Courtesy Mick Hamer
SCIENCE historians sometimes use a type of thought experiment called a counterfactual, otherwise known as a “what if?” What if Darwin hadn’t sailed on the Beagle? What if the ancient Greeks had invented steam engines?
These are not just parlour games; they reveal the extent to which progress is historically contingent. Had Darwin not sailed then the theory of evolution would probably have emerged anyway. But had the Greeks built a steam engine, history would have played out differently.
Sometimes the thought experiments reveal lost opportunities and agonising near misses. So it is with Edwardian London’s electric buses. Had they not been run by crooks, chances are that the internal combustion engine would not have dominated the 20th century (see “How crooks stalled the rise of electric cars for 100 years”).
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Hindsight is a wonderful thing; the bus fiasco reminds us that superior technologies don’t always win out and that the market doesn’t always make rational choices. With the development of clean energy technology at a crossroads (see “We really can run the world on renewable energy – here’s how”), a historical perspective on roads taken and not taken is more relevant than ever.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Roads not taken”
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