Quotes from David Edgerton

The great expanding centre of 'inner Britain', London, did not build ships but it built aeroplanes, it did not mine coal but it made electrical equipment, it did not grow food but it did process it – into beer, refined sugar, Horlicks and Mars bars. It made tyres, Hoovers, films.

in almost no instance can artificial-rational systems be built and left alone. They require continued attention, rebuilding, and repair. Eternal vigilance is the price of artificial complexity." He noted too, that in a technological age we should ask not who governs, but what governs: `government becomes the business of recognising what is necessary and efficient for the continued functioning and elaboration of large-scale systems and the rational implementation of their manifest requirements.

British battleships were driven by between 30 and 100 megawatts of power.

The history of invention is not the history of a necessary future to which we must adapt or die, but rather of failed futures, and of futures firmly fixed in the past.

Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia and China depended on constant vigilance over, and maintenance and repair of, complex irrigation systems. It was argued that this required a huge all-powerful state: these ancient 'hydraulic societies' were necessarily not democratic.

Thus, a battleship cost around £10m in 1940. Building that battleship today might cost £500m, but to build a battleship representing the same proportion of current GDP would mean spending £2.5bn.

Neville Chamberlain, the only British prime minister until Margaret Thatcher to have had a university education in science and the only university-educated twentieth-century prime minister to have studied entirely outside Oxbridge.