What would you write your dissertation about?

[KEV67]

When I did my MSc in Renewable Energy, my dissertation or project was on maintenance of offshore wind farms. It was a computer model of condition monitoring of offshore farms, compared to other forms of maintenance. For instance preventative maintenance, in which you replace parts before they break, or the other sort where you replace the parts after they break. In condition based monitoring there are sensors in the equipment which tell you ahead of time when a part is breaking down. 

 

Anyway, I think in most Masters degrees you have to do a dissertation in the third trimester. So what would you do yours about? I have several ideas I would like to research:

 

1. Which was more critical in the British contribution to winning WW2: the Spitfire or Hurricane
2. Were the British heavy bombers in WW2 overmanned
3. How much was a Pound Sterling worth in 1824 compared with today
4. Linen as a form of wealth in the 18th Century

[Hayley]

Oooh that’s a good question Kev! I think, if I could do another one, I might do nineteenth-century botany in periodicals .

 

Have you seen the National archive’s currency converter by the way? If not, I think you’d find it interesting! 

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/

 

[KEV67]

3 hours ago, Hayley said:

Oooh that’s a good question Kev! I think, if I could do another one, I might do nineteenth-century botany in periodicals .

 

Have you seen the National archive’s currency converter by the way? If not, I think you’d find it interesting! 

https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/currency-converter/

 

Thanks for the converter. I have seen websites like that before, but they do not tell the whole story. I first became interested when I read in Great Expectations about Pip receiving £500 from a mystery benefactor.  Did that make him a professional footballer or what. The converter on your link says it is the equivalent of about £28,000, but it is not really. Comparatively, Pip is much richer than most people, although not extremely rich. I generally multiply Victorian money amounts by a hundred. For working class people it does not work so well. For example, London costermongers earned about £1 a week selling fruit and veg. Multiplied by 100 that is £5000 a year. It would be impossible for someone to subsist on £5000 a year in London today, but it may still be an accurate multiplier because most people were really poor back then. There is another complication is that the middle class did not have labour saving devices in those days; they had servants; which meant that they were employers. Pip had one servant iirc, but he was a page boy I think. He split his £500 with Herbert Pocket, believing the money to come from his aunt. Knowing that £500 is worth about £50,000 today is important, because living on £25,000 is a lot different to living on £50,000. Living on £250,000 may not be that different to living on £500,000. At the end of the book Pip is arrested for a debt of about £117 (I cannot remember exactly). Joe pays it off. As a blacksmith Joe may have saved up that amount. Multiplied by a hundred, £117 is the sort of debt you can run up on a credit card. It is not evil spendthriftery. On the other hand it is the sort of debt it would take time to pay off if you suddenly had to work for it in a not very well paying job. 

I was surprised to see Pip could buy 47 horses with his £500. They must have been mostly nags. A decent hunter cost about £80 in Middlemarch. They cost about £8000 when I checked online, which was another justification for my 100x multiplier.