Technical Fixes, Technological Solutions

The past couple of decades have been a confusing, frustrating period for engineers. With their creations making the world an ever richer, healthier, more comfortable place, it should have been a time of triumph and congratulation for them. Instead, it has been an era of discontent. Even as people have come to rely on technology more and more, they have liked it less. They distrust the machines that are supposedly their servants. Sometimes they fear them. And they worry about the sort of world they are leaving to their children. Engineers, too, have begun to wonder if something is wrong. It is not simply that the public doesn’t love them. They can live with that. But some of the long-term costs of technology have been higher than anyone expected: air and water pollution, hazardous wastes, the threat to the Earth’s ozone layer, the possibility of global warming. And the drumbeat of sudden technological disaster over the past twenty years is enough to give anyone pause: Three Mile Island, Bhopal, the Challenger, Chernobyl, the Exxon Valdez, the downing of a commercial airliner by a missile from the U.S.S. Vincennes. Is it time to rethink our approach to technology? Some engineers believe that it is. In one specialty after another, a few prophets have emerged who argue for doing things in a fundamentally new way. And surprisingly, although these visionaries have focused on problems and concerns unique to their own particular areas of engineering, a single underlying theme appears in their messages again and again: Engineers should pay more attention to the larger world in which their devices will function, and they should consciously take that world into account in their designs. Although this may sound like a simple, even a self-evident, bit of advice, it is actually quite a revolutionary one for engineering. Traditionally, engineers have aimed at perfecting their machines as machines. This can be seen in the traditional measures of machines: how fast they are, how much they can produce, the quality of their output, how easy they are to use, how much they cost, how long they last.

Risk

In June 1995, speaking to an audience of 250 fellow doctors and medical researchers, Steven Decks described what he hoped would be a breakthrough treatment for AIDS. The human immunodeficiency virus, which causes AIDS, attacks key components of a person’s immune system and gradually destroys the body’s ability to fight off infection. Consequently, an AIDS patient generally succumbs to what doctors call “opportunistic infections”— invasions by viruses, bacteria, and other microorganisms that take advantage of the body’s weakened defenses. If some way could be found to rebuild a patient’s devastated immune system, Deeks said, it could be lifesaving news for the 100,000 or so Americans in the advanced stages of AIDS. It might even make it possible for people with AIDS to live relatively normal lives. The treatment Deeks advocated was dramatic. He proposed extracting bone marrow from a baboon, separating out a special portion of it, then injecting that bit into a patient with an advanced case of AIDS. Because bone marrow contains the special cells that produce the immune system, Deeks hoped that the bone-marrow extract would create a baboonlike immune system in the patient. And because baboons are immune to AIDS, Deeks surmised that the patient’s new immune system could survive and do the job that the old, AIDS-wracked system no longer could perform—fight off disease-causing invaders. The AIDS virus would still be present, lurking in the remnants of the patient’s own immune system, but its main threat to the patient would have been deflected. For Deeks, a San Francisco physician who treats many AIDS patients, it was a gamble that had to be taken. Deeks spoke at a conference on xenograft transplantation, the medical term for the transplant of organs or tissue from one species into another—particularly, from animals into humans. The audience, most of whom were xenotransplant researchers, generally approved of Deeks’s proposal, but there were dissenters. The most vocal was Jonathan Allan, a virologist at the Southwest Foundation for Biomedical Research in San Antonio.

Choices

During the 1940s and early 1950s, when atomic energy was new, it was common to hear reactors described as nuclear “furnaces.” They “burned” their nuclear fuel and left behind nuclear “ash.” Technically, of course, none of these terms made sense, since burning is a chemical process and a reactor gets its energy from fission, but journalists liked the terminology because it was easy and quick. One loaded fuel into the reactor, flipped a switch, and things got very hot. If that wasn’t exactly a furnace, it was close enough. And actually, the metaphor was pretty good—up to a point. The basement furnace burns one of several different fuels: natural gas or fuel oil or even, in some ancient models, coal. Nuclear reactors can be built to use plutonium, natural uranium, or uranium that has been enriched to varying degrees. Home furnaces have a “coolant”—the air that is circulated through the furnace and out through the rest of the house, carrying heat away from the fire. Reactors have a coolant, too—the liquid or gas that carries heat away from the reactor core to another part of the plant, where heat energy is transformed into electrical energy. There, however, the metaphor sputters out. In a nuclear reactor, the coolant not only transfers heat to a steam generator or a turbine, but it also keeps the fuel from overheating. The coolant in a furnace does nothing of the sort. And most reactors use a moderator to speed up the fission reaction. The basement burner has nothing similar. But the most importance weakness of the furnace metaphor is that it obscured just how many varieties of reactors were possible—and, consequently, obscured the difficult choice facing the early nuclear industry: Which reactor type should become the basis for commercial nuclear power? The possibilities were practically unlimited. The fuel selection was wide. The coolant could be nearly anything that has good heat-transfer properties: air, carbon dioxide, helium, water, liquid metals, organic liquids, and so on.

Introduction: Understanding Technology

This is a very different book from the one I began writing four years ago. That happens sometimes, usually when an author doesn't really understand a subject or when he discovers something else more interesting along the way, and in my case it was both. Allow me to explain. In 1991 the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation provided grants to some two dozen writers to create a series of books on technology. Because technology has shaped the modern world so profoundly, Sloan wanted to give the general, nontechnical reader some place to go in order to learn about the invention of television or the history of X-rays or the development of birth control pills. This would be it. Sloan asked that each book in the series focus on one particular technology and that all of the books be accessible to readers with no background in science or engineering, but otherwise the foundation left it up to the writers to decide what to write about and how. Various authors agreed to produce books on vaccines, modern agriculture, radar, fiber optics, the transistor, the computer, software, biotechnology, commercial aviation, the railroads, and other modern technologies. I took on nuclear power. At the time, I planned to produce a straightforward treatment of the commercial nuclear industry—its history, its problems, and its potential for the future. I knew that nuclear power was controversial, and I believed that both sides in the debate over its use were shading the truth somehow. My job would be to delve into the technical details, figure out what was really going on, and report back to the readers. To keep the book as lively and readable as possible, I would sprinkle anecdotes and colorful characters throughout, but the book's heart would be a clear, accurate account of the engineering practices and scientific facts that underlie nuclear technology. Given this information, readers could then form their own opinions on the nuclear conundrum. There was nothing original about this approach.

Managing the Faustian Bargain

A quarter of a century ago, Alvin Weinberg offered one of the most insightful— and unsettling—observations anyone has made about modern technology. Speaking of the decision to use nuclear power, the long-time director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory warned that society had made a “Faustian bargain.” On the one hand, he said, the atom offers us a nearly limitless supply of energy which is cheaper than that from oil or coal and which is nearly nonpolluting. But on the other hand, the risk from nuclear power plants and nuclear-waste disposal sites demands “both a vigilance and a longevity of our social institutions that we are quite unaccustomed to.” We cannot afford, he said, to treat nuclear power as casually as we do some of our other technological servants—coal-fired power plants, for instance—but must instead commit ourselves to maintaining a close and steady control over it. Although Weinberg’s predictions about the cost of nuclear power may now seem naive, the larger issue he raised is even more relevant today than twenty-five years ago: Where should society draw the line in making these Faustian technological bargains? With each decade, technology becomes more powerful and more unforgiving of mistakes. Since Weinberg’s speech, we have witnessed major accidents at Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Bhopal, as well as the explosion of the Challenger and the wreck of the Exxon Valdez. And looking into the future, it’s easy to see new technological capabilities coming along that hold the potential for far greater disasters. In ten or twenty years, many of our computers and computer-controlled devices may be linked through a widespread network that dwarfs the current telecommunications system. A major breakdown like those that occasionally hit long-distance telephone systems could cost billions of dollars and perhaps kill some people, depending on what types of devices use the network. And if genetic engineering becomes a reality on a large scale, a mistake there could make the thalidomide debacle of the late 1950s and early 1960s look tame.

Control

Texas Utilities is a big company. Through its subsidiary, TU Electric, it provides electric service to a large chunk of Texas, including the Dallas- Fort Worth metropolitan area. It employs some 10,000 people. Its sales are around $5 billion a year. It has assets near $20 billion. Yet this corporate Goliath was brought to its knees by a single determined woman, a former church secretary named Juanita Ellis. For nearly a decade, Ellis fought Texas Utilities to a standstill in its battle to build the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant. During that time the cost of the plant zoomed from an original estimate of $779 million to nearly $11 billion, with much of the increase attributable, at least indirectly, to Ellis. Company executives, who had at first laughed at the thought of a housewife married to a lawn-mower repairman standing up to their covey of high-priced lawyers and consultants, eventually realized they could go neither around her nor through her. In the end, it took a negotiated one-on-one settlement between Ellis and a TU Electric executive vice president to remove the roadblocks to Comanche Peak and allow it to begin operation. No one was really happy with the outcome. Antinuclear groups denounced the settlement as a sellout and Ellis as a traitor. Texas Utilities bemoaned the years of discord as time wasted on regulatory nit-picking with no real improvement in safety. And the utility’s customers were the most unhappy of all, for they had to pay for the $11 billion plant with large increases in their electric bills. So it was natural to look for someone to blame. The antinuclear groups pointed to the utility. TU Electric, they said, had ignored basic safety precautions and had built a plant that was a threat to public health, and it had misled the public and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The utility, in turn, blamed the antinuclear groups that had intervened in the approval process and a judge who seemed determined to make TU Electric jump through every hoop he could imagine. The ratepayers didn’t know what to believe.

Complexity

Things used to be so simple. In the old days, a thousand generations ago or so, human technology wasn’t much more complicated than the twigs stripped of leaves that some chimpanzees use to fish in anthills. A large bone for a club, a pointed stick for digging, a sharp rock to scrape animal skins—such were mankind’s only tools for most of its history. Even after the appearance of more sophisticated, multipiece devices—the bow and arrow, the potter’s wheel, the ox-drawn cart—nothing was difficult to understand or decipher. The logic of a tool was clear upon inspection, or perhaps after a little experimentation. No longer. No single person can comprehend the entire workings of, say, a Boeing 747. Not its pilot, not its maintenance chief, not any of the thousands of engineers who worked upon its design. The aircraft contains six million individual parts assembled into hundreds of components and systems, each with a role to play in getting the 165-ton behemoth from Singapore to San Francisco or Sidney to Saskatoon. There are structural components such as the wings and the six sections that are joined together to form the fuselage. There are the four 21,000-horsepower Pratt & Whitney engines. The landing gear. The radar and navigation systems. The instrumentation and controls. The maintenance computers. The fire-fighting system. The emergency oxygen in case the cabin loses pressure. Understanding how and why just one subassembly works demands years of study, and even so, the comprehension never seems as palpable, as tangible, as real as the feel for flight one gets by building a few hundred paper airplanes and launching them across the schoolyard. Such complexity makes modern technology fundamentally different from anything that has gone before. Large, complex systems such as commercial airliners and nuclear power plants require large, complex organizations for their design, construction, and operation. This opens up the technology to a variety of social and organizational influences, such as the business factors described in chapter 3. More importantly, complex systems are not completely predictable.

The Power of Ideas

When Edison introduced his new-fangled electric-lighting system, he found a receptive audience. The public, the press, and even his competitors— with the possible exception of the gaslight industry—recognized that here was a technology of the future. Alexander Graham Bell, on the other hand, had a tougher time. In 1876, just three years before Edison would create a practical light bulb, Bell’s invention of the telephone fell flat. “A toy,” his detractors huffed. What good was it? The telegraph already handled communications quite nicely, thank you, and sensible inventors should be trying to lower the cost and improve the quality of telegraphy. Indeed, that’s just what one of Bell’s rivals, Elisha Gray, did—to his everlasting regret. Gray had come up with a nearly identical telephone some months before Bell, but he had not patented it. Instead, he had turned his attention back to the telegraph, searching for a way to carry multiple signals over one line. When Gray eventually did make it to the patent office with his telephone application, he was two hours behind Bell. Those two hours would cost him a place in the history books and one of the most lucrative patents of all time. Some months later, Bell offered his patent to the telegraph giant Western Union for a pittance—$100,000—but company officials turned him down. The telephone, they thought, had no future. It wasn’t until the next year, when Bell had gotten financing to develop his creation on his own, that Western Union began to have second thoughts. Then the company approached Thomas Edison to come up with a similar machine that worked on a different principle so that it could sidestep the Bell patent and create its own telephone. Eventually, the competitors combined their patents to create the first truly adequate telephones, and the phone industry took off. By 1880 there were 48,000 phones in use, and a decade later nearly five times that. More recently, when high-temperature superconductors were first created in 1986, the experts seemed to be competing among themselves to forecast the brightest future for the superconductor industry.

Business

In January 1975, the magazine Popular Electronics trumpeted the beginnings of a revolution. “Project Breakthrough,” the cover said: “World’s First Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models.” Inside, a six-page article described the Altair, an unassembled computer that could be ordered from MITS, a company in Albuquerque originally founded to sell radio transmitters for controlling model airplanes. To the uninitiated, it didn’t look like much of a revolution. For $397 plus shipping, a hobbyist or computer buff could get a power supply, a metal case with lights and switches on the front panel, and a set of integrated circuit chips and other components that had to be soldered into place. When everything was assembled, a user gave the computer instructions by flipping the panel’s seventeen switches one at a time in a carefully calculated order; loading a relatively simple program might involve thousands of flips. MITS had promised that the Altair could be hooked up to a Teletype machine for its input, but the circuit boards needed for the hookup wouldn’t be available for a number of months. To read the computer’s output, a user had to interpret the on/off pattern of flashing lights; it would be more than a year before MITS would offer an interface board to transform the output into text or figures on a television screen. And the computer had no software. A user had to write the programs himself in arcane computer code or else borrow the efforts of other enthusiasts. One observer of the early computer industry summed up the experience like this: “You buy the Altair, you have to build it, then you have to build other things to plug into it to make it work. You are a weird-type person. Because only weird-type people sit in kitchens and basements and places all hours of the night, soldering things to boards to make machines go flickety-flock.” But despite its shortcomings, several thousand weird-type people bought the Altair within a few months of its appearance. What inspired and intrigued them was the semiconductor chip at the heart of the computer.

History and Momentum

It was New Year’s Eve 1879, and the small community of Menlo Park, New Jersey, was overrun. Day after day the invaders had appeared, their numbers mounting as the new decade approached. When the New York Herald dispatched a man into the New Jersey countryside to report on the scene, he described a spectacle somewhere between a county fair and an inauguration: “They come from near and far, the towns for miles around sending them in vehicles of all kinds—farmers, mechanics, laborers, boys, girls, men and women—and the trains depositing their loads of bankers, brokers, capitalists, sightseers, hungry agents looking for business.” At first it had been hundreds, but by the last evening of the year, some 3,000 had gathered. They were here to see the future. Thomas Alva Edison, inventor of the phonograph, master of the telephone and telegraph, was said to have a new marvel, and it was his most amazing yet. If the newspapers could be believed, the Wizard of Menlo Park was lighting up the night with a magic lamp that ran on electricity. The news had first broken ten days earlier. A reporter from the Herald had spoken with Edison, who showed off his latest success: a light bulb that would glow for dozens of hours without burning out. On December 21, the Herald trumpeted the achievement, taking an entire page plus an extra column to describe the bulb (“Complete Details of the Perfected Carbon Lamp”) as well as Edison’s trial-and-error search for it (“Fifteen Months of Toil”) and the electrical system that would power it (“Story of His Tireless Experiments with Lamps, Burners and Generators”). Other newspapers soon picked up the story, and Edison, never one to pass up good publicity, announced he would open his laboratory after Christmas. Members of the public could come see the marvel for themselves. And what a marvel it was. Perhaps in this age, when city folk must travel miles into the country to not see an electric light, it’s hard to appreciate the wonder of that night.