This Little Britain Read online

  The splendour of British invention in this period shouldn’t trick us into drawing any false conclusions. Above all, it needs to be remembered that for Britain to be noted for its inventiveness was a quite new phenomenon. As late as 1766, a Swiss textile printer commented that the English ‘cannot boast of many inventions but only of having perfected the inventions of others…for a thing to be perfected it must be invented in France and worked out in England’. That wasn’t Gallic solidarity speaking. The British themselves said much the same thing.

  Furthermore, Britain’s inventors led the field during a time when there really wasn’t much of a field at all. Industrialization on the Continent was held back by decades of war and social turmoil. The United States was still, overwhelmingly, a country of farmers and small towns, and its industrial sector was still in its infancy* As a result, if it wasn’t always British brains which came up with the key ideas of the Industrial Revolution, it was in the furnace of British industry that those ideas were most likely to take shape in iron, wood and steam. These were the glory years, the period in which modernity itself was forged in the factories, workshops and satanic mills of William Blake’s Britain.

  Watt’s invention was the central technology of that golden age, the invention that most called our modern age of technical advancement into being. What’s more, the age of steam has lasted much longer than we’re inclined to think. Steam locomotives weren’t phased out in Britain until the 1960s. When I travelled in India as a student in the 1980s, steam trains there were still commonplace. Even today, fossil-fuel power stations work by turning water into steam, and using that expansionary force to drive turbines. Though Watt never dreamed of trains or power stations, he remains their presiding genius all the same. Joel Mokyr, a leading historian of technology, sums it up when he writes: ‘In short, in the history of power technology, Watt is comparable to, say, Pasteur in biology, Newton in physics, or Beethoven in music. Some individuals did matter.’ Watt was one of them.

  * It was Watt who first defined and christened the unit of horsepower as a marketing gimmick to advertise his engines.

  * The link between the navy, commerce and industry pops up here too: Watt’s father’s business was fed by Glasgow’s shipping trade.

  * The one exception: Watt’s effective patent protection drove some invention overseas.

  * A precocious infant, mind you. Productivity per head in American manufacturing exceeded British productivity as early as 1820—a remarkable statistic.

  THE HORSE, THE CAR, THE POGO STICK

  Jeremy Clarkson—journalist, broadcaster and all-round motormouth—is wont to claim that ‘the British invented everything’, a view that has settled rather lazily into the popular consciousness. Even with a Clarksonian view of the world, however, the claim is hard to support.

  Take, for instance, the area of transport technology. It’s pretty clear that the pogo stick is not a British invention. Originating in Germany, the modern all-metal, enclosed-spring pogo was developed and patented in the United States by an Illinois toy designer, George Hansburg, in 1919. The device proved a big hit. Hansburg taught the girls at the Ziegfeld Follies how to pogo, and in 1920 the world’s first pogo wedding was celebrated. There are other modes of transport that the British have not invented. Neither the car nor the internal combustion engine was a British invention. Equally, not even the most patriotic British historian has suggested that the horse was first perfected on these shores. In the history of transport technology, therefore, the British record does admit some fairly gaping exceptions.

  TRANSPORT

  Things invented by the British Things not invented by the British

  Macadam roads Horse

  Steam locomotive Car

  Iron-hulled, screw-driven ships Pogo stick

  Aeroplane

  Steam traction engine

  Underground trains

  Chain-driven bicycle

  Pneumatic tyre

  Jet engine

  Jet-engined passenger aeroplane

  Hovercraft

  Supersonic passenger jet

  A small number of readers may be inclined to query the notion that the aeroplane was a British invention. It’s certainly true that the Wright brothers were the first to achieve flight that was controlled, powered and manned. But what actually did the Wright brothers invent? Gliders had been around for decades before the Wright brothers. So had internal combustion engines. So had airscrews or, as we’d now call them, propellers. The basic design of the aeroplane had been settled long before. The achievement of the Wright brothers was twofold. First, they were brilliant development engineers—tinkerers of genius. They took existing designs and made them better. Second, as bicycle men, they figured out that planes needed to bank like a bicycle, not steer like a ship. Their particular device for achieving this—‘wing-warping’, or deforming the wings to alter the attitude of flight—was rapidly superseded by the wing and tail controls still in use today, but that same basic insight has lasted the course. That’s why (centripetal force aside) your drink spills in a turning aeroplane, but doesn’t in a turning ship.

  The actual invention of the aeroplane occurred half a century or more earlier, thanks to one Sir George Cayley, a Yorkshire baronet. Cayley’s genius was to forget all about birds and hot-air balloons, and to divide the problem into its component parts. An aeroplane needs lift to keep the thing airborne, thrust to keep it moving, and control to stop it killing everyone on board. Lift, thrust and control were and are the central problems of flight, and it was Cayley who both defined the problems and took the first serious steps in solving them. He developed and tested the concept of the aerofoil-shaped wing. He tested different designs for airscrews. He worked out that dihedrally set wings (high at their tips, lower at their base) improved lateral stability in flight. He built and tested numerous working models. He laid out the basic design of the aeroplane, including the long body, the non-moving wings and the tail section. His 1810 treatise ‘On Aerial Navigation’ effectively inaugurated the field of aeronautics.

  If Cayley had stopped there, he’d certainly have been the father of flight, but he went one better and built the world’s first aeroplane. The plane was a glider, perforce, since the only sources of power available to Cayley were steam engines (too heavy) or horses (prone to airsickness). Having built his glider, Cayley did what baronets do and ordered his coachman into the contraption for the world’s maiden aeroplane flight. The glider flew five hundred yards across a Yorkshire valley and came to an awkward but not life-endangering halt. (The coachman, alas, resigned anyway.) If the Wright brothers and Cayley had ever come to slug out rights to the component parts of the aeroplane in a patent court, Cayley would have won on virtually every fundamental count.

  In Clarkson-world, therefore, while the British record on transport isn’t quite spotless, it’s hardly bad either. In power technology, for example, a similar list of British achievements would include at least the following.

  POWER

  Things invented by the British

  Steam engine

  Gas lighting

  Self-contained electrical generator

  Transformer

  Light bulb

  Fossil-fuel power station

  Commercial nuclear power

  James Watt’s steam engine, which for the first time allowed humanity to convert chemical energy into usable power, must rank among the most significant technological achievements anywhere, ever. What’s less well known is that Britain played a significant role in every other major evolution in power technology. The first commercial use of gas lighting took place in Westminster in 1816. Many of the bits and pieces needed to turn electrical power into something of practical use were invented here. (They were sometimes independently invented elsewhere as well, the electric light bulb being one of the best known examples.) The world’s first fossil-fuel power station of commercial scale was built in Deptford in 1889. Much more remarkable, however, is that while both the America
ns and the Russians had made significant breakthroughs in nuclear power generation, it was Britain’s Calder Hall which, in 1956, became the first commercial nuclear power station to go online anywhere in the world. In the new field of eco-friendly power technology, Britain lost out to Denmark in wind power, but is currently making a credible bid to lead the way in wave power: Britannia’s last-gasp attempt to rule the waves, perhaps.

  Arguably more impressive still, however, is British achievement in the sphere of communications and IT.

  COMMUNICATIONS & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

  Things invented by the British

  Steam-cylinder printing

  Electric telegraph

  Penny post

  Fax machine

  Undersea telegraph

  Dry-plate, multiple-print photography

  Telephone

  Radio

  Television

  Fibre-optics

  Radar

  Electronic computer

  World Wide Web

  Steam-cylinder printing sounds a bit too technical to be genuinely revolutionary but, by mechanizing the actual print process, it represented the most important development in print technology since Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press. Likewise, the invention of the penny post may seem slightly out of place in a basically technological survey, but the cheap standard rate and the ‘sender pays’ model inaugurated the era of a mass postal system, which still remains one of our most basic communications media today.

  In terms of electronic communications, telegraphy inaugurated the modern era. It had long been recognized that pulses of static electricity could be sent down a wire for the purposes of communications. A Spanish inventor, Salva, had even suggested that the signals could be read at the far end of the line by an operator receiving small electrical shocks through his fingertips. Brilliant as this solution may have been, it was through the collaboration of two Britons, Crooke and Wheatstone, that the first useful telegraph system emerged. The system was deployed in 1838, and received vast publicity a few years later when a suspected murderer was seen to board a London-bound train at Slough. The news was telegraphed to Paddington, where the murderer was arrested, charged and later hanged—mid-century electronics on this occasion beating the transport technology of a couple of decades earlier. Less well known is the fact that a Briton, Scotsman Alexander Bain, also invented the first fax machine in—I kid you not—1843: the key element of the invention being a means of converting electrical impulses into print.

  British contributions to the phone, radio and television are all fairly familiar. Alexander Graham Bell made his crucial breakthrough in the United States, but had not yet taken US citizenship, so certainly counts as a British inventor.* In radio, the key advance was made by Marconi, an Italian working in England, but vital contributions were made also by Oliver Lodge (who developed the first radio receivers) and Ambrose Fleming (who developed the thermionic valve—don’t ask, but it mattered). In the world of television, John Logie Baird didn’t simply offer the world the first demonstration of black-and-white TV, he also helped pioneer colour TV, transatlantic TV, video recording, fibre-optics, radar and the forerunner to Ceefax/Teletext. In the computer industry, many of the key first steps were taken by British engineers, although the industry quickly migrated to America, where it has largely stayed. The Briton Tim Berners-Lee made one of the nost notable inventions of the century by pioneering the World Wide Web*—and, in a strikingly altruistic decision, made it available to the world for free, on the basis that the technology was too important to have a price attached.

  Alas, this cheering roll-call of British achievement is all rather deceptive. The true story is all rather different. To break the recent history of technology into three roughly equal-sized chunks, it would be more accurate to say that from 1770 to 1850, Britain was by far the world’s most technologically fertile nation. Then, from 1850 to the First World War, Britain was still able to count herself as being in the first rank of nations for invention, albeit that in industry after industry other nations—most notably Germany and the United States—were catching and then surpassing her. In the final period, after the first war, Britain’s contribution has been fitful at best: sporadically important, generally not.

  Take, for instance, that oh-so-impressive-looking list of communications and IT inventions. The first five items on the list (steam-cylinder printing, the electric telegraph, the penny post, the fax machine and the undersea telegraph) were all crucial inventions, dating respectively from 1810-14, 1838, 1840, 1843 and 1851. In each case, it’s more fair than not to say that the key developments were essentially British, albeit that steam-cylinder printing was developed by a German immigrant to Britain, and that there was plenty of American experimentation with undersea cables too.

  Beyond that point, however, the British ownership of the list becomes increasingly contestable, or downright misleading. The key development in photography was Eastman Kodak’s invention of celluloid film. The telephone was invented in the USA, by a British émigré who soon became a US citizen. In radio, TV and fibre-optics, the most important contributions to the development process were made by overseas inventors, not British ones—a fact wholly forgotten when we laud the (amazing, but rather isolated) achievements of Baird and others. When we push still farther into the twentieth century, it becomes ever harder to muster a credible roll-call of British achievement. True, the first electronic computers were built here, but virtually every innovation since that point has come from the fertile minds of the United States. True, Tim Berners-Lee gave the world the Web, but again virtually every other notable software development arose elsewhere. To claim things such as the computer and the Web as British inventions may be justifiable in some narrow sense, but entirely false if taken to imply wider leadership.

  The same pattern holds wherever else you look. In transport, those early inventions (the train, the screw-driven iron ship, macadam roads and, yes, George Cayley’s glider) do indicate something genuine about Britain’s technological lead at the time. The farther down you look, however, the more misleading the list is likely to get. The jet engine was first developed by a Briton, true enough; but in a three-way race between Britain, Germany and the USA, it was Germany who first put a jet aircraft into the air. The first passenger jet was indeed British, but it had the slightly bothersome habit of falling apart in midair and was withdrawn from service. The hovercraft was genuinely British, but of minor consequence. The supersonic passenger jet was amazing, but a commercial dead end. The same basic pattern holds true in power technologies. It holds true pretty much everywhere else too.

  In short, the Clarksonian view of the world just isn’t tenable. Of course, the scale of that early technological lead was never going to last for ever. That Britain’s relative position slipped was inevitable, but the problem ran deeper than a mere increase in competition. Inventors don’t invent in a vacuum. They need to have an intimate relationship with manufacturing industry. Without competent manufacturers to turn ideas into products then money, no invention will clamber far from the drawing board. The dawning twentieth century was one in which British brains would fall foul of British manufacturing ineptitude. That sorry tale is the theme of the next chapter.

  * Though Bell’s most famous invention may have triumphed, he failed on another significant count: it was Edison’s ‘Hello!’ not Bell’s rousing ‘Ahoy!’ which won the battle of the telephone greeting—more’s the pity.

  * A current advertisement put out by UK Trade & Investment, a government agency, claims that a Briton invented the Internet. Not so. The Internet is a computer networking technology that was invented decades ago in the USA. The World Wide Web, which piggybacks off the Internet, consists of a set of standards regarding addresses, transfer protocols and the content and structure of hypertext documents.

  COLOSSUS

  At the outbreak of the First World War, British companies owned around 80 per cent of the world’s international cable networ
k, the information superhighway of the age. As a result, the international traffic of enemy combatants, including Germany, was easily intercepted by the British, whose own traffic was entirely secure. The Admiralty’s code-breaking team, known simply as Room 40, deciphered some 40,000 messages during the course of the war, of which one altered its course completely. In January 1917, a cable was intercepted which offered Mexico military assistance from Germany in recapturing ‘her lost territory in Texas, Arizona and New Mexico’. Much as Woodrow Wilson hated the war, he could no longer resist the pressure to join on the Allied side. German hopes of winning the war were effectively ended by that single interception. On both sides, the lesson was learned: codes mattered.

  When world war broke out for a second time, both sides were well prepared. The Germans made extensive use of a mechanized encoding device, the Enigma, whose plugboards and rotors generated a theoretical 22,000,000,000,000 possible encodings. That was the bad news. The good news was that early on in the war Polish sources had let the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park know what they were up against, and an electromechanical device—Alan Turing’s famous ‘Bombe’—was constructed to help mechanize the code-breaking process. These Bombes had a single very specific role. Let’s say that a message was intercepted from a particular unit. The message would quite likely begin with some preset formula, OBERKOMMANDO5WEHRMACHT, for example. If Bletchley’s code-breakers thought they could guess even a portion of the underlying text in the intercepted message, they could get the Bombe to test which of those 22,000,000,000,000 encodings might generate the appropriate bit of text. The power of geometric progression meant that the number of possible encodings might fall to a few hundred only, easily enough to be tested out by hand. It was a huge breakthrough, one that made an important contribution to the Battle of Britain, and a crucial one to the Atlantic war, yet the breakthrough was a partial one, all the same.