(Kevin Kelly)
vo: Bootstrapping the Industrial Age
March 2007
One of favorite games for engineers is to imagine how they could reinvent an essential technique from scratch. If you were stuck on an island, or survivor after the Apocalypse, and we needed to make, say, a blade, or a book, maybe a pair of radios operating, what would be need to forge iron, make paper, or create electricity?
On occasion, the tinkerers find themselves in a position to put their game in practice. In February 1942, R. Bradley, a British officer of the Royal Artillery, was captured and held prisoner by the Japanese in Singapore. Their camp was isolated supplies almost nonexistent, and they were harshly treated as prisoners of war when they rebelled, they were locked in a shed isolation without food. But then, they were yourselfers. With other prisoners in the camp, Bradley subtilised hand tools to Japanese soldiers, and with these disparate elements, he turned to scrap in a miniature lathe. The short tour was ingenious. It was small enough to be kept secret, and large enough to be useful. It could be disassembled into pieces that could be stowed in a backpack, and transported to the mercy of frequent relocation camp. As large metal parts were readily available without attracting attention, the tailstock of the tour consisted of two steel parts assembled dovetail. The original platform was cut with a chisel.
The tower was an egg could hatch from which tools and was used to make things more sophisticated. With him, the prisoners usinèrent a duplicate key to the hangar isolation (!), And fabricated a battery that powered a radio hidden secret. During the two years of their captivity, the tour made its turn the tools - as taps or punches - which had been used to create it. A tour to these self-reproducing qualities.
Recently, a guy has reinvented the fabric of industrial society in his garage. Fire Dave Gingery was a machinist by night in Springfield, Missouri, who relished the challenge of making something from nothing, or perhaps it is fairer to say how many by leveraging the power of little . After years of tinkering, Gingery managed to assemble a complete workshop zero from scrap dropped. It was summary tools that were better tools, which then were sufficient tools to make real stuff.
Gingery began with a simple backyard foundry. It was a 20-liter bucket filled with sand. At its core, charcoal grill smoldering in a tin of coffee. Inside the box of coal, there was a small ceramic crucible in which he threw pieces of aluminum - cans, etc.. With a fan, Gingery blew air into the furnace rudimentary, which burned coal hot enough to melt aluminum. He poured molten metal into a mold wet sand carved to the shape he wanted. When the cast was cool, he had a platform usable metal, which became the heart of a handmade lap. Other elements of the tower were cast. It ends with these coarse hand tools. His only "cheating" was to add an electric motor used - although not impossible to imagine a version powered by wind or hydro.
When the tour was in rough condition, he used to turn parts of a drill press. With the drill running around and he constantly reworked parts of the tower itself, replacing components with improved versions. Thus, his tiny shop was an incremental device capable of generating a machine with higher precision than himself. He used this tool to create incremental to manufacture parts of a milling machine fully operational. When the mill was finished, he could do just about anything.
Gingery recreational developments in the technology's vast scheme by which simple tools create more complex tools and so on to infinity. This expansion of power of creation is the means by incremental which a whole culture is drawn from the creek by doing. However, it is obvious that this little demonstration is not absolute. As a process to manufacture its own machine tools, Gingery's plan is perfect. It uses the font from engine washing machines and other scrap discharge, to mount a workshop rather robust. But if you want an example of recovery technology company in the manner of Robinson Crusoe - land somewhere and start a civilization - it's cheating, because in the latter game, you do not get started with aluminum cans abandoned nuts and bolts of recovery, old electric motors and scrap metal. To really make the course a minimum of tinkering around the industrial network, we should start by finding its own ore, mine and refine it with primitive tools, bake bricks, sheet metal rolling, manufacture of screws and bolts to hand - all just to get to the point where we have enough tools and materials for making simple foundry bucket of 20 liters, which began Gingery.
Every weekend, some twenty American schools provide a survival course on how to make their own clothes from skin, cut a knife into a stone or bone, cut and assemble a shelter from trees and, more generally, living off the land with self-made tools. They start earlier than Gingery - with elements such as we find in nature. That's a lot of work. You can start a fire without matches, but only after a long drive, almost as much as to become a pro in a video game. Even with all the tools the best expert in the world can do so from scratch (one hundred), it's a hard life that attracts few people.
Beyond these primitive tools, the interdependence of artifacts is incredible. Randomly select an object among thousands to reach the place where you sit. None could exist without many others around. No technology is an island.
Take an object very sophisticated: a web page. A web page may depend on a hundred thousand other inventions, all required for its birth and to prolong its existence. There is a web page anywhere without the invention of HTML code without computer programming, without LED or cathode ray tube, without computer chips, semiconductor, without phone line, without repeater signals over long distances without electrical generator without turbine at high speed without stainless steel, without molding, and without control of fire. None of these inventions concrete exist without the inventions that are basic writing, an alphabet, hyperlinks, indexes, catalogs, archives, libraries and the scientific method itself. To recreate a web page, you must recreate all these other functions. You might as well recreate the modern society.
more we try to disentangle this network of interdependencies, for pulling a single discovery of the skein of inventions related thereto or necessary, the more it all becomes meaningless. We get the same support network for any substance or device today. Antibiotics? A field of invention that begins with sterilization techniques, through the paths of chemistry, the technique of pumping, packaging innovations, the study of animal testing procedures, statistical analysis, and many more are needed.
is why a sophisticated society again after a devastating setback is so difficult. Not all adjacent objects in a given ecosystem, technology alone can not have any effect, so we need that they all work to make a run, so we should fix them all at once. When a war, an earthquake, tsunami, flood or fire destroy the infrastructure of a society without detail, the task of rediscovering all at the same time is impossible. Proof of this interdependence is the deep puzzle of disaster relief: we need roads to bring fuel, but gasoline to put the roads in repair; medicines to treat people, but people in good health to dispense drugs; communications to initiate the organization but the organization to restore communications. Above all when we see it collapsing platform interdependent technology.
This also explains why it is better not to confuse an unobstructed view of the future and the short-term . You can see the precise contours to which technology is going, but we tend to overestimate the proximity of his coming. Usually, the delay (in our eager eyes) is due invisible to the ecology of other technologies that are not yet ready. The invention will remain suspended in the future for many years without coming closer to this. Then, when the co-ignored technology are in place, it will appear suddenly in our lives, accompanied by surprise and applause for his unexpected appearance.
0 comments:
Post a Comment