July 2014 archive

Jul 29 2014

Book review: The Shock of the Old by David Edgerton

shock_of_the_oldThe Shock of the Old by David Edgerton is a history of technology in the 20th century.

A central motivation of the book is that, according to the author, other histories of technology are wrong in that they focus overly on the dates and places of invention and pay little attention to the subsequent dissemination and use of technologies.

The book is divided thematically covering significance, time, production, maintenance, nations, war, killing and invention. Significance reports on the quantitative, economic significance of a technology, something on which there is surprisingly little data.

A recurring theme is the persistence of things we might consider to have been replaced by new technology, the horse, for example. It’s perhaps not surprising that a huge number of horses were used during the First World War but the German’s, the masters of the mechanised blitzkrieg, used 625,000 horses in 1941 when they invaded the Soviet Union. This isn’t the end of the story of animal power: Cuba, as a result of sanctions and the fall of the Soviet Union was using nearly 400,000 oxen by the end of the 1990s.

The same goes for battleships and military aircraft. When Britain and Argentina fought over the Falkland Islands in 1982, the Belgrano, originally commissioned into the US Navy in 1939 was sunk by 21-inch MK8 torpedoes originally designed in 1927! The Falklands airstrips were bombed from Britain by Vulcan bombers refuelled by Victor in-flight tankers, originally built in the 1950s. The reason for this is that the persistent technology actually does it’s job pretty well, the cost of replacing it for marginal benefit is too high and maintenance and repair means that to a degree these technological artefacts have been almost entirely rebuilt.

The time chapter expands on the idea that the introduction of technologies to different places is not simply a case of timeshifting, it depends on the local context. We find, for example, that horse draw carts are constructed from the parts of cars. And that corrugated iron and asbestos-cement are the material of choice for construction in the new slums of the developing world. Edgerton refers to these as ‘creole’ technologies – old technologies which have been repurposed into a new life.

In terms of technology and economic growth, it has really been mass production which has lead directly and obviously to economic growth particularly in the 30 years after the Second World War, known as the ‘long boom’. And whilst there was a boom in new technologies, all around the world the oldest technology – agriculture was also experiencing a boom in productivity – overshadowed by the new things.

As usual with such a book I picked up some useful facts to deploy at the dinner table:

  • The German V-2 rocket killed more people in its production than it did in its use.
  • The inventor of the Aga cooking range was a Nobel prize winning physicist.

For a scientist this book makes for an uncomfortable read in places since we come to the topic with some preconceived ideas and position, which are not necessarily grounded in the best of historical methods. For instance, Edgerton highlights that R&D spend just doesn’t correlate with economic growth. And that to a large degree the nation of invention is not the nation which benefits from an invention.

Perhaps most damning in the eyes of scientists, their bête noire, Simon Jenkins has supplied a cover quote:

The Shock of the Old is a book I can use. I can take it in two hands and bash it over the heads of every techno-nerd, computer geek and neophiliac futurologist I meet!

It’s a mistake to think of all scientists and computer geeks as being neophiliac. One of my colleagues works using an IBM Model M keyboard which we recently established was older than our intern, he also prefers the VIM editor – based on technology born in the 1970s. In the laboratory, the favoured computer language for scientific computation is still often FORTRAN, invented in the 1950s.

Thinking back over the other books I’ve read on the history of technology, for example A Computer Called LEO, Fire & Steam, The Subterranean Railway, Empire of the Clouds, The Idea Factory and The Backroom Boys. It is true to say they have very much focussed on single technologies or places but to my mind they have generally been pragmatic about the impact on society of their chosen subject. The authors have each had a definite passion for their topic leading to regret for what might have been: a thriving British aircraft industry, computer industry and so forth. But they don’t seem to provide the litany of dates and inventions of which Edgerton accuses them.

Despite this The Shock of the Old is readable, the author knows his field and provides a different viewpoint on the history of technology, more overarching, not so besotted. I’ll certainly be looking out for more of his books.

Jul 20 2014

Book review: Half a wife by Gaby Hinsliff

half_a_wifeHalf a Wife: The Working Family’s Guide to Getting a Life Back by Gaby Hinsliff, is a proposal as to how families can live their lives.

The title sacrifices clarity for a catchy headline. The “half a wife” is a reference to the fraction of her time Hinsliff wanted to be a full-time mother, or rather the collective target that she, and her husband would aim to achieve. Mrs SomeBeans and I have accidently hit this target – I work full time, Mrs SomeBeans works 2.5 days per week.

As a society we’ve moved away from the traditional family of a full-time employed (male) breadwinner and a full-time (female) housewife. This model used to be enforced firmly. In the early 1970s, when she fell pregnant with me, there was no question my mother would leave her job and wouldn’t be coming back. In fact when my brother and I were small, a local garage refused to give her a job application form because she had children. My mothers experience was not unusual. But by 1983 two thirds of mothers stayed at home to bring up their children, by 2010 only one third were doing so.

This shift is a result of a societal change with a macroeconomic benefit – more workers make a more productive economy. It has been facilitated and encouraged by government policy.

Half a wife addresses how we might cope with this change. It is written from the point of view of someone getting a “London premium” by moving out of London, whose reduced income just goes over the line into the upper rate of tax and who seems pretty talented. Things not available to all of us.

The book is based around interviews with a range of parents, focussed on how people organise their family life. This is rather useful since I suspect we are largely unaware of other people’s domestic arrangements, what might be possible. At times I felt Hinsliff must have been spying on us, so many things rang so true – the tensions over household chores, the boredom and frustrations of child rearing, the added stress of travelling for work with a child at home. I’d have welcomed an appendix collecting each of these stories, since as it stands they are scattered in fragments through the book.

I worked 4 days a week for a while, when Mrs SomeBeans was still on maternity leave. This was a cosy arrangement but when she returned to work and I looked after Thomas by myself for one day a week – I got bored. I feel ashamed to say it but it seems from Hinsliff’s book that I’m not alone. Financially, working an extra day a week didn’t make a great deal of difference. What I gained in salary I pretty much lost in nursery charges, and would have gone completely if we’d have taken on a cleaner. This does fit with a theme of the book, people – both men and women, value working life. So even if going to work is no better than cost neutral, many people will chose to work.

Hinsliff’s proposal for family life is the “half a wife” solution, a midway point between the traditional breadwinner/homemaker and two full-time employed model. The path to this proposal is not direct, it’s a combination of career, housing, childcare and schooling. A recurring theme of the book is that the family policy to support this proposal is not just for women. I like this sentiment.

The career side of the problem is covered by the “z-shaped trajectory”, with the horizontals representing those times when family takes over and the career goes on hold and the diagonals when things take off. I have to say this seems terribly well organised! My career has suffered from a lack of a master plan. My earliest guide was my dad, who worked for the same organisation for his entire working life. I had a spell working on short term contracts in academia before gaining tenure, then gave it all up to work for Unilever for a period. Most recently I joined a startup in Liverpool, it’s only with this most recent move that I’ve started to appreciate that I’ve got marketable skills. The policy support here is in pushing companies to allow more flexible working, for both women and men.

Housing forms another part of the jigsaw puzzle, housing costs in the UK are high, particularly where there are jobs. Long commutes to work are both bad in themselves for employee happiness, and damaging for family life. Housing is a difficult bullet to bite there is a tacit agreement that house prices are too high. But bringing them down means a large block of voters will lose out.

Childcare is a second leg of the problem, I must admit I look with envy on other couples mentioned in the book who get support from conveniently located family. Schooling has some part to play here, for working families a school day shorter than a working day presents a childcare challenge. Even worse, the long summer holidays, originally designed to support the use of children as an agricultural labour force.

Half a wife helps answer the question: “how do I be a grown-up?”  for which I’ve never felt well-prepared. Doubly so when it came to fatherhood and how it fitted with work, and my previous life. It’s well researched and readable. I wish I’d read it before I entered adult life!