Powers of Ten (1977) takes you on an adventure in magnitudes. Starting at a picnic by the lakeside in Chicago, this famous film transports you to the outer edges of the universe. Every ten seconds you view the starting point from ten times farther out until our own galaxy is visible only as a speck of light among many others.
Returning to Earth with breathtaking speed, the film moves inward—into the hand of the sleeping picnicker—with ten times more magnification every ten seconds. The journey ends inside a proton of a carbon atom within a DNA molecule in a white blood cell.
In 1998, Powers of Ten (1977) was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. The short film was written and directed by Charles and Ray Eames.
