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The Great Fever

Aired October 30, 2006

In 1900, Major Walter Reed, Chief Surgeon of the U.S. Army, led a medical team to Cuba on a mission to investigate yellow fever. For more than two hundred years the disease had terrorized the United States, killing an estimated 100,000 people in the nineteenth century alone. Shortly after Reed and his team arrived in Havana, they began testing the radical theories of Carlos Finlay, a Cuban doctor who believed that mosquitoes spread yellow fever.

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Test Tube Babies

Aired December 14, 2022 | 53 min

Test Tube Babies tells the story of doctors, researchers, and hopeful couples who pushed the limits of science and triggered a technological revolution in human reproduction.

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The Boy in the Bubble

Aired April 10, 2006

When David Vetter died at the age of 12, he was already world famous: the boy in the plastic bubble. Mythologized as the plucky, handsome child who had defied the odds, his life story is in fact even more dramatic.

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Race to the Moon

Aired October 31, 2005

On Christmas Eve 1968, one of the largest audiences in television history tuned in to an extraordinary sight: a live telecast of the moon's surface as seen from Apollo 8, the first manned space flight to orbit the moon.

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The Great Transatlantic Cable

Aired April 11, 2005

Though the need for a transatlantic cable was obvious, the physical challenges to laying one were enormous. The project would require the production of a 2,000 mile long cable that would have to be laid three miles beneath the Atlantic.

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Kinsey

Aired February 14, 2005

This probing documentary assesses Kinsey's remarkable achievements, while examining how his personal life shaped his career.

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The Center of the World: New York, A Documentary Film

Aired September 8, 2003

New York: The Center of the World examines the rise and fall of the World Trade Center -- from its conception in the post-World War II economic boom, through its controversial construction in the 1960s and 1970s, to its tragic demise in the fall of 2001 and extraordinary response of the city in its aftermath. It is the eighth episode of filmmaker Ric Burns' award-winning series New York: A Documentary Film.

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The Pill

Aired February 24, 2003

In May 1960, the FDA approved the sale of a pill that arguably would have a greater impact on American culture than any other drug in the nation's history.

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Partners of the Heart

Aired February 10, 2003

In 1944, two men at Johns Hopkins University Hospital pioneered a groundbreaking procedure that would save thousands of so-called blue babies' lives.

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Streamliners: America's Lost Trains

Aired February 5, 2001

Although fleets of these high speed trains crisscrossed the country by the 1940s, their success was short-lived. The dramatic story of the streamliners is one of remarkable achievements and opportunities lost.

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The Wizard of Photography

Aired May 22, 2000

With his introduction of the popular Kodak and Brownie camera systems, George Eastman revolutionized the photographic industry, transforming a complex, expensive technology used by a small professional elite into one that anyone could use. A brilliant innovator and entrepreneur, Eastman changed the way people viewed time and the world around them -- and even themselves. Produced by James A. DeVinney.

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Rescue at Sea

Aired February 15, 1999

On January 23, 1909, two ships -- one carrying Italian immigrants to New York City, the other, American tourists to Europe -- collided in dense fog off Nantucket Island. In a moment, more than 1,500 lives became dependent on a new technology, wireless telegraphy, and on Jack Binns, a twenty-six-year-old wireless operator on board one of the ships.

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