Sunday, 11 October 2009

The Place of the Ravens, 30km west of Baghdad, has long been of interest to civil liberties groups. The largest prison in Iraq, built in the 1960s by British contractors, has for decades generated stories of abuse, not least under Saddam Hussein, who kept as many as 15,000 people imprisoned there. But it was in 2004, when pictures of offences ranging from the grossly humiliating to murderous leaked out, that the jail’s name became a byword for torture – Abu Ghraib.

The abiding image of that period is of a hooded detainee, standing on a box and draped in sack cloth, with electrodes attached to his fingers and testicles as if he is about to be shocked. Other pictures show grinning guards with naked prisoners in degrading poses. Reports of beatings, rapes and deaths were described by the US army’s own investigation as “credible”. The commanding officer of Abu Ghraib, Brigadier General Janis Karpinski, who was demoted to colonel for failing to stop the abuses, later said that 90 per cent of the Iraqi prisoners were innocent.

It was exactly the sort of case that Amnesty International was established to fight against. “We should have had huge protests,” admits Irene Khan, Amnesty’s secretary general, with an engaging candour. “We failed. As an organisation, we failed to move people to outrage.”

You can tell that it bothers her. For the first time during our interview at Amnesty’s fortress-like headquarters in Clerkenwell, London, she’s uncomfortable and fidgety. “We published reports,” she says. “We had meetings with governments. We were on the website, and we were in newspaper interviews. But the other side was the security agenda, and we were unable to understand how to overcome the fears of the people. In Amnesty we are still too legalistic and remote from the concerns of people.”

While many in the US, and elsewhere in the West, felt revulsion over Abu Ghraib, few experienced anger. Many people saw the detainees as the enemy, the sort who crash airplanes into skyscrapers. Besides, the US army acquitted itself relatively well, investigating even before the first public leaks and court-martialing those soldiers it could, including officers.

Higher up the chain of command, though, the Bush administration and its supporters circled the wagons around the then defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who since 2001 had encouraged the use of “aggressive interrogation techniques” – the euphemism for torture.

Amnesty’s failure to rouse even its 2.8 million members, let alone the public, may simply have reflected the general ambivalence created by divided authority figures at a time when the West, and the US in particular, felt under threat. But perhaps it was because, under Khan’s eight-year leadership, Amnesty has taken its eye off the ball. Faced with the biggest single threat to the liberal values that underlie Amnesty’s existence, Khan has been haring off in new directions.

Irene Zubaida Khan, who is relinquishing her post at Amnesty at the end of this year, is in many ways the epitome of a career international bureaucrat. She was born in 1956 in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, the privileged daughter of a doctor and granddaughter of a lawyer. “We were a professional, middle-class family,” she says, “which taught me that you have a responsibility for others. I saw my father take considerable risks to go out and provide medical care to civilians who had been wounded by the army during the war of independence.” That was in 1971, when she was 15. “War seemed almost romantic,” she says. But there were painful experiences, too. “The father of one of my very close school friends was shot dead, in front of his daughter’s eyes, because he was a Hindu. There were stories of women being raped and once bullets came flying through our house.”

After the war came retaliation against those who had collaborated, and then famine. In 1973, her parents sent Khan to the safety of a boarding school run by Catholic nuns in Northern Ireland. “In the middle of the Troubles,” she says, her eyes agleam with amusement beneath her nest of curly black and grey hair. “A lot of bombs were going off, so to me it seemed a normal way of life.”

School was followed by law degrees at the University of Manchester and Harvard. By the time she got her masters in 1978, she had already helped set up the development organisation Concern Universal. A year later she was working as a human rights activist with the International Commission of Jurists. By 1980 she had settled into her 20-year career with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees.

She served as chief of mission in India and as head of the UNHCR team in Macedonia during the Kosovo war. “In the evenings I would go to the border crossings and you could see thousands of people walking across.” One night, the Macedonians decided they’d taken in enough, and guards began pushing people back across the border to where the Serbs were waiting. Some of those refugees were never seen again. “As UN officials, we protested, but it was a terrible experience to watch people being pushed back and not be able to do anything.”

While Khan was wending her way from Dhaka to Skopje, Amnesty was on a journey of its own. The organisation was founded in 1961 by Peter Benenson, an employment lawyer, after he read about two Portuguese students jailed by the Salazar dictatorship for drinking a toast to liberty. Its aim was to protect prisoners of conscience under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Among those it would not support at first was Nelson Mandela, because he had advocated violence. Over the next three decades it expanded its remit, adding torture and disappearances, and winning, along the way, the 1977 Nobel Peace Prize. Later came concern for refugees forced to flee from human rights abuses, extra-judicial killings, arms sales to oppressive regimes, and the death penalty.

“Amnesty had its biggest exodus of members when it decided to pick up the issue of the death penalty; the US section was totally opposed,” says Khan. “A lot of people also joined after that, because they thought it was right to campaign against executions.”

But while all those extensions could be seen as connecting to the original concept of “prisoners of conscience”, the change wrought at the turn of the century was viewed by a “strong minority” of Amnesty members as a stretch too far. The organisation began campaigning not under the Universal Declaration, which limits what states can do to their citizens, but under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, which obliges nations to ensure their citizens have things like an adequate standard of living and the highest attainable standard of health. While the Universal Declaration grew out of the Enlightenment and the Second World War, the covenant has its roots in the Fabian Society and the socialist politics of the 1960s. It is deeply partisan, cutting sharply along the left-right divide in many countries.

In her new book, The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights, published in Britain this week, Khan reasons that without economic rights, there can be no human rights. A poor rural woman who can’t afford the bus fare to visit the police or courts in the nearest town has no access to justice, for instance. “There is a link between discrimination and poverty. It’s often discrimination that drives people into poverty, and the poor tend to be discriminated against.”

It’s a compelling argument, and one that many IoS readers will agree with. But it comes with a price attached. The more resources Amnesty pumps into campaigning against poverty and women’s issues, the fewer it has available to defend prisoners of conscience. The world has plenty of organisations devoted to alleviating poverty, though often without the human rights angle, but few that are dedicated to prisoners of conscience, and none as effective as Amnesty.

The organisation spent a decade debating the issue before making its decision and hiring Khan to implement it. She took up her new post in London on the morning of 12 September 2001, less than 24 hours after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington. The “war on terror” that followed ushered in the sharpest curtailment of freedoms in the West since the Second World War. As Benjamin Franklin said: “Those who sacrifice liberty for security deserve neither.”

Khan doesn’t see things that way. “Loads of classical human rights problems, such as torture and cruelty in detention, were thrown up by 9/11, but we realised there were deeper problems. One was that the international community had ignored what was happening in Afghanistan. So it showed the indivisibility of human rights.”

When we meet, Khan is preparing for a trip to Sierra Leone to launch an Amnesty campaign to raise awareness of maternal mortality, but she is vague about what she will do after she leaves the organisation. For those interested in human rights, the bigger question is who will replace her; Amnesty is still looking. If the next secretary general continues on the course that Khan has charted, perhaps the time will come to start a new group, one dedicated solely to prisoners of conscience.

CV

Born 1956, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh)

Educated LLB at University of Manchester, masters at Harvard

1977 Helped found Concern Universal

1979 Activist, International Commission of Jurists

1980-2001 United Nations High Commission for Refugees, including chief of mission in India and Macedonia

2001-2009 Secretary general, Amnesty International

Married to an economist, one grown daughter

‘The Unheard Truth: Poverty and Human Rights’, by Irene Khan, is published on Thursday by WW Norton

Sunday, 12 September 2010

The acrobat was performing the Spanish web, winding down from the ceiling on a red ribbon in a move many Britons will remember from an advert promoting BBC1. But the people clustered around the stage weren’t watching Berlin’s Cosmic Artists directly. Instead, they peered through special spectacles at TV screens showing the action live in 3D.

The giants of the television hardware business, Samsung, Sony, LG, Toshiba and Panasonic, were all pushing stereoscopic screens (and accompanying goggles) at the IFA consumer electronics show in Berlin last week. Panasonic, for example, featured not only the live acrobats, but 3D clips from the Blue Man Group, Universal’s Despicable Me, a promo for the London Olympics, and, on a more high-brow note, a trailer for the forthcoming Wim Wenders film about the late dancer Pina Bausch.

Crucially, after Avatar’s success, film-makers and broadcasters are piling into the technology. A flurry of films including Alice in Wonderland, Shrek Forever After and Toy Story 3 followed the sci-fi blockbuster. And as Sky says of its new channel, due in homes before Christmas: “3D is the next revolution in television.”

The new technology is not just for content professionals, either. Panasonic’s headline-grabbing gadget this year is a 3D home camcorder – a world first – for under €1,500 (£1,250). Wedding videos will never be the same.

But a bigger contributor to the Osaka company’s bottom line will be the one million 3D sets it expects to sell. “It’s like the switch to colour,” says Panasonic’s president, Fumio Ohtsubo. “Once they’ve tried colour, no one wants to go back to monochrome. When you compare it with the pleasure of 3D, the inconvenience of wearing glasses is next to nothing.”

In a Spartan conference room above one of the vast exhibition halls at Berlin’s Messe complex, Mr Ohtsubo is holding forth in Japanese, his voice soft and his demeanour calm. He’s wearing a blue striped shirt with a white collar and two small badges on his jacket lapel: one says simply “Panasonic”, the other is a green leaf with the slogan “Eco ideas”. And there-in lies a contradiction. For while Panasonic’s marketeers are focused on television’s latest magic, Mr Ohtsubo wants to talk about a less sexy product – batteries.

Like companies from Marks and Spencer to Shell, Panasonic has an environmental plan, in this case called GT12 (Green Transformation 2012). “We want to bring everything under the eco umbrella,” he says.

Central to that plan is Panasonic’s 100 per cent takeover of its home-town rival, Sanyo, launched this summer after it bought a 50.2 per cent stake for £2.8bn last December. The attraction, says Mr Ohtsubo, is not Sanyo’s wide range of consumer products, from mobile phones and (2D) television sets to refrigerators and washing machines. Instead, the allure is its expertise in alternative energy generation – particularly solar power – and storage, a low-profile field that he believes has huge potential. “Even without subsidies, we think the solar business will grow,” he says.

The company that is now Panasonic was founded in 1918 by Konosuke Matsushita, his 22-year-old wife, Mumeno, and her brother, Toshio Iue, 15. Its first product was an improved light-bulb socket. Nearly 30 years later, while Japan was occupied by US forces, Mr Iue borrowed a disused Matsushita factory and began to manufacture bicycle lamps. His business later became Sanyo.

So was Panasonic’s acquisition a fraternal rescue or a predatory pounce on a weakened rival? Sanyo has been plagued with bad luck for the past decade. First it got caught selling under-powered solar cells in the subsidised Japanese market. Then, in 2004, a devastating earthquake crippled its semiconductor plant in Niigata plunging it into a financial crisis. A ¥300bn (£2.3bn at today’s exchange rates) restructuring in 2006 left its banks holding five out of nine board seats.

Even the company’s battery division was not immune. In 2006, shortly after the collapse of a proposed joint venture with Nokia to make handsets, it recalled 1.3 million mobile phone batteries when they demonstrated a tendency to overheat. Efforts to sell the semiconductor division were abandoned in 2007 after the credit crunch hit. Mr Iue’s son, Satoshi, stepped down as chairman for personal reasons in March that year and the grandson of the founder, Toshimasa, resigned as president in April.

By then, Sanyo was embroiled in a US Securities and Exchange Commission investigation (since settled) for allegedly failing to report a $1bn loss. By November 2008, Sanyo’s new president, Seiichiro Sano, was in talks with Mr Ohtsubo.

There are several possible explanations for Mr Ohtsubo’s dedication to greenery and interest in Sanyo. Cynics might argue that it’s just greenwash. But the price he’s paying for his rival, though well below peak, is far too much if all he wants is a lick of green paint to satisfy investors on corporate social responsibility (CSR).

Another explanation is that Mr Ohtsubo has spotted, or thinks he’s spotted, a genuine growth market and is seizing the opportunity. If so, he’s got nerves of steel, because this is a huge gamble. Solar power installations are not profitable without subsidy, and in tough economic times, government handouts are vulnerable. Spain, Europe’s solar power leader, cut its photovoltaic subsidy – worth €3bn (£2.5bn) last year – by up to 45 per cent this summer amid howls from the industry.

Rechargeable batteries, where Panasonic-Sanyo now leads the world, with 43 per cent of the market, is also a long-range bet. The company likes to show off the battery packs it makes for hybrid cars. But while it’s true that hybrid market share is growing fast, it’s doing so from a low base, 3 per cent in Europe last year. This is a market driven by the desire of some people to “do something” about the environment rather than by calculated self interest. The sales growth could have a low ceiling.

To succeed in either of these fields, Panasonic will have to improve its technical performance. This, it seems, is Mr Ohtsubo’s strategy. “There’s a lot more we can do to improve our technology in order to increase capacity and speed up charging time,” he says. “Everyone knows petrol will be replaced by electricity.”

What nobody knows, though, is how quickly this will happen. The tipping point will come when electric cars undercut the price of those with internal combustion engines. And that will depend not only on Panasonic’s technology but on innovation by car makers and how long supplies of cheap oil last.

Initially, investors took a dim view of Mr Ohtsubo’s decision to buy Sanyo and another part-owned energy subsidiary outright in an ¥800bn deal. The move sent Panasonic shares tumbling 11 per cent. And the firm had only just pulled out of a two-year slump.

But the buy-out did make sense to some analysts. “Panasonic faces fierce competition from Samsung and Sony in consumer electronics,” Yuji Fujimori of Barclays Capital in Tokyo told Bloomberg at the time. “Its rivals are not as competitive in the energy-related products and household-electrics systems that Panasonic aims to strengthen.”

Oddly, Mr Ohtsubo does not justify the acquisition by pointing to juicy profits so much as matters of principle. “A company is only viable when it is useful to society,” he says. “Each company has a role to play, and the role Panasonic should play is to cope with the most important issues of the time. At the global level, that’s how human beings can co-exist with the environment.”

At Panasonic, the idea that the company has a higher social purpose was being taught to employees long before Western management gurus invented CSR. “At the base of our vision is the principle and philosophy of our founder,” says Mr Ohtsubo.

That principle was set out in 1932 in an address by Mr Matsushita to his assembled employees: “Our mission as a manufacturer is to create material abundance by providing goods as plentifully and inexpensively as tap water,” he said. “This is how we can banish poverty, bring happiness to people’s lives, and make this world a better place.”

And nearly 80 years later, Mr Ohtsubo is eager to take up the challenge. “We have so many things to do,” he says. “This is giving us much pleasure.”

The first sign of trouble came when the Eagle was five minutes into its descent, 33,500ft above the Moon’s surface. A shrill alarm rang through the cramped, seatless cabin in which two astronauts stood facing the stars. An error message flashed up on their primitive computer’s tiny read-out: “1202″. Neither Neil Armstrong nor Buzz Aldrin knew what it meant. It was left to Steve Bales, a 26-year-old technician at Mission Control in Houston to decide they should keep going. The error, he was fairly sure, would fix itself, and he repeatedly called “Go!” as the alarm sounded four more times.

Armstrong later said it was the computer glitch that kept him from dealing with a much more serious problem: when the descent had begun, before they rolled so they were face up, the Apollo 11 astronauts had noticed they were passing landmarks four seconds early. After the lunar module rocked forward, to point the engine nozzle straight down to feather their descent, they should have been able to see their smooth, flat landing site in the Sea of Tranquillity below. But Armstrong recognised nothing when he looked out of his window; the autopilot had taken them four miles beyond their target. “We were landing just short of a large crater with very large rocks covering a high percentage of the surface,” he recalled.

Ten minutes after beginning their descent from orbit, at an altitude of 500ft, Armstrong switched to manual control. His heart rate leapt from 77bpm to 156bpm as he set the engine to hover and sought a safe place to touch down. To his right, Aldrin called out their altitude, rate of descent and forward speed, his hand never far from the button that would explosively abort the landing. Then he added a number: “90 seconds” – the time until their landing fuel ran out. Finally, among the rubble ejected from the crater by a meteor impact millions of years ago, the mission commander saw a gap. Tilting the lunar module, they drifted to port.

At Mission Control, Gene Kranz, the flight director, turned to Charlie Duke, the astronaut charged with communicating with the crew. “Better remind them there ain’t no damn gas stations on the Moon,” he said. Duke’s warning was more concise: “30 seconds.” Aldrin’s tense voice crackled back: “Light’s on,” referring to the low fuel signal. “Thirty feet… Kicking up some dust… Faint shadow… Contact light.” They were down, with just enough fuel left for 16 seconds of flight – less than the time it took you to read this paragraph.

For a 10-year-old boy, nervously fidgeting around his living-room, confirmation came from Armstrong: “Houston, Tranquillity Base here. The Eagle has landed.” It was 8.17pm GMT on 20 July 1969. I remember whooping and jumping on and off the sofa in a scene much like the one at Mission Control. The 12-minute descent had been an agony of suspense. There had been no pictures of the descent to watch, and between the distortion of the communications and the technical jargon, the astronaut’s funny accents had conveyed no meaning.

I knew nothing then about how close my heroes had come to disaster. The computer alarm was later blamed on a radar dish which had been left switched on, overloading the tiny computer. (Your mobile phone is about a million times more powerful.) The navigational error was caused by “masscons” – the Moon, like the Earth, is less than perfectly spherical, so its gravity fluctuates as you fly over it. Mass concentrations had pulled the Eagle into a slightly lower orbit, speeding it up, and it was already going at more than one mile a second.

What I did know about Apollo 11 was still pretty impressive for a 10-year-old. I knew, for example, that the 363ft Saturn V rocket was one foot shorter than the dome on St Paul’s Cathedral. I knew the velocity required to escape the Earth’s gravity (seven miles per second), the distance to the Moon (239,000 miles) and the time lag as radio signals travelled there and back (three seconds). Years before the word was invented, I was a geek – a space geek. I knew that the age I was growing up in was neither Modern nor Atomic, nor Post-War. It was the Space Age, and the arrival of men on the Moon, even if they were, disappointingly, not British, was its defining moment. By the time I was an adult, I knew lunar trips would be as routine as taking a jumbo jet from London to New York.

So the past 40 years have been a bit of a letdown, a point I tactfully made to David Scott, commander of Apollo 15, when he visited London last month to open a new ride at the Science Museum. Where was Moon Base One, I demanded. Why couldn’t I just buy a ticket on the internet for a discount break on a space station? “We made it look too easy,” said Scott, the seventh of 12 men to walk on the Moon. “Put it in perspective,” he said, comparing the Apollo missions to the gradual discovery of the Americas. “Columbus has just returned but Cabot and Magellan have not yet made their voyages. And Cook hasn’t even been born.” He’s right about Captain James Cook, but John Cabot and Ferdinand Magellan both sailed within 40 years of Columbus.

I’m not about to argue. Aged 77, Scott is still a commanding figure, tall with a distinguished head of grey hair. He flew with Armstrong in Gemini 8 and was the command module pilot in Apollo 9. On his lapel he wears a gold astronaut’s pin, a shooting star rising to orbit on three streaks. He must have heard the same questions 1,000 times, yet he answers patiently. Moon rocks feel as though they’re made from Styrofoam, he tells one young lad. To me, he describes flying the lunar module as “like trying to run on an ice-covered pond and turn without skates. It’s more difficult than any plane I ever flew,” he says. “You ‘zone’ like an Olympic athlete. You’re totally focused.” Then the former test pilot thinks of a better metaphor: “It’s like riding a pogo stick on a trampoline.”

Our nearest neighbour was hurtling around Earth once every 27 days, seven hours and 43 minutes long before man evolved. It governs the tides, illuminates the night and provides a convenient measure of time between the day and the year. The Greeks believed in Hecate, a three-faced goddess who transformed into Artemis as the satellite waxed and then into Selene when it was full. Plutarch told of cave-dwelling Moon demons. Johannes Kepler wrote that its craters were built by Moon creatures. And as recently as the 1920s, the American astronomer William Pickering thought it might have insects. The superstitious believed sleeping in moonbeams would drive one crazy and werewolves transformed from men into monsters by its light. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare called the crescent moon “a silver bow new-bent in heaven”; Shelley described it in “The Cloud” as “that orbed maiden with white fire laden”. So enamoured were poets and lyricists, particularly bad ones, that by the early 20th century, rhymes with “spoon” and “June” were the worst of clichés.

The first recorded story of a trip to the Moon was a satirical piece by the Syrian writer Lucian of Samosata during the 2nd century AD, who had his hero sucked up in a water spout. In the 1600s, Cyrano de Bergerac imagined being lifted to the Moon by bottles of dew. Two centuries later, Jules Verne fired his crew off from a huge cannon, while in 1901 HG Wells invented anti-gravity. And in 1950, Hergé, Tintin’s author, launched the young reporter and Captain Haddock in a ship that looked suspiciously like a German V2 rocket. They were all wrong – but Hergé came closest.

Wernher von Braun conducted his first rocket experiment in 1924 by attaching fireworks to his sister’s red wagon and setting it off in a busy Berlin street. The police arrested him. By the time he reached university, his love of astronomy and things that go bang was firmly established. He joined the Verein für Raumschiffahrt, an amateur spaceflight society, and was writing his doctorate when the Nazis came to power in 1933.

Von Braun’s connection with the Nazis is controversial. He built weapons for Hitler, notably the V2, joined the SS and employed slave labourers at his factories. (More people died building the V2s than were killed when they landed on London.) But he was also suspected of being a Communist and was arrested for defeatism. He was one of those obsessed people who believe their work is more important than anything around them. His comment when the first V2 exploded in London is revealing: “The rocket worked perfectly except for landing on the wrong planet.”

At the end of the Second World War, Von Braun and his team arranged to be captured by the Americans and were sent to the US under Operation Paperclip. Eventually, he would build every major US rocket up to the Saturn V. But at first, Washington was uninterested. Then the Soviet space programme scored a series of triumphs: the first artificial satellite (1957), the first animal in space (1957), the first unmanned Moon mission (1959), the first man in space (1961) and the first woman (1963). The space race had begun, and America was losing.

It doesn’t take a cynic to appreciate the significance of Cold War politics on the Apollo programme. The ascendancy of the free market is clear now, but in the 1960s, central planning still seemed viable. The space race looked like a reasonable way to determine which system, capitalist or Communist, was superior, though so many factors were involved, including blind luck, that it could have gone either way.

President Dwight Eisenhower had been caught napping by Sputnik, a fact John Kennedy used in his 1960 campaign. But once in power, Kennedy seemed distracted by the Communist threat. Influential advisers argued that the US should cede space to the Soviets and get on with earthly business. Many space scientists wanted to concentrate on unmanned exploration, which offered richer rewards at lower cost. Yet Kennedy’s hand was forced by the April 1961 flight of Yuri Gagarin in Vostok 1 and the Bay of Pigs fiasco five days later. The president had promised an army of Cuban exiles air support for their invasion, but failed to deliver. Survivors bitterly denounced his treachery, and his standing with the American public hit a record low. Desperate for a distraction, he called on vice president Lyndon Johnson. “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting up a laboratory in space?” he asked. “Or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man?” The mission didn’t matter; all that counted was beating the Russians. In a speech to Congress a month later, Kennedy announced: “This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the Earth.” America was back in the running.

‘Apollo 1′ sat atop a Saturn 1B rocket at Cape Kennedy on 27 January 1967 while its three member-crew went through a tedious five-hour systems check. The atmosphere inside the command module was pressurised pure oxygen. Political pressure was also high; president Johnson wanted an Apollo success to boost his re-election chances. But the command module had been plagued by 20,000 failures, and condemned as “sloppy and unsafe” by a quality-control inspector. Early in the test, the astronauts complained of a sour odour, and static was breaking into their communications. At 6.31pm, something sparked. “I’ve got a fire in the cockpit,” reported mission commander Gus Grissom. “Fire!” shouted Roger Chafee. Then came a garbled, “Get us out!” possibly from Ed White.

In the pure-oxygen atmosphere, almost everything was inflammable. Metal pipes bubbled and dripped, joints melted, cooling lines burst, spraying burning fluid like a blowtorch. The foam cushions on the floor burst into a wall of flame between the crew and the exit. The hatch took 90 seconds to open in ideal circumstances. The crew of Apollo 1 died in 8.5 seconds.

The fatal fire could have brought the programme to a halt, or slowed it so much that the Soviets won. For the first time, public debate turned to whether the huge sums ($25bn in 1965 dollars, about £100bn today) being spent on a Moon shot were worthwhile. An internal investigation was never able to find the point of ignition, listing 10 possible sources. Poor management, carelessness, negligence and failure to consider safety were highlighted. Management at Nasa and the command-module contractor, North American, now part of Boeing, were overhauled. Half-a-billion dollars was spent on redesigning Apollo. Chris Kraft, one of the flight directors, said later: “It was unforgiveable that we allowed that accident to happen. [But] had it not happened, we probably would not have got to the Moon when we did.”

The Russians had not been idle meanwhile, but they had been unlucky. Their first plan was to launch a “direct ascent” mission, with a single vehicle going all the way to the Moon and back. But their massive N-1 rocket was delayed. Under a second plan, “Earth orbit rendezvous”, several smaller rockets would dock in orbit, then head to the Moon. But the first ship in the flotilla, Soyuz 1, crashed, killing cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov. A compromise mission, Zond, was devised to send a reduced crew to orbit the Moon and return without landing. Moscow dithered, however, and Nasa swapped its mission plans for Apollos 8 and 9, getting a crew into lunar orbit first. In 1968, Americans were treated to a Christmas Eve broadcast from the Moon. Mission commander Frank Borman looked back at the Earth, calling it “a grand oasis in the vastness of space”.

Nasa’s plan was to employ a technique known as “lunar orbit rendezvous”, in which a two-part lunar module goes to the surface, and the top section blasts off to rejoin the orbiting command module, transferring the astronauts and samples. The command module then heads for Earth. After Apollo 9 practised docking manoeuvres between lander and command module above the Earth, Apollo 10 returned to the Moon, dropping its lander to within nine miles of the surface. (That command module is in the Science Museum in London.)

In February 1969, the Soviet N-1 rocket was at last ready, but it exploded on its first unmanned flight. The Russians were all but beaten. They made one last attempt – a smaller, unmanned mission that would return rock samples to Earth – but it, too, crashed. Only the Americans were left in the race.

Half-a-million people crowded the roads and waterways around Cape Kennedy to watch the launch on 16 July of Apollo 11 and an estimated half-a-billion saw it on television. “It was awe-inspiring,” recalls Dr Allan Needell, curator of the space-history division at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington. “There was a lot of tension in the US over civil rights and the war in Vietnam back then. Apollo 11 overcame some of that strife and conflict. There was a great sense of human accomplishment.” Even a small band of protesters who felt Nasa’s money could be better spent reducing poverty ended up appreciating Nasa’s point of view after being given ringside seats to the launch of Armstrong, Aldrin and the command-module pilot, Michael Collins.

Neil Armstrong never quite matched the image of the first man to walk on the Moon. “How long must it take,” he demanded in 1976, “before I cease to be known as a spaceman?” Unlike many other astronauts, he never jumped on Nasa’s publicity bandwagon. “He was a bit of a recluse even before the mission,” says Dr Needell. “He’s a respected member of the astronaut corps, very knowledgeable. But he has never readily accepted the role of public icon.”

If Armstrong were to be remembered for anything else, it would be as an aeronautical engineer. The son of a state civil servant posted to Wapakoneta, Ohio, he enrolled in the Navy to fund his education at Purdue University. His experience as a pilot in the Korean War helped further his understanding of aircraft, but only after he graduated did he think of becoming a test pilot, and from there of joining the astronaut programme.

Nasa is said to have been divided about whether Armstrong or Aldrin should be the first to set foot on the Moon. In the end, the mission commander got the honour… then flubbed his lines. He intended to say, “One small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” but left out the definite article, turning it into a tautology. Aldrin’s most memorable quote came shortly after he joined Armstrong on the surface: “Magnificent desolation.”

For the two spacemen, the point of the mission was to get to the Moon and return safely. Science was not their top priority, nor was putting up flags or taking pictures. But they did collect samples, and more were added on the five subsequent missions. In all, some 382kg of Moon rocks were returned to Earth. Two fragments are housed in the Natural History Museum in London: a blackened chunk of anorthosite breccia, a calcium-rich feldspar, brought back by Apollo 16, and a volcanic basalt gathered by the Apollo 17 astronauts.

What started out as a political, Cold War race ended up adding substantially to human knowledge, says Tom Watters, senior scientist at the Center for Earth and Planetary Studies at the National Air and Space Museum. Before Apollo, the Moon was thought to have originated either as a passing planetoid captured by Earth’s gravity or by condensing out of the same primordial dust cloud as the Earth. Thanks to evidence including the Apollo rocks, the consensus today is that a Mars-size planet slammed into the early Earth, throwing up a cloud of debris that coalesced into the Moon.

A new space race is shaping up, though the competition will be far less intense than it was 40 years ago. The US plans a return to the Moon, while China, India and Japan are each preparing for manned missions. If they succeed, they will add substantially to our knowledge. Dr Watters is hopeful, for example, that additional seismometers will help locate the sources of the small quakes detected by instruments left by the Apollo missions. It is not yet clear whether these are from unseen impacts or tectonic processes. And little is known about the far side of the Moon.  

For the 10-year-old space geek in me, this flurry of activity also holds out hope. One day, probably too late for me admittedly, someone will build a permanent Moon Base One. And then the Space Age will really start to reach for the stars.

For the lucky, a check-up at the GP consists of nothing more sophisticated than a blood-pressure cuff, an icy stethoscope and a jar to pee in. For those with bigger problems, it can involve medicine’s heavy artillery, from bedside ultra-sound devices to giant metal doughnuts that generate magnetic fields several times stronger than the Earth’s.

Medical imaging has come a long way since Wilhelm Roentgen took the first X-ray of his wife’s hand in 1895. Until then, doctors had no way to tell what was going on inside a living body. Autopsies (often illegal) could show them where organs were but not their functions.

If today’s scanning technologies – X-ray, positron emission, magnetic resonance (MRI), computer-aided tomography (CAT), ultrasound and single photon emission – seem impressive, tomorrow’s promise to be wondrous. Doctors will be able to detect not just large-scale structures but the microscopic interplay of proteins and enzymes as they react to diseases and treatments. Early screening will spot many problems before they become terminal. Diagnostic scans will predict which therapy will work best on a given patient, while follow-up images will determine whether all is going to plan.

From biotech start-ups to pharmaceutical and medical equipment giants, all want a piece of this new action, but one British-based company seems particularly well positioned. GE Healthcare, formerly Amersham, the first company to be fully privatised by Margaret Thatcher in 1982, was sold to the Americans in 2004 for $10bn. Back then, some in the City professed confusion about a company with a wide range of businesses lumped under the catch-all heading “diagnostic life sciences”. They may still be nonplussed, but one set of numbers is crystal clear. GE Healthcare’s sales have soared from $9bn in the year before the sale to $17bn in 2008.

“We’re at a tipping point,” the company said in a paper last May, comparing the coming transformation to that brought about by Thomas Edison when he invented the light bulb. “To take healthcare into the future, we do not have to wait for technologies that will be available in 2025. We need only look at the technologies we have today and act.”

GE Healthcare’s main campuses are scattered around the Chalfonts, a huddle of leafy villagesnorth-west of London. Dr Patrick Grove, then a 26-year-old organic chemist, established the company at Chilcote House in 1940 to refine radium for instrument dials on aircraft and ships. After the Second World War, it became a national centre for the development of radioactive materials and is still a licensed nuclear site.

Chilcote House is now the campus reception centre; security is tight and before visitors can enter some buildings, they must pin on a dosimeter to measure their radiation exposure. The office of Dr Marivi Mendizabal, GE Healthcare’s head of discovery, is in a less glowing building. Still, the main room is divided in half by a glass wall inscribed with a double helix at waist height, with her lab on the far side. In a soft Spanish accent, Dr Mendizabal introduces a series of techniques, some developed in-house (the R&D budget is $1bn), some by partner companies, and others licensed from academia. They range from products approved for use to those still in early trials. What they share is a simple logic – better imaging means earlier diagnosis and more effective treatment.

While hardware has improved, the big change is in what Dr Mendizabal calls “wet science”. One characteristic of chemistry, and particularly large biological molecules, is that they have counterparts that fit like keys in locks. Find the right key and it will latch on to a particular lock. It’s the same technique used by the body’s immune system to send antibodies after the antigens on invading cells. “It’s not just antigens, though,” she says. “This works on other molecules too.”

Consider AH118635, a synthetic molecule invented at GE Healthcare that’s so new it doesn’t even have a catchy name yet. It reveals whether cancers are growing or not by latching on to a marker called integrin alpha 5 beta 3, which regulates blood-vessel growth. Most tumours are only alive near their surface; the centres die because they can’t get enough blood, says Dr Mendizabal. AH118635, if it gets regulatory approval, will be able to tell how successful a tumour is at building new vessels, both by itself and after it’s attacked with drugs designed to disrupt the process, such as Roche’s Avastin.

Or take Hexvix, a chemical which accumulates in tumour cells and glows when exposed to blue light. Developed by PhotoCure, a Norwegian company, and distributed globally by GE Healthcare, Hexvix is already in clinical use. It increases the number of potentially cancerous cysts detected during optical bladder inspections, reducing the risk to the patient.

Another collaboration, this one with InSightec, combines two technologies, MRI and ultrasound, to replace the knife in treating uterine fibroids, a condition which often leads to hysterectomy. Instead, surgeons locate the fibroids on an MRI scan and focus a beam of high-intensity ultrasound to raise their temperature until it destroys the cells. The procedure takes just three hours and the patient is off work for a day, as opposed to four to eight weeks after a hysterectomy.

Even Roentgen’s X-rays are becoming more useful. Nano agents, the first major development in X-ray technology since the invention of computer-aided tomography 30 years ago, promise to give doctors 1mm resolution of soft tissues as well as bones. The trick is to bundle up a tiny but dense ball of iodine atoms in a shell. Injected into the body, the iodine atoms act as tiny shutters, blocking the X-rays and revealing the internal shapes of organs.

Elsewhere in the Chalfonts, Robert Dann is showing off a virtual colonoscopy. Early treatment of colon cancer is 90 per cent successful, compared with 10 per cent if it is caught late. But the screening process is intrusive and unpleasant, so the take-up rate is low. The virtual colonoscopy turns a CAT scan of the large intestine into a movie, allowing the doctor to “fly” through the colon looking for colour-coded, pre-cancerous polyps. If this raises the screening rate from 30 to 100 per cent, more than 10,000 lives a year could be saved in the UK alone. 

Saving lives is the popular measure for medical successes, but cutting costs is also important. The new wave of scanners promises to do this in two ways. By helping researchers evaluate drugs at an earlier stage, they reduce the cost of pharmaceutical development. And by catching diseases earlier and allowing more targeted treatments, they reduce direct clinical costs.

After generations in which technology drove the cost of medicine ever higher, it’s about time the pendulum began to swing the other way.

Dame Mary Perkins adamantly denies she’s the Imelda Marcos of spectacles. Unlike the former first lady of the Philippines, who had 1,060 pairs of shoes in her wardrobe by the time her husband was deposed, Dame Mary insists she has “just” four dozen eyeglasses.

On the day we meet, she’s sporting a semi-rimless pair with a light-green metallic frame, fashionable letterbox lenses and broad armatures with a horizontal slit along the middle to allow just a sliver of peripheral vision. “For years I used to tell people not to choose frames with thick arms, because if you’re reversing your car you’ll have a blind spot,” she says, tucking the Supras back into their case. “And now, what’s the fashion? Thick arms,” she laughs. “So what if you crash your car?”

If her personal collection is – relatively – modest, her company stash is not. “Over the past 15 years I’ve kept every single frame we’ve carried. It’s all in boxes and I’m trying to find the best way to display them,” says the co-founder of Specsavers, Britain’s largest chain of opticians. Possibly at the V&A, I suggest, thinking that if the country’s leading design museum can make room for Kylie Minogue’s gold lamé hotpants, it could surely spare a rack of display cases to exhibit a few thousand snazzy frames.

At first glance, Dame Mary, 64, is an unlikely champion for the fashion industry. Her personal style is a businesslike twinset-and-pearls look (accented with a Guernsey flag pin) and her manner reminds me more of a wise elder aunty than, say, Dame Vivienne Westwood. Yet her influence has surely been more far reaching than her punk contemporary’s.

The two-for-the-price-of-one deals at the heart of Specsavers’ aggressive marketing campaigns have led to a revolution in eyewear, turning a once-ugly prosthetic into a must-have fashion accessory. The chain sold 18 million prescription lenses last year, all of them made – under licence from Pentax – at its three UK factories.

Glasses are no longer a sign of geekyness and are regularly worn by people with 20-20 vision. The likes of Tommy Hilfiger, Red or Dead and, in an exclusive deal signed last year, Jasper Conran now design frames. Gone are those NHS specs for children, with the springy wires that looped over the ears and dug painfully into the flesh. Or at least, they were gone for a while. “Who would have thought Harry Potter would have brought them back into fashion?” she says.

Like some early 20th-century Bolshevik, Dame Mary is already exporting her revolution. Specsavers had more than 1,000 stores in nine countries at its year-end in February, and is aiming to double that in the next four years. Its latest expansion is into New Zealand, where it plans to open 60 outlets this year. In Australia, it has been on an acquisition spree, picking up 40 outlets from Vision Centres and Vision Crest Optometrists. Turnover also crossed the £1bn mark last year, two years ahead of schedule.

The main obstacle to global growth is the structure of national markets. “What we like is where the optics model is similar to the UK’s,” she says. “In Italy or France or Germany, most people would go to an eye doctor to get tested, then go around the corner to buy their glasses. We prefer to have a fully qualified optometrist on the premises, owning that practice and both testing and dispensing.”

Domestically, the company is still expanding, though slower than it is abroad. Dame Mary thinks it will benefit from the downturn in the economy as shoppers look for cheaper options without sacrificing style. “Our typical customer has a very similar profile to an Asda customer,” she says. Already the chain has introduced a new Star range of glasses, frames and lenses, for just £25. “We managed to hold prices for 10 years but six months ago we could see people starting to think, ‘I’ve only got so much money in my purse.’ ”

She’s also optimistic about the future of her digital hearing-aid stores – after five years, already the largest private providers in the country – and positively bullish about a varifocal lens, called Occupational Tailormade Multifocal, that is due to be rolled out this autumn. And despite the downturn, the company is investing in technology. It is introducing fundus cameras, a microscope that takes pictures of the retina, as standard in many of its shops.

Specsavers is Dame Mary’s second chain. The first she formed with her husband, Doug, whom she met while they were studying to be optometrists at Cardiff University. Based in her home town, Bristol, it grew to 23 stores before they sold it in 1980 for a reported £2m. Soon after that, the family moved to Guernsey, where her father, also an optometrist, had retired.

“I thought I might do something different,” she says. But after a spell doing charity work for the Citizens Advice Bureau, and a term studying to be an accountant (”ghastly thought”), she returned to optics.

The lure was Margaret Thatcher’s plan to liberalise the business in 1984. “Before that, you could not advertise – not even an announcement in the local paper for a new shop opening. You couldn’t put frames in the window with prices on them.”

Many in the industry decried the reforms as the end of the small, family optician. “It was like asking turkeys to vote for Christmas,” she says. But the flip- side, she realised, was that a chain could lift the burden of boring business bits so opticians could spend more of their time gazing into eyeballs.

Her vision was a chain of joint partnerships, similar to franchises. Most of her shops are half owned by Specsavers and half by the resident optician. The company looks after such back-office operations as marketing, payroll and the warehousing of frames at the headquarters in Guernsey, where it is the island’s largest private employer.

The result is that some 1,000 opticians have survived instead of being squeezed out by chains of wholly owned shops.

The irony for Dame Mary is that all this means she no longer does eye tests herself. Instead, she contents her self with “secret shopper” expeditions, which she finds far more informative than focus groups. “You wouldn’t believe the things people will tell you if you’re just sitting next to them.”

Entrepreneurial success has come at a price. Her children suffered when she was building her first chain, because the business had priority, she says. “When I give speeches, I always tell people not to do what I did.” Still, her offspring have not disowned her. All three have gone into the family business and her son, John, became joint managing director last year. Though she’s cagey about when, or even whether, she’ll retire, the company clearly has an in-house succession plan. For good or ill, we can all expect to hear her catchphrase for years to come: “Should have gone to Specsavers”.

Nigel Mason is apologetic when he arrives at GE’s British head office in Berkeley Square, central London. This isn’t his building, explains the boss of GE Healthcare UK as we wait for security to sign him in. Once his visitor’s badge has been clipped to his jacket, we’re ushered into G4, an ultra-modern but poky little room. By then, though, he’s done saying sorry. And by the time we get to the subject of the much-criticised NHS computerisation project, he’s bridling a bit at the very suggestion that he should be on the defensive.

“I’m proud of our role,” he insists. “It’s a positive story.”

Mason has been head of GE Healthcare International’s Public-Private Partnership team since 2004, two years before he added the title of country manager to his job description, and he clearly takes the project personally.

His company is responsible for the picture archive and communications system (Pacs) in the southern cluster, one of five broad NHS regions. Every one of the hospitals had their Pacs delivered both on time and on budget, he claims.

“As a result of the successful roll-out, we were asked to take an active part in the North-west and West Midlands, where a previous incumbent had been struggling.”

Pacs has had two technical failures in the past 18 months, he admits, but in both cases the backup kicked in immediately and the medics using the system to look up patients’ X-rays or scans weren’t even aware there was a problem.

GE Healthcare, which has its global HQ in Chalfont St Giles, Buckinghamshire, is one of the biggest players in the medical technology sector, supplying a wide range of equipment including big-ticket items such as magnetic resonance (MR), positron emission tomography (PET) and computed tomography (CT) scanners. Since 2004 when it bought Amersham – the first company privatised by Margaret Thatcher – GE has also had a presence in the pharmaceutical side of medicine. Worldwide, it has earnings of $17bn (around £8.5bn); in the UK, it has 2,800 employees.

And even in with recession starting to bite in the US, the American conglomerate is unlikely to retrench in its core market. “The UK is relatively small in global terms, less than 10 per cent of our business. But what that masks is the importance of the international market relative to the US. We genuinely do see ourselves as a global company, rather than a US company doing business overseas, which is what it might have been five years ago.”

Mason’s job is to figure out which of a dizzying range of technologies is best suited to a particular task, and then persuade NHS trusts to see things his way. “Healthcare cannot go on expanding its budget for ever,” he says. “For example, we produce six diagnostic tools that can be appropriate for coronary artery disease.”

He starts ticking them off on his fingers without pausing to explain what they do, let alone how they work: “echo cardiography, stress ECG, myocardial scintigraphy, multi-slice CT, cath lab and PET”. Each is understood well individually, but until recently there has been no assessment of their relative merits. Mason’s team has now developed a model showing which works best for patients in different risk groups, and will be sending it out to cardiologists for trials within the next few months.

Appropriate technology is also central to GE Healthcare’s response to the Government’s proposals for polyclinics – super surgeries with 20 or 30 doctors. Although critics complain that these would herald the end of personalised GP services, Mason thinks they would have the opposite effect, bringing medicine closer to patients.

“After you see your GP, if you need anything more elaborate than a pill, you have to get an appointment and go to a hospital five or 10 miles away,” he explains. “But patients who don’t need to go into an acute setting should never go there. This will be a lot better for the patient and from a cost point of view.”

The only question is whether a given polyclinic will need its own MR scanner (price tag £700,000) or just a bone densitometer – a low-level X-ray machine that can detect osteoporosis or identify “tofis”, people who are Thin on the Outside and Fat Inside. “Potentially, people like me, who look relatively slim, could be at risk because they have a build-up of fat around key organs,” he says.

In his late forties with a thick head of silver hair, Mason prides himself on being a walking endorsement of “early health”, and still pursues windsurfing – a sport he took up at university. His other great interest is restoring and racing classic cars. In 1998 he co-drove a blue 1959 Jaguar Mark 9 in the classic Monte Carlo Rally, finishing a respectable 36th out of 200.

Such competitive, adrenalin-fuelled sports just add to Mason’s image as a confident, go-ahead corporate executive. But hidden inside is something less common. Unlike most people at his level, his degree was not in business or finance but science, specialising in nuclear medicine. “I studied biophysics [at York] in the second year it was offered, before it was even known as a viable subject,” he says.

His Masters thesis, completed while he was working at Barts hospital in London, was the development of a “tissue equivalent phantom for CT” – in essence a three-dimensional test card for the scanners. Although he demurs when it is suggested that he actually understands all his products, Mason admits to deriving pleasure from being able to keep up with developments in his field.

He is also enthusiastic about ultrasound and uses it to illustrate several of his points, such as the pace of miniaturisation and convergence. “Five years ago, ultrasound was the size of a domestic fridge, wheeled around on a trolley,” he says. “Now it’s not much bigger than my portfolio here and soon it will be the size of my BlackBerry.”

Images of Dr McCoy’s tricorder on Star Trek spring to mind, but Mason immediately brings me back to Earth. “Several ambulance trusts are looking at ultrasound,” he says. “It could be life-saving with appropriate training, but we don’t want to put this diagnostic tool out into the hands of anybody.”

By convergence, he means that separate technologies are being used together to get results that neither could achieve alone. One example is the combination two years ago of PET scans and CT scans. “PET looks at function, down to molecular pathways, but you end up with a bright dot in the middle of blackness. That’s not much use to a surgeon,” Mason explains. “By using a CT scanner, which gives good spatial resolution, he’s able to see that hotspot in full three-dimensional context. Ultrasound could be next, he says, combining with the catheters and X-ray machines used in cath labs to investigate heart function.

Other than that hint, Mason is cagey about what his fellow scientists are working on in their labs. But he’s optimistic that the pipeline of ideas will continue to flow. “We’re moving from a world of ‘I believe our technology can do that’ to ‘I can prove our technology can do that’.”

‘Fore!” When Tiger Woods smashes the ball straight for their heads, most people flinch – some duck – until the point-of-view pulls back to show trees hurtling past along the fairway. The simulacrum of the world’s greatest golfer is a bit dodgy, but the ball he has just smacked at your head is convincing. And it will be sailing out of a screen in a living room near you by this summer. After a century and a half of intermittent research, three-dimensional television is so close, you may feel you can reach out and touch it.

Some people watching the demonstration at Samsung’s digital media and telecoms research park in Suwon, an hour south of Seoul, do try to grab the animated images of approaching spacecraft, anthropomorphic cars and blobby aliens. It makes them look even sillier than the oversize goggles they have to wear to get the 3D effect. But the experience is so riveting that none of them cares. “It feels really real,” declares one normally sceptical French technology journalist as he tries on the goggles for a third viewing.

The target early adopters for 3D TV are, anyway, the affluent young men who have redefined cool to include computer games. No longer geeky, this business will be worth $46.5bn (£23.6bn) by 2010, almost half as much as the $104bn filmed-entertainment market, and it’s growing faster. High-end games, like most animated films today, are created using CGI (computer- generated images), and making them 3D is child’s play: you just instruct the computer to calculate each frame from two slightly different angles. The result is an illusion of depth which, whether you’re roaring around Monte Carlo in your F1 Ferrari or quarterbacking the Dallas Cowboys to NFL glory, makes a huge difference to the feel and enjoyment of a game.

That Samsung Electronics, the world’s largest consumer electronics firm, should want to take the lead in 3D TV is not surprising. From entering the flat-screen sector 16 years ago, without any technical support from the Japanese companies that had pioneered liquid crystal displays, it has risen to sit among the dominant players in the industry. In Europe alone it is number one for TVs, with 22.3 per cent of the market.

And the company is just one of more than 50 that make up Samsung Group, South Korea’s biggest conglomerate, responsible for fully one-fifth of the Asian Tiger’s economy. That’s 20 per cent of a big pie: Korea joined the trillion-dollar club in 2004 and today it has a GDP per head similar to Spain or Greece.

Size brings with it problems, however. To operate efficiently, different companies within the group have to act independently, sometimes developing incompatible strategies. For example, Kim Hunsuk, vice-president for research at the visual display division of Samsung Electronics, who still wears the company’s tan and blue bomber jacket, sees no new niches for his product to exploit – a view not shared by the LCD division that supplies his screens. At Tangjung, 40 minutes from Seoul by high-speed train, close to 100 robotic production lines are churning out the latest LCD screens in pristine conditions – guests have to wear plastic slippers over their shoes just to look through windows at the sealed units on the shop floor. Here there is much talk about new uses for flexible flat screens, made with plastics instead of glass, such as compact screens to which you can download today’s newspaper before rolling it up and carrying it to the Tube.

The family-owned chaebol – as South Korea’s biggest conglomerates are known – has other woes. An independent counsel investigating corruption allegations against Samsung Group demanded that its reclusive chairman, Lee Kun-hee, his wife, Hong Ra-hee, and son, Lee Jae-yong, appear earlier this month to answer questions. Mr Lee was questioned for 11 hours during his first visit to the counsel’s office, and was called back again a few days later. The investigation, into accusations made by the group’s former top lawyer, Kim Yong-chul, involves an alleged 200 billion won (£100m) in slush funds, below-value sales of convertible bonds and the purchase by Mrs Hong of 60bn won of artworks in a single year. No charges have been laid, but the notoriety alone must be deeply upsetting for Mr Lee, who almost never speaks publicly.

In Suwon, however, no one wants to talk about the parent company’s legal troubles. The fifth floor of the research centre is packed with flat screens, LCDs, plasmas and even a few organic light-emitting diodes, stacked inches apart, sometimes with the cases removed to reveal the circuit boards inside.

Lab benches seem to be in such short supply that three young techs have partially blocked the main corridor, just outside the glassed-in laboratory, with a trolley-mounted screen. Crouched round it, they conduct their tests oblivious to the gaggle of Western journalists filing by into a conference room where Michael Zöller, senior marketing manager for televisions at the European head office of Samsung Electronics, is explaining a chicken and egg problem: “Who’s going to buy a 3D TV if there’s no content for it, and who’s going to make 3D content if no customers are equipped to watch it?”

Samsung Electronics is trying to break that impasse. Instead of waiting five or 10 years for the next generation of 3D technology to become widely available, it is bringing out a souped-up version of a very old technology in the hopes that when the switch comes, its brand will already be established as the dominant player.

Sir Charles Wheatstone, a Victorian scientist, invented stereo-scopy, as it is formally known, in 1840. Sir Charles recognised that 3D vision is an illusion created by the brain using various clues, most importantly the stereoscopic images collected by the eyes. Hold a finger close to your face and shut first one eye and then the other – your finger jumps, and the size of that jump is a reliable gauge of how far away it is. With both eyes open, the brain erases the jump, but keeps the information to tell it how distant things are.

The future technology that everyone is hoping for will most probably involve angled beams that deliver slightly different images to each eye. The drawback is that the viewer has either to sit in exactly the right place, or the television must identify faces, locate the eyes, and aim its beams at these precisely chosen points. The former is a non-starter; the latter is still years away from going on sale at an affordable price.

In Samsung’s system, as with earlier 3D technologies, both images are displayed but light heading for the wrong eye is blocked – as it was, most famously, in the Seventies by the red and green filter cardboard spectacles given away in cinemas showing 3D films.

The Korean company’s innovation is to have the television screen flicker between images for the left eye and right eye, at the same time that the lenses of their goggles flicker between opaque and transparent. To ensure that the viewer doesn’t notice this, it has to be done very fast, 120 times a second – more than twice as fast as images appear on ordinary television screens and five times as fast as in movies. This only became possible with the latest generation of plasma screens.

Samsung’s 3D TV system has three components: a 120Hz plasma screen; the PDP 470 – not cheap, but attractive on its own for anyone who wants the large-screen plasma experience; a computer, which most people have already; and a 3D kit consisting of goggles, software for the computer and a little infrared emitter that sits on the television and ensures that goggles and screen are synchronised.

“The kit will cost about as much as two new games,” says Mr Zöller, picking just the right comparison to appeal to his target market. After games, content is expected to flow from films, television and websites.

Like any big electronics company, Samsung Electronics has numerous other technological tricks to promote, most of which will be standard fare in the industry within a year. The main selling point of the PDP 470 is that it makes moving images look sharper, particularly during the high-speed movements you get in live sports.

My own favourite innovation is a modest function that keeps the sound volume level when you’re channel hopping. Others may prefer the limited interactive content, including built-in recipes and children’s programming and even static displays of famous paintings by artists such as Matisse – though a poster from the National Gallery would be a lot cheaper.

Gannon and Gage Swanston are already pioneers of the 21st-century media era at the tender ages of seven and four. When they visit friends’ homes, they don’t understand why SpongeBob SquarePants can’t be put on hold while they go to the bathroom or get a glass of milk from the kitchen. In their house, as in a quarter of American homes, programmes are managed by TiVo, a device that allows the brothers to pause, replay or store shows at the push of a button. “They will never know a time when TV was one way,” says their father, Matthew, the director of business analysis at the Consumer Electronics Association. “This will be the first analogue-free generation. They’ll be intolerant of their content being trapped or delayed.”

One happy consequence is that when the weather is fine, the boys prefer to play outdoors, knowing that their favourite programmes will be waiting for them later. It’s a far cry from the mid 1960s, when I was their age, and a delayed trip home from Grandma’s meant that I missed Thunderbirds and my parents endured an unexpected back-seat tantrum. In those days, television had only two channels, and if you missed something, it evaporated in the ether. The telephone, with a proper dial, sat on a table in the hallway. Music was a collection of scratchy 78rpm classical records. Clocks and watches had to be wound up every day.

Even a decade ago, things were dramatically different from today. The internet was still a novelty and debate raged over whether business could or even should try to colonise it. More of my colleagues had pagers than mobile phones. DVDs existed, but Blockbuster was still stocked to the rafters with video cassettes. Now, even the Queen is on YouTube.

What, then, will things look like a decade from now, let alone in 2048? The short answer is that even Bill Gates doesn’t really know. The Microsoft boss became the richest man in the world by placing a winning bet on the future of personal computers in 1981 when everyone thought mainframes were the way to go. But even with the backing of a $7bn-a-year R&D department, he’s made some howlers.

At the annual Consumer Electronics Show (which he opens this weekend in Las Vegas), Gates has for a decade provided a glitzy peek into his digital crystal ball. Among the many announcements he’s made that you almost certainly don’t remember was Bob, a $100 program launched in 1995 that replaced desktop icons with cartoon characters in a virtual house. In 2002 he predicted that “entertainment would never be the same” thanks to Mira, a wireless touch screen that you could carry around the home with you. And if the pronouncements from on high at the CES aren’t enough, there’s his famous declaration at the 2004 World Economic Forum in Davos that the problem of spam would be solved within two years. You can understand why, when he steps down as chairman of Microsoft later this year, he’ll also be giving up his starring role at the mammoth trade show. His last appearance will be tonight at 6.30pm Pacific Time (1.30am GMT tomorrow).

Even predicting what will be revealed at the CES this week is a mug’s game, except to say that the volume of announcements will be huge. The Las Vegas Convention Center, the Sands Expo and Convention Center, the Venetian and the Hilton will play host to 2,700 exhibitors from around the world, not to mention celebrities such as Yoko Ono, Kevin Costner and a gaggle of rap artists, Rick Wagoner, the chairman of GM, and even the President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. Britain’s delegation numbers 41, with companies ranging from Airsound of Torquay to Zetex Semiconductors of Oldham.

Rumours about deals between content companies, service providers and hardware manufactures are widespread in the industry press, but official confirmation, particularly of new gadgets, is scarce. “It’s an intensely competitive industry,” says Swanston. “They sit on things until the last minute. Then it’s like a fashion show. They put out a lot of designs and the ones that pull crowds and get a lot of questions determine what’s going to stick. Some products never make it.”

Even so, with the able advice of Mr Swanston and an IoS research budget of, admittedly, slightly under $7bn a year, here are 10 predictions of the sorts of products and trends you’re likely to see downloaded from Las Vegas to Dixons and Currys in coming years. If, however, your “triphibian atomicar” or “ultrasonic cycloplane” don’t materialise in the shops by 2018, don’t blame me, Matt or Bill, OK?

1 Led by Apple’s success in making hardware as stylish as the music, videos and games it hosts, the industry is scrambling to look cooler. Samsung is working with Armani, and LG has formed a partnership with Prada, while Dolce & Gabbana added its touch to a limited-edition Motorola Razr phone. “Japan is almost becoming the new Italy in terms of style and fashion,” says Swanston. “They’re not ashamed of their technology. They’re proud of being geeks.” So how long can it be before we get a Kate Moss laptop?

2 The phone, already the most important fashion accessory for many people. In America, which has always been behind the curve on what they call cellphones, hormones are being stirred with talk of mobile video conferencing, apparently unaware of the technology’s commercial belly flop in Britain. Pundits talk of the kind of wristwatch videophone seen in Warren Beatty’s 1990 film Dick Tracy. More plausible is the idea that while people want to carry around a single device, with lots of functions, they won’t all want the same options. Some will choose to combine their phones with MP3 players, web browsers or cameras. But few people will want a phone that can do everything. I, for example, used the video camera function on my 3G phone exactly once, to record a five-minute clip of my pocket.

3 Batteries. Boring, admittedly, but crucially important. While the rest of the technology has been getting smaller, lighter and more powerful by exponential leaps, battery technology has been, by comparison, plodding along. “Battery tech has been slowing down the industry for years,” says Swanston, adding that it’s one reason people still carry more than one device. “I don’t like killing the battery on my phone playing music or video.” That will probably change over the next five to 10 years, but don’t expect it to come with a lot of hype.

4 Robots are finally emerging from decades of industrial slavery, and years in the toybox. Robot cars successfully navigated their way around mock city streets for the US army last year. And in Las Vegas, their domestic cousins will be demonstrating skills such as vacuuming, lawn-mowing and pool-cleaning. Rosie, the Jetsons’ mechanical maid, must surely be on her way to a kitchen near you. And no worries about her visa status.

5 Televisions the size of your wall. Any wall. “Architects are going to have to redesign homes with fewer doors and windows to make room for them,” says Swanston. Just a few years ago, screens were all CRTs, the last surviving dinosaur from the age of the vacuum tube. Now consumers have a choice of flat-screen devices using technology such as plasma, liquid crystal, LED and digital light processing, which involves microscopic mirrors mounted on chips.

6 E-books. We’re out on a bit of a limb with this one, since early versions failed to take off, but the companies seem determined., and Swanston is convinced. “The industry is coming back to the written word. Amazon’s new ebook, Kindle, looks and feels like a real book,” he says.

7 PCs will look less like PCs. The Microsoft Surface, for example, is embedded in a table top like a sink in a counter. The beige box is already on its way out. What will replace it is harder to predict, but the iMac is not the last word.

8 Internet gaming. Connecting players around the world sounds like a great idea, but in practice the lag in transferring data drives players mad. You really don’t want to get frozen in mid-swing when the dragon you’re fighting is taking a deep breath. Higher bandwidth and better data compression will soon make this a viable option, though.

9 WiMax. Like Wi-Fi but over a much wider area. This technology promises to rival phone lines and cable for delivering broadband to the home. Expect opposition from those who fear it will damage their health.

10 The wired home. A perennial whose time to bloom may have arrived. ZigBee, for example, is an alliance of companies promoting a common standard for wiring up a house to automate everything from the hall lights to the fridge. Expect Sarah Beeny’s Property Ladder and the like to feature hi-tech rewiring, making it the central heating of the 21st century.

Being saintly is never easy. In the early days of Christianity, the holy faced persecution by the superpower of the day and were likely to be killed in imaginative ways: fed to wild beasts in the arena, like St Ignatius of Antioch, or tied to a bull and dragged through the streets, like St Saturninus. Or cooked on a grill, like St Leonard, who is said to have cried out before his death: “I am done on this side; turn me over and eat.”

Martyrdom is less common today, but other tests for the pious have multiplied. Consumerism, licentiousness and secularism tempt them at every turn. Neither the 20th century nor the start of the 21st has been lacking in evil. And advances in science have left less room for miracles. The opposite of a sinner now is someone who eats Fairtrade bananas and cycles to work. Little room left, you might think, for exceptional piety. Not so. Sainthood is back in vogue.

At a solemn ceremony at the Basilica of St John Lateran in Rome last week, five black metal chests were delivered to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Among those present was Sister Marie-Simon-Pierre, a French nun in the Little Sisters of Catholic Motherhood. Foremost among the documents in the chests – the results of an in-depth examination of the life and beliefs of the late Pope John Paul II – was evidence of her medically unexplained recovery from Parkinson’s, a miracle attributed to the intercession of the late Pope.

In the glacially slow world of the Vatican, the presentation of the inquiry’s results on the second anniversary of John Paul’s death is the equivalent of an overnight delivery by FedEx. Canonisation usually takes decades, sometimes centuries. Joan of Arc, for example, was not officially recognised as a saint until 1920, 489 years after the English burnt her at the stake. According to the rules, the process isn’t even supposed to start until five years after death. In waiving that requirement for John Paul II, Pope Benedict XVI was bowing to the cries of “Santo subito” (”Sainthood now”) at his predecessor’s funeral.

The Polish Pope’s elevation will be quicker than St Joan’s for another reason: the reforms he introduced in 1983. Before then, the church demanded proof of two miracles for beatification, the level below full sainthood, and two more for canonisation. Now it requires one for each. Less noted but just as importantly, he abolished the role of Promoter of the Faith, better known as the Devil’s Advocate, whose job was to argue against canonisation. The Rev Stephen Wang, a lecturer at Allen Hall Seminary in London and a spokesman for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Westminster, says the new system is cheaper but no less rigorous.

But it has also made canonisation easier. And Pope John Paul II took full advantage of that. In all, he canonised a record 464 saints, more than any other pope, prompting charges in the press that he was running a “saint factory”. Some Catholics worry that the flood of new saints dilutes their importance, or that their credibility could be called into question later if corners are cut now. Scientists regularly challenge the validity of saintly relics; just last week it was found that a Vatican-recognised jar of ashes from St Joan’s pyre were the remains of an Egyptian mummy. Still others see a reflection of John Paul’s conservative control over the earthly church, where by 2005, all but three of the top posts were filled by his men. “He appointed cardinals on earth and saints in heaven,” says the Rev John Drury, a fellow of All Souls, Oxford.

Defenders of the late Pope’s generosity with halos say he was just continuing the process started with the Vatican II reforms in the 1960s, when the church finally allowed mass to be celebrated in the vernacular as well as Latin. John Paul’s global saints were a recognition that the church’s centre of gravity has shifted towards Latin America, Africa and even Asia. Among the 464 new saints were 103 martyred in South Korea and 110 in Vietnam. “There’s no reason why the church’s saints should all come from the Mediterranean,” says Catherine Pepinster, the editor of The Tablet, a Catholic paper. “Lots of people think the church focuses heavily on sin, but with saints, it’s focusing on those who have done good.”

Many religions hold that some people are holier than others, from Sufi mystics and Sikh martyrs to enlightened Buddhists. Though they lack the formal vetting procedure, non-Catholic Christian sects, the Orthodox, the Coptics and even the Anglicans, have their own lists of holy people. But in early Christianity, the word “saint” referred merely to the baptised. Thus the simple division of people into “saints and sinners”. It was under the Roman persecution that sainthood became something special. Ever since, saints have fulfilled two roles for the faithful.

The first is as an inspiration and guide, says Dr Wang. Take St Francis of Assisi, a 13th-century friar who preached to the birds, made peace with a wolf and gave thanks to his donkey (bringing tears to the beast’s eyes). A well-crafted sermon on St Francis’s joyful poverty could make even the most materialistic parishioner reconsider his priorities.

The second is as a spiritual link to God. To this day, shrines are often designed so that worshippers can reach inside and touch something closer to the divine. They can also call upon saints to intercede with God for them. The Almighty hears all prayers, but apparently he’s more likely to respond to pleas channelled through souls who have already proven their sanctity.

But there is a third function too, one the church does not so readily acknowledge. Saints are, and always have been, political. Even the early martyrs served a political purpose, hardening the resolve of believers and striking awe into the hearts of the unconverted. Without martyrs, Christianity might well have withered.

Throughout the first millennium, sainthood was an unregulated business. Holy men and women were venerated where they lived, and their fame gradually spread after they died. Local bishops might declare a feast day, which might or might not be recognised in Rome. Until the popes began to exert their authority in the 1200s, the system was ripe for corruption. Possession of a well-known saint’s relics, however dubious their provenance, guaranteed the arrival of wealthy pilgrims, lavish gifts for the host church and inflated prices for local merchants.

Like Chaucer’s pilgrims, I went to Canterbury, the heart of English Christendom. As the spring sunshine spilled through the ancient stained-glass windows, the dean, the Very Rev Robert Willis, led me through the history, from the cathedral’s founder, St Augustine, to St Thomas à Becket, martyred by four of King Henry II’s knights. Becket’s murder was the result of a broad political clash between the church and the rising feudal states. It was a severe setback for Henry II, who was so remorseful that he came to the cathedral barefoot.

But it is the fate of the cult of St Thomas that best illustrates the power of sainthood. On the flagstones behind the archbishop’s throne, a single white candle flickers where an elaborate shrine once stood. Plated with gold and encrusted with jewels, it was dismantled and carted away to London on the orders of Henry VIII.

Henry may have been motivated by a hunger for treasure, or by the Protestant belief that saints, like other mortals, had to wait for Judgement Day before ascending to heaven. But as a consummate politician, he was keenly aware that shrines could become the focus of resistance to the Reformation. Becket’s was a particular threat, as he represents the humiliation of secular authority at the hands of Rome.

Today, even without the shrine, St Thomas is a powerful draw to Canterbury, while the political controversy has passed into history. Not so the disputes about some of Pope John Paul II’s saints, such as St Josemaria Escriva. The founder of Opus Dei is greeted with suspicion by those who see the order as a shadowy church within the church.

More contentious still is Padre Pio, now St Pio of Pietrelcina, a charismatic friar famous for supernatural events, including the stigmata – wounds matching those Christ suffered on the cross. He has been accused of everything from plagiarism to having sex with women in the confessional. During his lifetime, the Vatican denied that he was divinely inspired, and restricted his public preaching.

And the canonisation of Edith Stein, a Jewish convert killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz, stirred an interfaith row between those who say she was martyred for the anti-Nazi stance of the church in Holland and those who say it was for being Jewish.

Almost as controversial are the candidates John Paul II did not promote, central among them Archbishop Oscar Romero, who was shot by a death squad while celebrating mass at a hospital in El Salvador in 1980. His enemies accused him of being allied with Marxist-influenced liberation theology. For a Pope who will always be remembered for his role in bringing down the Iron Curtain, it was an unacceptable political stain. Archbishop Romero’s halo remains in storage, for now.

Pope John Paul II 1920-2005

During his 27 years on the throne of St Peter, John Paul II travelled to 117 countries, becoming one of the best-loved pontiffs in history. He created more saints than any other pope. The others are:

St Ignatius of Antioch 35-107

A student of John the apostle, Ignatius was eager to prove his faith through martyrdom. The Roman authorities hoped to discourage the new religion’s spread but found that putting him to death in the arena only inspired more converts.

St Francis of Assisi 1182-1226

Patron saint of animals and founder of the Franciscans. He adopted a life of poverty and service after an icon of the crucified Christ spoke to him three times: “Francis, Francis, go and repair My house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins.”

St Thomas à Becket 1118-1170

A close friend and servant of Henry II, Thomas à Becket was reluctant to become Archbishop of Canterbury, knowing his allegiance would then have to shift to Rome. After years clashing with the King, he was murdered by four over-zealous knights.

St Joan of Arc 1412-1431

Inspired by visions of God, Joan led a relief force that lifted the English siege of Orléans when she was only 17. Two years later, she was captured, tried for heresy and burnt at the stake. A retrial, ordered by the Vatican, overturned her conviction.

St Josemaria Escriva 1902-1975

A friend of Spain’s fascist dictator, Francisco Franco, and founder of Opus Dei. Two of the nine judges on the Congregation for the Causes of Saints opposed Escriva’s canonisation, and one said it could cause the church grave public scandal.

St Edith Stein 1891-1942

A doctor of philosophy, Stein converted from Orthodox Judaism to Catholicism after reading the autobiography of the mystic St Teresa of Avila and became a nun. She was killed by the Nazis in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.

St Pio of Pietrelcina 1887-1968

Known as Padre Pio. His fame rests on his penetrating understanding of people and miracles such as the stigmata. The founder of Rome’s Catholic University called him “an ignorant and self-mutilating psychopath who exploited people’s credulity”.

Archbishop Oscar Romero 1917-1980

An outspoken critic of human rights violations by the authorities in El Salvador and their allies in the late 1970s. Although his canonisation has been delayed, he is honoured by the Anglican church and his statue is one of 10 20th-century martyrs above the west door to Westminster Abbey.

Sunday, 8 October 1995

FEW PEOPLE today would deny that Paul Reichmann is sharp. Even his features seem chiselled. Framed by his black yarmulke, prominent ears and full beard, a pair of dark, deep-set eyes bore out. For 30 years he cut deals in Canada, the United States and Britain that were estimated to have made the family worth more than all of New Zealand. But the collapse two years ago of his grandiose Canary Wharf project in London’s Docklands led many to believe he had been permanently blunted. Sent away for re- honing might have been a more accurate metaphor.

For last week Reichmann retook possession of his most famous landmark, the skyscraper at 1 Canada Square and its attendant office and retail complex. Not many businessmen can say they stumbled so badly, then rose again. The rapid comeback, taking less than three years, is a testament to his reputation for being not only canny but scrupulously straight in his business dealings. But while paying off the banks that backed him in the 1980s will have polished that image, the episode has left nagging doubts about his judgement.

At first glance the pounds 800m purchase from an international consortium of 11 banks vindicated his staunch belief in the project in 1992, when all around him were sceptical. At that time Olympia & York, the company founded by Reichmann and his two brothers, Albert and Ralph, owed its banks almost pounds 600m on the Docklands development. Reichmann claimed an extra pounds 590m in bridging loans would see him through until the London office market turned up again. After pushing the project into administration the banks, led by Lloyds, invested pounds 280m to complete the 4.5 million sq ft first phase of the development and deferred interest charges until 2007. Reichmann, you might conclude, was right all along.

The main difference between then and now is that while Canary Wharf was initially backed by debt, it is now financed by equity partners, Larry Tisch, the media mogul, and Prince al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz of Saudi Arabia. Reichmann International, the family’s new company, also has an ambitious pounds 800m plan for Mexico City.

But the failure of O&Y had other consequences, one of which was to shed more light on its secretive workings. Reichmann’s distaste for publicity is well known. The Reichmann brothers, five in all, were the sons of orthodox Hungarian Jews who fled central Europe during the Second World War, first to France, then Spain and on to Tangiers. Paul Reichmann still recalls the Nazi bombing of refugees south of Paris when he was eight.

His father, Samuel, had made money in poultry but in Tangiers he switched to banking. His mother, Renee, began shipping chocolate into Europe in exchange for the lives of refugees smuggled out of Hitler’s death camps.

From Tangiers Paul was sent to school at a Talmudic college in Gateshead, Tyne and Wear. His family wanted him to teach but in the 1950s he moved to Toronto and began building factories in the suburbs. From there he moved into office properties. In 1975 he put up First Canadian Place, a daring 5 million sq ft office and retail complex in Toronto.

But the big break came shortly afterwards when he expanded into New York, buying eight properties for $320m (pounds 202m) followed quickly by another 10. Although derided by critics, the portfolio is reported to have increased in value 10-fold over the next decade. Backed by the Bronfman family, the owners of Seagram, the international drinks company, he also built the $1.5bn World Financial Centre on Manhattan Island during the depths of recession in the early 1980s. It too was criticised for being over- ambitious, but again hindsight showed Reichmann to have been a wise investor.

Throughout O&Y’s evolution into the world’s largest property company the Reichmanns stuck to a family management structure typical of much smaller businesses. Outsiders were not allowed to peer into the boardroom. Decisions were made quickly and silently, sometimes by Paul alone, sometimes with Albert and Ralph present. And those decisions were heavily influenced by their strong spiritual and family ethos. Paul Reichmann is famous for sealing deals with a handshake, and eschewing corporate lawyers whenever possible.

While other moguls luxuriated in yachts and jets, Reichmann’s extravagances were aimed wholly at family and faith. Peter C Newman, a Canadian business writer, described the Toronto wedding of a minor niece in his book The Acquisitors.

The women were dressed by the country’s top fashion designer, in outfits that cost up to $50,000. But the dresses had to conform to orthodox traditions of modesty, and their wearers were separated from husbands and sons during the service. An orchestra was flown in from New York but played only Hasidic music. The dancing was segregated.

Those values also emerge in Reichmann’s projects. Although Canary Wharf has many critics, it undeniably relies on classical sources. Apart from the tower itself, the development is well-proportioned and spacious, with shady arcades and wide pedestrian walks beside the waterfront. It is a reflection of the deep commitment to the aesthetic that lies at the heart of Reichmann’s beliefs.

But around that core lie convictions that are, perhaps, less well founded. One of his ideas is a counter-cyclical theory of property markets – the theory that brought about his downfall. Reichmann was convinced that the boom and bust property markets moved in conflicting waves in different cities. When New York was down, for example, London would be up. The recession of the early 1990s did not prove him entirely wrong – merely that he had chosen the wrong cities. The downturn hit North America, Britain and Japan at about the same time, while leaving other European and East Asian economies buoyant. With rents falling in all his key markets, Reichmann was unable to keep up payments on Canary Wharf’s debt.

His reliance on his own business instincts also led him astray, claims Peter Foster, author of Towers of Debt: The Rise and Fall of the Reichmanns. Persuaded that others would be bound by their word just as he was, he failed to get firm guarantees of transportation links to Canary Wharf. The development is still three years away from getting the Jubilee line extension it so badly needs.

Over-confidence, compounded by the banks’ eagerness to lend, was also to blame. Reichmann borrowed billions of dollars for takeover bids in pulp and paper and the oil business, industries where he had little experience. Not until Canary Wharf ran into trouble did the banks question whether his balance sheet was strong enough to support the loans. When it collapsed, the O&Y empire owed between $13bn and $15bn.

Whether he has learnt from the debacle of 1993 is unclear. The cloak of secrecy, though parted by the banks, remains in place over most of his activities. If he is older and wiser, Reichmann can look forward to building a second great fortune. If not, another spectacular disaster could await him.