Chapter 22

Ten Triumphs of Technology

In This Chapter

Finding the gadgets that make life a little easier . . .

. . . and finding some gadgets that might worry us just a bit

The twentieth century was nothing if not the century of technology. We’re so used to the power of technology to take away pain or carry us huge distances that remembering that life was ever different is difficult. Everyone has their own ideas of which have been the most significant technological breakthroughs. I’ve avoided some of the most obvious, like cars and planes, because I suspect we all know about the impact – for good and bad – that they’ve had on our lives. I look at this as a historian rather than as an engineer: These are just some of the technological breakthroughs of the twentieth century that had a big impact – sometimes surprisingly big – on the way people actually lived, and even on how they thought.

The Refrigerator

Never underestimate the power of food. Empires have been built – and fallen – on the search for food: Whoever controls the food supply controls the people. In 1959 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and his wife were treated to an American display of economic and technical superiority at a trade fair where they could marvel at the latest designs of fridges. The Americans knew full well that such things were virtually unobtainable in Russia. Khrushchev knew this too. Throughout history, the simple, everyday objects that people really care about have had the most profound effects.

Until the nineteenth century if you wanted to keep food cool you had to keep an expensive ice house in the garden or invest in an insulated ice box, lined with tin or zinc (not cheap). Nineteenth-century inventors toyed around with various designs of refrigeration units but they ran on toxic gases so you kept your fridge outside if you had any sense, in case of leaks. In 1929, however, a bright spark at General Motors called Thomas Midgley came up with a non-toxic chemical compound that he called Freon. It worked and in the years after the Second World War homes all over the world began to install fridges run on Freon. It even ran air conditioning. Cool.

Don’t break open the bubbly yet, though. Freon is made up of a number of chlorofluorocarbons, CFCs for short, which are now busily eating away at the earth’s protective ozone layer. Not so cool.

Television

You might think television is an obvious choice, like cars or aeroplanes, but you could argue (and I do) that television had a deeper impact than either of those. I don’t underestimate the importance of transport, but television actually changed the way people thought and saw the world around them. You could even say that television took the world back to the days before the printing press, when people thought and communicated visually, rather than through the printed word. Television created a world of people who watch.

Part of television’s impact lies in the speed with which it took hold. In the 1930s and 1940s television was a novelty toy. In the 1950s people in the West began to latch onto it, and by the 1960s it was everywhere, even on the moon. The poorest households saw a television set as a necessity, not as a luxury. Television allowed people around the world to share in the same experiences, watching major events from the cosiness of their own homes: The Vietnam War, the Munich Olympics crisis, the fall of the Berlin Wall, Tianenmen Square, and Nelson Mandela walking to freedom were all TV events. Politicians dropped the ancient art of oratory in favour of the TV soundbite, and terrorists cannily learned to exploit the potential of TV news schedules: The 9/11 attacks, for example, were carefully planned so that the TV cameras were covering the first plane crash when the second one attacked. The people who control TV have become figures of global power, their every move watched nervously by the leaders of even the most powerful countries.

Nothing, not even the Internet, has done more to create a global universal culture than television.

Cats’ Eyes

Some of the most important breakthroughs with enormous impacts on everyone’s lives are the ones we hardly notice. I’d list street lighting here (think of the lives it must have saved around the world) except that it was a nineteenth century breakthrough; the twentieth century just substituted electricity for gas. But a small triumph in the same area of preventing death on the world’s roads came one foggy night in 1933 when a Yorkshireman called Percy Shaw was saved from driving over a steep precipice by the reflection of a cat’s eyes in his headlights. ‘By gum,’ thinks Percy, ‘now that’s an idea.’ Being an inventive chap, he designed a reflective stud that lies flat in the road and shines in the headlights of an on-coming car. Simple, effective, and cheap. And almost certainly to be seen on a motorway near you.

James Callaghan decided that introducing cats’ eyes was his most important achievement as British prime minister. Different versions are in use in different countries, and the new ‘smart’ cats’ eyes can trigger red lights to stop oncoming vehicles. A small but genuine technological triumph which has probably kept you safe more times than you can count.

The Helicopter

Everyone knows the story of how the Wright brothers made the first powered heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in 1903 (if you don’t, it’s in Chapter 2). That was a massive technological breakthrough and no mistake, but I’ve included the helicopter rather than the plane here for rather different reasons. Planes can duck and weave, drop bombs or food parcels, and blast each other out of the sky, but they are still essentially a way of getting from A to B. Helicopters, because they can hover, move forwards or backwards, and don’t need runways, can interact with the ground much more effectively than planes can. Helicopters can winch people off sinking ships or inaccessible mountainsides, airlift people from rooftops, carry troops straight into battle and whisk the wounded straight out again, search for criminals or monitor the traffic, and ferry blood supplies or human hearts, or even politicians canvassing for votes. Okay, that last one might not be such a plus.

Frenchman Paul Cornu made the first successful helicopter flight in 1907. Helicopter pioneers needed a powerful motor to lift the thing and a lightweight metal to make it out of – they hit on aluminium. Russian helicopter pioneer Igor Sikorski solved the problem of torque, which happens when the rotor forces the fuselage to rotate in the opposite direction to the engine, by introducing a tail rotor to counteract the torque and keep the copter flying straight. The helicopter’s versatility, and the way it has been integrated into the lives even of people who aren’t travelling, wins it a place in this list.

The Ballpoint Pen

If life were fair the credit for ballpoints would go to John Loud, who invented one back in 1888, but it didn’t work very well and was never exploited commercially. Instead the laurels go to Laszlo Biro, a Hungarian journalist fed up with having to fill his fountain pen every five minutes only to see it tear up the newsprint paper he was using. He worked with a small ball- bearing to control the flow of ink to the pen tip and got his breakthrough when the Royal Air Force commissioned his company to supply pens to pilots who found their fountain pens leaked at high altitudes. Biro patented and marketed his pens in Argentina through his company, Eversharp, where they attracted the notice of a sharp Chicago businessman called Milton Reynolds. Reynolds pinched the idea and marketed ballpoints in the US, where Biro didn’t have a patent. The 1950s saw a veritable ballpoint war as more companies got in on the act and tried to sell cheap, messy ballpoints to the public, who soon got fed up with ballpoints leaking in their pockets and looked out their trusty fountain pens and bottles of ink.

Two companies rescued the ballpoint’s reputation. In 1957 Biro sold Eversharp to the Parker pen company, whose reputation for high-quality pens helped get ballpoints accepted socially. At the other end of the market, the Frenchman Marcel Bich had introduced a cheap throw-away ballpoint in 1952. He chopped the h off his name and the Bic pen was born.

The world of pen nibs and inkwells seems like ancient history now, but it’s a reminder of how expensive and how much work writing used to be. Biro’s invention helped spread literacy to everyone, so it’s appropriate that his name should have entered the English language and that his invention features here.

Satellites

Who’d have thought, when the Russians launched Sputnik in 1957, that satellite technology and humankind’s conquest of space would end up with a little box in your car telling you to turn right at the next junction? Sputnik was a propaganda triumph for the Russians and certainly put the Americans’ noses out of joint until they could start launching their own satellites. But it took a while before anyone could actually work out what these satellites could do. Telstar, a US–British–French collaboration (and that’s remarkable enough on its own!) was the first communications satellite, launched in 1962 and capable of transmitting television pictures. By the 1970s NASA (the National Aeronautical and Space Agency) was launching Landsats that could transmit detailed pictures of the earth, which could then be used for anything from weather forecasting to crop management. Satellite photography has allowed us to map power usage around the world and more recently to track the progress of climate change.

The first satellites went up at the height of the Cold War and it didn’t take long to exploit their potential for espionage. No need for agents furtively peeping from behind newspapers when the ‘spy in the sky’ can look over an enemy agent’s shoulder and read the time from his watch. Now any of us can look up an address on the Web and see a detailed satellite photo of it. Ronald Reagan’s ‘Star Wars’ proposal for a satellite system to destroy incoming nuclear missiles raised the stakes higher than the Russians could afford to go and played a crucial part in bringing the Cold War to an end.

The way in which satellite technology has come down from the stratosphere into our ordinary lives is why I place satellites on this list.

Heart Transplants

As the twentieth-century world put age-old scourges like smallpox and plague behind it, other diseases like cancer and heart disease took their place. I’ve included heart transplants here because they’re a good example of the application of technology to medicine. People have long been used to the idea of seeking a remedy for illness in the natural world, but the idea of transplanting a human heart from one body to another, as you might replace an old car engine, still seems almost miraculous: It’s the nearest we come to bringing people back to life.

The first successful human heart transplant was carried out in South Africa in 1967 by Dr Christiaan Barnard, and it provoked enormous excitement around the world. Unfortunately, these early transplants weren’t very stable: Barnard’s patient only lived another 18 days. Too often the recipient’s body tissue simply rejected the new heart. Scientists worked on immunosuppressant drugs to overcome the body’s resistance, and from the 1980s recipients began to live for significantly longer; the number of heart transplants began to climb again. Even children could receive heart transplants and in 1984 a baby girl in the US gained a few days’ life with a baboon’s heart. To say that we take heart transplants for granted is probably an overstatement, but the idea that they are possible is now well established in our minds. For that achievement alone heart transplantation deserves its place here.

Personal Computers

We depend on computers so much now that we can scarcely believe how much effort we used to put in to tasks that now take a click of the mouse. Modern computing can be traced back to the nineteenth century and its principles to the British wartime codebreaker, Alan Turing, but the big breakthrough came on 12 August 1981 when IBM released its new ‘PC’ – Personal Computer. The PC had a keyboard, a monitor, two floppy disk drives, and an operating system called MS-DOS designed by a company called Microsoft headed by one Bill Gates. A new world was born.

Time magazine made the IBM PC its ‘Man of the Year’ in 1981 as the full, mind-boggling implications of computing began to take shape. In fact IBM didn’t particularly benefit from the breakthrough (anyone could design the hardware), but Microsoft did. Two years later a company called Apple bit back with its Macintosh computer, which still has its fans, but Microsoft, which in 1983 launched its Windows operating system (it nearly got called ‘Interface Manager’ – yawn), was unstoppable and remains unstoppable as I write this. On a Windows-powered PC.

Mobile Phones

No one objected to police walkie-talkies (okay, criminals weren’t too pleased) yet somehow for a long time people resisted the idea of mobile telephones. Their acceptance wasn’t helped by the first-generation models, launched in the early 1980s, which were huge and mainly designed for use in cars by loud-mouthed people with too much money. By the 1990s mobiles were much smaller and easier to use, so ordinary people bought them. People still worry about the effects of mobile phone masts in public streets and whether the phones themselves will frazzle our brains. I guess time will tell.

The impact that mobiles had took everyone by surprise. No one expected SMS text messaging to become so popular, nor that mobiles would be able to take pictures, show films, and operate as portable computers. And who could have predicted just how mad you could drive people by choosing an annoying ring tone? Above all, no one realised that mobile phone records would enable phone companies – and the authorities – to keep track of our movements. Still, you can always tell them – and everyone else – exactly where you are by shouting loudly into your mobile ‘I’m on a train!’ A qualified technological triumph, then.

Barcodes

Had barcodes remained a way of putting prices on goods in supermarkets, I wouldn’t have included them here. But they’ve grown beyond their origins into one of the most important ways by which They keep tabs on Us.

A barcode is essentially a speedy identification system which can tap into a database. For example, supermarket barcodes identify an item and the database gives the price. But what if you are the item and the database carries your personal information? A passport barcode, for example, can give a border control guard instant access to huge amounts of information about any passenger just arrived off the plane. Even supermarkets are getting into the control game, using barcodes on their products and their own loyalty cards to build up profiles of their regular customers. Alongside the metallic strips and microchips on the plastic cards we all depend on, the barcode has done more than anything else to give the State, big business, and anyone else with access to the right technology the information they need to keep an eye on all of us.