Nuts & Bolts; Seven Small Inventions That Changed the World (in a Big Way), by Roma Agrawal, Hodder & Stoughton, 2023, is a book I asked for and was given on my birthday last year.
I was hopeless at physics at school. Our teacher, Mr Baker, seemed to have long since lost interest in the subject himself, his flat, monotonous drone doing nothing to inspire his charges to want to learn more. He was, as they say, dialling it in. I don’t remember much about the lessons except that there was a lot of messing about with ripple tanks. From that we were told, we could begin to understand how light worked. But was light a wave or did it consist of particles (photons – which always make me think of Star Trek’s* photon torpedoes)? Both, said Mr Baker, and that was pretty much it for me. As with Schrödinger’s Cat, I really don’t get it at all. I can’t make the (quantum) leap. Because you don’t know whether the cat in the box is alive or dead, that means it is both at the same time. Beats me – it is still either alive or dead. Mr Baker did wonder aloud at the end of the lesson whether physics ever truly explained anything, but merely gave things names and descriptions. I decided that was pointless and lost interest in the subject altogether. Which was a shame – my grandmother subscribed to a magazine called How It Works (it had been the great comics The Beezer and Valiant previously) for me and I loved that.
I am also loving this book. The inventions are the nail, the wheel, the spring, the magnet, the lens, string and the pump. The author has been awarded an MBE for her services to engineering, best known for working on the design of The Shard in London, and “is passionate about promoting engineering and technical careers to young people, particularly those from minoritized groups”. The contributions made to the field by women is emphasised throughout the book.
What she achieves, along with splashes of humour, for me at any rate, is to explain how these inventions actually work in ways even I can understand. I have been constantly surprised and enlightened. It’s a fine balance, which she absolutely pulls off on every page. In spite of her knowledge and prestigious career, she writes happily about the ‘pointy end’ of a nail, for example, but she does so without ever being patronising. I salute her and will never hammer in a nail or look at a bicycle wheel, to name but two, without thinking about what is actually going on as I do so again.
*Wars or Trek? And what does it tell you about someone? I am definitely a dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie, classic mostly, absolutely not Next Generation or much else that followed, with honourable exceptions including the movies. I have had two stand-up pub quiz rows about the same question, the wrong answer to which must be out there on the internet somewhere. Which rock band is named after Spock’s mother? Most people say T’Pau. But she was a Vulcan High Priestess. The whole point about Spock is that he is half-human and his father is a Vulcan ambassador called Sarek. So his mother must have been human. Her name was Amanda, since you ask. I don’t know of a band called Amanda, so there is no right answer to the question. I find the Star Wars movies, apart from the first one, over long and terribly dull. All that wandering around the desert. The recent follow-up series Andor was excellent though, if oddly named (and/or?) I watch a lot of tv and it’s a common trope to have characters wandering around similarly and endlessly in the woods, which is usually when they lose me. I enjoyed The Walking Dead for a number of seasons until it kept jumping the shark – why were they trying to divert the zombies with balloons, and why when the enemy were stood right in front of our heroes did they not shoot them but instead fire a ridiculous number of rounds of ammunition into the building behind them which did nothing but break a lot of windows? “Jumping the shark”, if you happen not to know it, is a wonderfully succinct way of saying that a series and its writers have run out of ideas. It comes from the gentle sitcom Happy Days, when the only remaining challenge they could think for the Fonz was literally to jump over a shark on water skis. I digress! When it come to my Star Trek fandom though, I am pretty obsessive. I have read a fair few of the cast’s autobiographies. In William Shatner’s he comes to the realisation towards the end that the rest of the cast hated him, mostly for stealing all their lines. And it never ceases to amuse that Leonard Nimoy wrote two autobiographies, the first called I Am Not Spock, the second I Am Spock. I also have to mention that Captain Kirk and Lieutenant Uhura’s kiss was the first interracial kiss on television and that Nichelle Nichols, who played the latter, was urged not to leave the programme by no less than Martin Luther King who made a special visit to see her.
To get back on track, as opposed to trek … This book reminds of another I read a year or two ago which I also highly recommend, Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World, by Simon Winchester, William Collins, 2018, which does what it says on the tin, giving a history of the progress of engineering through the refinements of precision over the centuries. It is always refreshing I think to be enlightened into a new, scientific way of looking at the world.
Especially at a time, the post-truth era, in political terms in particular, when, as discussed by Ben Elton in a recent interview, we seem to be in a precipitous, headlong rush backwards, to a time before the Enlightenment. The primacy of empirical evidence seems now to be blithely, even gleefully ignored. Boris Johnson is not alone, nor was he the first, but his inability, not only to know the difference between truth and lies, but to understand why it even matters set a very dangerous precedent and the tone for government and politics generally and in the UK and the USA in particular. Chris Packham was depicted a day or two ago with his head in his hands after watching a short clip of Matt Hancock proselytising about a charity run he was undertaking. Asked why, Chris responded that it was the sheer insincerity of the man. I am genuinely intrigued as to whether Rishi Sunak actually thinks that anyone believes a word that comes out of his billionaire, oligarchic mouth. It is clear that he doesn’t believe any of it, but does he really think we do?
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