Cold Fusion Presents Read online

  New

  Thinking

  I would like to thank God, my family, and my friends for their support, and tolerating my occasional complaining, while writing this book. A special thanks to my sister, Piriye, for her role in helping this book take shape. Last but not least, I want to show gratitude to all of my YouTube subscribers for making this opportunity possible in the first place.

  ColdFusion Presents:

  New

  Thinking

  From Einstein to Artificial Intelligence, the Science and Technology That Transformed Our World

  Dagogo Altraide

  Mango Publishing

  Coral Gables

  Copyright 2019 © Dagogo Altraide

  Cover Design: Dagogo Altraide

  Layout Design: Jermaine Lau

  Images from shutterstock:

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  Cold Fusion Presents: New Thinking: From Einstein to Artificial Intelligence, the Science and Technology That Transformed Our World

  Library of Congress Cataloging

  ISBN: (print) 978-1-63353-750-7 (ebook) 978-1-63353-751-4

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018952299

  BISAC category code: “TEC000000—TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / General”

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Introduction

  Part 1: Origins

  Chapter 1

  The Industrial Revolution

  Chapter 2

  Building a Foundation

  Chapter 3

  A New World 1900–1909

  Chapter 4

  Innovation and the Great Conflict 1910–1919

  Chapter 5

  Gears in Motion 1920–1929

  Chapter 6

  Sound, Vision, and Genius 1930–1939

  Chapter 7

  War Is the Mother of Invention 1940–1949

  Part 2: The Acceleration

  Chapter 8

  The Seeds of Today 1950–1959

  Chapter 9

  Peace, Love, and…Computers? 1960–1969

  Chapter 10

  The New Age 1970–1979

  Chapter 11

  Technology Merges into Society 1980–1989

  Part 3: The Great Expansion

  Chapter 12

  Digital Nostalgia 1990–1999

  Chapter 13

  Technology Becomes Personal 2000–2009

  Chapter 14

  Impossible Possibilities The 2010s

  Chapter 15

  Looking to the Future

  Conclusion

  The Power of New Thinking

  About the Author

  Introduction

  “The spread of civilization may be likened to a fire; first, a feeble spark, next a flickering flame, then a mighty blaze, ever increasing in speed and power.”

  —Nikola Tesla

  The history of mankind is built on new thinking. We use the previous generation of tools as a foundation to build new tools, which in turn build even more powerful tools—a feedback loop that keeps on accelerating. Some of these innovations change the world forever: fire, steam power, the transistor. Some, not so much: the Power Glove, the Clapper, Smell-O-Vision. What hidden stories lie behind the technology we all use today? New Thinking is the story of human innovation. Through war and peace, it is humanity at its most inventive, and sometimes most destructive. In this book, we will take a walk through the history of technology, the history of us: from the Industrial Revolution to Artificial Intelligence.

  Before we start, however, we need to talk about the new thinker of all new thinkers—an inventor who is so important to the history of technology that he’s nicknamed “The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century.” I am speaking, of course, about Nikola Tesla.

  You won’t find Tesla’s name in the following chapters of this book. This isn’t because he isn’t important. It’s because he is too important. If I were to include Tesla, his name would be on every second page.

  Let’s run down a few of the inventions he was either instrumental in realizing, or invented himself: alternating current, the induction motor, the Tesla coil, wireless lighting, the steam-powered oscillating generator, the radio, hydroelectric power, x-ray imaging, the remote control. This doesn’t even begin to list the things he envisioned but couldn’t get around to or realize because his thinking was too advanced for the materials at hand. There is a reason Elon Musk named his car company after Tesla.

  The legend of Nikola Tesla grows by the year, and the crazy thing is, the legend probably doesn’t even capture half of the amazing truth. This is a man who once built a small earthquake machine in New York, and then dared Mark Twain to stand on it. The machine only caused a small rumble, but it was enough to loosen the bowels of the famous author. Tesla’s legend includes wireless power, weather control, and a death ray that he reportedly carried with him in an unmarked bag—a bag that mysteriously went missing after his death.

  Many of the wilder legends about Tesla are unsubstantiated, though there are more than enough verified stories to fill an encyclopedia. Tesla was so ahead of his time that, when he first displayed his radio remote-control boat at an electricity exhibition in Madison Square Garden, the technology was so far beyond anything onlookers had seen that some literally thought Tesla was either a magician or telepathic, while others chalked the display up to a tiny trained monkey that had been hidden in the remote-control boat.

  Alternating current, along with the induction motor, is the reason we can plug things into the walls in our homes. It was such a huge step that it wasn’t just shown off at the famous 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, it was used to light it.

  Without Tesla, we wouldn’t have the electricity in our homes, the motors in our cars, or the ability to change the channel when American Idol starts. We wouldn’t be able to see broken bones on an x-ray image or listen to the weekly Top 40 on the radio.

  Tesla is the poster boy for Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from
magic.”

  But rather than spending all of our time with this amazing Serbian-born inventor, let’s start at the beginning with chapter 1, and the Industrial Revolution.

  Part 1

  Origins

  Chapter 1

  The Industrial Revolution

  If you’ve ever eaten food you didn’t grow, put on clothes you didn’t make, driven a car, used electricity, watched TV, used a phone or computer, slept on a bed, used a toilet, consumed water from a tap, or been inside a building, then congratulations, you’ve lived with the consequences of the Industrial Revolution. This event was the single biggest change for mankind in history.

  Before the Industrial Revolution, people lived on the land that provided them with food and the means for clothing and shelter. Average life expectancy was around forty years (including infant mortality), and any form of structured education was extremely rare. All the while, disease and malnutrition were rife. Until the revolution, humans never used tools or objects that weren’t produced within their immediate community or traded. The fastest any human could travel was the speed of a horse. Over 80 percent of the population lived on farms. With no mass production or the ability to transport large quantities of goods a long distance, people had to be close to their source of food. It was the only means of living. Today, the number of people on farms in the United States is down to less than 1 percent.

  So where did the dawn of our modern era take place?

  The Steam Engine That Powered a Revolution

  It all began in England, around 1712. At the time, a primitive tin and coal mining industry existed, but there was a major problem. The mines would get flooded whenever it rained, and in England, rain was a pretty common occurrence. Every time a mine flooded, production stopped. This meant that production was subject to weather conditions. To deal with the flooding, scores of men carrying endless buckets of water would be commissioned to bail out the mines. As you can imagine, this was very inefficient and costly. There had to be a better solution.

  Enter Thomas Newcomen from Dartmouth, Devon. He was the inventor of the first practical steam engine.

  What’s important here is the revolutionary application of one of water’s most fundamental properties: that heated water turns to gas (steam), and that this steam expands, pushing objects in its wake, causing motion. This was the first practical device that used steam to produce motion.

  This steam pump (now named the Newcomen engine) was put to use in the mines. This in turn increased the production of coal and tin. Through the power of steam, human effort was no longer needed to bail out the flood water. As great as this was, there were some problems with Newcomen’s engine. It was slow and used a lot of coal, making it expensive to run.

  James Watt

  With a basis to start from, there was now room for someone to come through and improve the technology of the Newcomen steam engine. That someone was Scotsman James Watt, the man who truly got the revolution going.

  Born on January 19, 1736, James Watt was the son of a shipyard owner. While in school, he was taught Latin and Greek, but was thought to be “slow” by his teachers. As it turned out, he just wasn’t interested in language. When it came to engineering and mathematics, however, James excelled.

  At age nineteen, he went to Glasgow to study the trade of making precisely calibrated instruments such as scales and parts for telescopes. Watt eventually made instruments for the University of Glasgow. During his time at the university, Watt was given a model of a Newcomen engine to repair. Very quickly, he became interested in steam engines and noticed how inefficient the standard Newcomen engine of the day was. He decided he could improve it. While taking a walk on a Sunday afternoon in 1763, an idea struck him. Instead of heating and cooling the same cylinder, why not have a separate chamber that condenses the steam? This meant that the machine could work in both an upstroke and a downstroke motion.

  This idea would end up cutting the fuel needed by 75 percent. After experimenting with a small model of his new design, Watt was convinced it would work. Soon, a partnership with an industrialist by the name of Matthew Boulton was formed. This partnership would alter the world for good.

  It has been said that Boulton was a little like Steve Jobs, an enthusiastic, business-minded individual, while Watt was like a gloomy version of Steve Wozniak—the man behind most of the technical work. This isn’t far from the truth, although there was much more crossover in the roles of Watt and Boulton than with Apple’s founders.

  Throughout the mid-1770s, James Watt and Matthew Boulton would use their own company (Boulton & Watt) to distribute the new steam engines throughout England. The impact was immediate within the mining industry, and also reached the liquor industry in grinding malt.

  To explain the benefits of the machine, Watt had to come up with a way of relaying its power. He figured that a horse could pull around 82 kg (180 pounds), so, in his description to customers, Watt would say, for example: my machine has the power of twenty horses—twenty horsepower. This is in fact where the unit of power came from.

  Subsequent improvements in the steam engine soon opened the door to powered factories and a revolution in the textile industry. For the first time, the mass production of goods was possible. These conditions allowed for new employment opportunities in city locations. As a result, job seekers left their farms and headed to the city in search of a new life.

  Steam Revolutionizes Transport

  Steam power had now revolutionized production, but Watt realized that, by expanding the gas at even higher pressure, this invention could be used in transportation. The locomotive application for the steam engine would push humanity to another level. The first patent of this kind was obtained in 1784 by Watt, though it is often said to be the brainchild of Boulton & Watt employee William Murdoch. These patents barred anyone from creating higher-pressure versions of the Watt steam engine until 1800. When the patent expired, the floodgates were opened, and innovation flowed.

  One of the first improvements was made by Cornish engineer, Richard Trevithick, who enabled the use of high-pressure steam. Yielding more power, this development opened the door to feasible locomotive steam engines. Improved designs and power-to-size ratios meant that engines became so compact they could be used, not just in factories, but also in mobile machines.

  The year 1804 was monumental in history. That year would see the world population reach one billion, the isolation of morphine, and Napoleon come to power; but most of all, it was the first time goods were transported over land without the power of man or animal. This feat came in the form of a steam locomotive with a speed of 8 km an hour (5 miles per hour) carrying a load of more than twenty-five tons. Not bad, considering cars were still almost a century away.

  Steam-powered trains and railroads became a major British export and began to have a small impact on the rest of Europe. Arguably, however, the biggest effect was seen in the United States. In the early 1800s, many models of locomotives were imported from Great Britain, but by 1830, the United States was building its own trains. American companies began forming and a new industry emerged.

  Steam Transforms America

  At first, the tracks were no more than a few miles in length, so long-distance rail travel became the holy grail. Previously, Americans had tried camel caravans and horse-drawn stagecoaches to deliver mail or travel over long distances, but these attempts had met with limited success.

  A trip from St. Louis to San Francisco, via either the camel-caravan or stagecoach method, would travel 2,800 miles (4,500 km) of dirt trails and last around three weeks. American writer Mark Twain went on one of these stagecoach trips. He was unpleasantly surprised by the experience.

  The meals consisted of beans, stale bacon, and crusty bread. He described the comfort level as “bone-jarring,” “teeth-rattling,” and “muscle-straining.”

  By 1863, it was time for a change. A young civ
il engineer by the name of Theodore Judah had a vision to build the ultimate railway, a railway so large it would connect America from the west to the east. Around that time, members of the United States Congress were thinking about such a railway but couldn’t determine the precise route on which it should be laid. Judah figured out the perfect route and stepped in as the one to build the tracks. He contracted a company called Union Pacific to build from the East Coast and another company, Central Pacific, to build from the West. On May 10, 1869, after six years of hard work—including laying steel tracks in the Nevada desert and the devastating sacrifice of much human life—the two companies met in Utah, and the first transcontinental railroad was built.

  Thanks to this sacrifice and hard work, California was now connected to the rest of the nation.

  With steam-powered locomotion, people and large amounts of cargo could travel long distances across land, with relative ease, for the first time. The possibilities were endless.

  Goods and services could be transported to support new towns that weren’t by ports. It became less common for people to be born and to die in the same place—the common man was now mobile. The California connection allowed perishable food to quickly be transported across the country in refrigerated railcars, ushering in a new era of prosperity.

  We essentially still use steam engines as a way of generating power today. Coal, nuclear, and some natural-gas power plants all boil water to produce steam. This steam then drives a turbine that generates electricity. It’s amazing that the consequences of Watt’s idea during a Sunday stroll still impact us today.

  While the steam engine was just starting to move from the factory onto the railroad, there was another technology whose time had not yet arrived; however, it would soon be just as, if not more, revolutionary.

  This innovation was none other than electricity.