by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
Last night’s “feature” was
the fourth episode in the Breakthrough series, about the history of the automobile — which had some odd twists
and turns in the story line. It actually begins in Siberia, among the
indigenous people of the Russian Arctic whose main source of food and clothing was reindeer (and those of us, which is
practically everybody, who associate reindeer with the Santa Claus legend can’t
help but be disappointed by how scrawny and unassuming reindeer look “in the
flesh”). Their problem is that reindeer move considerably quicker (about 20
miles per hour) than humans do, especially humans trying to survive in an ultra-cold climate. So the early
Siberians about 9,000 years ago took the native wolves and started breeding
them for lightness and speed, essentially creating the dog. They also invented
the curved runners on which sleds have operated ever since and trained the dogs
to pull them. They quickly ran into a problem — dogsleds moved fine on ice but
you couldn’t use them once the ice melted — but the makers of this show did
establish the interesting points that dogsleds were the first vehicles humans
had that they didn’t have to power themselves and the domestication of dogs
occurred about 2,000 years before the domestication of horses and oxen,
humankind’s other principal sources of animal power. The show then worked its
way up to the discovery of the wheel — something that occurred relatively late
in human history (about 5,000 years ago) as an alternative to moving heavy
stones by rolling them over logs. The show pointed out that wheels don’t work
without axles and without a way of making them so precise that both the inside
of the wheel and the outside of the axle that carries it are perfectly round —
something that’s impossible until you invent metal tools that can do the job.
The show then cut to 18th century England and the invention of the
steam engine — which was originally designed not for locomotion but to run
water pumps that could drain the insides of coal mines so a population increasingly
demanding coal for fuel could be supplied by ever-deeper mines — and James
Watt’s improvements on it that allowed the invention of trains and the
locomotives that pulled them. (Watt’s engine needed precisely machined
cylinders and pistons to work, and the technology to make them was actually
developed under a grant from the British Navy to improve the reliability and
accuracy of shipboard cannons and keep them from jamming and/or blowing up.)
Unfortunately, railroads still had what’s now called the “last-mile problem” —
in order to get from the train station to your ultimate destination you still
had to walk or ride either on horseback or in a horse-drawn carriage. Then
there’s a fascinating segment in which a modern-day German woman rally driver
reproduces the very first long-distance trip by automobile; the original driver
was Berta Benz, wife of the device’s inventor, Karl Benz. Benz had built a
primitive car in 1885 that was the first vehicle powered by an
internal-combustion engine, but he wasn’t able to sell any until his wife
managed the feat of driving one of his contraptions 60 miles from their home to
her parents’ house in Pforzheim. She had to stop a lot along the way to keep
the car in working order and pump water into the radiator that cooled it, and
at one point in her trip she asked a leather-shop owner to put leather pads on
her brakes to make them more effective (thereby, the show argued, inventing the
brake pad). But she got there, the German papers wrote it up and the auto was,
at least for the well-to-do, an established consumer item.
The Breakthrough episode then takes an interesting turn into the
home — estate, really — of someone you’re likely to have heard of in another
context: former Tonight Show host Jay Leno, who since the breakup of casino magnate William Harrah’s
collection after his death probably owns the largest assemblage of historic
cars in private hands in the world. Leno showed off some items in his
collection, including the Stanley Steamer as well as the Baker Electric, and
discusses some of the problems with them — though oddly the show doesn’t
mention the biggest problem with the steam-powered car: it took half an hour
for the car to build up enough boiler pressure to move. During the early 20th
century would-be car buyers had a choice — put up with the half-hour it took
for a steam car to build up boiler pressure, or risk breaking your arm with the
hand crank with which an internal-combustion car had to be started. (Before
there was a hand crank there was a flywheel you had to pull — the process
wasn’t all that different from starting a lawn mower — and Leno is shown
grabbing the flywheel of one of the earliest gas-powered cars in his possession
and hoping it starts without kicking
back and risking his arm.) Then a name unmentioned in this program, Charles
Kettering, invented the “self-starter,” a way of starting a car electronically
using the battery already included to supply the sparks needed for an
internal-combustion engine to work. Once anybody could start a gas car without
risking breaking their arm, it assured internal-combustion’s victory in the
format war. The show also briefly discussed the experimental electric cars of
the early 20th century, and Thomas A. Edison’s hope that the
electric cars would be the future — which ran into the same problems electric
car owners have today: the limited range of the batteries available and the
length of time it takes to charge them (though the show argues that a new
miracle material called “graphene” — essentially graphite, the form of carbon
in pencil leads, refined to just a single layer of carbon atoms, in which form
it’s an excellent electrical conductor and a car surface made of graphene would
itself be a battery which would be recharged by the sun — will at last make the
electric car completely practical).
It then argues that one big reason cars
became as popular as they did was horseshit. The show points out that New York
City expanded so quickly in the late 19th century that not only did
its human population zoom to 3.5 million by the end of the decade, there was a
similarly dramatic increase in its population of horses — and horses were
dumping so much shit in the streets that getting rid of it seemed an unsolvable
problem. Autos solved the horseshit problem — though they substituted air
pollution and smog in its place — and made it possible for mega-metropolises
like New York to grow even faster and further without leaving mounds of shit
behind that in turn attracted flies and other insects which spread disease. The
show then featured another familiar name, Henry Ford, who not only developed the cheap Model “T”
but learned how to mass-produce it (based, this show argues, on the
observations one of Ford’s executives made in a slaughterhouse — he saw how the
carcasses of beef were moved down what narrator Patrick Stewart calls a
“disassembly line” and taken apart piece by piece, and Ford and his staff
realized you could put something together quickly in the same step-by-step way
slaughterhouses pulled animal carcasses apart). The show details the
cost-saving mechanisms Ford built into the Model “T” (no fuel pump — the fuel
was fed into the engine by gravity — and no water pump; as one writer put it,
the Model “T”’s cooling system was “based on the principle that hot water rises
and cold water sinks. It doesn’t do this very fast, but then Model ‘T’’s didn’t
go very fast, either”) — which included clinging to that dangerous hand-crank
to start the engine while more expensive cars had self-starters. Charles was
upset with the program because it didn’t discuss the bicycle as an important
precursor of the car, probably because it’s still human-powered, but not only
did a lot of bicycle technology end up in the early cars (wire wheels, rubber
tires, chain drives with various gear ratios — though gearboxes and
differentials quickly replaced driving chains for safety reasons; as late as
1926 a British racing driver, Parry Thomas, was literally decapitated during a land-speed run when his car’s
driving chain snapped at 200 miles per hour), but more importantly, as Charles
pointed out, it was the popularity of modern-style safety bicycles in the late
19th century that led to the move to pave roads with asphalt or
concrete instead of leaving them as dirt paths, which literally paved the way for cars to take over from
horse-drawn conveyances as the basic mode of individual transport in advanced
countries.
Once the story gets to Henry Ford, the rest of it is broadly
familiar: the auto became a mass-consumer item instead of a luxury (the show
did not mention that, unlike most
capitalists, Henry Ford realized that the only way people could afford his
product is if workers got paid enough to buy it, so he guaranteed his factory
workers $5 per day at a time when the prevailing wage for factory work was
one-half to one-third of that and thereby assured that they could buy the cars they made) and soon cities were
being replanned — and whole suburbs built — around the assumption that everyone
would have at least one car and rely on it for most of their transportation
needs. (The show dramatizes this with the inevitable stock footage of cars
zipping around the curves of a cloverleaf freeway intersection.) The show
doesn’t explore whether this is a good or bad thing, and among the negative
aspects of automobile culture it doesn’t explore is just what the sheer amount of the earth’s surface that has
been paved is going to do to its ecosystems and its ability to sustain human
(or any other) life long-term. It also doesn’t explore whether a world in which
each person relies on a private car for transportation does in terms of the
drain on the earth’s resources to build them, fuel them (the show ends with a
back-to-the-future note that the huge amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by
internal combustion engines may lead to the revival of the electric car and all
Thomas Edison’s hopes for it), or the philosophical notion of just what making every person responsible for his or her own
transportation does to the whole sense of community; obviously “car culture”
was a neat fit to America’s myth of self-actualizing individualism as the motivation for all human progress, and there’s not
only a disinterest but an active hatred of the entire idea of public
transportation because it puts people together in close spaces and leaves them
reliant on someone else to drive them. (I remember one Republican U.S. Senator
from Oklahoma whose name escapes me at the moment being quoted about the
California bullet-train project, “We’ve killed every other bullet train in the
U.S., and we’ll kill that one.”)
At the same time I’ve long believed in the
transistor-radio theory of technological advance — that the transistor radio,
which allowed people literally to cut themselves off from each other and consume media privately as
individuals, even when they were physically in public spaces, set the tone for
a basic change in media from “broadcasting” (a single message sent from a
single source to multiple people) to “narrowcasting” (multiple messages sent
from at least seemingly varied sources and customized to individual people),
which in turn changed the basic nature of politics from collective to
individual. I’ve argued that this is why the extreme political movements of the
first half of the 20th century — fascism on the Right and socialism and
communism on the Left — were collectivist, while the extreme political
movements of the second half of
the 20th century and since, libertarianism on the Right and
anarchism on the Left, are individualistic. The auto has been one of the key
forces in changing people’s perception of themselves from being members of a
community to being self-sufficient individuals — which has made it
extraordinarily difficult to pull people together and get them to unite for
political purposes (though Donald Trump has been a partial exception, building
a Right-wing political base through the same sorts of big, collectivist rallies
and sweeping appeals to community Mussolini, Hitler and Franco made in their rises to power). But then these kinds of political
and philosophical issues are pretty much beyond the brief of the Breakthrough series, which seems to be based on the assumption
that the technological advances that happened are the ones that should have happened and the only ones that could have happened — even though, as I’ve noted in my
comments on the previous two Breakthrough episodes I’ve watched, one of the morals of this series is that
scientific and technological advances are themselves collective processes, with researchers
continuously building on the work of their predecessors — yet more evidence
that the attempts to lock up “intellectual property” and declare individual or
corporate monopolies on certain lines of research are counterproductive and will make human progress more
difficult, not easier, since they will put legal roadblocks into the kinds of
collaborations (including cross-generational virtual collaborations) that
actually produce innovative technologies.
