(dramatic music)
- Seven AM,
in the morning,
Junior technician Robert Benchler Sr arrives for work
at the largest power plant on the Eastern seaboard.
He sits at his desk.
It's a usual morning for Benchler.
But something very unusual is about to happen.
Disaster.
He quickly discovers the plant is minutes away
from a catastrophic explosion.
Almost simultaneously he hears a warning chime
from his cell phone.
Five percent battery.
Benchler needs to use his phone
to confirm his dinner reservations for that evening
and important dinner with a woman he needs to sleep with.
Without his phone he is doomed.
It looks like a meltdown is just seconds away,
make that two meltdowns, a nuclear one
and a personal one.
Benchler's phone goes black, his face goes white,
his underwear goes brown.
What will happen next to the power plant?
To the eastern sea board?
To his dinner plans?
To his sex?
The answer is fascinating.
(adventurous music)
The sun, the waves, the wind,
even the sun drenched people,
everything here moves, flows, changes.
Everything here is powered by something,
a force so invisible, it is unseen to the naked eye.
This cosmic masseuse pushes and pulls the very fabric
of the universe,
kneading out any knots and wrinkles, inspi-
(dramatic music)
Energy is a camouflage force that controls everything
we've ever known.
And everything we shall never have not known.
Energy is essentially invisible.
It cannot be seen.
But it can often be felt.
Sometimes be smelled.
And occasionally be tasted.
Energy appears in many forms and it can be transformed
into many different shapes,
much like a ball of clay or stripper.
Electricity,
water,
food,
radioactivity,
rodeo activity,
roller coasters,
gravity,
immigrants,
and the sun,
each of these is an example of something
that can not only kill a person,
but can also power one.
And energy has been doing both of those things to man,
since the dawn of civilization.
And for centuries man has investigated every corner
of his planet to find ways to harness the power
of it's energy.
This quest began long ago in the ancient world,
in a time before tables.
The ancient Greeks worshiped powerful Roman gods
like Medusa and Caesar.
And these gods manifested their awesome energy
in the form of lightning.
None more powerful than Je-zeus.
The Roman Greek god of holding lightning.
And man, in his quest to become powerful
like the gods he worshiped, would often try to capture
this lightning for himself.
- We now know that early man would stand
on a mountian top during thunder storms
mouth open wide in an attempt to eat the lightning
that they believed the gods were feeding them.
They thought this would work.
Of course many times it didn't work and the results
were death or embarrassment
or one followed by the other.
- People have this theory that I you walk outside
you might just randomly get struck by lightning
but the thing is, it's not as random as you might think.
It takes a very magnetic kind of being
to pull the light from the sky
and that's what's actually going on.
- [Ted] And in early cultures these magnetic people
who could pull lightning from the sky
became known as wizards and witches.
And then it was during the Renaissance
that English Medieval scientists began the practice
of tying these wizards and witches,
often the most attractive or magnetic women in each village,
to a post in the center of town to attract lightning.
And this led to many women being quote,
burned at the stake.
- Well if you shine a light on a magnet
the magnet would be magnetized and so when you stick it
on a refrigerator, the refrigerator would light up.
- But these human magnets when struck by lightning
would not light up a refrigerator but instead
an entire town square for up
to three or four hours per witch
and while this practice did provide some energy
and warmth for local municipalities,
it was still not enough.
The result was only a small amount of usable energy
and a large amount of dead witches and wizards.
But then a man named Benjamin Jefferson Franklin
came along and changed everything.
Before becoming the seventh President of the United States,
Jefferson Franklin was elected US Ambassador to China.
On a trip to that nation's capital, Tokyo City,
Jefferson Franklin bought himself a kite.
The kite was a new device that the Chinese president,
Ghengis Khan had recently invented as a way to hunt birds.
Jefferson Franklin brought his kite back to America
and then one summer night after a long day
of working on a new draft of the USS Constitution
Jefferson Franklin decided to hunt some birds
with his kite and his child assistant.
But then something curious happened,
a thunderstorm erupted and suddenly a bolt of lightning
struck his kite, the force of which cracked his glasses
and in that moment Franklin not only invented bifocals,
he also invented something we call: electricity.
And this sparked a revolution.
Soon kites flew over every house in the colonies.
For the first time people could use electricity
to power their homes.
Of course it was limited.
It would power the house but the only problem was
that it only worked for a short time.
Still the world was changed forever.
In fact today we still use kites to get electricity.
Giant kites which float in space high above the Earth.
We call these giant kites, satellites
and they draw their energy from the very same lightning
that Jefferson Franklin first harnessed
with his small Chinese kite.
How do these satellites work?
Well the satellite uses giant magnets
each as attractive as 10 medieval witches
to attract lightning from the constant storms
that are happening in the space wind above the Earth.
But instead of illuminating a simple town square,
the satellites beam the energy down
to a receiver on the ground and the energy
from the lightning is distributed
to power needy home everywhere.
Once we had discovered that lightning could provide us
with so much energy, it didn't take long to crack
the mystery of the greatest source of lightning,
something called: the sun.
The sun, which is the planet located at the center
of our solar system, is similar to Earth
but it is much larger and it is always on fire.
And this fire is caused by constant lightning strikes
that cover its surface.
As a result it is very bright and very powerful.
- If you look into the sun for one, two minutes
your eyes will magnify that light
and the back of your brain will catch fire.
- [Ted] This sun energy that could potentially burn
a human brain is the same energy that constantly seeps
into the Earth and could potentially cause the planet
to explode some day.
And what do we call this potential energy?
Potential energy.
- The difference between kinetic and potential energy
is that kinetic energy can be likened to a belly dancer.
I once was approached by this belly dancer
at an anniversary party it was part of a Greek themed thing
years ago and she just had this look in her eyes,
sort of the undulations of her movements was very
sort of drew me in I guess and I felt like
she was dancing just for me really,
even though it was a huge room.
And uh,
potentially energy I guess, its more like my energy
where I was, thinking about all the possibilities
the potentials that could exist with this women
if things were different, you know, it wasn't to be.
- And so we would attempt to unleash
the Earth's awesome potential energy,
coaxing the precious stored lightning
out of this flirtatious illuminated belly dancer.
This is where the story gets fascinating.
(explodes)
Next time on Our Fascinating Planet:
- Of course we knew reflection is when light bounces off
a surface, refraction is when light is bent
by passing through a medium of differing density.
Then there's reflaction which isn't a word
but is of course fun to say,
like most things in science we've come up with the word
and are waiting to discover if there is a phenomenon
to fulfill it.
(whooshes and squeaks)