From Łódź to London
Jacob Bronowski was born on January 18, 1908, in Łódź, then part of the Russian Empire and today in Poland, into a Polish Jewish family of haberdashery traders. When the First World War broke out the family moved to Germany, and in 1920 they settled in London, where his parents had married in his grandfather's house in 1907. Bronowski later said that when he arrived in England at the age of 12 he knew only two words of English. His father traveled often to England on business, which is how the family came to settle there.
He learned fast. He won a place at the Central Foundation Boys' School in London and then a scholarship to Jesus College, Cambridge, to study mathematics. In 1930 he graduated as Senior Wrangler, the top mathematics student of his year. He earned a PhD in algebraic geometry in 1935.
A mathematician who loved poetry
Bronowski never accepted that science and the arts belonged to separate worlds. At Cambridge he co-edited, with the poet and critic William Empson, the literary magazine Experiment. He wrote poetry, published a book on the poet William Blake, and was a strong enough chess player to become Hull champion in 1935 and Yorkshire champion in 1936. He composed chess problems for decades.
From 1934 to 1942 he taught mathematics at University College, Hull. Later he would write that one of the most destructive modern prejudices was the belief that art and science are different and incompatible interests. Much of his life's work was an effort to undo that prejudice. He lived in Hull and later in Cottingham, where a blue plaque now marks his home, and during the early war years he volunteered as an air raid warden in the city.
War, and what he saw in Japan
During the Second World War Bronowski worked in operational research for the Ministry of Home Security, using mathematics to model the effects of bombing raids. MI5 had placed him under watch because of his left-wing views, though he was never a member of the Communist Party, and its suspicion may have limited his career for years.
At the end of the war he joined a British scientific mission to Japan to document the effects of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. With W. N. Thomas he wrote the mission's report, which was used in planning British civil defense. The experience changed him. He turned away from military research and toward the question of what science means for human values, and a BBC broadcast about what he had seen in Japan began his career as a broadcaster.
Science and human values
After the war Bronowski headed the projects division of UNESCO, the United Nations agency for education, science and culture. From 1950 to 1963 he worked for Britain's National Coal Board, eventually as director of research. In 1950 he was asked to use statistics on the teeth of the Taung Child, a famous early human fossil, to help show that it was not an ape, work that drew him toward human evolution.
His books for general readers, including The Common Sense of Science (1951) and Science and Human Values (1956), argued that science is not a cold machine but a deeply human activity that depends on honesty, tolerance and the willingness to be corrected. British audiences came to know him in the late 1950s on the BBC panel program The Brains Trust. In 1964 he moved to California as a fellow and associate director of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, founded by Jonas Salk, and in 1967 he gave the Silliman Lectures at Yale on imagination and knowledge.
He wrote widely for different audiences. The Western Intellectual Tradition (1960), written with the historian Bruce Mazlish, traced European thought from Leonardo to Hegel. Biography of an Atom (1963), with Millicent Selsam, explained atomic physics for young readers. The Identity of Man (1965) and Nature and Knowledge (1969) explored what it means to be a thinking creature in a scientific age, and his Yale lectures were published after his death as The Origins of Knowledge and Imagination (1978), still in print.
The Ascent of Man
In the early 1970s David Attenborough, then running BBC Television, commissioned Bronowski to write and present a series on the history of science, 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. Its title echoed Darwin's The Descent of Man.
Bronowski told the story thematically: the evolution of the human hand and brain, farming, tools and architecture, fire and metals, mathematics, Galileo and Newton, the Industrial Revolution, Darwin, the atom, and genetics. He filmed in places as different as the Great Rift Valley, Easter Island, Cambridge and Auschwitz, and he spoke to camera in long, unscripted-seeming monologues that made complex ideas feel like conversation. The BBC calls the series one of the landmarks of documentary television. The scripts were published as a best-selling book, reissued in 2011 with a foreword by Richard Dawkins.
The 13 episodes ran from Lower than the Angels, on human evolution, through The Harvest of the Seasons, The Grain in the Stone, The Hidden Structure, Music of the Spheres, The Starry Messenger, The Majestic Clockwork, The Drive for Power, The Ladder of Creation, World within World, Knowledge or Certainty and Generation upon Generation, to The Long Childhood, his closing reflection on why humans learn for so long and what we owe the next generation. Co-produced with Time-Life Films and shot on 16 mm film, with music by Dudley Simpson and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the series reached American audiences from January 1975, and was digitally remastered for DVD in 2007.
Knowledge or certainty
The most remembered moment of the series comes in its eleventh episode, Knowledge or Certainty. Standing at Auschwitz, where many members of his own family had been murdered, Bronowski waded into a pond into which the ashes of victims had been flushed. He told viewers that it is false to say science turns people into numbers: that was done at Auschwitz, he said, not by science but by arrogance, dogma and ignorance, by people who believed they had absolute knowledge with no test in reality.
The same episode opens with a blind woman describing by touch the face of an elderly Polish man, Stefan Borgrajewicz, while the camera examines his face in X-rays, heat images and paintings, as a lesson in the limits of every kind of knowledge. Only at the end does the viewer learn that the lines in his face were made by Auschwitz, where he had been a prisoner.
The scene became one of the most famous in British television. The interviewer Michael Parkinson, who spoke with Bronowski soon afterward, later said that if he could save one interview from the thousands he had done, it would be that one. The episode made Bronowski's central argument unforgettable: that the habits of science, doubt, testing and tolerance, are also the best defense of human dignity.
Jewish background
Bronowski was born into a Polish Jewish family in Łódź. Many of his relatives who remained in Poland were killed in the Holocaust, and he made that loss part of his life's work when he stood at Auschwitz in The Ascent of Man. Sources including Wikipedia and The Hull Story describe his Polish Jewish background and the family members who died at Auschwitz. He was not known for religious practice; his commitment was to a humanist view of science.
Criticism and reassessment
Bronowski's life has been studied critically as well as celebrated. In 2013 the historian Ralph Desmarais argued that in his early broadcasts on atomic energy Bronowski played down the significance of the bomb and was vague about Britain's own weapons program. Others have pointed out that his wartime work involved modeling the effects of bombing on cities. His 2019 biographer, Timothy Sandefur, took a more admiring view, calling him a serious philosopher who was involved in nearly every major intellectual undertaking of the 20th century and who made probably the finest documentary ever filmed. Both views agree on the reach and seriousness of The Ascent of Man.
Death and legacy
Bronowski died of a heart attack in East Hampton, New York, on August 22, 1974, a year after The Ascent of Man was first broadcast. He was 66. He was survived by his wife, Rita Coblentz, and their four daughters, one of whom became the historian Lisa Jardine.
His influence on how science reaches the public has been enormous. Two of the series' producers, Adrian Malone and David Kennard, went on to make Carl Sagan's Cosmos, and the model of a single presenter carrying viewers through a big idea across the world shaped science television for decades. In 2000 industry professionals placed The Ascent of Man 65th among the 100 greatest British television programs, and the BBC broadcast it again for its 50th anniversary in 2023. Since 2015 the British Science Association has awarded the Jacob Bronowski Award Lecture for work that joins the arts and sciences. Millions of people first understood science as a human story through his voice. Even before the series, he was famous enough that in 1970 a Monty Python sketch had John Cleese protest that he was not Doctor Bronowski.
Sources & further reading
The Ascent of Man, History of the BBC · Jacob Bronowski: How MI5 failed to thwart an intellectual genius, The Hull Story · In pursuit of Jacob Bronowski, Łódź In Your Pocket · Jacob Bronowski, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.