Published by Justin Lewis-Anthony on 10 Jun 2009 at 12:48 pm
3MT : Drains and Heroism
We look too easily for heroes, and we overlook the ways in which the world is truly transformed for the better.
The Science Museum in London has announced a poll of its top ten objects, and, this being the twenty-first century, the public will be asked to vote on whether apples or oranges are the more important fruit. As they say, “the hunt is on for the all-time top invention”, and celebrities are lending their name to the exercise. There is a public education aspect to the stunt: a speaker for the museum has said they want the top 10 to spark debate about the value of inventions and discoveries.
What are the top ten? The usual suspects are present: the V2 rocket engine, the X-ray machine, penicillin, Stephenson’s Rocket, and the Apollo 10 capsule. The V2 engine has its advocate in Trevor Bayliss, the inventor of the wind-up radio: “It’s one of the greatest achievements of our time because it led to space exploration, and then satellite development, which then led to mobile phones and the astounding communication services we enjoy today.”
It is curious, but most of the inventions nominated share in our society’s usual mythology of the lonely inventor, battling against the indifference of a wider society: Henry Ford’s Model T, Alexander Fleming’s penicillin, Pavel Schilling’s electric telegraph. The top ten inventions are all heroic.
Which is curious as well, because when you think of the invention and technology which has made the single greatest difference to the sum of human happiness the last word you would think of is “heroic”. John Snow was a doctor in Soho in the 1850s, when there was yet another outbreak of cholera. Disbelieving the prevailing “miasma” theory of transmission, that cholera was caused by bad air, Snow undertook to prove the unpopular germ theory. With the help of Henry Whitehead, curate of St Luke’s Soho, he used statistics and a spot map to connect instances of cholera with the use of, what turned out to be, a contaminated water pump in Broadwick Street. Snow and Whitehead created the modern science of epidemiology. London’s sewers, the ditches and rivers of the capital, were at breaking point, and the health of the population was suffering. Within four years of the Soho cholera outbreak, Parliament instructed Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer of the Metropolitan Board of Works, to build a modern sewage system. Six intercepting sewers, (100 miles), fed by main sewers (450 miles), in turn fed by 13,000 miles of local sewers. 318 million bricks, 2.7 million cubic metres of excavated earth and 670,000 cubic metres of concrete were used in this greatest of all civil engineering projects.
John Snow, Henry Whitehead and Joseph Bazalgette between them made the single greatest difference to the lives of people who live in cities: now the majority of people on this planet. Their use of science and technology wasn’t heroic: how could it be? It dealt with illness and fecal infection. But sanitation changed the world.
What is true in science is true in the whole of human life and culture. Too often we laud the heroic and ignore the virtuous. We are impressed by the spectacular, and overlook the unobtrusive. We look for the pose and forget compassion. God save us from heroes, and God be blessed for the quiet work that transforms the world.
Joan of Quark on 13 Jun 2009 at 1:28 pm #
While I agree with your end paragraph, and that the whole voting for an invention thing is a bit of a gimmick, I’d say Snow was a doctor and statistician and Bazalgette an engineer, rather than describing their wonderful work as scientific invention, or even technological innovation. Sewers had been created by the Romans.
I think there is a drastic shortage of scientists, engineers and technologists, and possibly the lone inventor myth/exaggeration is forgivable if it gets people interested.