I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (7 page)

The fact is that in 1842 Brunel had seen the future. He knew that props and vast iron hulls were the way forward and as usual he was right. Given time, there’s no doubt he could have made the
Great Britain
work. But time was running out.

In only its second season, for some extraordinary reason, the captain failed to find the Atlantic and
crashed into Ireland. No one was hurt but the ship was stuck fast and so, with winter closing in, her owners decided that was that.

Brunel was incandescent with rage. He went to the crash site and found his ship, virtually undamaged, on the beach. ‘It is positively cruel,’ he wrote. ‘It would be like taking away the character of a young woman without any grounds whatever.’

Back in London he set about the Great Western steamship company, using his second-greatest skill. As a bright and educated man, he could cajole and bully and sweet-talk anything out of anyone. He’d forced his bosses to cough up the vast sum of £117,000 to build the
Great Britain
and then, just as the shareholders were staging a revolt over the cost, he talked them out of another £53,000 for her dock in Bristol. Now he needed £34,000 to rescue her from the beach.

It would be, everyone knew, a waste of money. The ship could never, in a thousand years, repay the debt. It was a lost cause. Everyone with a hint of financial know-how could see it was better to let her rot. But Brunel talked them into it nevertheless. He got his ship back to sea and in doing so finished the company.

As it turned out the
Great Britain
never did make a success of the transatlantic route, and rather than try to improve her Brunel had moved on and was busy killing himself with the
Great Eastern
, a ship so enormous it could steam to Australia without refuelling.

In the end the
Great Britain
was sold for £25,000, after just eight trips to America, and spent the next 40 years plying the world’s oceans, mostly under sail. She was used as a troopship both in the Crimean War and during the Indian Mutiny and then one day, in 1886, when she was taking coal from South Wales to San Francisco, she was caught in a storm off Cape Horn and virtually wrecked.

She limped into the Falkland Islands, where she was turned into a floating wool and coal bunker until she became so riddled with holes they took her round to Sparrow Cove and left her to die.

Happily, in the 1970s an American benefactor sent a pontoon to the Falklands, wrapped the old girl up in bandages and brought her back to Bristol, where she sits now, restored and resplendent and waiting to greet visitors.

A failed ship? A flaw in Brunel’s armoury? Some say so. Some say he was out of his depth and
had no understanding of the sea. But come on. Imagine what the Americans must have thought when this astonishing iron monster chugged into New York with no visible means of propulsion. The sails were down, there were no paddle wheels. But she was moving. And imagine their surprise as they moved closer and found that she was made from iron.

The SS
Great Britain
was the biggest hammer blow to American pride until Concorde touched down at JFK nearly 150 years later. They’d beaten us in the War of Independence, but when they saw that ship they must have wondered how. Doesn’t that make you feel a little bit proud?

Yes, I agree, it didn’t work. And many would say lots of Brunel’s ideas were similarly flawed. They point at the atmospheric railway he built in Devon, saying it was ridiculous to use a vacuum pump to suck trains along a track. And they reminisce with titters about his broad-gauge railway.

But think about it. With the atmospheric system, Brunel had taken the power source off the engine and put it in a pumping station. In much the same way that modern electric locomotives take their oomph from a power station. And everyone agrees that if the country had stuck with
his idea for a seven-foot gap between the tracks, instead of the 4’ 8” we have now, it’d be much easier to design trains that could corner at 200 mph or more.

Brunel’s problem was that he was thinking twenty-first-century thoughts in a nineteenth-century world.

That showed on his ships. Yes, the
Mauretania
set the tone for modern cruise liners. But the
Great Britain
set the scene.

Thirty years ago the weather forecast may as well have been written by J. K. Rowling. Every night we were served up another dose of fiction and nonsense, none of which had anything to do with what the weather would actually be like the next day.

But in recent years you may have noticed that things have changed. When they say it’ll be wet it usually is wet. They can see a cold snap coming a week before it gets here. And they can predict where the winds will be strong enough to down chimney pots and where they won’t. Some of this new-found ability is down to much better computers, but mostly it’s due to the satellite.

And it’s not just weather forecasting that has benefited from these space-based messenger boys. In fact, when you stop and think about it, vast chunks of modern life are reliant on them as well. Without those eyes in the sky cars, planes and
boats would have to rely on human guidance. Which means 747s bound for Heathrow would end up at South Mimms services. Furthermore, we would never be able to see live sporting events from the other side of the world. International calls on your mobile would be impossible. America wouldn’t be able to keep its eye on developments in the Middle East. And, most important of all, you wouldn’t be able to stay up half the night watching Jo Guest frolicking naked on the sun-drenched island of Jamaica.

To quench our seemingly insatiable thirst for better communication and more TV, the vast emptiness of the universe isn’t empty any more. There are, in fact, 9,000 satellites orbiting earth, and the business of getting them there has turned space into a dustbin. Insurance specialists say there are probably 100,000 pieces of space debris too small to catalogue and tens of millions of man-made particles.

This is beginning to make space travel in the vicinity of earth extremely hazardous. The Shuttle recently hit a paint chip, which doesn’t sound like the end of the world, but because of the speeds involved the tiny particle blew a hole halfway through one of its windows. More recently the
French-made satellite
Cerise
was destroyed when it crashed into a piece of debris.

Then there’s the bothersome business of all this rubbish coming back down to earth. It’s estimated that in 1999 nearly half a million pounds of junk re-entered the atmosphere. 84,000 lbs survived the heat and, because 25 per cent of the earth’s surface is land, we can deduce that 21,000 lbs didn’t fall harmlessly into the sea.

In the eighties the Canadians had a bust-up with the Russians over large chunks of radioactive space waste that landed in the Northern Wilderness. And the Australian government charged NASA with littering after
Skylab
crash-landed in the outback.

It’s all a far cry from the system of space communication dreamed up by the then-unknown science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. Back in 1945, in a paper called ‘Extra-Terrestrial Relays’, he suggested that three satellites positioned 22,000 miles from earth would mean the whole planet could be linked.

It was a wonderful piece of speculation, especially since there was no way, back then, of reaching even five feet into space. Rocketry was limited to a handful of British geeks, who understood
it only in theory, and the Nazi V2s, which had a job reaching England, leave alone the heavens.

So how Clarke thought his satellites could be taken to their carefully chosen mooring spots 22,000 miles away, God only knows.

Actually, that’s not true. Today it isn’t only God that knows. Anyone with access to the internet can find out as well. The thing is, though, it’s a bit complicated. It really is rocket science.

You see, in order to break free of the earth’s atmosphere you need to achieve a speed of 8 km per second. That’s 17,500 mph. And that’s pretty fast.

At this speed your forward momentum exactly balances the downward gravitational acceleration so you achieve orbit. Fine, but it will be a low orbit, just a few miles up, and you will still be battling traces of friction from the atmosphere. In time, a few months maybe, your expensive satellite will start to slow down, and when that happens the people on earth had better stay indoors because it’s going to start raining steel…

What you need is a huge rocket capable of getting you up to 17,500 mph and then, when
you’re cruising round the world, another rocket to take you far, far away.

22,000 miles, as Clarke predicted, is perfect because here the satellite has a huge view of earth – it can therefore beam its pictures or information to a wide area – and what’s more, for mathematical and scientific reasons I simply don’t understand, its speed can be perfectly matched to the rotation of the earth. Think. The dish that brings Jo Guest into your sitting room is pointing at a satellite that’s howling through space at thousands of miles per hour, but from your point of view on earth it’s always in the same place.

This is handy. Imagine how annoying it would be if Jo were just about to remove her top when the satellite moved. You’d have to go outside with a ladder to wave your dish about until you found it again.

Of course, pumping geo-stationary satellites into space today is a piece of cake. Even the French can do it. But back in the early days it wasn’t even remotely possible.

The Russians were the first to get up there with
Sputnik
. It was little more than a radio beacon, screaming round the world beeping.

The Americans were next. A huge mirror called
Echo
was sent up there, just getting out of the atmosphere where it reflected radio signals back to earth.

The first proper satellite that could receive a signal, amplify it and then send it back to the other side of the earth was launched on 10 July 1962. It was called
Telstar
, and the Queen, in her Christmas message that year, called it ‘the invisible focus of a million eyes’.

It was a remarkable advance for humankind. A true triumph. Because it was high enough to see America and Europe at the same time events in New York could be beamed, live through space, to sitting rooms in Britain and France.

Well, that was the theory. But
Telstar
did not sit at the same place over the earth. The Delta rocket that took it into space was simply not powerful enough for that, so it rose and set like the moon, the sun and all the other stars… only a lot faster. It would only be visible from Britain for 40 minutes and then you had to wait two and a half hours for it to go all the way round the world and come back again.

You needed to hope, then, that the sporting event it was capturing as it flew over America didn’t go into extra time.

And that was just the start of the problems. The really big one was trying to track and lock on to what was nothing more than an electronic beach ball that was 2,000 miles away, doing 14,000 mph.

Britain took up the challenge, and just before
Telstar
was launched opened a ground station at a place called Goonhilly on the Lizard Point in Cornwall. The Lizard was ideal, partly because it’s as far south as you can go in Britain, which eked out the maximum time
Telstar
would be visible, but also because the rock down there is super-stable. Any tremor, any movement at all, and the whole project would be dead in the water.

Nevertheless, the ground station worked.
Telstar
worked. And on 11 July 1962 Britain heard Alistair Cooke live, via the heavens, from New York. Just seventeen years after Arthur C. Clarke had predicted such a thing the age of space communication was upon us.

For many, the hero of the piece is
Telstar
and for sure there was much sadness when, a year later, it caught radiation sickness and died. But actually, my favourite link in the chain is Arthur, the huge satellite dish that was built in Cornwall to follow the satellite’s progress.

He was the first open satellite dish in the world
and he was a leviathan. But of course he had to be 30 metres in diameter if he was to stand a chance of pinpointing that pinprick in the sky. He also had to be fast, and he was. He may have weighed 1,180 tons but he could turn a complete circle in three minutes while moving from the horizontal through 90 degrees to the vertical.

What on earth must people have thought when he was unveiled? This huge white saucer, supported on a latticework of girders, tracking an invisible object in the sky so we in Britain could see what was going on in America… right now. He must have seemed like science fiction.

But he wasn’t. And even more astonishingly, despite the advances in telecommunications these last 50 years, he isn’t ancient history either.

Certainly, visitors to Goonhilly shouldn’t mistake his lack of movement for inactivity. Nowadays he doesn’t have to swivel his hips because the roving
Telstar
has been replaced by
Intelsat 903
, which does him the service of sitting still, right above the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

Sure, Arthur has been joined over the years by a host of other dishes, all of whom are named after characters from Camelot but the king himself is still very much alive and well. In fact he is now
part of the biggest machine in the world, the web of communication that spreads from below the seabed to solar-powered satellites in deep space. As a result in a normal day he can expect to handle all the banking transactions from the Caribbean, people holding for 0898 girls in California, news from New Zealand, most of the phone calls between Britain and America, and the Indian internet.

Arthur dealt smoothly with all the military radio traffic in Afghanistan and Iraq, and by firing up his motors and pointing to a new satellite he even stood in for America’s wounded communications network on 11 September 2001.

Not bad for a machine that was originally designed in the fifties to deal with one television signal or 600 phone calls. But not both at the same time.

What is bad is the state of him. I’ve been to all sorts of engineering sites in America. The Ames wind tunnel in California. The Stennis rocket plant in Louisiana. And, of course, Cape Canaveral in Florida. These places are just as old as Goonhilly but they’re obviously well maintained and nurtured so they look like they were built yesterday.