In Defense of Steve Jobs

It seems that everyone with any sort of digital soapbox has felt the need to write about Steve Jobs.  I was particularly interested to read a couple of articles that tried to either make or dispel the idea that his impact on society equalled that of Thomas Edison or Henry Ford.

I think Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal might have started the comparison in a very personal article he wrote about the thoughtful and personal side of Steve Jobs.  Rick Newman at US News and World Report picked up on the theme but threw mostly cold water on the comparison of Jobs to either Edison or Ford. Even the Christian Science Monitor got into the act with a followup article to Newman's.  At this particular moment in time, the loss of a leader in any field is felt acutely and the loss of someone with as many proven leadership skills as Steve Jobs is perhaps all the more strongly felt amongst the rest of us.

Of course, only history will be able to sort out the contributions of Mr. Jobs. But it seems safe to at least question some of the aspersions that Rick Newman made in his piece. Mr. Newman writes of Edison:

By the late 1800s, Thomas Edison developed an electric-lighting system that literally turned darkness to light and ushered in sweeping second- and third-order changes, from the improvement of working conditions in factories everywhere to safer homes no longer lit by candles.

Thomas Edison was a persistent, egocentric, dynamic leader of highly skilled technologists whom he employed to help create his vision for new products. (Sounds kind of like Steve Jobs to me.)  He never pursued anything without thinking about its likely commercial impact. He was a master of managing his image in the media. His work on the incandescent light was innovative not because he found a filament that could endure long durations of being heated, but because he envisioned that to make lighting successful he would have to build the whole system. This included the dynamos, the distribution wiring, the switching, and the end appliance - the electric light. That he pulled it off was a testament to his determination and persistence in the face of many, many hurdles.

Having said that, Edison didn't get it right when it came to extending his vision. He defended his direct current (DC) approach in the face of Tesla's clearly better alternative of alternating current (AC). AC power could be distributed without losses over much greater distances than could DC power. Edison even went so far as to mount a public relations campaign against AC power as being much more dangerous than DC. To prove his point, he was instrumental in the development of the electric chair for executing criminals. In the end, it took another generation of innovators beyond Edison and Tesla to make commercial lighting a reality for most people. Samuel Insull, who made commercial electricity a reality in Chicago, was the first of many of these innovators who built large electric distribution systems to bring power to the people.

Edison didn't get candles out of the home. Most people in the late 19th century were lighting there homes with either piped in gas or with kerosene. Factories were often lit by simply more windows or if night work was required, lighting was provided by arc lamps which predated Edison's invention of the lightbulb.

So who gets the credit?  Edison for the first embodiment of an electric lighting system or Tesla or Insull?  The answer is, of course, all of them, not just Edison alone.  If Edison hadn't developed his system, someone else would have done it within the next five to ten years. It was the focus of too many innovators who wanted to be first to show the new power of electricity.

Henry Ford is a different case but he also shares many similarities to Steve Jobs. Ford was neither a particularly talented machinist or even all that literate. What he did have in spades was the ability to envision a new type of automobile and the charisma and passion which attracted really good engineers to work with him to make it a reality. His first focus was not on a car for the masses but on racing cars (which were the earliest means of demonstrating automotive technology and reliability). He was a partial-founder of two automobile companies that failed to achieve his vision. It was only when he decided to be the founder of his own company - where he controlled the vision - that he began to succeed.

His first cars were not particularly different from scores of other startup auto companies. Everyone was selling to a customer who had the means to spend several thousand dollars on a car. Ford's genius was to see that if the cost of the car could be reduced dramatically, a mass market could emerge for the automobile for the first time. Ford not only hired great engineers, he hired a great business manager, James Cousins, to manage the finances of his company. Ford didn't invent the assembly line. That idea emerged from his engineers touring the disassembly lines of the Chicago meat packing plants. Ford provided the single-minded focus to pursue the dream of a mass market car when everyone else told him he was crazy. The result was the introduction of the Model T in 1908 (This was not his first model. There had already been Models A through S before the T came along).

Ford was a true innovator. He was the first to recognize the value of vertical integration in the automotive industry - owning everything from the iron mines to the steel mills to the final assembly plants in the giant River Rouge complex. Ford pioneered the five dollar day for his workers - not just to have them earn enough money to be able to afford a Model T but to get them to not quit (employee turnover on those first assembly lines was in the hundreds of percents).  Ford's vision proved to be correct and his company dominated the industry. But unlike Steve Jobs, Henry Ford did not die young. He lived long enough to have his initial vision become an impediment to Ford Motor Company's future. He would not give up on the Model T even when it was outdated and sales were plummeting. He micromanaged his son, Edsel's, period of running the company after Henry ostensibly retired. It would take Ford's grandson, Henry II, to put the company back on track.

So the traits that seem to recur in these three men of different eras and different industries are incredible vision, an awe-inspiring sense of determination, dictatorial decision-making, charisma, passion, and an ability to hire the best and the brightest and give them the environment to create. Each had the ability to see a future, not a future that others couldn't see, but a future which was holistic - one that went further than just one product to see what was needed to make it valuable to millions of people.

So in defense of Steve Jobs, I think he will, indeed, go down in history as being in the same league as Thomas Edison, Henry Ford, and a host of other visionaries who have helped to create the world we live in.  His legacy will be felt for generations in the digital devices that are the offspring of the iPods, iPhones, and iPads.  His legacy will be felt in the digital animation studios that come after Pixar.  His sense of what the market needed was truly remarkable. But even more remarkable was his willingness to bet the company on his vision - not once but over and over again.   Steve Jobs was the quintessential American Innovator.  Even though I never met the man, I will miss him.

(Disclaimer: I have been a longtime user of Apple products. I am typing this on my iMac desktop computer.)

The Century of Progress: Chicago, 1933

A couple of days ago, I was looking for something on my bookshelves when I got waylaid by a couple of books I had inherited from my Dad when he passed away a couple of years ago.  The first book was entitled, "The Official Pictures of A Century of Progress Exposition, Chicago 1933."  The book was the glossy souvenir book offered at the Exposition for those "take home" memories.  The second, a book of the same title, was a series of watercolor paintings of scenes from the Exposition.

My father visited the Exposition when he was eleven-years old - and he never forgot it.  The Century of Progress was a marvelous display of the latest in technology and architecture.  Just 40 years earlier, Chicago had hosted the World's Columbian Exposition, the so-called White City.  The 1933 Exposition was deliberately designed to be the opposite of the White City.  The architecture of the buildings was entirely modern rather than classical.  The buildings were painted in vibrant colors rather than a monochrome white, engendering the name "The Rainbow City".  The Exposition intended to look forward, not back. The motto of the fair, "Science Finds, Industry Applies, Man Conforms", was intended to be uplifting, even if today it carries more Orwellian connotations.

Despite the efforts to differentiate it, the 1933 Century of Progress had a lot in common with its earlier predecessor. Both expositions were held in the middle of a severe economic depression.  Both attempted to put on a brave face and look past the tough times.  Both were mostly compendiums of artifacts displaying what mankind had created. Both featured a major ride to awe the visitors (the Ferris Wheel in 1893 and the Sky Ride in 1933).  Both were built on the Lake Michigan shoreline and featured a Midway for amusement to complement the educational displays.  Most of all, both were proud proclamations by the City of Chicago showing that it was the leading industrial city in America.

Given that only 40 years had elapsed between the two expositions, many people could certainly have attended both.  But the differences between those two fairs were astounding. In 1893, automobiles were only in their earliest infancy.  By 1933, some of the largest pavilions were built by GM, Ford, and Chrysler.  In 1893, electricity had barely begun to be available in most homes and businesses.  By 1933, it was becoming ubiquitous.  The list goes on to include airplanes, radio, talking motion pictures, and the first experiments in television. There were clearly more technology changes in the 40 years between 1893 and 1933 than there were in the next 40 years from 1933 to 1973.

When I look at the photos of both of these past expositions, I lament how little of them remains.  Like the White City, the Rainbow City of 1933 - 1934 was quickly torn down after The Century of Progress Exposition was finished. Maybe that is as it should be.  Having visited Epcot at Disney World many times over the years, the excitement of the exhibitions begins to fade with repetition. I would guess that much of what was created for the 1933 Exposition was eventually destroyed.  That's a pity given the number of museum-quality displays and diorama that were built for the Exposition.

In 1933, the World's Fair was called The Century of Progress. In 2010, the World's Fair in Shanghai is called Expo 2010 - but it could easily be called The Century of Progress.  So far, every year marks a century of advancement. Given our current world problems, let's hope it stays that way.

Images:

First two are photos of my book jackets.
Second two from Wikipedia

Further Exploration:

Internet Archive film: Wings of a Century (1933). This is a 13 minute silent film but gives a good feeling for the Exposition.
University of Illinois at Chicago Photo Archive. About 1400 still shots taken at the Expostion.

Linchpins of Technology

I was thinking about all the changes brought about  by digital technology and the internet.  It really is staggering to live through a technology change with this level of impact.  I was talking to a friend about it recently and he remarked on how there has never been a time of greater change.  This may be true but it got me to thinking about other technologies and the impact they had in their own day.  I would only give up my internet connection kicking and screaming.  I would sooner give back the television than the computer network.  So what are some of my candidates for "Linchpins of Technology"?  What technologies, if suddenly yanked out of our culture, would create the biggest craters?

I would nominate two technologies that are so embedded in our world that life as we know it would change overnight.  First, remove the internal combustion engine.  That would bring not only cars and trucks to a stop, it would also stop buses, diesel locomotives, ships, motorcycles, airplanes, emergency power generators, golf carts...the list goes on.  Not only couldn't we drive, we couldn't feed ourselves, move any goods in or out of our factories and stores, or even get sick people to the hospital fast enough to save their lives.

The internal combustion engine remade our world in less than three decades (1890 - 1920).  It did so at a more fundamental level than digital technology.  We could turn off the internet and we would struggle mightily for awhile, but we could go back to the world of 1995.  It wouldn't be pretty.  The number of digital systems that we depend on would rapidly become very, very apparent.  But most of us can remember how we did things before the digital era and we might make it work again.  Take away our transportation networks and we would simply fall apart.

Another technology whose loss would be even more devastating than the internal combustion engine is  the electric power distribution grid.  We experience what this would mean every time a storm knocks out the power to a wide area of the country, like it recently did in New England.  But for critical applications, we have our friend, the internal combustion engine, to power the backup generators at hospitals, airports, and other critical facilities.  No power:  no lights, no heat (furnace blower motors), no refrigeration or air conditioning, no computers, no television or radio...even the garage door won't open!

I can easily understand why governments are so worried about attacks on the power grid.  It would be paralyzing.  And unlike disabling hundreds of millions of internal combustion engines at once, knocking out the power grid (or at least critical pieces of it) is quite possible.  Come to think of it, it IS possible to knock out all the internal combustions engines at once.  It happened in the 1970's.  It was called the Arab Oil Embargo.  No oil, no gas, no fuel, no operating engines.

Both of these "linchpin technologies" share something in common.  They are both at their hearts,  systems.  The electricity grid allow energy to be used in places far removed from the sources that generate it.  The internal combustion engine is the key component of our transportation system. Both systems free us from the tyranny of geography.  Both are critical because they form a backbone upon which everything else is built.

The Industrial Revolution was powered by the steam engine, the first energy source that could be built anywhere without being dependent on the vagaries of the wind or falling water.  Mechanical power from steam engines came from gears, shafts, belts, and pulleys directly coupled to the engine.  Hence, the uses of that power had to be built in the same place as the steam engine.

The real industrial revolution came when the steam engine was coupled to an electric dynamo which could transform the power of the steam engine into mobile, distributable electricity.  Motors and lights on the far end converted the energy back to useful forms. It took some clever inventing to get from Edison's original DC system to the AC systems that made long-distance power transmission practical, but most of the kinks were worked out in only twenty years (1880 - 1900).

The internal combustion engine also brings portable, distributable power.  This, in turn, makes possible a transportation network with much greater flexibility than the railroad. Perhaps the real comparison to electricity is oil.  But oil was around for awhile before the internal combustion engine and it was only in harnessing the oil's energy that made petroleum products critical to the world.  Still, I vote for the engine more than the oil.  It was the seminal invention that made it all possible.  By the way, the invention of the internal combustion engine (like all inventions) has a long history.  The first to receive a patent was invented by the Englishman, Samuel Brown, in 1823.

Take away the internal combustion engine and we are back to the horse-and-buggy.  Take away the electricity grid and we would return to our own form of the Dark Ages.  I now believe that the more ubiquitous and invisible the technology, the more critical it is to our lives.  When the media goes on about the latest new "hi-tech" gadget, like Apple's iPad, I have a more balanced view for what real high technology is.  Very quickly (if we are not already there), digital systems will play at least as critical a role (if not an even more critical role) in our lives than the other two I have mentioned.  Systems and networks are the true Linchpins of Technology.

Do you have another view of this?  I am always interested in your thoughts.

Solar Storms and Damage to the Communications Grid

I was interested to read over at the Discover Blog, 80 Beats, that NASA is going to be launching a new satellite next week tagged the Solar Dynamics Observatory, SDO.  For all that is known about the solar system and the universe, surprisingly little is known about the engine of our own sun - specifically the deep causes for solar storms.  The SDO's mission is to take a very high resolution image of the sun every 60 seconds in order to provide visual clues to measurable electromagnetic behavior here on earth.  The hope is that eventually, NASA will be able to forecast solar storms.

One of the biggest storms ever observed occurred on Sept. 2, 1859.  The electromagnetic field was so strong that telegraphers operating between Boston and Portland, Maine were able to communicate without any electricity in the system except that generated by the solar storm.  They actually had to disconnect the batteries that normally powered the telegraph so as not to burn the batteries out.  I had never thought about the communications grid being vulnerable even in the days of the telegraph!

In 1989, a massive solar storm took out some of the power grids in the United States and Canada.  Last year, the National Academy of Sciences released a study report that estimated the damage to the power and communications grids from a solar surge the size of the 1859 storm at one trillion dollars.  The sun operates on an eleven-year sunspot cycle and reverses its magnetic poles every twenty-two years.  While the 1859 storm has been established to be the single largest event in the last 500 years, it is only a matter of time before another major solar storm erupts.

At least solar storms are a force of nature and while they can damage the grid, it is not the same as the damage from malicious hacking attacks.  Given the ever-increasing dependence on the grids, however, anything that can be done to harden them seems like a good investment.

The Next Innovative Hardware Industry?

In my last blog, I was musing about the electric car. The early history of an industry intrigues me. The automobile industry seems very much like the early history of personal computers: lots of tinkerers working in their garages (in both cases) to bring out machines that were initially more like toys than mainstream products. Early automobiles were thought to be the playthings of the rich, not practical transportation. And early personal computers were the toys of the geeks, not day-to-day information appliances.

What is similar between these two industries is that anyone who was a little savvy in the technology could experiment and build a new machine. The earliest pioneers didn’t need a lot of capital to get started. Much of the technology could be hand-crafted right in the garage or purchased as components from other sources. In the case of the automobile, the first focus for the individual innovator was usually on the engine. Ford hand-built a working gasoline engine before he attempted to build his Quadracycle. He could buy wheels and tires from bicycle shops and seats from buggy makers. Early personal computer makers could buy the integrated circuit components from suppliers. They couldn’t buy the assembler language software code that turned their digital circuits into useful devices. The code was homegrown and in many ways “the engine” of their devices.

Economists like to describe the automobile and the personal computer as industries that had low barriers to entry. The field was wide open to anyone with an inventive spirit. Patents were few. Large, entrenched players were non-existent. The buggy makers and railroads were no more competition for the automobile than IBM and mainframe manufacturers were competitors to the personal computer makers. What results in early industries like this is an exploding number of entrants. Hundreds of would-be innovators jump in when they see the early interest beginning to develop around the pioneer businesses. Of course, this can’t last. Darwinian selection starts to weed out the weak, the players without a competitive advantage. After a decade or two, consolidation reduces the competitors to a few companies who are now competing on price, scale and efficiency.

These sorts of industries are the complete opposite of capital-intensive industries like railroads, electric utility companies, or even cable television companies. These are all networks and by their very nature networks take lots of investment simply to get to the stage where they provide any value at all. It doesn’t do any good to have a train without tracks or a home cable box without the copper or fiber cable. These industries have a very different kind of birth. Their parents are capitalists and investors more than inventors and tinkerers. Thomas Edison invented the first electric distribution system but it was limited as a business by the geography it could power. It took Samuel Insull, a protégé of Edison’s, and a shrewd businessman to create the first modern electric utility, Commonwealth Edison in Chicago.

In this current economic crisis the government is proposing to put a large sum of money into repairing and replacing our infrastructure. Having been in the Twin Cities when the I-35 Bridge collapsed, I can confirm how much investing in our infrastructure is needed. Besides fixing the highways and bridges, there is also a lot of money set aside for high-speed rail. This is also very much needed. Anyone who has enjoyed the rail networks of Europe or Japan can easily see the lamentable condition of American passenger rail. But, I would argue, we also need to set funds aside to identify and fund the hundreds of startups that could flourish around the next automobile or personal computer industry. These bring out the innovations that spill over to create thousands of jobs and even local manufacturing.


The internet and the dot coms have certainly followed the garage model. Thousands of software programmers have created everything from Google to the software in our cellphones. These have been terrific businesses and more are needed. But while these have done much for innovation, they have not had a manufacturing component. Maybe this is where Green comes in. The industries I dream about could be in solar panels, wind energy, and other forms of Green technology. Biotech and Nanotech will certainly continue to have their strong place in advancing cutting-edge businesses but these businesses are both capital intensive as well as patent intensive. No, what I am thinking of are industries that are within the reach of the person in the garage, the person with a passion to create who doesn’t have access to millions of dollars of financial backing. I would be willing to bet that there is yet another nascent automobile or personal computer industry out there just waiting to be born. As a country, we need it now more than ever.

[Images: Apple IIe Personal Computer and Wind Turbine from Wikipedia.]

Electric Cars: Deja Vu All Over Again

I recently came across this excerpt:

Gasoline prices are rising rapidly. Nevertheless, more and more internal combustion vehicles are being sold and there are fears of a gas shortage. Experts predict that prices will continue to rise since proven reserves of petroleum are limited. Electric vehicle enthusiasts urge more emphasis on electric cars and trucks, since these will become more competitive as gas prices rise. They also point out the nonpolluting aspects of their technology. Business and government are being urged to push the electric vehicle, while conferences and associations are formed to coordinate this work. The electric enthusiasts are impatient that more is not being done to support electric vehicles, but they are convinced that such support must grow in the future. The year is 1912.

I found that quote in the opening paragraph of an article written in 1980 by Richard H. Schallenburg for the electrical engineering journal, IEEE Transactions on Education. Almost a century has passed but the story remains virtually the same. What intrigues me about the story of electric vehicles is why, after a hundred years, they remain a tiny minority of the cars and trucks on the road? How tiny? In 2008 (which was a disaster for the automotive industry), 13.2 million cars and light trucks were sold in the United States. Of these, 281,846 were hybrids (source: Electric Drive Transportation Association). Of the hybrids, 56 percent were Toyota Priuses. That means that hybrids make up just over two percent of sales last year. One might make the case that a decade earlier hybrid cars were non-existent so selling 281 thousand of them last year looks pretty good. And it is. But the internal combustion engine remains the (black) gold standard as it has for a hundred years.

The automobile has always been a machine that appealed to more than functionality. The automobile was never simply an alternative to the horse or the electric trolley. The automobile represented freedom, adventure, the harnessing of power. In the very early days of the automobile when it was not clear whether steam, electric, or internal combustion engines would be the power source for vehicles, cars started to be marketed for city driving where roads were better and distances shorter. Electrics made a lot of sense in this market. But the electrics were relatively slow compared to gasoline engines, the batteries were heavy and unreliable, and the infrastructure to recharge the cars was not readily available. Despite the limitations, automakers tried to find the niches to which the quiet, clean power of the electrics would appeal most. Rudi Volti in a Fall 1990 Invention and Technology magazine article wrote:

As with steam cars, the technical limitations are usually blamed, but the electric’s failure has also to do with the nature of the car’s customers and manufacturers. In fact, because of the users that it attracted, the electric’s very virtues became part of its undoing. Its reliability, silence, cleanliness, and ease of operation endeared it particularly to women drivers, who were also less likely than men to be put off by its limitations. A 1915 magazine article extolled the electric’s appeal to a woman: “She knows that it fulfills all of the demands of her daily routine of calling, shopping, and pleasure seeking. She knows that she likes to run it because there is a certain charm in its simplicity of operation and control—a sort of mild fascination. She knows, too, that she can step into its beautifully cushioned and brocaded interior, enjoy every minute of her ride and arrive at her destination as fresh and spotless as when she started.”

Despite the advertised advantages of electrics, the lower cost, economy, and higher speed of gasoline engines allowed cars to be driven longer distances over rough terrains unsuitable to the electrics. And the infrastructure was being rapidly built by the oil companies to make gasoline readily available almost everywhere. Cars became differentiated on speed, cost, and power. The automobile became not only a conveyance but a part of the very infrastructure of American life: the interstate highway, the suburbs... and the resultant traffic jams, pollution, and highway mayhem.

The current collapse of the automobile market is creating terrible stress on people all over the country. But perhaps out of this dark period we may finally move forward into an era where the newer technologies will be sustained. In 1912, the hope for electric vehicles was the specter of increasingly expensive gasoline. There may yet be another miracle which keeps oil prices low but we are running out of rabbits to pull out of our hats. The current world economic crisis seems like as good a time as any to finally move to a new generation of automotive technology.

[Image from Wikipedia showing Thomas Edison in 1913 in front of an electric car.]

Benjamin Franklin

Benjamin Franklin, statesman, inventor, scholar, businessman, and scientist, was born on January 17, 1706. Franklin strikes me as being about as close as we get to America's Da Vinci. He was a man that seemed to be good at virtually everything. He left his mark on our language (Poor Richard's Almanac), our daily life (lightning rods, fire departments, bifocals), and most especially our country (Founding Father and diplomat extraordinaire).

Franklin always had an inquiring mind. Self-educated, in 1727 he organized a club for philosophical inquiry that he named the Junto (Latin for club). He wrote of it in his Autobiography:

I should have mentioned before, that, in the autumn of the preceding year, [1727] I had form'd most of my ingenious acquaintance into a club of mutual improvement, which we called the Junto; we met on Friday evenings. The rules that I drew up required that every member, in his turn, should produce one or more queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy, to be discuss'd by the company; and once in three months produce and read an essay of his own writing, on any subject he pleased.

Our debates were to be under the direction of a president, and to be conducted in the sincere spirit of inquiry after truth, without fondness for dispute or desire of victory; and to prevent warmth, all expressions of positiveness in opinions, or direct contradiction, were after some time made contraband, and prohibited under small pecuniary penalties.

One spin-off of the Junto was Franklin's later founding of the American Philosophical Society in 1743. This is America's oldest society for inquiry in science and technology.

The Junto, however, seems to me to be an idea worth reviving. Where in our society today can we find a place where people can talk with friends and colleagues about such a broad range of topics? Most of us find what discussions we can through our work environment. But this is a limited substitute for a group like the Junto.

Recently, I have begun attending meetings of a group called the Socrates Cafe. They are held in many places across the country - coffee shops, book stores, churches - and they are always open to new participants. Socrates Cafe shares some things in common with Franklin's Junto. The meetings consist of groups of people who come together freely to discuss a philosophical questions suggested by the attendees themselves. I find these meetings to generate some great discussions but they do not usually allow inquiries into science and technology. With the rapid advancements in science, perhaps discussions groups are more critical now than ever. We need to be better informed about issues like climate change, energy utilization, nanotechnology and a host of other areas. Something like the Junto may be needed now more than ever. Franklin would have understood completely.

The Origin of the Computer: Counting Noses

I was interested to learn that it was the U.S. Census that provided the compelling need for the development of the calculating machine, the predecessor of the computer. Herman Hollerith was a young engineer who went to work for the U.S. Census Bureau in 1880. He witnessed firsthand the long and tedious hand tabulation methods used on the 1880 Census data. It took the Census Bureau eight years to finish the tabulations! Hollerith saw the need but nothing came of it immediately.

Hollerith left the Census Bureau for a teaching position at MIT in 1882. He began looking at ways to encode information in punch marks on a continuous paper tape. The needle penetrating through the holes would complete an electric circuit and trigger an electric counter. But the paper tape had too many problems to be practical. On a train ride, Hollerith observed the conductor punching his train ticket. As Harold Ellis relates in They Made America:

The train ticket that Hollerith handed the conductor was also a form of identity card, called a punch photograph, which matched the presenter of the ticket with the purchaser. "The conductor punched out a description of the individual as 'light hair, dark eyes, large nose, etc.' said Hollerith, who then commented on his adaptation of this system to the census: "So you see, I only made a punch photograph of each person."

On January 8, 1889, he was issued U.S. Patent 395,782 , claim 2 of which reads:

The herein-described method of compiling statistics, which consists in recording separate statistical items pertaining to the individual by holes or combinations of holes punched in sheets of electrically non-conducting material, and bearing a specific relation to each other and to a standard, and then counting or tallying such statistical items separately or in combination by means of mechanical counters operated by electro-magnets the circuits through which are controlled by the perforated sheets, substantially as and for the purpose set forth.

Hollerith's invention intrigued the Census Bureau but it did not take it by storm. The Bureau arranged a trial between three competing systems on a limited set of data. Hollerith's machine trounced the other two contenders. The Census Bureau ordered multiple machines, machines that Hollerith had no factory to produce. He contracted his electric tabulators to Western Electric and his punch card machines to Pratt and Whitney. Where it had taken eight years to complete the 1880 Census, it took only one year to complete the tabulations for 1890, even though the population had grown by twenty-five percent.

You might have thought people would have been thrilled. Hollerith's tabulations showed that the United States in 1890 had 62,622,250 people. Some people felt that the numbers were much too low to represent the grand growth they saw everywhere around them. The New York Herald even ran a headline stating:

SLIPSHOD WORK HAS SPOILED THE CENSUS
MISMANAGEMENT THE RULE
Speed Everything, Accuracy Nothing!

Hollerith's calculations stood the test and the he was vindicated. Hollerith's invention found immediate acclaim and for the next 15 years it was used to tabulate census data not only in the U.S. but also in many other countries. But success was not to last. Hollerith charged exorbitant fees to census bureaus to lease his machines. The U.S. Census Bureau balked after the 1900 Census and invented a machine of their own. The competition soon surpassed his devices and his company languished.

In 1912, Hollerith sold the company to the Computer Tabulating Recording Company. This company was created from a variety of lackluster companies in the general field. It continued to languish until Thomas Watson, Sr. took over as the head of sales and marketing. Hollerith was still chief design consultant for the company, but he hated Watson. They hardly ever spoke. Hollerith finally left the company entirely in 1921. The company was renamed the International Business Machine Company (IBM) and the rest, as they say, is history.

Ready Kilowatt

I don't know why this image from my youth just popped into my head but I just remembered a character called Ready Kilowatt which was used by power companies to promote the use of electricity in the home. Ready had a stick-figure body made of lightning bolts and a light bulb for a head. I can clearly see him in my mind's eye gracing the Edison Sault Electric Company office in the town where I grew up. Ready was always so...peppy. He just exuded energy (but what else would you expect from a lightning bolt?).

According to Wikipedia, the Ready character was created in 1926 by the Alabama Power Company and then licensed to over 300 other power companies for use in promoting electricity usage in the home. Ready was bought by Northern States Power Company in 1998 but the promotion of electricity usage has fallen out of favor. With today's emphasis on conservation, having Ready telling us to use more of the juice seems rather old fashioned. I guess that NSP (now Xcel Energy) created an analog of Ready to promote gas usage but I don't remember seeing it (and we were NSP customers for years).

The icons of our culture change with the technology and the times. Ready Kilowatt would probably be indicted today in the court of world opinion for adding to the greenhouse gases driving climate change. Now we see reminders to save rather than consume. While I agree with the more environmentally sensitive era we are now in, I still kinda miss old Ready. But I also miss Howdy Doody and Sky King.

[Image of Ready Kilowatt from Wikipedia]