December 18, 2009: The rewards of respecting engineers

I was looking at an array of goods in a shop today, wondering why none of the items on sale was made in the UK. Having watched the cars queuing up to enter the car park, I had also noticed (once again) that not one of them was British. So I asked myself, why has this happened? There’s nothing there that we couldn’t have made if we wanted to; but we just don’t do it.

Part of the reason must be the lack of willingness of Government and the banks to support design and manufacture, and the lack of educationalists to recognise the importance of science and technology.

It is no coincidence that the countries that have a healthy manufacturing industry also hold the engineer in great esteem. In those countries if an engineer goes to his or her bank manager with a proposal, there is little difficulty in obtaining funding to support research, development or construction. That’s because the bank respects the engineer as somebody who has special knowledge and skills, and whose ideas must be supported, even if the bank doesn’t actually understand much about them. And that’s how it was when British engineers like Brunel created the wealth that we have now squandered.

In a country where the title “engineer” is used loosely to cover everything from a car mechanic or a washing machine repairer to a professionally qualified technocrat, it is hardly surprising that the engineer with an idea receives little encouragement of support from financiers and government. (I’ve been there – at times I’ve felt that I might as well have been speaking Klingon to my bank manager.)

And at the end of that trail, you get a country where people drive around in Japanese or Korean cars, take their holidays on cruise liners built in Spain, Italy or Sweden, and whose electricity comes from power stations designed and built by French or German engineers.

The result? A steady balance-of-payments deficit, where our wealth continually, and ultimately fatally, bleeds away – the rate of decay being only slightly, and temporarily, ameliorated by service industries.

I revert to the (allegedly Churchillian) expression: “Engineers should be on tap and not on top”. We were on top once folks, and that’s when we built our nation’s glory days.

December 17, 2009: Santa setting a bad example

There’s an item on the “Today” programme this morning about Santa setting a bad example. I can provide a bit of evidence for the prosecution.

At this time of year it is a great pleasure for me to take part in a huge fund-raising activity by my Rotary Club. We collect outside supermarkets and we escort Santa’s sleigh on its annual tour of the locality. All the money we raise goes to local charities and, all in all, it’s a hugely worthwhile and heart-warming thing.

It’s great to see toddlers peeking shyly past their parents and waving to Santa as they are wheeled into the supermarket in trolleys. It’s really emotional when mothers emerge from their front doors with a hastily towel-wrapped child who – clearly plucked out of the bath – is held up, still steaming,  to see the be-whiskered old man as he glides past.

But things do sometimes go wrong.

On one occasion the Sleigh-master and escorting elves were alarmed when Santa didn’t turn up on schedule. A ‘phone call to his home was met by the admission that he’d forgotten all about it. Worse, he had been relaxing with a Scotch or two (or three) and opinion was divided as to whether he was capable of doing the job. Still, he was driven to the sleigh and we set off. It was, shall we say, an interesting evening. We had to take it in turns to rush to one side of the sleigh or another to return him to a vertical position before he could topple out. When the babies in warm towels were held up to him, you could see them recoil as breath that would have stripped paint at ten yards wafted over them. It was something of a relief to end that particular round, but I must say it had been a particularly jolly one.

On another occasion, a row developed between Santa and the driver of the towing car.

You must understand that Santa has absolutely no control of the car or the sleigh; he just sits there, waves mightily and “ho, ho ho’s” to the best of his ability. At times the driver is forced to make way for other traffic and the result is a temporary separation from the elves. And sometimes the sleigh sets off before Santa has finished chatting to a child.

Well, in this occasion things became rather heated and open warfare broke out between Santa and the driver – to the extent that when the sleigh stopped at one point, Santa scrambled to his feet, slithered out of the sleigh, tore off his beard an robes, threw them to the ground and jumped up and down on the pile, swearing in no uncertain way that he would never, ever go out on the sleigh again.

All this in front of a crowd of bemused, startled and sometimes crying youngsters, whose illusions had been totally trashed by the display.

I rest my case, m’lud.

December 16, 2009: Have you heard of Benjamin Baker?

Today’s media hype focuses on actors, authors, musicians (or rather, pop and rock stars) to the virtual exclusion of every other occupation. It was not always this way. In the 19^th Century such lavish praise and attention were heaped on engineers, who were the stars of that era.

Now, although many of these people are forgotten, what they achieved lives on and is still in use today, even if much of it is taken for granted.

Sir Benjamin Baker was an example – an amazing engineer. He was one of two men who designed the Forth Bridge (the other was Sir John Fowler). He was also involved with the construction of the London Underground, and introduced the idea of stations being built with the tracks on either side rising up towards them. (This helped to slow trains as they approached and reduced the power required when they left the stations.) Finally, just for kicks, he advised on the construction of the Aswan Dam in Egypt.

An amazing man and in his time he was lauded by the media and the public and honoured by the Crown. People actually listened to him, and took notice of what he said and did.

In short, he got the sort of adulation that today’s pop stars get. The difference is that his achievements contributed to the wealth and status of his country in a lasting and meaningful way. Plus, of course, I doubt whether he ever got the equivalent of a million-pound banker’s bonus for doing his job.

P.S. Did you know that people travelled on the Underground to watch the last public execution in London?

December 15, 2009: A proper engineering job

After I’ve gone from here, anybody tackling my house ought to take a look at what they find before they bring in the sledgehammers.

In my central heating boiler, for example, there is a diagram that shows how the rather complicated control system is wired. Every junction box is labelled and the wires connected to it are also identified by function and what they are connected to at the other end.

It’s all to make life easier when trying to troubleshoot or modify it and, from an engineer’s viewpoint, it is very nice. But would a new owner care or worry? Probably not. The average central-heating “engineer” won’t bother to look at it. They are working against the clock and expect everything to be done in a standard way. With a few very notable exceptions, most of them wouldn’t even understand it.

This leads me to my point. These days, in my opinion, engineering training is very limited. Whereas I learned from first principles up – and that took a long time – today’s people are shown the rudiments and rushed out to start earning money as quickly as possible.

They get awarded all sorts of certificates, and the money-making organizations that issue those certificates make sure the people they’ve trained come back at regular intervals, ostensibly to get their knowledge updated, but more importantly to make sure they or their employers cough up the lucrative fees.

I’ve seen electricians and “gas engineers” waving wonderful-looking (and expensively bought) certificates of competence, when a few minutes with me have shown me that they have absolutely no idea about what they are doing.

I’ve been called in to fix the lighting in a neighbour’s glitzy new kitchen when the builders and electricians had left, baffled and confused. Successive teams of them had been unable to explain why, when the kitchen light was turned on, the upstairs bedroom light turned off. I sorted it out eventually, but while trying to do that, and staring at all the unlabelled cables, all with the same colours, I wished that someone had labelled them and the junction boxes. If they had, the problem would never have arisen.

December 14, 2009: I swear; the ants weren’t killed or injured!

Some of the things that were done to children when we were at school would probably make headlines in today’s papers. These range from the teachers hurling heavy blackboard dusters directly at us if we misbehaved, through rapping us across our knuckles with the edge of a wooden ruler if we hit the wrong notes at the piano, to attempts to electrocute us.

The electrocution thing comprised a group of us being made to stand in a semicircle around the teacher, all holding hands while the people at each end of the group were given wires to hold. The teacher then spun the handle of a “shocking coil” which made us all jump as the current passed through us.

This wasn’t punishment; it was just part of the teaching process. We learned about life and its realities and I think that we – and society in general – were all the better for it.

Perhaps it was the experience of the shocking coil that led to my becoming an electrical engineer. Certainly it led me to develop my ant deterrent.

In the back garden of my home was a big old pear tree. This yielded a good crop of fruit each autumn, but the harvest was affected by birds that ate the fruit and ants that crawled up the trunk of the tree and attacked the crop as well. I hit on an idea for deterring them. I built a small rig comprising one transformer that stepped the mains down to around 6 volts, which was fed into another that stepped it up to several hundred volts. This gave you a shock if you touched it, but it couldn’t deliver much current so it didn’t kill you. I wrapped two wires round the trunk of the tree, spaced about a millimetre apart from each other, and hooked these to the step-up transformer.

When the ants tried to cross the wires, they drew small blue sparks from their feet and fell off the trunk. It worked brilliantly; we had no more ants in the fruit.

But there’s one very strange part of this story. After I had disconnected the transformers and years passed, we noticed that no ants ever went up that tree again. Was it some sort of race memory? If I’d looked at the ground would I have seen small columns of ants rushing past, bowing their little heads in worship as they passed the magic tree?

I don’t know, but it was certainly interesting. (Oh, and no insects were seriously hurt or injured in making this discovery.)

December 10, 2009: Bloodhound

I went to a lecture last night given by Dr John Davis and Wing Commander Andy Green (“the fastest mathematician on earth” – he holds the world land speed record with Thrust). They were talking about the plan to beat 1,000 mph in a car. “Project Bloodhound” is a truly awe-inspiring mission, and the supersonic car (SSC) is an amazing machine.

It uses a jet engine to get going, and then a rocket to push it to the target speed. A third engine – a mere 800 bhp Formula 1 baby – is needed just to deliver fuel to the rocket while it’s firing!

As I listened I was impressed by the comprehensive attention to detail that has been paid to every aspect of the project, from the engineering to the search for a suitable strip of land for the attempt.

Make no mistake, this is no pipe-dream – it is going to happen.

But the things that most impressed me were the confidence, skill and sheer panache of the whole project and the people running it. All of this filtered through to the audience in the packed lecture theatre, including many school-children. When it came to question time, Wing Commander Green took the brave step of asking the youngsters in the audience whether their minds had been changed by what they’d seen and heard, and whether they would now like to head towards a career in engineering. It brought a lump to my throat to see the forest of hands that sprang up.

This is the sort of thing we need if we are going to get engineering recognised for what it is – exciting, stimulating and worthwhile.

Go to the Bloodhound Website to get more information - www.bloodhoundssc.com . And give them your support; it is a stunning project.

December 9, 2009: Let the folk at Copenhagen answer this

At a place called Cadarache in France, a team of scientists and engineers is presently constructing ITER, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor. The programme is for the reactor to start generating power in 2018 – 500 million watts of the stuff. If that was electric power it would be about the size of one middle-sized coal-burning boiler/turbine unit (power stations consist of four such units). So, you may think that the output of ITER will be something less than a quarter of a present-day power station. But you’d be wrong; the 500MW that ITER will generate is in the form of heat, not electricity, and it will do that for about a quarter of an hour. Then it will stop.

However, by then it will have proved that it is possible to obtain heat safely and reliably from the process of joining together atomic particles (fusion) rather than by splitting them (fission), which is the basis of all our present-day nuclear power stations – and incidentally atomic bombs.

By the time it’s finished, ITER will have cost more than £9 Billion.

Why is this important? Because fusion is the power of the future: it is inherently safe and it uses Deuterium, an element obtained from sea water, plus Tritium (obtained from Lithium). There’s enough Deuterium on the planet to provide mankind's power for 60 billion years and enough Lithium for 30 million years.

How does this relate to Copenhagen? Well, once we have fusion power we will have the ability to provide electricity for the whole world’s needs – effectively for ever. With fusion power there will be no greenhouse-gas emissions, no carbon footprint (at least not from operating the plants: constructing them is something else). And there will be no radioactive waste to get rid of.

So we should be asking ourselves whether this will stop mankind’s destruction of the planet. Of course it won’t. People will still be cutting down forests, poisoning rivers, polluting oceans, generating heat, and so on. Unless we do something about population control we’ll be doing all these things on an ever-increasing scale.

As I’ve said before, Copenhagen isn’t even thinking about that – and that is the real problem.

December 7, 2009: Roll on Copenhagen

The thing about blogging is that it lets one get things off one’s chest. But it also lets people put their views in front of other people, and those views can get believed. Nut-cases and quantum physicists alike can bleat on, and on and on, and sooner or later somebody is going to be influenced by what they read.

Of course, although the medium is new, the principle isn’t. It all started with “Speakers’ Corner” in London’s Hyde Park in the 19^th Century. The critical difference is that the views proclaimed there were heard by a handful of people only; nowadays blogs like this can be read right round the world. Does that change anything? Yes, it does – or rather it can – if people believe what they read.

Our democracy is characterised by all sorts of people standing on their soapboxes and trying to persuade others to follow their lead. Some profess to be experts, others don’t – but they still expect people to follow them. So we have people like environmental activists being believed by the gullible, even if the people voicing the opinions are totally unqualified and their arguments have very little scientific foundation.

I hope everybody who reads my own blog realises that I speak as a professional engineer, and the things I say are founded on scientific fact. (Oh, I admit that there are times when I do spout off about politics, art or cooking, but I don’t expect to influence people, I only want to sound off, and I always make it clear that that’s what I’m doing.)

The problem is that really important issues are these days steered by people who shouldn’t be at the helm at all. The other evening I sat in an audience listening to all sorts of people speaking about global warming, the environment, carbon footprints et al. The innocents in that audience could have been forgiven for thinking that they were listening to facts, not opinions – and they certainly wouldn’t have known that the opinions they were hearing were those of non-specialists who had absolutely no scientific basis for speaking on the subject at all.

As we enter Copenhagen week we will see demonstrations by crowds of those very well-intentioned innocents who have all been brainwashed and led along by very vocal, and totally misguided, activists. It’s absolute madness, but let’s admit it: there’s not going to be an awful lot of sanity on the other side of the barriers either.

December 4, 2009: Lies and cover-ups

OK, I did say I wasn’t going to do Friday blogs any more, but the news about those leaked e-mails got me going.

You probably know the story. Some “climate-change sceptic” allegedly hacked into a computer at the University of East Anglia and got hold of emails showing attempts to cover up evidence that supported the belief that global warming has little to do with human activity. Let’s look at what’s happening.

One of the emails refers to “a trick” to hide the actual decline in global temperatures over the last 20 years. The university says that the reference to  “a trick” is “a colloquialism” and that it is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.

In commenting on this row, the New York Times has said, "The evidence pointing to a growing human contribution to global warming is so widely accepted that the hacked material is unlikely to erode the overall argument."

However a noted climatologist has challenged that position, saying: "This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud."

That’s just one of the messages. The e-mails implicate scores of researchers, most of whom are associated with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an organization many sceptics believe was created exclusively to provide evidence of anthropogenic global warming (AGW).

This morning, the IPCC has been stung into responding, saying that it will look into the matter.

Given that the climate-change argument provides governments with an extremely powerful tool for raising taxes and imposing rules that suit their needs, we can expect a strong response to preserve the status quo, and once again the real truth will be buried.

Does it matter? You bet it does! While the world is stampeded into addressing a fatuous argument, attention is diverted away from the unpopular realities that really could make a difference. By reducing population growth we will cut the poisoning of our oceans with toxic waste, we will stop de-forestation that results in flooding and the extinction of species, we will reduce the rate at which we plunder the planet’s resources and we will make life better for everybody.

Will we address that? No – not while we are totally focussed on bowing down to the false gods of Global Warming and Carbon Footprints; not while we expend all our efforts, money and resources on them.

December 3, 2009: Building nuclear-power expertise

Lord Mandelson is today going to announce a new initiative: the establishment of a “Government-funded nuclear research facility” in Rotherham. There was a telling moment in James Naughtie’s interview with him on the Today programme this morning, when Mandy admitted that he knew nothing about the circumstances of the Government sell-off of our one remaining nuclear power company to Hitachi. (This happened when everybody who knew anything about power generation was saying that we would be forced to embark on urgent construction of nuclear power stations.)

But back to our lamb-chops. The need for a research facility is real, but what we urgently need to do is set about training a new generation of engineers who can build, commission and maintain these plants (I would have included “design” in that list but we’ve already lost the plot in that area and no amount of crying will un-spill the milk). Academics are OK, and continuing research should continue, particularly into the next generation of fusion power reactors, but we need people who know about things like pressure vessels, switchgear, containment and so on – the nuts and bolts of power-plant engineering, and I know of very few training facilities that are capable of doing this.

I remember when my company took on some University undergraduates as part of their training. Two guys who were up to here with computers – but whom I would not trust to wire up a three-pin plug. That was many years ago, but there is still a huge gap between the theory and the practice. It’s easy to sit people down at computers, but much harder to set up rigs with pipes and valves operating under high pressures and temperatures, so that the trainees can get their hands dirty and learn how to maintain the instruments upon which the computers depend.

We must get to grips with this yawning gulf or – in addition to importing most of the hardware of these plants – we’ll be forced to import the engineers to run them as well.

December 2, 2009: Fiddling while Copenhagen approaches

You will all know my position on global warming: yes, it may happen but no, man has little to do with it and has very little influence over it. This view is backed by thousands of responsible scientists and engineers (I gave the references a few months ago). So you can’t blame me for crowing when I hear that evidence supporting my stance has been manipulated to back the vociferous Climate Change Lobby.

You will also know that I, and many others, believe that the reason for the push to reduce carbon footprints is a cynical subterfuge: the real reason is that it gives Governments a tool to justify tax increases and industry a vehicle for selling more products.

The Australians, with typical no-nonsense candour, have just thrown out the leader of their Opposition in favour of Tony Abbott, who is branded in today’s Times as “a right-wing maverick”. That’s because he opposed the former leader who had wanted to support the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The paper also says that most Australians were behind the ETS, but I wonder about the basis of this claim. Has anybody actually presented all the arguments to the population and then taken a vote? I doubt it.

Joss Garman has an article in the Times today, headed “Beware global warming – and the lobbyists”. In this article he sneeringly says “Prepare to be told, in contrast to the peer-reviewed science and indeed reality itself, that the glaciers are expanding, the polar ice caps are growing, global temperatures are dropping and sea levels are falling”. I am surprised that the Times hasn’t stressed that this is the view of a Greenpeace activist, and that there are plenty of opposing views. I hope they will publish an article of equal length by somebody like Doug Lightfoot, who is actually capable of speaking much more sensibly – and is actually qualified to do so. Unlike Garman, who is a wet-behind-the-ears arts graduate (he has a degree in politics from the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies), Lightfoot is a qualified and mature professional engineer.

Look, guys! Global temperatures have swung wildly for millennia – look at the evidence of tropical plants growing in Britain. Temperatures will continue to swing, under the drivers of geological and astronomical changes. They will do what they will do, irrespective of our puny efforts.

The argument is whether we can or should do anything about it.