Book Review: Backroom Boys - The Secret Return of the British Boffin

Britian has always produced people who can develop things and do science. We're not so hot at turning this stuff into money, but not always as bad as portrayed. 

Francis Spufford has tracked down the brains behind several major achievements - The Black Arrow space programme, Concorde, the computer game Elite, mobile phone networks, the human genome project and Beagle 2 - and documented the stores behind these. 

This isn't a technical book. With the exception of the mobile phone stuff, I easily followed the project descriptions, and even when things do get technical, the text carries you along so well that there's no need to worry that you will get bogged down. 

What we do get is a lot of the politics (small P) behind some of the project such as how the space programme got off the ground - just, or Concorde didn't get cancelled. Or how public finance stopped the human geneome being taken over by a private company for profit.

I loved the history behind Elite, a game I coveted until a ZX Spectrum version appeared. It's a time I lived through and was fascinated by at the time. Those days when one, or in this case two, people did everything in the development. A few years, later the World WIde Web came along, with a similar ethos in those early days. Now, every job gets chopped up and delivered by experts, and I miss those wonderful days when you could have a finger in every pie. 

Most of all, this is a celebration of the people behind the science and engineering. Everything is based on first hand interviews, so it reads as fresh and interesting, not just regurgitated stuff from other books. We find ourselves in worlds where boffins were working at the cutting edge, producing innovative solutions, often with very little money. 

This is not a new book - far from it, the final chapter on Beagle 2 finishes with the failure of the mission in 2003. I found a copy online and paid a pittance for it. If you like this blog, I'm confident that you'll enjoy this book, so go get yourself a copy.