The Tale of the Scale by Solly Angel, Oxford University Press, $28, ISBN 0195158687 Reviewed by Roy Herbert
JET-LAGGED, Solly Angel sat in his hotel room in Bangkok and stared at the bathroom scales. They seemed to him a thing of no elegance – clumsy, inaccurate. Surely they could be improved. They could be beautiful, slim and precise, an instrument anyone would be proud to own and, furthermore, portable. In Hollywood, what followed would have been called A Lone Man’s Battle to Make His Dream Come True.
Angel, an authority on urban planning, had no idea how scales worked. The rest of the book is about his staggering perseverance to become an expert on the technology of weighing and finally a designer of wonderfully efficient and cheap load cells, and his tussles with bad faith, lack of money, wrestling with patent law, constant disappointment and the complicated tactics of big business, all this while carrying on his original profession across the globe. There is a danger that his travails could seem bathetic, much ado about something as mundane as improving bathroom scales. Who cares?
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Against the odds, Angel makes The Tale of the Scale interesting. His determination is impressive. His sense of humour stays alive even in the direst circumstances and he is easy to identify with. His early vision of making a million dollars soon fades, but this doesn’t stop him. A rueful book, and a much more rewarding read than might be supposed.