Why Not Technology News?

Disclaimer:  After a glass of wine and watching the network news on television, I decided to have an "Andy Rooney Moment" and bitch.  (For those of you who don't know who Andy Rooney is, he's on CBS's 60 Minutes but you can get a sense of his style here.)

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If you want to find stories about what's new in science, just open almost any newspaper or magazine.  The New York Times has a whole section on Tuesdays.  Scientific American, Science, Nature, Discover, and a host of other media outlets have a constant parade of what's new in most scientific areas, including stories, blogs, Tweets, and Facebook listings.

But what if you are more interested in technology?  Well, if you are talking "hi-tech" - which is to say the web, cellphones, social networking, e-readers, or a host of other personal technology - you don't have much trouble finding out the latest news.  Everybody runs stories.  David Pogue in the NY Times is a big source for me but so is Gizmodo, Tech Crunch, CNET, and a boat load of other websites.

I find most of the hi-tech stuff interesting but not very inclusive.  If I want to know what's new in other technology areas (which includes virtually any area other than electrical engineering and computer science), I  have to do some digging.  Even Popular Science and Popular Mechanics come up short when it comes to the cutting-edge of new, non-silicon technology.  Why is that?  Why is science and hi-tech news so easy to come by yet other technology news so hard to find?  Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge any of these other areas their news streams.  People should know something about science and certainly most of the younger crowd wants to know what's the New New in wireless and personal tech.

But we seem to have hit the Yawn Threshold when it comes to other technologies.  It doesn't seem to matter whether they launch a Space Shuttle or complete an enormous bridge across the Colorado River (as they just did), you would be hard pressed to know anything like this is happening.  And yet, it is this very same technology that underpins so much of our lives.  You might think that Green Energy news would be everywhere but it gets buried under the deluge of social networking and political noise on the web.  Same goes for the fact that our economy is in shambles because we are losing our older technology base (read: manufacturing economy) that kept this country going for the last century.

I realize that this sounds a bit jaded, especially from a blogger who writes about the history of technology.  While I admit to being biased, I think that most people can find something of interest in the technology that makes the world they live in possible - even if it is only from the human interest side of the story.  Maybe you even want to protest against a technology but at least you might be better informed about it. And some positive news might just get some kid interested in a great career path.  I would love to see a front page headline in the major newspapers of this country with something like, "Largest Solar Installation in the World Goes Online."  But I'm not holding my breath.

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Post-Disclaimer:  When the wine imbibed is metabolized, a sense of calm returns... for better and for worse.

Truing the Wheels of a Steam Locomotive

I read an article yesterday from the St. Paul Pioneer Press about a rail buff group in Minnesota that is refurbishing one of their prized old steam engines.  This engine, No. 261, was built in 1944 by the American Locomotive Company and was used on Milwaukee Road passenger and freight runs between Minneapolis and La Crosse, Wisconsin.

The engine, which has eight drive-wheels over six feet in diameter, had developed a problem:  the drive wheels were out-of-round and need to be turned on a lathe to make them run true again.  In the old days of steam locomotive maintenance, this was a common problem.  The engine was driven over a track equipped with a special area known as a Drop Table and the drive wheels were lowered into a pit for maintenance.  Drop Tables no longer exist, so this time they had to pick up the entire locomotive with two cranes and pull the drive-wheels out from underneath and then set the locomotive back down on its forward and trailing trucks while the repairs are being completed.

Members of the group were taking bets on how much the boiler and frame of the engine weighed as the could measure it when the cranes lifted them off.  The answer: 227,000 pounds. That's a lot of iron and steel (and it doesn't include the weight of the wheels).

I am always encouraged to see groups like this who work so diligently to keep prime examples of past technology operating.  The plan is to put the engine back to work after the wheels are turned.  No. 261 will be the largest, active coal-burning steam locomotive in the world. Impressive. (This photo and more in the Pioneer Press article).

New (Old) Wax Cylinder Recordings

I am on a bit of a roll at the moment looking around various news websites for stories that relate to the history of technology.  Forgive me if this gets to be too much.  This phase will probably pass rather quickly.

I just read a very interesting story about recording on wax cylinders.  Now, this was not news in the late 1800s or even the early 1900s but it IS news if you want to do it today.  A British Steampunk band called The Band That Will Not Be Blamed for Nothing, who loves all things Victorian, decided to release 40 copies of their new CD on wax cylinders.  However, they did not release a wax cylinder player thus the crew at the BBC Technology website decided to "give it a go" (as the Brits might say) and build their own wax cylinder record player.  You can see the results in the video below:



You can also read the full story at the BBC website here.

Thomas Edison (pictured above with his first recording device) was dubbed the Wizard of Menlo Park, not because of his electric lights, but because of his invention for mechanically capturing sound for the first time in history.  He thought his invention would be most useful as a stenographic tool for business and actually frowned upon the idea of using it for entertainment purposes.  But technology has this habit of morphing into forms that users want rather than what inventors conceive.  Clearly, the customers had spoken (no pun intended).

Cheerio!

Two Interesting Articles on the History of Technology

Just yesterday, I commented on how news stories on science seem to eclipse news stories on technology - at least technology outside of Silicon Valley Tech.  So much to my surprise, as I was reading the New York Times today, I find two articles directly focused on the history of technology.

The first actually was the lead in the Science Times section of the paper.  But despite the name of the section, the article by William J. Broad, entitled "Taking Lessons from What Went Wrong", is a great example of the kind of story I like to see.  The gist of the article is that at least one outcome of the Deepwater Horizon disaster will be failure analyses that will make future drilling much safer.  Broad looks at a number of events beyond the current Gulf oil spill to illustrate his point.  His examples include the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Suspension Bridge in 1940, airplane crashes, the explosion of the Hindenburg, and even the sinking of the Titanic.

Broad quotes the well-known author and Duke University engineering professor, Henry Petroski as writing in his book, Success Through Failure,

Failures...always teach us more than than our successes about the design of things. And thus the failures often lead to redesigns - to new, improved things.

The second article was in a more unlikely part of the paper, The Arts section.  In an exhibition review by Edward Rothstein, entitled "The Anatomy of a City Traffic Jam", I learned the Museum of the City of New York currently has an exhibit on the role of the automobile in the life of 20th Century New York City.  Not surprisingly, that relationship has had both its good and bad elements over the years.  I learned quite a bit from Rothstein's review.  For instance, in 1900 there were only 8,000 autombiles in the United States but 2,500 of these were owned by people who lived in New York City (only the wealthy could afford them).  The nation's first course in automobile design was taught in New York City in the 1890s.  Many of the early safety signals, including the stop sign, were first used in New York City.

I particularly liked this quote from the article:

[I]t is impossible to separate the development of modern New York from the automobile's evolution. The city and the car were both expressions of the technological hopes of early modernism. They reflected a wide-ranging sense of possibility, in which speed, ease and power would seemingly become available to all.

Some great stuff here.  I would recommend both articles to your reading.