Cocoa, biccies... and a brainwave

The Weekender

Sign up to our free weekly newsletter for exclusive competitions, offers and theatre ticket deals

I would like to be emailed about offers, event and updates from Evening Standard. Read our privacy notice.

This is the most fascinating book I've read all year. Backroom Boys is a hymn of praise to British technology.

The author Francis Spufford has a marvellous combination of gifts - a deep passion for his subject, an engaging way with prose and a wonderful ability to explain elaborate concepts without erring into triviality.

His account of Concorde's chequered progress from the drawing board to the stratosphere is full of unexpected insights. Everyone knows that the supersonic aircraft exercises a strange emotional hold over every pilot who has ever flown it. Spufford explains why.

The plane's technology grew out of the delta-winged Vulcan bomber which was built to deliver the British nuclear deterrent in the days before Polaris. The mystery is as simple as that: Concorde was the only airliner that handled like a military jet.

He also traces the bureaucratic wranglings that dogged the plane's development. The project seemed in permanent danger of being scrapped but somehow it survived.

In the early Eighties, the newly-privatised British Airways found itself with an unwanted liability on its hands, a consummately beautiful machine that cost pots of money every time it went screaming down the runway.

Heeled passengers were able to scoot from London to New York in barely three hours. For the privilege, they paid just 25 per cent above the first-class subsonic fare. Could the market bear a price hike? No one at BA was sure, so they conducted a simple piece of market research.

They asked first-class passengers on their ordinary transatlantic flights to guess the price of going supersonic. The guesses were a lot higher than the Concorde fare. They'd stumbled on the solution. The price was raised to the average of the guesses, and while demand for tickets held steady, Concorde's profits began to soar. The gorgeous bird was made safe for another two decades.

The book springs all kinds of surprises. Spufford's chapter on mobile phones explains exactly how the technology works. I assumed I knew this already: when I make a call, my voice is somehow beamed up through the ozone layer and into a silvery dish circling the globe hundreds of miles overhead.

This complex piece of wizardry, probably owned by a Japanese billionaire, bounces my voice back to earth and into the earpiece of another mobile phone.

Not a bit of it. The miracle happens much closer to home. My phone is a radio transmitter with a very limited range. The call that I make despatches a series of electrical pulses to a receiver standing on the roof of a nearby building. This makes automatic contact with another receiver a few miles away, and so it goes on.

An interconnected web of ground-transmitters sends my voice racing across the country, leaping along motorways, bouncing over skyscrapers, scurrying around hill ranges and chasing the length of green valleys.

Satellites don't come into it. The challenge for those who created the network was to cover the whole of Britain with as few transmitters as possible. The chapter reads rather like a sitcom, with teams of engineers in white vans fanning out across the motorway system making random phone calls to check the strength of the signal.

Not all these success stories have happy endings. The chapter on video games tells the amazing story of Ian Bell and David Braben. These were the original teenagers-in-the-attic who managed to earn a software fortune while their mums supplied them with cocoa and biccies. In the early Eighties they both became fascinated by a prototype PC known as the BBC Microcomputer.

They put in long hours in the evenings and at weekends and, after 18 months of labour, they came up with the groundbreaking Elite computer game set in Outer Space. It became an instant success, eventually selling 150,000 units.

This figure matches the number of Microcomputers in existence at the time. So although the statistics seem small, the scale of their success is almost incredible: total market saturation achieved by two students tinkering in their spare time.

Since their initial breakthrough, Bell and Braben have grown apart. They spent most of the Nineties in legal disputes with each other. Braben is still developing games and searching for a success to rival Elite.

Bell spends his time practising aikido and rearing pedigree Burmese cats. He avoids modern computer games. 'Too obvious, too violent,' he says.

As Spufford poignantly comments: 'He doesn't much like the world he helped to create.'

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in