Skip to main content

Imagine That… The History of Technology Rewritten – Michael Sells ***

Asking the question ‘What if…?’ is a classic approach to creativity and original thinking. As Michael Sells shows, it is also a good way to explore a whole range of subjects, from technology in this book through to the likes of ‘Football Rewritten’ and ‘The History of Music Rewritten.’
What Sells does here is take a number of key events in the history of science and technology where a small change in situation could result in a major difference in outcome. So, we are invited, for instance, to consider what would have happened if Alexander Fleming had cleaned his petri dishes and penicillin was washed down the drain – or if Steve Jobs never visited Xerox PARC at Palo Alto and got the inspiration that would lead to the Mac.
It’s a fascinating approach and Sells brings us ten scenarios including the transistor, Facebook, cats’ eyes (the ones in the road) and the totally wonderful ‘Newspaper Radio’, an idea from the end of the 1930s of broadcasting a facsimile newspaper bringing, as Sells puts it, 24 hour journalism to 1939. Most of the ‘what if?’s did happen, though a couple – like that broadcast newspaper and Tesla’s wilder ideas having enough financial backing – didn’t.
There were a couple of disappointments for me. A minor matter was that the title grated. It would have read much better as ‘Imagine… The History of Technology Rewritten.’ But what was more significant was that very little of the content was ‘What if?’ According to the bumf we are taken on a ‘historical flight of fancy, imagining the consequences if history had gone just that little bit differently’, but in practice the text is almost all about what actually did happen. So, for instance, with Fleming, we get the initial set up of ‘Imagine if he cleans up his dishes’, but then around 90% of the text is a simple description of what actually did happen, with just a few pages on how things would have been if Fleming had got down to scrubbing.
I was also unhappy with the Tesla section, which suggested he would have gone onto far greater things if he had ‘received philanthropic support.’ However there is no evidence that Tesla’s ‘World System’ of ‘free energy’ and broadcast power and information that would span the globe would have worked. It had no scientific basis. Sells comments that ‘Tesla had an unerring habit of being right.’ But this just isn’t true. He was a brilliant engineer, and his work on AC was outstanding – but he showed several times that he had limited understanding of some aspects of physics. For instance, he refused to accept relativity. Not to mention his infamous claim to have a box containing a deadly energy weapon that in fact held a Wheatstone bridge. It’s true that Tesla predicted many things – but that didn’t mean he could make them happen, any more than Roger Bacon could have produced the aeroplanes, cars, television etc. he dreamed up in the thirteenth century if only he had philanthropic support.
So, an excellent concept with some very good entries (my favourites were cats’ eyes and the newspaper radio), but a little patchy and not delivering enough on the ‘what if?’s. Even so it’s a well-priced pocket-sized book and well worth taking a look.

Paperback:  

Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

It's On You - Nick Chater and George Loewenstein *****

Going on the cover you might think this was a political polemic - and admittedly there's an element of that - but the reason it's so good is quite different. It shows how behavioural economics and social psychology have led us astray by putting the focus way too much on individuals. A particular target is the concept of nudges which (as described in Brainjacking ) have been hugely over-rated. But overall the key problem ties to another psychological concept: framing. Huge kudos to both Nick Chater and George Loewenstein - a behavioural scientist and an economics and psychology professor - for having the guts to take on the flaws in their own earlier work and that of colleagues, because they make clear just how limited and potentially dangerous is the belief that individuals changing their behaviour can solve large-scale problems. The main thesis of the book is that there are two ways to approach the major problems we face - an 'i-frame' where we focus on the individual ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Introducing Artificial Intelligence – Henry Brighton & Howard Selina ****

It is almost impossible to rate these relentlessly hip books – they are pure marmite*. The huge  Introducing  … series (a vast range of books covering everything from Quantum Theory to Islam), previously known as …  for Beginners , puts across the message in a style that owes as much to Terry Gilliam and pop art as it does to popular science. Pretty well every page features large graphics with speech bubbles that are supposed to emphasise the point. Funnily,  Introducing Artificial Intelligence  is both a good and bad example of the series. Let’s get the bad bits out of the way first. The illustrators of these books are very variable, and I didn’t particularly like the pictures here. They did add something – the illustrations in these books always have a lot of information content, rather than being window dressing – but they seemed more detached from the text and rather lacking in the oomph the best versions have. The other real problem is that...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Laws of Thought - Tom Griffiths *****

In giving us a history of attempts to explain our thinking abilities, Tom Griffiths demonstrates an excellent ability to pitch information just right for the informed general reader.  We begin with Aristotelian logic and the way Boole and others transformed it into a kind of arithmetic before a first introduction of computing and theories of language. Griffiths covers a surprising amount of ground - we don't just get, for instance, the obvious figures of Turing, von Neumann and Shannon, but the interaction between the computing pioneers and those concerned with trying to understand the way we think - for example in the work of Jerome Bruner, of whom I confess I'd never heard.  This would prove to be the case with a whole host of people who have made interesting contributions to the understanding of human thought processes. Sometimes their theories were contradictory - this isn't an easy field to successfully observe - but always they were interesting. But for me, at least, ...
Post a Comment
Read more