Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention, Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. To demonstrate this view, Burke begins each episode with a particular event or innovation in the past (usually ancient or medieval) and traces a path from that event through a series of connections to a fundamental and essential aspect of the modern world.
Starting from an attempt for cheaper fusion power using superconductivity, which was discovered by Onnes, with liquid gas provided by Louis-Paul Cailletet, who carried out experiments on a tower built by Gustave Eiffel, who also built the Statue of Liberty with its famous poem by the Jewish activist Emma Lazarus, helped by Oliphant, whose boss Elgin was the son of the man who stole the Elgin Marbles and sold them with the help of royal painter Thomas Lawrence, whose colleague John Hunter had an assistant whose wife's lodger was Benjamin Franklin, who charted the Gulf Stream with a thermometer Fahrenheit borrowed from Ole Rømer, whose friend Picard surveyed Versailles and provided the water for the fountains and the royal gardens and all the trees that inspired Duhamel to write the book on gardening that was read by the architect William Chambers, who hired the Scottish stonemason Thomas Telford, whose idea for London Bridge was turned down by Thomas Young, whose light waves travel in e
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