There are certain bits of received wisdom that nobody normally challenges. Such as that we live in an era of constant, accelerating change; that innovation is the key to economic survival; and that we all travel everywhere by personal jet pack.
Okay, I made that a bit obvious. That’s the trouble with yesterday’s futures. They’re so yesterday. Yet the same people who were so sure about the jet-pack future didn’t have the slightest inkling that, by 2006, we would be flying to Budapest for lunch on a whim, for pocket money. On planes seemingly little different from the machines on which the world’s elite used to fly in the 1950s.
What’s happening? Why don’t things follow the headlines? Why is white-heat-of-technology Concorde a fading memory, while the utterly conventional Boeing 737 rules the skies? Why won’t vinyl records go away? Why have killer diseases such as malaria not yet been eradicated? Why did Tomorrow’s World become a joke? Because people were thinking jet pack when it should have been bicycle.
This is the fertile territory explored by David Edgerton, professor of history of science and technology at Imperial College, in his new book, The Shock of the Old. In it, he eviscerates our obsession with novelty. It’s time, he argues, to look at the history of science and technology in a new way. It’s blindingly obvious, really. Instead of recording when devices and processes were invented or predicted, why not look at how we use things? I find him in Buenos Aires for Christmas — he was born in Uruguay, of an English father and an Argentinian mother. He knows that Fray Bentos is a place, not just a brand of corned beef. And not just a place, but a remarkable example of 19th- and 20th-century industrialised food production, the scale and efficiency of which — without need even of refrigeration — rivals anything today. Our shops are still full of canned food, an older technology we never stop to think about.
We are both alive to the irony that, in an online age, we are talking to each other by telephone, a 19th-century invention. I mention that outside my window is a wooden pole, sprouting copper wires in a way the Victorians would have recognised, and that our words are passing through it. “Ah, yes,” he shoots back, “but the wires have changed, the exchanges are different. It’s like today’s airliners. They’re no faster now than they were in the 1950s, but they’re more efficient.”
It would be easy, and wrong, to characterise Edgerton as some kind of scientific conservative simply because he is a revisionist historian. What he does is question the presentation and interpretation of the facts at our disposal. Key to this is to question the myth of the inevitability of sudden techno- logical change. So we have the internet? He does not deny it is a powerful thing. Yet there are alternative technologies. Mankind managed fine before the internet, and if the system crashed globally, as it often threatens to do, then we would find ways round the problem.
“If we get a half-decent account of the history of 20th- century technology, then that allows us to rethink some aspects of 20th- century history,” he says. “In other words, technology is so important that if we understand it properly, we might be able to produce a new kind of history.”
For Edgerton, the problem is not that technology has been ignored — we can’t get away from accounts of it — but that those accounts have been idealistic rather than pragmatic. They incline towards glamour, drama, spectacle. The humble soldier’s rifle — Lee-Enfield or AK-47 — was vastly more important in 20th- century warfare than the V-2 missile or the atom bomb, he points out. But a basic killing tool like the rifle doesn’t make good television, or good political capital. Weapons of mass destruction, anybody? “A lot of our understanding of 20th-century global history is shaped by a particular understanding of technology that may not be that useful,” he remarks. “I’m not saying there isn’t very, very dramatic change. On the contrary, I want to highlight the fact that there is change. But in terms of the technology that is actually used, it’s very different from the stories of invention and innovation that are told. Those stories are narrow — our creativity is more general than we think.”
In other words, we’ve got it all wrong. Corrugated-iron sheeting and bicycles feature more prominently in all our lives than the Apollo moon missions and nuclear submarines. “For example, motor-car technology continues to change. Steel-making technology continues to change. Textile technology continues to change. And all those are changing our lives today,” he says. Glamorous, no. Important, yes.
China is the nation/region having the biggest impact on our lives, yet it restricts use of the internet. “If we think about the rise of China, we’d be mistaken to do so in terms of the internet, or nanotechnology or biotechnology. We’d be better off thinking about the continued importance of mass production — steel, coal mining and so on. We made a big mistake ...” He pauses, and corrects himself. “We made a partial mistake in the dotcom boom, thinking that we’d come into a new economy driven by IT. We found ourselves back in an old economy of heavy commodities and shipping.”
Even genocide has gone retro, he contends. The ghastly efficiency with which up to 1m Rwandan Tutsis were slaughtered in 1994 — mainly with machetes costing less than a dollar each, and clubs costing nothing — rivals any process the Nazis were able to invent. The terrible truth is that Hitler didn’t need gas chambers. The idea the Hutu tribe had — simply to import shiploads of cheap machetes, then use them on an unprecedented scale — was enough. “Invention happens at unexpected times and places,” says Edgerton, with masterly understatement.
Then there is the old canard that you cannot uninvent something, that you cannot put the genie back in the bottle. Yes, you can, says Edgerton. It happens all the time. Just as plenty of old ideas remain in use, unremarked, so others fall out of use for various reasons. The world used to depend on asbestos. It was useful stuff; then we discovered that it was also dangerous. Now we use other stuff instead. It would be nice to think people just couldn’t be bothered with nuclear weapons any more. Unfortunately, we are still transfixed by their sabre-rattling potential.
Edgerton’s position is highly nuanced. He is no Luddite, no golden-age nostalgist, no denier of the importance of real innovation, for good or evil. He just points out that many of the real advances are in areas seldom considered. Better materials in planes, rather than new types of superplane; gradual progress in pharmaceuticals, rather than the invention of new wonder drugs; and, of course, economies of scale. “Mass production in the recent past has made an enormous, almost invisible change. It has made things so cheap, we almost don’t notice their existence in the economy. That’s very, very important.”
In the end, what Edgerton is banging on about is the significance we ascribe to things. We all love the idea of a new super- invention, the eureka moment. But in our hearts, we know that the world of technology is more of a plodder than a sprinter. We know barbed wire changed the world far more than manned space stations.
“We should celebrate all invention — though most invention is bound to fail,” he says. “As for the stuff that goes on to be significant, at the moment we don’t celebrate most of it. We think in clichéd ways about what the future will bring. We need to invent right across the board, not just in those areas we think might be the future. Otherwise, we’ll end up where we were in the 1950s and 1960s — putting all our eggs into the nuclear and supersonic baskets.”
And what’s so wrong with pinning your hopes on the future? Edgerton is very clear on this. “You can make up the future, which means you don’t have to face up to the realities of politics, economics and society in the present. Futurism is the refuge of the scoundrel.”
The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 by David Edgerton (Profile Books £18.99)
