The Inexorable March Towards the Virtual

Second Life, The Sims, video games: the virtual world seems to be taking an ever-stronger hold in the high-tech world we live in.  Some people seem to feel even more comfortable in the virtual world, where they can craft new and different identities through their self-invented avatars.  But it's not hard to hear the murmured fears about how much time some people spend in these Neverlands rather than being grounded in reality.  The people that inhabit these binary universes are thought to be somehow just a bit whacky.

But these fears of the virtual are not new.  The move from the physical world to a more virtual world has been going on for a very long time.  I was reminded of this as I was reading T.J. Stiles National Book Award-winning biography, The First Tycoon, The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt.  In the first decades of the 19th century, the economy consisted of individual proprietors and limited partnerships.  As the first corporations began to be chartered to build canals and railroads, the concept of what constituted a business began to become untethered from the hard and comforting reality of the physical world.  The structure of the corporation not only created a new entity that had a legal life of its own (including legal immortality), the stock issued by the corporation began to move away from an accounting-based recognition of the value of the corporation's real property.  Stocks began to be issued for financial reasons and were now free to seek their value in the open market.  This uncoupling of what used to be considered "real" for something more intangible created great angst in the general public.  Shares that were issued for financial reasons were considered to be "watered stock", an expression that derives from the trick of old drovers who would would let their cattle over-drink just before being weighed to determine their market value.  What did stock represent if not the total capital assets of the corporation?  If it couldn't be taken apart and sold, many felt it wasn't real.  Things like an existing customer base, brand recognition, or know-how were considered to be intangibles and hence of no monetary value.  People like Cornelius Vanderbilt helped to move the country forward into a new era, a more virtual era, through his creation of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad.

The march to the virtual continued during the Civil War when the lack of enough gold in the U.S. Treasury made it impossible to procure all that was needed to fight the war.  The Greenback was issued as legal currency and it set off a wave of negative reaction that went on for decades.  Why should a piece of printed paper be worth something?  It wasn't either gold or silver.  It was just... paper.  We moved another step towards a more virtual world.

When Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, communication took a giant step towards the virtual.  No longer would long-distance communication require either people or a written document moving from place to place to carry information.  Information could now move instantaneously, unfettered by the limitations imposed by geography.  The same sense of uncoupling followed the introduction of the telephone and the phonograph.  Edison was known as The Wizard of Menlo Park, not because of his lightbulb, but because his phonograph took the physical world of sound and somehow encapsulated it so that it could be reproduced at will.

So many of our technologies have a component of abstraction to them; photography, motion pictures, radio, and television all uncoupled the real from the virtual.  With the blooming of the Information Age, we have moved to virtual money through ATMs, cash cards, and PayPal.  We make friends through social networks such as Facebook and MySpace.  We chat through text messaging, tweets, instant messaging, and video calls.  We shop on the internet without giving it a second thought.  We fight our wars using pilots who fly Predator aircraft through virtual links halfway around the planet.  The boundaries blur rapidly.

As surely as there is an Arrow of Time that moves in only one direction, there is also an Arrow of the Virtual which moves ever more away from what we like to call the Real World.  The rate of change often exceeds our capacity to cope.  We feel disoriented and apprehensive as we are pried loose from the old objects of our security.  But what was uncomfortable to one generation is taken for granted in the next.  Our world of 2010 is only a way station on the journey to something that will seem even more disconnected from what we think of as real.  Maybe the comfort in all of this is to realize that it is not only natural, it is inevitable.  People will feel just as comfortable (and uncomfortable) with the world of 2110 as people felt in 1910.   Maybe the secret is to relax and try to enjoy it.

Technology's Impact on the Land

We just returned from a week's trip to the Maine coast. This morning, we drove down the Hudson River Valley from Fishkill, New York, past the Manhattan skyline, and down the New Jersey Turnpike (it's always best to do this on a Sunday morning).

Coincidentally, I have been reading T.J. Stiles' recent biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt, "The First Tycoon."  Vanderbilt made his first fortune in steamboats and his second in railroads.  Vanderbilt first operated ferries that plied the waters between his home on Staten Island and the docks of Manhattan.  To say he led a colorful life would be an understatement.

When young Vanderbilt lived in the same environs that we drove through today, New York City had a rapidly-growing population of 40,000 people.  Staten Island was a farming community that sent produce to market across the river to New York City.  Getting from Manhattan to Philadelphia was an arduous journey that required a steam ferry, a long stagecoach ride across New Jersey, and a second steamboat trip down the Delaware. It took 12 hours... on a good day.

As I looked at the acres of freeways, the towering skeletons of ship gantries on the shores of Staten Island, the smokestacks of chemical plants and oil refineries, and the miles of dilapidated housing, I couldn't help wondering if the rise of technology has been worth it?  Have we lost our way somewhere and raced right past the Point of No Return as we built our cities and industries?

What would Vanderbilt have thought if he could see his old haunts today?  I'm not sure. Maybe he would have been fine with it.  He was first and foremost a ruthless businessman.  Vanderbilt had no problem spoiling the natural beauty and resources of his own day to make a buck.   But I wonder if the sheer scale of the change would set even Commodore Vanderbilt back a bit?  Would he see this as some scene out of a future run amok, even for someone as rapacious as he was himself?

Cornelius Vanderbilt

T.J. Stiles relates a very interesting moment in Vanderbilt's life. When Vanderbilt was middle-aged, he became desperately ill with what was thought was either pneumonia or pleurisy.  His doctor told him point blank that he should get his affairs in order because he wouldn't survive.  Vanderbilt called his family together and spoke to them from what he thought was his death bed.  One of his family later recalled his words:  "Don't be too anxious to make money, there is enough for all of you."  When the chips were down, Vanderbilt could see that the pursuit of wealth was not the most important thing even in his life.

Miraculously, Vanderbilt recovered from his pneumonia. Deathbed insights don't always stick.  He went on to become an even more hardened and calloused tycoon who took the greatest pleasure in crushing all who stood in his path.    Vanderbilt's world, the world centered on New York City, was changing forever.  It keeps on changing, of course.  Maybe the changes that come in the future will actually be more positive because there is nothing left to build on unless the old and the ugly is torn down first.  I hope that the result is not only functional and profitable, but also something that doesn't deaden the soul to look upon.

Vanderbilt lived in the days when most Americans believed in unlimited natural resources.  Thomas Jefferson thought it would take centuries to exploit all the riches of the continent. Instead, it took just over one.  We seem to learn most lessons, even the lesson of blighting the land, the hard way.  I would like to think we are at least gaining a little wisdom as we continue to mature as a nation.

New Book Page

I've decided to add a separate book page to the blog where I can add books that I've been reading. Look for the link at the top of this page just below the banner.  The first book I've added is Gavin Weightman's, The Industrial Revolutionaries.  I will update the page from time to time as I find books of interest to this blog.  Hope you enjoy it.

Back in My Library

I'm finally home after our week-long trip north from wintering in Florida.  Spring is arriving early all over the country, even here in Minnesota.  Now that I am back, I hope to pick up the blog again on a more regular schedule.

One of the nice things about being back is that I have access once again to my books.  My wife can tell you that I can't seem to travel without an inordinate number of books but even those are only a small portion of my library on the history of technology.  As I look at the titles that I can see next to me by the computer, I feel like I am with learned old friends.  The titles and art work beckon with a promise of interesting stories of entrepreneurs and inventors who tried to changed the world.  And some even succeeded.

I can never see a shelf of books without thinking about the authors who labored over the research and the manuscripts.  Each one of them wanted to write something that would be well received by their readers.  They wanted to see their names on the covers, offering at least a little immortality.  They probably even made a little money along the way. I am thankful that they made the effort.

Lots of my books are older editions.  Some date back fifty years or more, but that makes them no less appealing to me.  Sometimes these older books are even more interesting for the different perspective they provide.  The worn dust jackets and linen covers reveal a book that has been "around the block" a few times and has survived the recycle bin or landfill. (The image is a stock photo.  My books aren't yet that old!)

When I think about reading some of these old histories on a Kindle or iPad, it just doesn't feel like it would be right somehow.  If, as Marshall McLuhan said, "the medium is the message", then  I need an old medium for my history of technology books.  The musty pages have a certain aroma that connotes time.

It is always fun to travel but it is good to be home.

Text 2.0: Coming Soon to a Book Near You

Tomorrow brings the launch of the iPad.  The first experience comments coming back from various sources make the device seem even more promising than I had first thought.  Of course, there is so much hype around this at the moment that it is hard to see the iPad clearly for it might or might not become.  What is undeniably true is that we are in the middle of a sea change in the way we interact with what we experienced before as words on paper.  While we might lament the lack of innovation in other parts of our economy, there is ample evidence of innovation being alive and well in rethinking our reading experience.

Now comes another level of innovation being dubbed Text 2.0.  Imagine if your book knew what words you were looking at on the page/screen.  What would that mean?  A group in Germany has been experimenting with just such a concept and has put together a really interesting little video to give you a sense of the power of such technology.

I saw this first at a blog called Becoming-A-Writer-Seriously and then at an old favorite, TechCrunch.  Enjoy.

The Book Wheel and the Origin of Technology Books

I love books.  I have piles of them sitting on my desk and in my family room in various stages of being read.  I came across the Book Wheel and thought how cool it would be to have one.  As real as it looks, the Book Wheel was never built.  It was a "paper invention" of the Italian military engineer, Agostino Ramelli (1531 - 1600).  The illustration was published in 1588 in a book entitled, The Various and Ingenious Machines of Agostino Ramelli.  

The book belongs to a genre called Theater of Machines.  These late Renaissance books were some of the first printed books with detailed technical illustrations.  The term Theater of Machines comes from the first book of this type published in 1571 or 1572 by Jacques Besson (1540 - 1573), a French mathematician and failed clergyman. His book was entitled Theatrum Instrumentorium et Machinarum (Theater of Instruments and Machines, hence the name of the genre).  The Smithsonian has a copy of both Besson's and Ramelli's book in their Dibner Library.  You can flip the pages of the books virtually using the hotlinks.

Besson started something big with his Theatrum Instrumentorium.   These Theater books were showpieces that were designed to impress the reader with the technical sophistication of the author.  Almost all of the illustrations are fanciful inventions that were never built - and might not even have worked.  But for the first time they provided clear illustrations of mechanisms, gears, and other mechanical devices that were later incorporated into truly useful machines.

Before the Renaissance, almost all technical work was done by craftsman who passed their knowledge down orally from master to apprentice. Most of these skilled craftsman were illiterate or at best, sub-literate.  Moreover, the skills they taught were often quite literally "trade secret", the means by which they protected their business.  There was no other practical means of legal protection of intellectual ideas.

Everyone knows that Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519) kept extensive notebooks of his ideas for machines.  But Leonardo kept his notes secret.  He even wrote in a code (he taught himself to write in the mirror image of script) that was only intelligible when viewed in a mirror.  He did not disclose these works during his lifetime.  Another Renaissance Man, Fillippo Brunelleschi (1377 - 1446), who built the dome on the cathedral in Florence, deliberately left no records at all of how he achieved his engineering masterpiece.

The Theater of Machine books were very well received.  But books like these were rarely produced before the advent of moveable type printing in the mid-1400's.  They also needed the invention of linear perspective drawing (another Brunelleschi invention of around 1425) and the availability of copper engraving plates around 1500.  The copper engravings showed much more detail than previous woodcuts.

In the 1600's, there was a veritable explosion of technology books.  Many were plagiarisms of the Theater books and other texts but the result was the same:  technical knowledge began to diffuse to other countries and other craftsman to be incorporated into new machines.  Drawings became ever-more refined with details describing dimensions, tolerances, materials, and processes for fabrication.

In 1790, when patents finally emerged as a means of protecting inventions in America, the Patent Office required a drawing, a written description, and a working model.  The latter was because drawings still did not convey the essence of how mechanical details might work.  The model requirement was dropped in 1880, partly because drawings had improved but mostly because the Patent Office ran out of room to store the models.

What put me on to all of this was an entry in a book I am reading entitled, Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution 1790 - 1860, by Brooke Hindle and Steven Lubar (published by the Smithsonian in 1986). Hindle and Lubar described the Theater of Machines books which led me (via Google) to a wonderful blog named BiblioOdyssey which focuses on illustrations from books of all ages.  This blog is well worth a visit for the diversity of books and illustrations that are presented.

Now, if I just had my Book Wheel...

The Universe, in Awesome Color

The New York Times has a review of the book Far Out: A Space-Time Chronicle, by Michael Benson.  This new book (which I have not seen) is reported to have some simply spectacular images that Benson has collected from the world's greatest observatories.  An accompanying slideshow on the Times site (with 16 of the images) can be seen here.  The image on this post (and part of the slideshow) of the "Pillars of Creation" in the Eagle Nebulae is taken from the Hubble telescope.  This book review particularly caught my eye after I wrote about Hubble in one of my last posts.  The book is not about Edwin Hubble but it does give you a sense of the fascination that motivates those who look deep into the night sky. I highly recommend watching the slideshow to get some sense for the awesome beauty that can be found in our universe.

Book Highlights From My 2009 Reading

With the year (and the decade) drawing to a close, I thought I would give my own version of the ever-popular "best of" listings for the year.  When I went back over the books I read in 2009, I realized that  my selections are not to be found on any current bestseller list.  Truth be told, I am much happier burrowing like a mole into some musty corner of a used bookstore.  Nonetheless, I think the books below are definitely worth a look if you relate to anything I write here.  So here is my list in no particular order:

Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, by William Cronon.  This book provides a fascinating history of the growth of Chicago. But moreover, Cronon describes how the city and its surroundings were inextricably linked. Without the Great West, there would be no Chicago.  He focuses on railroads, lumber, meat-packing, and commerce to illuminate his points.

The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet, by Reif Larson.  This is to show that contrary to popular opinion around our house, I do indeed read novels.  This recent book tells the tale of a precocious young genius (Spivet) who wins a fellowship to the Smithsonian. What they don't understand is that Spivet is a 12-year-old boy from Montana.  The story is full of humor and interesting little drawings in the margins (supposedly drawn by Spivet, himself).  One of the things that captivated me was Larson's wonderful descriptions of the world including a Union Pacific freight train that Spivet hops to get to D.C.  Lots of fun.

What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848, by Daniel Walker Howe.  This Pulitzer Prize-winning history from the Oxford History of the United States series is long, detailed, and very really well-written.  Howe makes that blank period in my understanding of American history come to life.  For those who find current events to be full of partisan bickering and yearn for the "good old days", Howe makes it clear that things haven't changed.  There has always been partisan bickering (and worse). The title is the famous line that Morse used to open the telegraph which was one of the two technology revolutions that Howe talks about.  The other was the railroad.  Worth the read despite the length

The Age of Betrayal: The Triumph of Money in America: 1865 - 1900, by Jack Beatty.  I added this one to the list with mixed feelings.  Beatty lays out a litany of Gilded Age sins in this book but I found his treatment to be sometimes compelling and sometimes tedious.  His narratives on the injustices committed against the recently-emancipated slaves in the South will make your blood boil.  His descriptions of some of the rulings of the Supreme Court of that era should do the same but these are less clearly told. Still worth the read.

Invention in America:  With Images from the Library of Congress, by Russell Bourne.  This slim volume is very well-written and well-illustrated.  Bourne does a great job in looking under the hood of American invention to fill in the blanks on much of what we think we know on the topic.

Wedding the Waters: The Erie Canal and the Making of a Great Nation, by Peter L. Bernstein.  The Erie Canal really was a Big Deal.  Bernstein tells the tale of the politics behind its construction, the engineering prowess of the amateurs who built the canal, and the canal's impact on American history. It was the marvel of its age - and deservedly so.

Death in the Haymarket: A Story of Chicago, the First Labor Movement and the Bombing that Divided Gilded Age America, by James Green.  Before reading this book, I had this fuzzy image that, yes, there was something special about the "Haymarket" but I couldn't have told you what it was.  Green's book brings history to life, describing the events in Chicago in the middle of the 1880's when labor was being systematically exploited by very wealthy capitalists.  This story makes clear that our fear of Communism is much older than the McCarthy Era.  This is a tale of injustice, well told.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything In It, by Arthur Herman.  This is really a tale of the Scottish Enlightenment.  The number of 18th Century thinkers coming out of Edinburgh and Glasgow was (and is) astounding.  Almost everything that we consider to be modern has at least a trace that goes back to this period in Scottish history.  The mystery is why Scotland didn't continue to be an intellectual leader.

The Big Switch:  Rewiring the World:  Edison to Google, by Nicholas Carr.  Carr shows us the parallels between Edison's world and the world of the Internet.  Both depend on large networks for their impact.  Moves right along but an interesting read.

The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson, by Kevin J. Hayes.  This biography of Jefferson will appeal to any bibliophile as it tells the story through both the books that influenced Jefferson, the works that he wrote, and the libraries that he built.  Jefferson is famously quoted as saying, "I cannot live without books". This book tells you why.