The Automatic (Rail) Road Machine

As I wrote in my last blog, machines that can lay an entire road in one operation are now a reality. I just came across a video of such a machine.

The video below shows a multi-part machine which lays high-speed railroad tracks. The video was shot in Europe but a similar machine is being used to lay tracks on the high-speed rail line between St. Louis and Chicago.  According to the source that I saw, these are the only two such machines that exist in the world. It's quite an operation. Give it a look:

[A "Hat's Off" to my sister-in-law, Peggy, for bringing this to my attention.]

In 1958, Disney Imagines the Future of the Highway

As long as I seem to be on an automotive futures theme, I want to draw your attention to part of a Disney television production from 1958, entitled Magic Highway USA. The show was part of the Wonderful World of Disney series, Most of this program explored the history of the highway in the United States. But the last ten minutes looked to the future.  You can watch the whole thing at the link about or just the last nine minutes here:

I love these old predictions of the future. Almost all of them have people flying around in their personal helicopters or living in some undersea colony. The buildings all look like they came out of the Jetsons. But just like in the Futurama exhibit that I wrote about a couple of entries ago, some of the predictions turn out to be remarkably accurate. Others turn out to be true but are embodied in some way other than that described. And of course, there are the "dead wrong" predictions. So how did the Magic Highway USA predictions turn out?  Here's a list of what was in our futures, circa 1958:

Dead Wrong Predictions:

- Multi-colored highway lanes to give motorists a color-coded path to their destination
- Radar screens to allow drivers to see in poor visibility
- Fog-eliminating devices to clear the roadway
- Atomic reactors to melt tunnels through mountains in a single pass
- Cantilevered highways hung from the side of mountains
- Automatic servicing of the car in the homeowner's garage
- Tandem vehicles that separate into parts for different destinations
- Special highways for new forms of vehicles (e.g., tubular highways)
- Individual parking spot for your car in your office at work
- Massive parking "cylinders" at shopping malls instead of parking lots
- Highway "elevators" to lift cars up sheer cliffs
- Gas turbine-powered automobiles
- Atomic-powered automobiles
- Jet engine-powered automobiles
- Cars that convert from highway vehicles to cabin cruisers



Nothing much surprising in this first list. This is the usual science fiction view of the future. What was more interesting to me was the number of predictions that turned out to be true, even if they were accomplished in a slightly different way. Have a look:

More-or-Less Correct Predictions:

- Larger, simpler highway signs that can be easily read at high speeds
- Roads specifically designed for better visibility
- Electronic navigation controls (at least there are now onboard navigation and traffic monitoring GPS systems)
- Rear view mirrors are television cameras (back-up cameras are becoming common)
- Helicopter rescue of traffic accident victims
- Integrated road building machinery that can lay down whole roadways at one pass
- Prefabricated bridges and overpasses
- Form-in-place concrete structures, such as bridges
- Wider, faster expressways that extend the areas from which people can commute to work
- A nation crisscrossed by a network of super highways
- Communities that are built around the design of the freeways for better access and commuting
- Preprogrammed route selectors (think GPS systems)
- Electronics that drive the car to its destination (not here yet but Google is working on a driverless car)
- Business conferences on video screens (... at least for a passenger)
- Family entertainment systems in the car (think DVD and game counsels)
- Ability to know your location on a synchronized electronic map (GPS again)
- Office buildings that combine multi-level parking and office facilities
- Moving sidewalks (at least in airports and convention centers)
- Solar powered automobiles (experimental cars are here. Production cars?  Hmmm).
- Air-conditioned routes across hot deserts (in-car AC is now virtually standard).
- Roads over subfreezing mountains (high-speed roads over subfreezing terrain are common in the northern parts of the country)
- Vehicle travel under the ocean (the Chunnel between the UK and France pops to mind)



Like most technology visions, this program also had its moments where it lapsed into the rhapsodic:

"These giant arteries will link together all the nations and help to create a better understanding among the peoples of the world. As in the past the highway will continue to play a vital role in the progress of civilization. It will be our magic carpet to new hopes, new dreams, and a better way of life for the future!"

Have you ever noticed how technology (whether embodied in better highways or in the internet) is always predicted to improve the relationships between peoples? There is some truth in these euphoric predictions but there is an equally true and opposite reality: technology creates frictions between the peoples of the world. Technology has never been a panacea. And predicting the future of technology remains one of our most difficult challenges.

The Horseless Age

In my last post, I wrote about Futurama, an exhibit sponsored by General Motors at the 1939 World's Fair. Futurama was Norman Bel Geddes vision of an America of 1960, fully connected by interstate highways. That vision became reality.

But visionaries have always been with us. I recently came across an editorial written in 1896 in the first publication that exclusively focused on the automobile. The magazine was called The Horseless Age and the publisher was a man named E.P. Ingersoll. He was a tireless reporter and promoter of all things automotive. In the fifth issue of Volume 1 of his journal, he penned an editorial with the very sedate title of "Effects on Land Values and the Distribution of Population."  But what he wrote was an insightful analysis of things to come.

The first thing that caught my eye when I read his piece was that it was the trolley and bicycle that began the movement of people to the suburbs - even before the advent of the automobile. When this editorial was written, there were essentially zero automobile companies in the U.S.  Any cars that were being purchased were imported from France and then only by the wealthy. It was this same trend to the suburbs that was illuminated in the Futurama exhibit forty-five years later. 

Ingersoll clearly understood the impact of transportation systems on land values. What Ingersoll didn't state was that it was the cost of transportation and not just its availability that drove land values. I think of the falling home prices today in the outer exurbs as people respond to high fuel costs by trying to move closer to the urban centers. The problem, of course, is that their homes are worth less than they owe on them, essentially trapping them in the exurbs.

Finally, I think Ingersoll deserves credit for not mincing words about congestion in the cities. He understood that the poorest people in the cities could never afford their own cars and hence would remain locked in the slums. Today, the poor are still locked in the slums of cities and run-down neighborhoods. They might have a car but if they do, it is usually very old and in very poor condition. Their upward mobility is close to zero.

Ingersoll's editorial isn't that long. I repeat it here verbatim:

"One of the most interesting phases of speculation called up by the motor movement relates to its probable effect on land values and distribution of population.


 In the aggregate the constant tendency of land values is to increase as population increases, and there is no reason to believe that this tendency, now very strong in this country, will be checked for some time to come. Every mechanical improvement introduced adds to land values, which may be considered as the capitalized value of civilization.


 But while the general tendency to increase will in all human probability remain unchanged, local changes are bound to result from the general introduction of motor vehicles as the have resulted from the introduction of other improvements in locomotion.


The trolley car has opened the suburban property, and by connecting rural towns has made populous streets where before were farmers' houses.


The bicycle has had a similar effect upon land values, pushing the line of possible residence near business centers further out, and hence making such outlying sites more desirable and more valuable.


The slight depreciation which these new agencies of locomotion have caused in the case of land devoted to industries injuriously affected by them is but a sign of the stimulating effect in other directions. The bicycle and the trolley depressed the prices of certain grades of horses and this has undoubtedly depressed the values of some lands devoted to raising such grade of horses, though this depression is apt to be quickly relieved by putting the land to more profitable uses.


Country hotel sites have in many sections been given additional value from the fact that they are frequented by bicycle riders seeking rest and refreshments on their outings.


The general adoption of the motor vehicle will intensify these tendencies. It will make suburbs easier of access, improve the trade of country hotels in many places, and still further depress the business of horse-raising. Much of the land now used for horse-raising and growing horse feed will in process of time find other uses more in harmony with the trend of progress.


The establishing of new factories will stimulate the growth of population locally, as has been observed in the case of the bicycle industry, but there is not the slightest hope that the motor vehicle will relieve the congestion of cities; for the congested districts are inhabited by the very poor, who cannot afford to buy a vehicle of any kind."


Note: The Horseless Age remains in publication today but its name was changed around World War I to Automotive Industries. You can read all the early volumes of the magazines on Google Books.

Our Futurama

The lines formed as soon as the gates opened. It was the premier attraction. People were willing to wait for hours in the hot summer sun to see it. Many saw it multiple times during their visits. When they finally got into the building and entered one of the moving cars, the magic began.

Exhibit Building. Note the lines.

I might be talking about the iconic ride, Spaceship Earth, the geodesic-like sphere at Epcot in Disney World.  It is the the ride that most captivates people in our modern-day version of a permanent "world's fair".  But I am writing about General Motor's Futurama exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair. Futurama was the single most popular attraction at the fair by a large margin. People would wait for hours in the long snaking lines that wound up a curved ramp to finally enter the building through a deep-red slit in a towering wall. Huge letters, "G" and "M", defined the edges of the opening. Once inside, visitors would seat themselves in one of moving modules called "carry-go-rounds" that formed an endless loop slowly moving past the perimeter of the exhibit. Music and narration would emanate from a speaker in the back of each module, exquisitely timed to what the passengers were viewing.

Futurama was industrial and stage designer Norman Bel Geddes vision of what the United States would look like in the future of 1960. His vision was conveyed in a massive, 36,000 square-foot model of a city and countryside of that distant time 21 years in the future. The model contained over half a million individually-fabricated structures, a million trees, and fifty thousand vehicles.  Viewers were, in essence, flying over the landscape at a low altitude and witnessing what they might look forward to in the years ahead.

Model city. The tall buildings are actually about four feet in height.

The central theme of Futurama was that a network of better roads and superhighways would provide for a transformation of the nation. The current dirty and congested cities and clogged local highways would be replaced by cities that were clean and accessible by multilane, limited-access highways.  People would be able to live in green communities outside of the city and drive to work on modern roadways with higher speeds, better safety, and a minimum of congestion.

The Last Intersection 

The last scene in this futuristic vision of 1960 was of a city intersection with multilevel roads and modernistic buildings. When the visitor left the carry-go-round and walked through the exit doors, they found themselves in a full-sized version of the same intersection they had seen in the model. The illusion must have been startling. Perhaps most startling of all was that the vision, in fact, came true. The superhighways that Norman Bel Geddes portrayed became our interstate highways and toll roads. The green spaces where people lived away from the cities became our suburbs. We might not have quite gotten there by 1960 but most of us finally did.  And has it been the utopian vision described in Futurama?  We would, of course, say no. But we are not the same people who looked at it from afar and saw it in sharp contrast to their own world of 1939.

We don't have world's fairs in this country any more. The last one was held in 1984 in New Orleans and it declared bankruptcy halfway through its six-month run. Maybe because of television and computer imagery we can no longer related to the seemingly-quaint idea of a physical model of the future.  Dioramas to portray the world to come are expensive to build and go out of date quickly. Even Spaceship Earth at Epcot requires constant updating on what its vision of the future of communications looks like.  But let's just imagine for a moment that we could hire someone like a Norman Bel Geddes of 2012 to build a Futurama of 2035. What would it look like?  Would we see a better world ahead, as Futurama did, or would we see something much more worrisome?

I think we have become more cynical about the promise of technology.  At least we no longer believe in the illusion that it can solve all our problems. More often that not, we see technology as creating as many problems as it removes.  The internet and its attendant privacy issues are just the latest example of the duality of every new technology.  It might be easy to fall into envying the untroubled vision of technology portrayed in the 1939 World's Fair but these people were not naive, either. They saw their world being torn apart by the beginnings of World War II. They didn't know yet about atomic bombs but they saw - correctly - a horrific conflict ahead. Yet most people interviewed at the fair were optimistic about the longer-term future of the country. The American Way promised a brighter future for themselves and their children.  We might be tempted to disagree with them in our own times.

They say that hope dies last. I don't think we are anywhere near the end of hope but I do think we are facing some tremendous challenges in the coming decades and we have only just begun to see them looming ahead of us.  I would suggest that we build a new Futurama that would be a marker to help us get a better fix on the future.  I, for one, would even volunteer to help pay for it. And I would certainly stand in line for a few hours to see it.

Note: General Motors produced a film about Futurama, entitled "New Horizons". You can watch it on YouTube below. It runs about 23 minutes but is worth the time.

Professionals

I am on a diet trying to shed a few of those extra pounds that so insidiously creep up on us as we age. I haven't had so much as a cookie in three weeks. Why, then, am I watching a documentary entitled, The Kings of Pastry (a 2009 film by Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker)? Am I eating vicariously? Beyond the scrumptious-looking treats, the film raised an interesting question in my mind.

The premise of the film is the desire of French pastry chefs to earn the coveted title of "Meilleur Ouvrier de France" - or MOF, for short - that is the premiere achievement for French pastry chefs. Every four years, a competition takes place in France where the best pastry chefs are invited to spend three days in a peer-judged event.  The results will determine if they will be allowed to claim the appellation of MOF and wear the tricolors of France on their chef's jacket collar. It is considered to be the pinnacle of the profession and pastry chefs have been known to compete for decades to try to win entry into the select group.

The competition is grueling. Three days of entering the kitchen at the crack of dawn and being there for ten hours or more without a break, even for lunch. These chefs are not just producing little creme puffs or eclairs. Their efforts produce sculptural works of art in sugar. They might work for a day on one piece only to have it shatter into a million sweet fragments when they try to move the sculpture to the display area. The competition is intense.

The film got me to thinking about professionalism and pride in your work. I find it interesting that where these sorts of competitions exist to identify the "best-of-the-best", you can always find a sense of professional pride in whatever occupation is involved.  Recognition comes from an elite cadre of your peers who judge whether you are good enough to join them in the Inner Circle. You receive the appellation and you wear it as visible evidence that you are in this select group. Others outside the profession may have no idea what any of this means but your peers know and you are held in high regard. Most of all, you know yourself to be at the top of your game.

Are there similar sorts of recognition in science and technology? Yes and no. The most prestigious national groups in the U.S. for science and technology are the National Academy of Science and the National Academy of Technology. These are mostly recognition for academic achievement. There is the Presidential National Medal of Technology and Innovation which is granted to individuals and groups that have made significant contributions to U.S. inventions and innovations. But none of these gets at the sort of thing I was thinking about. Is there ever a peer-reviewed competition to determine the best, say, airline pilots, truck drivers, bridge builders, or software programmers? My guess is that there is something in each of these fields. Do they get to claim a visible recognition of their stature? Are there names known to their peers? In France with such a strong culture surrounding food and wine, it seems natural to honor chefs and vintners. In our country, so based on commercial success, it seems that the salary or the position in the organization suffice as recognition.

What might happen if such recognition was started for occupations that don't provide recognition at the moment?  Would the whole occupational area rise in its performance if there was, say,  a Master of Postal Clerks or Master of Welding? (There is such a thing, by the way, as a Master of Wine for wine tasters and it has exactly the effect I am writing about).  I doubt that we will ever get a Master of Fast Food or a Master of Greeters at Walmart. But maybe this helps to separate what are jobs from those that can rightly be called professions.

Food for thought (sorry, I couldn't help the pun).

iPhone: Computer in My Pocket

Two weeks ago, I (finally) bought an iPhone 4S. I had been debating whether to buy one for a long time. For someone who writes a blog on technology, I felt almost as though I was some kind of anachronism. How could I not have a Smart Phone? Many of my friends have had one for years.  I was still on my plain-vanilla cellphone which, in addition to making calls could even send text messages using a little keyboard! Ooooh.

So why so long?  Well, I didn't want to be one of those people who whips their iPhone out walking down the street or while they are sitting in a darkened movie theater or while they are at the dinner table. I am all for connectivity but is it necessary to check your email or text messages every ten minutes?  The answer, I think, depends on your age. If you are a twenty-something, your life revolves around social networking. The expectation is that you are always online. Your friends want immediate responses. If you happen to be a little older, the fact that you can email someone when you get back to your home computer seems like connecting at light speed compared to growing up with snail mail. For the most part, my friends are not hanging out on line waiting for instant responses on where to meet up for tonight's social event.  Social networking with yourself isn't very much fun.

I have also learned that most of my email is, well... , boring. I have signed too many email political petitions and now my mailbox is filled mainly with the seemingly-urgent Rant-of-the-Day from one action group or another. I am suffering from Rant Fatigue and mostly hit the Delete button. Having removed the political email, I next winnow out the Groupons and Living Social coupons. Most days, I don't need a Brazilian or a facial so those go in the trash. What's left is an all too meager number of real emails. So, I didn't get an iPhone to check my emails and text messages.

Why did I get the iPhone? I wanted a mobile Information Appliance. I wanted to be able to look up locations on Google Maps. I wanted to find a good restaurant with Yelp. I wanted to know the answer to some question using Wikipedia. I wanted to check movie reviews on IMDB. I want to know if it's going to rain in the next 30 minutes. Could I have done without any of those functions? Sure. I have done without them so far. But the ability to have a computer in my pocket (for that is what a Smart Phone is) gives me an odd sense of freedom. I can navigate through my day a little better. I can find the answers to questions I will surely forget to look up by the time I get home (senior moments).  I feel...I admit it... hip.

I worried that I would become a slave to my new iPhone but, so far, I have surprised myself at how infrequently I check my emails (maybe for all the reasons I already mentioned).  My iPhone just nestles down in my pocket ready to give me answers when I ask. Oh, did I mention Siri?  This little artificial intelligence gnome is someone I want to get to know better.

Now, if you will excuse me, I need to check my iPhone. I want to know...

Connections

What does Llewellyn Park, New Jersey have to do with Bix Beiderbecke, the jazz trumpeter?   They are connected, if only through my web meandering yesterday. Maybe everything is connected at some level but I thought I might share with you the path of my meanderings as an example of what you can learn along the way.

I was looking at a book that is a chronology of automobile events. In the chapter on pre-automobile events, I found this entry:

1856
Alexander Jackson Davis designs Llewellyn Park, New Jersey, the first suburban subdivision in the United States. Planned in the romantic style with curving, non-gridiron streets.

That got me curious about both Llewellyn Park and Alexander Jackson Davis, which sent me off to Wikipedia. Today, Llewellyn Park is home to perhaps a few hundred extremely wealthy individuals. From the beginning, the community was planned to provide beautiful mountainside vistas to the residents. Estates varied in size from a couple of acres to ten acres, all nestled within the woods and highly-planned landscaping for a suburban Eden. The development was the brainchild of Llewellyn Solomon Haskell, a prominent New York City businessman who asked the architect, Alexander Jackson Pope to design his new suburban community. When it was built, Llewellyn Park was as close to downtown Manhattan as was Central Park. Thomas Edison built his palatial estate, Glenmont, in Llewellyn Park.

Glenmont, Edison's Estate

U.S Customs House, New York City

Not to belabor Llewellyn, I started to look at what else Alexander Jackson Davis had designed. Davis was one of the preeminent architects of the first half of the 19th century. He was famous for both his Greek Revival designs (like the New York Custom's House) and his Italianate homes.  One of those homes was the Blandwood Mansion in Greensboro, North Carolina - within an hour of my home. The Blandwood Mansion was the home of Governor John Motley Morehead. The home was originally constructed in 1795 but Morehead had the house redesigned by Davis in 1844 in the Italianate style. Davis had never been to Italy but the pictures he saw inspired him to design many grand homes in the style. Blandwood was the furthest south of all of Davis's designs.

Blandwood Mansion

Governor Morehead's family lived in the mansion until around 1900. in 1907, Blandwood was sold to Col. William H. Osborne to be the location of the North Carolina franchise of the Keeley Institute.  The Keeley Institute was based in Dwight, Illinois.

The Keeley Institute was probably the first U.S. institution to treat alcohol and drug addiction as a disease, rather than a moral failing. The founders of the Institute were Leslie E. Keeley, a doctor in Dwight, John R. Oughton, a local druggist, and a Fargo, N.D. merchant named Curtis Judd. The treatment they devised was an injectable concoction that they termed "bi-chlorides of gold".

The first Keeley Institute was opened in Dwight, Ill in 1879 with the slogan, "Drunkenness is a disease and I can cure it." The treatment which consisted of four injections a day plus other remedies plus rest became known as the "Keeley Cure". The Cure turned out to be a huge moneymaker for Dr. Keeley and his compatriots. They built a complex of buildings consisting of offices, laboratories, and a hotel to house their patients. By sheer coincidence, I had come across  a Detroit Photographic Company image of the Keeley office building a while back in Dwight - a magnificent Richardsonian structure with an enormous portal - taken sometime before 1902 when the building complex burned in a fire.

Keeley Institute Office circa 1902

The buildings were rebuilt and the facade of the office building was reused - albeit in a heavily modified design. The Keeley Institute itself stayed in operation until 1965. The treatments were controversial as to their effectiveness but at least they treated alcoholism as a disease. The Institute was sort of the Betty Ford Center of its day. Many thousands of people passed through its portals including many celebrities.

Bix Beiderbecke

And finally, this brings us to Bix Beiderbecke, the young jazz trumpeter of the 1920s who played in Paul Whitman's Orchestra. Beiderbecke was never healthy but seemingly he was bent on self destruction through drug and alcohol abuse. In 1929, when he was only in his mid-20s, he went to Dwight to the Keeley Institute to dry out. He was there a month and seemed in good shape when he left. But the Depression left him without much work in his native Midwest and he returned to New York City with all of its temptations. He died of his alcohol addiction in 1931 at the age of 28 .

And so that is how Llewellyn Park is connected to Bix Beiderbecke. It is a connection built on links between seemingly-unrelated subjects. Yet, the world is connected through just such random links. I love the internet but I sometimes hate it when I get off on one of these tangents. Nonetheless, I learned a lot for just one day.  May you be so blessed (or cursed).

The Serpent and the Telegraph

It's interesting how connections sometimes come about. I am on an email list for the Library of Congress and there was a post on their blog about Hans Christian Andersen (yes, the same Andersen of fairy tale fame). The blog post was announcing that an American family had donated some letters between one of their family members and Andersen that were written in the 1860s and 1870s. The blog mentioned that some of Andersen's stories, including "The Great Sea Serpent", had first appeared in english language publications such as Scribner's magazine.  The "Serpent" appeared in the January, 1872 issue.

"The Great Sea Serpent" is a fairy tale of how the fishes and sea creatures reacted to the laying of the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable in 1866.  In the story, the cable is thought to be some great sea serpent that originated from the creatures on the surface. The fish were trying to decide whether to bite it in two because they despised its presence in their world. The wise ones among them advised the more adversarial fish to leave it alone. The story ended with this paragraph:

Good for nothing!” said all the creatures in the sea, and held fast to the sea-cow’s opinion, so as to have an opinion. The little fish had its own thoughts. “That exceedingly long, thin serpent is perhaps the most wonderful fish in the ocean. I have a feeling it is.

The very most wonderful,” say we human folks, and say it with knowledge and assurance. It is the great sea-serpent, long ago the theme of song and story. It was born and nourished and sprang forth from men’s cunning and was laid upon the bottom of the sea, stretching from the Eastern to the Western land, bearing messages, quick as light flashes to our earth. It grows in might and in length, grows year by year through all seas, round the world, beneath the stormy waves and the lucid waters, where the skipper looks down as if he sailed through the transparent air, and sees the swarming fish, brilliant fireworks of color. Down, far down, stretches the serpent, Midgard’s snake, that bites its own tail as it encircles the earth. Fish and shell beat upon it with their heads—they understand not the thing—it is from above. Men’s thoughts in all languages course through it noiselessly. “The serpent of science for good and evil, Midgard’s snake, the most wonderful of all the ocean’s wonders, our—GREAT SEA-SERPENT!

I always find it interesting when technology intersects with art and literature. Who would have thought that something like the Trans-Atlantic Telegraph Cable would inspire a fairy tale? And yet, through the form of the fairy tale, we see Andersen revering the cable as one of mankind's greatest achievements. He was not alone.  The cable of 1866 (there had been an earlier attempt that failed in the 1850s) would connect the continents and that connection would never again be broken.

Now, of course, the telegraph looks so terribly antiquated.  We can hardly imagine that messages would have taken two weeks to travel in letters from England to America before the advent of the Trans-Atlantic telegraph. I wonder if Hans Christian Andersen was alive today, would he write a fairy tale about the internet? Would we have something like "The Great Spider Web of Communications"?  It would be nice to think so - but somehow I doubt it.

What's Needed for Successful Innovation?

In Sunday's New York Times, Susan Cain, who is an author and essayist, published a piece entitled, "The Rise of the New Groupthink". In this very well-written essay she more or less bursts the bubble of the current trend which prioritizes group activities over solo efforts. As she writes in her opening paragraph,

Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink., which holds that creativity and achievement come from an oddly gregarious place. Most of us now work in teams, in offices without walls, for managers who prize people skills above all. Lone geniuses are out. Collaboration is in. 

But there's a problem with this view. Research strongly suggests that people are more creative when they enjoy privacy and freedom from interruption. 

I couldn't agree with her more. In my 35 years of experience working in, and directing, R&D labs, I saw numerous examples of the best ideas coming from the solitary work of individuals. Team meetings had their place but not at the creative front end. This was the territory of the individual, not the team.

In thinking about what makes successful innovation tick, I see four things that are needed for successful (in this case, commercial) innovations:

1. Very bright people who have the spark to think in new ways.
2. Freedom for those individuals to explore their ideas without close supervision.
3. Extreme persistence that provides the energy to surmount the inevitable naysayers.
4. A very smart commercialization team that knows how to get the innovation to market.

When I was running R&D labs, I saw my job as identifying those people who had the really glorious new ideas and giving them space, time, and resources to flesh out their ideas. Often, my "management" meant wandering into their labs from time to time to have them show me what they were up to. Being willing to give them the support they needed quickly opened the door to their enthusiastically showing me their early ideas. The worst thing I could do would be to assign a team to them too early before the creative work was well along.

Our labs would often have fifty to a hundred technical people in them but not everyone had the creative spark. Many were more comfortable shepherding the creative ideas of others along the path to commercialization. It was never easy to pick out the really creative people during the hiring process.  Sometimes, those who seemed creative were just blowing smoke.  It often turned out that the quiet people were the really creative individuals. They were comfortable in the world of ideas more than they were in interacting with people.

Even so, getting a new innovation underway often took the combined efforts of both the innovator and supportive management. There was always a reason that the really creative ideas were deemed by upper management to be impractical or unattractive from a marketing perspective.  The innovator was often the best person to explain the technical nuances of his or her idea. My role in management was to wrap the idea in the acceptable attire of our business so that it wasn't seen as too outside the box to be acceptable. Often, ideas would percolate for years before suddenly becoming "obvious" to everyone that they should be commercialized.

At that point, getting a really good team of people together to go through the paces of manufacturing, marketing, perhaps regulatory approvals, and sales became the priority. Great teams could do wonders to get the idea out the door. But not all teams were great and many good ideas would languish for want of a strong commercialization team.

The inventors and innovators were often gratified to see their ideas go all the way through commercialization but that wasn't what motivated them. Their motivation came from the freedom to do it again -- to come up with another new idea.  They basked in the knowledge that they were appreciated for what they could create.  We all crave the approval of our peers. For them it came not through promotion to becoming a team leader but through the ability to have the space to explore their ideas.

In Ms. Cain's Times' essay, she quotes Steve Wozniak, the engineer who designed the Apple II computer:

Most inventors and engineers I've met are like me... they live in their heads. They're almost like artists. In fact, the very best of them are artists. And artists work best alone... I'm going to give you some advice that may be hard to take. That advice is: Work alone... Not on a committee. Not on a team. 

I couldn't agree more.

Twittered to Distraction

For the last month or two, I decided to try to see if Twittering on technology topics would be useful. The result of my test is that I think Twitter can drive you to distraction and not add much to the conversation.  Let me explain my observations a little more carefully.

I Tweet under the handle @techalmanac1.  I decided that in addition to my sporadic blogs, I would look at what was going on the Twitter-sphere and pass on the best and most relevant posts on technology. I was following a host of technology sites including Scientific American, the Smithsonian, Science aggregators, Fast Company, Fortune, Forbes, and many others. I was less interested in the "what I am doing right now" sort of Tweet compared to links to news articles and reports. Over the month or two I was doing this, I found it took me hours each day to scan even the 100+ feeds I was following and review them for distribution. My reward? I grew my Followers from under ten to maybe 50 or so.  I appreciated the followership. In the positive column, I found that I was reading more about current and future technology and was more aware of what was the buzz of the day.  The negative was that there was very little being written that appeared on Twitter about the history of technology - my primary interest.

I'm calling a halt to the experiment. If I see something particularly relevant, I will pass it on but I would rather spend my time developing my own ideas than re-Tweeting someone else's work.  So if you are one of my 50 or so followers, thanks for following. I hope that by focusing on my own ideas, I will add more value to the conversation. I will still put items up from time to time but I won't be as focused on it as I have been in the last couple of months.

This experiment leads me to ponder how much time is used up in general with little to show for it.  The constant scanning of Twitter, Facebook, Google +, let alone email, has lead to a huge loss of human productivity. I know there are those who would argue that the connectivity leads to innovation. Sometimes, it probably does. Most of the time, it is lost energy. I also realize that this sounds like the kind of argument someone from my generation, i.e., older, makes about the way young people live their lives - lives connected via their iPhones and computers to their friends and working colleagues.  I understand that I don't understand, but I will still argue for less distraction and fragmentation and for more focus and integration. It is impossible for anyone to keep up with the ever-growing amount of data out there on the web.  It seems to me that figuring out what you are passionate about and pursuing it with as much energy as you can muster is still the formula for making the world a better place.

So here's to focus! May it re-emerge into the mainstream of our daily lives.

Amtrak Video

I took a video class this fall and I had to put together a little video on something that interested me. I made a (very) short little story about the Amtrak trains that run through the small North Carolina town I call home. Hope you like it.

Small Can Be Beautiful

I realize that the title of this post is something of a rip on E.F. Schumacher's book, Small is Beautiful, but small is not always beautiful. Sometimes small just leads to being crushed.  I started thinking about this when I was listening to an interview on the Diane Rehm Show on NPR. She was talking to  Stanford historian, Richard White, about his book, Railroaded: The Transcontinental and the Making of Modern America.

In his book, White lays out the mostly-sordid business history of the building of both the Transcontinental Railroad and other major expansions of the railroads in the late 19th Century. Railroads were the first large corporations in America. It was not possible to build something as capital intensive as a railroad without major investment. It was also not possible to operate such a large enterprise without layers of management. The Transcontinental Railroad was built mostly through political favors, bribes, and kickbacks. There was no business reason at the time of the Civil War that could justify building a rail line through mostly unpopulated areas. But the railroad got built because there was money to be made in railroad construction costs, land grants, and subsidies.

My purpose here is not to revisit the seamy sides of the railroad business. What got me thinking was how the railroads were once the dominant transportation system in the United States - at least for passenger travel. The over-used term of the time was how railroads "collapsed time and space", and it was true. Travelers depended on the railroads to get where they wanted to go. And in the late 19th Century, you could get almost everywhere on a railroad. Of course, you had to travel on the railroad's timetable and if the town you wanted to get to wasn't on a rail line, you were on your own.

Model-T Assembly Line

At the end of the 19th Century, a laughably obscure technology began its unstoppable derailment of railroad passenger travel.  I refer, of course, to the automobile. From the very beginning, people loved the idea of being able to decide where and when to travel. Roads of the day weren't great, but people started to lobby for better roads. When Henry Ford's assembly line made the Model T affordable to almost every middle-class family, the automobile exploded onto the roadways.  For trips under a hundred miles, people would drive rather than take the train. They could leave on their own schedule and get to any town served by a road - even a bad road.  The family didn't have to have invest in a massive corporation to be able to drive. The large corporations like Ford Motor Company put the individual in charge of their own transportation.  It took decades, but gradually the railroads stopped running passenger trains and the country is now laced with interstate highways that carry the bulk of ground travel.  In the end, the individual would rather have control than give it to a large corporation. Small can be beautiful,

A second example is the main frame computer. When computing  came of age after World War II, it was the large companies like IBM that controlled the industry.  Once again, development was helped by government support - mostly from the Defense Department. Users were allowed limited access to these huge computing machines, mostly through leases to other corporations and universities.  The large capital required to build and operate these machines called for huge corporate investments and specialized technical people to operate the machines.

Then in the early 1980s, the personal computer became available from both Apple and IBM (and a host of smaller players). Computing was now available directly to the individual without an intermediary. People loved it. PCs were found in more and more homes and businesses. The individual became empowered and took control of computing virtually overnight. It didn't take the decades it took to move from the railroads to the automobile. Within a decade, PCs were ubiquitous. And those PCs when hooked to the emerging network called the internet gave people even more individual freedom to communicate and create thousands of new uses for the personal computer. Today, personal computers are in your pocket, in your smart phones, and tablets are becoming the new laptops. Given a choice, people will always opt for more control of their technology.

With these examples in mind, I started to muse about what the next big waves of personal control might be?  The starting point is to look for high capital intensity today. What demands a large corporation to provide the capital to make the technology possible?  I think it would be fair to eliminate those corporations that supply network services like power and oil companies. But even as I write this I think of Skype which has done a lot to eat into the phone companies' business. Maybe the two areas that might come to pass next are manufacturing and health care.

Right now, if you want a new widget, you have to look for someone who makes it and offers it for sale. But 3-D printing is changing the paradigm. Now, you can design or scan an object and send it directly to a 3-D printer that can pop a widget out in nothing flat. The technology is still early and you won't find a 3-D printer in your neighbor's house but give it a decade or two and see where we are. I predict that  manufacturing is going to undergo a sea change - and that sea change which will put more power into the hands of the individual.

The second area that comes to mind is health care. Right now, hospitals and clinics are capital intensive. Most people have to go to a physical facility to talk to a nurse or doctor. Medical records are closed for both privacy and competitive reasons. I think the forces of personal computing and the internet are going to change the way a lot of health care is practiced.  Small sensors built into your smart phone or tablet will measure your physical status and convey it to a doctor who will make electronic "house calls" to you via video links. For most minor situations, you will no longer have to go to the clinic or hospital to be seen.  Even for major procedures like surgery, you will be able to choose an expert who might live half-way around the world to do your procedure via robotic surgery.  Health care is ripe for change due to its taxing infrastructure and exploding costs.

People want control of their lives and technologies. New technologies that give them the sense of control at affordable costs will be rapidly embraced.  The world awaits the next waves of change. Small can be beautiful.

Automata

Have you seen the new Martin Scorsese movie, Hugo? I highly recommend it for multiple reasons - a great story, a love of silent films, wonderful cinematography (in 3D, no less), and the recreation of an automaton. The film is based loosely in real people and events. Georges Melies. the first creator of silent fictional films, is one of the central characters of the film - wonderfully portrayed by Ben Kingsley. The film is set in Paris's Montparnasse train station some time after the end of World War I. Melies is selling toys in a tiny stall in the train station where he meets the film's protagonist, Hugo.

Jacques de Vaucanson

Automata are what today we would call robots. They were an attempt by their builders to render a life-like creature from machine parts. The history of automata goes back millenia. Even Leonardo da Vinci drew designs for automata and built at least one in the shape of a lion. Various builders followed with increasingly sophisticated automata. One of the earliest masters was Jacques de Vaucanson who exhibited in 1738 the mechanical figure of a flute player which could actually play this difficult instrument through subtle recreations of the lips, palate, and facial muscles (not to mention the fingering of the keys). This automaton was a smash hit and other builders followed with their own mechanical recreations of life.  Much later, as we shall see, Georges Melies became fascinated with automata.

Georges Melies

Georges Melies was born in France in 1884 and trained to become a shoe maker, like his father. But while training in London, he became enthralled by the magic he saw performed in the Egyptian Hall.  When he returned to France he worked in his father's business until his father died. At that point, he sold his share of the business to his two brothers and used the money to buy the dilapidated Parisian theater of magician, Jean-Eugene Robert-Houdin (from whom Houdini took his stage name).

Robert-Houdin started life apprenticing as a watchmaker but was always fascinated by magic. While working in the Loire valley, he became seriously ill and was nursed back to life by a magician named Torrini. Torrini, it turns out, had several automata that he used in his magic shows. The automata were badly in need of repairs and Robert-Houdin used his mechanical skills to bring them back to working condition. He also immediately saw the link between magic and the seemingly life-like power of these mechanical androids.

Robert-Houdin

Robert-Houdin went back to Paris and began his work building clocks, astronomical instruments, and automata.  In 1844, he won a medal at the Paris Exposition for his writing automaton.  Robert-Houdin now started to devote all his energy to automata. His 1844 model was enhanced to where it could perfectly recreate Robert-Houdin's signature. Ironically, P.T. Barnum bought the automaton while on a tour of Europe with Tom Thumb. The automaton was exhibited in England and then sent back to America where it was displayed in Barnum's museum of oddities. It was eventually destroyed in a museum fire.

Robert-Houdin had opened a magic theater in Paris during this time period. He died in 1871 and his sons managed his theater for 17 years until one of the son's widows sold it to George Melies.  The theater came with all of the props including Robert-Houdin's remaining automata.  Melies immediately repaired the theater and the automata.  The movie would have us think that the writing automaton was still in Paris but this was not the case as mentioned before.

Soon after, Melies became fascinated with photography and moving pictures when he saw the early work of the Lumieres brothers.  He tried to buy one of their cameras and when they turned him down, he went on to build his own. Melies started making his own films and by 1897, the magic theater was mostly a movie theater. Below is his 1902 classic, A Trip to the Moon.

In the film, Hugo, the boy, must repair the writing automaton to try to retrieve a message he felt that his dead father had left encrypted in the automaton. When he finally did get the machine repaired, it drew pictures which lead Hugo to the secret past of Georges Melies, who had long ago  fallen out of favor as a film maker and was now a toy seller in the train station (Melies did, indeed, fall out of favor as a film maker and ended his working years selling toys from a tiny stall in Montparnasse Station).

In the film, the automaton is meant to cast a mysterious grip on us. But that's nothing new. Automata have always delighted and confounded people with a mechanical imitation of life.  We still find robots fascinating. The word "robot", by the way, comes from a 1921 play by Karel Capek entitled, Rossum's Universal Robots.  Today, robots are literally part of our everyday life - whether it is the GPS navigation system in our car or the Scooba that scrubs our floors. But we still want to instill life and personality into these machines (Disclosure: we have named our GPS systems in our cars Jeeves and Prudence and talk to them regularly).  Robots populate our films and stories (who can forget HAL in 2001?). Robots might seem like our future.

Maybe someday these machines will become so sophisticated we might not be able to tell them apart from human beings. Personally, I doubt that it will happen. Even if we could create such creatures, our sensibilities would demand some form of visual recognition that tells us that this creature is not human. We are fascinated by machine life but we are very wary of losing the boundaries of our own humanity.  Robots will become ubiquitous but not invisible.  The line between man and machine is not easily transgressed.

[For a much more in depth treatment of automata, mechanical life, and Georges Melies,  I would recommend Gaby Woods 2002 book entitled (in the U.S.), Edison's Eve, and in Britain, Living Dolls.}