Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin

by Francis Spufford

Britain is the only country in the world to have cancelled its space programme just as it put its first rocket into orbit. Starting with this forgotten episode, The Backroom Boys tells the bittersweet story of modern British engineers and inventors. Sad, inspiring, funny and ultimately triumphant, it follows the technologists whose work kept Concorde flying, created the computer game, conquered the mobile-phone business, saved the human genome for the human race - and who sent the Beagle 2 probe to burrow in the cinnamon sands of Mars.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, History, Engineering, Technology, Space, British Literature

276 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2003

About the author

Officially, I was a writer of non-fiction for the first half of my career, and I certainly enjoyed scraping up against the stubborn, resistant, endlessly interesting surface of the real world. I like awkwardness, things that don't fit, things that put up a struggle against being described. But when I was excited by what I was writing about, what I wanted to do with my excitement was always to tell a story. So every one of my non-fiction books borrowed techniques from the novel, and contained sections where I came close to behaving like a novelist. The chapter retelling the story of Captain Scott's last Antarctic expedition at the end of "I May Be Some Time", for example, or the thirty-page version of the gospel story in "Unapologetic". It wasn't a total surprise that in 2010 I published a book, "Red Plenty", which was a cross between fiction and documentary, or that afterwards I completed my crabwise crawl towards the novel with the honest-to-goodness entirely-made-up "Golden Hill". This was a historical novel about eighteenth century New York written like, well, an actual eighteenth century novel: hyperactive, stuffed with incident, and not very bothered about genre or good taste. It was elaborate, though. It was about exceptional events, and huge amounts of money, and good-looking people talking extravagantly in a special place. Nothing wrong with any of that: I'm an Aaron Sorkin fan and a Joss Whedon fan, keen on dialogue that whooshes around like a firework display. But those were the ingredients of romance, and there were other interesting things to tell stories about, so my next novel "Light Perpetual" in 2021 was deliberately plainer, about the lives that five London children might have had if they hadn't been killed in 1944 by a German rocket. Ordinary lives, in theory; except that there are no ordinary lives, if you look closely enough. It was longlisted for the Booker Prize. Then in 2023 I returned to strong forms of story, and to plotting more like "Golden Hill", with a noir crime novel called "Cahokia Jazz", set in the 1922 of a different timeline, where a metropolis full of Native Americans stood on the banks of the Mississippi. I was aiming for something like a classic black and white movie, except one you never saw, because it came from another history than our own. It won the Sidewise Award for alternate history. And now (2025/6) I've written a historical fantasy, "Nonesuch", set during the London Blitz, where as well as German bombs the protagonist Iris needs to deal with time-travelling fascists, and the remnants of Renaissance magic, preserved in the statues of the burning city. As writers of fantasy, I like C S Lewis, Ursula Le Guin, John Crowley, Tamsyn Muir, Guy Gavriel Kay, Katherine Addison. If you like them, you may like this.

Biography: I was born in 1964, the child of two historians. I'm married to the Dean of an Anglican cathedral in eastern England, I have two daughters, and I teach writing at Goldsmiths College, London.

Reviews

[Edmole · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poetry of science and determination told with equal eloquence and passion. A book about British people calmly and good naturedly going about complex tasks for good reasons. Francis Spufford teaches at Goldsmiths about 2km from my house, and having read this and Red Plenty, it is another reason I am proud to be a South Londoner again. (ZONE 2, EAST LONDON LINE, COFFEE SHOPS, ART STUDENT GRADUATE WOMEN, NICE FRONT DOORS)

The book details six Quiet British Science Triumphs of the post war era as the UK adapted to a gutted industrial base and the absence of Empire. Our BOFFINS SLASH EGGHEADS kept working on big ideas. Rockets (We got a rocket into space!), Concorde (We made the coolest plane of all time and shared it with the French!), Computer Games (We made ELITE on a flipping BBC MICRO. I mean COME ON. If that doesn't make you proud to be British...), Mobile Phones (It made me not hate Vodafone briefly!), DNA (This is one of the great David and Goliath stories, or maybe more like a superhero story where the villain punches Clark Kent and breaks his hand 'cause it turned out he was punching an unassuming Superman. Basically, I'm not going to be able to walk past The Wellcome Trust in Euston without punching the air from now on.), and Space Biology Exploration on Mars (Naming your landing craft after Darwin's ship takes some balls).

Underneath all the cab-driver anger, internet trolling, sex tape leaking, hate-thy-neighbour Tory voting dogshit on the shoe grimness that this country sometimes feels like, there is still a great deal of hard work, decent people and worthwhile achievement. This book allows you to mainline the satisfaction of that fact.

Ed

[Victoria Roe · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't at all sure of this when I started but, on reflection, I think it just took me a while to get used to the style of writing. I really don't read a lot of this sort of book but it was very engagingly written with a lot of humour and some great use of interview quotes throughout. I struggled slightly with some of the engineering detail but managed to get through it; I think it's fairly telling that the two stories I found the hardest to get through (the rockets and the radio) were probably also the most techy. The Concorde and Human Genome were fantastic; I surprised myself in that I enjoyed the political manoeuvres so much. I also enjoyed Beagle 2, partly for the politicking but also as a story that I could actively remember, with the added benefit of hindsight (the book was written when the fate of Beagle 2 was still unknown). However, the standout favourite of mine was the development of Elite. The characters were fantastically drawn in a modest amount of words and by cleverly using the views of their colleagues, and it was so funny throughout. But I think the best element was just how much that story symbolised the larger point Spufford was trying to make about underfunded, desperately clever people in a shed changing the future of technology.

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

I struggled a bit with this because I found the style too whimsical, which is not a complaint I make often. It's also a little out of date now, being published in 2002 and listing Lemmings and Tomb Raider as the cutting edge of videogame achievement. But the stories of British scientific achievement are interesting. I appreciated the way Spufford tied them together (the chapter on the Human Genome Project opens with a call received over the UK's mobile phone network, whose setup was described in the previous chapter), and also the panels from the Eagle comic at the start of each chapter.

[Chasquis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Have you ever wondered how Concorde actually got built? Just the politics alone would make up a chapter or a thesis! The cutting edge technology and the whole sacrificial nature of the project; both we and the French had to make offerings to the gods of the air, of our egos, our secrets and ever vaster sums of money for the thing to fly at all, let alone cross the Atlantic on a regular, noisy and super expensive basis.
From supersonic to microscopic, Francis Spufford covers some of the more outstanding dimensions of British applied science. Reading somewhat like a novel, this book tells you everything you want to know about the breakthroughs in DNA studies (more politics again,) the Beagle shot at Mars (yet more politics but with extra PR) and the amazing in and outs of mobile phone coverage both here and abroad, (and yet more political shenanigans.)
I am extremely grateful to Francis Spufford for explaining the social and technical history of gaming too by the way, as well as all the cells, as in phones.... and bodies.
A cure for cancer must be next, speaking of which, Red Plenty by the same author touches on the Soviet approach to applied social and medical science, even delineating the inexorable progress of a carcinoma within an inventor's lung. That is a bit of a page turner too.
The message is that Britains boffins were still biffing away for Blighty, despite all appearances to the contrary, post war acidie aside, knowledge was passed on, stuff was invented and shared here in the UK. Who'd have have thought it?

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book, insightul and well written also does not skimp on the detail. Especially around the universe generating algorithm for Elite.

Language a but too fruity in places for my liking but not a major detractor.

[Daniel Polansky]

The history of post-war British industry as told in a series of technological innovations emblematic of the (sometimes self-defeating) British genius. As in Red Plenty, I admire Spufford's ability to weave a vivid narrative out of obtuse subject matter.

[Gavin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Black Arrow, Concorde, Elite, Vodafone, the race for the human genome, and the lamented Beagle 2. £9 million, £900 million, £0.09 million, £10 million, £150 million, £40 million: combined, a tiny fraction of the Apollo budget. It takes an eye to spot what these have in common, to honour them as the giant creative landmarks they are.

When the old industries faltered in Britain, the ingenious spirit of the backroom boys survived. The urge to build the future detached itself from lathes and wind tunnels, and reappeared in the new technologies of software, gene sequencing and wireless communications.

(Note also Spufford's taste - he avoids the obvious exemplars, steam, longitude, telegraph, Tube Alloys, Bletchley, Radar.)

It isn’t a category mistake, or an idle compliment, to call PACE2 poetry. Engineering is poetic, in the ancient sense of the original Greek word our ‘poetry’ derives from. Poesis meant making. And so every maker is a kind of poet; everyone who wants to subject ideas to the tempering of existence, and is willing to stay with the process as the ideas are changed by being realised, and cares enough to labour until the creation comes right. The words that might be used to describe a piece of engineering are secondary things, limping attempts to convey an act of making that didn’t happen in the medium that’s now being asked to express it. The poetry isn’t in the description. It’s in the numbers, it’s in the algorithms, it’s in the system design... We used to quote the joking definition of art,’ John Causebrook told me. ‘“An art is a science with more than seven variables.” So we used to say, yeah, we’ve got more than seven variables. We must be artists.’

He is best in class at spotting the philosophical and emotional significance of technical things.

Every tool, every machine that human beings ever invented has created the possibility of a new physical state for the person using it...

Whether the components are atoms or bits, ideas or steel girders, building something is a process of subduing wishes to possibilities. Some of the best bridges, programs, novels – not all of the best, but some – come about because their makers have immersed themselves in the task with such concentration, such intent openness to what the task may bring, that the effort of making wishes real itself breeds new wishes. ...

More than any rocket ever built in Europe, [Concorde] was the European equivalent to the Apollo programme, a gasp-inducing, consciously grand undertaking that changed the sense, in those who contemplated it, of what human beings were capable of... Concorde has a payload capacity of only 7 per cent of its takeoff mass, a ratio more reminiscent of a satellite launcher

Asserting a proprietary right over the whole genome was not like holding a patent for, say, a particular model of car; it was like saying you had a patent on the very idea of a car in general, a patent that covered every conceivable self-propelled personal transportation device there ever had been – and ever might be in future – while your patent lasted. People kept saying, in 1998, that the twenty-first century was going to be the age of the life sciences, the century when applied genetics banished a thousand diseases, abolished a thousand sources of suffering, creating the same kind of step change in human mastery over the terms of human existence that mass mobility had done in the twentieth century thanks to the internal combustion engine. Well, in 1898, tiny manufacturers all over Europe and North America had been experimenting with different ways to fit a petrol motor together with four wheels and a transmission. Only a few designs, from a few firms, prospered; but it was the multiple experiments in multiple directions that allowed the few successful designs to emerge and to form the foundation of the car industry.

It's a beautiful view of the world - or rather, a beautiful search. Spufford actively finds or forges beautiful parallels, not unlike the angels he mentions from Wings of Desire: one “attuned yourself to the particular concerns of that voice, its special idioms, its rhythm of experience; and now you let it fall, and searched again through the crowd, and took up another.”


He goes and interviews these ascended nerds. They have names like "John Scott-Scott" and "Jim Scragg". Their offices are cupboard-sized. They often work on a midcentury civil servant pittance.

Those who survive from the heyday of British rocketry all live in detached, modern houses in Home Counties commuter villages or Midlands suburbs. So does Mr Dommett. He, like them, drove home every day from establishments shrouded in secrecy to family tea and an after-supper pint in the Green Man. But he inhabits a much shaggier version of suburban pastoral than his colleagues. Their houses are ultra-neat, with outbreaks of supernaturally competent DIY, like externalisations of the kind of mind that adjusts a complex system until it’s just so. His is surrounded by a runaway experiment in growing wild flowers... These Morris men came dancing up the street, led by this big fat bloke in a kind of Andy Pandy outfit who was bopping people on the head with a pig’s bladder – and I said to my wife, “Sweetheart, you won’t believe me, but that man is one of the brains behind Britain’s nuclear defence.”’

The book is also wise about the British state and the peculiar organisms it supports or supported (the mad MP, the slash-and-burn Conservative, the impassive civil servant, the trade union suit, the nationalised CEO). Also about the Two Cultures - writing beautiful, effusive stuff about Kantorovich and the boffins is Spufford's rebuke of the dichotomy (though more of a rebuke to the foolish arts people who ignore half of human creativity and thought).

To a good half of their fellow students, of course, they were just indistinguishable nerds. They had come to a place where the arts/sciences split in British education (and British culture, for that matter) manifested itself as a social split. Humanities students mostly didn’t hang out with science students, and vice versa. This wasn’t a matter of class division, since the science students came from the same mix of backgrounds as the arts ones, or of active hostility either: indifference and mutual incomprehension did the work of separation. It was a difference of style, more than anything. The arts students valued verbal prowess and they looked for the complexity that made their studies exciting in the forest of unpredictable connections that law or history or literature or anthropology kept ceaselessly throwing up. In their spare time, they put on plays, drank cheap Bulgarian wine, and protested against Mrs Thatcher. Oh, and had sex without worrying about their parents hearing them through the bedroom wall. To them, the way the scientists got their helping of complexity, by rooting around among the factual bones of the universe, was out of reach. They weren’t mathematically equipped to see it...

He believes in gift economies, your work as your art, and shielding some things from Econ 101 (obeying a higher economics which includes beauty and dignity as variables).

by having people who were proud of what they were doing, the British were getting the kind of quality that was needed without the sophisticated quality control methods that were being used in America.

Spufford is thus able to write about the deep idiocy of both Benn and Thatcher, and has an acute sense of both the vast importance and self-congratulatory delusions of commerce:

Under the recessed halogen lights of the Red Carpet Club, very little contradicted this perspective. There were logos woven into the carpet, and printed onto the porcelain of the coffee cups. No one was gross enough to demand actual cash for the coffee, or for the orange juice in the glass jug on the snowy linen cloth... This was a room for the new masters of the universe. Out there, beyond the smoked-glass windows, everything existed in order to be bought and sold, from thousand-acre lots of edge-city building land down to... the order of the nucleotides in every human cell; everything existed in order to be divided, packaged, transformed, exchanged, shifted between the multiplying warehouses of proliferating business parks, and gently squeezed, gently milked for the margin that you then paid to be admitted back into little bubbles of quiet corporate utopia like this, where the flight announcements were delivered at a sympathetic murmur and every article you read in the free copies of Fast Company and Business 2.0 in the magazine rack confirmed that moving goods through the market was the one, the true, the only occupation of mankind.

It didn’t obey the rules of scientific speech, which say that you should only claim what you are already sure of, what you have proved. Instead, it followed the rules of good PR, as taught by every investment bank presently engaged in guiding unprofitable companies along the short, beautiful road to a listing on the NASDAQ. These rules were different: you should claim everything you can, they said, that can’t be disproved. Claim Big, in other words, and Cover Your Back. Accordingly, the press release ended with the standard piece of legal boilerplate that insured against baulky behaviour by the future you’d just declared you were seizing. ‘Certain statements in this press release and its attachments are forward-looking. These may be identified by the use of forward-looking words or phrases such as “believe”, “expect”, “anticipate”, “intend”, “should”, “planned”, “estimated”, “potential” and “will” among others … The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 provides a “safe harbour” for such forward-looking statements.’

The forgotten space programme is the most moving bit (the successful launch came after the programme had already been cancelled, so "their sad satellite Prospero... the magician who lays down his book, who gives up power over earth and heaven"). The British Interplanetary Society nerds cheer when a V2 lands near their pub, because hey someone made it to space. ("this was certainly the first V2 to be greeted at the receiving end with laughter and excitement. The BIS rose to their feet and cheered.... In terms of deaths per reichsmark, it was considerably less lethal than a handgun.") The British rockets were handmade, producing invisible superheated steam exhaust. The largest of them was 137cm wide. The entire R&D budget, culminating in a successful launch, was £9m, 3 thousand times smaller than Apollo's.

Dribbles of HTP left behind after a test in the twists of a pipe assembly would drain out onto the sleeve of the person taking it apart: ‘Instantly the whole sleeve catches fire, pooff, as quickly as that. So everybody worked in twos, with one of them holding a running hose, and you just flicked the hose onto your mate when he was on fire, and he’d go, “Oh, that was a nuisance...

'I would not underestimate the romantic reasons why we got into Black Arrow,’ he says. ‘Even people who worked in the ministry went home and read science fiction, saw science-fiction stuff on the television; they dreamed too

It's not a particularly patriotic book, but for once I find myself fond of a national subculture. British engineering is depicted as quiet, bespoke, clever, economical, surviving in an American world in those places "where small brilliant teams could create the products".

‘If you don’t know what to do, do something, and measure it'...

No one I met in radio engineering talks the way other British engineers do, with a rueful sense of operating small, of having to make do with inadequate means, and this is part of the reason why. Vodafone had the cash. It could pay the price of its ambitions. From now on, Vodafone would be a bidder in almost every competition for a mobile licence, everywhere.

His political points are made in passing, like when he contrasts the British failure to launch space or nuclear industries with the French nursery successes ("The market... enormous, and the French, who stuck with space as much for la gloire as from commercial calculation, would inherit an impressive piece of it. Ariane makes a hefty profit, most financial years... Where RAF Fairford remained a shabby military base, minimally adapted for flight development work, its counterpart facility at Toulouse became the nucleus of a giant new industrial complex. (It’s now the nerve centre of Airbus)"). He is thrilled by the freedom we gave John Sulston: "He never had to write a grant application. (When he wrote his first one in 1989, asking the Medical Research Council for a million pounds to buy two gene sequencers, the answer arrived as a half-page handwritten fax. It said yes.)... John Sulston always had the same answer when an entrepreneur approached him, even in ambiguous cases where there might have been room for discussion. Sorry, no deal. ‘There is nothing for sale at the Sanger Centre.’"

Every country in the world could have one of these histories of their sublime nerds, and should. (Yes, every country.) But the others won't, because they don't have anyone as good as Spufford.

[Tim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating book looking into the development 6 British technical and geeky projects involving rockets, DNA, home computers and mobile phones. Some were more successful than others! Sadly the edition I read ends in late 2003 just before the British Beagle 2 was due to land on Mars. At least the author was open to the risks and possibility of the probe being unsuccessful, and concentrated on the joy of the probe getting built and launched at all.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cracking account of what British scientists have brought to the modern world, touching on the space programme, the making of Vodaphone, Concorde, gene therapy and computer graphics. Interesting, informative and, on the race to prevent the an American mapping the human genome and selling it, quite inspiring.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book covers the following subjects:

* Black Knight satellite launcher
* Concorde
* Elite (Acorn BBC computer game from the 80s)
* Mobile Phone
* Human Genome Project
* Beagle 2 Mars lander

Overall the book is pretty good.

The Black Knight chapter (something I had never heard of) was interesting, and highlighted the UKs failure to spend money or have a clear strategy for space, unfortunately, France and other EU countries did have a plan.

The Concorde chapter was also interesting, Concordes capabilities seem awesome even now, but the focus of the chapter is mostly on the running cost of Concorde and how to make a profit. Once again France seemed more willing to spend money on technology than the UK.

The Elite story was my main reason for reading the book. It is a really nice account of the creation of a game which was totally ahead of its time.

The Mobile phone chapter was the least interesting. It focuses on how to build the mast infrastructure in the UK. Sounds dull? it mostly was dull to me, although the history of the mobile companies we know today (mostly Vodafone) was interesting.

The Human Genome chapter was very interesting, UK scientists stopped a US business from commercialising something which really should be in the public domain.

The Beagle 2 chapter was great. I remember following the news when this should have landed on Mars. I was very disappointed with its failure, and even more so when I heard Colin Pillinger had died. Once again, the UKs unwillingness to spend money plays a major part.

The bottom line, the UK government comes across as very shortsighted and stingy in many of the areas covered. This does not surprise me but it is a shame.

[Tony Lawrence]

(retrospective review c.2011) Who better [than Francis Spufford] to get under the skin and into the tool boxes of this unique breed of British boffins; his memoir about a boys life in books and the boys-own adventure that was the antarctic explorations.

This just had to be good, even without the brilliant ‘Universe in a bottle’ chapter – of which more later. I know that Spufford is a thorough and intelligent writer, but he had a challenge to ring any excitement from such seemingly dull raw material; the UK’s involvement in mapping the human genome, getting a small satellite into orbit and planning mobile phone networks, for example. But, in all these, he creates a potted thriller, the underfunded British boffin against the world, success stories in new industries and new technologies. Sometimes the politics and economic detail is a bit too much (Concorde) and sometimes the science went above my head (DNA), but these are genuinely interesting stories. The chapter about the birth of personal computing and game design was sublime, especially if you were a 16-year-old boy in 1981; if only I had been a bit better at programming, my ZX Spectrum could have been my route to a fortune!

A quote from FS, 'Engineering is poetic ... Poesis meant making. And so every maker is a kind of poet'

[Jennifer · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book was very readable although I am not enough of a scientist, especially at the engineering and physics end of things to be confident I always followed.

As someone else has said, this book is a love letter to British engineering (and science) through the medium of chapters on Concorde, Beagle 2, the Sanger Centre, mobile telephony and others. It is affectionate and wry rather than jingo-istic, thank goodness, and the stories don't always have happy endings, although I had to wipe away a tear at the end of the chapter on the human genome and the Sanger Centre. Perhaps that was because I know someone (a backroom woman) who worked there at that time and the special atmosphere of the place was something I already knew to be real. Or perhaps it was because of how things have changed for the worse in the way the British approach science, engineering and the world in the almost 20 years since the book was published.

[Dmitry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of several "tales from the trenches" about British engineers. I knew that this book has a chapter about "Elite" -- the game that I played extensively in middle school and was fascinated about -- but it was in the middle of the book, so I decided to start at the beginning. And gradually I read the whole book. It has chapters about Concord -- that I always wanted to read about, and British space program -- which I did not know anything about, and Vodafone and dawn of GSM networks -- which was my bread and butter for a number of years. So, overall, I was even a bit disappointed when the book ended. If anything mentioned tickles your fancy, know that chapters are independent and you can choose what to read and what to skip.

[Steve Green · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this selection of what can best be described as case-studies of British ingenuity. As a computer game nerd the insights in the ‘Elite’ chapter were excellent, and the Black Knight chapter equally so for the space nerd in me. I won’t mention them all, but there’s something for everyone, and if you want some concise histories of some truly great engineering projects with a British background this is the book for you. It’s accessible and interesting, with jus the right amount of depth.

[Philip Talmage · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well written; an entertaining insight into the (mainly financial and political) problems facing British engineers post-1945.
It deals with only a limited number of projects, as detailed in the blurb - hence only four stars.
I would have liked to read about much, much more, including debacles such as the Advanced Passenger Train or British Shipbuilders, and successes (and eventual or partial successes) such as Arm, Inmos or the Channel Tunnel. And, right now, Crossrail and HS2.

[Sean · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure how a book about brilliant engineering feats could be so boring, but Spufford pulls it off. Ended up skimming the second half, hoping for interesting tidbits, finding few.

[Stuart]

Entertaining.

[Kate Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a sort of love letter to British engineering, but a deprecating one with notes of doubt. Spufford looks at projects from the Black Arrow space rocket to the computer game Elite to the Human Genome Project. Sometimes, like that last example, the Brits formed part of an international effort, but it is very much the Brits that Spufford is writing about.

Spufford is playing up the idea of the unsung hero, the small project dwarfed by international (especially US) comparison, which isn’t actually always as true as he implies (but obviously in the case of, say, the space programme, it really is). A book about technology, especially one including ongoing projects, does risk feeling dated quickly, and in the 11 years since this was first published, things have changed. In fact, the paperback edition includes an author’s note at the end with updates that had already happened in the first year since publication.

This is an interesting, entertaining book that brings to life largely forgotten (or possibly never known to begin with) stories. Spufford doesn’t just explain the science and technology well, he bubbles with enthusiasm, pouring praise on the men and women (but as he admits himself, mostly men) who made these projects happen. I was actually a little saddened when later chapters concentrated more on the policy and politics of making projects happen, not because that’s not a valid part of the story, but because it meant there was less of that almost childlike enthusiasm and adulation.

- See my full review: http://www.noseinabook.co.uk/2014/12/...

[Gordon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved every piece of this book. One of the best non-fiction I have read.

Six chapters/sections on various "British" scientific endeavors: Black Knight (Rockets to Space!), Concorde (Wow!), Elite, Cellphones (I still hate Oftel), DNA (Saving the Human Genome project from corporate America) and Beagle 2 (our last, best hope).

Every one well written. Every one a good length. Every one compelling.

In a parochial somewhat British way all of these stories struck a chord, but they are also great stories. I'm a non-scientific geek (see stories 1 & 6). I work with cellphone software (see story 4); my high school years impacted by the games world of Elite (see story 3); Concorde is... Concorde (see story 2) and the Human Genome Project and Wellcome Trust (story 5) makes me believe defeating corporate America is possible (it was almost stolen from the world, and the American public by the American law that forbids the State to compete against private enterprise).

You might also like How Mumbo-jumbo Conquered the World if you like this; but read this first.

[Ian Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Utterly brilliant. Six quirky histories of postwar British engineering - everything from Concord to Mars exploration. Not all of it successful, but then we Brits thrive on qualified failure. "Better to have loved and lost....." and "It doesn't matter whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game." Pure BS, but a great way of disguising failure!

The weakest of the six? Perhaps the story of 'Elite' - an apparently groundbreaking computer game. No, I hadn't heard of it either.

And the best? Easily the story of the human genome project. Not just because this was a profoundly important piece of science combined with some remarkable perseverance and extraordinary hard work, but because this particular episode in the history of innovation exemplifies the war for knowledge. A war fought between those who see all information as a commodity to be bought, sold and traded, and those who wish to protect certain types of knowledge from the vagaries of the market place. The good guys won this particular battle, but the war is far from won.

I would highly recommend this book for this great chapter alone.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

In my favorite sections, Backroom Boys is an immensely readable account of technological and technical innovations in Britain, and at its finest, it sustains an incredible amount of tension over whether--or, at any rate, how--specific plans will bear fruit. Because of varying levels of technical detail and (my) technical expertise, I didn't find all the sections equally involving (and since I'm weakest at physics, the opening chapter on rockets was the one I found hardest to follow), but a remarkable amount of this was easy enough for even a lay-reader to follow. I especially liked the chapter on the development of Elite, the British computer game that effectively invented open gaming environments and free play, but the political maneuvering and specific work details of the Human Genome Project fell at a close second. Recommended especially for readers who might not be scientifically-minded, but who want to broaden their horizons.

[Fiona · Rating 3 out of 5]

A collection of essays about a selection of British projects in science and engineering, ranging from rocket-design, to computer-game development, to the siting of base stations for cellphone networks. The individual essays are fascinating and Spufford describes the technical and organisational issues extremely well, but he makes no attempt to pull them together - which is the same problem I had with I may be some time , his book about the place that the polar regions have in the British imagination.

[Steve · Rating 4 out of 5]

For anyone who wants to know how the Brits established themselves as leaders in the cellphone and computer games industries (amongst others), then this is a great introduction. More importantly though, it describes the inspiring and motivational "can-do" attitude of some of the most important applied scientists, engineers and scientific entrepreneurs. The story of a bunch of men driving around London in a van trying to work out mobile phone cell blackspots made me chuckle. If you like this book, then Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" is also worth a read.

[Doug Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a report of British science and technology which reached its summit under the Bad Boy of British politics, Tony Benn, from early radar through to the trials and tribulations of Concorde, which was abandoned by the Austerity drive in the early 2000s. It's a wonderful story, mainly of individual effort and persuasion of top scientists working against often in comprehending politicians.

I must admit I lost interest once the story swung into the political arena, knowing what the result would be, but the first few chapters were fascinating.

[Janet]

British non-fiction author writes a love letter to technology. He covers the period from post-WWII British rocketry, through the supersonic Concorde, software startups, cell phones, and mapping the human genome. He's a wonderful writer, with an amazing gift for the delicious anecdote. There was a computer game in the 1980s that sold 150,000 copies -- the same as the number of BBC Micro computers in the world, and that release only ran on the BBC Micro. How's that for market penetration?

[Dick Davies · Rating 4 out of 5]

A ripping yarn of British boffins which climaxes with the arrival of a British suitcase on Mars. Don't let the boffin bit put you off this book makes advanced science (including the rocket type) understandable and fascinating.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

You can find my review of Backroom Boys on my book blog.

[David Tucker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some great facts and insight to untalked about technologies but sometimes goes on too long about to and froing between government etc. Glad to have read it, favourite chapter was on history of mobile phone

[Allan Donald · Rating 3 out of 5]

Made me think of Vodafone in a whole new light. And want to play Elite again.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

Readable technical stuff; interesting about how companies attempted to patent the gene.