Large companies such as Rolls-Royce and Rover have led the way in hurling
out old-fashioned attitudes to innovation and quality. Although many businesses
have yet to follow their example, size is no barrier to any manufacturer
seeking to compete in the world market. For example, Renishaw of Wotton-under-Edge,
which makes precision measuring equipment, obtained a full listing on the
Stock Exchange in 1983, just 10 years after it was founded. Now more than
90 per cent of its annual sales of around £50 million comes from
exports.

Recession and the nation’s concern for the price of its stocks and shares,
rather than the value of science and engineering, have helped to obscure
a rising confidence in manufacturing industry. At the same time, industry
has been blamed for problems which are not strictly its fault. After all,
the primary purpose of any successful company must be to satisfy customers
and not, say, to create jobs or to exploit more science and technology.

Manufacturers are right to complain about their unjustified reputation
for poor performance in international markets. The unrecognised, if incomplete,
transformation of manufacturing industry is one of a limited number of successes
which can help to increase the nation’s wealth. Science and industry will
have to scream in unison to make politicians listen.

When the Centre for the Exploitation of Science and Technology, a think-tank
backed by industry and government, compared British industry with elsewhere,
it found that 18 per cent of companies in Britain considered themselves
to be world class. Although there is no accepted definition of a world-class
company on which to base statistics, the Advisory Committee on Science and
Technology puts 25 per cent of manufacturing industry in this category compared
with 50 per cent in Japan.

The value of Britain’s manufacture is now 25 per cent greater than it
was 10 years ago. During the 1980s exports grew faster than world trade.
And since 1986, after decades of decline, Britain’s share of the goods exported
by developed countries has risen from 7.5 per cent to 9 per cent.

Industry is also spending more on innovation. In 1985 British industry
carried out research and development worth £5.12 billion, of which
66 per cent came from business, 11 per cent from overseas and 23 per cent
from government. The latest figures for R&D reveal a record expenditure
of £7.6 billion in 1989: 70 per cent from industry, 14 per cent from
overseas and 16 per cent from the government.

In addition, Britain attracts an increasing share of overseas companies
which want to invest in the European Community. In 1990, more than 50 per
cent of Japanese investment in the Community came to Britain. These overseas
companies are some of the world’s best.

The reality of manufacturing is that successful businesses display two
important qualities that were not common across industry in Britain 10 years
ago. First, they are prepared to question everything they do in order to
keep costs down and to raise the quality of their products. Secondly, manufacturers
no longer treat innovation as a series of disconnected steps. Competition
demands that everyone, from researchers to production engineers, must cooperate
to place innovative products on the market in time.

Until recently companies such as Lucas, which makes components for the
automotive, aerospace and manufacturing industries managed R&D along
academic lines. Their researchers worked in specialist departments and seldom
communicated with each other directly let alone with the production engineers
or the sales department. British Telecom is another good example of a British
company which has had a complete change of attitude to competing in international
markets.

Ten years ago BT’s scientists would have been happy to do research for
a supplier. Today the company will not make a major purchase from a company
incapable of carrying out the R&D necessary to keep its products competitive.
BT even extends this type of relationship between customer and supplier
through the company. Its scientists and engineers are expected to treat
one another as customers and suppliers involved in the stages of product
innovation.

An overriding concern with quality and a customer-supplier approach
to innovation, two of the most important marks of a world-class company,
are spreading throughout British manufacturing industry and beyond. Companies
of all types have adopted BS 5750, or one of the other international standards,
for quality management.

Last year the Confederation of British Industry set out to change the
run-down image of manufacturing. One result was Competing with the World’s
Best, a report which prescribes a means of increasing the number of world-class
manufacturers in Britain by the next century. Every MP received a copy but,
so far, they have taken little action. Admittedly, the major parties had
already rewritten their policies on industry, but that is no excuse for
the current ‘election campaigns’ to be more concerned with taxing the nation
than with creating wealth.

The CBI’s prescription to give Britain a world-class manufacturing base
for the next century will not be easy to follow. It demands an annual growth
in productivity of at least 5 per cent and a doubling of investment in industry.

There is a lot of work to be done but industry can now demonstrate a
measure of success on which to build. The past 50 years have shown that
tweaking economic and political policies without reference to innovation
and customer satisfaction does not guarantee a successful manufacturing
base. It is time to offer manufacturers a chance to write the agenda needed
to raise the nation’s standard of living.

Manufacturing industry now needs nothing less than a national effort
to develop its full potential to create wealth. As the CBI says: ‘The improvements
in manufacturing productivity and performance over the past decade have
been achieved against a backdrop of relatively benign neglect by all except
those directly concerned with running the country’s manufacturing companies.’

So what is it to be? An election fought over manufacturing wealth or
another decade of benign neglect?

John Bell is a freelance journalist who specialises in manufacturing
technology and environmental engineering.

A few years ago Japanese industry decided to merge electronic and mechanical
engineering to create a new discipline which it named ‘mechatronics’. Some
people in Britain found this invented word such a hoot that they failed
to notice what the Japanese had achieved. Now British universities run courses
in the subject and nobody is laughing.

Fumio Kodama has gone one better with the phrase ‘techno-paradigm shift’
to describe the subject of his book. His argument is that existing intellectual
models of innovation cannot cope with technological change in certain industries,
mainly – but not exclusively – in Japan.

‘The innovation process of high technology seems to be different from
that for conventional technologies,’ he writes. Fortunately, he also explains
how ‘high technology’ is defined by the US and Japanese governments. High-technology
companies either have payrolls which consist of at least 10 per cent scientists
and engineers or produce goods which rely on at least 10 per cent of their
value to come from R&D.

Kodama argues his case with the help of specific examples of innovative
products and companies. He illustrates these with data and offers mathematical
models of his six techno-paradigm shifts. There are also about 25 references
for each of his six chapters.

The author’s first techno-paradigm shift changed the nature of manufacture
in high-technology industries. Japanese and American companies in particular
have begun to invest more in R&D than in capital equipment. This change
is due in part to investment in flexible manufacturing systems which can
make several generations of different products. The shift means that factory
managers now spend more time thinking about future business than worrying
about production.

Japanese companies are also becoming so technologically diverse that
their principal business is increasingly difficult to define. Kodama’s third
shift affects the nature of investment. He says that the rate of return
on capital is less important than the need for investment to coincide with
the arrival of new technology.

Even the manner in which Japanese industry adopts technology has taken
a techno-paradigm shift. Some companies no longer wonder how to exploit
the supply of existing research. Instead, they demand the research they
want. Others don’t wait for scientific breakthroughs, they fuse technologies
to create new disciplines such as mechatronics. The final shift concerns
attitudes to technology inside institutions such as local authorities or
telecommunications and medical organisations.

The book sets out to provide an empirical analysis rather than yet another
description of progress in Japan. Kodama succeeds in offering the reader
both, so the book should appeal to its intended audience which includes
company training programmes and science policy researchers.

Of course quite a few British and European companies fail to fit existing
models of innovation too. Kodama, who is based at Saitama University, recognises
this. He would like his country to ‘contribute to the world’ by inviting
Western academics to the policy research centres set up in Japan to explore
the phenomenon of high technology.

John Bell is a technology journalist.

The book consists of a series of well-written essays about 21 scientists
and technologists who helped to make the US what it is today. Besides being
a good read, the cameos are a reminder that the US went through an industrial
revolution every bit as important as the events in 18th and 19th-century
Europe. Thomas Jefferson, the third president, was an intermediary between
the foremost scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. He also founded the
US Patent Office.

The Yorkshire engineer Benjamin Latrobe knew James Watt and other engineers,
and transferred many ideas about steam technology to the US. Around the
same time, Eli Whitney developed the idea of manufacture with interchangeable
parts, the start of modern mass production. Then there was Cyrus McCormick
whose reaping machine (see photo) mechanised American agriculture, Frederick
Taylor who laid down the principles of scientific management, Henry Ford
who made cars popular and Frederick Terman whose vision in the 1930s led
to what is now known as Silicon Valley.

Gustaaf Sevenhuysen, one of the nutritionists, says that the prototype
equipment is at least as accurate as subjective methods of determining diet
such as after-dinner interviews or weighing the food first.

The researchers have come up with a system consisting of an ordinary
camera and flashgun, mounted on a bracket, which fold neatly away into a
convenient package. A slide in front of the flashgun is covered with opaque
lines 0.5 millimetres wide and 0.5 millimetres apart which project parallel
lines of light and shadow onto the food. This gives the photograph a scale
to measure the volume of the food against.

The problem is that the distance between the lines in the final photograph
depends on the distance between the camera and the food and the angle from
which the picture is taken. The optics of the camera also distort the true
shape of the food. To calibrate the lines the volunteer must place a small
reference object in the picture. The Manitoba researchers use a cylinder
3.3 centimetres tall and 3.4 centimetres in diameter.

Once the photographs of the food have been developed, they are scanned
into a computer as digital images. Image analysis software then calculates
the volume of a ‘slice’ of food marked out by one of the stripes of light
or shadow. The software assumes that plates are flat and portions of food
are symmetrical so that it can estimate the position of parts of the food
that are obscured. For example, to calculate the volume of a slice through
a rectangular piece of toast, the software would need to identify at least
four pairs of coordinates, but a slice through an egg might need 30 pairs.

The software then measures the pattern of stripes on the reference cylinder
in the picture and compares the result with its known dimensions. It also
measures the angle between the contour lines on the flat surface of the
table and the camera’s line of sight.

These calculations correct distortions caused by the camera’s position
and optics. The software can then calculate an accurate volume for each
slice and add the results together to find the volume of any food on the
plate.

Sevenhuysen says that for the software to calculate the food’s nutritional
value they must first identify foods in the picture by sight. He would like
to develop programs which can recognise different types of food by their
colours.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s with a good sense of logic and a feel for mathematics may
begin Machines With A Purpose at the first page working their way to the
end. Nonspecialists, as the blurb describes anyone who is not a scientist,
should begin at the last chapter and read the examples of how machines can
serve people. A grasp of something concrete is reassuring when you embark
on the theory that challenges the view that people are biological machines.

Readers will probably find that it is best to work at this book rather
than attempt to absorb it in one go.

Howard Rosenbrock, emeritus professor of control engineering at the
University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, offers ideas
that scientists may well find uncomfortable. So he presents his thesis with
a detailed and logical approach that he describes as occasionally pedantic.

The last chapter explains that industry is usually based on the scientific
principle of cause and effect. Sometimes it is based on a purpose, such
as meeting people’s needs for satisfying work. The difference between the
two types of industry is that one automates where possible and treats people
as machines to serve machines, while the other makes machines subservient
to people and their purposes.

The author says that the former approach is based on the myth of cause
and effect while the latter depends on the myth of purpose. He defines a
myth as ‘a description of events which carries with it implicit values and
may serve a social purpose’.

He points out that the scientist’s view of nature, as intrinsically
causal, does not necessarily suit the technologist, who has to serve purposes
that are defined by industry and society. The professor also chooses the
word ‘myth’ to emphasise that causal and purposeful views of nature are
equivalent; that is to say, what proves or disproves one proves or disproves
the other.

By definition precise language contains a precise meaning but that does
not mean everyone will understand what it says. As the author warns, society’s
usual ‘explanations are causal – whether in physics or chemistry or biology
or social science and to the extent they are verified by facts they suggest
that nature itself is inescapably causal. Medieval society in Europe had
much the same relation to Christian theology.’

Go to the beginning of the book and you will read an invitation to science
to develop a purposeful view of nature. If science sticks only to the idea
that nature is an endless chain of cause and effect, then the technology
it creates must inevitably dehumanise people by treating us all as links
in this chain.

A short review cannot do justice to the density of thought in this
volume. The author deserves to be read in his own words. After all, he is
forced to challenge a myth that has been held by science for more than 400
years. As he says: ‘This is necessity rather than design.’

John Bell is a technology journalist.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s and managers write too many words and numbers and make too
few pictures. The simplicity of working a computer has overwhelmed the convenience
of a clear image. But if photographs or a video can record weekly progress,
why send the boss spreadsheets and a written report?

Paintings, drawings, pictograms and ideograms were for 30 000 years
our only means of recording information. They began to lose their importance
with the invention of the phonetic alphabet 3000 years ago. The arrival
of printing 500 years ago accelerated the decline by prompting universal
literacy.

Now a digital computer can hunt through a patent library in moments
by shuffling key words. Yet it is virtually incapable of identifying a trademark
or a detail in a drawing protecting an inventor’s copyright in a reasonable
time. It is not surprising that images are unpopular as objective records.

Electronics, however, has done more than bring alphanumerics to preeminence
over images. It has sparked off technologies that may make pictures as important
to human communications as they were more than 3000 years ago.

Although most of these technologies were unknown 30 years ago their
effect is already overwhelming. Some of them, such as video conferencing,
interactive video, high-definition television, facsimile machines and better
photographic emulsions, present familiar views of the world in new or better
ways. Others provide images, such as satellite surveys, that could not exist
without electronics or which may need no written or numerical analysis to
be understood as, for example, medical tomography does.

New or innovative images are a problem for people who rely on alphanumerics.
Better imagery challenges those with Luddite tendencies; novel types of
image demand a re-evaluation of our world. Three-dimensional films, for
example, are so valuable to both physicists and chemists that they have
begun to break down traditional linguistic barriers between the two disciplines.

But the lack of reliable indexing systems will inhibit the popularity
of all kinds of imaging systems until computers become adept at locating
images within, for example, a video library. The technology needed for pattern
recognition may not even come from electronics. Biotechnology has begun
the search for hardware and software inspired by the way DNA and other biological
systems pass on information.

This is a rough summary of Duncan Davies’s eloquent exposition of his
basic ideas. (He died before finishing his book and the Bathursts completed
the task as a tribute to the former chief scientist of the Department of
Trade and Industry.) Davies believed that it may take society a thousand
years to adapt to the new and powerful range of imagery that has appeared
since the 1960s. He suggests that schools are among the few places with
a grasp of what it means to integrate pictures, words and numbers. Therefore
the onus is on teachers to find the balance between the three.

Although The Telling Image is probably the first book to analyse the
role of pictures in communication from the point of view of science, graphic
designers and photographers have looked at the problem before. For example,
the book suggests videos as an alternative to paper manuals for computers.
Some English designers in the late 1970s experimented with producing instruction
booklets without any words.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s, designers and writers would benefit by a cooperative approach
to solving the mysteries of what might be called ‘information design’. Why,
for example, does a scientist’s paper build up to its main point, and a
journalist’s article start with what a scientist would call a conclusion,
while the photographer says ‘just show me what you mean’?

Information design has at least two problems to resolve. The first concerns
the hierarchy of who is giving information to whom. The formal structure
of a scientific paper, for example, may convey a sense of academic acceptability,
but it may not be comprehensible to a sponsoring company. Similarly, a column
of figures that is sufficient for specialists to understand one another
will be guaranteed to frustrate a public that knows little about science.

The second involves choosing the right means of communication. Photography,
computer graphics, formulas or various forms of English may all be available,
but which are the right ones for the job?

The fundamental issue raised by The Telling Image is not new. ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s
and artists often confuse expression, the act of making known, with communication,
the act of revelation. A work of art or a page of formulas may contain everything
that their authors intended yet remain incomprehensible to all but a few
other people.

New electronic tools and innovative imagery have increased the ways
in which we may express ourselves while making communication more difficult
than ever. It is time to start talking to the other culture.

John Bell is a science writer.

Technologies Without Boundaries by Ithiel de Sola Pool, edited by Eli
Noam, New Amsterdam, pp 283, $11.95

Stephen Saxby set out to write an introduction to computers and communications
for students studying his course in information technology law at the University
of Southampton. He changed tack after 25 000 words and decided to write
instead for those intimidated by the subject, and for experts who want to
put information technology into perspective.

The result is a readable book stuffed to the stitches with facts, a
bioliography, more than 1000 references and a decent eight-page index.

Anyone seeking a broad perspective of information technology should
enjoy the author’s legal insights. Elsewhere, students will find detailed
histories of past revolutions in information technology. They start with
cave paintings, (the world’s first ROMs) then work through printing, Charles
Babbage’s ‘analytical engine’, Isambard Brunel’s effect on the development
of the postal system and the idea of information as property. The histories
show how the past affects progress in international communications today.
School and degree students will also discover why the convergence of com
puters and communications is different to any previous development in information
technology.

Anyone with a gappy general knowledge of computing should head for the
chapters on the evolution of the hardware and software industries. At first
sight, abbreviations and acronyms litter these pages but they soon fade
out of view once you become involved in the underlying stories. Although
the family history of the microchip seems easier to follow than progress
in the software industry, the reader’s motivation will define what he or
she gets out of these packed chapters. If you want financial facts, dates
and names, they are there alongside computer-assisted software engineering,
the fate of the mainframe and the new operating system Windows 3.

The last chapter tackles the global development of telecommunications.
It lays down the technologies, such as optical fibres or satellite transmission,
and spells out the implications of a universal digital network – ISDN –
to carry television, voice and computer signals.

Ithiel de Sola Pool, a professor of political science at Massachusetts
Institute of Technology before he died in 1984, picks up the story where
Saxby finishes. His book, subtitled ‘On Telecommunications in a Global Age’,
tackles the implications of a universal digital network which the author
calls the ganglia of a worldwide brain.

The initial few ganglia have set off five changes, says de Sola Pool.
First, transmission costs are becoming much less important to communications
than people’s choice of where and how they want to work and live.

Then there are the questions raised by the digitally blurred distinction
between sound, words and pictures. If a voice and an electronic transfer
of funds are in the same form, must they obey the laws of a free speech
or international banking? Thirdly, such legal issues will affect leisure,
which depends increasingly on handling information.

Next, as communications and computing merge they will allow individuals
to choose how they use mass media. You can switch the television news only
on or off but you can quiz data bases for selected information. Finally,
the mass media will be able to send messages to targeted individuals. Six
years after the author’s death an American publisher began experiments in
varying the editorial and advertisements across one edition of the same
magazine. The idea is to tailor content to meet the needs of individuals.

The review copies of the book provided a final and unintentional insight.
Both are printed with a bar code but neither is marked with a price. Information
technology, global or otherwise, has an enduring capacity to provide too
much data and too little information.

John Bell writes about computers.