Taken to new heights, by “no one messes with” Joe Biden. Matt Welch eviscerates accordingly.
19 thoughts on “Government Worship”
Comments are closed.
Taken to new heights, by “no one messes with” Joe Biden. Matt Welch eviscerates accordingly.
Comments are closed.
What was the “government vision and government incentive” that produced the assembly line? Motion-picture film? Air conditioning? The electric guitar? How about the personal computer? The mobile phone? Non-violent resistance? Aspirin?
What government vision and incentive did the Wright Brothers need to invent the airplane? What about Edison and so many of his inventions? Did the government mandate the development of the light bulb, the phonograph or motion pictures? Or Bell’s telephone? The list is practically endless.
Biden is an idiot and only a heartbeat away from the presidency. And to think we were supposed to be afraid of Sarah Palin. By comparison to Biden, she’s a freaking genius. But then, so is a potted plant.
As I noted on Reason’s site… Biden is so far off he’s not even wrong. The government funded railway was so full of scandals and corruption is was ridiculous. Look at Credit Mobilier. Look at the land holdings Abe Lincoln bought that were somehow accidentally right where the railway was going to make them valuable. Then look at the unsubsidized private Great Northern transcontinental venture that actually made a buck.
Not only did the Wrights build their plane without a penny of government assistance, they did it for a fraction of the cost spent by U.S. government-sponsored Prof. Langley, who’s huge, cumbersome Aerodrome was an unqualified disaster.
I’ve read that the Wrights spent less than $2000 of their own money on their airplane experiments through the 1903 Flyer. Langley received a $25,000 government grant for his failed Aerodrome. It did have a terrific engine for its time but to my knowledge, nothing came of it.
But, the Wright’s prime customer was the U.S. Army. Biden’s right in a sense, most bleeding-edge R&D and a lot of industrial technology was developed either by the government, or with the government as a prime customer. The government – these days usually either the DoD or NASA – is just about the only customer that can afford the high risk of bleeding -edge research.
Most commercial entities simply do not have the backing or patience. There are some examples of commercial labs that develop bleeding-edge research without near-term customers – most notably Edison, Bell Labs, and Xerox-Palo Alto – but they’re very rare.
For some good examples of current technological development, get a copy of NASA Spinoffs, http://www.sti.nasa.gov/tto/, and NASA Tech Briefs, http://www.techbriefs.com/. NASA’s real job isn’t space-exploration, per se, it’s developing high-risk, long-term pay-off technologies for the aerospace industries. Remember the DC-3, the first commercially successful airliner? It relied heavily on NACA (NASA’s predecessor) developed technologies, particularly the aerodynamic engine cowlings.
What was the “government vision and government incentive” that produced the assembly line? Motion-picture film? Air conditioning? The electric guitar? How about the personal computer? The mobile phone? Non-violent resistance? Aspirin?
Assembly line: Samuel Colt, made revolvers for the U.S. Army. Henry Ford borrowed from him. I also rather imagine that Ford got quite a commercial boost from WW I and the need for military transportation.
Motion-picture film: the CIA, with their requirements for air and satellite imagery.
The electric guitar: Well, where do you think that Gibson got his transducers from?
The person computer: That’s a classic – NASA. The whole compact computer industry is derived from the Apollo and Minuteman guidance computers.
The mobile phone: Army mobile communications.
Apirin – military medics. Actually, military medical requirements are responsible for a whole lot of innovations, especially in the areas of reconstructive surgery and brain-injury treatment.
Ok, I’m pushing it a bit. The point is, if you look back along the track of just about any technological development, you are quite likely to find a government program of some kind as the first customer – the one willing to take the risk of buying the 1st copy of something. Boeing spent $11 billion developing the 777 aircraft – a straight forward improvement on the 707 – 767 line, and that was with a couple of dozen customers already signed up sign unseen. Do you really think that even Boeing would be willing to develop something like the X-48B without a government sponsor? Something that might prove to have commercial potential 30 years down the road? Not likely.
But, the Wright’s prime customer was the U.S. Army.
The Wrights didn’t sell their first plane to the Army until 1907 or 1908, several years after their pioneering flights at Kitty Hawk and more substantive flights at Hoffman Prairie.
Assembly line: Samuel Colt, made revolvers for the U.S. Army. Henry Ford borrowed from him. I also rather imagine that Ford got quite a commercial boost from WW I and the need for military transportation.
Colt was only one of many who developed assembly lines, some for government customers and others for the commercial market. Ford began his pioneering work on the use of assembly lines for cars in 1908 which was many years before the US entered WWI (1917).
The assembly line was first used on a large scale by the meat-packing industries of Chicago and Cincinnati during the 1870s. These slaughterhouses used monorail trolleys to move suspended carcasses past a line of stationary workers, each of whom did one specific task. Contrary to most factories’ lines in which products are gradually put together step-by-step, this first assembly line was in fact more of a “dis-assembly” line, since each worker butchered a piece of a diminishing animal. The apparent breakthroughs in efficiency and productivity that were achieved by these meat packers were not immediately realized by any other industry until the American industrialist Henry Ford (1863-1947) designed an assembly line in 1913 to manufacture his Model T automobiles. Ford openly admitted using the meat-packing lines as a model. When the total time of assembly for a single car fell from 12.5 labor hours to 93 labor minutes, Ford was able to drastically reduce the price of his cars. His success not only brought automobile ownership within the grasp of the average person, but it served notice to all types of manufacturers that the assembly line was here to stay. The assembly line transformed in a revolutionary way the manner and organization of work, and by the end of World War I, the principle of continuous movement was sweeping mass-production industries of the world and was soon to become an integral part of modern industry.
Motion-picture film: the CIA, with their requirements for air and satellite imagery.
The motion picture was invented before 1900 which was well before the invention of the airplane or satellite. The CIA didn’t come into existance until the late 1940s. There were decades of movies being made in Hollywood and elsewhere before there was a CIA.
The person computer: That’s a classic – NASA. The whole compact computer industry is derived from the Apollo and Minuteman guidance computers.
NASA was a major consumer of ICs during the Apollo era but the first microprocessor (Intel 4004) was made to support the calculator market. For over 20 years, the commerial market has been the leading driving factor in electronics development, not the government.
In 1969, Nippon Calculating Machine Corporation requested that Intel design 12 custom chips for its new Busicom 141-PF printing calculator. Instead of creating a dozen custom chips specifically for the calculator, Intel’s engineers proposed a new design: a family of just four chips, including one that could be programmed for use in a variety of products.
The set of four chips was called the MCS-4. It included a central processing unit (CPU) chip—the 4004, a supporting read-only memory (ROM) chip for the custom applications programs, a random-access memory (RAM) chip for processing data, and a shift-register chip for the input/output (I/O) port. Intel delivered the four chips and Busicom went on to sell some 100,000 calculators.
Intel offered Busicom a lower price for the chips in return for securing the rights to the microprocessor design and the rights to market it for non-calculator applications, allowing the Intel 4004 microprocessor to be advertised in the November 15, 1971 issue of Electronic News. It’s then that the Intel 4004 became the first general-purpose microprocessor on the market—a “building block” that engineers could purchase and then customize with software to perform different functions in a wide variety of electronic devices.
@Paul of Alexandria: Say “bleeding-edge” again. Say “bleeding-edge” again! I dare you! I double-dare you, motherfucker! Say “bleeding-edge” one more goddamn time!
It would appear from some of the comments above that because the government uses fire in 2011, the caveman who first harnessed it for his own purposes has to admit to some government involvement in his achievement.
This follows the same kind of time-travel logic that would tax Americans in the 21st century to pay reparations for slavery.
Sheesh, somebody needs to go watch some Connections.
Seriously. If you haven’t seen James Burke’s works before, at least check out the original. He credits governments (specifically, war, most of the time) when they earn it, but many inventions are created by accident, determined effort, and/or logical-if-unexpected progression from innovations elsewhere, sometimes in wholly-unrelated fields.
The “government customer” theme is used (without evidence, let alone proof) in a number of situations. The classic is that “munitions” manufacturers are behind all of the big wars. Explosives certainly is a big industry. But only 3% of all the explosive material produced is used by the military.
Warfare has always been a major driver of technological development, since the stakes are literally life and death. Stone weapons were perfectly adequate for hunting animals and were used for millennia, but once humans settled down and organized complex societies, they were quickly replaced by bronze and then by iron. They weren’t needed for hunting; they were developed to secure an advantage in fighting other groups of humans.
But governments themselves are usually not responsible for technological innovation. Inventions are created by individuals, and they are then put to use by the governments.
Governmental organization is inevitably an important part of warfare. A well-organized army will always defeat a disorganized rabble. The moon race was an important “battle” in the Cold War, so it’s not surprising that governments took a lead role in organizing and focusing the efforts of individuals and businesses.
An outstanding book about the invention of flight is To Conquer the Air. It naturally centers on the Wright Brothers, but also describes the efforts of other aviation pioneers in the first decade of the 20th century. I learned more about Langley from this book than I ever knew before. The contrast between the private efforts of the Wrights and the government-sponsored Langley could not be clearer.
An earlier commenter mentioned Langley’s engine. The book chronicles the difficulties, expenses, and delays in its development. As an Amazon reviewer said:
Yet once the Wrights perfected and patented their machine, the first thing they did was peddle it to the Army.
I should point out that Langley’s “aerodrome”, being much heavier, required a more powerful engine. Langley was pushing the bleeding edge in engine development (there, I said it). The Wrights’ airframe was lighter, so they could make do with a less powerful engine.
It’s not so much whether Joe B. is right or wrong, it’s that the longer you tell a lie, the more times you tell a lie, the more people think it’s the truth.
Here’s a perfect example.
How many people associate Nixon with being THE President who fought the Viet Nam war? Plenty do, even people who should be old enough to know better. I know adults my age, mid 50’s, who say Nixon ramped up troop levels, bombed every living inch of the country, drug his feet in Paris at the peace talks and is THE guy most responsible for All the deaths over there. I had one guy tell me Eisenhower started the war and Nixon carried it on!! It certainly is not the right side of politics that perpetuates that historically challenged thinking.
.
Here’s further proof. Break out a current HS history book. If the war is mentioned, Nixon’s pictures is usually there, his name is always there. WWII is missing, but Nixon fought in Nam!!
Biden is like the rest of the left. He’s willing to tell great big lies to prove, or create, his point. All this constant lying and rewriting of history means is, in the future Obama will replace Washington as the first President.
So what. Al Gore is already getting credit for creating the internet. History isn’t important. Big woop.
(I’m just going to assume that P of A meant LEADING edge?)
I should point out that Langley’s “aerodrome”, being much heavier, required a more powerful engine. Langley was pushing the bleeding edge in engine development (there, I said it). The Wrights’ airframe was lighter, so they could make do with a less powerful engine.
In other words, Langley chose the wrong solution, and it didn’t work.
A Libertarian friend of mine likes to make the point that if the U.S. government had taken charge of the fight against polio in 1945, then by 1960 the program would have developed portable, mass-produced iron lungs that only cost $20,000 apiece.
And speaking of Langley, let’s not forget that the Party invented helicopters.
It’s interesting how the government has evolved. Back then they picked one contractor who picked the wrong component of the problem to focus on.
If we transplanted today’s philosophy to the problem of building a plane in the 1900’s then they’d (try to) avoid the risk of going down the wrong path by letting 6 contracts in Phase I. Two for the plant, two for the control system and two for the aerodynamics. All three areas would get the same resources allocated because everyone would be competing to get their preferred technology front and center.
There’d be a downselect for Phase II. The remaining contractors (Wrights for control, Langley for the engine and let’s say, Chanute for the aerodynamics). The contractors working largely independently would come up with solutions that would work together – just barely. For example, aerodynamics problems the Wrights solved would go unaddressed because Chanute would not have been doing the glider tests the Wrights did (not his fault).
The final solution would be so prohibitively expensive it would be impossible to responsibly consider acquisition. That wouldn’t matter because it isn’t TRL 6 anyway.
Eventually the commercial world would decide they need a plane and would build it and that’s when the acquisition groups would get interested. Then the likes of Joe Biden would tell us about government innovation.
Fortunately for aviaition, we started at the final step.
I’ve said for a long time that if the government had controlled aviation from the beginning, today we would have gigantic 8-engine triplanes with 20-man crews, and we’d still be looking forward to the first transatlantic flight.
But Murgatroyd put it much more succinctly with his polio comment.
An earlier commenter mentioned Langley’s engine. The book chronicles the difficulties, expenses, and delays in its development. As an Amazon reviewer said:
One of the most memorable passages in the book describes how Charlie Taylor, the Wright’s mechanic at their bicycle shop, put together a lightweight 12-horsepower gasoline engine out of spare parts, easily outdoing the best engine that Langley could provide for his craft.
Taylor’s engine development was remarkable. Still, if you read about the Manly-Balzer engine, it’s hard not to be impressed. The engine had a dry weight of 136 pounds and produced 52 horsepower at 950 RPM. It held the power to weight ratio record for many years. Manly later worked for Curtiss and helped develop the successful OX-5 engine.
While on a trip in Europe in 1900, every engineer he met told Manly that the rotary design was hopeless. Manly eventually became convinced of this himself, and started work on adapting one of the existing Balzer engines into a non-rotating radial engine instead. The main concern was cooling, which he solved by welding a jacket to each cylinder and filling it with water. The results were more than encouraging, and the engine was soon delivering 12-16 hp, double what it had. This version was soon in place on a 1/4 scale model of the “Great Aerodrome”, which flew successfully in 1901.
Encouraged by this success, Manly started scaling up the engine with larger cylinders and new lightweight pistons. The resulting design weighed 120 pounds, and delivered 52 hp, making it by far the most powerful lightweight engine of its era, far outperforming the one that would eventually be successful on the Wright Flyer. The engine was delivered in March 1903 while work on the Great Aerodrome continued, and was fitted for testing that summer. In September the aircraft was moved to the Potomac River for testing, where it crashed in spectacular fashion on October 7th. Ironically, Langley had also fallen prey to the “scale it up” problem, and the full-sized model of what was a sturdy 1/4 scale model was hopelessly fragile.
Glenn Curtiss later revived the engine in an effort to break the Wright’s patents on aircraft by flying the Aerodrome. Although his new version of the Aerodrome itself was heavily modified, the engine was used “as is”, and proved to be entirely successful.