What does a birdcage have to do with a skyscraper? Everything.



How We Invented the World is a fascinating series that examines the four inventions that define the modern world: mobile phones, cars, aeroplanes and skyscrapers and celebrates the people and sequence of events that made them possible.



Each of them has played a crucial role in how we have ended up where we are now in the 21st Century able to travel the globe, to talk to one another at any time at the push of a button, to live in huge cities, to commute, to capture the world we live in and make the fantasies we create come to life. These are the inventions that have made us truly modern.



Every episode in this four-part series lifts the lid on how these iconic inventions came to be each so integral to the modern age it virtually impossible to imagine life without them, yet each is reliant on a sequence of extraordinary discoveries and often random connections.



Episode 1 Skyscrapers

Episode 2 Cars

Episode 3 Aeroplanes

Episode 4 Mobile Phones