Lindsley’s blog

On a recent visit to a local hospital, and in a fit of boredom while I waited for hours for something to happen,  I picked up a tendon hammer to look at and play with. This is one of those little gadgets with which they tap your knees and elbows, to judge your reflexes. Closer examination showed that this ’simple gadget’ bore the CE stamp. This is applied to a product to show that it meets defined safety and conformity requirements of the European Union. Should you have a month or two to kill, visit the EU’s website and prepare to have your eyes glaze over. And when you’ve got bored with that, look up the many organizations that offer CE assessment services.

Now think what all this costs. The quirky little video on the website http://ec.europa.eu/enterprise/policies/single-market-goods/cemarking/facts/index_en.htm has to be paid for and this can only be done by adding cost to the devices that are given this mark. The result? A thing that ought to cost the NHS a few pennies ends up costing £5 plus.

Now, I can well understand the need for careful testing of complicated gadgets or things that have to meet safety and performance requirements - but a hammer?

We need the UK (or what’s left of it after the Scots leave) to have a niche market that makes the world beat a path to our door.

To some extent we already have it: technical excellence. Look at Rolls Royce, Jaguar, Bentley and the like, but don’t forget the excellent graphics people like Ardman and Jacquie Lawson, and remember that Apple’s success is in no small way due to the skills of a British designer. Given half a chance we’re good it these things and we need to build on these seemingly innate skills so that, in due course, anybody in the world who wants something that is truly beautiful, reliable and efficient will turn to us. To achieve this we need our government, financiers and managers to recognise and reward talent.

As a first step we should develop methods that help banks to understand, recognise and encourage true genius.

From bitter experience I know how hard it is to persuade banks to support technology that they themselves cannot begin to understand. You can see how they support businesses that they can understand - just look at the proliferation of cafes and clothes shops in our high streets - but when anything really clever and technical is brought to them they really struggle to cope. I suspect that this is why we’ve lost so much of our engineering industries. More often than not when banks are asked to support high-tech ventures they turn for advice to big, expensive consultancies who may be very good at promoting themselves and dazzling their clients with glittering PowerPoint presentations, but who are themselves technologically challenged.

I suspect that if another Microsoft, Google or Apple tried to start up the the UK they’d have no chance. And it’s not just because our market is smaller (though that is a real factor) but because our political and financial leaders are so inept when it comes to technology. I challenge them to address this weakness, which will otherwise shackle us to mediocrity.

These days everybody can get to China easily. It was very different a few decades ago.

In 1973, two years before the death of Chairman Mao, I took part in a major exhibition in Peking (as we called it then), aimed at improving East/West relations. All sorts of things happened (of which more another day) but at one point large groups of us Brits were taken by coach to a massive cinema to see a long, colourful and convoluted epic about how a young Chinese girl, a soldier in the Red Army, had saved her village from a severe flood. It was all in Mandarin with subtitles and after a couple of hours most of us were fast asleep. But as the (beautifully orchestrated) music swelled towards the denouement we woke to see the heroine march up to the camera. Now, she had a very boyish figure and close-cropped black hair under her khaki cap with its distinctive red star. She spoke up, and her words appeared in the subtitle: “The pride of my achievement makes my chest expand!”

The auditorium exploded in loud and raucous cheers as the evil minded Westerners took this in a way that was quite unintended by the producers. This elicited huge smiles from our hosts, who all thought that our response indicated great approval of this masterpiece.

We kept quiet of course, and in this way probably contributed greatly to improving Sino-British relations.

Today’s Sunday Times has an article on the Stuxnet worm. This was a malicious way of attacking industrial processes and rumour has it that it was developed by the CIA and/or Mossad. One of the first attacks was on an Iranian nuclear installation. The Stuxnet worm infiltrates industrial process-control systems - in this case one manufactured by Siemens. In “The Darkfall Switch” I postulated a broadly similar device which was accidentally deployed when an American teenager triggered the system controlling London Underground’s power system.

In fact, Stuxnet is a comparatively crude device; the trick I described in my book is much more sophisticated. Stuxnet merely disables the computers controlling the industrial process whereas mine allows somebody to make the computers do something very serious.

No doubt somebody will at some time get to work ro develop a scheme that works in the way I described!

There was a discussion on the radio recently about apprenticeships and internships. I am a great believer in the former, but I consider the latter to be little more than exploitation of a pool of cheap labour. But that’s immaterial for my present purposes. What I was thinking was how these training schemes showed up the vast distinction between the engineering business and many other types of operation. (Not that I think of engineering as unique - the same considerations apply to many other professions, such as medicine.)

My point is that, while it may be perfectly feasible to bring a trainee in to an office to work a word-processor (for example), you just could not let a raw trainee loose on a big plant like a power station - not unless you wanted to run the risk of him/her injuring or killing himself/herself as well as others.

News this morning that a water company in the US has had its computer control systems hacked into brings a wry smile to my lips. My predictions in “The Darkfall Switch” were pretty accurate, albeit the victim there was a power company. The principle’s pretty much the same; the results equally dangerous.

Today’s Sunday Times carries an article about the Duke of Edinburgh’s forthright views on wind turbines. It’s about time somebody in a high-profile position spoke out. Up to now those who pointed to the stupidity of wind farms were seen as prejudiced reactionaries. Never mind the fact that many of the opponents are engineers who quote the statistics that prove their case - they are dismissed out of hand.

What kind of blindness has afflicted society?  Wind turbines are indeed capable of easing our dependence on gas, oil and coal, but their effect is absolutely miniscule. The problem is that the wind turbine industry is very, very good at confusing the issue: there is much talk of this project or that scheme being “big enough to power a city the size of Manchester” (or wherever), but no mention of the economics, or of the need for backup generators. The stark reality is that for every kilowatt of wind turbine power, a kilowatt of conventional generator capacity is needed. That capacity cannot spring into life at the instant that the wind dies - it has to be running already.

HRH correctly points out the stupidity of the subsidies paid to wind farms. When we are all finding it harder and harder to pay our bills, it is plain bonkers that we have to cough up these subsidies, which add almost £100 to everybody’s annual electricity bill, for no good technical, economic or environmental reason.

The Emperor is out there on the streets in his birthday suit, the crafty makers of invisible clothes are chortling and rubbing their avaricious little hands, and at last it’s not just a little boy shouting out the glaringly obvious - it’s the granddaddy of them all.

Today’s announcement of a prize of £1M to encourage technical innovation is a long-overdue recognition of the value of the engineer and engineering to society. It will be interesting to see the results. This competition is open to individuals and companies in the UK and overseas.

In his interview on Radio 4 this morning, Lord Browne was disparaging about the present battle to protect the title of “Engineer”. He says that he calls the man who comes to mend the washing machine an engineer. That is hardly the point: the argument is over the use of the title as a pre-nominal. Engineer Smith would be seen as being a few notches better and more widely trained than Mr Smith the washing-machine engineer.

Such recognition is vital if we are to recruit more engineers to the profession - and we desperately need to do this quickly. I was talking to an engineer who admitted that his company was in some difficulty because a client was insisting that an important project should be signed off by a Chartered Engineer. The few such animals they employed were all committed to other projects and it was not just a matter of borrowing one of these to sign off the work: hisname was going to be on it, and if anything went amiss he would be held responsible. The only way he could sign was to be deeply familiar with the entire job, and he couldn’t do that in a few minutes.

Lots of talk these days about whether we should or shouldn’t stay in the EU, but one comment in particular made me prick up my ears. The speaker wailed on about whether the UK could survive outside the Union; he said “After all 20% of our exports go to the EU”. Maybe, but does that necessarily mean that we will lose that trade if we’re outside the Union? I say that if we have a product or service that people really want, they’ll carry on buying it, whatever. Look at Jaguar: the newly-affluent Chinese are falling over themselves to buy Jags and the company’s owner, Tata, has very wisely stepped up investment and production in the UK. In the past the Government and British investors have been notorious in thinking only for the short term and this has led to the decline of many of our industries. In fact, the decline of our design and engineering skills is probably the biggest challenge the nation faces: unless we can dream up ideas and designs - and bring them to fruition - we simply won’t have better mousetraps to offer to world markets in the future.

Explaining his foresight and business acumen, the late Steve Jobs is reported to have said that an ice-hockey coach had once told him that it wasn’t good enough to go to where the puck was at any instant, but to go to where it was going to be. In the present economic turmoil our Government should follow that advice: they should be looking at Germany and France, imagining what would happen to them in the future, and positioning ourselves to take advantage of the situation. For example, if Germany’s mighty manufacturing structure is going to face difficulties because of the strength of their economy, it should open up great possibilities for British industry. We should be encouraging and supporting all sorts of manufacturing industries so that tomorrow’s power-stations, ships, trains, lifts, escalators, washing machines, freezers are made in Britain and not imported as they are now. It’s impractical to set up our own design and manufacturing companies to make these things right away, but we should be signing up as their licencees at least. Dyson does very well with products designed here but made overseas: why shouldn’t other British companies do equally well by manufacturing products here that are designed in Germany? Unless we act now (or at least very soon) we will miss this unique opportunity.