The Greatest Shot in Television: Science Historian James Burke Had One Chance to Nail This Scene … and Nailed It

The 80-sec­ond clip above cap­tures a rock­et launch, some­thing of which we’ve all seen footage at one time or anoth­er. What makes its view­ers call it “the great­est shot in tele­vi­sion” still today, 45 years after it first aired, may take more than one view­ing to notice. In it, sci­ence his­to­ri­an James Burke speaks about how “cer­tain gas­es ignite, and that the ther­mos flask per­mits you to store vast quan­ti­ties of those gas­es safe­ly, in their frozen liq­uid form, until you want to ignite them.” Use a suf­fi­cient­ly large flask filled with hydro­gen and oxy­gen, design it to mix the gas­es and set light to them, and “you get that” — that is, you get the rock­et that launch­es behind Burke just as soon as he points to it.

One can only admire Burke’s com­po­sure in dis­cussing such tech­ni­cal mat­ters in a shot that had to be per­fect­ly timed on the first and only take. What you would­n’t know unless you saw it in con­text is that it also comes as the final, cul­mi­nat­ing moment of a 50-minute explana­to­ry jour­ney that begins with cred­it cards, then makes its way through the inven­tion of every­thing from a knight’s armor to canned food to air con­di­tion­ing to the Sat­urn V rock­et, which put man on the moon.

For­mal­ly speak­ing, this was a typ­i­cal episode of Con­nec­tions, Burke’s 1978 tele­vi­sion series that traces the most impor­tant and sur­pris­ing moves in the evo­lu­tion of sci­ence and tech­nol­o­gy through­out human his­to­ry.

Though not as wide­ly remem­bered as Carl Sagan’s slight­ly lat­er Cos­mos, Con­nec­tions bears repeat view­ing here in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, not least for the intel­lec­tu­al and visu­al brava­do typ­i­fied by this “great­est shot in tele­vi­sion,” now viewed near­ly 18 mil­lion times on Youtube. Watch it enough times your­self, and you’ll notice that it also pulls off some minor sleight of hand by hav­ing Burke walk from a non-time-sen­si­tive shot into anoth­er with the already-framed rock­et ready for liftoff. But that hard­ly lessens the feel­ing of achieve­ment when the launch comes off. “Des­ti­na­tion: the moon, or Moscow,” says Burke, “the plan­ets, or Peking” — a clos­ing line that sound­ed con­sid­er­ably more dat­ed a few years ago than it does today.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Endeavour’s Launch Viewed from Boost­er Cam­eras

The 100 Most Mem­o­rable Shots in Cin­e­ma Over the Past 100 Years

The Most Beau­ti­ful Shots in Cin­e­ma His­to­ry: Scenes from 100+ Films

125 Great Sci­ence Videos: From Astron­o­my to Physics & Psy­chol­o­gy

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.