HOW IT BEGAN:
A HISTORY OF THE MODERN WORLD
20 cinematic episodes on the origins of electricity, the internet, surgery, coffee, and more. Over 20 hours of deeply researched, richly produced audio by historian Brad Harris (PhD, Stanford University, 2015).
We live like superheroes compared to our ancestors. But how did we get here?
How It Began originally aired as a podcast series that traces the origins of the innovations that built the modern world. Each episode dives into a single topic — from the taming of electricity to the invention of money — and tells its complete story, from the earliest beginnings to the present day.
These are far more than dry lectures. Every episode features music and immersive sound design, turning rigorous historical scholarship into a cinematic listening experience. No ads. No filler.
The Episodes:
1 Introduction - Discovering the Origins of Progress
What does it mean to make things better — and how did humanity actually do it? In this opening episode, historian Brad Harris (PhD, Stanford) introduces the series and its mission: to celebrate the scientific, technological, and cultural breakthroughs that built the modern world. From science and surgery to electricity and the internet, How It Began traces how our ancestors turned bold dreams into the innovations we now take for granted. This episode sets the stage for 20 cinematic journeys through history, each one revealing the origins of a different triumph of human progress.
2 Horsepower - From Stallions to Steam Engines
For 6,000 years, horses were humanity's most important source of power — pulling plows, charging into battle, and hauling goods across continents. This episode traces the complete arc of horsepower, from 30,000-year-old cave paintings of wild horses in the Pyrenees and the first domestication on the shores of the Black Sea, through the mounted armies of Alexander the Great and the armored knights of medieval Europe, to the coal mines of 18th-century England where horses could no longer keep up with industrial demand. Discover how Thomas Newcomen and James Watt built the steam engines that replaced them, how Watt invented the very unit of "horsepower" as a way to sell his machines, and how Richard Trevithick's terrifying steam carriage on Christmas Eve 1801 launched the age of machine-powered transportation.
3 Modern Science - From Belief to Knowledge
For over 4,000 generations, humanity wondered at the stars without understanding what they were. This episode tells the story of how we finally learned to find real answers — through the invention of modern science. Begin with the ancient Greeks, who first pursued rational inquiry under Plato and Aristotle, then follow the thousand-year detour when Christian authorities froze their ideas into religious dogma. Discover how the printing press, the discovery of America, and a mysterious new star in 1572 cracked open the European mind, how Galileo shattered ancient beliefs by simply pointing a telescope at the sky, and how a generation of revolutionary experimenters — from Pascal and Boyle to Newton — built a new system for understanding the world based on evidence rather than authority. This is the story of humanity's most powerful idea: that we can move beyond belief to genuine knowledge.
4 Wolves to Dogs - The Origins of our Alliance
Over 35,000 years ago, humans and wolves were competitors — and sometimes prey. Today, there are 75 million dogs in the United States alone, from 5-pound terriers to 200-pound mastiffs. This episode traces the remarkable journey from predator to best friend, beginning with Stone Age tribes whose scraps attracted the most submissive wolves to the edges of their camps. Discover how selective pressure over thousands of years transformed wolf temperament and physiology alike — a process mirrored dramatically by a Soviet experiment that turned wild foxes into tail-wagging, floppy-eared pets in just 30 years. Follow 26,000-year-old footprints preserved in a French cave where a boy and his dog walked side by side, and learn how dogs helped humanity domesticate other animals, produce surplus food, and launch civilization itself. From the dog-headed god Anubis of ancient Egypt to Roman war dogs and the British Kennel Club, this is the story of humanity's oldest and most transformative partnership.
5 Monumental Infrastructure - From Stonehenge to the Golden Gate Bridge
How did humanity go from rocks and sticks to the Golden Gate Bridge and the Hoover Dam? This episode traces 5,000 years of building big, starting with the armies of workers who hauled 25-ton stones into place at Stonehenge and stacked two million blocks to build the Great Pyramid of Giza. Follow the Greek mathematicians who formalized the science of construction, the Roman engineers who perfected the arch and built the Pantheon's astonishing dome — still standing after 1,900 years — and the medieval castle builders who finally surpassed Roman engineering after a thousand years of regression. Discover how Europe's Age of Precision replaced guild secrecy with calculation, how cast iron revolutionized construction in 1779, and how the 1930s became the most audacious decade in building history, when the Hoover Dam consumed enough concrete to pave a highway across America and all 102 floors of the Empire State Building went up in just 410 days.
6 Surgery - How We Learned to Heal
Until little over a century ago, a broken bone poking through the skin was often a death sentence — followed by agonizing amputation without anesthesia and near-certain infection. This episode traces the full arc of surgery, from 12,000-year-old skulls found with holes carefully bored through them by Stone Age healers, through the young medical student Andreas Vesalius who stole corpses from the Paris gallows in 1536 to produce the first accurate map of human anatomy in over a thousand years. Discover how battlefield surgeon Ambroise Paré saved lives by tying off arteries with twine, how a Boston dentist's experiment with ether in 1846 ended 10,000 years of surgical agony in a single demonstration, and how Joseph Lister's carbolic acid bandages on a seven-year-old boy's shattered leg in 1865 finally conquered the ancient killer of post-operative infection. Three breakthroughs — anatomy, anesthesia, antiseptics — transformed surgery from a terrifying last resort into the safest era of healing in human history.
7 Electricity - The Beacon of Modernity
If you took someone from the early 1800s and dropped them into our world, almost everything that would baffle them traces back to one thing: electricity. This episode follows the full history of that invisible force, from William Gilbert's first use of the word "electricity" in 1600, through Benjamin Franklin's theory of positive and negative charge, to Alessandro Volta's invention of the battery — the device that first produced continuous electric current. Discover how a 20-year-old former bookbinder named Michael Faraday built the world's first electric motor in 1821 and then cracked the principle of electromagnetic induction that would power the modern age. Follow the rapid cascade of inventions that followed — Morse's telegraph, Bell's telephone, Edison's lightbulb — and learn how Nikola Tesla designed the system that actually delivered electricity to homes and cities. It took three centuries from Gilbert's first experiments to finally discover what electricity actually is, but along the way, inventors built an entire civilization on a force they didn't yet understand.
8 Computers - From Charles Babbage to Steve Jobs
The amount of information our world processes in a single day now matches the total output of all human history up to around the year 2000. This episode traces how we built the machines that made that possible. Start with Charles Babbage, the frustrated Cambridge mathematician who in the 1820s dreamed of mechanizing the error-prone mental labor of human "computers" — the men and women who calculated math tables by hand. Follow Herman Hollerith's punched-card machine that reduced the 1890 U.S. Census from seven years to six weeks, the wartime engineers who strung together 18,000 vacuum tubes to build ENIAC — a 30-ton electronic brain that dimmed the lights across campus — and the NASA challenge that drove the invention of integrated circuits small enough to land astronauts on the moon. Discover how Ted Hoff's microprocessor at Intel made computers cheap enough for ordinary people, how a drab grey mail-order kit called the Altair 8800 inspired Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Paul Allen to launch the personal computer revolution, and how the information machines born from firing tables and census tallies became the comprehensive tools of the modern mind.
9 The Internet - From Sputnik to the World Wide Web
For a hundred thousand years, the insights of others were mostly beyond our reach — locked behind distance, language, and privilege. Then, in a single generation, we connected the majority of the human population on one platform. This episode traces how it happened, beginning with the Cold War panic that followed Sputnik's launch in 1957 and the creation of ARPA, the defense agency that funded America's most visionary research. Discover how a man nicknamed "Lick" dreamed up an "Intergalactic Computer Network" in 1962 to let researchers anywhere use any computer anywhere, how the revolutionary concept of packet-switching made it possible to route data like trucks carrying lumber instead of hauling entire houses, and how a small Cambridge firm delivered the first node of the internet to UCLA in September 1969. Follow the invention of email as a casual hack in 1971 that quickly consumed three-quarters of all network traffic, the TCP/IP protocols that knit together networks worldwide, and Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web in 1991 that finally made it all navigable. By 2016, nearly four billion people were online — the majority of humanity interacting on a single platform for the first time in history.
10 The Stock Market - How Democratized Investment Changed the World
For most of history, if you wanted to fund a world-changing venture, your options were a wealthy relative or a prince — and even their fortunes often weren't enough. This episode traces how the stock market changed that forever, starting with the bond markets of ancient Rome, where speculators and insider traders already flourished, through the medieval religious prohibitions against making money with money that shut down financial markets for a thousand years. Discover how the Dutch East India Company in 1602 became the first publicly traded corporation in history, flooding with capital from ordinary citizens who could buy small, affordable, liquid shares of ownership — and how its 30% annual dividends intoxicated all of Europe. Follow the speculative manias that inevitably followed, from tulip mania to the South Sea Bubble, through the railroad boom that stitched together America, the crash of 1929, and the revolutionary insight of portfolio diversification that gave rise to retirement investing. From a narrow street of London coffeehouses to 80 million American stockholders managing trillions in retirement assets, this is the story of how selling ownership replaced selling things — and reshaped civilization.
11 The English Language - From a Dark Ages Dialect to Global Domination
Over 1.5 billion people speak English today, but a thousand years ago it was a fragmented island dialect spoken by a few million farmers — and two thousand years ago, it didn't exist at all. This episode traces the improbable rise of the world's dominant language, beginning in the power vacuum left by Rome's abandonment of Britain in 410 AD, when waves of Germanic tribes — Angles, Saxons, Jutes, and Frisians — sailed across the North Sea and planted the seeds of Old English. Hear how English actually sounded a thousand years ago in the Lord's Prayer, and discover how each successive invasion enriched the language rather than destroying it: Latin from Christian missionaries, thousands of Scandinavian words from the Vikings, and 10,000 French words from the Norman Conquest that gave us distinctions like cow and beef, brotherhood and fraternity. Follow the language through Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Shakespeare's invention of 2,000 words we still use daily, and the mass emigration that carried English to every corner of the globe. No other language has absorbed so many influences, expanded so rapidly, or offered such expressive range — adding 20,000 new words every year and outpacing every dictionary the moment it's printed.
12 The Theory of Evolution- A Triumph of Wonder, from Coal Miners to Darwin
Where did all the plants and animals come from? Where did we come from? For thousands of generations, mythology and scripture offered the only answers. This episode traces how humanity finally discovered the truth, beginning with Aristotle's first empirical natural history on the Greek island of Lesbos in 344 BC. Follow the coal miners whose picks struck fossilized bone and shattered the biblical claim that Earth was only 6,000 years old, the paleontologists who unearthed an ancient race of giants they named dinosaurs, and the French naturalist Lamarck whose flawed but pioneering theory of adaptation pointed the way forward. Then join Charles Darwin on his five-year voyage around the world, where observations of island birds, earthquake-lifted shorelines, and the simple fact that more offspring are born than can survive led him to a theory of breathtaking simplicity: natural variation plus competition in changing environments over vast stretches of time could produce all of life's diversity without any supernatural intervention. Since Darwin published On the Origin of Species in 1859, every major scientific discovery — from radioactive dating confirming Earth is over 4 billion years old to DNA revealing we share 96% of our genes with chimpanzees — has only strengthened the case for evolution by natural selection.
13 What Defines the History of the Modern World?
In this bridge between seasons, Brad Harris reflects on why understanding the history of progress matters now more than ever. In a culture increasingly dominated by cynicism and relativism, the story of the modern world offers a powerful antidote — evidence that humanity is striving toward something real, that truth and progress are not just matters of opinion but observable trajectories built through centuries of courage and effort. The next episodes expand the exploration into new territory: refrigeration, metallurgy, the printed book, the Enlightenment, and more.
14 Refrigeration - From Ice Harvests to Superconductivity
Every fresh banana, burger, and salad on your plate is a small miracle — 400 years ago, almost none of it would have reached you without rotting. This episode traces humanity's conquest of cold, starting with Francis Bacon, who literally died in 1626 from a chill caught while stuffing a chicken with snow in the name of science. Follow Robert Boyle's discovery of the inverse relationship between gas pressure and volume, Daniel Fahrenheit's painstaking invention of the modern thermometer, and the 1756 breakthrough when two Scottish scientists actually made ice by spraying alcohol into a vacuum — the world's first refrigerator. Discover how Frederic Tudor built a global empire shipping New England lake ice to the tropics, losing half his cargo to meltdown on every voyage, and how the mathematics of thermodynamics finally enabled Carl Linde to build a practical mechanical refrigerator for a German beer brewer in 1871. In 1925, only 1% of American homes had a refrigerator; by 1950, they were everywhere — transforming cities, enabling skyscrapers, and stretching the global food supply chain from Indonesian banana farms to San Francisco breakfast tables.
15 Coffee - Sobering Up for The Enlightenment
Coffee sits just behind petroleum as the world's most valuable legally traded commodity, with over 500 billion cups consumed every year. But this episode reveals something far more surprising than coffee's commercial scale — its role in catalyzing the modern world. Begin with the legendary Ethiopian goatherd Kaldi, whose dancing goats led humans to discover the stimulating cherry of the coffee tree over 1,500 years ago. Follow the Sufi mystics of Yemen who perfected roasting and brewing through the 1400s, creating a beverage so popular that Constantinople had 600 coffee shops within a single decade. Then discover what happened when coffee arrived in a Europe where men, women, and children drank beer and wine all day because the water was contaminated — average consumption of 5 liters of beer or 7 liters of wine per person per day. Coffee sobered up an entire civilization practically overnight. The coffeehouses that followed became "penny universities" where Robert Boyle helped found the Royal Society, where London's Stock Exchange and Lloyd's insurance market were born, and where America's Founding Fathers plotted revolution. But coffee's rise also fueled colonial exploitation, slave labor on Brazilian plantations, and rainforest destruction — a legacy the specialty coffee movement is only now beginning to address.
16 Mastering Metals - From Sticks & Stones to Cars & Computers
Everything around you — every building, bridge, car, and circuit — was once just mineral in the earth and wood in the forest. This episode traces how humanity unlocked the potential sealed inside stone, beginning with a 33,000-year-old flint mine in the Nile Valley and the first campfire experiments that melted copper nuggets into jewelry 10,000 years ago. Discover how the invention of smelting 6,000 years ago launched civilization itself, how combining copper with tin created bronze and fueled the first great empires, and how the catastrophic collapse of the tin trade 3,200 years ago plunged the Western world into darkness and forced humanity to master a far more stubborn metal: iron. Follow centuries of smiths heating and hammering at the anvil to forge steel, the Chinese who liquefied iron 1,800 years before Europeans managed it, and the self-perpetuating cycle of mining and machinery that led to the steam engine. Then witness the breakthrough that unlocked the Industrial Revolution — Henry Bessemer's 1856 discovery that simply blasting air through molten iron could burn off excess carbon and mass-produce steel for the first time, enabling the railroads, skyscrapers, and machines that built the modern world.
17 The Printed Book - Opening the Floodgates of Knowledge
Before the printing press, the average person almost never saw a book. A single Bible might require 170 animal hides and months of a monk's labor, costing as much as a year's salary. This episode traces how that changed, beginning in the freezing scriptoria of medieval monasteries where shivering monks copied text one letter at a time, venting their misery in secret margin notes. Follow the invention of paper in China around 105 AD and its slow migration through the Muslim world to Europe in 1150, where it arrived just in time to fuel the founding of universities at Paris and Oxford. Discover how growing book demand still couldn't overcome the ancient bottleneck of hand-copying — until a goldsmith named Johannes Gutenberg cast individual metal letters in a mixture of lead, tin, and antimony and printed his first Bible in 1455. Within fifteen years, every country in Europe had a printing press. Within a century, annual manuscript production exploded from 50,000 to 5 million. The consequences were world-changing: Martin Luther's mass-printed protests ignited the Reformation, Copernicus could finally challenge Ptolemy because readers could see the data for themselves, and Vesalius's anatomical illustrations overturned a thousand years of medical error in months. The printed book didn't just spread knowledge — it convinced humanity that the future held more promise than the past.
18 The Enlightenment - From a Medieval to a Modern Mindset
Do you believe democracy is better than dictatorship? That people have rights? That men and women deserve equal opportunity? If so, you are a citizen of the Enlightenment. This episode traces the intellectual revolution that created those convictions, beginning in the carnage of the Thirty Years War — the most destructive conflict in European history before the World Wars — when 8 million died fighting over variations of Christianity. Discover how the philosopher Descartes, a veteran of that war, stripped away every inherited belief until he hit bedrock with "I think, therefore I am," and how Hobbes and Locke built on that foundation to replace the divine right of kings with consent of the governed and natural rights. Follow Spinoza's radical argument that the Bible reveals more about its human authors than about God, Diderot's revolutionary Encyclopedia that tried to make all knowledge accessible to everyone, and Hume's powerful distinction between what is and what ought to be — the philosophical engine of human progress. These thinkers were imperfect, sometimes racist and contradictory, but without them, subsequent generations would have had no intellectual foundation for abolition, women's rights, or democratic self-governance. Every measurable factor of human well-being has improved since their era — and the project they started isn't finished.
19 Measuring Time - The Hidden Mechanism of Modernity
Clocks are so woven into modern life that we barely notice them — yet without clockwork, there would be no science, no railroads, no GPS, no computers. This episode traces 4,000 years of humanity's quest to measure time, from Egyptian sundials that divided daylight into 12 hours that stretched and shrank with the seasons, through water clocks that freed timekeeping from the sun, to the medieval Benedictine monks whose obsessive prayer schedules demanded a new invention — and gave us the very word "clock" from their Latin bells, clocca. Discover how mechanical clockwork in the 1300s severed time from nature's rhythms forever, how astronomers like Tycho Brahe pushed clockmakers to ever greater precision, and how thousands of sailors drowned for lack of knowing their longitude until a self-taught English carpenter named John Harrison built a clock that lost only 5 seconds on a voyage to Jamaica. Follow the chaos of early railroads — where every town kept different time — that forced Britain to unify under Greenwich Mean Time, and the 20th-century leap from quartz crystals to atomic clocks that vibrate at exactly 9,192,631,770 cycles per second, redefining the second itself and synchronizing everything from power grids to satellites.
20 Money - From Barter to Blockchain
Money is not really dollars or gold — it's a system of trust. Around 90% of money in the U.S. economy has no physical existence at all. This episode traces how that system evolved, from the inefficient barters of 5,000 years ago near the border of Israel and Egypt, through the first coins minted by the Lydian Kingdom 2,500 years ago, to the sophisticated credit markets of ancient Rome whose collapse plunged Europe into centuries of darkness where money itself virtually disappeared. Discover how the mathematician Fibonacci revolutionized European commerce in 1202 simply by introducing Hindu-Arabic numerals, how the Medici family built a banking network that funded the entire Italian Renaissance through bills of exchange and currency conversion, and how Amsterdam, Stockholm, and London pioneered the breakthroughs — cashless transactions, fractional reserve banking, and fiat currency — that divorced wealth creation from precious metal forever. Follow Spain's paradox of importing hundreds of billions in silver while going bankrupt 14 times, the financial frauds from John Law's Ponzi scheme to the collateralized debt obligations of 2008, and the emergence of blockchain technology designed to make the trust underlying our transactions incorruptible — finally building an internet of value to match the internet of information.
You can purchase the complete series of How It Began to gain access to all 20 episodes