The Secret Genius of Modern Life - Episode Guide

Hannah Fry takes a look at the bank card. This humble piece of plastic is often taken for granted, but it's the digital key to accessing cash and is packed full of extraordinary technological innovations - including some with surprising and sinister origins.

Hannah is granted the first ever TV access to Visa's European bank card data centre, discovers why we have Russian spies to thank for contactless payments, and finds out how the CIA and a 1950s housewife helped kickstart the bank card revolution.

Hannah Fry tucks into the tech behind food delivery apps like Deliveroo and Just Eat, which are now used by 24 million people in the UK.

Hannah meets the R&D team behind food delivery titan Deliveroo, finds out how pensioners ordering Greggs revolutionised food delivery, and discovers how pizza made us fall in love with the internet in the 1990s.

Hannah Fry delves into the inner workings of virtual assistants, such as Google Assistant and Siri, which are now found in almost half of all UK homes.

Hannah goes behind the scenes with Alexa's chief scientist, reveals how secret technology invented to hunt U-boats led to their targeted hearing, and discovers modern wireless networks' debt to a 1940s Hollywood star.

Hannah Fry discovers why innovations in meat packing almost derailed the electric car revolution and how a breakthrough in camcorder batteries led to Elon Musk's electric empire, as well as demonstrating how not to drive a multimillion dollar prototype car of the future.

With around a third of the population now owning fitness trackers, Britain has become a nation obsessed with tracking its every move.

Hannah Fry finds out how 1970s car crashes helped us to count our steps, why high-altitude WWII dog-fights led to a crucial health monitor and how fitness trackers are even being used to catch killers.

Did you know that a family feud created two of the world's biggest trainer brands? Hannah Fry visits Ebay's authentication centre, where they are waging war against fake high-value trainers. She discovers how American breakfast waffles transformed our trainer soles, and how an 18th century tea set led to the use of celebrity endorsement.

Hannah gains access to a top-secret site where anonymous staff and the latest tech work to make the British passport one of the most secure documents on the planet. 

She reveals the World War I spy craft hidden in the pages of every passport and takes a look into how modern ID checks were shaped by the hunt for a 19th-century French serial killer and 1970s psychedelic art.

Hannah takes a look at the vacuum cleaner, going behind the scenes with Dyson and discovering how the motor in their latest vacuum spins nine times faster than that of a Formula One race car.

She finds out why a wheezy janitor in the 1900s took inspiration from a sewing machine to create the first popular, portable vacuum. And she comes face to face with a colony of creepy crawlies whose job is to help us fight the filth.

With over six billion of them across the planet, smartphones have changed the modern world. With rare access to electronics giant Samsung, Hannah uncovers the technological game-changers that have made the smartphone a reality.

She finds out how 1940s comic book hero Dick Tracy inspired the first mobile phone, discovers why the invention of the digital camera led to one of the biggest commercial blunders of all time, and reveals what a 2010 South Korean sausage frenzy can tell us about touchscreens.

Hannah Fry discovers the hidden WWII radar technology that heats up baked beans, learns the legend of the melted candy bar in an engineer's pocket that kick-started a kitchen revolution, and puts her life on the line to demonstrate why microwaves zap food but not people!

Headphones: these marvels of miniaturisation are worn by over 30 million people in the UK. Hannah Fry visits legendary headphone honchos Bose to find out how today's teeny earbud tech works and meets the human testers with ‘golden ears'.

She discovers how helicopters in the Korean War helped put the ‘shhh' into noise-cancelling, why it took a muted Mormon church service to get headphones onto people's heads, and how an opera singer's electric shock therapy led to the invention of the speaker.

Hannah goes behind the scenes to look at the technology behind the lift, entering a 246m high lift shaft to test everything from the brakes to her own fear of heights.

Along the way, she finds out how rickety 19th-century coal mines made lifts safer, gets to grips with a piece of medieval siege technology still used in lifts today, and discovers how an 1850s PR stunt changed the modern skyline forever.