“Si j’etais bien en fonds, j’achèterais une presse !” – French Revolutionary Camille Desmoulins

The role of the printing press as transformational communication technology is a commonplace so powerful that it is frequently invoked as a parallel to the Internet.

We think of it in terms of the spread of ideas, of bibles hitherto copied laboriously by monks now churned out for the newly literate middle classes of the Reformation; of cheap-as-chips chapbooks spreading gossip and popular culture in Pepys’ London; and of the great Enlightenment figures, such as Joseph Priestley and Tom Paine, able to disseminate their works of science and politics halfway across the world in a matter of months.

But listening to a lunchtime talk by Geoffrey Forster of the Leeds Library I was struck by another way of thinking about the press, as a tool for group formation and organisation.

Forster is the 18th Leeds Librarian, a role dating back to 1768 when a group of 105 founders, of whom Priestley was the fourth, came together to establish a private subscription library. Each paid a guinea to join, a substantial sum in those days, but books were dear: a copy of Priestley’s 700-page The History and Present State of Electricity could cost as much.

The founding subscribers – Nonconformists, Anglicans, one Roman Catholic, four 13 of them women joining in their own right – modelled their library on that at Liverpool, established 10 years earlier, and were part of a movement that saw subscription libraries across the country.

They had responded to an advertisement in the Leeds Mercury, a newspaper re-established in the city only the previous year, and the founding 105 were named in a prospectus listing the first titles that the library would acquire.

They set out to accumulate an ever-growing catalogue, buying regularly from a suggestions book kept by Priestley, their secretary. By 1772 they had 1200 volumes at the Kirkgate library. 243 year later there are 140,000 books housed in a purpose-built Victorian building on Commercial Street, above shops whose rents help to finance the library to this day.

In The Invention of Air, and latterly Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson tells the story of Priestley’s discovery of oxygen, after a chance visit to Jakes and Nell’s Brewery on Leeds’ Meadow Lane. Priestley chewed over his discoveries with his friend Ben Franklin, who according to Forster almost certainly visited the Kirkgate building, now a branch of Superdrug. Johnson talks about the importance of leisure-time and literacy in enabling 18th Century geeks like Priestley to develop their ideas, and coffee shops as venues to share them.

To this now I think it’s worth adding Forster’s theory, that the printing press enabled for the first time large-scale associations like the Leeds Library to function.

In a city without a press, someone proposing to start a library had first to attract the interest of fellow citizens. He or she might write letters, laboriously by hand, requesting their attendance at a public meeting. Supposing they could be gathered together, those people would need prospectuses, membership cards, notices and minutes of annual meetings, all things impractical to write out repeatedly in long-hand.

Through its natural associations with booksellers, newspapers and printers, the Leeds Library had ready access to technology to automate all these dull but necessary functions. The press was not just a means to spread ideas, it was an organisation tool through which groups of people could make stuff happen together.

In the medium of ink on paper, Joseph Priestley and his fellow citizens were pioneer social networkers.

As ever, I’m grateful to Imran Ali and Craig Smith of O’Reilly for making the event happen, and to the audience at the Rose Bowl for giving me five minutes of their time. If you missed the event, all 15 presentations are now on Slideshare and there are reviews by Phil Kirby on the Culture Vulture and Sarah Harley on Guardian Leeds.

The way James Watt Junior tried to sabotage Murray’s steam engine start-up never gets old. Indeed its issues of openness in business and the rights of wrongs of intellectual property seemed especially relevant to the Ignite audience.

I want to do more with this story, but first I have some more research to do. For instance:

• Where was Matthew Murray living when Watt’s employees visited him in 1799? His famous steam-heated house Holbeck Lodge, or “Steam Hall”, on Holbeck’s railway triangle is dated to about 1804 so it may not have been there.
• Where were the cottages from which Watt attempted to steal the letters of defecting staff? Later in the 19th Century there were workers’ cottages on the edge of the Round Foundry complex, roughly on the corner now occupied by Out Of The Woods, but were these completed when Watt was visiting the City?
• Why was Murray so much better than Boulton and Watt at green sand foundry work? Can we get some green sand and try it out?
• Who was E. Kilburn-Scott, the engineer who in the 1920s sought to restore the reputations not just of Murray but also of Leeds’ cinematic pioneer Louis Le Prince? Can we take his account at face value or was he too clouded by civic loyalty to give the Birmingham firm a fair hearing?

When I can find the time between my dayjob and other outside interests I plan to spend some time in the library tracking these things down. In the mean time if, dear reader, you have either answers or questions, please let me know.

Lizzie Le Prince was the daughter of Sarah and Joseph Whitley of Leeds. She trained under Carrier-Belleuse at the Sèvres pottery in France, and in 1869 she married Louis Aimé Augustin Le Prince, also a student of pottery. Louis had been instructed by Louis Daguerre, inventor of the Daguerreotype, and specialised in applying photographic techniques to pottery and brass.

The Le Princes settled in England where Louis started work for the Whitley family brass-founding business. It’s clear that the marriage was a true partnership. They both joined the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. Together they ran the Leeds Technical School of Art from their townhouse in Park Square, providing training in materials which were literally the new media of their age. Lizzie records that in Park Square Louis began experimenting with “moving photographs” and the best materials for films.

In 1881 the couple moved to New York where Lizzie taught art at the Institute for the Deaf. Louis is said to have projected his first moving pictures on the walls of that building. Lizzie is described as “a splendid helpmate”. In October of 1888, back in Lizzie’s parents’ garden in Roundhay, was recorded the world’s oldest surviving motion picture. The dating is precise because the pictures show Lizzie’s mother who died just a few weeks later.

By 1890, the Le Princes were ready to go public with the invention, well ahead of rivals including the Lumière brothers and American Thomas Edison. Lizzie had by this time founded the New York Society of Ceramic Arts and held regular meetings in Manhattan’s Jumel Mansion. Assisted by her son Adolphe, she began preparing for a public unveiling in New York. It should have been a grand occasion securing Louis’ place in history as the inventor of the the cinema.

But Louis never arrived back in New York. He was last seen at Dijon, boarding a train to Paris. Wild rumours surrounded his disappearance and Lizzie suspected foul play. She believed competitors including Edison himself had wanted her husband out of their way.

Lizzie Le Prince spent the following decades in America trying to prove Louis’ claim to be the inventor of cinema. Her tragedy was compounded by Adolphe’s unexplained death in 1901, shortly before a judge delivered a verdict in favour of Edison’s motion picture patent which the Le Prince family had contested.

A number of articles have sought to posthumously restore Le Prince to his rightful place in cinematic history. One of his cameras is in the National Media Museum at Bradford, and Leeds has not one but two blue plaques commemorating him. “Roundhay Garden Scene” is listed in the Guiness Book of Records and can be seen on Youtube. Sarah and Joseph Whitley are the oldest born actors to be credited in the Internet Movie Database.

But today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science. From my reading of the story, Lizzie Le Prince is equally deserving of the honour, not as the tragic, devoted wife and mother that she clearly was, but as an artist, technologist, educator and advocate.

Fittingly, the wonderful Sydney Padua illustration for this year’s Ada Lovelace Day shows the world’s first computer programmer in Victorian dress holding up a string of punched cards…

Replace those punched cards with a reel of celluloid (the first reel of celluloid!) and you have Lizzie Le Prince. Should the credit for the first moving pictures really go to a husband and wife team?

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Sources:

• A Technological History of Motion Pictures and Television, article by E. Kilburn Scott
• A Movie Murder Mystery, by Richard Howells
• Louis Le Prince Centre for Cinema, Photography and Television website article
• Louis Le Prince: the body of evidence, by Richard Howells
• Wikipedia entry on Louis Le Prince
• The Missing Reel, Christopher Rawlence

See also:

• “Embellish your Country with useful inventions & elegant productions” – my post from Ada Lovelace Day 2009
• Why I took part in Ada Lovelace Day – a subsequent post about, erm, why I took part in Ada Lovelace Day

… on which more later, but meanwhile you can also read the original blogpost: How to get ahead in business the Boulton and Watt way.

About this time of year, this blog gets a peak in search hits for Thomas A Watson of “Mr Watson, come here. I want you” fame.

Somewhere out there, I imagine, is a teacher who sets the same class assignment every year, and whose students flock obediently to Google in search of information and images. I applaud that teacher. Alexander Graham Bell’s collaborator is not as well known as he should be. While Bell had the big ideas, it was Watson’s talents as an electrical engineer that saw them successfully realised. He was one of the original hardware hackers.

So every year I feel a twinge of guilt that I’m somehow letting down my audience, given the flippancy with which I invoked Watson’s name in a post that contains little meaningful information about the man himself.

To make amends, I have tracked down a copy of Ted Clarke’s wonderfully titled biography “Thomas A. Watson: Does That Name Ring A Bell?” which paints a picture of a true Renaissance man.

Here are 10 cool things about Thomas A. Watson. Nine of them are actual true facts from Mr Clarke’s book. The other one is a barefaced lie made up by me to add a little piquancy for the Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V squad. Sorry, I couldn’t resist. You can’t believe everything you read on the internet.

1. Tom Watson came from beginnings so humble that as a young man he was accustomed to eating only with a knife. The more educated Alexander Graham Bell introduced him to the delights of the three-pronged fork
2. Before making the first telephone, Bell commissioned Watson to make an experimental “autograph telegraph” which was intended to transmit facsimile pictures and writing by wire
3. Bell’s summons to Watson is famous as the first understandable sentence ever transmitted by telephone. It is less well-known that Bell had just spilled acid on his clothes when he issued that command
4. Watson was offered a 10% share in all future profits from Bell’s patents, but took two whole weeks before he agreed to give up his steady $3-a-day job to join the partnership full-time
5. Early demonstrations of the telephone were given in theatres where Watson would sing “Yankee Doodle” and “Do Not Trust Him, Gentle Lady” over the equipment to rapturous applause
6. While Bell invented the telephone, Watson invented the bell to signal incoming calls, making him the father of the ringtone. This took some years and was preceded by other devices known as “Watson’s Buzzer” and ”Watson’s Thumper,” a kind of metal hammer
7. Thomas Edison once offered to decide a patent dispute by playing Watson at a game of Four-Ball Billiards. However a judge ruled in Bell and Watson’s favour before the match could take place
8. Watson invested his telephone fortune in building up one of America’s biggest shipyards, which went on to supply much of the USA’s First World War fleet
9. Aged 56, he took up acting and travelled Europe performing Shakespeare with a touring theatre company
10. Watson was a keen amateur geologist and discovered a fossilised Cambrian gastropod, which was named “Watsonella” in his honour.

Sincerely, I think the World needs more Thomas A Watsons.

It’s a pleasure to see – at risk of sounding like a Key Stage One Literacy Coordinator – that reading is hot right now.

• Amazon is starting to ship the Kindle DX worldwide
• Apple is apparently about to launch some kind of new device
• eReaders are predicted to be the hottest category at CES this week

Into this maelstrom come the Mag+ concepts from BERG for Bonnier. If you haven’t seen the video you should watch it now. Beyond the thoughtful work on the interaction within the user interface, I like the thinking about ”how the device might occupy the world.”

And separately, Christian Lindholm has some interesting ideas about linearity as a low-involvement user experience, perfectly suited to mobile.

Everyone’s talking about how it feels to be the reader – how he or she will be empowered to enjoy the best aspects of printed and digital media rolled into one wafer-thin device. It’s all very user-centred.

But I think to succeed eReaders must not only meet the needs of the direct user, but also of those around them, the friends and family who may not welcome their loved one’s absorption in this exciting new media. They are the “next largest context” within which the new device must win acceptance.

BERG’s video hints at this with that “how the device might occupy the world” line. Rather than zooming in on the lovely concept UI, I wanted the camera to pan out, or swing round to observe fellow travellers on a crowded train, or a significant other snuggled up on the sofa. I’m not so interested in their initial reactions – the inevitable lookit-new-shiny glances – but more in how reader devices settle into the ebb and flow of everyday sociability.

I mean, as I type this…

My wife is sitting across the room, reading a book.

“What are you reading?” I ask.

She tells me. I glance at the cover for instant visual reinforcement of what my ears just heard, because books are open on the outsides as well as the insides.

“Is it a good book?” I ask.

She answers. We briefly discuss the content.

She goes on reading. There is a stillness. Even the page turns are almost imperceptible.

I watch her face for a faint smile.

Now rerun the scene with a digital device.

The first question is no longer “what are you reading?” It’s “what are you doing?” – a question that somehow already carries a hint of reproach.

Whatever the answer, the hard, blank underside of the device affords no confirmation.

Then, momentarily floored by the multiple possibilities of multimedia, there’s a pause while we establish that a book is being read, and mentally summon the terms in which we discuss books.

And here comes the toughest part, to engender stillness. Where once there was just the flicker of an eye, now there is the jabbing of a finger to exactly where on the page the reader is interacting.

The device may be rejected because it is closed to casual inspection. The lack of a cover to indicate the content makes it an occult thing, excluding observers as printed texts exclude the illiterate.

Yet at the same time, the device may be too distractingly revealing – of exactly where the reader is pointing her attention. An unwelcome disruption of the stillness of being with someone who is reading.

These are the subtleties that make this a more wicked problem than it may first appear to technologists or to publishers. I trust they will be solved, but only by considering all the people who are touched by books, not just the ones who happen to be reading them.

Norman’s hypothesis is that John F Kennedy’s commitment to the goal of “landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth” within a decade represented a kind of big picture leadership now lacking in the world. On his blog Futures-Diagnosis, he argues that:

this is the time to develop bold new arguments for why we need

• more long-term investment in research (as opposed to the short-term funding of development);
• more experimentation and less emphasis upon predictable outcomes driven by narrow ROI considerations; and
• more failure to build success.

… and

… the US Space Program (despite being rooted in the politics of the Cold War) provided a bold vision and impetus to the generation of ground-breaking new research and innovation. The research created new industries while NASA provided impetus for the formation of thousands of new companies and product innovation. It is this kind of boldness that is so noticeably absent in our society today.

Really?

The Moon landing was almost the opposite of pure research. It was a development effort with a very practical, specific, measurable and timebound goal, which was met with just months to spare until the end of the Sixties. At just over eight years from inception to completion, the project was significantly shorter than, for example, bringing a new pharmaceutical product to market today.

Neither was it some swashbuckling escapade. America could doubtless have put a man or woman on the Moon even quicker had it not been for the ”safely back to Earth” stipulation. Kennedy rightly and explicity included health and safety in the brief from the outset.

And as Norman acknowledges, and Tom Morgan develops further in his thoughtful review of TEDxLeeds, the motivation for the Moon expedition was far from idealistic. It was geopolitical, and possibly even colonial. Maybe we’d have been back more often if those samples of moonrock had proved to contain readily extractable supplies of gold, diamonds or oil.

All that would be an  interesting historical footnote were it not for the way the Moon landing is held up as some sort of benchmark against which early 21st Century people are supposed to fall short.

A trip to Mars would be a cool thing, even one-way as proposed by Paul Davis. Yes, I think we should have a go. But it seems a rather literalistic interpretation to say that, having done the Moon, we’ve lost our bottle as a society if we don’t go on to tick all the other boxes in the I-Spy Book of the Solar System.

It’s not as if humanity has been idle in the intervening 40 years. I think it’s also quite bold to:

• recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang
• sequence the 3 billion chemical base pairs that make up human DNA
• try to eradicate malaria
• pledge to cut your carbon emissions by 10% in a single year
• provide one connected laptop to every school-age child in developing countries, or
• create a web page for every book ever published.

These things may not have the same instant appeal as three men journeying to the Moon (and the estimated 500 million who stayed at home to watch them on TV) but they seem to me equally capable of generating massive and unforeseen innovation and benefits.

By all means have reverence and respect for the past. Be inspired by the Moon landing. But don’t let that stop you marvelling at the things our own generation is set to accomplish.

At the time I tried to keep my personal pontification to a minimum. It’s hard for men to address this topic without sounding patronising. Anyway, on the day itself many others were making the case for higher visibility of women in technology far more eloquently than I ever can.

But this post from Paul Walsh, trailing a Techcrunch Europe panel on the subject of women and start-ups, prompted me to speak up more directly. In Paul’s opinion:

… the books of males vs females doesn’t need to be balanced in favour of more females. Why? Well, because there are plenty of females in tech and those that aren’t, don’t want to be. Ok, so there might be a small percent who would like to be in tech, but don’t make it. But can’t the same be said for any industry?

Are we trying to balance the books to encourage more males to become nurses?

To which I reply the following (originally posted as a comment on Paul’s blog):

Of course there are some very talented and successful women in our industry. That’s not in doubt. It’s not so much that there are too few women in the tech sectors as that there are too many men! Look around you at most tech conferences and you’ll see mainly male audiences listening mainly to other men.

This is not just bad because women are missing out on opportunities (though I believe some are) but also because, in the words of David Ogilvy, “diversity is the mother of invention.” We are all missing out on the creativity and customer-centricity that a more diverse culture would engender. Think, for example, of how long the games industry remained stuck on the demands of a small power user niche while the needs of the much bigger casual user segments went unmet. What other business opportunities might be there for the taking right now?

The nursing analogy is an interesting one. Why not doctors, one might ask, and how much by nature, how much by nurture? (And yes, I do think men should be encouraged to consider nursing as a career!) Either way, if, as I think [Paul is] suggesting, there are deeply engrained differences between men and women then there’s a clear imperative for us to capitalise on those differences.

That means taking active steps such as ensuring that girls can see strong female role models in our industry, as it seems they might in medicine. It means making work more compatible with family life (from which men also stand to benefit). It means changing our business culture so women’s voices can be heard, and their contributions recognised and rewarded equally with those of men.

The conversation will be more profitable as a result.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day of blogging to draw attention to women excelling in technology.

When I pledged to “publish a blog post on Tuesday 24th March about a woman in technology whom I admire but only if 1,000 other people will do the same,” I wanted to reflect my interest in the history of innovation. It could so easily have been Rosalind Franklin or Marie Curie or even the Countess of Lovelace herself. The great Eleanor Coades (both of them!) came within a stone’s throw.

But as I Googled around the subject I was repeatedly drawn back to a woman who never, so far as I know, conducted an experiment or wrote a scientific paper in her life. I was a little worried about the thinness of her credentials, but then Suw’s brief for the blog post did say we could interpret technology “widely”, and that the woman in question could be dead.

Besides, my subject was a powerful force in 18th Century London society, a financial backer of remarkable businesses in a remarkable time and place, and a woman who understood how the arts and sciences were inextricably linked.

Introducing Mrs Elizabeth Montagu, the Queen of the Blues …

Born Elizabeth Robinson in Yorkshire in 1718, she married the banker Charles Montagu. At her “blue stocking” gatherings she played host to writers, actors, philosophers and inventors. And taking on the family business after the death of her husband she funded start-ups including that of Matthew Boulton, one of Birmingham’s “Lunar Men.”

After a visit to Boulton’s Soho Works in 1772, she wrote of his enterprise as a force for good in a wartorn world:

“To behold the secrets of Chymistry, & the mechanick powers, so employ’d, & exerted, is very delightful. I consider the Machines you have at work as so many useful working subjects to Great Brittain of your own Creation: the exquisite Taste in the forms which you give them to work upon, is another National advantage. I had rather see my Country in continual contention of arts than of arms. The Victories of Soho, over every other Manufacture, instead of making Widows & Orphans, as happens even to the conquering side in War, makes marriages & Christenings…”

She concludes in a phrase that prefigures William Morris by 100 years:

“Go on then Sir to triumph over the French in taste, & to embellish your Country with useful inventions & elegant productions.”

Elizabeth Montagu, Georgian venture capitalist, social networker extraordinaire, with a social conscience and a feel for the combined force of art and science.

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

It was a privilege to present at this week’s GeekUp Leeds on a topic close to my heart, the amazing industrial heritage of Leeds and why it should be an inspiration to those working in the technology sectors today.

Thanks to Deb and Rob for organising another great event, and to the GeekUp participants for putting up with me.

A few people asked for more info so I’ve put together some pages with my slides, notes and lots of links.

The history of Leeds: What every geek should know – part 1 starts here