When the last energy revolution occurred, fossil fuels began with coal taking over the roads. For century it was like the huge UNIVAC computers, limited to large scale in the form of railroads and factories. Then Henry Ford became the Bill Gates of fossil fuels.
Neither Ford nor Gates claimed to be original. Gates said he was waiting on personal computers to reach a certain level, and he named the new PC that developed and caused him to tell his partner, “Now it’s time to get going.“
Certainly Ford made even less claim to being original.
In fact, who exactly invented something is usually a historical detail. Some Chinese invented one thing after another, OR it got to China from White India, but each time the invention stopped when it got to China. The printing press was there but died, the gun was in Japan in the sixteenth century but died.
There is a lot of debate about whether China invented GUN powder. They did have rockets that made no difference to their history, so the question is did they have GUNS that made no difference to their history?
But the real, the HISTORICAL question about Oriental inventiveness is already answered: If you have to look so closely to see whether gunpowder was ever there, then clearly the Oriental use of it is entirely different from the Aryans’.
In a white society there is a lot of debate about who invented something. The reason for this is that the SOCIETY had reached a point where the ingredients are there and someone will put them together. There has never been a debate in Oriental society about who invented what.
Unlike Al Gore, Gates did not claim to invent the Internet just as Henry Ford never claimed to have invented the automobile. Ford‘s mass production methods were what made Eli Whitney rich after he found the cotton gin was simply too simple to keep patent rights on.
But both Gates and Ford did the thing that is utterly lacking in Oriental societies. They took a concept and made it a societal advance.
The space program is going through a similar process. When the USSR’s Sputnik went up in 1958 a number of giant programs were adopted to counter that achievement in the US. What most people didn’t know was that a rocket that could do the same thing was sitting in the US stockpile.
I wonder if the Soviets ever invented ANYTHING?
But there is nothing the media like like a national crisis, so a national crisis Sputnik became.
If you read science fiction from the 50s and 60s you consistently find the computers involved are giants, Univac’s big brothers, as dependent on size as on advancing technology. In China, the things which impress Americans in history, like iron foundries, were huge projects.
But it is on the Ford stage that Western technology is built. In 1958 Sputnik, which was putting an overweight basketball into orbit, was a massive project that showed that only The Collectives of the Peoples’ Democratic Republics, working the entire economy under Mommy Professor’s planning, could produce such a marvel.
Now putting things into orbit is regular business, and each year the businesses able to do it get smaller.
Right now a person can construct an A-Bomb off the Internet if he has the uranium. It is the power that is missing. So BoardAd and I are watching for the new power source.
With that new power source will come a time when private use of outer space is as common as it is in old sci-fi stories.
We are now seeing problems with regulating the Internet between countries like the ones they will encounter in regulating space.
But you will not see any of these future realities discussed anywhere but BUGS.
#1 by backbaygrouch on 06/14/2010 - 7:04 am
Some thirty plus years ago I did a stint with a small brokerage house in the back office located on an upper story of an old commercial building. It was the sort that could not be subdivided as efficiently as modern structures that are essentially without immovable walls. There was sort of a cubbyhole of unused space in which sat a very heavy, dust laden thingey about four feet high, five feet deep and eight feet long. It would have been tossed but for the weight and that the space was not needed.
What was it? I asked around and one old codger of a broker laughed, “That’s our fax machine.” Faxes were just then becoming popular and the hide bound old firm still had not sprung for any. But they had a fax machine that was nearly a hundred years old.
He was right. The previous tenant had been an architectural partnership and when they merged or went out of business, the fax machine was left behind. Seems fax machines were invented in the mid 19th century in the US. They were not much used until later in the century when, combined with the telephone, construction firms could have blueprints drawn up in Boston for work in China throughout a project. Saved money, you did not have to send draftsmen overseas.
The technology stagnated until the later 20th century when someone in Japan miniaturized it to the point where offices adopted them and then they invaded our homes. Oh those clever Japanese. I always wanted to power up that behemoth but never got to.
#2 by Dave on 06/14/2010 - 10:57 am
We are on the receiving end of an endless promotion about China, but what people don’t know is that manufacturing is easy if the supply chain is in place to support the construction of a manufacturing platform.
That supply chain is now missing in America, but with pain and effort it could be recovered. Whether it makes sense to recover it, is a whole other issue.
But think of the nonsense the Chinese are involved in. They have made surreal efforts at a preposterous scale to construct high-rises, long after they have been proven obsolete. A high-rise was a stupid investment in 1930, let alone 2010! Yet, they think cities of high-rises constitute modernity.
They build dams in their muddy rivers with a service life of less than 25% of American dams that generate electricity in rivers running clear water.
They have made stupendous investments in high speed rail, another stupid idea America is blessed not to have participated in, obsolete nonsense, yet the Obama administration is promoting high speed rail!
I have to pinch myself to believe people can be that stupid.
Americans have the solution to their transportation problems staring them in the face, easy and cost effective, but of course the bureaucrats don’t want it, because it is not a huge expensive project, and that is simply maintain our current freeway platform with lane set asides for natural gas buses and to throw up toll booths to control auto volume.
For buildings, going underground means security and energy effectiveness; high-rises are an affectation of the 19th century.
Our airline platform needs to shrink, another stupid form of transportation. There is too much involved in making it work securely at a price people can afford. It is not needed in the Internet era.
Nothing, but nothing needs to “wait” on energy developments. That’s more Mommy Professor nonsense. There is no such thing as a “shortage” of energy. Energy clears at the price it clears at.
If the cost of energy is brought down by developments in nuclear power, it is true we all become richer, but it still clears at the price it clears at, and it doesn’t make high-rises and high-speed rail and airlines any less stupid.