Skip to main content

How the Victorians took us to the Moon - Iwan Rhys Morus ****

Despite beginning and ending his book with a tale of a Victorian moonshot, Iwan Rhys Morus is not writing steam punk fiction here, but rather exploring the nature of the Victorian scientific and engineering mentality, particularly in the UK, and how that made a huge transformation possible and has continued to influence the way we do some things, up to and including the Apollo programme.

Rhys Morus goes on give us stories of the development of everything from steam railways to the telegraph, from the transformation of electricity into the power source of the world to powered flight. Many of the characters we meet will be familiar - names such as Brunel, Stephenson, Faraday (anything but typical in personality of the kind of inventor Rhys Morus is focussing on), Babbage, Edison (less than I'd perhaps expect), the Wright brothers and many more. But there are also the less familiar, for example those involved in developing and laying the transatlantic cable, an epic boys-own story of failure transformed into eventual success.

We also get a useful contrast between the often wealthy inventors and the working people who made their inventions come to life. Stories of hardship and skill in, for example, digging Victorian tunnels have often been heard before, but we also see, for example, a dispute between Babbage and the craftsman who built the constructed part of the Difference Engine, who claimed ownership of the specialist tools he developed, where Babbage believed, as it was his idea, they should be his. And another very strong thread is the connection between Victorian invention and technology and empire. Rhys Morus makes it clear that he does not approve the imperial links - though it would have been interesting to explore whether we would have the science and technology we enjoy today without this being the case.

Sometimes, Rhys Morus does suffer from the enthusiast's habit of giving too much detail about things that don't really carry the story forward - naming too many bit part players, for example - while the underlying theme of these being practical men (almost all men), with focus and discipline is perhaps repeated a bit too often. We also see too much attention given to Nikola Tesla (who Rhys Morus has written a biography of): Tesla was arguably not a typical Victorian inventor in the sense we see here, being far too flamboyant and given to fantasies. As a result, for example, Rhys Morus claims that Tesla's dream of wireless power 'came to nothing, in part at least, because Tesla refused to learn the most important lesson of Victorian invention - that invention could never be a one-man show.' In reality those dreams came to nothing because Telsa was an excellent electrical engineer but had very little understanding of physics and his scheme could never have worked.

However, the span of the exploration of Victorian achievements (always with that underlying doubt about the tie-in to empire) is excellently handled and this was an interesting book to read.

Hardback:   
Kindle:  
Using these links earns us commission at no cost to you
Review by Brian Clegg - See all of Brian's online articles or subscribe to a weekly digest for free here

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

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

Amazing Worlds of Science Fiction and Science Fact: Keith Cooper ****

There's something appealing (for a reader like me) about a book that brings together science fiction and science fact. I had assumed that the 'Amazing Worlds' part of the title suggested a general overview of the interaction between the two, but Keith Cooper is being literal. This is an examination of exoplanets (planets that orbit a different star to the Sun) as pictured in science fiction and in our best current science, bearing in mind this is a field that is still in the early phases of development. It becomes obvious early on that Cooper, who is a science journalist in his day job, knows his stuff on the fiction side as well as the current science. Of course he brings in the well-known TV and movie tropes (we get a huge amount on Star Trek ), not to mention the likes of Dune, but his coverage of written science fiction goes into much wider picture. He also has consulted some well-known contemporary SF writers such as Alastair Reynolds and Paul McAuley, not just scient...
Post a Comment
Read more