Highways to the future

I have often thought that the Age of Enlightenment would be better described as an Era of Entanglement. In their search for a tipping point for the origins of the modern world, historians motor up and down between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries, identifying changes in attitudes to society, politics and knowledge (Hampson 1968:15). Such a broad carriageway is strewn with the crashes that resulted from speeding revolutions, and although the road is initially bumpy the surface improves as the journey progresses. Technology is an inescapable element in the narrative. Indeed, the Scottish engineer John Loudon MacAdam, after whom tarmacadam, or tarmac is named, was born in 1756 at the heart of the Enlightenment with the Industrial Revolution getting into full swing. It was his idea to use broken stone ‘which shall unite by its own angles so as to form a hard surface (http://www.hotmix.org/history.php)’, while later hot tar was employed as a bond to keep the surface together and reduce dust.

Where would the modern world be without tarmacadam pavements? Caught in the ruts of history no doubt, but more to the point entangled in other different strands of change.