In the beginning of the Stuart Period a curious new device appeared, it looks like a church bell but in fact it's an exercise machine.

This machine was one of many trendy new ideas that enhanced the life style of the Stuarts.

It was the beginning of designer living.Hart-Davis travels around Britain to introduce the idea and inventions of the Stuart Period in architecture and life-style.

Before Stuart times the man who really ruled the scientific roost was the Greek philosopher Aristotle, even if he had been dead for 2000 years.

In a Dutch spectacle shop a chap called Zacharias Jantzen looked through two lenses at once and got the shock of his life, he was seeing the world in super-close-up.