by Robert Bryce
Emboldened by his success in the desert on the Suez Canal, an uncomplicated sea-level waterway, a pompous French diplomat named Ferdinand de Lesseps convinced himself and numerous French investors that he could repeat his success in Panama, and that he could do so by building yet another sea-level canal. He was wrong. Spectacularly wrong. The idea of building a sea-level canal in Panama was foolish from the get-go. But it took years of failure and enormous financial losses before de Lesseps and his French backers finally conceded and the Americans took over.
June 1909: Afro-Caribbean workers operating air drills in the Culebra Cut. (Also known as the Gaillard Cut, in honor of the American engineer David D. Gaillard, who managed the excavation of the Cut during the height of the work on the canal. Gaillard died in 1913, felled by a brain tumor.) Completing the Cut required the removal of 100 million cubic yards of dirt and rock.5 To put that 100 million cubic yards in perspective: Cowboys Stadium—the palatial $1.3 billion home of the Dallas Cowboys, which seats 80,000 people—has a volume of 3.85 million cubic yards.6 Therefore, the material removed from the Cut would fill Cowboys Stadium 26 times. At the peak of construction, about 6,000 workers were excavating the Cut, filling 160 trainloads of spoil per day.7 John Stevens, a dynamic American engineer who headed the canal effort for several years, wrote that the excavation of the Cut was “a proposition greater than was ever undertaken in the engineering history of the world.”8 Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–75161.
The desire for a Faster Cheaper route through Panama that would allow travelers to easily traverse the continent first arose in the early 1500s, when the Spanish explorer Vasco Nuñez de Balboa succeeded in crossing the Isthmus on foot.9 By 1811, a German scientist and adventurer named Alexander von Humboldt was declaring that Nicaragua was the best route for a path between the Pacific and the Atlantic. (Nicaragua continues to be discussed as an option for a new canal. In 2013, a Chinese company announced it had been awarded a hundred-year concession that would allow it to build an alternative to the Panama Canal. The project has an estimated cost of $40 billion.)10
In 1882, the company that de Lesseps controlled, the Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique de Panama, began excavating the Culebra Cut. (The word “culebra” is Spanish for “snake.”) They optimistically estimated that they would be finished with their excavation by 1885.11 The French effort to build the canal failed for many reasons. Chief among them was de Lesseps’s failure to understand the immensity of the excavation that would be required.
In his landmark book on the building of the canal, The Path Between the Seas, historian David McCullough wrote that the variable geology of the Cut was “fascinating terrain to a geologist, but for the engineer it was an unrelieved nightmare.”12 The earth in the region was a mixture of shales, marls, and clays along with some igneous and volcanic rock. The clays were the most problematic because, as McCullough points out, after a heavy rain, they “became thoroughly saturated, slick, and heavy, with a consistency of soap left overnight in water.”13 Numerous landslides forced the engineers to make the Cut wider than they had planned. That was a problem because the nine-mile-long Cut was being made in the saddle between two big hills. As the Cut was widened, more and more dirt, clay, and rock had to be removed. “The deeper the Cut was dug, the worse the slides were, and so the more the slopes had to be carved back,” explains McCullough. “The more digging done, the more digging there was to do. It was a work of Sisyphus on a scale such as engineers had never before faced.”14
August 2, 2013: A cruise ship heading south through the Culebra Cut. The excavation of the Cut, which began in 1882, was ongoing even as this ship passed. Dredging operations, including the use of explosive charges to break up the rock in the Cut, continued nearly around the clock. The sound of the explosions could easily be heard as far away as Canopy Tower, a popular bird-watching spot located about three kilometers (1.5 miles) east of the Cut. Source: Photo by author.
The Cut became known as “Hell’s Gorge” due to the dust, heat, and smoke from the coal-fired steam shovels, and nearly constant noise. The working conditions were made worse by the nearly constant danger of dying on the job. Workers were crushed by equipment or falling rock. Others were killed when dynamite accidentally detonated. From start to finish—and there were plenty of interruptions as the French effort faltered—the excavation of the Cut took thirty-one years until the canal was finally opened to traffic.15
In many ways, the opening of the Panama Canal on August 15, 1914, marks the true beginning of the twentieth century.16 It opened just after the beginning of World War I.17 It opened at about the same time that the internal combustion engine, the automobile, and the airplane were all coming of age—and all of them made transportation Cheaper than ever before. The canal was the first major public works project to utilize electricity on a large scale. The locks were operated by electric motors and switches, all of which were made by an upstart company called General Electric.
Today, a full century after it opened to traffic, the Panama Canal continues to be one of the largest and most astounding feats of human ingenuity on the planet. To transit the canal by boat, or to fly over it in an airplane, is to be awed by the human desire to achieve, to innovate, to go Faster.
The drive toward Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper that the Panama Canal represents is manifest in many other examples throughout human history, and I’ll discuss a few of the most transformative ones in the next chapter. They all have their origins in an innovation engine that has no peer: the human brain.
* The Suez route opened to traffic just six months after the opening of another major public works project aimed at providing Faster Cheaper transportation: the Transcontinental Railroad. In May 1869, the last spike was inserted into railroad ties at Promontory Summit, Utah.
2
THE TREND TOWARD SMALLER FASTER LIGHTER DENSER CHEAPER
THE BRAIN
The gravimetric power density of the human brain is 100,000 times that of the Sun.*
Yes, it sounds implausible. The Sun is massive. It’s the engine for nearly all life on earth. But it is a verifiable fact. My pal Mark Ehsani, an engineering professor at Texas A&M University who heads the school’s Advanced Vehicle Systems Research Program, first told me about the power density of the brain in 2010.1 He walked me through the math. Our brains make up just 2 percent of our body weight, and yet they consume about 20 percent of all the calories we burn.2 The average power flow in the human body is about 100 watts. Twenty percent of that would be 20 watts. The average brain weighs about 1.5 kilos. Simple division, then, shows that the gravimetric power density in the human brain is approximately 13 watts per kilogram. Meanwhile, the gravimetric power density of the Sun is about 0.00019 watts per kilogram.3
The huge difference in power density between the Sun and the brain makes sense when you think about it. The Sun is made up of gases, a big ball of plasma.4 The brain is a tangled mass of fatty liquid. Water is heavy. Gases are not.
The brain is not only extraordinarily power dense, it also supports the most complex network in the universe. As Steven Johnson explains in his 2010 book, Where Good Ideas Come From, the brain contains about 100 billion neurons. And “the average neuron connects to a thousand other neurons scattered across the brain, which means that the adult human brain contains 100 trillion distinct neuronal connections, making it the largest and most complex network on earth.” By comparison, Johnson points out that there are about 40 billion pages on the World Wide Web. “If you assume an average of ten links per page, that means you and I are walking around with a high-density network in our skulls that is orders of magnitude larger than the entirety of the World Wide Web.”5
The brain has greater power density than the Sun, is more complex than the Internet, and yet is so compact, it can fit inside the confines of a St. Louis Cardinals baseball cap. That’s quite a machine. Whether this particular machine was invented by a supreme being or is the result of natural evolutionary proces
ses, it is itself an exemplar of the trend both in nature and society toward density, toward making things Smaller Faster Lighter.
Here are a handful of other historical examples of the trend toward doing more with less.
THE PRINTING PRESS
Sir Francis Bacon (b. 1561, d. 1626) is considered the father of the scientific method, and he named the printing press, gunpowder, and the compass as the most important inventions of his time. In 1620, he wrote that those innovations “have changed the appearance and state of the whole world; first in literature, then in warfare, and lastly in navigation; and innumerable changes have been thence derived, so that no empire, sect, or star appears to have exercised a greater power and influence on human affairs than these mechanical discoveries.”6
While gunpowder and the compass have undoubtedly changed history, I’m sticking with Bacon on his first choice. The printing press—developed in about 1440 by Johannes Gutenberg—allowed books to be Smaller Lighter Faster Cheaper. Sure, the original Gutenberg Bibles were huge, with each page measuring about 17 inches by 12 inches, but as printers got better at their trade, they developed Smaller fonts and better papers, which allowed books to get Lighter. In the decades following Gutenberg, presses were continually refined so that they printed Faster, and as that printing got Faster, books became radically Cheaper.7
1899: The printing operation at Claflin University, a historically black school located in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–107845.
The movable-type invention by Gutenberg (b. 1398, d. 1468) changed the world like no other innovation ever has. As historian Abbott Payson Usher explains, the development of printing, “more than any other single achievement, marks the line of division between medieval and modern technology.” Printing was among the first instance of “the substitution of mechanical devices for direct hand work in the interests of accuracy and refinement in execution as well as reduced cost.”8 In other words, the printing press enabled Faster Cheaper.
By 1500, more than 2,500 European cities had a printing press.9 The proliferation of the printing press made education Cheaper. Once reserved only for the rich, the clerics, and the nobility, Cheaper books allowed common people to access knowledge. Gutenberg’s invention allowed Faster dissemination of discoveries and scientific information. It increased accuracy. And perhaps most important, it took the control of ideas away from the Catholic Church and gave them to the masses. Without the printing press, there would have been no Renaissance, no Reformation. Martin Luther, the German cleric who lit the fuse on the Reformation, once declared that printing was “God’s highest and extremist [sic] act of grace.”10
Today, thanks to the Internet, billions of people on the planet have access to a virtual printing press; they can instantly publish nearly anything they want to say. If they want to read books, they can download them onto their computer. Project Gutenberg, founded by a visionary named Michael S. Hart, now has more than 42,000 books available for download.11 Every one of those books is available for free.
THE VACUUM TUBE
The spread of freedom, democracy, and racial integration around the world has many causes. But one that cannot be overlooked is rock and roll, which along with most of the electronic inventions of the twentieth century was a child of the vacuum tube.
Lee De Forest has never occupied the same hallowed place as Thomas Edison in our pantheon of inventors. But by perfecting the vacuum tube, in much the same way that Edison perfected the lightbulb, De Forest helped birth a seminal technology. De Forest’s vacuum tube changed music, and in doing so, it changed history. The vacuum tube corralled some of the smallest and fastest things known to humans—electrons—and made them malleable. It put those electrons into the hands of creative people, from Buddy Holly and Chuck Berry to Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley, who were ready to twist them into entirely new sounds.
In 1906, De Forest, an American, invented the triode vacuum tube. It was the first electrical device that could amplify a weak electrical signal. Vacuum tubes went into the guts of amplifiers, radio receivers, telephone switchboards, TVs, and nearly every other significant communications device created between 1900 and 1950. The vacuum tube put real power—the wattage needed to be heard at loud volume by large crowds—into the hands of musicians who were ready to, as Jack Black put in School of Rock, “stick it to the man.”15
Perfected by the American inventor Lee De Forest (1873–1961) in 1906, vacuum tubes (sometimes called electron tubes) can take weak signals and make them stronger, or act as a switch to stop and start the flow of electrons.12 When heated to somewhere between 1,000 and 2,400 degrees Celsius, a cathode boils off electrons into the vacuum inside the tube. The electrons then pass through a grid, or several grids, which control the flow of electrons before they reach the anode, where they are absorbed. If the cathode, grid, and anode, are properly designed, the tube boosts a small AC current into a larger one, thereby creating amplification.13 Vacuum tubes were essential to the Information Age. The MANIAC computer built at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, New Jersey—the first computer to use random access memory—used 2,600 of them.14 Source: Photo by author.
Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey, and other big-band leaders needed a dozen or more players to make a big sound. By contrast, relatively low-cost amplifiers hooked to cheap electronic pickups on mass-produced guitars meant that four musicians, or sometimes even just three, could rock the foundation of nearly any building.
The vacuum tube transformed the guitar from an instrument more suited to the parlor and folk singers into a musical-cultural icon that has come to represent youth and rebellion. Armed with a Fender Telecaster—the world’s first commercially successful solid-body electric guitar, introduced in 1950, or another iconic instrument like the Gibson Les Paul (1952) or the Fender Stratocaster (1954)—and an amplifier made by Fender, Vox, or Marshall, a single musician could hold his own against the biggest of the big bands.16 The guitar democratized the making of music. The guitar didn’t require the years of intense training required by more demanding instruments like the violin, clarinet or saxophone. Bob Dylan and a host of other singer-songwriter-rock-and-rollers made their livings with just three or four basic chords. The electric guitar allowed a talented musician like a Hendrix, Eric Clapton, or Freddie King or even untalented ones (a list too long for this book) to bend the minds of tens of thousands of listeners from Wembley Stadium to the Cotton Bowl.
Thanks in large part to the ingenuity of a California radio repairman named Leo Fender, rock and roll gained the tools it needed. Fender used his knowledge of vacuum tubes and electronics to start building guitars, amplifiers, and basses at his shop in the Los Angeles area. Fender’s designs were quickly adopted by musicians like Muddy Waters, Lionel Hampton, Buddy Guy, Keith Richards, Bruce Springsteen, Stevie Ray Vaughan, and ultimately, millions of others.17 Cheap vacuum tubes, which were followed by even Cheaper integrated circuits (which could perform the same functions) allowed musicians more flexibility and tonal range than had ever been imagined.
The vacuum tube birthed rock and roll and set the stage for the Information Revolution. In doing so, it changed the world by making music a global commodity—one that connected people of different cultures, economies and languages by giving them a common lyric and a common beat.
On February 9, 1964, the Beatles made television history by appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show. Paul McCartney played an electric bass. George Harrison and John Lennon played electric guitars. That appearance, watched by an astounding 40 percent of the US population, launched what became known as the British Invasion.18 That transfer of musical styles—all of it made possible by the vacuum tube—helped rock and roll become a global phenomenon. The Beatles’ appearance on the Sullivan show “opened the transatlantic floodgates,” writes Tim Brookes in The Guitar: An American Life. After the Beatles, came other British groups: the Kinks, the Moody Blues, the Who, and, of course, the Rolling Stones. That motley group
of Limeys—the Stones in particular—introduced white American audiences to the black American music that had inspired them. “Perhaps the most important contribution of the British Invasion was in helping America connect with its own past and its alienated present,” writes Brookes.
The advent of rock and roll—which included the success of the Beatles, along with that of black blues artists, and southern singers like Elvis Presley, who was born in Tupelo, Mississippi—undermined long-held prejudices and helped the United States become more integrated. As Brookes points out, rock and roll held a giant mirror in front of Americans and allowed them to see Jimi Hendrix and Freddie King not as black men but as dynamic musicians.
When the Beatles came to America, the Fab Four were asked by an interviewer about what they wanted to see during their visit. They quickly answered “Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley,” the great African American electric-guitarists and performers. When the interviewer didn’t recognize the two names, John Lennon’s “indignation flattened the guy.” Lennon asked, “Don’t you even know your own music?”19
Rock and roll did as much, or more, to bring down the Berlin Wall as any other single factor. In 2003, Mikhail Safonov, a researcher at the Institute of Russian History in St. Petersburg, wrote a piece for The Guardian, in which he declared that it was John Lennon who “murdered the Soviet Union.” Safonov wrote that the history of the Beatles’ persecution in the Soviet Union—their music was banned and the group was prohibited from playing there—was “the history of the self-exposure of the idiocy of Brezhnev’s rule. The more they persecuted something the world had already fallen in love with, the more they exposed the falsehood and hypocrisy of Soviet ideology.”20