Science and Technology

Modern technology tends to be thought of in terms of the advances brought about by computers and electronic communications but it is in transport, medicine, energy and weaponry that we have seen the greatest impact upon our lives. It is these areas that distinguish the first world from the second and third worlds.If poverty and disease are to be alleviated and the environment sustained, then technology must be harnessed on a vast and all inclusive scale . Large scale industry must be involved. Significant technology is not created by lone workers but by tens and hundreds of individuals working together across social and geographic boundaries. We must wake up to the fact that it is technologists that is determining the future of the human race. Advances require vast resources and companies that are prepared to take risks, and if Britain is to continue to play a crucial role in technology then our establishment must realie that applied science is rivaling pure science both in importance and in intellectual interest.

Venue: Waterloo Chamber
In the honorable presence of : His Royal Highness
Lecturer: Senior Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering
From: The Triumph of Technology: the Dawning of a new age
Invention chosen by their public as #1 in the last 200 years: Bicycle
Brings solution to: Traffic congestion, air pollution, poverty, disease, global warming
Lecturer´s message today: Solutions won't be possible unless all of us, scientist, engenieers, and non scientist all of us alike, are prepared to engage together and require the political will to bring that change to light.

Almost exactly 93 years ago tonight, on 15 April 1912, over one thousand terrified and bewildered people found themselves with little warning drifting or drowning in the ice-cold North Atlantic. Only 712 of them survived that night. They were, of course, the passengers, officers, and crew of the White Star steamship Titanic and they were in a sense victims of 'failures' of technology.
The Titanic disaster was in the main a result of over-reach, of a gap between the achievements of some technologies and the shortcomings of others; and of managerial failures on the part of those who used the available technology. Although Titanic had a radio communication system - and it was an important factor in directing rescue vessels to her - it was a system still in its infancies. Although the technology of shipbuilding already embraced double skins and water-tight bulkheads, these fell far short of the completeness that we now expect. Those navigating this huge vessel were in some important respects no further advanced than the vikings who had sailed these same seas ten centuries before: they could themselves only by means of stellar observation and dead reckoning, and they had only their eyes to see what lay ahead - and this was less than a hundred years ago.

The managerial failures were perhaps worse. The ship's officers were warned of ice by radio messages, which they ignored. They hadn't carried out safety drills or trained the ship's company. The ship was speeding blindly into a known danger area in order to meet her scheduled arrival time in New York. Accidents, by definition, happen. But more diligent officers, properly-trained crew and a sufficiency of lifeboats, could have saved the majority of those lost to the depths on that dreadful April night.