The role usually given to science in the First World War is that all it did was to introduce ghastly new inventions to the arsenal of war, including powerful new high explosives and hideous clouds of poison gas. It has been written that it was a ‘chemists’ war of poison gases and explosives’.5 This brutal industrial-scientific war, conducted by means of the long-range artillery shell, the machine gun and newly-formulated chemical weapons, it is argued, led to killing on a vast, appalling, unprecedented scale. In many histories of the war, the contribution of science goes no further than this. It was seen as murderous, destructive and entirely negative.
Beyond this common view of the war, however, it is possible to see how engineers, chemists, physicists, doctors, psychologists, mathematicians, intelligence gatherers and propagandists were taking part in an unknown struggle that made a more positive contribution to what happened at home, at the front, at sea and in the air. They helped to fight a war that was won by scientific advantage, achievement and breakthrough in many fields that helped to transform life after the conflict ended. Many of the foundations of scientific progress in the 1920s and 1930s in fields such as radio technology and medicine, aviation and psychology were laid in the four years of war. In Britain, the new skills developed in aeronautics and intelligence gathering would live on for much of the rest of the century. The expertise that went on to produce the jet engine, a powerful aviation industry and the supersonic airliner was developed during the First World War. In addition, Britain is still today, for good or ill, a nation renowned for its intelligence-gathering capabilities and is often referred to as ‘the surveillance state’.6
However, at the opening of the twentieth century the world of science was itself deeply divided. Several men of science (the word ‘scientist’ was still relatively little used) thought that their discipline was best pursued in academic isolation through pure research. Fighting for professional status and independence in the universities, they believed the only valuable science was pure science. They looked down on the world of applied science, just as gentlemen as a class looked down on those who dirtied their hands with business or worked in industry. But a growing group of scientists began to feel that this was a false distinction, that the principal role of science was to improve the lot of men and women. For instance, Professor John Haldane of New College, Oxford, a leading physiologist, used his understanding of poisons and of respiration to work tirelessly for the improvement of industrial health in coal mines. Professor John Ambrose Fleming, a top electrical engineer at University College, London, in addition to his academic duties also worked as consultant and scientific adviser to commercial companies and invented the first electric valve. In the world of medicine, of course, there never was a distinction between pure and applied science. All medical research was for practical purposes and an immense amount of it took place in the early twentieth century. But although medicine had been the exception rather than the rule, there was unquestionably a shift towards finding the practical application of science and of using scientific principles to understand and improve the electrical and mechanical world that was developing fast in the early years of the century
As part of this transition, new organisations came into being in Britain in the years before the war to advise on the science behind many of the great technological changes that were transforming the age. The Advisory Committee on Aeronautics was established in 1909 and the Medical Research Committee in 1913. They and other such bodies bred a new type of scientist who helped to link the universities with the practical world, the academy with government and industry. These scientists helped develop new forms of intelligence gathering, helped to save lives by developing new medicines, advanced the understanding of how the human mind worked, and brought dramatic breakthroughs in code breaking, naval warfare and the war in the air. In 1915 Professor John Ambrose Fleming summed up the impact of these changes in a public lecture when he said: Tt is beyond any doubt that this war is a war of engineers and chemists quite as much as of soldiers.’7
I have written extensively about the boffins, backroom scientists and mavericks of the Second World War. In a sense this book is the prequel to these histories, looking at the boffins of the Great War (not that the word ‘boffin’ was ever used during that war). But it is not just those obviously defined as scientists who provide the subject matter for this book. This is the story of many individuals with specific skills, often from the universities or from industry or the arts, who contributed to the war effort. In the top secret world of the code breakers, the Admiralty recruited men and women with specific and vital linguistic skills and brought in classical scholars who were experienced in piecing together the full meaning of a manuscript from fragments of text. In the censorship of the press and in the new medium of the cinema, the War Office recruited a broad range of writers including one of the greatest novelists of the day, while the army engaged film-makers, cinema distributors, photographers and artists to help depict the war for the public at home and abroad. A general awareness of the existence of a ‘Home Front’ came into being and slowly it was realised that in a modern war a vital relationship would exist between what people thought at home and the general level of support needed to sustain the fighting abroad. So a wide net was cast to recruit the skills needed to manage this relationship and to win the war.
Secret Warriors takes in aviation, intelligence and code breaking, engineering and gunnery, chemistry and medicine, as well as censorship and propaganda. It follows the work of some extraordinary individuals who became part of the first ‘total war’ in which all the resources of the state were involved. This was not just a war fought by sailors, soldiers and airmen, but one in which public opinion would play a central role in supporting the fighting front. As the war progressed it drew in an ever-widening group of experts, scholars, scientists and literary figures. They were the secret warriors of the Great War. A huge group of brilliant men (and they were mostly men, although there were a few women) were drawn into the titanic struggle. For the first time in this nation’s history some of the finest brains from the university laboratories, colleges, factories and hospitals of Britain willingly came forward not to do their bit on the battlefield but to contribute their expertise at a time of national crisis.
As the Great War was transformed from a conflict fought by professional armies on continental fields into a national struggle that affected most aspects of the life of the nation, so the scientific and intellectual establishments were drawn in. As the army and the air force, and to a degree the navy, became more professional and more prepared for a long, bitter, attritional war, so the best and the brightest were called upon to contribute. A few of those who helped to solve the problems of aeronautics, to carry out extraordinary new forms of surgery or to write the first narratives of the war, became household names. Most, however, remained unknown and returned to relative obscurity in their laboratories, libraries or university departments. Many remarkable individuals appear in these pages. This is their story. It is an unusual one.
1
New Century, New World
The year 1914 is often seen as the end of an era. It has been described as the last year of the ‘long’ nineteenth century, and as marking the final break between the old world order and the modern era. As a consequence, Edwardian Britain is often depicted as a sort of Indian summer, the last decade of the old world before everything was engulfed in the Great War. It is sometimes portrayed as an elegant, golden age shimmering in the distant light of country house parties, with public schoolboys playing cricket on long hot summer afternoons, the navy in great battleships proudly ruling the waves, the pomp and glory of imperial durbars … and so on. It is presented as a period of stability and continuity before the tsunami of war washed everything away.1
However, this is to see life in the first decade of the twentieth century through the looking glass of hindsight. Most evidence shows that the Edwardians believed they were living through years of immense promise and pot
ential, years of dramatic change in the present that offered exciting new possibilities for the future. They saw the Victorian era ending symbolically with the death of the old queen and the coming of the new century. New ideas, new technologies, dramatic changes in workers’ rights, the provision of state pensions and the big debate about ‘Votes for Women’ were the characteristics of their age. The word ‘new’ itself became one of the most fashionable words of the age: people spoke of the ‘new art’, the ‘new morality’ and the ‘new woman’. All of this generated great debate. Edwardians argued intensely as to whether so much ‘newness’ was a good or a bad thing. But they were not wrong about the scale of change they were living through. One of the young technological pioneers of the age, John Moore-Brabazon, summed up the spirit he and his friends felt when he wrote, ‘I think we were all a little mad, we were all suffering from dreams of such a wonderful future.’2
Britain was still a deeply divided land. In London there was a glittering West End and an impoverished East End. In the countryside there were superbly wealthy country homes and bleak village hovels. Workers had formed trade unions to battle for their rights and for a better livelihood; and rich owners were determined to give them neither. Industrial unrest was widespread; in 1912, for example, forty million working days were lost in strikes. Suffragettes demanded rights for women; the establishment wanted to preserve the status quo. Change was not happening evenly or necessarily fairly. But it was happening.
In the rarefied world of pure science nothing short of a revolution was taking place in the twenty years before the Great War. At Berlin University in 1900, Max Planck discovered quantum theory and a new basis for theoretical physics. At Zurich in 1905, Albert Einstein proposed his ‘special theory of relativity’. These ideas were to transform the intellectual landscape of the twentieth century, utterly changing views on space, time and matter. At Manchester University in 1911 Ernest Rutherford discovered the nucleus of the atom and nuclear physics was born. At Cambridge from 1910 to 1913, Bertrand Russell and A.N. Whitehead revolutionised the foundations of modern mathematics with their Principia Mathematica. Meanwhile in Vienna, Sigmund Freud laid down the basis for psychoanalysis as a formula for the treatment of psychological problems through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst. A new science of genetics was established. Incredible advances were made in understanding the activities of microbes in the new science of bacteriology. These fundamental changes in a brief period of time, as Eric Hobsbawm has observed, utterly transformed ‘man’s entire way of structuring the universe’.3 But of course, only a tiny number of people picked up these revolutionary ideas. In 1910, there were barely 700 members of the British and the German Physical Societies combined. The total number of pure scientists in the world in 1914 could be counted in only the thousands. And mostly they researched and worked in Western Europe with only very small numbers in either Russia, the United States or elsewhere. In 1901 the Swedish Academy of Sciences first awarded the Nobel Prize to scientists who had made major advances in their field. By 1914, of the first seventy-five highly prestigious awards, all but ten were made to scientists in northern Europe, mostly Britain, Germany, France and the Netherlands.
Most Edwardians knew nothing of these seismic changes and few would have understood them had they known of them. But if merely a few hundred advanced thinkers felt the earthquakes in the world of pure science, pretty well every Edwardian would have been aware of the massive technological changes that were impacting on almost every aspect of their lives. Developments in electricity, the spread of the internal combustion engine, the advance of the chemical industries, huge improvements in medical science, dramatic developments in communications technologies were all bringing about what many saw as a new age. Some people even went as far as to hope that these new scientific technologies could soon eradicate altogether the traditional problems of poverty, disease and war. Others were more pessimistic and feared that traditional values and long-standing social relationships would disintegrate as a result of all this turmoil.
Many of the scientific changes that were taking place had their foundations in the Victorian era, although the consequences were only being felt in the early part of the new century. The first, electricity, had already begun revolutionising life at the end of the nineteenth century. Just as coal and steam power had been at the heart of the Industrial Revolution, so electricity was at the foundation of the new era. It had been known since ancient times that electricity existed, but it was not until the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that men of science analysed and began to understand concepts like electrical currents and electric fields. In 1879, the American Thomas Edison invented the electric light bulb -or at least designed the first incandescent bulb that could be mass produced, in which a metal filament glowed white within a glass bulb. Two years later he built the first modern electric power station in New York to supply the electricity for his light bulbs. Within two decades, by 1900, a recognisably modern form of the electrical power industry was beginning to emerge. Electricity was produced in large generating stations sited near the main centres of demand. In Britain, the Ferranti company built one of the first of these giant generating stations in 1889 at Deptford, only a few miles east of London. Electricity travelled at a high voltage along cables from power stations to the local user where it was stepped down to a low voltage through a transformer.
The principal use for electricity at the end of the nineteenth century was to replace gas lighting in public streets in order to provide a cleaner and safer form of illumination. This central fact of demand determined the shape of the early electricity supply industry. In Britain by 1900 there were about 250 separate companies supplying electricity in a range of different voltages from 100 to 480 volts. There was no uniformly accepted standard of supply. At least half of the companies were owned by local municipalities and their task was merely to light the streets of their town or city. Even by 1914 relatively few households in Britain – only about one in ten – had access to electricity. And the 10 per cent of houses connected to the electricity supply were clearly the wealthiest homes in the bigger towns and cities. During the first decades of the century the numbers grew dramatically, partly fed by the huge growth in the electrical industries as new manufacturers like the General Electric Company (GEC), whose slogan was ‘Everything Electrical’, developed into industrial giants. Manufacturers produced a vast array of electrically powered domestic gadgets, from the telephone to the electric fire, from gramophones to vacuum cleaners. By the time of the First World War, these household items were only just beginning to revolutionise the home, but they pointed towards the future.
In the wake of electricity came a huge growth in new electronic industries like those of the telephone and radio, both founded on the development of the electric telegraph. This was another nineteenth-century industry. In 1844, in America, Samuel Morse had demonstrated a code that became a universal system for translating letters into dots and dashes, which could then be sent as electrical pulses along telegraph wires. Tens of thousands of miles of telegraph cables were soon in place, crossing countries and continents. The first underwater cable linking Britain and France was laid in 1851 and the first transatlantic cable began operating in 1866. British scientists soon established themselves as leaders in the technology of insulating copper wires in a rare tree sap and wrapping them in protective steel wire. The Eastern Telegraph Company dominated the process of linking all parts of the British Empire and by the 1870s telegraphic cables extended to Hong Kong and Australia. Initially used by diplomats and news agencies, the telegraphic cables made the world a genuinely smaller place. News, information or dispatches that would have taken weeks to transport around the globe by ship, now arrived in minutes. Officials headquartered in their capitals could send orders to generals and admirals in the field. The first ever world wide web of telegraphic cables was created in a single generation in the second half of the nineteenth century.4
In 1876 this went a step
further when an American, Alexander Graham Bell, patented his invention of the telephone, basically a telegraph but able to carry the electromagnetic signal of a human voice. It took a while for telephones or ‘speaking telegraphs’ to catch on as they depended upon a complex and costly infrastructure of local exchanges and telephone operators. Moreover, surprising as it may seem today, few people could see the point of the telephone; official and business users already had the telegraph and could send telegrams worldwide. The telephone seemed nothing but a frivolous extension to this service. It remained largely an urban device and by 1914 there were still only about 1500 exchanges in Britain, of which the vast majority had fewer than 300 subscribers.
By the 1880s, the German physicist Heinrich Hertz had established the existence of electric waves travelling at the speed of light. Hertz’s work, though/was purely theoretical and academic. It took others to make some practical application of the discovery. The principal figure in the development of the use of radio waves to send Morse signals was Guglielmo Marconi, an Italian who settled in London and during the 1890s made a series of inventions that created the new technology of wireless telegraphy. Marconi’s principal interest was in improving and developing long-distance wireless communication with ships at sea. In March 1899 he sent a radio signal from Britain to France and in 1901 succeeded in sending a signal from Britain to America. In 1909, aged only thirty-five, he was awarded a Nobel Prize for physics for his work on electric telegraphy. At about the same time came the invention of the thermionic valve. Two electrodes were placed inside a glass vacuum tube, enabling an electric current to pass in one direction but not in the other. Advances on this principle followed rapidly, creating one of the first truly electronic components. The use of valves made it easier both to transmit a more powerful radio signal and to amplify a signal once it had been received, improving the transmission of the human voice as well as of Morse code.
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