Boffin Bonanza
Nov. 2nd, 2003 11:46 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
major_clangerA couple of weeks ago Ken MacLeod reviewed a new book on the history of that great British proto-Geek stereotype: the Boffin. Francis Spufford's Backroom Boys sounded like a book I might enjoy, so when I saw a few copies on sale the other day I quickly grabbed one. To say that I got everything I'd hoped for would be an understatement.
Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin is one of those books so wonderful, so perfectly attuned with the essence of what enthuses me, that it was almost impossible to read more than a few pages at a time without wanting to bounce up and down with glee. Perhaps more than than other book I've read this year, maybe any other book I can recall, This Book Is Me. Moreover, I'd wager a good deal that the same would be true for many of my fannish friends. Spufford has a genuine gift for lucid and at times almost poetic writing that illuminates the sheer joy of technical challenge.
And it is that joy that is the very heart of what Backroom Boys is about. From shoestring space-launcher design at 1960s Farnborough, to finding a way to code for whole galaxies of planets in a handful of bytes in Elite, to modelling the flow, spread and bounce of radio waves through city streets to plan the first cellular phone networks, Spufford does a superb job of capturing the heady pleasure of solving a difficult engineering or scientific problem not for reward, or prestige, but because the answer is beautiful. His 'Backroom Boys' (and yes, one or two Girls) range from Cambridge undergraduates to OU professors by way of aviation engineers and radio propagation analysts, but all of them are fired by the pleasure of reaching not the cheapest or quickest answer, but the neatest (although it often has the former qualities almost as incidental fallout).
Spufford begins with the tale of Black Arrow, Britain's sadly-forgotton home-grown satellite launcher. As a grade-A obsessive regarding the history of the British space programme, I found most of the material in this chapter familiar, but Spufford's engaging presentation brought it alive for me in a way few other writers have. This is also the most overly Boffinish story; the end of Black Arrow marked the final decline of the Mark 1 British Boffin, happily ensconced in his lab with a soldering iron and cup of tea for company. The heroes of the remaining chapters mainly work in industry or are self-employed, but nonetheless display sufficient true marks of Boffinhood to merit Spufford's attention. He goes on to describe Concorde, and the efforts made to make it viable when it faced cancellation in the early 1980s; the genesis of the classic BBC Micro space-combat game Elite; the creation of the first cellphone networks in the UK; the battle to rescue the human genome from privatization; and the Beagle II probe to Mars. In this last chapter Spufford almost comes full circle, for he is returning to the theme of a small team of visionaries battling to bring a British space project to fruition under a tiny budget. In many ways though the contrasts are more fascinating than the comparisons: Black Arrow's developers never had to vie for commercial sponsorship, or endorsement from the pop icons of the day. (I have this vision of it blasting off from Woomera decked out in a Bridget Riley op-art paint job).
But it's not all technical geekery. One of the most pervasive threads throughout the book is Spufford's take on the underlying politics of many of the projects he describes. Boffins are perhaps thought of as at least small-c conservative by nature, but Spufford readily highlights the public-spirited and at times out-and-out socialistic nature of much of the work he describes. From Tony Benn flying a busload of shop stewards on a Concorde prototype, to the British biotech community's determination to go to any lengths to stop Celera from turning our DNA into a private commodity, Spufford emphasizes that one of the common characterstics of Boffinhood is the drive to find not the best solution for oneself, or the shareholders, but for everybody.
If I have any criticism of Backroom Boys it is its brevity. That may seem odd to say of a 250-page book, but at the end of Spufford's six chapters one is desperate for more. What of TSR-2, Britain's answer to the F-111 that was sacrified on the altar of party politics? Or any of the many projects of that uber-Boffin, Clive Sinclair? Even the tales Spufford does relate are necessarily truncated, with the Concorde chapter, for instance, concentrating on one brief (albeit crucial) episode in the plane's history.
But these are minor nitpicks. Smiths are selling Backroom Boys for £12.99; pick up a copy, download some Pathe Newsreels of 1960s Farnborough Airshows, put The Tornadoes' Telstar on the stereo and dive in for a Boffin nostalgia-fest.
Oh, and for why I really, really liked this book, see the top of page 236... :-)
MC
Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin is one of those books so wonderful, so perfectly attuned with the essence of what enthuses me, that it was almost impossible to read more than a few pages at a time without wanting to bounce up and down with glee. Perhaps more than than other book I've read this year, maybe any other book I can recall, This Book Is Me. Moreover, I'd wager a good deal that the same would be true for many of my fannish friends. Spufford has a genuine gift for lucid and at times almost poetic writing that illuminates the sheer joy of technical challenge.
And it is that joy that is the very heart of what Backroom Boys is about. From shoestring space-launcher design at 1960s Farnborough, to finding a way to code for whole galaxies of planets in a handful of bytes in Elite, to modelling the flow, spread and bounce of radio waves through city streets to plan the first cellular phone networks, Spufford does a superb job of capturing the heady pleasure of solving a difficult engineering or scientific problem not for reward, or prestige, but because the answer is beautiful. His 'Backroom Boys' (and yes, one or two Girls) range from Cambridge undergraduates to OU professors by way of aviation engineers and radio propagation analysts, but all of them are fired by the pleasure of reaching not the cheapest or quickest answer, but the neatest (although it often has the former qualities almost as incidental fallout).
Spufford begins with the tale of Black Arrow, Britain's sadly-forgotton home-grown satellite launcher. As a grade-A obsessive regarding the history of the British space programme, I found most of the material in this chapter familiar, but Spufford's engaging presentation brought it alive for me in a way few other writers have. This is also the most overly Boffinish story; the end of Black Arrow marked the final decline of the Mark 1 British Boffin, happily ensconced in his lab with a soldering iron and cup of tea for company. The heroes of the remaining chapters mainly work in industry or are self-employed, but nonetheless display sufficient true marks of Boffinhood to merit Spufford's attention. He goes on to describe Concorde, and the efforts made to make it viable when it faced cancellation in the early 1980s; the genesis of the classic BBC Micro space-combat game Elite; the creation of the first cellphone networks in the UK; the battle to rescue the human genome from privatization; and the Beagle II probe to Mars. In this last chapter Spufford almost comes full circle, for he is returning to the theme of a small team of visionaries battling to bring a British space project to fruition under a tiny budget. In many ways though the contrasts are more fascinating than the comparisons: Black Arrow's developers never had to vie for commercial sponsorship, or endorsement from the pop icons of the day. (I have this vision of it blasting off from Woomera decked out in a Bridget Riley op-art paint job).
But it's not all technical geekery. One of the most pervasive threads throughout the book is Spufford's take on the underlying politics of many of the projects he describes. Boffins are perhaps thought of as at least small-c conservative by nature, but Spufford readily highlights the public-spirited and at times out-and-out socialistic nature of much of the work he describes. From Tony Benn flying a busload of shop stewards on a Concorde prototype, to the British biotech community's determination to go to any lengths to stop Celera from turning our DNA into a private commodity, Spufford emphasizes that one of the common characterstics of Boffinhood is the drive to find not the best solution for oneself, or the shareholders, but for everybody.
If I have any criticism of Backroom Boys it is its brevity. That may seem odd to say of a 250-page book, but at the end of Spufford's six chapters one is desperate for more. What of TSR-2, Britain's answer to the F-111 that was sacrified on the altar of party politics? Or any of the many projects of that uber-Boffin, Clive Sinclair? Even the tales Spufford does relate are necessarily truncated, with the Concorde chapter, for instance, concentrating on one brief (albeit crucial) episode in the plane's history.
But these are minor nitpicks. Smiths are selling Backroom Boys for £12.99; pick up a copy, download some Pathe Newsreels of 1960s Farnborough Airshows, put The Tornadoes' Telstar on the stereo and dive in for a Boffin nostalgia-fest.
Oh, and for why I really, really liked this book, see the top of page 236... :-)
MC
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no subject
Date: 2003-11-03 12:22 am (UTC)Do they have any boffins of 'squishy science' in the book?
no subject
Date: 2003-11-03 12:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-11-03 01:30 am (UTC)PS Did Bug want that "Gay Bar"? or just the "Gay Bar" wrapper? or nothing at all related to chocolate?
no subject
Date: 2003-11-03 01:36 am (UTC)http://www.spaceuk.org/index.htm
Must get the boffins book. It sounds really good.
(dop)