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

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire - Henry Gee ****

In his last book, Henry Gee impressed with his A (Very) Short History of Life on Earth - this time he zooms in on one very specific aspect of life on Earth - humans - and gives us not just a history, but a prediction of the future - our extinction. The book starts with an entertaining prologue, to an extent bemoaning our obsession with dinosaurs, a story that leads, inexorably towards extinction. This is a fate, Gee points out, that will occur for every species, including our own. We then cover three potential stages of the rise and fall of humanity (the book's title is purposely modelled on Gibbon) - Rise, Fall and Escape. Gee's speciality is palaeontology and in the first section he takes us back to explore as much as we can know from the extremely patchy fossil record of the origins of the human family, the genus Homo and the eventual dominance of Homo sapiens , pushing out any remaining members of other closely related species. As we move onto the Fall section, Gee gives ...
Post a Comment
Read more

The New Lunar Society - David Mindell *****

David Mindell's take on learning lessons for the present from the eighteenth century Lunar Society could easily have been a dull academic tome, but instead it was a delight to read. Mindell splits the book into a series of short essay-like chapters which includes details of the characters involved in and impact of the Lunar Society, which effectively kick-started the Industrial Revolution, interwoven with an analysis of the decline of industry in modern twentieth and twenty-first century America, plus the potential for taking a Lunar Society approach to revitalise industry for the future. We see how a group of men (they were all men back then) based in the English Midlands (though with a strong Scottish contingent) brought together science, engineering and artisan skills in a way that made the Industrial Revolution and its (eventual) impact on improving the lot of the masses possible. Interlaced with this, Mindell shows us how 'industrial' has become something of a dirty wo...
Post a Comment
Read more

Pagans (SF) - James Alistair Henry *****

There's a fascinating sub-genre of science fiction known as alternate history. The idea is that at some point in the past, history diverged from reality, resulting in a different present. Perhaps the most acclaimed of these books is Kingsley Amis's The Alteration , set in a modern England where there had not been a reformation - but James Alistair Henry arguably does even better by giving us a present where Britain is a third world country, still divided between Celts in the west and Saxons in the East. Neither the Normans nor Christianity have any significant impact. In itself this is a clever idea, but what makes it absolutely excellent is mixing in a police procedural murder mystery, where the investigation is being undertaken by a Celtic DI, Drustan, who has to work in London alongside Aedith, a Saxon reeve of equivalent rank, who also happens to be daughter of the Earl of Mercia. While you could argue about a few historical aspects, it's effectively done and has a plot...
Post a Comment
Read more