Humans making stuff

The maker movement robustly engages kids.

To those who have come along since, it is impossible to relate the excitement, the fluorescent electric buzz of growing up in the 1950s.

It hadn't been that long since the rural poor had lived on hardscrabble farms with hand-pumped water, outhouses, and kerosene lanterns. Some still did.

But we were on the cusp of monumental change. AT&T had invented the transistor, we soon had hand-portable radios and heard tales of electronic computers projecting presidential election results. TV sets, fine as any piece of furniture, were quickly supplanting radios as the figurative family hearth.

The days of propeller-driven aircraft became numbered. Jet airliners began to leave contrails high across the blue domed sky and futuristic Air Force fighters delighted air show attendees and model builders alike.

The first artificial satellites blasted into Earth orbit to the intense excitement of kids who had been reading Heinlein, Asimov, and Clarke. These great authors were serious futurists who prepared our minds for incredible advances to come, usually teaching real physics in the process.

After thousands of years of very gradual advances, it seemed that technology was exploding in waves around us, driven by a deep understanding of electromagnetic forces and a burgeoning electrical power infrastructure. This was a thrilling time to be a kid, to soak it all in.

We were inveterate tinkerers. We made go-karts from scratch using old, rebuilt lawn mower engines. We built crystal radio sets which were powered by the very radio waves they teased from the night sky. We learned to make electromagnets using large dry-cell batteries and hand-wound, iron-core coils. We learned how to repair TV and radio sets which suffered from burnt-out vacuum tubes.

And as the 50s melded into the 60s, we built more ambitious radio receivers and transmitters with sophisticated antenna systems. Our thoughts turned to computers and we learned how to build flip flops and memory devices using transistors.

We demanded coaxial cables, connectors, discrete components (resistors, capacitors, transistors) and whole kits – TV sets, short-wave radio receivers, and elementary computers – all to be assembled, soldered, tested, and put to use by the hobbyist. These parts and kits came from a thriving, growing hobbyist marketplace – Heathkit and Radio Shack served as pluperfect examples.

So it was with great regret and nostalgia when we heard the news that RadioShack had declared bankruptcy.

Started by two brothers in 1921, Radio Shack was initially located in downtown Boston. It offered a retail store and mail order catalogue operation largely to supply the rapidly growing field of amateur (“ham”) radio. Surviving over 90 years was no mean feat, but RadioShack (the final name) eventually succumbed to financial failure. Its peak success occurred in the 1970s, as it catered to the needs of citizens band (CB) radio hobbyists. Along the way, the firm tried many business models, offering proprietary Tandy Radio Shack (TRS) computers and then betting heavily on smartphones. But the do-it-yourself market was allowed to languish, and some feel this inattention was a major cause of failure.

Because the do-it-yourselfers and hobbyists and tinkerers are still out there. Today we call them “makers.” And RadioShack missed the maker movement.

Makers are a wide and varied demographic made up of kids of all ages. Students, executives, engineers, house wives, just about anyone who is a kid at heart. The only requirement is to have an intense curiosity in how things work and a desire to build stuff.

Technology has changed dramatically since the 1950s. Makers obviously don’t test and replace vacuum tubes in a failed radio, but they interact with a whole new set of technologies.

Makers write code and build computer games. Makers create automatic guidance systems for drones. Makers use 3D printers to create prosthetic hands and jewelry and  musical instruments, and openly share the computer files that define these objects. (Sharing is a fundamental attribute of the maker movement).

But makers also created squishy circuits, enabling one to build basic logic circuits from batteries and homemade dough. Or plush toy DNA molecules with magnetic strips that allow them join and assemble only into chemically correct combinations.

The modern maker movement appears to have a strong dose of STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) with an equally robust measure of art to boot. Perhaps STEAM would be more appropriate.

It’s not surprising that our do-it-yourself spirit is still strong. Humans make stuff. 

Perhaps the reconstituted RadioShack, as it emerges from bankruptcy, should look back to its roots.

Knowledge is Power

Huge 3D printers will build houses.

In the 1961 film “The Errand Boy”, Jerry Lewis plays the part of a mailroom clerk serving a sprawling Hollywood studio. The movie depicts Lewis and his band of fellows as they deliver mail and scripts and revisions and memos between hundreds of offices. In typical Lewis fashion, there are lots of laughs as items are misdelivered and paper flies everywhere.

The mailroom was a classic entry opportunity into the business world. Mail clerks, if assiduous, could learn the business, gain knowledge, and begin to rise within the organization. The mailroom was a common feature of many businesses as disparate as banks, grocery chains, manufacturers, and hospitals. They all had in common the need to distribute information between knowledge workers in a variety of departments, a function the mailroom was designed to fulfill.

But the number of mailroom jobs is quickly dwindling and the culprit is obviously the rise of digital technologies. Email and text messages and a variety of other technologies have sharply reduced the need for human clerks to move physical representations of information from place to place. We now increasingly move information as bits over the internet, not physical pages made of atoms. Bits don’t require clerks as atoms do.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the fastest growing and most rapidly declining occupations over the next ten years.  Not really surprising, health care, computer, and construction jobs are ascendant. Equally not a shock is that apparel manufacturing, federal postal work, and sugar and confectionary production are on the decline.  A combination of dietary evangelism, technological shifts, and globalization has created winners and losers in the job market.

There is yet another technological revolution on the horizon which may wreak havoc with skilled machinists and a number of other occupations – 3D printing.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of metal working, where milling machine or lathes are used to manufacture precision parts. These parts are then combined with others, screwed, bolted or glued together to create a final product or component such as an airplane wing or an artificial limb.

3D printing turns this time honored approach on its head. The thing to be produced is first represented, in its entirely, as a  highly detailed computer file. This information is then processed by a machine which miraculously turns the description of the thing into the thing itself.

The machine, a three dimensional “printer,” is called such because the basic mechanism is reminiscent of the old dot matrix printer.  A dot matrix computer printer utilizes a print head which moves left and right across a page and deposits tiny dots of ink to create letters and numbers and graphics; patterns of dots which finally become your recipe for tomato soup or a letter to mom.

Now imagine a “print head” that can move in three dimensions – vertically as well as two horizontal directions – and instead of ink, exudes bits of material which harden on contact. Processing the detailed design file, the 3D printer patiently “paints” the thing itself, building up layers as it sweeps back and forth. It can take many hours, but an actual object, such as a coffee cup or piece of jewelry, finally emerges.

Long a curiosity of hobbyists, 3D printers were little more than expensive toys. But continued refinement has vastly improved their capabilities. For instance, Boeing now uses 3D printers to create certain airplane parts. Medical researchers are printing human body parts, such as kidneys and livers, and while this is still in the experimental stage, the prognosis is good.

A University of Southern California team is building a huge 3D printer designed to create buildings. Exuding concrete, this machine will be capable of creating houses or other structures, complete, from the ground up.

This technology is truly amazing and will revolutionize how we humans create objects in our world. But what does all this mean on the job front?

Like other disruptive technologies, it will destroy some occupations but create many others. It is difficult to precisely predict the job skills demanded in this new world. But for our children, a solid education including language and computers and mathematics seems a good bet. The successful worker of tomorrow will need to be literate in many ways.

As we were all taught, knowledge is, indeed, power.

On wooden ships and foxhole radios

Foxhole radio - c. 1942

We commemorated the two-hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Lake Erie a few weeks ago. On September 10, 1813, a rag-tag group of American sailors led by Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry beat the British fleet at Put-in-Bay, Ohio. This decisive battle was a major factor in resolving the War of 1812. Perry is memorialized in his home state of Rhode Island and at Presque Island, Pennsylvania, where six of his nine-ship fleet were built by hand, from their keels up.

In a seemingly unrelated event, National Public Radio recently aired an appreciative retrospective about AM radio. Listeners called in and recounted tales of making crystal radios from scratch. Veterans of World War II remembered building “foxhole radios” which used a razor blade and pencil as a detector to pull music and comedy skits from the ether, cheering an otherwise grim battlefield.

These disparate observations illustrate an important point. For nearly all of humankind’s existence, we lived in close proximity to our various technologies. You could either weave cloth from wool yourself or knew someone who could. And at the very least, you were certainly capable of understanding how it was done. Nearly anyone could become a blacksmith or learn to grow and reap a crop of wheat. Or build a wooden ship, or a radio.

It is only in the past fifty years or so, the briefest tick of human existence, that our technologies have become so complex, so remote.

Former backyard mechanics joke that one now needs a double degree in mechanical and computer engineering to build a car. But the joke is true. Fifty years ago, we could adjust the point gap and timing, change the carburetor jets, and really understand what was happening. Today, we look at our shiny new iPhone and haven’t a clue that it uses quantum tunneling effects to store our silly cat video, a concept that bedeviled Albert Einstein himself (quantum tunneling, that is, not the cat videos, but one wonders what he would have thought of them).

This evolution of complexity and technological remoteness will accelerate, and it will do so exponentially. Our children and their children will live in a world far removed from crystal radios and backyard brake jobs. This isn’t a bad thing. Technology has given us wonderful advances leading to notably longer human life spans.

But, yet, a wedge is being driven into our humanity, separating us from the world that nurtures us. It’s not that we shouldn’t celebrate the advent of autonomous (driver-less) cars and nano-engineered robots, but we need to retain our connectedness to Mother Earth. It is important to know how to grow a tomato and how to make your own sauce. While enjoying the constant chatter of Facebook, you must write an actual letter, in your own hand, to express your love to a distant elderly relative.

So let’s revel in this wild ride we're all on together, but don’t forget to take that quiet walk in the woods with the iPhone shut off. The silly cat video can wait a bit. 

Learning the ropes

Main-mast, Joseph Conrad, Mystic Seaport

Mystic Seaport Village is a living museum on the Mystic River in eastern Connecticut.  The museum memorializes our rich New England maritime history and several restored wooden sailing vessels show us how fishing and whaling and trade were accomplished in the age of sail. The town, famous for Mystic Pizza and its eponymous movie, is situated several miles north of Fisher’s Island Sound and is reached from the sea by navigating a circuitous channel and negotiating several ponderous bridges.

The first, a swing bridge, carries Amtrak trains across the river.  After contacting the bridge operator by radio, the bridge swings open when train schedules allow.  After waiting for one northbound and one southbound high speed Acela to pass, the bridge slowly swings open and we slip though. The next bridge carries busy US Route 1 through the middle of Mystic.  It opens at 40 minutes past each hour – if you arrive late, you must wait.

After negotiating both of the bridges and carefully staying within marked channels (the mud flats are treacherously shallow), we arrive at the Seaport.

The museum features a number of large sailing ships, notably the Charles W. Morgan (a whaling ship built in 1841 in New Bedford, MA), the L.A. Dunton (a fishing smack built in Essex, MA), and the Joseph Conrad (a 111 foot, square rigged training ship). All of these ships share the use of wind power, intricate sails strung from masts and yardarms, hoisted and canted by multitudinous lines.  Knowledgeable docents vividly describe life at sea, the jobs that the crew performed, and how they climbed through the ranks.

On a large capital ship of the late 18^th century, twenty or more sails hung on three masts provided power to the ship. Well over 300 lines were used to control and support the sails, and an able seaman must know all of their names and their functions. These were a combination of halyards (to haul the yards, i.e., raise the sail), sheets (to control sail angle and shape), and stays (to steady the masts). More, there were cunninghams, and vangs, and topping lifts, all used to control and refine sail shape, and hence deliver power to the ship.

In days of sail, the able seamen who mastered the complexity of their ships were the highly skilled workers of their time. They were the equivalent of today’s firemen and engineers who tend the engines of huge container ships and oil tankers.

Rising though the ranks, the sailing ship officers were educated and skilled in the arcane science of navigation.  Charts and sextants and trigonometry were used to ascertain the ship’s position and plot a course to the desired destination. Those mastering these skills were the technology wizards of their time, and handsomely paid.

After several days spent pleasantly reliving our maritime heritage, we fondly bid the Seaport adieu and head down the river.  Early, sun just risen, mist hangs on the water but begins to dissolve as we negotiate the two bridges. But upon reaching the base of the Mystic and entering Fisher’s Island Sound, we encounter a heavy fog, barely able to see the bow from the stern. Time to deploy our modern miracle, an iPhone with a marine GPS navigation app. We creep through the treacherous shoals and reefs, watching the navigational buoys loom from the fog, each on time and in position as predicted by the app. After some time, we emerge into the expanse of Block Island Sound, and the fog eases.

It becomes clear that what was of value then, and now, is knowledge. The able seamen and navigators of the sailing ships were the diesel engineers and Apple programmers of their day. Knowledge and skill must be learned, and earned, and applied to our common good. Anything we can do, collectively or individually, to motivate our children to learn, to enable their academic journey, is the highest good. We, and they, will benefit mightily.