"Their prosperity," writes Howard Bloom, "depended on the
fact that they were ahead of any other country in the commercial utilization of
technology". Their fall, he continues, came when the British "grew fat with
prosperity" and ignored three basic facts: "a) every technological breakthrough
eventually grows old; (b) new innovations arrive to replace it; and c) the
country that dominates these new technologies often rules the world".
In The Lucifer
Principle: A Scientific Exploration Into the Forces of History, Howard Bloom
covers topics ranging from the biological basis for human evil to the rise and
fall of the British Empire. The "Lucifer" in
the book's title - the fallen angel of the Bible – is a literary reference
in a well-researched work which contends that "evil is woven into our most
biological fabric". Although Bloom consigns technological complacency to a less
prominent place in the text, his brief history of British industry is
instructive.
Don't mistake this installment of "The Y Files" as a bit of post-Independence
Day Britain-bashing. It's not. After all, Bloom's discussion of national complacency
comes in a chapter called "The Victorian Decline and the Fall of America", an
eight-page tract which warns that "when hot new innovations come out of
American labs, no American company scoops them up and turns them into the
gadgets of tomorrow."
As evidence, Howard Bloom notes that while Bell Labs
invented the transistor in the 1940s, Japanese companies made their fortunes by
selling transistorized televisions in the decades that followed. American
companies also invented the videocassette recorder (VCR), flat panel display
(FPD), and amorphous crystal solar panels. Once again, however, Asian companies
reaped the financial rewards.
So what about the rise and fall of Britain's
technological empire? Bloom begins this part of his study with a discussion of
coal tar – a byproduct of efforts to use coal for lighting, and to find a
synthetic equivalent to malaria-fighting quinine. Although a British chemist
named William Perkin discovered coal tar's use as a cloth dye, Bloom writes
that "British industrialists turned up their noses at his discovery." German companies
did not, however, and soon built a dye business that formed the kernel of that
nation's chemical industry.
Britain
also ignored opportunities in electricity and steel. Although "some of the
greatest physicists of the age" worked in British labs, the electrifying discoveries
of Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell were maximized by the Germans and
the Americans. The first electricity-generating plant in Britain was
built by an American, Thomas Edison. By the time the Ohio native's British-born rival, Sir Coutts
Lindsay, built his own power station, the alternators had to be imported from a
German firm – Siemens. As for steel, the stuff of skyscrapers and weaponry,
a Scottish-born American named Andrew Carnegie produced more of it than all of Britain by
1902.
So is the United
States technologically complacent and in
state of decline, an empire whose scientists still make great discoveries, but
whose industrialists lack the vision to apply them? Bloom's 1995 book is dated,
a product of a time when "Japan, Inc." put fear in the heart of American industry.
Also, whereas German industrialists once built a chemical industry out of
British-trained recruits, the United
States remains a magnet for foreign-born students
and scientists. Plus, modern industries are multinational or transnational, providing
jobs from Michigan to Mississippi.
What do you think?
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