James Burke hosts this ten-part series tracing how one invention leads to another across centuries, following chains of cause and effect that rarely run in a straight line. An episode on the 1965 New York blackout works backward through the history of electrical networks; another follows the plow through feudal land use to the invention of the mechanical clock; another connects the stirrup to the Domesday Book. Burke narrates on location, standing in medieval workshops, factory floors, and laboratories, using working replicas and period artifacts to show how technologies most people think are unrelated actually depend on each other. His argument runs against the textbook idea of history as a tidy sequence of great inventors: instead progress looks like an accident network, where a change in one field forces an unplanned change in another. The pace is quick and the connections sometimes startling, jumping from ancient Rome to the atomic bomb in a single episode. It remains one of the more ambitious attempts to explain how the modern industrial world actually got built.