Documentary corporate & narration scripts

[Music: soft piano, a field of milkweed in late summer] At the end of summer, in a field in the American Midwest, a monarch butterfly opens its wings for the first time. It looks exactly like its parents. Orange and black, light as a scrap of paper. But this butterfly is different. Its parents lived for only a few weeks. So did their parents before them. This one may live for eight months. And it has a job none of them ever had. It is going south. Over the coming weeks, millions of monarchs from across eastern North America will begin to move. They ride warm air upward, then glide, covering long distances with surprisingly little effort. Some will travel well over two thousand miles. Their destination is a handful of mountain forests in central Mexico, high up, where the fir trees grow thick and the air stays cool but rarely freezes. None of them has ever been there before. [pause] No map. No parent to follow. Scientists believe they steer using the position of the sun, with an internal clock that corrects for the time of day. Exactly how they find the same few mountains, year after year, is still not fully understood. When they arrive, they gather in their millions. They cover the trunks and branches so densely that the trees seem to turn orange. Branches bend under the weight. They wait out the winter here, mostly still, conserving energy. In spring, they begin the journey north. But they will not finish it. They lay their eggs along the way, and it is their children, and their grandchildren, who carry on. By the time the monarchs reach that Midwest field again, several generations will have lived and died. And at the end of the summer, one of them will open its wings and head south.

[Music: low strings over archive photographs of the East River] In the middle of the nineteenth century, the only way between Manhattan and Brooklyn was by ferry. In winter, ice could choke the East River for days. The engineer John Roebling believed he could span it. His design called for a suspension bridge larger than any that had been built before, hung from steel-wire cables between two great stone towers. He never saw it built. In 1869, while he was surveying the site, his foot was crushed in an accident at a ferry slip. He died of tetanus a few weeks later. The work passed to his son, Washington. To build the towers, crews worked in caissons, enormous sealed chambers sunk deep below the riverbed, filled with compressed air. Many men who worked down there fell ill with what we now call decompression sickness. Washington Roebling was one of them. By the early 1870s, he was too sick to visit the site. He directed the work from a room in Brooklyn Heights, watching the towers rise through a telescope. [pause] The person who carried his instructions to the bridge was his wife, Emily Warren Roebling. She studied the mathematics. She learned the language of cable and stress. For years, she relayed questions and answers between her husband and the engineers on the river, and she became the bridge's link to the outside world. On the twenty-fourth of May, 1883, the Brooklyn Bridge opened. Its main span was the longest of any suspension bridge in the world. Before the official ceremony, Emily Roebling was given the honor of being one of the first to cross it. The bridge is still standing. Every day, people walk across it, and most of them have no idea how many lives it took to make.

[Music: a slow, ticking pulse] In 1926, Ashby Falls, Minnesota, was a town of eleven hundred people and one employer: the Halvorsen woollen mill. Nearly every family had someone on the mill payroll. And every Friday, that payroll passed through the hands of one man. His name was Walter Pell. He had kept the mill's books for nineteen years. He sang in the church choir. He lent money to neighbors and never asked for it back on time. People said you could set your watch by him. [pause] In the spring of that year, the mill's owner died, and his nephew came up from Chicago to take over. He was young. He was suspicious of everything. And he asked to see the books. Walter Pell handed them over without a word. It took the nephew three weeks to find it. Small amounts, never more than a few dollars at a time. Wages for workers who had left years before, still being paid out every Friday. Repairs that were never made. Wool that was ordered, and paid for, and never delivered. Added together, over nineteen years, the numbers did not add up. The money was missing. Nobody knew where it had gone. The nephew called the county sheriff. The sheriff drove out to Walter Pell's house on a Sunday morning. The house was neat. The bed was made. The kettle on the stove was still warm. But Walter Pell was gone. So was his suitcase. And so was the morning train to Saint Paul. He was never found. No one in Ashby Falls ever spoke of him in church again. But for years afterward, every Friday, someone at the mill would count the payroll twice.

[Music: slow, shimmering synth] On the fifth of September, 1977, a rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. On board was a spacecraft about the size of a small car. Its name was Voyager 1. Its first mission was to visit the giant planets. In 1979, it flew past Jupiter, sending back images of storms larger than Earth and of moons no one had ever seen up close. In 1980, it reached Saturn and its rings. Then it kept going. Bolted to its side is a gold-plated record. On it are greetings in dozens of human languages, music from around the world, the sound of rain, of footsteps, of a kiss, and more than a hundred images of life on Earth. It is a message, sent on the slim chance that someone, someday, might find it. [pause] In 1990, at the request of the astronomer Carl Sagan, Voyager turned its camera back toward home. From billions of miles away, Earth appeared as a single, pale blue point of light, smaller than a pixel, caught in a beam of sunlight. Everything humans have ever known happened on that dot. In 2012, Voyager 1 crossed the boundary where the wind from our Sun gives way to the space between the stars. It became the first human-made object to reach interstellar space. Its power is slowly running down. One by one, its instruments are being switched off to save energy. A radio signal from Voyager now takes nearly a whole day to reach us. But it is still out there. Still travelling. Still carrying the sound of rain. Still saying hello.

[Music: deep, slow drones] Two and a half kilometers below the surface of the Pacific, there is no light at all. The water is close to freezing. The pressure would crush a human body. For a long time, scientists assumed the deep sea floor was a near-empty desert. In 1977, a small research submarine called Alvin descended to a ridge on the sea floor near the Galápagos Islands. The scientists on board were geologists. They had come to look for hot springs. They found them. Cracks in the sea floor, where water heated deep inside the Earth came pouring out, carrying dissolved minerals. And all around them, they found life. Clams the size of dinner plates. Fields of mussels. Crabs picking their way across the rocks. And, swaying in the warm water, giant tube worms with bright red plumes, some taller than a person. [pause] It made no sense. Almost every food chain on Earth begins with sunlight. Plants and algae capture its energy, and everything else eats them, or eats something that did. But here, there was no sunlight. The answer turned out to be bacteria. These microbes draw energy from chemicals in the vent water, such as hydrogen sulfide, a compound poisonous to most life. They turn that chemical energy into food. The giant tube worms have no mouth and no gut as adults. Instead, they carry billions of these bacteria inside their bodies, and the bacteria feed them. An entire world, running without the Sun. Since then, hundreds of vent sites have been found across the world's oceans. And some scientists now wonder whether life on Earth may have begun in a place very much like this. In the dark. In the heat. At the bottom of the sea.

[SFX: ferry engine, gulls, wind] The ferry to Skerra leaves once a day, in summer. In winter, it leaves when the weather allows. The crossing takes an hour and twenty minutes. Most of the passengers sleep through it. The ones who don't stand at the rail and watch the mainland shrink to a grey line behind them. Then, out of the haze, the island appears. It is not much to look at, at first. A low hump of green and rock. A white beach. A scatter of houses around the harbor. A single road. [pause] Skerra has a population of eighty-four. There is one shop, one church, a primary school with nine pupils, and a hall that doubles as a cinema on the first Friday of the month. There are no trees to speak of. The wind sees to that. What Skerra does have is light. In summer, it barely gets dark at all. The sky turns a deep, glowing blue around midnight, and the sun is back up before four. And it has the sea. Everything here depends on it. The fishing. The ferry. The weather that decides whether the ferry comes. Morag MacLeod runs the shop. She has lived on Skerra all her life, apart from three years at college in Glasgow, which she describes as long enough. She knows every face that comes off the boat. She knows who is visiting, who is coming home, and who is coming home for good. Every year, a few young people leave for the mainland. Most years, one or two come back. That is what keeps an island alive. At five o'clock, the ferry sounds its horn and pulls away from the pier. Morag watches it go, the way she has watched it go a thousand times. Then she turns the sign on the shop door, and puts the kettle on.

[Music: low whistle, then strings] It was a wet October, and Seán Dolan was ploughing a field his family had farmed for four generations. He was nearly finished for the day when he saw something in the furrow behind him. At first, he thought it was a bit of an old bucket. Bent metal, caked in mud. He picked it up, rubbed it with his thumb, and saw that it was gold. [pause] He did not tell the neighbors. He did not post a photograph. He put it in a biscuit tin, drove into town, and rang the museum. Within a week, archaeologists were walking his field. What he had found was a gold collar, a crescent-shaped ornament worn around the neck. Objects like it are known from the Bronze Age in Ireland, made roughly three thousand years ago or more. It had been hammered from a single sheet of gold and decorated with fine lines along the edge. Over the next few weeks, the team uncovered more. Two bracelets. A small gold disc. All of them lying close together, in what had once been the edge of a bog. They had not been lost. They had been placed there. Across Ireland and Britain, archaeologists have found many Bronze Age objects deliberately buried in bogs, rivers and lakes. Why people did this, no one can say for certain. An offering, perhaps. A gift to the land, or to whatever they believed lived in it. Somebody, three thousand years ago, stood near this spot and let go of something precious. The collar is now in a museum, under glass, in a quiet room. Seán Dolan has been to see it twice. He says it looks smaller there, and cleaner. He still ploughs the field. He says he looks at the ground differently now.

[Music: low drones, a slow drum] In the year 79 AD, Pompeii was a busy Roman town on the Bay of Naples. It had bakeries and bars, temples, bathhouses and a large amphitheater. Behind it rose a green mountain that few people seem to have feared. Its name was Vesuvius. When it erupted, it sent a vast column of ash and pumice high into the sky. Over the hours that followed, the debris rained down on the town, until roofs collapsed under the weight. Then came surges of superheated gas and ash that swept down the mountainside. Pompeii was buried under several meters of volcanic material. And then, for a very long time, it was largely forgotten. [pause] Systematic excavations began in the eighteenth century. As the diggers worked down through the ash, they found a Roman town preserved in astonishing detail. Frescoes still bright on the walls. Carbonized loaves of bread, still in the oven. Graffiti scratched into plaster: jokes, insults, lovers' names, and painted notices urging people to vote for candidates in local elections. In the 1860s, the archaeologist Giuseppe Fiorelli developed a new technique. Excavators had noticed hollow spaces in the hardened ash, left behind where the bodies of victims had decayed. Fiorelli's team poured plaster into these spaces. When the ash was chipped away, the casts showed the shapes of people in their final moments. They are some of the most moving objects in all of archaeology. And they remind us that Pompeii is not only a site. It is a place where people lived, and where many of them died. Excavation continues today. There are still parts of the town no one has seen in nearly two thousand years. Pompeii is still being found.

[Music: broad, building orchestral] For centuries, ships sailing between the Atlantic and the Pacific had to go the long way: all the way around the southern tip of South America. The narrowest point between the two oceans was the Isthmus of Panama. And the dream was simple. Cut through it. Doing it was anything but simple. In the 1880s, a French company began digging a sea-level canal. Landslides, floods and disease, especially yellow fever and malaria, killed thousands of workers. The project collapsed. In 1904, the United States took over. Its engineers changed the plan. Instead of cutting all the way down to sea level, they would lift the ships up and over. They dammed the Chagres River, creating a huge artificial lake, Gatun Lake, in the middle of the route. Then they built sets of locks at each end, to raise ships up to the lake and lower them back down to the sea on the other side. [pause] Here is how a lock works. A ship sails into a long concrete chamber. Huge steel gates close behind it. Then valves open, and water flows in from the chamber ahead, filling it from below. Slowly, the ship rises. When the water is level, the next gates open, and the ship moves on to the next step. Small electric locomotives on tracks beside the lock help keep it centered. There are no pumps. The water simply flows downhill, from the lake, under gravity. Step by step, the ships climb roughly eighty-five feet, cross the lake, and are lowered back down on the far side. The Panama Canal opened in August 1914. In 2016, a new, larger set of locks opened alongside the originals, built for the giant ships of today. Every year, thousands of vessels pass through. And every one of them climbs a staircase made of water.

[Music: waves, a gentle piano line] The cliffs at Lyme Regis, on the south coast of England, are always falling down. Every storm brings more of them crashing onto the beach. And every fall reveals something hidden in the rock. Mary Anning was born here, in 1799, into a poor family. Her father was a cabinetmaker who also collected the curious stone shapes from the cliffs and sold them to visitors. People called them curiosities. Today, we call them fossils. When he died in 1810, he left the family in debt. Mary and her brother Joseph kept searching the beach to help make ends meet. Around 1811, Joseph found a strange skull in the cliff. Over the following months, Mary, then about twelve, helped uncover the rest of the skeleton. It was an ichthyosaur, a marine reptile from the age of the dinosaurs, and one of the first ever to be properly recognized by scientists. [pause] Mary kept going. She spent her life on that dangerous beach, often in winter, when the storms had done their work. In 1823, she found the first complete skeleton of a plesiosaur, a long-necked sea reptile so strange that some experts at first suspected it was a fake. It was real. Scientists came from across Europe to visit her shop, to buy her finds, and to learn from her. She taught herself anatomy and geology and could argue with the experts on their own terms. But she was a woman, and she was not wealthy. She was never allowed to join the Geological Society of London. When her fossils were described in scientific papers, her name was often left out. She died in 1847, at the age of forty-seven. Today, her fossils are among the treasures of the Natural History Museum in London. And her name is no longer left out.