Soft Machines, by Richard Jones – Science, innovation policy, economic growth, nanotechnology

The Sheffield Heavy Spring Trade

My repost earlier this year of my piece on the history of the Sheffield steel industry prompted an interesting response from John Austin, who has written a history of one subsector of that industry – The Sheffield Heavy Spring Trade – and was kind enough to send me a copy. Reading it prompted these thoughts.

Capital investment bubbles always offer great, and sometimes unexpected, opportunities for producers of some relatively obscure intermediate goods. We’re seeing that now as a result of the the huge AI-driven investment in data centres; aside for the obvious demand for GPUs and memory chips, the makers and installers of HVAC systems (heating, ventilation, and air conditioning) are also seeing a bonanza. For a 19th century parallel one can, perhaps, look to the great railway boom. The railways were built on steel – for boilers, for bridges, and above all for track. But they also needed waggons to run on those tracks, those waggons needed springs. By 1861, there were about 175,000 waggons on a railway network that was still exponentially growing, and most of the springs for those waggons were made in Sheffield, building on that city’s predominance in the steel trade.

Austin’s book tells the story of the rise and fall of this significant subsector of the steel industry, and illustrates in microcosm much about the wider story of the UK’s industrialisation. The industry emerged in Sheffield from the craft traditions of the coach builders of the early nineteenth century, and built on the availability there of crucible steel, Benjamin Huntsman’s great 1740 invention. Sheffield’s near-monopoly position bred a complacency about foreign competition, and its early lead led to technical conservatism. But essentially, the industry rose and fell with the wider fortunes of the railway industry in the UK and in overseas markets.

The spring industry’s workforce were well-paid, and transactional in their relationship with their employers. They were well aware of their value, arising from their skills and their resilience in being able to cope in a job that made huge physical demands in a dangerous and unpleasant environment: the “romantic image of the Sheffield craftsman, hard and coarse but skilled and strong” wasn’t entirely groundless. There was a long tradition of trusting craft wisdom over science; the crucial processes of heating, tempering and working the metal were optimised purely on the basis of experience, while much depended on the quality of the spring steel itself. So what technical improvements came along in the 19th and early 20th century were largely upstream of the spring industry – in the transition from crucible steel, first to the output of the Bessemer process, and then the Siemens open-hearth process.

Even these innovations were met with suspicion by the workforce. Austin quotes the recollection of Harry Brearley, the inventor of stainless steel and one of the pioneers of the new early twentieth-century scientific approach to steel-making. Brearley asked a spring smith how he liked working with the new Siemens open-hearth steel compared to the older Bessemer steel. “I don’t like it… I can’t explain the difference but I can feel it. He talks of steel being composed of molecules; if there are such things in Bessemer steel they are round and in this new stuff they are square – I can feel them grate over the corners as I bend it”.

The twentieth century saw a decline of the industry, inevitable perhaps given economic depression and the troubles of the railway industry. A government “Spring Research Committee” doesn’t seem to have had a lot of impact. There was undoubtedly some mechanisation, but this was resisted by a pride in doing things the old way. After the Second World War the industry suffered, as a rather peripheral player in a series of nationalisations and reorganisations of the wider steel industry. Despite the invention of a new design of spring for the Ford Transit van in the mid-sixties, the Sheffield industry failed to adapt from the decline of the railways and the growth of road transport.

The nicely written book is both a colourful look at the sociology of the steel industry in Sheffield, and a thoughtful and informed reflection on the way an industry responds – or fails to respond – to changing markets, wider economic conditions, and technological change. The final section is more personal – Austin’s reminiscences of his own time in a spring shop in the 1970s. There’s no sentimentalism here about the nature of work in this kind of heavy industry: “It was a coarse and somewhat brutalising existence, desensitising to an extent that was too often taken home … physically hard, lacking sophistication, arrogant, disdainful of authority, hedonistic, lived in the moment”. These are words that are worth remembering when we consider what it might mean for the UK to re-industrialise.

Done Years Ago

When I was a youth, getting better at rock climbing but still a universe away in ability from the superstars, I’d sometimes sit in the café in the Derbyshire village of Stoney Middleton, then one of the centres of hard limestone climbing in the UK. I’d have a chip butty and a pint of tea, and enjoy overhearing the conversation of those same superstars. Then, when they’d gone back to the rock, I’d take a look the New Routes Book, a tattered hard-back exercise book in which those stars would record their hardest new ascents, to be commented on by their friends and rivals. But every now and again, a hapless interloper (probably a visitor from the South) would have recorded the ascent of a claimed new line, usually at a modest grade. Across the proud paragraph, one of the local superstars would have scrawled in aggressive capitals, “DONE YEARS AGO”.

This illustrates the danger of any field of human activity which is in some sense progressive, with new achievements building on the old ones. As the field gets mature, it’s more and more difficult to have a sense of what’s genuinely new, and what’s merely retreading the old. Science is no exception.

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Moving beyond the dichotomy between pure and applied science

The public funding system for science in the UK is currently going through a major transition. It’s moving from a predominantly discipline-based way of organising funding, to a new threefold categorisation. Lord Vallance’s “three buckets” distinguish between discovery and curiosity-driven research, strategic government and societal priorities, and supporting innovative companies to start, scale and stay in the UK.

Last week, the government department overseeing most of the science budget, the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology, was abolished. Responsibility for science funding has been transferred to an expanded Department of Business and Trade (now the Department of Business, Innovation, Science and Trade) – one motivation for this must be to make a stronger link between the priorities for science funding and the government’s industrial strategy.

Does this mean, as some fear, that we’re seeing a systematic shift from pure science to applied science? There’s certainly more pressure to demonstrate outcomes from the R&D the government supports. The political consensus in support of science funding is crumbling in the face of continuing economic stagnation and fractious politics, and in an earlier piece I’ve argued that UK science must deliver on its promise of economic growth.

But we should take a deeper look at the underlying assumption here, that science is very different from technology, and that it makes sense to distinguish between pure science and applied science. The idea of a one-way trajectory, with applied science emerging from pure science, and then being translated into technology is seductive, but misleading. In this view, pure science is the seed corn from which future technologies emerge – but this neglects the way that technology itself can seed new fundamental discoveries.

We focus a lot on the effectiveness – or lack of it – of our system for translating fundamental science into new, economically valuable technologies. But maybe we should think more about the process of reverse translation – the way in which new science can arise from developments in technology. In the postwar world, it was in the great corporate laboratories, like Bell Labs and IBM, and, in the UK, ICI and GEC, that this reverse translation happened. This relied on having those industrial laboratories employing outstanding researchers working on basic science, alongside more applied scientists and technologists. But that world has largely gone, leaving a giant gap in the institutional R&D landscape. That gap needs to be filled.
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Five glosses on Andy Burnham’s big speech

The leading candidate to replace Keir Starmer as the UK’s next Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, gave a speech on Monday in which he laid out his proposed governing plan. There was a lot in the speech – lots of politics, some immediate priorities, but also a lot more policy than many commentators were expecting. This piece is not a systematic review of the speech, and I won’t touch on the proposals for institutional change, as exemplified by the announcement of No 10 North. Instead, here are some of my reflections prompted by a few key passages, focusing on my interests of innovation, universities, industrial strategy, and regional economic growth.

Bottom up growth:

“It is time for Whitehall to accept that growth cannot be ordered from the top down. Instead, it can only be nurtured from the bottom up … It comes from running sound finances as we have done here in Greater Manchester, which in turn gives businesses the stability and the confidence to invest, increasing their productivity and adoption of new technology. It comes from placing our universities at the heart of local economies, as all the mayors do, and bringing the innovation-lead approach through start-ups and scale-ups.”

This is the central statement of Burnham’s economic thinking – we need economic growth, growth comes from improvements in productivity, & productivity growth is achieved by businesses investing and adopting new technology, and new businesses starting up and scaling. The argument is that this is most effectively encouraged at the level of a place, archetypically a city-region like Greater Manchester.

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Life, death and active matter

“The force that drives the flower drives my green age”

At the dawn of modern chemistry, in the 18th century, the prevailing view was that there was something special about living tissue compared to inert matter. In conventional accounts of the development of chemistry, this view – known as “vitalism” – is widely believed to have been definitively killed by Wöhler’s synthesis of urea from inorganic starting materials in 1828, opening the way to a purely mechanical concept of biology, full of pumps and levers.

And yet, there is something special about a swimming bacteria, a crawling amoeba, a growing plant, a muscle, a heart, a brain. We know now that what’s special about these forms of living matter isn’t some occult life-force; it’s a continuous input of free energy. These systems are driven systems, sustained far from equilibrium by this constant free energy input. In soft matter physics, we call this kind of matter active matter. This encompasses not just biological tissues, but increasingly, synthetic analogues.

UK science must deliver on its promise of economic growth

This piece was first published on the WonkHE blog on 18 May 2026. It’s an attempt to condense the arguments I’ve been making in my three longer blogposts – UK Science in a post-liberal world, UK science policy in transition, and Winds of change for UK science policy.

For more than a decade, there’s been a remarkable cross-party political consensus in the UK in support of funding scientific research. Despite the wider pressures on public finances, public spending on science has been increasing in real terms, and further increases are planned. But that consensus is now breaking down – and, in my view, the wider UK research community has not yet woken up to the threat. We can’t take continuing government and public support for science for granted, and the science funding system needs to adapt and demonstrate that it is delivering for the nation, to make sure that support continues.

The recent English local elections made clear that the old political duopoly is breaking up – and what’s driving many supporters of both Greens and Reform is a sense that the old system is broken. “Burn it all down” is an emerging political theme. There are obvious new threats that the country needs to respond to, notably increasing geopolitical insecurity. The Conservative Party’s plan to cut UK Research and Innovation’s funding by 20%, moving the money into direct defence R&D, is a signal that, whoever forms the next government, times are changing.

But perhaps the biggest issue the research community must face is this: the justification for increases in the government’s research budget has been that more R&D will lead to economic growth – but that growth has not materialised. GDP per person is about 29% lower than it would have been if the pre-2008 trend had continued, and this stagnation manifests itself directly in people’s wages and living standards, which on average have barely increased over the last twenty years, and in governments’ difficulties in funding public services.

How Sheffield became Steel City

For the first time for several decades, there are grounds for optimism about the future of Sheffield’s steel industry (very much reduced in scale though it now is). Sheffield Forgemasters (now UK state owned) is building a major new facility, and Special Melted Products (with an infusion of Taiwanese capital) is also expanding. This isn’t about the standard grades of steel for use in construction – the expansion is to meet demand for specialised forgings from speciality steels and other alloys, driven by applications in defense, aerospace, civil nuclear and energy, and influenced by a new focus on UK national resilience and industrial capacity. This gives me a pretext to republish this piece I wrote nearly ten years ago about the history of the steel industry in Sheffield – and the valuable lessons this history can teach us about innovation.

As someone interested in the history of innovation, I take great pleasure in seeing the many tangible reminders of the industrial revolution that are to be found where I live and work, in North Derbyshire and Sheffield. I get the impression that academics are sometimes a little snooty about local history, seeing it as the domain of amateurs and enthusiasts. If so, this would be a pity, because a deeper understanding of the histories of particular places could be helpful in providing some tests of, and illustrations for, the grand theories that are the currency of academics. I’ve recently read the late David Hey’s excellent “History of Sheffield”, and this prompted these reflections on what we can learn about the history of innovation from the example of this city, which became so famous for its steel industries. What can we learn from the rise (and fall) of steel in Sheffield?

Andy Burnham, Manchesterism, and Reindustrialisation

As the Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, attempts to re-enter national politics, he’s talked a lot about “Manchesterism” as an approach that underlies the relative economic success of Greater Manchester in recent years, and has argued for the re-industrialization of those parts of the country that lost much of their industry in the 1980’s and 90’s. What is behind these arguments? I can’t claim any direct knowledge of Burnham’s plans, but I do have some insight into the development of the Greater Manchester Combined Authority’s economic strategy, which may offer some clues.

The slow road to digital matter

Ray Kurzweil’s book “The Singularity is Near” is twenty years old, and its thesis has become conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley. The Singularity is an event horizon – a date at which technological growth becomes so rapid that to look beyond it becomes quite unknowable to pre-Singularity humans, a point at which machine intelligence surpasses human intelligence and goes into a recursive cycle of self-improvement. Kurzweil’s target date for the Singularity was 2045, and in the opinion of many in Silicon Valley we’re well on schedule.

The evidence for the accuracy for Kurzweil’s prediction is, of course, recent rapid progress in AI. But that’s not the only technological development that Kurzweil’s prediction depends on. The connection between machine super-intelligence and control over the physical world needs to be established through nanotechnology.

Winds of change for UK science policy

The Conservative Party plans to cut funding for UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) by 20%, amounting to £6 billion over three years, reallocating the funding to military drone procurement, according to a report in Research Professional. Julia Lopez, Shadow DSIT Minister, says “we need to focus our remarkable British scientific and technological capabilities more explicitly on defence”.

We’re seeing a two-decade old cross-party consensus around science funding now breaking down. It’s notable that UKRI was a creation of the 2015 Conservative Government, with a funding increase balanced with the explicit goal of bringing the UK’s R&D programme more directly under government control. The R&D spending plans of the current government are essentially those it inherited from the 2020 Conservative Government. But, as its leader Kemi Badenoch has taken to saying, the Conservative Party is under new management now.