If the Difference Engine re-enchants computers, The Difference Engine refreshes the nineteenth century. Let me give the best illustration. The Central Statistical Bureau of Gibson and Sterling’s 1855 is a special effect, with its pyramid walls pierced by smokestacks, its polished halls of pandemonium within. The spinning Engines, multiplied in row upon row of ‘majestic gearage’, are ‘like some carnival deception, meant to trick the eye’. In our 1855 a ‘computer’ was a person who did bulk arithmetic. But the unsettled admiration the Bureau provokes had an exact real-world counterpart. The Quarterly Review of June 1850 contained forty-six rapturous pages devoted to the ‘Mechanism of the Post Office’. There were no literal machines at all in the giant sorting halls the article explored, stacked one on top of another out of the reach of daylight – except a lift, described with estranged wonder as ‘a very ingenious contrivance suggested by Mr Bokenham’. Instead they presented a ‘mechanism’ built from human components, each class of whom broke down the ‘multitudinous mass’ of the post by one specific stage: the red-coated postmen ‘like a body of soldiers playing for their very lives at cards’ who face all the 2,288,000 weekly letters in the same direction; the clerks who pass one verifying finger over each stamp with ‘rapidity . . . most astonishing’; the postmarkers whose right hands ‘destroy from 6,000 to 7,000 Queen’s heads in an hour’; the twenty-one sorting clerks through whose sets of fourteen tiny identical pigeonholes pass ‘the whole of the correspondence of the United Kingdom, not only with itself, but with every region of the habitable globe, primarily arranged!’ Except for the packages gingerly removed from circulation because they enclosed gunpowder or leeches or ‘a human stomach &c’, and the odd letter addressed only to ‘sfromfredevi’ (Sir Humphrey Davy), every item, rejoices the Quarterly Review, departs again in its right direction ‘by two great pulsations’, ‘diurnally directed along six arterial railways to about 600 principal towns’. It was all ‘very strange’ but ‘magnificent’.
Since the real years between have abolished the strangeness, it takes the replacement of the GPO by a mirage of the Babbage Engines, the morphing of the human circuitry into impossible metal, to remind us that what the Quarterly Review is describing is – that thing whose promise comes and goes in different lights – data processing.
(1996)
BOFFINS
Five years ago I was on the Isle of Wight making a radio documentary about the British rocket programme of the 1950s and 1960s, and while I was there I realised something. Well, several somethings. I discovered, for example, that although retired British rocket engineers tend to live in neat, unremarkable semis, you can often tell their houses apart from other people’s because they will have one or more astonishingly competent pieces of DIY on display. DIY that towers in scope and ambition over other people’s sets of shelves or scumbled paint effects. In one case literally. I went to a house where the engineer in residence – who’d been in charge of rocket development at a firm called Saunders-Roe Limited – had strung the clothes-line in his back garden between two steel pylons about twenty-five feet high, with a ratchet system and a little crank, so you could load up the line with your washing and then winch it to the top. Because, he said, he’d worked out that if you could get the laundry into the quicker flow of air over the roof of the house, it would dry much more efficiently. So I learned that. And I learned that towards the very end of Britain’s participation in satellite-launcher building, in 1971, when the programme was cancelled while the very last Black Arrow test vehicle was already on its way to Australia, and the engineers were given their last chance to prove their system on the understanding that, succeed or fail, Black Arrow was cancelled anyway – one of this bloke’s colleagues at Saunders-Roe had suggested that it might be nice to paint a Union Jack on the side of the last British rocket. ‘Oh no’, he was told by the powers that be. ‘Why would we want to do that? We don’t put the name of the country on the stamps, you know . . .’
But the larger thing I realised, put together from all the anecdotes like this, and all the testimony we got down on tape, was that I was dealing with the remnants of a lost world. Although Black Arrow’s sad ending at the moment of its triumph happened in my own lifetime, the world it came out of had vanished so completely during the great deindustrialisation of the 1970s and 1980s that it was now hard to believe that the events I was hearing about had really happened. They didn’t fit with British reality as I had got used to it being, coming to adulthood in the 1980s, when the UK was phobically averse to getting involved in any grand technological projects, and certainly in European rocket-building. This was another world, with different assumptions and expectations; where, although the UK was only a minimal and half-hearted participant in the space race compared to the US and the Soviet Union, with the French coming up behind, nevertheless it was still a player; and there in the geography of the Space Age, alongside Cape Kennedy and Baikonur, there was still the faint presence of Woomera, on the Nullarbor Plain of South Australia. The last scraps still lingered in that world of the great-power military-industrial mindset that had held in Britain during the Second World War – the attitude that, if space was the next item on the technological agenda, a country like Britain would of course be involved. Probably this attitude hung around longest among the rocket engineers themselves, because they were so focused on the technical challenge. And on the technical level they couldn’t see why not, they couldn’t see why, with a bit of ingenuity and a bit of deft exploitation of some of the cheaper and more peculiar technologies in the rocket engineer’s cupboard, there couldn’t be a viable British rocket industry.
They weren’t expecting the future that actually arrived. By 1971, not many people were still entertaining the dream of a British space programme in its full-on, full-blown romantic form; the form that the British Interplanetary Society had dreamed it in not long after the end of the war; the form of it that Dan Dare acted out in the Eagle; the form of the dream in which, one day, an RAF squadron leader would drink tea beside the Sea of Tranquillity while getting a crackly congratulatory radio message from the Queen. ‘Good hivens, I should think this must be the most expinsive telephone call iver made . . .’ The tea, presumably, in some sort of self-heating aluminium canister invented by the boffins at Lipton, and available on earth for thirty guineas a time in Fortnum & Mason. That dream was never likely, because Wernher von Braun had been essentially right about the facts of the situation when he chose the Americans for him and his Peenemunde colleagues to surrender to in 1945. ‘We feared the Russians, we despised the French, and the British could not afford us.’ But other more modest dreams were possible. For instance, the one in which Britain built up the kind of profitable specialised competence at building rocket motors which Rolls-Royce presently has at building jet engines. Or the one in which Britain collaborated wholeheartedly in European launcher development, and ended up manufacturing half of every Ariane. All of these possibilities, romantic and sensible, likely and insanely unlikely, disappeared together. They popped out of existence like a soap bubble when Black Arrow was cancelled. And what struck me, doing the radio documentary, was that as a result it wasn’t just the squadron leader on the moon that belonged in the domain of alternate history. From the point of view of the world that replaced it – the world whose dimensions and expectations I’d learned to take as normality, growing up in the 1980s – the world that these retired rocket engineers really remembered, not very long ago in the grand scheme of things, itself seemed almost counterfactual, seemed to belong to a different strand of history. To the other leg of the Trousers of Time. Which seemed to me to be a wonderful index of just how drastic the change had been when the old industrial tradition fractured in Britain.
I was fascinated. I decided I wanted to write about the change, about this enormous phase shift that had happened so recently, but so thoroughly that the world before it now looked as if it belonged to a different history. I wanted to know about what had happened, not just
in the specific little territory of rocket-building, but in lots of other technologies. I wanted to know how the vanishing felt to the generation of engineers I’d been interviewing on the Isle of Wight. But then, as I looked around, I started to see transformation as well as disappearance; I started to see quiet ways in which there was unexpected continuity between this lost world of technology and the new world that followed it, after the crash, after the industrial landscape shattered, when technology in Britain reconstituted itself, both in completely new areas, like the videogame, and also around ancient competences in music, in genetics, in pharmacology. I realised that, if I could just work out how to tell it, how to pick the right bits from a profusion of material, there was an enormous story here. And at its centre would be the figure of the engineer, first of the rocket engineer but then also of the software designers and the biotechnologists and the people who laid out the mobile phone network, and and and. People whose experience got hardly any attention in mainstream culture. (SF is the grand exception, which is one reason why SF was a vital resource of ideas throughout the whole project.)
If you think about it, although there’s now a lot of critically acclaimed popular science writing, and a good thing too, there is hardly any ambitious and inventive writing about engineering out there. Which seems to me to be perverse. My theory is – and I want you to know that I’m beating myself up here as much as anyone else – my theory is that in a culture still dominated by the assumptions of the liberal arts, it’s far easier to assimilate the importance of the abstract idea-driven things that scientists do, than to pay proper attention to the muddy, kludgy, impure, applied activities of those who wrestle with steel, string and software and actually construct stuff. Particle physics and chaos theory get subtle, adventurous coverage, and writing about evolutionary biology has virtually taken over the slot in the culture that theology used to occupy. But few writers have put serious literary effort into conveying how a Formula One engine works, or where the beauty lies in object-oriented programming. Even the glut of ‘technology’ books inspired by the late-1990s bubble economy mostly told business stories, about technology lending money new mobility and velocity. There’s nothing wrong with that in itself – the story of the money is always a part of how something concrete gets created – but again, explaining technology’s finances is the easy bit, the bit that’s least of a challenge, that causes least culture-shock for verbal types like me, with my college degree in literature and my D at Physics A-level.
Yet engineering ought to be a deeply sympathetic subject for writers. It’s like writing; in many ways it’s more like writing and the other arts than pure science is. It too is about making. It too is a mode of imagination, working concretely in the world of things. To represent it on the page, you have to come up with some sort of necessarily artificial verbal counterpart to its non-verbal processes: but if you can contrive to do that, you gain access to an activity which makes deep, immediate human sense, because it’s part of the grappling with the physical world which we’ve been doing as long as we’ve existed as a species. And also to an activity which is gloriously interconnected with area after area of the rest of human life, precisely because getting things made is not pure. It’s an art of the possible two ways round: it happens at the point of intersection between what’s technically feasible and what a particular enterprise in a particular society in a particular time in a particular place is willing to do, can manage to do, wants to do, can afford to do. Looked at right, technology tells you about history, about politics, about economics, and about the dimensions of human character. It has universal themes, and it tells a thousand local stories. Often it tells a local story most pervasively when it believes it’s being most universal. At the height of the internet bubble, when I was thinking about different ways to talk about technology, I spent a lot of time reading Wired magazine,27 and all of the stuff I found in it about the abolition of place breathed out an intensely local understanding of place, and all the stuff about atoms becoming bits made it clear that these were Californian atoms becoming Californian 1s and 0s, and all the stuff about real life being just another window made it clear that said window opened on a view of the Bay Area of San Francisco. It wasn’t a palette of shades that was very well adapted to technology’s other histories in other places.
Which brings me to the British boffin.
Different countries have different folk-myths by which they understand technology, and different iconic figures to embody those myths. In America, the mythological engineer is a polymath and an entrepreneur, someone who can turn their hand to anything and turn it into a saleable product. Pre-eminently, Edison, the human cornucopia from which lightbulbs, telephones, sound recording and movie cameras all gushed out. The Russian or German one is an imposing visionary in danger of losing his soul to power by making a Faustian bargain. Wernher von Braun, Korolyev. The Italian one is a designer of temperamental genius. The French one is a technocrat. And what do the British have? Well, close your eyes and look at the picture that forms. (I absolutely swear that I won’t ask you to clap your hands if you believe in boffins.) Probably what you’re seeing is a middle-aged man of mild demeanour with an absent-minded expression, wearing some sort of white or brown labcoat. He works for the government, and though he wouldn’t hurt a fly personally, he spends his days creating weapons of mass destruction: bouncing bombs, jet fighters, exploding toothpaste, death rays. He is, in short, a stereotype straight out of the same Second World War setting that produced the fading impulse behind the British rocket programme. I’d guess that the stereotype was established because, at the time, the war was such an intense experience of technological acceleration, and because it made people aware of depending very directly on technology for survival. The black-and-white war-film boffin put a comfy, manageable face on military tech; like a lot of stereotypes he provided a sense of familiarity that let you stop asking anxious questions. I’d guess that the stereotype is still around, amazingly, when it’s decades out of date, and actual British engineers are more likely to be smoking a spliff than a pipe, and wearing a black T-shirt that says Plus Plus Ungood on the front instead of a labcoat, and even from time to time to be women, exactly because the post-war industrial tradition in this country crashed without leaving a culturally obvious successor. The rival figure of the geek started to make inroads in the 1990s, but it still hasn’t displaced the older stereotype. Recently there’s been a very welcome rediscovery of the world-shaking powers of Victorian engineers like Brunel: but, still, our mental boffin endures. I don’t, myself, like the word ‘boffin’ much. It seems to me to be an alibi for incuriosity about what’s actually going on, stuffing present-day reality into a nostalgic container it doesn’t really fit. Newspapers use ‘boffin’ as one of their special headline-shorthand words which are completely divorced from ordinary speech, like ‘love nest’ and ‘probe’, whereas in British playgrounds ‘boffin’ is a term used to oppress speccy gits who do their homework, which as a speccy git myself, I object to.
So is the stereotype completely without meaningful content? Nope. Like clichés, stereotypes go on circulating because they also embody recognisable truths. If you discard the bits of the picture that are just anachronisms, and just patronising, and just borrowed from Q in the Bond films, you are left with something that does, sort of, correspond to the peculiarities of the particular, local history of technology, here. When I went looking for the new technologies into which our local urge to build the future migrated, in the 1980s and 1990s, I kept finding patterns that repeated, even when, as with the subculture of programmers writing the early videogames for the BBC Micro and the Commodore 64 and the Sinclair Spectrum, the big draw of the technology in question was that it offered a clean slate; that these twenty-year-olds in their bedrooms were joining something so early in its life cycle that anything could happen, and anyone who wanted to make a difference in them could, without any money, without anything much but the determination to do it. Yet these repeating pat
terns were still there. And one of them was to do with the element of truth in the stereotype; with the temperament encouraged in British engineers by the local technoculture. If the iconic French engineer is a technocrat, and the iconic American one is an entrepreneur, then the iconic British one, and quite often the actual British one, is an enthusiast. He (or, increasingly, she) is usually an employee rather than a lone inventor in a shed, these days more likely an employee of a company rather than the government – but he brings to his work a passion which has almost nothing to do with the bottom line (except as a means of going on doing what he loves doing) and almost nothing to do with dreams of personal glory (except in terms of winning the good opinion of other enthusiasts like himself). This kind of attitude to engineering is very strongly associated with informal, self-constituting networks – with clubs, and hobbies, and wet Saturday afternoons in garages, and midnight emails. It also has, often, very strong connections to a childhood fascination with constructing things, which in turn steers it as an adult activity towards the types of making which you can use your hands for; towards messing about, and getting dirty, and being rewarded by feeling the project developing intricately under your fingers. Interestingly, this seems to be true of software too, which you’d think would be too disembodied to offer that tactile satisfaction, but which exists quite firmly enough in the minds of some of those creating it to feel to them like a sculptural, textural thing, something with extension and weight and different degrees of smoothed-out done-ness, which can therefore be tinkered with to your heart’s content. I kept finding parallel formative experiences in the lives of the people I interviewed. For example, there was the old-fashioned metal construction kit Meccano buried way down in the decision by John Sulston, the director of the British end of the Human Genome Project, to become the kind of biologist who wanted to touch things; and then there was Meccano again in James Dyson’s evolution towards being the king of the bagless vacuum. (Interestingly, Dan Dare was also a big influence on Dyson. In his autobiography, he describes reading the Eagle as a child in deepest Norfolk in the early 1960s, and naively assuming that, way out there in the big cities, people really were getting on with building the Dan Dare future. He says he was genuinely angry when he found out that the world wasn’t going that way. I suppose you could interpret the vacuums as small yellow and purple plastic contributions to making the dream come true. Dual Cyclones against the Mekon!)
True Stories Page 26
