Been a long time...

Hi all,

Well, it's been a while since I've been on here. The usual stuff got in the way but I'm back and I'll try to keep the updates more regular.

So today is Groundhog Day! And Punxy Phil saw his shadow so northwestern Pennsylvania is in store for six more weeks of winter. Not a big stretch for that part of the world. But is it just a coincidence that the Superbowl is this Sunday? What? Groundhog day and the Superbowl?

Groundhog day is related to the christian holiday of Candlemas and the pagan Imbolc. Imbolc in particular celebrates the half way point from the winter solstice to the spring equinox. Both were feast and celebration days and especially in northern Europe both were seen as a time to celebrate winter being half over. Pennsylvania German settlers carried these customs and the weather prognostication myths of various animals to the new world and, a couple centuries later, we have Groundhog Day!

What is the Superbowl if not a chance to spend a Sunday (a church day after all) sitting around, eating, with friends, in a nice warm house away from the winter cold and snow? Doesn't a football look suspiciously like a groundhog? Superbowl Sunday has become our very own midwinter feast day.

Now who has some good chili recipes?

Been through the desert on a horse with no name...

As an historian of technology I love old, "high tech" things that are still in their original intended use. The B-52 bomber is a great example. Originally designed in the late 1940s and first flown in 1952, it is still in service in its original role with its original customer. The Russian/Soviet Tu-95 is a similar aircraft that was originally designed 60 years ago but is still in service.

The latest issue of Trains magazine has another example of old tech still in daily use, the Ferrocarril de Tocopilla al Toco, a nitrate railroad in Chile. It was built back in the 1890s and operated with steam locomotives until 1928 when the railroad electrified the line and purchased several General Electric electric locomotives for motive power. They are still there running in daily heavy mineral service on a tortuous line in one of the harshest climates in the world, the Atacama desert. Now over 80 years old the original Erie, Pennsylvania built locomotives are still toiling away in the barren and arid desert hauling endless trains of nitrates out of the mountains and to the seaport town of Tocopilla. Railroad historians in many countries could probably find locomotives 50 or 60 years old still in service, especially in low speed switching service but 80 years for a mainline electric locomotive on a mountain railroad is pretty good, if not a record. New isn't always better.

Do any readers have other examples of old technology still in its original use decades or even centuries later?

Who needs a highway, an airport or a jet when you can't get a gallon of gas?

You could make a convincing case that the modern world started 150 years ago this week in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Back in 1859 an out of work railroad conductor with no engineering or drilling experience drilled the first successful oil well. Colonel (the title was honorary) Edwin Drake struck olive green Pennsylvania crude at a depth of 69 1/2 feet and so touched off the age of petroleum.

For the first 50 years of oil production the key product was not gasoline for motor vehicles but kerosene for lighting. Whales were getting scarce and whalers were having to head as far south as the Falkland Islands to look for whales for whale oil. Kerosene refined from Pennsylvania crude was cheaper and more easily accessible. Only after about 1910 and the rise of the Model T did gasoline become more important than Kerosene. The US supplied itself from domestic sources for the first 90 years of production but became a net importer of petroleum in 1949. The last 60 years and the economic and societal growth that has gone along with it has been fueled by imported oil.

I'll let others debate the future of oil but let's take a moment and remember when it all began in a bucolic middle of nowhere Pennsylvania town back before the Civil War.

Chasing the Moon...

You'd have to be in a cave not to have noticed that July 16-24 is the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing mission. (July 18th is also the 40th anniversary of my birth). There have been some very well done documentaries and books on the moon missions and some that are not so well done. You can view the moon missions in a political context, a scientific and technological one, a social one, a cultural one, even a religious and spiritual one. Now that Apollo is fading into history its interesting how a current event is making the transition to historical event. The astronauts themselves have kept a low profile except for Buzz Aldrin who has been a little more publicly visible. The science and technology necessary for the moon missions has seemed to disappear in the background of the political and social impacts. The moon missions are today viewed (correctly) in a cold war context as a battle with the Soviet Union and more cynically as a distraction from the Vietnam war and civil rights controversies at home. Some view the moon missions as a gigantic waste of money that would have been better spent here at home. Most amazingly there are a large number of people that doubt that we ever went to the moon at all!

The decreasing emphasis on the technological achievement of the moon missions is interesting for an historian of technology. The space program was an incredible technological program that resulted in myriad technological and other impacts. It was a program created, developed, led, managed, and executed by people. These people had many, possibly conflicting motivations for participating. They did achieve the objective and landed men on the moon and returned them safely to earth. Whatever other lessons we take away from the moon missions, we should remember that we imperfect humans actually did create, manage and execute a technological program that let a very select few walk around (and even drive a car!) on the surface of the moon.

Dissapearing Railroad Blues...

My folks came down for a visit recently. Among the other stuff that we did during the visit, Dad and I watched some of his old video tapes of railroads. One featured passenger and freight trains in and around St. Louis. The other was a comprehensive look at the western end of the former Erie Lackawanna railroad. The bulk of the St. Louis video was filmed in the late 1960s while the Erie Lackawanna video was filmed from 1968 to 1976.
I was struck by the sheer number of passenger trains at St. Louis in the late 1960s. The 1960s were far from a golden time for railroads and by the late 1960s passenger service was poor and far between. However, St. Louis was still served by trains of the Penn Central, Gulf, Mobile and Ohio, Illinois Central, Missouri Pacific, Norfolk and Western, Louisville and Nashville and Baltimore and Ohio. St. Louis Union Station was still in use for its intended purpose, not as a hotel, mall and tourist attraction. Several of the scenes in the video showed the construction of Highway 40 in downtown St. Louis. Highway 40 soars right over the top of the approach tracks to Union Station and seemingly entombs the rails. A more concrete and poignant symbol of the decline of passenger rail and the ascendancy of the interstate is hard to find. St. Louis however is lucky to still have Amtrak service today with several round trips to Chicago and Kansas City leaving daily.
The cities on the former Erie-Lackawanna are not as lucky. The EL was absorbed into the government created Conrail in 1976 and promptly downgraded and abandoned. The vast majority of the double track, high speed railroad that existed in 1975 was torn up and sold for scrap by the early 1980s. This was not a single track branch line through the weeds but a high traffic, well engineered double track main line. It is now gone forever. The EL was a scrappy railroad. It was surrounded by larger railroads like the Penn Central. It also missed most of the larger cities in Indiana and Ohio with the exception of Youngstown, Ohio. No large on-line cities means little on-line traffic. None the less, the EL responded and competed aggressively for traffic between Chicago and New York. It landed a lucrative contract to haul UPS truck trailers on railroad flatcars between the two points. As passenger service declined, the EL had an excess of passenger locomotives. Instead of scrapping them it put them to use hauling fast freight trains between Chicago and points east. The EL was surviving the hard times and deindustrialization of the early 1970s but only just. The nail in the coffin for the EL was Hurricane Agnes which washed out miles of track in upstate and western New York and Pennsylvania.
The video also showed a thriving Youngstown and other Ohio cities with steel mills and factories providing jobs (and pollution). After watching both videos I realized perhaps more concretely just how far we have come and how much we have lost over the last 40 years. We no longer have run down passenger stations like St. Louis Union station was in 1970. But we no longer have a large terminal station in St. Louis at all. (St. Louis does have a much smaller but very nice and usable station, the Gateway Intermodal Center.) We no longer have steel mills belching smoke into the sky but we no longer have the middle class jobs those mills provided. We still have steel though. It just isn't made in Youngstown any longer but in China, India and Brazil. Globalization and the deindustrialization of the northeast and Midwest are large topics but sometimes it helps to drill down to a company like the Erie Lackawanna, a railroad that played by the rules and did what railroads are supposed to do, move trains and make money.

This beat goes on...

A friend sent me this link.

While the Walkman was a revolutionary new consumer electronics product, like the I-pod, the first truly portable music device was the original transistor radio from the 1950s. It really did allow a user to take the music (or sports, news, etc.) with them. Even before that you had radios in cars and semi-portable sets date back to the 1920s.

Before radio there were semi-portable crank operated Victrolas that one could cart from room to room and out on the porch at least. And of course, the ultimate in portable music goes back at least 35,000 years, instruments.

If there is a trend here it is toward more variety, more choice and smaller size. The 35,000 year old German flute recently found is very portable but it can only play what you play on it. Edison's Phonograph allowed you, in the comfort of you own home to listen to recordings of great symphonies or backwoods jug bands. Player pianos allowed you to have a skilled musician in your own home whenever you wanted but were hardly portable. Radio allowed you to listen to music live as it was happening and a much greater variety than you could ever purchase on a phonograph record. The only problem was that with radio, you weren't in direct control of what you heard next. That was eliminated with the Walkman and I-pod. The problem for musicians, record companies, and perhaps others is that when you only listen to what you like, how do you get exposed to new music that you may, or may not, like? Does Radio still have a role to play here?

110 in the shade...

I'm sitting here in my office on a fine summer day. It's in the mid-90s outside but not in here. It's in the mid 60s here in my office thanks to the wonders of Air Conditioning! Why is it so cold in here? I'd be happy with a temperature of 75 today. An engineering friend tells me that in many large buildings the constantly moving air is cooled to a low temperature, usually in the 50s, and then heated back to a comfortable temperature before being blown out into occupied spaces. Why cool air only to re-heat it? Humidity. Cooling the air removes the humidity that produces that sticky feeling.

This gives us a hint why it's called Air Conditioning rather than Air Cooling. Engineers back in the 1930s at Carrier Corp. in Syracuse, NY conceived modern air conditioning. But they wanted to do much more than simply cool the air the way a furnace heats air in the winter. The engineers visualized a world where windows would be permanently sealed and we would control the indoor climate completely. Many manufacturing processes needed not only rigidly controlled temperatures but also controlled humidity. Architects liked the idea of buildings where heating, cooling, ventilation and conditioning the air was all controlled and integrated with the other building systems.

The legacy of this is my building where it's 60 degrees inside and 90 outside. I'm lucky that I have a window that opens. Many do not. The conflict here is obvious. Engineers and architects envisioned buildings where the heating, cooling and ventilation were all integrated into the structure like one large machine. It would be efficient and would achieve the dream of controlled weather. Many consumers cared not for integrated building systems and just wanted to not have to endure the summer heat. Consumers increasingly opted for small window units that blew cool air at them. The window unit was the engineers worst nightmare. It was inefficient and did nothing to control and condition the air in the entire building. Comfort vs. Efficiency. Control vs. Convenience.

This conflict is still being played out in buildings across the world but it all dates back to some engineers 80 years ago who wanted to achieve the dream of controlling the weather.