William Gosling is an engineer and, like many of us in that profession,
recognises that perhaps the most effective way of teaching the subject is
by showering the student with hundreds of examples of related phenomena
and hoping that somewhere along the way the ‘penny will drop’ and that student
will become aware of some underlying truth behind it which cannot be articulated
by either party.

Not that this is a book to be read only by academics, or engineers.
It is good reading for all people who dare to think. While the general theme
is control engineering, those who know nothing at all about the subject
need have no fears that they will not be able to read the book with interest.
The fact that they will learn a considerable amount about control theory
in the process will simply be a bonus.

Such topics as the formidable (for the uninitiated) mathematical concept
of Nyquist’s criterion of stability are int-roduced gently but firmly by
examples, taken not so much from the realms of electrical or mechanical
devices as from religion, politics, economics, physiology and medicine.

Critics may argue that the author has too strong a tendency to let the
example take over the text, so that history, the philosophy of the various
religions and world politics – interesting and well-presented as they are
– become the centre of attention, tending to distract the reader from the
main topic of control theory. But they would be wrong, control theory is
not the main topic. The main topic is helmsmen and heroes, just like the
title said.

All right, so the author is constantly sidetracking himself. For example,
in telling the story of the early life of Isaac Newton he relates how, when
the Plague spread from London to Cambridge, Newton, who was living there
after he graduated, fled to Lincoln to escape the disease. At this point
the author goes into some detail as to the causes, symptoms and history
of bubonic plague before resuming his story of Newton.

But this is part of the charm of the book. It is as if the author were
sitting beside you and telling you stories all the time, and if, in the
process, a sentence or just a word reminds him of something else, he will
break off to tell you about that, confident that you will be interested
to hear about it, and for me, such confidence is entirely justified.

Among many other things, it is useful as a reference book. It gives
a quick insight into such varied topics as the manufacture of aluminium,
CD and tape recording, the history of cast iron, the beginnings of the General
Electric Company of America, a potted history of China and Japan, the sex
lives of Charles Darwin, Newton and Einstein and over a hundred other topics.
The further reading references are a self-educational programme in themselves.

There is something in it for the experts, too. How many electrical engineers,
well versed in Hans Christian Oersted’s discoveries in electromagnetism,
know that he also discovered aluminium? In his introduction Gosling speaks
of writing the book without any mathematics as ‘a sore trial’. Yet the nature
of his discourse never demanded any mathematics. It would have been extremely
difficult to quantify aspects of religion and politics in terms of numbers.

Nor is the book devoid of humour. As an example of the absurdity of
exponential extrapolation he quotes the prediction made in the 1880s ‘that
horse droppings would be uniformly knee-deep in the streets of London by
the 1920s’. In the event, motor cars were invented, postponing anxieties
about waste product pollution by half a century. One gets just the faintest
suggestion that the author is a cynic with his tongue in his cheek.

Everything is set against the background of control theory, something
which is beautifully illustrated by a statement near the end of the book
that: ‘The Technical Director of the mechanical calculator company, put
out of his employment by the rapid development of the competition, was
the unknowing victim of a positive feedback loop’. This reminded me of the
man in one of Moliere’s plays who discovered that for forty years he had
been speaking prose.

This is not a criticism – I enjoyed the book a lot.

Eric Laithwaite is an emiritus professor at Imperial College London.

GYROSCOPES have long been a source of fascination for people with enquiring
minds. They appear to have a ‘mind of their own’ insofar as they do not
react to applied forces in the usual way. Many amateur inventors have tried
to harness gyroscopes to produce unidirectional forces, while the popular
press is ever ready to call such devices ‘anti-gravity’ machines and to
link them with perpetual motion and other impossible concepts.

In Beyond 2001 Sandy Kidd describes his adventures in this strange world
of mechanics, and the interesting people he met on his journey. Whatever
else it may claim to be, this is a story of a man who saw a spinning wheel
doing something that it should not do. So he followed it, much as Alice
in Wonderland followed a white rabbit because it pulled a watch from its
waistcoat pocket.

The story is told by the man himself. He has recorded many of the facts
that accompanied his experiments and much of the emotion that went with
them. It is a story about human relations.

Kidd is obviously proud of his humble technical background and of the
way his ideas about gyroscopes took him from a garden shed to meet the captains
of industry and almost landed him a research fellowship at a university.
Yet in the end it was that same lack of technical background that prevented
him from going beyond that first bit of inspiration that he had after watching
the Royal Institute Christmas lectures for children which were televised
between 1973 and 1974.

Of course, there are curious effects to be felt when one hand les rapidly
spinning objects. Hundreds of people, including children, have felt them
and written to me about them. It is now known that there is, indeed, at
least one phenomenon that needs further investigation. But it is not anything
like as simple as it might at first appear – and Kidd did not equip himself
to find the magic ingredient.

He reports a meeting he had with me at Imperial College. It is true
that at that time I was convinced that he had found just the merest pinch
of the ingredient built into his machine and to this end I encouraged him
to continue, although at no time did I ever subscribe to the view that he
had broken any sacred laws of physics.

Kidd, alas, went on and convinced himself that he was building a new
world, as the title of the book suggests. He began by calculating how few
hours it would take to get to Mars. This is just the sort of thing that
the popular press will pick out and print in letters inches high.

I have to state categorically that Kidd has neither broken nor re-written
any of the known laws of physics. He does not yet know what the essential
ingredient of an inertial propulsion system is, despite years of intensive
work and half a million pounds worth of support.

The book contains no detailed drawings of the apparatus, only vague
references to specific parts of it so the reader can never form an idea
of what he was really doing, in an engineering sense. But having said this,
the book is very readable.

It is a charming narrative of great honesty and sincerity. Much of the
text is about Kidd’s manoeuvres with people, about suffering ‘the slings
and arrows’ that befall any of us who dare to step out of line. I might
say that Kidd was lucky and unlucky in having the media available to project
him into the public eye. He gained and suffered; perhaps in a little while,
when a great deal more work on inertial propulsion has been done, he may
reflect, like Coleridge’s ancient mariner, that ‘a saddler and a wiser man,
he rose the morrow morn’.

Out of the text comes a man of considerable ingenuity, of great determination
and dedication. He lacked guidance in the early days – guidance of the encouraging
kind, rather than guidance of the kind that told him not to waste his time,
that it had ‘all been done’. This book may serve as a warning to other would-be
inventors of ‘the roughness of the road’.

Eric Laithwaite is professor of physics at Imperial College, London.