of hydrogen and oxygen in London, just as Henry Cavendish did in the late 18th century to prove that water was H20. He also stops in Hungerford, Berkshire, where farmer Jethro Tull invented the seed drill in 1701.
Haven't Seen
North West
Episode 8 - 4-06-1998
Adam Hart-Davis takes a ferry across the Mersey to celebrate the work of the North West's unsung heroes of science in the last of the current series.
He relives his childhood love of Meccano, invented by Frank Hornby, before moving on to celebrate the work of other scientists and innovators, including Arthur Doodson, who perfected a way to predict the tides; Alastair Pilkington, who invented a way of producing flawless glass; and Jeremiah Horrocks, the founder of English astronomy, who was the first to track the orbit of Venus and revolutionised how astronomers consider the universe.
Haven't Seen
N & W Birmingham
Episode 7 - 3-30-1998
Adam Hart-Davis searches for unsung heroes of science on a trip to the Potteries, Staffordshire. Using a few pipes, a ribbon and an air pump, he demonstrates the early ideas for a voice synthesiser that were developed by Erasmus Darwin. Charles Darwin's grandfather.
Other subjects include John "Iron Mad" Wilkinson, who perfected the aim of the cannon.
Haven't Seen
Ireland
Episode 6 - 3-26-1998
Adam Hart-Davis cycles around Ireland to rediscover some scientific milestones. He looks at how John Tyndall found the sky was blue, how Charles Parsons used a telescope to see spiral galaxies, and why catamaran inventor William Petty revived a hanging woman.
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South
Episode 5 - 3-23-1998
Adam Hart-Davis continues his search for unsung heroes of science when he cycles around the south of England. On a stop-off in Surrey, he uses a tin of tuna to explain the physics behind Neville Barnes-Wallis's invention of the bouncing bomb.
Other subjects include Charles Darwin, whose theory of evolution is explored in a series of programmes beginning on Friday, and Thomas Young, who discovered how the eyes focus.
Haven't Seen
Sicily
Episode 4 - 3-19-1998
In the second programme for Science Week that traces the origins of modern science,
Adam Hart-Davis visits southern Italy, home to the greatest scientists of the ancient world.
In Syracuse, he recreates Archimedes's famous "eureka" incident and attempts the mythical trick of burning boats with mirrors. Atop Mount Etna, he reveals how a scientist's last volcanic experiment to prove his immortality went tragically wrong.
Haven't Seen
Egypt
Episode 3 - 3-16-1998
In the first of two programmes to mark Science Week, Adam Hart-Davis travels to Egypt in search of the earliest heroes of science. Using a drinks can and a stove, he recreates Hero of Alexandria's invention of the steam engine. Other early geniuses include Eratosthenes, who calculated the earth's circumference using only a stick, and Alhazen of Cairo, who devised the pinhole camera.
Haven't Seen
London
Episode 2 - 3-09-1998
Adam Hart-Davis cycles around the country in search of the unsung heroes of science.
This week he visits London, where he builds his own submarine to illustrate the achievements of Cornelus Drebbel, who rowed underwater from Westminster to Greenwich and back again.
His other subjects include Charles Babbage, whose work with mechanical adding machines heralded the computer age.
Haven't Seen
Devon and Cornwall
Episode 1 - 3-02-1998
First of an eight-part series in which Adam Hart-Davis cycles around the country in search of the unsung heroes of science.
He visits south-west England, where his subjects include William Murdock, who devised the world's first mechanical vehicle and also came up with the idea of gas lighting, and the tragic Henry Winstanley, who amazed critics by building Eddystone Lighthouse in the seas off Plymouth, only to perish with his creation in a storm.
Haven't Seen
Season 2
Exploding Heroes
Episode 8 - 10-31-1997
Haven't Seen
Science Week Special
Episode 7 - 3-20-1997
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South East
Episode 6 - 2-10-1997
Cycling scientist Adam Hart-Davis visits London, where he re-creates a device invented by Hertha Ayrton to clear trenches of poison gas during the First World War. On the Thames he tests a 21ft megaphone, which Samuel Morland, the master mechanic to Charles I invented to conduct long-distance conversations.
Hart-Davis views the work of Eleanor Coade, whose artificial stone can be seen all over the city, including the huge lions on Westminster Bridge. He also tests swimming umbrellas, designed to help people attain greater speeds in the water, and makes his own version of carbon paper, first developed by a London stationer. Last in the series.
Haven't Seen
Wales
Episode 5 - 2-03-1997
On a visit to Wales cycling scientist Adam Hart-Davis gets bogged down on the road to Holyhead. Fortunately, one of his heroes is the great road builder Thomas Telford, so Hart-Davis is able to rebuild the road using scientific principles. He also finds out more about the reclusive inventor who claimed his death ray could kill a rat at 64 feet; the bonesetters of Anglesey, whose extraordinary skill was passed down through four generations; and Robert Recorde who invented the equals sign. In Merthyr Tydfil, where the first railway locomotive was run 25 years before George Stephenson's Rocket. Hart-Davis celebrates its inventor, the Cornish wrestler Richard Trevithick.
Haven't Seen
North East
Episode 4 - 1-27-1997
In Tyne and Wear Adam Hart-Davis re-creates the device conceived by Whitley Bay's Gladstone Adams. Travelling home from the FA Cup final, Adams had to fold down his windscreen in order to cope with a snowstorm. He realised there must be a better way to drive in bad weather, and invented the windscreen wiper.
Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, Hart-Davis discovers, is the site of the invention of the friction match, devised by accident by John Walker. The cycling scientist also dismounts to build a steam turbine in the kitchen of its inventor's house, and to make a light bulb to celebrate its Gateshead creator.
Haven't Seen
East
Episode 3 - 1-20-1997
Hart-Davis's journey around the country takes him to Essex, Suffolk and Norfolk. En route he re-creates a treadmill invented by William Hase for the punishment of prisoners, and makes a simple contraption that helps artists with limited skills create beautiful sketches. He relates how William Harvey discovered how blood circulates throughout the body, and he tells how William Gilbert determined that the earth is a magnet.
Plus the story of ship's captain Robert Fitzroy whose weather warnings were published in The Times in the mid-19th century and led to the modern forecast, but who committed suicide after his accuracy was questioned in the House of Commons.
Haven't Seen
Scotland
Episode 2 - 1-13-1997
Adam Hart-Davis goes in search of pioneers of science and invention in Scotland. He investigates the achievements of Alexander Bain, Charles Macintosh, James Clerk Maxwell, the Rev Robert Stirling and James Gregory.
Haven't Seen
Devon
Episode 1 - 1-06-1997
Adam begins his search in Devon where he discusses the work of great British engineering innovators, such as Isambard Kingdom Brunel, Henry Moule and Thomas Savery. He also looks at the legacy of the work carried out but the famous fossil collector Mary Anning.
Haven't Seen
Season 1
North West
Episode 6 - 2-06-1996
The last in the series about pioneering scientists and inventors comes from the north west of England. Host Adam Hart-Davis discovers the connection between botany and Wordsworth the poet when he learns about his friend, John Gough, a local botanist who identified many rare plants despite being blind. A bicycle pump and a disgusting jelly help unearth the history of Lake Windermere. Adam climbs to the snowy summit of Helvellyn to try to reproduce John Dalton's weather forecasts. Finally, in Manchester, he learns about Joseph Whitworth, whose move to standardise the nuts and bolts of the engineering industry has endured to the present day.
Haven't Seen
Northern Ireland
Episode 5 - 1-30-1996
Tonight's stories of pioneering scientists and inventors come from Northern Ireland. Host Adam Hart-Davis discovers that the pneumatic tyre, invented by Belfast vet John Boyd Dunlop, began life as a remedy for his son's sore bottom. He also finds out how the name Harry Ferguson became synonymous with the development of the tractor. Taking his bike underwater, Hart-Davis goes in search of the origins of the submarine and wet suit. And, in Armagh, he learns how a child poet and astronomer rocketed to fame.
Haven't Seen
Midlands
Episode 4 - 1-23-1996
Tonight's stories of pioneering scientists and inventors come from the Midlands. Host Adam Hart-Davis investigates the Lunar Society of Birmingham, known as "lunaticks".
Its members included James Watt and William Murdock, responsible for a copying machine, revolutionising the steam engine, and gas lighting. Plus the stories behind the gas turbine, the first British car and holography.
Haven't Seen
Scotland
Episode 3 - 1-16-1996
Tonight, Adam's journey takes him to Scotland, and includes the story of Neville Maskelyne, the man who weighed all the planets of the solar system from a bothy on a Perthshire mountain. Plus, John Napier, inventor of the calculator, the explanation of why ice takes so long to melt in whisky, and David Brewster, the croquet player who invented the kaleidoscope.
Haven't Seen
South
Episode 2 - 1-09-1996
Tonight, Adam's journey takes him south, and in Chard, Somerset he recreates the world's first powered flight - which was made 50 years before the Wright brothers by John Stringfellow, an engineer in the lace trade. He also investigates the "perpetual mouse trap", which was a great success for its inventor Colin Pullinger, from Selsey in Sussex.
Haven't Seen
South West
Episode 1 - 1-02-1996
Tonight, he travels to Bristol and the south west of England where he pays tribute to the woman who invented a bed with built-in exerciser and a breakfast maker. He also discovers how lead shot was first produced, tries laughing gas in memory of Humphry Davy and, in Gloucestershire, wields the knife Edward Jenner used to perform the first smallpox vaccination.
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