Bell telegraph letter mail

Understanding industrial design : principles for ux and interaction design, written by Simon King and Kuen Chang, 2016

p.185
Another example is Alexander Graham Bell, whose mother and wife were both deaf, which sparked his interest in the possibility of artificial speech.  “This led to his experiments in transforming sound into an electrical signal and back to sound and eventually to the invention of the telephone.”39
      39  Edward Steinfeld and Jordana L. Maisel, Universal design : creating inclusive environments (hoboken, js: wiley, 2012), 309.

Understanding industrial design : principles for ux and interaction design, written by Simon King and Kuen Chang, 2016
   ____________________________________

message passing
message intercept
message snoping
message infiltration
   ____________________________________

written by James Bamford (The puzzle palace), 1982

pp.377-378
  “HUMINT [Human Intelligence] is subject to all of the mental aberrations of the source as well as the interpreter of the source,” Lieutenant General Marshall S. Carter once explained. “SIGINT isn't. SIGINT has technical aberrations which give it away almost immediately if it does not have bona fides, if it is not legitimate. A good analyst can tell very, very quickly whether this is an attempt at disinformation, at confusion, from SIGINT. You can't do that from HUMINT; you don't have the bona fides ── what are his sources? He may be the source, but what are his sources?”
  Having served as deputy director of the CIA and director of the NSA, Carter was one of the very few people to have been intimately associated with both collection systems, and in his opinion SIGINT won by a wavelength. “Photo interpretation,” he explained, “can in some cases be misinterpreted by the reader or intentionally confused by the maker in the first place ── camouflage, this sort of thing. SIGINT is the one that is immediate, right now. Photo interpretation, yes, to some extent, but you still have to say, ‘Is that really a fake, have they confused it?’ It is better than HUMINT, it is more rapid than HUMINT [but] SIGINT is right now; its bona fides are there the minute you get it.”
   ____________________________________

Jon Gernter., The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation, [2012]

p.18
Their phone service was riddled with interruptions, poor sound quality, unreliable connections, and the frequent distraction of “crosstalk”, the term engineers used to describe the intrusion of one signal (or one conversation) into another.

p.20
The telephone essentially converted the human voice into an electrical signal;

p.20
; in turn-of-the-century phones this was done by allowing sound waves produced by a voice to vibrate a taut diaphragm ── usually a disc made of this aluminum ── that was backed by another thin metal disc.  A mild electric current ran between the two discs, which were separated by a chamber filled with the tiny carbon granules Edison had invented.  As sound waves from a voice vibrated the top diaphragm, waves of varying pressure moved through the granules below it.  The varying pressure would in turn vary the resistance to the electric current running between the metal discs.  In the process sound waves would be converted to electric waves.  On a simple journey, the electrified voice signal would then travel through a wire, to a switchboard, to another cable, to another switchboard, and finally to a receiver and a distant eardrum.  But a telephone voice signal was weak ── much weaker and more delicate than a telegraph's simple dot-dash signal.  Even worse, the delicate signal would grow thinner ── or “attenuate”, to use the phone company's preferred term ── after even a few miles.
─“”

p.32
That an industrial laboratory would focus on research and development was not entirely novel; a few large German chemical and pharmaceutical companies had tried it successfully a half century before.  But Bell Labs seemed to have embraced the idea on an entirely different scale.  

p.32
Harold Arnold
As Arnold explained, his department would include, “the fields of physical and organic chemistry, of metallurgy, of magnetism, of electrical conduction, of radiation, of electronics, of acoustics, of phonetics, of optics, of mathematics, of mechanics, and even of physiology, of psychology, and of meteorology.”10

p.32
In short, he added, modern industrial research was meant to apply science to the “common affairs” of everyday life.
·‘’•─“”

p.49
experimenting on springs for switchboard keys, others in improving the metal within the springs.
established strength and standards for the two-inch leather belts (limiting  “the content of Epsom salts, glucose, free acid, ash and total water-soluble materials”) and improving the metal rivets and parts.
millions of soldered joints held the system together

p.49
to invent a better teletypewriter oiler, a small square oil can, named 512A tool.
The 512A was an example of how, if good problems led to good inventions, then good inventions likewise would lead to other related inventions, and that nothing was too small or incidental to be excepted from improvement.
Indeed, the system demanded so much improvement, so much in the way of new products, so much insurance durability, that new methods had to be created to guarantee there was improvement and durability amid all the novelty.
And to ensure that the products manufactured by Wester Electric were of the proper specifications and quality, a Bell Labs mathematician named Walter Shewhart invented a statistical management technique for manufacturing that was soon known, more colloquially, as “quality control.”  

p.51
In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin.  At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors.  Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place ── perhaps all three ── require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem.  And then ── sometimes ── a leap.  Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious.  When Niels Bohr ── along with Einstein, the world's greatest physicist ── heard in 1938 that splitting a uranium atom could yield a tremendous burst of energy, he splapped his head and said, “Oh, what idiots we have been!”11

p.82
“There was a time not so long ago when a thousandth of a percent or a hundredth of a percent of a foreign body in a chemical mixture was looked upon merely as an incidental inclusion which could have no appreciable effect on the characteristics of the substance,” Frank Jewett, the first president of the Labs, explained.  “We have learned in recent years that this is an absolutely erroneous idea.”11

p.107
   John Bardeen, the most careful of men, referred to his transitor work as a “discovery” of “transistor action”; he and Brattain had effectively observed in their experiment how a current applied to a slightly impure slice of germanium could hasten the movement of microscopic holes inside and thus amplify a signal.

p.107
a product like the transitor could ultimately fail for technical reasons (if it proved unreliable) or for manufacturing reasons (if it proved difficult to reproduce consistently or cheaply).  Also, it might be the case that there was no market for a new device:

p.108
“But learning how to make them by the hundreds or thousands, and of sufficient uniformity to be interchangeable and reliable, was another problem.”31

p.108
Jack Morton
innovation was “a total process” of interrelated parts.

pp.108─109
“It is not just the discovery of new phenomena, nor the development of a new product or manufacturing technique, nor the creation of a new market.  Rather, the process is all these things acting together in an integrated way toward a common industrial goal.”33

p.109
“reliability”, “reproducibility”, “designability”
·‘’•─“”

p.113
   There had been whispers in the electronics industry about whether Bell Labs' enthusiasm over the transistor was overblown; the reported difficulty in manufacturing the devices only added to the skepticism.  Whether it was a shortcoming or an advantage, Kelly's confidence was almost certainly rooted in his early experiences.  He remembered the endless days and nights constructing vacuum tubes in lower Manhattan, the countless problems in the beginning and then the stream of incremental developments that improved the tubes' performance and durability to once-unimaginable levels.  He could remember, too, that as the tubes became increasingly common ── in the phone system, radios, televisions, automobiles, and the like ── they had come down to price levels that once seemed impossible.  He had long understood that innovation was a matter of economic imperatives.  As Jack Morton had said, if you hadn't sold anything you hadn't innovated, and without an affordable price you could never sell anything.  So Kelly looked at the transistor and saw the past, and the past was tubes.  He thereby intuited the future.

p.113
The transistor and other research projects at the Labs were hard work.
Goals were set carefully, and then achieved by the process of experiment and calculation.   
“Bell Labs is no ‘house of magic,’” Kelly warned,

pp.128─129
Rather, one might think of [information] in term of its ability to resolve uncertainty.  Information provided a recipient with something that was not previously known, was not predict able, was not redundant.  “We take the essence of information as the irreducible, fundamental underlying uncertainty that is removed by its receipt,” a Bell Labs executive named Bob Lucky explained some years later.30  

pp.149─150
Mervin Kelly
March 23, 1950
a polished version of the lecture about Bell Labs
Royal society
Bell Labs was the world's foremost example of a place where scientists pursued creative technology.
p.150
Bell
 Labs helped maintain and improve that system, he said, by creating an organization that could be divided into three groups.  The first group was research, where scientists and engineers provided  “the reservior of completely new knowledge, principles, materials, methods and art.”  The second group was in systems engineering, a discipline started by the Labs, where engineers kept one eye on the reservoir of new knowledge and another on the existing phone system and analyzed how to integrate the two.  In other words, the systems engineers considered whether new applications were possible, plausible, necessary, and economical.  That's when the third group came in.  These were the engineers who developed and designed new devices, switches, and transmissions systems.  In Kelly's sketch, ideas usually moved from (1) discovery, to (2) development, to (3) manufacture.
p.150
the telephone system, Mervin Kelly

p.151
a living organism
  In truth, the handoff between the three departments at Bell Labs was often (and intentionally) quite casual.  Part of what seemed to make the Labs “a living organism,” Kelly explained, were social and professional exchanges that moved back and forth, in all directions, between the pure researchers on one side and the applied engineers on the other.  These were formal talks and informal chats, and they were always encouraged, both as a matter of policy and by the inventive design of the Murray Hill building.  Researchers and engineers would find themselves discussing their respective problems in the halls, over lunch, or they might be paired together on a project, either at their own request or by managers.  Or a staffer with a question would casually seek out an expert, “whether he be a mathematician, a metallurgist, an organic chemist, an electromagnetic propagation physicist, or an electron device specialist.”

p.152
Just because you had made something new and wonderous didn't mean you would make something else new and wonderous.  

pp.152─153
its new inventions “always originated because of a definite need.”
In Kelly's view, the members of the technical staff had the great advantage of working to improve a system where there were always problems, always needs.

p.153
making something that worked better and faster,
making something that appealed to an evolving society,
And sometimes they sprang from military necessity ── an invention such as radar or automatic gun controllers, which were urgent for national defense.
p.153
What's more, the institute of creative technology should take it upon itself to further the education and abilities of its promising but less accomplished employees, not for reasons of altruism but because industrial science and engineering had become so complex that it now required men and women who were trained beyond the level that America's graduate schools could attain.
1948, a series of unaccredited but highly challenging graduate-level courses for employees known as the Communications Development Training Program, or CDT.
but nobody at Bell Labs really called it CDT.
the program was informally known ── much to Kelly's discomfort ── as
 “Kelly college”, because that's what it was.

pp.153─154
tools
full-time technical assistants (TAs)
"Never underestimate the importance of money"
five, ten, and even twenty years away.

pp.154─155
“A new device or a new invention stimulates and frequently demands other new devices and inventions for its proper use.”10  Just as the invention of the telephone had led to countless developments in switching and transmission, an invention like the transistor seemed to point to even more developments in switching, transmission, and computer systems.  Or to put it another way, the solution to a technological problem invariably created other problems that needed solutions.  So making something truly new seemed to ensure that you would be making something else truly new before too long.  

pp.302─303
Peter Drucker, Bell Labs
   The business philosopher Peter Drucker saw a murkier picture.  “Does Bell Labs have a future?” he asked as he sorted through the implications  of the decision just after the break up.  Like John Mayo and Morry Tenenbaum, Drucker believed that Bell Labs' technical contributions over the course of fifty years had essentially made it continued existence untenable.  “Bell Laboratories' discoveries and inventions,” he wrote, “have largely created modern electronics.”  As those discoveries and inventions had spread around the world, however, they had made telephone technology indistinct.  To Drucker, telecommunications was now just a part of the immense field of information and electronic technology.  There were many competitors and many competing ideas in this field.  And therefore, going forward, no single lab could on its own provide the new technology for the entire electronics and information industry.
   At the same time, he noted, the reverse was true:  The scientists and engineers at Bell Labs had been producing too many ideas over the past half century for a single company to handle:  

      In a wide array of areas, from the transistor to fiber optics, and from switching theory to computer logic, the Bell System has been no more adequate as a conduit for Bell Labs' scientific contributions than an eye dropper would be to channel a mountain freshet. The main users have been others ── that is, non-telephone industries ── with Bell Labs getting little out of its contributions other than an occasional footnote in a scientific paper.30

   Drucker saw two possible road ahead.  On the one hand, Bell Labs could become a standard industrial lab, much like the ones that supplied technology to General Electric or RCA.  Or the Labs could take a  “far bolder, but also far riskier course”  by going into business for itself, making money from its patents and products.  It could become a kind of unique and monolithic brain trust, one that did research for AT&T but also for any company or part of the government that was willing to pay for access to its people and resources.  “Nothing like this has ever been done,” Drucker noted.  “And no one knows whether it could succeed.”  
·‘’•─“”

p.332
   In 1986, for instance, the challenges that lay ahead remained indistinct.  John Pierce, watching the fate of his old employer from his perch in California, set down some thoughts at the time in a letter to a friend.
p.332
As Pierce saw it, the great laboratories of the 20th century had a clear purpose:  “Someone depended on them for something, and was anxious to get it.  They were really needed, and they rose to the need.”  For Bell Labs, Pierce noted, the need was modern communications.  That future rested upon the institution and the researchers who worked there.  
p.332
Pierce was now watching “as an interested on looker” to see if the new AT&T Bell Laboratories could figure out a new mission, a new purpose.  He wasn't skeptical; he believed it was indeed possible.  But he wasn't terribly optimistic, either.  The old world was already gone, he explained, it was just that most people hadn't yet noticed.  “It is just plain silly”, he wrote, “to identify the new A&T Bell Laboratories with the old Bell Telephone Laboratories just because the new Laboratories has inherited buildings, equipment and personnel from the old.  The mission was absolutely essential to the research done at the old Laboratories, and that mission is gone and has not been replaced.”2   

p.409
Block, Fred, and Matthew Keller.  “Where do innovations come from : transformations in the u.s. national innovatin system, 1970─2006” (July 2008).  Information technology & innovation foundation; www.itif.org.

p.411
Reid, T. R. The Chip: how two Americans invented the microchip and launched a revolution. paperback edition.  1985.  2001.

  (The idea factory : the Bell Labs and the great age of American innovation / Jon Gernter.
1. bell telephone laboratories──history──20th century.
2. telecommunication──united states──history──20th century.  
3. technological innovations──united states──history──20th century.
4. creative ability──united states──history──20th century.
5. inventors──united states──history──20th century.
TK5102.3.U6G47  2012
384──dc23
384  Gernter
            )
   ____________________________________

       National academy of sciences
       A biographical memoir
       of
       Mervin Joe Kelly (1894─1971)
       by John R. Pierce
       copyright 1975
       Mervin Joe Kelly (February 14, 1894─March 18, 1971)

creative technical management.

As Frederick R. Kappel, former board chairman of AT&T said after
Kelly's death:
   "He was a great fellow for the Bell System. Mervin was
always and forever pushing the operating management, and the
heads of AT&T as well, to get on with new things. His aggres-
siveness got him in a lot of hot arguments, but I always sat back
and said, 'Give it to them, Mervin, that's what we need.' Every
place needs a fireball or spark plug, and he was it."

Others were less disturbed by Kelly's temper. Estill Green
describes his experience as vice president in charge of systems
engineering in these mellow words:
   "A few years in close association with Mervin were the hap-
piest time of my life. For years on end I had believed I needed
insulation from the high voltage. Yet when I was directly ex-
posed to it, I never experienced a serious shock, and I rejoiced
to observe how the high potential overpowered inertia and loose
thinking and prejudice.
   "I learned never to oppose him when he had the bit in his
teeth. Next morning I could remark casually, 'Mervin, there
are some aspects of that matter discussed in yesterday's confer-
ence that you may not be fully aware of.' He would listen, and
generally modify his position, to a minor or sometimes major
extent."

In 1943 Kelly outlined a branch-laboratory concept. This
eventually led to the establishment of laboratories for final
development at manufacturing locations of Western Electric.
This proved important in several ways. It linked final develop-
ment and its procedures and personnel closely to those respon-
sible for the manufacture of new devices and systems. It pre-
vented too large a concentration of personnel in a few central
locations. It gave a desirable measure of responsibility and
independence to work in various well-defined fields of devel-
opment.


While Kelly recognized basic research as the source of all
technological advances, he understood that a complicated tech-
nological process lies between discovery and use. He wrote:
   "There has been so much emphasis on industrial research
and mass-production methods in my country, that even our
well-informed public is not sufficiently aware of the necessary
and most important chain of events that lies between the initial
step of basic research and the terminal operation of manufac-
ture. In order to stress the continuity of procedures from re-
search to engineering of product into manufacture and to
emphasize their real unity, I speak of them as the single entity
'organized creative technology'."

   Using the Bell Laboratories as an example of organized tech-
nology, Kelly delineated three areas that preceded the manu-
facture of complicated technological systems:
   "The first includes all of the research and fundamental
development. This is our non-scheduled area of work. It pro-
vides the reservoir of completely new knowledge, principles,
materials, methods, and art that are essential for the develop-
ment of new communications systems and facilities.
    "The second we call 'systems engineering'. Its major respon-
sibility is the determination of the new specific systems and
facilities development projects—their operational and economic
objectives and the broad technical plan to be followed. 'Systems
engineering' controls and guides the use of the new knowledge
obtained from the research and fundamental development pro-
grams in the creation of new telephone services and the im-
provement and lowering of cost of services already established.
   "The third encompasses all specific development and design
of new systems and facilities. The work is most carefully pro-
grammed in conformity with the plan established by the systems
engineering studies. Our research and fundamental develop-
ment programs supply the new knowledge required in meeting
the objectives of the new specific devleopments."

   Concerning Systems Engineering, Kelly said:
   "Approximately 10% of our scientific and technical staff are
allotted to systems engineering. Its staff members must supply
a proper blending of competence and background in each of
the three areas that it contacts: research and fundamental devel-
opment, specific systems and facilities development, and opera-
tions. It is therefore, largely made up of men drawn from these
areas who have exhibited unusual talents in analysis and the
objectivity so essential to their appraisal responsibility."

   Kelly illustrated an ideal relation between systems engi-
neering, research and development by the case of the NIKE
antiaircraft missile:
   "For example, the programming study on the NIKE missile
system established that basic knowledge and art were available
for the development of a system that would meet the service
requirements except for a particular area of radar technology.
This area was at once subjected to a research and exploratory
development attack. The project was not undertaken until this
deficiency was eliminated by new knowledge from research.
The NIKE missile system now in production meets the require-
ments initially agreed upon and in its technical character is in
close correspondence with the plan of the initial study.
   "I am familiar with large military systems developments
where this approach is absent, where research and exploration
are intermingled with specific development, probably with the
intent of gaining time. Actually, time has been lost."

   Kelly goes on to say that development, while a continuous
operation, is done in three distinct stages: first the laboratory
model; after tests and modifications, the preproduction model,
which is field tested; and finally, the final design for manufac-
ture (by Western Electric).

   Above all, a technological organization must have the lead-
ership to see and pursue real opportunities and real needs. In
an address to a naval research conference, Kelly said:
   "The first, and perhaps the most important, factor is the
program itself. What shall it contain? What can be discarded
at once, and what shall be eliminated after limited exploration?
How can comprehensive coverage with freedom from gaps be
assured? In an endeavor so broad in scope and requiring such
a highly functional organization for its operation, how can
unneeded duplication be prevented, and duplication that is
worthwhile, though usually small in volume, be provided?"

Leaders or
managers must be technologically trained and technologically
competent. Only thus can decisions be based on insight and
understanding rather than on salesmanship and hearsay.


source:
       National academy of sciences
       A biographical memoir
       of
       Mervin Joe Kelly (1894─1971)
       by John R. Pierce
       copyright 1975
       Mervin Joe Kelly (February 14, 1894─March 18, 1971)
   ____________________________________

Tim Wu, The Master Switch, 2010                                        [ ]

p.57
  Bell's dedication to common carriage was a promise to serve any customer willing to pay, charge fixed rates, and carry his or her traffic without discrimination. It made Bell's telephone service offer rather what a taxi service is meant to provide in most cities--a meaningful similarity, since the concept has its origins in transport.

p.99
... Brave New World, as we have seen, Aldous Huxley could already glimpse where the centralization and mechanization of culture was leading. He foresaw culture's future dominated by commerce. He also saw the prospect of global standardization. “In 3000 A.D.” wrote Huxley, “one will doubtless be able to travel from Kansas City to Peking [currently known as Beijing, Peking is an older name of the city] in a few hours. But if the civilisation of these two places is the same, there will be no object in doing so.”, p.99, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.

p.114
  Having won its case, Hush-A-Phone ran a series of advertisements proclaiming its device newly approved for use by federal tariff. Unfortunately, its could not keep up with Bell's own stately pace of product design, and then the phone company began to sell new handsets again, sometime in the 1960s, Hush-A-Phone folded. Such are the wages of stifling innovation: to this day, while the annoyance of mobile home chatter, the banality of overheard conversations, has become a cliché, there is not a Hush-A-Phone or its equivalent to be found.
  Hush-A-Phone's valiant founder died sometime in the 1970s, to be forgotten, apart from one great cultural reference. In the 1985 film Brazil, Robert De Niro plays a maverick repairman who does unauthorized repairs and leads a resistance movement against a totalitarian state. The hero and hope of that dystopia is named Harry Tuttle.

   (Wu, Tim, The master switch : the rise and fall of information empires / Tim Wu., 1. telecommunication--history., 2. information technology--history., 2010 )
  (The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Tim Wu, 2010.)

HE7631.W8  2010
384'.041--dc22
   ____________________________________

Terry Gillian's BRAZIL
   Pitting the imagination of common man - Sam Lowry - against the oppressive storm troopers of the Ministry of Information.
   Screenplay by Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown.

by Jack Mathews
The inspiration for BRAZIL, as Gilliam has explained, came from several intersecting ideas inside his head, all of them having to do with the craziness of our awkwardly ordered society and the desire to escape it through whatever means possible.
   critic Richard Corliss wrote: “A terrific movie has escaped the asylum without a lobotomy. The good guys, the few directors itching to make films away from the assembly line, won out for a change.”
   ____________________________________

Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and entrepreneurship, 1984               [ ]

p.243
   English schoolboys used to be taught that Rowland Hill “invented” the postal service in 1836. That is nonsense, of course.

pp.243-244
The Rome of the Caesars had an excellent service, with fast couriers carrying mail on regular schedules to the furthest corners of the Empire. A thousand years later, in 1521, the German emperor Charles V, in true Renaissance fashion, went back to Classical Rome and gave a monopoly on carrying mail in the imperial domains to the princely family of Thurn and Taxis.

p.244
Their generous campaign contributions had enabled him to bribe enough German Electors to win the imperial crown--and the princes of Thurn and Taxis still provided the postal service in many parts of Germany as late as 1866, as stamp collectors know.

p.244
By the middle of the 17th century, every European country had organized a postal service on the German model and so had, a 100 years later, the American colonies.

p.244
Indeed, all the great letter-writers of the Western tradition, from Cicero to Madame de Sévigné, Lord Chesterfield, and Voltaire, wrote and posted their letters long before Rowland Hill “invented” the postal service.

p.244
   Yet Hill did indeed create what we would now call “mail”. He contributed no new technology and not one new “thing”, nothing that could conceivably have been patented. But mail had always been paid for by the addressee, with the fee computed according to distance and weight. This made it both expensive and slow. Every letter had to be brought to a post office to be weighted. Hill proposed that postage should be uniform within Great Britain regardless of distance; that it be prepaid; and that the fee be paid by affixing the kind of stamp that had been used for many years to pay other fees and taxes. Overnight, mail became easy and convenient; indeed, letters could now be dropped into a collection box. Immediately, also, mail became absurbly cheap. The letter that had earlier cost a shilling or more--and a shilling was as much as a craftsman earned in a day--now cost only a penny. The volume was no longer limited. In short, “mail” was born.

   (Peter F. Drucker, Innovation and entrepreneurship : practice and principles, Claremont, California, Christmas 1984, )
   ____________________________________

p.313
  Before most modern industries emerged, during a period we'll call “Stage Zero,” things were almost always done by hand. We wrote letters, calculated with slide rules, made copies with carbon paper, and so on. Activities during Stage zero in these industries are diffused and local. When “modern” technology comes to an industry, it often brings quantum improvement in quality, cost, and speed. But the equipment that accomplishes this typically is so complicated and expensive that only people or institutions with a lot of skill and a lot of money can own and use that equipment. To economise on the scarcity of money and skills, activity in the industry becomes Centralised--meaning we must take the problems we're trying to resolve to a Central location, where people with the requisite expertise and equipment can solve them. Ultimately, however, the cost and inconvenience of these Centralised solutions creates the impetus for disruptive innovators to find ways that Decentralise the ability to solve these problems. When this is accomplished, rather than taking our problems to the Center to be addressed, technologically advanced solutions go to where the problems are.
  As an example, during Stage Zero of the “distance communication” industry we wrote letters that were delivered by railroad, stagecoach, or boat.  When the telegraph emerged, it was much faster than the mail. But we had to take our message to the nearest telegraph office, where a skilled operator sent the message in Morse code. Eventually, the wire-line telephone brought the capability of distance communication to our homes. We no longer had to go to a Central location where an expert did the job for us; we just had to go home and do it for ourselves. Today, wireless mobile phones have brought the ability to communicate to us, wherever we are--so we no longer have to go to the phone.

   ( Christensen, Clayton M., 2009, The innovator's prescription : a disruptive solution for health care / by Clayton M. Christensen, Jerome H. Grossman, Jason Hwang., 1. Health services administration., 2. Public health administration. 3. Disruptive technologies., RA971.C56  2009, 362.1  Christen, p.313 )
   ____________________________________

  • http://build.slashdot.org/story/15/09/21/1841222/why-hardware-development-takes-longer-in-the-west-than-in-china-video
  • There are some hard words here, because David Cranor is talking about problems that go way beyond the usual perceived Chinese advantages such as low labor costs and a lack of environmental regulations.
   ____________________________________

Railways.
CARTOPHILIA
Time travel
An isochronic map shows where to go, how long it took to get there – and what changes were on the way
SIMON WILLIS | NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2015
http://www.intelligentlifemagazine.com/places/cartophilia/time-travel
     IN 1914 JOHN G. BARTHOLOMEW, the scion of an Edinburgh mapmaking family and cartographer royal to King George V, published “An Atlas of Economic Geography”. It was a book intended for schoolboys and contained everything a thrusting young entrepreneur, imperialist, trader or traveller could need. As well as the predictable charts of rainfall, temperature and topography, it had maps showing where you could find rubber, cotton or rice; maps showing the distribution of commercial languages, so that if you wanted to do business in Indonesia you knew to do so in Dutch; and maps showing the spread of climatic diseases, so that if you did find yourself in Indonesia you knew to look out for tropical dysentery. It also contained the map you see here, which told you how long it would take to get there from London: between 20 and 30 days.

This is an isochronic map – isochrones being lines joining points accessible in the same amount of time – and it tells a story about how travel was changing. You can get anywhere in the dark-pink section in the middle within five days – to the Azores in the west and the Russian city of Perm in the east. No surprises there: you’re just not going very far. Beyond that, things get a little more interesting. Within five to ten days, you can get as far as Winnipeg or the Blue Pearl of Siberia, Lake Baikal. It takes as much as 20 days to get to Tashkent, which is closer than either, or Honolulu, which is much farther away. In some places, a colour sweeps across a landmass, as pink sweeps across the eastern United States or orange across India. In others, you reach a barrier of blue not far inland, as in Africa and South America. What explains the difference? Railways.

In the early 1840s an American dry-goods merchant called Asa Whitney, who lived near New York, travelled to China on business. It took 153 days, which he thought a waste of time. When he got back he began lobbying for a transcontinental railroad connecting Lake Michigan with Oregon, which had a trade deal with China. The railroad, he thought, would cut the journey time to China to about 30 days and open up the market. Similarly, the British invested so heavily in the Indian railway that between 1860 and 1880 it extended from 838 miles to 15,842 miles. If you compare this isochronic map to one from the 1870s, by Francis Galton, you see the difference. Bombay is quickly accessible by sea; the rest of India less so. Likewise, there is no spit of pink reaching across the Russian Empire on Galton’s map, because there was no Trans-Siberian Railway. As the geographer L.W. Lyde says in his introduction to Bartholomew’s atlas, “isochronic distances...change with every additional mile of railway brought into use.” What was the one thing a young entrepreneur needed most? A train ticket. ~ SIMON WILLIS
   ____________________________________

Sailing ships
Maury, Innovation and Change
Friday, February 28, 2014
Written by Cory Ondrejka
http://ondrejka.net/history/2014/02/28/maury.html
(selected TEXT)

The fastest way to learn is leveraging existing information.
Matthew Fontaine Maury

 Until transoceanic cables revolutionized communication in ..., sailing ships were the fastest, most reliable way to transmit information.

 In his 1855 book, “The Physical Geography of the Sea”12, Maury assured the world that anyone who shared data with him would have access to the results, saying he wanted to publish data

“in such a manner that each may have before him, at a glance, the experience of all.”

In 1851, the clipper Flying Cloud left New York, trying to set a new record. Her navigator, Eleanor Creesy, built her course around Maury’s work. Just 89 days later, Flying Cloud arrived in San Francisco, setting a new record the stood until 1989

common routes
Common routes are clear.

In 1853, he keynoted The Maritime Convention in Brussels14, where he proposed a standardized reporting format for meteorological data – if it was 2005, he would have proposed a public API to let computers talk to each other – to enable more efficient and accurate data collection. Within several years, most major navies were sharing their data with Navy Depot, now rechristened as the Naval Observatory.

150 years before Web 2.0, he built a valuable service around common APIs and aggregated data by distributing it freely to the people who needed it.

Maury’s story inspires me every time I revisit it. It challenges me, because if Maury could accomplish what he did in the age of sail, how could I aspire to less today?
   ____________________________________

pp.85—86 n11
    11.  Makers of early hybrid ocean transports, which were steam powered but still outfitted with sails, used the same rationale for their design as did the Bucyrus Erie engineers: Steam power still was not reliable enough for the transoceanic market, so steam power plants had to be backed up by conventional technology.  The advent of steam-powered ships and their substitution for wind-powered ships in the transoceanic business is itself a classic study of disruptive technology.  When Robert Fulton sailed the first steamship up the Hudson River in 1819, it underperformed transoceanic sailing ships on nearly every dimension of performance: It cost more per mile to operate; it was slower; and it was prone to frequent breakdowns.  Hence, it could not be used in the transoceanic value network and could only be applied in a different value network, inland waterways, in which product performance was measured very differently.  In rivers and lakes, the ability to move against the wind or in the absence of a wind was the attribute most highly valued by ship captains, and along that dimension, steam outperformed sail.  Some scholar (see, for example, Richard Foster, in Innovation: The Attacker's Advantage [New York: Summit Books, 1986]) have marveled at how myopic were the makers of sailing ships, who stayed with their aging technology until the bitter end, in the early 1900s, completely ignoring steam power.  Indeed, not a single maker of sailing ships survived the industry's transition to steam power.  The value network framework offers a perspective on this problem that these scholars seem to have ignored, however.  It was not a problem of KNOWING about steam power or having access to technology.  The problem was that the customers of the sailing ship manufacturers, who were transoceanic shippers, could not use steam-powered ships until the turn of the century.  To cultivate a position in steamship building, the makers of sailing ships would have had to engineer a major strategic reorientation into the inland waterway market, because that was the only value network where steam-powered vessels were valued throughout most of the 1880s.  Hence, it was these firms' reluctance or inability to change strategy, rather than their inability to change technology, that lay at the root of their failure in the face of steam-powered vessels.

    (Innovator's dilemma, by Clayton M. Christensen, copyright © 1997, 2000, 658.4 Christen, pp.85-86  n11)
   ____________________________________

Sonia Shah, Pandemic, 2016                                             [ ]

p.38
   Air travel doesn't just ferry new pathogens around; it also dictates the shape and spread of the pandemics they can cause.

A simulated flu pandemic on a map depicting locations and cases according to their temporal distance on the air travel network (Dirk Brockmann)

p.39
   But Brockmann found that if you track that same pandemic on a map that plots locales in terms of their proximity via air travel, a revealing picture takes shape. On such a map, New York City is closer to London, England, over 3,000 miles away, than to Providence, Rhode Island, just 300 miles away, because of the availability of direct flights. Plotting the spread of a pandemic on a flight-time map does not result in the chaotic eruptions seen on a geographic map. The pandemic resolves into a series of waves, radiating outward one by one like the ripples of a stone dropped into a lake. Our transportation network, Brockmann's map shows, shapes the pandemic more than our physical geography.5

5. Emily Badger, “We've Been Looking at the Spread of Global Pandemics All Wrong,” The Atlantic, CityLab, Feb. 25, 2013.

   (Shah, Sonia (2016), Pandemic : tracking contagions, from cholera to ebola and beyond / Sonia Shah., 1. communicable diseases--epidemiology--history., 2. public health surveillance., 362.1  Shah, )
   ____________________________________

Sonia Shah, Pandemic, 2016                                             [ ]

p.103
   They could have implemented quarantine. The first one had been enacted by Venice in 1374, when the city's gates and ports were shut for 40 days to keep out bubonic plague (thus deriving the method's name, from quarante giorni or “forty days” in Italian).27  That was pretty good containment measure for a pathogen like bubonic plague, which manifests itself in visible pathology in less than 40 days. After being held in quarantine for that long, people, ships, and their goods were, as one historian put it, “medically harmless.”28

   (Shah, Sonia (2016), Pandemic : tracking contagions, from cholera to ebola and beyond / Sonia Shah., 1. communicable diseases--epidemiology--history., 2. public health surveillance., 362.1  Shah, )

1374
   ____________________________________

DELIVERING
TOMORROW

Logistics 2050
A Scenario Study


scenario process and realization
Z_punkt The Foresight Company, Cologne

translation
Anke Bryson

1. Edition February 2012

copyright © Deutsche Post AG, Bonn, Germany

filename
szenario_study_logistics_2050.pdf

URL
http://www.dhl.com/content/dam/Local_Images/g0/aboutus/SpecialInterest/Logistics2050/szenario_study_logistics_2050.pdf

 pdf
 184 pages
2.27 MB


(excerpt)
The Future of Secure Communications in the Age of the Internet
by Jürgen Gerdes

“Everything has to change in order for everything
to stay the same”
   From The Leopard, by Guiseppe Tomasi de Lampedusa

... [...] ...

Instead, we have a better chance of
answering this question by looking into our company’s past – to
the origins of Deutsche Post when Franz von Taxis built a modern
mail system for the Habsburg dynasties in Germany. Von Taxis was
a very clever and far-sighted businessman. He developed a busi-
ness plan that to this day remains unparalleled. His unique selling
point was not delivering letters. The Habsburg postmen were
already doing this. The real innovation at the time was the logistics
behind the mail operation that Taxis developed. This system guar-
anteed a mail service that was confidential, binding and reliable.
For the first time, a recipient could be sure that the sender was
really the one indicated on the letter. And, conversely, the sender
knew that the message would reach the right recipient. This was an
invaluable service during somewhat turbulent times.

The Internet today is really no different. Secure identification of
the other party in online communications is exactly the current
business model of Deutsche Post DHL. This includes the inviola-
bility of the mail, which is one of the main pillars of our demo-
cratic society. Just as it was important and possibly even vital to
one’s survival during the Habsburg Empire, so it is also important
for us today to be certain that the contents of our communica-
tions are not read by unauthorized persons.

... [...] ...

That is why we can look to the Italian writer Lampedusa
as a guide for the future: “Everything has to change in order for
everything to stay the same.”


<about the author>

Jürgen Gerdes, born 1964, has been a Member of the Board
of Management of Deutsche Post DHL since July 2007. He
is responsible for the letter and parcel business in Germany
as well as the international mail business of DHL Global
Mail. After graduating in Business Administration at
the University of Münster in 1994 he had a number of
management positions in Marketing and Sales, including
Head of Sales and Operations, Northern Region, Member of
the Divisional Board responsible for Sales, and Chairman of
the Divisional Board Mail Germany.

·‘’•─“”
<------------------------------------------------------------------------>
   ____________________________________
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