 Master and commander Britain’s Royal Navy in the 18th and 19th centuries has a reasonable claim to be the most dominant fighting force in history. During the Napoleonic Wars it destroyed 30 French ships of the line — the largest and most powerful ships — for each one lost; British vessels were expected to be able to engage and defeat opponents with up to 50% more guns and crew in combat. But, the technologist Arjun Panickssery notes, Britain’s navy was not ahead of its rivals technologically: “French ships were even marginally superior” at times. Nor were they better at gunnery or other specific skills. The key difference with other navies was one of incentives and organization, Panickssery argues. The navy was unusually meritocratic, with no way of buying promotion. Captains also could not remove their own senior officers, meaning headquarters had “watchdogs” on board distant ships. And captains were not only encouraged but actually ordered — on pain of court-martial and death — to engage any ship of their own or smaller size, and to attack from upwind from where it was harder to run away. It meant the Royal Navy suffered less from the widespread problem of commanders shirking combat: At Trafalgar, over a third of the French fleet did not join the battle at all. Euro trip None of the world’s 20 biggest tech companies are European, and the continent is falling further behind all the time. European tech users use non-European platforms: Google, Instagram, YouTube, Amazon. US tech firms invest vastly more in R&D, and European startups are less likely to scale up than their US equivalents. Spotify and Revolut are “rare, anecdotal exceptions” which do not negate the “clear picture of systemic failure” painted by the numbers, the French entrepreneur Nicolas Colin argued. But, he says, there is reason for optimism. European tech has tried to follow Silicon Valley’s “disruptive” model with limited success, but China’s rapid rise has shown there are other ways. “A new generation of players is emerging who understand that Europe must develop its own distinctive approach,” says Colin, “one that transforms our supposed weaknesses into strategic advantages.” Among them is Europe’s fragmented geography: “Europe’s tech renaissance must be decentralised.” Fresh ideas How did medieval Venice get its fresh water? Unlike other cities of the time, it couldn’t dig wells to groundwater: It sat (and sits) on mudflats in a saltwater lagoon. Even if you did excavate, the mud was unstable and tended to collapse. Importing water from the mainland by aqueduct or boat left it vulnerable to siege. But a city must have water. Venice solved the problem in an ingenious way, the civil engineer Connor Tabarrok notes in Of All Trades. Courtyards in the city are subtly sloped from a central peak, directing rainwater into inlets. Below the ground is a huge, inverted, bell-shaped chamber of waterproof clay, filled with layers of sand as natural filtration. The water that gathers in the bell is accessible through a central well: There were 6,000 in Venice by the 16th century, and the result was “surprisingly clean drinking water in a city where such a resource should have been scarce.” The city switched to modern water infrastructure in the 1800s, but “as water scarcity becomes a growing global concern, [Venice’s system] reminds us that innovative solutions often lie in understanding and working with local environmental conditions rather than fighting against them.” |
