Many innovations and gadgets have their roots in the past, for example, we are now furiously building giant windmills and considering tidal power for green energy but the sight of wind power in action, pumping water and grinding corn would have been familiar to most people in the medieval times. What can we say about the future if we think of times past?

In the current festive season adults will remember their childhood and children will be experiencing our rich cultural heritage anew. Christmas trees, carols, nativity plays, and Yule Logs all originated in the Middle Ages or before but we also expect something new: perhaps a new movie, pop song, game, party clothes or gadgets. The ancient saying “… and there is nothing new under the sun” rings true but is actually incorrect. There are genuinely new things especially those that come from scientific research.

On the other hand, history does sometimes repeat itself. We all hope the air bases built near where I live in East Anglia during the Second World War and in the Cold War that are now mostly redundant, will never be needed again in anger. We tend to look back with nostalgia and hanker for a lost golden age (but few want to go back to before the invention of anaesthetics!). Yet, during the war, because food was scarce and rationed, the health problems we have today with obesity were far less. Perhaps this Christmas we ought to see what the war-time generation can teach us. Digging for Victory on an allotment or back garden now rings true but for a different purpose: of having healthy organic local food without massive carbon-footprints (just muddy ones instead!).

It is unlikely that a cargo vessel would not have an engine but there are plans to use sails once again to save fossil fuel consumption (at least on parts of voyages when the wind is blowing in a useful direction). It is interesting to note that only two classes of vessel can circumnavigate the globe non-stop. One being, the latest generation of sailing yachts and the other nuclear submarines. Even cruse ships are being fitted with sails since there is an inherent beauty in some past technologies.

The Victorians had their own “internet” before the invention of the telephone. Look out for the Morse-Code telegraph operator in any Wild West movies that are on TV over the holiday. He will be sending a very early version of a text-message. The radio signaller on the Titanic could probably outperform any of today’s kids with their mobile phones. Morse is still used by radio amateurs but has been replaced by satellite communications at sea. The telegraph network started the electronics revolution and used signals that travelled at near light speeds. Before the telegraph , the fastest messages were carried by couriers, pigeons or by semaphore. The next big change we will see, will be the delivery of broadband using optical fibres or wireless directly into the home. (The author is fortunate to be trialling this at his home in Martlesham Heath in Suffolk).

Christmas presents quite often have a battery problem yet in the past things just worked without the need for expensive batteries or inconvenient charging periods. Indeed, some people might say that the slide rule (in the hands of someone old enough to have suffered logarithms at school), still has the potential to out-perform an electronic calculator or a spreadsheet. At least grandfather’s clock could be wound up anytime. Powering gadgets by clockwork or by other physical motion is a useful way to combine the convenience of the past with the current need of some electricity. In the future, many devices will need less power as technology gets smarter, so there will be more scope to harvest energy and avoid the need for inconvenient cables and batteries. In the future it is likely that nanotechnology will give us better and more efficient batteries (and will probably give electronics and computing a future beyond silicon). Double helix, However, digital technology generally has the edge over analogue systems and although we might think that the natural world is analogue, inexact and somewhat fuzzy, at the level of the genome, DNA is digital and the minute changes that occur during cell division is a mechanism that helps drive evolution. DNA’s double helix was discovered at Cambridge and the consequences of that discovery could be as profound as Isaac Newton’s mechanics at Cambridge in the 18th Century. Nature is both digital and analogue and we will start to see new technology that mimics this. We can expect to be more healthy in the future as new wearable sensor technology measures our bodily functions and alerts us when to see a doctor. In the past, many healers took a whole body view of the state of a patient and in the future we will be able to emulate this using advanced computers and sensors. Perhaps the greatest technology of the future will come from understanding better the technology that nature evolved over billions of years in the past.

Science, one of the most powerful forces for change in the world, started with some very old ideas in ancient philosophy. The Scientific Method developed during the Renaissance as a way of rational and logical thinking based on theories that can be tested as true or false by observing evidence and conducting experiments. It is still the cornerstone of scientific research. Technology based on this approach will be filling our stockings in the future, with presents that would appear as amazing to us, as would some of our presents today to those in Dickensian times. What would Tiny Tim make of a Playstation? Would anyone fancy having a master-chef robot that could prepare, cook and serve the Christmas lunch? And of course clear up afterwards!