The first one ever made, and how badly it worked.
Serial 0001 is about original specimens. Not the invention and not the patent — the actual first unit, the one somebody screwed together on a bench, and what it was genuinely like to use.
The first computer mouse was a wooden block with two wheels and one button. The first webcam existed so that fifteen people in a Cambridge lab could see whether the coffee pot was empty. The first hard drive stored five megabytes, weighed a ton and shipped by cargo plane. The first laptop cost twenty thousand dollars and needed mains power.
Every film goes to the surviving object where there is one: what it weighed, what it cost, who used it and what they said about it at the time.
No inventor hagiography and no "changed the world forever". First versions are almost always clumsy, expensive and barely fit for purpose, and that is the interesting part.
New film every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
