I know you got soul: machines with that certain something (20 page)

The
Millennium Falcon
was forever going wrong.Time and again Han and his rebel cohorts would have to bang the dashboard with their fists to get some wayward system working. And this helped give the ship a flawed, almost human quality.This is something I look for in all machines.

The
Falcon
was styled to resemble a burger. And the unusual, protruding control pod was modelled on an olive that George Lucas saw peeping out of the bun.

The Sunderland became the most formidable anti-submarine weapon in the country’s arsenal. In the five years of hostilities Sunderlands killed 28 U-boats and helped to destroy another seven.

The Princess had been taken out merely to see how she handled while taxiing but test pilot Geoffrey Tyson gave all ten engines some beans and up she went. Much later, when asked why he’d done this, he said,‘Well, she simply wanted to fly, so I let her.’

It was the most amazing ocean liner of all.The SS
Great Britain
wasn’t the biggest or the fastest, and it certainly wasn’t the most luxurious, but it was Genesis. A ship 50 years ahead of its time.

The
Great Britain
limped into the Falkland Islands, where she was turned into a floating wool and coal bunker until she became so riddled with holes that they took her round to Sparrow Cove and left her to die.

The
Mauretania
set a transatlantic record in 1902 and it wasn’t beaten for another 22 years.The
Mauretania
was not only fast and vast, but also beautiful. Imagine the Palace of Versailles at sea, then double the size and double the luxury and you’re still not halfway there.

What on earth must people have thought when Arthur was unveiled? This huge white saucer, supported on a latticework of girders, tracking an invisible object in the sky so we in Britain could see what was going on in America . . . right now. He must have seemed like science fiction.

The Jumbo has become the modern-day yardstick in the lexicon of superlatives. Like football pitches, and Nelson’s Column and Wales, it is now an established unit of measurement.

The newer Boeing 777 cruises at 565 mph.The 747 pictured above is a full 20 mph faster and, over 11,000 miles, that makes a big difference to your deep-vein thrombosis.

I was horrified by the exchange between the pilots who hadn’t heard which runway they were supposed to land on.‘Oh, just follow the bloke in front,’ said the captain to his young apprentice in the right-hand seat.Then we hit a flock of birds. ‘Got ’em,’ said the captain, but I hardly registered because I simply couldn’t believe how much effort the co-pilot was having to make. He was bathed in sweat as he manhandled the big jet out of that sticky, sultry sky.

Mikhail Kalashnikov set about designing something that could rival the Germans’ MP44.A hand-held sub-machine gun. Something called the AK47.