Something always seems to come up to link things we talk about in the history of technology to the world of today. This week presidential candidate Newt Gingrich has proposed the United States establish a colony on the Moon. It seems obvious that he did so at this time because the Florida primary is coming up and a renewed space program would create a lot of jobs in Florida. What do you think the Apollo program can tell us about the prospects of establishing a Moon base? It is intriguing (and I think appropriate) that a New York Times article on this subject has the headline "technology is the easy part." This is a reminder that all technologies have to "work" technically, but they also have to work politically and economically.
This also happens to be the 45th anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire. The Washington Post ran a story on it recently.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
Saturday, January 21, 2012
Where does your Apple come from?
Where does that Apple product that you have, whether it is a Mac, IPhone, IPod, or IPad, come from? When Apple started, it made all its products in the US; now, it doesn't make anything here. A New York Times article reports on a Silicon Valley dinner last year whose attendees included Steve Jobs and President Obama:
The article details a number of reasons why Apple prefers to manufacture its products in China. Lower labor costs are just one reason. The Chinese labor force gives Apple a flexibility that it could never achieve in the US. Foxconn, a Chinese company that does most of Apple's manufacturing, has a facility that employs 230,000 people, many of whom live onsite in dormitories. It can respond to changing production needs far more quickly than any factory in America could. To build Iphones, Apple needed 8700 industrial engineers to oversee the process. One estimate was that it would have taken 9 months to find those engineers in the US. In China, it took 15 days.
Apple still designs it products in the US, and provides many highly skilled engineers with good high paying jobs. However it no longer provides high paying jobs to Americans with mid-level skills. Those types of jobs, whether they were auto workers building cars in the 1950s and 1960s or electronics manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s, were once one of the foundations of the American economy.
A recent radio show provides a fascinating portrait of Apple's China manufacturing operations. From a history of technology perspective, people once lived in close proximity to where the things they used in daily life were made. They could see the blacksmith making parts they might use in the house. They could see a cooper making a bucket. Now we are far removed from where the things we use are made. Would we be as enthusiastic about using them if we saw how the people who made them suffered? This audio piece has a segment where New York Times columnist Nick Kristof (he and his wife wrote the book Half the Sky, which was a former freshman summer reading book at NCSU), argues that sweatshops, such as Apple uses, actually have helped to raise many people out of poverty. All of this echoes debates about whether the Industrial Revolution in England in the 1700s and 1800s actually improved or degraded workers' lives.
But as Steven P. Jobs spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest.
The article details a number of reasons why Apple prefers to manufacture its products in China. Lower labor costs are just one reason. The Chinese labor force gives Apple a flexibility that it could never achieve in the US. Foxconn, a Chinese company that does most of Apple's manufacturing, has a facility that employs 230,000 people, many of whom live onsite in dormitories. It can respond to changing production needs far more quickly than any factory in America could. To build Iphones, Apple needed 8700 industrial engineers to oversee the process. One estimate was that it would have taken 9 months to find those engineers in the US. In China, it took 15 days.
Apple still designs it products in the US, and provides many highly skilled engineers with good high paying jobs. However it no longer provides high paying jobs to Americans with mid-level skills. Those types of jobs, whether they were auto workers building cars in the 1950s and 1960s or electronics manufacturing in the 1970s and 1980s, were once one of the foundations of the American economy.
A recent radio show provides a fascinating portrait of Apple's China manufacturing operations. From a history of technology perspective, people once lived in close proximity to where the things they used in daily life were made. They could see the blacksmith making parts they might use in the house. They could see a cooper making a bucket. Now we are far removed from where the things we use are made. Would we be as enthusiastic about using them if we saw how the people who made them suffered? This audio piece has a segment where New York Times columnist Nick Kristof (he and his wife wrote the book Half the Sky, which was a former freshman summer reading book at NCSU), argues that sweatshops, such as Apple uses, actually have helped to raise many people out of poverty. All of this echoes debates about whether the Industrial Revolution in England in the 1700s and 1800s actually improved or degraded workers' lives.
Friday, January 13, 2012
Success Through Failure
A well-know historian of technology, Henry Petroski, has made the focus of his work how failures in technology can lead to success--ultimately a superior technology. We are now right around the 30th anniversary of the crash of an Air Florida plane in Washington, DC, which killed 77 people. The crash was caused by a variety of problems, but the main issue was inadequate deicing of the plane, which was attempting to takeoff during a snow storm. The Washington Post has a piece describing all the procedures that are in place now which make a similar accident very unlikely. Most of them are not very glamorous--things like checklists, better deicing solutions, and better defined procedures, but they work well. As far as I can tell, the last fatal accident of a major jetliner in the United States was over 10 years ago. (There was a crash of a commuter turbo-prop three years ago.) The history of technology often focuses on the major inventions, when small incremental changes can be very significant as well.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Technologies in Decline: Letter Writing
The history of technology is about technologies being born and growing, but it is also about technologies dying or diminishing. When I went to college one of the highlights of the day was to check one's mailbox to see if there was a letter from home or from a friend. Does anyone still write letters anymore? I had an elderly friend that I lost contact with because she didn't use email, and I don't really write letters. Sometimes technologies enter a death spiral, where as they are less used, they degrade in quality. We can think of that with the Post Office no longer promising next day delivery. Here is a brief piece thinking about the history of the mail and of letter writing and its loss. (Imagine having two mail deliveries a day!) But when we want to know about our past, will we be able to access emails or texts in the same way we can access old letters of our relatives? Letters have been one of the staples of history; what will happen when they are gone? India has a tradition of letter writers, who set up shop outside post offices, offering their services to write letters for illiterate people. Some still work, but many are gone now, as even very poor people are able to afford cell phones and call home on their own. Three years ago, I did run across some letter writers in front of a post office in Ahmedabad, and their picture is above.
Saturday, January 7, 2012
Deaths in Technology Last Year: More Than Steve Jobs
While the death of Steve Jobs attracted the most attention, other people died who played fundamental roles in building the world we now live in. The fact that they are almost completely unknown suggests something about the large number of people who make fundamental contributions to technology--it's not just a few people. Dennis Ritchie was one of the two people most responsible for developing the Unix operating system. Unix is the basis for the operating systems on Apple computers, on Android cell phones; it is also the basis for Linux. Ritchie is at least known among computer scientists, while Keith Tantlinger is almost completely unknown. Tantinger worked on making containers and container ships viable vehicles for shipping goods. His specific contribution was a locking mechanism that locked containers to each other and which could be locked or unlocked by a crane operator. It may not sound very glamorous, but our technological world depends on seemingly small, but important innovations like Tantingler's.
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