Adam Hart-Davis : Articles

Articles

Radio Times articles, from 2003-2005

Escape-proof???
Sounds Familiar
The Hounding of the Royals
Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells?
The Mystery of the Stones
Going Loco
Troy
Pedal Power
Dentures
Obesity
Genius Sperm
Ultimation
Sandals, Slaughter and Sex
Greased Lightning
Flying Saucers
Aztecs
Venus
The Stuarts
The Ascent of Man
Test-tube Tantrums
RT Mastermind
Medical Marvels
Engineering Triumphs
Eccentricity
Surreal Estate
Offshore Wind Farms
Nothing to Loos
Groovy
A Bridge Too Far
Flogging a Dead Horse
Worst Jobs
Asteroid Alert
Eureka Years
Crash
Inspired
The Man Who Missed Dinosaurs
The Sagger-maker's Bottom-knocker
The Master
Naming Nature
Albert Einstein
Environmental Scariness
Geronimo!
Ancient Plastic Surgery
The Ancients
Gold in Them Thar Banks and Braes
Animal Magnetism
Egyptians
Technophilia
HIGNFY
Panem et Circenses
Tambora
That Spotty Old Sun
Telling Stories
Beethoven's Hair
A Blind Eye
Comets
Medrocks

The pioneers who invented progress


	Progressive times: Adam Hart-Davis taps into the Victorian age to find the roots of modern life

WHEN Alexandrina Victoria came to the throne in 1837, just after her 18th birthday, Britain was already the world leader in the production of iron, steel and steam engines. During her reign, a combination of this and other factors released a torrent of technology that brought about tremendous social change. The Victorians called it "progress", and used their immense energy and self-confidence to build the world we live in today.

I live in a Victorian house, travel on Victorian roads on what is little changed from a Victorian bicycle, and catch trains that thunder along lines surveyed by Robert Stephenson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. Even such modern contrivances as the telephone, the computer and the internet had their origins in what the Victorians did for us.

The first real passenger railway ran from Liverpool to Manchester in 1830; by the time Queen Victoria appeared, there were 500 miles of lines, but in the next decade railway mania took over, and thousands of miles of track snaked all over the country, bringing significant change.

New towns were created. George Stephenson invented Crewe - halfway between Liverpool and Manchester - for his railway workshops. For the same reason, Isambard Kingdom Brunel covered the green fields outside the tiny village of Swindon with workshops and houses for his workers.

The railways homogenised time, as "railway time" spread nationwide. Most towns used to take their time from noon, when the sun was highest in the sky, but this varied from place to place. Sunrise in Bristol is about 10 minutes later than in London, because Bristol is further west.

When the Great Western Railway (sometimes then called God's Wonderful Railway) reached Bristol in 1841, Bristolians who set their clocks by local time found they kept missing the trains, which ran on London time. As a result, "railway time" and the station clock took over from the clocks on the town hall and the church. One of the last bastions of resistance was Christchurch College at Oxford, where the clock on Tom Tower had two minute hands, one showing railway time, and the other, five minutes behind, showing Oxford time.

Alongside the railway lines were laid the wires for the electric telegraph, patented in 1837. Originally, these carried simple messages from one station to another to prevent trains from meeting head-on on the same single line. Soon, however, people realised they could use the growing telegraph network to send messages from one company to another, from one person to another, and to send news across the country.

Julius Reuter set up his news agency in 1851, rapidly converting to the electric telegraph when it became available, and a national newspaper launched in 1855 astutely called itself The Daily Telegraph, to show that it was in touch with the latest technology. By 1870, it had the largest circulation of any London daily.

The electric telegraph was such a success that people began laying cables under the sea, first to France in 1850, and then to Spain and Gibraltar. In 1866, Daniel Gooch laid a cable across the Atlantic and by 1875 the Gibraltar cables had been extended on through the Mediterranean and the Suez Canal to India and Australia. Most of these telegraph wires left Britain under the beach in a tiny sandy bay at Porthcurno, a couple of miles from Land's End.

Just above the beach there still stands a tiny concrete hut, where cables come snaking out of the ground with labels saying Bilbao, Gibraltar and Newfoundland. This hut was the hub of the Victorian internet, and through it the Queen could send a personal message from her telegraph station at Buckingham Palace to all the far corners of her empire.

A vital factor in these underwater cables was insulation; they could not have worked if the wire made contact with seawater, and in 1837 the best insulator, tarred string, was hopelessly inadequate. But then came gutta-percha, a milky fluid from the sap of a Malayan tree that sets into a white material. It is plastic but not elastic - it does not stretch - and is ideal for insulation.

Stretchy rubber also came into its own in the Victorian era. Way back in 1780, Joseph Priestley had noted that he could rub black marks off paper using the sticky raw material that was called caoutchouc, which was why he called the stuff "rubber". In 1840, Michael Faraday stuck two sheets of caoutchouc together round the edges, and so invented the balloon. Commercial balloons appeared a few years later, and so did rubber balls. The main use for rubber, though, was in tyres, first solid and later pneumatic, thanks to the efforts of American Charles Goodyear, who had discovered how to vulcanise rubber.

Seven years before Victoria's coronation, Edwin Beard Budding had a brainwave at the Phoenix Ironworks in Stroud, Gloucestershire, where he made machines to trim the nap off cloth. Inspired by their example, he wondered if a machine could trim grass. At one stroke, he invented the lawnmower. In his patent, he said: "Country Gentlemen may find in using my machine themselves an amusing, useful, and healthy exercise."

He made little money before he died, but his mowing machines gradually caught on. The growing middle classes made themselves lawns, cricket pitches and bowling greens appeared, and in 1875 Walter Clopton Wingfield invented a new game that he called sphairistike, or lawn tennis. He was far more successful than Budding, and within a year sold 1,000 tennis sets, each of which contained nets, balls, bats, and everything else you needed for the game, including a book of rules and handy tips, such as: "Look well before striking, so as to place [the ball] in a corner most remote from your opponent."

Thus the new technologies of vulcanised rubber and the mowing machine brought about a great social change, for lawn tennis made it acceptable for young men and women to run about together and enjoy the summer, without breaking all the complex social rules of behaviour.

Rules were important. While Mrs Beeton laid down rules for household management, Joseph Whitworth invented rules for standardising nuts and bolts and made a machine that could measure to a millionth of an inch. People laughed at him for insisting on such absurd precision, but he became one of the most successful engineers of the age.

Before the rules of the Victorian age, mob football was popular; any number of people might play, and the game often went in and out of the pub. Windows and arms were sometimes broken. When the railways made away matches possible, different teams had to learn to play using the same rules, or the games did not work. On October 26, 1863, 11 football clubs met in the Freemasons' Tavern in London to form a Football Association based on a universal set of rules.

The railways had other effects. When Thomas Cook organised the world's first package trip on July 5, 1841, it was a sell-out: 570 people paid their shilling and crowded on to the train from Leicester to go to Loughborough for a temperance picnic. This marked another major social change - the beginning of free time, spare cash, and therefore the leisure industry.

People began to go away on trips, especially to the seaside. Naturally there was a scientific reason for this, even though it was entirely specious. The gas ozone, an unstable form of oxygen, had been discovered in 1839, and was shown to be a powerful antiseptic. Since it was often generated by electrical machines, which many quack doctors claimed could cure all ills, people jumped to the conclusion that ozone was healthy.

The smell of rotting seaweed is faintly similar to that of ozone, and people jumped to a second conclusion - that sea air was full of ozone, and therefore healthy. So they went promenading by the sea, or preferably over the sea, on the piers that were being built all around the coastline. Alas, there is no excess of ozone at the seaside, and far from being healthy, it's poisonous. But these facts have not undermined the myth. Even today, people believe sea air is healthy, because of the ozone.

What else did the Victorians do for us? They tamed electricity, gave us a uniformed police force, bicycles, cars, aircraft, ice cream, sea bathing, nude bathing, the dentist's drill, anaesthetics, Florence Nightingale, photography, the weather forecast, and, my personal favourite, the velocipede shower, for the person who wanted to get fit and clean at the same time.

In other words, Queen Victoria's subjects gave us progress.

Daily Telegraph, August 2001

Page last updated: Friday, 22 July 2005 22:35

Radio Times articles, from 2003-2005

Other articles

The pioneers who invented progress