Machines and Nightmares

I recently finished reading a riveting memoir by Agnès Humbert entitled, Résistance, A Woman's Journal of Struggle and Defiance in Occupied France.  This book is a diary of Humbert's experiences from the time the Nazis invaded France in 1940 to the end of World War II. Humbert was an intelligent  woman who was employed at one of the museums in Paris at the time of the invasion. At the age of 43, she decided to work with some trusted friends to produce an underground newspaper of the same name as the book, Résistance.  The little group of a dozen friends lasted about a year until it was betrayed by an unknown informer. The Nazis executed the men involved by firing squad and Humbert and several other women were convicted to five years of slave labor working in Nazi factories in Germany.

What does any of this have to do with technology? Humbert was assigned to work under the most horrifying conditions at a rayon factory in Krefeld, Germany.  I will skip over the descriptions of the malnourishment, abuse, filth, and inhumane treatment at the hands of the Nazis to relate something she wrote while working at the factory. While pondering the inhumanity and total unpredictability of her situation at the hands of her captures, she remarked in August, 1942:

"I wonder - a worthy subject for meditation - what Descartes would have made of industrial machinery. What a subject for a philosopher! Not just the relationship between man and machine, and all the upheavals, material, moral and social that come in its wake, but simply the thoughts that sometimes come into your head when you are working at a machine. There's no tricking a machine; it's just not possible. A part out of alignment? Production immediately slows down. A loose screw? The whole machine seizes up. I like and admire the incorruptible integrity of the machine. With work done by hand there is always a little leeway, a margin of error, and any time lost can be made up with a little effort or improvisation; machinery, on the other hand, admits absolutely no possibility of inaccuracy or prevarication, is immune to all excuses, lies or flattery, Enduring, unswerving and fiercely tenacious, machines can teach men a marvelous lesson in integrity. The builders of the future, of our future, should take inspiration from man's handiwork, the Blessed Machine!"

I had to think about this for a bit because the machine she was describing was the spinning machine which extruded the viscous rayon pre-polymer through a very fine platinum minaret into an acid bath to form the thread. She had to work on this machine without any protection for her skin or eyes. The pre-polymer is extremely caustic to the skin. The acid is not only caustic but leads to blindness. The slave laborers were offered no protective clothing or gloves and had to work ten to twelve hour shifts even while Allied bombing raids were going on. She was a mass of sores and unable to even see for days at a time. How could she sing the praises of machinery? Because she desperately needed to experience something that had integrity.

Humboldt's countrymen in her opinion had totally lost their integrity in rolling over without fighting back against the Nazis. What kept her alive through her incarceration was a feeling of integrity - she would never bend or yield to her captors. She never cracked under interrogation by the Gestapo when they wanted information on her colleagues. She never once begged for mercy. She was one tough lady.

Humboldt survived the war. She was liberated by the U.S. Army while being held captive in April 1945. She stayed for a few months after her liberation and worked tirelessly, but fairly, to identify the true Nazis in the area that were trying to fade into the woodwork. She returned to France and lived for almost another twenty years, dying in 1963.

It still amazes me as I reread her words on machines that she could have been so lucid about such a subject in the middle of such horror.  Having never worked with machines, I would have thought she would have hated them. Yet, she found something positive in them even under the worst of circumstances. I stand in awe. I would love to have met her.

You can get the book on Amazon. There is also a Kindle edition.

Technology Reshapes the Landscape

As we were driving across I-64 in Kentucky today, headed back to Minnesota, I started to really notice how technology has changed the landscape in front of me.   We were in a beautiful, rural area on the eastern side of the state.  Of course, my attention was first drawn to the highway stretching out in front of me: the concrete, the guardrails, the traffic signs, the mile-maker stakes.  Then I started to notice that the landscape itself had been sculpted to allow the road to unwind smoothly across the rolling hills.  There were deep cuts blasted out of the rocky hills and massive bridges over the deeper ravines.

Looking farther afield, I noticed..,well, the fields.  Again, man-made, cultivated, plowed, stripped clean of trees.  Fences divided the fields into neat squares to clearly indicate that the land had been surveyed and was recorded in plat maps somewhere.  There were high-tension towers and power lines, windmills for pumping water for the livestock, and billboards to lead us to the nearest McDonalds.  Even the livestock and crops most likely came from deliberate breeding programs.

In the distance on the rolling hills, forests made soft blankets over the contours of the land.  But even these were at best second-growth forests.  The original trees had long since been logged for lumber.  I even wondered how many of the plants growing in the ditches along the roadside were invasive species brought there by passing automobiles?

As far as I could see over this rural landscape, I could see nothing that had not been altered in some way by technology.  Don't get me wrong on this.  I am not saying that technology has completely ruined the land.  Far from it.  In many ways, technology has allowed us to move more easily, to feed ourselves, and to provide a living to people who live in rural areas.  It is not all bad.  It is just that it has changed our world without our being aware of it.  Barring some nuclear winter scenario, what I was looking at today will probably always be a domesticated landscape.

We live so closely and constantly with technology that we hardly notice its effects.  We think we are seeing nature when we are really seeing the handiwork of people.  Awareness at least lets us make a conscious choice about how we alter our environment.

I am glad that there are places like our National Parks where nature has at least half a chance of being itself for a while longer.  I think of Henry David Thoreau's classic quote:

"In wilderness is the preservation of the world."

It is, quite literally, true.

Show Me the Facts!

Today is my dad's birthday.  He died a couple of years ago, but today I honor his memory.  When I was growing up with my three brothers, we would often be sitting at the dining room table talking about the day.  I, or one of my brothers, would make some wild assertion about something we had heard.  My dad, who was trained as an engineer, taught us the art of "skeptical inquiry" by looking at us with a raised eyebrow and saying, "Really? Show me the facts!"  We would be forced to defend what we had said - which, of course, we often couldn't do.

So on your birthday, Dad, here's to you.  You taught us well.

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.

Machiavelli on Innovation

Niccolo Machiavelli (1469 - 1527) is perhaps most famous for his book on political science, The Prince (1513).  In Chapter 6, Machiavelli offers some telling insight on the difficulties of the innovator.  Like most of what Machiavelli wrote, it is as true today as it was in 1513.

There is nothing more difficult and dangerous, or more doubtful of success, than an attempt to introduce a new order of things in any state. For the innovator has for enemies all those who derived advantages from the old order of things, whilst those who expect to be benefited by the new institutions will be but lukewarm defenders. This indifference arises in part from fear of their adversaries who were favored by the existing laws, and partly from the incredulity of men who have no faith in anything new that is not the result of well-established experience. Hence it is that, whenever the opponents of the new order of things have the opportunity to attack it, they will do it with the zeal of partisans, whilst the others defend it but feebly, so that it is dangerous to rely upon the latter.

[I read this quote in a piece by Jim Toedtman, editor of the AARP Bulletin, Jan-Feb, 2010.]

Science Ideas to Consider

I put together a short video of some quotations that I like that have to do with science.  It works best if you let the video load about halfway before you begin watching it.  Hope you enjoy.

Miller and Whitney: Early Innovation

"An invention can be so valuable as to be worthless to the inventor."

- Eli Whitney

Every child knows (or maybe every kid used to know) that Eli Whitney (1765 - 1825) invented the cotton gin.  Like most stories of the Hero Inventor, this one is a much-distilled and over-simplified version of the truth.  Cotton gins had been around for a long time before Eli Whitney came along. These earlier gins squeezed cotton between rollers and the friction pulled the seed from the cotton fibers.  The roller gins did a good job on long-staple cotton but there were a couple of limitations.  First, long-staple cotton only grew in the rich soil found near the coast, and secondly, while the roller gins worked, they were slow and favored good fiber over production output.

Eli Whitney was a Yale-educated son of a Connecticut farmer.  He seems to have been quite mechanically inclined from a young age.  After Whitney graduated from Yale, the president of the college, Ezra Stiles, arranged for Whitney to take up a tutoring position in the South.  Stiles put him in touch with another young Yale man, Phineas Miller, who had graduated a few years earlier.  Stiles had previously arranged for Miller to be a tutor in the South at the plantation of the Revolutionary War General, Nathaniel Green.  The general had died around this same time and Miller became not only the tutor to Green's five children but also the plantation manager for Green's widow, Catherine Green.

Whitney traveled with Miller and Mrs. Green from New York City to Savannah and stayed with them for several months.  The story goes that once there, Whitney turned down the tutoring job because of a dispute over the pay and stayed on at the plantation to invent his cotton gin. The exact order of events was deliberately obscured by Whitney and his new business parter, Phineas Miller, in order to facilitate getting a patent and to get a head start on manufacturing machines.  The partnership that was formed was always known as Miller and Whitney (not the other way around).  Once again, we see the indispensable role of the entrepreneur (Miller in this case) in moving an invention towards the market.  Miller not only had more business savvy, he had the deep pockets of Catherine Green's money.  Miller had married her at about this same time.

Miller conceived of a business plan in which their company would manufacture the gins in Connecticut and build service locations throughout the South where farmers would bring raw cotton for ginning.  The ginning mills would also have cotton seed presses to capture this source of revenue as well.  The company would be paid for their services, not in cash (which was very scarce), but by keeping one third of the ginned cotton output.  It seemed like such a great idea but like most great ideas, there were problems.

First, while Whitney's cotton gin did a good job of stripping out the seeds, it left the cotton fibers entangled in little knots called neps which created problems for the subsequent spinning operations to make cotton thread.  Spinning companies in England complained bitterly about the poor quality of the fiber from Whitney's gins.  The second problem was that Whitney's gin was elegantly simple and hence easy to pirate and there was a strong incentive to do so because of the high output of the gin. Many Southerners made copies or improved on Whitney's gin, ignoring Whitney's patent of 1793.  Miller and Whitney fought back in over 60 lawsuits but the number of infringers and the bias of the Southern courts towards helping local plantation owners proved to be too costly to continue.  While they lost most of the cases, Miller and Whitney were eventually awarded some compensation by the legislatures of the states of North and South Carolina (Georgia never did recognize their claims).

Whitney's gin galvanized local mechanics to come up with their own ideas on how to improve his design.  In this way, it was a tremendous spur to Southern innovation. The most common approach was what was called the saw gin in which the individual wire teeth of Whitney's gin were replaced by teeth mounted on a circular saw blade.  Eventually, the designs were improved to the point where the problems with fiber neps were reduced to an acceptable level.  Cotton production exploded because the short staple, green-seed cotton could be grown in much poorer soil conditions in the upland South. With the expansion in cotton production came a massive increase in the number of slaves to work the land.

What became of Miller and Whitney?  Miller died in 1803 having poured most of his money (or rather Catherine Green's money) into the venture. He never recovered his investment.  Whitney, penniless from his cotton gin venture, turned his back on the South and in 1798 went into the business of manufacturing firearms for the U.S. government at a factory in New Haven, Connecticut.  He didn't do as well financially as he had hoped with his new business but he did cement a name for himself as having had a crucial role in the development of manufacturing using interchangeable parts.

Whitney would never have been remembered for the cotton gin had it not been for the motivation and resources of Phineas Miller.  I find this interesting because in most cases in our culture it is the entrepreneur who gets the credit for an inventor's ideas.  Perhaps Miller would have been the one remembered had the company of Miller and Whitney been financially successful.  When it failed and Miller died, Whitney lived on until 1825 to continue to remind people of his patent and his inventions.  Miller was to become only a minor footnote in Whitney's later retelling of the story.

It helps to be the one to write the history of a venture.  You can give yourself all the credit you think you deserve. But I, for one, think that Phineas Miller ought to be up there as the Hero Entrepreneur as much as Eli Whitney was the Hero Inventor.  Invention is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for innovation.  That takes money, business savvy, and often more than a little good fortune.

Edwin Hubble

My wife and I have been watching a Teaching Company lecture series entitled "Dark Matter, Dark Energy: The Dark Side of the Universe", taught by Sean Carroll.  It is a fascinating look into the makeup of the universe, of which only five percent is the stuff that is known to be visible anywhere.  Twenty-five percent is Dark Matter which can't be seen but which behaves like particles and exhibits a gravitational pull.  The other seventy percent is Dark Energy which does not behave as particles and is thought to be evenly distributed throughout the universe.  It is postulated to be there because it is the only way in which the behavior of the universe can be explained.

Carroll is a good teacher.  In his second lecture, he was talking about the expansion of the universe and the role that Edwin Hubble (1889 - 1953) played in providing data to show that this expansion was taking place. Hubble was able to demonstrate that the farther a galaxy was from any observation point (like the earth) the faster it was receding away from that point.  This is now called Hubble's Law.  It works no matter where you might stand in the universe.  If you are a long way from the earth, it is not that the intervening galaxies would be seen to be coming towards your point of observation.  They would be seen as receding even there.  It seems counter-intuitive, as is much of particle physics and cosmology.

My ears perked up a bit higher when Carroll was describing the path that Edwin Hubble took to become a world famous astronomer.  Turns out, he was a bright kid and a great high school athlete.  He excelled at track-and-field at the University of Chicago and set a high jump record while a student there.  He won a Rhodes Scholarship and went on to Oxford University where he first studied law and then switched his major to Spanish.  When he came back to the States, he taught Spanish, physics, and mathematics at the New Albany, Indiana High School before enlisting in the army in World War I.  Does this sound like the path to becoming a world renowned cosmologist?

After the war, Hubble returned to the University of Chicago to pursue what he had decided was going to be his career: astronomy.  He studied at the Yerkes Observatory at the University and after he received his Ph.D., he was invited to join the staff at the Mt. Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles.  He spent the rest of his career at Mt. Wilson.

There is hope for all of us late bloomers who can't quite figure out what we want to be when we grow up.  It took Hubble some time to figure out where he needed to be but when he did, he was extremely productive.  Hubble was not alone.  Samuel Morse and Robert Fulton were both accomplished artists in their first careers before finding later success in technology.  Henry Ford was a mechanic at the Detroit Edison.  Thomas Edison was a telegraph operator.  It would seem that a lot of creative people don't come into their own until they have passed through an incubation period of shorter or longer length.  What seems to be common among these people is that when they heard their muse, they followed it.  Maybe we would be better off as a society if more people left their dead-end jobs for more creative paths.  Certainly, Hubble didn't go directly from the high school classroom in Indiana to Mt. Wilson.  He needed education, and he got it at the University of Chicago.  So what if it takes a little retooling?

Most of us are not going to have a scientific law named after us or a satellite-based observatory named in our honor.  But that's not the point.  It seems to me that the point is to do what releases what is best in each of us.  The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, is quoted as having said, "Follow your bliss".  I think following your passion would do just as nicely.

Even Apollo Required Mundane Fixes

I wrote in my last blog about the new images of the moon which show the Apollo landing sites and even the astronauts, footprints on the moon. The photos also show the scientific experiments that were placed there to monitor the geophysical makeup of the moon. These experiments were collectively called the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package (or ALSEP). Each Apollo mission carried a set of experiments but the mix of experiments was different on every flight. [The image to the left was from Apollo 16 and you can see the Lunar Rover in the background next to the Lunar Lander.]

I began working for Bendix Aerospace Systems Division in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1970, right after graduating from the University of Michigan. Bendix was the prime contractor for the ALSEP experiments. The Apollo 11 and 12 missions had already successfully landed on the moon by the time I joined Bendix. Shortly after I started, the Apollo 13 disaster occurred (April, 1970) and it set back subsequent missions by more than a year. I was involved in engineering efforts on all the subsequent Apollo science packages (14 through 17).

A little background about the experiments: ALSEP was designed to be a package of experiments that shared a common communication and power source. The Central Station housed all of the communications electronics and telemetry systems. It is the tall, gold structure in the photo below. The antenna for transmitting data is the pole-like object on top of the Central Station. The gold is actually metal-coated mylar-plastic film and it was used to control the thermal environment inside the Central Station. Keep in mind that the moon in the daytime is over 200 degrees F and it is -200 degrees F at night. That is a tough environment and controlling the temperature in the electronics in all of the experiments was a major challenge.



The little gray, finned object to the left and behind the Central Station is the Radio Thermal Generator or RTG. It is the power source for all of the experiments. Electricity is generated by converting the heat from a Plutonium-238 fuel cartridge inside the RTG. As an aside, one of the Apollo 12 astronauts said that he could feel the heat from the Plutonium cartridge all the way inside his space suit when he was loading the cartridge into the RTG. That's hot (in more ways than one)!

The silver disk-like object in the foreground is actually a lunar seismometer, part of something called the Passive Seismic Experiment or PSE (the program just loved acronyms). It was designed to measure "moonquakes". Actually, you are not looking at the seismometer but at the thermal shroud (think blanket) which covered the seismometer. The instrument was so sensitive that if it had been directly exposed to the lunar day and night, it would have "creaked" due to thermal expansion and contraction. Even with the thermal shroud, it still creaked a little and buggered up the data.

All of the experiments (and there are three more that are out of the picture) were connected to the Central Station by cables. You can just make these out in the photo as copper/gold-colored ribbons in the lunar soil. They really were ribbons, by the way, ribbons that were about three inches wide, each of which carried multiple wires.

By the time I got to Bendix, the system and the experiments had already been designed (the work started in 1966). Bendix was in the process of building the final instrument packages and testing them to make sure they were ready for their missions. As a young engineer, my job was to work on problems that came up from experiences on previous missions. One of those experiences happened on the Apollo 16 mission. Astronaut John Young was deploying some of the experiments when his boot became entangled in one of the flat-ribbon cables. With the bulk of his suit and the changed sensations of lunar gravity, he was completely unaware that he had snagged a cable. When he moved, he accidentally tore the cable out of the experiment (it was an experiment for measuring heat flow) and the experiment was wrecked. Several million dollars gone in an instant. You can see this happen in the movie below if you start watching around the 11:36 mark. (The whole movie tells the story of the Apollo 16 mission. It is worth watching.) [movie from Internet Archive]



I was at work the afternoon that the ALSEP deployment was being broadcast live from the moon. We were all in a conference room watching a television and we could see Young get tangled up in the cable and everyone in the room started yelling at the set as though Young could hear us. There was a palpable gasp that went up from the group when we saw the cable snap. We knew before Young did that it was not going to be repairable. It is just not possible to put a broken cable back together on the surface of the moon.

Not surprisingly, shortly after the mission, orders came down from NASA to look at ways to prevent this from happening again. Despite the best of planning, nobody had really thought about strengthening the cable connections. Each of us has tripped over an extension cord or laptop power cable sometime in our lives. Usually, a plug pops out of its receptacle but sometimes plugs can be damaged or broken. Same here. But there were no plugs to come undone (the cables were hardwired in place). The cable snapped. My job was to design a better cable strain relief that would withstand the impact of a skipping astronaut in full gear. We couldn't change the basic cables so we had to find a way to spread the load out. A combination of well-rounded mounting brackets and reinforcing fiber tapes seemed the best way to get the job done.

But how do you test something like this to know it will work? You can't go to the moon to do it. We rigged up a test system in the lab and enlisted our "test astronaut" to see he could break the cables in a deliberate accident. What you see in the first picture below is the ALSEP package of experiments (a non-flight model) in the form that it is stowed in the Lunar Lander and before it is unpacked. Attached to the front of the package is our redesigned test cable with a heavy lace to put around the test astronaut's leg. Yours Truly is standing with my back to the camera in the stripped shirt.



It didn't seem like a fair test to have the high friction between the bottom of the ALSEP package and the floor of the lab so we put the package on a greased plate to decrease the friction and more closely simulate the friction in the lunar dust.

The next photo shows the test in progress with the astronaut putting his full weight into the cable. Two assistants stood on either side of him to catch him if he fell. You can see the cable snap taut.



The last photo shows me examining the cable stress relief after the test. It worked; the cable was intact and fully functional. This wasn't the only testing but it was the most convincing. We retrofitted all of the cables on the Apollo 17 mission with the new strain reliefs. Of course, the astronauts were now extremely mindful of getting tangled in the cables and nothing untoward happened on that mission.



Complex missions like the Apollo Program were staffed by tens of thousands of engineers doing the same sort of unglamorous, day-to-day jobs like fixing cables. Nothing is perfectly designed the first time. Not every contingency can be planned for. (If you want to see the ultimate example of this, rent the movie Apollo 13). To tell the truth, many days were pretty mundane but I still feel proud of the fact that I was there and had a tiny part in the Apollo missions. We have so few things in life that command the kind of vision that the Apollo Program did. It brought out the best passions in so many people. As Georg Hegel, the German philosopher said, "We may affirm absolutely nothing great in the world that has been accomplished without passion." Apollo proved that to me. I wish there were a comparable challenge to stir the dreams of the next generation.

Postscript: The ALSEP packages went on sending back data until September 30, 1977 when for the reason of budget cuts, the experiments from all the flights were powered off to save costs on the earth-side monitoring station.

P.S.S. Today mark's the 40th anniversary of the first lunar landing on the Apollo 11 mission.

Quotation for the Day

Don't worry about people stealing an idea. If it's original, you will have to ram it down their throats.

Howard Aiken, U.S. Computer Scientist (1900 -1973)

[As quoted from The Quotations Page]

Technology: I Know It When I See It

Technology. We live with it every day. It creates our life experiences as much as we create technology. We can't pick up a publication without reading about what is hot in "tech" (the shortened version of hi-tech which is itself the shortened version of high technology). Our current list of what wears the "tech" accolade consists of biotech, nanotech, infotech, and other esoteric topics. Carl Sagan once remarked,

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology,in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

I am trying to do my little bit to remedy that. I have started planning a short course on the history of technology. It seems that a practical place to start such a history is to define the word "technology". The word is used so frequently and so casually that surely a good definition would be easy to find. Not so. The word has its roots in the Greek words "techne" and "logos". For the Greeks, techne related to the arts and crafts and contrasted with "episteme" which usually referred to the sciences. More specifically, techne referred to the skills that were needed to make or build something. The term "logos" meant "word" and has been broadened to mean "knowledge". So, techne+logos has been interpreted to mean the knowledge of skill and crafts.

It's not clear who first used the word "technology" in its modern form. One candidate whom has been suggested is Jacob Bigelow, a professor at Harvard who wrote a book in 1829 entitled The Elements of Technology. This book was intended to be a catalog of technologies from ancient to modern. Bigelow was the first to hold the Rumford Chair at Harvard, a chair endowed by Count Rumford (Sir Benjamin Thompson) who had been born in Massachusetts in 1753 and who died in Paris in 1814. Thompson, a loyalist, fled the colonies for England during the American Revolution. He was named Count Rumford in 1792 while working for the Bavarian Government (the name he took, Rumford, was the early name of Concord, New Hampshire where he taught school). But Rumford would have been very much in tune with Bigelow's book.

Bigelow wrote extensively in the introduction of his book about the "arts and sciences" (the same as the Greek techne and epsiteme). This is an older pairing than our more current "science and technology". In Bigelow's world, the arts included all of the practical arts embodied in the Greek word "techne". Technology was part of the arts and separate from the sciences, which focused more on discovery than on crafts. As technology has become evermore based on science, we have coined the phrase "applied sciences" to represent the intersection between pure science and the more pragmatic technologies. The boundaries between these domains get ever blurrier and we probably will never have something that is pure technology.

But I still am looking for a good definition of technology. Perhaps a good working definition is:

The systematic knowledge and the methods and procedures which can be used in a specific area in order to resolve practical problems.(ref)

What makes up what we call technology changes with every generation and often much more often than that. A century ago it was airplanes, automobiles, electric power distribution, motion pictures, and a host of other things that have since receded into the background fabric of our lives.


The late Douglas Adams who wrote The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy gave a great tongue-in-cheek description of the evolving stages of technology in a 1999 essay on the internet:

1) Everything that’s already in the world when you’re born is just normal;
2) Anything that gets invented between then and before you turn thirty is incredibly exciting and creative and with any luck you can make a career out of it;
3) Anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things and the beginning of the end of civilisation as we know it until it’s been around for about ten years when it gradually turns out to be alright really.

Apply this list to movies, rock music, word processors and mobile phones to work out how old you are.

I love this description because it not only helps to define the "newness" angle on technology but also our ambivalence about the new dimensions of tech that threaten our status quo. The New New Thing is still trying to solve some practical problem in our lives. It seems to often happen that the original target for the technology proves to be unworkable but technology is amazingly resilient and seeks an application as surely as water seeking its own level. The reservoir of technology, of knowledge of the practical arts, keeps rising.

Rome, Inc.

I have been reading a fair amount lately about ancient civilizations. I mentioned in an earlier post Susan Wise Bauer's excellent book, The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome. Another really great read is Cullen Murphy's Are We Rome? which thoughtfully explores the parallels between the Roman Empire and the United States today. The latest book on my reading table is Peter Watson's Idea, A History of Thought and Invention, from Fire to Freud. My hat's off to Watson for a one-volume romp through the great ideas that have driven our civilization.

With all of this ancient history rattling around in my head, it occurred to me that there are some remarkable parallels that can be drawn between Greece and Rome and today's companies. What I'm thinking about specifically is innovation. Greece is almost universally acknowledged as the foundation of Western culture. The innovations that came from the Greeks span almost every domain you can name: architecture, theater, philosophy, science, history, the list just goes on and on. The Greeks loved exploring new ideas. The Romans' focus was twofold: empire and efficiency. They believed in the mantra that bigger is better. They were ferociously productive at building everything from roads to amphitheaters. They originated much of what has come down to us as law, perhaps because of the needs for contracts. They borrowed from everyone, especially the Etruscans and the Greeks and then improved upon and replicated the ideas. Rome was Big Corporate. Greece was Silicon Valley. Scale versus creativity, operations versus innovation.

Why were the Greeks so innovative and the Romans not? This is a complicated question with lots of dimensions but I can't help but wonder if it didn't have a lot to do with the small, independent nature of the Greek City-States, the polis. Greece was a loose amalgam of many independent small governments that were fiercely independent. Yet many Greek scholars traveled widely between these independent City-States pollinating new ways of thinking and new innovations. While some of these cities rose to central power for a time (I think of Athens in the 5th Century BC), there was generally no long-term "Rome", no corporate headquarters that enforced one way of doing things.

The Romans had Rome and they built everything from roads to aqueducts to frontier garrisons on a common blueprint. There was one best way to do everything and Rome knew what it was. As a result, the Romans were highly successful in expanding their empire, the ancient equivalent of corporate growth. All of this worked until growth slowed and finally stopped in the 2nd Century AD. The weight of complexity, bureaucracy, and dictatorial control began to eat the vitality of the Roman Empire from within.

Rome could not have happened without the Greeks and many other cultures. Large corporations could not survive without the acquired innovations of small companies. Were the Romans more successful than the Greeks? What's your definition of success?

So very difficult a matter is it to trace and find out the truth of anything by history.
Plutarch
Greek biographer & moralist (46 AD - 120 AD)

[Bust of Pericles, leader of Athens' Golden Age, from Wikipedia]

Quotation for the Day

And speaking of the telephone, I just came across this...

For a list of all the ways technology has failed to improve the quality of life, please press three.
Alice Kahn

The Roads More Traveled

I live in Florida during the winter. My house is about two miles from I-75. If I go south on the Interstate, I will reach the end of this highway in about 200 miles at Hialeah, FL. From Hialeah, it is 1785 miles to the terminus of the highway in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan. I spent most of my childhood growing up in the "Soo". My dad still lives there.

We take the Interstate highways for granted. They connect us in a highway grid that lets us get to virtually any area of the country. According to Wikipedia, there are 46,837 miles of road in the Interstate Highway system. The need for the highway system emerged from experience during World War I when the army found that the railroads could not transport all the needed supplies to support the war effort. Truck convoys were added to supplement the railroads. I can just imagine what that must have looked like in 1917. In 1919, Lieutenant Colonel Dwight D. Eisenhower set off from Washington on a coast-to-coast truck convoy to San Francisco to explore highway readiness in the event of another war. His experience then, coupled with his later experiences with the autobahn in Germany during World War II convinced him of the need for a high-speed national highway network. At the urging of President Eisenhower, legislation was passed in 1956 to begin the network and it was completed in 1991. The cost was originally projected to be $25 billion. The 2006 estimate for the cost of the system is $425 billion.

I was prompted to write about the highway system while reading a book called, Are We Rome? by Cullen Murphy. Murphy draws many parallels between the United States and the Roman Empire. Murphy points out that this is not a new idea. The Roman Republic was, in fact, the model of the Founding Fathers. Murphy makes the comparison of the Roman road system to the Interstate highways. The Roman system at its peak consisted of about 53,000 miles of roads. The rationale for the two systems was the same: a way to rapidly move military supplies. The Roman mileposts were all tied to a Golden Milepost in the Forum in Rome. The Zero Milestone of the Interstate system lies in the Ellipse in Washington, just south of the White House. The old saw, "All roads lead to Rome." was based not only on a political reality but an engineering one as well. The same could certainly be said for Washington, DC today.

The Interstate highways make our lives immeasurably easier (disregarding the traffic jams around major cities). But they need to be maintained, not something we seem to be fond of doing. Just last summer, the I-35 Bridge over the Mississippi River collapsed in Minneapolis. The cause appears to be a combination of design flaws and poor maintenance. There is very little glory in a keeping a good highway system together...at least, until we see it fall apart. The glory is all in the new project, the new bridge, the new interchange. We would do well to take better care of what we already have.

We merely want to live in peace with all the world, to trade with them, to commune with them, to learn from their culture as they may learn from ours, so that the products of our toil may be used for our schools and our roads and our churches and not for guns and planes and tanks and ships of war.
Dwight D. Eisenhower
34th president of US 1953-1961 (1890 - 1969)

Quotation for the Day

This is an interesting quote from one of my favorite books. It might be better titled "Everything is connected."

ONE GOOD IDEA DESERVES ANOTHER

Connections between innovators are ubiquitous— - one good innovation deserves another. LEO BAEKELAND corresponded with EDISON, the WRIGHT BROTHERS, FORD, WILLIS WHITNEY of General Electric, the DUPONTS and BELL. That the engineering potential of Bakelite might be greater than the chemical was ELMER SPERRY’’S contribution. SAMUEL COLT was friends with SAMUEL MORSE. GIANNINI’’S Bank of America took a risk by investing in WALT DISNEY’S’ early movies, including Fantasia in 1940. Disney hired the young BILL HELWETT and DAVID PACKARD to build some of its first electronic equipment for Fantasia. THOMAS WATSON SR. was probably the first passenger in a car with an electric self-starter built by his friend CHARLES KETTERING, who needed Leo Baekeland’’s new plastic for insulation. HENRY FORD used Bakelite for his fenders. Ford’ assemble lines were inspired by the beef and pork disassembly lines in the Chicago factories of the meatpacking innovators ARMOUR and SWIFT. ARNOLD BECKMAN backed WILLIAM SHOCKLEY who hired ROBERT NOYCE and GORDON MOORE whose circuits were used by NOLAN BUSHNELL, the founder of Atari, who hired STEVE JOBS, and TED HUFF, creator of the chip that made personal computers possible, worked for Intel, which called in GARY KILDALL, the most important innovator in computer operating systems, who was betrayed by IBM.

Harold Evans, They Made America

Quotation for the Day

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is unfamiliar with it.

Max Planck, A Scientific Autobiography and Other Papers (1949)

Quotation for the Day

We have the habit of writing articles in scientific journals to make the work as finished as possible, to cover up all the tracks, to not worry about blind alleys or describe how you had the wrong idea first, and so on. So there isn’ any place to publish, in a dignified manner, what you actually did in order to get the work done.

Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Lecture, 1966

Quotation for the Day

Eight hundred life spans can bridge more than 50,000 years. But of these 800 people, 650 spent their lives in caves or worse; only the last 70 had any truly effective means of communicating with one another, only the last 6 ever saw a printed word or had any real means of measuring heat or cold, only the last 4 could measure time with any precision; only the last 2 used an electric motor; and the vast majority of the items that make up our material world were developed with the life span of the eight-hundreth person.

R.L. Lesher and G.J. Howick, Assessing Technology Transfer (NASA Report SP-5067) (1966)

Quotation for the Day

Some problems are just too complicated for rational logical solutions. They admit of insights, not answers.
- Jerome Wiesner

Quotation for the Day

Every production of genius must be the production of enthusiasm.

Benjamin Disraeli
(1804-1881, British statesman, Prime Minister)