Give them Lego

A Review of Backroom Boys by Francis Spufford

Of the half-witteries that have brought us to the present crisis, one of the worst is `creative industry’. This is a phrase used to describe music, television, advertizing and other pursuits where overpaid mediocrities are held up as the saviours of the nation because they can sometimes gull foreigners into imitating them. The use of the word `industry’ to describe enterprises that produce nothing and involve little or no skill on the part of the people who `work’ in them is one of the small nonsenses we have learnt to accept as part of the great nonsense which has led us to the present crisis.

Francis Spufford’s book, published in 2003, should be forced into the hot little hands of every child who cries at the thought of multiplication tables and erected into towers for the imprisonment of the board of every bank in the country. It is an account of six beautiful, very British, things, Platonic forms of boffinry. The term `boffin’ is one of those that does not seem to exist in other languages, probably because cultures that respect engineers and scientists have no need of it. There appears to be no American equivalent. Boffins, proper ones, appear in war films (films, not movies) making tea in laboratory glassware and showing handlebar moustaches the device that will give Jerry a fright. Boffins are the scientific equivalent of the funny little man who knows how to repair his lordship’s plumbing: we couldn’t do without them, but what is it they do? Spufford identifies a splendid example of the species, Roy Dommett who, after working on Black Arrow, was responsible for Chevaline, Britain’s naval version of the Polaris nuclear missile. Another rocket designer happened to see him Morris dancing in Bristol:

These Morris men come dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladder-and I said to my wife, “Sweeheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is one of the brains behind Britain’s nuclear defence.”

Black Arrow was Britain’s attempt to enter the space race, a small rocket built on a tiny budget, and cancelled just after it had been made to work. On its final launch it placed Prospero, a small satellite, into orbit. It was to be Puck, putting a girdle round the earth in forty minutes, but the minister didn’t trust himself to say it in the Commons, so they named it after the magician who gives up his power. By the way, mark the elegance of the names. Where other countries name their rockets after gods of might – Jupiter, Saturn, Thor – Britain has Black Arrow, Skua, Petrel, Skylark, Stonechat (you can see them all in the Science Museum).

The people are as modest as the names they give their work. As Spufford says, rocket scientists don’t think that rocket science is rocket science. Things are `neat’, `simple’, `tidy’ solutions to engineering problems. They might involve thousands of components exposed to burning gases at temperatures higher than the melting point of the materials that contain them, but being able to think about such things is the price of entry to the game.

Every chapter of the book is about making things work. Spufford describes how Britain took the lead in mobile phone network planning when Vodafone hired John Causebrook of the BBC, who had literally written the book on signal propagation when you have to deal with reality. The kind of problem that engineering and science students learn is the one parodied as a spherical horse in a vacuum. No vulgarity sullies the regularity of the mathematics: surfaces are smooth; air is uniform; there is no interference.

If the world were like the ideal system of elementary textbooks, building mobile phone networks would be easy, for engineers’ values of easy. As the train proceeds, regularly spaced base stations would pass our details on to each other and our declaration of location would be uninterrupted. The problem is that buildings, trees, hills and all the other places we want to be interfere with that signal. The question for a mobile phone company is: where do I need to put my base stations so that the customer can always make a call, so that the stations do not interfere with each other and so that as the customer moves about, the transfer of the call from one base station to another is unnoticeable. Causebrook, being the kind of man who would stand on a hillside in Scotland seeing the waves propagate, had the job of working out how to work it out when the GSM system was standardized in Europe. Using his computer programs, which executives compared unfavorably to the flashy graphics of their competitors’, Vodafone could decide where to place a base station in the time it took to drink a cup of coffee, the de facto standard time for middling sized problems.

Spufford says, rightly, that it is not an idle compliment to call engineering `poetic’ and quotes Causebrook’s joking definition of art: `a science with more than seven variables.’ On that definition, the work of John Sulston and team at the Sanger Centre in Cambridge, where a public team led the effort to beat Craig Venter to the decoding of the human genome, is the finest art. By 1998, the Sanger Centre employed five hundred people to carry out the scientific industrial line work that was the state of the art in genome sequencing at the time. The qualification for the work was a pair of steady hands. There were people with PhDs and people with minimal GCSEs, learning new specialisms. `Gel ladies’ moved gel from gel’s kitchen to the room where the great machines applied an electric current to the gel so that millions of copies of DNA would be separated out into their sequences to be read and recorded. Those who had the knack of pouring an even, bubble-free, layer of gel between two glass plates became gel puddlers until, like many a tradesman, they saw their art superseded by new sequencers that had no need of gel.

The Sanger Centre was the main element of the Human Genome Project, the effort to decode and make publicly available the human genome. The competition was Craig Venter who aimed to do the same thing but to do it with private money, in order to patent parts of the genome. The Wellcome Trust shamed the rest of the world into funding part of the project by declaring that it would the lot itself, if it had to. In the end, the Human Genome Project got there first and the human genome is free to view.

The other examples selected by Spufford are the foundation of the computer games business in the early eighties, when two proper geeks developed Elite, the first game which did force the player to follow a linear sequence of challenges but allowed him (usually him) to explore a world; the Beagle lander, in a chapter written before it was lost on the Martian surface; Concorde which, for all its technical excellence, was a commercial failure. The themes remain the same, however: people who can make things work making things work. Read this book and then give a big box of Lego to your nearest relation under seven.

1. Spufford, Francis, The backroom boys: The secret return of the British boffin, 978-0571214976

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