Connections

Season 1 Episode 9: Countdown

What happens when you combine a carbon arc light, a billiard ball coating, a spoked wheel and consecutive images? Motion pictures! Complex and sometimes incredible events led to Thomas Edison's remarkable invention; the beginnings of limelight on a Irish mountain; George Eastman's production of celluloid from the slightly explosive gun cotton; the ""magic lantern"" of an Austrian ballistics teacher. Then Eadweard Muybridge settled a bet in 1872 by photographs; does a horse raise all four feet when galloping? (Yes.) Today moving pictures, together with television, are enormously powerful mass media. Have we become trapped by our own technology?

Genre:

Documentary

Seasons:

3

Episodes:

40

Actor:

James Burke

Quality:

HD

Status:

Ended

First Air:

1978

IMDb:

8.2