James Burke, the host of this program, spends the first half of this episode looking at the Black Out of 1965 which affected northeastern North America. He focuses on people in different parts of New York City including a woman in a hospital getting ready to give birth to twins, people stuck on a subway train, and pilots flying a passenger plane that was approaching JFK International Airport. Electricity was something that everyone depended on and yet in a moment it was gone and didn't return for hours. How did people manage?
The second half of this episode looks at what Burke says is the device that changed everything, the plow. He begins this section by looking at a farm outside of New York City. He changes locations then and travels to Egypt where he talks about what led to the invention of the plow, thousands of years before, and what came from it.
This program first aired in 1978.
There is what looks like footage from the Blackout. Presumably people either had film or video cameras handy or were already filming when when the blackout began.
My first exposure to the work of James Burke was another program that he created called The Day the Universe Changed. I'm not sure if I have seen Connections before. Both series are based on books that Burke wrote.
This program moves at a pretty fast pace. It jumps back and then forward in time. It is a bit of a sampler as it draws connections between all sorts of things.
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