Category: Book Reviews

Reviews of books featuring a summary of the book and links to related material

Feb 07 2023

Book review: Richard Trevithick – Giant of Steam by Anthony Burton

A second hand book to review this time, Richard Trevithick – Giant of Steam by Anthony Burton. I bought it in Malvern. Richard Trevithick is best know as the inventor of the steam railway locomotive – the first person to put a steam engine on a carriage with wheels and put that carriage on metal rails. This followed his demonstration of a steam road carriage in 1801, with the railway locomotives in the following couple of years.

Richard Trevithick was born near Camborne in Cornwall to Ann Teague (a miners daughter) and Richard Trevithick Senior, a mine “captain”, in 1771. He died in 1833. He had a wife, Jane who would be well-described as “long-suffering” – Trevithick had little interest in providing a steady income for his family or at least if he had the desire he was inept at executing it and was briefly bankrupt in 1815. Furthermore he left for South America for a period of 11 years from 1816 to 1827, with little communication back home with his wife and friends in England during that period. Despite this his six children, and his wife, seemed to have held him in at least some regard and his son Francis, at the very least in high regard. Jane Trevithick lived until 1868.

The Cornish mining milieu is a key feature of his upbringing and subsequent career. The mine “captains” were very hands-on managers who led mining operations at the Cornish mines. They often had significant financial interest in mines. Cornwall in the 18th century was seen as a bit of an English Wild West with a degree of opposition to ideas developed outside the area. Steam engines had been born in the South West to drain mines, with the first made by Thomas Savery in 1698, followed by Thomas Newcomen’s more practicable engine invented in 1712. Both Savery and Newcomen were from the neighbouring county of Devon.

The James Watt / Matthew Boulton steam engine was to dominate the market for steam engines in the United Kingdom from 1775 until the end of the 18th century. It was a more efficient engine than those that went before, commercially it was protected aggressively by Watt and Boulton using patents which supressed other developments in the area until they expired.

Trevithick had a fairly minimal education but seemed to be a very adept calculator, he was a large, strong man with something of a temper. This caused him problems later in life with some of his inventions which essentially failed because he fell out massively with his backers/potential customers and stopped work on them. He had a life-long friendship with Davies Gilbert who was more scientifically inclined. Trevithick quickly moved to working in the local mines first as a helper to his father but then in his own right. It’s interesting that steam engines would have been a regular part of the Cornish mining industry for seventy or so years before Trevithick entered the scene. Developments were clearly relatively slow until the arrival of the Watt/Boulton engine. The key scientific development in the area, the discovery of latent heat – the energy required to bring water from the liquid to gaseous state – was only published in 1763 by Joseph Black.

On railway locomotives it turned out Trevithick was a little before his time, George Stephenson was to successfully kick off the railway revolution with the Stockton and Darlington Railway in 1825 and the Liverpool and Manchester line in 1829 – twenty or so years after Trevithick’s demonstration. Trevithick’s effort suffered from two issues, one systematic issue was Trevithick’s approach which was to demonstrate many ideas but never to follow them through to successful, commercial exploitation. The second, technical, issue was that iron rails at the time were not tough enough to handle the weight of a steam engine and soon fractured. Interestingly Robert Stephenson, George’s son and a significant railway engineer in his own right, met Trevithick in Columbia in 1826.

Trevithick’s real innovation was in developing a high pressure steam engine, operating at pressures ultimately in excess of 150 psi compared the Watt-Boulton engine operating at less than 10 psi. This gave Trevithick a compact and flexible power source that could be used for a variety of purposes and, according to his vision, could actually physically propel itself to new work. Essentially he had invented the traction engine which wasn’t to be successfully patented and exploited until the 1860s.

Trevithick moved to London with his family in 1803, he had demonstrated his railway locomotive and a road stream carriage there initially but he moved on to work on dredging for the new docks, and also a tunnel under the Thames. He was frustrated that the Admiralty were unwilling to take on any of his ideas. Ultimately nothing came of his London stay, other than he was made briefly bankrupt. That said, he actually did a pretty good job on a tunnel under the Thames, a task only successfully completed by the Brunels following nearly 20 years of work from 1824.

Soon after returning to Cornwall from London he left again, this time without his family, to Peru where he had been taken on to supply and install steam engines for the mint in Lima, and a mine in Cerro de Pasco. His plans in Peru were foiled by revolution. He then moved on to Costa Rica, where he started a pearl-fishing business using a diving bell he had designed a few years earlier. He also attempted to start a gold mine but was unable to raise sufficient finance for this.

He died in 1833, 6 years after having returned from South America.

I’ve missed out any mention of Trevithick’s threshing machine, his ideas for steam-powered boats, a diving bell and using iron containers to carry liquids on boats!

I found this book fascinating, I’ve previously read books on Thomas Telford, George and Robert Stephenson, Matthew Boulton, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and William Armstrong who collectively span the Industrial Revolution in England – Trevithick fits into the earlier part of this story.

It has led me to wondering a little about being “before their time”, this was very apparent in the Trevithick story with so many of his ideas only coming to fruition decades after he died. Was he exceptional or is this not so uncommon – we simply don’t hear about those whose ideas required other developments for them to work? The names that have been prominent from the Industrial Revolution are those that not only invented but also were commercially successful, at least some of the time – leaving lasting monuments to their ideas.

Jan 16 2023

Book review: The Wood Age by Roland Ennos

My first book of 2023 is The Wood Age: How wood shaped the whole of human history by Roland Ennos, a history of wood and human society.

The book is divided into four parts “pre-human” history, up to the industrial era, the industrial era and “now and the future”.

Part one covers our ancestors’ life in the trees and descent from them. Ennos argues that nest building as practised by, for example, orangutans is a sophisticated and little recognised form of tool use and involves an understanding of the particular mechanical properties of wood. Descending from the trees, Ennos sees digging sticks and fire as important. Digging sticks are effective for rummaging roots out of the earth, which is handy if you moving away from the leaves and fruits of the canopy. Wood becomes harder with drying (hence making better digging sticks), and the benefits of cooking food with (wood-based) fire are well-reported. The start of controlled use of fire is unknown but could be as long ago as 2,000,000 years. The final step – hair loss in humans – Ennos attributes to the ability to build wooden shelters, this seems rather farfetched to me. I suspect this part of the book is most open to criticism since it covers a period well before writing, and with very little fossilised evidence of the key component.

The pre-human era featured some use of tools made from wood, and this continued into the “stone” age but on the whole wood is poorly preserved over even thousands of years. The oldest wooden tools discovered dates to 450,000 years ago – a spear found in Essex. The peak of tool making in the Neolithic is the bow and arrow – as measured by the number of steps required, and materials, required.

The next part of the book covers the period from the Neolithic through to the start of the Industrial Revolution. In this period ideas about farming spread to arboriculture, with the introduction of coppicing which produces high yields of fire wood, and wood for wicker which is a new way of crafting with wood. There is some detailed discussion on how wood burns, and how the introduction of charcoal, which burns hotter is essential to the success of the “metal” ages and progressing from earthenware pottery (porous and weak) to stoneware, which is basically glassy and requires a firing temperature of over 1000 celsius. As an aside, I found it jarring that Ennos quoted all temperatures in Fahrenheit!

This section has the air of describing a technology tree in a computer game. The ability to make metal tools, initially copper then bronze then iron then steel, opens up progressively better tools and more ways of working with wood, like sawing planks which can be used to make better boats than those constructed by hollowing out logs or splitting tree trunks. Interestingly the boats made by Romans were not surpassed in size until the 17th century.

Wheels turn out to be more complicated than I first thought, slicing a tree trunk into disks doesn’t work because the disks split in use (and in any case cutting cleanly across the grain of wood is hard without a steel-bladed saw). The first wheels, three planks cut into a circle and held together with battens, are not great. The peak of wheel building is the spoked wheel which requires steam bent circumference, turned spokes and a turned central hub with moderately sophisticated joints. Ennos argues that the reason South America never really took to wheels, and the Polynesians did not build plank built boats was a lack of metals appropriate for making tools.

Harder, steel tools also enabled the carpentry of seasoned timber – better for making furniture than greenwood which splits and deforms as it dries.

Ultimately the use of wood was not limited by the production of wood but rather by transport and skilled labour. The Industrial Revolution picks up when coal becomes the fuel of choice – making manufacturing easier, and allowing cities to grow larger.

The final substantive part of the book covers the Industrial Revolution up to the present. This is largely the story of the replacement of wood as fuel with coal, wood as charcoal (used in smelting) with coke (which is to coal what charcoal is to wood), and the replacement of many small wood items with metal, ceramic, glass and more recently plastic. It is not a uniform story though, England moved to coal as a fuel early in the 19th century – driven by an abundance of coal, a relative shortage of wood, and the growth of large cities. Other countries in Europe and the US moved more slowly. The US built its railways with wooden infrastructure (bridges and sleepers), rather than the stone used in Britain, for a much lower cost. The US still tends to build domestic buildings in wood. The introduction of machine made nails and screws in the late 18th century makes construction in wood a lower skilled activity. Paper based on wood was invented around 1870, making newspapers and books much cheaper.

In the 21st century wood and processed-wood like plywood or chipboard are still used for many applications.

The final part of the book is a short look into the future, mainly from the point of view of re-forestation. I found this a bit odd because it starts complaining about the “deforestation myth” but then goes on to outline when humans caused significant deforestation and soil erosion damage.!

Ennos sees wood as an under-reported factor in the evolution of humanity, but authors often feel their topic is under-reported. I suppose this is inevitable since these are people so passionate about their topic that they have devoted their energy to writing a whole book about it.

This is a nice read, not too taxing but interesting.

Dec 17 2022

Book review: Dutch Light by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

dutch_lightIt’s taken me a while but my next review is of Dutch Light: Christian Huygens and the making of science in Europe by Hugh Aldersey-Williams.

I have read a biography of Christiaan Huygens – Huygens – the man behind the principle by C.D. Andriesse, this was a little over 10 years ago so it says something about my memory that I came to Aldersey-Williams book fairly fresh!

Huygens was born in 1629 and died in 1695, so after Galileo (1564 – 1642) and René Descartes (1596-1650) but before Isaac Newton (1642-1726).

Huygens came from a relatively prestigious family his father, Constantijn was an important diplomat as was his brother (also Constantijn, the Huygens reused forenames heavily!). The family had a broad view of education and his father and brothers were brought up to appreciate, and make, art, music, and drawing as well as learning more academic subjects. Christiaan’s scientific collaboration with his brother continued throughout his life – mainly focussed on lens grinding.

This practical turn had an impact on Huygen’s scientific work, he made the lenses and telescopes that he used to discover the rings of Saturn, and his discovery was sealed with the beautifully drafted illustrations of Saturn’s rings seen at varying orientations relative to earth. It had been known since Galileo’s time that there was something odd about Saturn but telescope technology was such that the rings were not clearly resolved, furthermore as earth changes position relative to Saturn we view the rings at different angles which changes their appearance which added to the confusion over their nature. Having hypothesised that the structures around Saturn were rings, Huygens was able to predict (successfully) when the rings would be oriented edge on to earth and hence disappear.

The Netherlands has given birth to more than its share of astronomers, Aldersey-Williams discusses whether this is a special feature of the landscape: big open skies with reflecting water, material resources – abundant high quality sand for glass/lens making or the culture – in particular the Dutch school of art from the period. He doesn’t come to a firm conclusion on this but gives the book its title.

Huygens work on telescopes and Saturn also led to his more theoretical work on a wave theory of optics and the “Huygens Principle”, something I learnt at school.

Aside from his practical work on astronomy, Huygens was a very capable mathematician – respected by Newton and Leibniz. His work pre-figured some of Newton’s later work, he led the way in describing nature, and observations, with mathematical equations. A was a transitional figure at the cusp of the Scientific Revolution, a pioneer of described observed phenomena using maths – diverging from Descartes who believed that nature could be explained by the power of pure thought.

Huygens also worked on clocks, largely in relation to the problem of the longitude, again this is an example of a combination of practical design skills and mathematical understanding. His main contributions in this area were modifications of pendulum clocks to be more accurate and the invention of a spring driven oscillator – more robust than pendulum driven clocks at sea. In the end his contributions were not sufficient to solve the problem of the longitude, and he also fell out with Hooke over the invention of the spring drive. He also had a dispute with Huret, the clockmaker who implemented his designs. But if you were working in science in the 17th century and didn’t fall out with Hooke, what sort of scientist were you?!

“…the making of science in Europe” in the title of this book refers to Huygens international activities. He was a founding member of the French Academie des Science, courted specifically by its prime mover – Jean-Baptiste Colbert, living in Paris for 16 years between 1666-1672. Colbert’s successor was not as favourable disposed towards Huygens, and when Colbert died in 1683 he left the Academie. Huygens also met and corresponded with scientists in London, at the Royal Society and elsewhere, and across the rest of Europe. This was a time when discoveries, and experimental techniques were being shared more often, if not universally.

Andriesse and Aldersey-Williams both ask why Huygens is not more famous when compared particularly to Newton. I’ve thought about this a bit since reading Andriesse’s book and come to the tentative conclusion that figures like Galileo, Newton, Einstein and Hawking are not famous scientists. They are famous, and they happen to be scientists, they are symbols for a period not necessarily rooted in scientific achievement. Newton was promoted very heavily after his death by the English, and prior to his death he was not only a scientist but also Warden of the Royal Mint, and briefly an MP.

I enjoyed this book more than the Andriesse biography, in both cases it felt that there was perhaps a scarcity of material for Huygens life which led to a great deal of discussion around Huygens father, to the extent that in the early pages it wasn’t clear whether references to Huygens were to Christiaan or his father Constantijn.

Oct 10 2022

Book review: Curious devices and mighty machines by Samuel J.M.M. Alberti

albertiThis review is of Curious devices and might machines: Exploring Science Museums by Samuel J.M.M. Alberti. I picked this up because I follow a number of history of science and museum people on Twitter. One downside of this is that these are the sort of people that get sneak previews of such books, leaving us mortals a long wait before we get our hands on them!

There are a couple of thousand science museums around the world, out of a total of 30,000 museums globally. About a fifth of the population visits a science museum every year. In the UK the Science Museum Groups gets about 6 million visits a year. Around 100,000 visits a year are required for a museum to be economically viable. There is an overlap between science museums and the more recently instituted "exploratoriums". Science museums have always been technology and science museums, with artefacts actually biased towards the former. Science museum exhibits can be massive (whole aeroplanes and steam engines), they can be commonplace (for example one of billions of mobile phones) and unlike most museums it is not unusual for the public to be able to handle selected parts of the collection. 

The first science museums came into being out of the personal "cabinets of curiosities" found in the Renaissance, they became public institutions in the 18th and 19th century. They were often founded to demonstrate a country’s technological prowess, or provide training for a workforce as the Industrial Revolution occurred. Sometimes scientific workplaces became museums by the passage of time, this was certainly true of the (New) Cavendish Laboratory where I once worked – the spacious corridor outside the suite of labs I worked in contained a collection of objects including James Clarke Maxwell’s desk and some of his models of mathematical functions. It was striking how scientific apparatus transitioned from finely crafter objects in the 19th century to rather more utilitarian designs in the early 20th century. Frank Oppenheimer (brother of Robert Oppenheimer) founded the first Exploratorium in San Francisco in 1969.

Perhaps a little surprisingly, science museum collections have not historically been formed systematically. The London Science Museum started, alongside the Victoria and Albert Museum, with objects from the Great Exhibition, and was boosted by part of the (enormous) Henry Wellcome collection. More recently curators have been proactive – cultivating collectors and research and industry institutions. Acquisition by purchase at auction is less common than in the art museum world but not completely unknown. Sometimes museums will make public appeals for objects, for example during the recent COVID pandemic. It has always been the case that documents, and more recently software and other digital artefacts greatly outnumber "physical" objects. Digital artefacts represent a challenge since for most modern scientific equipment to be useable the software required to run the equipment is required, and speaking from experience it can be challenging to get the software running whilst the equipment is in working use. These documents are either artefacts in their own right (for example railway posters) or documentation relating to a particular object.

Like icebergs much of a science museum collection is away from public view in increasingly specialised storage facilities. Alberti is keen to highlight the vitality and dynamism of storage facilities, curators in general appear reluctant to refer to stores as "stores"! Stores are places where research and conservation happen, sometimes there are hazards to be managed – legacy radioactive materials are an issue both in museums and also in currently operational labs.

Museums present objects in long term exhibitions, and shorter, more focused exhibitions which may move from museum to museum. Exhibitions can be object-led or story-led, and the human stories are an important element. Science museums attract a wide age range. Pierre Boudieu makes an appearance here, as my wife completes her (Doctorate of Education) Bourdieu has been a constant occupant of the mental space of our home. His relevance here is the idea of "scientific capital" to parallel Bourdieu’s "cultural capital". "Scientific capital" refers to all the scientific touch points and knowledge you might have, I have demonstrated my "scientific capital" above, citing my experiences in word class research laboratories, and experience with scientific research. As a scientist from a very young age science museums have been my natural home but this is in large part due to my family rather than formal education.

The book finishes with a chapter on campaigning with collections, covering climate change, racism and colonialism, disability, and mis-information. Museums are held in high regard in terms of confidence in the information they provide, although they see their role more in teaching scientific literacy – supported by the objects they hold – rather than trying to megaphone facts. Many collections contain objects with morally dubious histories, as white Western countries we have typically ignored these issues – the Black Lives Matter movement means this is starting to change.

I think the best way of placing this is as a social history of the science museum – the author cites Richard Fortey’s Dry Store Room 1 as a model/inspiration and talks of the book as a "curator confessional", an entertaining enough read but rather specialist.

Sep 14 2022

Book review: Writing and script – A very Short Introduction by Andrew Robinson

writingA very short book for this review, Writing and script – A very short introduction by Andrew Robinson – this fits in with my previous review on Kingdom of Characters by Jing Tsu. In some ways the “very short” format stymies my reviewing process which involves writing notes on a longer book!

Robinson makes a distinction between proto-writing and fully writing, the first proto-writing – isolated symbols which clearly meant something – dates back to 20,000BC. Whilst the first full-writing defined as “a system of graphic symbols which can be used to convey any and all thought” dates back to some time around 3300BC in Mesopotamia and Egypt. It first appeared in India 2500 BC, Crete (Europe) 1750BC, China 1200BC and Meso-America 900BC. In common with humanity itself there is a lively single origin / multi-origin debate – did writing arise in one place and then travel around the world or arise separately in different places?

When I am reading books relating to history I am very keen to pin down “firsts” and “dates”, I suspect this is not a good obsession. As for mathematics the earliest full-writing was used for accountancy, and bureaucracy!

An innovation in writing is the rebus principle that allows that word can be written as a series of symbols representing sounds whilst those symbols by themselves might convey a different meaning.

I was excited to learn a new word: boustrophedon – which means writing which goes from left to right and then right to left on alternate lines – it is from the Greek for “like the ox turns”. Writing in early scripts was often in both left-right and right-left form and only stabilised to one form (typically left-right) after a period of time. I have been learning Arabic recently (which is read right-left) and was surprised how easy this switch was from my usual left-right reading in English.

Another revelation for me is that a written script is not necessarily a guide to pronunciation – in English it broadly is, some languages do a better job of describing pronunciation in the written form but other languages like Chinese, the core script is largely about transmitting ideas. Arabic holds an intermediate position – accents were added to an alphabet comprised of consonants to provide vowels and thus clarify pronunciation.

As well as the appearance of scripts, Robinson also discusses their disappearance, this happens mainly for political reasons. For example, Egyptian Hieroglyphics fell into decline through invasions by the Greeks and then Romans who used different scripts. Cuneiform was in use for 3000 years before dying out in around 75AD.

Deciphering scripts gets a chapter of its own, classifying decipherment efforts in terms of whether the script was known or unknown and whether the language it represented was known or unknown. Given a sample of a script the first task is to determine the writing direction, and the number of distinct elements. This second task can be challenging given the variations in individual writing styles and, for example, the use of capitalisation. The next step is to identify the type of script (an alphabet – standing for vowels and consonants, a syllabary – standing for whole syllables , or  logograms – standing for whole words) – on the basis of the character count and other clues. The final step, of decipherment, requires something like the Rosetta stone – the same text written in multiple languages where at least one is known – names of people and places are often key here. A broad knowledge of languages living and dead is also a help.

The chapter on How writing systems work expands further on the alphabet/syllabary/logogram classification with a separate chapter on alphabets – I particularly liked the alphabet family tree. Greek is considered the first alphabet which included both consonants and vowels, earlier systems were syllabaries or just contained consonants.

Japanese and Chinese writing systems are covered in a separate chapter. I don’t think I had fully absorbed that Chinese characters were a writing system equivalent to the Latin alphabet, and so can express multiple languages. Kingdom of Characters focus on Chinese elided the fact that Japanese has troubles of its own, particularly in the number of homophones, Japanese speakers sometimes sketch disambiguating characters with their hands to clarify their meaning.

The book finishes with an obligatory Writing goes electronic chapter which highlights that text speak (i.e. m8 for mate) is an example of the rebus principle in action. Robinson also highlights that the electronic publishing has not ended or diminished the importance of the physically printed language, the opposite is true in fact.

This book packs a lot into a short space, it provides the reader with interesting new facts to share (I liked boustrophedon), it would not be a substantial holiday read but a great introduction to the field.