This Little Britain

by Harry Bingham

  The results are by no means disappointing. There have been six British winners of the medal, plus, in 1998, a silver plaque in lieu of the medal itself was awarded to the forty-one-year-old Andrew Wiles, for his extraordinary proof of the most famous conjecture in mathematics, Fermat’s last theorem. So: six winners, or, cheating only marginally, seven. Not bad at all. The United States has had thirteen winners in total, but since the US population has been between three and five times as large, Britain has certainly exceeded it on a per capita basis. By the same argument, we can also hold our heads high in comparison with the Russians and their eight medal winners. As for our old scientific rival, Germany, the country has produced just one medal-winner during the seventy years of the prize.

  Unfortunately, there is a but. It’s hard to know how to put it. Readers of a sensitive or nervous disposition may prefer to skip the rest of this chapter and scurry forward to safer things. Anyone else…well, you’ve been warned. You read on at your peril. The ugly truth is simply this: the French have beaten us, with nine medallists to our six or (cheating) seven. No excuses spring to mind. In twentieth-century mathematics, the French have simply been better.

  Perhaps at this point, it’s worth coming completely clean. It would be easy to make the mental leap from Isaac Newton at the dawn of serious mathematics to British excellence in the twentieth century and assume that everything in between has been rosy. Easy and wrong. British mathematics after Newton was not quite a desert, but it came close. All the maths that mattered was being done elsewhere. In the eighteenth century, the best mathematicians were largely French. During the nineteenth century, when the foundations for modern mathematics were being laid, the most important contributors came from Germany (Gauss, Cantor, Rieman, Hilbert and others), from France (Cauchy, Galois and Poincaré, for example), and elsewhere in Europe (Lobachevsky). If all British mathematicians working during the era had had their working papers stolen by the CIA and locked away in that alien-infested Nevada bunker, the history of modern mathematics wouldn’t be so very different. The inauguration of the Fields medal more or less coincided with the renaissance (or, more accurately, just the plain old naissance) of maths in Britain.

  Since it’s confession time, we may as well make a clean breast of things. The problem with a book like this one is that it’s all too easy to end up sounding like the father in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, who claimed every good thing as Greek, no matter how contrived his reasoning. So let’s be clear. This book explores the numerous ways in which Britain has been exceptional, and simply leaves aside the ways in which we’ve been nothing special, or even a bit rubbish. In science, we’ve had a good twentieth century, and before that made groundbreaking contributions to such things as biology, geology and physics, but our overall record in those earlier centuries was patchy. We contributed little to the early development of chemistry. During the nineteenth century, Britain made numerous practical advances in medicine, but our contributions to medical theory fell far short of the work being done in France and Germany. We lost leadership in the electrical and chemical industries because our engineers couldn’t keep pace with Germany’s.

  And why stop at science? We aren’t the world’s most musical country. It’s no coincidence that our most notable composers include the less-than-entirely-English-sounding Georg Friedrich Händel and Gustav von Holst. Our most famous operas are those written by Gilbert and Sullivan. Our track record in the visual arts has been solid, but no more. We’ve had some good architects, but Paris is a prettier city than London, as are (feel free to make up your own list) Prague, Amsterdam, Rome and Stockholm. Our development of consultative government was precocious and of huge significance, but we were nowhere close to leading the next crucial movement towards one-person-one-vote democracy. We haven’t been a very feminist country. We do badly by our children. We lack the social egalitarianism of northern Europe, without enjoying the economic dynamism of North America. By American standards, our entrepreneurs are feeble. By German standards, our manufacturing is laughable. By French standards, our record of state intervention in the economy is simply awful. Our education has mostly been worse than that of our neighbours, our technical education vastly worse. Our elite universities have, over the centuries, had a record that is sometimes wonderful, but often hopeless. We aren’t a spiritual nation. There have been some British contemplatives and mystics, but almost none of us could name one. Our principal religious denomination, Anglicanism, is notable mostly for its very English aversion to anything too religious. (At a famous Oxford college, a former chaplain used to remark, ‘I can’t be doing with all this Jesus worship.’) When it comes to abstract philosophy, we’re good at producing a particular brand of empiricism, but have almost nobody to compare with Sartre, Hegel, Heidegger or the rest. Though we’ve excelled at naval warfare, fighting on land has seldom been our forte. Our army has mostly been an ordinary little army, which has chiefly excelled at winning minor colonial wars against hopelessly inferior opposition. We’ve had some good generals, but many more lousy ones. Even by sea, there was nothing remarkable about the British naval record from AD 400 to almost 1600. Our kings and queens have generally been poor, usually foreign, and have included a generous quotient of dolts, thugs, rogues and lunatics. Our sports teams nearly always lose. Our food is rubbish. Our fashion sense has generally been derivative or just plain bad. Throughout the 1,200 years since the Romans left these shores, the British Isles were remote, poor and mattered little to anyone except those living there. And if it’s mathematicians you’re after, then you’ll need to learn French.

  TECHNOLOGY

  RAISING WATER BY FIRE

  In Monty Python’s Life of Brian, Reg (played by John Cleese) demands: ‘What have the Romans ever done for us?’ Getting more answers than he’s bargained for, he adjusts his question:

  REG: All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?

  ATTENDEE: Brought peace?

  REG: Oh peace—shut up!

  That interchange encapsulates much of how we view the Roman and post-Roman era. The Romans got things sorted. The Dark Ages were, well, dark. It’s striking, however, that not one of the items on Reg’s list represents new technology. Those masterpieces of Roman engineering—roads, irrigation, aqueducts and the rest—were largely dependent on the effective implementation of existing technology. (The most notable exception: a much-improved cement.) The Roman Empire was largely powered by men and animals, while use of inanimate power sources was rare. Exceptional builders the Romans may have been; good technologists they were not.

  Conversely, two or three centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire, Dark Ages Europe began fizzing with creativity. The seven centuries from AD 700 to 1400 were vastly more productive than those seven Roman centuries from 300 BC to AD 400. Along came the heavy plough, capable of working the heavier clay soils prevalent north of the Alps. Along came the three-field agricultural system. Along came three-masted ships, better navigational tools and carvel-type construction.

  And power. Despite the empire’s dependence on ox-and horsepower, Roman harnesses were bizarrely hopeless, involving a neck strap that pulled directly against the animal’s windpipe and jugular. If you’ve ever wondered why the chariots in Ben Hur were so flimsy, part of the answer is that the horses pulling them were half choking as it was; heavier chariots might have finished them off completely. Medieval Europeans sorted out a proper harness, first a breast strap, then the shoulder collar. When those later animals pulled, they didn’t have to stop because they were nearly dying.

  Water and wind power played their part too. By the end of the tenth century, waterwheels had been vastly improved and widely disseminated. We don’t know where most such inventions and innovations originated—the records simply don’t exist—but we do know that the English were, at the very least, enthusiastic adopters of such techniques. In 108
6, the Domesday Book listed an amazing 5,624 watermills in England south of the Severn, or one for every fifty households. As a rainy country, England is, of course, ideally suited to such technology, but not more so than Ireland, where waterwheels were comparatively scarce. It’s significant too that the first windmills whose dates can be accurately documented sprang up in Yorkshire in 1185. England, and other technologically enthusiastic European nations, were the first societies in the world to make wide-scale use of inanimate power; not animals, not slaves.

  With the Renaissance, the technological clock began to beat faster. The old distinction between thinkers and makers disappeared. It wasn’t science as such which pushed technology forwards—science-based invention would play little part in things till 1850 or later—but it became normal for thinking men to become interested in the mechanical, to mess around with lenses, pumps, clocks, navigation, and the rest. Inventors became a protected species—literally, with the world’s first patent law arising in Venice in 1460 and numerous copies across Europe thereafter. England’s own 1624 Statute of Monopolies was the most effective such law anywhere.

  For all these advances, however, the Renaissance was a time of incremental improvement only. The great medieval revolutions—the watermill, the heavy plough, the stirrup, the printing press—had no counterpart in the quarter of a millennium from 1500. The horse, wind and water power of Norman England had not been superseded. Machines were scarce. The use of raw materials was restricted. Production was small-scale. By 1900, none of that was any longer true. From a purely technological point of view, the Europe of 1750 would have been less awe inspiring to a time traveller arriving from 300 BC than the Britain of 1900 would be to one arriving from 1750. In each of these crucial dimensions—power, the factory, machines and the exploitation of raw materials—Britain would lead the way. That leadership wouldn’t last, of course. By 1900, Britain was no longer pre-eminent in any of these areas, but there’s no doubt at all who got the party started. Of all these revolutions, the most central was power. Without power, machines were useless. Without machines, factories were just big buildings. Without machines and factories, those raw materials were never going to get cooked. Power lay at the very heart of things.

  In the economically sophisticated climate of the eighteenth century, it was fairly obvious where that new source of power might come from. Back in the first century AD, Hero of Alexandria had made steam-driven toys. A French Huguenot refugee in London, Denis Papin, had invented a simple ‘steam digester’. More significantly, in 1698, Thomas Savery patented an engine ‘for raising water by fire’, which Thomas Newcomen would come to refine. In Newcomen’s engine, steam was injected into a piston, forcing it to rise. Cold water was then injected into the cylinder, causing the temperature to drop, the steam to condense and a vacuum to be created. Atmospheric pressure then drove the piston back down the cylinder, and the downward action was converted by a see-saw type beam into an upward action, used to pump water. These engines worked and were widely used. For the first time in history, the energy in a lump of coal was being converted into economically useful motion.

  It was a crucial start, but not yet a revolutionary one. Newcomen’s engines were wasteful. Because steam was both injected and condensed in the same cylinder, the cylinder itself went through a continual cycle of heating and cooling. In other words, coal was burned both to bring water to boiling point and continually to reheat a huge metal cylinder. The process was so wasteful that it only made commercial sense where coal was cheap (as in coal mines themselves) or where the potential rewards were so large that wasting coal didn’t matter (as in the Cornish tin mines). For revolution to happen, steam power didn’t just need to work, it needed to be cheap.

  Enter James Watt. As a youth, Watt had his own space in his father’s large and well-equipped workshop, building intricate working models of cranes, capstans and other devices. Equally significantly, perhaps, the family was Scots Presbyterian, with the true Scots Presbyterian horror of idleness and waste. Watt became an instrument maker, working closely with Glasgow College, then seething with talent.

  One day, in 1760, Watt was asked by the college to fix a toy-sized model of a Newcomen engine, a demonstration model used in lectures. In due course, as his aptitudes were better known, he was asked not simply to fix it, but to make it work better. At that stage, no one had any idea of doing anything more than turning an unreliable toy into a more dependable one, but Watt was intrigued. Early on, he came to understand the challenge as one of waste: wasting steam, wasting coal.

  Although Watt was no scientist, his mode of thinking was utterly scientific in approach, in tune with the rationalism and empiricism of the age. Watt conducted experiments to see how far water expanded when converted into steam. He investigated the issue of latent heat and heat capacity. He tested out different materials for the cylinder. He came to understand and deal with the fact that the condensation point of steam (normally 100°C) was altered by the ever-changing pressures inside the cylinder. He applied all these findings to the task in hand and in the process his mission changed. No longer was he interested in that classroom model. He was interested in Newcomen’s engines themselves, and how to perfect them. In 1765 came the masterstroke. In Watt’s own words:

  I was thinking upon the engine at the time and had gone as far as the Herd’s house when the idea came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if communication was made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it, and might there be condensed without cooling the cylinder…I had not walked further than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.

  That separate condenser was a stroke of genius, the stroke of genius on which the Industrial Revolution would depend. Rather than cooling the cylinder, the engine that Watt envisioned would simply allow steam to rush out of the hot cylinder into a separate condensing chamber. There, the steam could be condensed and a vacuum created without the constant need to cool and reheat a huge chunk of metal.

  Yet to say that the ‘whole thing was arranged’ was just a tad premature. Building an engine of commercial scale proved deeply challenging. Just to pick one example, Newcomen’s pistons had been kept airtight by leather packing with a pool of water sitting on top. Watt’s engines, which would eventually use cylinders some six feet in diameter, would need something better than that, and it was only when cannon-boring technology was applied to the problem that it really gave way. (A notable example of the way in which the proto-industrial navy helped spark industry itself into life.) With every problem, every part of his machine, Watt sought to innovate. Some of those innovations never worked. Others became standard.

  In 1776—the year in which the first shots of America’s War of Independence were being fired—an almost equally revolutionary moment took place on the other side of the Atlantic. Watt’s steam engine went into commercial production. Where Newcomen’s engine had used 30 pounds of coal per horsepower-hour,* Watt’s used just 7.5. It was the birth of cheap energy, the birth of energy that could be used when, where and how humans wanted.

  Watt’s place in history was already assured, but he wasn’t done. He had the temperament of the true inventor, constantly seeking to refine and improve. Watt didn’t merely invent the first commercially efficient steam engine, he invented its second-generation replacement too: the double-acting engine, which used steam to pull as well as push. He invented the centrifugal governor, by which the engine regulated its own speed. Perhaps most crucial of all, he realized that factories wanted power not just in the thump-pause-thump-pause mode of Newcomen’s pumps, they wanted constant rotary power too. Through a brilliant sun-and-planet gearing system, Watt provided just that. He hadn’t simply invented the world’s best source of industrial power, he’d invented its crucial gearing mechanism as well.

  The importance of Watt’s engine also lies in the extent to which it released a flood of innovation by others. In 1802, Richard Trevithick built th
e first high-pressure steam engine, working at 10 atmospheres, rather than Watt’s 1.5. Other innovations followed. By 1850, the best steam engines burned just 2.5 pounds of coal per horsepower-hour, a threefold improvement on Watt.

  Watt’s innovations may have been born of his own technical genius, but if so they were midwifed by the culture that nourished him. It’s significant that virtually every major technical development in steam power, from Papin to Trevithick, took place in Britain. Watt’s own development was nourished by at least three critical influences: his childhood access to a well-equipped, technically advanced and commercially bustling workshop;* his access as an adult to the brains and scientific thought of Glasgow University; and the huge economic fires that lay just waiting to be kindled in the only just pre-industrial Britain. The first two of these influences, the technical and the scientific, were to be found in plenty of other locations in Europe, yet they were to be found more densely in Britain than elsewhere. As for the third, British industrial readiness made a difference at every stage of the process. The British readiness to make wide-scale commercial use of power did much to encourage investment in the development process—profits, not necessity, being the mother of invention.

  The basic friendliness to invention of Britain in this period can hardly be overstated. From about 1770 to about 1850, Britain’s inventors were rampant, hyper-productive, world dominant. The key technologies to emerge in the cotton spinning and weaving industries were British. The key power technologies, ditto.* The key innovations in iron-making, ditto. The most important innovations in machine tools, ditto. At the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, British exhibitors and technologies were dominant. Extraordinary as it seems to us now, the American exhibitors weren’t even able to fill their allocated space.