WHAT IT WAS MADE FOR
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WHAT IT WAS MADE FOR Book 1
4 parts · 15 h 22 min
Hartford, Paterson, the Texas border and London, 1814 to 1862. Samuel Colt did not invent the revolving pistol. He patented a workable one at twenty-one, lost the company built on it within six years, and spent the next decade selling laughing gas, underwater mines and himself.
WHAT IT WAS MADE FOR Book 2
4 parts · 14 h 47 min
Stockholm, St. Petersburg, Hamburg, Paris and San Remo, 1833 to 1901. Alfred Nobel takes a liquid that Ascanio Sobrero had made in 1847 and warned the world against, and builds around it the first genuinely international manufacturing company.
WHAT IT WAS MADE FOR Book 3
4 parts · 15 h 35 min
Deutsch-Wagram, Austria, 1980. A fifty-one-year-old manufacturer of curtain rods, field knives and entrenching tools hears that the Austrian army wants a new service pistol, and enters a competition he has no business entering: he has never designed a firearm and does not shoot.
WHAT IT WAS MADE FOR Book 4
4 parts · 15 h 27 min
Vannevar Bush built no weapon. He built the instrument that made weapons: a contract between the United States government and a university laboratory, signed at a desk in Washington, that left the scientist where he already was and paid for what he already owned.
WHAT IT WAS MADE FOR Book 5
4 parts · 15 h 9 min
New York, Tuxedo Park and Cambridge, 1887 to 1975. Alfred Lee Loomis made a fortune underwriting electric utilities in the 1920s, took it out in cash before the crash, and spent the next decade running a private physics laboratory in a stone house above a gated village where he answered to nobody.
WHAT IT WAS MADE FOR Book 6
4 parts · 17 h 45 min
An Army engineer who had just finished the Pentagon and a theoretical physicist with no administrative experience and a file full of communist friends were put together in September 1942 and told to build a weapon nobody had built.