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.'"
Understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
I derive a great amount of personal satisfaction from learning and understanding how things work. I find I'm definitely a minority in that respect. It saddens me.
Poem from the early days of electricity. (Score:3, Insightful)
Lord Finchley tried to mend the Electric Light
Himself. It struck him dead: And serve him right!
It is the business of the wealthy man
To give employment to the artisan.
Hillaire Belloc
They didn't understand the machinery either. (Score:5, Insightful)
They were just familiar with it.
Re:Lost the ability? (Score:3, Insightful)
Well then, please explain to us peons how fuckin' magnets work!
Understanding is not the same as prediction (Score:5, Insightful)
I think Goldberg's drawings reminded his contemporaries of a time when they could understand the world's industrial processes just by looking
I think predict would be a more accurate description. Understanding is not the same as prediction, though it helps make better predictions.
I could could predict that something would fall in a certain scenario even though I don't understand much about gravity. Most of us nerds aren't satisfied with mere prediction, we seek understanding (which helps us make better predictions). But "normal" people don't care that much about understanding stuff, they are happy with just being able to predict stuff. So keep the windows and icons in the same places and they will be happy that they can repeat the same steps to get their stuff done.
So yes, from the electrical age to the computer age many things have become less predictable. A live wire that's deadly could look the same as one that has no electricity flowing in it.
But in the US anyway, flip a switch and you can turn the lights on fairly predictably. More predictably than gathering firewood, starting your own fire from a "magical match" or even a flint (do normal people actually understand how matches work?), or being able to get enough tallow to make your own candles for the night.
So other things have become more predictable.
Re:Lost the ability? (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a goddamned miracle or magic or some shit, clearly, as was explained to me in Physics class.
New Complexities in Cars (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't think most people who have opinions against the computerization of cars have negative opinions because they don't understand it. I'm a programmer, and I have a negative opinion of the computerization and software control of cars for quite another reason ... it simply isn't necessary.
How do you know if your car is transmitting your location to a 3rd party ? Answer ... you don't.
How do you know if the software controlling the throttle doesn't have bugs ? Ask the Toyota owners who found themselves driving into buildings.
How do you make modifications to the vehicle to increase performance / increase gas mileage ? Answer ... you have to rip out all the un-necessary junk the manufacture put in it.
Mechanics at car dealers are already incompetent when it comes to servicing vehicles. I bought a used car from a couple, who had taken it to a dealer, and paid $100 for the dealer to say "Sorry, we can't find anything wrong with it." That is why the couple sold the car to me, without telling me the engine would spontaneously shut down. 15 minutes of searching on the web, and $60 later, and I fixed the car. This process would have taken much longer had the car had all it's systems "computerized."
Good luck fixing your On-Star'd ... Computerized transmission, computerized throttle control, computerized braking system, computerized POS on the side of the road. It's not gonna happen.
Re:They didn't understand the machinery either. (Score:5, Insightful)
They had to understand most of it to operate it properly.
Back in The Day, when Popular Mechanics literally MEANT "popular mechanics", machines didn't stay functional without understanding operators and frequent maintenance.
Get the spark advance and throttle wrong on a Model T Ford and it won't start, or won't run properly if it does start. Changing transmission bands was routine, as was carrying spares. The reason old machines had LOTS of CONVENIENT access covers was that they were necessary.
http://www.cimorelli.com/projects/relining_transmission_bands/relining_model_t_transmission_bands.htm [cimorelli.com]
If you drove a car, you were expected to be able to not only swap a spare wheel when you got a flat, but be able to repair the flat by patching the tube. Materials wore quickly and lubricants weren't very good, so a "grease pit" was a common feature of HOME garages. Brakes were trash by modern standards, so DIY brake jobs were very common for many decades.
High personal involvement with what one used and drove was standard through the 1950s.
Rube & the interwebs (Score:1, Insightful)
Looks like ol' Rube rigged his web site [rubegoldberg.com] the way he rigged his machines, but this time it's broken [wikipedia.org]. ;-)
Re:Understanding (Score:3, Insightful)
I derive a great amount of personal satisfaction from learning and understanding how things work. I find I'm definitely a minority in that respect. It saddens me.
I actually find that most people are interested in understanding how things work. However, most people don't have time to learn advanced physics or learn how other things work because they are more worried being busy raising kids, feeding their family, maintaining social relationships, or dealing with crime in their neighborhood.
It's just the nerds that grew up in suburbia and never leave their computers who think that they are special.
Actually, electricity is simpler (Score:5, Insightful)
If you read documents from the early history of the telegraph industry, you find that it was considered easier to hire and train "electricians" than "mechanics". People who could understand and fix printing telegraphs, which are complex mechanical devices, were hard to get. People who could wire up simple key-and-sounder Morse systems, maintain the batteries, and use the things were cheaper and easier to train.
Building working mechanical devices is hard, and designing complex ones is very hard. There aren't that many good mechanism designers, and there never were. Edison was one. All the good Teletype machines were designed by one man, Edward Kleinschmidt. Only a few people ever designed good mechanical calculators. It was really tough before CAD; when Burroughs was designing the first good adding machine, he had to draw on zinc sheets with scribing tools, because paper wasn't dimensionally stable enough. Even today it's tough. You have to design within the limits of what can be manufactured, what can be manufactured cheaply, what doesn't need an excessive parts count, what will wear well, and such.
Bad mechanism designers today tend to build things that have too many moving parts and are overly expensive to build. If you build mechanical devices from standard components, the way you build electronics, you get a big kludge.
Re:New Complexities in Cars (Score:5, Insightful)
I'd like the airbag to be controlled by something too simple to be considered a computer.
Re:Distributor caps and a strobe light (Score:4, Insightful)
Teenage boys are still car geeks, if car forums are to be believed.
They grew up with EFI and don't know they shouldn't be able to understand it.
Re:Understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
I find the opposite. Your average American wouldn't bother learning how things work even if they had all the time in the world. When I try to explain computer concepts to my kid-raising, family-feeding, social-relationship-maintaining co-workers, they usually just shake their heads and say "that's way over my head."
Given the extra time, most of them would probably spend it watching TV, going out to eat, or reading trashy novels.
Insightful Novel about EMP devastation to society (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:\lim_{tech \to commodity} = iMac (Score:3, Insightful)
"Anyway, it would not have taken thousands of years of human civilisation, including a mathematical and scientific component, to reach F=ma if classical mechanics were really that obvious."
You're forgetting systems of social organization and hierarchy have direct effects on whether scientific thinking is even possible. I'm sure many individuals of the ancient world made great progress towards scientific thinking but due to political or environmental (economic) circumstances beyond their control stopped this process. I see scientific progress as a matter of fits and starts area's of world history where it can incubate before some upheaval takes place that prevents reaching conceptual "singularity".
radio waves (Score:4, Insightful)
So now with this knowledge behind us, we are facing exactly the same thing again with radio waves instead of electricity.
All the people who can't conceive of how RF energy works are swearing that we'll all die if we use a cell phone, and much of the public seems to be buying it.
A generation from now radio waves will be common place enough that people don't worry about their cell phone killing them, but some new technology will come about and make everyone paranoid again.
Oh for a bit of science education of the masses...
Re:Actually, electricity is simpler (Score:3, Insightful)
It's not that electricity is simpler, it's just that it leads to simpler solutions for telegraphs. Take something like a deadbolt lock and make an electric version, with a power source, switch, and solenoid, and tell me which is simpler to understand.
Re:New Complexities in Cars (Score:1, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-lock_braking_system#Early_Anti-lock_Brake_System [wikipedia.org]
Not a computer in sight... In the 20s computers were people. In the 40s they filled buildings... Anti lock invented in the 20s.
Computer controlled ABS lets for better stability in a turn and uneven slick surfaces.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airbag#History [wikipedia.org]
Computer controlled air bags lets you do things such as figure out the velocity of the car and put just enough air in so you dont smash the person as much.
Small computers for cars did not come about until the early 80s (at least common place). As by that point they were small enough and reliable enough.
Dont let the fact you grew up with computers shade the fact that these dudes created some amazing things without them, AT ALL. Not even to calculate things we wouldnt think twice today about pumping into a computer.
Now on the other hand computers have made our cars a zillion times more reliable. But also a zillion times more complex. For example the AC/Heater control on my car just ate itself. Back in the day it would have been a matter of put a scope on it and find the short and replace the shorted wire/part. These days I will probably have to pull half the dash apart and then junk the whole part as it would take me a week to find the 1mmx1mm surface mount resistor that probably ate itself.
Re:Understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually find that most people are interested in understanding how things work. However, most people don't have time to learn advanced physics or learn how other things work because they are more worried being busy raising kids, feeding their family, maintaining social relationships
Raising a family and having a social life are choices. Nobody is forced to do either.
I generally feel that some of the basic human needs are (1) being loved and accepted, and (2) doing your own thing. Everyone has to balance between these two, since they are conflicting to some extent. I think nerds/geeks are simply the ones who choose to do a little more of (2).
Re:New Complexities in Cars (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd like the airbag to be controlled by something too simple to be considered a computer.
I want the airbag to fire when needed and only when needed.
Simplicity for it's own sake is not a virtue.
Re:Understanding (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Understanding (Score:5, Insightful)
I derive a great amount of personal satisfaction from learning and understanding how things work. I find I'm definitely a minority in that respect. It saddens me.
I actually find that most people are interested in understanding how things work. However, most people don't have time to learn advanced physics or learn how other things work because they are more worried being busy raising kids, feeding their family, maintaining social relationships, or dealing with crime in their neighborhood.
It's just the nerds that grew up in suburbia and never leave their computers who think that they are special.
Your mileage has obviously varied from mine...
I spent the last 7 years of my life working for a small IT shop providing support to local businesses, private individuals, college students, and anyone else with a broken computer.
It's been my experience that folks simply do not care to learn how things work. It isn't a matter of not having time, they just don't care. They've got their job, their set of tasks, and that's all they care about. They don't want to know anything more than that.
Obviously there's individual variation. I find computers interesting, so I've learned a lot about them. Some other person finds plants interesting and has learned a lot about gardening. And not everyone is averse to learning about new things.
But I've found an awful lot of people just aren't curious. They don't know how something works, they don't care how it works, and they'll actively resist learning about it.
I've tried to teach people how to work the computers they're sitting in front of... How to use the software that's necessary for them to do their jobs... And they'll almost instantly declare that something is beyond them as soon as you vary one hair from their daily routine. Try to explain that you can move an icon to a different place on the screen? "I just don't understand those computer things..."
I'm not sure that your average human being has ever been terribly curious. Maybe it's always been somewhat atypical.
But curiosity is definitely being discouraged these days. You aren't supposed to ask too many questions. You aren't supposed to do anything too unusual. Better not do anything suspicious...
Geeks, almost by definition, are curious creatures. Not just IT geeks. Anyone with the drive and passion to really find out how things work - be it a computer programmer, an automotive mechanic, a structural engineer, a geologist, or whatever - is going to fall outside of the social norm. That's why they're called "geeks".
Re:New Complexities in Cars (Score:3, Insightful)
Simplicity is a great thing for debugging but does not decrease probability of failure. Classic case in point you have a valve that is held open by air, with a bigarse spring to close it when the air is removed, a standard failsafe trip valve. The single most simple mechanism of hooking it up is to have a solenoid that dumps air from the valve and the spring forces it to close. Yet a better option would be to have two solenoids in parallel in case one fails. Yet an even better option would be to have positional feedback along with a partial stroke test unit which will jog the valve ever so slightly to ensure that when the air is removed the valve will also move and isn't physically jammed.
The last option is complicated and relies on quite a lot of a smart computer gear compared to 1x air, 1x spring, 1x 24V power and 1x solenoid. But I know which I would rather stake my life on. And just like my trip to the mechanic a few years ago, I'd much rather bet my life on an airbag which told me when I started the car that it wasn't working, rather than finding out the painful way.
Re:Distributor caps and a strobe light (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Understanding (Score:3, Insightful)
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?
Engineers that think it's OK to make you half disassemble the car to change a spark plug should be sentenced to travel the country doing exactly that for free until the last such vehicle is crushed.