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.'"

Comments

Understanding

[dr_strang]

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.

Re:Understanding

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

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.

Re:Understanding

[Ephemeriis]

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".

Understanding is not the same as prediction

[TheLink]

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?

[Nursie]

It's a goddamned miracle or magic or some shit, clearly, as was explained to me in Physics class.

Re:They didn't understand the machinery either.

[couchslug]

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

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.

I'm glad modern OS's aren't Goldberg machines!

[pigiron]

Oh wait...

Actually, electricity is simpler

[Animats]

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:Distributor caps and a strobe light

[Oceanplexian]

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.