Review - Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-tech Britain is on at the Science Museum, London, until October 29 2008.

Supersonic missiles, nuclear bombs, automatic kettles, prefabricated houses, nuclear power stations, wooden radiograms and a homemade hi-fi. A mixture of fact and fiction, or a comic book world of invention? No; these were ideas and inventions made for real in Britain’s post-second world war new Elizabethan age.

The Science Museum’s new Dan Dare exhibition uses the comic book hero devised by Frank Hampson and first seen in 1950, as an entree to some of the key technological moments in post-war Britain.

Image above - © Dan Dare Corporation Ltd.

Star of the show: in the late '50s, the Bristol Bloodhound anti-aircraft missile was the deadliest weapon of its type in the world. Image courtesy Science Museum

Dan Dare, a commander in a future military space force, fights an evil empire led by the devilish green-headed Mekon (who actually looks a bit like Russia’s President Putin…) The heroic commander’s exploits unfolded week-by-week in The Eagle, a massively popular comic of the era. Dan Dare and his adventures must have seemed like a welcome breath of fresh and futuristic air in the years of grey austerity after hostilities across Europe ended in 1945.

Soldiers returned to shortages of housing and jobs; prospects were bleak. Factories, used to churning out row upon row of bombers, fighters and radar sets needed new challenges and new peaceful products to manufacture.

Life in post-war Britain wasn’t without threat. While Dan Dare fought the evil Mekon, around UK shores, and around the borders of the rest of the empire, the Soviet Union became the biggest threat. New technologies and weapons were urgently needed to defend the west from the (apparently) encroaching forces of communism.

Dan Dare's evil adversary - the Mekon © Dan Dare Corporation Ltd

Within Britain, a society was emerging with a new hunger for better machines. The welfare state, an emerging consumer society, and housing shortages meant that industry was working flat out to get people housed, diagnosed, heated and entertained.

In this brief, free to enter and fascinating exhibition you can see some of the ways our inventors, engineers and industries answered the needs of Britain in the 50s. Hanging in the centre of the show is a massive missile, the Bristol Bloodhound. By the early 1960s, hundreds of these supersonic anti-aircraft weapons were dotted around airfields and strategic installations, waiting for a Russian attack on UK forces that never quite came.

In many ways, the war-related items reveal interesting back-stories that tellingly open out other concerns. Britain’s great engineers and scientists worked round the clock to come up with massively important war-winning scientific gains like radar, computing advances, and new ways to fly faster and further than ever before.

But for every successful project like the Vulcan bomber (seen in the show in model form) there were many that failed, like the TSR2 strike aircraft. Over and again, technological advances were beaten not by material science challenges or technological boundaries, they were defeated by politicians. Defence budget cuts put paid to many great ideas; other clear leads in areas like supersonic flight were simply given away to our strategic allies with little thought to the price paid in intellectual rights.

Home-designed and built washing machines, radios, cars and televisions rolled out of British factories to meet domestic demand, but the world was getting bigger, and UK companies have rarely been able to compete in world markets.

We might think globalisation is a recent trend – of course it’s not. In the 60s imports of consumer goods began to turn heads. People liked buying motorbikes that didn’t break down every five minutes, washing machines that span reliably, and TV sets that didn’t look like something from an Edwardian front room.

It spelt the beginning of the end for manufacturers like BSA, Triumph, Murphy and Pye. However, one look today round the high street shops reveals some good news; British engineers, designers, inventers and software designers still come up with great work which leads the world.

We might not actually manufacture much any more, but people like Tim Berners-Lee (inventor of the world wide web), James Dyson (the amazing Dyson vacuum cleaner) and Jonathan Ives (designer of the iPod, iMac and, no doubt, many more cool ideas) are putting our engineering, science and design heritage in front of billions of people all over the world.

See this small, free exhibition and you’ll see the seeds of comic book genius and home grown invention that inspired our current generation of hi-tech high achievers.