Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, was a man fascinated by scientific invention and progress.

One of the greatest snags in studying this world lies in the fact that we're on it.

Observers can't see it from the outside,

and it has always been a problem to find out just what is going on outside.

As a naval officer and then as husband to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland,

he used his prodigious energy and sense of inquiry to make an impact on whatever he turned his hand to.

What I feel very strongly about is that mankind by its activities should not put whole species

at risk of total extinction. You can not down Westminster Abbey and rebuild it.

But if you extinguish a dodo, you simply cannot bring it back. It's gone forever.

And he had a sustaining belief in the importance of education, education beyond the purely academic,

from craft skills and technology to sport and play.

There's a lot to be said for individual sports.

They give you a great kick if you win, and that's one thing.

The important thing about team games is that it's really a part of social education.

And it's a sort of education education you don't get anywhere else

because it's fun you learn to cooperate you learn to sublimate your personality into

the team you have to learn to win and to lose and I think it's very good for people and they learn how to get on in society in the sense very easily through games which is very difficult to learn in any other way.

Over the next hour we'll be hearing the story of this man who married a queen and went on to become the longest

serving consort to a monarch in British history. It's a story of achievement, of loyalty, and

of enthusiasm and drive for a huge range of projects and causes.

It was a life that began a century ago on a Greek island.

Philippos Andreyu of Schleswig Holstein-Sonderberg-Luxburg, Prince of Greece and Denmark was born on the 10th of June, 1921. It would have taken a fortune teller of extraordinary powers to have

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