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Spanish football was not something the Spanish began. At the close of the nineteenth century, British labourers working in copper mines and telegraph companies brought the ball with them; before long a Swiss man founded Barcelona and a band of students founded Madrid. The pride of Catalonia and the prestige of the capital — from the birth of two contrasting giants, the hundred-year story of the road to La Roja begins.

The Olympics were never, in the beginning, a sporting event. The ancient Olympic Games, which began in 776 BCE, were a religious festival dedicated to Zeus, the supreme god, at which a hundred oxen were sacrificed. To run, to throw, was to pray. This is a journey back through the sacred precinct of ancient Greece, in search of the memory of the 'sacred body' that modern sport has forgotten.

For more than a thousand years after the first Games, traditionally dated to 776 BC, a festival of contests dedicated to the gods endured at Olympia in Greece. The prize was honor — yet beneath it stirred the prestige of cities and the murmur of wagers. Episode 1 traces the starting point of the long story of money and the Games back to that ancient festival.

In the early Meiji era, an American teacher introduced a foreign ball game to a handful of students, and over half a century it transformed into this country's national sport. The fervor of students, a way of baseball bound up with bushido, and the birth of professional baseball in 1936. This is the story of how it began, tracing why the Japanese became so captivated by the game.

Founded in 1965, the Japan Soccer League was an amateur national competition sustained by company employees. Empty stands, articles buried in the corners of newspapers, and a creeping fear of being left behind by the rest of the world. Eventually, a handful of men began to speak of a dream: to root professional football in this country. This is the story of the eve of the J.League's birth.

The story of the sporting brands that split the world began in a laundry room in a small German town. Two cobbler brothers, Rudolf and Adi, joined forces, and at the 1936 Berlin Olympics their shoes reached the summit of the world. We quietly trace where it all started.

From the closing days of the shogunate into the Meiji era, a single ball carried across the ocean gradually grew into a national undertaking. How did a pastime first kicked about in the foreign settlements of port towns lead to the birth of an association in 1921 and the beginnings of the Emperor's Cup? The story of a century of Japanese football sets out from this quiet origin.

A ball once kicked around by British factory workers somehow came to carry the weight of a nation's honour. In 1930, the first World Cup was born in the small country of Uruguay, as it celebrated a century of independence. Behind the fervour lay one man's vision — and the moment where nation and sport first became one.

The internet was built for nuclear war — this widely believed story is only half true. A distributed network that could survive a nuclear strike, and the wish of researchers, far apart, to share their expensive machines. In 1969, where those two motives crossed, the first message sent from UCLA to Stanford broke off after just two letters. This is where every origin begins.

Giving a machine a mind — that audacious dream began with one mathematician's question. In 1956, at a summer workshop, the term 'artificial intelligence' was born. But after the euphoria came two long winters.

Deception has been with humanity since before writing was invented. From the oracle of Delphi, the sacred site of ancient Greece, to the tale of a false prophet and the serpent-god Glycon in Roman times, this first chapter traces the workings of the mind at the root of fraud ― why people come to believe.

On the day of defeat, Japan's skies were closed off by GHQ. For seven years, every aircraft was grounded and engineers lost their wings. With the restoration of sovereignty, Japan Airlines rose into the sky again in 1951. Episode 1 traces the road to the birth of a national flag carrier.

At the close of the 19th century, people dreamed of a carriage that ran without a horse. Germany's Karl Benz patented a three-wheeled gasoline automobile, while Gottlieb Daimler and Maybach built a high-speed engine. From two cars born in the same year, each unknown to the other, the story of the automobile quietly begins. Episode 1 of the series.

In the 19th century, a single craftsman set out on foot for Paris. In an age when steamships and railways transformed travel, Louis Vuitton flattened the rounded lid of the trunk and created luggage that could be stacked. From a long fight against imitators came the Damier and the Monogram. Episode 1 traces the starting point of how a bag came to carry a story.

In the Age of Exploration, the wealth beyond the sea promised enormous profit and the danger of sinking along with the ship. In 1602, the people of the Netherlands devised a way to share that danger among many hands. The Dutch East India Company, regarded as the world's first joint-stock company, and the Amsterdam Stock Exchange. Episode 1 traces the quiet revolution of investment and risk-sharing.

From the medieval tower clock to the invention of the escapement, from the mainspring that gave birth to portable timepieces, to the arrival of the pocket watch. Episode 1 of a serialized history that traces, through the historical record, humanity's desire to 'own' time.

The gamblers who gathered at early-modern gaming dens, the tekiya stallkeepers who set up at festival fairs. Born at the margins of the modern state, cloaking themselves in a self-image of chivalry, these groups lived off the gambling and entertainment trades. What were they really? Episode 1 traces the origins of the later yakuza, viewed coolly through the lens of institutions and money.

In the 19th century, as the new medium of the newspaper spread, a curious profession arose between the shop and the printed page: the 'agent.' Volney Palmer in the United States, the firm of Ayer that devised the open contract, and Japan's own road that began with the Edo-era hikifuda handbill. Episode 1 traces the origins of advertising and the advertising agency.

In an age when money did not yet exist, how did people exchange things? The inconvenience of barter, primitive currencies such as shells, livestock, and cloth, and the two theories of money's origin — barter and debt. The first of ten episodes tracing the beginnings of 'credit,' the true essence of money.

Why was humankind able to wield a 'power' that no other animal could grasp? From the discovery of fire to firewood and charcoal, the muscle of people and beasts, and on to waterwheels and windmills. Episode 1 of A World History of Energy traces how pre-modern societies obtained power and the limits that bound them.

A metal that does not rust, does not decay, and simply keeps on shining. The people of ancient Egypt called it the flesh of the gods and entrusted to it the eternity of their kings. Why does the golden mask of Tutankhamun still draw us in? This first episode traces gold's permanence and humanity's earliest thirst.

Long before it powered wars or industry, the black mud that seeped from the ground waterproofed arks, bound temples, and preserved mummies. What did humanity use it for, on the eve of oil becoming the lifeblood of the modern world?

In the 18th century, before the Industrial Revolution began, Asia accounted for more than half of the world economy. Qing China, Mughal India, and a Southeast Asia that thrived on trade. Episode 1 traces, through historical fact, an age of prosperity in which tea, silk, cotton, and vast amounts of silver changed hands.

In the first half of the 20th century, two world wars reduced Europe to ashes. Why could neighboring nations not stop slaughtering one another? Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-Europa vision, Briand's proposal for a European federation, and Churchill's United States of Europe speech. Episode 1 traces how a dream of never going to war again first took root.

The story of Amaterasu Omikami as told in the Kojiki and Nihon Shoki, the tradition of the heavenly descent, and the tale of the first emperor, Jimmu. Episode 1 traces, with respect and neutrality, the boundary between the myths surrounding the origins of the imperial house and the facts that history can verify.

In the winter of 1938, a uranium atom split in two in a Berlin laboratory. What Hahn and Strassmann observed, and what the exiled Meitner and Frisch understood, was the true nature of the force that makes stars shine. Following Einstein's letter, E=mc², and the premonitions the scientists felt, this is the opening of the nuclear century.

Why did people try to draw a line between faith and the state? From the fusion of religion and rule in antiquity, through the clashes of clerical and royal power and the bloody wars of the Reformation, to the birth of the separation of church and state and freedom of belief. Episode 1 traces two thousand years of European struggle.

Rome arrived and departed; across the sea came the Anglo-Saxons, and later the Vikings. The island's map, redrawn again and again, was finally bound into a single kingdom by the Norman Conquest of 1066. Episode 1 traces the thousand years it took for the country called England to come into being.

Facing the Western powers bearing down on it in the late Edo period, Japan was gripped by an intense sense of crisis. Starting from the humiliation of the unequal treaties, it pressed forward into modernization under the banner of a rich nation and a strong army. This piece reads how, behind that light, a mindset that prioritized armaments and an anxiety to catch up before being caught quietly prepared the structures that would lead to later wars.

At the close of the 19th century, Joseon Korea slept quietly under the suzerainty of Qing China, only to be shaken by the approach of Western powers and its neighbor Japan. Why did the peninsula known as the Hermit Kingdom shut its own gates, and why was it forced at last to open them? Episode 1 traces the Ganghwa Island incident and the structures of the eve of opening, grounded in the historical record.

At the end of the 19th century, two great powers on either side of the Pacific met in earnest for the first time. The same nation that demanded China open its door also shut its own door to Chinese immigrants. This is the origin of an American view of China where hope and prejudice lived side by side.

The land Europeans believed they had 'discovered' was already home to countless peoples. The contact that followed Columbus, the Mayflower settlers, the making of the Thirteen Colonies — a story of hope, and the sacrifice of Native peoples that unfolded behind it. We trace both the light and the shadow on the eve of a nation's birth.

From roughly 16,000 years ago to about 2,400 years ago, the Japanese archipelago is said to have known an age that lasted more than ten thousand years without major wars or the rise and fall of dynasties. By the standards of world history, it is a strangely long stability. That age is 'Jomon.' Without over-idealizing it, this first episode traces the riddle of those ten millennia, beginning with its outline and dates.

In 1917, on a small screen in Asakusa, pictures drawn by hand one frame at a time began to move. From the three pioneers Oten Shimokawa, Seitaro Kitayama, and Junichi Kouchi, to Kenzo Masaoka's wartime masterpiece — the story of a hundred years of Japanese animation begins here.

At the close of the nineteenth century, humankind gained the power to give motion to still images. Edison's peep-box Kinetoscope, and then, in 1895, the Lumière brothers' Cinématographe, which cast light onto a white cloth in a darkened room. Episode 1 traces the dawn of a new age called cinema, an age that began with a single machine.

A single grain of rice crossed the sea from the continent and transformed the tables of the archipelago. Rice and soup, the dashi of kelp and bonito, the Buddhist taboo against eating meat and the cuisine of monastic devotion. This first episode quietly traces how the foundations of Japanese food took shape from antiquity into the medieval age, following the historical record.

The word 'idol,' which we now use so casually, has a history of crossing oceans. In the 1960s, a single French film carried the word idole into Japan, and during the high-growth era a trio of young stars appeared like comets. Neither mere singers nor movie stars, a new kind of icon was being born. This is Episode 1.

In the final years of the shogunate, what came ashore with the Black Ships was not only the footfall of soldiers but the sound of Western music played on unfamiliar instruments. Young men of Satsuma learned the bugle, and Izawa Shuji brought school songs into the classroom. This first episode traces how East met West and Japan's modern music drew its first breath.