When the future Dr Hannah Fry was 10 years old, her Irish mother insisted she read one page of a maths textbook every day before going out to play. It doesn’t sound like fun. But it imbued in her a lifelong enthusiasm for learning, which she brings to her engaging new series, The Secret Genius of Modern Life (BBC Two, Wednesday, 8pm).
The show’s premise is engaging and uplifting – a useful counterpoint to the popular idea that technology has plunged us into a never-rending dystopia of TikTok hate and Spotify Wrapped hashtags. Dr Fry’s argument is that technology is actually wonderful – and a testament to the triumph of the human spirit.
Having looked at the development of the passport and the vacuum cleaner, she now turns to the most divisive technology the 21st century, the smartphone. Dr Fry is here strictly for the science rather than the social commentary, however and the story she tells is astonishing.
We all know that smartphones are sci-fi tech wedged into our pocket, with more processing power than the computers that took man to the moon. Dr Fry’s fluency in science and her sheer ebullience lets her get under the bonnet and show us the nuts and bolt of how they work.
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She explains how pioneers in the 1970s and 1980s worked out how to create localised networks by which a mobile phone signal could connect to a larger grid (arranged in honeycomb “cells”). We learn how the outer-rim of a smartphone contains the antenna – or rather a series of antennae – which ensure we’re never out of contact
Were you sitting in a lecture theatre this might be dry, dusty stuff. What makes the difference is Dr Fry’s zest and lack of portentousness. She collapses into laugher when it is revealed she has taken thousands of selfies in the past several years. And she has fun mucking about in a photo booth with her daughter by way of explaining the Japanese craze that first led to the invention of the cameraphone.
Through it all though, her thesis that science is wonderful and fascinating shines. “In our pockets we are literally carrying around a supercomputer,” she says. “This one single device that your whole life goes through.” Some scientists might say this as if it were a bad thing. Not Dr Fry, however. At a time when it can feel as if civilisation is disintegrating one X, formerly known as Twitter, thread at a time, Dr Fry’s sunny-side up outlook is a breath of cool, fresh air.
