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:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

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

The Infinity Machine - Sebastian Mallaby ****

It's very quickly clear that Sebastian Mallaby is a huge Demis Hassabis fan - writing about the only child prodigy and teen genius ever who was also a nice, rounded personality. After a few chapters, though, things settle down (I'm reminded of Douglas Adams' description of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy ) and we get a good, solid trip through the journey that gave us DeepMind, their AlphaGo and AlphaFold programs, the sudden explosion of competition on the AI front and thoughts on artificial general intelligence. Although Mallaby does occasionally still go into fan mode - reading this you would think that AlphaFold had successfully perfectly predicted the structure of every protein, where it is usually not sufficiently accurate for its results to have direct practical application - we get a real feel for the way this relatively unusual company was swiftly and successfully developed away from Silicon Valley. It's readable and gives an important understanding of...
Post a Comment
Read more

Nanotechnology - Rahul Rao ****

There was a time when nanotechnology was both going to transform the world and wipe us out - a similar position to our view of AI today. On the positive transformation side there was K. Eric Drexler's visions in the 1986 Engines of Creation. Arguably as much science fiction as engineering possibilities, it predicted the ability to use vast armies of assemblers to put objects together from individual atoms.  On the negative side was the vision of grey goo, out of control nanotechnology consuming all in its path as it made more and more copies of itself. In 2003, for instance, the then Prince Charles made the headlines  when newspapers reported ‘The prince has raised the spectre of the “grey goo” catastrophe in which sub-microscopic machines designed to share intelligence and replicate themselves take over and devour the planet.’ These days the expectations have been eased down a notch or two. Where nanotechnology has succeeded, it has been with the likes of atom-thick mat...
Post a Comment
Read more