Science Show

David Ellyard considers the impact of innovation and technologies that leave their mark on Christmas.

Transcript

Robyn Williams: David Ellyard has been examining devices through history, to see who invented what, when. And the innovation goes on. David...

David Ellyard: With the year mostly behind us and the festive season ahead, you may think the pace of our technology-driven lives will ease for a while. It may, but the impact of innovation will not diminish. A few minutes reflection will reveal many examples of the technologies that leave their mark on Christmas. Behind each such invention lies a story and the often fascinating life of the inventor.

The convivial glass around the Christmas dinner table may well of be the sparkling white wine which the French allow only themselves to call 'champagne'. The 17th century monk and wine guru Dom Perignon is the key name here. The legend runs that, having quaffed a glass of his new bubble-filled brew, he proclaimed to the other monks, 'Brothers, I have been drinking the stars.'

Not quite so. Initially he was called into action to remove the bubbles which had begun to collect in bottles of wine from the Champagne region of northern France. Such bubbles were not welcome then, commonly regarded as a sign of poor wine-making. But as fashion changed and sparkling wine became popular among the nobility and the royals, Dom Perignon had to change course, devising a technique (the methode champagnoise) to produce more bubbles, not less. We raise our Christmas glass to you, Dom Perignon

Then there are the small lamps which decorate most Christmas trees, and even the fronts of many houses at this time of the year. These embody a technology in use for more than 120 years. Its roots run even further back to 1800, when the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta announced to the world (through a letter read in front of the Royal Society of London by Sir Joseph Banks) how to make a continuous electric current from what we now call a battery.

Over the next few decades, we found the new electricity could do all sorts of exciting and useful things, including to cause the wires through which the current flowed to heat up and even glow. The first to use this phenomenon to make a lamp was probably Walter de la Rue around 1820, with a platinum wire inside an evacuated glass bulb, but the cost was so high it never took off. The hunt for something cheaper took 60 years.

The name everyone recalls in this matter is of course the American Thomas Edison, he who once wrote that 'invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration'. But Edison was not really the pioneer. He bought a patent for a lamp from some Canadians and then put his considerable resources into the quest for a filament which was both acceptably cheap and acceptably durable. Carbonised cotton thread proved to be the answer, but he was not the first there either. Englishman Joseph Swann had hit upon the idea a year earlier but he was slower to get into production.

Edison's real achievement was to mass-produce the bulbs and to put in place the infrastructure of generators, wires, meters and so on that allowed electricity to be distributed, like gas was at the time, to street lamps and to homes and ultimately to Christmas tree lights. Lamps today use tungsten in the filaments and fill the bulbs with argon, but the technology otherwise remains pretty much unchanged.

Under the Christmas tree of course, the fruits of all sorts of technologies will lie wrapped. Many perfumes, for example, carry the names and aromas of flowers and other natural products, but they are actually synthetic. Likewise, the brilliant colours of modern clothing. Here the story of invention runs back more than 150 years to another teenager, Englishman William Perkin.

At the time, the goal was making the anti-malarial drug quinine from a chemical found in coal tar. Now, coal tar is decidedly unpromising stuff to work with, it's a smelly, black, sticky mess left behind when coal is heated to produce coke and coal gas. Cleaning up after a failed experiment, Perkin, still a student, accidentally produced a beautiful purple dye. Soon chemists across Europe were releasing dyes of all colours from coal tar. Perfumes and drugs soon followed and the modern chemical industry was born. We still enjoy its bounty today, including in the diverse synthetic materials lumped together as plastics. You will find these even in your Christmas tree unless you have a 'real' one.

Information technology, the ubiquitous IT, has penetrated Christmas as completely as any other part of life. You will find it in the video games and MP3 players among the gifts, the digital cameras recording the festivities, even the microprocessor controlling the oven where the Christmas chook is cooking. These many wonders, or at least the basic technology in them, have an ancestry dating back to 1947 when three physicists at the Bell Telephone Company-John Bardeen, Walter Brittain and William Shockley-invented the transistor. Some accounts place the breakthrough discovery on Christmas Eve.

Half a century of massive miniaturisation now allows hundreds of millions of transistors to fit into the space which originally could hold only one. The resulting microprocessors and digital memories, simple devices in principle, operate with such speed and reliability their powers seem magical.

Technology has given to Christmas but it has also taken away. Fifty years ago, Christmas was the one time of the year you make sure you rang the Old Country, whichever country that was, to wish your families back there a merry Christmas. At the time, overseas phone calls were so expensive you had to save up to make them. A three-minute call, operator-connected and of variable quality, cost you $5. Not much, you say, but then average wages were only $8 a week.

How different now, mostly due to optic fibres which came into use in the 1980s. They carry so many calls at once, all riding on beams of laser light, that any one call is virtually free. Today you can make a call overseas almost any time with little regard for the cost. That special significance of Christmas has been lost.

Guests

David Ellyard

Further Information

Who Discovered What When

Publications

Title: Who Discovered What When
Author: David Ellyard
Publisher: New Holland

Presenter

Robyn Williams

Producer

David Fisher