Posts Tagged ‘Benjamin Franklin’
“Infrastructure is much more important than architecture”*…
.. much, much more important, as Debbie Chachra explains in a piece featured once before in (R)D. It’s excerpted here again, with special emphasis on our power grid…
We use exogenous energy every day to exceed the limits of what our bodies can do. Artificial light compensates for our species’ poor night vision and gives us control over how we spend our time, releasing us from the constraints of sunrise and sunset. So valuable is artificial light that it’s a reliable correlate of wealth and economic development: researchers use the growing brightness of regions over time, as quantified from satellite images taken at night, as a proxy measure—more resources, more light. The southern half of the Korean Peninsula and the ocean surrounding it is ablaze with light; while North Korea has just faint threads of light leading out from Pyongyang, a result of decades of imposed scarcity.
Energy in the form of mechanical work also replaces our body’s labour, from the domestic scale—all the technologies for textiles, for example, from spinning and weaving to sewing and laundry—to scales that are nearly impossible for human bodies alone, like building skyscrapers and bridges. And we use mechanical energy to move our bodies and ferry goods around: transportation. Exogenous energy also makes our living environments more comfortable; for a long time, this was mostly limited to heating, but in the twentieth century, the technologies of refrigeration and air conditioning became widespread. The newest uses of energy are telecommunications technologies—from Morse code to TikTok, they turn electrons into bits of information, facilitating human connections on a global scale.
In fact, this ability to access more energy than our bodies themselves can provide is—all but literally—baked into being a human. All cultures eat cooked food (and no animals cook their food). While it’s not required to survive, strictly speaking, heating food breaks it down, making the nutrients more bioavailable; in essence, the food becomes more nutritious. Learning to cook our food is thought to have been an important contributor to the development of our calorie-dense brains and all that followed, helping to free humans from the ongoing labour of foraging and eating that occupies most animals. But the near-necessity of cooking food then requires a different labour: for most women on most of the planet, obtaining fuel for cooking remains their primary daily occupation.
“Care at Scale”
How is that we in the U.S. have more-or-less abundant power? Brian Potter explains the evolution of our electric grid…
Abundant electricity is a defining feature of the modern era. At the turn of the 20th century electrical power was a rare, expensive luxury: in 1900 electricity provided less than 5% of industrial power in the US, and as late as 1907 was in only 8% of US homes. Today, however, 89.6% of the world’s population has access to electricity (97.3% if you just consider urban areas), and Wikipedia’s “list of countries by electrification rate” has 123 countries sharing the top spot at 100% electrification.
Electrical service is considered critical in a way that’s different from most other services. Even a brief interruption in electrical power is considered a serious problem in industrialized countries where power outage durations are typically measured in minutes per year. To put this in perspective, the average yearly outage time in the US is around 475 minutes per year, which is considered especially unreliable despite representing ~99.9% uptime. By comparison, Germany averaged just 12.7 minutes of power outages per year in 2021—a remarkable 99.998% uptime.
Electricity’s transition from a luxury good to the foundation of modern life happened quickly. By 1930, electricity was available in nearly 70% of US homes, and supplied almost 80% of industrial mechanical power. By 1950, the US was tied together by an enormous network of high-voltage transmission lines…
“The Birth of the Grid” (and Part Two) from @_brianpotter.
Keep an eye out for @debcha‘s forthcoming book, How Infrastructure Works.
* Rem Koolhaas
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As we think systemically, we might recall that it was on this date in 1752 that Benjamin Franklin and his son tested the relationship between electricity and lightning by flying a kite in a thunder storm. Franklin was attempting a (safer) variation on a set of French investigations about which he’d read. The French had connected lightning rods to a Leyden jar, but one of their experiments electrocuted the investigator. Franklin– who was, of course, no fool– used a kite; the increased height/distance from the strike reduces the risk of electrocution. (But it doesn’t eliminate it: Franklin’s experiment is now illegal in many states.)
In fact (other) French experiments had successfully demonstrated the electrical properties of lightning a month before, but word had not yet reached Philadelphia.
The Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing created this vignette (c. 1860), which was used on the $10 National Bank Note from the 1860s to 1890s
“Time and space are modes by which we think and not conditions in which we live”*…
A new kind of matter?…
In a preprint posted online… researchers at Google in collaboration with physicists at Stanford, Princeton and other universities say that they have used Google’s quantum computer to demonstrate a genuine “time crystal.” In addition, a separate research group claimed earlier this month to have created a time crystal in a diamond.
A novel phase of matter that physicists have strived to realize for many years, a time crystal is an object whose parts move in a regular, repeating cycle, sustaining this constant change without burning any energy.
“The consequence is amazing: You evade the second law of thermodynamics,” said Roderich Moessner, director of the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, and a co-author on the Google paper. That’s the law that says disorder always increases.
Time crystals are also the first objects to spontaneously break “time-translation symmetry,” the usual rule that a stable object will remain the same throughout time. A time crystal is both stable and ever-changing, with special moments that come at periodic intervals in time.
The time crystal is a new category of phases of matter, expanding the definition of what a phase is. All other known phases, like water or ice, are in thermal equilibrium: Their constituent atoms have settled into the state with the lowest energy permitted by the ambient temperature, and their properties don’t change with time. The time crystal is the first “out-of-equilibrium” phase: It has order and perfect stability despite being in an excited and evolving state…
Like a perpetual motion machine, a time crystal forever cycles between states without consuming energy. Physicists claim to have built this new phase of matter inside a quantum computer: “Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real.”
See also: Time Crystals #1 (source of the image above).
And for a not-altogether-apposite, but equally mind-blowing read, see “Scientist Claims That Aliens May Be Communicating via Starlight.”
* Albert Einstein
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As we push through purported paradoxes, we might send accomplished birthday greetings to James Bowdoin II; he was born on this date in 1726. A successful businessman who was a political and intellectual leader during in the decade after the American Revolution (for a time, as Governor of Massachusetts), he was also an important experimental scientist. His work on electricity with his friend Benjamin Franklin earned him election to both the Royal Society of London and the American Philosophical Society. He was a founder and first president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, to whom he bequeathed his library. Bowdoin College in Maine was named in his honor after a bequest by his son James III.
“To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past”*…
As historians from James MacGregor Burns to Jill Lepore remind us, the United States was– and is– an experiment. The Constitution was the collective best effort of the Framers to write the first draft of an operating manual for the society they hoped it to be– a society unique in its time in its commitment to political equality, natural rights, and the sovereignty of the people– what Jefferson called “these truths.”
But like any wise group of prototypers, they assumed that their design would be refined through experience, that their “manual” would be updated… though even then Benjamin Franklin shared Jefferson’s worry [see the full title quote below] that American’s might treat their Constitution as unchangeable…
Our new Constitution is now established, and has an appearance that promises permanency; but in this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. -Benjamin Franklin, letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy (13 November 1789)
The Framers expected– indeed, they counted on– their work being revised…
Laws and institutions must go hand in hand with the progress of the human mind. As that becomes more developed, more enlightened, as new discoveries are made, new truths disclosed, and manners and opinions change with the change of circumstances, institutions must advance also, and keep pace with the times. We might as well require a man to wear still the coat which fitted him when a boy, as civilized society to remain ever under the regimen of their barbarous ancestors. -Thomas Jefferson, letter to H. Tompkinson (AKA Samuel Kercheval) (12 July 1816)
Jesse K. Phillips has found a beautifully-current– and equally beautifully-concrete– way to capture the commitment to learning and improving that animated the Framers: he has put the Constitution onto GitHub, the software development platform that hosts reams of (constantly revised) open source code (and that was featured in yesterday’s (Roughly) Daily.)
[Image above: source]
* “To treat the founding documents as Scripture would be to become a slave to the past. ‘Some men look at constitutions with sanctimonious reverence, and deem them like the ark of the covenant, too sacred to be touched,’ Jefferson conceded. But when they do, ‘They ascribe to the men of the preceding age a wisdom more than human [and suppose what they did to be beyond amendment].”‘
― From These Truths: A History of the United States
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As we hold those truths to be inalienable, we might recall that it was on this date (which is, by the way, Fibonacci Day) in 1644 that John Milton published Areopagitica; A speech of Mr. John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, to the Parlament of England. A prose polemic opposing licensing and censorship, it is among history’s most influential and impassioned philosophical defenses of the principle of a right to freedom of speech and expression. The full text is here.
“MESMERISM, n. Hypnotism before it wore good clothes, kept a carriage and asked Incredulity to dinner”*…
Detail from a colored etching after C-L. Desrais depicting people gathered around the “baquet” at one of Franz Mesmer’s group animal magnetism sessions — Source.
Patients, mostly women, are sitting around a large wooden tub filled with magnetic water, powdered glass, and iron filings. From its lid emerge a number of bent iron rods against which the patients expectantly press their afflicted areas. A rope attached to the tub is loosely coiled about them, and they are holding hands to create a “circuit”. Through the low-lit room — adorned with mirrors to reflect invisible forces — there wafts incense and strange music, the other-worldly sounds of the glass harmonica (invented by a certain Benjamin Franklin). Meanwhile, a charming man in an elaborate lilac silk coat is circulating, touching various parts of the patients’ bodies where the magnetic fluid may be hindered or somehow stuck. It appears that these blockages, in the ladies in particular, are generally in the lower abdomen, thighs, and sometimes “the ovaria”. The typical session would last for hours and culminate in a curative “crisis” of nervous hiccups, hysterical sobs, cries, coughs, spitting, fainting, and convulsing, thus restoring the normal harmonious flow of the fluid.
The man in the lilac coat is Franz Friedrich Anton Mesmer and this scene could be describing any number of animal magnetism sessions he held in late eighteenth-century Paris. While Mesmer’s antics are perhaps familiar to many today, lesser known is the key role they played in the development of the modern clinical trial — particularly in connection with the 1784 Franklin commission, “charged by the King of France, with the examination of the animal magnetism, as now practiced at Paris”…
Benjamin Franklin, magnetic trees, and erotically-charged séances — Urte Laukaityte on how a craze for sessions of “animal magnetism” in late 18th-century Paris led to the randomized placebo-controlled and double-blind clinical trials we know and love today: “Mesmerising Science: The Franklin Commission and the Modern Clinical Trial.”
* Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
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As we ponder proof, we might send thoroughly-analyzed birthday greetings to Anna Freud; she was born on this date in 1895. The sixth child of Sigmund Freud and Martha Bernays (the aunt of Edward Bernays, the “father” of modern propaganda and public relations), she continued her father’s work, with special interest in the young. Indeed, with Melanie Klein, she is considered a founder of psychoanalytic child psychology.
“The city’s full of people who you just see around”*…
An archaeologist’s reconstruction of Dvin, one of the most ancient settlements of the Armenian Highland and an ancient capital of Armenia [source], and modern day New York City [source]
Much of the history of the city—its built forms and its politics, the urban experience, and the characteristic moral ambivalence that cities arouse—can be written as a tension between the visible and the invisible. What and who gets seen? By whom? Who interprets the city’s meaning? What should remain unseen?
Rulers of cities have always had an interest in visibility, both in representing their power and in controlling people by seeing them. The earliest cities emerged out of the symbiosis of religion and political power, and the temple and the citadel gave early urbanism its most visible elements…
Warren Breckman‘s fascinating history of the city as a place to see and be seen: “A Matter of Optics.”
* Terry Pratchett, Men at Arms
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As we wonder, with Juvenal (and Alan Moore), who watches the watchmen, we might recall that it was on this date in 1752 that Benjamin Franklin and his son tested the relationship between electricity and lightning by flying a kite in a thunder storm. Franklin was attempting a (safer) variation on a set of French investigations about which he’d read. The French had connected lightning rods to a Leyden jar, but one of their experiments electrocuted the investigator. Franklin– who may have been a wastrel, but was no fool– used a kite; the increased height/distance from the strike reduces the risk of electrocution. (But it doesn’t eliminate it: Franklin’s experiment is now illegal in many states.)
In fact, (other) French experiments had successfully demonstrated the electrical properties of lightning a month before; but word had not yet reached Philadelphia.
The Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing created this vignette (c. 1860), which was used on the $10 National Bank Note from the 1860s to 1890s
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