Wednesday 6 June 2007
Globalisation by Christopher Claxton
GLOBALISATION impacts us all. Our speaker Christopher Claxton (left) had worked in more than forty countries and travelled round the world nine times. Raised in Central Africa, he was schooled in England, was then commissioned and soldiered in the Horn of Africa. At university he briefly studied the law and later obtained an Honours Degree in the Sciences.
During more than forty years he worked variously for the National Economic Development Office and the National Enterprise Board, and for many companies in diverse industries. He has worked in Luxembourg, India and Algeria; he set up joint ventures backed by the British Government into Russia, India, and the USA; then with the backing of the European Commission all over Europe. He masterminded the development and was General Manager of a global newspaper enterprise that dominated global markets, was distributed into about 107 countries from ten international print centres, and won top publishing awards. During this time, aged over 60, he ran the London Marathon in three consecutive years. He has written five books and many articles for the management press. More details below.
With this track record Christopher gave a very impressive account of globalisation, not as every body expected as a present day concept but from an historical setting stretching back into our industrial heritage. During his travels around the world he had come across widespread across the Pacific memorials to Captain James Cook as witness to the enormous impact of our forebears and contemporaries.
For example Cook changed the course of history for Hawaii when he sailed into the Waimea Harbour in January 1778, with his ships Resolution and Discovery. He reportedly was the first westerner to ever set foot on the islands. He explored several of the Hawaiian Islands until he was killed in 1779 on the Big Island of Hawaii in a petty dispute over a rowboat. This monument of Captain Cook is actually a replica of the one that stands in his home town of Whitby, England.
Christopher then turned to more recent times by bringing to our attention a series of individuals who had by their inventiveness and research changed the way things were done and in the process had developed technologies that have turned the world into a village.
He started with William Shockley who was born in London in 1911 to American parents who were in England on business. His father was a mining engineer and his mother a federal deputy surveyor of mineral lands. They returned to California when William was a toddler. His interest in science was encouraged from early on, through his parents' professions and by a neighbour who taught physics at Stanford. He graduated from Cal Tech in 1932 and then received his PhD from MIT in 1936.
Shockley began work the year following in 1937 at Bell Labs. His research in solid state physics, especially vacuum tubes, made many theoretical advances in the company's goal to use electronic switches for telephone exchanges instead of the mechanical switches used up until then. During World War II, Shockley (shown at his microscope) worked on military projects, particularly refining radar systems. As soon as the war ended, he was back doing solid-state research, now investigating semiconductors. One of his major contributions to the electronics industry was to apply quantum theory to the development of semiconductors. In 1947, with colleagues John Bardeen and Walter Brattain, he made the first successful amplifying semiconductor devices but out of germanium. They called it a transistor (from transfer and resistor). Shockley made improvements (with inspiration from his laboratory technician Gordon Teal who showed how to use silicon) to it in 1950 which made it easier to manufacture. His original idea eventually led to the development of the silicon chip. Shockley, Bardeen, and Brattain all won Nobel Prizes for the development of the transistor. It allowed electronic devices to be built smaller and lighter and even cheaper.
Christopher then went on to trace retrospectively key developments through a multitude of engineers and scientists who built upon the work done by Shockley and his research team up to the present including well know figures as Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce at Intel, of Bill Gates and Paul Allen at Microsoft, and Steve Jobs at Apple Mackintosh.
Christopher next looked further back in time to a product we all know so well, but not perhaps the inventor (Chester Carlson, 1906) or the history of the dry copying machine, The astounding success of xerography is all the more remarkable because it was given little hope of surviving its infancy. For years, it seemed to be an invention nobody wanted.
Upon graduating from high school, Carlson worked his way through a nearby college where he majored in chemistry. He then entered California Institute of Technology, and graduated in two years with a degree in physics. More problems faced Carlson as he entered a job market shattered by the developing depression. He applied to eighty-two firms, and received only two replies before landing a $35-a-week job as a research engineer at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City and worked for a firm of patent agents.
Carlson noted that there never seemed to be enough carbon copies of patent specifications, and there seemed to be no quick or practical way of getting more. The idea occurred to him that offices might benefit from a device that would accept a document and make copies of it in seconds. Obeying the inventor’s instinct to travel uncharted courses, he learned that when light strikes a photoconductive material the electrical conductivity of that material is increased. This realisation allowed him use black powder on white paper and to build in 1938 a prototype. But for its development over the next six years, he was turned down by more than twenty companies. Even the National Inventors Council dismissed his work.
Finally, in 1944, Carlson was able to interest the Battelle Memorial Institute, a non-profit research organization, which signed a royalty-sharing contract with him, and began to develop the process. And in 1947, Battelle entered into a separate agreement with a small photo-paper company called Xerox. But it was not until 1959, twenty-one years after Carlson invented his prototype, that the first convenient office copier using xerography was made available as a consumer product. The Xerox 914 Copier could make copies quickly at the touch of a button on plain paper. It was a phenomenal success. Today, xerography is a foundation stone of a gigantic worldwide copying industry, including Xerox, Canon and other corporations which make and market copiers and duplicators producing billions of copies a year.
It was the vast profits made by Xerox that gave rise to the Palo Alto Research Corporation and the development of facilities in computers that today we take for granted, black text on a white background, drop down menus, the Word programme, modems, the mouse and the interlinking of computers, all of which were incorporated by Steve Jobs in his new Apple Macintosh computer to programmes written by Bill Gates’ Microsoft.
Christopher continued his retrospective survey but into even earlier developments, each of which was as dramatic in its time as those in high tech are to us today. There was not least at Cambridge the work of nuclear physicists John Cockcroft, James Chadwick, Ernest Rutherford and J J Thompson who discovered the structure of the atom and then smashed it and ushered in the nuclear age. He mentioned the Wright Brother as pioneers of flight, but also John Stringfellow and Charles Henshaw; in steam locomotives George Stephenson, the greatest instrument of change probably of all time. In steam engines James Watt and Matthew Boulton, who had improved so much upon those of John Savary and Thomas Newcomen.
By way of example, George Stephenson was the son of a colliery fireman. He found employment as an engineman at Killingworth Colliery. Every Saturday he took the engines to pieces in order to understand how they were constructed. This included machines made by Newcomen and Watt. By 1812 Stephenson's knowledge of engines resulted in him being employed as the colliery's enginewright.
Stephenson became aware of attempts by others including William Hedley and Timothy Hackworth, at Wylam Colliery, to develop a locomotive. Stephenson successfully convinced his colliery manager to allow him to try to produce a steam-powered machine. By 1814 he had constructed a locomotive that could pull thirty tons up a hill at 4 mph. Stephenson called his locomotive, the Blutcher, and like other machines made at this time, it had two vertical cylinders let into the boiler, from the pistons of which rods drove the gears.
Where Stephenson's locomotive differed from those produced by his competitors, was that the gears did not drive the rack pinions but the flanged wheels. The Blutcher was the first successful flanged-wheel adhesion locomotive. Meantime he continued to try and improve his locomotive and in 1815 he changed the design so that the connecting rods drove the wheels directly. Stephenson became chief engineer of the Stockton & Darlington Railway company, which led to his famous Rocket.
Mention was made of another of the great pioneers of the Industrial Revolution Richard Trevithick, yet few outside Cornwall are aware of the immense contribution he made to the development of the modern world. During the eighteenth century, Cornwall was home to a greater number and concentration of steam engines than anywhere else in the world. This placed it at the forefront of technology and the Camborne area in particular became a centre of inventiveness. The constant need to keep the ever deepening tin mines of Cornwall dry made it necessary to employ the beam engines of Newcomen and latterly the more efficient engines of Boulton and Watt. But it was Trevithick who produced there the much lighter weight high pressure steam engine, and the first steam car. It was his work that allowed George Stephenson to build the Rocket and several decades for the German Nicklaus Otto to invent the internal combustion – petrol – engine and Carl Benz the modern motor car.
Christopher continued with his high speed marathon of individuals who had by their skills accelerated globalisation, such as Josiah Wedgwood who besides inventing modern porcelain also promoted canals and helped initiate the start of work on what would become a 3,000 mile network for safe and easy transport of raw materials and the finished products. He mentioned Francis Drake who navigated the world in the Golden Hind in 1585, bringing back the fabulous wealth of nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and spices from what is now Indonesia. He mentioned the earlier navigations of the Dutch and Portuguese. He contrasted all these with the situation of 1,000 years ago when 98% of the landscape was covered with thick forest and nine out of every ten people worked in the country, the two major towns being London and Norwich, the population in 1000 AD was about 2 million, 1.8 of whom lived in the country and only 200,000 in the towns of which only London and Norwich were significant.
The essential theme was how over the centuries it was individuals of talent and vision who had, and who would continue to play, the key roles in the development of technical methods and their major impact upon society.
There were many questions ready but due to time limitations these had to be restricted to only a few. In response to one about the part the East India Company played Christopher explained that at its fullest development the Company accounted for more that half of the entire would account for more than half the world’s entire international trade. It would need another lecture to cover this theme alone.
Eric Hussey raised a point that in the development of the computer from the transistor stage to present day, Christopher had not included any British input. In reply our speaker mentioned Alan Turing, the English mathematician, logician, and cryptographer, who is often considered to be the father of modern computer science. Turing provided an influential formalisation of the concept of the algorithm and computation with the Turing machine. During the Second World War Turing worked at Bletchley Park, Britain's code-breaking centre, in the section responsible for breaking the German naval code, where he devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including the method of an electromechanical machine that could find settings for the German code Enigma machine.
This was a truly interesting and captivating presentation and these pages hardly do credit, so many thanks Christopher.
