From the Rolls-Royce experimental archive: a quarter of a million communications from Rolls-Royce, 1906 to 1960's. Documents from the Sir Henry Royce Memorial Foundation (SHRMF).
Magazine article from 'The Motor' reviewing the book 'A Century of Science (1840-1940)', focusing on changes in transport and daily life.
| Identifier | ExFiles\Box 160\5\ scan0231 | |
| Date | 29th January 1941 | |
| The Motor 568 January 29, 1941. FROM POST-HORSE Life, Leisure and In 100 Years (With drawings from some) THERE came to my desk one morning one of the most interesting books of a serious character that I have read in recent years. It has the somewhat forbidding title of “ A Century of Science ” (1840-1940), by F.{Mr Friese} Sherwood Taylor, Ph.D., M.A., B.Sc., and is published by Heinemann at the price of 8s. 6d. However, this is by no means a dry, scientific work. There is a human interest in the story of the life, leisure and the occupations of the people, of which it makes a fairly wide survey. It covers such widely divergent subjects as the introduction of sanitation and industrial mechanization, with an inquisitive peep into the middle-class home, from basement to garret. And there is a really intelligent survey of the development of transport. Intimate Home Life The author describes how washing-up was done in the days when no modern utensils, such as enamelled ware, were available. He explains the crude methods of obtaining colours for dyeing fabric before Perkins’s discovery in 1856 of mauve, the first synthetic dyestuff, followed shortly afterwards by the discovery of magenta. He goes into the intimate details of trades in 100 years. He relates the quaint amusements of the classes, revolutionized in the past 25 years by the dancing craze, the gramophone, the cinema and radio, and the great change in the cloistered seclusion of Victorian times to the open-air life of the present century. He traces the evolution of engineering from production in back-street workshops, as close as possible to the source of the raw material, to the vast rapid repetition factories of to-day. He reminds us of the unhappy conditions of the masses, sometimes causing chronic ill health and perhaps an early death. He deals with the cures effected by modern medicine and skilled surgery for “ incurable ” complaints of a century ago. Some were diseases unknown in 1840, and even much later, now remedied by lesser operations, or diagnosed by controlled penetration X-rays, which have been developed in the past year or two. In thousands of ways this interesting work conveys a fascinating picture of life in the past century, a century of very great changes indeed. But it is with transport and communications, which forms the first chapter after the introductory one, that I would deal here. Curiously enough, thorough as is his book, and it seems singularly free of bias, even on such a controversial topic as transport, there is not, so far as I can discover, a single reference to the motorcycle. Does the author regard it merely as a supplementary form of cycling, which he treats well, or as an offshoot of the motorcar, where again he covers an extensive field? And yet there was a period when there were more motorcycles in use than motorcars. As quotations are tedious to the reader, I have summarized and paraphrased this chapter on transport to make a comprehensive story; but even then I have merely skated over some 45 pages of a very thorough survey of the development of travel; and travel has altered our lives more than any other single factor in the past century. Travel in 1840 was attended with considerable discomfort. The gentleman wore colourful attire, a frock coat of green or brown, a fancy waistcoat, narrow trousers strapped under the shoes, a bow-cravat or stock that was the usual neckwear, and top hat. His lady sported a truly astonishing multiplicity of garments, which included no fewer than six petticoats, one sometimes being padded for warmth. Yet they were pleased to regard this as an enlightened age, which had provided them with such expeditious travel that if they went by road it would take them 40 hours to reach Newcastle from London, reduced in 1844 by the new-fangled railway to twelve hours and a half. Although there were many railway companies operating upon comparatively short lines, there were numerous districts that could not be reached other than by post-horse, which was more adaptable to the bad roads of the time. English society and law, from time immemorial, have been founded on the axiom that a man belongs to a place, that he has rights over and duties to the soil A20 | ||