How did a humble piece of metal quietly reshape the American suburbs—and with them, our expectations for modern homes? This video explores the history and impact of the gang-nail plate, a simple yet revolutionary invention that transformed residential construction and accelerated suburban growth.
Originally devised to combat hurricane damage in places like mid-century Miami, the gang-nail plate allowed builders to quickly and securely connect multiple pieces of lumber at virtually any angle. By enabling the mass production of roof trusses in off-site factories, it led to stronger, cheaper, and more efficient construction. This efficiency opened the door to spacious open floor plans, complex rooflines, cathedral ceilings, and the sprawling McMansion aesthetic, all of which have come to define much of American suburban architecture.
Yet, the influence of this unassuming invention isn’t entirely positive. While it helped streamline building processes and cut costs, it also encouraged rapid housing expansion and larger, more resource-intensive homes. The result was an architectural shift that contributed to suburban sprawl, increased energy demands, and homes increasingly treated as commodities rather than unique, handcrafted spaces. These changes reverberated through building codes, real estate markets, and even family life, influencing how we interact with our homes and one another…
The story of gang-nail plate illustrates an inescapable reality of capitalist economics: companies tend not to pass cost savings from efficiency gains onto consumers…they just sell people more of it. And people mostly go along with it because who doesn’t want a bigger house for the same price as a smaller one 10 years ago or a 75” TV for far less than a 36” TV would have cost 8 years ago or a 1/4-lb burger for the same price as a regular burger a decade ago?…
As we practice restraint, we might spare a thought for Canvass White; he died on this date in 1834. An engineer and inventor, he worked as head assistant to chief engineer Benjamin Wright in the construction of the Erie Canal. Needy of a hydraulic cement to serve as mortar between the stones used to create the Canal’s locks, and unable to afford to import it from England, White developed and patented a locally-sourced waterproof cement– Rosendale cement— which was used to build the Erie Canal then host of major works in the US including the Delaware and Hudson Canal and Brooklyn Bridge. As Bill Bryson wrote (in At Home) “the great unsung Canvass White didn’t just make New York rich; more profoundly, he helped make America.”
Well, yes… Centuries before audio deepfakes and text-to-speech software, inventors in the eighteenth century constructed androids with swelling lungs, flexible lips, and moving tongues to simulate human speech. Jessica Riskin explores the history of such talking heads, from their origins in musical automata to inventors’ quixotic attempts to make machines pronounce words, converse, and declare their love…
The word “android”, derived from Greek roots meaning “manlike”, was the coinage of Gabriel Naudé, French physician and librarian, personal doctor to Louis XIII, and later architect of the forty-thousand-volume library of Cardinal Jules Mazarin. Naudé was a rationalist and an enemy of superstition. In 1625 he published a defense of Scholastic philosophers to whom tradition had ascribed works of magic. He included the thirteenth-century Dominican friar, theologian, and philosopher Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great), who, according to legend, had built an artificial man made of bronze.
This story seems to have originated long after Albert’s death with Alfonso de Madrigal (also known as El Tostado), a voluminous commentator of the fifteenth century, who adapted and embellished the tales of moving statues and talking brazen heads in medieval lore. El Tostado said that Albert had worked for thirty years to compose a whole man out of metal. The automaton supplied Albert with the answers to all of his most vexing questions and problems and even, in some versions of the tale, obligingly dictated a large part of Albert’s voluminous writings. The machine had met its fate, according to El Tostado, when Albert’s student, Thomas Aquinas, smashed it to bits in frustration, having grown tired of “its great babbling and chattering”.
Naudé did not believe in Albert’s talkative statue. He rejected it and other tales of talking automaton heads as “false, absurd and erroneous”. The reason Naudé cited was the statues’ lack of equipment: being altogether without “muscles, lungs, epiglottis, and all that is necessary for a perfect articulation of the voice”, they simply did not have the necessary “parts and instruments” to speak reasonably. Naudé concluded, in light of all the reports, that Albert the Great probably had built an automaton, but never one that could give him intelligible and articulate responses to questions. Instead, Albert’s machine must have been similar to the Egyptian statue of Memnon, much discussed by ancient authors, which murmured agreeably when the sun shone upon it: the heat caused the air inside the statue to “rarefy” so that it was forced out through little pipes, making a murmuring sound.
Despite disbelieving in Albert the Great’s talking head, Naudé gave it a powerful new name, referring to it as the “android”. Thus deftly, he smuggled a new term into the language, for according to the 1695 dictionary by the French philosopher and writer Pierre Bayle, “android” had been “an absolutely unknown word, & purely an invention of Naudé, who used it boldly as though it were established.” It was a propitious moment for neologisms: Naudé’s term quickly infiltrated the emerging genre of dictionaries and encyclopedias. Bayle repeated it in the article on “Albert le Grand” in his dictionary. Thence, “android” secured its immortality as the headword of an article — citing Naudé and Bayle — in the first volume of the supplement to the English encyclopedist Ephraim Chambers’ Cyclopaedia. In denying the existence of Albert’s android, Naudé had given life to the android as a category of machine.
But the first actual android of the new, experimental-philosphical variety for which the historical record contains rich information — “android” in Naudé’s root sense, a working human-shaped assemblage of “necessary parts” and instruments — went on display on February 3, 1738…
[There follows a fascinating account of examples from the 18th and 19th centuries…]
Plates depicting the components of artificial and natural speech from Wolfgang von Kempelen’s The Mechanism of Speech (1791) — Source
… In the early part of the twentieth century, designers of artificial speech moved on from mechanical to electrical speech synthesis. The simulation of the organs and process of speaking — of the trembling glottis, the malleable vocal tract, the supple tongue and mouth — was specific to the last decades of the eighteenth century, when philosophers and mechanicians and paying audiences were briefly preoccupied with the idea that articulate language was a bodily function: that Descartes’ divide between mind and body might be bridged in the organs of speech…
* Philip K. Dick, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”
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As we muse on the mechanical, we might spare a thought for a man whose work helped pave the way for androids as we currently conceive them: J. Presper Eckert; he died on this day in 1995. An electrical engineer, he co-designed (with John Mauchly) the first general purpose computer, the ENIAC (see here and here) for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory. He and Mauchy went on to found the Eckert–Mauchly Computer Corporation, at which they designed and built the first commercial computer in the U.S., the UNIVAC.
Eckert (standing and gesturing) and Mauchy (at the console), demonstrating the UNIVAC to Walter Cronkite (source)
Increasingly, as Patrick Sisson explains, that’s literally true…
If you had to identify a specific type of real estate that has seen its value increase because of changing consumer eating habits, global demographic shifts, worldwide pandemic preparedness, and US export policy — while its importance to reducing global carbon emissions and adapting to climate change rise in tandem — refrigerated warehouses may not be your first pick.
But there’s a strong case to be made that the expansion and evolution of the cold-storage industry — often called the “cold chain” — will play a significant role in energy, environmental, and economic news in the 21st century. Cold storage facilities aren’t fun places to visit; some are kept so frigid, at minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, that the workers who toil in these windowless spaces rotate in 15-minute shifts, despite their heavy protective gear…
… refrigerated warehouses are great to build and own. Investors and developers expect 8 to 10% annual growth in this specialized real estate, according to Adam Thocher, SVP of Global Programs and Insights at the Global Cold Chain Alliance (GCCA). That’s made it a profitable real-estate niche…
The ability to more easily cool and freeze food for storage, preparation, and distribution has revolutionized grocery shelves, home cooking, and restaurants for decades, and will continue to do so for years because it taps into every trend all at once. Growing fast-casual restaurant chains, last-mile delivery, a surging global middle class seeking more protein, and the explosion in healthy, organic produce and industrialized frozen food, all need cold storage…
The pandemic accelerated these trends, spiking frozen-food sales in the US to over $74 billion in 2023, a $10 billion increase in just three years, and leading to a wave of refrigerator purchases by Chinese consumers. The need to refrigerate Covid vaccines underscored how important these sites are to global health. Even Ozempic and similar blockbuster anti-obesity drugs need to be stored at 46 degrees F. And the rest of the world is increasingly asking why, if you can always get a Granny Smith apple in New York, can’t you get one in Beijing or London?…
The GCCA estimates there is at least 7.4 billion cubic feet of cold storage worldwide, and 3.7 billion in the US alone, but that’s a vast understatement, Thocher said. The alliance only looks at partial data from 92 countries (not including China) and governments tend to be cagey about sharing his kind of data because of economic and food-security concerns, since these sites are crucial parts of food infrastructure and can reveal levels of economic activity…
Food security has become a global challenge with a growing population, Peters said, especially since roughly 30% of global food production is lost, making increasing supply and reducing food waste imperative. That’s extremely tricky when the critical loss of arable land and desertification, due to climate change, strengthens the case for cold-storage warehouses, which, because of their vast energy use, contribute to that very problem. A 2023 Columbia University study found the sector responsible for 3.5% of total global emissions. The cold-storage industry has responded with more energy-efficient designs and less harmful ammonia-based refrigerants, but it adds an additional challenge to efforts to ramp up sustainable energy production.
“This is a real system-level challenge, a wicked problem,” [Toby Peters, professor of the cold economy at the UK’s Birmingham Energy Institute] said. “My exam question is, how do we feed 9 billion people while economically empowering 400 million small farmers, all without using diesel?”…
As we chill, we might recall that it was on this date in 1903 that Carl von Linde received two U.S. patents for his Linde oxygen process and associated equipment (Nos. 728,173 and 727,650). Linde had already invented the first industrial-scale air separation and gas liquefaction processes, which led to the first reliable and efficient compressed-ammonia refrigerator (in 1876).
In 1901, Linde had began work on a technique to obtain pure oxygen and nitrogen based on the fractional distillation of liquefied air. His 1903 patents were steps in that direction.
Linde founded a company to commercialize access to these pure gases. Now known as Linde plc (but formerly known variously as the Linde division of Union Carbide, Linde, Linde Air Products, and Praxair), it has become the world’s largest producer of industrial gases– and ushered in the creation of the global supply chain for industrial gases that serves the global cold chain.
Your correspondent is hitting the road, so (Roughly) Daily will be a good bit more roughly than daily for a bit. Regular service should resume on or around May 6. Meantime, a fascinating– and meaty– piece to hold you…
Josh Dzieza goes deep on an undersung technology and the folks who keep it functioning…
The world’s emails, TikToks, classified memos, bank transfers, satellite surveillance, and FaceTime calls travel on cables that are about as thin as a garden hose. There are about 800,000 miles of these skinny tubes crisscrossing the Earth’s oceans, representing nearly 600 different systems, according to the industry tracking organization TeleGeography. The cables are buried near shore, but for the vast majority of their length, they just sit amid the gray ooze and alien creatures of the ocean floor, the hair-thin strands of glass at their center glowing with lasers encoding the world’s data.
If, hypothetically, all these cables were to simultaneously break, modern civilization would cease to function. The financial system would immediately freeze. Currency trading would stop; stock exchanges would close. Banks and governments would be unable to move funds between countries because the Swift and US interbank systems both rely on submarine cables to settle over $10 trillion in transactions each day. In large swaths of the world, people would discover their credit cards no longer worked and ATMs would dispense no cash. As US Federal Reserve staff director Steve Malphrus said at a 2009 cable security conference, “When communications networks go down, the financial services sector does not grind to a halt. It snaps to a halt.”
Corporations would lose the ability to coordinate overseas manufacturing and logistics. Seemingly local institutions would be paralyzed as outsourced accounting, personnel, and customer service departments went dark. Governments, which rely on the same cables as everyone else for the vast majority of their communications, would be largely cut off from their overseas outposts and each other. Satellites would not be able to pick up even half a percent of the traffic. Contemplating the prospect of a mass cable cut to the UK, then-MP Rishi Sunak concluded, “Short of nuclear or biological warfare, it is difficult to think of a threat that could be more justifiably described as existential.”
Fortunately, there is enough redundancy in the world’s cables to make it nearly impossible for a well-connected country to be cut off, but cable breaks do happen. On average, they happen every other day, about 200 times a year. The reason websites continue to load, bank transfers go through, and civilization persists is because of the thousand or so people living aboard 20-some ships stationed around the world, who race to fix each cable as soon as it breaks…
The internet cables that knit the world together and the people that keep them working: “The Cloud Under the Sea,” from @joshdzieza in @verge. Eminently worth reading in full.
* Nicole Starosielski, The Undersea Network
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As we dive deep, we might send effectively-transmitted birthday greetings to a pioneer of telecommunications, Granville Woods; he was born on this date in 1856. An inventor, he held more than 50 patents, for innovations that ranged from a locomotive steam boiler to an egg incubator. But he is probably best remembered for his Synchronous Multiplex Railway Telegraph, a variation of the induction telegraph that relied on ambient static electricity from existing telegraph lines, allowing railroads to send messages between train stations and moving trains.
He is often referred to as the first African American mechanical and electrical engineer after the Civil War and as “the Black Edison” (sic).
… and so, for a very long time, it has been. Consider the case of the inventive Ismail al-Jazarī, a predecessor of Da Vinci…
… Al-Jazarī, who passed away in 1206, served as the chief engineer for the court of the Artuqids in Diyarbakir. His Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices lives up to its name, detailing lock-like devices for raising water, sophisticated zodiac clocks, avian automata able to produce song, and a showering system for King Salih, who “disliked a servant or slave girl pouring water onto his hands for him”. He invented bloodletting technologies, mischievous fountains, segmental gears, and a chest (sundūq) that featured a security system with four combination dials — presumably a safe for storing valued possessions — and has been subsequently dubbed “the father of robotics”, due to his creation of a life-like butler who could offer guests a hand towel after their ablutions. Al-Jazarī’s contemporaries already recognized his eminence as an engineer, referring to him as unique and unrivaled, learned and worthy. He stood on the shoulders of Persian, Greek, Indian, and Chinese precursors, while Renaissance inventors, in turn, stood on his.
The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devicescontains some fifty mechanical devices divided into six categories: clocks; vessels and figures for drinking sessions; pitchers, basins, and other washing devices; fountains and perpetual flutes; machines for raising water; and a miscellaneous category, where we find a self-closing door. The second category is perhaps the most intriguing, and grants some insight into the extravagant concerns of al-Jazarī’s courtly patrons. One machine — “a standing slave holding a fish and a goblet from which he serves wine to the king” — is programmed to dispense clarified wine every eighth of an hour for a certain period. Numerous similar devices follow: robots that drink from goblets, which are filled from the recycled contents of their stomachs; automaton shaykhs that serve each other wine that each consumes in turn; a boat full of mechanical slave girls that play instruments during drinking parties. Not unlike our “AI assistants”, al-Jazarī’s inventions are never allowed to transcend the category of indentured laborer, reproducing the inequalities of social relations across the human-machine divide.
The illustrations from the Berlin manuscript are notably different than some of its sister specimens, such as the ornate pair of manuscripts held in Leiden. Here the images are mainly in-line illustrations and seem more focused on technical details and inner workings than other versions, which tend to lean toward aesthetic exteriors. Red and yellow predominate, offset by the occasional body of water in indigo blue. Gears and levers are rich in tone, while humanoid figures get left as simple, colorless sketches. To the contemporary viewer, the illustrations invert the power dynamic that is so present in al-Jazarī’s text. Machines come to the foreground; humans are incidental figures, almost irrelevant…
As we imagine machines, we might spare a thought for Henry Christopher Mance; he died on this date in 1926. An electrical engineer and inventor, he was instrumental in laying the earliest underwater telecom cables (under the Persian Gulf) and developed the Mance method of detecting and locating the positions of defects in submarine cables. But he is better remembered as the inventor of the Mance heliograph (a wireless solar telegraph that signals by flashes of sunlight using Morse code reflected by a mirror), which found wide military, survey, and forest protection application and for which he was knighted.
Signaling with a Mance heliograph, Alaska-Canada border, 1910 (source)
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