Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
China–innovating not just imitating
Rare Earths: How did China become so dominant?
Outmanufactured: How China leapfrogged the West
Golden ages, and how they end
OTOH, what if we’re building too much AI infrastructure?
Content containerization ruined the web
A color photo from 120 years ago…enhanced, but not colorized. BabelColour has found and enhanced dozens of old autochromes, here’s a post on how he does it
The prospective deal for the acquisition of US Steel by Nippon Steel reminds me of a great song about an earlier episode in US Steel’s history.
Neptunus Lex: The liberation of France started when each, individual man on those landing craft as the ramp came down each paratroop in his transport when the light turned green made the individual decision to step off with the only life he had and face the fire.
Numerous links at my 2024 post: D-Day Plus 80 Years…a few links are broken, but most still work. See also Before D-Day, There Was Dieppe.
General Eisenhower, in an interview 20 years after the war, spoke of those who died at Normandy and throughout the war and said “They bought time for us so that we can do better.” This is an appropriate day to consider how we have been using that time, and how we can indeed do better.
Walker Percy, in Love in the Ruins:
Undoubtedly something is about to happen.
Or is it that something has stopped happening?
Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?
Jean Anouilh, Antigone:
And now the spring is wound up tight! It will uncoil of itself. That is what is so convenient in tragedy. You don’t need to lift a finger. The machine is in perfect order: it has been oiled ever since time began, and it runs without friction.
The twenties. An era of Prohibition (and gangsters)…jazz…flappers…The Great Gatsby…and an accelerating stock market. I thought it might be fun to take a look at the state of technology as it stood a century ago, in 1925. This third post of the series is focused on calculating and information management systems. (The first post focused on communications and entertainment and the second post on transportation)
Devices to assist human computation go back a long way, The abacus first appeared around 2400 BC. and notched tally sticks have been found from as long ago as 20,000 BC. The first true mechanical calculator was developed by Blaise Pascal in 1642. (It was apparently developed to assist with tax calculations!) It was improved by Leibnitz in 1673, but the first commercially-successful calculating machine was the Arithmometer, introduced in 1820!
The growth of large organizations–government and business–drove the need for more computation, as did the expansion of scientific research. By 1925, machines for addition and subtraction were well-developed, with many being electrified to reduce operator fatigue. Multiplication was a harder problem, and multiplying numbers on most of these machines involved a rather klutzy multistep process. If your process involved a lot of multiplication, probably the best option in 1925 was still the Millionaire, introduced in 1893 and featuring direct multiplication–the multiplication table was actually mechanically built into the machine, rather than requiring multiple additions for each multiplier digit. These devices were priced at $475 to $1100 in the early 1900s–for comparison, in 1909, a new Oldsmobile Runabout automobile cost approximately $650, and the average annual wage was under $750. I haven’t found any sources for the Millionaire price in 1925, but given the mechanical complexity of the system, I doubt that it had gotten any cheaper.
The cash register first appeared in 1886 and was dubbed The Incorruptible Cashier, reflecting its primary purpose–preventing employee fraud. Some history.
Bookkeeping machines (also called accounting machines), which evolved from cash registers, were basically adding machines which could maintain multiple totals and print them when required. Here’s a video about the NCR Class 2000 Accounting Machine, which was introduced in 1921 and marketed through 1955. These machines were used for a range of applications, notably in hotels and banks. They were fiendishly expensive..the video quotes a 1940s machine at $2000, which would be around $40,000 in today’s money…but businesses seemed to feel that they got a good return on their investment from them.
When great precision was not required, slide rules were employed: they were common in science and engineering. They also found some use in business for such things as profit margin calculations, but they couldn’t be used for accounting purposes where precise balancing was needed.
Typewriters had become common in offices. One major advantage they offered, in addition to improved legibility, was the ability to make multiple copies via carbon paper–Xerox machines were still a long way in the future. (It’s generally claimed that it was the introduction of typewriters that brought women in large numbers into offices, although it’s not obvious to me why they couldn’t have performed equally well making copies and doing other functions in pre-typewriter offices)
Mathematical tables were important as a way to minimize burdensome calculations. Celestial navigation was one area in which great effort had been developed to creating tables and making them as accurate and easy-to-use as possible. Logarithms were extensively used to shortcut the multiplication and division of multi-digit numbers.
Punched card systems were a significant technology in 1925, though not as important as they would later become: just one year earlier, the predominant company in the field had changed its name to International Business Machines from its previous one, the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company. (“That little outfit?” thought young Tom Watson Jr when his father announced the change, picturing the company’s rather random-seeming collection of products, which included time clocks, coffee grinders, and scales, and the “cigar-chomping guys” who sold them)