The BBC series that taught a boy how innovation actually moves
This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.
Jonathan Hare's favorite television program as a child in the 1970s. Each episode of Connections began with an innovation in the ancient world and traced a chain forward through unrelated inventions, accidents and trades, arriving at something modern — the computer, the jet engine, the production line.
What it taught was not history. It was a shape. Innovation does not descend a lineage; it recombines. The thing that mattered was rarely the thing anyone was working on, and the path from A to Z ran through people who never met and disciplines that never spoke.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
It sent him to the history of science and technology, which he has read ever since — the personal lives of Euclid, Archimedes, Newton, Riemann, Einstein, Bohr, out of a complete run of National Geographic and a library he read to the end.
And it is the format this record uses. The Connections section is Burke's structure applied to a life: a requirement written for missile silos becomes the internet; an appointment at Oxford becomes the Royal Society becomes the Royal Mint; a clerical error at a fourteen-person firm becomes a thirty-year relationship with a Nobel laureate.
Each one is a chain, each link is checkable, and the point is always that nobody involved could have seen where it was going.
The second organizing form he names is the multi-generational history — the Medici in Florence, the Rothschilds, the Churchills, a dynasty or a country or a faith followed across centuries.
Those work because a continuous thread through changing circumstances reveals what the circumstances were. You cannot see the shape of the seventeenth century by describing it; you can see it by following one family through it.
This record uses both. The lenses are the family-history form, cutting the whole graph by people, capital, enterprise, government or idea. The connections are Burke's form, tracing one chain through all of them.
There is no single root. This is one view of the graph, from this node — what you see depends on where you enter and what you are looking for.
Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
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