by Robert Bryce
The diesel and the jet turbine, like many other innovations, have brought us great convenience, and in doing so have exacted a price. Nevertheless, the diesel and jet turbine have helped conquer the tyranny of distance; they made the global economy just that—global.
THE TELESCOPE AND MICROSCOPE
The telescope brought the distant nearer. The microscope made the tiny larger. They were the first true extensions of the most important of the human senses. Together, they were the pivotal instruments of the Scientific Revolution. The telescope destroyed the myth of a geocentric universe; the microscope hinted at the nanogalaxies inside cells and molecules. Armed with them, astronomers and physicians could peer into worlds that had never been imagined.
We use those same devices today—albeit far more powerful ones—to peer light-years into space and down to the angstrom level of the atom.* In short, the telescope and the microscope made magnification Cheaper. They allowed ordinary people to see celestial and microscopic phenomena for themselves.
A woodcut of a man looking through a telescope. This image was published in 1637 in “La Dioptrique,” an essay by Descartes. Source: Library of Congress, LC-USZ62–110450.
For centuries, humans have been making ever more powerful devices in order to see things that are Smaller and more distant. That pursuit blossomed with Galileo Galilei (b. 1564, d. 1642) and Antoni van Leeuwenhoek (b. 1632, d. 1723), the father of microscopy. Obvious examples of continuity are the 11-meter-wide mirror of the Hobby-Eberly Telescope in Fort Davis, Texas, and the University of Manchester’s “microsphere nanoscope,” which can examine objects as small as 50 nanometers across.70 (A nanometer is one-billionth of a meter.)
Galileo wasn’t the first to use a telescope. But the improvements that he made to that device allowed him to use the telescope as a weapon in the war between reason and faith. In 1610, after months of observations using a 20-power telescope for which he had ground his own lenses, Galileo published his Sidereus Nuncius (The Message from the Stars), a forty-page pamphlet.71 It was the first scientific treatise based on telescopic observations.72 Arthur Koestler in his history of astronomy, The Sleepwalkers, declared that Galileo’s “short but momentous book . . . heralded the assault on the universe with a new weapon, an optic battering ram, the telescope.”73
The knowledge that came from Galileo’s optic battering ram made him a target for the Catholic Church and the Inquisition. In 1633, the Church forced Galileo to recant his belief in the Copernican theory of the solar system—with the Sun, not the Earth at its center—a move that saved Galileo from being burned at the stake. (In 1992, Vatican officials finally admitted that Galileo had been right.)74 While the Church may have had the muscle to force Galileo to recant, it couldn’t stop the Scientific Revolution, nor prevent others from confirming his work.
Since the days of Galileo, a “telescope race” has continued unabated as astronomers have sought more powerful devices. Galileo himself relied on telescopes that were about 1 to 1.2 meters (3 to 4 feet) in length.75 By the 1670s, the Polish astronomer Johannes Hevelius had built a telescope 140 feet long.76 Since then, designers have come up with a variety of ways to increase the power of telescopes while decreasing their cost. A similar push for Cheaper magnification occurred in microscopy.
Van Leeuwenhoek wasn’t the first to build a microscope. But like Galileo, he made critical improvements to the device. Also like Galileo, he relied on himself to grind and polish his own lenses. While other microscopes of the seventeenth century could provide magnification of about 50x, van Leeuwenhoek was able to achieve magnifications of about 270x.77 That magnification allowed him to be the first to see and describe bacteria, muscle fibers, capillaries, and single-celled organisms. The microscope allowed scientists to study the structure of cells and examine microorganisms. Today, the microscope is commonly used in medical clinics and offices all over the world to examine specimens and help diagnose illnesses.
The American photographer Gordon Parks took this photo of students using microscopes at Bethune-Cookman College in 1943. Source: Library of Congress, LC-USW3–017132-C.
Nearly three hundred years after van Leeuwenhoek’s death, consumers can easily purchase microscopes that are twice as powerful as those he used, but spend only $100 or so. A telescope with twice the magnification of the ones used by Galileo can be had for half that sum.78 By making magnification Cheaper, the telescope and the microscope democratized science and learning. By bringing the distant near and making the small large, the telescope and microscope liberated the human mind from the intellectual straitjackets of the Church. Thus, they provided the foundation for much of modern science and modern society.
THE PEARL STREET POWER PLANT
In just one year, 1882, Thomas Edison completed 106 successful patent applications. Ponder that for a moment. The great inventor died in 1931 at age 84.79 In his lifetime, he was awarded 1,093 US patents.80 Thus, in a single year, 1882, the Wizard of Menlo Park obtained nearly 10 percent of all the patents he would accumulate over his lifetime. No other inventor in US history—with the possible exception of Ravi Arimilli, a researcher for IBM who claimed 78 patents in 2002—has come close to the single-year record that Edison set.81 His patent record is akin to Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in baseball in 1941 or the 100 points that Wilt Chamberlain scored in a single basketball game back in 1962.82
On September 4, 1882, Edison began providing electricity from a coal-fired facility located at 255–257 Pearl Street near the southern tip of Manhattan. In doing so, he almost single-handedly created modernity. The 600-kilowatt generator was the world’s first centralized power plant, and it sparked a wave of electrification that continues to this day.
Edison’s Pearl Street plant made lighting Cheaper. Author David E. Nye explains that Edison’s electric lights were “unlike all previous lights, whether candles, oil lamps, torches, fires, or gas mantles. Light by definition had always implied consumption of oxygen, smoke, flickering, heat, and danger of fire. For all of human experience light and fire had been synonymous.” With his incandescent bulbs, Edison provided light that was “at once mild and intense, smokeless, fireless, steady, seemingly inexhaustible . . . The enclosed light bulb seemed an impossible paradox. Fire and light would never again be identical.”83
Electricity is the fire of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries. Electricity has changed human society like no other form of energy. Edison’s breakthrough designs at the Pearl Street plant allowed humans to reproduce the lightning of the sky and use it for melting, heating, lighting, precision machining, and a great many other uses. Electric lights meant workers could see better and therefore make more precise drawings and fittings. Electricity allowed steel producers to operate their furnaces with greater precision, which led to advances in metallurgy. Electric power allowed factories to operate drills and other precision equipment at speeds unimaginable on the old pulley-driven systems, which relied on waterwheels or steam power. As Henry Ford wrote in 1930, without electricity “there could be nothing of what we call modern industry.” Electricity, he said, “emancipated industry from the leather belt and the line shaft.”84
Thomas Edison in an undated photograph. Source: Library of Congress, Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62–78996.
Edison understood the importance of the Pearl Street endeavor, later calling it “the biggest and most responsible thing I had ever undertaken . . . Success meant world-wide adoption of our central-station plan.”85 By 1890, just eight years after Edison launched the beginning of the new world, there were a thousand central power stations in the United States, and new ones were being added at a frenzied pace.86 Edison’s coal-fired power plant was directly responsible for the construction of thousands of others, and that building boom continues to this day.
In late 2013, Maria Van der Hoeven, executive director of the International Energy Agency, remarked on the soaring use of coal, saying that coal is “really emerging as a fuel of choice because of its ab
undance and affordability.” Between 2010 and 2015, the countries of the world are expected to add 285 gigawatts of new coal-fired electric generation capacity. For comparison over that same time period, just 20 gigawatts of nuclear capacity is expected to be built.87 The proliferation of coal-fired electricity that has given us access to lighting and countless other technologies has also caused a dramatic increase in coal mining, which has taken a heavy toll on miners, particularly those who mine underground. Although coal-combustion technologies have improved since Edison’s day, burning coal to produce electricity also releases huge quantities of air pollutants and heavy metals. Those pollutants have taken an additional toll. Coal-fired power plants are among the world’s biggest producers of carbon dioxide, the gas that contributes to climate change.
It’s readily apparent that the electricity revolution that started on Pearl Street in 1882 has come with a cost. But it’s also easy to forget the benefits. Indeed, we’ve largely forgotten just how awe-inspiring artificial lighting can be. In April 1880, two years before Edison began operating the Pearl Street plant, the town of Wabash, Indiana, arranged to have four big arc lights—each with 3,000-candle power—set up at the courthouse. At that time, artificial light was rare, and promoters traveled the country to demonstrate the power of their arc lights. The excitement preceding the event was so great that special trains were arranged to help carry some 10,000 visitors, along with reporters from forty newspapers, into the Indiana town.
As darkness fell on the settlement on that spring night in 1880, a reporter for the Wabash Plain Dealer explained that the town “presented a gloomy uninviting appearance.”88 When the arc lights were switched on, the flood of light should have “caused a shout of rejoicing from the thousands who had been crowding and jostling each other in the deep darkness of the evening.” Instead, “No shout, however, or token of joy disturbed the deep silence which suddenly enveloped the onlookers.” The crowd “stood overwhelmed with awe, as if in the presence of the supernatural. The strange weird light exceeded in power only by the sun, rendered the square as light as midday . . . Men fell on their knees, groans were uttered at the sight, and many were dumb with amazement.”89
We are no longer “dumb with amazement” at electric lights as the people of Wabash were back in 1880. But we must recall that the flow of cheap, abundant, reliable electrons began on Pearl Street. Modernity began in 1882, when Edison was collecting a new patent every three and a half days.
THE ROLLER-CONE DRILL BIT
Without Howard Hughes Sr.’s roller-cone drill bit, Henry Ford’s Model T—along with the entire Age of Automobiles—would have run out of gas.
It’s become accepted wisdom that when Ford began mass producing the Model T in 1908, he revolutionized the automotive industry and our transportation system. What’s often overlooked is the critical role played by the roller-cone drill bit, an innovation for which Hughes and partner, Walter Sharp, filed for a patent on November 20, 1908, just weeks after Ford began production of the Model T.90 (Production started on October 1 of that year.)91
More than a century ago, long before bits and bytes—described in all manner of tera, giga, mega, and kilo—we had the fishtail drill bit. And it wasn’t worth a darn at boring holes in the earth. The business end of the device did look somewhat like a fish’s tail or the business end of a very wide screwdriver—a solid piece of steel with curved, sharpened edges. But the fishtail bit’s limitations were many. The bits tended to wander off course and couldn’t drill effectively in hard-rock formations. Whenever it struck hard rock, the bit would dull quickly, and crews would have to pull the entire drill string out of the well and replace the bit—a costly and time-consuming process. Those limits meant that wildcatters were limited to looking for oil deposits that lay close to the surface. For instance, in 1901, one of the most famous oil wells in history—the gusher at Spindletop, located just outside Beaumont, Texas—came in. That well was drilled to just 1,160 feet.92 At that time, prospectors looking for oil in Texas and elsewhere were only interested in locations where oil could be found relatively close to the surface. Drilling deeper than 1,000 feet or so simply took too long and cost too much.
The breakthrough came seven years after Spindletop, when Sharp and Hughes—the father of Howard Hughes Jr., the eccentric, reclusive playboy who loved fast airplanes and Faster women—introduced their new roller-cone design, which was vastly superior to the fishtail. Instead of scraping rock as the fishtail bit did, the roller-cone mechanism chipped, crushed, and powdered the rock. That allowed the cuttings from the well to be easily removed by drilling fluid. The bit was also easier to control in the well and had less of a tendency to deviate. Early tests proved the roller-cone bit’s superiority. On a well drilled in Humble, Texas, a crew using a fishtail bit was able to bore just 38 feet over nineteen days, or 2 feet per day. When the same crew used one of Hughes’s new roller bits, they were able to drill 72 feet in six days, or 12 feet per day.93
By making drilling Faster, the roller-cone bit revolutionized the oil and gas sector. Without it, there simply would not have been enough oil production, and therefore enough gasoline, to fuel all of the cars that Ford and other automakers were building. The history of US oil production throughout the 1890s and the first decade of the 1900s shows that production growth was painfully slow. In the decade from 1890 to 1899, production grew only slightly, from 126,000 barrels to just 156,000 barrels per day. By 1909, when Hughes was granted a patent for his design, US oil production had grown to 502,000 barrels per day. A decade later, it had doubled. By 1929, it had doubled again. Forty years later, in 1969, when Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon, domestic production of oil was 9.2 million barrels per day—18 times as large as it was in 1909.94
In 2009, the American Society of Mechanical Engineers named the Hughes two-cone drill bit a “historic mechanical engineering landmark.” The group said that Hughes’s bit “and the rotary drilling system were pioneering inventions that paved the way for the development of technologies and processes still used in the oil field today.”95
The drill bit didn’t just fuel the growth of auto manufacturers like Ford. Nor did it only enrich oil producers and refiners. By making drilling Faster, the roller-cone drill bit liberated city dwellers. As author Edward Tenner has written, the automobile came “to represent independence from the rich.” With cheap cars and cheap gasoline, Tenner points out that people were liberated from the railroads, streetcar companies, and “center-city landlords. By the 1950s and 1960s, the automotive industry had come to represent big business at its most arrogant, but motorization won because it rallied so many small businesses. Diffuse interests were its political strength.” The Automobile Age helped create thousands of small and large businesses. More automobile sales required more auto dealers, mechanics, gasoline retailers, and tire shops. More mobility meant that consumers didn’t need to rely on landlords in the city; instead they could move to suburban homes and have a yard of their own. That suburbanization led to the building of new roads, more houses, and retail establishments of all kinds. And those businesses helped foster yet more economic activity.
Fishtail drilling bits like this one dominated the drilling sector in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They were quickly cast aside in favor of roller-cone bits. Source: Wikimedia Commons.96
Patent document for the roller-cone bit. Howard Hughes Sr., along with his partner, Walter Sharp, changed the oil and gas industry with their design for the roller-cone drill bit. The success of the drill bit at developing more oil went hand in hand with the growth of the American auto industry. In 1912, after Sharp’s death, Hughes bought out his interest. His company, Hughes Tool, is now part of Baker Hughes Incorporated, one of the world’s largest oilfield services firms. Source: US Patent Office.
The roller-cone drill bit made gasoline and other refined oil products Cheaper and more abundant. In doing so, it also fostered suburban sprawl, air pollution, and the dreaded time-wasting commute. The roller-co
ne bit led indirectly to accidents like Deepwater Horizon in 2010, which resulted in a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Oil, and its production, continue to be points of conflict in numerous countries around the world, with Nigeria, Libya, and Iraq being obvious examples. Juan Pablo Perez Alfonso, a Venezuelan who was one of the founders of OPEC, famously called oil “devil’s excrement.” He also claimed “oil will bring us ruin.”
No other commodity inspires more passion, or more witless hyperbole, than petroleum. Nevertheless, the world runs on oil. It will continue running on oil for decades to come because petroleum is such a useful commodity. And the roller-cone bit played a key role in making that commodity Cheaper. By making oil Cheaper, the Hughes drill bit allowed huge improvements in living standards around the world, and that trend continues to this day.
DIGITAL COMMUNICATIONS
Back in 1620, Francis Bacon enthused about the printing press and its effect on humanity. Given his enthusiasm for that technology, it’s fun to consider what the great scientist might have said about the World Wide Web.
The printing press enabled the leader of the Reformation, Martin Luther, to “throw a lot of ink at the devil.”97 Today, thanks to the virtual printing press that’s available via the Internet, nearly everyone can throw ink at his or her devil. And they can do so for free, or nearly so. The importance of today’s digital communications networks can scarcely be overstated, particularly for people who are struggling against repressive governments. As one Syrian political activist told the New York Times in 2011, “If there’s no Internet, there’s no life.”98