The world’s long romance with speed may finally be ending.
Even if Concorde (协和式飞机) flies again, its antique nature was revealed as soon as
the Paris accident made people scratch their heads and ask quite why these odd
aircraft were still flying. Much of the technology that surrounded us has, when
we look at it afresh, a Jules Verne quality-solving problems that once seemed
important in ways that are ingenious but not necessarily efficient or
safe. The reorientation of science toward the biological and
computer frontiers is now an old story, but the 19th century fascination with
motive power has retained a powerful hold on our imaginations and our economies.
71. Advances in motive power were for a long while the main way in which
progress and national competition in technology were measured. First at sea,
then on the railways, then on the roads, in the air and finally in space, more
and more rapid movement was seen as an Carefree good and also, in some vague
way, as a key to a fuller understanding of the world. So
intoxicating was this ultimate way in which the growing speed and reach of
manmade vehicles could be used that when an unknown rocket enthusiast called
Hermann Oberth published his By Rocket To Interplanetary Space in the 1920s, it
represented such an escape from the difficulties of the present to the anxious
citizens of Weimar Germany (德国魏玛共和国) that it became a bestseller
overnight. 72. For individual sportsmen, pilots and drivers,
speed had the status of a privileged substance to which, in those early days,
only a minority had full access. Mechanized speed made men, and a few women,
into heroes, and it remains a commodity to which males, in particular, are
attracted. The front of the Boys Own annual of half a century ago would
typically feature a speeding train in the middle ground, a fast aeroplane above,
and a racing car in the foreground. Disentangling the genuine
advantages of speed from its cult aspects has always been a problem, and this
was certainly the case in the era in which Concorde was conceived. Land,
air and sea speed records had mattered since the 20s in a way inconceivable
today. This manic race was run on three tracks-of celebrity sport, of
competition between civil industries, and of military development. All three
were littered with casualties, whether spectators at Le Mans, Donald Campbell on
Coniston Water, or numerous test pilots and astronauts through the
years. Britain was slowing down on all three courses when
Concorde came along. Indeed the Concorde project survived in part because, as
Harold Wilson explained in his memoirs, the agreement with the French was
embodied in an international treaty, and they refused even to consider
abandoning or postponing the work. "We had little choice but to go on," the then
prime minister concluded. His lack of enthusiasm suggests that,
long before Concorde flew, some those responsible for it knew that it was not
going to be a practical aircraft, and also that the technical spin-off would be
less than advertised. The reason was that speed was such as dominant
consideration that everything else had to take second place. The result was an
aircraft that was both ahead of its tie and behind the times, since the era of
small-scale luxury air travel was over. A preoccupation with
speed has always gone hand in hand with a preoccupation with safety, the two
standards between them providing a way in which advanced states calibrate the
state of civilization. Increasing speeds have world lives in constant fear of
regression, of losing the scientific and organizational edge that enables it to
be both fast and safe. That is one reason why air and sea accidents can attain
such mythic status. The disparate treatment of first and third world accidents
in the Western press is probably due more to the feeling that accidents are
indicators of technical health than to any devaluation of American or Asian
lives. Speed still has its kingdom, but it is shrinking. Its
limits have long ago been reached on the roads, and its value in the air, even
for manned military aircraft, is diminished- agility and protection are as or
more important. 73. It is still marginally attractive to make trains go
faster. The pursuit of physical speed has been replaced by the pursuit of near
instantaneity on the Net, an aim which we may in time come to regard just as
skeptically. It is hard to imagine the mood in which David
Lean’s The Sound Barrier was made in 1952. breaking that barrier seemed to hold
the key to a mystery. But there was no mystery. Man can go faster, but that does
not mean it is worth doing so.