Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper

by Robert Bryce

  Tour de Doper

  The world’s most famous cycling event—indeed, the entire history of bicycle racing—has been plagued by doping. Of course, many other sports, from sprinting to baseball, have seen their share of cheaters who rely on banned substances. But when it comes to pharmacological chicanery, cycling has no peer.

  In the push to go Faster, cyclists have used strychnine, chloroform, and cocaine during races. Others have used ether or alcohol. In the modern era of the Tour, cyclists have used anabolic steroids, EPO, testosterone, human growth hormone, female hormones, insulin, and blood transfusions. Herewith a few examples of the doping at the Tour:

  1949: A rider named Fauso Coppi admits using amphetamines during the Tour.

  1962: Nearly two dozen riders become ill during the Tour, likely because of morphine doping.19

  1965: During a TV interview, Jacques Anquetil, who won the Tour four years in a row, dismissed concerns about drug use, saying simply, “Leave me in peace. Everybody takes dope.”20

  1987: Two riders, Guido Bontempi and Dietrich Thurau, failed drug tests after early stages in the race and are given time penalties of 10 minutes apiece.21

  1997: The Tour is won by Jan Ullrich, a German, who goes on to win both gold and silver medals in cycling at the Olympic Games in 2000. In 2013, Ullrich admitted that he had cheated, saying, “Almost everybody back then took performance-enhancing substances.”22

  1998: The Tour becomes known as the “Tour de Farce” after a member of the Festina team is caught with anabolic steroids, growth hormones, and a variety of masking agents. A few days later, the entire Festina team is expelled from the Tour.23

  1999–2005: Lance Armstrong wins the Tour seven consecutive times.

  2004: Lance Armstrong tells Oprah Winfrey, “I have to win at all costs.”24

  2006: American rider Floyd Landis wins the Tour but tests positive for doping and is stripped of his title. In 2010, Landis admits that he had cheated and says he began using performance-enhancing drugs in 2002, when he was a member of the US Postal Service team. The star of that team was Armstrong.25

  August 2012: Jonathan Vaughters, a prominent American cyclist, admits that he had doped during his career. In an op-ed published by the New York Times, Vaughters wrote that doping can provide “that last 2 percent” that can “keep your dream alive, at least in the eyes of those who couldn’t see your heart.” He continued, pointing out that an extra “2 percent of time or power or strength is an eternity.” In the Tour, he said, “2 percent is the difference between first and 100th place in overall time.”26

  August 24, 2012: The US Anti-Doping Agency issues a lifetime ban from competition on Lance Armstrong in all sports that follow the World Anti-Doping Agency code. Two months later, the International Cycling Union strips Armstrong of all seven of his Tour titles.27

  January 2013: Armstrong admits that he’d taken banned substances, and/or had done blood doping, in all of his wins at the Tour de France.28

  8

  THE ENGINES OF THE ECONOMY

  For all of the talk about what creates economic growth and prosperity, there is one unassailable truth: the engines of the economy are engines.

  For centuries, businessmen, engineers, inventors, and everyday working people have been finding ways to harness more energy so that we can do more work Faster Cheaper. Our ability to do work, and therefore, create economic growth, largely depends on our ability to convert energy of whatever type—heat, kinetic, chemical—into motion. By doing so, we are able to produce the power we need to perform the work at hand. Engines convert energy into motion that can be used for doing work. As my friend Stan Jakuba has put it, the more we increase the energy flow through those engines, the more power we get and the more work we can do.* And the more work we can do of whatever type, the more work we want to do.

  The entirety of the Industrial Revolution, through the Age of Steam, the Age of the Automobile, and today’s Information Age, can be described as the push to derive more useful power from the energy we consume. We are, all of us, power hungry. We want Cheaper watts. Always. Everywhere. And the push to produce Cheaper watts has focused on our ability to more efficiently convert the joules of energy we put into our engines into more watts. Proving that point requires us to look back a few centuries to see how engine technology has developed, and more particularly, how we have made our engines Denser—how we have continually sought engines with higher power densities.

  A waterwheel on the Orontes River in Syria. It provided water for agricultural and urban use. A wheel of this size likely produced the equivalent of about 40 horsepower. Source: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-matpc-06756.

  Of all the artifacts of antiquity that demonstrate the human desire for power, few are bigger, or more beautiful, than the waterwheels of Hama, a region in west-central Syria. Built in the Byzantine era, the waterwheels are marvels of engineering. Fashioned primarily from wood and stone, they lifted water from the Orontes River into aqueducts that carried the water to farms, mosques, and urban centers. About seventeen of the Syrian waterwheels are still in existence, a fact that testifies to the durability of their construction. Standing as much as 66 feet (20 meters) high, waterwheels like those in Hama were capable of moving about 1,270 gallons (4,800 liters) of water per minute.1 While there are no reliable estimates of how much the waterwheels weighed, we can estimate their horsepower by comparing their water-moving capabilities with that of modern pumps. Doing so indicates that waterwheels like the ones at Hama likely produced roughly 40 horsepower (about 29,000 watts), a modest sum by today’s standards, but a remarkable feat for the thirteenth century.2

  The waterwheels at Hama are only one example of a technology that dates back to the ancient Greeks. But before we delve further into waterwheels, and we will, let’s look at the only other power options that were available to humans before the Age of Steam: human muscle, animal muscle, or wind energy.

  Sailing vessels were used to move goods on rivers and along coastlines, and windmills were useful in locations that had reliable wind. But when it came to doing the everyday work of civilization—transporting goods, digging in the fields, processing grain, or moving water—we had to do it ourselves or put a harness on draft animals. And for millennia, that’s what we did.

  Humans have powerful brains but relatively weak bodies. A person in average physical condition can produce somewhere between 60 and 120 watts of power while doing moderate to strenuous work. (Elite athletes, of course, can produce far more than that.)3 Rather than do all the work themselves, humans used their big brains to innovate: They made harnesses that allowed them to use oxen, water buffaloes, or cows to pull carts and plows as well as to mill grain. Harnessing cattle allowed humans to cultivate land at least three times Faster than what could be done by a peasant armed with a hoe.4 And while cattle were useful, they were not as powerful as a horse and could produce only 300 to 400 watts (about one-half horsepower) of power. Further, their slower gait meant they could only travel about two-thirds as fast as a horse.

  Draft horses were far superior to cattle in power output, speed, and stamina. For short durations, horses could pull as much as 35 percent of their body weight, which in some cases meant they could produce about three horsepower (about 2,200 watts). Horses were durable, relatively easy to manage, and with the advent of the collar harness, which became prevalent in Europe by about the ninth century, they could pull heavy loads comfortably for many hours. But heavy draft horses also had to eat. Horses can survive on grass-only diets. If they are worked hard on a daily basis in a harness or under a saddle, they need better diets. That means grain. The results were obvious: as more horses were put to work, their need for grain increased. And that put them in direct competition with humans. By the early 1900s, as much as 20 percent of all US farmland was being used to cultivate grain solely for horse feed.5

  For centuries, horses were the engines of the economy, but they were never very powerful. To illustrate, let’s return to the met
ric of power density. Calculating the power density of a horse is fairly straightforward. Assume an average-size horse weighs 1,000 pounds (call it 450 kilos). A horse can produce 746 watts (one horsepower). Given those numbers, the math is easy: 746 watts divided by 450 kilograms gives us a power density of about 1.7 watts per kilogram.

  The limitations of human muscle, cattle, and horses led inventors and engineers to design waterwheels and windmills in order to turn the available kinetic energy of the rivers and the wind into useful power. The Romans used waterwheels most commonly for small-scale milling of grains.6 The earliest use of windmills likely occurred in about the tenth century A.D., in Seistan, a region of eastern Iran. The windmills were used to pump water for agriculture.7 Around 1300, windmills began to proliferate in medieval Europe and were used for moving water, milling grain, and other purposes.8 Over time, windmills grew to be quite large, as the builders began to understand that adding height to the windmill was the best way to increase its power. That trend continues today. Many of the latest turbines stand about 500 feet (150 meters) high.9 But even as the European windmills proliferated through the 1700s, they were still relatively modest in terms of power output, with even the most efficient of the machines able to produce perhaps 13 horsepower, or about 10,000 watts.10

  While windmills were popular, particularly in northern Europe, the advent of the Industrial Revolution was made possible by waterwheels, which were the prime movers of choice for factories that churned out everything from cloth to firearms. But while the waterwheels were effective at converting the kinetic energy of flowing rivers and streams into rotating mechanical power, they were always at risk from both drought and flood. Too little water, or too much, imperiled the factories and the livelihoods of the workers in them. Nevertheless, inventors and entrepreneurs teamed up to create entire industrial ecosystems that were powered by waterwheels. Author Charles R. Morris in his excellent 2012 book on the American Industrial Revolution, The Dawn of Innovation, points to the development of the Locks & Canal Company in Lowell, Massachusetts, during the early 1800s as a pivotal period in American history. The company diverted the Merrimack River in order to create what Morris calls a “hydraulic power utility.” By the mid-1830s, the utility was providing waterpower to twenty-five textile mills, as well as a variety of other operations. By the late 1840s, the Locks & Canal Company was operating a network of canals 17 miles long. The arrangement of factories in the Lowell area was, writes Morris, “by far the greatest industrial development in the country, and its impact on machining, metalworking, and other industrial technologies is hard to overestimate.”11

  This photo of an Amish farmer working his fields near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, taken in about 1980, shows a method of working the land that has lasted for centuries. This team of horses can generate 6 to 8 horsepower for several hours. For short bursts, it can probably produce two to three times that amount. Source: Library of Congress, LC-DIG-highsm-16027.

  Although the waterwheels fed the factories that sparked the Industrial Revolution in America, they were never very efficient. Morris points to one particular waterwheel designed by Henry Burden, an American inventor. In 1851, Burden built what was then the world’s most powerful waterwheel in Utica, New York. The machine was 62 feet in diameter and weighed 250 tons. While it proved to be extremely durable, operating for some fifty years, its maximum power output was about 300 horsepower.12 That’s a remarkable amount of power for the 1850s. But when looked at in terms of gravimetric power density, it only produced about 1 watt per kilogram.

  The desire for more power, along with the limitations of human muscle, draft animals, wind energy, and waterwheels led inevitably to the development of the steam engine. The first steam engine used in an industrial setting was built by Thomas Newcomen (b. 1664, d. 1729), an Englishman. First deployed in 1712, it was used to pump water out of a tin mine. While Newcomen’s engine was ingenious, it burned copious quantities of coal. Furthermore, the engine was built to very low tolerances. The boiler used in the Newcomen engine was limited to pressures of about 2 pounds per square inch (13.8 kilopascals).13 That’s not very much when you consider that compression levels inside the cylinders in modern automobile engines max out at about 1,000 pounds per square inch (6,895 kilopascals).14

  Pivotal improvements to Newcomen’s design were made by a Scotsman, James Watt, whose last name has become synonymous with power. Watt coined the term “horsepower.” Today, Watt’s name lives on as the standard unit of power, the watt. Watt (b. 1736, d. 1819) assessed the Newcomen engine and estimated that about 75 percent of the fuel it used was being wasted in the reheating of the engine’s cylinder after the cylinder had been cooled to create a vacuum. Watt saw that a separate condenser unit could be employed so that the cylinder, and the piston inside it, stayed hot, and thereby saved energy. Watt saw a business opportunity in a simple idea: make engines that were “cheap as well as good.”16

  James Watt’s improvements to the steam engine helped ignite the Industrial Revolution. The SI unit for power, the watt, is named for him. Source: Wikimedia Commons.15

  In 1774, Watt, who had been making his living as a surveyor, teamed up with Matthew Boulton, an industrialist who had a knack for both business and promotion.17 Over the next two decades, their firm, Boulton & Watt, sold hundreds of engines.18 And while their engines were reliable, safe, and relatively efficient, they were not overly powerful. A typical Boulton & Watt engine from the early nineteenth century was capable of producing about 24 horsepower (17,900 watts). But it weighed about 2 tons (1,818 kg) giving it a gravimetric power density of 9.8 watts per kilogram. That was an enormous improvement when compared to the power density of many waterwheels. It was also nearly six times the gravimetric power density of the average horse. But unlike a horse, the steam engine could be worked around the clock, produced no manure, and didn’t require grain, meaning it didn’t compete with humans for available farmland.

  Boulton & Watt engines unleashed the Age of Steam and led to a surge in productivity and commerce.19 Unlike waterwheels, which had to be placed close to rivers, steam engines could be put almost anywhere. Furthermore, they could be used for more than just manufacturing; they could be used for transportation. That use proved to be critical because without transportation, there is no commerce.

  Replacing sails with steam meant humans could travel farther Faster Cheaper than ever before. In August 1807, after years of prototypes and failures, inventor Robert Fulton (born in Little Britain Township, Pennsylvania, in 1765) launched the Clermont, the first successful commercial steam-powered boat.20 Fulton’s boat (powered by a Boulton & Watt engine) traveled the Hudson River, carrying passengers between New York and Albany.21 At the time that Fulton launched the Clermont, the sail-powered sloops carrying passengers and freight between the two cities were taking about a week.22 Fulton’s boat made the same voyage in about thirty-six hours.23

  A few years after launching his service in New York, Fulton, who had teamed with one of New York’s richest men, Robert Livingston, began operating steamboats in the western United States. In 1811, Fulton’s boats began carrying passengers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans, a journey of about 2,000 miles, via the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers.24 Within a few years, steamboats proliferated on the Mississippi and other rivers, and those boats played a critical role in the opening of the American West.

  Replacing sails with steam meant Faster travel on the water, but it was the use of steam in factories and on rails that supercharged the Industrial Age. The more steam engines that were produced, the more factories there were that relied upon them. As engine production capacity grew, so too did advancements in metallurgy, lubrication, machine tools, punches, presses, hammers, and all the other technologies needed to make engines that were Smaller Faster Lighter Denser Cheaper than their predecessors. More engines begat better engines, and the rapidly spreading steam-powered railroads and ships fed the symbiosis.

  The first railroad that carried people and freight on
a regular schedule began service in 1825, carrying passengers and coal from the British coal town of Darlington to the port at Stockton. As Jeff Goodell writes in his book Big Coal, the railroads were a key invention that led to more coal production because, “in effect, coal hauled itself.” Goodell points out the mutually beneficial relationship between the shippers and the fuel producers: “The partnership of railroads and coal created a kind of perpetual motion machine: better transportation meant cheaper, wider distribution of coal, which fed the growth of steel mills and steam power, which in turn further increased the demand for coal.”25

  It wasn’t just steel and coal. According to William Rosen, the Industrial Revolution was also fueled by another commodity: cotton. Coal-fueled steam engines drained the mines that produced yet more coal. Coal fueled the forges and furnaces that produced the steel needed to produce the engines that were put into the steamships that carried raw cotton to the British Isles, where it was spun into cloth by steam-powered mills. The finished cloth was then carried to market on steam-powered railroads and ships. The steam engine, writes Rosen in his 2010 book, The Most Powerful Idea in the World, created a “perpetual innovation machine in which each new invention sparked the creation of a new one, ad—so far, anyway—infinitum.”26