Barry Pilton - In a Nutshell - Einstein's Watch

The late Leonard Rossiter recorded these for Radio 3 in the early 1980s. They remain one of the finest bits of comedic social satire of the age. Writer Barry Pilton's musings on assorted topic are called in a Nutshell and available, I believe, on CD and DVD.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
It used to be said that necessity is the mother
of invention, but when one sees some of the more
bizarre inventions of the twentieth century, it appears that necessity
is a whore who sleeps with some very odd bedfellows,
including a dirty old man called prophet. Moreover, as science
and the microchip redesign the world in their image, it
seems the most obsolescent piece of merchandise is man. One

(00:24):
of the more enduring cliches is the one that goes,
I'd just like to make the world a fit place
for our children to live in. We might yet make it,
providing our offspring our robots. For inventions are supposed to
be in aid to living, but increasingly, as we become
surrounded by gadgetry with a high IQ, life seems to
be conducted in a foreign language called microtechnology, and only

(00:45):
spoken by a small elite. Everything we use will soon
become too complicated for us to understand. It was the
common or garden watch which set off this trade of thought,
because it is destined for the chop and it is
the Swiss who first gave neilstroom to the cuckoo clock.
Who are going to do the chopping soon you will
no more tell the time with a boring old watch

(01:06):
than you would attack the Russians with a non ficcile
bow and arrow. Soon, according to press releases, it won't
be watch at all. It'll be a wrist computer, and
that won't just tell the time. It will perform such
an extraordinary variety of functions that it has been sold
complete with a thirty six page instruction manual on how
to operate it. As King Lear said, it will do

(01:28):
such things I know not what they are. You can
even program it to remind you of your mother in
law's birthday a year hence, and that is a fact,
though the rumor that it will get flowers for her
is possibly fiction. You will have buttons to poshe no obstable,
and probably even antennae to suck. It will probably quite

(01:49):
require both hands to operate, thus involving a level of
dexterity and wrist movement as to reshape the course of
human evolution. So in the interests of science and progress
the progressive Sietists that is gone are the horse and
card days of the casual plants at the wrist watch.
Our risk computers will probably be so busy calculating the

(02:09):
problems of intergalactic time variable, so that we won't be
able to find simple answers like is the pub open
to waste its intellect on such trivia as the actual
time will probably involve mastering some ten figure combination on
its databank. For the first time in history, people will
be able to obtain government retraining grants for learning to
operate their watch. For a new era is coming. People

(02:33):
used to say, if you want to know the time,
ask a policeman. Now an overstretched police force will constantly
be stopped in the street and ask to work out
quadratic equations. And why is this change? Were people clamoring
to be able to calculate Einstein's theory of relativity whilst
waiting for a bus whilst they are an overwhelming public
demand to be able to calculate once age to twelve

(02:55):
decimal places. No, it appears that the risk computer is
the Swiss marketing man's way of saying up yours to
the Japanese digital watch. The desire to improve mankind's knowledge
came a poor second to the desire to lead the
market by a microsecond and a macro dollar. But perhaps
we should be grateful that we can't fire ballistic missiles

(03:16):
from the watch in the nineteen eighties, or perhaps top
Swiss nuclear scientists are working on it. For not only
is science making us seem like strangers who wandered into
somebody else's world, but it's increasingly favoring the frivolous or
the malevolent. Admittedly it's an age old complaint, but the
more sciences miniaturized, the more man seems the bottomized. One

(03:39):
recent prediction is that only point three percent of the
population need to do meaningful work when the microchips are down.
All the rituals of life are being phased out so
that man can concentrate on the fundamentals. No doubt somebody
is working on a computerized soap so that we don't
sit idly in the bath. But once the rituals have gone,
will we remember what the fun undamentals are? If instead

(04:03):
of going to work, we consider at home with a
risk computer, what major world problems? Will we suddenly be
solving famine, overpopulation, disarmament. No. My guess is that by
nineteen eighty five we will all be celebrating the latest
scientific breakthrough in combs as an indispensable aid to civilization.
Necessity will have invented a comb which not only gives

(04:25):
you the chromozone formation of your dandruft, but will constantly
update on the length of your longest strand and record
your distances at any given time from the nearest hair dresser.
It will of course also bleep when you need to
comb your hair, For there is no doubt that, thanks
to microtechnology, science can now perform miracles.