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Rube Goldberg and the Electrification of America
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.'"
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.
This is a sig. It is like every other sig in the world, except that it is mine, and it is different.
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 were just familiar with it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Well then, please explain to us peons how fuckin' magnets work!
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.
It's a goddamned miracle or magic or some shit, clearly, as was explained to me in Physics class.
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.
I'd like the airbag to be controlled by something too simple to be considered a computer.
# cat
Damn, my RAM is full of llamas.
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.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Take a read on William Forstchen's One Second After for an interesting persepective on how we (as a society) would not do well if suddenly thrown into the dark ages. It is very enlightening.
"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".
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...
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.
That's not really true and the downside is the less likely you will be informed if it's not likely to fire, like that little light that lit up on my dashboard to tell me my airbag was not working.
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.
Why is this even up for discussion? Just show him these pictures:carb vs fuel injector