Inspired by the long read by Neal Stephenson, "Mother Earth Mother Board" (https://www.wired.com/1996/12/ffglass/)
The ICI scientists took the cheap and common gas ethylene - C2H4 - and compressed it under more than 1000 atmospheres. This is a pressure greater than that found at the bottom of the deepest ocean, and the result was startling. The invisible gas turned into a waxy solid, and when the pressure was released it remained a solid. This new substance, which had never existed in the world before, was christened polyethylene - a name which was itself rapidly compressed to polythene.
one Captain Selwyn, RN, wanted to avoid paying out cable from tanks inside the ship (with the attendant risk of kinks and breakages) by having it wound on a large floating drum which would be towed behind a steamer. The drum would revolve in the water as the cable uncoiled, but the committee remarked, "We have great doubts as to the practicability of this plan." As far as the open Atlantic was concerned, the committee was quite correct. However, in 1944 just such floating drums were used to lay the underwater pipeline PLUTO (Pipe Line Under The Ocean) through which fuel was pumped across the English Channel to power the invasion in Europe in 1944.
what is so often called a 'crash programme': 'at first one goes nearly mad with vexation at the delays, but one soon finds that they are the rule, and then it becomes necessary to feign a rage one does not feel... I look upon it as the natural order of things that if I give an order it will not be carried out; or if by accident it is carried out, it will be carried out wrongly.
(1850) Electrical tests showed that it had broken somewhere near the French coast, and it was subsequently discovered that a fisherman had fouled the line with his anchor. As the line was so light he was able to haul it aboard, and he was immensely puzzled by this new kind of seaweed with a metal core. Thinking that it might be gold, he cut out a section to show his friends, and thus started the long war between the cable companies and the other users of the sea that has lasted to this day. More damage has been done to submarine cables by dragged anchors or trawls than by any other cause, and the annoyance is often mutual. A small boat that hooks its anchor around a modern armoured cable is as likely to lose its anchor as to damage the cable.
(1851) After the initial failure and the complete scepticism of all but a few enthusiasts, the establishment of this cross-Channel link - the world's first efficient submarine cable - created a great impression. With typically Victorian optimism, this new miracle of communications was hailed as a triumph for peace, which would undoubtedly improve understanding and co-operation between nations. Today we are sadly aware that though civilisation cannot function without such links, it by no means follows that they automatically bring peace. As the mathematicians would say, they are necessary- but not sufficient.
(1856) ... though among the private subscribers it is interesting to note the names of Lady Byron and William Makepeace Thackeray. These literary figures were obviously keener on progress than their contemporary Thoreau, who had written in Walden two years before;
We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that Princess Adelaide has the whooping-cough...
William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, was not the greatest scientist of the nineteenth century; on any reasonable list, he must come below Darwin and Maxwell [...] Thomson was a unique bridge between the laboratory and the world of industry [...] It would not be unfair to say that if one took half the talents of Einstein, and half the talents of Edison, and succeeded in fusing such incompatible gifts into a single person, the result would be rather like William Thomson. What his contemporaries thought of him is shown by the fact that he was the first scientist ever to be raised to the peerage.
During the development of the atomic bomb, it was necessary to construct the largest electromagnet ever built in order to separate the isotopes of uranium. The magnet was over a hundred feet across, and providing copper for such a monster would have created a serious drain on the United States' supplies of this vital material. Some genius therefore proposed using the silver which was lying in the Treasury vaults, pointing out that it would be at least as safe inside the closely guarded confines of Oak Ridge. So the US Treasury handed over 15,000 tons of the precious metal to go into the magnet windings; it got over 99.9 per cent of it back when the isotope separator was dismantled and its coils melted down again.
Gutta-percha is a substance much more familiar to our grandparents than it is to us, for it has now been largely replaced by the many synthetic plastics that modern science has produced. The gum of a tree found in the jungles of Malaya, Borneo and Sumatra, it was introduced into Europe in 1843, and its remarkable properties were at once recognised. Indeed, it was the first natural thermoplastic ever to come into general use. Unlike rubber, it is not elastic, being hard and solid at room temperatures. However, in hot water it becomes as malleable as putty, reverting to its original hardness when cold again.
In his researches into the very foundations of physics, Heaviside became aware that mass and energy were equivalent long before this was generally realised by the scientific world. By 1890 he had already arrived at a rigorous proof of the famous relationship E=rac2, thus anticipating Einstein's more general formulation of this law by some fifteen years. This is perhaps his most astonishing - and least-known - achievement.
Forty years before my invitation to The Hague, I was on the other side of the North Sea, scanning the coast of Nazi-occupied Holland with the newly invented microwave radar, and wearing an RAF officer's uniform that was even newer. The heart of our three-gigahertz transmitter was the most important secret of the war - the cavity magnetron, invented in 1940 by Boot and Randall at Birmingham University. This generated centimetre-length radio waves of unprecedented power, and so made possible the airborne radar sets which won the vital Battle of the Atlantic.
When Britain's chief scientific adviser Sir Henry Tizard carried the first experimental magnetron to America, the face of war was changed over a weekend (that of 28-30 September 1940), at a meeting which established the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's famous Radiation Laboratory. Sir Henry's unprepossessing block of copper was later called the most valuable cargo ever to reach the shores of the United States: although the atomic bomb ended the war, without the magnetron it might well have been lost before the Manhattan Project could have got under way.
Yet - and this is one of history's biggest if's - Japanese scientists had made and tested an identical device a year before the British. If they had followed up their invention, we would not be living in a very different world.
