America’s Iron Giants – The World’s Most Powerful Metalworkers
An evening pause: Heavy tech (literally) that makes everything go, was built with slide-rules and pencils — in feet, inches, ounces, and pounds — and still operates.
Hat tip Mike Nelson.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
That was fascinating!
Being reminded of such incredible productive achievements, I somberly reflect at what we now take for granted.
I am also reminded of Ayn Rand’s fictional epic, “Atlas Shrugged.”
It is interesting to contrast these mammoth presses with the Giga Presses used by Tesla. These presses are much lighter, although still massive, and are horizontally-oriented.
Rather than stamping out iron parts from billets, they produce castings formed by the rapid injection of molten aluminum, allowing them to produce major auto frame sub-assemblies at a rate on the order of one per minute.
3D printing is now leading another evolution of the same materials science. Pulse power too. So wonderful. Too bad millions oppose the very industries that provide their affluent lives.
The TV show How It’s Made covers, over and over, a full variety of metal forming processes used to make the things of our world, large and small. They go exclusively right into the factory to show the machinery, workers, and robots in action. The segments are all short. I jump ahead to the ones that interest me.
“Atlas Shrugged” does not seem so fictional now.
Not only did they use slide rules and pencils, you can be sure that they made considerable use of the SWAG method in design and development – and it’s amazing how close those initial guesses were.
Some people just have a knack for things.
My Dad, however, would shove me away from anything I worked on—on account of me being a jinx.
He drove my Ford Fairmont to Indiana and back on a visit to his brother’s family.
I drive it five miles the next day—and it strands me.
Same thing with his truck. I walk past a lawnmower—it quits.
My combination locker at school opened for anyone BUT me.
I’m the better idiot that engineers warn about.