@ 0:37: The Trigger Effect is the title of the first episode of Connections. @ 1:13: James Burke asks you to look around your room at the man made objects such as your telephone and television and ask yourself "what those objects do to your life, just because they're there?" @ 1:29: This series is going to explain exactly why those objects are there and how they shape our lives. @ 3:25: Like everyone else, James Burke takes technological advances such as elevator rides for granted @ 4:55: New York City is a technology island. @ 5:30: A great blackout affected New York City on November 9, 1965. @ 6:00: Burke explains the normality of the New York day moments before the blackout @ 9:43: People used to smoke on airplanes

@ 2:05: The blackout occurred when a relay switch at the Niagara Falls power plant failed. @ 2:30: When one power line was overloaded, the power drain was transferred to the next power line, which was then overloaded, triggering a domino effect that caused a blackout across the northeastern United States @ 4:00 The United Nations especially had trouble as the translators could no longer communicate with the delegates.

@ 0:57: After about 90 minutes stuck on a dark subway panic begun. @ 2:35: The next day, the power was back on, and everything went back to normal. @ 4:00: James Burke describes a hypothetical scenario of what happens when technology fails and society erupts into mayhem. @ 4:30: So you left the city to escape the mayhem, now what? * Do you know where to go in order to survive? * Do you have a map? * How do you get out? Walk? Drive until you run out of fuel? * Have you considered the millions of people behind you, also trying to survive? * Can you protect yourself? * Did you bring enough food and water? * Where will you get it? steal it? @ 5:49: The best place to find in this situation would be a farm. @ 7:24: Yet everything on the modern farm needs electricity. @ 9:10: If you're lucky, you may find a basic plow, but once challenged to use it, the average person may realize how much they depend on technology. @ 9:35: It was the plow that triggered the modern technological revolution. ...

@ 0:12: Around the 10th millennium BC people in Northern India, Syria,Egypt and Central America moved towards the rivers after the climate warmed up and grasslands begun to dry out. @ 1:08: In Egypt that turned out to be the Nile River ,where the land was fertile and rich because it flooded every year. @ 1:30: However, this caused the population to outgrow the available resources. This problem however led to the creation of the plow @ 2:00: The plow made it possible to grow harvests and that changed the world as we know it, since food surpluses allowed people to plan for the future for the first time in history. @ 2:55: With the surplus of food: * You can domesticate animals because you no longer need to hunt * You can use their milk, meat and skin * With the excess grain, bread can be baked, leading to ovens and pottery * A greater demand for pots leads to the pottery wheel. * The need to declare ownership led to writing * The next thing you know, you have the Ancient Egyptians Great Pyramid @ 4:19: The oldest stone building in ...

@ 0:45: James Burke describes Thebes as the New York City of it's time. @ 4:15: The plow and the annual flooding of the Nile River made the middle east rich just as its Oil does today @ 5:58: Never have so many people, known so little, about so much. @ 6:25: An invention acts as a trigger that sets off new inventions which inevitably sets off a chain of more inventions. @ 7:15: Inventions have always come from putting the right pieces of already available technology together to build something new.