Trends in Retail

Like much in society today, the retail landscape is changing.  And I am not talking about what store chain is up and what chain is down.  Or what trends are newly hot and what trends have gone cold.  I am talking about structural changes in the industry as a whole.

And this is not the only upheaval in retailing I have observed in my lifetime. There have been plenty.  But, as is my wont, I want to begin at the beginning, or, at least close enough to the beginning so I won't miss anything of significance.  So let's start a thousand years ago.

At that time, most people were tied to the land and saw little commerce of any kind, let alone retailing.  The exception was China, where things were far advanced over pretty much the entirety of the rest of the world.  I am going to ignore China.  The rest of the world eventually caught up to China so it will get covered indirectly.

Transportation at the time for most people consisted of foot power.  They were farmers who got from place to place by walking.  So typically there was a market or village (often the same thing) within ten to twenty miles of the farm, and at that time most people lived on a farm.  There was no money to speak of so what little commerce there was took place using barter.  And barter is very inefficient.  But at the time it was the only option available.

So people tried to accumulate a small surplus of something, anything, that others might need, so they had something they could trade for what they couldn't make or grow themselves.  So besides the market, the village hosted a small number of artisans, blacksmiths, carpenters, and the like, who provided what people couldn't make themselves.  The villages were small and served a small population so any one village hosted a very few artisans.  There wasn't enough local economic activity to host more.

But mostly people made for themselves.  So, they made clothing.  But they had almost no technology to help them out.  So they wove and they knitted.  And they used the skins of animals.  For weaving and knitting you need thread or yarn.  Both are difficult to make without equipment and the process is labor intensive.  So making the thread or yarn was where most of the effort went.  A good carpenter with good tools could make a spinning wheel.  That could turn fibers and hair into thread or yarn.  And a skilled carpenter could make a simple hand loom for use in weaving cloth.

But the these simple looms were best employed making rectangular pieces of fabric.  So a sarape was a good design.  You wove two rectangular pieces of cloth.  Then you could sew one edge of each together leaving a gap in the middle for the head.  A cloak, that article much beloved by purveyors of romantic fiction and epic fantasy, can also be made with a rectangular piece of fabric to which a couple of ties are attached.  Add ties to a rectangular piece of cloth and you have a wrap-around skirt.

But neither a sarape nor a cloak is actually very good at keeping you warm.  (The wrap-around skirt is a definite improvement over both.)  But complicated construction was nearly impossible and that limited peasants to simple garments, none of which worked all that well.  The button was invented late, not because buttons are hard to make, but because button holes are hard to make.  And the zipper dates back only to about 1900 and Velcro to about 1960.  Only rich people could afford elaborate clothes of complicated construction.

And that was generally true of almost the entire population.  If they couldn't make it for themselves, perhaps aided by a few simple tools that had to be well enough made to last decades, they had to find a way to do without.  All this made the exchange of goods very difficult so few goods were exchanged.

Things slowly got better.  Money, necessary to replace barter with more complex forms of exchange, was slow to arrive in quantities sufficient to make a difference.  And more complex tools also became available only slowly.  Steel was a luxury.  So, for a long time, if it couldn't be made from wrought iron, it couldn't be made.  This meant, for instance, that plows were very crappy for a very long time.  A wrought Iron plow wears out quickly.

But the situation slowly improved.  And specialists like harness makers started to arrive on the scene.  It was difficult but possible for a small farmer to make his own harnesses.  But a specialist could turn out a much superior product much more quickly.  But that specialist needed skill and tools. Cobbling, making shoes and boots, is similar.  Again, it is possible for a farmer to make sandals or moccasins but a specialist can turn out a much superior product much more quickly.

So, as money became more and more available and other improvements were made, the typical town or village slowly acquired more and more types of specialists.  And these specialists made the farmers more productive.  And that meant a village could afford to support more specialists leading to a virtuous circle.  And typically each specialist was installed in his own shop.  And at this point, advertising was not a problem.  There were still so few of them that everyone knew where everyone's shop was.

Probably the first type of business where some kind of advertising became important was the tavern or public house.  If a town was going to host more than one of a particular kind of business it would be a tavern.  Taverns started hanging up signs.  And, since most people still couldn't read, they went with easily identifiable symbols.  And as taverns multiplied in large metropolises like London or Paris, they started using with two symbols on a sign.  So you had the "rose and crown" or the "pig and whistle".  The sign would have a stylized but identifiable rose and a stylized but identifiable crown carved into it, as an example.

Probably the first standardized signage was the three gold balls that identified a pawn shop / money lender.  The second was the striped pole that identified a barber.  And the combination of signage and for a long time word of mouth was the entirety of an establishment's marketing campaign.

And for a long time all roads were crap.  So all larger cities were located on rivers or the seashore.  Back then ships were the only way to reliably and cheaply transport large volumes of goods.  The Romans (and the Chinese) had built good roads.  But the Roman roads stopped getting maintained when the Empire fell so they slowly decayed.  This means that outside of China the volume of commerce increased but it was still at a very low level.

If we move forward a few hundred years the high technology device of the day was the ship.  And better technology meant better ships, be they warships or merchant ships.  So there was money in the ship business pretty much before anything else.

And the complexity of an oceangoing ship, say of the fourteen hundreds, demanded a lot of specialized labor and equipment to build and maintain.  And that resulted in the first example of what we would now recognize as a mercantile operation, the ship's chandlery.  This was a retail establishment that specialized in selling all the bits and bobs that large, complex, ships needed.

And by this time more money was in circulation.  So we saw all kinds of specialty retailers following in the footsteps of chandlers.  And, for the most part, they followed the tavern model.  They would put a sign up outside with some kind of icon carved into it that indicated their area of specialization.

Later, when good quality and inexpensive window glass became available, a window display was added.  But their marketing campaign consisted primarily of "word of mouth".  This is when the phrase "by appointment to the King" came into general use.  This all changed with the advent of the newspaper.

It took a while for people (both the publishers and the readers) to figure out that placing an advertisement in a newspaper acted like word of mouth on steroids.  People read newspapers to find out what was going on.  It is a small step from learning the news of the day to learning where to find the best (or cheapest or closest) merchant selling a particular item.  The world has not been the same since.

To state the obvious, newspapers depend on a high level of literacy in the population.  Once a significant percentage of the population could read and write (and a process for making paper cheaply came into widespread use), trends in retailing started to be strongly influenced by trends in communication.  The other strong influencer is one I have already talked about, trends in transportation.

I noted that for a long time the siting of large cities depended on access to rivers or seashore.  This was because, as I noted above, for a long time volume transportation over substantial distances was only possible using ships.  If a merchant dealt in goods originating a distance away those goods traveled in ships.

So towns in the interior tended to be small.  And retailers in these interior towns tended to mostly to depend on the skill of their labor rather than their access to goods from a distance for their livelihood.  This severely restricted the types and amounts of commerce that was possible.

Roads slowly got better but the big revolution in land transportation came about with the introduction of the railroad.  It now became possible to transport large volumes of goods over long distances quickly and inexpensively.  Railroads came into existence in the 1800's.  And that roughly coincided with the introduction of the telegraph.  Telegraph messages were quick but they were also very expensive.  So their impact on retailing was limited.  It was cost effective to deal with suppliers via telegraph but it was not cost effective to deal with customers that way.

What railroads, and a reasonably quick postal system (perhaps a week to send a letter a thousand miles) enabled was the catalog retailer.  The most famous example of this was Sears, Roebuck, and Company.  Sears set up shop in Chicago, which had excellent rail connections to the rest of the country.  They sent out their "wish book" catalog and received orders by mail.  Then they used rail freight to deliver the goods ordered.  A wide variety of goods was available in a large city like New York City.  But Sears was able to provide a similar wide variety of goods to anywhere that had good rail service.

This revolutionized small town life.  It did it in two ways.  The first way is the obvious one.  People could order and receive a much wider selection of goods than local merchants stocked.  But the second revolution is often overlooked.  A customer could look in the Sears catalog and see what something cost there.  If the local merchant charged a lot more than Sears, this could be brought to the merchant's attention.  The merchant was forced to either lower his prices or see business decline.  A much higher level of competition was thus introduced into small town retailing.

But this increased level of availability and competition did not extend to everything.  There used to be something called a "dry goods" store.  Dry goods were the kind of thing you could ship via boat or train without damaging it.  So anything "perishable" still had to be sourced locally.  And most kinds of food is perishable.  Drying or pickling many kinds of foods ruins it.  Just ask sailors whether they preferred "salt beef" to fresh meat.

One way this played out has become a staple of American mythology.  If you built an insulated rail car and packed it with ice you could keep meat, particularly beef, from perishing while preserving its flavor.  The cheapest place to raise beef cattle was out on the prairie a long way from anywhere.  So, "beef cattle" were fattened up, say in West Texas, then they were "driven" to a railhead, say at Abilene, Kansas.  There, they were slaughtered and the beef loaded into chilled rail cars and shipped east.  This is the economics behind the "cattle drive" much beloved in Western movies and TV shows.

At about the same time Sears was getting into business (1886) there arose another phenomenon that I don't completely understand, the "department store".  These only existed in medium and large cities.  They were a large, single, unified, store that internally was broken up into a large number of departments.

Each department functioned along the lines of a specialty shop.  One department sold dresses.  Another department sold furniture. A single department store could host an amazing assortment of merchandise for sale.  And, other than the fact that it was all the kind of thing an average person would buy, there was little commonality involved.

I am old enough to remember when a number of these operations were still going strong in Seattle, my home town.  But why?  I can come up with two suggestions.  The first is management.  Not everyone knows how to run a successful retail operation.  And there is a considerable amount of "general retailing expertise" that applies across lots of kinds of merchandise.  My second suggestion is also the one I think is the important one, advertising.

A department store can afford to advertise regularly in a newspaper.  They can build up "brand loyalty" for the store.  "Shop with us and we will have everything you need and treat you right."  A department store can also feature goods from one department in one ad and goods from a different department in the next.

The consumer was continuously reminded of the existence of the department store due to the regularity of the appearance of an advertisement.  And over time each department in the store could be featured.  The customer was reminded of the many departments that could be found, all in one convenient place and clustered under a trusted name.

A stand alone operation  specializing in the goods from just one department could not afford the cost of duplicating the size and frequency of the newspaper ads the department store could afford.  They had to settle for ads that were either smaller or less frequent.

So the state of transportation at the time (railroads) and the state of communications at the time (newspapers, catalogs) shifted the retailing landscape dramatically in the late 1800s.  The advent of airplanes, radio, and later TV, didn't shift the retailing landscape as much.  But cars did.

The wide availability of cars made the shopping center possible.  Starting in about 1950 the shopping center was able to sell itself as a bigger, better, department store.  The shopping center could engage in the same kind of newspaper advertising department stores had been doing.  And they could offer more departments in the form of specialty shops.  And each specialty shop could offer a wider variety of goods than the department in a department store could.

But for a long time in spite of the fact that they were competitors, department stores and shopping centers coexisted.  In fact, a successful shopping center was "anchored" by one or more department stores.  The only change for department stores was now, instead of a single store in a single city, all the successful department stores had expanded into "chains".  At one time there was only one Macy's store in the world.  Now they are all over the place.

At the same time the catalog operations added stores to the mix.  You could order from the Sears catalog or you could go to the Sears store.  You could even order from the catalog but have it shipped to the store.  You would then use your car to pick it up.  J. C. Penney's evolved into another of these hybrid operations.  For a long time both Sears and J. C. Penney's (and others) had extensive catalog operations.  At the same time they had large chains of stores, often serving as an anchor to a shopping mall.

It would be interesting to have access to the books of these hybrid operations like Sears and Penney's.  I think there was a slow shift.  Catalog volume dropped off slowly.  But for a long time it remained profitable (I opine).  And for a long time the anchor stores at malls were also profitable.  But I suspect that the trend of business moving away from catalog and away from department stores in malls moved slowly enough that a case could always be made to continue on as before.  But the trend has finally caught up with them.

And coming up along the inside was a different retail model, the big box store.  "Big box" is often associated with Walmart.  But Walmart is more accurately seen as a department store chain.  They were just the first to figure out how to adapt the department store model to rural and suburban-fringe areas.  The secret to success was the combination of the interstate highway system and the car.  The customer density might have been low.  But Walmart figured out how of how to get people to drive long distances to one of their stores.

And at the time Walmart was growing quickly, rural and other low density areas were underserved by the retail industry.  So, Walmart didn't make a fundamental change to the industry.  They just figured out how to expand an already tried and true formula into a new market.

As I noted above, the size of the average specialty shop in a mall could be substantially larger than the department of a department store.  That trend got taken to extremes.  All of a sudden we started seeing very large stores dedicated to a single line of products.  A classic example is Best Buy, an electronics store.

But the grocery store, which started out pretty small, kept getting bigger and bigger.  It is now a "supermarket", and it is truly "super" in terms of size.  We also have big box book stores, furniture stores, sporting goods stores, etc. now.  Most often they are in malls.  But sometimes they are like Walmart's, a free standing operation,

And, of course, what makes the big box store feasible is the same thing that made Walmart stores feasible.  People can now drive long distances to find what they want.  You just have to give them sufficient reason.

And then coming up fast on the rail you have the internet and Amazon.  The internet is a communications revolution.  The equivalent of a Sears catalog can now be delivered to your home on demand.  And the catalog entries can be updated instantly.  And the cost of creating a "catalog" entry on the Amazon web site is far less that the equivalent cost for Sears to create an entry on its catalog.

The "Amazon story" is now well known.  It started out selling books.  Then it branched out by adding this and that.  It has since added third party sellers.  So now you can get almost anything through Amazon.

And this whole "Amazon is killing retail" story is now well known.  My local mall has a big Barnes & Noble bookstore but B&N is reputed to be hanging on by a thread and most of it's competitors are already gone.  Video rental stores are gone.  And so on and so on.  The rapid expansion of the big box trend was supposed to be an "Amazon beater" strategy.  It worked for a while.  But it looks like it lacks long term staying power.

Retailing at all levels has had to adjust to the internet.  Many companies quickly added an internet along side the rest of their operation.  But for most it was supposed to be an adjunct to their main retail business.  Barnes & Nobel, for instance got into the web in a big way.  They even developed the proprietary Nook e-reader.  The conventional wisdom on all of this is now "too little - too late" and "doomed to failure".

But here's where I think I have something fresh to contribute.  And that is this.  I think retailing is not doomed.  I just think we need to do a rebalancing.

Nordstrom's is a department store chain that people used to think was getting it right but those same people now think they are in trouble.  And right this minute they are.  They put in lots of large retail stores in malls and for a long time that strategy worked well.  They were one of the first companies to create an internet presence so people figured that they had done the right thing here too.  But now people are not so sure.

The "all internet - all the time" people figured that all of retailing was going to follow the move rental model.  But I think that is too extreme.  What I expect to see is a rebalancing.  Neither retail sales nor internet sales will go away completely.  But I see the internet side becoming more important and the retail side less so.  In the specific case of Nordstrom's, I don't see them going down the drain.  I do see them needing to downsize their retail presence (smaller stores) while continuing to enhance their internet presence.  And that will be difficult and expensive to pull off.

People like to shop at Nordstrom's.  They got the whole "shopping as theater / entertainment" thing well before most of their competitors.  So their stores are very pleasant places to hang out.  But stores cost a lot of money to operate.  When almost all of Nordstrom's sales came through their stores this worked fine.  Their stuff was a little more expensive that what could be found elsewhere.  But people figured the price difference was worth it and Nordstrom's bottom line reflected that for many years.

But let's say you are a Nordstrom's regular.  If you are a "fast fashion" type who always has to have whatever is trendy RIGHT NOW then time spent in the store is still well worth it.  But most of us, including the fast fashion types, also buy a lot of staples.  When it comes to a lot of what we buy, we know exactly what we want before we enter the store.  For these purchases the in-store experience is less valuable.  So why not just order it off the Nordstrom's web site?

Nordstrom's needs to hold on to their customer base, and expand it, if possible.  For new customers the in-store experiences is the best way for Nordstrom's to introduce itself.   And for the person who needs assistance, help finding the right size or style or color or accessory, you can't beat the in-store experience.  The problem is "how does Nordstrom's (or any other retailer) get the additional expense of their retail operation to pencil out".

I think the way Nordstrom's needs to do that is by downsizing their stores, thus reducing the cost of their retail presence.  The remaining retail side of the business would be much more tightly focused on the customer service aspects of their business.  Nordstrom's runs an extensive cosmetics operation.  Providing help finding just the right shade of lipstick or other cosmetic is something customers regularly need and appreciate.

Taking the measurements necessary to make sure clothing fits properly is also important.  But if a complete set of measurements is taken and entered into Nordstrom's computer system, that system can then apply those measurements to all the clothes Nordstrom's offers in a way that insures that all the clothing the customer orders will fit properly.  That would be especially helpful to women as it is harder for them to achieve the correct fit.

Finding the right store size and the right mix of products and services will be hard to figure out.  And getting from where store chains like Nordstrom's are, namely lots of big stores in lots of malls, to where they need to be, smaller stores, perhaps in more locations, perhaps in fewer, will be even harder to do.  Nordstrom's is trying to pull exactly this off.  I wish them luck.

And Amazon is coming at it from the other side.  Like Sears, Amazon started out with no retail presence.  But Amazon has been experimenting with physical stores for some time now.  Their recent efforts include purchasing the "Whole Foods" supermarket chain, and rolling out "Amazon Go" cashier-less stores.  Both of these initiatives have attracted a lot of attention.  And no one, Amazon included, is sure where either initiative will end up.

And taking the wide view of retailing, there is another trend going on.  Lots of malls were built.  The theory was "there is no such thing as too many malls".  That is obviously nonsense.  But it took a long time for this sector to get overbuilt.  Then, among other things, the internet came along.  And, as I have argued above, we need less retail than we used to.

But at the same time, cities like Seattle, changed their zoning so that pretty much every building had to include row of small retail stores at street level.  At one time there was probably a shortage of spaces for small retail.  But the zoning was changed quite a long time ago now so there is now a substantial surplus of these sites for small retail, at least as I see it.

This combination of a surplus of retail space, large and small, and a decreasing need for all kinds of retail, means I see trouble in the market for retail real estate.  Lots of malls went out of business in the past decade.  I think most of the damage has been done in that area.  But, here too the shrinkage will continue.  And I see particular trouble for anchor stores in malls.  I see the occupants of those malls staying in the mall but I see them downsizing into smaller spaces.  And I see building owners having trouble keeping the small retail the City forced them to build full.

And as long as we are talking about external trends that affect retailing, here's a final one.  The entire world has been shifting from a middle class based economy to a banana republic-style model.  We will have a few super-rich people and a lot of poor people.  The middle class has been shrinking as a percentage of the total population and I expect this to continue.  (For the moment, China is an exception here.  China has a growing middle class.  But they are coming from no middle class at all.)

Each individual rich person buys more stuff than poorer people do.  But there aren't that many of them.  So the aggregate demand they represent is small.  What drives a healthy retail economy is a large middle class.  Even more helpful, from a retailing perspective, is to put more money into the pockets of poor people.  Poor people spend what they have and they spend most of it on retail.  Middle class people spend almost as high a percentage of their money on retail as poor people do.  Rich people spend a far lower percentage of their money on retail than do people in either of the other two groups.

There are far more poor people than rich people.  Even with their reduced numbers, there are also far more middle class people than rich people.  If you add 1% to the income of every rich person there will be essentially no impact on retailing.  If you add 1% to the income of every poor person you will see almost 100% of that money flow through to retailers.  But poor people have little money so that 1% change will add up to a relatively small amount.  If you add 1% to the income of middle class people a lot of it will flow through to the retail segment.  And it will be a large amount in the aggregate.

What we have been doing is taking new income away from the people who underpin retailing, the poor and the middle class, and giving it to the rich, the people who do the least for retailing.  We have seen growth in retail.  But it has been almost entirely funded by the poor and the middle class taking on more debt.  That is unhealthy.  The best thing that could be done to improve the lot of retailers is to direct new income away from the rich and toward the middle class and especially the poor.  But that does not seem to be in the cards any time soon.  And that is going to put retailing into yet another bind.

U. S. Mail - Number Please

I like to know how things work.  And in almost every case the current system for how a particular thing works evolved in stages over time from humble origins.  This post covers the evolution of Mail Addresses into numbers.  It turns out that every single place the United States Postal Service (USPS) is capable of delivering mail to has a specific unique number associated with it.  How can that be?  Well, it didn't start out that way.

The phrase "Number Please" conjures up the image of a telephone operator.  Back in the day a lot of the telephone system was operated manually.  An "operator" sat at an "exchange".  When you wanted to make a phone call you did something (cranked on a handle in the early days) to get the operator's attention.  This lit up a light on the "plug board" of the exchange.  The exchange was manipulated by the operator by plugging and unplugging "patch cords".  So the operator would connect herself to you, ask for the phone number you wanted to connect to, then manipulate some patch cords to connect you up.

In the very early days you could just say "connect me to Mable" and the operator knew what to do.  But phones soon became so popular that asking for someone by name soon became unwieldy and everyone who had a phone was assigned a number.  For a long time the "number" was a combination of letters and numbers but that was actually a con.  If you look at a phone "dial" you will see that the "2" key is labeled "ABC", the "3" key is labeled "DEF", etc.

So if my phone number was "Olive 7335", which it was at one point, that really meant OL7335, "OL" being the first two letters of "Olive".  And the "O" was really a "6" and the "L" was really a "5".  So, for all practical purposes my phone number was 657335, a number.  At some point the phone company decided that this "letters and numbers" business was not worth the bother and dropped it.  People are now used to phone numbers being a series of digits.

But in an interesting development, "phone numbers" are going back to being names.  Most people now use smart phones.  And to call somebody they look that person up in their "Address Book" and hit the "dial" button.  People only know another person's actual phone number just long enough to enter it into their address book.  After that, they go by their name.  (The same goes for texting, which is rapidly replacing the phone call.)

Back in the day (early '60s) there was a British TV show called "Danger Man".  It was syndicated in the US under the catchy name of "Secret Agent".  And for the US run, besides giving the show a new name, they slapped on a catchy new theme song.  That song contained the line "they've given you a number and taken 'way your name".  The USPS has given every mail delivery location a number but they haven't taken it's "address" away -- yet.  But that's the end of the story.  Let's go back to the beginning.

For a long time almost everybody was illiterate.  Before paper was invented writing material was very expensive so most people found a way to get along without learning to read or write.  Then paper was invented.  This was followed by "movable type" printing.  Now there was much more of an incentive to learn to read and write, and lots more people did.  And if two people can read, information can be shared by one person writing a "letter" to the other person.  The problem was how to get the letter from the party of the first part to the party of the second part.

Well, most of the people the typical person knew didn't live that far away.  So talking a friend or acquaintance into delivering the letter worked reasonably well.  But governments and some business people found it valuable to communicate over longer distances.  And for a long time the "find a friend or acquaintance who is going that way" was the only option available.

Governments have the most money and the most need of long distance communications.  So governments started setting up regular messenger services.  Messengers would travel a fixed route on a fixed schedule carrying letters.  At first these messenger services only transported "official" letters pertaining solely to government business.  So business groups ended up setting up parallel messenger systems that handled commercial letters.

Eventually sanity intervened and the systems were consolidated into a single messenger system that handled both government and business correspondence.  But these systems were complicated, idiosyncratic, and expensive.  And most people still couldn't read or write.

Fast forward to the American Revolution and Ben Franklin.  Literacy in the "colonies" was increasing and Franklin recognized that an inexpensive, simple, reliable, Mail system was valuable to everyone.  So he made sure that the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8, clause 7) empowered Congress to "establish Post Offices and post Roads".  The US government has been in the Post Office and Mail delivery business ever since.

One idea Franklin pushed successfully was for a standard cost to send a letter regardless of how far it was going.  This drastically reduced the complexity involved in using the system.  You addressed a letter.  As long as you were in an area served by the USPS and you were sending a letter to a destination served by the USPS you paid the same low price ("for the low, low, cost of a stamp . . .").  This meant mail going a short distance subsidized mail going a long distance.  But initially very few letters went a long distance.

Unfortunately, junk mail has changed that.  We can now get bombed with catalogues, sales flyers, etc., from all over the country.  And this ability to send a letter from anywhere in the country to anywhere in the country demands a uniform system for identifying where the letter is supposed to go.

And, as with the case of telephones and operators, initially whatever the system was it would be operated by people.  And people are very flexible.  So early on locations had what amounted to a nickname.  There is the famous "Bleak House" of literature fame.   The house Winston Churchill lived in most of his life was called "Chartwell".

Once you got close, people were just supposed to just know where it was.  In order to facilitate the "get close" part of the process, the destination was additionally identified (in the case of Chartwell) as being near the town of Westerham in the district of Kent in the country of England.  And back in the days when only rich people in fancy homes got mail that system was sufficient.

About this time a standard hierarchical form was adopted.  The bottom line of the address contained the most general type of location information, typically a city, state, and perhaps a country.  The next line was more specific, typically a building number and street name.  And the line above was still more specific, typically the name of the recipient.

Thanks to Franklin and others, more and more people were availing themselves of the postal system.  And as the number of users increased, the stateliness of the typical mail recipient's abode declined.  Just going with a name like "Chartwell" stopped being tenable.  So, an effort was made to give all streets in a town a unique name and each building on a given street was given a unique number.

Addresses of the form "123 Elm Street, Anytown, Anystate" came into general use.  Around the World War II time period this was not always enough so large cities started getting broken up into "zones".  So it became "Anytown 3" to indicate that the address was located in zone 3 of Anytown.  This meant that letter sorters didn't need to be familiar with all of a large city.  They just needed to know their way around whatever zone they were working in.

But by World War II mail volumes were large and a lot of the mail traveled a significant distance.  By this time the USPS was organized into a hierarchy.  The country was divided up into "sections".  If a letter was not going to someplace local it was sent to one of a limited number of "sectional center facilities".  Internally within the USPS these facilities were assigned a 3 digit number.  This represents the third incursion (after street numbers and then city zones) of numbers into the business of delivering the mail.

Even after the War a lot of flexibility was permitted because the system was still a manual one, for the most part.  A person can easily determine that "Wa", "Wash", and "Washington" all refer to the same state so all three forms (and several others) were permitted.  And address lines that became too long were not a problem.  If it looked like there would be a problem then whoever was doing the addressing would just do something like go with an abbreviation instead of spelling things out in full.  The mythical "Frostbite Falls, Minnesota" worked just fine, for instance.

Then in 1963 a switch was made.  The postal zones within cities were dropped.  And two more digits were added to the sectional center facility number.  These two extra digits allowed a specific post office within a section to be identified.    And the system was publicized and given a catchy name, the "ZIP Code".  People and businesses were instructed to add the ZIP Code to the city-state line.  But adding the ZIP code could be a problem if the city-state line was already quite long.

So, at the same time a list of two letter state codes were promulgated and people were encouraged to use them instead of all the earlier (and usually longer) variants.  So my state became "WA" and that shortening allowed the ZIP Code to fit right in.

In order to encourage the widespread adoption of ZIP codes starting in '67 bulk mailers were required to use them if they wanted to mail at a discount.  So every Post Office in the country had its own unique ZIP Code.  This got rid of a lot of problems caused by near-duplicate addresses.  Any town could have a "123 Elm St.".  And it was possible that two close together towns with similar names could have the same address.  When the ZIP Code boundaries were set up the USPS made sure that each instance of "123 Elm St." (or any other specific address) ended up in a different ZIP Code.

And the 5 digit ZIP code was a big help.  But there were still a lot of addresses within a single ZIP Code.  So in 1983 the USPS went to a ZIP+4 system.  They added a "+" and another 4 digits to the end of the ZIP Code.  They also started rolling out a barcode system.  All of a sudden, a bunch of ticks started appearing below the address.  These ticks were designed to be read easily with a dumbed down version of the UPC Code scanners used in supermarkets.

The original barcode contained only the 5 digit ZIP code.  But improvements and enhancements were added over the years.  First it was expanded to include the ZIP+4 information.  Finally a two digit "Delivery Point" number was added.  A 5 digit ZIP Code gets us to the correct Post Office.  A ZIP+4 Code gets us to the specific delivery route (or part of a route) operating out of that Post Office.  The addition of the two digit "Delivery Point" number gets us to a single specific house, apartment unit, etc.

This 11 digit number (a 5 digit ZIP, plus a 4 digit +4, plus a 2 digit delivery point) gets us to a single number that uniquely identifies any specific location capable of receiving mail anywhere in the US.  And in 2012 the latest version of the USPS barcode was introduced.

It is called the "Intelligent Mail" (IM) barcode and it became mandatory in 2013.  It is much more elaborate than even the 11 digit barcode it replaced.  The old barcode used only short ticks and tall ticks.  So that each tick encoded one bit of information.  The IM barcode used four tick types - short-centered, short-centered+up, short-centered+down, and long (a combination of short-centered and the "up" part and the "down" part of the other two ticks).  So each tick encodes two bits of information.  The IM barcode consisted of 65 ticks encoding 130 bits of information.

Ignoring some "overhead" ticks (you need to know if you are reading the barcode upside down or right side up, for instance) the "payload" translates to a 31 digit number.  11 of those digits are used to encode the ZIP+4+2 11 digit number described above that identifies the unique delivery point of the letter.  Most of the rest of the digits are used to create a tracking number so letters or packages can be tracked like they can at UPS or FedEx..

The tracking number is broken into two sub-parts.  The first part is the sender identification number and the second part is the item number.  The USPS assigns a sender identification number to each participating company or organization.  A unique item number is then assigned by the sender to each item that sender mails.  Two formats are used.

Some of the "sender" numbers are short.  They are assigned to (relatively) high volume mailers.  There are fewer numbers but there are also fewer high volume mailers than there are (relatively) low volume mailers.  By keeping the number short for some mailers there is room for a larger pool of item numbers for these mailers to use.

Other "sender" numbers are longer.  This allows the system to accommodate a larger number of low volume mailers.  But the trade-off is that these mailers have a smaller pool of item numbers to work with.  But they shouldn't need as many as the high volume mailers so it is a good trade-off.

In either case a unique item number is assigned to each piece of mail.  But the number only needs to be unique within a 90 day window.  After that it can be reused.  The combination of the sender identification number and the item number is a fixed size.  So the combination always takes up the same amount of space within the 31 digit number.

So it is cool that the USPS can now track an item.  But that's not the main point of adopting barcodes.  The main point was to permit machine sorting.  A mail sorting machine can sort mail by reading the barcode.  It doesn't have to have the smarts to handle all the variation in regular printed addresses.  And it is still legal to write an address by hand.  No machine can read handwriting reliably.  And they definitely can't do it at high speed.

There is a nice feature that this 11 digit unique delivery point number enables.  I was sending an Amazon package to a cousin a few days ago.  I filled in the address and Amazon came back with "is this the address you mean".  It had made a small change to what I had entered.  There are now lists available to Amazon and others of all the valid addresses in the US.  Amazon chunked through the address I had provided and found no match.  But it did find a very similar address, which it suggested to me.

A similar thing happened to me several months ago when I was at the USPS mailing a package.  The staffer entered the address I gave and it came up "tilt".  It turned out that the person who had given me the address had included a ZIP code that was completely wrong.  With a little poking around the staffer was able to suggest to me a completely different ZIP code that turned out to be the correct one.  That's definitely a good thing.

So is all this automation helping?  I'm sure it is.  But the cost of a First Class stamp has been rising quickly over the last several years.  (And I'm old enough to remember when the cost of a First Class stamp went from two cents to three cents.)  What's going on is that mail volume is dropping.  But it costs a lot (and costs keep rising) to keep all those Post Offices running all over the place.  City people like me heavily subsidize country people.

There is a high enough volume of mail to cover the overhead in cities.  But that is not true in rural areas.  A rural Post Office may cost less to run.  But it costs a lot more on a per-letter basis to run than an urban Post Office does.  The very people who benefit from this cross subsidization are the ones who scream loudest about how much it costs to keep the USPS going.  But they also don't want any of those rural Post Offices, the ones that lose so much money, closed.

I know what my ZIP+4 ZIP Code is.  But I don't know what my Delivery Point number is.  And if there is a way to find out what it is I haven't been able to find it..  So, I only know 9 digits of the 11 digit number that represents my delivery address.  Could the USPS switch over to the 11 digit number at some point?  Sure.  But it doesn't look like they are going to do it any time soon.

But there are lots of businesses that know what my 11 digit address is.  You see many bills and pieces of junk mail come with that IM barcode printed on it.  And I can tell it was printed at the same time my address was printed.  It wasn't added later by the USPS.  Instead, it's right there underneath the address that was printed by the people who are sending the mail to me.  And you can't create an IM barcode without knowing what my particular and unique 11 digit address is.

And on an apparently unrelated but actually related subject, the decennial US Census is coming up in 2020.  The Census people need to know where to look to find everyone.  Well, guess what?  The magic database that is used to validate addresses and to list what each address's Delivery Point is tells you almost every place to look for people.

It's not going to catch people who are living in their cars or otherwise have no fixed address.  But if you regularly get junk mail then your address should be in the Delivery Point database.  The Census people were able to work with bulk mailers to develop a "where to look" list when they were doing the 2010 Census and that was helpful.  But this Delivery Point database business means that things have gotten much better organized since.  And the Census people should be able to take advantage of that.

Giving people numbers is not just for secret agents any more.

Third Party Anyone?

This is a perennial question in American politics.  It crops up regularly.  It cropped up ahead of the recently completed midterm elections.  The long version is:

Both political parties are screwed up.  What we need is a third party that is not tainted by the sins and flaws of the two current parties.  This new party will be better than either of them could possibly be given their unrepairable state of advanced decay.  If we start with a clean slate and build a brand new party from the ground up we can finally get the political party we desperately need.

Stripped of all policy baggage, this is the argument. But there is always policy baggage.  It's just that the specifics of the policy baggage change from era to era while the core argument I have reproduced above stays the same.  So is there any merit to the argument?  In a word, no.

Let's start not with my usual historical survey (don't worry, I'll throw some history in below) but instead with a geographic survey.  What do we find in the rest of the world?  What we find in the rest of the world is a lot of third and even fourth and fifth parties.  A lot of parliamentary democracies, and there are a lot of these scattered around the world, have a political structure that features multiple political parties.

The United Kingdom ("England" for the ignorant) has many political parties.  The big two are the "Conservatives" (currently the largest) and "Labour" (second largest and spelled the way the British spell it).  Traditionally, the third party there has been the "Liberal Democrats".  But Scotland has been feeling frisky recently (there was a referendum on Scottish independence not all that long ago that almost passed).  As a result, the Liberal Democrats are in fourth place and the party that is actually third largest (as measured by number of seats in Parliament) is the "Scottish National Party".

Roughly speaking, the Conservative party corresponds to our Republicans and Labour to our Democrats.  But the correspondence is very rough.  Why?  Because of the presence of the other parties.  And I have left out the four other parties that hold at least one seat in Parliament.  Yes!  There are eight political parties with enough support to merit at least one seat in Parliament.  In the US only two parties hold seats in the House and, if you count the two "Independents" as a third party, three parties holding seats in the Senate.

And the situation in the United Kingdom is common.  France, Germany, Israel, and many other countries have some variant on this idea.  The specifics vary from country to country but each country has been forced to come up with a method for forming "coalition" governments.  It has been ages since "Likud", the party that has long been the largest party in Israel, has held enough seats to govern unilaterally.  And before it was supplanted by Likud the Labor party, which also had a long run as the dominant party, was often forced to form a coalition with "splinter" parties in order to reach a governing majority in the Knesset (what the Israelis call their parliament).

The deals necessary to assemble a coalition government often results in a weak government.  The splinter parties are in a strong negotiating position in the runup to the formation of the governing coalition.  They use this leverage to exact promises that are loved by their supporters but hated by the larger party.  Neither side is completely happy so threats to bolt (or actually bolting) are common.  And this "mutual hostage situation" cuts way down on the maneuvering room of the people trying to actually run the government.

The benefit of this sort of thing is that extremists are siphoned out of major parties by the splinter parties.  But this benefit is undone by the wheeling and dealing necessary to create the coalition and by the posturing, etc. that follow.  This sort of thing is not what US advocates of a third party are after.

Instead they want the US government to start (or stop) doing certain specific things.  That requires that the government be strong so that it can overcome entrenched opposition.  After all, if the opposition was not entrenched one or the other of the major parties would have done (or undone) whatever it is the advocates of a third party are so exercised about.

So we can be clear.  People don't want a third party in the style of parliamentary democracies, a relatively powerless entity that is more of a pressure group than a robust political party.  They want a "new and improved" political party that replaces one of our current parties.  And, as it will manifestly be wonderful, it should quickly rise to become the dominant party.  Okay.  Now for some history.

Third parties have arisen from time to time in the US going all the way back to the beginning.  The US started out with no political parties.  But that didn't last long.  Soon we had the Federalists and the anti-Federalists.  These parties quickly evolved into the Democratic Party (under various names) and the Whig Party.  (For some reason the British like the name "Whig" for a political party and that's where the name of the US party came from.)

In the middle 1800s the Whig party imploded over the issue of slavery.  The anti-slavery wing of the Whig party reorganized and became the "Republican" party in the runup to the Civil War.  The Republicans won the war and have displayed a remarkable instinct for survival ever since.  The Civil War Democratic party has also displayed a remarkable instinct for survival.  As a result we have had the same two major political parties ever since.  Many have argued that this is far too long.  Hence the periodic urge for a third party.

More recently we have had various "Dixiecrat" splinters.  For historical reasons the "Solid South" was firmly in the hands of the Democratic party for a long time.  But the Democratic party contained a lot of people who favored civil rights.  So southern Democrats, who opposed civil rights, staged various revolts under the "Dixiecrat" banner.  But rather than trying to be a "new and improved" version of the Democratic party these were throwback movements.  They never got much traction outside the South and eventually the need went away.

Someone who could more credibly be seen as being seriously interested in forming a new and improved major political party is Ross Perot.  Perot was a successful businessman from Texas.  He hijacked the "Reform" party, a then largely unknown splinter party, and had quite a bit of success in the 1992 Presidential election.  He collected almost 20% of the popular vote.  The Reform party is still around today.  But the '92 campaign turned out to be mostly Perot (who turned out to be a, shall we say, "quirky" candidate) so it hasn't had significant success since.

Before moving on let me explain why the Dixiecrat party went away.  It got replaced by the Republican party.  In '68 Nixon embarked on the "Southern Strategy", an effort to lure southerners away from the Democratic party.  He was successful.

Except that what he wanted was for southerners to become merely a loyal faction within a larger Republican party.  The party as a whole, however, would continue to be dominated by people (and ideas) from elsewhere.  That part didn't work out at all.  The southern "faction" has now taken complete control of the Republican party.  Trump may be a New Yorker, born and bred, but his governing style and philosophy is pure "old south".  And that demonstrates a key point about third parties.

The fundamental force driving the movement is the perceived need for a party that behaves differently than either currently party is apparently capable of.  But every election subjects each political party to fierce evolutionary pressure.  They do what they do because they believe what they are doing will win them elections.

If a pattern of behavior results in consistent election losses then the political party employing that pattern of behavior will change its pattern of behavior.  The heart of every political party is its elected officials.  If a bunch of them engage in a specific pattern of behavior and that pattern is unsuccessful they will be turfed out of office.  As a result, their ability to impose that pattern of behavior on the rest of the party will be diminished or eliminated completely.  Other patterns of behavior will come to dominate.

Political parties behave the way they do because it leads to election success.  The Republican party became the Southern party because people employing the "Southern" pattern of behavior won elections and other Republicans who employed a different pattern of behavior lost.  This is not true of every race in every election.  But it is true of most races most of the time.  And that is enough.

As late as 1990 the Republican party was not the Southern party.  But in the roughly 30 years since, on average "Southern" candidates in the Republican party have won and non-Southern candidates have lost.  And until a few weeks ago Republicans controlled the White House, both chambers of Congress, and many state legislatures and governorships.  Their success has been undeniable.

And that leads to the fundamental truth about third parties.  They are only seen to be necessary because the two current political parties don't behave as they should.  But they behave as they do because that behavior leads to success with voters.  The current political parties behave as they do because voters have made them behave that way.  To bastardize Shakespeare:

The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our political parties but in our voters.

If you want to change the behavior of political parties change the behavior of voters.  And the first thing to understand is that voters hate the way the current political parties behave.  But they love and, therefore, vote for the elected officials of those very same political parties who represent them.  The typical Incumbent wins reelection something like 80% or more of the time.

If a large group of voters voted like they actually thought both current political parties were horrible the logical thing would be to vote for the non-incumbent, regardless of political party.  But they don't.  Somehow, the bad behavior of the party as a whole is not the fault of the voter's own elected officials, who just happen to be members of that very same party.  It's the fault of all the other elected officials that represent those other idiot voters.  If this sounds stupid to you it's because it is.  But it is also true.

This irrational behavior is the foundation of the yearning for a third party.  But it is misplaced.  A major political party is a massive undertaking.  It takes obscene amounts of money.  It requires giant staffs of skilled and talented people.  It requires the collection and effective use of vast amounts of information.  Ideally, it requires the recruitment, training, and deployment of thousands upon thousands of volunteers.  Putting an operation of this scale and complexity together from scratch is a herculean endeavor.

It is far easier to change the behavior of one or the other of the current political parties than it is to create a new one. But admitting that would also require voters to admit their own complicity.  They can get exactly what they want.  All they have to do is to change the criteria they use to decide who they are going to vote for.  This does not require any money or any great amount of political organization or anything else.

Besides the "hate the group but love the individual" behavior, here are some other criteria voters actually use.  They like tall handsome (but not too handsome) men with a full head of hair.  (This applies only to their first run for their current office.  After that, the "incumbent" factor dominates.  There are a lot of fat, homely, old, elected officials.  But for the most part (Trump is an exception) they are long time incumbents.)  Voters also like good looking women (but not too good looking and preferably blonde) with good figures.  (Palin fits the mold to a "T", except for the hair color part.)

Voters also like charmers rather than people with demonstrated competence.  Everybody can list a bunch of people who fit this criteria.  But most people's list will consist primarily of people from the opposition.  We love our own charmers most of all.  If you want "new and improved" none of the criteria on this list should be there.  But in the real world, sadly they all are.

More generally, people say they want money out of politics and they say they hate negative ads.  But the only candidates who win without bags of money are people running (usually for reelection) in super-safe districts where the electorate is heavily skewed in favor of one party or the other.  (I live in just such a district.)  And the problem with negative ads is that they work.  Lots of candidates have run without employing them.  Mostly, they lost.  Now all politicians swear they hate them and they wouldn't use them, but they do.  They rightly believe they can't win without them.

The call for a third party has died down for the moment. The Republican party has evolved under the influence of Trump.  It is not the party it was four years ago.  And many would argue that the Democrats have evolved in response to Trump.  We'll see.  But we will also likely see chatter about the need for a third party emerge yet again once the campaigns for the 2020 election are well under way.  You just can't keep a bad idea down these days.

Dr. Phil is Wrong

Dr. Phil McGraw was a guest recently on the "The Late Show with Steven Colbert".  Specifically he was on the Season 4 Episode 33 show.  That episode aired on October 26, 2018 on CBS but was actually recorded the day before.  You can see the segment at https://www.cbs.com/shows/the-late-show-with-stephen-colbert/video/W9ZiZBuwoE7htzZq4LhfH0v8bQV2lHEQ/dr-phil-on-trans-rights-rollbacks-kiss-my-ass-/.  It runs a little over ten minutes in length.  So who is Dr. Phil and why does this matter?

McGraw has a Ph. D. in Clinical Psychology so he is an actual certified professional.  But at some point the "show biz" bug bit him and he started appearing regularly on Oprah Winfrey's show.  The appearances were popular so Winfrey decided to produce a stand-alone show called "Dr. Phil" and starring McGraw.  That show has been on the air continuously since 2002.  It has aired over 2,000 episodes.  As part of the interview Dr. Phil announced that his show had been renewed for an additional couple of years.

"Dr. Phil" is now a household name.  He is popular enough to routinely score interview segments on shows like Colbert.  Shows are happy to book him because he is a popular and entertaining guest.  His show falls into the general category of "advice givers".  It is not a category he pioneered.

The concept probably dates back to the mists of time but I cam going to start in 1943 with a newspaper column in the Chicago Sun Times called "Ask Ann Landers" (or something similar).  People would write in with their problems.  Each column would reproduce a couple of letters.  After each letter "Ann" would weigh in with a response.

The column was pioneered by Ruth Crowley.  But in 1955 Esther Lederer took over and the column became wildly popular.  It was so popular that her twin sister jumped in with a column of her own called "Dear Abby".  There she wrote under the name of Abigail Van Buren.  "Dear Abby" was very popular but never quite as popular as "Ask Ann Landers".

The formula, then and now, consisted of someone writing about something odd, difficult, or downright silly.  The columnist would then provide a sensible answer.  The formula works because readers associate themselves with the sensible columnist and feel better about themselves.  "At least I am not as silly or unlucky or clueless as the writer."  The successful columnists figured out this formula and picked letters to publish that fit the formula.

And the "Dr. Phil" show is just the evolution of the same idea into a daytime television format.  Dr. Phil freely dishes out advice and perspective left and right.  People feel that if they had a serious problem Dr. Phil would provide some help.  And as a bonus they get to feel good about themselves knowing they are not as silly or stupid as other guests.  McGraw did an excellent job of showcasing this particular formula in his segment on Colbert.  So what's to complain about?

At about 5:20 into the segment he said "I don't follow politics because I don't think I should use my platform to influence people".  If he had stopped there I would have no complaint.  He gets paid a lot of money because his show gets high ratings so it pulls in big advertising fees.  Alienating part of your audience risks driving a good chunk of that audience away.  And that means lower ratings and, more importantly, lower advertising fees.

The problem is he continued talking.  He pasted "on things I don't know enough about" onto what I have quoted above.  Really?  His whole format depends on people believing he is a sound thinker of above average intelligence.  It also depends on him knowing things and being willing to impart that knowledge to others.

Finally, he is a certified Clinical Psychologist and a big issue in our politics is a psychological one.  What he does for a living is diagnose and try to remedy psychological disorders.  He should be very familiar with this particular disorder and he should have a remedy close at hand to share with us.

More than one person has observed that I have lots of opinions and I dispense them freely.  Dr. Phil is the same way.  He freely dispensed several opinions within the span of the interview on Colbert.  If he had said "I don't publicly weigh in on political matters for business and other reasons", that would have been an honest statement.  What he said instead was deeply dishonest.  And credibility is part of his stock in trade.  You can depend on what he has to say because "he tells it like it is".

He succeeded in his mission of entertaining Colbert's audience and creating good publicity for his show.  But he did the country and his audience a disservice by being dishonest.  So far I have been beating around the bush about what the problem is that he should have been willing to talk about.  (Or he should have given an honest disclaimer about why he wouldn't talk about it.)  That problem is the blatant dishonesty that infects the White House and the Republican Party today.

Dr. Phil has something to say about the behavior that is routinely on display in both of those institutions.  I know this because he discussed the exact same behavior during the interview.  He told a number of stories but I am only going to focus on two.  The first one concerns some guests who appeared on a recent "Dr. Phil" show.

According to Dr. Phil there is a thing.  That thing consists of women claiming to be pregnant for 3-5 years straight.  This is a single pregnancy and it does not even result in a birth at the end. Instead the pregnancy goes on, apparently indefinitely.  He contrasts this situation with another situation that turns out to be strange but true.  In the other situation there is abundant evidence available that what those women are experiencing is an actual thing.

In the case of the "indefinitely long pregnancy" women, and apparently there are group of them.  We know this because, according to Dr. Phil, there are places on the Internet that cater to them.  A proper examination by competent professionals quickly determines that nothing is going on.  These women are not pregnant at all.

Dr. Phil's "solution" was to tell them to their face that they were not pregnant.  Needless to say he convinced none of them.  But both he and his audience felt better.  His point was that what these women were up to consisted of a lie that could be, and in this case was, easily disproven.  He denigrated them for failing to take cognizance of the evidence, evidence he presented to them on his show, that they were wrong.

His second story arose out of the question of "when did you discover that you were 'Dr. Phil'".  The short version of the answer turned out to be "in the fifth grade".  This story begins about 9 minutes into the interview.  He began his explanation by outlining the circumstances of a fight he got into at the time.  He got involved because some kids were picking on a fellow student.  Eventually this led to a trip to the principle's office.

That in turn led to was confronted with his teacher at the time, Mrs. Gates.  Here the problem was that Mrs. Gates was completely uninterested in learning the facts of the situation.  As a result McGraw decided she no longer deserved to be seen as an credible authority figure.  And he told her so.  He quotes himself as saying to her at the time "that's right lady -- that includes you".

So Dr. Phil establishes that he disapproves of people who deny the facts even when they are presented by competent authority.  He also disapproves of people who are not interested in finding out what the facts are.  But wait!  It gets worse.  At 4:15 into the interview he asks "when did it stop being okay to disagree?"  So it turns out that there is an aspect of our present political climate that he disapproves of.  He does have an opinion about politics.  And at its most simplistic level he has a solution he recommends.  "Make it okay to disagree."

We can argue about the hour or the day or the year when it stopped being okay to disagree?  And Dr. Phil may not have yet spent the time and effort necessary to figure out how we got to where we now are.  But he owes it to us to follow his own advice to Mrs. Gates and learn the facts of the situation.  Maybe he has and he doesn't want to alienate a part of his audience by disclosing what he has found.  Before continuing let me provide a longer version of "make it okay to disagree".

People need to be willing to listen, to be willing to find out what the facts are.  And people need to be willing to modify their opinions when the facts unambiguously say their opinion is wrong.  But we have a large group of people who behave otherwise.

Everybody does it some of the time.  We sometimes choose to ignore facts or are uninterested in determining what the actual facts are.  But not everybody does it to the same extent and degree.  And it turns out that the Trump Administration engages in this behavior to an extreme extent.  This is profoundly wrong.  And they have dragged the Republican along with them.  Both operate in an alternate universe where they believe that if they say something loud enough and often enough it magically becomes true.

Dr. Phil could have contributed to the solution by pointing this out but he has chosen not to.  And we are all the less as a result of that decision.  And this behavior by Dr. Phil and many, many, others is why we are where we now find ourselves.  But Trump didn't invent any of this.  He just took it to an extreme.  For the remainder of this post I would like to examine what led us to this point.  And that involves going back in history.

For a long period of time the Republican party was dominant.  Every once in a while the Democrats had some success but overall, especially at the national level, the Republicans were by and large the dominant party.  This all ended with the Great Depression.

Republicans had been generally seen as the superior stewards of the economy.  Then the stock market crashed in '29 and the Great Depression set in shortly thereafter.  Republicans did not stand aside idly.  They immediately sprang into action.  And their leader, Herbert Hoover, was well respected.  And he did the obvious thing.  He consulted with experts and did what they recommended.  And things got worse.

By 1932 people had enough.  They no longer believed Republicans knew what they were doing and they were desperate.  So the turned to the Democrats and FDR.  Within a year or so they saw forward progress.  Things got slowly better until 1938 when FDR was convinced to adopt some Republican economic ideas because "it's over".  Things immediately got worse again.  This '38 experience destroyed any economic credibility Republicans had left.

Then World War II started and the US was eventually dragged into it.  And the public generally approved of how FDR and the Democrats conducted the War.  So by the postwar period the roles had flipped.  Democrats were now the dominant party.  Republicans could have some success under someone as popular as Eisenhauer but Republican were deeply concerned about how to get back on top.

In 1960 Nixon ran as the seasoned and experienced moderate who had been closely associated with the popular Eisenhauer and his popular administration.  But he lost to the charismatic but inexperienced Kennedy.  Things looked dire.  At the time both parties were seen as centrist.  And each party consisted of various factions and wings.  Put in modern terms, many Republicans were more liberal than many Democrats and vice versa.  Many Republicans saw a need to differentiate.  In a race between two essentially similar parties the Democrats would maintain their dominant position.

While this was going on the patron saint of modern conservatism, William F. Buckley, emerged.  He was a brilliant man and a fierce and effective debater.  His creed was conservativism.  He believed deeply in its inherent correctness.  He considered himself smart enough and articulate enough to defend it against all comers.  And he was right.  He was smart enough and articulate enough.  So over the years he took on all comers on his long running TV show, "Firing Line".

Most of the time he won, either by being brilliant enough or by pulling out various debating tricks.  He took this as evidence that Republicans should differentiate themselves and that they should do so by embracing conservatism.  A lot of fellow Republicans agreed with him on the "differentiation" part of the argument but they weren't convinced about the "embrace conservatism" part.  So Buckley and "Firing Line" were a niche phenomenon.  Die hard politics junkies and people concerned about the future of the Republican party followed him carefully but the general public didn't.

Then in 1964 Barry Goldwater, a staunch conservative, ran for President against Lynden Johnson and got shellacked.  To many this meant the death of conservatism as a viable approach to gaining mainstream success.  But others took away a different lesson.

Kennedy beat Nixon not by being smarter, or more knowledgeable, or ever more liberal (their positions on many issues differed in only small ways).  Johnson beat Goldwater in '64 not based on his better ideas but by crass political manipulation.  For instance, he appealed to the Kennedy "legacy" but Kennedy's actual record of legislative success was modest and contained no marquis successes.

So the problem, they concluded, was not the message but the messenger.  Republican standard bearers needed to be more like Johnson, who they believed was deeply cynical and dishonest, and less like Goldwater, who was committed to his beliefs and completely honest.

Before moving on I am going to make one more observation about Buckley.  He believed in honesty, intellectual and otherwise.  Leaving aside the occasional debating trick he believed he was right so he didn't have to lie or ignore the facts.  So he famously read various individuals and groups out of the conservative movement.  Most famously, he read the John Birch Society out of the conservative movement.  It wasn't that that their beliefs weren't conservative.  They were.

It was they peddled numerous quack ideas and made up conspiracies.  Fluoridation (adding Fluoride to drinking water to reduce cavities) was some kind of communist plot.  That sort of thing.  He found them dishonest.  And he had enough power within the conservative movement at the time to make his edicts stick.  While Buckley was in charge, conservatism was about ideas.  They embraced facts because he thought the facts were on their side.  Unfortunately, conservatism soon moved away from Buckley.

In the '70s a new kind of conservative emerged.  This kind valued popularity.  They soon found a suitable standard bearer in Ronald Reagan.  Reagan was a believer but he was an intellectual lightweight.  He believed in conservatism because "he had faith" in it.  He also had a poor understanding of it.  He stuck to a few slogans and left it at that.  But he was a skilled politician and was extremely likable.

He ran unsuccessfully for President in '76 and successfully in '80.  He came to the job with substantial executive experience.  He had been Governor of California, the biggest state in terms of either population or economic power.  And it was the home of Hollywood, one of the most powerful cultural institutions in the world.

So running the US was a step up from running California but it was not that big of a step.  Look at the size of the step up that Kennedy, for instance, took.  Before becoming President he was a US Senator, a job he had not held for all that long and which did not involve running a large bureaucracy.

Reagan was no Buckley and it showed.  He appointed one of the weakest cabinets ever installed.  That is until we saw the Trump cabinet.  And Reagan was easily conned.  To con Reagan all you had to do was to be liked by him and to construct your argument so that it sounded like what you wanted to do was in line with his principles.  And, unlike modern Republicans, Reagan liked to make deals.  So he and "Tip" O'Neill, the long time and very cagy Democratic Speaker of the House, made many deals.

Reagan liked Tip and Tip found ways to structure his arguments as best he could to align with the slogans Reagan believed in.  And he frankly threw in some things Reagan did not want but he was careful to not do that very often.  As long as Reagan believed he was getting the better end of the deal and Tip believed he was getting the best deal he was likely to get, they could and did agree to move ahead.  So a lot of legislation was passed under Reagan and a lot of it attracted at least some Democratic support.

I don't know if he did it on purpose or not but Reagan introduced what I call the "both sides" ploy.  He would say one thing but do exactly the opposite.  For instance, he was a vigorous deficit hawk.  "Deficits are evil and not to be tolerated".  That's what he said.  On the other hand his administration ran large deficits every year he was in office.  And he took no action to reduce them.

I remember grilling a Reagan supporter about this at the time.  I'd say "what about this?"  He would say "well, I really like what he says on this".  Then I'd ask "what about that?"  The supporter said "I really like what he does on that?"

This allowed Reagan to effectively get credit for both sides of an issue.  His supporters picked the "said" or "did" part, whichever they approved of, and gave Reagan credit for being on the right side of the issue.  Talk about a "win", "win", situation for Reagan.  There is no secret as to why he was so well liked.

As I said, I don't know if Reagan had a clue as to what was going on.  I suspect he didn't.  Two more examples.  He also strongly believed "you don't pay off blackmailers".  And, after they kidnapped about a hundred of our embassy staff and held them for ransom he saw the Iranians as blackmailers.  But then along comes Oliver North.  He was a mid level official in Reagan's administration.

The congress had tied the administration's hands with respect to the Nicaraguan civil war.  On one side you had the government and on the other side you had the "Contra" rebels.  Reagan desperately wanted to get funds to the Nicaraguan government to fight the Contras but congress had passed a law forbidding this.

North came up with a deal that involved selling arms to Iran at inflated prices.  The profits would be funneled to the Nicaraguans.  The Iran piece violated Reagan's deeply held belief.  The Nicaraguan piece violated the congressional ban.  But North pulled the wool over Reagan's eyes and put the deal together anyhow.  The whole thing eventually blew up into the Iran/Contra scandal.

In the other example I am going to describe the results were actually beneficial.  Reagan was fervently anti-communist.  He was opposed to communism on ideological grounds but he also felt that communist leaders were untrustworthy liars.  So you couldn't do a deal with them.  But he ended up doing a big disarmament deal with the communist Gorbachev.  Why?  Because his wife Nancy convinced him that a disarmament treaty was a good thing and that he actually could deal with a communist.  He ended up having a warm and friendly relationship with Gorbachev.

There is a thread that runs through all this.  That thread is deception.  Various people convinced Reagan of things that were not true.  That followed a well established trend within the Republican party.  Nixon got his start in politics by using smear and innuendo campaign tactics to defeat his Democratic opponent.  He used similar tactics to climb up the political ladder to the Vice Presidency.

Then in  '60 he decided he could play it straight against Kennedy as he was by far the better qualified of the two.  He lost.  He played it straight again in '62 when he ran for Governor of California.  Again, he lost.  He went back to his old ways in '68 and '72.  He won both times.  Being honest and ethical is for losers.

I believe Reagan thought of himself as an honest person.  But he surrounded himself with people who weren't.  Perhaps the most significant, even more so than North, was Lee Atwater.  He was a mid level political operative.  He was a firm believer in "winning is the only thing".  And he became a master at lying for political advantage and getting away with it.

Various dirty tricks were played against Reagan's primary opponents, not by Reagan himself, but by Atwater and others like him.  Atwater then moved on in the General Election to lying and playing dirty tricks on Democrats.  Reagan might have won (maybe not the first time but definitely the second time) without these lies and dirty tricks.  But he won and neither he nor Atwood paid a price for the dirty tricks played on his behalf.  People liked and trusted Reagan anyhow.

With a well liked person on the top of the ticket the sky was the limit when it comes to lying as long as you take precautions.  It is okay to be found out as long as it is not until later.  Then it doesn't matter.  All of Atwater's deceptions were eventually exposed but only when exposure no longer mattered.  We just recently learned that the famous Gary Hart "Monkey Business" affair was manufactured by Atwater.  But Hart stopped running for President decades ago.  And the Republicans eventually won the White House after Hart was forced out.

The next key event in the story is the rise of Newt Gingrich.  In the late '80s he figured out that there was a lot of money lying around that could be put to good use.  He put it to good use building the "machine" that is the Republican campaign operation to this day.  He is definitely of the Atwater school where only winning counts.

And he represented a move away from the Buckley belief that honesty combined with ideas were "the only thing".  Gingrich started out with a bunch of ideas.  They were the product of intensive polling to determine what could be sold to the public rather than from some intellectually rigorous process.

Gingrich did subscribe to "differentiation". He saw the Democratic party as not moving so he moved the Republican party away from where the Democrats were.  He also introduced the "no negotiation" approach.  To his way of thinking giving up on 20% of what you wanted in order to get 80% was a bad deal.  It was 100% or nothing.

This was a complete repudiation of the Reagan approach.  And Reagan's approach was a repudiation of the Buckley approach.  As most conservatives were not as doctrinaire as Buckley they were fine with Reagan.  They were tired of losing and thought that 60% or 80% of what they wanted was a win.

And if the Gingrich approach had failed badly enough then that would have been the end of that.  But Gingrich won big in '94, two years into the Clinton administration.  Things went backwards for a while but the Gingrich approach roared back in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush.  The Bush people used a strategy that involved a lot of deception.  Compare what Bush said he would do with the budget surplus he inherited with what he actually did, for instance.  Or look at how the Iraq war was sold versus what the truth was.

Bush represented Reagan-light.  He was likable but not as likeable as Reagan.  He too saw his job as mostly to be the front man for his administration.  And like Reagan, he left the details to his subordinates and was careful not to inquire too closely about what they were actually up to.  This approach was successful enough that Bush got re-elected in '04.  But by the end of Bush's second term the public was well and truly done with Bush and his administration.

That brings us to Mitch McConnell.  As with the Republicans in the '60s there was a deep feeling that the Democrats had regained the inside track in terms of the popularity of their agenda.  But the Republican election machine was so effective that Republicans won races in spite of how unpopular their agenda was.

Part of the reason for this unpopularity was that after Gingrich Republicans ran out of ideas.  But by this time they had become heavily dependent on rich and powerful donors.  And the "donor class" knew what they wanted.  But what they wanted was very unpopular with the public.

McConnell hatched the "just say no" strategy.  Oppose everything Obama and the Democrats tried to do and present nothing as an alternative.  That way no one on the right had anything to complain about.

They told rich donors that Obama was blocking their initiatives.  They told doctrinaire conservatives "we're with you but we are out of power".  They told their base that everything Obama was trying to do was evil.  And they invented outright lies like "death panels" to convince them this was so.  And it worked.

It was fundamentally dishonest but it worked.  And as long as Obama was in office to serve as the universal villain who was blocking all the "wonderful" things Republicans wanted to do for their donors, their increasingly out of touch conservative wing, and their base, it all worked well.

It helped that the press went along with this.  Republicans had long since figured out that the press would print anything as long as it was sensational and, therefore, likely to be good for circulation/ratings.  "We don't fact check.  We just report what they say and let the public figure it out."  But the public was spectacularly ill equipped to "figure it out" on its own.

Then Trump came along.  He took dishonesty to new heights.  And he applied all the skills he had developed from his years of manipulating the New York City media, both tabloid and legitimate, to his advantage.  In effect he "turned the knob up to 11".

Much of the Republican establishment was appalled by Trump.  But they were a victim of their own long standing behavior.  Trump wasn't doing anything they hadn't already been doing for decades to a lesser extent.  He just did more of it and he did it better.  He got away with it because they had learned how to get away with it during his business carrier.  Trump's only contribution was the idea that you could get away with far more than anyone had previously imagined possible.

The New York (and later national) press had long since decided that Trump was "good copy".  As a candidate and later as President he has continued to be good copy.  As long as he continued to produce large amounts of good copy the press literally could not stop themselves from continuing to behave as they always did.

Trump would make some outrageous pronouncement.  The press would cover it extensively because it was good copy.  If it was the usual harmless lie or exaggeration, that was that.  The story would die with no one the wiser.  The real story was not good copy so it didn't run.

In other situations actual harm was being done or someone would dig down and find the story false.  But this would take time.  So a small story exposing the falsehood would perhaps appear somewhere days later when everybody had moved on.  There would be no follow up or extensive coverage because the story had reached its "stale date".  And, to the extent that the exposure of the falsehood was covered at all, it would be buried on page A-23 where only true news junkies noticed.

Trump knew this was how the news business worked and he took full advantage of his knowledge.  Recently the New York Times admitted that it had published far too many "puff pieces" (their characterization) about Trump over the years.  And, as you would now expect, this revelation was buried deep in the paper and there was no follow up.

As we have now seen, Republicans figured out a long time ago that you can lie if you go about it properly.  They have by now so inured us to this that neither they nor the rest of us knows how to deal with Trump.  He didn't start it.  He just took maximal advantage of what McConnell, Gingrich, Atwater, and others, laid the groundwork for.

This is not politics in the usual sense.  It is much more Psychology.  And getting to the bottom of things, exposing the psychological truths that underlie this kind of behavior, that's what Dr. Phil is supposed to specialize in.  And he is supposed to be on our side on this.  It is sad and disappointing to find him MIA on this.  On the other hand, based on his total lack of success with the "pregnant" ladies and his fifth grade teacher, maybe he doesn't have anything useful to contribute.

And in a sense Dr. Phil is now right.  If caught before it got out of hand, a psychology-based solution might have been effective.  But that was then.  Republicans now think that this is the way they must do business if they are to be successful.  After all, Trump won in 2016 and the Republican base is largely still with him.  They will not change their behavior until they decide that continuing to do things the Trump (or McConnell or Gingrich or Atwater) way is a recipe for disaster.

Now the only solution left is a political one.  Republicans must lose.  They must lose consistently and by substantial margins.  Otherwise, they will think they have encountered a dry spell not unlike other dry spells they have encountered in the past.  They will only change if election results convince them they must.

50 Years of Science - Part 12

This post is the next in a series dating back several years.  As I have previously indicated, a more correct title might be something like "59 Years of Science".  But I like the original title, even though it becomes less accurate every year, so I am sticking with it.  By now we are up to the twelfth post in the series.  And you can go to http://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-links.html to find an index with links to all of the previous posts in the series.  I will update that post to include a link to this post right after this post is published.

I take Isaac Asimov's book "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences" as my baseline for the state of science as it was when he wrote the book (1959 - 60).  In these posts I am reviewing what he reported and what's changed since.  For this post I am starting with the chapter Asimov titled "Gases".  I will then move on to the chapter he titled "Metals".

The traditional "phases" of materials are solid, liquid, and gas.  Since the dawn of Chemistry it has been known that a material can transition from one phase to another as the temperature is changed.  In 1787 Charles discovered the law now named after him.  A gas contracts as it is cooled (and expands as it is heated).  He also noted that the contraction amounted to one part in 273 if the temperature was what we now call 0 degrees Celsius.  (In Asimov's time the equivalent temperature scale was called Centigrade.  I am going to skip over the small technical differences between the Celsius and Centigrade scales.  For our purposes they are essentially the same.)  Charles wondered if there was an "absolute zero" that was 273 degrees colder than 0 Celsius.

It turns out he was on to something but it would be a long time before equipment existed to lower temperatures more than a few tens of degrees below zero Celsius.  When the "atomic theory of gasses" was developed temperature could be related to tiny molecules of gas moving at high speeds and banging off of each other.  A decrease in speed would accompany a decrease in temperature.  This would naturally lead to a decrease in the average distance between molecules.  And that would make the same amount of gas occupy less space.

In the 1860's the physicist Thompson discussed with Lord Kelvin the idea that at absolute zero (-273 degrees Celsius) all molecular motion would cease.  It was obviously not possible to go slower than zero speed so no lower temperature was possible.  Asimov pegs Absolute zero at -273.12 degrees Centigrade.  We can now add several decimal places (plus make the adjustments necessary to switch from Centigrade to Celsius) but the value has changed little in the intervening time.

Quantum Mechanics tells us, however, that it is impossible for all motion to completely stop.  The Heisenberg Uncertainty principle requires that even at absolute zero there is some motion still present.  And it turns out that the amount of residual motion matters.  Scientists are now able to reduce the temperature of small amounts of matter to a thousandth, a millionth, or even a billionth of a degree above absolute zero.  And in some cases these tiny temperature changes cause the properties of the material to change due to quantum effects.  The study of temperatures very near absolute zero is now is now an area that commands the energies of a relatively large scientific community.  But that's getting ahead of the story.

The coldest temperatures available to early scientists were not much lower than 0 Celsius.  But that just led to "out of the box" thinking.  The first step along this path was to notice that some gasses could be liquified without lowering their temperature.  All that was necessary was to raise their pressure.  This worked well for Chlorine, Sulfur Dioxide, Carbon Dioxide, and a number of other gasses.  Pressurizing gasses tends to heat them up.  But if you pressurize a gas, cool it down, then depressurize it, it becomes very cold.  That's how refrigeration works.  And refrigeration extended the range of cold temperatures accessible to scientists.

Another trick is evaporation.  The process of evaporation draws heat out of a liquid.  At the microscopic level what's going on is that all liquids contain molecules traveling at different speeds.  If a high speed molecule happens to fly above the surface of a liquid it may never come back.  This is how evaporation works at the molecular level and this mechanism preferentially removes the speediest molecules from the liquid.  And, just as with a gas, these speedy molecules are the warmest ones.  So evaporation, by removing the warmest molecules, lowers the average temperature of the remainder.  In other words, it cools the liquid down.  This "evaporative cooling" technique is how "Swamp coolers" work.

So scientists found clever ways to use refrigeration, evaporation, or both to reach heretofore unreachably cold temperatures.  By 1885 -110 Celsius was reachable.  But this is only 40% of the way to absolute zero.  And, more importantly, a number of common gasses, Hydrogen, Oxygen, Nitrogen, and others, stayed in their gaseous form at this temperature.  In 1869 Andrews determined that gasses had a "critical temperature".  Above the critical temperature the gas would not liquify no matter how much pressure was applied.  That made it all the more was important to be reduce the temperature of these gasses still further.

The "cascade" method allowed temperatures to be further lowered.  An evaporation/refrigeration process using one gas was used to lower the temperature a certain amount.  Then a second evaporation/refrigeration process using a different gas was used to lower the temperature further.  By using a cascade consisting of several stages Pictet managed to liquify Oxygen at -140.  Others liquified Carbon Monoxide (-190) and Nitrogen (-195).  But it wasn't until 1900 that Dewar managed to liquify Hydrogen at -240 by using a multi-stage process that depended on these tricks plus his own invention, a "Dewar bottle", what we now call a "thermos bottle".  But we are now only 88% of the way to our goal.  And, as is common in these situations, the closer you get the harder it is to make additional progress.

Now we make a couple of digressions, not compliments of me, but instead compliments of Mr. Asimov.  He first digresses by noting that by 1895 Hampton had been able to turn laboratory scale techniques into ones that could be performed at industrial scale. A simple modification of the same basic technique made it possible to cheaply and easily manufacture Oxygen in either liquid or gaseous form.  It could then be used in Acteline torches and as a component in liquid fueled rockets, to name just two of the many applications that this breakthrough made possible.

In his second digression Asimov takes a moment to talk about what makes a good rocket fuel.  As the results are informative, I am going to summarize them here.  (Feel free to consult the original if you want to know more.)  The magic number that tells you how efficient a rocket fuel is is something called "specific impulse".  The more the better.  Mixing Kerosene and Oxygen yields a specific impulse of 242.  Using Hydrogen and Oxygen gives you 350.

So a pound of Hydrogen-Oxygen performs as well as about a pound and a half of Kerosene-Oxygen.  But, of course, in the former case the rocket is lighter to the tune of a half a pound.  Solid fuels generally have a lower specific impulse.  But they are cheaper and safer and easier to work with.  This makes it much easier to understand the trade-offs involved in selecting the fuel to use in your rocket.

Among the options listed, liquid Hydrogen + liquid Oxygen is the best but the hardest to work with so when you factor everything in it is likely to be the most expensive option.  Solid fuels are the easiest to work and so initially they look to be the least expensive option with but are not nearly as efficient.  Kerosene + liquid Oxygen is somewhere in the middle both in terms of efficiency and ease of use.  Elon Musk went with this middle choice for his Space-X rockets.

And I always thought that liquid Hydrogen + liquid Oxygen was the best (as in most efficient) chemical fuel.  But Asimov says I am wrong.   Both Oxygen and Hydrogen are normally molecules consisting of two identical atoms bonded tightly together.  And it is the combining of molecular Hydrogen with molecular Oxygen that I have been talking about.  But they both elements also have an "atomic" form consisting of a single atom.

And if you start out with "atomic" Hydrogen and let it combine with itself in a rocket motor to form molecular Hydrogen you get a hell of a lot of energy.  The specific impulse of this configuration is 1,300.  It is almost 4 times as efficient as what I thought was the best chemical fuel.  It's not used because no one has been able to figure out how to store atomic Hydrogen in the necessary quantities.

Most people know where the end of the line is when it comes to liquifying gasses.  The hardest gas to liquify is Helium.  But in 1908 Onnes cracked the riddle and liquified Helium under high pressure at -255 Celsius.  By applying more tricks to his already extremely cold liquid Helium he was able to get small quantities down to 4.2 degrees above absolute zero (now referred to as 4.2 K for "degrees Kelvin").  At that temperature Helium is a liquid at normal pressure.  The lowest temperature he was able to achieve was 1 K.

Work at these temperatures allowed Onnes to discover super-conductivity.  Under the right circumstances materials lose all resistance to the movement of an electric current.  Mercury becomes a super-conductor at 4.12 K.  Lead becomes one at 7.22 K. In Asimov's time the highest temperature at which super-conductivity was observed was 11.2 K.  Things have changed a lot since.  The first "high temperature" super-conductor was discovered in 1986.  Since then many others have followed.

But the holy grail, a material that super-conducts at room temperature, is still only a dream.  And there is now a two track contest.  Some materials become super-conductive at relatively high temperatures but only if they are compressed to very high pressures.  These materials are interesting but not that practical.  Unfortunately, materials that super-conduct at normal pressure do so at much lower temperatures.

And the lack of even a hint of a realistic possibility of ever finding a room temperature super-conductor has led scientists to move the bar.  A material that super-conducts at normal pressure and at or above the temperature of liquid Nitrogen would be immensely useful.  Liquid Nitrogen is now considered so widely and inexpensively available that a material that super-conducts in a bath of liquid Nitrogen is now considered "good enough".  But even this considerably relaxed goal is still well out of reach.

Most devices that employ magnets constructed from super-conducting material like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the CERN laboratory that straddles the Swiss - French border, bathe them in a cooling fluid of liquid Helium.  Using materials that super-conduct at higher temperatures could instead use a less demanding and less expensive non-Helium cooling system.

But so far, no one has figured how to get such a system to work well enough to be practical.  That means that everyone needing the performance a super-conducting magnet delivers has ended up being forced to go with a liquid Helium cooling system.  Moving to high-temperature super-conductors for practical applications is still a dream rather than a reality.

And both the super-conducting phenomenon and super-conducting materials were quite mysterious in Asimov's time.  They are now less mysterious.  There is now a theory called BCS that seems to be relatively successful in providing some insight.  It involves something called "Cooper pairs".  I don't understand it well enough to talk about it so I'll leave it at that.

Asimov goes into a number of the starling properties of super-conducting materials in general and liquid Helium in particular.  In the interests of brevity I am going to skip over them except to note that the record low temperature achieved by this time was 0.00002 K.

As I noted above, scientists can do better now.  And they have discovered and explored many more remarkable ultra-low temperature phenomenon.  There is something called a Bose-Einstein Condensate that displays remarkable quantum mechanical properties.  Then there is the "Cesium Fountain Clock".  Feel free to search out the details on your own as they are fascinating.  I am going to confine myself to noting that this type of clock is so accurate that over a period of 300 million years it will be off by a second or less and that two Cesium Fountain Clocks, NIST-f1 and NIST-f2, provide the official time standard for the US.

It turns out that an interest in low temperatures naturally led to an interest in high pressures.  Pressures are often measured in "atmospheres".  One atmosphere is 15 pounds per square inch (PSI).  The pressure at the center of the earth is about 3 million atmospheres.  By the 1880s scientists could produce 3,000 atmospheres (45,000 PSI) in the laboratory.  In 1905 Bridgman achieved 20,000 atmospheres.  And somehow this led to a discussion by Asimov of diamonds.

It took a while for scientists to prove that diamonds were just Carbon arranged in a specific crystalline configuration.  It is easy to turn a diamond into another form of Carbon.  Is it possible to go the other way?  Yes, but it takes a lot of pressure.  The first artificial diamonds were produced in 1955 in a lab owned by General Electric.  The feat required pressures of 100,000 atmospheres combined with temperatures of 2,500 degrees Celsius.

Artificial diamonds were a curiosity at the time.  They are now a business, albeit a modest one.  The GE process has been improved upon but not by much.  The more interesting recent development is the "Diamond Anvil Cell".  Diamonds are extremely hard.  If you take a diamond with a point on it (the part on the bottom in the setting of an engagement ring) and chop a very small part off of it, you get a small flat spot.

Now do the same thing to a second, similarly sized, diamond.  Now glue one diamond, point out, to one jaw of a vise and the other diamond, also point out, to the other jaw.  If everything is lined up properly all the pressure the vice generates as it is closed is focused into the space between the two tiny flat surfaces at the tips of the diamonds.  If you put something into that tiny space you can subject it to fantastic pressures.

Now add a microscope.  Remember that diamonds are transparent so you can see what is going on by looking through the flat surface of one or the other diamond at whatever you put between them.  You can also shine lights through the diamonds or add other components to perform a wide variety of experiments under extremely high pressure.

Diamond Anvil Cells have become a common tool in labs that want to subject materials to extremely high pressures.  Lots has been learned about the inside of the earth, for instance.  Before the advent of the Diamond Anvil Cell, rocks and minerals thought to be common in the interior of the earth couldn't be subject to pressures high enough to reproduce those found at depth in the earth.  Now they can.

Moving on to "Metals", the first thing to understand is that the definition of what is and is not a metal evolved from experience.  The ancients became familiar with Gold, Silver, Copper, Iron, and Tin.  They seemed to share similarities so they were lumped together as "metals".  Fast forward to the present and Chemists scan the Periodic Table of the Elements and classify many elements as metals and others as non-metals.  But more than anything, what they are doing is retrofitting things to fit the ancient conception of what was and was not a metal.

The ancients observed that a metal in it's pure state was shiny.  You could form it into sheets by beating it with a hammer.  Later it was found to conduct electricity and heat.  So over time elements that seemed to have properties similar to known metals were added to the "metals" group.  This resulted in some weird decisions.

Mercury is a metal even though it is liquid at room temperature.  Why?  Because it is shiny and conducts both heat and electricity well.  So the fact that you couldn't form it into a sheet and beat it with a hammer was ignored.  And so it went to the present day when, as Asimov notes, only about 20 of the (then) 102 elements in the periodic table are classified as non-metals.  The rest are metals.

Then there are the Astronomers.  They have an entirely different definition of a "metal".  At the time of the Big Bang the universe consisted of about 90% Hydrogen (atomic number 1), 10% Helium (atomic number 2), a trace of Lithium (atomic number 3), and pretty much nothing else.  To an astronomer a "metal" is anything that is not either Hydrogen or Helium.

They ignore the trace of Lithium that was also formed during the Big Bang and use "metal" as short-hand for any element created after the Big Bang.  As Asimov goes with the Chemistry definition of "metal", I will too.  But knowing this Astronomical definition of a "metal" may avoid some confusion.  If you come across the word "metal" in an Astronomical context and something seems wrong it's because something actually is wrong.  Astronomers are just being Astronomers.  Once you understand this the confusion evaporates.

Anyhow, the first metal that came into wide use in ancient times was Copper.  Warfare drives a lot of technological advances and "Copper" edged weapons were found to have advantages over stone edged weapons in a lot of contexts.  And Copper, as it is found in the ground, often has some Tin mixed in.  As a result, a lot of ancient "Copper" was actually Bronze.  Bronze has more of the hardness that stone possesses but avoids stone's brittleness.  Pure Copper, on the other hand, is quite soft.

It took a while for the ancients to figure out that they wanted to avoid pure Copper when they were making weapons and go with the Copper that contained a substantial amount of Tin.  By between 3,500 BC (Egypt and other palaces) and 2,000 BC (Greece and other places ) years ago people figured out what the story was and were deliberately mixing Copper and Tin together in the correct proportions to get weapons grade Bronze.  And that's where the "Bronze Age" got it's name.

Iron was known to have excellent properties from antiquity but the only known source for a long time was meteorites.  Smelting, the deliberate manufacture of Iron from ore, was pioneered in Asia Minor in about 1,400 BC.  Iron is much harder to make than Bronze as it requires much higher temperatures and careful attention to the carbon content of the resulting metal.  The early product, called "Wrought Iron", did not have the strength and other properties we now associate with Iron due to all the impurities it contained.

By the middle ages the process was better understood and "Cast Iron", an Iron with fewer impurities, became widely available,  It made much better weapons.  But it tended to be brittle because (as was found out later) it had too much carbon in it (4-5%).  Steel (what we would now call "Mild Steel") is low-carbon (0.2-1.5%) Iron.  It is both stronger than and less brittle than Iron.  But it is also very hard to make.

That is, until 1876 when Bessemer came up with his process for making Steel in large volumes using the simple and inexpensive process that was named after him.  He invented the process to solve a different problem.  Adding rifling (groves that caused the projectile to spin and, therefore, fly much straighter) to the barrels of cannons substantially increased their accuracy.  But the added stresses were too much for the Iron or Brass cannons of the day.  He needed something stronger and his "blast furnace" could make Steel, and that was exactly what was needed.

It turned out that Bessemer steel was inferior if it contained Phosphorus.  Bessemer got around this by using ore that was Phosphorus free.  But in 1875 Thomas figured out that lining blast furnaces with limestone and magnesia enabled the use of high Phosphorous ore.  The lining removed the Phosphorous.  Soon, suitably lined Bessemer-style blast furnaces took over everywhere and the "Age of Steel" got under way.

By 1900 steel was showing up everywhere.  It was used in the rails trains rode on and in the trains themselves.  It was used in the bridges that spanned rivers.  It was in the skeletons of "skyscraper" buildings that rose above the street. It was in the pipes below the streets.  It was in automobiles that rode on the streets.  It was in appliances in the kitchen and more appliances in the laundry room.  It showed up hundreds of consumer products large and small.  It was in the factories that made everything else.  And it revolutionized warfare.

The "Dreadnaught" was the first modern battleship.  It set the pattern that continued to the end of World War II.  The "tank", a weapon invented by the British during World War I, revolutionized how land battles were fought.  Rifled artillery weapons, deployed both on land (most famously as the "Big Bertha" gun the Germans used to shell Paris during World War I) and at sea (also famously as the "16", or in the case of the Japanese "18", "main battery" guns found on the battleships that fought in World War II).  And many of the battles fought during World War I were, in essence, artillery duels involving thousands of guns on each side.

But Bessemer Steel pouring straight out of a blast furnace was not the end of the "Steel" story.  The "Carbon" and the "Phosphorus" stories got scientists to thinking "what would happen if we added a little of this or a little of that to Steel?"  The answer turned out to be very interesting.  Adding Manganese, Tungsten, Chromium, and other materials, could produce Steel with very beneficial properties. Most famously, adding the right amounts of Nickel and Chromium produces "Stainless Steel".

Progress has continued in this area since Asimov published but there have been no big breakthroughs.  One candidate that ultimately failed is something called "Cor-Ten" Steel.  Initially it rusts.  But once a thin layer of rust has built up no more rust forms.  In theory that makes it a good roofing material and it was used on a number of buildings.

The industry had high hopes for it at one point.  But, although it worked exactly as advertised, it never caught on with the general public.  So the Cor-Ten craze lasted only a short while.  Nor has any other "magical new" kind of Steel caught on in a big way.  There have been numerous small advances but no big breakthroughs when it comes to Steel.

But Steel (or the Iron that is its principal component) is not the only metal out there.  Aluminum is a striking example of this.  For most of history Aluminum was considered a rare and exotic material.  It's not because Aluminum itself is rare.  It is actually more common than Iron.  But before 1886 pure Aluminum was very hard to come by.  There are a few chemical processes that will break up molecules containing Aluminum.  But they were either difficult or expensive to perform.  This put Aluminum in the same category of "only for the rich" as Gold and Silver.

All this finally changed in 1886 when Hall figured out that the tight chemical bonds Aluminum formed could be broken by the application of electricity.  This led to the "smelting" process still in widespread use.  Since it takes a lot of electric power, smelters that turn bauxite (the most common ore that contains a large amount of Aluminum) into relatively pure Aluminum ingots are all located where cheap electricity is available in large quantities.

Aluminum has two advantages when compared to steel.  It is light, weighing in at only a third the weight of steel.  The second advantage is corrosion resistance.  Like Cor-Ten Steel, Aluminum quickly forms a tough shell on any surface exposed to the air.  Once a relatively thin shell has formed it does not continue to get thicker.  The difference is that the public has accepted the shell Aluminum creates while they have not accepted the shell Cor-Ten creates.  So we see Aluminum items like ladders all over the place but Cor-Ten items are rare.

Pure Aluminum is too soft to be of much use.  But in 1906 Wilm developed an alloy by adding Copper and Magnesium to Aluminum.  The resulting "Duralumin" quickly became a hit, especially in the airplane business.  Duralumin is not very corrosion resistant.  But if you add a thin surface layer of pure Aluminum you get "Alclad", which is. Work has continued to find new better Aluminum alloys.  There have been successes, but the story is that same as with Steel.  There have been a lot of small improvements but no big breakthrough.

And there was a lot of talk for many years of moving from Steel cars to Aluminum cars.  But it turns out that Aluminum is far less versatile and far harder to work with than Steel is.  So modern motor vehicles have a lot more Aluminum in them these days than cars of yore.  (The Ford F-150 pickup truck is an example of this.)  But they also still contain lots of Steel.  Efforts to use Aluminum for engine blocks, for instance, have been largely unsuccessful.

And airplanes skipped over Steel and went from wood to Aluminum.  Aluminum has ruled the roost as the metal of choice when it comes to airplanes from the '20s pretty much to this day.  It looks like the material that is most likely to supplant it is carbon fiber.  The Boeing 787 was a big bet on carbon fiber that seems to be paying off.  But carbon fiber is even harder to work with than Aluminum.

It has been a long slow learning curve for the aerospace industry to figure out how to work with it.  The auto industry has moved even slower.  There are a few super-expensive cars that use substantial amounts of carbon fiber.  But, so far, that's it.  No one had a clue as to the possible existence of something like carbon fiber in Asimov's day.

Asimov next moves on to Magnesium.  Magnesium is lighter and rarer than Aluminum.  There is lots of Magnesium in the ocean.  All salt water contains small amounts of it.  But it was not then and is still not economically practical to extract Magnesium from salt water.  Besides its expense, Magnesium has the additional problem that it is easy to get it to burn.  And it burns really well.  A "Magnesium flare" is very bright.  It's also very dangerous to be anywhere near.

After Asimov published his book it was discovered that vast beds of "Magnesium Nodules" could be found on the sea floor in various parts of the ocean  Several schemes were hatched to harvest these nodules.  But none of them turned out to be feasible.  So Magnesium never went mainstream.  There are various niche uses for it but it is too expensive and hard to work with to come into widespread use.  Are there any other interesting metals?

There are seven really common metals in the earth's crust, Asimov observes.  We have already covered three:  Iron, Aluminum, and Magnesium.  The other four are:  Sodium, Potassium, Calcium, and Titanium.  Quoting Asimov, "Sodium, Potassium, and Calcium are far too active chemically to be used as construction materials."  This line of thinking allows him to focus on Titanium.

Titanium is roughly half the weight of Steel while being stronger, more corrosion resistant, and possessing better tolerance of high temperatures than its competitors.  It sounds like the wonder metal and it is.  The only thing holding it up is the difficulty of procuring it and working with it.  Asimov saw it as a potential metal of the future.

Titanium has found many in the intervening years.  But the cost and difficulty of working with it have limited these uses to a few high value situations.  One marquis use of it is in the SR-71 spy plane.  There, its ability to withstand very high temperatures while maintaining most of its strength were critical.  But each SR-71 costs a bloody fortune to build and maintain.

At present, Titanium is most commonly found inside jet engines.  Modern jet engines have two sets of "compressor" blades.  The front set operates in a cool and relatively benign environment.  The back set are literally located in the middle of the flame of the jet.  That environment is very hot and very chemically harsh.  And it turns out the higher operating temperature at which you can run this rear part of the engine, the more efficient you can make the engine.

So engine makers figure out exactly how much punishment blades in the back part of the engine can withstand and design the rest of the engine accordingly.  As new methods and materials come along that allow the blades to stand up under still more punishment the engine design is changed accordingly.

It's a fine line that is walked as any increase in operating temperature or other means of torturing the blades that can be safely withstood translates directly into increased engine performance and/or efficiency.  But if you go too far really bad things happen.  The engine explodes into very hot, very sharp, shrapnel.  It's a good thing Tungsten and its alloys can withstand a truly astonishing amount of torture.

Both the operating temperatures and the efficiencies of modern jet engines far surpass anything an engineer of Asimov's day could have imagined would ever be possible.  And that has enabled airlines to be profitable while charging far lower fares than anyone could have imagined back then.  At the time the book was written the Boeing 707 had just come into service.

Back then, most planes were still propeller driven.  People forget that the piston engines in propeller planes are complex and finicky.  That means they require a lot of maintenance to keep them running well.  Jet engines are far simpler and turn out to require far less maintenance.  And they are way more fuel efficient, lighter, etc.  But at that point airlines had little experience with jets and didn't know what to expect.

The obvious expectation is that the costs and performance of jets would be similar to that of propeller planes.  It turns out that jets were faster so you could get more flights in per day.  And they were more fuel efficient and required far less maintenance.  And modern jets can fly a lot further.  The longest range jets in today's inventory can fly directly from pretty much anyplace on the earth to pretty much anyplace else.  Predicting that all these changes were going to happen would have been nearly impossible.  It's not any one thing.  It's the combination of all of them.

Asimov ends this chapter with a trenchant observation:

There is reason to think, however, that the older metals (and some non-metals, too) can be made far more "wonderful" than they are now.

This observation has proven to be spot on.  Progress consists of a combination of new discoveries and ways of making old things work better than anyone thought possible.

In the next installment we will move on to the section titled "The Particles". This will circle back to subjects covered previously.  But it will dig deeper into them and that will allow me to discuss at greater length and in more detail the new discoveries and advances that have taken place AA - After Asimov.