There's nothing I enjoy writing about more than the history of science and technology. I try to indulge my love of history as often as possible, but it's quite tricky if you work, as I do, for a weekly news magazine. One solution is to write books. Another is to find a way to link modern developments to historical ones. So I do both.
In fact, I have been collecting examples of modern technologies with historical precursors for several years. Originally, my plan for my first book, The Victorian Internet, was to write an anthology, looking at a different historical analogy in each chapter, of which telegraphy would have been just one. But I soon realised that I had enough material to do a short book about the Victorian Internet on its own. So the anthology idea was shelved; and my second and third books, which are about planet hunting and a mechanical chess-player respectively, are both derived from ideas for other chapters of the anthology.
The appeal of the anthology was that it would have enabled me to highlight several of these parallels at the same time. And since I have written about many of them in article form, it occurred to me that a web page with links to each one might be a good way to draw these threads together. In fact, a web page is about the only way I could possibly put all this material in one place. So here it is.
Bringing things together in this way also lets me point out the common strand that has been running through my writing ever since I started on The Guardian back in 1995. Simply put, I think the right attitude to new technologies is to regard them with historically-informed scepticism. My approach is intended as a sort of antidote to the scourge of mindless product stories: when something new comes along, I like to point out that it isn't new at all. This isn't quite as gratuitous as it sounds; it is quite often possible to learn useful lessons from history, particularly the history of technology.
Many of the early stories I wrote in this vein for the Daily Telegraph are no longer available online. But here are some links to some other examples.
The coffee-house internet
This piece looks at the internet-like role played by coffee-houses in the 17th and 18th centuries. They acted as information exchanges for scientists, politicians and businessmen, and were particularly popular in London. In the days before regular postal deliveries, coffee-houses were also used as mailing addresses. Regulars would pop in a couple of times a day to check for new mail and hear the latest news and gossip. Sounds like the internet to me; there is also a lesson for Wi-Fi hotspot operators here about pricing. (The Economist, 2003)
Beyond the telecoms bubble
My survey of the trillion-dollar telecoms industry, which is in something of a mess following the bursting of the technology bubble, inevitably starts with a telegraph reference: to the first ever "network to network" (ie, internet) connection, in 1801. (The Economist, 2003)
No text please, we're American
This brief article, which explains why text-messaging is much less popular in America than elsewhere, contains a brief telegraphic reference that shows how Morse code persists even on today's Nokia mobile phones. (The Economist, 2003)
Ethics and Archaeology
This piece draws analogies between historical, contemporary and future ethical problems in archaeology, with particular reference to a proto-archaeologist and tomb raider called Giovanni Belzoni, the prototype for Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, and other torch-carrying, "kick down the door first and ask questions later" archaeologists. I may yet decide to do a book on this. (The Economist, 2002)
The Internet, untethered
My 15,000-word magnum opus on the future of the wireless Internet. There's a large dose of historical analogy, with particular reference to horseless carriages and, of course, telegraphs. This survey ended up answering the question that I posed at the end of The Victorian Internet -- which technology will take the Internet mainstream, in the way that the telephone took the telegraph mainstream? My guess is: the Internet-enabled mobile phone. (The Economist, 2001)
The Internet's new borders
Has the Internet killed geography? Can you really run a dotcom from the top of a mountain? Will the Internet prevent national governments from enforcing local laws? Er, no. It turns out that the Internet is more constrained by geography than you might think. Its cables piggyback on previous infrastructure, such as railways, sewers and (as I can't resist pointing out) the pneumatic tubes that once carried telegrams. Honestly, I'm like a cracked record sometimes. (The Economist, 2001)
Private eyes in the sky
A whole new generation of commercial imaging satellites is making detailed images, which were once the province only of the military superpowers, available to anybody. Should we be worried? Once again, there is a lesson from history. (The Economist, 2000)
Weather forecasting, then and now
One of my favourite historical parallels concerns weather forecasting. Today, the weather is forecast using huge computers, which divide the world up into a grid and assign a different processor chip to each square. The chips then all talk to each other to work out how the weather patterns will evolve from their initial (observed) state. This idea was pioneered in the early 20th century by Lewis Fry Richardson, an English mathematician. Since there were no digital computers at the time, he imagined a concert-hall full of mathematicians, each assigned to a grid square, and passing slips of paper from desk to desk. This piece is mainly about Piers Corbyn, a maverick weather forecaster, and it was very heavily edited by Wired, so that the narrator (supposedly me) appears to be American at one point. But I got Richardson in there, anyway. This is yet another idea from my original anthology, which I may yet turn into a book in its own right. (Wired, 1999)
A question of longitude
The Greenwich Meridian, the line of zero longitude, has moved. Why has nobody noticed? (FEED, locally cached copy, 1999)
A mechanical Moore's Law?
It is often said that Charles Babbage failed to build his mechanical computer because Victorian machine tools were not precise enough, but that had he succeeded, he might have kick-started the computer age a century earlier than it actually happened. In this article I look at these two claims in the light of the modern reconstruction of Babbage's Difference Engine at the Science Museum in London, and conclude that they are both wrong. For the record, Nathan Myhrvold wrote to me after a version of this article appeared in The Economist to say he was not as sceptical as I am. He and David Deutsch, a quantum-computing pioneer at Oxford, point out that electro-mechanical switches were available to Edison and Tesla in the late 19th century, so the technology could have moved out of the purely mechanical domain far quickly, had it worked. (FEED, locally cached copy, 1998)
The Analog Bill Gates
An article comparing Thomas Edison with Bill Gates. While Edison was a great inventor and inventor, he was also surprisingly ruthless, a side of his character that is often overlooked. As such, I think he makes a more interesting comparison with Gates than John D. Rockefeller does. A lot of people complained when I wrote this article that it was unfair to compare an all-American hero like Edison with Bill Gates, who is widely regarded as the devil incarnate. I was even accused of having been bribed by Microsoft to write the article. Anyone who actually reads the piece, however, will see that I am actually warning of the danger that Gates could end up being seen as every bit as much of a hero as Edison. I think this would be wrong, at least as far as Gates' achievements in computing are concerned. Since I wrote this piece, however, he has become the world's greatest philanthropist, and he is putting his money into healthcare, not computers, in the developing world. Never mind the rhetoric about the digital divide; water, sanitation and healthcare are more pressing concerns that an IP connection. Right on, Bill. In that regard, anyhow. (FEED, locally cached copy, 1998)
The hypertext of Leonardo
You can tell this article is really old, in two ways: it's in plain text format (OK, so I was just too lazy to mark it up properly) and it originally appeared in the short-lived British edition of Wired -- that is to say, the second of the two short-lived incarnations of the British edition of Wired -- back in the late 1990s. Anyway, it's a review of the Corbis CD-ROM of Leonardo's Codex Leicester, and it argues that Leonardo was a hypertext pioneer. He was not the first, of course; the nested commentaries added to the Talmud and the Koran are hypertexts too. But it seems fitting, given the way he prefigured so many other modern technologies (if not the bicycle). (Wired UK, 1997)