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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.
They were just familiar with it.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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.
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...
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.
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. :(
http://www.venganza.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/cupcake1.jpg
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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.
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.
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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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!
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.
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!