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The Race Underground

Aired November 12, 2019 | 53 min

Learn how Boston overcame a litany of challenges, the greed-driven interests of businessmen, and the great fears of its citizenry to create America’s first subway.

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The Rise and Fall of Penn Station

Aired February 18, 2014

The Pennsylvania Railroad Company accomplished an enormous engineering feat, but destroyed a great architectural monument.

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Henry Ford

Aired January 29, 2013

The story of a farm boy who rose from obscurity to become the most influential American innovator of the 20th century.

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Panama Canal

Aired January 24, 2011 | 83 min

In 1914, the Panama Canal connected the world’s two largest oceans. American ingenuity and innovation had succeeded where the French had failed disastrously, but the U.S. paid a price for victory.

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Grand Central

Aired February 4, 2008

A marvel of engineering, architecture, and vision, the story of the Beaux Arts structure on 42nd Street that forever changed midtown Manhattan.

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It could have been the start of World War III. Instead, it became the largest humanitarian campaign the world had ever seen. On June 24, 1948, one of the first major crises of the Cold War occurred when the Soviet Union blocked railroad and street access to West Berlin. For nearly a year two million civilians and twenty thousand allied soldiers in the city's western sector were fed and fueled entirely from the air.

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Building the Alaska Highway

Aired February 7, 2005

The Alaskan Highway stands today as one of the boldest homeland security initiatives ever undertaken.

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Golden Gate Bridge

Aired May 3, 2004

On May 27, 1937, 200,000 people thronged to the newly-completed Golden Gate bridge and walked, climbed, skated or cycled across. After 18 years of struggles to complete the bridge, San Francisco's jubilance was unrestrained.

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The Transcontinental Railroad

Aired January 27, 2003

The remarkable story of greed, innovation and gritty determination to build a railroad connecting California to the East.

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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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Secrets of a Master Builder

Aired October 30, 2000 | 58 min

A self-made man and one of America’s greatest engineers, James Buchanan Eads led a life inextricably intertwined with the nation’s most important waterway, the Mississippi River. He explored the river bottom in a diving bell of his own design; made a fortune salvaging wrecks; in the 1870s built the world's first steel bridge over the Mississippi at St. Louis; then deepened the river at its mouth, turning New Orleans into the second largest port in the nation. By the time of his death in 1887, Eads was widely acknowledged to be one of the most influential men of his day.

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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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