Skip to main content

The Electric Century - J. B. Williams ***

After reading J. B. Williams' The Electronics Revolution I couldn't resist also having a go at The Electric Century. The mysterious J. B. provides a similar mix of historical data and narrative, in this case for aspects of electricity, from generation to household products using it. Covering a total of 21 topics, plus intro and conclusion, Williams reminds us just how far the use of electricity has spread into our lives. As well as the obvious, we get, for example, the use in cars - not so much electric cars, but a requirement from day one in even the most basic petrol vehicle.

 I say petrol, but Williams would say gasoline, as there is a really strange approach taken here. Although it covers both the US and the UK (and to an extent Europe), this is a very British book, giving far more detail on what happened in the UK than you would otherwise expect. Yet it's not only got American spelling it uses US words (so, for example, we hear of people in the UK using 'faucets' and riding on 'street cars'). And it goes even further to a remarkable extreme, giving historical UK prices in cents.

 So we read, for instance, about the UK's 1916 Entertainment Tax and its impact on cinema seats. We are told 'It was quite severe with 2 cent (1 old pence) and 4 cent tickets attracting a 1 cent tax, and the common 4 cent to 12 cent range charge at 2 cents.' Okay, there is that small piece of context in the '1 old pence' but it's totally meaningless to give all those values in cents. This was, frankly, very irritating.

 When it comes to the topics, Williams is very thorough, and as with the electronics book, he or she is at his or her best when giving us historical statistics and nuggets of information about, for example, the early fragmented electricity generation companies, or Marconi's work or the development of batteries. There tends not to be a huge amount of scientific content, not really, for example, describing how the various batteries work, just giving a quick overview of their makeup. Rather more so than the electronics book, there is quite a lot of material here that feels summary and that is stating the relatively obvious about, say, the impact of various households technologies. There is (also like the electronics book) a feeling this was written a few years ago - LED lighting, for example, is described as 'waiting in the wings' rather than being in active use.

 Despite its flaws (almost because of them), I rather liked this book. As with its companion, this is because of those statistics and factoids. A graph of the very different rate of take-up of dishwashers in the US and UK, for example. Or the origin of the brand name Hotpoint in a company first making electric irons with... hot points. It's certainly not a book for everyone, but if you'd like to fill in some gaps in the history of technology, it's worth taking on.

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

Beyond Belief - Helen Pearson *****

Apparently it comes as a surprise to many that medicine was not particularly scientific until the end of the twentieth century (to be honest, it's no surprise to me - we had a GP who used homeopathy in the 90s). Instead it was based on anecdotal guidance - the kind of thing that appeared to work. Evidence-based medicine has since improved the field, trying where possible to base decisions on evidence, ideally based on randomised controlled trials. The first part of Helen Pearson's book covers this well - though I think it's by far the least interesting part of what we discover. Instead what's truly fascinating is the rest of it, looking at a wide range of other fields where evidence was rarely properly used and that are only now starting to dip a toe in the water. These include social policy, policing, conservation, business and education. The main part of the book gives us examples of how bad these areas have been in terms of basing decisions on what's always been ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Random Universe - Andrew Jaffe *****

This is an absolutely fascinating book for anyone interested in the way that science really works, bearing in mind the difficulties of having to base our models and theories on induction. Andrew Jaffe introduces the difficulties we face when trying to take a scientific view because largely we are dependent on induction: predicting the future from what has previously been observed. He explores what probability is, the two key ways of looking at it (frequentist and Bayesian) and how scientists use (or misuse it) to work out the implications of their experiments for hypotheses. This is then expanded into looking at the nature of scientific models and the philosophy of science before heading out to entropy, quantum randomness and attempting to achieve meaningful cosmology with its potential dearth of evidence.  The topic might sound a little dry, but in fact Jaffe does it with good humour and a very readable style. For example, he uses measuring his daughter's height by making marks on...
Post a Comment
Read more

The AI Paradox - Virginia Dignum ****

This is a really important book in the way that Virginia Dignum highlights various ways we can misunderstand AI and its abilities using a series of paradoxes. However, I need to say up front that I'm giving it four stars for the ideas: unfortunately the writing is not great. It reads more like a government report than anything vaguely readable - it really should have co-authored with a professional writer to make it accessible. Even so, I'm recommending it: like some government reports it's significant enough to make it necessary to wade through the bureaucrat speak. Why paradoxes? Dignum identifies two ways we can think about paradoxes (oddly I wrote about paradoxes recently , but with three definitions): a logical paradox such as 'this statement is false', or a paradoxical truth such as 'less is more' - the second of which seems a better to fit to the use here.  We are then presented with eight paradoxes, each of which gives some insights into aspects of t...
Post a Comment
Read more