Peter Ball

The Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), London, has a monthly magazine entitled the “E & T” magazine, which has a regular column, written by Justin Pollard called the “Eccentric Engineer”. It is factual, informative and above all witty. Pollard is not an engineer but a historian with an inkling for science and technology. In his column he brings  personalities that were little known or have been forgotten, along with their inventions back to life. A collection of his articles was published in the book “Buses, Bankers & the Beer of Revenge” and in my opinion it should be on every engineer’s bookshelf.

Engineers tend to be seen as a serious and dour lot and what they do seems by many to be rather boring. However, the fifty short stories contained in Pollard’s book would astonish the reader and change that perception. Each story is no longer than a single magazine page, yet on reading you are always left with a smile on your face and you have learnt something new.

Engineering in all its disciplines is the bedrock on which the modern world rests. It may not be glamorous or trendy but just imagine for a moment a world without engineers – no cell phones, no computers, no electrical appliances, no buildings, bridges or roads, no trains & boats & planes (Burt Bacharach, 1965 Top Ten hit). We would be back in the Stone Age.

Humankind has needed engineering skills from the time that humans abandoned the nomadic life of the hunter gatherer in favour...

If I undertook a street survey and asked passers-by how much they weighed or how tall they were, the answers I would get back would be dependent on what system of weight and measures a person was brought up on and was familiar with. Grandparents would most likely answer in imperial units (pounds, feet & inches), and their grandchildren would reply in metric units (kilograms and metres), the reason for this is that South Africa converted to the metric system in the early 1970’s. Metrication started here in 1967 with the appointment of a Metrication Advisory Board to oversee the change over from the old units to the new (click here for a short history of Metrication in South Africa) with the bulk of the process taking place between 1971 and 1973. The authoritarian Nationalist Government speeded up events by banning the sale of measuring devices calibrated in imperial units, and by 1977 the Board was made redundant. South Africans on the whole took metrication without complaint and accepted it as a move forward, just as they had with the decimalisation of our currency 10 years before (1961) when the country changed from Pounds, Shillings and Pence (£.s.d.) to Rands and cents (at an exchange rate of R2-00 to £1). The changing of the currency (on 14-02-1961) not only signified going decimal but also South Africa’s impending departure from the British Commonwealth, which would be on the 31st May 1961 when South Africa became a republic (59 years after the...

The reason I say this is that the game of football means different things to different people. If I were an Australian, football (or footy) would mean Aussie Rules, to a New Zealander football would be Rugby football and to an American, football is a contact sport where the ball is handled rather than kicked more akin to rugby. Europeans, Africans, Asians and South Americans know football as a predominantly kicking game with the passing of the ball by use of the foot between players: i.e. football played to the rules of Association Football (a.k.a. Soccer).

Association Football is without a doubt, the world’s most popular team game, as it has spread across the globe from its original small beginnings in the Public Schools of Victorian England (Public is a misnomer as they were private fee paying schools for the sons of the gentry). The famous schools, Charterhouse, Eton, Harrow, Marlborough, Rugby, Shrewsbury, Westminster and Winchester each played their own form of football which was entirely controlled by their pupils (masters were not involved) and when they went up to the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge they wished to continue playing football, but to whose rules? The schoolboys of Rugby school, in 1846, were the first to lay down a written set of rules for their particular version of football, the others would soon follow suit and as there were no inter-school matches at the time it mattered little that each school had its own set of rules.

As time went by...

'Meccano' was the brainchild of Frank Hornby (1863-1936) who developed and patented in 1901, a metal model construction kit for boys called “Mechanics Made Easy”, which was the precursor of “Meccano”. The name change came about in 1908, and is thought to have emanated from the expression “Make and know” as pronounced with a Scouse accent, as Hornby was a Liverpudlian and got his brainwave by watching the cranes loading ships at Liverpool Docks. In Victorian and Edwardian times it was common for a father to make wooden toys for his children, however, Hornby would cut strips and plates from off-cuts of sheet metal to make toys for his two sons - Roland and Douglas. His hobby would in time become a business and make him a millionaire.

Frank Hornby (Wikipedia)

In the first decade of the 20th century Meccano Outfits (box sets) began selling in volume to budding young mechanics throughout the British Empire and Europe and by the time of the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 Meccano Ltd. would relocate to larger premises to meet the demand. The new factory was situated in Binns Road, Wavertree, Liverpool which became the company headquarters for the next 60 years. During the interwar years (1919-1939) Meccano Ltd. would diversify into other lines of toys. In 1920 they would introduce “Hornby O gauge” (1:43 scale) tin plate model trains...

Robert Crawley, the 7th Earl of Grantham (a British peer) is a fictional character in the popular television period drama, “Downton Abbey”, set one hundred years ago. His family seat is Downton Abbey, Yorkshire, where he lives with his wife Cora, the Countess Grantham and their three daughters, the Ladies Mary, Edith and Sybil. He, being one of the landed gentry, generates his major income from tenant farmers farming on his Estate which he inherited from his father the 6th Earl. The rub is that he has no son and heir to inherit from him and his title must pass, on his death, to the nearest male heir. This is due to the law of primogeniture, which precludes the female line inheriting.

In the very first episode of Downton Abbey the nearest male heir, Robert’s cousin James and his cousin’s son Patrick are both lost at sea when the RMS Titanic of the White Star Line sinks in the early hours of the 15th April 1912 after hitting an iceberg on her maiden voyage to New York. A search is made for a more distant male relative to become next in line and the family lawyer, Murray finds that it is Matthew Crawley, a solicitor from Manchester.

The 'Upstairs Downstairs' goings on at Downton continue for another 13 years (1912-1925) through six series (screened between 2010 and 2015) and rumours abound that a full length feature film is a possibility, although Maggy Smith says her character, Lady Violet, the Dowager Countess of Grantham (Robert’s...

The first thing I did when researching this piece of writing was to look at a modern physical map of South Africa and envision that the urban areas and the modern road network shown thereupon were on a thin film that could be peeled away. What remained on the under layer were the physical features such as the coastline, rivers, escarpments and mountain ranges. It was a clean canvas on which I could put settlements on, but before I could do this I had to determine a date in history. I chose the year of 1841 as that was when the young David Livingstone, 28 years of age, first set foot on African soil.

Young David Livingstone

Livingstone is best remembered as the intrepid explorer who mapped out vast tracts of central Africa and who was thought lost in 'Darkest Africa' and then found on the shore of Lake Tanganyika at Ijiji (on 10th November 1871) by Henry Morton Stanley; his greeting to Livingstone of “Dr. Livingstone I presume?” has become one of most hackneyed (done to death) sayings in the English language.

When Dr. Livingstone came to Africa it was to be as a medical missionary, recruited by the London Missionary Society (LMS) and sent to join Robert Moffat at the Kuruman Mission, to preach the Gospel to...

In 1884, before Johannesburg ever existed and when herds of game still roamed free across the savannah, a young man left his home in the Eastern Cape in search of adventure in what was then the Eastern Transvaal (now known as Mpumalanga). His name was Percy Fitzpatrick (1862-1931) and he went hoping to find his fortune on the newly proclaimed goldfields. He, like so many others found nothing but disappointment but far from being downhearted he responded by making a living as a transport rider carrying supplies in an ox-wagon from Delagoa Bay (present day Maputo) to the goldfields of Barberton and Pilgrims Rest. It was tough going as the journey to and from the goldfields was through fever ridden bushveld, along rough trails on which the ox-wagons, travelling in convoy, rumbled along at the pace of the Ox. Each wagon had a team of 12 to 16 oxen and because of the heat during the day they travelled in two four hour shifts, the first before sunrise and the second after sunset. Seldom would they travel more than 20 miles (32 km) in a day and at the end of each shift the wagons were out-spanned, when men and oxen rested before it was time for the next shift.

“Outspan"...

In 2014 the monthly magazine “Civil Engineering” (published by the South African Institute of Civil Engineers) ran a series of articles entitled “A brief history of transport infrastructure in South Africa up to the end of the 20th century” (comprising ten chapters issued from January/February to November 2014), which gave an interesting account of the history of our roads, railways, harbours and airports. The author of the articles was Dr. Malcolm Mitchell, Senior Fellow of the SAICE, and in “Chapter 1: Setting the Scene”, he encouraged his readers to participate and add additional value to the topic. This is what I hope to do in a series of articles that will appear on the “Heritage Portal” in the coming months. To get the ball rolling I shall give an overview of today’s road infrastructure and then go back in time to when there were no roads only trails.

Road Map of South Africa (Durban 2012)

A three week summer holiday trip to the Cape, from Johannesburg, which entailed a round trip of 4000 km, opened my eyes to the splendour of our beautiful land. It would have been an easy option to hop on an aeroplane and arrive in Cape Town two hours later but to do so would have meant missing all that was in...

For those of us old enough to remember, there was a tune called the “Lift Girl’s Lament” by the British singer songwriter Jeremy Taylor (he who was banished from South Africa for deriding Apartheid), which had the immortal line “I might go a thousand feet a day but I’m not going to go that far”; the song told the tale of a lift operator in a downtown Johannesburg department store in the 1960’s.

The old lift entrance at Stuttafords in Johannesburg during restoration (The Heritage Portal)

Johannesburg was founded in 1886 and rose up from a mining camp to become a metropolis, the largest city in Southern Africa. Its beginning coincided with the coming together of the new technologies of electricity, the elevator (lift) and steel, which brought about a great revolution in architecture giving the opportunity to architects to go skywards.

Johannesburg Council Chamber and Skyline (The Heritage Portal)

Ever since the story of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11.4) mankind has tried to reach upwards into the sky, the spires of the great medieval cathedrals are a case in point, however the master...

We South Africans live in a polyglot society, which under our Constitution, has 11 official languages that “must enjoy parity of esteem and must be treated equitably”. Mother tongues range from Afrikaans to IsiZulu, from isiXhosa to Setswana, however to stop us being a modern Tower of Babel we largely use one language to communicate between each other and that is English. In doing so we are reflecting a world wide trend. In today’s world English has become the “Lingua Franca” replacing French as the language of diplomacy and German in the field of science. It has also become one of the essential languages for global trade.

In 21st century South Africa, English is used in many walks of life, in media and advertising, in education, law, commerce and government. English is the language of the big city especially Johannesburg, South Africa’s financial capital. Although should one drive 50 miles (80 km) in any direction out of “Egoli”, you are more likely to hear Afrikaans or an African language being spoken. How is it then that a European colonial language has managed to become so influential?

To answer this question a look at South African history from the beginning of the 19th century is needed.

The English language first came to the southern tip of Africa 1795 when the British occupied the Cape of Good Hope in order to protect their trade with India and the Orient. They left in 1803 as part of the terms of the Treaty of Amiens, but in January 1806 they returned for good, after...