The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

For those of us who can remember a time not so long ago when we didn’t have telephones (computers really) in our pockets and the Internet was something few were connected to, even of those few who had computers in their homes, the current state of communication technology can seem revolutionary. This is tame compared to the changes wrought by technology that seems commonplace to us now. In The Age of Edison, Ernest Freeburg describes the amazing changes brought about in the 50 years following the introduction of electric lighting.

Though Thomas Edison is a huge figure in electric lighting, especially in the United States, Freeburg is careful to avoid the myth of the solitary inventor bringing an idea out of thin air. Many people were working on electric lighting.  Edison’s incandescent bulb had advantages over other lights, especially because he conceived of a complete lighting system with power sources, distribution and controls in addition to lamps. There were predecessors in the field, so Edison was working in a social context of seeking to provide superior lighting.

These competitors were not only other electric light inventors, but also older technologies, especially gas. Because electric power did not reach rural areas until the 1930s, much older artificial lights, like kerosene lamps, persisted even as electric lights became common in middle-class urban homes.

The first customers of electric lights were not homeowners, but businesses and cities who were already customers of lighting systems. These lights transformed cities, which various economic forces were causing to grow. From public lighting, electric systems were adapted to retail businesses, arts, entertainment, and science.

The early electric lighting market was competitive, unregulated, and wild. Electrocutions and fires were too common and widely publicized. Light companies were forced to improve safety by a political movement that supported municipal government control and ownership, and insurance company interests. This led to electric codes, the founding of the Underwriter’s Laboratory (UL) in 1893, college programs in electrical engineering, and the unionization of electrical workers.

Commercial interests dominated the early development of electric lighting. This was not the only reason electric lights had critics, but it was a significant reason. Intellectuals criticized the unartistic randomness of commercial messages seeking outshine each other. They were not especially successful in curbing electric lights, but the industry began to mature in this context and develop more attractive, effective and efficient lighting systems that were adapted to uses in homes and businesses.

Freeburg wraps up with Henry Ford’s 1929 jubilee of the invention of the incandescent electric lamp. In 50 years, the invention transformed almost every part of American life, especially urban life that was quickly becoming more common as people left farms for opportunities in cities. One of the telling things is that the event was broadcast on radio. In 1879, people huddled around candles and lanterns if they had to have light when the sun went down, but well within the span of a lifetime electric lights became dominant and electric appliances were common enough that radios were in homes and many were able to participate in a distant celebration of a transformative technology. It is hard to imagine how amazing these changes were to the people who experienced them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Freeburg, Ernest. The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America. New York: Penguin, 2013.

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Lithium is one of the most abundant elements in the universe. It is also in important part of the small, light, energy-packed rechargeable batteries that make our portable devices possible. It is also likely an important part of future batteries that might make longer-running electric cars and large-scale energy storage possible. Journalist Seth Fletcher describes the history of lithium as a battery material, especially in batteries for electric and hybrid cars, in Bottled Lightning.

Fletcher goes way back to the batteries made by Alessandro Volta in 1800 and, possibly more important, the first rechargeable batteries made by Gaston Planté in 1859 (a lead acid battery).

Fletcher treats this older history briefly. Like his readers, he is not as interested in batteries as in the uses of energy batteries enable. One of these uses is transportation. Many early cars were electric vehicles (EVs) that were powered by batteries. The technology of the time required large batters to hold relatively modest charges, which limited the range of the cars. Gasoline held much more energy than batteries, was widely available and cheap. For most motorists, gasoline beat batteries hands down.

Of course, priorities and technologies change. The energy crisis of the 1970s, along with a growing environmental movement, pressured automakers to develop electric car concepts. The technology of the time probably wasn’t up to the task for what most drivers wanted, and in combination with a return of low oil prices and automotive industry inertia the electric car development of that era came to an end.

Technology rolled on, as it does, and the development of cell phones—and the portable, networked computers they have become—put pressure on the battery industry to come up with lighter, longer lasting, rechargeable batteries. They found the answer in lithium-based batteries, especially the lithium-ion type that is common today.

When the automakers were again needing to look at alternatives to oil, mostly for fuel economy and emission control reasons, the new lithium-ion batteries changed the equation for the effectiveness and affordability of electric and hybrid cars. It is yet to become cheap, as attested by the price of the high-end electric cars made by Tesla. Even cars marketed for the mass market like the Chevy Volt is expensive without subsidies. (The Volt is technically a plug-in hybrid, but for the majority of drivers who travel less than forty miles a day it can be all-electric.)

There is a lot of potential for advance batteries becoming the industrial driver of the future. A growing electric car market will create a demand for a lot of batteries. The increased uses of renewable energy, and the eventual retirement of coal-burning and other fuel-consuming power plants, depends on energy storage to even out the waxing and waning of energy sources that vary with the cycles of the sun and the whims of the weather. The 2009 stimulus bill put a lot of money into new battery research and manufacturing, but Asia is still ahead of the U.S. in manufacturing capacity if not in innovation. If America wants a piece of this revolution (we’re going to buy a lot of these batteries, so maybe we should reap some of the benefits of making them), we’ll need to invest in these industries (as China is) and not leave to Asian manufacturers to lengthen their lead.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Fletcher, Seth. Bottled Lightning: Superbatteries, Electric Cards, and the New Lithium Economy. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011.

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

Maury Klein’s book The Power Makers is a history of power from the Thomas Newcomen’s steam engine to the foundations of America’s electric grid.

Unlike many historians who look at the history of electric power, Klein gives a lot of attention to steam. We haven’t had steam engines directly powering industrial plants for decades, but steam turbines are still central to the production of most electricity in the United States. Even nuclear power plants use steam turbines to run their generators, they just use the heat from nuclear reactions rather than from the combustion of coal or natural gas to boil water and heat the steam to more than a thousand degrees.

Klein gives attention to many lesser known names in the history of power. He shows that Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse had rivals other than each other, such as Elihu Thomson. Nikola Tesla is well known as the genius who invented the AC motor, but other engineers helped develop his prototype into a commercial product, such as mathematically talented engineer Benjamin Lamme. Many talented inventors tried their hands at making electric lighting and power systems better. Only some of them had the vision, business sense, good partners and luck to turn their ideas into successful products. Few of them are widely known today.

Electrification had clear, direct effects in industry and transportation. Klein discusses how it’s influence reached into other sectors of the economy. Corporate management and finance changed to meet the needs of a growing new technology. For instance, Edison General Electric was able to take advantage of a new New Jersey law that allowed corporations to own businesses in other states. Electric companies grew, expanded and consolidated through numerous mergers and acquisitions. They had a demand for capital that nearly rivaled the railroads, another transformative technology that had shortly preceded electric power.

As the availability of electricity grew, certain industries were able to grow, too. Some chemical and metals manufacturing required abundant electric power to catalyze chemical reactions or generate the high temperatures of electric furnaces. Manufacturers flocked to Niagara after a lager hydroelectric power station started operation there in 1895.

Klein brings the many thread of his story of power together by reflections on three great fairs: the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the 1939 New York World’s Fair. In the first, a giant steam engine that powered exhibits by means of belts and pulley was a significant attraction. By the second, electricity was on display, and the White City fairground was a model for testing AC power systems. By the 1939 fair, large power utilities of the type we would recognize today were becoming common. By then it was no big deal to flip a switch or pull a lever and get power so, unlike the previous to fairs, no dignitary undertook a show of doing it; the power was on from the start.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The Lighthouse Stevensons by Bella Bathurst

Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

1939 by David Gelernter

Planck by Brandon R. Brown

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Steam by Andrea Sutcliffe 

Technology in World Civilization by Arnold Pacey

Klein, Maury. The Power Makers: Steam, Electricity, and the Men Who Invented Modern America. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008.

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

In the last decades of the 19^th Century, inventors and industrialists battled for dominance in the emerging market of electric energy. One of the major fronts of this conflict was the choice of DC (direct current) or AC (alternating current). Jill Jonnes explains the history of this pioneering age of electricity in Empires of Light.

Thomas Edison was a major player in the early days of electrification. He is known for developing a commercially viable incandescent light. The innovation that made his light commercially successful was that he developed an entire system for generating a distributing electric energy to make those lights work.

Edison designed a DC system, and he was a major proponent of DC. A weakness of his system was distance. He could only supply power over a distance of about a mile. If large areas were to be lit, a power station would be needed every mile. This made it hard for Edison to market the system for community lighting, though he successfully sold many systems to manufacturers, commercial establishments and very wealthy homeowners. In spite of the limitations, he built a system to light a portion of Manhattan; his Pearl Street station began powering lights in 1882.

Though it was not obvious at first, it soon became clear that high voltage AC could be transmitted over very great distances. The invention of transformers in Europe provided a way for voltage to be stepped up for transmission and stepped back down to levels appropriate for lighting.

George Westinghouse adopted the AC system. The advantages of AC soon make Westinghouse Electric Company a major competitor with Edison. Even Edison’s own salesman began to ask for an AC system to sell, though he was reluctant to have any involvement with AC.

Edison believed that AC and the high voltage used for its transmission were dangerous. He also had business and personal reasons to oppose the introduction of rival systems. He attacked the use of AC. He even went so far as to aid an AC opponent who successfully lobbied to make electrocution by AC power the official means of executing condemned prisoners in the state of New York.

Westinghouse pressed on and won high profile contracts that proved the safety and efficiency of his AC equipment. Notably, he had the major lighting contract for the White City of Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition of 1893. He also won the contract to build generators for the hydropower plant at Niagara Falls. The promise of inexpensive power drew major manufacturers to the area before the plant starting operating in 1895. This surprised the investors, who had though the city of Buffalo would be the target market.

Though transformers made AC a very viable system, it had other technological hurdles, such as difficulty powering motors. Serbian-born inventor Nikola Tesla solved this problem with his induction motor. Like Edison, Tesla invented an entire system for supplying electrical power to his motors, which could also easily accommodate incandescent and arc lighting. The Niagara Falls system was based on Tesla’s patented technology.

Tesla went on to invent and explore the potential of other electrical devices, notably fluorescent lights and radios. Unfortunately, he was never able to create commercial products from these later works. He fell on hard times and was quite poor for many of the last years of his life. He died in 1943.

After the formation of General Electric, which largely pushed him out of the management of the company, Thomas Edison moved on to other things. His later ventures were of mixed success, but his work on the phonograph and improvements to motion picture helped to launch the American entertainment industry. Edison passed away in 1931, semi-retired in Florida.

Westinghouse continued to grow his electrical empire. After the Panic of 1907, in which a banking crisis shook the economy, investors forced him out of the management of Westinghouse Electric. He had four other companies to run. He didn’t care for the way Wall Street did business so he got involved in Progressive politics. He died in 1914.

Jonnes includes a chapter that is a very good, brief introduction to the history of electrical science. She describes the discoveries of William Gilbert, Stephen Gray, Andreas Cuneus, Benjamin Franklin, Alessandro Volta, Sir Humphrey Davy, Hans Christian Oersted, André Marie Ampère, Zénobe-Théophie Gramme and Michael Faraday.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Great Bridge by David McCollough

Jonnes, Jill. Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World. New York: Random House, 2003.

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

Anthropologist Gretchen Bakke has written about a system integral to the American lifestyle that we associate more with engineers: the electrical grid. The Grid describes how we arrived at the system we have, the forces that are operating on it and how they might shape its future.

The grid is more than a set of wires on poles. It is also a system of companies, markets, laws, regulations, government agencies, cultures and individual people. As an engineer, I feel it is important for me to be aware of the business, policy and cultural aspects of my work. Technology cannot be easily isolated from these things. An engineer who focuses completely on technology risks putting a lot of effort into a solution that fails for important non-technical reasons.

Having commented on engineering, I should mention that Bakke’s book is written for laymen.

She explains the science and technology of electricity in terms that I think most people can understand.

One of the reasons she doesn’t need to resort to deep technological or scientific explanations it that technology is not the biggest barrier to the grid of the future. Of course, technology is very important, but much of what we need to make our grid more resilient and wireless is already in our hands, or will be within our grasp in the near future.

The harder things to wrangle are the business and regulatory aspects of the grid. Renewable energy sources (especially variable sources like wind and solar), distributed generation (which is becoming increasingly affordable), increased efficiency, flat or declining demand, and regulatory reforms over the last three decades have put the squeeze on electric utilities. Our electric utilities, and the system of large, central generation plants they operate, were built for the business and regulatory setting of the early 20^th Century, when rapidly increasing demand meant that the consolidation of generation into large plants controlled by highly-regulated monopolies made sense as a way to provide ever cheaper power for an ever growing population of customers.

By the 1960s, this model of growth was failing putting upward pressure on electric prices. Regulatory reforms starting in the 1980s introduced competition to electric markets that put another squeeze on utility profits.

These historic changes are still in action and accelerating. Environmental regulation and customer expectations about the use of renewable energy are also a growing pressure on the system, especially because the variability of solar and wind energy make it difficult to balance demand and generation on the grid, which must be done constantly and almost instantaneously.

In addition to describing how our grid came to be and the troubling weaknesses it has in light of our changing environment and expectations, Bakke looks to the future. Of course, no one knows what the grid make look like, but current developments have the potential to scale up to shape the grid.

A future grid is likely to be a highly computerized system of integrated microgrids that can operate independently when the larger grid is out. It will include many generators distributed across the grid (large, central power plants are on the way out) that take advantage of alternative and renewable energy sources. New developments in energy storage, such as the batteries that will be in fleets of electric cars, and a host of smart meters, homes and appliances will help us balance the grid. We’ll need to develop standards that allow all this new technology to communicate and work together as it also controls the existing parts of the grid that continue to be useful. Continued regulatory reform will be needed to adapt to these changes and possibly to force openness into a market that existing power monopolies may be tempted to guard. Utilities will need to find new business models, and we all might need to be open to what they could be, because it is unlikely that they’ll be able to keep going by selling kilowatt-hours in the old fashioned way.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

Bakke, Gretchen. The Grid: The Fraying Wires between Americans and Our Energy Future. New York: Bloomsbury, 2016.

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

The prevailing myth of invention is that it is the product of a solitary genius. Steven Johnson takes on this myth in How We Got to Now.

Johnson’s book is a history of invention with a focus on six particular innovations. He demonstrates that simultaneous invention is common, suggesting that societal knowledge, norms and expectations play a part in invention—at least in providing an environment in which certain types of inventions can be created and flourish.

Thomas Edison and the light bulb is the classic myth challenged by simultaneous invention. Humphrey Davy demonstrated an incandescent electric light in 1802 and Frederick de Moleyns received the first patent for a light bulb in 1841. By the time Edison got involve, people had been working on light bulbs for 30 years, and the potential for electric light had been now for 70 years. Edison and his team of collaborators deserve a lot of credit for creating a commercially successful electric lighting system, inventing solutions to many problems along the way, but is a story of systematic hard work.

Edison’s electric lighting system depended on a lot of prior technology, which relates to another of Johnson’s points: clusters of inventions. An invention can illuminate a previously unnoticed problem (or create a new one). For instance, the availability of affordable books that follow Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press revealed that many people were farsighted. This sparked a demand for reading glasses. The tinkering with lenses led to the invention of telescopes and microscopes. Galileo took up the telescope and made discoveries in astronomy that reshaped how people saw the world. Robert Hooke used the microscope to explore a seemingly alien world of the very tiny thing all around us, though the revolution he inspired took longer to bloom.

Johnson explores other aspects of invention and society. I think it is fair to say that his view of how invention works is a lot messier than the myth. Inventors are at the right place at the right time, with open minds that are prepared (likely by accident) to make a connection and a willingness to do the work of thinking, testing and making something new. They probe the boundaries of their fields, tinker and throw themselves into hobbies that bring them, often with companions, to crossroads that challenge their notions of where they can go and how they can get there.

On the whole, Johnson presents a vision of hope in our history. We are not dependent on genius or serendipity; human creativity is both a social and an individual process in which the collision of ideas leads to new ideas. We live in an era where the collision of ideas may be more possible than ever.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Ada's Algorithm by James Essinger

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Big Necessity by Rose George

The Big Roads by Earl Swift

The Big Thirst by Charles Fishman

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

Circles by James Burke

Dreams of Iron and Steel by Deborah Cadbury

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

Hedy's Folly by Richard Rhodes

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Pinball Effect by James Burke

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Steven Johnson also wrote

The Ghost Map

The Invention of Air

Johnson, Steven. How We Got To Now: Six Innovations that Make the Modern World. New York: Riverhead, 2014.

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

The technology that has the potential for a breakthrough that could revolutionize life in the next few decades is not one many might think of. It’s the battery. The next generation of battery could make affordable, long-range electric vehicles available to the masses. They could make variable energy sources like wind and solar more viable competitors to traditional, fuel-burning energy.

Though it is not widely publicized, major companies, start-ups and even government agencies are involved in a race to bring the next generation battery to the market. The company that creates it and the nation that can establish the manufacturing base for it will be in a position to make a lot of money. It’s a dramatic story, which Steve Levine relates in The Powerhouse.

Levine provides some background on the development of the lithium ion battery and improvements to it. His focus, however, is Argonne National Laboratory.

Argonne, located near Chicago, started as a lab to research nuclear energy and weaponry. It traces its history back to the Manhattan Project and the University of Chicago lab where Enrico Fermi started a manmade, self-sustained nuclear chain reaction. At the close of the book, Argonne was taking the lead of a hub of battery technology development aimed particularly at creating the battery that will put electric cars in millions of garages.

Argonne is not the only player in the field. Levine also reports on some of the companies, large and small, and countries that are staking out their places in the field. Automakers, particularly General Motors, are particularly interested in these devices that might radically change their industry.

The chemistry of these batteries, particularly the cathodes, is discussed in the book, but not deeply. It is not a textbook on electrochemistry. It is instead a book on the business and politics of an uncertain technological development that has the potential to alter the economic and environmental condition of the world.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

Lights Out by Ted Koppel

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Levine, Steve. The Powerhouse: Inside the Invention of a Battery to Save the World. New York: Viking, 2015.

Interesting Stuff July 14, 2011

Another funny take on Superman by Kerry Callen
Calvin & Hobbes Tributes at ComicTwart
Calvin on TV—Wish It Were True
Interesting Stuff April 17, 2011
Kansas City Gets Charging Stations for Electric Vehicles
Massive Haboob Hits Phoenix
Mother Admonishes Politician Son to Apologize to Comics Writer for Name-Calling
The Spirit Reboot is Neo-Noir Comics at Their Finest
Tsunami Affected U.S. Groundwater Levels
Turbulent Weather System Wallops Missouri with Rain, Floods

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont (234) & The Revenge of Kali-Ra by K. K. Beck (235)

Malmont, Paul.  The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Beck, K. K.  The Revenge of Kali-Ra.

Paul Malmont clearly loves pulps. The Chinatown Cloud Peril is one of the most fun books I’ve ever read.  He revisits this territory in The Astounding, the Amazing and the Unknown.

Astounding places fictional versions of science fiction authors in a scientific mystery adventure some of them might have been glad to write.  Some of the characters are pulp authors who appeared in Peril (Robert Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Walter Gibson, and Lester Dent, a fellow Missourian).  Others are authors of the era when the old pulps gave way to comics and sci-fi magazines (Isaac Asimov, L. Sprague de Camp, and editor John Campbell).

A group of science fiction writers, most of them scientist and engineers as well, are working for the Navy to turn crazy ideas into reality in a proto-DARPA.  They’re not producing a lot of results and their leader, former Naval officer Heinlein, is feeling the pressure.  They stumble upon the suggestion that inventor Nikola Tesla accidentally created a superweapon at Wardenclyffe, which is why the tower he built there came down.  Their search for answers leads them on a twisting trail from the underground rivers of New York to the heights of the General Electric hierarchy.  Red herrings about and these clever authors don’t catch on to the biggest one in the book.

The character development is interesting, too.  Heinlein is feeling left out of opportunities to make a real difference, but eventually gets an inkling that his stories can make a difference.  The seeds of Scientology are planted in Hubbard.  I think the strongest character development occurs in the fictional Asimov.  He goes through something like a conventional coming-of-age story.  He starts as a frightened youth, faces his fears and becomes a man.  In addition, is a loner struggling in his marriage who finds a way to bring his wife into partnership with him, having a passion for her that matched the passion he had for his work.  That is good stuff; it adds depth to a story that is mostly and-then-and-then suspense.

For the geeks (that includes me), there are appearances by fictional versions of many other people.  Authors include Nowell Page of The Spider, Hugh Cave, aka Justin Case, and Kurt Vonnegut as an Easter egg.  Actor Jimmy Stewart lends his skill as a pilot.  Mystic and rocket scientist Jack Parsons could spin off a weird tale of his own.  Even Manhattan Project physicists Robert Oppenheimer, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman make an appearance.

While I’m writing about an homage to pulps, I’d like to mention The Revenge of Kali-Ra by K. K. Beck.  I wrote a review of it that got lost in a hard drive crash (even so, I named it one of the best books I read in 2010).  The story focuses on fictional pulp stories featuring the villainous vixen of the title, which may no longer be public domain and may be valuable because of a proposed movie base on them.  The scent of money is in the air, bad characters pick up the scent, decent people are caught up in the events, and mayhem ensues.  Kali-Ra isn’t as good as Astounding, but it’s a fun read.  Beck includes clips from ersatz Kali-Ra tales that are full of the type of florid language one might expect, even hope for, in pulp.

Paul Malmont also wrote The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon

The Great Stink by Clare Clark

The Hunter adapted by Darwyn Cook

The Sherlockian by Graham Moore

Google

Interesting Stuff Oct. 17, 2009

20 Years after Quake, Is Bay Area Safer?
A Plan To Knit Together The US Electric Grid
Archaeologists Find Nero's Dining Room
Bird-Eating Fanged Frog Found in Thailand
Cubedudes: 18 Superheroes Built out of Legos
Environmentalists Battle Over Toilet Paper
Interesting Stuff Oct. 3, 2009
Meet The World’s Longest Bridge — If It Ever Gets Built
Other Nations Expand Nuclear Power While America Keeps Watching The Simpsons
Senate: Cut Greenhouse Gasses 20% by 2020
Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood Kicks Off Historic Summit to Tackle Dangers of Distracted Driving
U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood Announces Administration Wide Effort to Combat Distracted Driving

1939 by David Gelernter

I’ve been time traveling.  I went back to visit the 1939 World’s Fair in New York.  I tagged along with a couple of locals, both to New York and 1939, Mark and Hattie.  I was looking forward to it because, like me, Mark studied engineering and is attending the fair for the first time.  I wondered how he might react to the visions of future technology on display, like the superhighways anticipated by Democracity and the Futurama (which I read about in The Big Roads by Earls Swift).  I grew up in an era of Interstates, commuting, and electrified kitchens, so the even the visions of the future on display at the fair are the past to me.

I also time traveled to 1995 to take a look back at the fair with Hattie.  I was reintroduced to her by a computer science professor.  (The professor was David Gelernter.  This is a review of his book, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair.)  Back then I was starting my career in Kansas City, so I didn’t worried about running into myself in New York.

I was fascinated by what I saw of the fair.  These people had a vision of the future.  It might seem modest to us, but it was big to them.  They dreamed of the good life in which many more people owned homes in pleasant suburbs, drove to work in their own cars on broad roads, had enough to eat, and were relieved from drudgery by electric appliances.  Within a generation, in spite of the difficulties of a major war, they largely brought their dream into reality, and we have fitfully enjoyed the results.

Gelernter compares the fairgoers to Moses looking into the Promised Land (an apropos analogy considering he also writes about what it was like to be Jewish in America at the time).  Their vision of a land of milk and honey is very much the time we live in.

This leads to one of the many points of comparison Gelernter draws between that generation and ours.  They had drive, even a kind of joy, because they had a goal toward which to strive.  The cultural angst that began to show in the 1960s is in part a sign that we had arrived.  Our goals were achieved and we hand no reason to strive, so we lost our way.  We perish for lack of vision.

I find Gelernter to be a pretty good critic of technology.  You might expect a computer science professor to be enthusiastic about the changes computers have wrought.  He is more impressed with the improvements made by that older generation.  He looks at roads and refrigeration and the host of other mid- to late-Twentieth Century technologies and sees that they made improvements to human health and happiness.  The differences made by computers pale in comparison. I can remember that in 1995, I could cut up documents with a pair of scissor, tape pieces of them together, mark the mess up by hand and give it to a person in the office we called a clerk.  A short time later, the clerk would bring me back a freshly-printed, neat document, a final version of what was represented by my taped-together prototype.  The clerk would even do a little copy editing.  When a computer can do that, I’ll be impressed.  In other words, I think Gelernter’s critique holds water even 17 years later.

Gelernter may be glad that I got the sense of time travel for which he was going.  He might be disappointed that I didn’t like Mark and Hattie much.  I slipped away from them as much as I felt I safely could.  I wanted to see the fair, and though it may seem hardhearted, I had little interest in the ups and downs of their romance or their fretfulness over the war in Europe.  I think someone could write a good novel about this couple and how the day they got engaged at the fair became a touchstone for Hattie even decades later.  If I had expected a novel, I might have liked these characters, but I was expecting a history, and I found them distracting.

Gelernter, David.  1939: The Lost World of the Fair.  New York: Free Press, 1995.

Google

Professional Amateur by T. A. Boyd

Charles F. Kettering’s legacy as a philanthropist is memorialized in the names of the institutions he supported such as the Kettering Foundation and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. As an engineer, I’m more familiar with is reputation as an inventor and innovator, especially in automotive engineering.

Kettering’s associate, T. A. Boyd, memorialized him in the biography Professional Amateur. I think the title is intended to convey Kettering’s humility and determination to not let expertise or established knowledge get in the way of progress. As an engineer, and arguably a scientist, Kettering was devoted to experimentation.

As with others of his era (he was born in 1876), Kettering’s education was not traditional by current standards. After graduating high school, he began teaching in one-room schoolhouses in Ohio such as the one he had attended. He later attended the College of Wooster, studying Greek with an eye toward becoming a pastor, and eventually graduated from the Ohio State University with a degree in electrical engineering. Problems with his eyes caused interruptions in his formal education.

Kettering valued his school experience, but he also valued his practical experience. He got a job installing poles for a telephone company and worked his way into installing lines and switchboards. He and friends undertook amateur experiments in chemistry and electricity. Even as a child he took great interest in nature.

After introducing us to his early life, the book turns to his career as an inventor and research engineer. He established what is now Delco, which he sold to General Motors. He had a long career leading the research efforts at GM. The final chapters of the book describe Kettering’s views on business and education and his career as a public speaker.

Kettering met his wife, Olive, while working for a rural telephone company. Their son, Gene, followed his father into engineering and eventually had a successful career in designing and building diesel-electric locomotives a General Motors.

Boyd was a friend of Kettering, who was still alive when Professional Amateur was published. Needless to say, the book is very complimentary to its subject. Few faults are attributed to the man, except that Kettering is depicted as being so absorbed in his research that he would overlook social conventions like keeping a nice suit clean, entertaining guests, or remembering the purpose of his appointments. The research engineer left his business affairs mostly in the hands of trusted partners so he could concentrate on the work that interested him, though Boyd’s depiction indicates Kettering was shrewd about business.

I don’t think the book is intended for children, but it is written in simple and direct style that might be accessible to many young readers. It was published in 1957, so more recent or thorough biographies may be available. For instance, Kettering introduced tetraethyl lead to gasoline as a way to reduce knock and improve fuel efficiency. Though it was considered safe at the time (as Boyd points out), the lead emissions from automobiles has be reevaluated sense and we no longer use leaded gasoline. The book was written before anyone was seriously aware of or concerned about this issue, so it does not consider it.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Essential Engineer: Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems by Henry Petroski

Make a Joyful Sound by Helen Elmira Waite

The Pinball Effect by James Burke

Boyd, T. A. Professional Amateur: The Biography of Charles Franklin Kettering. New York: E. P. Dutton & Co., 1957.