Local Heroes – Season 5
Episodes
London
Cycling boffin Adam Hart-Davis pedals around Britain for a six-part sixth series, hunting out unsung pioneers of scientific ideas. London is the first destination, where he investigates the invention of the lightning conductor, the pressure cooker and the electrocardiogram.
Episode 2
Adam Hart-Davis continues his bicycle tour of Britain with a visit to England's south coast, where he celebrates the construction of Brighton's West Pier, the work of biologist Thomas Huxley , and the invention of both the shutter telegraph system and the hovercraft.
Episode 3
Adam Hart-Davis stops off in Yorkshire as he continues his celebration of unsung scientists. In Whitby, he lauds whaling scientist William Scoresby before taking to sea in a soggy bid to re-create the navigation techniques of Captain James Cook. Also acclaimed are William Bateson, inventor of the term "genetics", and Sir Edward Appleton, who discovered the ionosphere region of the Earth's atmosphere.
Nobel Prize Winners
In an edition devoted to celebrating Britons who have won the Nobel Prize, Adam Hart-Davis lauds John Cockcroft's work on splitting the atom and Dorothy Hodgkin's discovery of the structure of penicillin. He also visits Ayrshire to explains how the instigator of the award, Alfred Nobel, came to invent dynamite after his brother's death.
Episode 5
Adam Hart-Davis sets his sights further afield with a trip to Italy, where he ascends the Leaning Tower of Pisa in a bid to reproduce Galileo's groundbreaking demonstration of gravity, visits Padua to celebrate some of the anatomical breakthroughs made by Vesalius and looks at the man who invented the rules of perspective, Filippo Brunelleschi.
East Midlands
In the last instalment of the series, viewers get the chance to show off their ideas for hovercraft, ice lenses, scientific musical instruments and bar-snack separators - all responses to the challenges inspired by the scientific heroes examined by Adam Hart-Davis in the last six weeks. Hart-Davis also heads for the East Midlands, where he turns his bicycle into a spinning machine to demonstrate the invention of Richard Arkwright, whose own version replaced 96 skilled workers with just one operator. George Green, a miller from Nottingham, produced a brilliant and revolutionary mathematical tool that is still used to solve problems in maths and physics today. What was his inspiration? The final hero of the series is Isaac Newton. In his house at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, Hart-Davis wonders if the great man might have invented the cat flap.