Waves of Innovation, Waves of Materials

I am continually reminded in my readings of just how important new materials are to innovation, especially the major waves of innovation.  Unlocking the possibilities in a new material releases endless opportunities for inventors and entrepreneurs to exploit.  We even note a new material era almost like chapter-headings in the history of technology:  the Iron and Steel Age, the Petroleum Age, the Polymer Age, the Age of Silicon. Material revolutions underlie a multitude of other major innovations from automobiles to plastics to microchips.

The common thread in all these earlier ages was that the raw materials to enable these waves of material innovation were abundant.  The very success of the early ventures into a new material - oil drilling, for example - led to ever-increasing investment to find more sources of untapped oil reserves.  For the last 150 years or so, it seemed like we could never run out.

But Earth is a finite place and the cost of retrieving raw materials has to rise as the difficulty in getting at them increases.  Deep-water oil drilling is one very glaring example in the news lately.  The supplies of rare metals used in microchip doping lies in only a few places on the planet and most of them could become inaccessible if the political winds change in the future.

I recently came across a very interesting interactive graphic  entitled "How Much is Left?" on Scientific American's web site that was designed to make you think about the limits of our planet's resources.  The interactive links are well worth exploring.

If new materials drive innovation, what can we expect if the raw materials are themselves limited?  It seems a no-brainer that we will focus more and more on finding ways to economically extract materials from renewable resources.  Some of this will driven by a desire for cleaner, greener technologies.  But most of  the impetus will be that it is the only way to sustain production of some materials.  The commercial gates will open when rising costs from shrinking supplies of the old materials exceed the diminishing costs of sustainable materials.  It will not be viable unless it is driven by economics rather than ideology.

So the next wave of material innovation may be less about how we exploit some new raw material and more about how we replace ever-more-scarce natural materials.  The difference this time is that the new raw materials will be sustainable indefinitely.  We better hope that is true because the alternative isn't pretty to think about.

Bethlehem Steel Blues

I was browsing through a website called SnagFilms which hosts documentaries and I came across a three-minute film on the sad aftermath of the failure of Bethlehem Steel in 2003.  This short video is worth a look.

Watch more free documentaries

The deep sadness in this film piqued my curiosity about this very successful company and its namesake town of Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.  Wikipedia has a great overview article on the company.  Fortune Magazine did a post-mortem on the company's demise back in a 2004 issue which was worth a quick read. 

The steel industry was once the bellwether of American industrial health.  Bethlehem Steel provided the steel for the Golden Gate Bridge and the Empire State Building, among a long list of other American icons.  It was not only one of the largest of the U.S. steel producers, it was also one of the largest ship-building and railroad car manufacturers in the country.  Now, the original steel mill site in Bethlehem is bare ground except for a new casino.  In some bitter twist of fate, the construction of the casino was delayed for a shortage of... you guessed it... steel.

What went wrong?  The answer is both complicated and simple.  The complicated answer involves the emergence of cheaper steel from newly-built mills in Japan and Europe following World War II, the dependence of U.S. industry on trade barriers for protection rather than reinvesting for innovation, arrogant management, huge legacy costs for retiree healthcare benefits, and a steelworkers union that refused to give an inch to a management that was equally obstinate.  The simple answer is that the steel industry ran its natural course and we no longer need to make steel.  That simple answer, like most simple answers, is also wrong.

Lehigh University has done a great job putting together a website called Beyond Steel that goes into many different aspects of the manufacturing and cultural history of the region.  I especially liked this picture of Bethlehem management taken in 1950.

You don't have to see any detail to know that this was an old, white guy's club. 

Unfortunately, we don't seem to learn much from the life cycles of companies and industries.  The early risk takers give way to the managers who drive up efficiency which leads to the management that pays itself enormous salaries for what seems like their God-given success which precedes the bankruptcy experts who dismantle the enterprise after it crashes.  We are seeing it now in banking.  The auto companies have also been recently knocked down a notch by their own arrogance.  The jury is still out  to see if they survive the long term.  After all, it took Bethlehem Steel almost thirty years to die.

But as the first film shows, often the biggest cost to a community is the disruption to families that have lived there for generations.  In the end, when a company fails, everybody loses.  Everybody.  If you look back at that picture of management, you can just make out five little statuettes on the back wall of the auditorium.  They represent the Customers, Employees, Management, Shareholders, and Suppliers.  Every one of them lost out. 

And we are left building casinos on old industrial sites which form a kind of scab on what was once the healthy corpus of our economy.  But, what the hell, this time around, the odds are with the house.

Thomas Pope and the First Brooklyn Bridge

Thomas Pope was a carpenter, a landscape architect, a bridge designer, and a poet.  In 1811, he published the first book ever written in the United States on bridge building entitled, A Treatise on Bridge Architecture in Which the Superior Advantages of the Flying Pendent Lever Bridge Are Fully Proved.  You can find the entire book online at Google Books.

Pope's book gives a detailed history of many bridges around the world and throughout history.  His illustrations are certainly part of the fun of the book.  I have provided a few of them below.  You can see more in the online book.

The most interesting part of the whole book is Pope's proposal to build what can only be seen as a futuristic vision of a cantilever bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn; the first design of a Brooklyn Bridge.

Pope proposed a wooden structure over 1800 feet long and with a free height at its center of over 260 feet!  Pope anticipated by fifty years that bridges that were cantilevered would be built as self-supporting structures from each shore until they connected in the center.  The fact that his bridge design was unbuildable because it was made of wood, a material not strong enough for the span, does not detract from many of his insights.  The clean simplicity of his cantilevered arc design would not be seen for almost 200 years.

Pope's book is filled with bridge history, data, and designs, but these are also accompanied by long stanzas of poetry.  The illustration above contains a few of the opening lines of a poem about his proposed bridge.  They read (and the verse continues):

Let the broad arc of the spacious HUDSON stride,

And span COLUMBIA'S rivers far more wide;

Convince the world AMERICA begins

To foster arts, the ancient work of kings.

Stupendous plan! Which none before e'er found,

That half an arc should stand upon the ground,

Without support while building, or a rest;

This caus'd the theorist's rage and sceptic's jest.

Like half a rainbow rising on one shore,

While its twin partner spans the semi o'er,

And makes a perfect whole, that need not part,

Till time has furnish'd us a nobler art.

[Caps in original]

Pope's bridge was never built.  But the idea of a bridge to span the East River would not die.  Finally, the Brooklyn Bridge, an icon of American architecture, was completed on May 24, 1883.  It remains one of the most beautiful bridges in the world.  But the dream started with Thomas Pope.  And some dreams just will not die.

Happy New Year: 1960

The New Year is usually the time to look forward, make those resolutions, vow to do better.  I thought I would take a look back in time fifty years, to 1960, and see what has changed.  Of course, the answer is "a lot", but I have forgotten just how pervasive the changes have been. Here are some things that come my mind.  If you have others to add, drop me a comment.

In 1960....

- Television was analog, black-and-white, and came in through your antenna.
- Telephones were owned by AT&T, were mostly black, and still had rotary dials.
- Cars had no seat belts, shoulder harnesses, air bags, or other collision safety features.
- Tires were bias-belted, not radial, and lasted about a third as long.
- Airliners were almost all propeller-driven.
- We still had not put a person in space, let alone on the moon.
- The only computers that existed filled large rooms and were tended by special gurus.
- Cameras still used film which was predominantly black-and-white.
- Home record players and televisions were built with vacuum tubes.
- 45 RPM records were the rage for hit rock-and-roll songs.
- 33 PM Long-playing records were just coming on the scene.
- Automobiles had carburetors, mechanical ignitions, and needed frequent tune-ups.
- Long distance phone calls were an infrequent event and reserved for special events.
- Phoning someone when away from home required a pay phone, found in a phone booth.
- Gasoline cost about 35 cents a gallon.
- Plastic was just coming into its own as a material for consumer products.
- Flying from New York to Paris on a 707 required a fuel stop in Gander, Newfoundland.
- The Interstate Highway system had only been underway for a little over five years.
- Engineers did complex calculations with slide rules and mechanical calculators.
- Shoe store fluoroscopes that allowed you to see how shoes fit had just been banned.
- Doctors were routinely shown smoking in cigarette commercials.
- Just about everything that was in a bottle came in one made of glass.
- Dishwashers in the home were still very uncommon.
- Many women sewed a portion of their families' clothing on a home sewing machine.
- Milk was still delivered to the home by milkmen.
- The U.S. launched its first weather satellite in 1960.

You get the idea.  Of course, the equally interesting list is what wasn't around.  There were no:

- cellphones
- mp3 players
- video cameras
- home vcr or dvd players
- microwave ovens
- personal computers
- internet or worldwide web
- e-mail
- stereophonic music systems
- lasers
- LED or LCD anything
- high speed (bullet) trains
- catalytic converters for cars
- anti-lock brakes
- intermittent windshield wipers
- video games
- car navigation systems

The theme that runs through most of these items is the importance of solid-state electronics. Our world has been fundamentally remade on silicon.  While not a new observation, it does show how pervasive and powerful one technology concept, the microchip, can be.  I wouldn't be writing this on my laptop and posting it on my blog without it.

But the electronics revolution is only one part of a larger theme:  a materials revolution.  Not only did the last fifty years bring silicon and all its derivatives, but t also brought polymers and plastics which have had an almost equally large impact.  It brought fiber optic filaments which allowed the world to be wired with high-speed networks based on laser pulses (also a silicon technology).

Materials technology is down there at the ground level of invention and innovation.  That is why there is so much hype about nanomaterials.  These promise to unleash another wave of innovation.  Whether they do so remains to be seen.  Maybe the collateral risks to our health and environment will knock them out in their infancy.  Further out is the promise of materials engineering through biotechnology.

It is fun to think for a minute about what the lists for 2060 will be.  It seems quite certain that someone looking back to today will think of us as hopelessly antiquated.  Kids will wonder how anyone could have even survived in those backward days.  Happy New Year from the Good Old Days of 2010.