Rube Goldberg and the Electrification of America 207
Hugh Pickens writes "Alexis Madrigal has an interesting essay in the Atlantic about the popular response of people in the 19th century to the development of the electric power industry in America. Before electricity, basically every factory had to run a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine, transmitting power from a water wheel or a steam engine to the machines of a manufactory but with the development of electric turbines and motors the public believed engineers were tapping mysterious, invisible forces with almost supernatural powers for mischief. 'Think about it,' writes Madrigal. 'You've got a wire and you've got a magnet. Switch on the current — which you can't see and have no intuitive way to know exists — and suddenly the wire begins to rotate around the magnet. You can reverse the process, too. Rotate the magnet around the wire and it generates a current that can be turned into light, heat, or power.' And that brings us back to Rube Goldberg, a cartoonist who was was shockingly popular in his heyday and whose popularity closely parallels the rise of electrification in America. 'I think Goldberg's drawings reminded his contemporaries of a time when they could understand the world's industrial processes just by looking. No matter how absurd his work was, anyone could trace the reactions involved,' writes Madrigal. 'People like to complain that they can't understand modern cars because of all the fancy parts and electronic doo-dads in them now, but we lost that ability for most things long ago.'"
Niagra falls (Score:3, Informative)
Before the electricity generation station was built there, all the land above the falls was covered in factories, all with their own water wheels.
An alternative plan to electricity was to have around 100 mill races, each making about 500hp, and keeping the factories on site.
Also, they experimented with using hydraulic and mechanical power transfer as a way to transmit power to the nearby towns.
Re:Understanding is not the same as prediction (Score:4, Informative)
Flint and steel is pretty straightforward, though a bit unintuitive. If struck right, you'll actually knock bits of steel off - these have a lot of kinetic energy since you were moving the (much bigger) objects pretty quickly. The blob of steel will glow red hot and light stuff on fire.
Re:New Complexities in Cars (Score:4, Informative)
It's very much necessary. There have been big gains made in efficiency by computerizing spark timing and fuel injector mappings. It's been a boon to reliability, too; how many people these days even know what the term "loose distributor cap" means?
Engines today almost never fail mechanically, precisely because of all those electronic sensors. They'll keep going even with shockingly bad maintenance practices [bimmerforums.com].
Re:most people still don't understand electricity (Score:3, Informative)
There could be real 'magic' performed, with things shining and flying and moving and doing some other work, even moving the dead carcasses of animals!
Thomas Edison tried the electrocuted animal thing back during the War of Currents, when he and Tesla were in a huff about whether AC or DC was better: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_Currents [wikipedia.org]
Apparently, the folks back then were not terribly impressed. Maybe the ancient Romans would have gotten their rocks off at seeing an elephant being electrocuted.
O tempora o mores!
Re:New Complexities in Cars (Score:4, Informative)
Electronic stability control and ABS are hugely important to drive safely? Hahaha. Clearly nobody ever taught you how to drive.
If you take a moment and learn how to properly threshold brake, your braking times will be LESS than with an ABS car if you just panic stop and hold the pedal to the floor.
Traction control is just nanny shit...if you need a computer to cut throttle because you are losing traction obviously you can't drive for shit and should stay the fuck off of the road.
This whole engineer cars to the lowest common denominator is a shame....do we really need all of these thoughtless morons commanding 4,000 pound hunks of plastic, metal and glass? NO.
While it may be the case that a skilled driver can brake better than an ABS system, I'll just note that ABS isn't meant to help you stop more quickly - it's to give you more steering control during your stop. As much as they get derided, Consumer Reports testing experimentally demonstrated this behavior dozens of times over a decade ago.
Re:Understanding is not the same as prediction (Score:3, Informative)
If struck right, you'll actually knock bits of steel off - these have a lot of kinetic energy since you were moving the (much bigger) objects pretty quickly. The blob of steel will glow red hot and light stuff on fire.
There's a little bit more to it than that: tiny bits of iron (thus with a high surface area to volume ratio) will spontaneously combust in air, so they're actually burning, not just glowing. The kinetic heat helps that happen with somewhat larger bits. That's why it works with iron or steel but not other metals to which the same energy transfer argument would otherwise apply (like bronze).
Um... no. (Score:4, Informative)
In other words, tax the rich, and the workers go jobless.
No... it's a little satire on 19th century society. It says nothing whatsoever about taxes. What is says is that it is incumbent upon the wealthy to employ the less wealthy rather than doing things for themselves: it is their public duty to have servants, in other words. It was called noblesse oblige -- the obligations of nobility.
Re:Rrelativity is involved (Score:3, Informative)
HTH
Re:They didn't understand the machinery either. (Score:3, Informative)
ipad?
Re:Understanding (Score:3, Informative)
Auto engineers are incredibly bad at providing decent access for repairs. If they're going to put the fuel pump in the top of the gas tank, how hard would it be to include an access hatch in the trunk floor to get to it?
Nissan(/Infiniti) and Subaru both do this, among others. Chevy and Ford are known for not doing it. I haven't really taken an exhaustive survey otherwise. I've personally done fuel pump replacements on Nissan and Subaru vehicles and there's generally 4-6 bolts holding down a hatch, then 4-6 more bolts or a screw-on plastic unit on the tank itself. Easy as pie. The Subaru fuel pump even plugged into a via connector on the fuel pump lid so you'd only need a 10mm wrench to make the swap if you had a prewired replacement pump. My replacement came from a Legacy; my 240SX pump was from an Infiniti I20. ALL of these vehicles have a common type of pump and you can swap pretty freely, although it's safest to use a pump from a vehicle with the same power or more.