Plot
A rapid-fire history of our world, from the beginning of time as we know it to present day. This two-hour CGI-driven special delves into the key turning points: the formation of earth, emergence of life, spread of man and the growth of civilization--and reveals their surprising connections to our world today.
Keywords: agriculture, airplane, america, amphibian, anthropocentrism, arab, asteroid, automobile, bacteria, big-bang
[first lines]::Himself - Narrator: What if we could tell you everything? The entire history of the world. Now, what if we told you we could do it in just 2 hours? We're going to tell the whole story... from the big bang to the present day, how the planet prepared for the rise of man, how the stone age led to the steam engine, how the first seeds sprouted into cities and civilizations. Everything is connected, and the path leads to you. It took history 13.7 billion years to unfold. We'll show you everything you need to know in the next 2 hours.
[last lines]::Himself - Narrator: On earth, the seeds of the past have bloomed into a present filled with energy and creativity. The stories of billions of lives have played out against the backdrop of a universe almost too vast to comprehend. In everything that we do, in all that we are, we remain living monuments to the past as we continue to make history every day.
Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (c. 1170 – c. 1250) also known as Leonardo of Pisa, Leonardo Pisano, Leonardo Bonacci, Leonardo Fibonacci, or, most commonly, simply Fibonacci, was an Italian mathematician, considered by some "the most talented western mathematician of the Middle Ages."
Fibonacci is best known to the modern world for the spreading of the Hindu–Arabic numeral system in Europe, primarily through the publication in 1202 of his Liber Abaci (Book of Calculation), and for a number sequence named the Fibonacci numbers after him, which he did not discover but used as an example in the Liber Abaci.
Leonardo Fibonacci was born around 1170 to Guglielmo Bonacci, a wealthy Italian merchant. Guglielmo directed a trading post (by some accounts he was the consultant for Pisa) in Bugia, a port east of Algiers in the Almohad dynasty's sultanate in North Africa (now Bejaia, Algeria). As a young boy, Leonardo traveled with him to help; it was there he learned about the Hindu–Arabic numeral system.
Recognizing that arithmetic with Hindu–Arabic numerals is simpler and more efficient than with Roman numerals, Fibonacci traveled throughout the Mediterranean world to study under the leading Arab mathematicians of the time. Leonardo returned from his travels around 1200. In 1202, at age 32, he published what he had learned in Liber Abaci (Book of Abacus or Book of Calculation), and thereby popularized Hindu–Arabic numerals in Europe.
Arthur Leslie Benjamin (18 September 1893 – 10 April 1960) was an Australian composer, pianist, conductor and teacher. He is best known as the composer of Jamaican Rhumba, composed in 1938.
Arthur Benjamin was born in Sydney, but at age three his parents moved to Brisbane. At the age of six he made his first public appearance as a pianist and his formal musical training began three years later with the Brisbane City organist, George Sampson. In 1911, Benjamin won a scholarship from Brisbane Grammar School to the Royal College of Music (RCM), where he studied composition with Charles Villiers Stanford, harmony and counterpoint with Thomas Dunhill, and piano with Frederic Cliffe.
In 1914 he joined the Officer Training Corps, receiving a temporary commission in April 1915. He served initially in the infantry as 2nd Lieutenant with the 32nd Battalion of the Royal Fusiliers and in November 1917 he was attached to the Royal Flying Corps. On 31 July 1918 his aircraft was shot down over Germany by the young Hermann Göring, and he spent the remainder of the war as a German prisoner of war at Ruhleben camp near Berlin. There he met the composer Edgar Bainton, who had been interned since 1914, and who was later to become Director of the New South Wales State Conservatorium of Music.