I Know You Got Soul Part 1

I Know You Got Soul: Machines With That Certain Something.

by Jeremy Clarkson.

Introduction

I suppose the inspiration for this book came from my reaction to the Concorde crash in Paris.Normally when a plane goes down we mourn for the people on board, but on this occasion I found myself mourning, most of all, the death of the machine. How could something so wondrous and dazzling have come to grief? It really was as shocking as the death, just down the road, in fact, of Princess Diana.The fact is that most machines are just a collection of wires and plastic. The computer, for instance, on which I've written this book has no more of a heart than a Toyota Corolla, which in turn is no more soulful than a Corby trouser press.But some machines do have a soul. Sometimes, as is the case with Concorde and the AK47, it's because they possess that most human of qualities, a flaw, and sometimes it's because they were born carrying the genetic fingerprint of a foolish and misguided inventor. Count Zeppelin springs to mind here.Whatever, just about all the machines here have formed the backbone of some incredible stories, none more so than the Spitfire. Of course we remember 'the few' whose bravery held back the n.a.z.i hordes in that balmy summer of 1940. But, secretly, we know that much of their success was attributable to the incredible speed and manoeuvrability of the aeroplane they flew.And yes, before you raise an eyebrow, I know all about the Hurricane but it lacks the film-star looks somehow, and the glamour. And anyway, I can't pretend this book is a comprehensive list of all the machines ever made with a soul. Nor is there any scientific basis for the choices. My editor and I simply went out for lunch one day and came up with a list on the back of a napkin. They were machines we liked, picked for emotional reasons, using our hearts rather than our heads.The hard part was choosing which machine from a particular genre should be singled out. All battleships, for instance, had soul by the bucketful princ.i.p.ally because they were flawed and usually useless, but there was only s.p.a.ce here to look at one so I went for the biggest. And most useless of them all the astonishing Yamato.The next difficult bit was choosing what to leave out. The Gibson Les Paul should be here, I know, but unfortunately, before I had the chance to include it the producer of Top Gear rang and said I really must get back to the bothersome business of making television programmes.Sorry.

Concorde

There was much brouhaha when the last Concorde touched down at Heathrow in the summer of 2003. Television stations went live to the scene, tears were shed and commentators talked about how it was the end of an era. And yet in the midst of all this were a handful of Guardianistas saying 'good riddance'.They pointed out that Concorde had cost 2.1 billion to design, which, even though this was the sixties, made it three times more expensive than the Dome. And with little specks of spittle at the corner of their mouths, they went on to remind everyone that for years the great white bird was, in fact, a great white elephant.The taxpayer had met the cost of building it, and for many, many years they'd had to dig even further into their pockets to run it. And who benefited? Well, according to those of a sandal persuasion, it certainly wasn't the ordinary working man in the street. No. It was a bunch of fat capitalist corporate raiders going to New York to do another deal that would make life even less pleasant for the poor sods who'd paid for the plane in the first place.If you squint a bit, it is possible to see the logic in this argument. But if you open your eyes, then I'm afraid it makes no sense at all. Concorde was indeed extremely useful for those who make and break companies and countries for a living. You could sell GEC and GM over breakfast in London and then, over a second breakfast in New York, buy Guatemala and Chad.But for these people it was only a tool, a timesaving device, like an electric razor or a toaster. And from inside the plane it really wasn't anything special. There was no shortage of legroom but the seats were no wider than the seats you get on a National Express coach, and headroom was pinched too.What's more, because of the weight, pa.s.sengers were denied even the basic frills that are commonplace in cattle cla.s.s these days. Yes, the wine was fine, and free, but there was no in-flight movie system, no little map telling you where you were, no video camera in the nose wheel. You spent three hours in a seat with nothing to do but devise a plan for buying Peru while staring at the bald patch of the man in front, who was trying to bankrupt Poland.Exciting? You'd think so, wouldn't you, tearing through the stratosphere at Mach 2, but actually it wasn't exciting at all. Sure, there was a meaty kick on the runway but it was no more thrustful than a BMW 330i. And there was a satisfying surge as the tail cleared Cornwall and the pilot lit the afterburners to break through the sound barrier. But you could get more of an adrenalin rush on any fairground ride.Far, far below, people crossing the Atlantic on boats would hear the sonic boom and yet on board there wasn't even a judder as the sound barrier was breached, and there was no view either. People say you could see the curvature of the earth but really it was no more p.r.o.nounced than it is from the beach. And nor was it black or purple up there because, contrary to popular belief, you were not on the edge of s.p.a.ce. You were not even halfway there.Concorde flew at 60,000 feet, which is twice as high as a 747 goes, and that sounds impressive. But 60,000 feet is only 11 miles and that, when you remember the moon is 240,000 miles away, is not really very far at all.So, on the upside Concorde was quick and comfortable because it did fly above the turbulence. But on the downside it was cramped, boring and so noisy in the back that Michael Winner and Roger Moore would have fist-fights over who'd get seat 1A where it was only deafening.I flew on Concorde twice. Once when I was given an upgrade and once as a guest on its final flight from New York. I never paid for a ticket and I never wanted to because I never saw it as a tool. For me, watching Concorde was so much better than being on it.This is the point the Guardianistas missed. They thought the ordinary miner and nurse had paid for Concorde and derived no benefit. But we did. Because we were the ones on the ground, pointing...For eighteen years I lived in Fulham, slap bang in the middle of the flight path into Heathrow, and as a result I never once heard the second item on either the six or the ten o'clock news. Every night, at 6.03 and 10.03, the gentle hum of London would be drowned out by the immense crackling thunder of those four Olympus engines. And every night I'd go to the window to watch the source of this roar slide by.In Barbados all the planes are made to fly miles from the coast so they don't disturb the holiday-makers. But Concorde was allowed to come right down the beaches of the West Coast, skimming the palm trees with its broken nose, the jet wash rippling the sand. To watch the Americans wetting themselves with excitement over the spectacle and it was pure theatre made me almost gooey with pride.2.1 billion? Bah! It was cheap.It was a scientist with NASA who summed up Concorde better than anyone I've ever met. 'Putting a man on the moon was easy,' he said, 'compared to getting Concorde to work.'First of all there were the political hurdles. To get Armstrong onto the lunar surface NASA simply furnished a bunch of German rocket scientists with a lot of American dollars and sat back to reap the rewards. But over here we had no German scientists. They refused to come here after the war because it was felt we didn't have enough money.They were right. We had the bones of an engine but not the funds to build a plane. So in 1962 we had to join forces with the French, who had the bones of a plane but no engine. This meant France and England would have to work together. And that's a bit like a.r.s.enal teaming up with Manchester United. Macmillan and de Gaulle fell out after about seven minutes. No one could even agree about how Concorde should be spelled with or without the 'e'.It was Tony Benn, the then minister for science and technology, who pushed the deal forward, forcing the French to sign a 'no-get-out clause'. This meant that, no matter what, they would be required to stick with the project and not pull out leaving the British taxpayer holding the billion-dollar albatross.It sounded like a good idea at the time because you can't trust Johnny Frog. However, as the years rolled by, it was a succession of shaky British governments who wanted out but couldn't because of Benn's clause in the contract.Meanwhile the engineers were hard at work. Now you have to remember that this was a time when top-loading washing machines were considered advanced. There were no CD players or push-b.u.t.ton phones. There were computers, but they were the size of houses and took all day to get through the seven-times table. So Concorde was going to be designed by men, with pencils.It seemed like a truly impossible dream. There were fighter jets capable of getting through the sound barrier, but they only had a range of fifteen minutes at full power and they were flown by RAF pilots who sat on ejector seats and needed oxygen masks. What's more, after one sortie the planes would need weeks of maintenance.So the idea of building a plane that could fly all the way to America faster and higher than any fighter, and then turn round and come straight home again, seemed ludicrous, especially as the people inside would be wearing lounge suits, rather than g-suits.The main problem was the atmosphere. When a plane is travelling subsonically it parts the air easily, but when it goes up past Mach 1 the air no longer knows it's coming and does not part. It smashes into the leading edges of the plane with such force that people on the ground, miles below, can actually hear it being rent asunder. This is the sonic boom.This collision creates ma.s.sive heat, so ma.s.sive that Concorde really does grow by seven inches in flight. On one early trip across the Atlantic a pilot put his hat in a s.p.a.ce between two bulkheads and was alarmed to find on landing that the bulkheads were joined together more tightly than two coats of paint. Not until the return leg, when the plane had swelled up again, could he get his hat back, although by then it was more a mortar board really.Some of the heat that generated this expansion transferred itself into the cabin. There was one part of the dashboard that was hot enough at Mach 2 to double up as a frying pan. The tiny windows were hot to the touch. And 10 per cent of the power produced by the engines had to be used to juice the air conditioners.It was the heat that screwed the Americans. Like the British and French, they never foresaw millions of holidaymakers paying 99 for trips to Florida with Freddie Laker. Flying, for 50 years, had been the preserve of the rich, and as a result they thought the future lay beyond Mach 1.Unfortunately, they felt Mach 2 wasn't fast enough, and with their SST project aimed for Mach 3. That's what finished them. They tried and tried, but at the time neither the technology nor the materials were available to get them past the drawing board. As a result they gave up and designed the Boeing 747 instead. Subsonic, cheap transport for the ma.s.ses. Well, you never know. It might work...The Russians, too, developed a supersonic pa.s.senger plane that did actually fly. Into the ground. At an air show.But even before this mishap Concordski was doomed because it had a range of just 1,500 miles, which would get it from Moscow to a point exactly 300 yards from the middle of nowhere. Technically it was clever because it could do Mach 2.2, like its European rival. Commercially it wasn't going anywhere, so Ivan jacked it in.The British and French, however, did not give up. I have seen film of the engineers throwing an endless succession of paper darts down the wind tunnel at Bristol as they struggled to work out which shape worked best.The second problem, after the heat, is that the supersonic shockwave has a nasty habit of sitting on the trailing edges of the wings, causing the ailerons to jam. It was this that caused a number of Spitfires to crash in the Second World War. In a dive, without realising it, the pilots were getting awfully close to Mach 1 and as a result they were dealing with forces they couldn't comprehend. What they could comprehend, in their last moments before they hit the ground, was that for no obvious reason the controls had jammed.It was boffins at the Miles Aircraft Corporation who figured this one out, and knew the key to supersonic flight was to lose the ailerons. The whole wing had to move. Or you needed a delta wing as was used on the Vulcan bomber, and eventually Concorde. But the shape of that wing had to be precise because, and this is not an exaggeration, life on the far side of the sound barrier is the most hostile place on earth. Mach 1 makes the Arctic Ocean or the Sahara Desert look like Battersea Park.And if the forces were troublesome enough for the plane, they were a complete nightmare for the engines. Because if you let the spindly blades of a jet crash into the air at Mach 2, they will shatter and that will be that.So the plane would be travelling at 1,500 mph, but the air going into the engines could only be moving at 500 mph. How do you do that? Well, you need to have paid attention in your physics lessons, that's for sure.As the engineers toiled away the marketing men were having even bigger problems because of Concorde's range. It was better than a fighter, and better than the Russian attempt. But it was never going to be able to cross the Pacific and even the Atlantic was a struggle. It could get to New York from London or Paris, but not from Frankfurt. This meant the number of routes it could fly was limited, and that meant the number of airlines that might buy it was equally small.And then, after the Yom Kippur War and the subsequent oil crisis, the number dwindled from sixteen to just two. The national carriers of the countries involved. So although the engineers surmounted all the technical problems, no outsider wanted to buy their creation.And to make matters worse, the Americans, spiteful because their supersonic plane had come to nought, invented all sorts of reasons why it should not be allowed in their air s.p.a.ce. Farmers even argued that it would knock over their cows.In the end just fourteen Concordes were made, the last going to Air France for just 1, and the only place you could fly to from London was Bahrain. Absurd. The greatest technological achievement of all time and no one could find a use for it.Eventually the Americans caved in, and later still British Airways even worked out how their white elephant could be turned into a cash cow. Pa.s.sengers were asked how much they thought their ticket had cost each had PAs and a.s.sistants to deal with travel agents so they didn't know and amazingly most guessed way above the actual price. So BA simply matched the cost to the expectation.It seemed that Concorde's future was a.s.sured. Compared to normal planes, which bounce around the world's airports like they're on speed, BA's flagship had a very small workload. There were very few landings and take-offs. And very little time spent in the air so there was quite literally no end in sight. Concorde would keep going until another visionary kick-started a project to build a replacement.But then one of them crashed.There had been near misses before. Tyres had burst, sending chunks of rubber into the wings. And on one notable occasion a BA plane had d.a.m.n nearly run out of fuel coming in to land at Heathrow. It actually conked out while taxiing to the terminal building.None of these incidents had really made the news. After the fuel scare BA's publicity department said that the plane was at a different angle on the ground than it is in the air and that actually there was enough left in the tanks to keep the engines running for 20 minutes.As a result it made a small story in just one newspaper. But, in fact, while it had enough fuel for 20 minutes' taxiing, there was only enough left for 90 seconds of flight.The pilot, it turned out, had refused to slow down or refuel at Shannon when both his co-pilot and engineer realised something had gone wrong. He was sacked even before he could bash his hat back into shape.The crash in Paris, though, made headlines everywhere and not just because of the casualties, who were mostly German. No, for the first time since the t.i.tanic we were actually mourning the loss of the machine itself.As the weeks wore on scientists realised a burst tyre had punctured one of the fuel tanks and that, somehow, the fuel on board had caught fire. They took steps to make sure it couldn't happen again but the writing was already on the wall. And what little confidence was left went west after the World Trade Center thing.Richard Branson made a few noises about taking the planes off BA's hands and making them work with Virgin logos on the tail fin, but this was ridiculous. The French had already announced there would be no airworthiness certificates any more, and Beardy knew that even if there were, BA would never relinquish their flagships. He was turning the slow death of Concorde into a PR stunt. And I'll never forgive him for that.Concorde, you see, represented the greatness not just of the British and French boffins who'd made it against all the odds but also the sheer wondrous genius of the human race. This plane served as a twice-daily reminder that nothing was beyond us. Given time, and money, we could do absolutely anything.Which is why, as I walked off the plane for the last time, I remember thinking, 'This is one small step for a man. But a giant leap backwards for mankind.'You see, unlike any other machine that is mothballed or donated to a museum, Concorde has not been replaced with something better or faster or more convenient.This, and I'm trying not to exaggerate, is a bit like discovering fire and then snuffing it out because someone got burned. Or finding America and not bothering to go back in case one of the ships sinks. Not since the Romans left Britain in AD 410 has mankind shied away from technological or social advance, until now. And that is the main reason, I think, why there was so much shock at Concorde's pa.s.sing. Because it represented a sea change in the way we are.We went to the moon and now we're on our way to Mars. We invented the steam engine and immediately replaced it with internal combustion. We went to Mach 1 and then we went to Mach 2. We went across the Atlantic in three hours... and now we can't any more.And then there's the fate of the machine itself. For more than twenty years it was woken in the morning and flown to New York. And then one day no one came to replenish its tanks or vacuum its carpets. There was a big party and the next day... nothing. Imagine doing that to your dog. Putting it in a kennel one night and never going back.It's a machine, so it can't possibly know about the crash or the problems of getting an airworthiness certificate. It was built to do a job and it did that job, faultlessly, for year after year. So why, it must be thinking, do they not want me any more?Of course, we'll still be able to go and see the old girl in a museum. That'll be strange though. Going to a museum to see the future. Except, of course, Concorde isn't the future. It's the last, tumultuous, nail-biting chapter of the past.When the car came along, we didn't shoot our horses. They became playthings, toys for huntsmen and twelve-year-olds at gymkhanas. And it's the same story with air travel.Now we have the internet and video conferencing, big business can buy and sell its countries and its companies without ever leaving the swivel chair. There's no need to fly to America.So the only reason for using a plane is because you want to go on holiday. And given the choice of going to Florida at Mach 2 or for 2, most would opt for the cheaper option.Concorde, then, had to die not because it was too fast but because, in the electronic age, it was too slow.

Rolls-Royce

As I write a car is sitting outside my window, waiting to be tested. I do not know where it is made or what it is called. I think it might be a Kia but it could be a Daewoo.Whatever it is, you would find more character in a gla.s.s of water and more heart in an office rubber plant. And there's a very good reason for this.In order for a car to have personality, an X factor, the company that makes it must be able to take guidance and inspiration from one man, the man who started the company in the first place.This did not happen with the car outside my window, which was undoubtedly built in a jungle clearing by a company that makes cars to make money. No one began Proton or Hyundai or Daewoo because they'd harboured a dream of making something extraordinary or special. These are just enormous engineering and construction conglomerates that have been told by their respective governments to make cars so that the locals can get off their oxen and get modern.We see the same sort of thing in j.a.pan. There never was a Mr Toyota who, since he was a small boy, yearned for the day when he could build a small family hatchback that never broke down. And you can scour the history books until the sky turns green but you'll not find any mention of a young Timmy Datsun who stayed up until ten o'clock, even on school nights, devising his plan for a car with two milometers.Subarus are made by a romantic-sounding outfit called Fuji Heavy Industries. At night I bet the chairman sometimes forgets he has a car division. It'll be just another entry in his plofit and ross accounts.The only j.a.panese cars with even a trace of humanity are Hondas, and there's a very good reason for that. There was a Mr Honda and he did have a vision when he was a small boy. Even today that vision still steers the engineers, and as a result there's a very definite correlation between the S2000 sports car and those early motorbikes. It's solely because of this link with the past that I like Hondas more than any other j.a.panese cars.Of course, in Europe most car firms were started by a visionary. Lotus was kick-started by Colin Chapman, who liked things light and frothy. Jaguar was the brainchild of Sir William Lyons, who liked comfort and speed, with a low, low price. Enzo Ferrari wanted to make cars solely to support his beloved race team.Most of these guys, and others like them, are remembered by sound-bite quotes. Ettore Bugatti, for instance, once said, 'Nothing is too beautiful or too expensive.' Enzo Ferrari came up with 'the customer is not always right'. And Colin Chapman summed up his philosophy thus: 'Simplify and add lightness.'Mind you, he also said, 'You would never catch me driving a race car that I have built.' Which probably explains why Lotus came to be known as an acronym for Lots Of Trouble, Usually Serious.These men are all now dead, or in South America, but their DNA is still evident in the cars that are being made today. The Lotus Elise is light and breaks down a lot. The new Bugatti Veyron will be astoundingly expensive and I think the paddle-shift gearbox in a Ferrari 575 is silly. But what do I know.Unfortunately, however, time does have a nasty habit of blurring the idealism that gave rise to these companies. I'm not sure, for instance, that Herr Porsche would get much of a hard-on for the Cayenne. And how would William Lyons react, I wonder, if he knew Jaguar's current board was chasing euros by offering a front-wheel drive, diesel-powered estate car? Sure, it may help Jaguar out of a small hole now, but by losing sight of the goal, the vision, it will drive them into a bigger one later. I grew up, for instance, wanting an E-type. But my son is not growing up yearning for the day when he can buy an X-type diesel.There is, however, one car company out there that has never lost sight of its role in the market place. Rolls-Royce.Sir Henry Royce, who founded the company back in 1904, really was a one-man quote machine. 'Strive for perfection in everything you do.' 'Accept nothing as nearly right or good enough.' 'The quality remains long after the price is forgotten.' 'Whatever you can do, or dream you can, begin it.'You get the picture. And so did BMW. When they bought the company they could have fitted a new body to one of their 7 series. That's what Mercedes did to create the Maybach. But instead of wandering around the BMW spare-parts division saying, 'What do we want?' the engineers fired up their computers and asked, 'What do we need?'Plainly they looked at what Henry Royce and Charles Rolls were trying to achieve a hundred years ago, and thought, 'Zis is vot ve must do also.' And as a result the Phantom is quite simply the best car in the world.Obviously, it is not the easiest car in the world to park and nor, thanks to a top speed of 150 mph, is it the fastest. I should also draw your attention at this point to the handling, which is not what you'd call sporty. Unless, of course, your everyday transport is a hovercraft.In my experience it is not the best-built car in the world either. It's not handmade that's another way of saying the door will fall off but it is hand-finished, and that's the next worst thing.I heard, even before the car was launched, that on an advertising photo shoot the flying lady refused to come out from her cavity in the radiator grille. On Top Gear the same thing happened. And then, when I drove a Phantom to Hull, I came out of my hotel in the morning to find the statuette had hibernated and wouldn't come out for love nor money.I rang a man at Rolls who did his best to sound surprised. 'The Spirit is stuck down?' he said, with an almost pantomime level of incredulity. 'That's never happened before.' Yeah right.Inside the car BMW made a decision you might not like. Instead of festooning the cabin with a myriad of k.n.o.bs and b.u.t.tons, they are all hidden away in cubbyholes. You get a gear lever that allows you to go forwards and backwards, and that's it. You get a version of the BMW i-Drive computer with most of the functions removed. And most of the time the computer and satellite-navigation screen are hidden behind a perfectly normal, a.n.a.logue clock.As a result it's no more daunting in there than in a Georgian drawing room. You sit on a supremely comfortable chair it'd be even better if it were a wingback, I'm surprised it's not overlooking acres of leather and wood. You're never tempted, as you are in the Maybach, to push a b.u.t.ton just to find out what it does. And then having to spend the rest of the journey trying to find which b.u.t.ton undoes whatever it is the first b.u.t.ton did.This makes for a hugely relaxing drive. So relaxing, in fact, that you sometimes forget that you're in a car.I did. I was trundling up a motorway the other day, doing 60 mph, in a long snake of other cars, also doing 60. Only, unlike any of the other drivers, I could not feel the road pa.s.sing by through vibrations in the wheel and I could not hear the engine, big and V12-ish though it was. I have had long soaks in the bath that were more stressful. I have been on tropical beaches that are more noisy.After a while I became so detached from reality that I put on my indicator and tried to overtake the car in front. Sounds fine except for one thing. I was already in the outside lane. I came within an inch of hitting the central crash barrier and to this day I wonder what on earth the chap in the car behind felt when he saw a three-ton, 250,000 Rolls-Royce indicate, to show the driver wasn't asleep, and then drive off the road.I'd like to think he nodded sagely, turned to his pa.s.senger and said, 'My, to have detached the driver so completely from reality that must be a well-engineered car.' But I suspect he probably said, 'What a t.w.a.t.'That's the thing about driving a Phantom. You could pull over and give someone the entire contents of your wallet, and they'd look at you like you'd just given them the entire contents of your stomach. Stop at a junction to wave someone out and instead of a cheery wave you get a sneery V sign. On the pavement you are a normal person with ears and a spleen. In a Rolls you are the b.a.s.t.a.r.d love child of Fred West and Harold Shipman.I quite like that. I like it because it shows cars, despite the best endeavours of Kia and Hyundai and Daewoo, are still able to raise the blood pressure a bit. It's good that nothing more than a ma.s.s-produced collection of iron ore, rubber, sand, cow skin and petrochemical by-products can still raise a bit of bile.I also like it because from inside you really don't care. It's like walking into a fighty football supporters' pub in a suit of armour. There's a sense of 'and what are you going to do about it exactly'.This really is a vast car. And, because the Laws of Automotive Styling say that the tyres must be exactly half the height of the car itself, they come up to my thigh. Then you have the radiator grille, which is bigger than my first flat, and the bonnet on which you could quite easily have a game of cricket. Certainly you could have a very major crash in a Phantom and simply not know.There's also a sense of imperiousness, a sense that you really are driving round in Queen Victoria. It's the effortless power and the sense of empire. Yes, the leather may come from Bavarian cows, and all the components may arrive at the underground factory having already been a.s.sembled in Germany, but for all we know Elgar's quill was bought in Munich. It didn't stop his music from being as English as the Malvern Hills.I loved my time with the Rolls as much as everyone else hated it, and me, for having one.

Riva

It's not easy to decide which of man's creations is the most beautiful. It may be a painting, or a garden, or a building or perhaps one of Jordan's b.r.e.a.s.t.s.Once, on a glorious summer's morning, I saw the Humber Bridge rising out of some dawn mist and thought it might well be the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen. But then there's the SR-71 spy plane and the Aston Martin DB7 and the Lamborghini Miura. The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao isn't too shabby either.However, after a long walk round the garden I've decided that the most jaw-dropping, eye-watering, hand-biting man-made spectacle of all time is the 1965 Riva Aquarama speedboat.There's something about the angle of its prow and the positioning of that wraparound windscreen: it was actually based on the panoramic cinema screens that were popular at the time and this is the reason why the boat was called the 'Aquarama'.Then you have the leatherwork in white and turquoise that seems to go so perfectly with the deeply polished mahogany hull, and the whole thing is finished off with a tail that tapers and flares just so.Now, that the most beautiful man-made creation should have come from Italy is no surprise. There's a pa.s.sion for aesthetics in Italy that you simply don't find anywhere else. But what about the most beautifully made creation? Is it the 1995 Honda Civic or maybe the Great Wall of China? Perhaps it's one of David Linley's wardrobes or a Brunel steamship? We shouldn't forget the Whitworth rifle either.Well, I've just had another long walk round the garden and I've decided that the most perfectly crafted of all man's achievements, with the greatest attention to detail and quality, is, in fact, the 1965 Riva Aquarama. Oh, and it'll do 50 mph. All things considered then, quite a boat.Riva began to make boats on the spectacular sh.o.r.es of Lake Iseo in northern Italy way back at the beginning of the nineteenth century. To begin with the products were simple, robust ferries really, but pretty quickly, this being Italy, they turned their attention to the notion of going quickly.By 1934 they were going very quickly indeed. So quickly, in fact, that one of their 1500cc racers actually set a world speed record on water.After the war things changed. Old man Riva, the third generation of the family that started it all, was keen to carry on making bash 'n' crash racers but his son, Carlo, had seen the new boats coming in from America and had other ideas. He wanted to make quality products for the leisure market.There were furious rows over which direction the company should take. Some were so bad that Mrs Riva would have to step in and physically separate her brawling husband and son. And then one evening Carlo fell to his knees and said, 'Father, you can take that bottle from the table and hit me over the head with it. You can kill me, but I have to make my boats.'Dad relented and Carlo was in business. At first he didn't appear to be very good at it. Fed up with the racing teams who argued that they must have a discount in exchange for all the publicity they brought, he doubled the price and scared them all away. Within weeks, then, he had no customers at all.He also had no money, so he went to see the Beretta family who had made a fortune from guns. They gave him enough to buy six engines and off to America he went.The first port of call was Detroit, where he had a meeting with the company that made the boats he so admired: Chris-Craft. They listened politely to the young man from Italy and said they'd be only too happy to supply him with engines providing he bought 50. That was 44 more than he could afford.The next day he went back to see them and with a lot of shrugging said he'd love to buy 50 but sadly the post-war Italian government would only allow him to import six at a time. Very sorry. Nothing he could do. Hands are tied. The boys at Chris-Craft fell for the story hook, line and sinker and Carlo got his V8s.Back at home he set about annoying as many customers as he could. Once, a German industrialist came to the factory and placed an order, then made the mistake of laughing when he was given the delivery date. 'Don't be silly,' he said. 'There's no way you Italians could manage that.' Carlo threw him out.He was completely obsessive. He colour-coded the staff's coats so the people in the woodyard wore red and the people in the engine bay wore yellow and so on. This way, if he looked out of his gla.s.s office and saw all the coats mingling, he'd know immediately that something was wrong.Colleagues roll their eyes when they talk about the old days. 'I remember once,' said one, 'we spent all night going through pictures of our boats to see which was best for our publicity material. We didn't get finished until dawn, and then Carlo messed them all up again to see if we'd pick our original choices a second time around.'Putting that much care into the pictures shows just how much care he put into the boats. He used the latest varnishes and varnished them again and again. And then again for good measure. The Italian motor industry was using 1.5 microns of chrome on its cars. He was using 30 microns on his boats. He was so pathological about quality that it was taking an age to get anything out of the factory and into the water. He reckoned on spending 1,500 hours to make one boat a ludicrous amount of time for what was only an open pleasure craft but pretty soon he was spending 3,000 hours on each one. Sometimes more.Small wonder they became known as the Rolls-Royce of boats, the Stradivarius of watercraft.However, while his time and motion was a bit skew-whiff, his timing was impeccable because his crowning achievement, the Aquarama, came along in 1962. Which was pretty much the precise moment when the jet set really got into its stride.In the olden days the idle rich played a bit of tennis and read a few books and that was about it. The only excitement came when someone decided to have a war. But then, towards the end of the fifties, they suddenly found that thanks to the jet engine and the helicopter they could pretty well go where they wanted, when they wanted. St Tropez for breakfast. St Moritz for lunch. St Albans for dinner even.The epicentre of all this, the maypole in the playground if you like, was the South of France. And that meant they needed a boat, and because they were very rich they needed the best, and that meant that they all ended up at Carlo Riva's door.Over the next few years the list of celebrity customers became a joke. He sold boats to Stewart Granger, John Barry, Rex Harrison, Peter Sellers, Brigitte Bardot, Karl Heineken, Sophia Loren, Joan Collins, President Na.s.ser, Victor Borge, King Hussein, Ferrucio Lamborghini, Prince Rainier, Roger Vadim and Richard Burton. The Aquarama became a mahogany pa.s.sport to the high life.Over in the States Chris-Craft were horrified and immediately stopped supplying engines, but this didn't stop Carlo. By then he was on such a roll he simply made his own. Beautifully, of course.Eventually the boat-building world turned to gla.s.s fibre, which was tough and resilient, but Carlo refused to buckle. 'Here in Italy,' he told me once, 'we won't take a s.h.i.t unless the lavatory seat is made from wood.'His staff were equally vehement. One day, at Portofino, a Riva salesman was to be found berating some poor chap who'd dared to park his plastic gin palace in the harbour. 'Go away,' he shouted. 'Portofino is a beautiful place full of cultural heritage and only beautiful things can come here.'It was no good though. The plastic boats started to take over and the Aquarama, at 250,000, started to look preposterously expensive. It soldiered on until 1996, by which time 3,760 had been made. But by then Carlo had sold the company to Vickers, who had introduced a gla.s.s-fibre cabin cruiser and were concentrating on restorations.Horrified, he tried to buy the rights to his old boat back. But Vickers said no. Carlo told me it 'hurt his heart'.Today you can buy one of his reclaimed Aquaramas for 250,000 exactly the same as the d.a.m.n thing cost new. But whatever, you will have one of the best-handling sports boats ever made. There's no power trim, no adjustable this and active that. You just get the wooden hull and two V8s, but that's all you need.Gianni Agnelli, the playboy head of Fiat, once asked to try one out. He was told that if he could turn it over, he could have it. And Gianni, being Gianni, tried. But couldn't.I tried too, one still morning on Lake Iseo. All I managed to do in one spectacular turn was hurl half a hundredweight of melted snow water into the cabin of the helicopter that was filming me. Quite what this tells us, I don't know. That I'm incompetent, or that the pilot was flying far too low a bit of both probably.What I do know is that of all the machines I've ever driven, flown or ridden the Aquarama remains my favourite, the one I'd most like to own. Yes, an F-15 fighter jet would be a laugh but I couldn't go anywhere in it, and yes, Leander, the superyacht, was spectacular but a bit of a b.u.g.g.e.r to run. Carlo's wooden baby, on the other hand, has a real-world attraction.It hits all the bases too. It's fun, it's fast, it is exquisitely made and when you've finished looning around and you're back on dry land you can look back and think to yourself, 'That is the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.'

Millennium Falcon

When you're looking for the greatest s.p.a.ceship ever made there are many choices, from Discovery in 2001: A s.p.a.ce Odyssey to the Liberator from Blake's Seven.But really, it comes down to a straight fight between the USS Enterprise from Star Trek and the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.So far as speed is concerned, well, that's a tough one. The Enterprise could tool along at warp nine, which appeared to be pretty fast. But is it faster than the Falcon in hyperdrive? It'd be interesting to ask Gene Roddenberry and George Lucas, the men who created these craft, to discuss it over tea and buns, but this isn't possible due to the fact that Mr Roddenberry is dead.Obviously, with its photon torpedoes and its transporter room the Enterprise is by far the most sophisticated, but when it was destroyed in Star Trek III no one really shed a tear. They just built another. The Millennium Falcon could never be replaced.Plus there was always a sense that it was the Enterprise's captain and crew who won the day, despite the ship rather than because of it. I mean, the lumbering old barge was hopeless against a cloaked Klingon vessel. And even at full speed the Borg cube had no problem keeping up. Victory was only ever possible because of the ingenuity of Kirk and co.In Star Wars it was the other way round. Han Solo and his trusty sidekick Chewbacca were always out of ideas and at the mercy of yet another death ray when, lo and behold, the Falcon would get them out of trouble. This made it as much of a character as R2-D2 or C-3P0.But that said, Solo was a bit of a boy. I mean, when Picard encountered an asteroid belt he nosed through on a quarter impulse power. Han, on the other hand, just floored it.And let's be honest, the Falcon was well tooled up. It had four turbo-lasers, a bunch of concussion-missile launchers and scanner-proof interior compartments for smuggling contraband. This, after all, is the purpose for which it was built.It was won, in a game of cards, by Solo from his friend Lando Calrissian and then tweaked, customised and souped-up with a double-power hyperdrive system. Unfortunately, much of the after-market accessories were fitted by Chewbacca, a Wookiee, who was modelled on the director's dog and speaks a language that's part walrus, part badger, part bear and part camel. Not the normal qualifications one needs for rocket science.This probably explained why the Falcon was forever going wrong. Time and again Han and his rebel cohorts would have to bang the dashboard with their fists to get some wayward system working. And this too helped give the ship a flawed, almost human quality. This is something I look for in all machines...Once upon a time I was in a country far, far away doing some filming for the television. The story called for us to join a band of ex-pats and Arabs on a motorised fun run through the desert outside Dubai, so obviously we needed some vehicles. Naturally, I went for a Range Rover, leaving the director with a Jeep Wrangler and the crew with a Discovery. The producer took a Mark One Toyota Land Cruiser pickup truck.As the day progressed it quickly became apparent that a bunch of media types weren't exactly proficient in the art of desert driving. Those of us who had been 'off road' before had been taught to keep the revs as low as possible and use the engine's torque to pull us out of trouble. Slowly, slowly, gently, gently was the key.Well, it may be the key in England, where the ground is wet and there are tree roots, but it sure as h.e.l.l doesn't unlock any doors in the desert. Here if you let the engine's low-down grunt dribble you along, you sink into the soft sand and that's pretty much that.What you have to do, I learned very quickly, is pretend you're in a stolen Astra on a housing estate at midnight. Keep it in as low a gear as possible, weld your right foot to the floor and drive like you're being chased by Darth Vader himself.This doesn't work either because if you go too fast, you crest the lip of a dune, find a sheer drop on the other side and can't stop. So you slither down the slope and get bogged down in your own little avalanche on the other side. Or you rip a tyre off the rim. Or something important breaks. Either way, you end up as immobile as you would if you'd been crawling.We made a sorry spectacle. The director going slowly because he had a bad back. The crew going slowly because the boot was full of delicate camera equipment and me going like a bat out of h.e.l.l because it was fun. And all of us, ultimately, going nowhere.All of us, that is, except the producer. His name is Andy Wilman and he is far from the best driver in the world. And yet, despite his fists of ham and his fingers of b.u.t.ter, he never got stuck once. This, we deduced, must have had something to do with his vehicle the Land Cruiser pickup truck.We were right. Even when it was up to its axles in powdery sand, that thing had enough grunt and enough traction to tow a bogged-down Range Rover. Nothing stopped it. No slope was too severe, no terrain too arduous. With its ancient diesel under the bonnet, its ladder cha.s.sis and its primitive four-wheel-drive system it was unstoppable.It was, however, not pretty. I mean, the Mark One Land Cruiser pickup wasn't beautiful when it was new. After fifteen years of hard labour it was a sorry spectacle, its k.n.o.bbly tyres bleached grey by the sun and its silver paintwork dulled, scratched and streaked with rust.Still, it was one of the best, most endearing and most lovable machines I've ever encountered.We called it the Millennium Falcon.The real Falcon was not beautiful either. When George Lucas was planning Star Wars he envisioned a sleek rocket, but his original design looked startlingly similar to craft being used at the time in the TV show s.p.a.ce 1999. So he went back to the drawing board, or rather the local burger restaurant.It was here he got his inspiration. Yup, the Millennium Falcon was styled to resemble a burger. And the unusual, protruding control pod was modelled on an olive that Lucas saw peeping out of the bun.The noise it made? Well, that was a recording of some experimental aircraft at the Oshkosh Air Show in 1976. And the battle scenes? Well, they were modelled on actual moves in the film 633 Squadron. Especially the canyon-running in the final moments of Star Wars IV.All of this helped create a sense of reality. But the icing on the cake was the model itself. Instead of being a t.i.tchy little thing on wires or a computer graphic it was real and it was big: five feet across and perfect in every detail.That's the thing though. It was a model. This small detail, however, seems to have bypa.s.sed those who still live with their mothers and spend their evenings in the attic, reading magazines about murderers. These people have got it into their heads that the Millennium Falcon was real.By a.n.a.lysing the film, frame by frame, they've worked out that it's 27 metres in diameter, with a thickness of 6.9 metres and a density of 4,000 cubic metres. a.s.suming that 95 per cent of this volume is air and the remaining material has the thickness of iron they have come up with the conclusion that it has exactly the same density as the USS Enterprise. Spooky.One of them has even made this observation about the behaviour of the Falcon when it was. .h.i.t by a burst of what, to you and me, is green light: 'The rotational kinetic energy of an object is 0.512 at non-relativistic rotational speeds. Therefore 3.902E8 joules of rotational kinetic energy were added to the Millennium Falcon. However, the physics of collisions involve conservation of linear or angular momentum rather than the conservation of kinetic energy, which only happens in elastic collisions.'So, the green light has no ma.s.s. It is pure light energy. Interesting. And yet somehow not interesting at all.Normal people didn't watch Star Wars as an endless series of freeze frames. Certainly I watched it in one lump and I thought it was terrific. All those s.p.a.ce fights between creatures from worlds so much more strange than anything Captain Kirk had ever discovered.This was the joy of Star Wars. It took us on a mind-bending flight of fancy and yet we swallowed all the nonsense because actually the tale itself was as old as the hills. You had the evil lord fighting the princess and her band of knights. And stuck in the middle was Han, the lovable rogue, with his pet monkey/dog and his amazing, beaten-up s.p.a.ceship.Small boys everywhere know that in a fight between Superman, James Bond and the Terminator, James Bond would win. Well it's the same story in Star Wars. In a fight between the Enterprise, Stingray, Thunderbird 2 and the Millennium Falcon, the Falcon would reign supreme. It just would. The end.

Flying Boat

It was 14 March 1939 and the Empire Flying Boat Corsair was already two days into its journey from Durban in South Africa to Southampton Water in England.Nothing odd about that. This was a five-day journey back then because the plane would drop down several times a day for morning coffee, lunch and afternoon tea. Flying was civilised in those days.But then, on the leg from Uganda to the Sudan, everything went horribly wrong. Pilot John Alc.o.c.k, brother of the more famous Alc.o.c.k who'd made the first ever flight across the Atlantic, put the plane on automatic pilot and went back to dispense some bonhomie among the pa.s.sengers.He returned to the c.o.c.kpit just as the landing zone should have been coming into view. But it wasn't there. a.s.suming he'd overshot, he turned the plane around and retraced his steps but there was nothing below except jungle and swamp. After four hours of flying and with just fifteen minutes of fuel left in the tanks he knew he had to find the straightest piece of water he could and try to get Corsair and its thirteen pa.s.sengers down safely.The waterway he found was barely wider than the plane's wingspan but he made it anyway and had d.a.m.n nearly brought the machine to a halt when the hull hit a partially submerged rock. With water gushing in, he applied full power and drove Corsair onto the beach.No one was hurt and everyone was soon rescued and given shelter by a Belgian missionary who was quickly on the scene. Marvellous. End of story.Except it wasn't. The Corsair was the most modern flying boat around in 1939, and her owners were determined that they weren't going to simply write her off and spend 50,000 on a new one. They decided that they would get her out.The story is told beautifully in Graham Coster's book Corsairville, but, in summary, she was mended once but crashed on take-off. So they had to mend her again, even though the war was in full swing back at home. This involved damming the river and shipping in so many workers that a town had to be built. It's called Corsairville and it's still there today.There is no doubt in my mind that this epic story, set against the background of war in Europe, would make a magnificent film. Having won the Battle of Britain single-handedly in Pearl Harbor, Ben Affleck would be the perfect quintessential Englishman, John Alc.o.c.k. The Belgian missionary would be played by Jean-Claude Van Damme and his wife by Nicole Kidman. She gives good bodice.Obviously, in the vast heat that is Africa, Nicole and Ben would fall madly in love. As he struggled to free the plane, she'd swoon at the muscles in his back writhing like a sack of pythons. He in turn would be mesmerised by her b.u.t.tocks like ostrich eggs. Maybe Jean-Claude Van Damme could be eaten by a lion at some point.However, no matter what happens or who they get to fill all the major roles, the star of the show would have to be the plane itself. The Corsair. Flying boats, you see, are just adorable. Partly this is because they were flying when flying was so glamorous, and partly it's because they were jacks of all trades but masters, if I'm honest, of none. They therefore have that most human of traits a flaw.The first thing you need to know is that they are flying boats with the emphasis on the word 'boats'. They are not to be confused with float-planes, which are just normal aircraft that have flotation chambers instead of wheels. A flying boat really is a boat with wings; the underside of its fuselage really is a hull and as a result they are governed by all the usual maritime rules. They must, for instance, fly the flag of the nation onto whose waters they've landed.When they first came along in the twenties they made perfect sense because airfields required all kinds of civil engineering and bulldozers, and it only took a brief shower to render them muddy and inoperable. In the twenties Heathrow and Gatwick were villages.Whereas three-quarters of the world's surface was water and could therefore be used as a landing strip, either if something went wrong or when you reached journey's end.America was the first nation to really get cracking with the notion of a plane that could take off and land on water. Spurred along by that great aviation pioneer Juan Trippe of Pan Am, they had three different models up and running before the rest of the world had even woken up.They were called Clippers after the nineteenth-century sailing ships and they were all magnificent. The Boeing 314, for instance, had seating for 74 and 36 berths. There was a dining room, a deluxe compartment for VIPs, dressing rooms and a lounge. It made the Orient Express look like a Chinese ox cart.And they were flown by just the most dashing people. Pilots were earning $8,000 a year at a time when a dentist could only make a quarter of that and a new Pontiac would cost just $500. This put the man in the hot seat on a par with the pa.s.sengers, who were paying $500 to be up there the equivalent of 7,500 today.Fine, but Britain wasn't simply going to sit by and let the vulgar, new-moneyed colonials have it all their own way. So a plan was hatched...The Postmaster General announced in 1934 that all first-cla.s.s mail would have to be carried by air. This provided an effective subsidy for any aircraft maker or airline who wished to invest in a long-haul carrier. So immediately Imperial Airways went in search of a plane that could cover the world. Shorts provided the answer with the Empire Flying Boat.They were known as the C Cla.s.s because all the names chosen and Corsair was one of them began with a C. They were lovely things, but sadly they were not quite so impressive as the American rivals. They could only carry 24 pa.s.sengers and had a range of just 700 miles.But that was enough to service the British Empire. And I'd like you to imagine that; flying to say Australia or India on one of these glorious machines in 1939, stopping every three hours or so in another country, in another time zone, for food and more tea. It must have been absolutely thrilling.But the Americans by this stage were well ahead. Their planes were crossing the Pacific and then, on 26 March, they crossed the Atlantic too. We had a pit pony, charming and charismatic for sure, but they had a racehorse. In fact with the Sikorsky, the Boeing and the Catalina they had three racehorses and as a result they were on the brink of enveloping the world and bringing everyone a little closer together.Sadly, it didn't turn out quite like that, because five months later Adolf Hitler sent his troops into Poland and the world fell apart.In the build-up to war the British military had seen the advantage of flying boats and had already commissioned Shorts to build a version with guns instead of tea. It was called the Sunderland.Like all the most human machines, the Deltic locomotive, the s.p.a.ce Shuttle and the Jumbo Jet, the windscreen rises up out of the nose to create more of a face. The Sunderland really did appear to have eyes and eyebrows and you know what, it even seemed to have an expression. It looked sad.We had 40 by the time war broke out, each of which had a 7.7mm gun in the nose and two in the rear. In addition to this the Sunderland could carry 2,000 lbs of bombs, mines or depth charges. Small wonder the German U-boat crews used to call them 'flying porcupines'. They really did bristle with death.Mind you, they weren't exactly fault free. In the early days bombs dropped at low alt.i.tude would sometimes bounce right off the water and hit the plane that had dropped them. And landing on water meant the pilot had to shift, in the blink of an eye, from being a master of the air to being a salty sea dog with a nose for currents. Make no mistake, these things were not a walk in the park.As the war rolled on the flying boat was given more powerful engines and eventually radar that became more and more sophisticated. Couple this to its ability to remain aloft for hour after hour and it became, despite the shortfalls, the most formidable anti-submarine weapon in the country's a.r.s.enal.In the five years of hostilities Sunderlands killed 28 U-boats and helped to destroy another seven. To fight back the U-boats were given anti-aircraft guns, but it didn't do them much good. On one occasion they did manage to riddle a Sunderland so comprehensively that the crew on board knew they were finished. So they simply pointed the nose at the sub and deliberately crashed into it.Eventually the battle of the Atlantic came down to a technological war between the radar in the planes and the radar-jamming equipment on the subs, a war Britain kept on winning.But, surprisingly, the Sunderland was rather more than a flying listening station that could destroy targets when they were identified. It was also a d.a.m.n good plane.On 2 June 1943 a lone Sunderland was on patrol when it was jumped by no fewer than eight long-range Junkers Ju-88 fighters. Now even if the German pilots were blind and mad, a ratio of eight to one should have a.s.sured them of victory. I mean, apart from anything else, they were in fighters and they were up against a converted post-office van.On their first pa.s.s the Sunderland was raked with fire and the forward machine gun was put out of action. On the second the radio was destroyed, and on each subsequent attack more damage was done. The crew didn't fare terribly well either. One was killed and the others suffered wounds of varying severity.But on each of the pa.s.ses the Germans were taking losses too, until only two of the original eight planes were left. They decided to scarper, leaving the wounded Sunderland to limp back to Cornwall where it landed safely and was driven on to the beach.Eight to one. Not even a Spitfire could have managed that.Unfortunately, however, while these flying boats were keeping the supply lines from America open their very future was being threatened back at home.By the time the war ended Britain was a ma.s.s of airfields, which had been hastily built to house the vast numbers of fighters and bombers. So now there was no need to land at sea. Now new planes with wheels and jet engines could land six miles from the outskirts of London.There have been attempts over the years to make jet-powered seaplanes. There was the Caspian Sea Monster, for one, and various attempts by the Americans. But really, everyone knew the flying boat was finished. Everyone, that is, except a company called Saunders Roe.With airfields changing the face of air travel, this tiny Isle of Wight-based operation decided to have one last go at a truly magnificent flying boat. And what they had in mind wasn't that far short of sticking wings on a cross-channel ferry. What they had in mind was something called the Princess, a 105-seat monster.It sounded daft but Saunders Roe had a reputation for thinking out of the box. Over time they built helicopters, rocket-a.s.sisted fighters, hovercraft and s.p.a.ce probes, so when they said they were going to make a seaplane, when seaplanes were finished, and that theirs would have ten engines and six props and would weigh 320,000 lbs, the government said 'sure' and gave them 10 million.It would be the biggest plane the world had ever seen, a 220-foot-wide double-decker fitted with all the appurtenances of gracious living. Powder rooms, restaurants. It would be Blenheim Palace in the air.What staggers me about this project is that it didn't simply wither and die. The boffins at Saunders Roe really did get stuck in and make their amazing plane. And not just one but three of them. And then what staggers me even more is that on 21 August 1952 this giant did actually fly.She had been taken out merely to see how she handled while taxiing but test pilot Geoffrey Tyson gave all ten engines some beans and up she went. Much later, when asked why he'd done this, he said, 'Well, she simply wanted to fly, so I let her.'She actually flew on ten more test flights before someone somewhere realised she was heading in completely the wrong direction. The future of flight lay in low cost, not Earl Grey. Three or four hundred people crammed in like sardines, not 105 lounging around on sofas. And as a result the plug was pulled.For years people wondered what might become of these three giants, which sat on the quayside on the Isle of Wight, rotting. At one point NASA showed an interest, thinking they could be used to transport Saturn V rockets. At another some bright spark suggested they could be used as a test bed for nuclear-powered aircraft. In the end, though, no one could think of anything and they were broken up for sc.r.a.p.I once saw a Princess and it left a lasting impression. Because unlike normal flying boats, which were planes with sculptured undercarriages, this one really did look like a giant boat, with a keel. And even allowing for the fact I was seven and small, it was absolutely b.l.o.o.d.y ma.s.sive.It was also an example, like Concorde, of post-war Britain barking up the wrong tree and getting it wrong. However, when you encounter a magnificent folly in the grounds of a stately home, you often wonder what on earth possessed the old blue-blood to build such a thing. But you never think he shouldn't have bothered in the first place.

SS Great Britain

In 1936 the governor of the Falkland Islands, Sir Henniker Heston, decided the old barge in Port Stanley harbour was really too far gone to be used as a floating coal and wool bunker any more. So it was towed out to the windswept and barren Sparrow Cove, where it was holed below the water line, beached and left to rot.This was a sad day because the rusting old hulk wasn't a barge at all. It had started out in life as the SS Great Britain. The most amazing ocean liner of them all.It wasn't the biggest or the fastest, and it certainly wasn't the most luxurious, but it was Genesis. A ship 50 years ahead of its time. The first iron-hulled steamship with a propeller ever to cross perhaps the most dangerous stretch of water in the world: the North Atlantic.Of all the world's oceans this is the most psychopathic. The Southern Oceans are always angry and fierce. You know what to expect. But the North Atlantic can kill you in ways you never even thought possible. One moment it's calm and benign and then, just when you think the trip will be kind and friendly, you find yourself facing the kind of rogue wave that nailed George Clooney in The Perfect Storm. That's a.s.suming, of course, you've managed to dodge the other shipping in the thick cloying fogs that hang over the Grand Banks for months on end, and to miss the icebergs that drift southwards from Greenland between June and September. But sometimes in other months as well, just to catch you out.When we think of this 3,000-mile stretch of water we think of the t.i.tanic, and we marvel at the loss of life. 1,500 souls going to their icy graves in what we a.s.sume was a freak accident. But it wasn't a freak at all. It was just another page in another chapter in a roll-call of death that boggles the mind.History teaches us that in the eighteenth century France and Britain waged a war in America and that men, messages and supplies were routinely carried between the Old and New Worlds as though the crossing were some kind of train journey. Not so. In the 300 years after Columbus found the Americas tens of thousands died trying to follow in his footsteps. It is estimated that off the coast of Britain alone there are 250,000 ships on the seabed, and in 1839 Parliament reckoned that 1,000 people a year were dying at sea.Those that did make the journey talked of icebergs bigger than houses and ma.s.sive waves over 100 feet tall. They spoke of 120mph winds and holes in the ocean. They spoke of a lumpen, vicious, white-flecked, freezing, grey, watery h.e.l.l.In the nineteenth century, engineering was beginning to work its magic. Invented as a concept in France, where bright men with huge foreheads sat around talking about the possibilities, it was taken up by the British, who actually dug the coal, made the iron and got the machines to work.If anyone had come to Britain in, say, 1840, they simply wouldn't have believed their eyes. Elsewhere in the world it was sail and oxen, but here there were factories and steam engines and trains. It would have been like visiting a country today where they have interstellar travel and dogs in s.p.a.cesuits. We were light years ahead.Leading the charge was Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He'd cut his engineering teeth running a project to dig a tunnel under the Thames, the first tunnel ever to be excavated under water. Then he'd designed the Clifton Suspension Bridge and the Great Western Railway, or Mr Brunel's billiard table, as it became known.Other engineers of the time were wary of putting their know-how to the test in a battle with the Atlantic. They had the machines to power ships but held back, fearful that no boiler, no matter how big and reliable, would be capable of dealing with such immense savagery. Investors held back too, fearful that their cash was bound to end up feeding the fishes.What's more, there was a feeling that in order to have enough fuel to power the fires that heated the boiler all the available s.p.a.ce on board would be taken up by coal. That