Science of Discworld III

harder to build but would require even less energy. The trick is that people and goods coming down can help to lift other people and goods up. The energetics satisfy all the standard mathematical rules, but the context supplies an unexpected source of energy.
    These gadgets work better than rockets, but not because these use relativity or other clever new physics like quantum. Or because they don’t obey Newton’s laws, because they do, to the extent that these are still relevant. Instead, the bolas and the elevator have new invention immortalised into them, so that a spaceman who gets into the cabin of a bolas in thin upper atmosphere from a jet aircraft can shortly afterwards get out of the cabin 400 miles up. Going at the right speed, it so happens, to catch the passing cabin of a 400-mile space bolas, which can deposit him, days later, in the right orbit to catch the 15,000-mile bolas, which deposits him in geostationary orbit, 22,000 miles up, after a couple of weeks. Such machines can be powered by using them to drop valuable asteroid material down to Earth, or (in the case of the bolas) by ‘pumping’ them like a garden swing, using motors in the middle powered by sunlight and reeling in or letting out the cabin tethers as the bolas rotates.
    Once we’ve made the huge initial investment required to build such machinery, rocket technology becomes largely obsolete, just as animal traction was dispossessed by the internal combustion engine. Sure, you can’t attach 500 horses to the front of a big canal-barge, because there wouldn’t be room on the towpath – but a 500-horsepower marine engine is another matter entirely. Sure, a rocket would use far too much fuel to be a practical method for hoisting goods and people into orbit en masse – but that’s not the only way to get them there. Yes, Newton’s laws still have to be obeyed, and you have to ‘pay’ to set everything up, and it still costs just the same energy to get people into orbit. But nobody pays once the machinery is there. If you don’t believe this, go up in an elevator in askyscraper, noting how the counterbalance weights go down, and return to solid ground. Then , to ram the message home, walk up the stairs.
    The wordprocessor we’re using to type this book is a metaphorical space elevator compared to a manual typewriter (remember those? Maybe not). A modern automobile is a space elevator compared to a Ford model T or an Austin-7, which were themselves bolases, while 1880s steam cars were rockets. Think of the investment that went into the Victorian railway system, the canals – then realise how this immense investment changed the rules, so that later generations could do all kinds of things that were impossible to their forebears.
    Victoriana, then, was not a situation, it was a process. A recursive process, which built itself new rules and new abilities, as previous hard work and innovation led to new capital, new money, and new investment. The new poor, downtrodden though they may have been, were much better off than the rural poor had been. Which is why people poured into the cities where their lives, even though Dickensian, were easier and more interesting than they had been in the countryside. The urban newcomers provided a new workforce to build new industries. They provided a useful consumer base too. Those workmen’s cottages, still found in the suburbs of many towns, were not only housing for an exploited labour force; they were also a source of new wealth for that young aristocrat back from the Gold Coast who’d opened a pickle factory in Manchester. He had seen the sauces made in Madagascar or Goa, liked the taste, and thought that he could sell them to workmen to put on their sausages and bacon. Think of him for a moment, perhaps a chinless wonder who employed thirty men to mix the tropical-fruit ingredients and boil them in great cast-iron vats. The vats had been made in Sheffield andcarried by narrow-boat along canals, giving coin to perhaps fifty workmen who supplied the original vats and buildings: 3 His pickle company supported a whole small industry for generations: supplying coke for heating, imported and locally grown fruit and spices to be processed into sauces, special water, glass bottles, printed labels …
    There would have been half a dozen middle-aged matrons busy at different tasks in his factory, too, even bossing some of the men. This was new – outside the home, anyway. Women also got jobs with him