Heroes in Cardigans, Daring to Dream
Apr. 4th, 2005 09:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mtvessel27 Feb 2005
Backroom Boys - Francis Spufford - Faber and Faber 2003
* * * *
This delightful book is ostensibly about the unsung heroes of British science, the technical geniuses who have been responsible for Britain's contributions to technological advance from the 1950s to the present day. It actually goes further than that - in telling their stories, it chronicles the fall and rise of the UK's industrial base in the second half of the twentieth century.
The fall is illustrated by the first, second and to some extent the sixth chapters, which tell the stories of the Black Knight rocket launcher, the funding for Concorde in the 1980s and the Beagle 2 expedition to Mars. All can be regarded as honourable failures - Black Knight was an attempt to do on a shoestring what NASA and the Russians had already done with budgets ten times the size, Concorde was an engineering marvel built to satisfy a demand that didn't exist, and we all know the sad fate of Beagle 2.
The common feature of all these failures is interference by government. Black Knight suffered from a lack of vision. It was the minimum that Britain had to do to put a satellite into space. Concorde, having been horrendously misconceived from the outset, was very nearly ditched by the British and French governments in the 1980s and was only rescued to fly another twenty years by an imaginative plan put forward by the newly privatised British Airways (the descriptions of the tense meetings between the BA negotiators and the government civil servants make for surprisingly gripping reading). The government's pusillanimous approach to funding of Beagle 2 forced Colin Pillinger into the uncomfortable position of salesman as well as scientific director.
By contrast, the success stories recounted in the other chapters - the extraordinary technical achievement of the computer game Elite, fitting over 2000 planetary systems into just 22 K of memory (0.006% of the memory of the machine I am writing this on), the creation of the cell network for mobile phones and the successful fight by John Sulston to keep the human genome sequence in the public domain - were all funded by private industry or private charity.
All this, it should be mentioned, is extremely well and pacily written. One of the reviews quoted in the front describes Spufford as the "Bruce Chatwin of applied science" and that's an apt description. That said, I can't really go along with the implied message of "government bad, private enterprise good" when it comes to successful application of technological innovation. The success of Elite, amongst others, spawned a whole cottage industry of small design studios producing innovative games. Most of these have now vanished as the monopolising tendencies of big business force the little guys out, and the result is an impoverished industry pushing sports simulations and sequels with no real developments in gameplay. Whether Concorde was commercially viable or not, it is a beautiful design and one of the icons of twentieth century technology. Not bad for an Anglo-French collaboration. Ariane, France's vanity rocket project, is now making big money.
Spufford also missed out a number of other stories which really ought to be told. What about Tim Berners Lee and the development of the world wide web? What about the engineering marvel and financial disaster which is the Channel Tunnel? What about the invention of the hovercraft? It's not often I say this, but what this book really needs is a sequel.
Backroom Boys - Francis Spufford - Faber and Faber 2003
* * * *
This delightful book is ostensibly about the unsung heroes of British science, the technical geniuses who have been responsible for Britain's contributions to technological advance from the 1950s to the present day. It actually goes further than that - in telling their stories, it chronicles the fall and rise of the UK's industrial base in the second half of the twentieth century.
The fall is illustrated by the first, second and to some extent the sixth chapters, which tell the stories of the Black Knight rocket launcher, the funding for Concorde in the 1980s and the Beagle 2 expedition to Mars. All can be regarded as honourable failures - Black Knight was an attempt to do on a shoestring what NASA and the Russians had already done with budgets ten times the size, Concorde was an engineering marvel built to satisfy a demand that didn't exist, and we all know the sad fate of Beagle 2.
The common feature of all these failures is interference by government. Black Knight suffered from a lack of vision. It was the minimum that Britain had to do to put a satellite into space. Concorde, having been horrendously misconceived from the outset, was very nearly ditched by the British and French governments in the 1980s and was only rescued to fly another twenty years by an imaginative plan put forward by the newly privatised British Airways (the descriptions of the tense meetings between the BA negotiators and the government civil servants make for surprisingly gripping reading). The government's pusillanimous approach to funding of Beagle 2 forced Colin Pillinger into the uncomfortable position of salesman as well as scientific director.
By contrast, the success stories recounted in the other chapters - the extraordinary technical achievement of the computer game Elite, fitting over 2000 planetary systems into just 22 K of memory (0.006% of the memory of the machine I am writing this on), the creation of the cell network for mobile phones and the successful fight by John Sulston to keep the human genome sequence in the public domain - were all funded by private industry or private charity.
All this, it should be mentioned, is extremely well and pacily written. One of the reviews quoted in the front describes Spufford as the "Bruce Chatwin of applied science" and that's an apt description. That said, I can't really go along with the implied message of "government bad, private enterprise good" when it comes to successful application of technological innovation. The success of Elite, amongst others, spawned a whole cottage industry of small design studios producing innovative games. Most of these have now vanished as the monopolising tendencies of big business force the little guys out, and the result is an impoverished industry pushing sports simulations and sequels with no real developments in gameplay. Whether Concorde was commercially viable or not, it is a beautiful design and one of the icons of twentieth century technology. Not bad for an Anglo-French collaboration. Ariane, France's vanity rocket project, is now making big money.
Spufford also missed out a number of other stories which really ought to be told. What about Tim Berners Lee and the development of the world wide web? What about the engineering marvel and financial disaster which is the Channel Tunnel? What about the invention of the hovercraft? It's not often I say this, but what this book really needs is a sequel.