by Vaclav Smil
FRONTISPIECE 6. An image that embodies aspirations of a new era: “The Progress of the Wheel: The Ousting of the Horse from London Thoroughfares,” portrayed in The Illustrated London News, June 27, 1903.
Orwell also talked about spirit and tempo of life, two elusive but critical concepts that I feel to be essential for real understanding of civilizations. And, serendipity squared, within days after reading Orwell’s essay I came across a fitting frontispiece. Once I decided to precede every chapter of this book with an image that would capture both a key accomplishment and the spirit of innovation to be described in the subsequent pages I realized that it would not be easy to choose an appropriate illustration for these closing reflections. I rejected dozens of possibilities until I came across a 1903 engraving of a “continual procession of motors and cycles” that could be seen “any fine holiday afternoon and Sunday morning” along London’s Kensington High Street.
This picture appears entirely unremarkable when seen from the vantage point of the early 21st century, yet it would have been quite unimaginable in the mid-1860s, and so it conveys perfectly the great technical saltation accomplished during the two pre-WWI generations. And the two portrayed conveyances and their users also tell us much about the attendant socioeconomic impacts. Phrases that come to mind capture the tempo and spirit of modern age: mobility (both in the physical and in the social sense), mass consumption, democratization, opportunity, equality, emancipation, rise of the middle class, recreation and leisure. And also aspiration and anticipation: so much had changed, but so many changes are ahead as those determined riders proceed on their way.
In structuring this chapter, I decided first to fill in some missing perspectives, and I do so in two different ways. But the principal subject of this chapter is to explain, in a terse and resonant manner, those social, economic, and behavioral waves that began to radiate across modern societies after new techniques had disturbed and transformed the traditional surface. Doing this in a fairly comprehensive way would require another book, and that is why my survey of new realities and enduring trends will concentrate only on two conjoined fundamental attributes and legacies of the era: the increase of energy consumption, and mechanized mass production and the delivery of new services.
Missing Perspectives
Writing this book was a constant exercise in restraint. Again and again I wanted to supply more technical details regarding particular inventions because those numbers and their improvement over time tell best the stories of unprecedented achievements and of continuous quest for technical perfection. At the same time, I would have preferred to prepare the ground for these details with generous explanations of conditions that prevailed before the great wave of the late 19th-century innovations, and to enliven the technical presentations by supplying much more personal information regarding the background, effort, and expectations of the era’s leading inventors. And so, exercising restraint once again, I chose only two subjects for this section. Given the recent preoccupation with computers, I first describe the origins and early development of modern data processing. My second choice is to reflect a bit more systematically on personal triumphs, trials, and tragedies, as well as on notable idiosyncrasies, of some of the era’s leading protagonists.
BC (Before Computers)
I did not set out to write a comprehensive history of technical advances brought by the Age of Synergy; instead, I concentrated on the four classes of fundamental innovations that have created and largely defined the 20th century. Even within those confines, there are many omissions and unavoidable simplifications. Undoubtedly, the most important set of innovations that I left out deals with what could be broadly described as modern information management.
Seen from the vantage point of the early 21st century, this may not seem to be an important omission. After all, the enormous post-1970 advances in computing—exemplified by Moore’s law (see figure 1.1)—have greatly overshadowed even those accomplishments that were achieved during the first three decades of computer evolution before 1970. Those post-1970 developments—so promptly translated into widespread ownership of affordable personal machines and leading to the emergence and, after 1993, to very rapid adoption of the Internet—appear to relegate all of the precomputer data management to the category of inconsequentially primitive tinkering. This would be a wrong interpretation of historic reality.
Although semiconductors and microchips, the key components of modern computers, were invented only after WWII, we should not forget that for the first two-thirds of the 20th century, information management was directly beholden to innovations that were introduced well before 1914. The two pre-WWI generations were not as epoch-making for data management as they were for other advances described in this book, but they were much more important than the perspective skewed by recent accomplishments would lead us to believe. This conclusion is justified not only because of the fundamental fact that the age of electronics could not arise without reliable and affordable electricity generation. Two important pre-WWI advances included automated handling and evaluation of massive amounts of statistical information and the invention and widespread diffusion of mechanical and electromechanical calculating devices. Both of them retained their importance until the early 1970s, and I have vivid memories on both accounts.
The first new skill I had to learn after we arrived in the United States in 1969 was to program in FORTRAN. At that time, Penn State was a proud owner of a new IBM 360/67, and there was only one way to talk to the machine: to spend hours at a keypunch producing stacks of programming and data input cards, a technique introduced for the first time by Herman Hollerith (1860–1929) during the 1880s. And a few years later, when I needed to do some weekend calculations at home, I was still lugging from the university one of those portable yet not-so-light Burroughs machines. So here are at least brief reminders of the pre-WWI origins of two modern techniques that were instrumental in ushering the computing age.
Unfinished construction of Charles Babbage’s analytical engine has been the best-studied advance of the early history of automated calculation: more than a dozen books were written about it and its creators (Babbage and Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace); a partial prototype was completed and is now displayed in the Science Museum in London. Curiously, a much more successful effort by George (1785–1873) and Edvard (1821–1881) Scheutz, who succeeded in finishing and actually selling (with difficulty) two of their machines, which could not only do complex calculations but also print the results, remains generally unknown (Lindren 1990).
Both Babbage and the Scheutzes aimed too high, but many simple calculating machines were designed and offered for sale throughout the 19th century (Redin 2003; Chase 1980). Some of them were admirable examples of clever mechanical design, but none of the devices that were offered before 1886 was easy to use, and hence none of them was in demand by the growing office market. The necessity to enter numbers with levers and the absence of printers were the most obvious drawbacks. The first key-operated calculator was the Comptometer designed by Dorr Eugene Felt (1862–1930). Its prototype was housed in a wooden macaroni box and held together by staples and wire, and its production by Felt & Tarrant Manufacturing began in 1886. More than 6,000 units were sold during the subsequent 15 years (Boering 2003). By 1889 Felt added a printer to make the first Comptograph, but the machine never sold well.
A prototype of the first very successful adding and listing device was completed by 1884 by William Seward Burroughs (1857–1898), whose work as a bank clerk motivated him to ease the repetitiveness of tasks and to improve the accuracy of their calculations. In 1886 Burroughs and his three partners formed the American Arithmometer Company (renamed Burroughs Adding Machine Company in 1905), whose first adding machines had a printing mechanism activated by pulling a lever (figure 6.1). Initially modest sales rose rapidly after 1900 with an expanded product line, and their cumulative total reached 50,000 machines by 1907 (with more than 50 models); two decades later it surpassed 1 mill
ion units (Cortada 1993).
Although there was no shortage of competition, Burroughs machines were the world’s dominant calculators throughout the first half of the 20th century. Class 1 models, introduced in 1905 and weighing nearly 30 kg, were famous because of their glass side walls showing the mechanism inside the machine. Subsequent important milestones included the first portable device (9 kg) in 1925, the first electric key-actuated machine three years later, and the first account machine with programmed control panel in 1950 (Hancock 1998). Two years after that a new era began as Burroughs built an electronic memory system for the ENIAC computer, but the company kept producing portable calculators throughout the 1960s (in 1986 it merged with Sperry to form Unisys). For more than eight decades, innumerable calculations, from astronomical ephemerids to artillery tables, were done by hundreds of different models of Burroughs machines and their competitors.
Hollerith’s inventions were both derivative and original. His challenge was to find a practical automatic substitute for the highly labor-intensive, expensive, and increasingly protracted manual tabulation of U.S. Census data, which depended on marking rolls of paper in appropriate tiny squares and then adding them up. Hollerith began to work on a solution in 1882 (after he joined MIT), and in 1884 (after he moved to the U.S. Patent Office) he filed the first of his more than 30 patent applications, which detailed how the information recorded on punch cards would be converted into electrical impulses, which in turn would activate mechanical counters (figure 6.2). The storage medium chosen by Hollerith was first introduced in 1801 when Joseph-Marie Jacquard (1752–1834) programmed complex weaving patterns by the means of stiff pasteboard cards with punched holes. Hollerith’s punched cards could store an individual’s census data on a single card, and in his prototype he used a tram conductor’s ticket punch to make the holes.
His great innovation was not just to have large numbers of these cards read by an automatic machine but to devise means of tabulating the results and to extract information on any particular characteristics or on their revealing combinations. Reading was done by a simple electromechanical device, as spring-mounted nails passed through the holes and made contacts. Punched cards were used to process a large variety of statistical information and to keep records that ranged from the U.S. censuses to particulars of prisoners in Hitler’s Germany, where IBM’s subsidiary Deutsche Hollerith Maschinen was taken over by the Nazis before WWII (Black 2001). The age of encoded paper ended with the rise of magnetic memories, whose advantage includes not only enormous storage capacity per unit volume but also the ease of reuse by erasing the stored information, an obvious impossibility with punched cards.
FIGURE 6.1. Longitudinal section and a plan view of a calculating machine invented by William S. Burroughs and granted U.S. Patent 388,116 in 1888. These images are available at http://www.uspto.gov.
FIGURE 6.2. Holerith’s 1889 machine for compiling statistics (U.S. Patent 395,781). Punched paper strips or cards placed on a stationary nonconducting bed-plate (B) with holes that contain embedded wires are read by lowering a movable platen of pins (C). The circuit wires from the bed-plate are connected to the switchboard (P3). Counters (P4, upper right hand) and sorting box (R) were other prominent features of the apparatus.
Triumphs, Tragedies, Foibles
Although I did sprinkle the text of topical chapters with brief references to some interesting biographical facts, it is obvious that there is vastly more information that could be shared about fascinating or mundane private lives of great innovators and about their fate following their (often singular and brief) sojourns in the public eye. Not surprisingly, there were quite a few deserved triumphs as well as personal and family tragedies. And, as is rather common with creative individuals, many of them behaved in highly idiosyncratic ways, and while some of their beliefs, quirks, and foibles were quaint or amusing, others made them appear unbalanced and even psychotic.
One of the most admirable qualities of many creators of a new technical age, and one of a few readily quantifiable marks of their intellectual triumphs, was their prodigious inventiveness. Edison’s unparalleled record of 1,093 U.S. and 1,239 foreign patents that were granted between 1868 and 1931 (additional 500–600 applications were unsuccessful or abandoned) is by far the best-known achievement in this illustrious category (TAEP 2002). Nearly 40% of his U.S. patents pertained to incandescent lights and to generation and transmission of electricity, with recorded sound, telegraphy and telephony, and batteries being the other major activities and dozens of patents were obtained for ore mining and milling and cement production.
Tesla’s worldwide patent count surpassed 700. Frederick Lanchester, builder of the first British car and the inventor of disk brakes, held more than 400 patents. George Westinghouse, one of the creators of the electric era, amassed 361 patents, the most famous of which was the one for compressed air brake (U.S. Patent 88,929 in 1869) he designed after witnessing a head-on collision of trains between Schenectady and Troy. His other notable railroad-related inventions included automatic signaling and an automatic air and steam coupler; as already noted, he also had numerous patents in the field of new AC generation and transformation (Prout 1921). Among Nobel’s 355 patents are substitutes for rubber and leather, perforated glass nozzles, production of artificial silk, and the world’s first aluminum boat. Ernst Alexanderson had 344 patents, the final one granted in 1973 when he was 95 years old!
These examples show that triumphs of many great innovators of the Age of Synergy were not limited to a single class of devices or to a group of kindred advances within a particular field. Many multitalented thinkers and experimenters left behind entire catalogs of inventions and improvements strewn over their specialty, and frequently extending over several fields. The Siemens brothers contributed to such disparate advances as regenerative furnaces, dynamos, and intercontinental telegraphs. Werner will be always best known for his dynamo, but his inventions included also such unusual devices as electric range-finders, mine exploders, and a continuous alcoholmeter that was used by the Russian government to levy taxes on the production of vodka (Siemens 1893). Tesla’s first U.S. patent, in 1888, was for electric motor (U.S. Patent 391,968; see figure 2.19); his last, in 1928 (U.S. Patent 1,655,114), was for what we would call today the vertical short takeoff and landing aircraft.
Before he designed the first practical electric starter for cars, Charles Kettering patented a driving mechanism for cash registers (U.S. Patent 924,616 in 1909) and later investigated the most suitable antiknocking additives for gasoline. Emile Berliner, the inventor of a loose-contact transmitter and gramophone, also patented a parquet carpet, porous cement tiles designed to improve acoustics of concert halls, lightweight internal combustion engine, and a tethered helicopter that actually lifted the weight of two adults in 1909 (LOC 2002). Besides amplitude modulation and heterodyne, Reginald Fessenden also patented electric gyroscope, sonar oscillator, and a depth finder.
Despite the keen perception and clever thinking that they displayed in technical matters, many inventors turned out be dismal businessmen. Edison spent virtually all of his fortune created by his numerous electrical inventions on his futile enterprise of mining and enriching iron ore in New Jersey. Lee De Forest was not the only inventor who spent a great deal of money on protracted law suits, but he was an exceptionally poor businessman: several of his companies failed, in 1903 he was accused of stealing one of Fessenden’s inventions (and eventually found guilty of patent infringement), and a decade later he was tried with two of his business partners for misleading stock offerings (and found not guilty).
FIGURE 6.3. Oliver Joseph Lodge, one of the leading pioneers of radio age who promised to send the signals from “the other side” after his death.
Other inventors were surprisingly susceptible to fraudulent claims of assorted spiritualist movements that were much in vogue during the late 19th century. Two of the era’s leading British scientists—William Crookes and Oliver Joseph Lodge—became committe
d spiritualists. Lodge (figure 6.3), who shared his spiritualistic enthusiasm with his friend Arthur Conan Doyle, believed that the unseen universe is a great reality to which we really belong and shall one day return (Lodge 1928), and he hoped that after his death he will be able to send a message from “the other side” by using a medium. Carl Kellner, one of the inventors of sulfite papermaking process, was not only a devoted spiritualist but also a student of Asian mysticism (OTO 2003).
Political and social judgments of many famous inventors and industrialists of the era were also questionable. Henry Ford’s antisemitism was of such an intensity that in the early 1920s his framed photograph hung on the wall of Hitler’s Munich office and copies of the German edition of The International Jew, a series of articles that appeared in Ford’s newspaper The Dearborn Independent (1922), were displayed on the future Fuhrer’s table (Baldwin 2002). And in 1935, before the Fascist invasion of Ethiopia, Louis Lumière dedicated his photograph to il Duce “avec l’expression de ma profonde admiration,” while in July 1941 the name of his brother Auguste appeared on the list of French ultracollaborators who created the Légion Volontaires Franñais to fight along with the Nazis (Cercle Marc Bloch 1999).
And while it is not surprising that a large and disparate group of pre-WWI innovators included individuals with dubious or even reprehensible beliefs, one of the last attributes one would associate with the creators of a new era would be their lack of imagination. Counterintuitively, this was not an uncommon failing. Recognized excellence in a particular field is no guarantee that every technical judgment would be acute and rewarding; it is perhaps the most fascinating idiosyncrasy of the creative process to see that many minds that were so inventive and so open to radical experimentation could be at the same time surprisingly resistant to other, and not even so shocking, ideas. One demonstration of this conservative behavior is the reluctance, or an outright refusal, to carry some inventions even a step further. There is no special term for this attitude, but Watt’s syndrome may be a good description.