- Person
- Jacob Bronowski
- Lived
- 1908–1974
- Field
- Mathematics, science for the public
- From
- Polish-British
The story
Jacob Bronowski was born to a Polish Jewish family in Łódź in 1908 and arrived in England at 12 knowing almost no English. He became the top mathematics student of his year at Cambridge, wrote poetry and books on William Blake, and after seeing the ruins of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 devoted much of his life to the question of what science means for human values.
In the early 1970s David Attenborough, then running BBC Television, commissioned him to write and present a series on the history of science. It was meant as a companion to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, which had told the story of art. The Ascent of Man, in 13 episodes, began on BBC2 on May 5, 1973, and reached American viewers from January 1975.
Bronowski told the story by themes rather than dates: the evolution of the human hand and brain, the first farms, tools and buildings, fire and metals, numbers, Galileo and Newton, the Industrial Revolution, Darwin, the atom and genetics. He filmed in the Great Rift Valley, Easter Island, Cambridge and many other places, speaking to the camera in long, flowing monologues. The BBC remembers his gift for explaining complex ideas, and he described the series as being about the making of creation, people making mistakes and then seeing the right answers.
Its most famous scene was filmed at Auschwitz, where many of his own relatives had been murdered. Standing in a pond into which the ashes of victims were flushed, he said it was not science that had turned people into numbers there, but arrogance, dogma and ignorance. The interviewer Michael Parkinson later said that, of thousands of interviews, the one he would save was with Bronowski.
The scripts became a best-selling book, reissued in 2011 with a foreword by Richard Dawkins. Two of the producers went on to make Carl Sagan's Cosmos, carrying Bronowski's model, one thoughtful presenter guiding viewers through a great idea around the world, into science broadcasting for decades. The series was broadcast again for its 50th anniversary in 2023.
Why it matters
The Ascent of Man still introduces viewers and readers to science as a creative human story, and its approach shaped popular science television around the world.
About Jacob Bronowski
Polish-born mathematician who wrote and presented The Ascent of Man, the landmark 1973 BBC series that told the story of science as a human adventure for millions of viewers.
Sources
- The Ascent of Man History of the BBC
- The Ascent of Man Wikipedia
- Jacob Bronowski Wikipedia
- Jacob Bronowski: How MI5 failed to thwart an intellectual genius The Hull Story
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