In terms of the investigation into the Glasgow bombings back in 1883, for Chris Hester, a post-blast investigator and forensic consultant who investigated the Manchester Arena bombings, in many ways, little has changed since Majendi wrote the report we've based this series on.

The process that he went through back then actually is really no different to the process that they'd go through today.

So I would like to think that at Manchester... could have been stood on my shoulder and nodding along as I'm doing things going, yeah, I know exactly what you're doing here.

I know exactly what you're doing here.

And this is no different to what I would do.

And I know that sounds really retrograde in that we're saying that in the 2020s, we're still doing bomb scene investigation the same way as they did in 1880.

But I think that just goes to exemplify how how advanced Magendie was with his processes.

The horror, though, is that if he hadn't been as well-minded a person, his personality and his fame and the way in which courts and judges received him was such that he could have carried cases purely because he said something was the case.

Contemporary investigators like Chris Hester would use a number of routes in an attempt to make those connections.

In the world that we live in today, everything's commercial.

So we'd primarily be looking at serial numbers.

We'd be looking at information that might be printed or etched or stamped into different components so that we can identify the source of those.

If we can go back to the source of where that came from.

So, for example, a switch.

So a switch, any switch that you buy today will have a plethora of information on it.

And those are three chemicals that are listed in this Act.

I asked Chris why he'd be thinking now if he was stepping back in time to 1883.

Knowledge around bias is really important.

And it's only through further academic study and my master's degree where I really understood that.

And that was fundamental in my understanding of the way that I investigated bomb scenes.

So my approach to a scene.

So it's interesting.

Let's say Maginda's gone to scene one.

The Bomb Data Centre is a special facility based inside the counter-terrorism unit at New Scotland Yard, with the express aim of collecting and analysing evidence from explosive incidents.

Chris Hester was a bomb scene investigator in counterterrorism policing for 11 years, and is now a post-blast investigator and forensic consultant.

And the key as a bomb scene investigator is to recover identifiable parts so that you can do two things.

So we look at doing something called a, a technical categorization of the device.

So how is the device actually manufactured? How is it made? What are the individual components that go into it? And we're also looking at the tactical categorization, which is how that device is built to target that particular incident.

A, an example of that would be a device with a, with ball bearings in it.

You wouldn't expect to try and take on a tank with a device with ball bearings in it.

That's an anti-personnel device that you would look to try and kill as many people as possible.

For Chris Hester, commonalities in device components and methodology, those silent witnesses the article describes, can provide a kind of signature as to who might have made the device.

For his part, Chris is particularly impressed with Majendi's approach.

I knew the level of detail that he went into, into his reporting, and the fact that his scene plans were just meticulous to the nth degree.

So having never seen the Glasgow report, I didn't expect anything less, I guess, from him.

But I just loved the level of details.

When he was describing the gas monitor, It was down to the fact that he was describing the dimensions of the plates and the thickness and the beauty of that is, and this is one of the things that goes through to today, is that I could go and replicate that right now.

I could take those drawings to a steel fabricator and I could get them to manufacture and All of those fundamental bits to exactly the same dimensions that he had, you know, we're talking about 140 years later.

That's the level of detail that was in there that we could replicate that today.

Stoichiometry.