2017 Issue

72 Rise of the Machines: The 250-year Trend Towards Longer-lived and Highly Complex Systems E ven well before the popular movie franchise, Termi- nator, there were many visions across many media of a dystopian future where our servants, the machines, had made us their slaves. No one should be surprised at this since both the First (~1760 – 1865) and Second (~1865 – 1915) Industrial Revolu- tions were unpleasant affairs with widely shared anecdotes of those who were employed by, or ruled over by, the peo- ple producing and using these new machines. These true stories go well beyond merely unpleasant or bad (the key words in the definition of dystopia). And no one had to wait for the future to experience it. Figure 1: Terminator is a Paramount Franchise And once the Industrial Revolution was well underway, the American Civil War turned out to be the perfect laboratory for proving just how hellish modern industrial war could be, even before the even more hellish Great War (WWI) in Europe. There are, of course, benefits to living in a society with modern industry such as indoor plumbing, low infant mortality rates, and cures for most major diseases. This is our heritage and history, the bad and the good, especially for France, England, and the United States where conditions of liberty, free trade, and ownership of property and ideas allowed these revolutions to really take off. Another less distressing lesson exists in this history. It is a lesson that does a very good job of pointing out to us to what our future (say, circa 2029) will actually look like. To begin, let’s recap the entire First and Second Indus- trial Revolutions with an insanely short description: In the 1780’s in northern Delaware, Oliver Evans began realizing his ideas of a flour mill run entirely by machines. He went beyond just improving the grinding, cooling, sifting, and packing. He created bucket elevators to lift the grain, automated “hopper boys” to spread the grain, and other linked-process machines. For this, he is considered the inventor of modern continuous production. The Evans Flour Mill at the Red Clay Creek is seen as the first visions of today’s modern factory. Oliver thought the need for uncontaminated and well-ground flour could be met by a system of machines all linked together. Thus, factories can be thought of as one large system of machines that allows for continuous and efficient transformation of raw materials and parts into the final product using economical energy sources. Steam power is still the power source most think of when considering the Industrial Revolution. And steam power was also used in the other major trend in the revolu- tion, transportation. Necessity is the mother of invention. England and France could solve many of its materials transportation problems with canals, as could many locations in the northeastern US. But canals could not solve the transportation needs of a young nation expanding westward. When steam power was linked to wheeled vehicles, the icon of modern industrial transportation was invented. That is, we had train engines and cars that could effi- ciently transport the raw grain from across America to locations where it could be processed into flour and then on to the cities where the bread was needed to feed a growing nation. Another system came into being. This system was comprised of the trains, tracks, trestles, water stations, terminals, and all the other parts and machines needed for modern transportation of raw materials, goods, and people. These systems could be linked to other systems to create new opportunities. Literally far-sighted Civil War military leaders used trains to transport balloons, hydrogen gen- erators, and other required materials to allow them to rise into the air and see what the other army was doing behind the front lines. The failure of Civil War generals to fully exploit the aeri- al balloon and failure of WWI generals to break through entrenched warfare led the Signal Aviation Section of the US Army to develop the idea of aerial strategic bombard- ment well behind enemy lines. Don’t just spy on them, attack their means to wage war. Bomb the oil refineries, rail switching yards, and other key systems which allowed the country to wage a war at an industrial scale.