Connections is a fantastic series, it's a lot of fun and I loved it as a child.

My concerns about it is that too many people seem to imagine that because historically an outcome had a cause, that therefore that cause must have been necessary, and that therefore the outcome could never have happened without that specific cause. If they Fluyt, a type of Dutch cargo ship had not been invented, would we really have never developed plastics? So the series provides a very valuable insight into historical processes, but some people seem to take that to implausible extremes. A case in point is the many examples of technologies being independently developed by different people under very different circumstances.

Not so much necessary as it was a driving force. A bit like evolution, whatever caused our ancestors to develop eyes wasn't s necessary precursor,it was just something that was reacted too. There resulting solution being good enough to survive. There were many implementations of bicycles that never made it, those branches of development died off. However unlike evolution we can pick those up again and improve on them if we thought we could produce a better bicycle

Probably worth noting a subtle link at the bottom of wiki page: "Full series on the Internet Archive":

https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke/

Pretty much anything by James Burke, either video or print.

Richard Hammond's (from Top Gear fame) Engineering Connection is a continuation of the original Connections. We found ourselves watching it on the weekends during breakfast as a gentle jumpstart to daily thinking. It's fantastic and highly recommended.