Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity

The story of the very first `natural philosophers' who started to unlock the mysteries of electricity; they studied its curious link to life, built strange and powerful instruments to create it and even tamed lightning itself.

Jim discovers how harnessing the link between magnetism and electricity would completely transform the world, allowing us to generate a seemingly limitless amount of electric power.

Professor Jim Al-Khalili tells the electrifying story of our quest to master nature's most mysterious force: electricity; until fairly recently, electricity was seen as a magical power, but it is now the lifeblood of the modern world.