Show Documentary
Architect Danny Forster takes you inside some of the most head-scratching builds in the world. Join Danny as he meets the men and women tackling the unique challenges of constructing the tallest buildings, the most effective military tanks, the largest luxury cruise ships, and the most extreme thrill rides. How do you build a 3,113-foot-long wooden roller coaster in winter temperatures of minus 40 degrees? Or get your workers safely to and from a worksite on a skyscraper that's 1,614 feet above street level? Or dig a water tunnel - along the San Adreas Fault and 1,000 feet below the earth's surface - without it collapsing on itself ... or flooding? Our intrepid host answers these puzzles and more. Don't miss the big stories behind these even bigger engineering marvels.
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East Side, West Side
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9/11: Explosive Evidence: Experts Speak Out
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W.I.S.O.R.
In a lab somewhere on the Lower East Side, a team of scientists and engineers are designing a robot named W.I.S.O.R.; a futuristic, subterranean robo welder that, being able to withstand temperatures of 300 degrees and navigate through the snaking, hundred-mile long world of buried steam pipes beneath Manhattan, will repair the rapidly decaying century-old system. New York's little known or understood underground steam pipes provide the necessary heat and hot water for everything from Chinese laundries and Turkish baths to the World Trade Center and the Empire State Building. A thousand engineering hours behind a schedule and way over budget, Honeybee Robotics, W.I.S.O.R.'s creators, are worried. They argue, discuss God, baseball, and technology and ultimately lead us into a futuristic world originally thought impossible in this eerie, stranger than fiction tale set in the city beneath the city.
Great Homes of Rochester
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Raising the Costa Concordia
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Joanna Lumley in the Land of the Northern Lights
Comedy icon Joanna Lumley pursues a life-long dream to track down the elusive and beautiful Northern Lights. She travels North across the Arctic Circle, up through Norway and finally to Svalbard, the most northerly permanently inhabited place on Earth, where she has to cope with temperatures approaching minus 30° C. Joanna’s journey takes her from train to boat and huskysled to snowmobile as she is pulled ever northwards and finally, in a breathtaking climax to the film, Joanna gets to see with her own eyes the spectacular beauty of the Northern Lights. As seen on ABC1.
Down To The Earth's Core
Down to the Earth’s Core takes viewers from the sidewalk to the centre of the planet in one epic unbroken shot. Using spectacular computer generated imagery; the camera smashes through almost 9 000 kilometres of solid rock to explore the hidden world beneath our feet. Experience an earthquake inside the San Andreas Fault, blast out of a volcano, encounter bizarre cave-dwelling creatures and enter caves full of giant crystals – all inside planet Earth. As the camera lowers into Earth's bosom, the planet’s extraordinary story, is laid bare layer by layer, showing how prehistoric forests became modern-day fuel, witnessing the dinosaur’s cataclysmic death, and watching as stalactites form and gold grows before our eyes. Deeper, beyond the reach of any mine, any drill, we find wonders beyond imagination: towering molten metal tornadoes, forests of solid iron crystals, until we reach the strangest, least understood place on the planet – the core.
Amazing Earth
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The Tank
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Fred Dibnah's Building of Britain
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A construction foreman conducts his workers like a symphony orchestra as they build a skyscraper to Franz Liszt's "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2."