Robots of the Week

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Sewing robots.  Although spinning and weaving have long been highly mechanized, the final phase of the apparel-making value chain has resisted automation:

IN 1970 William J. Bank, president of the Blue Jeans Corporation, predicted that there would be a man on Mars before the production of apparel was automated. Almost half a century later, he has not yet been proved wrong.  

But that may change soon, given recent development in robotic sewing. Two companies, Softwear Automation (Atlanta) and Sewbo (Seattle) are pursuing different strategies:  Softwear’s approach is to create computer vision and robotic manipulation which is intelligent and subtle enough to deal with highly flexible fabric, whereas Sewbo’s approach is to temporarily stiffen the fabric in order to make working with it more like metalworking.

Depending on how well these systems work in practice, and how the technology evolves, they may turn out to be not only the robots of the week, but the robots of the year or even the decade.  Apparel-making is a vast industry, concentrated in nations which are not-so-well-off economically, and employs a large number of people. A high level of automation would likely result in much of this production being relocated closer to the markets, thus saving transportation costs and shortening supply cycles.  The consequences for countries like China, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka could be pretty unpleasant.

Most likely, unforeseen problems will slow the full deployment of these systems and an Apparel Apocalypse will not occur.  It would certainly be wise, though, for the leaderships of apparel-manufacturing-intensive countries to focus on the need to develop a broader employment base.

More here.

See also my post on 3d knitting

Remedial Reading for a ‘New Yorker’ Writer

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This New Yorker writer seems to feel that, had government been adequately respected, funded and supported (and the dangers of Climate Change properly recognized), the ‘Cajun Navy’ of volunteer rescuers would not have been needed.

Glenn Reynolds suggests that the author has apparently never read Alexis de Tocqueville.  (Or, alternatively, I would suggest, may have read him but not really understood him all that well)

Tocqueville, of course, wrote famously (in his book Democracy in America) about the tendency of Americans to come together and form voluntary associations to accomplish particular goals, without anyone having to tell them to do so.

Tocqueville also wrote another book, The Old Regime and the French Revolution, in which he traced the constancy of certain aspects of French society across the monarchy and the Republic.  In an appendix, he argues that “the physiognomy of governments can be best detected in their colonies, and rendered more conspicuous.”  Looking at French Canada under Louis XIV and Algeria under the Republic, he wrote:

In both places the government numbers as many heads as the people; it preponderates, acts, regulates, controls, undertakes everything, provides for everything, knows far more about the subject’s business than he did hiself–is, in short, incessantly active and sterile.

He contrasts this system–under which “there was not a shadow of municipal or provincial institutions; and no collective or individual action was tolerated” with that in America:

In the United States, on the contrary, the English anti-centralization system was carried to an extreme.  Parishes became independent municipalities, almost democratic republics.  The republican element, which forms, so to say, the foundation of the English constitution and English habits, shows itself and develops without hindrance. Government proper does little in England and individuals do a great deal; in America, government never interferes, so to speak, and individuals do everything.

Rose Wilder Lane  also found it useful to contrast the differing colonial strategies of European powers:  France and Spain, on the one hand, and Britain, on the other:

The Governments gave them (in the case of the French and Spanish coloniesed) carefully detailed instructions for clearing and fencing the land, caring for the fence and the gate, and plowing and planting, cultivating, harvesting, and dividing the crops…The English Kings were never so efficient. They gave the land to traders. A few gentlemen, who had political pull enough to get a grant, organized a trading company; their agents collected a ship-load or two of settlers and made an agreement with them which was usually broken on both sides…To the scandalized French, the people in the English colonies seemed like undisciplined children, wild, rude, wretched subjects of bad rulers.

Does the New Yorker writer also see Americans as “undisciplined children, wild, rude, wretched subjects of bad rulers,” with the badness of the rulers lying mainly in their not having been given enough power?

It strikes me that Leftists are mostly very  institutional people….they believe that things must be done by people who are properly trained and credentialed, organized in a top-down manner.

This attitude was very much on display when, immediately after 9/11, the idea of arming airline pilots was first mooted. Media types were appalled; to them, there are people who are trained and credentialed to fly airplanes and there are people who are trained and credentialed to carry firearms on behalf of the government, and never the twain shall meet.

(And, of course, it was action of the  passengers, not coordinated by any central authority, that prevented Flight 93 from being used to conduct even greater devastation on 9/11.)

Robert Heinlein wrote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

Such thoughts are anathema to the Institutional Left.

See also Lead and Gold on Elite Panic and The Hive Mind, also People are the Design Margin, by Richard Fernandez.

Machine Tools and Glassmaking

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In early August, I visited the American Precision Museum in Vermont, which is dedicated to the history of the American machine tool industry, and also made a side trip to the Simon Pearce Glass facility, recommended by Mike Kennedy in comments not too long ago.  Images (should expand when clicked) from upper left…

1–The museum is located in the former  Robbins & Lawrence armory.  Power was initially from a waterwheel, later supplemented by steam

2–Blanchard Copying Lathe.  Mechanically copies a prototype shape…a rifle stock, in the example shown, but also used for table and chair legs, etc

3–A much later approach to automated cutting of a specified shape:  this is a paper tape reader used to feed data to a numerically-controlled machine tool.

4–Bendix G-15 computer, from the mid-1950s.  This one was used for gear-cutting calculations, reducing the typical time taken from 2 hours to 2 minutes.  Computers of this type were also used to directly produce the punched paper tapes used to operate machine tools.

5–Sewing machine from 1859.  The success of these devices created great demand for precision machining.

6–A very elaborate model of a steam engine, made by a German man who came to the US between the wars. When he visited Germany in the 1950s, he found that the model had survived intact in an attic.

7–Profile milling machine, for cutting the outside periphery of a flat surface.

8–Columbia chainless bicycle, from the 1890s. An advantage of this type was that women could ride them without danger of getting their long skirts caught in a chain.  A disadvantage was the price…$125 in 1890 dollars!

9–Bevel gear cutting machine…made gears of a type required for the chainless bicycle.  Not clear if this machine came before the Columbia bicycle or if it was a later production-cost improvement.

10–The showroom at Simon Pearce glass.

11 & 12–Hydroelectric dam and turbine used to generate power at Simon Pearce.  Capacity is about 600KW, and what they don’t use for their own needs (which are pretty significant given the electric glass-heating furnaces) is sold to the grid.

Lots more pictures of Simon Pearce at this article.

Happy VJ-Day, Plus 72 Years

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Happy Victory over Japan Day!

On August 14th in 1945 Imperial Japan accepted the terms of the Potsdam Declaration and averted Operation Downfall, the two stage invasion of Japan. On Sept 2, 1945 the surrender was signed on the USS Missouri in Tokyo bay, This invasion would have resulted in at least a million American casualties (see below) and likely millions of Japanese dead from direct effects of the invasion plus the mass starvation that would have been sure to occur in its aftermath.

Since August 2010, it has become an eight years and counting tradition (See link list at the end of this post) for the Chicagoboyz web site to commemorate the major events closing out World War II in the Pacific and address the leftist agitprop surrounding those events. Where the worst recorded war in human history became a nuclear war via the August 6th and 9th 1945 A-bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, followed by the Imperial Japanese acceptance of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, and the Sept 2, 1945 formal surrender on the battleship USS Missouri.

This years year’s Chicagoboyz commemoration will focus on the academic “revisionist history” controversies regards American casualties in an invasion of Japan versus the use of two Atomic Bombs.

  • The controversy traces from the rise of the leftist “Atomic Diplomacy” revisionism in 1946-1965.
  • Atomic Diplomacy’s subsequent credibility collapse of  “Atomic Diplomacy” historical underpinning in the 1995 Smithsonian Enola Gay Exhibit controversy.
  • Its enshrinement as a leftist academic virtue signaling cult in the aftermath.

 

Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 Imperial Japanese Surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.

Color Photo of the Sept 2, 1945 surrender ceremony marking the conclusion of WW2 on the Battleship USS Missouri.

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Summer Re-Run: The Galveston Hurricane of 1900

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(A reprise post from two years and a month ago – on the subject of the great Galveston Hurricane of 1900, which struck a coastal Texas city with such horrifying effect that all the casualties from all the storms which struck the continental US since then have still not equaled that toll. The book that I was writing at the time, and for which I was doing research was Sunset and Steel Rails, during which the heroine is sheltering from the great hurricane in a house loosely based on the Moody mansion.

To further the current work in progress (which will feature the heroine being in Galveston during the hurricane of 1900), I am re-reading Erik Larson’s Isaac’s Storm a gripping and almost novelistic account of the hurricane which struck the Texas Gulf coast city of Galveston on Saturday, September 8th, 1900. The Isaac of the title is Isaac Cline, the resident meteorologist in Galveston for the U.S. Weather Bureau who paid a devastating price the loss of his heavily pregnant wife when his house was swept away at the height of the storm for miscalculations made; miscalculations made both by himself and by the Weather Bureau headquarters policies in far-distant Washington DC.

That 1900 storm still stands as the single deadliest natural disaster ever to strike the United States, with a death toll equal of all later storms combined; at least 6,000 in Galveston alone a quarter of the population at the time and along the Texas coast. The storm surge went for miles inland, and may have carried away another 2,000, whose bodies were never found and never reported missing, as there was no one left to do so. Galveston Island a coastal sand-bar, little more than eight feet above sea level at its highest point was a busy and strategic port. At the turn of the last century, it was the largest city in Texas; a center of commerce, transportation hub and port of entry for immigrants coming into the Southwest by sea. Galveston was connected to the mainland across a normally placid lagoon by three railway trestles. Although the rival port city of Indianola, farther west along the Gulf Coast had been wiped out by a pair of hurricanes fifteen and twenty-five years before, generally the citizens of Galveston were complacent, comfortable in the belief that any storm and they had easily weathered many of them was readily survivable. And after all this was a new century, one marked by unparalleled technologic and scientific advances! So a sea-wall proposed by certain concerned citizens was never built; indeed, Isaac Cline had written an article for the local newspaper in 1891, arguing that such a wall was not necessary; it was impossible for a storm of sufficient destructive intensity to strike Galveston. And he, of course, was an expert.

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