Hello, it's Stephen Fry here.

You may not have heard from me for quite a while in this medium at least,

but now a new podcast series from me tracing revolutions and leaps in discoveries and inventions that have supercharged history

leading up to the big one that is coming soon.

The future has already happened.

The world is on the very edge of utter transformation

and perhaps the best way of understanding what this might mean is not to peer blindly into the dense fog of the unknown,

but to look back and see how we have transformed our world in the past.

The saga of the development of technologies that criss-crossed continents, railroad, telegraph, electricity, telephone, radio, television and internet

is filled with extraordinary stories of human will, coincidence and inspiration.

In a series of podcasts, I will tell some of these stories and show how the world has been changed by a fascinating and astonishing mixture of human decision and vision, greed and need.

The cable of history that connects Galvanne and Valta to Alexander Graham Bell and Edison is the cable that connects Europe to America, New York to San Francisco,

yesterday, today and most excitingly, today, to tomorrow.

By telling the biographies of great inventors and thinkers and the stories of the rise and fall of enormous corporations

and by tracing the transmission of ideas through war and peace, I hope to excite and fascinate all of those whose curiosity might lead them to wonder at how ideas become so great

that they result in reordering the very way human society works, talks, lives, loves, makes and moves.

The world is about to change as fundamentally as it did as a result of the agricultural and then the industrial revolutions.

We sleepwalked into the information age. Let's not stumble as blindly into humanity 4.0.

I'm excited and frightened at one and the same time. Join me, Stephen Fry, for the future has already happened.