The Engineering That Built the World Season 1, Episode 2: Liberty Rising

Race for the Railroad

Two rival rail companies, led by Charles Crocker of the Central Pacific and Thomas Durant of the Union Pacific, stop at nothing to best each other.

63 min

Road Warriors

Two master roadbuilders spend decades struggling to create a highway system that connects every city and town in America. It will be the greatest public works project in history--more expensive than two thousand Hoover Dams, three times longer than the Great Wall of China, and with enough pavement for three round trips to the moon.

63 min

The Panama Canal

Two powerful nations--France and America--compete to build a path just 50 miles long that will connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Completing it will cost 30 thousand lives, $600 million dollars, and require overcoming every obstacle imaginable--from mudslides to malaria to bankruptcy.

Race to the Underground

After the London Underground becomes the first subway system in the world, visionary engineers in New York and Boston vie to build the first one in America. But being first will mean overcoming unprecedented engineering challenges, deadly accidents, fierce political infighting, and the public's fear of the underground. When the dust settles, the American city will never be the same.

63 min

Cable Across the Sea

A century before the Internet, two brave visionaries, Collin Perry and Cyrus Field, endure failure and heartache while risking everything to connect the United States to the rest of the world with a cable under the ocean.

60 min

Battle of the Bridges

Braving treacherous waters 350 feet deep, gale-force winds and earthquakes, obsessed engineer Joseph Strauss and President Herbert Hoover battle side by side to build the two longest suspension bridges of all time in San Francisco: The Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge.

The Hoover Dam

A hard-driving engineer with a reputation for excellence is on a quest to tame one of the wildest rivers in the United States, bringing much needed water to the arid American West. He'll struggle with a disgruntled workforce, hellish conditions, and nearly insurmountable engineering challenges, but when it's done, the Hoover Dam will be as tall as a 60-story building, requiring more material than the Great Pyramid, and with enough concrete to circle the equator.

62 min