Local Heroes Episode Guide

Episode Guide

Local Heroes: Season 2

• Season 2 Episode 4: North East

  Inventor of a seemingly unpickable lock Joseph Bramah, volcano photographer Tempest Anderson, windscreen wiper inventor Gladstone Adams and motion picture pioneer Louis Le Prince

• Season 2 Episode 3: East

  Adam Hart-Davis cycles to East Anglia, where he tests a prisoner-punishing treadmill and recreates a gadget that enables even the poorest artists to produce masterpieces

• Season 2 Episode 2: Scotland

  Adam Hart-Davis tours Scotland in his continuing search for scientific innovators. He visits John O'Groats, birthplace of the first fax machine, and runs an engine on haggis

• Season 2 Episode 2: Scotland

  Adam Hart-Davis makes his own mackintosh in John O'Groats, visits the site of the world's first colour photograph, and runs an engine on fuel made from haggis and neeps

• Season 2 Episode 1: Devon

  Adam Hart-Davis discovers a 19th-century waterless toilet and presents a re-creation of Brunel's railway between Exeter and Newton Abbot

• Wales

  Adam Hart-Davis profiles Welsh scientists and inventors, including the man who invented the mobile phone in 1912, Rober Recorde, the mathematician who came up with the equals sign and the naturalist who inspired Charles Darwin

Local Heroes: Season 1

• Season 1 Episode 6: North West

  The story of blind botanist John Gough, who inspired William Wordsworth to write a poetic tribute, and John Dalton's weather experiments

• Season 1 Episode 5: Northern Ireland

  Pioneers of science and technological developments from Northern Ireland, focusing on the pneumatic tyre reinvented by Belfast's John Boyd Dunlop

• Season 1 Episode 4: Birmingham

  Pioneers of science and invention from the Midlands, including John Barber, who patented the gas turbine in 1791. Plus, the first British car and the birthplace of holography

• Season 1 Episode 3: Scotland

  Adam Hart-Davis looks at Scottish pioneers, including the story of John Napier, who invented the pocket calculator, the discovery of whisky's effect on ice and an interesting attempt to weigh the Earth in 1774

• Season 1 Episode 2: South

  Adam-Hart Davis recreates the world's first powered flight, made by John Stringfellow from Somerset, and looks at the remarkable contribution Florence Nightingale made to the use of statistics

• Season 1 Episode 1: South West

  Adam Hart-Davis tells the stories of the 19th-century vicar who invented a waterless toilet, and Mary Anning, the leading fossil collector of her day. Plus, a steam engine made of soup tins and a re-creation of Brunel's atmospheric railway

Local Heroes:

• Brunel

  Profile of engineer Isambard Kindgom Brunel, winner of the viewers' vote as the greatest southerner. Moulded by his father Marc, an inventor who fled Napoleon's France, he became one of the leading Victorian figures with his work on some of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken, ultimately helping to define modern Britain

• Cornwall

  Adam Hart-Davis delves into the world of William Murdoch, designer of the first mechanical vehicle, and Henry Winstanley, who confounded critics by constructing a lighthouse on the Eddystone Rocks

• East Midlands

  Profile of unsung heroes such as Frank Whittle, inventor of the jet engine, and Robert Bakewell, whose pioneering work in genetic engineering and selective inbreeding in the 1760s produced bigger, woollier sheep

• East Midlands

  Adam Hart-Davis examines Robert Bakewell's scientific animal breeding method and appraises the achievements of Edmund Cartwright, Charles Vernon Boys, Jean Hanson and Frank Whittle

• Edinburgh

  Adam Hart-Davis pays tribute to Edinburgh's inventors, including the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell, and Peter Mark Roget, famous for his thesaurus

• Egypt

  Adam Hart-Davis visits Egypt to pay tribute to the unknown scientists who discovered the power of steam and invented a water clock

• Egypt

  Adam Hart-Davis examines the work of Egyptian inventors, including Hero, who discovered the power of steam and Ctesbios, who invented the water clock

• Egypt

  Adam Hart-Davis visits Egypt to pay tribute to the unknown scientists who developed a pinhole camera and a technique for measuring the circumference of the Earth using only a stick

• Exploding Heroes

  Adam Hart-Davies travels from Cornwall to Scotland, investigating the history of fireworks and the unsung heroes in their development throughout the ages

• Generic Regional Poll

  The results of a national poll in which viewers nominated their most revered local heroes, and the winners' life stories revealed

• Glasgow

  Profile of John Logie Baird, controversial inventor of the first primitive television system, and the Glasgow siblings who laid the first transatlantic cable

• Gloucestershire

  Adam Hart-Davis visits Gloucestershire, where his science heroes include Edwin Beard Budding, inventor of the lawnmower, James Bradley, who first calculated the speed of light, and Sir Charles Wheatstone, creator of the concertina

• Home Counties

  Profiles of Henry Cavendish, who demonstrated that water was made up of hydrogen and oxygen, and agricultural pioneer Jethro Tull

• Ireland

  The work of pioneering Irish inventors William Petty, who created the catamaran, Robert Boyle, who engineered the vacuum pump, and Jo Sheridan, who formulated the recipe for Irish coffee

• Italy

  A celebration of Italian inventors who made their mark on the world, including the man who discovered vacuums. Adam Hart Davis presents

• Local Heroines

  Historian Adam Hart-Davis uncovers London's female inventors, including Margaret Lindsay Huggins, who discovered that the Orion nebula was a cloud of hot gas

• Local Heroines

  Adam Hart-Davis visits London, where his heroines include Rosalind Elsie Franklin, who helped discover the structure of DNA, Mary Waller, pioneer in the field of vibrations, and Margaret Lindsay Huggins, whose research established the Orion Nebula is a cloud of hot gases

• London

  Adam Hart-Davis cycles to London where he reconstructs a 21-foot megaphone invented by Samuel Morland, master mechanic to Charles II, and visits Lambeth North underground where precision engineering was founded

• London

  Historian Adam Hart-Davis presents a look at the lives of engineer Marc Isambard Brunel - father of Isambard Kingdom Brunel - inventor Hubert Cecil Booth and Queen Victoria's anaesthetist, John Snow

• London

  Adam Hart-Davis uncovers the achievement of Cornelius Drebbel, who built the first working submarine. He also examines the lives of inventor Michael Faraday and computing pioneer Charles Babbage

• London

  Adam Hart-Davis looks at the history of the lightning conductor and steam engine, before recreating the 'philosophical' supper held by the inventor of the pressure cooker, Denis Papin

• London Legends
• The Man Who Shrank the World

  Adam Hart-Davis tells the story of jet engine inventor Frank Whittle, winner of a recent poll to find out who was the region's favourite local hero, going in search of the man behind the legend

• Merseyside

  Adam Hart-Davis cycles round the UK, telling the stories of each region's pioneering scientists and inventors

• Merseyside

  Adam Hart-Davis examines the works of Merseyside inventors Frank Hornby, Arthur Doodson, Jeremiah Horrocks and Alastair Pilkington

• The Netherlands

  Adam Hart-Davis looks at the work of Daniel Fahrenheit, who made the first calibrated mercury thermometer, and Christiaan Huygens, inventor of the pendulum clock

• Nobel Prize Winners

  Adam Hart-Davis unearths the stories of some of Britain's Nobel Prize winners and tells the inspirational tale of Alfred Nobel himself, who invented dynamite after his brother died in a nitroglycerine-induced explosion

• Nobel Prize Winners Special

  Adam Hart-Davis celebrates the centenary of the Nobel Foundation by visiting the home towns and cities of British Nobel prize winners, including Liverpool, where he commemorates malaria-beating Ronald Ross who allowed mosquitoes to feast on his blood, and Todmorden, home of atom-splitter and quantum tunneller John Cockcroft

• North

  Adam Hart-Davis visits Leeds to discover more about the man who invented the siphonic flush lavatory, and tells the story of the man who discovered the significance of pollen

• North East

  Adam Hart-Davis pays tribute to the pioneers of the North East, including Gateshead's Joseph Swan, who invented the light bulb long before Thomas Edison applied for his patent, and John Walker from Stockton-on-Tees, who devised the friction match. Plus, the achievements of Charles Algernon Parsons, whose marine turbine took the 1897 Naval Review by storm

• North of England

  Presenter Adam Hart-Davis talks about William Sturgeon, inventor of the electric motor, and Ernest Rutherford, the man who discovered the structure of the atom

• Nottingham Forest

  Brian Clough and Martin O'Neill are among those recalling the heady days of 25 years ago when Nottingham Forest football club went from a struggling second division team to European champions over just three seasons. Pat Murphy examines what impact the club's success had on the city

• The Potteries

  Historian Adam Hart-Davis reveals the stories behind photography pioneer Thomas Wedgwood and ironmaster John Wilkinson, who greatly improved the efficiency of cannons

• Royal Institution Special

  Adam Hart-Davis visits the Royal Institution, where he celebrates the lives of the RI's founder Count Von Rumford, Humphry Davey, who invented a lamp used in mines, and bookbinder Michael Faraday

• Science Special

  Adam Hart-Davis hops on his bike to present a special edition of the inventions extravaganza. Items featured include the discovery of Uranus in 1781, an automated egg-boiler patented by a Harrogate dentist, a notepad for recording ideas in the dark and Eadweard Muybridge's analysis of horses in motion

• Scotland

  Adam Hart-Davis visits the Edinburgh home of John Scott Russell, the man who discovered the solitary wave, and then attempts to create a machine that demonstrates the principles of Brownian motion

• Sir Norman Wisdom

  Paul Ross and comedian Norman Wisdom visit Deal in Kent to trace the veteran's earliest influences in the south east, meeting friends and family who offer their thoughts on what makes the winner of the regional poll of local heroes so funny. Featuring contributions from Tim Rice and Roy Hudd

• South

  Adam Hart-Davis recreates the world's first powered flight, made by Somerset engineer John Stringfellow 50 years before the Wright brothers' attempt. He also builds a contraption for detecting earthquakes using objects including a can of tomatoes and a fence post. Plus, pioneering designs for mousetraps and screw propellers, and Florence Nightingale's outstanding contribution to the study of statistics

• South

  The unsung pioneers of science and invention, including Barnes Wallis, who developed the bouncing bomb, and the work of 17th-century inventor Robert Hooke

• South Coast

  Adam Hart-Davis builds his own pier in honour of Eugenius Birch, the man behind Brighton's famous West Pier, before looking at the humble beginnings of hovercraft inventor Christopher Cockerell and a contraption designed to turn anyone into an artist

• South East

  Adam Hart-Davis travels to London and reconstructs the 21-foot megaphone invented by Samuel Morland, the master mechanic to Charles II

• South West

  Adam Hart-Davis tells the stories of pioneers from the South West, including Norman Lockyer who is credited with assessing what the sun consists of and discovered helium, Benjamin Robins who was the first person to calculate the speed of a bullet and John Canton, inventor of a thunderstorm predictor

• South West

  Adam Hart-Davis cycles round the UK, telling the stories of each region's pioneering scientists and inventors

• South West

  Historian Adam Hart-Davis talks about Andrew Thomas Turton Peterson, who proved the worth of concrete, and Charles Lyell, who investigated the startling effects of erosion

• South West

  Adam Hart-Davis and Sarah Guppy visit the south-western corner of the British Isles, to examine the knife used for the first smallpox vaccination, William Watts's invention of lead shot and the early use of laughing-gas

• Yorkshire

  Adam Hart-Davis travels to Whitby in North Yorkshire to explore the navigation skills of Captain James Cook, and challenges viewers to create fire from ice, mirroring a whaling scientist's extraordinary feat

• Yorkshire Greats

  Harry Gration presents as a panel of judges weigh up nominations from viewers before declaring the winner of Yorkshire's local hero