Tomorrow's World 3

Any one who isn't jailbait must surely remember the BBC's long running science and technology program, Tomorrow's World. You can check out a video clip of the old-skool flying-down-the-middle-of-a-bar-of-Dairy-Milk opening sequence here!

Actually, I think it might be supposed to be a brain we are flying over. I'm not sure. Anyway, a few weekends ago I was checking out the sorry selection of damp and abandoned books which live on the outdoor shelves at the Castle Bookshop, Hay-On-Wye when I came across a book published to go with the series dating from 1974. “Woa,” I thought, “White heat of technology, 70s style!”. Then I opened it, saw the first of a series of very special illustrations and I was sold!

Many of my favourite parts of this book are pictures, includng an especially bizzare sequence of images from an abattoir. I can't make out whether the point of the pictures is supposed to be that the process is automated, or that it ought to be. There are a lot of men stabbing pigs in insanitary conditions and because it's the 70s, each worker has a fag on the go. In one image several dead sheep are suspended in what appear to be the showers at the SWCC caving hut.

Staying with livestock, my favourite experiment described in the book was one to see if cows could be fed on a diet of recycled paper pulp. The logic was that since cows have 4 stomachs to break down cellulose and paper is mostly cellulose, cows might be abale to eat paper. At the time of printing the results hadn't been published, but since cows are not currently chomping on old newsprint, I think the answer was “No”.

My favourite invention created by an individual, rather than a company. In 1974, Mr J Edwards of Chatham nearly invented the car navigation system. His idea was to record a set of instructions for getting from one place to another on an audio cassette, then use an odometer to work out how far the car has traveled and whether it was time to play the next instruction to the driver. It would have worked too, providing that you never took a wrong turning or found a road closed. If he's still alive today,I bet Mr Edwards wears a tin foil hat to stop the government stealing his ideas.

Another highlight was finding a reference to my former employers. The book says, “Scientists at Standard Telecommunications Laboratories have found a way of transmitting television and telephone signals down very long glass fibres.”. STL founded a group to build GPS test equipment in the 80s. After several takeovers, that group eventually became Spirent Communications who employed me between 2001 and 2006. Some of the very oldest and most dust-covered examples of our products still bore the STL logo. Unfortunately, the rest of STL was bought by Nortel and closed down.

The communcation section is generally excellent fun. The “phone of tomorrow” might just be able to handle call forwarding, if we're very lucky. There could also be a “box next to the phone” which would hold several numbers and do speed-dial for you. I like the assumption that there's no reason to build this functionality into the phone itself. I don't think I could have handled 70s telecoms; they were shit!

This book would have been even better if they had seen fit to include some predictions for the future. I would have loved a section on how they imagned we'd all be living in space by now, or perhaps some daring speculation about how one day there might be a computer in every city.

My top technological innovations since 1974

• The World Wide Web
• Mobile Phones
• GPS
• videos/HDD recorders as they allow you to watch telly whenever and avoid all the adverts.

Technology that I'm STILL waiting for

• nuclear fusion to prduce more energy than it takes to get it going
• my flying car
• 3D television
• colonisation of space