Radio appearance: robotic elephant trunks and controlling your computer by waving your hands

I discuss motion control computer interfaces, searching for oil deposits with satellite technology and robotic elephant trunks with Monocle 24's Matt Barbet.

Is the UK automotive industry on the road to revival?

Road to success: Vauxhall will build the new Astra in the UK

This week saw a big moment for UK manufacturing, one that probably should have received more attention than it has. According to March trade figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), Britain now makes more money from exporting cars than it spends on importing them for the first time since 1976.


The announcement yesterday that Vauxhall would build the new Astra at its Ellesmere Port plant was headline news, but even more important than the 2,100 jobs saved as a result was the longer-term trend that it represented: the turnaround of the UK automotive industry.


In recent months we’ve seen Honda and Nissan also announce the creation of hundreds of jobs at their UK plants while Jaguar Land Rover has pledged to invest a further £1bn with British suppliers over the next four years.


‘It’s not an uncertain anymore: there is a renaissance in UK automotive manufacturing,’ says Paul Everitt, chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT).


‘Over the course of the last 18 months we’ve seen around £4.5bn of investment committed to the UK. Almost every single one of the major vehicle manufacturers operating here has committed and recommitted to their facilities. And so we have a forward view of almost a decade of product into UK plants, which is in memory unheard of.’


Driving change
With production rates of around 1.4 million vehicles a year, we might still be far off our 1970s peak of more than two million, or even the late 1990s when we returned to almost as high a level. But there’s been a 40 per cent increase since the 2009 recession despite the country’s continuing economic struggles and those of our main export market, the Eurozone.


So what’s behind this revival? The first thing most people mention is the continued strength of the UK engineering base. Despite the decline of manufacturing we still have the strong capabilities, innovation and skills of a developed industry, not to mention a large domestic market. But this in itself doesn’t explain the change.


Everitt argues that UK-based car companies have worked hard to improve their businesses, a point echoed by analyst Dr Daniel Guttmann, head of the automotive team at PWC. ‘Ellesmere Port is one of the most efficient production sites in Europe, so it would have been a very strange decision to close that site down,’ he says. ‘British engineering and ingenuity has gone a long way to making these plants more efficient.’


It’s a far cry from the image of British car making in the 1970s, which the industry now seems to have shed, along with the problems of worker relations. Vauxhall said a new flexible working agreement had helped Ellesmere to reduce costs and was a key part of the company’s decision, but was also welcomed by the union Unite.


‘While we would argue the relationship with the trade unions and employees has been very good for a long time, these perceptions are sometimes difficult to overcome and I think we have unquestionably changed that,’ says Everitt.


Rebound from recession
Part of the growth in the last few years has of course been the rebound from recession, aided by a good exchange rate after years of a strong pound. But political changes have played their part as well as economic ones.


‘The government has now very publicly and proactively stated its aim to grow the manufacturing sector to rebalance the economy,’ says Vauxhall’s managing director, Duncan Aldred, arguing that the government’s determination to stick to austerity at least creates consistency for investment. ‘We know the economy isn’t growing anywhere near what we want it to be but at least we have a path forward. Like it or not, there is a plan and I think that helps create stability.’


The regional growth fund, increased R&D tax credits and the willingness of ministers and even the prime minister to lobby for the UK’s automotive industry — business secretary Vince Cable flew to the US to meet with the boss of Vauxhall owners General Motors before the deal was signed — have all played their role.


And to be fair to Labour, it was the previous government and former business secretary Lord Mandelson who began the process, argues Everitt. ‘He established the Automotive Council, he worked with industry on establishing a strategy around the transition to low-carbon vehicles, strengthening the supply chain, improving communication.’


Maintaining momentum
But now that we’re seeing strong growth, the question is whether it’s sustainable. Will it last beyond the crisis in the eurozone, in a European industry that is already recognised as having an overcapacity, in the face of — as the chief executive of Ford Europe, Stephen Odell, recently pointed out — growing competition from Asian manufacturers in the wake of free-trade deals?


‘It’s a good question and there’s actually no simple answer,’ says Guttmann. ‘The overcapacity is much more acute for some manufacturers than others. And I would think the more vulnerable manufacturers are not in the UK and therefore I would expect the UK’s share of manufacturing in Europe to go up.’


Another reason to be positive about the future for the UK is the appeal of classic British brands in the upper market segment — Jaguar, Land Rover, Bentley, Aston Martin. These are seen to have particular appeal in rapidly developing countries such as China and India among a growing middle class gaining a taste for luxury. So Asia provides an opportunity as well as a threat.


Sadly, the mass-market cars built by Honda, Ford or even Vauxhall (badged as Opel abroad) don’t have the same British stamp, even if the UK industry has overcome its image problem. And there is an urgent need to nurture the supply chain after years of decline and the ravages of recession, something that will be difficult without more economic stability.


But the manufacturers’ commitments to Britain’s automotive plants have already secured some future prospects and, with continued innovation, efficiency and the right environment for investment, this could mark a major turning point in our industrial history.


This article first appeared on The Engineer

Radio appearance: electricity from viruses, brain scans to aid multitasking, and walking vehicles

My latest appearance on Monocle 24's The Briefing, discussing generating power with virus-based piezoelectrics, a brain scanner that can tell when you're multitasking and tell a computer to help out, and a video system to enable robotic vehicles with legs to walk more securely.

Interview: Graham Hawkes, founder and chief engineer of Hawkes Ocean Technologies and designer of the DeepFlight personal submarines

Winged submersible specialist Graham Hawkes has set his sights on making undersea exploration more affordable.

When film director James Cameron became the first man to complete a solo trip to the deepest point in the ocean, Graham Hawkes was happy to be thousands of miles away, diving in the two-man winged submersible he had built for billionaire businessman Tom Perkins. Of course, most people would be happy in this situation, and for Hawkes it’s a regular part of his routine - he has spent the past four decades designing manned underwater vehicles for research, industry and personal pleasure. But on that day he was particularly glad to be away from civilisation, as Cameron and his team were busy achieving what Hawkes had been striving for for more than 20 years.

The viewing dome considerably increased the complexity of the design

The recent efforts of several groups to single-handedly reach the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific Ocean (oceanographers Don Walsh and Jacques Piccard made the first journey in 1960) had become something of a media-constructed race. Cameron’s ‘competitors’ included one team backed by Virgin Oceanic that had bought the craft Hawkes designed for the late businessman and adventurer Steve Fossett. However, the DeepFlight Challenger vehicle had been ready for sea trials by the time Fossett died in 2007, and its creator was so confident it would succeed that for him the challenge was already complete.

‘No one understands this but, as an engineer, as soon as the numbers work out and you know it is possible, in some ways you’re done,’ said Hawkes. ‘I hope this doesn’t sound callous but by the time we lost Steve I had got out of that programme what I, as an engineer, wanted.’

Softly spoken with a US twang to his British accent that comes from years of living in California, Hawkes comes across as unassuming despite his achievements. He formerly held the world record for the deepest solo dive; he can recount tales of encountering a great white shark while flying under water with Richard Branson; and he even appeared in the James Bond film For Your Eyes Only, piloting the one-man submersible he helped design.

Yet back in the 1990s, he said, he was the only ‘nutcase’ working on a vehicle to take him to the depths of the Mariana Trench. And, crucially, he wanted to do it in a way that was much cheaper than previous missions by building a craft light enough (less than 10,000lb) not to need a dedicated launch ship. After years of failing to secure financial backing, he agreed to let Fossett - who had also long held a similar ambition - fly the craft in return for putting up the cash to build it. ‘I always felt it could be done for much less money - $5m instead of $100m,’ said Hawkes. ‘Anything more than 10,000lb is just too heavy to go and rent a ship as needed.’ Basing the craft on the most space-efficient shape - a cylinder - in order to reduce weight created the need for stronger materials to cope with extreme pressures. ‘We suddenly realised that we could get there with carbon,’ Hawkes said. ‘If we very efficiently wound carbon, fibre by fibre, then with the theoretical properties of the material - the strength-to-weight ratio - we                                                               could do it.’

Creating the viewing domes that Hawkes wanted added further complexity to the design. ‘We made life 10 times harder by the other goals we set,’ he said. ‘A steel sphere with a conical frustum viewport will answer the purpose of getting to the bottom of the ocean… But if you’re squinting through a little porthole, then why not just use a camera? If you’re going to go down there, let’s have panoramic vision or don’t bother. That requires a view dome and changes the complexity of the pressure hull enormously.’

Working very closely with Fossett on the design meant taking his input but also freed Hawkes from some typical constraints. ‘[Normally] I am not going to be responsible for taking away obvious basic safety systems but that’s what Steve and I were able to do with the design,’ he said. ‘We were able to pare this thing down to the bare minimum, which you have to do really for a record-breaking machine.’

Given the importance of Fossett to the vehicle’s design, it’s not surprising that when he disappeared while flying an aircraft over the Nevada desert the project came to a halt. ‘I felt that craft was so much Steve - and myself - that the programme best just stop,’ said Hawkes. ‘You can’t really just hand it to some third party and say “go for it”, so I didn’t try to find somebody else… I tell that story and it doesn’t make sense to most people. Most people see the end result only as going down; they don’t understand the engineering reward of having built and tested that machine.’

DeepFlight Super Falcon can be launched without a dedicated support ship

After deciding it wasn’t worthwhile to mortgage his home to buy the craft from Fossett’s estate, Hawkes and his wife Karen decided to build their own vehicle and experience for themselves the wonder of flying through the ocean. So when the Virgin-backed team, led by entrepreneur and sailor Chris Welsh, resurrected the project, Hawkes had to think twice about returning. ‘I needed assurance it would be bought for its original purpose and not be used as a tour sub,’ he said. ‘I had to be pretty sure that I thought that the person making that dive knew what they were doing and what they were getting into.’

“Once you’ve achieved a goal, what it usually does is illuminate the next one”

After such a marathon process, Hawkes admitted that Cameron’s success stung. ‘It shouldn’t have, because it’s been a long time. He deserves that,’ he said circumspectly. ‘Life is like that - it hurt Steve much worse than it hurt me.’ But as well as the belief that DeepFlight Challenger could have made the journey much earlier had Fossett lived, Hawkes also had different goals from Cameron and it was these that led him to the craft he built for himself: the DeepFlight Super Falcon.

‘I was never in the race because I wanted to get under 10,000lb and I wanted to fly in the ocean,’ he said. ‘I’m hopeful that engineers might understand this; that once you’ve achieved a goal, what it usually does is illuminate the next one… This craft that we’ve built is the one I’m most proud of. Everyone’s going to ask “how deep does it go?” but I’ve been there and done that - I don’t care about that. What I want is a balanced capability to move in a three-dimensional space the way that big animals do.’

Now he has this capability, Hawkes isn’t leaving the submersible business behind to enjoy a retirement exploring the seas. He now aims to bring the costs down further so that thousands of people can have the experience so far limited to himself and a handful of billionaires - and hopes to make an announcement soon. ‘This is an ocean planet and there will be a Boeing of the future building craft to take us down, and I think we’re taking a shot at that,’ he said. ‘The full ocean-depth thing is a record but that means one man. We need to find something bigger than that.’

Graham Hawkes Founder and chief engineer, Hawkes Ocean Technologies
Education 
1969 Degree in mechanical engineering, Borough Polytechnic
Career 
1970 Engineer at Plessey Underwater Weapons Unit 
1974 Chief engineer at Underwater Marine Equipment; worked on JIM diving suit 
1977 Co-founded Offshore Systems Engineering; designed the Wasp and Mantis diving systems 
1981 Founded Deep Ocean Engineering 
1985 Set the world record for deepest solo dive (3,000ft) 
1989 Founded Deep Sea Discoveries 
1996 Founded Hawkes Ocean Technologies to develop DeepFlight series of winged submersibles 
1997 Founded Precision Remotes 
2010 Founded Hawkes Ocean Sports to introduce a line of manned submersibles for adventure and recreation 
2010 Founded Hawkes Remotes to launch a new generation of ROVs

Q&A
Why do you think there’s so much renewed interest in the Mariana Trench? 
If you really look hard at the situation and ask who has the hardware - who’s actually working on this as opposed to talking about it - there aren’t that many. Once you’ve got people such as Cameron and Sir Richard Branson working at this then suddenly it’s a different ball game. Before it was just Graham Hawkes and who the hell is he? Suddenly you’ve got a race and other people saying ‘I could do that’ - that’s what I think has happened here. And it’s terrific that Cameron and Branson have brought some daylight onto all this stuff.

What inspired you to take on the challenge? 
In the field I’m in, it has been the Holy Grail since I was a lad. I ended up working in the North Sea, and manned vehicles for the deep ocean were, and are, going extinct. I thought I understood why: the cost of the support ship - it’s too heavy and too clumsy. My goal was to get rid of the ship; just get to the bottom of the ocean and be done with it.

Were you always interested in submersibles?
Actually, I grew up dreaming of aircraft. It would have been great to be born at the turn of the century, when as an individual you could make a difference. You could build an aircraft in the back yard and go fly the thing and set a world record. But nowadays engineering’s just been taken over… We were born too late to make a difference. Then I got to look at this subsea stuff and I saw this is where aviation was all those years ago. The whole field was completely backwards, and that’s why I jumped in.

This article first appeared on The Engineer 

The Antikythera mechanism: a 2000-year-old computer highlights the importance of preserving and sharing knowledge

The Antikythera mechanism was preserved at the bottom of the sea for 2,000 years

We tend to think of computers as a modern invention, electronic devices with roots in the mechanical engines invented by the likes of Babbage in the 19th century. But a programme on BBC Four last night highlighted that computing has a much longer history stretching all the way back to ancient Greece.


The Antikythera mechanism is a clockwork calculator dating back to the first century BC that was designed to predict the movement of the celestial bodies. Watching the programme, I found it difficult to decide what was more amazing: the machine itself, which combined centuries of knowledge of astronomy and mathematics with intricate engineering that some put on a par with Victorian clocks; or the techniques employed by modern researchers to discover how the mechanism worked and what it was used for by studying the calcified fragments rescued from the bottom of the sea 100 years ago.


Thinking about this incredible device sparked a discussion in The Engineer office about not only the longevity of technology but about the fragile nature of knowledge itself. So much of our most advanced engineering today is found in electronics that would unlikely survive entombment underwater for 2,000 years, while the information it stores is locked up in bits and bytes that could easily be lost, even if the machine itself remained in tact.


And yet a technology (albeit a much simpler one) created when people still believed the Earth was the centre of the universe can still impart its knowledge to us, two millennia after it was built and then lost.


While the artefacts of the ancient world had to make it through conquests, dark ages and being shunted around on ships that could easily succumb to stormy weather, it’s easy to assume that our own technological achievements will last forever. You can picture visitors to a museum in the year 4,000 staring in wonder at the simplistic design of an iPhone.


But at a time when the latest technological gadgets are viewed as disposable, this is by no means guaranteed. A lifetime of research saved on a computer without a backup can be destroyed if a hard disk fails, reflecting how more tangible ways of storing information have their benefits too. And who’s to say a future global conflict won’t send human progress spiralling backwards for decades or even centuries?


However, there is one unquestionable advantage to the electronic nature of our modern system of storing information. The internet has opened up the sharing and preservation of knowledge on a global scale, achieving more than any invention that came before it, from the alphabet to the printing press.


The Antikythera mechanism itself may have survived in some form but its impact could have been so much greater had the ancient Greeks’ knowledge of this first computer not been restricted to a small number of people. Imagine a world where the Romans or the early Muslim world had widespread use of mechanical clocks, calendars and calculators. Perhaps iPhones might have already become museum pieces thanks to such a leg-up.


Speculation of parallel worlds aside, this awareness of the importance of both preserving and sharing knowledge feeds into the debate going on today about access to scientific journals and whether publishers should make them freely available on the internet. Individuals can make huge strides in technology but how much more can society achieve if its knowledge is open to all?

The Two-Thousand-Year-Old Computer is available to watch on iPlayer.


This article first appeared on The Engineer.