As he unveiled Tesla’s new humanoid robot, Optimus, this September, Elon Musk spoke with characteristic flamboyance about the device’s potential. “This means a future of abundance,” he declared. “A future where there is no poverty … It really is a fundamental transformation of civilisation as we know it.” Perhaps deliberately, he was echoing the tone of his company’s namesake, Nikola Tesla, who in the 1890s was making similarly bold claims about his own work-in-progress. With his new system of wireless telegraphy, Tesla insisted, battleships would be controlled remotely, meaning that pretty soon “war would be abolished” and there would be a “revolution in the politics of the whole world”.
How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon argues that this triumphalist view of the future, so much the norm among Tesla’s contemporaries, led directly to the advances that enabled the moon landings, the technological present we now inhabit and the way we still think about the future today. It rattles thrillingly through such developments as the Transatlantic telegraph cable, the steam locomotive and electric power and recalls the excitable predictions of the fiction of the time: “In the year 2000 imagined in John Jacob Astor’s A Journey in Other Worlds, electricity was ubiquitous … Everyone had a windmill on their roof.”
The book describes the kind of men who did science, how they did it and who they did it for. And they were largely men, as Morus is at pains to point out. As the biographer of Tesla and Michael Faraday, his previous work seems to support a “Great Man” theory of history, and certainly references to Joule, Hertz, Siemens and Morse pepper the text. Mathematician Ada Lovelace’s name appears (though only as frequently as that of her father, the poet Lord Byron); Eleanor Sidgwick, who worked on electrical resistance, is mentioned. But the repeated assertion that “the future was … made by singular men” comes to seem like an excuse, when you think of the women who might have been included. What about Josephine Cochrane, who patented the dishwasher in 1886; the domestic and shipping patents awarded to Sarah Guppy; the bestselling popular science books of Mary Somerville; the discoveries of the palaeontologist Mary Anning?
Those who do get Morus’s attention often made their names through fabulous showmanship. They displayed their creations at public palaces of discovery in London, while “the curious flocked to see a new world being made” at factories and engineering works around the country. He describes a grand banquet of distinguished guests in Marc and Isambard Brunel’s half-finished tunnel under the Thames in 1827, “serenaded by the Coldstream Guards Band”. But work on the tunnel “was punctuated by strikes as the men who toiled beneath the river fought for a [fair] wage”.
For these great men relied heavily on talented teams of makers and engineers. Here, the author does acknowledge unsung heroes. Joseph Clement was the precision toolmaker who made components for Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine, an early computer; his departure in 1833, after disputes over the ownership of the tools, marked the end of the project. The glaziers building the Crystal Palace to house the Great Exhibition went on strike in 1850, demanding a safer pace of work. The strike was broken and its leader arrested.
We learn how upper-class gatekeepers of science and knowledge did not welcome contributions from lesser sorts. Before he was known as the “father of railways”, George Stephenson invented a safety lamp for miners. Scientist John Ayrton Paris wrote of his achievement: “It will hereafter be scarcely believed that an invention so eminently philosophic, and which could never have been derived but from the sterling treasury of science, should have been claimed on behalf of an engine-wright of Killingworth … not even professing a knowledge of the elements of chemistry.” How many inventions were lost altogether because their creators had no status or power? An interesting subject for another book, perhaps.Morus does not shy away from highlighting the intertwined roles of innovation and colonialism in Victorian Britain. In the 1800s, scientists called for discipline, measurement and standardisation, while “deciding what (and who) to count was a political matter that went to the heart of imperial government”. John Beddoe’s The Races of Great Britain (1862), which defined a hierarchy based on physical characteristics, was just one way of “rational” men “displaying the discipline they thought made the Empire great, and imposing discipline on its peoples”.
It’s important to understand how Victorians invented the future, Morus writes, because “we’ve also inherited some of [their] unthinking assumptions. We still imagine that our future will be made by men like these – charismatic innovators willing to take risks but possessed of the self-discipline and drive needed to get the job done.” This book implies that the spirit of Victorian invention was made of arrogance, imperialism and masculinity. Some readers may agree that our future will be made by the same brand of charismatic man. Others might hope that collaboration, open-mindedness and inclusivity will play more of a role in our 21st-century technological adventure.
• How the Victorians Took Us to the Moon: The Story of the Nineteenth-Century Innovators Who Forged the Future is published by Icon (£25). To support The Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
