Peter Forbes

_ Origami is a metaphor for a certain kinds of folding operations which exist in nature and can be replicated in technology. In The Gecko’s Foot I devoted a chapter to the subject. New twists on this are coming to light. George Whitesides has recently been creating paper electronics, electronic circuits printed onto paper. Once the circuits are in place the paper can be folded by traditional origami techniques. So paper aeroplanes can now enter the electronic era, complete with LED lights.

Advanced Functional Materials, 2010, 20, 28-35. Download PDF

_ I’ve been re-reading James Gordon’s two Penguin books The New Science of Strong Materials and Structures: Or Why Things Don’t Fall Down. I can say that I’ve learnt more about the physical world from these two books than from any other source. Gordon was a British engineer and materials scientist who can claim to be the pioneer of biomimetics in Britain.

Gordon shows, with the confidence of an engineer who’d made materials for WW2 fighter planes but with a disarming irreverence, why it’s almost impossible to destroy a brick arch, why the comet airliner crashed, why ships still break in two, how to create superstore whiskers of glass, and countless others insights into our material world.

As the first biomimetician he counters the prejudice many engineers used to have against natural materials, showing how many natural materials exceed conventional engineering materials in their properties. Above all he explains the difference between strength, stiffness, toughness and elsaticity in the most vivid way possible. 

The great beauty of structural engineering is that that the whole subject can be explained in terms of two opposed concepts: compression and tension. The interrelationship between the two lies behind every structure, from the Parthenon to the London Eye. Once you grasp this, buildings and bridges never look the same again. As a rule of thumb, all buildings until the 19th century used compression only, but architects and engineers now increasingly favour tension structures, being lighter and potentially more elegant, hence those wonderful cable-stayed bridges.

Not only do you learn wonderful things from Gordon’s books, he writes so well, with a tone so intimate you feel he is talking just to you. He laces his text with stories from nature, the classical world (a passion of his), and his own rich experience of the triumphs and disasters of a life in engineering. They are books to re-read as you might want to read again any literary classic. They are literary classics.

 

Will the quasicrystal tie catch on? Shock image of the day is Israel's PM Netanyahu wearing one (no, this isn't Netanyau but Dan Schechtman, the quasicrystal Nobel Laureate. Pity graphene is transparent and is therefore not tie-friendly, otherwise George Osborne could put a matching tie on his £50 million nanotech punt.

It’s an enduring mystery why Britain, with a fabulous roll-call of scientific Nobel Prize winners, can’t create world-class hi-tech industries. A glance at Dragon’s Den and The Apprentice might give us a clue. Both extol the tough barrow-boy, rags to riches approach. This is business as philistine ruthlessness. The result is that university technologists and businessmen do not speak the same language. We have no Steve Jobs, or anyone remotely like him. Instead we have Lord Sugar, who boasted in a recent interview that he never read a book or listened to music. Like Steve Jobs he used to make computers. They were calledIt was called Amstrad and flickered briefly.

Earth, air, fire and water were the 4 Greek elements. We know better now: there are 92 natural chemical elements and a few more that can be made in nuclear reactors; there are, according to Chemical Abstracts 55 million known chemical compounds and this total grows at a frightening rate.

But perhaps we should think more in terms of two of those Greek “elements”: air and water. Many vital materials for hi-tech industry are in short supply but air and water are massively abundant. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could make mouldable solid materials from these primal (but not elemental) substances?

An obvious pipedream but thanks to nanotechnology it is coming true. It has been known for  along time that the paradoxical way to make strong material is to leave much of the solid stuff out. The honeycomb core of composite panels is strong and exceptionally light. What this idea tends towards is the solid foam and this was realised a long time ago in the form of aerogels.

The aerogel was invented as long ago as 1929. It is a foam from which the water has been withdrawn, leaving the structure intact and replacing the water with air. The most common material is silica, which is also used by nature in the intricate Buckminster Fuller-like structures of the tiny marine radiolarians. Aerogels have been much developed since their invention but they are still fabulously expensive, Their main applications have been in space technology.

What is special about them? Aerogels are the lowest density materials known. They are so wispy that the name “solid smoke” has been coined for them. They are almost transparent but not quite, having an eerie bluish cast They are tough in compression but above all they are the most efficient insulators on earth. A crayon placed on aerogel cannot be melted by a Bunsen burner placed underneath. If aerogels could be made more cheaply they would revolutionise insulation technology, especially in the home.

Various figures are quoted for the proportion of air in an aerogel, but it is reliably over 90%; the highest figure I’ve seen is 99.8%.

Can the same be done with water? Yes: a Japanese team has developed mouldable plastics consisting of 98% water. The secret of both the air and water substances is dendritic molecules. These are large many branched molecules in which the endless ramifications provide a strong network which encloses the air or water. The idea seems entirely counter-intuitive, like most nanotechnology, but both aerogels and aqua plastic pass the Dr Johnson test of reality: they are solid – you can stub your toe on them. And so much more.

With thanks to Dan O’Dwyer for reminding me about the properties of aerogels.

Q. Wang, et al. High–Water–Content Mouldable Hydrogels by Mixing Clay and Dendritic Molecular Binder, Nature 2010, 463, 339.

John Betjeman used to wax lyrical about the old North London railway that emanated from Broad Street Station in the City, near Liverpool Street. It was an urban railway that ran across North London, through Islington and Camden to Richmond.

Broad Street station itself was closed in 1986 to make way for the unloved an unlovely Broadgate complex (now facing redevelopment). It was the down at heel, along-the-houses’-backs nature of the railway that appealed to Bejeman and over the years it became even more shabby. The abandoned bits around Shoreditch and Hackney rotted away, unredeveloped, and a skeleton railway, often vandalized just about survived on subsistence level. By the turn of the Millennium it was on its last legs.

The came the new Greater London Authority and its Mayor. One of the sad things about modern Britain has been its can’t do attitude. Fifty years after nationalisation and subsequent privatization, most of Britain’s railways still ran along the old pre-nationalization company lines, The idea of joining them up was anathema. There then came Thameslink, linking North and South London, and the new GLA had the idea of joining up some abandoned tracks to create Overground. By next year this will provide an outer rail ring linking Stratford, Richmond, Clapham, West Croydon and points in between. Overground have also taken over the local line to Watford Junction and the network is a major new resource for the capital. I’ve just travelled from Camden to New Cross Gate for the first time and the new railway is a joy. Like Betjeman I’ve always loved what used to be the North London Line. Researching my last book, I used to take it to get to the National Archives at Kew. It is a genuine urban railway, displaying the individual character of the city’s precincts and also knitting them together.

The engineering and design are very fine. There are many new stations and the architecture is nothing fancy but crisp, clean modern metal and concrete architecture, rather like the Jubilee line but without the extravagance. The service is generally 4 to 6 trains an hour on most routes so it is almost but not quite Tube-like – you certainly only have  to turn up.

One of the joys is the way it is opening up Hackney and the old East End. Some of the East End stations have wonderful murals by Sarah McMenemy, an artist in the line of David Gentleman of Charing Cross Tube Staition fame. Unlike Charing Cross, though, McMenemy's murals are devloped form water colours. (Why hasn't the Underground attempted anyhting like this in its huge station revamp programme - there is no original artwork at all.)

The new Overground is already very popular and it should become even more so when the final link is completed. It is fast, avoiding the crush of Central London, and there is scenery. The trains are much airier too. In case you hadn’t quite got the message, I am totally smitten.  It is a triumph of the practical imagination.

The obituary notices for the test pilot Peter Twiss brought back a lost world of British aviation. Twiss broke the world air speed record when he flew the Fairy Delta 2 at 1132 mph on 10 March 1956. British aviation, like British science and technology generally, had entered the post-WW2 era on a par with the USA in most departments but a series of catastrophic bungles reduced us to the condition we are in today. We no longer have the capacity to make a complete aircraft – we only do bits.

The FD2 saga is perhaps the most appalling. Not only were the Ministry of Defence not impressed by Twist’s feat, they were so incensed by the barrage of damage claims from sonic booms that they banned supersonic test flights. Twiss took the FD2 to the French Dassault airfield. The great plane maker Marcel Dassault was very impressed by the FD2 and the classic Mirage 3 shows clear signs of FD2 influence.

In 1957 the British Defence Minister, Duncan Sandys, cancelled all manned fighter projects other than the English Electric Lightning. Missiles would take over, he said. Only now are drones beginning to usurp manned planes. The last 50 years have been the age of the fighter bomber and few have been as successful as the Mirage 3. The whole story is beautifully told in James Hamilton-Paterson’s Empire of the Clouds.

I’ve just finished Ian Morris’s Why the West Rules…For Now and can confidently suggest that if you only ever read one history book, this is it. Morris tells a new kind of scientific history, beginning with human evolution, the growth of technology, and shows how our civilisation really works. He shifts the perspective to show how parochial some of our concerns are. In short: it’s the big picture he gives us.

The analysis of the past is utterly compelling but it’s his prognosis that is most telling. We are reaching one of the great barriers to development, such as human beings have faced several times before: in the Younger Dryas Cold Spell around 10,800 BCE, the Bronze Dark Age  of 1200 BCE, the Fall of Rome, etc. He says there are two ways it could go and there is unlikely to be a fudged halfway house. In many respects his work ties in with several other recent thinkers. Jared Diamond is his most obvious influence. James Lovelock is in there too and this probably isn’t an influence but there are similarities to David Deutch’s recent The Beginning of Infinity. These are two magnificent books that everyone should read.

There seem to be two wars in Libya: the one you know about and another one between the USA and NATO. When the US handed over control to NATO and withdrew most of its active forces, Senator John McCain pointed out that NATO did not have the right hardware for the operation. They lacked ground attack planes such as the A10 tankbuster and the Hercules gunship.

Now, several months later, NATO is indeed struggling for lack of the right equipment. Robert Gates, in Brussels the retiring US Secretary of State for Defense was publicly derisive of NATO. He said that NATO was only delivering 150 sorties a day instead of the 300 planned for. The British forces have expressed their frustration with the Americans for withdrawing the A10 tankbusters.

So what is going on? The USA seems to be trying to make a point. By withdrawing and then publicly criticising the European efforts they seem to trying to press home an old political point: that Europe should shoulder more of the burden in Nato. But it seems a particularly distasteful way to do it: whilst the war is being prolonged and people are dying.

But Europe doesn’t come out of it much better. Why is their equipment so inadequate? It has been obvious for at least 20 years (since Gulf War I) that this kind of operation was the most likely combat European forces would see in future. But there is a severe lack of ground-attack capability. The Eurofighter Typhoon has had to be clumsily converted to a ground-attack role. All of the planes involved are firing expensive missiles such as the Paveway to destroy individual tanks, a ridiculously expensive overkill. As for the Navy’s Tomahawks cruise missiles at £½ million a wasted shot….So expensive is it that the operation cannot continue for much longer, according to the British forces (stat: the UK has the 4th largest defence budget in the world). When complete air superiority is obtained, cruder and less expensive anti-armour weapons can be used (if you’ve got any). The whole affair is an embarrassment to us and a tragedy for the Libyans.

A piece in Ian Jack’s The Country Formerly known as Great Britain (p.143) reminds me that Field Marshal Wavell (1883-1950), published a popular anthology of poetry in 1944 called Other Men’s Flowers. This had a certain novelty value and the book’s continuing sales success (still in print today) may owe something to the surprise factor. The contents are the predictable canon of safe, mostly pre-1900 poetry – the kind that a stiff-upper-lip English military man might like.

Wavell is generally regarded as bit of a flop: an old-fashioned soldier. He was not a charismatic war leader and was replaced by Montgomery before the crucial battle of El Alamein. Wavell might have been an awkward stick and his taste in poetry uninspiring but he had one flash of pure genius: on 23 April 1941, he had scribbled a note, a facsimile of which is preserved in the War Office files:

Is it a wild idea that a tank could be camouflaged to look like a lorry from air by light canvas screens over top?  It would be useful; during approach march etc

Please have it considered.

This was more than considered it was implemented as the Sunshield and hundreds of them were used in elaborate decoys before the great battle of El Alamein. Sunshields were erected and at night tanks moved into position under them. Where the tanks had been, they were replaced by dummies. Churchill didn’t have much time for Wavell: meeting him was like “being in the presence of the chairman of a gold club”. But when the battle was won, Churchill paid tribute to “a marvelous system of camouflage”: “The 10th Corps, which he [the enemy] had seen from the air exercising fifty miles in the rear, moved silently away in the night, but leaving an exact simulacrum of its tanks where it had been, and proceeded to its points of attack.”

The story of Wavell and the Sunshields and other war ruses is told in Dazzled and Deceived.