Maybe you should think about computer programming…
In 1911, Britainia ruled the waves and Winston Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty.
It was the apex of the British Empire. The sun never set on the Empire and Britain’s holdings covered on fourth of the world’s landmass, from India to Australia to East Africa.
The Empire rested upon the power of the Royal Navy, the unquestioned number one military machine on earth, as it had been since Nelson defeated Napoleon’s armada at Trafalgar in 1805.
And the British fleet depeneded upon coal, which was not a problem for Britain, for the British Isles were and are to coal as Kuwait is to oil – they are basically made of it.
It was a cosy and simple relationship for Britain. The coal that fired the steam turbines that ran both their navy and their massive industrial base was driven by coal that was mined from Wales – essentially underfoot and cheap. And mining such vast quantities of coal also provided steady and good income to generations of miners.
Then technology came along to ruin everything.
As usual.
Oil, it turned out, was a lot easier to use, to burn and it made turbines in ships runs a whole lot faster.
A lot faster.
And in Germany, Admiral von Tirpitz was busy building a massive new fleet of oil powered dreadnaughts that were soon going to make the German navy the most powerful in the world.
So First Lord Churchill was faced with a very difficult and unpopular decision – to keep the British fleet on coal meant everyone kept working as they had been – and so successfully!!!- for the past hundred years. OR, to convert the British fleet to oil, which meant:
- Britain had no native supplies of oil, and ironically, there were none in their entire Empire. The fleet, and the military might of Britain would now be in the hands of their relationship with the Shah of Iran, and the Anglo-Iranian oil company, or they would be totally dependent upon Shell Oil, owned by the Germans.
- The cost of refitting the entire fleet with this new technology would be astronimical
- As coal moved to oil the entire native coal mining industry would be displaced and thousands of coal workers would find themselves unemployed.
Churchill was never one to back down in the face of hard decisions (as WW2 would later prove, fortunately for the British). and there were many (many) in and out of Government who thought this was a terrible, expensive, destructive and unnecessary idea. Churchill stood them down.
He made the choice to flip the fleet.
Of course, he had no choice.
Had the British navy stuck with coal, they never could have survived,
At the Battle of Jutland in 1916, the two fleets met – the new Geman fleet and the older but rebuilt British.
The German ships were lighter and far faster, and in the battle the Germans sank twice as many of the British navy ships as the British were able to do to the Germans. In the end it was considered a draw, but the dominance of oil was the real victor. Never again would a navy put to sea burning coal. Had Churchill not made the conversion, the entire British fleet would have been sent to the bottom of the Skagerracht.
No one in Britain would consciously have advocated making the very painful and expensive transition from coal to oil had they had the choice.
But they didn’t have the choice.
New technologies take on a pressing and ineviatable need of their own. There is no arguing with them, and no resisting them, except at your own peril and demise.
Now we see televison networks coming to grips, in their own way, with new technologies.
Small cameras, laptop editing systems, an Internet that carries video on demand all the time, everywhere.
Like the arrival of oil-fired ships, it is upsetting.
Most network executives would no doubt prefer that this was not happening.
But it is.
A generation of television employees who made a very good living as editors or cameramen or producers or reporters are discovering that their jobs are changing or worse being rendered obsolete.
So they argue that what worked in the past was great and why should we change. Change is dangerous.
What American television networks need is a Churchill.
Someone who can see what has to be done, and has both the courage and the vision to do it.
Or one day, divers are going to find CBS News at the bottom of the Skageraacht.
