Robots Failed in the 80s and Will Fail Again
The Innovations Issue
A Brief History of Failure
What follows is — depending on how you want to think about it — either a gallery of technologies we lost or an invitation to consider alternate futures. Some of what might have been is fantastical: a subway powered by air, an engine run off the heat of your palm. Some of what we lost, on the other hand, is more subtle, like a better way to bowl or type. As new standards emerge, variety fades, and a single technology becomes entrenched. (That's why the inefficient Qwerty keyboard has proved so difficult to unseat.)
We can take heart, however, in the fact that good ideas never disappear forever; the Stirling engine didn't pan out in the Industrial Revolution, for example, but it can keep the lights on for a small village. As you look through the images, then, please consider not only what might have been but what could still be again. — RYAN BRADLEY
In 1816, the same year that he became a minister in the Church of Scotland, Robert Stirling patented the Heat Economiser, which could take heat from anything — a fire, say, or the palm of your hand — and turn it into dynamic energy through the use of two pistons. Stirling and his brother, James, spent decades improving the engine before it was able to power a whole iron foundry in Dundee. But steam, which was an inefficient and dangerous power source when Stirling started, had improved and would provide the power and scale to drive the Industrial Revolution. Stirling's idea would be confined to use as a backup generator (like the Philips model, shown here) for a century or so until Dean Kamen, who invented the Segway, brought the Stirling back as the basis of his Beacon generator, a 1,500-pound, washing-machine-size system that can be tied to solar panels or natural gas to power a small business, a rural village or, in his case, a very large eco-friendly home.Stirling Engine
Gordon Earl Adams was a London-based engineer, scientist and seeker. In the late 1920s, he built a machine with dozens of flywheels, some perhaps weighing several tons and looking as if they could spin so fast that they would set off powerful electrical charges into the atmosphere. His goal was to control time and space. Adams worked for years in his basement in Shepherd's Bush and died in 1933, at 68, his machine lost to history. Eight decades later, notes from his project (shown here), along with photographs, were unearthed, highlighting its technical wizardry and spectacle. It was deemed conceptual art far ahead of its time.The Time Machine
In World War I, each region of the German empire was identifiable by a slightly different spiked helmet, or pickelhaube, designed by King Fredrick William IV of Prussia in 1842. The problem with all these designs, and there were dozens, was one of sourcing. The helmets required refined metalwork, decorative elements and hides all the way from South America. In wartime, they became difficult to replace or fix. By 1915, as the war devolved into the trenches and head injuries caused by shrapnel became common, the German military searched for a more streamlined solution. The stahlhelm, which found its way to the field of battle in 1916, now lives on in the helmets of almost every modern army.Decorative Helmet
The first fall came hard and fast, and it was fatal: On Feb. 4, 1912, in Paris, Franz Reichelt dove from the Eiffel Tower. Known as the Flying Tailor, Reichelt wore folds of fabric hanging from his shoulder like drapery, stitched together to form wings and fill up with air upon flight. It didn't, and though reports later claimed he died of a heart attack in midfall, he didn't quite stick the landing. Decades later, Clem Sohn, above, and his homemade wing suit did much better. The wings were made of a kind of wool called zephyr cloth and a web of steel tubing, and he could glide several thousand feet after jumping from an airplane before opening his parachute and touching down, triumphantly, to applauding crowds. They called him the Bird-Man. He died on the wing too, in 1937, in front of a large crowd, when his chutes failed (shown here, a memorial). But the wing suit returned with a vengeance — and better synthetic materials and air inlets — in 1999, when the world's first commercial suit, also called the Bird Man, hit the market. These days, about 20 people a year die in wing-suit crashes.Wing Suit
''If the Boeings and Airbuses of the world had put all that money and research into airships, who knows?'' says Joel Mokyr, an economic historian. After all, airships may have been slower than airplanes, but they were quieter, more energy efficient and logistically simpler. They could lift off from the center of a city, rather than an exurban airport, in silence. They could carry more people than airplanes too. But crashes tended to be slow-motion, stomach-churning spectacles. In 1930, after the R-101, a British airship, fell apart over France, the Air Ministry ordered its sister craft, the R-100, shown here, grounded and scrapped. Seven years later, the spectacular immolation of the Hindenburg, an airship en route from Frankfurt to New Jersey, essentially scuttled the airship's hopes for good.Airships
''Look at what we are doing in our cities today,'' the architect Paul Rudolph told The Daily Telegraph in 1968. ''We build an office building here and an apartment building over there.'' A year earlier, the Amalgamated Lithographers of America union approached Rudolph to build a megastructure in Lower Manhattan, featuring two skyscrapers 65 stories tall, 2,100 parking spaces, plazas, an elementary school, restaurants, a marina and apartments, as shown in the composite to the left. Rudolph had been fascinated by prefabricated housing and thought the mobile home could be the brick of his building. He designed each unit to be built and nearly finished offsite, including pipes for plumbing and wires for electric. This turned out, however, to be a major mistake. The union-backed building, if successful, would undermine other unions (particularly plumbers and electricians). They wouldn't have it, and the structure never got off the ground. ''It will be built somewhere,'' Rudolph said. And it was, in its way. Decades later, similar mixed-use megastructures are popping up in Singapore, Shanghai and even Brooklyn.Modular Megastructures
The aerocycle was intended for beginners. It was supposed to be possible to steer it simply by shifting your weight, as on a surfboard, riding a wave of air, a few feet above two contra-rotating propellers. A de Lackner aerocycle, shown here, was favored by the United States military and took test flights out of the Brooklyn Army Terminal in the 1950s. But the blades would wobble, then crash together. Close to the ground, they would kick up all manner of dust and rocks. The core idea, however, of an easy-to-operate, low-flying aircraft held the military's interest for decades, and it eventually brought us to the drone age.Personal Helicopter
While developing what became the Apple mouse in the '80s, David Kelley was also working with trackballs and joysticks. ''One reason the mouse worked and the others failed was, say you wanted to move the cursor from here to this dot — it didn't have to be really accurate ,'' Kelley says. ''Your brain and eye and hand are going to stop when you get to the dot. It moves to where it is that you need to stop, in other words. With joysticks, it wasn't that clean. Neither was the trackball. But the mouse hit it right on.'' Still, it wasn't perfect. ''We were testing with kids. If you wanted the cursor to go up on the screen, you'd move the mouse forward, but they'd lift the mouse off the table, which was actually more intuitive, because it was closer to what they saw happening, and wanted to happen, on-screen.'' Inevitably, this led to the allure, for kids and adults alike, of the touch screen. (Top, a NASA control stick from 1956; bottom, a later Atari model.)The Joystick
What's lost when we replace a person with software or a machine? It's a question worth asking because we do it all the time. (Shown here are office workers photographed by Lars Tunbjork in New York and Tokyo in the late '90s.) Humans are inconsistent, error-prone and sloppy. Technology, on the other hand, is predictable. But ''the reality is that there are things instrumentation cannot do,'' says Sylvia Earle, the former chief scientist of NOAA and marine explorer extraordinaire. ''There are subtleties.'' Humans accrue experience, machines collect data; even as robots and 3-D printers and apps take over many of our tasks, there is not, and never will be, anything equal to the personal touch.Humans
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/11/12/magazine/16innovationsfailures.html
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