High coefficient of unchallenged piffle in the Telegraph this morning; anyone would think something had gone to their heads.

In a curiously repetitious article about the government’s plan to allow energy companies to gather detailed usage information for marketing purposes, and to disconnect delinquent customers by remote control, a Mr. Bentley, said to be the MD of British Gas, is quoted as expressing the opinion that this measure will constitute

“the biggest step change for household energy since British Gas started to install gas into people’s homes in the 1970s”

Mr. Bentley is presumably unaware of the history of his own company. Wikipedia:

The Gas Light and Coke Company (also known as the Westminster Gas Light and Coke Company)… was founded by Frederick Albert Winsor… and incorporated by Royal Charter on 30 April 1812, under the seal of King George III… It is identified as the original company from which British Gas is descended.

I suppose this counts as another educational benckmark; personally I think that the lazy so-and-sos at the Telegraph should have checked it.

Nick M, at Counting Cats in Zanzibar, deplores manky pesudo-Green technology such as expensive, unsatisfactory and, to the professionally frightened, hazardous CF light bulbs.

My own preference (having been forcibly deprived of my natural style in such things) is for LEDs. In my occasional lucid moments I am supposed to be designing a lighting rig for a mobile theatre, based almost entirely upon this form of illuminant, which will run from a single 13A socket, change colour a hundred times in one scene without any beamshift, and never need relamping.

This wasn’t really the point, though. In a footnote to a paragraph decrying the pusillanimity of scrapping the Severn Barrage project because of the supposed convenience or otherwise of some wading birds, he says:

Fuck ‘em. The Victorians would have done and they built this country. Well the Victorians wouldn’t have fucked them exactly. They would have stuffed them and had ‘em under glass domes in their drawing rooms as conversation pieces. The more I turn into a grumpy old git the greater respect I have for the Victorians. They managed to re-gauge the entire Great Western Railway in two weeks! Railtrack/Network Rail have spent ten years and billions fecking about with the West Coast line and it’s still fucked and Virgin’s Pendolino tilt trains can’t tilt. They had a can do attitude. What the fuck is wrong with this country these days?

In exchange for the lighting rig design I have every intention of demanding from the theatre company at least the phone number of a theatrical costumier who can provide me with a complete I.K. Brunel outfit, including the big top hat.

I should like to make this now uncommon article of gentlemens’ apparel symbolic of the appreciation of the Victorian ethos of capability which Nick M and myself so clearly share.

[Image imperialistically requisitioned from this definitive source]

Whether this measure will have any effect on Virgin’s trains I’m not so sure. As any fule kno, the correct gauge for a railway is 7′, not 4′ 8½”. On this basis one is inclined to suspect that if Virgin’s trains ever do succeed in tilting, they will simply fall off the rails.

As a Brunel cultist of distant French descent I feel that I must take issue with one element of the otherwise uncontroversial historical article by Peter Davis, at the Libertarian Alliance. In a most welcome piece celebratory of everything British (with certain noteworthy exceptions, apparently both called Gordon), he says:

Then we had Great minds like Brunel (OK he was partly French) who, within a couple of days in the 1830s, revolutionised the nation, and I’m sure that if he were alive today, would design and build a bridge spanning the atlantic that could easily last several billion years in a couple weeks.

Sir Marc Isambard Brunel, the first famous engineer of that name, was indeed French; he married Miss Sophia Kingdom, who was English, and their son, the even more famous Isambard Kingdom Brunel, was born British (in Portsmouth on the 9th April 1806), though much of his education was obtained in France.

References (birthplace):

Beckett, D.: Brunel’s Britain, David & Charles, ISBN 0715323601
Wikipedia entry: ‘Isambard Kingdom Brunel’

Also (education, etc.):

Tames, R.: Isambard Kingdom Brunel; Shire Lifelines, ISBN 0852631405
Rolt, L.T.C.: Isambard Kingdom Brunel; Penguin, ISBN 0140117520

In respect of the great man’s infallibility, it must be pointed out that not every industrial historian accepts the conclusions of Rolt (op.cit.) in respect of the matter of Mr. John Scott Russell and the Great Eastern, and that there are now two increasingly clearly opposed bodies of opinion on the subject, the ‘Roltists’ and the ‘Emmersonians’ (after Russell’s biographer, who took a quite different view).

It is also clear that despite IKB’s enthusiasm for the atmospheric-railway project his faith in materials science was in this case misplaced; despite experimenting with some exotic and scarcely obtainable substances he could not contrive a reliable seal for the slot in the top of the vacuum pipe through which the piston inside acted upon the piston car outside, and the project was eventually abandoned, doomed never to be revived by the development of electric traction (however, the story goes that a most impressive statistic was obtained when a fellow perhaps unfamiliar with the principle of operation of the system sat on a piston car and knocked out its coupling pin without first checking that the vacuum was off; it wasn’t, and he and his piston car, detached from the heavy train and enjoying the full benefit of the vacuum, were eventually fired from the end of the track like the projectile from a gigantic airgun, to set a land-speed record that was not exceeded for a great many years)

There is also a story about someone rushing into Brunel’s elegant office to tell him that a minor railway bridge which he had designed had just collapsed, shortly after its completion. Brunel, his cool that of the proverbial cucumber, apparently said something along the lines of “My word, I’m glad you told me that; I was about to do another half-dozen exactly like it.”

As to an Atlantic bridge, was this not the purpose of the Great Western steamship proposed to the Board of the Great Western Railway Company by Brunel himself? It took him more than a fortnight, though.

Obliged to Counting Cats in Zanzibar for the complete comprinterputout of the EMACS (or Emacs? What does it mean? Did it ever mean anything?) spook-baiting vocabulary.

Much of it is beyond me but I do notice the curious presence of the word ‘quiche’, which I had innocently supposed to be free of any security implications, and the curious absence of the dramatic name of a WWII German secret bomber-guidance system, irresistible to British Intelligence; the transmitter station was known as ‘Wotan I’, but the system as a whole was called X-gerät (‘X apparatus’).

If the list is so historical as to include Enigma, then I feel that it should also include this. How can we possibly manage without it?

Wotan I; Wotan II; Y-gerät; Freya; Würzburg; Würzburg Reise; Lichtenstein-gerät; Mammut; Wassermann; Jagdschloss; FZG76; A-4; Hochdrückpumpe

It is reported by the Telegraph that the last working pit-pony in Britain has died, at the age of 35, at the Beamish Open Air Museum where he had lived for the last 23 years.

35 is a fair age for a horse.

I am a shockingly bad horseman, never really having trusted the beasts since having had, at the age of about five, all of the toggles on my duffel-coat eaten by one. But I am a bit of an industrial archaeologist, and have been down a (preserved) coal-mine, where neat little stables for the pit-ponies are still kept, hundreds of feet below the grass and sunlight which most of them would never see again.

By no means all pit-ponies died underground, and hardly any suffered the appalling fate of Bataille, the pit-pony in Zola’s Germinal (who was trapped by a fall and slowly drowned). Despite which, of those who were blindfolded and lowered into the darkness few, as Lewis puts it, ‘returned to the sunlit lands’.

The hydraulic coal-cutter and the armoured conveyor are prosaically efficient and historically quite uninteresting things, but they have done away with the little underground stables, and also with the depressingly regular practice of slinging a net beneath the cage in which finally to wind to surface the mortal remains of the likes of Pip.