Self-Similarity: Fractals and People

Last night, I was watching a rerun of a PBS Nova program on fractals entitled, Hunting the Hidden Dimension. I don't think the full episode is online at the moment but you can see the trailer here. (As I look at the preview image below, the full episode may be available via the link below the preview).

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

The essence of fractals is the concept of self-similarity - the idea that patterns repeat themselves at ever smaller dimensions. The discoverer of fractals, Benoit Mandelbrot, was initially chastised by his mainstream mathematical colleagues as  a bit of a nut. These patterns weren't real, they said, they were more like an entertaining parlor game. Those days are long gone, of course, and fractals (and their associated concept) Chaos theory are now being used to investigate everything from thunderstorms to heart arrhythmias.  In fact, Mandelbrot's initial insight into the nature of fractals came from his investigation of noise patterns on long distance data transmission lines while at IBM Research Labs.  The patterns are everywhere once you know how to look for them. 

As I was listening to the narrator talk about Mandelbrot's initial rejection by his colleagues, I began to think about the nature of groups and how they come to all conform to certain ideas that make up the status quo. Could it be that groups of people follow some of the same concepts you find in fractals? Let's look at a couple of hypothetical examples.

What if you have two university professors, both highly respected in their fields. One carefully chooses his or her grad students on the basis that they are bright, are seemingly willing to take their direction very closely from the professor, and are relatively conformist in nature. The other professor also wants bright grad students but hires non-conformists and students that have some strong ideas of their own they want to pursue.   

The first lab is going to really churn out productive research that augments the professors views. The ideas will be tight and reinforcing.  The students are self-similar to the professor and so a pattern of conformity emerges.  When they graduate, they go out into the academic world and what do they do? The look for students like themselves and the pattern is replicated again and again. The field begins to develop norms that are much based on self-similar thinking as they are on the underlying science. 

The second professor has a few mavericks in his lab.  Not everyone but a few. These people mix it up and challenge the professor and the other students to look at their way of seeing the problems. The lab is probably a little less successful at churning out papers but every now and then a new idea emerges that comes from the lack of self-similarity. After the mavericks graduate, they go forth in a new academic position and try to hire a few mavericks of their own.  More new ideas emerge.

The reality of the way people are made is that far more of us are conformists than mavericks. It is much easier to get along in the world if you are self-similar than different. Hence, conformist thinking dominates and the Mandelbrot's of the world have to push back hard to be heard. 

The same is true, by the way, in corporations. The pressure to conform to the company's culture can be very high in a large and established corporation.  Certainly, you can see examples where this is not the case in tech startups but in general, once a company has a formula for making money, it likes to keep making money. The business leaders feel they know the formula and don't want to mess with it. Non-conformists are not welcome. 

So the principle of self-similarity that drives fractals may also drive human group dynamics.  Mavericks pay a high price for their independence. But in many cases, like that of Benoit Mandelbrot, the world is far better for it. 

Pale Blue Dot Revisited

Earth is barely visible as
a pale blue dot in the  red
band on the right.

I love Carl Sagan. He was as much a poet as he was an astronomer.  Back in 1994, he published a book  entitled, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. These are the opening words to his book:

The spacecraft was a long way from home, beyond the orbit of the outermost planet and high above the ecliptic plane - which is an imaginary flat surface that we can think of as something like a racetrack in which the orbits of the planets are mainly confined. The ship was speeding away from the sun at 40,000 miles per hour. But in early February 1990, it was overtaken by an urgent message from Earth. 

Obediently, it turned its cameras back toward the now-distant planets. Slewing its scan platform from one spot in the sky to another, it snapped 60 pictures and stored them in digital form on its tape recorder.  Then slowly, in March, April, and May,  it radioed the data back to earth. Each image was composed of 640,000 individual picture elements ("pixels"), like the dots in a newspaper wirephoto or a pointillist painting.  The spacecraft was 3.7 billion miles away from Earth, so far away that it took each pixel 5 1/2 hours, traveling at the speed of light, to reach us. 

What the pictures showed was the Earth - just a pale blue dot in the black of the universe.  Sagan's words have become the inspiration for many, including artists and filmmakers.  I highlighted one such artist/filmmaker in an early post on the Symphony of Science. Recently, I came across another video on Vimeo by Michael Marantz using Sagan's words. Sagan himself provides the narration. Marantz shot the time-lapse images and composed and performed the music. I thought it might be worth sharing here. In these troubled and troubling times, a little perspective is useful.  Hope you enjoy.


EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from Michael Marantz on Vimeo.

Kudos to one of my favorite sites, Open Culture, for suggesting the idea for this blog.

Even Subways Can Be Beautiful

I came across a couple of items recently that make me realize that even the mundane can be beautiful.  The first is a photo from the Library of Congress's Detroit Photographic Company archives showing a 28th Street subway station in New York City when it was being newly constructed in 1904.  The tile work in the domed ceiling and the woodwork in the ticket booth are beautiful.

28th Street Station, New York City Subway, 1904
Click on photo to enlarge

The second was a more recent video made by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, two filmmakers at Redglass. They describe the film as a visual poem of the experience of emerging from the subway into a new environment above.  This film was taken   in New York City and is set to music by Erik Satie.


Sub City New York from sarah klein on Vimeo.

[Thanks to BrainPickings for the video link].

The Triangle Shirtwaist Fire

Watch the full episode. See more American Experience.

Three stories of ten-floor building at the corner of Greene Street and Washington Place were burned yesterday, and while the fire was going on 141 young men and women -- at least 125 of them mere girls -- were burned to death or killed by jumping to the pavement below.

The building was fireproof. It shows now hardly any signs of the disaster that overtook it. The walls are as good as ever; so are the floors; nothing is the worse for the fire except the furniture and 141 of the 600 men and girls that were employed in its upper three stories.

Most of the victims were suffocated or burned to death within the building, but some who fought their way to the windows and leaped met death as surely, but perhaps more quickly, on the pavements below.    New York Times, March 26, 1911.

I had missed the recent American Experience film on the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire but I was able to view it on the PBS Video website.  I highly recommend spending an hour watching it.  This program seems to be all the more pertinent to me as I continue to read about the daily struggles of unionized government workers in many states - starting with Wisconsin. They are, of course,  not fighting for safer working conditions but they are trying to hold onto long-fought-for collective bargaining rights.  The bitter irony of the workers at the Triangle Shirtwaist Company is that even though they had led a strike by New York City garment workers in 1909 for union representation, they never achieved it for themselves.  The owners, Isaac Harris and Max Blanck, would simply not permit any "meddling" in their control of the business.  Harris and Blanck were later tried and acquitted of manslaughter charges connected to the fire.  They went on to collect a lucrative insurance settlement and continued in the garment business. They were fined repeatedly for operating their factories under unsafe working conditions.

Asch Building in New York where fire occurred
on second to top floor still stands today.
Photo from Wikipedia.

Society benefits greatly from technology.  More often than not, that technology is made available through companies which compete fiercely against each other in the marketplace. The argument that nothing should fetter the owners of a business with regulatory burdens that might make them less competitive simply cannot be supported in the face of the tragic consequences that can so easily befall their employees.  Reasonable regulations and collective bargaining are not evils. They are part of the cost of doing business in a complex society. It is always a balance.  What should be regulated and what should be left to the market?  What voice should workers have compared to owners or managers?  While there is no lasting answer to these questions, it seems that we are once again tilting towards excessive power - and excessive rewards - on the side of owners and managers.

Thinking Machines: For Better and For Worse

Our machines get ever more intelligent, or at least capable of doing more and more complex tasks. Whether this should be considered intelligence is a separate question.  Last night, I saw two programs that brought this clearly into focus.

The first was the IBM Watson Challenge on Jeopardy. If you haven't been tracking this story, IBM has created a new computing system for its latest corporate Grand Challenge: a machine smart enough to understand Natural Language Processing (NLP).  In past Grand Challenges, IBM created a chess-playing computer it named Big Blue which was able to beat Grand Chessmaster, Garry Kasparov, and another computer dubbed Blue Gene (Big Blue + Genome) which was used to sequence DNA. For the current challenge, the IBM team named their computer Watson after IBM founder Tom Watson whose standing directive to his employees was "Think".  IBM's R&D lab wanted to take on a tough challenge and they felt that hardly anything could be tougher for a computer than being able to compete successfully on the television quiz-show, Jeopardy.  Who isn't familiar with the opening line, "This is Jeopardy!" with host, Alex Trebek (Disclosure Alert: we once sat in the studio audience of a filming of the show in LA. Our daughter chatted up Alex during the commercial break).

Watson was positioned at the center podium and competed against the two all-time high scoring contestants, Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter. Poor Ken and Brad. Watson's winnings over the three days of the tournament were $77,147 compared to Jennings' $24,000 and Rutter's $21,600.  Watching the show, I was impressed with how adept Watson was at answering questions filled with the usual twists on topics and language that are part of the Jeopardy game. But it was also clear that Watson got some things wildly wrong. His answer to a question about U.S. Cities was Toronto.  That seems like something that would have been easily ruled out in the programming of his logic circuits.  Nonetheless, Watson is an impressive advance in NLP and IBM now hopes to perfect the technology for many other fields including medical diagnostics.

The second program that I saw last night was Nova's "The Crash of Flight 447", which described in harrowing detail the final minutes of the Air France flight that disappeared over the Atlantic on the night of May 31, 2009.

Watch the full episode. See more NOVA.

Nova assembled its own team of investigators to look into what might have caused one of the most modern aircraft in the skies, the Airbus A330, to  tumble out of the sky. The official investigation is still ongoing and the Black Box and flight recorder have yet to be found in 15,000 feet of water in the mid-Atlantic. My short summary to the longer description given during the program is that the computer flying the plane was instrumental in the crash.

How could that be? The longer sequence of events was that Flight 447 encountered a very turbulent thunderstorm in the mid-Atlantic that caused all three of its airspeed sensors (called pitot tubes) to ice up and fail.  The flight computer was in control of the aircraft and airspeed is a key parameter for the computer to perform its tasks. The lack of airspeed data caused the flight computer to start to go into a sequence of failure modes, starting with disengaging the autopilot and throttling back the engines.  The pilots were instantly thrust into an extremely challenging situation with multiple cascading computer warnings coming at them as they manually tried to control the plane in heavy turbulence.  Without accurate airspeed information, they were flying in an even more dangerous situation.  Modern jets have very narrow windows of acceptable airspeed at cruising altitude.  Changes in airspeed of as little as 10 knots either up or down can cause the plane's wings to stall (lose lift).  When an aircraft stalls, the plane not only begins to rapidly descend, it also can go into a roll that can make recovery even more difficult.

The Nova team did a good job of demonstrating how pilots are supposed to avoid this problem.  The Nova investigators recreated the conditions that the pilots of Flight 447 encountered that night in a flight simulator. The two pilots who "flew" the rerun did not know in advance what they were going to be facing in the simulator.  The rerun began with the thunderstorm suddenly showing up on their radar and progressed to the loss of airspeed data and the flight computer issuing failure warnings. The standard procedure for pilots in such a situation is to increase engine power to 85 percent and adjust the rear elevators to 5 percent up-attitude.  This always put the aircraft at a safe speed to avoid a stall.  The pilots in the simulator did just what they were supposed to do and all went smoothly as they recovered control of the plane. But apparently, the pilots on Flight 447 were too busy or too distracted to follow this standard procedure.  The result was the loss of over 200 people's lives in a terrible aircraft tragedy.

Some of the pilots interviewed on the Nova program commented on how today's generation of pilots have come to depend on the flight computer to fly the plane.  They have too little experience with how to pull an out-of-control plane back to safety if the flight computer fails.  Having seen the pilots in the flight simulator follow the standard procedure of thrust and attitude adjustment, I wonder why the flight computer wasn't programmed to do the same thing when the loss of airspeed data started a sequence of failures?  Why depend on the pilots for this first safety measure?  Why doesn't the computer just do it and then alert the pilots to what had been implemented as part of the safety program to maintain control?  The program made clear that the flight computers are currently programmed to prevent pilots from maneuvering the plane in some way that would cause loss of control.  Why not in the loss of airspeed data situation?

Clearly, we are still in the infancy of computer intelligence whether it be computers like Watson which understand the difficulties of how we communicate in our natural language or the more prescriptive computers that fly airplanes, manage nuclear power plants, or even control the inner workings of our automobiles.  Much more is needed and certainly will be built into the computers in the future to enhance what we like to call intelligence. Computers are being built to mimic what humans can do under the best of circumstances.  Surpassing what humans can do is what Ray Kurzweil, the computer and music guru, calls The Singularity.  He thinks it is coming in the next decade or so.  I am not so sure.  But I am sure that it will happen in the first half of this century.  Then, like the computer, HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, we will be in a strange new world where the computer might say as it did, "I can't allow you to do that, Dave".  In the meantime, computers can be fun to watch or, under rare circumstances, they can create monumental tragedies.

[You can watch the entire Nova episode on the PBS website here.]

Floating Palaces

 [Note to readers: with this post, I am now offering images that can be enlarged by clicking on them. Often, the detail in the enlarged image greatly enhances the beauty of the picture. If the image can be enlarged, the mouse arrow will change to a hand when hovered over the image.]

Floating Palace: you don't hear the term much anymore but at one time it was the supreme compliment for a passenger-carrying ship.  Rich paneling, gilded fixtures, lush carpeting, detailed Corinthian columns supporting a dome or skylight, grand staircases - a Floating Palace had all of these and more.   Often (but not always), the words were used to describe an ocean liner. The steamboats which plied America's lakes and rivers in the 19th century also cultivated business by offering sumptuous furnishings and decor.

Scanning the fascinating photographs in the Library of Congress archives, I came across this photo which seemed filled with a melancholy for the past. The image was entitled, "Old Boats Beached to Rot Away, New York City."

Old Boats Beached to Rot Away

This photo is part of the Detroit Publishing Company archive at the LOC.  The date could only be determined to be sometime between 1900 and 1910.  The large steamboat in the left background can be easily seen to be the the Drew in this enlargement of a segment of the picture below:

 

Steamer Drew

 The poignancy of the image captured my imagination and I wanted to know more.  I did a little googling and learned that the Steamer Drew was built in 1865-66 for the People's Line, a company that operated steamboats on the Hudson River between New York City and Albany.  The line specialized in so-called "night boats", steamboats with sleeping cabins to accommodate overnight trips. The Drew might have been named for Daniel Drew, one of the shrewdest steamboat operators and Wall Street investors of the 19th century but I couldn't find documentation for this and there was already an earlier steamboat named the Daniel Drew sailing the Hudson.

The Drew cost $800,000 to build, an enormous sum in the closing days of the Civil War, and was equipped to handle the tastes of even the wealthiest of clients. The ship was almost 400 feet in length and had 284 staterooms on three tiers of decks.  The ship was powered by a vertical walking-beam engine having an 81 inch cylinder with a 14 foot stroke.  That is a massive single-piston engine!  Steam to feed the engine was supplied by two boilers mounted out on the external edges of the ship behind the paddlewheels.  In the photo above, the boilers and side-mounted paddlewheels have already been stripped off the old ship.

Ad from 1900 magazine

The Drew sailed without incident for over 30 years with its sister ship, the Dean Richmond. In the fall of 1896,  the new steamboat, Adirondack, was added to the People's Line. The Drew continued to carry passengers for a few more years but was finally retired in August of 1901.  The ship was sold to J.H. Gregory of Perth Amboy, New Jersey to be scrapped.  Unfortunately, the retired steamship burned to the waterline from a fire of undetermined origins on July 2, 1902.  The picture above must date from sometime between August 1901 and July 1902. If you look closely at the image, you can see some men in the wreckage near the bow of the ship.  Were these workmen or were they vagrants looking for something to plunder and were perhaps the source of the fire?

Further searching of the Library of Congress archives turned up a beautiful Currier and Ives print of the Drew that was published in 1876 at the height of her glory.

 The external boiler is clearly visible on the near side of the ship behind the paddlewheel.  In fact, the semi-circular box that enclosed the upper half of the paddlewheel was a work of art in its own right.  As you can see in the magnified view below, the paddlebox was painted to mimic the interior ceiling of the Pantheon in Rome, complete with painted sculptures on either end of the arc.

  The Drew was only one of hundreds of steamboats that sailed the Hudson in the century following Robert Fulton's steamboat, North River (often called the Claremont), which first sailed in 1807.  Many of these ships, including the Drew, became legends in their own time.  We have nothing like them today except perhaps the ever-bigger oceangoing cruise ships that have become small cities on water. They, too, are Floating Palaces but somehow they seem to lack the grace of the old steamboats of the Hudson.  The real Queens of the Waters are gone forever.

Outside the Box

Ships have been with us for a long time. We all know what they look like - a long rectangular box with a pointed bow and rounded stern. A few structures somewhere on the top of the long box to provide a place for the crew to live and to operate the ship.  A smokestack sticks up somewhere - usually towards the rear of the ship.  What could be more ordinary?  But why does it have to be that way? Why not think, if you allow me the little pun, outside the box?

Take a look at the ship in the picture below.  Something just looks... well... different about this ship, doesn't it?  Whose slightly delirious dream was this?

Steamer A.D. Thompson
Library of Congress Collections

The ship in the picture is the A.D. Thompson and it is a class of ship known affectionately to those who sailed them as a whaleback.  Whalebacks were never used for whaling.  Most of them (but not all) sailed on the Great Lakes.  The name (nickname, really) came from the shape of the hull which looked like a whale's back sitting low in the water when the ship was fully loaded.  The name was intended to be descriptive, even complimentary.  If you look at the way the bow comes to a little flat point, you can immediately understand the origin of the other, more derogatory nickname - the pigboat.

The whaleback design was the brainchild of ship's master, serial-entrepreneur, and inventor, Alexander McDougall. McDougall was born in Scotland in 1845.  His parents emigrated to the Lake Huron region of Ontario when he was a young boy.  His father died when McDougall was only ten and he took up a variety of odd jobs to help feed his family. By his late teen years, he had signed on as a deckhand on a Great Lakes freighter.  Being talented and hardworking, he rose rapidly and got his ship master's license when he was just 25, one of the youngest captains on the Great Lakes.

In the latter decades of the 19th century, the Great Lakes were the Northern highway for bulk freight traffic as lumber, iron ore, and grain were shipped from the western regions to the population centers in the East. The Great Lakes were home to hundreds of ships.  At first, these were schooners and other forms of sailing ships, but steam engines rapidly took over as the means to power these ships.  The size of the ships wasn't initially limited by the steam engines, it was limited by the small canals, channels, and locks that the ships had to navigate.  To increase the amount of tonnage that could be hauled on each trip, smaller ships began towing small barges (sometimes called consorts). McDougall was an experienced captain and he knew the difficulties of pulling these unpowered hulls, often through large waves and high winds.  Towing a barge could be a decidedly tricky task, more-so as the weather got bad.

McDougall began thinking about how to design a better barge. He wanted the most volume for the least perimeter, the least resistance to winds and waves, and a shallow-draft design that could be moored at docks with only a limited depth of water.  His innovation was his patented hull design, later dubbed the whaleback.  McDougall built his first consort, named simply Hull No. 101, over the winter of 1887-1888.  It was a technical success. But when McDougall tried to raise capital to build more consorts using his novel design, he was met with derision by the experienced businessmen around the Great Lakes.  Undaunted, he headed to New York where he enlisted the financial backing of several Eastern capitalists including John D. Rockefeller.

Two whaleback consorts in tow out of Poe Lock
Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan
Library of Congress Collections

McDougall founded the American Steel Barge Company in 1889 and began building his cheap, efficient barges in Duluth, Minnesota. After he had built five whaleback consort vessels, McDougall moved his entire shipbuilding operation next door to Superior, Wisconsin.  In 1890, McDougall built his first self-powered whaleback steamer, the Colgate Hoyt (named for one of his first financial backers).  This ship cost just a little more than twice the cost of one of his unpowered barges and could steam at 16 knots - very respectable for its day.

In 1893, McDougall built his only whaleback passenger ship, the Christopher Columbus.  The ship was used to ferry passengers from downtown Chicago, six miles south to the World's Columbian Exposition.  Following the Exposition, the passenger ship was placed in regular service between Cleveland and Chicago.

S.S. Christopher Columbus
Only Whaleback Passenger Ship Ever Built

While McDougall's innovative vessels proved themselves to be workable, the design never caught on.  Whalebacks suffered from a few practical limitations: the curve of the hull made the hatch openings smaller than on conventional ships and barges. This also made the hatches more prone to being bent in the loading and unloading process.  The hatches were expensive to repair. The design also lacked a protected passageway below decks from the front to the back of the ship making it difficult for the crew to communicate in rough weather (remember that this was before radio was invented).  Mostly though, the design just didn't look good to the more established shipping company owners.  The American Steel Barge Company was eventually absorbed into the American Ship Building Company in the late 1890s.

McDougall, ever the entrepreneur, didn't limit himself to ship design.  He operated a company that managed over a thousand stevedores on various Great Lakes docks. He owned an insurance company that wrote policies on Great Lakes shipping. He sat on the board of directors of several electric companies. And in 1899, after selling the whaleback company, he bought the Collingwood (Ontario) Shipbuilding Company, reorganized it, and ran it successfully for many more years building conventional ships.

McDougall died in 1924.  While his vision of a new type of hull did not have the impact that he had hoped for, he was able to demonstrate that his technical ideas were highly workable.  The whaleback ships were gradually scrapped out over the years.  One, the Thomas Wilson, lies at the bottom of Lake Michigan just outside the Milwaukee harbor entrance and is a popular diving destination.

Now, only one whaleback remains in existence.  The S.S. Meteor has been slowly rusting away as a museum ship in Superior, Wisconsin, where it was built in 1896.  When she's gone, none of these daring and innovative ships will remain.  But the old photos still tell the tale of the days when the whalebacks were the talk of the Lakes.

S.S. Meteor
Superior, Wisconsin

The Early Automobile Era: 1895 - 1910

Library of Congress Image
Detroit Publishing Company Collection

The story of America and the automobile has been going on for over a century.  We love our cars.  We love the sense of freedom they bring.  But it is much, much more complicated than that. Cars are modes of transportation, status symbols, a way to express who we want to be, and one of the mainstays of our economy. They have changed how and where we live, how we work, who we know, and even how some of us will die.

Let's play a little association game.  Don't try to be to self-conscious about this. Just remember the first thing that pops into your head when I say a word.  Ready?

Automobile

Now don't edit it.  What image came to mind - because it will most likely be an image.  Here's another:

Model-T

Did you think Henry Ford?  Old-fashioned?  How about these words:

General Motors

The quick image, now.  Bailout? Your father's Oldsmobile/Chevrolet/Buick? Crappy quality?

We could play this game forever and in fact, Americans a century ago could have played the same game. The automobile began to encroach on our collective and historic lives as far back as 1895 but the wheel really got rolling (bad pun intended) in the first few years of the 20th century. How some of that happened is the focus of a now out-of-print book entitled,  America Adopts the Automobile, 1895 - 1910, written by James J. Flink and published by the MIT Press in 1970.

 I came across this book in a used bookstore and I just had to buy it.  Something about those founding days of the automobile industry fascinate me.  Actually, the founding days of any industry fascinate me - but I digress.   The years covered in Flink's book were a period when we were thunderstruck by this glorious machine and willingly made the Faustian bargain to trade our very souls to become (in the term of the day) automobilists. Flink, who was not a historian of technology but a historian of American culture, wrote a number of books about the automobile but this was his first and it is a good one.

This is not the usual book of over-hyped color photos of "American Classics".  It is a thoughtful look at many aspects of how automobiles so rapidly became embedded in every aspect of our lives.  In his 300+ page book, Flink used as his primary sources most of the motoring periodicals of the day such as Horseless Age,  Motor Age, and The Motor Way.  He also referenced a number of books written shortly after this embryonic period when first hand knowledge of the beginnings of the automobile industry was still abundant.  There's plenty of data here and also some nice black-and-white car ads and car images that come out of the magazines of the day.

Why was the automobile so quickly adopted? Most people saw very quickly that an automobile was cheaper and a heck of lot easier to keep (not to mention less cranky) than a horse pulling a buggy.  For some occupations (such as the family doctor), the automobile allowed a more rapid and reliable way to get around town.  Contrary to our usual image of early automobiles broken down on the side of the road, they were in fact quite reliable even in their earliest designs.  What wasn't reliable was the tires on the car which gave endless reasons to the automobilist to curse until the tire technology finally began to catch up to the rest of the vehicle.  Those early trips were measured more in number of tires changed than in miles per gallon.

Flink covers topics such as how and when automobiles first began to be licensed.  At first, automobile registration was perennial.  Do it once and you were done.  Pretty quickly this proved to be impractical - not to mention the loss of tax revenue from annual renewals.  In the earliest days, automobilists had to license their car in every state in which they planned to drive.  Similar issues surrounded licensing of drivers.  Not surprisingly, this came about after a few hot-headed drivers managed to mow down some pedestrians and wreak havoc on the local horse-and-buggy traffic.

Licensing and regulatory issues were just some of the reasons that local automobile clubs formed quickly in the first decade of the century. Clubs formed to allow enthusiasts to share their passion for the car but also to band together to build garages and maintenance facilities.  In that first decade, townspeople didn't have garages and their automobile was more often a Sunday drive hobby.  They needed a place to park.  It was later that people began to recognize that their cars would get them to work more comfortably than they could get there on the streetcar.  If the owner was wealthy enough to own a stable behind the house, Ol' Dobbin was turned out and the shiny new Hupmobile or Packard took his place.

Flink spends some pages discussing why the gasoline-powered automobile quickly came to dominate the steam and electric cars of those early days. He also describes the chaos of the early manufacturing market with literally hundreds of companies jumping in to try to catch the wave.  How could so many people afford to start auto-making companies?  The early car manufacturers had an ideal set of business conditions.  People went crazy for cars and every car built was sold before it hit the end of the assembly line.  All purchases were strictly cash and people lined up to plunk down their money. The auto companies were essentially assemblers who bought almost everything from suppliers and demanded that the suppliers bear the cost of all the parts inventory.  Hence, very little capital was needed to get into the auto assembly business in this early stage.  That all changed, of course.  When Henry Ford introduced the Model-T in 1909, the jig was up for many of those still in the game.  More than that, most of the early car makers had focused on building higher priced (and more profitable) cars for the middle and upper-class markets. By 1909, these markets were already saturated and the game was then to build a reliable, low-cost car for the mass market.

The book doesn't go beyond the introduction of the Model-T.  The outcome of that era, though,  is still evident everywhere we look: suburbs, a vast network of highways, acres of parking lots, air pollution, and roadside carnage. But there is no going back.  Last week the venerable Ford Motor Company, which introduced the Model-T in 1909,  announced its first all-electric car.  GM already has the Chevy Volt and hybrids are becoming so common as to be non-events.  Our love of the automobile will go on but it will never be the same as those days in the first decade of the 20th century that Flink so ably describes. Maybe the same will be said for our own day with the excitement about the internet and the social networking of the world.  It looks great from here.  We shall see... or rather our great-grandchildren shall see.

Of Photos and History

I love old photographs.  They show the technologies of the past in ways that words often fail to convey. My last post described the Shorpy website which features a variety of images, mostly beautifully cleaned up images, from the Library of Congress Archives.  I wanted to highlight two other websites I came across recently that are mashups of Google Maps and historical photos.

The first website is historypin.  This recent entry out of the UK provides a unique way to combine old historical views (worldwide) of street scenes with the more recent Street Views available in Google Maps.  The historical images can be switched on and off to allow you to see them superimposed on the way the street looks like today.  The site encourages users to upload their own images although in the current beta release version uploads are limited to five per user. There is also a place to annotate the photos under what the site calls Stories. The site has a little over 29,000 photos "pinned" at this point and is definitely worth a look.  There is a map view that lets you enter an address to see if there are any photos in locations that interest you.  Your best bet at this point is to look at the larger cities.

The second website, similar in concept, is SepiaTown.  This site also encourages you to upload your own images and shows the historical image in a side-by-side comparison with the current Google Street View of that location.  The website allows viewers to leave comments or share the photos through various social networking sites.  SepiaTown is also a relatively new entry and I haven't seen much in the way of posted comments but the photos are interesting and seem distinct from those on historypin.

All of these site are getting at a new way of social networking historical images. If they can get enough users, the power of the network will allow all of us to benefit with the accumulated knowledge that is in our collective heads.  I hope they live long and prosper.  But I think these sites are just the beginning experiments in how to plumb the depths of our knowledge about the more recent past. The pictures are interesting but they lack so many other ways in which they could be made even better.  For example, how about building links to Wikipedia articles or automating a simple Google search of keywords.  Which brings up another point: none of these sites allow tagging the images which would help to build out a set of images.  Other connections could include the vast libraries of online images in Flickr, Picasa, or any number of other photo sharing websites.  Online databases of historical newspaper articles could supplement the images in some cases. Just some thoughts.

If you know of any other websites like these or have any other suggestions on how sites like these could be improved, I would appreciate hearing about them.  Drop me a comment!

Shorpy: Crowd-Sourced History

New Amsterdam Theater, New York City,
circa 1905, from www.shorpy.com
http://www.shorpy.com/node/9430

A couple of days ago, I had the pleasure of coming across the website Shorpy.com.  I'll let you read on the site where the name came from.  The webmaster (Dave - not Shorpy) has restored hundreds of old photos from the Library of Congress, particularly the Detroit Publishing Company collections.

The Detroit Publishing Company's major business was photochromic post cards.  These were colorized versions of black-and-white images that were produced before color film became commercially viable.  Post cards became the rage in the early years of the 20th century because Congress had passed the Private Mailing Card Act in 1898 which allowed post cards to be mailed for a penny (as compared to the standard rate of two cents for letters).  The post card collecting frenzy lasted through World War I but had run its course by the early '20s.  The Detroit Publishing Company declared bankruptcy in 1924 and was liquidated in 1932.  The good news was that through the generous donations of the Edison Institute and the Colorado Historical Society, tens of thousands of the company's original 8x10 glass-plate negatives ended up at the Library of Congress where they have been digitized and put online.

Dave (aka, Shorpy) spends hours cleaning up the scanned high-resolution, glass plate negatives using Photoshop and publishes the "hi-def" images on his website for your viewing pleasure.  And indeed, it is a pleasure. The clarity of these restored images is breathtaking.  It is hard to overstate the impact of the clarity of the photographs.  If you are so inclined, you can even purchase prints of your favorite images from the website.

Like everyone who comes to this website, the first thing that caught my attention was the clarity and size of the images.  But the website - in a stroke of "social networking" genius - allows viewers to post comments about the images.  As you might expect, quite a few comments simply express appreciation.  But more than a few offer great followup detail on the images, identifying buildings, automobiles, clothing styles, business history, and personal details.  The site essentially crowd-sources history.  The fact that viewers take the trouble to go out and find these details is itself quite amazing.

Shorpy is, of course, not the only website that allows crowd-sourced history.  The Internet Archives is another great place to see and comment on old films, books, and images.  Google Books lets users post reviews of out-of-print volumes. These sites (and others) seem to me to be a new way to teach history in a very interactive format. Think of what might happen if kids were given assignments to link to these images and research and post additional details.  The Library of Congress itself is missing out on a significant opportunity by not providing a place for comments as Shorpy and others have done.

This all works, of course, where there is something visual to share (even if that visual material is original text).  Photography was invented just before the Civil War hence photo archives of older events are just not possible.  But there are thousands of high-quality engravings in old books accessible through Google Books and the other websites and many old documents still exist and could be easily scanned.  The web offers a truly unique opportunity to mine our collective knowledge base and invites the all-important aspect of deeper engagement by sharing.

My hat is off to Shorpy.  What a great way to build and share enthusiasm for the past.

Post script:  The images from the Detroit Publishing Company are free for use at the Library of Congress website.  The LOC's original high-resolution scanned images are often faded and have blemishes and hence need the kind of treatment that Shorpy provides to achieve the same visual impact.

Fail Early, Fail Often? Not.

Business is full of pithy aphorisms.  One that you hear frequently is meant to be a mantra for innovation: Fail early, fail often.  The idea behind this little nugget is to experiment with many variations on an idea without investing much in any of them.  Get out there and get market feedback as quickly and as cheaply as you can.  Sounds like good advice, doesn't it?

I spent my career working with inventors and not many of them attempted to fail -- early or otherwise.  And they certainly didn't want to fail often.  That was a one-way ticket to unemployment or at least being moved into a position where they couldn't spend the company's money quite so easily.  Inventors work more from the old saw: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.  The first time out, their invention is a flop.  The second time it might be an even bigger fiasco.  But the dedicated inventor "knows" that their idea is just what is needed to make the world a better place (and make them a boatload of money).  They might finally even get an idea out that does the technical job but the money is another story.

The histories of technology and innovation are filled with stories of inventors who pioneered a new area only to go bankrupt.  Often, a savvy business person was watching in the wings waiting for market conditions to improve or shift.  Then with the biggest risks of invention out of the way, they would turn it into a money-making venture by better marketing or more efficient manufacturing.  And what of the inventor?  Often, these intrepid souls would be on to their next great idea.

Are inventors naive?  Are they over-confident about their ideas or abilities?  Why do they continue in the face of such daunting odds?  It seems to me that inventors have two drives: to shepherd their wonderful idea into the world and to get rich doing it.  At their core, they are made up of creativity and optimism.  They have a great inner eye that lets them see a new and untested idea before others can see it.  Their energy comes from their need to create.  They are more akin to artists than engineers.

But the same characteristics that makes a great inventor makes for a really lousy business person.  The business mind is focused on efficiency, scale, and profit.  Business has its own form of creativity but it shares little with that of the inventor.  Once an invention has proven itself, the business person wants nothing to do with further change.  Change is wasteful.  Change is inefficient. Now the drive is to get it out at the lowest possible cost.

It more often happens that an inventor thinks that he or she can also be a great business person than vice versa.  Business can't be that hard, can it?  The invention is the hard part, right? Most business people that I know don't often mistake themselves to be inventors.  The clear, cold thinking that makes them good at business puts a quick stop to any naive beliefs that they can also excel as inventors.

Inventors need business people to commercialize their ideas.  But without inventors the New New would never happen.  It is a symbiotic relationship.  The business people get most of the money, of course.  But the inventors get something equally valuable to them - the freedom to continue to invent.  And the cycle continues.

The Inexorable March Towards the Virtual

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

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

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

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

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

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

Technology Winners and Losers from the Mid-Term Elections

The people have spoken.  But what the people have said is a little harder to understand.  Imagine a room of ten thousand people who on the count of three are urged to shout out their favorite program for technology funding.  The resulting noise from the diverse answers would be hard to decipher.   The only thing of which we can be certain is that the emphasis will change.  So what are some of the potential winners and losers in the next couple of years?  What government funding is likely to get enhanced or reduced as the centers of political power realign once again in Washington, DC?  Here's a few of my predictions:



The Winners:

1. Defense and weapons systems.  
2. Materials technologies that drive the electronics industry
3. Oil exploration technology
4. Clean coal
5. The National Labs (again, with a focus on defense)
6. Pharmaceutical research

The Losers:

1. Stem cell research
2. Alternative energy sources
3. Climate research
4. NASA
5. Energy efficiency

The shifts in emphasis every two to four years play havoc on meaningful progress towards any research goals.  Most of these research programs are based in universities and National Labs.  Proposing and funding a program can take years.  Staffing with faculty and post-docs can take almost as long.  By the time a program gets set up and gains some momentum, it can find itself running out of gas during even the first refunding cycle.  We are constantly sub-optimized to progress as far and as fast as we can.  In a sense, everyone loses from the short-term reordering of research priorities.

Of course, nothing lasts forever, nor should any particular line of research be immune from changes in priorities.  Still, the need to achieve a minimum level of continuity - perhaps a decade - should be factored into setting research objectives.  Our future depends on it.