Tiny Histories

by Dixe Wills

  Seeing this gradation and diversity of structure in one small, intimately related group of birds, one might really fancy that from an original paucity of birds in this archipelago, one species had been taken and modified for different ends.

  This was the seed that would grow into his theory of ‘natural selection’. It posited that organisms that enjoyed advantageous characteristics increased their chances of both surviving and reproducing. These characteristics would therefore have more chance of being passed on to future generations, and thus the species as a whole would evolve over time.

  His master work, On the Origin of the Species, which he published in 1859, became one of the most important landmarks in scientific endeavour. Inevitably, it also caused a huge scandal for the way it appeared to take much of the work of creation out of the hands of God, and was thus condemned by many as blasphemous. It was for this reason that Darwin (who never became an atheist) had delayed making his theory public for well over a decade, the ideas behind it having crystallised in his mind way back in the 1840s. He was eventually rushed into publication when the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace sent him a paper in 1858 outlining his own thoughts. Wallace, quite separately, had reached the same conclusions as Darwin about natural selection.

  When Darwin took the lessons he had learnt about evolution and applied them to Homo sapiens in his 1871 book The Descent of Man, the outcry became a howl. For good Bible-believing Christians, the possibility that humans had descended from apes was simply sacrilegious. It’s an irony that the Beagle’s own Captain FitzRoy was himself an ardent believer in the literal truth of the Scriptures and yet his voyage perhaps did more than anything before or since to undermine such a viewpoint.

  By the time Charles Darwin died in 1882, his theories had established themselves in the mainstream of scientific life and had been widely accepted by the public. He was afforded a state funeral and buried in Westminster Abbey. And yet, if Captain FitzRoy had not been in need of a dinner companion, Darwin might well have seen out his years as an obscure country parson rather than becoming one of the most influential scientists who ever lived.

  A veterinary surgeon cuts up a hose

  Anyone who has ridden a bicycle any great distance along a cobblestone street will be able to testify all too readily to the bone-jarring experience that can be. What it must have been like to pedal over the cobbles on a bike with solid wheels can only be winced at. One can certainly sympathise with a young boy valiantly attempting to negotiate the cobblestone streets of 19th-century Belfast on his tricycle.

  Fortunately for the young boy – and for millions of cyclists (and then motorists) – his father did not just put an arm around his shoulders and tell him that the experience was character-building, but rather set about to remedy the situation. Since the cobblestones were clearly there to stay, it was the tricycle that needed to be redesigned – or more precisely, its tyres. The boy’s father was not an engineer or an inventor but, undaunted, he set to work to find a way of making his son’s tricycling less harrowing.

  John Dunlop, the father in question, was born on a farm in Dreghorn, Ayrshire, in 1840. Having grown up around animals he became a veterinary surgeon, practising in Edinburgh. He moved to Downpatrick, Ireland, in 1867 and four years later married Margaret Stevenson, with whom he had a daughter and a son. Moving to Belfast, Dunlop built up one of the most successful veterinary practices in the country.

  But for one incident in 1887 he would surely have carried on with this perfectly agreeable life and, after his death, his name would have been remembered by no one but grateful animal-owners.

  The stories surrounding that event vary but Dunlop either saw his son struggling over the cobblestones or his son asked him if he could do something that would make his ride more comfortable. Either way, he took his boy’s tricycle and started experimenting.

  His breakthrough came when he cut a length from an old garden hose, looped it around to form a continuous tube, pumped it up and fitted it around a wooden disc. He tested his new creation by rolling it across his yard. He then removed a wheel from his son’s tricycle and rolled that across the garden too. He found that the disc with the loop of hose on it went considerably further than the solid wheel. Excited by this turn of events, he fitted tubes to the rear wheels of the tricycle. The effect was immediate and dramatic – the ride over the cobblestones was suddenly a lot less bone-shaking than it had been. John Dunlop had invented the pneumatic tyre. By December 1888 his design had been granted a patent.

  Unbeknownst to him, he was not the first person to invent a pneumatic tyre. Just over 40 years beforehand, a fellow Scot called Robert Thompson had patented just such an invention and had registered it in France and the United States. However, the idea had not caught on and Thompson’s design had languished in the files of the respective patent offices.

  The difference now was that Dunlop’s tyre had a sporting champion. Willie Hume, the captain of the Belfast Cruisers Cycling Club, was the first person ever to buy a bicycle with pneumatic tyres. He promptly won all four races at a Queen’s College cycling gala in May 1889 with his newfangled tyres, and followed that up with further successes in Liverpool. The president of the Irish Cyclists’ Association, Harvey Du Cros, approached Dunlop with the idea of setting up a company to manufacture the tyres, and soon cyclists were taking to them in droves. The pneumatic tyre quickly became a standard feature on all bicycles and the day of the solid wheel was over. The new tyre meant that much greater distances could be travelled in comfort. Cycling boomed.

  It’s worth noting that the success of Dunlop’s tyre was due in no small part to its use of vulcanised rubber. This, too, had come about rather by chance. Back in 1839, in a Massachusetts workshop, Charles Goodyear was experimenting with a mixture of rubber, sulphur and white lead in a bid to create a rubber that would not go brittle in the cold or sticky in the heat. He left his mixture painted onto a patch of fabric and when he returned he discovered that someone had, for reasons unknown, placed it on top of a hot stove. Goodyear noticed that the heat had not made the rubber runny. Before long he had perfected the heating process and vulcanised rubber was born.

  The business set up by Dunlop and Du Cros – which they named The Pneumatic Tyre and Booth’s Cycle Agency – went from strength to strength, even overcoming the setback of losing the patent rights to the pneumatic tyre on account of Robert Thompson’s prior claim. Dunlop did not remain long with the company, and a year later, in 1896, Du Cros sold it to British financier Terah Hooley for £3 million. In the early 20th century, the company was renamed Dunlop Rubber.

  By coincidence, Karl Benz produced the world’s first motorcar just two years before Dunlop put in for his patent on the pneumatic tyre. A decade or so after the Scotsman’s invention had become de rigueur for bicycles, a thicker, more durable pneumatic tyre was developed and soon all new cars were provided with them.

  Dunlop died in 1921 at the age of 81. He never made a great deal of money from his invention, but his fatherly concern over his son’s discomfort resulted in the revolutionising of not just the bicycle but the motorcar as well.

  A young artist moves into a derelict Lincolnshire lighthouse

  The idea of someone in their late teens or early twenties going off somewhere in order to ‘find themselves’ has long since become a cliché. In fact, it’s become such a cliché that it’s a brave person indeed who announces such a plan to their friends without first preparing themselves for the inevitable response of pained expressions and sardonic jokes.

  However, back before everyone became so world-weary and cynical – in 1933, to be precise – a young man named Peter Scott took himself off to a remote lighthouse on the Lincolnshire/Norfolk border in order to work out what he wanted to do with his life. The experience was to be transformative to such a degree that a sign posted outside that lighthouse today makes the bold assertion that the structure is, ‘The most important building in the history of global conservation…’ It also claims that it’
s the ‘most romantic’ as well, but that judgment might better be left to the beholder.

  Scott was a 24-year-old under more pressure than most to make something of his life. Born in London, his mother was Kathleen Bruce, a renowned sculptor, while his late father had been none other than Scott of the Antarctic, the polar explorer who perished in 1912 during his attempt to reach the South Pole. Peter had been just two years old when his father died. Even so, he found himself growing up beneath the great man’s shadow – quite literally so, if he cared to visit his mother’s imposing statue of his father that was erected near The Mall just three years after the explorer had met his end. Captain Robert Scott’s reputation has taken some blows over the years, but for most of Peter’s life he was considered a national hero whose name was a synonym for courage. Even Peter’s godfather was famous, the Scotts having recruited author J. M. Barrie for the rôle. Peter did have the advantage of having a mother who was very well off (donations from the public for the widows of the Scott Expedition members had seen to that), but that may only have increased the expectations placed upon the only child of the national treasure.

  Always bright, Scott studied natural sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge before switching to the history of art, graduating in 1931. He had turned out to be not merely a capable painter but one who had the makings of a very fine artist – his talent no doubt inherited from his sculptor mother. He attended the Royal Academy of Art and by 1933 had been offered his first show at a gallery in London. It must have seemed to outsiders that he had set the course for his life. However, Scott felt a sense of unease about his future and cast about for somewhere he could escape to so that he could examine his life in solitude and weigh up his options.

  An obsessive wildfowler, Scott had often shot birds at the saltings at Terrington in Norfolk. The flat landscape at the southern end of the Wash was punctured by twin lighthouses built close to the mouth of the River Nene and on either bank. While considering the best place for a bolthole, he remembered these lonely dilapidated buildings three miles out into an enormous tidal marsh. He swiftly rented the one on the eastern bank at £5 per annum and put the proceeds from his London exhibition towards renovation. He added a studio, bathroom, garage and boathouse, and moved in. The decision was to change not only his own life but would also spark a revolution that has shaped wildlife conservation ever since.

  The lighthouse had been constructed in 1830 and, despite its name, it never actually bore a light but acted as a customs post and as a beacon to guide ships and boats to the mouth of the Nene. Scott’s American friend Paul Gallico visited him there and was inspired by the setting to write the novel The Snow Goose, with a thinly disguised Peter Scott as its hero. Gallico described the lighthouse as ‘Desolate, utterly lonely and made lonelier by the calls and cries of the wildfowl that make their homes in the marshlands and saltings.’

  Ironically, considering the cause to which he eventually decided to dedicate the rest of his life, Scott was drawn to the lighthouse not only because of its remoteness and the opportunities it afforded him to paint, but because it gave him the chance to shoot wild birds.

  Scott’s deliberations over his future were further complicated by the fact that he was unconscionably gifted at so many pursuits. If a fiction writer ascribed his list of accomplishments to the hero of a novel, readers would find their belief in him stretched well beyond incredulity. Scott was an expert wildfowler and a competition-winning pairs figure skater. In the years ahead he would also win a bronze medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games in the O-Jolle single-handed dinghy competition; race in the America’s Cup, taking the helm of the yacht Sovereign; and also somehow find time to become the British national gliding champion in 1963. In later life he would show himself a very able writer and television presenter. And then, of course, there was his art.

  Living at the lighthouse, he earned a living by selling his work, both at exhibitions and in book form, and it was not long before he achieved a certain amount of fame. His subjects were the birds he encountered on the marshes that had become his world and he found that he derived greater pleasure from painting the birds than from shooting them. As the lighthouse and the abundant avian life around it worked their magic on him, he realised what he wanted to do with his life: become a conservationist.

  His aspiration would be curtailed by the outbreak of war in 1939. Scott joined up and served in the navy, rising to lieutenant commander in charge of a squadron of steam gun boats in the English Channel, and winning the Distinguished Service Cross for acts of skill and gallantry at sea. Using his observations of birds he was also involved in the experimental camouflaging of warships, work for which he was awarded the OBE at the tender age of 32.

  When Scott was demobilised in 1945 he did not return to the lighthouse. It had been requisitioned during the war and had lost much of its marshland to agriculture as Britain attempted to feed its hungry citizens. Instead, he embarked on the life he had determined for himself while staying there. In 1946 he co-founded the Severn Wildfowl Trust (now known as the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust) at Slimbridge, in Gloucestershire. Fifteen years later he and a small group of other British naturalists formed the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature), which is now the world’s largest conservation organisation. He also designed the famous panda logo for the charity, choosing the animal specifically to entice China into getting involved in the protection of wildlife.

  He was influential in forcing a moratorium on commercial whaling upon the International Whaling Commission (whom he derided as ‘a butchers’ club’), and in the signing of the internationally recognised Antarctic Treaty, which aims to protect the continent as a scientific preserve free from all military activity. While at the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources he created what is now known as the Red List of Threatened Species, a globally recognised reference to the world’s endangered flora and fauna. He wrote over 20 books and illustrated many others, as well as hosting the popular nature programme Look on British television for 26 years. He was knighted in 1973 ‘for services to conservation and the environment’ and died in 1989 at the age of 79.

  The lighthouse on the east bank of the Nene still stands, and there are plans to transform it into a centre dedicated to Scott and his work. Had the young wildfowler not happened upon it, there’s every chance he might simply have made a career out of his art and ended his days still shooting wildlife. Instead, he is lauded today as one of the most influential conservationists who ever lived.

  There’s no doubt that his choice would have made his father proud, too. In the last letter Captain Scott ever wrote to his wife, he counselled her to ‘make the boy interested in natural history if you can; it is better than games’.

  Lord Byron’s daughter is taught maths to save her from becoming like her father

  The major highlights in the history of the computer are perennially linked with the names of four men: Charles Babbage, Alan Turing, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. However, it was a young woman who only lived to 36 whose contribution to the invention of the computer, and its eventual evolution into something beyond a mere number-crunching device, was arguably as important as any of these. She is also credited with having written the first-ever computer program way back in 1842, before the first machine recognisable as a computer had even been built. And it all occurred because her mother feared she might be infected by what she considered to be her father’s streak of madness.

  Augusta Ada Gordon came into the world on 10 December 1815, six months after the Battle of Waterloo. She would be the only child of the three (or possibly four) sired by the poet George Gordon, Lord Byron to be born in wedlock. Her father and mother, Anne Isabella Milbanke (the 11th Baroness Wentworth and known as Annabella), separated a month after Ada’s birth. She never saw her father again. Byron became ill and died in 1824 while playing a part in the Greek struggle for independence from the Ottoman Empire. Annabella was bitter about the way she had been treated b
y her husband, their marriage having lasted for just a year before he had compelled her to leave their home (he had just started an affair and wanted her out of the way). She was also horrified at his sexual escapades – which included an incestuous relationship with his half-sister – and his volatile behaviour. She was determined to bring her daughter up in such a way that she would, in adulthood, exhibit none of her father’s flaws: he was ‘mad, bad and dangerous to know’, to quote Lady Caroline Lamb’s famous summation of him.

  As a highly intelligent woman who was a particular devotee of mathematics, it was natural for Annabella to cocoon her daughter in a protective programme of maths, logic and science lessons – about as far from the flighty and capricious world of poetry as she could imagine. She employed the best-possible tutors to instruct her daughter, and it must have been a source of great satisfaction to her when Ada started exhibiting a passion for anything that involved engineering. At the age of 12 she would spend her time designing flying machines powered by steam, a full 15 years before such a design was actually patented by William Henson and John Stringfellow. She was also fascinated by scientific journals with their illustrations of the inventions that were helping to power the Industrial Revolution.