 I'm not talking about what I normally do, which is I compose music for film and theatre and what not, and make robotic instruments. I'm actually talking about something from the archives that I hope you find relevant to some of the themes that we've had today. This is about a pioneer, a very interesting pioneer, whose story is very very close to my heart. To start, picture the scene, 1950, far far away from the cares of the atomic research establishment and a pantomime cow is eating a radioactive lunch and then the cow gets up, rubs its belly, and then somebody pirouettes onto the stage, somebody called Atom Man, and he sort of kneels before this person who sort of swoops on in parachutes, somebody called Knowledge, and Atom Man says to Knowledge, the cow will soon be a perfectly healthy animal, and then seven women die right around the stage in evening gowns and then neutrinos. This is what actually happened in the Waldorf Hotel in October 1950, and it was a ballet, isotopia, an exposition in atomic structure. We had no idea if it ever saw the light of day again after it was seen, and it was performed by the ladies of the Ladies' Atomic Society, and it was performed to 250 members who were absolutely enwraptured by it, and a completely astonished journalist from Time Magazine, and there's so very very little we know about this piece, or the very important woman I want to talk to today, the woman that wrote this piece, Muriel Howarth. Howarth was a composer, she composed music for this ballet, she was a choreographer and costume designer, she was also the librettist, and most importantly for me, she was an amateur atomic physicist and an evangelist of the atomic age. What I find very interesting when I think about Howarth's work, because I'm actually thinking of making my next opera about Howarth, is I think about the half-life of the isotope, and I think going back to some of the things you heard earlier, I also think about the half-life of pioneers like this, who gets put in the record, and what is the half-life of their story if we're not recording it sufficiently. So Muriel, here she is in 1949, showing a model of a lithium atom to an astonished and thrilled Mayor of Eastbourne. She was very very fond of curiosity as Muriel, and she had a great eye for the theatrical, and she often did, and this is the very late 40s, is she would produce at events like this an eight-week-old baked potato from a handbag and proceed to eat it. As I'm sure you all understand, the potato had been irradiated, it had been blasted with gamma rays, which had sterilised it so it was germ-free. A few little other fragments we know about Muriel, and this is a very tantalising one that I want to investigate further. The Ministry of Information clocked her during the war as a very smart cookie. She had no formal physics training, but they said, please go and gen up immediately on atomic physics because we want you to explain atomic physics to the masses. And this is something that she continues to do with a plump into peacetime. And it's in 1960 that Muriel embarked on possibly her most astonishing feat, her most astonishing stunt of all. And it became public when she was photographed in the Sunday Dispatch by Beverly Nicholls, who was considered like the titchmarsh of his age. And here she is tickling the results of one of her experiments. And this is what he wrote, Beverly Nicholls. Yesterday, I held in my hands the most sensational plant in Britain. It is the only one of its kind, nothing of its sort has ever been seen in the country before. To me it had all the romance of something from outer space. It is the first atomic peanut. Now, this isn't just any old peanut, but this was NC4X. And it had come from a crop of atom-blasted peanuts. So what happened was scientists in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, home of the bomb, had taken crops and taken seeds and blasted them with gamma rays. And as I'm sure you would all understand, that battering caused remarkable things to happen to the DNA of some of those plants. Some of them would become totally wrecked and would wither and die. Some might grow twisted, some might grow in weird colours. But if you did this to millions and millions of seeds, they call this method now spray and pray. If you did it to millions and millions of seeds, or maybe hundreds of thousands of seeds, you might get lucky. You might get what they call the golden mutant, the giant mutant fruit or vegetable. And I talked to something called Paige Johnson in the US, who is very up on Muriel's story, and she sort of put it to me really well. She said, if today's sort of genome editing is like sort of snicking away with parasisms, this is like swacking away at the genome with a hammer. But nevertheless, they got lucky into Oak Ridge with this particular peanut, and she had been to the US. I wonder if she's, I've got so many theories about how. But there's a record of her visiting a sort of UN event where she ate some of these and then took some home and started growing them herself. So that's what she was at, that's what she was in the papers for in 1960. And then around that time she had to have an eye operation and she thought, what am I going to do with my beautiful crop? And she was quite smart and she thought, I know, I'll go to Wannock just outside Eastbourne where there's this beautiful wonder garden. And now the wonder gardens in Wannock, you'd go along there, you'd have strawberries and you'd sort of see all these little follies and fountains and crazy golf and all of that. And then there was some sort of weird stuff there. There was Fred Slaymaker's Wonder Village, which was a playing with scale, as you can see. And the horticulturalist that ran the wonder garden, she said, would you mind looking after the thing I had in the paper the other day? And he said, certainly, I'll put it in my cactus house. And then unsurprisingly, the fact that he had an atom blasted peanut was more interesting to anybody than the actual cactus. And so he gave Muriel run of the rabbit warren and she set up the world's first atomic garden. And what she was actually planting, well, because public one, what she was actually planting was all the sort of stable mutants that Oak Ridge had already found. So here's some tomatoes and if you look, so you could just sort of go along there, go and see the model village and then pop next door and see some atom blasted seeds, note early fruit and sturdy plant needs no support. So this was all very well, but she was working with other people's gear. She was working with stuff other people had discovered, and that wasn't enough for her. She didn't just want to show off somebody else's fancy peanuts and tomatoes. She wanted to do something far more ambitious. She wanted to find the golden mutant that would grow so big it could cure world hunger. And so in 1960, she embarked on an amateur experiment of astonishing ambition. She set up the world's first atomic gardening society. Anybody could join for the price of a few first class stamps. And if you did so, she would send you some random seeds from her friends in Oak Ridge and you would grow them in your garden. So this was like citizen science on an absolutely grand scale, all arranged through the post office. And she was very open about the methods. You'd also, just for a couple of shillings, get the pamphlets through the post where she would explain how to run your own atomic garden, what isotopes were, how to do some sort of basic horticulture. I should point out, there was no sort of test and control experiment here. If you imagine, the control was the unblasted seeds. What she was trying to do was just do sort of spray and pray method with thousands upon thousands of people. So yes, so she also backed early on even before she got to this stage. So for instance, when we go back to the time of that lithium atom, she was the kind of woman that would write to the great physicists of the age. She had a very long correspondence with Soddy and Einstein backed her in 1950. He sent her a very sort of gracious letter in 1950. So she knew how to sort of use the sort of power networks that were out there to sort of get some sort of recognition for what she was doing to give it a bit of wind in its sails. So yes, so that was Muriel Howe. She set up the Atomic Gardening Society and within that society she taught people the basics of radiation and in her mind the peaceful uses of the atom. Because what her sort of, let me just go back actually because there's a beautiful quote from her. What she felt, yes, this is what she felt she wanted to do. She wanted to lead women out of the kitchen and into the atomic age. Not to know about atomic energy and the wonderful things it can do is like living in the dark ages. So yes, so while the rest of us, you know, while people were worried about the doomsday clock and what wasn't coming out of Cockroff's follies and all of that, she was trying to evangelise about the atom and the peaceful uses of the atom. And of course this is absolute classic techno-utopianism, isn't it? And a very fine example. Here's a woman who very clearly understood the privations of rationing and famine. It was not long after the end of the war. There was not enough food. Here was a techno fix. Here was an easy way in inverted commas to solve it. But of course, what I find so interesting about techno-utopianism is often, oh, here we go again. Can you hear me? Yes. One of the things about techno-utopianism is that you have to tread very, very carefully because sometimes a techno fix isn't all that you need. Sometimes problems are more complicated and they need sort of more systemic solutions. This is actually a subject very close to my heart because I was actually a guinea pig in one of the big techno fix experiments of the 1960s, which was water fluoridation. So I'm born in Watford and Watford was a test town for water fluoride. And so if you imagine, 1960s, 66, I think they started in Watford, you kind of hope they thought about it really, really hard before they put a known toxin in the water supply and we like to think that they did. But I decided to go into the National Archive because I'm from Watford to find out exactly what went on. So as far as I was concerned, we were all told as kids that we were the chosen ones. We had regular dental visits and we were told we were going to have the best teeth in the country and all of this because then we were the subjects of the water fluoridation experiment. We were the test town babies. When I went into the archives, there were some fascinating things. There was great resistance to fluoridising the water for obvious reasons. So they just switched it on anyway. And then they said, you've been drinking it for three weeks. And then once they actually said that we'd been drinking it for three weeks, the local radio was flooded with anxious people who said their canary had fallen off its perch and things like that. So it's very, very interesting. But what's more murky than anything to me is the reason why they fluoridated in the first place. And this is why I always tread very carefully when I hear people talking about techno fixes. In 1960, the average five-year-old in the UK had five rotten teeth. And the reasons for that were obvious. I was born in 1966, but I'm a bird's-eye kid. We were all eating junk. The amount of sugar in our diet had gone up. The amount of processed food had gone up. Unless we were from wealthy families, we weren't necessarily getting enough fruit and vegetables. And that was really hard to fix because you had to sort out equality in the country. You had to take on big business, all the sugar barons, just as bad as the tobacco barons of old. And it was really, really hard to do. Sorting out food, poverty, time poverty, getting assertive with some of these big companies. And that's really hard to do, so they couldn't do that. But what they could do is they could shore up people's teeth because that was quick and easy. So they sorted out the symptom, but not the problem. So here I am into my early 50s. I'm the first generation to be around in our early 50s having drunk 15, 20 years of naturally fluoridated water. And we are still guinea pigs. I have got pretty good teeth, I should say. But what are we living through? We're living through an obesity epidemic. Because they didn't actually deal with the difficult problem. They went with the technofix. Here's another example of a technofix. Does anybody recognise this language? I mean, does anybody have any personal? Yes. So are you a personal? Yes. So, well, we've got somebody here who can probably explain it even better than I can. But this is astonishing. God knows what was wrong with us a lot, but just as around in the 60s there was a tooth decay epidemic, there was also real problems with low literacy in the UK. So the obvious way to fix that was with good teaching, evidence-based teaching and so on and so forth. But technofix came in from Pittman and the free-spelling movement. So this is, again, the got to be wary of the technoeutopia. The free-spellers were utopians. They had a technofix for illiteracy. And it wasn't get good teaching, learn about evidence-based teaching. No, it was fix orthography. Fix orthography because, you know, we've got this really messed up language where it's not phonetic. So make it easy for children in the first two years of school. Don't teach them traditional orthography, traditional letters and spelling. Give them this made-up thing with extra letters in the alphabet called Saxon Spanglish, which is spelt phonetically. So, and this is the absolute classic law of intended consequences. I'm going to send you around some examples. This one is a ladybird book in ITA called The Policeman. I'm just going to send that around. It is quite an astonishing thing to see. And this, oh, I've got 15 minutes left. This I find genuinely heartbreaking and I'd love to hear from this fellow here. This is a child's workbook written in ITA. Can I just? I can't put this in. I'm stymied by Philips. Right, okay. So the big, big problem with this experiment, which was sanctioned by the government, they did it with the thousands and thousands of children for a number of years in the UK, was that they only taught you ITA for the first two years. And then in year three you went in and they said, all that stuff you've learnt is not really like that. And it destabilised a whole generation of children. I mean I've spoken to one very, very accomplished professor who's got tremendous problems with reading and writing. I wouldn't say he's dyslexic, but he struggles with writing. And he said it completely screwed him up because he was waiting for the day that the maths teacher came in and said, all that maths we taught you is not really like that. So parents are being advised not to teach their children reading at home because it would interfere with what they were doing in the classroom. I mean the whole thing was so screwed up. And again, this is where the utopianism has a sort of more murky underbelly in that when you go into the National Archives you find that this was being spearheaded by Pittman, of Pittman's shorthand. And he was locking these schools into his books. So basically he had an awful lot of money to be made out of this thing because he almost owned the patent for the... Not the patent, but he kind of owned the rights to this whole system. And so it's another reason to be where, isn't it? Now I just want to say very briefly because I've only got sort of 10 minutes left. How did Muriel do? Well, going back to our conversation about lurkers, I think Muriel was a bit of a... When I think about the issue with lurkers, I would also like to raise the issue with gatekeepers because I think that's one of the biggest problems we have in open source communities and other communities in that gatekeepers need to be educated about being the kind of gatekeepers that allow the lurkers to feel that they can raise their head above the parapet. She was the worst kind of gatekeeper. Her letters were really, really snippy. And when you went to her meetings you had to wear a badge to explain your level of expertise and you had to wear it at all times. And so basically she didn't get the millions of people that she wanted. She didn't even get the thousands. She just got a few hundred and it was all a bit snippy and a bit bossy and unsurprisingly the whole thing sort of quietly fizzled out. And so she kind of just became this sort of brilliant woman and her legacy sort of ended there really. And I always think about her and I think about her strange stunts, her ballet and her baked potatoes and all that. And to me she just always feels like an absolutely brilliant woman who has never given the keys to the lab and was constantly saying to the world, look at me, look at me, look what I can do. And then I contrast her with women who were also pioneers who were much more successful because they had more sort of, they were more strategic in what they did and one of my favourite organisations was the Electrical Association for Women from the 30s. I haven't got time to talk to you much about it now in detail. Beautiful badges. They gave very detailed education on circuitry, main circuitry, just the basics of circuitry. I have to thank Andrew for sourcing me one of these beautiful, beautiful, this isn't mine, mine's a pride of place in a frame at home. They taught women how to fix things like their iron, this was like in the 1930s onwards and they peated out in the 80s, how to fix irons, how to rewire a plug. And they evangelised about electricity by doing wonderful things like building, commissioning this beautiful Corbusian Palace, which is right in the middle of this sort of Tudibethan suburb in Bristol and sort of packing it with wonderful inventions like the Thor Electric Servant, which was a food mixer that could double as a washing machine and things like that. And the word servant is very important because they were working with middle class women primarily in post first world war when there was the servants crisis, when all the people that come back for the war said stuff that for a game of soldiers and said I'm not going to be your servant anymore and there weren't, there was actually a genuine shortage of people as well because so many of men had died on the battlefield. And so they were thinking about replacing the human flesh and blood servant with these servant machines and they did some wonderful things like they designed and demonstrated rational kitchens. This may not look that rational to you but compared with Victorian kitchen believe me this is a rational kitchen and it has power points and things like that and electric clock and the way it's laid out and they were sort of basing this on the 1926 Frankfurt designs that were sort of coming on stream. And so they were if you like utopians too and they were utopians in many ways. First of all they were trying to openly sort of scientificify for whatever better term scientificify household drudgery almost to give it status and I find that a double-edged thing because why do you need to make it a scientific thing to give it status but that's what they were trying to do and they were sort of being led by idealists like the Gilbriths I don't know if you're familiar with these diagrams this is a photograph from one of Frank and Lillian Gilbriths experiments where somebody's doing a job, sewing buttons or whatever and they're looking at their motion and seeing where they stray from if you like a machine ideal this is the scientific management of labour the early days of that. The Gilbriths were ideal, it's what they were trying to do was trying to make humans movement by rationalising the layout of a workplace to make it more like an inverted commas a machine ideal because they were after what they called more happiness minutes. But of course that's a double-edged thing isn't it because that's also the scientific management of labour is also where the technology, if you like that ends up with people wandering around a warehouse at Amazon in the gig economy. Very briefly, where the electrical association of women's utopianism never quite met its potential was why they were interested in electrifying the home so here's an example of a beautiful EAW thing about how to rationally lay out your flexes at home for the 1930s and what they were doing was they didn't just want to give women less time with housework which never did quite pan out but they actually saw it as the next step beyond suffrage because women had got the vote but they felt cheated because they'd got the vote and not much else and they felt a bit let down and it was all very well having the vote because women were stuck at home all day how the hell can you ever get to the club let alone the House of Commons and so they saw electricity as a route to liberation and very briefly I'll play a little bit of one of my favourite bits of music this is actually the EAW teaming up with one of the electrical companies and it explains their rationale Let's lend you your time lend you your time for play Women's grace would be my home but now it's out for day See you're too sweet that's not a straw fly up the fire and then just rock then do the hard labor at the top but now he goes to the ladies' club and let's lend you your time Yes, and of course actually what all this sort of stuff does as I say it's really just sort of atomised labour and for many many working class people and it didn't get them into the club or the Houses of Parliament what it actually did was this sort of rationalised management of work and labour ended up somewhere rather different Now, so I don't want to be down on techno utopianism at all I just think that when we talk about these things that this could happen and that could happen I think all these new technologies they have to be embedded in the kind of societal structural changes that will bring about behaviour control The one that's alarming me so much at the moment involves the Paris Accord I was so alarmed to hear from James Dyke who's a very good friend of mine who's a climate change scientist he models dynamical systems in the climate that these, now correct me if I'm wrong if any is an expert on this but these say you know where we're trying to hit the two degree mark and we've got all these things that we can put in place to make sure we don't go above a certain level of warning that those contingent on us reaching that goal is the coming on stream of carbon capture technology that does not exist yet so our absolute existential future our future as human beings is reliant on a treaty that assumes a technofix is going to be here in time people do not have that technofix yet you have to be very very wary of technofixes and worry about behaviour change in the meantime just a very very quick addendum before we stop Muriel of course she got very snippy with the geneticists who were trying to use chemical means to splice the genome she just thought they were onto a no hope but of course history tells us something else but interestingly Muriel's stuff came back into fashion first of all obviously irradiated food it's among us all the time he's somebody who's making cobalt 60 sauce entirely from irradiated ingredients and this I find wonderful this is a high energy garden somebody's doing now because as you say you couldn't have done what Muriel wanted to do just with a sort of handful of sort of plucky gardens around the UK you needed huge huge numbers of plants to get the mutations and you need many many tournaments of those plants many many generations of those plants to get the sort of interesting mutation she was after but now of course with rapid genome sequencing you can do that and if you look here is what's known as a high energy garden people bathing plants in irradiation from cobalt 60 or whatever it is I'm not a nuclear physicist all the time waiting and hoping for a fruitful unexpected mutation and here is a photo a cut from a woodcut whatever from Muriel's book Atomic Gardening from the Laman in which she lays out her plans which she could never fund for a cobalt 60 garden that would do precisely that thanks