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Personal Note Archive January 2008

2nd January 2008

On the stroke of midnight on the 31st of December, people all over the world let off party poppers, had a drink, and got a kiss of they were lucky. Up until the late seventeenth century people would not have had a clear idea of when this special moment actually arrived. The telling of time was a vague business. It was from 1658 onwards that the clocks of the Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens allowed ordinary people access to accurate time pieces. Huygens, born in the Hague in 1629, designed telescopes, discovered Titan, the largest of Saturn's moons, and discovered Saturn's rings. He was keen to develop an accurate clock to help him time astronomical observations properly. The clocks Huygens designed began to appear on church towers in Holland in 1658, and quickly spread across Europe. So next time Big Ben chimes we could remember Huygens and the rings of Saturn.

 

10th January 2008

Babel once tried to build a tower that formed a bridge reaching all the way to heaven. He failed of course. Babel's tower, and all towers since are like bridges that have one end dangling in the air. But climbing a tower in a big city you realise there is still a sense in which a tower really does reach the other side. Wandering round the streets of Paris or London you are walking through cities so huge that it is virtually impossible to get a feel for the place as a whole. My efforts on foot have often led nowhere except a seat in Starbucks. It is only in looking out from somewhere high that the city comes together. Paris has the Eiffel Tower, and London has a huge wheel called the London Eye. This wheel might not look like a tower, but it serves the same purpose. It is a high place where London comes together.

 

12th January 2008

Last week I visited the Royal Society in London. Since 1662 the Royal Society has witnessed the announcements of the greatest breakthroughs in British science. The Society also became the focus for collections of scientific artifacts, which in 1781 became the core collection of the early British Museum. Last week I was lucky enough to visit a display of some of the oldest items in the Royal Society collection. We take museums full of stuff to look at for granted these days, but they are actually an indication of the nature of the modern age. The old, pre-scientific conception of the world did not involve looking at things. Wisdom came through prayer, meditation,or the peripatetic method, which involved wandering around university grounds talking. At the Royal Society I saw the iron spheres which the fifteenth century scientist William Gilbert used to study the magnetic nature of the Earth. William Gilbert was actually looking at things, and that was the crucial break with the past. Every time we go into a museum and look carefully at the objects in front of us we are in effect being scientists. Read more in our new History of Science pages.

 

23rd January 2008

After all the recent rain, I made the most of a few bright days and spent some time in London. I took the picture above from Hungerford Bridge, London looking good in the evening sun. Just below Hungerford Bridge on the Victoria Embankment is a memorial to engineer Joseph Bazalgette. Bazalgette is not well known, but he had a great influence on the appearance of modern London. He designed the sewer system, which saved London from cholera. He created the Thames embankments as part of that work. Below ground these huge structures carry the main sewers, and the District and Circle Underground lines. Above ground they carry roads and large areas of garden. Bazalgette also laid out many of London's best known streets - Charing Cross Road, Shaftsbury Avenue, Northumberland Avenue, Garrick Street, Queen Victoria Street, and Southwark Street. Coming down from the bridge I went over to see Bazalgette. Nobody was taking any notice of him. I don't think he would have minded. Sewers weren't glamorous. Bazalgette would just be pleased that all these people could walk past his statue and not get cholera! Read more on our history of London pages.

 

29th January 2008

Great Eastern Launch Site, Millwall

A recent fire at the Royal Marsden Hospital in London left the roof badly damaged. On hearing that repairs would take months Jeremy Clarkson waded in and suggested we go back to the good old Victorian days when you didn't have to worry about health and safety, and could build a railway between Bristol and London in a few weeks. Clarkson's exaggeration aside, he is quite right that health and safety wasn't a big issue in the nineteenth century. The early Industrial Revolution was an individualistic age in which people even resented being told what to do with their sewerage. Jeremy Clarkson has complained about legislation to prevent smoking in public places. This attitude is echoed in the way some looked at sewer building in the 1850s, which was frequently considered a threat to liberty! Perhaps the Industrial Revolution would not have happened as it did without the strangely individualistic English society of the early nineteenth century. Some historians have argued that the state is rarely a source of innovation: a society with minimal government intervention was necessary for the superhuman energy of people like Brunel to express itself. But then could we really have continued to live in a society where government simply did not involve itself in protective legislation, or in organising engineering projects for the public good - such as the London sewers? Do we still feel that sewers infringe our personal liberty? In fact the moment when English society moved from the early industrial age, the Clarkson age, to an age of greater control, can perhaps be dated quite precisely, to 1858. I've been tracking down the story in London over the last few weeks. Read more...