Books – Page 65 – artdiamondblog.com

In 1916 a Single Home Motor Would Drive All Home Machines

(p. 301) By the 1910s, electric motors had started their inevitable spread into homes. They had been domesticated. Unlike a steam engine, they did not smoke or belch or drool. Just a tidy, steady whirr from a five-pound (p. 302) hunk. As in factories, these single “home motors” were designed to drive all the machines in one home. The 1916 Hamilton Beach “Home Motor” had a six-speed rheostat and ran on 110 volts. Designer Donald Norman points out a page from the 1918 Sears, Roebuck and Co. catalog advertising the Home Motor for $8.75 (which is equivalent to about $100 these days). This handy motor would spin your sewing machine. You could also plug it into the Churn and Mixer Attachment (“for which you will find many uses”) and the Buffer and Grinder Attachments (“will be found very useful in many ways around the home”). The Fan Attachment “can be quickly attached to Home Motor,” as well as the Beater Attachment to whip cream and beat eggs.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: the quote above omits the copy of a 1918 electric motor ad that appeared in the middle of the original paragraph.)

Mencken’s Prejudices: Fresh, Vital, Withering and Gleeful

“Christopher Buckley.” Source of caption and image: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. 5) Which book has had the greatest impact on you? What book made you want to write?

H. L. Mencken’s “Prejudices.” He wrote these six volumes in the 1920s, but their zest, sinew and cut-and-thrust are undated, fresh and vital nearly a century after their ink dried. No American writer — except perhaps Twain and Bierce — could be so withering and gleeful at the same time.

For the full interview, see:
Buckley, Christopher. “By the Book: Christopher Buckley.” The New York Times Book Review (Sun., July 7, 2013): 5.
(Note: the bold in the original indicates a question to Buckley by the unidentified NYT interviewer.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date July 3, 2013, and has the title “Christopher Buckley: By the Book.”)

The six volumes mentioned in the interview, have been reprinted in a two volume set:
Mencken, H.L. H.L. Mencken: Prejudices: The Complete Series. New York: Library of America, 2010.

Slow Patent System Makes U.S. Look Like Third World Country

(p. 118) The absurd length of time and the outrageous cost of obtaining a patent is a national disgrace. If we heard it took two to five years to obtain title to real property somewhere, we would assume it was a corrupt third world country. And yet that is how long it takes to receive a patent now, depending on the area of technology.

Source:
Halling, Dale B. The Decline and Fall of the American Entrepreneur: How Little Known Laws and Regulations Are Killing Innovation. Charleston, S.C.: BookSurge Publishing, 2009.

If Driverless Cars Only Kill Half a Million Per Year, that “Would Be an Improvement”

(p. 261) . . . , human-piloted cars cause great harm, killing millions of people each year worldwide. If robot-controlled cars killed “only” half a million people per year, it would be an improvement!

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.
(Note: ellipsis added.)

Great-Grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt Privately Built First Highway Dedicated to Cars

Source of book image: https://lihj.cc.stonybrook.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/Motor-Parkway_review.jpg

(p. 13) It survives only as segments of other highways, as a right of way for power lines and as a bike trail, but the Long Island Motor Parkway still holds a sense of magic as what some historians say is the country’s first road built specifically for the automobile. It opened 100 years ago last Friday as a rich man’s dream.

As detailed in a new book, “The Long Island Motor Parkway” by Howard Kroplick and Al Velocci (Arcadia Publishing), the parkway ran about 45 miles across Long Island, from Queens to Ronkonkoma, and was created by William Kissam Vanderbilt II, the great-grandson of Cornelius Vanderbilt.

. . .

The younger Vanderbilt was a car enthusiast who loved to race. He had set a speed record of 92 miles an hour in 1904, the same year he created his own race, the Vanderbilt Cup.
But his race came under fire after a spectator was killed in 1906, and Vanderbilt wanted a safe road on which to hold the race and on which other car lovers could hurl their new machines free of the dust common on roads made for horses. The parkway would also be free of “interference from the authorities,” he said in a speech.
So he created a toll road for high-speed automobile travel. It was built of reinforced concrete, had banked turns, guard rails and, by building bridges, he eliminated intersections that would slow a driver down. The Long Island Motor Parkway officially opened on Oct. 10, 1908, and closed in 1938.
. . .
But by the end of Vanderbilt’s life (he died in 1944), the public had come to feel entitled to car ownership. And there was growing pressure for public highways, like the parkways that the urban planner Robert Moses was building.

. . .

In 1938, Moses refused Vanderbilt’s appeal to incorporate the motor parkway into his new parkway system. The motor parkway just could not compete with the public roads, even after the toll was reduced to 40 cents, and Moses eventually gained control of Vanderbilt’s pioneering road for back taxes of about $80,000. The day of public roads had come, supplanting private highways.
. . .
The parkway marked the beginning of a process: the road was designed for the car. But in offering higher speeds, the parkway and other modern roads would push cars to their technical limits and beyond, inspiring innovation. In that sense, the first modern automobile highway helped to create the modern automobile.

For the full story, see:
PHIL PATTON. “A 100-Year-Old Dream: A Road Just for Cars.” The New York Times, SportsSunday Section (Sun., October 12, 2008): 13.
(Note: the centered bold ellipses were in the original; the other ellipses were added.)
(Note: the online version of the article has the date October 9, 2008.)

The book mentioned in the article, is:
Kroplick, Howard, and Al Velocci. The Long Island Motor Parkway. Mount Pleasant, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2008.

“Approximate Route of Long Island Motor Parkway.” Source of caption and map: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited above.

The Precautionary Principle Is Biased Against the New, and Ignores the Risks of the Old

(p. 250) In general the Precautionary Principle is biased against anything new. Many established technologies and “natural” processes have unexamined faults as great as those of any new technology. But the Precautionary Principle establishes a drastically elevated threshold for things that are new. In effect it grandfathers in the risks of the old, or the “nat-(p. 251)ural.” A few examples: Crops raised without the shield of pesticides generate more of their own natural pesticides to combat insects, but these indigenous toxins are not subject to the Precautionary Principle because they aren’t “new.” The risks of new plastic water pipes are not compared with the risks of old metal pipes. The risks of DDT are not put in context with the old risks of dying of malaria.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.

Ignoring Einstein’s Mistakes by Deifying Him, Makes Us Forget His Struggles

Source of book image: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/41zyL4LVYxL.jpg

(p. A13) Mr. Ohanian finds that four out of five of the seminal papers that Einstein produced in the so-called “miracle year” of 1905, when he was working as a patent inspector in Zurich, were “infested with flaws.”
. . .
. . . he notes Einstein’s errors for a purpose, showing us why his achievement was all the greater for them.
In this Mr. Ohanian provides a useful corrective, for there is a tendency, even today, to deify Einstein and other men of genius, treating them as if they were immortal gods. Einstein himself objected to the practice even as he reveled in his fame. “It is not fair,” he once observed, “to select a few individuals for boundless admiration and to attribute superhuman powers of mind and of character to them.” In doing so, ironically, we make less of the person, not more, forgetting and simplifying their struggle.
. . .
. . . Einstein’s ability to make use of his mistakes as “stepping stones and shortcuts” was central to his success, in Mr. Ohanian’s view. To see Einstein’s wanderings not as the strides of a god-like genius but as the steps and missteps of a man — fallible and imperfect — does not diminish our respect for him but rather enhances it.

For the full review, see:
McMahon, Darrin M. “BOOKSHELF; Great and Imperfect.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., September 5, 2008): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Ohanian, Hans C. Einstein’s Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008.

Chinese Peasants Applied Precautionary Principle to Scythe Technology

(p. 249) In a letter Orville Wright wrote to his inventor friend Henry Ford, Wright recounts a story he heard from a missionary stationed in China. Wright told Ford the story for the same reason I tell it here: as a cautionary tale about speculative risks. The missionary wanted to improve the laborious way the Chinese peasants in his province harvested grain. The local farmers clipped the stalks with some kind of small hand shear. So the missionary had a scythe shipped in from America and demonstrated its superior productivity to an enthralled crowd. “The next morning, however, a delegation came to see the missionary. The scythe must be destroyed at once. What, they said, if it should fall into the hands of thieves; a whole field could be cut and carried away in a single night.” And so the scythe was banished, progress stopped, because nonusers could imagine a possible–but wholly improbable–way it could significantly harm their society.

Source:
Kelly, Kevin. What Technology Wants. New York: Viking Adult, 2010.

Record Companies Refused to See Efficiency of Napster Distribution System

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

(p. A15) . . . the central character in “Appetite for Self-Destruction” is technological change.
. . .
Record labels scrambled to negotiate with Napster and develop a legal version of the service with multiple revenue streams. The attempts all failed. In Mr. Knopper’s telling, there were unreasonable demands on all sides. But he faults music executives for “cling[ing] to the old, suddenly inefficient model of making CDs and distributing them to record stores. . . . In this world, the labels controlled — and profited from — everything.” In the new world being ushered in by Napster, he writes, control was shifting “to a snot-nosed punk and his crazy uncle.”
The labels’ inability to reach an agreement with Napster destroyed “the last chance for the record industry as we know it to stave off certain ruin,” Mr. Knopper writes in a typically overheated passage. Had a deal been consummated, he suggests, a legal version of Napster might have generated revenues of $16 billion in 2002 and saved the industry. Whether or not the author’s estimate is accurate, his larger point remains: The music industry’s big mistake was trying to protect a business model that no longer worked. Litigation would not keep music consumers offline.

For the full review, see:
JEREMY PHILIPS. “BUSINESS BOOKSHELF; Spinning Out of Control; How the record industry missed out on a chance to compete in a new digital world.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., February 11, 2009): A15.
(Note: first two ellipses added; third ellipsis in original.)

The book under review is:
Knopper, Steve. Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the Record Industry in the Digital Age. New York: Free Press, 2009.

The Decay of River Rouge’s Diseconomies of Scale

“The rolling hall at Ford’s River Rouge plant, one of Andrew Moore’s photographs of Detroit.” Source of caption and of the Andrew Moore photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

Ford’s River Rouge plant near Detroit is a standard textbook example of diseconomies of scale (aka diminishing returns to scale). The image above is an apt illustration of the consequences of diseconomies of scale.

(p. 19) A Connecticut native, Mr. Moore moved to New York in 1980, living near South and John Streets in Lower Manhattan. At night he would wander the neighborhood taking pictures of the construction of the South Street Seaport, which kindled an interest in documenting “life in flux,” he said. “I like places in transformation, the process of becoming and changing.”
. . .
Photos like those of the enormous rolling hall at Ford’s River Rouge plant and a sunset over the Bob-Lo Island boat dock were inspired, Mr. Moore said, by 19th-century American landscape painters like Frederic Church and Martin Johnson Heade.

For the full story, see:
MIKE RUBIN. “Capturing the Idling of the Motor City.” The New York Times, Arts&Leisure Section (Sun., August 21, 2011): 19.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 18, 2011.”)

Andrew Moore has a book of his photos of Detroit:
Moore, Andrew, and Philip Levine. Andrew Moore: Detroit Disassembled. Bologna, Italy: Damiani/Akron Art Museum, 2010.