Man, Moment, Machine

An episode about Bonnie and Clyde Barrow use of the BAR machine gun to rob banks during the Great Depression.

Recalling Doolittle's Raid on Tokyo in 1942, when a squadron of B-25 bombers made a retaliatory attack headed by Lt. Col. James Doolittle.

General Norman Schwarzkopf uses the M1A1 Abrams tank to liberate the Kuwaitis in just 100 hours in the "Mother of all battles" against the elite Republican Guard in Kuwait.

An episode dealing with the African American Inventor Garrett Morgan and his patented Morgan Safety Mask. His invention rose to prominence in 1916, when it was used to rescue 32 men in a collapsed tunnel underneath Lake Erie, and eventually became the basis for Air Rescue and Safety Masks used by the Military and Civilians alike.

This episode explores the intersection between the invention of the electric chair, its significant moment in history, and its inventor Thomas Edison.

Howard Hughes takes on the challenge to build an enormous flying boat capable of airlifting 750 troops and war materiel as heavy as tanks across the Atlantic Ocean in support of the Allied war effort, thus avoiding the threat of German U-boats. The project becomes the focus of Hughes OCD. Even after the project is canceled by the military his company successfully builds and Hughes personally flies the prototype dubbed by its detractors as the spruce goose.

J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the A-bomb, creates the world's deadliest weapon of mass destruction--with the "power of 1,000 suns" it can annihilate tens of thousands in a moment. His scientific brilliance is the power behind the atom bombs used against the Japanese during WWII, but his conscience led him to question the invention that helped end the war. Watch as Oppenheimer paces anxiously in New Mexico while the crew on a B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, deploys the massive "Little Boy" bomb towards the Aioi Bridge in Hiroshima. The resulting massive loss of life leads Oppenheimer to rethink the way in which nuclear energy was to be used.