The Best Shot in Tv: Science Historian James Burke Had One Likelihood to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

The 80-sec­ond clip above cap­tures a rock­et launch, some­factor of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or anoth­er. What makes its view­ers name it “the nice­est shot in tele­vi­sion” nonetheless immediately, 45 years after it first aired, could take multiple view­ing to note. In it, sci­ence his­to­ri­an James Burke speaks about how “cer­tain gasoline­es ignite, and that the ther­mos flask per­mits you to retailer huge quan­ti­ties of these gasoline­es secure­ly, of their frozen liq­uid type, till you need to ignite them.” Use a suf­fi­cient­ly massive flask crammed with hydro­gen and oxy­gen, design it to combine the gasoline­es and set gentle to them, and “you get that” — that’s, you get the rock­et that launch­es behind Burke simply as quickly as he factors to it.

One can solely admire Burke’s com­po­certain in dis­cussing such tech­ni­cal mat­ters in a shot that needed to be per­fect­ly timed on the primary and solely take. What you’d­n’t know until you noticed it in con­textual content is that it additionally comes as the ultimate, cul­mi­nat­ing second of a 50-minute explana­to­ry jour­ney that begins with cred­it playing cards, then makes its means by the inven­tion of each­factor from a knight’s armor to canned meals to air conditioning­di­tion­ing to the Sat­urn V rock­et, which put man on the moon.

For­mal­ly communicate­ing, this was a typ­i­cal episode of Con­nec­tions, Burke’s 1978 tele­vi­sion sequence that traces essentially the most impor­tant and sur­pris­ing strikes within the evo­lu­tion of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy by­out human his­to­ry.

Although not as huge­ly remem­bered as Carl Sagan’s slight­ly lat­er Cos­mos, Con­nec­tions bears repeat view­ing right here within the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, not least for the intel­lec­tu­al and visu­al brava­do typ­i­fied by this “nice­est shot in tele­vi­sion,” now seen close to­ly 18 mil­lion instances on Youtube. Watch it sufficient instances your­self, and also you’ll discover that it additionally pulls off some minor sleight of hand by hav­ing Burke stroll from a non-time-sen­si­tive shot into anoth­er with the already-framed rock­et prepared for liftoff. However that arduous­ly lessens the texture­ing of obtain­ment when the launch comes off. “Des­ti­na­tion: the moon, or Moscow,” says Burke, “the plan­ets, or Peking” — a clos­ing line that sound­ed con­sid­er­ably extra dat­ed a number of years in the past than it does immediately.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

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The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Photographs in Cin­e­ma Over the Previous 100 Years

The Most Beau­ti­ful Photographs in Cin­e­ma His­to­ry: Scenes from 100+ Movies

125 Nice Sci­ence Movies: From Astron­o­my to Physics & Psy­chol­o­gy

Primarily based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His tasks embody the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the ebook The State­much less Metropolis: a Stroll by Twenty first-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­ebook.