MITPressLog

The British Gas Industry Turns 200

2012 is the 200^th anniversary of the British gas industry. Leslie Tomory, author of Progressive Enlightenment: The Origins of the Gaslight Industry, 1780-1820, reflects on how this industry’s creation marked the beginning of a new phase in Western industrialization. 

 

The gas industry in North America has seen dramatic changes over the last few years as it expands rapidly with supplies of shale and coal-bed methane becoming available, thanks to new exploration and extraction technologies. This energy industry, however, has seen many technological shifts since the industry was created with the incorporation of the world’s first gas company, the Gas Light and Coke Company (GLCC), 200 years ago in London. The most important of these changes was the switch from manufactured to natural gas. Rather than relying on gas extracted from the ground, the GLCC operated by manufacturing gas through the gasification of coal. This process produced a gas which was a mixture of mostly methane and hydrogen, together with many impurities, some of which, like hydrogen sulfide, were quite toxic. The gas produced in the GLCC’s three London gasworks was then purified, stored, and finally distributed through a network of pipes to lamps spread throughout the city, mostly in streets, public buildings, and shops, but also in homes of wealthier people. From its founding in 1812, the GLCC expanded rapidly, with its pipes supplying 30,000 lamps in many parts of London.

The founding of the Gas Light and Coke Company represented more than the creation of an important new industry. It also marked a beginning of a new phase in the industrialization of the West because the gas industry presented some characteristics that set it apart from technologies and the industries based on them that had appeared earlier in the Industrial Revolution. These were to become more common later in the nineteenth century. Specifically, the gas industry was science-based; it required capital beyond what family firms or small partnerships could muster; and it had a degree of complexity as a large scale technological network that required a host of business and technological measure to stabilize and control. The combination of all of these characteristics together in the gas industry meant that 200 years ago, a new wave of the Industrial Revolution had begun.

 

Monday Eye Candy: Net Smart

Happy Monday! While we're on the subject of Net Smart by Howard Rheingold, here's some eye candy from the book (click on each image to enlarge):

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Monday Eye Candy: Greening through IT

Another reason to think "green" now that St. Pat's is over: Spring begins tomorrow! In spirit of the new season, today's Eye Candy comes from Greening through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability by Bill Tomlinson. Greening through IT contains 2 black-and-white illustrations, 9 halftones, and 8 graphs.

 

 

 

 

 

An oil palm plantation (Dittmar, 2008). © Percita Dittmar.

 

 

 

 

Migrant child from Hunan Province sits atop one of countless piles of unrecyclable computer waste imported from around the world. Guiyu, China. December 2001. Photo and caption © Basel Action Network.

 

 

 

 

Molten television. Use of brominated flame retardants and heavy metals in plastics by manufacturers such as Sony create dangerous emissions when burned and disposed in the way. Lagos, Nigeria. Photo and caption © Basel Action Network.

 

 

 

 

A proposed ziggurat in Dubai (timelinks.org, 2009). © Timelinks.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GreenScanner provides environmental impact reviews of consumer products via mobile phones. © 2008 IEEE.

Monday Eye Candy: Entangled

Happy Monday! This week's eye candy comes from Chris Salter's Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance, which features 62 black and white photos, 1 black and white illustration, and 15 halftones. Click on each image to enlarge.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lázsló Moholy-Nagy with Alfred Kemeny. Kinetic Construction System: Building with Conveyors for Play and Transportation, 1922/1928. Courtesy of the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Cologne.

 

 

 

 

Diller + Scofidio. Scenography for The American Mysteries, 1983. Photo 

© Diller + Scofidio.

 

 

 

 

 

Jeffrey Shaw/ERG. WaterWalk Tube (1970), Machsee Hannover, 250 m x 3 m. Eventstructure Research Group (Theo Botschuijver, Jeffrey Shaw, Sean Wellesley-Miller). Photo © Pieter Boersma.

 

 

 

 

Big Art Group. House of No More, 2005. Photo © Caden Manson.

 

 

 

 

 

Michael Saup. R111, 2001. Photo Canon Art Lab.

 

 

William Forsythe. City of Abstracts, 2007. Photo Philip Bussmann.

Cold War Reads

Forty-nine years ago today, on October 14, 1962, a spy plane photographed Soviet missiles stationed in Cuba, 90 miles off the U.S. coastline, which sparked the Cuban Missile Crisis. Only two years and two days later, China executed a successful nuclear test, making it the fifth nation with nuclear capability.

Today, nuclear conflicts have all but vanished from our minds. Take a dive through the history of Cold War technology, from the Cuban Missile Crisis to today, with these MIT Press reads:

 

Contemporary Nuclear Debates: Missile Defenses, Arms Control, and Arms Races in the Twenty-First Century Edited by Alexander T.J. Lennon

The proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, in the hands of both states and terrorist networks, is considered by many to be the greatest threat to global security today. Contemporary Nuclear Debates discusses the key issues surrounding that threat.

 

 

 

Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance By Donald MacKenzie

Donald MacKenzie follows one line of technology - strategic ballistic missile guidance through a succession of weapons systems to reveal the workings of a world that is neither awesome nor unstoppable.

 

 

 

 

Russian Strategic Nuclear Forces Edited by Pavel Podvig

Discusses the structure of the political and military leadership in the Soviet Union and Russia, the structure of the Russian military and military industry, nuclear planning procedures, and the structure of the command and control system.

All the information is presented chronologically, arranged by individual systems and facilities, and is not available elsewhere in a single volume.

 

 

 

Domesticity at War By Beatriz Colomina

Just as manufacturers were turning wartime industry to peacetime productivity—going from missiles to washing machines—American architects and cultural institutions were, in Buckminster Fuller’s words, turning “weaponry into livingry.”

Colomina examines, with interlocking case studies and an army of images, the embattled and obsessive domesticity of postwar America. She reports on, among other things…a corrugated steel house suitable for use as a bomb shelter, and the American lawn as patriotic site and inalienable right.

 

 

 

From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of The SAGE Air Defense Computer By Kent C. Redmond and Thomas M. Smith

The book shows how the wartime alliance of engineers, scientists, and the military exemplified by MIT's Radiation Lab helped to transform research and development practice in the United States through the end of the Cold War period.

Presents an organizational and social history of…SAGE, [which] monitored North American skies for possible attack by manned aircraft and missiles for twenty-five years.

 

 

 

Revolutionary Struggle 1947-1958: Volume 1 of the Selected Works of Fidel Castro By Rolando Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdes

A collection of Castro's chief statements—letters, articles, interviews, press releases, proclamations, and decrees—from the late 1940s to the fall of the Batista regime in 1959.

 

"Star Trek" and Cybersyn

Eden Medina, author of Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, celebrates the 45th anniversary of "Star Trek" by relating it to a different vision of the future--Project Cybersyn. 

 

On September 8, 1966, the first episode of “Star Trek” aired on U.S. television and presented viewers with a utopian vision of a future grounded in the use of advanced technology. On the show, a diverse crew of people (and other life forms) traveled across the universe at warp speed to promote peace, order, prosperity, and greater equality. From the high-tech bridge of the Starship Enterprise, Captain Kirk transmitted messages across vast distances, made decisions quickly and decisively, and monitored the health of both ship and crew.

To celebrate the 45th anniversary of “Star Trek,” this blog post commemorates a different, but related, vision of the future: “Project Cybersyn.”  The history of Project Cybersyn is detailed in the forthcoming MIT Press book Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile, which will be published in November 2011.

Project Cybersyn was a computer system built in Chile by the socialist government of Salvador Allende (1970–73). Chilean and British engineers, working under the direction of the British cybernetician Stafford Beer, viewed the system as a way to advance the economic nationalization program that was central to Allende’s economic platform and Chilean socialist change. The system enabled the rapid transmission of information between the nationalized factories and the government agency charged with their management (CORFO) and used statistical software to predict crises before they happened. The team called the system Cybersyn, a synthesis of the words cybernetics and synergy. The name reflected the cybernetic principles present in the system’s design and the team’s belief that the whole system exceeded the sum of its parts.

Like “Star Trek,” Project Cybersyn brought together technology and politics to advance a utopian vision of a just society. It was created to transmit information quickly across great distances (Chile is approximately 3,200 miles long), monitor the health of the national economy, improve governance, and facilitate decision-making. Moreover, its design included mechanisms to promote worker participation in industrial management, and thus increase equality on the shop floor, as well as a control space that rivaled science fiction.

Fish-Inspired Vehicles?

Happy Monday! Here's an excerpt from How to Catch a Robot Rat by Agnès Guillot and Jean-Arcady Meyer to kick off the week.

Forms

Forms present in nature have mathematical properties that have inspired inventors.

In 1420, appearing before the eminent committee that questioned his competence to construct the cupola of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence, Filippo Brunelleschi rapped an egg on the table and crushed the shell lightly at the base. Everyone could see that the egg remained vertical and immobile, whereas if the architect had tried to explain in words the planned construction, to do it would have seemed impossible. This egg presented in Florentine style (later used by Christopher Columbus) must have been convincing because Brunelleschi obtained carte blanche, and the gigantic dome that he built is still in place. He conceived it (by coincidence?) according to a principle that recalls the eggshell, so that bricks laid fishbone style mutually block each other and thus totally bypass the need for classic supports such as wooden arches. An ingenious encasing of two cupolas likewise ensures a good distribution of pressure.

An egg obviously does not contain arches, which would obstruct the embryo in development, yet its structure is capable of resisting considerable force: the shell of a hen's egg is 0.3 millimeters thick and can withstand up to 3.0 kilograms of pressure, and that of an ostrich egg is ten times thicker and can withstand a pressure twenty times stronger! The shells expoloit a "trick": the crystals of the mineral salts that constitute them are oriented toward the center of the egg and are self-blocking, like the bricks in the dome of Florence. Various architects--including the Germans Frei Otto, Carl Zeiss, and Heinz Isler--have recently adopted these characteristics to calculate the exact thickness needed to cover various domes or to establish force lines for immense stretched structures.

The oblong form is known to move rapidly in the air and in water without too much effort. Bizarrely, marine animals are also the best models for terrestrial or aerial mobiles! For example, the engineers of Daimler AG are currently trying out the form of the tropical boxfish to save precious liters of fuel in future automobiles. This research has resulted in a prototype presented in Washington in 2005. Although the animal presents an almost cubic belly, this characteristic makes it paradoxically very hydrodynamic and even, according to measurements undertaken by engineers, more aerodynamic than current cars, with a coefficient of air penetration of 0.06 instead of 0.30!  The "Mercedes-Benz bionic car" would boast a coefficient of 0.19 and could save 20 percent in fuel and 80 percent in nitrous oxide emissions. Its body, like the rigid carapace of the fish, is conceived as if it were composed of numerous hexagonal panels supported by a metallic vertebral column. Such a car would thus be very competitive in both lightness and robustness, the two great principles of both nature and the automobile industry.

Even an airplane of the future might be shaped like a fish, too. The Smartfish, being developed by several international companies and research laboratories at the initiative of Swiss engineer Koni Schafroth, is inspired by the form of several fish, especially the tuna, the fastest and most agile animal in the sea. A meterwide miniprototype has already successfully achieved first flight, in April 2007...

No Tech-fix for Justice

Virginia Eubanks, author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, on the Arab Spring and whether social media promotes radical political change. 

On my recent book tour supporting Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, audiences from Montréal, QC to Washington, DC asked incisive, insightful questions about the relationship between information technology and social justice. Audience members were particularly interested in how the high-tech equity agenda that I develop in the book applies to the thrilling revolts that took place across the Middle East and North Africa this spring. They wanted to know: Does the Arab Spring prove that social media fosters radical political change?

Social media were undoubtedly useful tools in the recent pro-democracy uprisings, and will continue to play a role in liberation movements around the globe. As Xiaolin Zhuo, Barry Wellman, and Justine Yu point out in their article “Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?,” published in the July 2011 issue of Peace Magazine, networked tools such as Facebook, Twitter and blogs facilitated rapid mobilization of protesters, developed a sense of community under a repressive regime with limited freedom of the press, and garnered global attention once protests had started.

However, as Zhuo, Wellman and Yu show, organized groups, informal networks, and formal organizing training played an equally (if not more) crucial role in these not-so-spontaneous protests. Established political groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and the April 6 Youth Movement were central to organizing the Tahrir Square protests. Word of mouth and television spread more information and mobilized more protesters than social media and internet sources. Egyptian activists received face-to-face training and support from international allies such as CANVAS (the Centre for Applied Nonviolent Action and Strategies) in Serbia. So social media supported and supplemented on-the-ground organizing, rather than simply unleashing democratic forces. Even in Asmaa Mahfouz's now-famous video blog, which some credit with launching the January 25 protests, she informs watchers that she's to get off the internet, because she’s on her way to hand out fliers in the street.

In cases beyond Egypt, the use of social media has markedly negative impacts on radical organizing, as Evgeny Morozov has persuasively argued in the cases of China, where the authoritarian regime deploys a small army of internet users to post pro-government propaganda, or Iran, where the Ahmadinejad government used internet and mobile device records to track down dissidents after the 2009-2010 election protests.

The focus on technology in the international media may also misrepresent the character of liberation movements -- hiding, for example, the important role played by women in the Arab Spring. Robin Morgan argues in “Women of the Arab Spring,” her article in the most recent Ms. Magazine, that when the mainstream media talked blogs, Facebook and Twitter, they focused on Zeid Al Heni and Google employee Wael Ghonim, not Tunisian feminist blogger Lina Ben Mhenni or even Asmaa Mahfouz and her viral video blog. That the face of “Facebook Revolutions” tends to be male says more about our perceptions of technology than about the reality of who is using online tools for progressive change.

While social media undoubtedly shaped the unfolding of liberation struggles in the Middle East and North Africa, to say that these were Facebook or Twitter revolutions is misleading. The focus on technical aspects of the Arab Spring marginalizes and minimizes the role of traditional organizing and downplays the risks and commitments made by ordinary people who put themselves, embodied and in real time, on the line for freedom.

The most troubling aspect of the myopic focus on “Liberation Technology” is the suggestion that if you add internet, you can produce instant revolution.* We need better stories about the relationship between technology and social change. As I write in  Digital Dead End,

[W]e do not have many stories that show us how hard, and how rewarding, it is to actually forge and maintain alliances across difference...Easier just to posit some mythical “Movement Moment” when differences are put aside, to deify a superhuman charismatic leader who turns divisiveness into coalition, or to mourn the sacrificial lambs who become a rallying cry for unity. Easier to ignore or forget the day-to-day heroism of ordinary people coming together to transform their world...This unattainable myth misrepresents collective process; it is a pale imitation of what Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called "the long and bitter, but beautiful struggle for a new world.” We should demand more.

In the book, I also describe a model of liberatory technology education my collaborators and I called "Popular Technology." Grounded in popular education, it focuses on resisting oppression, building coalition across difference, and fostering participatory decision-making. Fighting exploitation, imperialism and violence may sound so last century, but there simply is no tech-fix for justice. As Andrew Feenberg reminds us, technology is not a destiny; it is a site of struggle.

 

*See, for example, New York Times reporting on the US State Department's “Wi-Fi in a Box” project.

References:

Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?

Women of the Arab Spring

Andrew Feenberg, Critical Theory of Technology, Oxford UP: 1991.  

 

 

Digital Apollo

Happy Moon Day! Today marks the 42^nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. Here’s an excerpt from David Mindell’s Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight to commemorate Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins’ flight to the moon.

 

A July Day on the Moon

On a July day in 1969, after a silent trip around the far side of the moon, the two Apollo spacecraft reappeared out of the shadows and reestablished contact with earth. The command and service module (CSM) (sometimes simply “command module”) was now the mother ship, the capsule and its supplies that would carry the astronauts home. The CSM continued to orbit the moon, with astronaut Michael Collins alone in the capsule. “Listen, babe,” Collins reported to ground controllers at NASA in Houston, “everything’s going just swimmingly. Beautiful.” His two colleagues Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin had just separated the other spacecraft, the fragile, spidery lunar module (LM, pronounced “lem”) nicknamed Eagle, from the command module. This odd, aluminum balloon, packed with instruments and a few engines, would carry the two men down to the lunar surface.

A rocket engine fired to slow the LM, causing it to fall out of orbit. Once on its way down, the spacecraft would either execute a dangerous abort or soon hit the moon. Whether the impact was a landing or a crash depended on the next ten minutes—the longest continuous series of critical events in the entire mission.

In the LM, weight was such a premium that seats had been eliminated altogether. The astronauts stood up, stabilized by tensioned cables connected to the floor. The spacecraft was an enclosing home, complementing the astronauts’ bodies. It supplied their food, exchanged their gases, and collected their wastes. The human occupants, in turn, controlled flows of the spacecraft’s numerous fluids, drinking some for hydration and carefully igniting others for propulsion. An inertial navigation system—accelerometers wedded to precisely spinning gyroscopes—measured the vehicle’s motions. A radar reached an invisible beam down to sense the first approach of the moon’s surface, like a blind man’s stick tapping for a curb.

Tying the whole thing together was an embedded digital computer, made out of exotic devices called “integrated circuits”—silicon chips, running a set of esoteric grams. In the middle of the instrument panel, amid familiar dials and switches, stood the computer interface, a numeric keypad glowing with segmented digits. Throughout the mission the astronauts punched in numbers, ran programs, and read the displays. Much of the landing was under direct control of these programs. Neil Armstrong, when he did fly, did not command the spacecraft directly, but rather used two control sticks to command the computer, whose programs fired the thrusters to move the LM. Every move was checked and mediated by software, written by a group of young programmers half a world away.

Nor was the LM alone with its computer, for the command module had an identical computer of its own; both were linked to Houston’s control center. Down in Houston, numerous experts monitored systems, offered advice, and controlled some parts of the flight (they even had a remote computer keypad for entering commands directly into the computer in either of the two spacecraft). Communication between the three nodes was calm, matter-of-fact conversation, the precise technical banter of professionals, with an audience of millions.

As the LM began to descend the ground controllers focused their attention. Mission Control locked its doors.

Suddenly, the LM lost contact with Houston…

 

A Social Justice Tour

Virginia Eubanks, author of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age, fills us in on the highlights of her tour.

I’ve been lucky to spend much of the spring and early summer touring in support of Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age. It’s an especially exciting time to be thinking and talking about the relationship between technology and social justice. The questions asked by audiences from Concord, NH to New York City to Philadelphia made it clear that, despite differences in race, gender and class, many of us are curious and concerned about the impact of technology on social, political and economic inequities. I was asked tough, insightful questions: Does the Arab Spring prove that social media can create radical political change? How does technology affect workers in the sagging American economy? Can we use new IT tools to increase governmental transparency and accountability?

What truly stood out for me, though, was the extraordinary on-the-ground work being done by social justice organizations in the cities that I visited. In Montréal, my event at the Concordia Community Solidarity Co-op Bookstore was supported by both the Concordia Women's Studies Student Association and the wonderful Simone de Beauvoir Institute, which is dedicated to exploring feminism as a tool for understanding social justice and fighting for social change. While in Canada, I was hosted by the delightful Christina Haralanova, who co-authored the WITT training toolkit, Strategic ICT for the Empowerment of Women, and introduced me to Montréal's hackerspace, Foulab, which teaches people to repurpose and redesign everything from wearable electronics to analog robots to mustard.

In Baltimore, my event at Red Emma's Bookstore Coffeehouse was co-sponsored by Hollaback! Baltimore, a brash and refreshingly witty group dedicated to using online tools to end street harassment of women and girls. In Washington DC, my event at Busboys and Poets  was sponsored by DC Jobs with Justice, the Institute for Women's Policy Research, and Teaching for Change. I stayed a few extra days in DC to undertake a “social justice tour” of my own, meeting with members of a number of community organizations. Though I learned from all the people I met, the highlight was undoubtedly my visit to ONE DC, whose steadfast commitment to shared leadership and healing in the midst of difficult struggles for housing and economic justice astonished and inspired me.

Though my book offers some uncomfortable truths about the “real world of IT” in the lives of poor and working-class women and families, my intention has always been to highlight popular technology—approaches that help all people develop critical technological citizenship and engage with technology as a site of political struggle. We can make an extraordinary impact on the inequities of the information age when we think, and practice, technological development and social justice together. What my tour proved to me is that liberation technologies are possible; in fact, they are everywhere you look.

 ***

If you’d like to hear audio of Virginia Eubanks’ book event at Red Emma’s Bookstore Coffeehouse, you can access it here. You can also follow Eubanks’ writing through her blog, PopTech.