The test of time

Take a walk through any UK city and beneath the flashing, bleeping veneer of modernity the past is rarely hard to find: our buildings, stations and much of our infrastructure a daily reminder of the contributions our ancestors made to the modern world.

Throughout this year we have been celebrating the 150th anniversary of The Engineer. This milestone has frequently led us to our archives. And, among the engineering curiosities and glimpses of a very different world, what is striking about these documents is how many of the great engineering icons of the past, particularly from the Victorian era, are still with us today. They are not museum pieces but useful innovations still doing exactly what they were designed for.

Never a publication to shy away from a bit of futurology, this heavy debt to the past prompted us to ask what will be seen as today’s engineering and technological legacy when the magazine celebrates its 300th anniversary in 2156? What UK breakthroughs and developments will future historians trace back to the current era of innovation and engineering?

It is perhaps a trickier question than it would have been 150 years ago. In many respects we still live in a Victorian society. Much of our existing infrastructure and a significant chunk of our architecture dates back to the second half of the 19th century. Our ancestors did a lot of the hard work for us.

More significantly, the speed at which technology now develops means many of the truly great achievements of the modern age will be utterly out of date in 150 years time.

While things were once “built to last”, we now live in the age of the disposable device, with the fruits of our engineers’ and scientists’ most intense labours often on their way to obsolescence before they are removed from the packaging. Brunel’s bridges may still be standing in the middle of the next century but the Ipod, one of the great consumer technology success stories of the last few years, will almost certainly be a curiosity.

After much deliberation, we have identified 10 UK innovations that we believe will still be having an impact 150 years hence. In addition to engineered structures, we have turned our attention to less tangible developments, breakthroughs that herald the start of promising new fields as well as the legacy of decisions made today about our technological future.

Our starting point is 1989: the year that the worldwide web came into being — a world-changing UK invention and a convenient technological landmark for the purposes of this exercise.

Plus, despite our comments on the disposable age, not everything is designed to break after five minutes. The new Wembley stadium, the Channel Tunnel and the Channel Tunnel Rail Link (CTRL) are all examples of iconic engineering projects that in the great Victorian tradition have, or are at least being, “built to last”.

It would be possible to argue that our most enduring and chilling legacy will be environmental meltdown and that there will not be much worth celebrating in 150 years time.

But in the spirit of the piece, we have decided to take a rosier view. It is Christmas, after all, and we’ve had quite enough death and destruction for one year.

Finally, if all this crystal ball-gazing gets a bit too much, we have also unearthed from our archives original coverage of some of those Victorian-era engineering marvels that are still with us today.