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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.'"
Isn't necessary? Electronic Stability Control and Anti-lock Breaking Systems are hugely important to safe drive, and they aren't something that you can do without computer systems of some sort. Likewise, systems to monitor the tire pressure, while not strictly speaking necessary, do go a long way towards avoiding blowouts.
And would you really want to drive a car where the airbag wasn't controlled by a computer?
Sure it means that you can't fix it yourself, but honestly, how many people are going to be able to do it themselves anyways? That's not exactly simple equipment to work on, and the results of getting it wrong are potentially lethal.
I find "visual" mechanics, i.e. anything which supposedly can be deduced by cursory visual observation rather than a consideration of theory and careful experimentation, most difficult of all. Sometimes I go so far as to wonder whether people who stare at an engine and start waffling in detail about what bit does what, how and why are simply regurgitating what they have read in a book.
Contrast with quantum mechanics, which may not be "intuitive" to those who find classical mechanics so. But it is precisely why it makes me feel more comfortable. I rely on the facts presented, not on everyone's favourite harbinger of prejudice, common sense, and her sister in arms, the crude analogy. 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.
IMHO 'magic' is anything that the user doesn't understand (which is true at some level of everything) - for some folks, turning on a light switch is performing magic. But then there's this...
The Ark of the Covenant may have been a really big capacitor - two layers of conductor (gold foil) separated by acacia wood, with the two layers each connected to one of the cherubim that rose above and reached toward each other - essentially forming two points for an arc to traverse under the right circumstances. In the desert, this might well build up a pretty good charge. I think some folks at MIT once built a replica, borrowing the gold from somewhere - it could hold a one farad charge IIRC.
(Blue Letter Bible.
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
If you have an old 78rpm record, you can make a record player in about three minutes, to show kids how sound recording works.
Push a needle through an empty matchbox, put the record on something that you can spin (like the turntable in a microwave). Spin the record and touch the needle to the grooves, and the sound will come out of the matchbox. Kids love it! Then point out the wiggly grooves to them.
A compact disc isn't directly understandable like that. You can teach people how it works, but they can't see it so they just have to take your word for it.
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Nowadays, they use the electronics to compensate for less robust mechanical design. A lot of work and expense used to be put into making mechanical control systems linear and well behaved.
Now, instead you use position sensors and servo motors or other actuators with a microcontroller doing the translation in between. Who cares how bouncy, slippy, or hysteresis laden the system is? You just compensate for it in the software that calculates the control outputs to the actuator.
I'm a car geek and also into technology and computers. I have arguments with my "mechanically inclined" friend about carbs vs efi all the time. If you understand integrated devices and can plug in a multimeter, it's actually easier to work with computers. I can diagnose a fueling problem on my VW by plugging in my laptop and getting statistics.
1 - Car is running like crap, bogs when driving
2 - Plug in computer and get code (let's say the Coolant Temp sensor is malfunctioning)
3 - Plug in multimeter into said sensor and get voltage
4 - If the voltage is not between x and y, replace the sensor.
5 - If all else fails, replace the ECU for a total of $50 at a junkyard
How is this so difficult? Technology makes cars easier to work on, it's just that tech hipsters don't want to get dirty and car-geeks don't want to use that new fangled computer stuff.
I bet that if you asked a dozen people in their 30s what makes an electric motor work, you'd be lucky to get one who was even close to understanding the basics of how it works.
Define "works". I'm willing to bet that very VERY few people really understand how an electric motor actually works. Sure, some could say "it uses brushes that switch on/off electromagnets at synchronized times," but *HOW* does it work? What is an electromagnet actually doing to convert electrical energy into physical movement? What is a magnetic field? Why does it cause certain metals to move?
I'm reminded of this (rather profound) video of Richard Feynman being asked what, exactly, is magnetism and he explains just how difficult these questions are to answer.
My point is that you lament that certain people don't even know about brush and electromagnets, while a physicist might lament that you have very little idea what is actually happening with electromagnetic forces. Now, you might reply, "I don't need to know Deep Physics to have a basic understanding of how a motor works!"
And I would say, "exactly." We are all ignorant, just different levels of ignorance. It really doesn't matter how a motor works to most people's lives. Sure, it's interesting, but then, so is knowing how to shoot a proper jump shot in basketball.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.