Breakthrough: The Ideas That Changed the World

For almost all of human history,

the dream of flying remained just that, a dream.

But we are a strange, creative species.

Over the ages, the idea of human flight

passed from one mind to another,

and eventually, it would change the world.

But the story of how we took to the sky

is full of extraordinary accidents

and bizarre connections.

It involves the ill-fated penny farthing bicycle

and several trips to the beach,

a visionary student...

And a legendary genius...

A disaster at sea...

And the ultimate sacrifice.

Together, these events would give us our great superpower,

the ability to fly.

These are the inventions that define our age

and have changed our world forever.

They've allowed us to move in new ways,

to connect to each other

and discover our place in the universe,

each a story of ingenuity, of wonder...

Of breakthrough.

At this very moment,

at least half a million people are flying,

making enormous journeys at incredible speed.

Our ancestors would be amazed.

We've become a species

that has overcome our earthly limitations.

The invention of the airplane has been a true revolution.

But 11 centuries ago,

there was no one in the air

except for one ingenious inventor

who was way ahead of his time.

Legend has it, in about 860 A.D. In Moorish Spain,

a man named Ibn Firnas climbed to the top of a mountain.

He attached feathers to his body and arms.

He gave himself wings.

Ooh. A little shaky. A little shaky.

All right. All right. All right.

Then... He did something extraordinary.

3, 2, 1.

It must have taken incredible courage

for that leap of faith into the unknown.

I know what it's like because I've done it.

Brandon Mikesell is

one of the world's top wing suit fliers,

the latest in a long line of pioneers

prepared to put their lives on the line.

This is a passion that takes over my whole, entire life.

I've always wanted to fly since I was a little kid.

Flying is about speed, about control,

and it's about defeating gravity.

So, what happened

to that legendary pioneer Ibn Firnas?

The story goes that, although he managed to fly

more than 1,000 years ago, when he landed,

he came down much too fast.

He broke his back and never flew again.

Luckily, though,

I have modern technology on my side.

If Ibn Firnas were alive today,

I think his mind would be blown.

I think he would be amazed at how far it's come.

I think that he'd be thrilled that we carried on

his same passion and his same love for this.

Modern-day flying in all its forms

is due to a mastery of something that surrounds us

but that we cannot even see,

and even though it seems to have no strength,

it can hold us aloft...

The air.

It might seem odd, but the study of airflow

is actually called fluid dynamics.

And if that doesn't seem strange enough,

before we had wings, we had tails.

These structures are just absolutely magnificent.

I am a fluid dynamicist,

so I have studied how air flows,

and so when I come to a kite festival like this,

you really see how significant air is

in bringing these structures to life.

Details of the first-ever kite are lost in history,

but it's believed that around 2,500 years ago,

the Chinese put together a simple structure

of bamboo and silk, and that became the first kite,

and the reason why it's so significant

is because it's our first-ever understanding

of how a structure could become airborne and defy gravity.

One of the major principles that a kite uses to stay airborne

is balancing the forces that are pushing the kite downwards

and the forces that are lifting the kite upwards.

The wind that's blowing into the kite

and along its underbelly is deflected downwards,

and that deflection of air creates

an equal and upward force called lift.

The Chinese put their revolutionary technology

to many purposes.

Kites were used for signaling over long distances,

dropping weapons, and there are even legends

of them being used to lift people.

But, of course, kites have their limitations.

Kites were a great first start

in our understanding of flight,

but they needed to be tethered,

and they needed the wind to be able to glide.

So it was a good start, but we needed much more than that.

To fly successfully, we needed to master

the mysterious forces of the air.

It would take a man with many obsessions

to begin to solve this puzzle,

an artist who would go down in history

as one of the greatest minds who ever lived.

Leonardo da Vinci was born from fairly humble origins,

but from an early age, he showed an extraordinary talent

for painting and drawing.

His secret was to look at each subject in minute detail,

to try and see the structure beneath the surface.

He was obsessed with how the bodies of animals and humans

actually work,

which he discovered through the grisly process

of taking those bodies apart.

He was particularly interested in animals that fly.

He wanted to know how the beating of a wing

kept them aloft.

If he could discover this secret,

he was convinced he would have the key

to the age-old dream of human flight.

Looking ever closer at the natural world,

he noticed the exquisite efficiency of flying creatures.

He realized that attaching wings to your arms

was unlikely to work.

Human muscles are just not strong enough.

So, he came up with a revolutionary new idea,

an idea he believed would change the world.

Instead of attaching the wings to the arms,

they would be part of a machine

that had beating wings like a bird.

In his mind, he had invented the first flying machine.

Over his lifetime, he designed more than a dozen machines

that flapped their wings, but as far as we know,

none of them ever flew.

So, why is this?

What is it about a bird's wing that eluded

even the genius of Leonardo da Vinci?

To find out requires modern technology.

He's feeding.

OK. Ready? Wind tunnel is on.

At Stanford university,

researchers are still in the process

of unlocking mother nature's secrets.

The way Da Vinci inspires me

is that, not only is he an engineer,

not only is he a scientist, he's this artist

who combines everything in one vision of flight.

Leonardo is really the first person

to understand that the structure of a bird wing really matters,

the way the wing is built and how that enables flight.

But this kind of modern study of birds

leaves us no doubt that he actually really started

the science of flight.

But although Leonardo made drawings

and took detailed measurements,

he could not get the data he needed.

It's only recently that we've developed the technology

to unlock the secrets of how birds fly.

The key is high-speed photography.

Today we can see what Leonardo couldn't see.

He was thinking that it was all in the beating of the wing.

There's much more to it than that,

and actually, to really take off,

we have to think beyond flapping wings.

The complexity of this motion

meant that the secret of flight

would remain hidden for another 300 years,

until a trip to the beach

gave an obscure English aristocrat an idea.

This is the coast of the county of Yorkshire

in the northeast of England,

and it's here that one of the very greatest milestones

in the history of flight would occur.

This seaside town of Scarborough

became a fashionable destination at the turn of the 19th century.

Wealthy Londoners would flock here

to make use of the spa waters,

which apparently would increase well-being and mental capacity.

Living in a grand mansion

just outside Scarborough was a wealthy baronet,

sir George Cayley.

His house still exists to this day.

Cayley was a polymath with a myriad of interests.

He's even been called the English Leonardo.

Since childhood, he'd had the same dream...

To build a flying machine.

In a schoolbook dated 1784,

he drew a picture of a flying toy,

but it was in Scarborough

that Cayley's dream would take flight.

One day, Cayley was at the beach,