Posts Tagged ‘aviation’
“A good photograph is knowing where to stand”*…
Today’s post– commemorating the 124th birthday of a man who knew exactly where to stand– reverses (Roughly) Daily‘s usual format, opening with the almanac entry…
We might send thoughtfully-composed birthday greetings to Ansel Adams; he was born on this date in 1902. A photographer who specialized in landscapes, especially in black-and-white photos of the American West, he was hugely influential both in photography and in environmentalism.
Adams helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advocating “pure” photography which favored sharp focus and the use of the full tonal range of a photograph; was a key advisor in establishing the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and a founder of the photography journal Aperture.
His love of photography was born when, at age 12, he visited Yosemite and took his first shots. He became a life-long advocate for environmental conservation, a commitment deeply intertwined with his photographic practice. At one point, he contracted with the United States Department of the Interior to make photographs of national parks. For his work and his persistent advocacy, which helped expand the National Park system, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1980.
Visit the Ansel Adams Gallery to see more of Adams’ signature lanscape and natural wonder work.
Adams, c. 1950 (source)
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On the occasion of Adams’ birthday, we might note that, working photographer that he was, he took commercial assignments from time to time– assignments focused on subjects not usually associated with Adams. Two of them are especially interesting…
A collection of photos taken for Fortune Magazine in Los Angeles in the run-up to World War II documented the lives of workers in Los Angeles’ booming aviation industry…
More at “Ansel Adams’ Photos of Pre-War Los Angeles.”
And then, from the early 1960s, photos taken by Adams for Stanford’s PACE Program…
“Once it was a rich, sleepy school with rich, sleepy students; now it aims to be the ‘Harvard of the West’.” That was how Time magazine described Stanford University in the fall of 1962. The publication had been reporting on Stanford’s PACE program, a massive fundraising effort that the school launched to strive toward the kind of prominence that its founders Leland and Jane Stanford had originally envisioned. The core drive behind PACE, an acronym for Plan of Action for a Challenging Era, was for Stanford to transcend its “sleepy” backwater reputation (the “rich” part would remain) and emerge as a potential Western rival to the Ivy League universities on the East Coast.
When it came to PACE’s promotional materials for wooing donors, Stanford’s planning department hired Ansel Adams to produce the visuals. Adams was already well known and highly accomplished at the time, having shot the majority of his masterpiece landscapes depicting the natural grandeur of the American West. But in the early 1960s, he was also still a for-hire photographer trying to make a living in the Bay Area. According to archival letters, Adams and his team of photographers were contracted for $3,000 to produce a series of images from around the Stanford campus over a period of two months in early 1961.
The PACE program ultimately proved to be a resounding success, to the tune of $114 million in fundraising (nearly $1.1 billion today), which became foundational to Stanford’s present-day status as an ultra-elite university. In parallel fashion, Adams would eventually be considered the great American photographer of his era, an exceedingly rare household name in the world of photography, and a visual artist still highly celebrated in museums and pricey galleries around the world. However, his series of Stanford photographs was never recorded in his otherwise meticulous photo log and fell into deep obscurity, becoming all but never-before-seen images by the general public and unknown to even his biographers and archivists…
More at “Lost California photos from Ansel Adams.”
* Ansel Adams
“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing”*…
Prices are on everyone’s minds these days. Brian Potter looks underneath the costs of the finished products and services that we typically track to examine the costs of the commodities that go into them…
This American Enterprise Institute chart [above], which breaks down price changes for different types of goods and services in the consumer price index, has by now become very widely known. A high-level takeaway from this chart is that labor-intensive services (education, healthcare) get more expensive in inflation-adjusted terms over time, while manufactured goods (TVs, toys, clothing) get less expensive over time.
But there are many types of goods that aren’t shown on this chart. One example is commodities: raw (or near-raw) materials mined or harvested from the earth. Commodities have many similarities with manufactured goods: they’re physical things that are produced (or extracted) using some sort of production technology (mining equipment, oil drilling equipment), and many of them will go through factory-like processing steps (oil refineries, blast furnaces). But commodities also seem distinct from manufactured goods. For one, because they’re often extracted from the earth, commodities can be subject to depletion dynamics: you run out of them at one location, and have to go find more somewhere else. In my book I talk about how iron ore used to be mined from places like Minnesota, but as the best deposits were mined out steel companies increasingly had to source their ore from overseas. And the idea of “Peak Oil” is based on the idea that society will use up the easily accessible oil, and be forced to obtain it from increasingly marginal, expensive-to-access locations.
(Some commodities, particularly agricultural commodities that can be repeatedly grown on a plot of land, don’t have the same sort of depletion dynamics, though bad farming practices can degrade a plot of land over time. Other commodities get naturally replenished over time, but can still get used up if the rate of extraction exceeds the rate of replenishment; non-farmed timber harvesting and non-farmed commercial fishing come to mind as examples.)
Going into this topic, I didn’t have a great sense of what price trends look like for commodities in general. Julian Simon famously won a 1980 bet with Paul Ehrlich that several raw materials — copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten — would be cheaper (in inflation-adjusted terms) after 10 years, not more expensive. But folks have pointed out that if the bet had been over a different 10-year window, Ehrlich would have won the bet.
To better understand how price tends to change for different commodities and raw materials, I looked at historical prices for over a hundred different commodities. Broadly, agricultural commodities tend to get cheaper over time, while fossil fuels have a slight tendency to get more expensive. Minerals (chemicals, metals, etc.) have a slight tendency towards getting cheaper, with a lot of variation — 15 minerals more than doubled in price over their respective time series. But this has shifted over the last few decades, and recently there’s been a greater tendency for commodities to rise in price…
[Potter offers a thorough– and fascinating– analysis, concluding…]
… historically commodities have generally fallen in price over time, but recently this trend has increasingly shifted towards rising prices. Natural gas and oil got cheaper until the 1950s and the 1970s, respectively, and since then have gotten more expensive. Beef and pork both got cheaper from 1970 until the 1990s, and since then have risen in price. Agricultural products were almost uniformly falling in price until around 2000, and have almost uniformly risen in price since then.
My general sense looking at historical commodity price data is that the more that production of some commodity looks like manufacturing — produced by a repetitive process that can be steadily improved and automated, from a supply that can be scaled up in a relatively straightforward fashion, without being subject to severe depletion dynamics — the more you’ll tend to see prices fall over time. The biggest decline in price of any commodity I looked at is industrial diamonds, which fell in price by 99.9% between 1900 and 2021d ue to advances in lab-grown diamonds production. This effectively replaced mined diamonds with manufactured ones for industrial uses; roughly 99% of industrial diamonds today are synthetic. Many other commodities had major price declines that were the result of production process improvements — aluminum got cheaper thanks to the invention (and subsequent improvements) of the Hall-Heroult smelting process, titanium’s price declined following the introduction of the Kroll process, and so on. (Steel also got much cheaper following the introduction of the Bessemer process, but that predates USGS price data.) And of course agriculture, which has evolved from crops being harvested manually to being harvested with highly automated, continuous process machinery, closely mirrors the sorts of process improvements we see in manufacturing.
Of course, this trend alone can’t explain changes in commodity prices over time, and there are plenty of commodities — steel, cement, silicon — that are produced in a manufacturing-type operation but which haven’t seen substantially declining prices over their history. And even commodities which resemble manufactured goods have risen in price recently. More generally, there are plenty of things that can shift supply and demand curves to the right or left: cartels, national policies, a spike or collapse in demand, and so on. But the question of “how much, over time, does the production of this commodity resemble a manufacturing process?” seems like a useful lens on understanding the dynamics of commodity prices…
“Do Commodities Get Cheaper Over Time?” from @constructionphysics.skystack.xyz.
* Karl Marx
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As we brush up on the basics, we might recall that this date in the anniversary of two events that spurred commodity consumption.
Alexander Graham Bell spurred a boom on copper consumption when, on this date in 1915, he placed the first transcontinental phone call, from New York to San Francisco, where the Panama–Pacific International Exposition celebrations were underway and his assistant, his assistant Thomas Augustus Watson stood by. Bell repeated his famous first telephonic words, “Mr. Watson, come here. I want you,” to which Watson this time replied “It will take me five days to get there now!” Bell’s call officially initiated AT&T’s transcontinental service.
And, on this date 45 years later, in 1959, the aluminum market got a boost when the first non-stop transcontinental commercial jet trip was made by an American Airlines Boeing 707, from Los Angeles to New York. The sleek silver plane made the flight in airline official time of 4 hours and 3 minutes, half the usual scheduled time for the prop-driven DC- 7Cs then in regular use on that route.
“Whoever wishes to foresee the future must consult the past; for human events ever resemble those of preceding times”*…
In times like these, perspective is at a premium. Here, Derek Thompson on what we might learn from our not-so-terribly-distant past…
When we hear about technological change and social crisis in the 21st century, it is easy to imagine that we are living through a special period of history. But many eras have grappled with the problems that seem to uniquely plague our own. The beginning of the 20th century was a period of speed and technological splendor (the automobile! the airplane! the bicycle!), shattered nerves, mass anxiety, and a widespread sense that the world had been forever knocked off its historical axis: a familiar stew of ideas. I think we can learn a lot about the present by studying historical periods whose challenges rhyme with our own.
My favorite period of history is the 30- to 40-year span between the end of the 19th century and the early innings of the 20th century. It was an era of incredible change. From Abundance (which Thompson co-authored with Ezra Klein):
Imagine going to sleep in 1875 in New York City and waking up thirty years later. As you shut your eyes, there is no electric lighting, Coca-Cola, basketball, or aspirin. There are no cars or “sneakers.” The tallest building in Manhattan is a church.
When you wake up in 1905, the city has been remade with towering steel-skeleton buildings called “skyscrapers.” The streets are filled with novelty: automobiles powered by new internal combustion engines, people riding bicycles in rubber-soled shoes—all recent innovations. The Sears catalog, the cardboard box, and aspirin are new arrivals. People have enjoyed their first sip of Coca-Cola and their first bite of what we now call an American hamburger. The Wright brothers have flown the first airplane. When you passed into slumber, nobody had taken a picture with a Kodak camera or used a machine that made motion pictures, or bought a device to play recorded music. By 1905, we have the first commercial versions of all three—the simple box camera, the cinematograph, and the phonograph.
No book on turn-of-the-century history has influenced me more, or brought me more joy, than The Vertigo Years: Europe 1900-1914 by Philipp Blom. I think it might be the most underrated history book ever written. In my favorite chapters focusing on the years around 1910, Blom describes how turn-of-the-century technology changed the way people thought about art and human nature and how it contributed to a nervous breakdown across the west. Disoriented by the speed of modern times, Europeans and Americans suffered from record-high rates of anxiety and a sense that our inventions had destroyed our humanity. Meanwhile, some artists channeled this disorientation to create some of the greatest art of all time.
[Thompson uses passages from Blom to unpack those issues– a world moving too fast, the anxiety occasioned by technological change, and the responses of artists and creators of culture. He concludes with a consideration of two influential new theories of human nature that arose at that point…]
… Blom closes his chapter “1910: Human Nature Changed” by considering two intellectual giants of the time: the sociologist Max Weber and the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, whose International Psychoanalytic Association was founded in 1910. The tension between their theories of human nature are profoundly relevant today.
In his famous work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Weber, a German sociologist, argued that certain Protestant—especially Calvinist—traditions supported habits that aligned with the development of modern capitalism. He argued that the Protestant tradition of northern European worshippers cultivated a disciplined approach to work, savings, and investment that proved valuable in commerce, while the Calvinist doctrine of divine grace “could lead believers to read worldly success as a possible sign of God’s favor,” as Blom summarizes. Weber believed that Protestantism not only encouraged followers to pour their energies into labor (hence the allusion to Work Ethic in the book’s title) but also helped create a culture of trade and investment that supported the rise of modern capitalism.
“It is easy to see how Freud’s analysis follows on from Weber’s,” Blom writes. To Freud, human nature was at risk of being fully dissolved by capitalism and modern society, like chalk dropped in acid. Beneath the polite masks demanded by modern society, he said, there lurked a more atavistic and instinctual self. Freud saw our psyche as a tug-of-war between the id (our animal urges) and superego (the voice in our head that internalizes society’s rules), with the ego stuck in the middle trying to negotiate an authentic identity in the face of mass inauthenticity. One of Freud’s most fantastic insights was that some people can channel or redirect their most raw and unacceptable urges toward productive and acceptable work. His name for this bit of psychological alchemy was sublimation.
Modern capitalism, in Freudian terms, was the sublimation of self-interest—or, one might even say, the sublimation of greed. “The suppression of natural urges is a necessary precondition for capitalist success,” Blom writes in summary, “but while it is productive for the group and its wealth, such an approach will eventually exact its revenge on the individual.” By this interpretation, the mass anxiety of the early 1900s—whether you call it neurasthenia, American Nervousness, or Newyorkitis—was price of modernity, technological development, and even capitalism itself.
There is little evidence that Freud and Weber ever debated one another. Yet when you set their theories side by side, it’s hard not to hear a conversation that still shapes much modern commentary. Weber wrote that modern capitalism evolved from religious doctrines that fit our nature, while Freud argued that human nature is unfit for a modern world that distorts and represses our basic urges. Are our most impressive inventions the ultimate expression of our humanity, or are they the ultimate threat to it? This is the question that every generation must answer for itself, including our own. It is a question equally worthy of the automobile and artificial intelligence. The troubling answer—for Weber and for Freud; for 1910 and for 2025—is: perhaps, both.
Learning from our past: “1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind,” from @dkthomp.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
Pair with another “history lesson,” a consideration of American mechanisms of voter restriction/suppression over the years (as context for the current application of the Orban playbook by the Trump Administration and states like Texas: “Competitive authoritarianism” and America’s slide toward it.” moves fueled by appeals to the very anxieties (and to false nostalgia for times that were free of it) discussed above.
* Machiavelli
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As we look back to look forward, we might send altitudinous birthday greetings to a man whose work figured into the tale that Thompson and Blom tell: Orville Wright; he was born on this date in 1871. An inventor and aviator, he American inventor and aviator, he invented, with his elder brother Wilbur, the first powered airplane, Flyer, capable of sustained, controlled flight. In 1903, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Orville made the first ever manned powered flight, airborn for 12 sec. By 1905, the brothers had improved the design, built and and made several long flights in Flyer III, which was the first fully practical airplane, able to fly up to 38-min and travel 24 miles (though not without incident). Their Model A was produced later in 1908, capable of over two hours of flight. By 1909 their flights were the subject of wide public interest, watched by leaders (like President Taft) and by public crowds of as many as a million people (in Manhattan during the Hudson-Fulton Celebration in New York City)… by 1910, flight and its future had become one of the many accelerating vectors driving the turmoil that THompson describes.
“The most important things are paper airplanes and dreams”*…
The paper airplane has a long history of contributions to our understanding of flight…
… Our obsession with testing the boundaries of folded flight is relatively recent, but our desire to explore and explain the complex world of aerodynamics goes back much further.
Chinese engineers are thought to have invented what could be considered the earliest paper planes around 2,000 years ago. But these ancient gliders, usually crafted from bamboo and paper or linen, resembled kites more than the dart-shaped fliers that have earned numerous Guinness World Records in recent years.
Leonardo da Vinci would take a step closer to the modern paper airplane in the late 14th and early 15th centuries by building paper models of his aircraft designs to assess how they might sustain flight. But da Vinci’s knowledge of aerodynamics was fairly limited. He was more inspired by animal flight and, as a result, his design for craft like the ornithopter—a hang-glider-size set of bat wings that used mechanical systems powered by human movement—never left the ground.
Paper airplanes helped early engineers and scientists learn about the mechanics of flight. The British engineer and aviator Sir George Cayley reportedly crafted the first folded paper plane to approach modern specifications in the early 1800s as part of his personal experimentation with aerodynamics. “He was one of the early people to link together the idea that the lift from the wings picking up the aircraft for stable flight must be greater than or equal to the weight of the aircraft,” says Jonathan Ridley, PhD, the head of engineering and a scholar of early aviation at Solent University in the U.K.
More than a century later, before their famous 1903 flight in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the Wright Brothers built paper models of wings to better understand how their glider would sustain flight, explains Ridley. They then tested these models in a rudimentary, refrigerator-size wind tunnel—only the second to be built in the U.S. Paper planes are still illuminating the hidden wonders of flight. Today, these lightweight aircraft serve as a source of inspiration not only for aviation enthusiasts but also for fluid dynamicists and engineers studying the complex effects of air on small aircraft like drones…
For centuries, paper airplanes have unlocked the science of flight—now they could inspire drone technology: “A Living History of The Humble Paper Airplane,” from @PopMech.
* Christopher Morley
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As we fold ’em and fly ’em, we might spare a thought for Wiley Post. A famed aviator of the interwar period, he was the first the first pilot to fly solo around the world. Post was also known for his work in high-altitude flying; he helped develop one of the first pressure suits and discovered the jet stream.
Today is also the anniversary of the death of famed humorist Will Rogers. On this date in 1935, Post and Rogers were killed when Post’s aircraft crashed on takeoff from a lagoon near Point Barrow in the Territory of Alaska.
“You only need two tools in life — WD-40 and duct tape. If it doesn’t move and should, use the WD-40. If it shouldn’t move and does, use the duct tape.”*…
The fascinating history of WD-40, a chemical substance with an unusual origin story and a rust-fighting ability that has become a standby of households and workbenches the world over…
In the early years of the 1950s, the Rocket Chemical Company was on a mission. They wanted to make a line of solvents and degreasers that would prevent rust in the aerospace industry.
The first fifty years of the aerospace industry were marked by innovation and change. From the Wright Brothers’ first flight in 1903 to their 1908 military contract, it picked up interest in a big way. Aircraft played a role in the First World War and prompted an era of evolution and development for the industry. According to The Encyclopedic History of the Aerospace Industry, seven firms built more than 22,500 of the 400-horsepower Liberty engines that eventually laid the foundation of what became an incredibly efficient industry. They were also led by only two companies: Wright Aeronautical Company and Curtiss Aeroplane and Motor…
Most types of metal—including the ones used in the construction of those early aircraft—have a tendency to rust over time (although there are a few that don’t). Painting, maintenance, cleaning, and hangar storage help attenuate rust issues, but they are sometimes difficult to prevent entirely. Exposing the metal to the oxygen in the air around us causes paint to wear off and rust to build up (the process is known as “uniform surface attack”). Other parts of the plane—like the landing gear and engine—can also develop corrosion over time. Then there’s the issue of moisture building up in crevices and eventually causing rust. A rusty plane is not a good thing. Even so, rust-prevention wasn’t a high priority early on for some sectors of the industry. All that changed as the industry evolved.
[In 1953] the Rocket Chemical Company stood on the precipice of that change with their attempt to solve the problem once and for all… After forty attempts to create the formula, they famously came up with the right one on their 40th attempt. The name WD-40 stands for water displacement, formula 40. It’s first application came as a coating for the Atlas missiles made by Convair in the 1950s.
As their product began gaining traction, it exploded in popularity. Everyone loved it. And much like stealing office supplies, employees of the original WD-40 manufacturing plant inevitably snuck some of the stuff out for home use. So it wasn’t much of a surprise that five years after its invention, the miracle substance appeared on the open market in 1958…
The origins– and impact– of America’s most versatile household product: “The Can That Always Can,” from David Buck (@saltyasparagus1) in @readtedium.
* Anonymous
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As we spray it on, we might recall that it was on this date in 1913 that Gulf Refining Company opened the first “drive-in filling station” in Pittsburgh. It was the first architect-designed station and the first to distribute free road maps; it also offered tube and tire installation, free water and air, and crankcase services.
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