The first plastic (in the sense in which the word is normally used) arrived exactly on cue to benefit several other changes then taking place in the world. The electrical industry was growing fast, as was the automotive industry.38 Both urgently needed insulating materials. The use of electric lighting and telephone services was also spreading, and the phonograph had proved more popular than anticipated. In the spring of 1910 a prospectus was drafted for the establishment of a Bakelite company, which opened its offices in New York six months later on 5 October.39 Unlike the Wright brothers’ airplane, in commercial terms Bakelite was an immediate success.
Bakelite evolved into plastic, without which computers, as we know them today, would probably not exist. At the same time that this ‘hardware’ aspect of the modern world was in the process of formation, important elements of the ‘software’ were also gestating, in particular the exploration of the logical basis for mathematics. The pioneers here were Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead.
Russell – slight and precise, a finely boned man, ‘an aristocratic sparrow’ – is shown in Augustus John’s portrait to have had piercingly sceptical eyes, quizzical eyebrows, and a fastidious mouth. The godson of the philosopher John Stuart Mill, he was born halfway through the reign of Queen Victoria, in 1872, and died nearly a century later, by which time, for him as for many others, nuclear weapons were the greatest threat to mankind. He once wrote that ‘the search for knowledge, unbearable pity for suffering and a longing for love’ were the three passions that had governed his life. ‘I have found it worth living,’ he concluded, ‘and would gladly live it again if the chance were offered me.’40
One can see why. John Stuart Mill was not his only famous connection – T. S. Eliot, Lytton Strachey, G. E. Moore, Joseph Conrad, D. H. Lawrence, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Katherine Mansfield were just some of his circle. Russell stood several times for Parliament (but was never elected), championed Soviet Russia, won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, and appeared (sometimes to his irritation) as a character in at least six works of fiction, including books by Roy Campbell, T. S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley, D. H. Lawrence, and Siegfried Sassoon. When Russell died in 1970 at the age of ninety-seven there were more than sixty of his books still in print.41
But of all his books the most original was the massive tome that appeared first in 1910, entitled, after a similar work by Isaac Newton, Principia Mathematica. This book is one of the least-read works of the century. In the first place it is about mathematics, not everyone’s favourite reading. Second, it is inordinately long – three volumes, running to more than 2,000 pages. But it was the third reason which ensured that this book – which indirectly led to the birth of the computer – was read by only a very few people: it consists mostly of a tightly knit argument conducted not in everyday language but by means of a specially invented set of symbols. Thus ‘not’ is represented by a curved bar; a boldface B stands for ‘or’; a square dot means ‘and,’ while other logical relationships are shown by devices such as a U on its side (⊃) for ‘implies,’ and a three-barred equals sign (≡) for ‘is equivalent to.’ The book was ten years in the making, and its aim was nothing less than to explain the logical foundations of mathematics.
Such a feat clearly required an extraordinary author. Russell’s education was unusual from the start. He was given a private tutor who had the distinction of being agnostic; as if that were not adventurous enough, this tutor also introduced his charge first to Euclid, then, in his early teens, to Marx. In December 1889, at the age of seventeen, Russell went to Cambridge. It was an obvious choice, for the only passion that had been observed in the young man was for mathematics, and Cambridge excelled in that discipline. Russell loved the certainty and clarity of math. He found it as ‘moving’ as poetry, romantic love, or the glories of nature. He liked the fact that the subject was totally uncontaminated by human feelings. ‘I like mathematics,’ he wrote, ‘because it is not human & has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe – because, like Spinoza’s God, it won’t love us in return.’ He called Leibniz and Spinoza his ‘ancestors.’42
At Cambridge, Russell attended Trinity College, where he sat for a scholarship. Here he enjoyed good fortune, for his examiner was Alfred North Whitehead. Just twenty-nine, Whitehead was a kindly man (he was known in Cambridge as ‘cherub’), already showing signs of the forgetfulness for which he later became notorious. No less passionate about mathematics than Russell, he displayed his emotion in a somewhat irregular way. In the scholarship examination, Russell came second; a young man named Bushell gained higher marks. Despite this, Whitehead convinced himself that Russell was the abler man – and so burned all of the examination answers, and his own marks, before meeting the other examiners. Then he recommended Russell.43 Whitehead was pleased to act as mentor for the young freshman, but Russell also fell under the spell of G. E. Moore, the philosopher. Moore, regarded as ‘very beautiful’ by his contemporaries, was not as witty as Russell but instead a patient and highly impressive debater, a mixture, as Russell once described him, of ‘Newton and Satan rolled into one.’ The meeting between these two men was hailed by one scholar as a ‘landmark in the development of modern ethical philosophy.’44