All 1 entries tagged Present Progress

Way back when…

Having come back to the UK I have returned once again to the nomadic lifestyle that has been me since I joined the world of work. This time the movements have taken me to Bristol where I am to be based until the end of June. Fortunately this has given me the opportunity to live with Siggy and spend some time with a good mate. It has also given me the chance to remind myself what being in the south of the UK is like again.

Bristol itself seems to be a very nice city with a reasonable blend of the olde worlde and the modern. You can almost feel the “but” coming can’t you?! ...but, oh the TRAFFIC! Seriously where do all these people come from? No not the other motorists, I’m talking about the people who sequence traffic lights. It is a fact of life that theoretically the light sequences work perfectly, you can even see the theory: Three or four cars go in each direction and that way no road actually gets fully stopped up. The thing is though Mr Traffic Planner, sir, is that Doris doesn’t move off as soon as the light goes green, nor does Ben – he’s busy on his mobile. This means that one car gets through, and the person behind is so frustrated that they jump through on amber and pretty soon the whole system stops up and so does all of Bristol. So please Mr planner, take your estimates and then try them in the real world before you say it works.

Today though Emma and I took the opportunity to tour the SS Great Britain in dry dock in the heart of Bristol. This Iron leviathan takes you back to the time when most machines had more personality than they do now. Tucked away in the corner of the museum was a Rolls-Royce Olympus (from Concorde) which we’d loaned to them, and once again this reminds you of a great engineering achievement that genuinely had a personality too. I’m very proud to be part of the engineering company that created so many of our past achievements, I just hope that there are more for the country to come.

Take the early age of jet travel, where we had the DeHavilland Comet, a thing of beauty, albeit flawed in its original incarnation. Now we have the Airbus A380 and Boeing 787, both massively more technically impressive – carrying more with far less fuel use and emissions, but both far less emotionally exciting than the Comet. Likewise the F18 and Eurofighter are both great aircraft but far less evocative than a Spitfire or a Hunter. What is it that we have lost in our modern equipment? Perhaps our past achievements were amazing and had personality because we were exploring the unknown, the edge of ability, now we are refining the concepts and making them better. The sad thing about making the “perfect” plane though, is that it is no longer beautiful. Concorde, the Comet, the Hunter and the Spitfire were all beautiful and there was not one part that did not serve a purpose. The Airbus and Boeing likewise are marvels of engineering refinement but they don’t have the same beauty, they’ve become generic.

Going round the SS Great Britain you can see the desires of Brunel in the engineering and you can see the details that were there to last a hundred years and have lasted more. Somehow I doubt you get the same feeling going round P&O’s latest cruise liner. It will be very impressive, it’s decks not lacking for anything, but will it have the same feel as the SS in 100 years or will it have been returned to the parts from which it came? The same feeling is there with the train too – a Merchant Navy class locomotive requires skill and panache to drive and make a train move, a Virgin Voyager needs another skill set. Gone are the engineering needs to be replaced by understanding all of the safety systems and other technology.

The only area of transport where this isn’t really seen is the car, where it has to be said that recent cars are more impressive than their predecessors though of course there are exceptions. The Aston DB9 is in my view a more beautiful car than the DB7, while the new Jaguar XK is far more attractive than the old. You could happily make a case for the modern car being far better and in many cases prettier than the old. Equally though few have a personality to them.

Why is it that the soul is missing from our modern engineering creations? They are engineering achievements that are truly the limit of what is currently possible (for a given price point), so why do they lack the soul of the flawed past creations. Will people look back in fifty years and marvel at the Boeing 787 and A380? I really truly hope so, but fear that may not.

Christopher Hinds : 27 Apr 2008 20:07 |  Tags: Engineering Past Achievements Present Progress |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem