INTRODUCTION
We’re at a tipping point in the development of electrical transports. The problem is, to some extent, as at the start of the year 2022 it’s kind of lost among any number of other tipping points. Not the least of which is global warming, although as two world wars have shown us, if they have shown us nothing else, human beings share with every other species on Earth the common characteristic of being unable ~ even if they can forecast it with any degree of accuracy ~ to avoid their own fate. The ancient Greeks had it right, and one reason for teaching mythology (or indeed religion) is that whilst our technologies and environment is changeable, human nature is altogether less so.
We’ll get into that a little later, but firstly there has to be the story. I have long since lost touch, sadly, with someone in London who was working for a company called the Storytellers. These were consultants who were paid a lot of money to write the stories of well-known companies like Volkswagen, among the biggest involved in this instance with global means of transport. The development of their factories and cars had from the outset a guiding light in the form of Hitler ~ from which same well-spring Porsche would later emerge ~ but you probably wouldn’t want that as a means with which to inspire either young drivers or aspiring middle-class motorists.
The point is though, we live by stories, and as things stand here on the opening Monday morning of a New Year, looking at the development of the drone it would appear that I have gone heavy on the tech, and overly light on the promotion. It’s partly to do with age, as I watch with incredulity my nine year old son making others rich by following them following other people on YouTube whilst making a running commentary of the sort that would more normally have appeared in my day on toilet doors instead. But it’s also down to the fact that I spent the holidays reading James Dyson’s autobiography entitled simply “Invention”. He said, and he did so as Britain’s most successful living industrialist, that he wanted to call it “Failure” but that the publishers wouldn’t allow it.
If there are two iconic male career models in the UK however, then one has to be James and the other has to be Richard… and you would likely guess that the word Branson was to follow. For me they reflect the two “E’s” upon which the taxable economy in the UK is (like other advanced economies) based viz. engineering and entertainment. In the case of the latter you could possibly sub the word ‘experience’ as it amounts to much the same thing, for example the fact that Branson’s company Virgin also operates airlines and now passenger space-rockets. Nonetheless it would be true to say that on the one hand the owner of the Virgin Brand likely doesn’t know how to use an electric screw-driver whilst James Dyson is equally less likely to be seen being guided into record-breaking vehicles by models in bikinis.
Both have though faced considerable challenges in thriving among the status quo that is long established in Britain, or a peculiar set of circumstances evolved over centuries. Which is to say that since the age of feudalism, the British have always delighted in ‘get rich quick’ schemes that amount to an economy built effectively on commercial piracy; and that once achieved such riches need to be guarded by the incumbent at all costs at the expense of social mobility. In other words ~ and I have followed the careers of these two icons of business religiously ~ as Dyson and Branson are oft at pains to point out, ours is an economy and indeed a culture whose motto could be the biblical epithet, “To those that have shall be given.” In practical terms and from where I stand, this means that, much as we have seen during the Coronaviral pandemic, contracts are invariably awarded to those already enjoying established positions and considerable riches, almost invariably derived from tax-payers.
Dyson points out for example that he decamped to the Far East because (a) that’s where 80% of his customers live (b) along with 100% of his suppliers and practically the only source of his engineers. It is one reason for instance why he voted for the UK leaving the EU, whilst Branson voted the opposite: engineering is a sunrise industry rising suitably in an Orient set to overtake us on all counts, whilst entertainment is more a Western affair, much like the orchestra continuing to play during the sinking of RMS Titanic. In fact the among the reasons given by Branson for remaining in the EU was to broaden the choice of universities for his grand-children i.e. experiential whilst for Dyson the opposite was true in order to allow him to import desperately-needed engineering graduates from beyond the EU (from where in fact most of them are drawn to UK universities, only to be exported afterward by a short-sighted economy).
To return though to the electrification of transport, this too is tied up with the sclerotic nature of the political economies of Europe. In fact Dyson withdraw from the electrical car market because the UK government has consistently refused to assist them whilst at the same time providing lavish grants to say Indian-owned auto manufacturers in the UK to build diesel-engine plants. (Although you could as easily say Japanese, or in the coming years Chinese, whilst the only reason European manufacturers might not be substituted is that we import their cars wholesale already from across the Channel).
Ironically then an economy built upon the persistent engineering which produced the Industrial Revolution has since been diverted from its original source in Scotland, the North of England or the Midlands to a form of media-hub that goes by the name of London and outside of which it is practically impossible to succeed in the UK unless perhaps you play football. Nobody more exemplifies this than the late MP Alan Clark, whose wealth derived from Northern industrialists only to be squandered albeit both stylishly and spectacularly in the hot air manufactured in the Houses of Parliament instead. But as Dyson points out, the first thing that rich industrialists do once they have made their money is to send them to private schools to learn how not to ever have to make anything again, beside perhaps videos involving kittens.
On the upside, the British have an individual genius that successive governments have failed to quash despite continuous effort, and which they like to be seen to encourage for so long as it suits them. I once demonstrated a secure signature system of my own design to Mrs Thatcher’s Minister for Technology, at the conclusion of which he said “And so it’s all about creating jobs is it?” whilst beaming at the cameras. I was about to say, “Yes, you press the ENTER key and they come out of the printer over there…” though he’d already moved on.
But I’m straying as ever from the point, which is that until recently diesel engines were the government ‘flavour of the month’ across the EU, not least because those tasked with running it have rarely had a proper job (a fact that brexiteer Nigel Farage so often taunted them with) and let alone one involving engineering. They were thus as open to the sort of lobbying available to the deep pockets of the establishment in the form of say VW or Nissan, who would be able to steer them whichever way they felt appeared to provide the most jobs… albeit principally for robots. At the same time the same parties were as adept at lobbying as they were at programming defeat devices that made some of the most Earth- and people-unfriendly technologies look like ecological saviours.
The problem with government-by-lobby is that it is not conducive to the longer-term welfare of the economy, which is blown hither and thither by shorter-term interests like leaves in Ann Autumn gale. It is a rich irony that in the 20th century what would most nee visible to other planetary life-forms in space was the light from vast flares in Alaska, where natural gas was burned off in the desperation to get to the old beneath. I wrote this as that same resource is doubling in cost over the space of months and set to do so in perpetuity, and whilst Russia is holding the West to ransom not having squandered it to quite the same degree.
We have then been taking resource forged over aeons and pissing it around like Wayne Rooney in a Manchester casino. And in an effort to hide this from our own eyes we have resorted to a great extent to box-ticking exercises with all the appearance of us not having done so. For instance, coal-fired power-stations in the UK have been closed to great fanfare by politicians in London, if not by the communities that once dug coal. They have been converted to burning wood-pellets as often as not sourced from virgin forest in the Baltic states, which actually produce more carbon I the process. It’s a double-whammy that looks great in the parliamentary atmosphere but altogether less so in the real one.
To return however to that electrification of transport more broadly, it’s never really gone away. That same economical hub in the shape of London that was mentioned earlier has long been lubricated in its workings by electrified forms of mass-transport like the Tube, beside the commuter lines providing its workforce from among the suburbs. And with the scope of that commuting spreading further afield, trains operating over increasing distances have been gradually switched from steam to diesel and afterwards electric means of locomotion. In fact that bellwether of personal happiness in the UK ~ the house-price index ~ has often turned upon access to electrified railway lines for the simple reason that trains do a lot of stopping and starting, and this is done altogether quicker by motors than engines.
It doesn’t stop there either, for pre-pandemic the fastest growing leisure activity was probably lounging on ever-larger cruise liners that are driven by electrical motors, albeit supplied by diesel generators. Accordingly it can be seen that electrification has come to cars rather later than to rail or sea ways, and aviation a Johnny-come-lately only recently emerging upon the horizon. You may see a trend in all this in so far as the heavier stuff has been switched to electricity sooner than the lighter, and this is because transport itself evolves to some extent along the same pathway. The earliest boats were dug-outs and the earliest wheels derived from this same source viz. tree trunks denuded of their branches, and so there was some way to go before Formula One racing cars appeared.
Electric motors though excel at torque, for as my telephone-engineer father used to tell us, they work harder the more you load them up… which is why Teslas can accelerate in ways previously associated only with either drag-racers or GP motorcycles. Accordingly they are entirely at home turning heavily-loaded articles like locomotive wheels or else marine propellers taller than the average house. It was thus inevitable that as cars came to increase in weight and size that engineers would think again about powering them with electricity, not least because both motors and batteries were shrinking in the opposite direction at the same time as they were increasing in power due to computer control of their functioning.
In fact the best Dyson himself had been able to do was a car weighing 2.40 metric tonnes (compared to the Mini he self-confessedly adores having weighed in at just a quarter of this). How though did cars come to be so engorged like this? Well again, in brief, due our own habitual stupidity amply amplified by politics. During the oil crises of the Seventies when the Middle East proved ~ like the Russians today ~ that energy is as good a weapon as any, President Jimmy Carter decreed that Americans should drive at no more than 55 m.p.h. whilst draconian taxes were introduced in the tree-hugging state of California upon domestic vehicles. These taxes did not apply to commercial vehicles i.e. small trucks, which exemption led to the average family preferring these instead. Thus was borne the two-ton SUV that the rest of the world would slavishly imitate at the cost of (quite literally) the Earth.
Now therefore, just at the time quasi super-states like the EU realised they had got it wring over croissants and coffee with the diesel engine, they realised they could fix the problem by electrical means. Internal combustion engines fuelled by oil in its various forms are effectively using stored solar energy in the form of hydrocarbons, effectively using the ‘hydro’ bit whilst releasing the globe-warming ‘carbon’ bit… whereas electric motors effectively use readily-available power formed instantaneously from the same source i.e. the Sun. (Bear in mind that wind and wave energy derive from that same star along with all else on planet Earth, such that it comes as no surprise that it powered even the religions of the aboriginal human species too.)
Thus we had in the 21st century the twinned desiderata of increasingly available solar power, along with the means to adapt it to the increasingly heavy automobiles upon which the modern world survives, or at least until the biblical plagues that they trigger descend upon it. Like all evolutionary steps however it is somewhat of a muddle, so that for instance people have long swapped their cars not so much because they stopped working as simply for the fact that they’ve grown bored with them as they might have with their fast-fashion clothing. As a result, the exponential growth of car-production continues to decimate the planet as fast as the means by which they are operated appears to save it, or at least on paper or at the polls. Like drug-addicts however we can only be weaned off our technologies at a rate that is unlikely to steer us away from the iceberg of destiny.
Thus it is that for many people the 21st century really is one of rearranging the deck-chairs upon the Titanic whist having the best possible time doing so, among which I should have to include myself. Because there is probably a better argument for not using planes any more than there is for electrifying them instead, because as the legendary traveller Laurens van der Post was at pains to mount out, the car and aeroplanes between them have destroyed the diversity of the planet. What he means is, whereas a holiday in Thailand might have been considered something special two decades ago, now it is shit. When first I visited the place you might still have imagined you were starring like Leonardo di Caprio in a take of The Beach, whereas now as you queue up among any number of high-powered and over-priced launches to drop anchor, you might as well be sat on a bus in Oxford Street… at least as it were pre-pandemic.
For all things, as the inventor of Linux once said, devolve to entertainment and there is little to separate what we see on screens now from the larger world outside. This can only get better ~ or worse ~ as we move more of our experiential selves online into Mark Zuckerberg’s artificial heaven upon Earth. Accordingly there is an argument to say that it is worth electrifying flying machines for the sheer entertainment value so much as the apparent ecological benefits that will likely melt faster in reality than the Arctic ice.
Though you can’t separate technological advances from the individual either, and in the way that Hitler would found what would become the world’s most valuable automobile manufacturer, Elon Musk would replace him in that role albeit based upon success in invading the online world with PayPal rather than the real in the form of Poland. And so far as I am concerned myself, I am as motivated in building an electrical multicopter so much by the fact I missed out one flying a real helicopter earlier in life.
Though there is more than that too, as I tumble toward a sixty-third birthday and the yawning grave beyond: for in our advancing years a meaning to life is everything. Should you view your maturer years as a descent into meaninglessness and uselessness, then the process is itself advanced in a self-serving loop in that people who view themselves as decrepit become moreso that much sooner. To this end Brits the like of James Dyson, Richard Branson, or indeed those like Mick Jagger, Alan Bennett, David Attenborough or Paul McCartney are seen ~ and doubtless feel themselves ~ to be assets to the common weald. As indeed we all are able, or called to be. Thus given the choice between staying in bed on a Bank Holiday Monday morning and reflecting upon what might have been, I choose to open a chapter on my pursuit of electrical flight… and not because it is easy, but because it is hard.
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| Santa's 21st century sleigh? |
