Tag: history of science

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A recurring theme is the persistence of things we might consider to have been replaced by new technology, the horse, for example.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.

Jun 24 2014

Book review: Fire & Steam by Christian Wolmar

FireAndSteamI’ve long been a bit of a train enthusiast, reflected in my reading of biographies of Brunel and Stephenson, and more recently Christian Wolmar’s The Subterranean Railway about the London Underground. This last one is my inspiration for reading Wolmar’s Fire & Steam: How the railways transformed Britain which is a more general history of railways in Britain.

Fire & Steam follows the arc of the development of the railways from the the earliest signs: the development of railed ways to carry minerals from mine to water, with carriages powered by horses or men.

The railways appeared at a happy confluence of partly developed technologies. In the later half of the 18th century the turnpike road system and canal systems were taking shape but were both limited in their capabilities. However, they demonstrated the feasibility of large civil engineering projects. Steam engines were becoming commonplace but were too heavy and cumbersome for the road system and the associated technologies: steering, braking, suspension and so forth were not yet ready. From a financial point of view, the railways were the first organisations to benefit from limited liability partnerships of more than six partners.

Wolmar starts his main story with the Liverpool & Manchester (L&M) line, completed in 1830, arguing that the earlier Stockton & Darlington line (1825) was not the real deal. It was much in the spirit of the earlier mine railways and passenger transport was a surprising success. The L&M was a twin-track line between two large urban centres, with trains pulled by steam engines. Although it was intended as a freight route passenger transport was built in from the start.

After a period of slow growth, limited by politics and economics, the 1840s saw an explosion in the growth of the railway system. The scale of this growth was staggering. In 1845 240 bills were put to parliament representing approximately £100million of work, at the time this was 150% of Gross National Product (GNP). Currently GNP is approximately £400billion, and HS2 is expected to cost approximately £43billion – so about 10% of GNP. Wolmar reports the opposition to the original London & Birmingham line in 1832, it sounds quite familiar. Opposition came from several directions, some from the owners of canals and turnpike roads, some from landowners unwilling to give up any of their land, some from opportunists.

The railways utterly changed life in Britain. At the beginning of the century travel beyond your neighbouring villages was hard but by the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, a third of the population was able to get themselves to London, mostly by train. This was simply a part of the excursion culture, trains had been whizzing people off to the seaside, the races, and other events in great numbers from almost the beginning of the railway network. No longer were cows kept in central London in order to ensure a supply of fresh milk

In the 19th century, financing and building railways was left to private enterprise. The government’s role was in approving new schemes, controlling fares and conditions of carriage, and largely preventing amalgamations. There was no guiding mind at work designing the rail network. Companies built what they could and competed with their neighbours. This led to a network which was in some senses excessive, giving multiple routes between population centres but this gave it resilience.

The construction of the core network took the remainder of the 19th century, no major routes were built in the 20th century and we have only seen HS1, the fast line running from London to Dover completed in this century.

The 20th century saw the decline of the railways, commencing after the First World War when the motor car and the lorry started to take over, relatively uninhibited by regulation and benefitting from state funding for infrastructure. The railways were requisitioned for war use during both world wars, and were hard used by it – suffering a great deal of wear and tear for relatively little compensation. War seems also to have given governments a taste for control, after the First World War the government forced a rationalisation of the many railway companies to the “Big Four”. After the Second World War the railway was fully nationalised. For much of the next 25 years it suffered considerable decline, a combination of a lack of investment, a reluctance to move away from steam power to much cheaper diesel and electric propulsion, culminating in the Beeching “rationalisation” of the network in the 1960s.

The railways picked up during the latter half of the seventies with electrification, new high speed trains and the InterCity branding. Wolmar finishes with the rail privatisation of the late 1990s, of which he has a rather negative view.

Fire & Steam feels a more well-rounded book than Subterranean Railway which to my mind became a somewhat claustrophobic litany of lines and stations in places. Fire & Steam  focuses on the bigger picture and there is grander sweep to it.

Jun 18 2014

Book Review: The Idea Factory by Jon Gertner

The_Idea_Factory Cover

I’ve read about technology and innovation in post-war Britain, in the form of Empire of the Clouds, A Computer called Leo and Backroom Boys. Now I turn to American technology, in the form of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner.

Bell Laboratories was the research and development arm of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) which held a monopoly position in the US telephone market for over half a century. Bell Labs still exists today as a subsidiary of Alcatel-Lucent but it is much reduced from its former glory.

What did they invent at Bell Laboratories?

An embarrassment of things: the transistor, the charge-couple device, photovoltaic solar cells, the UNIX operating system, C and C++ programming languages. And they also discovered the cosmic microwave background. They were the main contractor for some of the earliest passive and active communications satellites and the earliest cell phone systems. Claude Shannon worked at Bell Laboratories where he published his paper on information theory, in computing Shannon is pretty much the equal of Turing in terms of influence on the field. If statistics is more your thing, then John Tukey is a Bell Labs alumnus.

This is a seriously impressive track record: Bell Laboratories boast 7 Nobel prizes for work done at the laboratory. To get an idea of the scale of this achievement the equivalent figure for Cambridge University is 17, Oxford University 8 and MIT 18. IBM has 5. See for yourself here.

I was semi-aware of all of these inventions but hadn’t really absorbed that they were all from Bell Labs.

For something over 50 years Bell Laboratories benefitted from a state-mandated monopoly which only came to an end in the mid-eighties. They had argued in the 1920s that they needed a monopoly to build the required infrastructure to connect a (large) nation. In the early days that infrastructure was a system of wires and poles, spanning the country, then cables crossing the ocean, then automatic telephone exchanges first valve based then solid-state. They developed a habit of in depth research, in the early days into improving the longevity of telegraph poles, and the leather belts of line engineers, moving on to solid-state physics after the war. In exchange for their monopoly they were restricted in the areas of business they could enter and obliged to license their patents on generous terms.

It’s interesting to compare the development of the vacuum tube as an electronic device with that of the transistor. In both cases the early versions were temperamental, expensive and bulky but through a process of development over many years they became commodity devices. Bell pushed ahead with the development of the solid-state transistor with their optimisation of vacuum tubes as a guide to what was possible.

During the Second World War, Bell Laboratories and its staff were heavily involved in the war effort. In particular the development of radar, which to my surprise was a programme 50% larger than the Manhattan Project in cost terms. Bell Laboratories most expensive project was the first electronic switching station, first deployed in 1964. This is a company that strung cables across continents and oceans, launched satellites and the most expensive thing it ever did was build a blockhouse full of electronics!

Ultimately the AT&T monopoly gave it huge and assured revenue for a long period, relatively free of government interference. The money flowed from captive telephone customers, not the government and the only requirement from AT&T’s point of view was to ensure government did not break its monopoly. In the UK the fledgling computer industry suffered from a lack of a large “home” market. Whilst the aircraft industry suffered from having an unreliable main market in the form of the UK government.

Despite my review which I see makes almost no mention of the people, The Idea Factory is written around people, both the managers and the scientists on the ground. Bell Labs was successful because of the quality of the people it attracted, it sought them out through a personal network spanning the universities of the US. It kept them because they saw they could work in a stimulating and well-funded environment which tolerated sometimes odd behaviour.

It does bring to mind the central research laboratories of some of the UK’s major companies with which I am familiar, including ICI, Unilever and Courtaulds. Of these only Unilever’s survives, and in much reduced form.

The Idea Factory is well-written and engaging, telling an interesting story. It lacks context in what was going on outside Bell Laboratories but then this is not an area it claims to cover.

Apr 05 2014

Book review: Darwin’s Ghosts by Rebecca Stott

darwinsghosts_bookcoverCharles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was rushed into print after a very long gestation when it became clear that Alfred Russell Wallace was close to publishing the same ideas on evolution. Lacking from the first edition was a historical overview of what went before, pertinent to the ideas of evolution. On the occasion of the publication of the first American edition, Darwin took the opportunity to address the lack. Darwin’s Ghosts: In search of the first evolutionists by Rebecca Stott is a modern look at those influences.

After an introductory, motivating chapter Darwin’s Ghosts works in approximately chronological order.  Each chapter introduces a person, or group of people, who did early work in areas of biology which ultimately related to evolution. The first characters introduced are Aristotle, and then Jahiz, a Persian scholar working around 860AD. Aristotle brought systematic observation to biology, a seemingly basic concept which was not then universal. He wrote The History of Animals in about 350BC. The theme of systematic observation and experimentation continues through the book. Jahiz extended Aristotle’s ideas to include interactions of species, or webs. His work is captured in The Book of Living Beings.

Next up was a curiosity over fossils, and the inklings that things had not always been as they were now. Leonardo Da Vinci (1452-1519) and, some time later, Bernard Palissy (1510-1590) are used to illustrate this idea. Everyone has heard of da Vinci. Palissy was a Hugenot who lived in the second half of the 16th century. He was a renowned potter, and commissioned by Catherine de Medici to build the Tuileries gardens in Paris but in addition he lectured on natural sciences.

I must admit to being a bit puzzled at the introduction of Abraham Trembley (1710-1784), he was the tutor of two sons of a prominent Dutch politician. He worked on hydra, a very simple aquatic organism and his wikipedia page credits him as being one of the first experimental zoologists. He discovered that whole hydra could regenerated from parts of a “parent”.

Conceptually the next developments were in hypothesising a great age for the earth coupled to ideas that species were not immutable, they change over time. Benoît de Maillet (1656-1739) wrote on this but only posthumously. Similarly Robert Chambers (1802-1871) was to write anonymously about evolution in Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation first published in 1844. Note that this publication date is only 15 years before the first publication of the Origin of Species.

The reasons for this reticence on the part of a number of writers is that these ideas of mutability and change collide with major religions, they are “blasphemous”. This becomes a serious issue over the years spanning 1800. Erasmus Darwin, Charles’s grandfather, was something of an evolutionist but wrote relatively cryptically about it for fear of his career as a doctor. I reviewed Desmond King-Hele’s biography of Erasmus Darwin some time ago. At the time when Erasmus wrote evolution was considered a radical idea, both in political and religious senses. This at a time when the British establishment was feeling vulnerable following the Revolution in France and the earlier American revolution.

I have some sympathy with the idea that religion suppressed evolutionary theory, however it really isn’t as simple as that. The part religion plays is as a support to wider cultural and political movements.

The core point of Darwin’s Ghosts is that a scientist working in the first half of the 19th century was standing on the shoulders of giants or at least on top of a pile of people the lowest strata of which date back a couple of millennia. Not only this, they are not on an isolated pinnacle, around them are others also standing. Culturally we are fond of stories of lone geniuses but practically they don’t exist.

In fact the theory of evolution is a nice demonstration of this interdependence – Darwin was forced to publish his theory because Wallace had essentially got the gist of it entirely independently – his story is the final chapter in the book. For Wallace the geographic ranges of species were a key insight into forming the theory. A feature very apparent in the area of southeast Asia where he was working as a freelance specimen collector.

Once again I am caught out by my Kindle – the book proper ends at 66% of the way through, although Darwin’s original essay is included as an appendix taking us to 70%. Darwin’s words are worth reading, if only for his put-down of Richard Owen for attempting to claim credit for evolutionary theory, despite being one of those who had argued against it previously.

I enjoyed this book, much of my reading is scientific mono-biography which misses the ensemble nature of science which this book demonstrates.

Oct 05 2013

Book Review: Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford

backroomboysElectronic books bring many advantages but for a lengthy journey to Trento a paper book seemed more convenient. So I returned to my shelves to pick up Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin by Francis Spufford.

I first read this book quite some time ago, it tells six short stories of British technical innovation. It is in the character of Empire of the Clouds and A computer called LEO.  Perhaps a little nationalistic and regretful of opportunities lost.

The first of the stories is of the British space programme after the war, it starts with the disturbing picture of members of the British Interplanetary Society celebrating the fall of a V2 rocket in London. This leads on to a brief discussion of Blue Streak – Britain’s ICBM, scrapped in favour of the American Polaris missile system. As part of the Blue Streak programme a rocket named Black Knight was developed to test re-entry technology from this grew the Black Arrow – a rocket to put satellites into space.

In some ways Black Arrow was a small, white elephant from the start. The US had offered the British free satellite launches. Black Arrow was run on a shoestring budget, kept strictly as an extension of the Black Knight rocket and hence rather small. The motivation for this was nominally that it could be used to gain experience for the UK satellite industry and provide an independent launch system for the UK government, perhaps for things they wished to keep quiet. Ultimately it launched a single test satellite into space, still orbiting the earth now. However, it was too small to launch the useful satellites of the day and growing it would require complete redevelopment. The programme was cancelled in 1971.

Next up is Concorde, which could probably be better described as a large, white elephant. Developed in a joint Anglo-French programme into which the participants were mutually locked it burned money for nearly two decades before the British part was taken on by British Airways who used it to enhance the prestige of their brand. As a workhorse, commercial jet, it was poor choice: too small, too thirsty, and too loud.

But now for something more successful! Long ago there existed a home computer market in the UK, populated by many and various computers. First amongst these early machines was the BBC Micro. For which the first blockbuster game, Elite, was written by two Cambridge undergraduates (David Braben and Ian Bell). I played Elite in one of its later incarnations – on an Amstrad CPC464. Elite was a space trading and fighting game with revolutionary 3D wireframe graphics and complex gameplay. And it all fitted into 22kb – the absolute maximum memory available on the BBC Micro. The cunning required to build multiple universes in such a small space, and the battles to gain a byte here and a byte there to add another feature are alien to the modern programmers eyes. At the time Acornsoft were publishing quite a few games but Elite was something different: they’d paid for the development which took an unimaginable 18 months or so and when it was released there was a launch event at Alton Towers and the game came out in a large box stuffed with supporting material. All of this was a substantial break with the past. Ultimately the number of copies of Elite sold for the BBC Micro approximately matched the number of BBC Micros sold – an apparent market saturation.

Success continues with the story of Vodaphone – one of the first two players in the UK mobile phone market. The science here is in radio planning – choosing where to place your masts for optimal coverage, Vodaphone bought handsets from Panasonic and base stations from Ericsson. Interestingly Europe and the UK had a lead over the US in digital mobile networks – they agreed the GSM standard which gave instant access to a huge market. Whilst in the US 722 franchises were awarded with no common digital standard.

Moving out of the backroom a little is the story of the Human Genome Project, principally the period after Craig Venter announced he was going to sequence the human genome faster than the public effort then sell it! This effort was stymied by the Wellcome Trust who put a great deal further money into the public effort. Genetic research has a long history in the UK but the story here is one of industrial scale sequencing, quite different from conventional lab research and the power of the world’s second largest private research funder (the largest is currently the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation).

The final chapter of the book is on the Beagle 2 Mars lander, built quickly, cheaply and with the huge enthusiasm and (unlikely) fund raising abilities of Colin Pillinger. Sadly, as the Epilogue records the lander became a high velocity impactor – nothing was heard from it after it left the Mars orbiter which had brought it from the Earth.

The theme for the book is the innate cunning of the British, but if there’s a lesson to be learnt it seems to be that thinking big is a benefit. Elite, the mobile phone network, the Human Genome Project were the successes from this book. Concorde was a technical wonder but an economic disaster. Black Arrow and Beagle 2 suffered from being done on a shoestring budget.

Overall I enjoyed the Backroom Boys, it reminded me of my childhood with Elite and the coming of the mobile phones. It’s more a celebration than a dispassionate view but there’s no harm in that.