By accident rather than design, a new set of vocational qualifications
aims to prepare people for a new industrial revival, the General National
Vocational Qualifications. GNVQs are designed for pupils aged between 16
and 19 in full-time education. The qualification will be a vocational rival
to the academic GCE A and AS levels, with increasing numbers of young people
attending unit-based courses lasting from two years upwards.

An experimental GNVQ in science will be on offer at a handful of schools
and colleges in September, and is planned to become generally available
from September 1994. Government forecasts of the future demand for scientifically
and technologically qualified people required for an industrial revival
emphasise the likely need for many more technicians – a group that has traditionally
been recruited from young people who have not opted for higher education
– though many go on to take a degree part-time while they are working.

The GNVQ in science should provide a fresh pool of 18-year-olds with
a full-time education geared towards the needs of industry. But whether
industry will be able to absorb them is, of course, another matter. History
shows that the main problem in the deployment of trained personnel is not
a shortage of supply but a lack of demand. British industries have not been
good at recognising their need for staff at intermediate levels of education
and training. Many technicians and scientific officers fall into this category.
All the predictions suggest that to remain competitive, business and industry
in Britain must come to terms with this, expand their uptake of such people
and provide them with satisfying careers. From this point of view, everything
looks rosy for the GNVQ in science. But a more depressing picture emerges
from the chemicals and pharmaceuticals industries which are typical employers
of technicians and might be expected to recruit young people with good A-level
qualifications – especially in science.

Over the past hundred years, laboratories have become sophisticated
places. The levels of competence and knowledge needed to work in them have
increased dramatically. From being unqualified in the early days, potential
laboratory technicians soon had to achieve a nationally approved level of
qualification by school-leaving age. By the 1960s and 1970s, many laboratories
no longer recruited technical trainees at the minimum school-leaving age
but at 18 and over with A levels.

With all employment sectors currently depressed, few people are moving
jobs in science-based industries and services. Career prospects for anyone
leaving school with science qualifications but not wishing to go on to higher
education are grim. Employers need to make little effort to recruit people
for training technical and scientific grades. They have enough unsolicited
applications from school-leavers and older unemployed people to fill what
vacancies they have. Frequently they prefer graduates, while many posts
which once carried entitlement to training and progression have been downgraded
to assistant status and classified as unskilled. So launching a new GNVQ
in science later this year might be considered a piece of bad timing.

Nevertheless, there are reasons to be cheerful and for thinking that
a new vocational science qualification for 16 to 19-year-olds might lead
to better prospects. Personnel and training managers who have taken on hardly
any staff over the past two or three years are well aware that any upturn
will generate demand for their company’s products or services and at the
same time provide opportunities for existing staff to move on. Once that
happens, they will be back recruiting trainees as hard as they can.

The tendency to replace 18-year-old trainees with graduates accelerated
during the 1980s, when many with science A levels chose to work or train
for careers in better-paid, nonscientific sectors. But an all-graduate entry
creates too many chiefs and not enough workers. Graduates will always expect
that they will not be doing essentially routine jobs for long, however
sophisticated the routine might be. This may help to explain why the heads
of many hospital pathology laboratories in Britain are fighting the idea
of all-graduate entry to their technical professions.

The tendency of employers to want ever more qualified scientists and
technologists for what are essentially the same old jobs has been dubbed
the ‘education and training creep’. The process seems to overcome the best-laid
plans of some managements to deskill people. The increasingly used assistant
grade (for whom there is often no training entitlement) is already receiving
informal training and educational support from some employers. If that attitude
spreads, the assistant grade will start on the same spiral which turned
the 19th-century laboratory-hand into the late 20th-century graduate technician.

Small laboratory-based firms cannot afford graduates nor provide them
with career development. Many therefore recruit school-leavers and train
and educate them through traditional part-time routes. The loss of this
pattern of on-the-job education for the post-19 population may have to
be reinvented if it is lost.

An employer of young people with scientific qualifications at 18 has
hitherto had to accept that the only qualifications that they bring are
likely to be A levels. Qualifications in science at that level carry no
guarantee that their holders have any of the skills and qualities which
employers seek, including such mundane and old-fashioned virtues as honesty,
reliability, neatness, a good speaking voice, unambiguous handwriting, evidence
of manual dexterity and aptitude for practical work.

At a more sophisticated level, A level provides no evidence of the
ability to work in a team, cooperate with others or of a wide range of communications
skills. Science A levels do not provide students with the remotest idea
about the environment of science-based careers while much of the knowledge
that they acquire has little relevance outside academic research and teaching
laboratories.

Which brings me back to where I began. The skills, aptitudes and knowledge
which GNVQ aims to provide are more closely matched to the demands of a
potential employer than the current diet of science A levels. It is to
be hoped that GNVQ will also provide a viable alternative route to full-time
higher education. There is every reason to suppose that for school-leavers
with science qualifications and who are not going on directly to full-time
higher education, the GNVQ in science will prove to be a very worthwhile
qualification.

Nicholas Russell is deputy director of the Nuffield Science in Practice
at the Nuffield Curriculum Projects Centre, London, and has been involved
with the working groups on the science units for the GNVQs.

The first version of the science curriculum was too complicated. The
original 17 ‘attainment targets’, designed for pupils across their school
careers from 5 to 16, have been boiled down to just five. There is one practical
target on scientific investigation and four knowledge and understanding
targets, essentially the basic disciplines of biology, chemistry, geology
and physics.

With the revised targets there are now a mere 178 ‘statements’ summarising
what level of understanding pupils should have reached as they move up through
school. These replace the 409 statements in the original version. Since
assessment is based on these attainment statements, such a reduction is
clearly sensible.

The knowledge and principles of science which children should be taught
are described in the ‘detailed provision’ paragraphs, which show an eminently
sensible balance between science as an abstract body of knowledge, its technical
and industrial applications, and some of the larger social concerns about
such issues as population growth and environmental pollution. The practical
work shows a carefully graded increase in sophistication for children as
they grow older, and open-ended exercises are encouraged.

Why, then, does it engender such ennui? To a large extent because the
most contentious of the original attainment targets, the notorious AT 17,
on the history of scientific ideas, has been dropped. Lip service is still
paid to its principles in introductory statements to the new targets, but
no explicit mention is made in the detailed provisions.

Many hard-pressed science teachers will breathe a sigh of relief. An
unfamiliar and difficult area has been dropped from a curriculum already
too big to cope with. But with the demise of AT 17, humanity, controversy
and social context also disappear. There is now hardly a hint that science
is a human activity, little idea that technological demands often drive
scientific investigation and scarcely a mention that science is mediated
by the social and intellectual frameworks of the different times and places
where it is carried out. There is barely a suggestion that today’s scientific
truth is provisional, constantly subject to alteration.

With AT 17 has also gone space for telling stories and for demythologising
science. It may aspire to be a body of knowledge, floating free on a celestial
plane high above the early human and historical events from which it was
forged, but the resulting alienation of science from human culture certainly
turns many pupils away from the subject and, in any case, the myth of abstraction
at its most extreme is absurd. Science cannot escape from the sometimes
sordid shackles which attach it to the mundane world of imperfect people
rubbing along in laboratory, library and conference hall. This is one of
the things which makes it so interesting.

For a hint of science in history, one must turn to the national curriculum
history document. This runs to over 200 pages, compared with the science
consultation document’s slender 54. The history document comes with lengthy
philosophical prologues, arguing out the real purpose of history in schools
in an attempt to settle the internal wrangles among historians over the
primacy of methodology or facts, and to establish good public relations
for a threatened subject. There are also separate chapters on implementation
and ‘bringing history to life’, imbued with a strong sense of enthusiasm
and commitment, feelings which seem to be missing from the science consultation
document, perhaps because it is assured a central place in the scheme of
things and does not have to try so hard.

But the great bulk of the history document is accounted for by the range
of core and option units which allow pupils scope for choice and individuality.
Sadly, the principle of a central core and a series of optional extras is
not offered in science. It would have provided a mechanism for fostering
individual teacher and pupil enthusiasms, so important for the actual practice
of teaching.

It is only in the history document that science can be seen to have
any kind of history or much humanity. It falls to the economic, technological
and scientific strands which run through every one of the multiple history
study units to discuss landmark figures such as Euclid, Hippocrates, Vesalius,
Paracelsus, Leonardo da Vinci, Halley, Harvey, Newton, Faraday, Stephenson,
Brunel and so on, and to give proper consideration to the place of science
in its full economic and social context. Perhaps the history curriculum
is the most appropriate place for such considerations, but one cannot help
feeling that an opportunity has been lost in downgrading the historical
element in the science curriculum.

There are enough hints in the new consultation document to encourage
teachers who want to explore historical or biographical elements as a way
of catching the attention of students beyond the traditional group who would
have chosen GCSE science. Even vague hints can lead to creative interpretations
and more interesting teaching material. The design and technology curriculum
document, for example, while retaining a central emphasis on the practical
skills of the workbench, has broadened out to embrace the widest principles
of design and the cultural constraints on technology. Pupils are encouraged
to compare technical solutions to problems in different cultures and at
different times.

Priory Comprehensive School in Shrewsbury has built on this hint to
include Roman engineering in its design and technology course, both to show
that technical solutions have historical frameworks, and as a source of
ideas for thinking about technical solutions in modern economies with little
scientific or technical expertise.

This has provided a clear point of entry into technology for those,
especially girls, who might never have considered or enjoyed technical studies
based entirely on workshop practice in wood or metal.

Many great pieces of science and any number of technical inventions
have come from people who managed to evade or overcome the heavy hand of
the general run of science education. The Science in the National Curriculum
should have been less prescriptive, messier round the edges, to inspire
a greater diversity of approaches to science teaching in our schools. That
is how scientists can be encouraged.

Nicholas Russell is a member of the Education Committee of the British
Society for the History of Science.

Does physics really deserve its position, or has it merely been good
at intellectual power politics? Its leadership is rooted in the Scientific
Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries, which engendered the modern techniques
of investigation. From the welter of technical, scientific and intellectual
confusion that existed in early modern Europe, figures such as Copernicus,
Kepler, Galileo and Newton emerged. Recent studies of the Scientific Revolution
have focused on these physicists and astronomers. Is this just? Does it
reflect historical reality? How fair is to pluck out a single strand of
intellectual activity and ignore most of the rest?

Examination of the minutes of the Royal Society in the 17th century
shows that most of the time and energy of the fellows was absorbed with
natural history and chemistry, not physics. Learned gentlemen laid out huge
sums on cabinets of curiosities, and societies and governments invested
large sums in botanic gardens, effectively the Big Science laboratories
of their day. Yet when discussing the Scientific Revolution, no one mentions
botany, or its huge implications for agriculture, which was the most important
contemporary productive activity.

If the detailed course of the revolution can be shown to have depended
less on physics and more on biology, this might seriously upset the ‘natural’
hierarchy in which physics assumes its dominance as much from historial
precedent as anything else. But natural history, along with technology,
chemistry, medicine and agriculture, has received short shrift at the hands
of postwar scholars.

Before the 1940s, scholars, on both sides of the Atlantic – for example,
F J Cole, Agnes Arber, Clifford Dobell and Charles Raven – were enthusiastic
students of the burgeoning physiology and natural history of the 17th century.
They were aware that the roots of modern biology do not begin only with
Darwin and the physiologists of the 19th century, and attempted to extend
the revoluntionary developments of the 17th century beyond the physical
sciences.

But some enthusiastic biologists, have continued to champion the importance
of the biology done in the 17th and early 18th centuries, notably Brian
Ford’s espousal of the cause of the great Dutch microscopist Antony van
Leeuwenhoek, and Howard and Syliva Lenhoff’s scholarly editing of the works
of Abraham Trembley, discoverer of the polyp and an avid investigator if
its powers of regeneration.

Now there is a growing movement to reinstate biology among the sciences
whose modern roots go back to the 17th century. In particular, a group of
young American scholars has rediscovered this mass of biological activity
and is proselytising for a new emphasis on biological science in the Scientific
Revolution. They point out that discoveries in medicine and natural history
created much of the enthusiasm for science in the 17th century.

Two of the leading young scholars are Harold Cook and Paula Findlen,
who have been exhuming the reputations of Jan Swammerdam and Francesco Redi
from the footnotes of history.

Jan Swammerdam a Dutch anatomist and entomologist, discovered the existence
of red blood corpuscles in 1658. He conducted much work of muscle physiology.
Almost single-handedly, he laid the foundation of modern entomology through
his massive collection on insects which he examined minutely with his single-lens
microscope.

Swammerdam’s scientific work was anchored firmly in his philosophical
concerns and he acquired an international cast of patrons for his work.
He fits all the criteria of a leading scientist and made long-lasting contributions
to biology. Why, then, is he not considered part of the mainstream of the
revolution?

The physician, natural historian, poet and linguist Francesco Redi is
best known as the man who conducted the first controlled experiments refuting
spontaneous generation. But Redi’s output of publications in many areas
of natural history was much more extensive. The roots of much of this output
would seem to lie in his need to stimulate the Tuscan court of Ferdinand
II – he was not only the royal physician but was also paid to be the resident
‘intellectual’. His task was to provide intelligent entertainment among
courtiers whose lives essentially consisted, as Findlen graphically puts
it, of hanging out fashionably on the right set of steps. This role set
the style and direction of much of Redi’s work in testing the bizarre claims
of his contemporaries, using a range of theatrical experiments.

These displays not only required erudition and education of a high order,
but massive supplies of specimens, both live and preserved. Redi could obtain
these because he had the ear and the open purse strings of Ferdinand. He
organised an informal public support system for scientific research.

These are parallels here with the role played by Inigo Jones as a court
designer of masques and entertainments for King James I, and with William
Harvey’s exploitation of his connections with Charles I to obtain plentiful
material from the hunting field for his physiological experiments. Redi’s
dependence of the favour of the Grand Duke was cruelly exposed when Ferdinand
was replaced by Cosimo II. Redi’s sources of material dried up, and his
later work was thin and consisted largely of recapitulation of what he had
already achieved.

For Redi, his employers at the court set the agenda for science, as
patrons always have, and continue to do in the Big Science projects of today.
The irony is that the characteristic Big Science of the 17th century was
biology, not physics. As the most expensive and productive scientists of
their time, the natural historians and anatomists of the 17th century demand
far more scholarly attention than they have so far received.

Nicholas Russell lectures at Bromley College of Technology

Public men (and that sadly less numerous group, public women) are generally
eager to justify their mistakes, reiterate their successes and explain how
much they owe to luck, hard work, cold showers or whatever other factors
seem to them to be significant. They also gossip and drop names, which is
probably why so many of them sell enough copies to justify publication.

ÐÓ°ÉÔ­´´s are not public figures in this sense. Cut off by public scientific
myopia, practising their trade in laboratories full of bizarre apparatus,
in many cases intensely private people, they are poorly understood by the
world at large. Yet it is a tiresome cliche that we live in a scientific
age. How depressing, then, that of all the volumes of reminiscence which
cascade from the presses, so few are by scientists. Their absence compounds
the mixture of awe and distaste with which science is often viewed.

Some scientists do break through and publish autobiographies. There
is a regular trickle, most notable recently being the autobiographies of
Arthur Kornberg, For the Love of Enzymes, and Francois Jacob, The Statue
Within. The life of a very famous scientist can be a commercial proposition,
although sales are limited because not enough people are interested in the
culture of science to guarantee good sales. Several enlightened educational
charities in America therefore sponsor scientific autobiographies. We have
the Commonwealth Fund and the Albert P. Sloan Foundation to thank for the
published lives of Salvador Luria, Maclyn McCarty and Rita Levi-Montalcini
among others. We could certainly do with more, although there are obvious
vices which accompany the virtues of the format.

Let us consider the virtues first. Everyone agrees that science has
an image problem, especially among the young. Children have few role models
of scientists as real people, with lives outside science, whose actions
as scientists are influenced by those outside lives. The scientist seems
to be an automaton, hermetically sealed in a laboratory, which is not an
especially appealing proposition. The scientific autobiography can provide
a human face, put a real person into the public persona of science. Science
is excitingly different from other careers but, at the same time, scientists
themselves need to be clearly seen as human beings just like everybody else.

A good autobiography shows science as a human activity. The best autobiographies
also reveal the creative and imaginative aspects of science, which seldom
find any place in the published scientific literature. In any case, young
people and the public do not read this literature. Science comes to them
filtered through textbooks or the media. Both are currently less concerned
than they should be about the imaginative side of science. Only scientists
themselves (or historians and biographers with access to their personal
papers) can show what this creative process is really like.

But let us not get starry-eyed. The autobiography has serious defects
as a record of events even if it has the virtue of saying what one participant
felt about what was going on. No one knows the whole story, old scores need
settling and memories are selective or confused. Historians always praise
the vividness of personal accounts while stressing their unreliability.
Nevertheless, they use autobiographical sources liberally, because they
are often the only record we have of a subject’s attitudes and feelings.

The autobiography must therefore be treated with caution before uncorroborated
statements are accepted. The dangers are illustrated by Jim Watson’s The
Double Helix. The book gives the impression of a fierce race between Watson
and Crick and the American group at Caltech, centred round Linus Pauling.
However, in a recent interview with Lewis Wolpert, Crick denied that he
felt any sort of race was going on and, as he recalled it, Jim never mentioned
it at the time either. Nevertheless the book remains an enormously valuable
source for what it reveals about Watson and his work.

Good autobiography can also illuminate key events in a subject’s work.
The very best are conscientiously done from documentary sources. Rita Levi-Montalcini
acknowledges that her account of the critical months in the discovery of
nerve growth factor in the 1950s would have been far poorer without access
to the letters which she wrote at the time to Victor Hamburger. Maclyn McCarty
very much regrets the absence of surviving material from his own adolescence,
from which he could have reconstructed the individual he once was, and from
the Rockefeller laboratory of Oswald Avery in the years before he (McCarty)
arrived there in the early 1940s, to collaborate with Avery on the isolation
of bacterial DNA.

If a science teacher and writer might make a plea to his colleagues
who actually do the stuff, it would be this. Don’t throw your old correspondence
away: it is the most rewarding and space-saving archival material. And preserve
your old research notes and laboratory books. Above all, write something
down about your life and work, or beg some journalist or historian to interview
you. Commercial publication of such a collection of interviews or statements
is a possibility. For instance, many volumes of the Annual Review series
of publications carry autobiographical prefatory chapters. These have been
collected in a four volume series as The Excitement and Fascination of Science.
They promise to be extremely rewarding as raw material for discussing the
human nature of science. More immediately accessible are Wolpert’s collected
radio interviews, A Passion for Science. But we need more, many more.

Go on, put your toe in the water. Why not write and tell the world what
science is really like.

Nicholas Russell lectures at Bromley College of Technology.

Unfortunately, children, like horses, are stubborn creatures. You can
show them the water but will they drink it? Will they hell. As Mrs Beeton
remarked, before any household management of small infants can be undertaken,
it is essential to catch your baby. Compulsory science will not necessarily
lead to more scientists, unless what is taught is more exciting than much
that is on offer now.

The influence of the Nuffield schemes, cries for more relevance and
the slow transition to student-centred learning have modified school science
into an activity with plenty of laboratory investigation, bags of worksheets
and textbooks stuffed with examples of scientific applications. Few would
dispute that the majority of children today receive a better experience
of science than did their parents’ generation.

But the improvements have not always achieved as much as they should
have done. The rush into extensive laboratory work has sometimes led either
to excessive triviality and boredom, or to over-sophistication and incomprehension.
Examples of scientific application sometimes reflect fashionable concerns
when a syllabus was drawn up, or the availability of industries with public
relations departments ready with prepared case material. What has been lost
completely in this current emphasis on the experimental aspects of scientific
method and the learning of relevant science is ‘romance’.

Where has imagination gone? Where are the discussions of big questions
and unresolved dilemmas in ways which are meaningful to children? Without
some sight of its cultural goals, and its controversies and confusions,
science can be dull stuff, the assimilation of lowish-order theory as ‘established
truth’, however cleverly this may be dressed up in experiment, problem sheet
or open-ended project. Where are black-holes, space travel, cyclotrons,
superstrings, chaos, sunspots, human embryo research, evolution theory and
so on in the official syllabuses, and where are the people behind the ideas
and the fuellers of controversies? Token sections, for instance, on pollution
and conservation, or resources for simple genetic engineering experiments
in the classroom, merely reflect the existing emphasis on the practical
and the relevant. They do not begin to address the romantic aspects of science.

Perhaps I can illustrate the need for a little romance in education
by referring to another school discipline: history. The GCSE syllabus studied
by my daughter is relentlessly relevant. The two-year course is entirely
taken up with the 20th century, and it looks at the ideological confrontations
which have shaped the modern world, providing a framework in which contemporary
political events can be judged. The repression in Tiananmen Square, the
possible movements of peoples in Hong Kong and the pock-marked remains of
the Berlin Wall might almost have been laid on as supplements to the syllabus
for current second-year groups. No problems with the size of the questions
and their relevance here.

But my daughter finds her history heavy going, whereas before it was
her favourite subject. She puts much of this down to a loss of romance.
Modern political history simply lacks any cloak of sentiment. ‘Real’ history
for her is Elizabeth I and the King of Spain, galleons on the high seas,
the rattle of sabres and the lust for gold; or Roman legions on the march
and, before them, Tutankhamen and the pyramids of Egypt. The script is the
same, of course, building a power-base and holding on to it, but the patina
of cos tume-drama made the ancient politics of brutalism more acceptable
than their starkly naked applications today. If she is to develop a lasting
love of history, then some concession to this need for romance in the adolescent
(and indeed adult) mind seems essential.

Bringing romance back into science presents a new series of challenges
to science teachers already gasping at the pace of change. I believe it
is nevertheless essential unless we want to see the potential benefit of
science education for everyone degenerate into a rejection of science by
almost all. And this romance must not merely be story-telling for the less
able. The continuing problem in science is that too many of the academically
bright are not taking it up. They need to be shown the creative aspects
of science, its debates, its uncertainty and open-endedness, things largely
hidden even from sixth-formers, let alone more junior groups.

Creativity brings risk, misconceptions and mistakes. Science students
need to be taught that it is almost essential to be wrong about many things
in order to have the mental capacity to solve really big problems. I am
tempted to use comedian Spike Milligan as a model for this essential tension.
When Milligan is good he aspires to levels of humorous brilliance which
others cannot match; but when he is bad he is diabolical. We get the soaring
peaks only because of depth of the troughs.

Few of us, at whatever level, can allow our students to take that kind
of creative risk and make the kind of gross mistakes from which they really
might learn something. There are no pedagogic techniques for achieving this
kind of intoxication and it is simply too dangerous. The risk that serious
misconceptions might be absorbed rather than currently accepted scientific
orthodoxy is too high. That is why I advocate secondhand adventures, romances,
as acceptable alternatives: Charlie Darwin and the natural history factory,
for example, or Sigmund Freud’s Thousand and One Nights. I can see them
all, and thousands like them.

I am sorry if the very idea sends a shiver of revulsion through your
whole intellect. If you know a better way to catch a baby, I am sure the
scientific community is anxious to hear from you.

Nicholas Russell lectures at the Bromley College of Technology.

But it would be a human giant indeedwho could grind corn on the scale
of a wind-mill and Don Quixote was not completelymistaken.

To the medieval husbandman, the lord’s mill, at which he was compelled
to have his grain ground, was a symbol of oppression; of power harnessed
to exploit monopoly. Richard Holt stresses this point in his article ‘The
medieval mill – a productivity breakthrough?’ in the July issue of History
Today. He reminds us that in the Middle Ages there were no competitive markets
which might encourage benificent technical innovation to produce cheap goods
affordable by the population at large.

Holt, a research fellow in medieval history at the University of Birmingham
and the author of a book on The Mills of Medieval England, is rather scathing
about historians of technology who have assumed that the appearance of new
machines must have been associated with a medieval industrial revolution.

The water-powered corn mill was not invented in the Middle Ages, but
went back at least to Classical antiquity. And despite the fact that water
and wind power could have been harnessed for industrial manufacture, there
is little evidence that they were much used. The only exception was the
fulling mill, in which rotary action of the water wheel was converted into
a stamping motion for scouring and pounding the woven cloth.

He argues that in medieval times labour was too cheap, there was too
little capital and the structure of society was not appropriate for industrial
development of the kind that occurred in the 19th century. The mere existence
of new technology does not necessarily imply a revolution. Technical change
alone does not drive social and economic development.

Nevertheless, historians cannot help noticing that an increasing economic-growth
rate is often associated with a range of inventions. Many believe that technical
change occurs in response to economic demand and that, without such a pull,
technical creativity and invention would not occur.

Holt accepts that the windmill was a Western invention, not inherited
from Classical antiquity or the Orient. It was probably invented in eastern
England in the decade around 1185, and diffused rapidly to the northwestern
seaboard of continental Europe up till about 1250, when its spread slowed
dramatically.

He argues that this distribution was governed by the disposition of
sites suitable for waterpower. The windmill was taken up only if such sites
were already saturated or in regions, such as East Anglia and the Low Countries,
where there were very few places where water mills could be built, but there
was nevertheless a large demand for milling, because plenty of corn was
grown. Pre-existing demand and the vagaries of geography called the invention
up. It did not represent a new desire to harness natural resources, or an
entrepreneurial vision of cheaply produced goods. The implication must be
that if geographical or economic circumstances had been different, the windmill
would not have been invented.

This analysis is fascinating. And yet the windmill appeared first in
England, although the same demand and geographical conditions presumably
applied over much of northern coastal Europe. Should we not therefore look
for additional, local factors at work? A large number of mechanical innovations
were made in medieval Europe (such as clock escapements, silk-twisting and
wood-turning machines, and applications of the water mill to grinding, sawing,
paper-making and mine machinery) even if they did not lead to large-scale
industrial manufacture. What caused them to be invented? In some cases alternative
social and technical factors can be postulated to account for their origin,
even if there were no classic economic incentive through the price mechanism.

For example, the introduction and spread of the rural fulling mill are
usually explained by the location of water-power sites and the differences
in cost between human and mechanical trampling of the cloth. But there are
other elements in the equation, including parallel changes in medieval technology
for spinning yarn, and the fact that mechanical fulling could, for the first
time, produce the heat and pressure needed to ‘felt’ woven cloth effectively;
an innovation which produced ‘broadcloth’, the staple export upon which
England’s position as a trading nation depended in the 14th and 15th centuries.

Technical changes in two different areas, the creation of a novel product
(which increased consumer choice rather than merely reducing costs of production)
and fashion are all significant here. Neither exploiting a monopoly nor
cutting the costs of manufacture seems to have been critical features in
the mechanisation of the fulling process.

The factors which cause new inventions must surely be complex. Economic
his-torians must not be allowed to argue thatprice and profit alone govern
technical pro-gress. Pre-existing technology, scientificideas, the availability
of materials and thetransfer of mechanisms and ideas by themigration of
masters and apprentices must all have played a part. While it is naive to
suggest that economic development is driven by science and technology, it
is equally simplistic to argue that economic conditions, on their own, are
responsible for inventions occurring.

The windmill was an extremely elegant device; harnessing a new source
of energy by combining the principle of an air-screw with a central post
upon which the whole mill was mounted (to allow the sails to be turned into
the wind) and the existing power-train of the water mill. Explanation of
its origin, and of other innovations of similar importance, need sophisti-cated
technological as well as economic analysis.

There are still not enough resources available to investigate these
fascinating questions, despite the critical importance of such sources of
invention in our own times. New machines and new solutions are indeed giants.
Rather than clumsily tilting at them, we should do more historical dissection
as a method of learning what makes them start to tick.

Nicholas Russell is a senior lecturer in biology and science studies
at Bromley College of Technology.

Somewhere in my family’s snapshot album is a photograph of the author
of this piece as a small boy in the 1950s, grinning aimlessly among a riot
of daffodils. It was a bracing early-April day in Kew Gardens. Apart from
a picnic I cannot remember much other detail, but we all enjoyed ourselves
in one of London’s more miraculous facilities. I remember being astonished
that it cost us just one penny each to get in. There was something noble
about a society which could provide such grandeur almost free at the point
of use, a sort of National Horticultural Refreshment Service.

Early in the 1980s, the imago into which the 1950s schoolboy had metamorphosed
was in the habit of taking parties of students round a fruit farm in East
Kent as part of a project on agriculture. If I got the timing right, the
cherry trees would be in full blossom. One of the more depressing features
of our later visits was the speed with which old cherry orchards were grubbed
up. I was also pretty depressed by the farm manager’s comments on the apple
crop. Too many planting and husbandry decisions were being made for appearance
and grading, he said; too few for flavour and texture. If a more discerning
consumer eventually decided to buy on taste, the growers might not be able
to satisfy the demand.

Both Kew Gardens and Britain’s orchards interested in new fruit varieties
face a depressing future. The government intends to cut public funding at
Kew from 85 per cent to 50 per cent of the total costs. The director is
already hiring marketing men and retail experts to try to turn this venerable
institution into a commercial operation. Meanwhile, at Brogdale Experimental
Station near Faversham in Kent, the National Fruit Trials collection of
4000 fruit varieties faces something close to extinction because the station
will close in the spring of 1990 unless the food industry agrees to fund
it. Its work has been classified as ‘near market’ and, therefore, theoretically
capable of attracting commercial sponsorship and contracts.

The core of both Kew and Brogdale are their plant collections, accumulated
over some 200 years. These collections are important, both as aspects of
our scientific heritage, and in providing gene and species banks for horticulture
and conservation. Industry queries whether it has any responsibility for
their upkeep. If the government is unwilling to go on supporting them, and
industry disclaims any role, we are left with charity in one form or another
as the only alternative source of funds.

On the whole, rich individuals prefer culture to utility; fine art as
opposed to craft. Brogdale’s National Fruit Trials collection is just about
small enough for a charitable endowment to save it in perpetuity if some
horticultural millionaire could be persuaded to come to the rescue. But
Kew is clearly far too large for this to be feasible.

So Kew faces the same dilemma as the unfortunate Victoria & Albert
Museum. If entrance fees and sponsors are to provide most of the support,
then exhibition and retailing will dominate at the expense of research and
scholarship. The precipitate dismissal of a swathe of senior scholars from
the V & A went ahead, despite orchestrated outrage among the arts establishment.
The director at Kew is already aware that he faces the same uncomfortable
choice. Scholarship and custodial research on the plant collections will
suffer if the amenity aspects of the gardens are exploited to maximise income.
I suspect that the dismissal of a bevy of botanical scholars would not attract
the same outrage as the fate of the keepers at the V & A, because science
does not excite or interest our cultural guardians.

Britain’s performing arts are even further down this particular road
than its museums. The Arts Council has been keeping its large revenue clients,
such as the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, on short
commons for some years. There can be little doubt that the proposed departure
of the RSC’s director is related to his frustration at spending so much
time seeking commercial sponsorship. Despite huge efforts, the RSC raises
only a small proportion of its costs from commercial sources. If commercial
support is to be a meaningful solution to the financing of our cultural
institutions, someone must begin to educate the sponsors.

This is a slow process but there has been some headway in the US. More
enlightened companies have realised that sponsorship should be something
more than paying for exposure of their logo at prestigious arts venues.
It has dawned on them that contributing to aspects of the cultural infrastructure
is a duty that they should be performing as powerful members of the community.
Contributing towards the maintenance of scientific monuments and collections
for cultural reasons, rather than because they are ‘near market’ which they
patently are not, may be within the remit of some American science-based
companies soon. But it will come too late for Brogdale or Kew.

Put not your trust in companies or rich individuals. The only short-term
alternative is a philanthropic foundation, dedicated to education and scholarship.
The trouble is that most of these foundations have concentrated on medicine.
None of the big charities has been involved in horticulture, except in the
Third World.

Ironically, it is easier to raise money for nature-conservation than
for food production, yet this much neglected area is desperate for salvation.
If the horticultural collections are a maiden tied brutally to a stake,
threatened with a loathsome dragon intent on lopping off chunks of limb
at random, where is St George the philanthropist? If he’s out there somewhere,
he’d better scrape the rust off his armour and get stuck in. There isn’t
much time left.

Nicholas Russell lectures at the Bromley College of Technology in Kent.