Subjunctive history
Library hopping in London
Everyone always says that February is a short month. I’ve always been sceptical of this claim - surely our internal clocks don’t feel the lack of an extra day or two in a month. But this month did fly by for me. One of my goals at the start of the year was to go through all the interview transcripts from my last trip, and have annotated notes that are ready to write up for each person. I’m happy to say that I just managed to finish this task! Now I’m tempted to just spend the next month reading and going down rabbit holes of internet archives - but I must be strict. It’s time to revise my original structure plan (in light of what I learnt during my trip and external comments I’ve received) and start on at least one chapter.
Despite longer days and slightly increased sunshine, I still wanted to find cosy places to work this month. Top on my list was the library at the Linnean Society. Founded in 1788, this is one of London’s (many) learned societies. Specialising in natural history, it is named after Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish scientist, who created the taxonomy of plants and animals we still use today (kingdom, genus, species etc). After his death, his papers were bought by British botanist, James Smith, who went on to found the society.
You might be wondering how I ended up here. In the winter of 2021, when gas prices suddenly skyrocketed and the current cost of living crisis kicked off, the Linnean society put out a tweet. It invited members of the public to come and spend time in the library - a warm, cosy (and free) place in central London. I took them up on it. Featuring skylights, pillar, portraits and of course the smell of old books, the library never fails to transport me back to student days.
Of course, I also spent a considerable amount of time in cafes. A new spot for me was Pophams. It’s surprisingly busy on a weekday, I suppose everyone else in Hackney is also writing a book? The downside of London cafe culture is that they tend to shut around 4 or 5 in the afternoon. So after Pophams, I headed to Hackney Central Library (open till 8pm) to wrap up some work. Save our public libraries!
Another new cafe I discovered was Olive Three. I was looking for a photo on my phone to post here, and then I remembered that this was a phone-free outing. Having decided that my phone distracts me, and contributes very little to improving my day to day life, I decided to leave it at home that day. (I had to remind myself that I do actually own a physical bankcard and oyster card, and so can pay for coffee and take transport without my phone - it’s crazy how integrated phones have become into aspects of our lives where they aren’t really needed).
Funnily enough, this was the day I found myself reading about the history of mobile phones. The idea of mobile phones1 dates back to the 1940s. Originally they were envisioned as carphones (so not fully mobile) but relying on radio transmission as you moved around, rather than the wired connections of home phones. The radio spectrum is used for many purposes and different frequency bands are allocated to various users. The allocation is done by the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Although Bell Labs engineers pitched the idea of mobile communication in 1947, the FCC decided that this was a niche use, and gave the spectrum to television instead. It was only in the late 1960s, that the FCC came back to Bell Labs and re-ignited the interest in mobile phone technology.
How would modern life be different if they’d decided to pour resources into mobile phones in the 1940s? Would we have ended up with a similar smartphone design - just 20 years earlier? Or perhaps something totally different? The answers lie in the realm of subjunctive history, as Alan Bennett describes in his play, The History Boys - “When something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined”.
Imagination was central to how Bell Labs functioned. In 1971, the marketing team at AT&T concluded that “there was no market for mobile phones at any price”. That’s unsurprising - the people they were surveying could not quite imagine what such a technology could mean. The Bell Labs engineers could. And they poured $100 million into cellphone technology before it even reached the market. Like they poured money and resources into the Cooperative Research Fellowship Program2, with no guarantee that it would work, but the vision to know that it would be worth it if it did.
The American term “cellular phone” comes from the concept of creating networks of hexagonal cells between different transmission poles (so as you move through a city, you go from getting signal in one cell, to the next one)
One of the first recruits into the scholarship was Jesse Russell, who went on to make great contributions to mobile phone technology.
Oooh I want to check out these places. Although I know a few floofs that can one up your anti technology phase. They have never even had phones!
Looking forward to reading your review of each and every London library in due course.