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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.
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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.
Most people today likely couldn't explain what electricity is even if they remotely understand what it does... sort of.
I think it only makes sense to build a religion around electricity.
There could be a stone with some writings on it, like:
1. Thou shalt not touch naked electrical wires with bare hands, etc.
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!
It'd be wonderful.
You can't handle the truth.
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.
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.
Oh wait...
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.
Not a typewriter
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.
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
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!
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Can I subscribe to your newsletter - I am going through a difficult time with my faith in the FSM atm, so I am desperately seeking the real truth. Someone sent me this as a present, and I still have nightmares that these things will haunt and eat me. Please help - I am at my wits end. :(
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Why OpalCalc is the best Windows calc
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 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.
...Whoopi's foolish younger brother.
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."
Well if something isn't working right one of the first things to check is "is it on"*. With something mechanical you usually have movement or sound to tell you the answer to that. For a circuit, you have to go get your multimeter- you can't really observe the circuit unaided. Anyone who has worked with breadboard circuits knows how tedious it is to debug a circuit compared to a mechanical device. It may not be magic, but it is always going to be more abstract than physical systems.
*As in you're checking if the "on" switch is actually doing anything.
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My 1990 MB W124 diesel has ABS, yet it doesn't have a single computer anywhere on board, no ECUs, nothing.
The interesting fact is more modern cars with the same basic systems PLUS computers are LESS reliable, and always generating system problems and failures.
Often, the fault is not the "computers" themselves per se, hardware wise, not even software wise, it is the peripherals (eg MAF senders etc) that die, and then take the whole system down.
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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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"'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 have no intuitive way to know current exists? My ass!
Turn on the current and then apply your fingers to the naked wire and then tell me there's no intuitive way to know if current is passing through!
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.
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...
Might want to brush up on your physics. No way in hell it would hold a Farad (ie 1 coulomb per volt). Only very recently can you get 1 farad caps, and they have a peek voltage on the order of 10V or less.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Belts are simple, cheap and provide some useful slip and stretch in a power transmission system. For short range power transmission (a few inches, or so), they're great. They use a lot less material and can tolerate more misalignment than a gear set or chain and sprockets that span the same distance.
When you have to use lots of them, and transmit the power greater distances (more than a few feet), they become unwieldy.
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'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.
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
Well, of course I don't know exactly how fucking magnets work, but ordinary magnets are a side effect of the Theory of Relativity (notice the capitals).
I see, the capitals are an important aspect of the incantation.
When electrical charges move, the charge is changed by the same proportion as masses are changed by the Lorentz contraction.
I have a magnet, and I have a piece of iron, I have no electricity. What does this charge you speak of come from? And How is it moving?
It's quite weird in fact, relativistic effects on mass are barely perceptible until you reach a significant speed compared to the speed of light, but that's because mass (as far as we know) is always positive.
Hang about just a minute. Exactly what does the speed of light have to do with anything here? If relativistic effects are barely perceptible until you get near the speed of light, why bring up the topic in relation to stationary (or very nearly so) magnets?
Electric charges are balanced between positive and negative, a very, very, VERY small change in them will disrupt the delicate balance and a force will appear: the magnetic force.
I've already told you I have no electricity here with my magnet and my iron. So a force appears out of a change in some mysterious electric charges that have no source? It must be magic!
Ahh - My eye!
The doctor said I'm not supposed to get Slashdot in it!
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.
Well actually, yes. That would be correct. While we understand magnetism as a force and how it can be generated, we still don't know WHY or HOW it even existed since the creation of the Universe. Pretty much like gravity and the strong force too.
So while we are very good at understanding our Universe compared to 100 years ago, fundamentally the laws are still "magic or some shit".
Life is not for the lazy.
seriously! I don't have mod points so I give you high five!
These days being a techy or being a car guy crosses over. I can't believe you friend argues that carbs are better than EFI! Yes carbs are more manly cuz you can go in there and just tune it with your hands and it sounds awesome and smells badass. But carbs gotta be tuned all the time and arent exact and can't be controlled on the fly during the whole engine range. Computers can do that for us. Also electronic parts don't need to be tuned. You just replace! Easy as pie.
People just don't wanna have to learn something that they have no clue about. It makes me sad that there seems to be so many more people these days that dont know shit about computers. Like the kids now dont know shit! people think they should cuz they are all texting or using devices and such but all they are doing is using stuff. Knowing how stuff works is a trait that should be more popular but it is not.
Balderdash!
There's this algae that lives in some ponds in the Nelson region of New Zealand that you can't really see during the day but at night time it fluoresces when the water is disturbed.
It's incredibly awesome whether you think its magic sparkly water or whether you understand the biological processes that are going on but all the people in the former category were very angry with me when I explained it.
mediocrity rules, man
My 1990 MB W124 diesel has ABS, yet it doesn't have a single computer anywhere on board, no ECUs, nothing.
Shame. Did it break, or did it get stolen? Either way, this guy seems to have your missing part:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=190370303982&crlp=1_263602_263622&ff4=263602_263622&viewitem=&guid=a3ca01141280a0b58f929422fff4b052&rvr_id=149029369801&ua=M*S%3F&itemid=190370303982#ht_1039wt_736
Cheers!
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
So, do they have a built-in window to let you peek at the voltage, or do you need specialized equipment?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
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.
I piss off bigots.
His piece of iron has lots of MOVING electrons. The don't just sit there and slosh about the nucleus; they are in constant motion. When that motion becomes coherent (mostly moving the same direction, or rather with a similar angular momentum vector) you have a net electric current. It's just that the circuits are on an atomic scale.
HTH
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
It was around 2000 but it still holds true today.
There was a very simple first year practical session I was running for engineering students to do a tensile test on a piece of metal and then plot the results using a spreadsheet. The plan was to drop the existing package and use MS Excel on the grounds that every student knew how to use MS Excel and we could get more done in the time.
It turned into a three hour session on teaching students how to do an incredibly simple line graph because the students didn't really know how to use MS Excel. They only knew how to point and click and had the illusion of familiarity which got in the way of them doing anything. I think about 30% even ended up with a bar graph at some point by completly ignoring the instructions.
The students could do the same task in less than half the time using the very clunky spreadsheet in MS Works, the complete unfamiliarity of which encouraged them to follow instructions instead of clicking randomly and hoping as they did in MS Excel. Some did not complete the two minute task of importing a comma seperated file and generating a line graph within the three hours, let alone anything else. Nobody had that problem with MS Works despite almost none of them seeing it before. It's a crappy spreadsheet and everything SHOULD be faster in MS Excel but perhaps the unfamiliarity actually made them think instead of an infantile pointing at pictures with hope.
Most of the folks that I know that advocate carbs over EFI do so because they want to be able to work on their vehicles on the side of the road. According to them, having an EFI system means that if things go to hell when they are stuck out in the boonies, then they can't break out the toolkit then and there and fix it. When I try to point out to them that proper maintenance should prevent the need to fix your shit out in the boonies, they get belligerent.
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