Historical dramas have important things to say about pen and paper so have a read

From the rise of the Industrial Age to the rise of the Space Age, never underestimate the power of ink

I seem to be consuming more than creating in 2023, at least for these first two months. I’ve watched some movies again in addition to watching some new television programs for the first time. So for a lark, I’m taking the last three TV shows/movies I’ve watched and I’m tying them together with a thread that’s fitting for this newsletter. They all happen to be historical dramas.

The three shows/movies are:

• Gentleman Jack (HBO) - Seasons 1 and 2 (1830s Yorkshire (UK), examining social mores and the coming rise of industrialization)

• Hidden Figures (2016) - 1960s NASA, touching on both racial inequality and the rise of the Information/Space age

• Apollo 13 (1995) - 1970s NASA, further along the Information/Space age, chronicles a catastrophe

The common thread throughout is pen and paper (or ink and paper). Note: I’m taking all three stories at face value considering their treatment of science and technology.

Gentleman Jack - British historical dramas are often dominated by letters and handwritten legal documents. Britain, unless Canada and the US, is relatively small and fairly densely populated and so there’s a LOT of correspondence whizzing around the Kingdom and to and from Europe with relative ease. Letters play a key role in “telling” the viewer about events, relationships, mores, and the realities of 1830s rural England. The TV series is inspired by the (handwritten) diaries and letters of Anne Lister, renowned both for her sexuality and her industriousness. A fair bit of screen time is devoted to people reading and writing letters, to and from Miss Lister and the people in her orbit, as well as legal documents. As we hear the correspondence read aloud we learn a great deal about the characters, British society, and the importance of correspondence in conveying both information and feelings. Given the lack of telephones and Internet the importance of writing and letters is plain to see. Or read.

Hidden Figures - three Black female “computers” rise above segregation, both through the power of pen and paper and information technology during NASA’s Mercury program in the early 1960s. During this era, a “computer” was a person skilled at performing complicated math calculations including those required for the first US human crewed orbital spaceflight (the first two manned spaceflights were sub-orbital). It’s during this movie that we see the rise of what we now know as a computer: an electronic machine capable of astounding calculations and data manipulation. But during the era of NASA’s Mercury program, electronic machines hadn’t yet reached the level of sophistication to calculate orbits and landing sites. The human “computers” had to not only do the calculations by hand, but they also had to invent the math to permit a space capsule to orbit the earth multiple times and then land safely to be retrieved. The power of human calculated, human written calculations was so highly regarded that astronaut John Glenn will only enter his Mercury space capsule for takeoff after receiving a human being’s confirmation that his flight calculations (provided by a new IBM computer) are accurate. And so the calculations were checked by pen and paper calculations.

Apollo 13 - in 1970, the third US human crewed lunar mission experienced catastrophic failures midway through the mission and the tale of how the crew safely returned to Earth makes for great entertainment. Although computers had advanced to the point where they could be used to plan and control a return spaceflight to the Moon, pen and paper (and slide rule) calculations still play a key role in getting the three astronauts home. At a key point, with the crippled Apollo command and lunar modules stretched to their limits, Jim Lovell’s (as played by Tom Hanks) reentry angles and calculations for the damaged spacecraft are calculated by hand and then validated (by hand) by 4 NASA flight engineers and their slide rules. Pen and paper were vital to the US space program in those terrifying days!

I’ve taken a rather narrow approach to finding the similarities between these three sets of stories but it is fun to find the common threads. Obviously there are also themes of rising above the odds and achieving great things throughout all three stories that I’ve featured in this post but sometimes I like to look for the less obvious connections.

Over to you: can you take the last 2 - 3 works of fiction that you’ve consumed recently and find unusual connections between all of them? Share your findings in the Comments section below!