A Brief History of Nuclear Power

Just before World War II scientists discovered nuclear fission.   There is such a thing as nuclear chemistry.  In the same way chemical reactions change the structure and composition of molecules, nuclear reactions change the structure and composition of the nucleus of atoms.

In the '30s physicists were just starting to figure all this out.  In particular, they learned that when they bombarded the nucleus of a Uranium atom with a neutron, the nucleus changed.  They initially thought that the result would be the creation of an atom with the next higher atomic number.  Uranium has an atomic number of 92 because it has 92 protons.  We now call the element with atomic number 93 Neptunium.

But they didn't get Neptunium.  Instead they got Boron, an element with the atomic number 5.  What also turned out to be true was that a tremendous amount of energy was released.  The neutron had, in fact, blasted the Uranium atom into fragments, one of which was an atom of Boron.  This process of breaking a nucleus up into smaller fragments ended up being called nuclear fission.

And we all know where this story goes next, to the creation of the Atomic bomb.  Atomic bombs depend on the fission process.  The two popular formulations are based on using either Uranium or Plutonium as the fuel.  Other formulations are possible.  But these turned out to be the easiest to pull off.

And, before moving on, I will note that there is another way to use nuclear chemistry to produce vast quantities of energy.  That's fusion.  Here two or more nucleuses are fused together in a way that releases vast amounts of energy.  The most common fusion bomb recipe is to fuse two Hydrogen nucleuses (atomic number = 1) to create one Helium nucleus (atomic number = 2).  Again, there are other recipes but this turns out to be the easiest to pull off.

And I will note one other thing before returning to my main topic.  Nuclear fusion tends to release energy if the atomic number of each constituent is less than 26, the atomic number of Iron.  Nuclear fission, in turn, tends to release energy if the atomic number of the nucleus being broken apart is higher than 26.

And, apparently, the further, the better.  Hydrogen is as far away as you can get from Iron on the low side.  Among the "naturally occurring" elements, Uranium is the furthest away you can get on the high side.  Plutonium is further away but it is an "artificial" element.  It does not exist in nature in significant amounts.

After the War ended an effort was made to "harness atoms for peace".  The idea was to see if fission, and later fusion, could be used in a creative and useful way, rather than just as the fuel for highly destructive explosive devices.  The obvious idea was to try to use "atomic power" to create electricity.  And scientists thought they knew a way.

As part of the process of figuring out how to make an atomic bomb, scientists had created an "atomic pile".  It was literally a pile of stuff, hence the name.  But the pile was carefully constructed so that it released atomic energy slowly and in small amounts.  That approach sounded ideal.

But not exactly as it had been done during the War, famously on a squash court at the University of Chicago.  There, blocks containing Uranium had been mixed in with blocks made of materials that were neutron absorbers to literally create a pile of blocks.  Both kinds of blocks were needed because an atomic bomb depends on a "chain reaction".

The thing that causes a Uranium atom to fragment into pieces is a neutron.  But the fission process, besides throwing off Boron atoms, also throws off atoms of various other elements.  And, importantly for out discussion, it can also throw off neutrons.  (This description vastly oversimplifies the fission process but retains the parts important to our discussion.)

In actuality, the Uranium nucleus can break up in many ways.  Some of them produce a Boron atom.  Some of them don't.  But, if we look at a large number of Uranium atoms fissioning, we can expect to see this many Boron atoms, that many of some other kind of atom, and so on.  How many of this or that even a small amount of Uranium throws off, when it is subjected to the fission process, is completely predictable.

If we know how many Uranium atoms are going to be subject to fission, we can predict how many of whatever we are interested in will be produced.  We do need more than a few atoms of Uranium.  But anything over a thousand will do.  And a thousand atoms of Uranium is too small to see with an ordinary microscope.

So the question becomes, "how many neutrons, on average, does the fissioning of a single Uranium atom produce"?  The answer turns out to be "about 2".  So, under ideal conditions, if we have a big lump of Uranium and we cause a single Uranium nucleus to fission, it will produce 2 new neutrons.  If each of these now causes some other Uranium nucleus to fission, we will get 4 neutrons.

As long as this keeps going we double the number of neutrons with each "generation".  That means that after ten generations we will have a thousand neutrons.  After twenty generations we will have a million neutrons.  And, if we have arranged things properly, each neutron causes the fissioning of a Uranium nucleus.

Cutting to the chase, after 80 or so generations, enough Uranium will have undergone fission to produce a "ten kiloton" explosion, one equivalent to blowing up ten thousand (kilo) tons of high explosive.  (The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs were each rated at about ten kilotons.)  And the time it takes to double through 80 or so generations is only a fraction of a second.

This chain of one fission causing more fissions, causing still more fissions, is why the process is called a chain reaction.  And going through 80 or so generations in a fraction of a second is a good way to make an atomic bomb.

But an atomic bomb is far too much energy getting released far too quickly to be of practical use,  We need to keep the amount of fission happening to be far less and we need to slow things way down.  And that's exactly what they did in that first atomic pile.

The trick they used was to cause a lot of the neutrons to be absorbed in things that were not Uranium.  That meant that the average number of neutrons from a Uranium nucleus fissioning that ended up causing another Uranium nucleus to fission was one, plus or minus a bit. 

We can have a chain reaction as long as the number of neutrons produced by a single Uranium nucleus's fission causes at least one other Uranium nucleus to fission.  If the number is a tiny amount greater than one then the process will go very slowly.

By monitoring things carefully those scientists working on the first atomic pile arranged things so that at first less than one neutron chained.  That told them that their design was sound.  Then they carefully tweaked things so that the number was almost exactly one.  That resulted in a steady amount of activity.  Then they tweaked some more so that it was a tiny fraction above one.  That caused activity to increase very slowly.

They had very carefully calculated which configurations would produce what behavior before they started.  Their extremely careful tests proved that their theories were correct.  They went on to use those theories to design the first atomic bombs.  Needless to say, the designs they came up with worked.

When they went back to try to design a device that would produce far less energy than an atomic explosion but enough energy to be useful, they went back to the same ideas employed by that original atomic pile.

The general idea stayed the same but the materials and configuration changed completely.  They could have come up with any of a number of different designs.  But at this point it mattered who was paying for this very expensive research.

It turns out that the people who had a lot of money and were interested in spending it on this particular project were the U. S. Navy.  Submarines of the time were very vulnerable to detection and attack when they were running on the surface.

The diesel powered submarine of the day had to spend a lot of time running on the surface so that its engines could get enough air to run.  The diesel engines were used in part to drive the boat through the water at high speed and in part to charge the batteries.  One way or another, a diesel sub had to spend a lot of its time on the surface.  This is because the sub couldn't go very far or very fast while only using battery power.

A nuclear powered submarine, however, did not need to be on the surface to make full use of it's engines.  They required no air.  (The crew did, but that problem was easily solved.)  And that meant that a sub powered by nuclear energy could travel long distances under water at high speed.

So the Navy was willing to provide lots of money to scientists to come up with a working design when no one else would.  So it is not surprising that they came up with a design for what we now call a "nuclear reactor" that worked well on boats.

The Navy later adapted it for use on Aircraft Carriers, where it also worked fine.  But it never saw wide use on other ship types.  A nuclear powered merchant ship was built as a demonstration project.  It was a technical success but a practical failure.  The technology worked fine but it kept getting banned from ports out of fear of anything nuclear.

The navy design depended on water, a lot of water.  A ship at sea, particularly a "blue water" type of ship, one that spends its time on the open ocean, has access to nearly unlimited amounts of water.  This water can be used for cooling and as a "moderator", something that soaks up neutrons.  Add in Boron rods, which are even better at soaking up neutrons, and you have the makings of a device that can produce a lot of energy in a controlled manner.

Nuclear fission produces a lot of radioactivity.  Anything close to the Uranium (pretty much the only fuel used, although others would work) ends up getting very radioactive over the course of a year or so.  So a "two stage" process was used.  Pellets of Uranium are encased in Zirconium rods.  Why?  I am going to skip over that.   If the right number of rods are put the right distance from each other then a slow chain reaction will take place.

The chain reaction can be quickly quenched by SCRAMing the reactor.  (SCRAM is an acronym.  I don't know what the letters stand for.)  SCRAMing consists of quickly jamming Boron rods between the Uranium rods.  This starves the process of neutrons and things quickly settle down.

Anyhow, water flows around the Uranium rods and carries away heat.  But this water becomes radioactive over time.  So this water is kept in a "primary loop".  The hot water in the primary loop is used to heat more hot water in a "secondary loop".  This exchange of heat is done far enough away from the Uranium rods that the water in the secondary loop does not get radioactive.

The hot water in the secondary loop is turned into steam that is used to turn a turbine that is connected to an electric generator.  From there, the electricity can be used for whatever we want.  On a ship it is used to run motors that turn the propellers.  On land it is piped into the electrical grid.

This is a handy design for a boat.  If something goes wrong, large quantities of ocean water can be used to cool things down.  It is relatively compact.  The components are heavy but this is not a problem on a boat.  The U. S, Navy has been using nuclear powered submarines successfully for a long time now.  Other navies have also been using them for almost as long.

When electric companies looked at nuclear power they saw a lot of possibility.  They could have spent the money to come up with a new design that was well suited for use on land.  But that would have been hugely expensive and the navy design was already right there.  

The power industry figured that if they went with the Navy design they could save a lot of time, effort, and money  Only relatively minor design changes would be necessary.  The cost of doing only the minimum kept research and development kept costs down to an acceptable level.

The reactor design problem that the electric power industry needed to be solved when building a nuclear power plant was cooling.  Nuclear plants throw off a lot of heat.  There was no longer an ocean handy.  But nuclear plants could be built on a coastline or a riverside.  That amount of water was far less than the ocean could provide, but with a little engineering, it would be enough.

Several methods for keeping machinery cool were already in widespread use.  They just needed to be scaled up.  When most people see a nuclear power plant what they mostly see is these giant structures that are curved in a funny way.  They think that's where the "nuclear" stuff is going on.  They are wrong.

Next to each of these giant towers is usually a much smaller cylindrical shaped building.  That's where the nuclear stuff actually is.  But that building is not as dramatic looking so it tends to get ignored.  The large structure is a "cooling tower" that depends on the "Venturi effect".

Basically, if you shape the structure correctly, air flows (wind) arise automatically that move the air around in useful ways.  This air motion that arises out of the shape of the building is used to create a cooling tower that requires no powered fans, etc.  Yet it is still capable of cooling a lot of water.

Given the amount of cooling needed by a modern nuclear power plant, the suckers need to be really big.  And, to make the Venturi effect work, they need to have that peculiar curved shape.  Anything that big is expensive to build.  But, once it is built, it has zero operating costs.  It also doesn't get radioactive as it is part of the secondary cooling loop.

So once something, a Venturi effect cooling tower or something else equally effective, was tacked on the side of the design they were all set, right?  Wrong.

It turns out that the fact that a single bomb was able to kill about 100,000 people at Hiroshima, and then another single bomb was able to kill another 100,000 people at Nagasaki, scared the shit out of people.  The power industry countered with the fact that their design was "proven safe by the navy".  And that worked well enough for a long time.

The public turned out to be willing to cut the military a little slack when it came to nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers.  After all, it was War we're were talking about.  And these boats with their nuclear reactors spent most of their time far out at sea.  Nuclear power plants would be in our own back yards, metaphorically, and sometimes actually.

And then there were all the monster movies Hollywood was churning out.  The deus ex machina for many of them was "some nuclear thing that normal people don't understand goes horribly wrong".  It all piled up and people became very afraid of anything nuclear.  Arguments that all this could be done safely fell on deaf ears.

So all of the nuclear stuff had to be constructed inside an extremely strong "containment vessel" to keep the public happy.  This consisted of a large room with extremely thick walls.  And this kind of overdesign drove up costs.  And enough was never enough so the overdesign had to be built up even more.  This caused schedules to stretch and that too increased the cost.

It might have been possible to overcome the public's resistance to nuclear power if it was cheap enough.  But by the time the dust settled, all these factors, and several more I am skipping over, drove the cost up to the point where nuclear power actually ended up being quite expensive.

But plants were built.  And by and large they performed as promised.  But the anti-nuclear people never gave up.  They kept demanding more and more measures that were supposedly intended to increase safety but were actually intended to kill off the nuclear power industry.  Ultimately, this "drive for safety" became counterproductive.

Then "Three Mile Island" happened.  It was a nuclear power plane near Pittsburgh.  At this point the anti-nuclear forces had been at it for decades.  As a result, nuclear plants were still using a design from the '50s that was well suited for use on ships.

The anti-nuclear people had made it impossible for the industry to move on to newer and better designs.  And that had made it impossible to replace an old plant built to an old design with a new plant built to a newer, much safer, design.

There were several design problems with Three Mile Island.  But they all stemmed from deficiencies in what was considered good design in the '50s.  It was good design, for the '50s.  But technology marches on and we learn things.

The most important problem was with a sensor on a valve.  The sensor did not measure whether the valve was open or closed.  Instead it measured whether the valve had been instructed to open or close.  I am going to skip over why this had been best way to do it when the plant was initially designed and built..

The operators ordered the valve to open.  But it got stuck so it stayed closed.  But the sensor correctly reported that it had been ordered to open.  So the operators erroneously thought the valve was open and took no action until it was too late.  This design problem, along with other less directly contributory factors, caused the "core" to overheat.

One of those contributory factors had to do with how the controls worked.  State of the art design for the '50s called for a schematic to be put on the wall.  Key controls and gages were put beside whatever they controlled or measured.

But something had been "tagged" for some reason.  And by chance the tag covered a key indicator that would have told the operators that something was wrong.  Nobody noticed so nobody moved the tag.

The reason  the controls had not been computerized was opposition by anti-nuclear people.  Management correctly felt that they had to be able to say "we stuck with a proven design and did not change anything that could have introduced new failure modes".  Any major change, like computerizing the controls, would have been vigorously opposed by the anti-nuclear people on the grounds that it just added new ways for things to go wrong.

In the general environment of everything being under a microscope nobody thought to worry about the bad design of the sensor.  And, of course, if a new plant had been built to replace the old plant, it would have fixed both of these problems (and many others).

Three Mile Island was another milestone.  It was a "China Syndrome" class of failure.  The entire "core", the part with all the Uranium, completely melted down.  This was supposed to be an "as bad as it gets" type of accident.  (We would learn differently later.)

This was called a China Syndrome event because if the core melted down we were told it would melt through the reactor vessel, the containment building, and pretty much everything else as it kept going all the way through the earth until it got to China.

A movie called "The China Syndrome", speculating on this sort of thing, had just opened a few months before Three Mile Island happened.  But, in spite of the total meltdown of the core, the reactor vessel remained completely intact.  It came nowhere close to failing.

 And the rest of it was nonsense too.  In fact, after the initial failure, everything worked exactly the way the experts said it would.  The safety measures built into the design kept everyone safe even though a "catastrophic failure" had occurred.

Three Mile Island was an economic disaster.  It was not a health disaster.  No one's health was significantly harmed.  But you couldn't tell that from the press coverage.  In fact, we learned something very interesting from Three Mile Island.  It turns out that granite is radioactive.  It also emits Radon gas, which is highly radioactive.

No one even suspected this before studies that were done as a result of Three Mile Island.  People in the vicinity of Three Mile Island were exposed to more radiation if they cowered in their basements than if they instead stood on their roofs basking in the "radioactive glow" we were told was emanating from Three Mile Island.

And it's a national problem.  Many people living far away from Three Mile Island (or any nuclear power plant) are getting far higher doses of radiation from the granite their house is built on than they ever would from a nuclear power plant.

For a while, contractors were making a bundle by first radiation checking people's basement and then selling them expensive "remediation" packages.  Fortunately, this particular scam soon died out and few now remember it.

Chernobyl is the anomaly.  It was a design similar to that used under the squash court.  The British built a small reactor along these lines in the '50s at a place called Windscale.  Things went wrong but it was small and the damage was contained relatively easily,  But Windscale convinced the nuclear industry to stay away from this design.  Except the Russians.

The Russians built a number of nuclear power plants using this design.  They did this in spite of the fact that, in the right circumstances, the reactor would "run away" (just as bad as it sounds).  They figured that everything would be fine if they did two things.

The first thing they did was to add a bunch of safety equipment so that the it was impossible to put the reactor in the "right circumstances". The second thing they did was to train all the operators.  "Don't do this.  If you do, very bad things will happen."  Their "human nature" calculations turned out to be fatally flawed.

A group of operators decided they didn't believe their training was correct.  So they carefully disconnected all of the safety equipment.  Then they carefully put the reactor in the "right condition".  It turns out that the experts were right.  Bad, bad, very bad things happened.

It turns out that Chernobyl is  the only example of a nuclear power reactor going south and killing and injuring a lot of civilians.  Chernobyl is also the only 100% human error event.  It was 100% caused by a bunch of people who knew better going out of their way to do a really stupid thing.

Chernobyl makes a strong case for not building nuclear power plants to this design.  But that's all.  And even Russia abandoned this design after Chernobyl.  Pretty much all nuclear plants use a minor variation on the the navy submarine design from the '50s.  It works pretty well.  But it can be improved upon.  Any doubt about this was delivered by the Fukushima disaster. 

Fukushima delivers perhaps the weakest case for abandoning nuclear power.  It happened in the midst of a massive earthquake and an epic tsunami.  Absent either, it would not have happened.  And absent anti-nuclear agitation it also would not have happened.  Let's review the circumstances.

A magnitude 9.4 earthquake happened a few miles offshore from the Japanese main islands.  The Fukushima nuclear power plants survived the earthquake just fine even though they weren't designed to handle an earthquake that large.  In fact, all of the more than 50 Japanese nuclear power plants rode through this gigantic earthquake just fine.

But then came a tsunami of epic proportions.  Fukushima was hit the hardest.  In spite of the fact that the plant was not designed to handle a tsunami nearly as large the plant itself survived with little damage.  Other nuclear power plants that were not hit as hard came through with flying colors.

What did the Fukushima nuclear power plants in was a small thing, the siting of their emergency generators.  Guess who had a big hand in this decision?

If the generators had been sited high up in the facility. everything would have been fine.  But anti-nuclear people argued for siting them low down to avoid hurricane (or Typhoon, as they are called in that pert of the world) considerations.  So they were.

And water got into all of the lower areas of the plant as a result of the tsunami.  Some of that water got into the emergency generators and wrecked them.  BTW, the high areas stayed dry.

So why did they even matter?  When the earthquake hit the reactors SCRAMed, just like they were supposed to.  From then on, theoretically, the reactors were shut down.  So what went wrong?  It turns out that reactor cores contain a lot of heat.  And, although the nuclear reaction is tamped way down, it is not stopped completely.  Heat is produced at a low rate for about four days.

Normally this heat is not a problem.  The amount produced is way less than is produced in the course of normal operation.  All that "cooling tower" business can easily handle it.  The problem is getting the heat out of the core and into the cooling tower.  Normally, you just pump a little water and everything is cool.

It doesn't take much electric power to run the pumps.  But it takes some.  Normally, the Fukushima plants would get this from the Japanese power grid, which is very robust.  But the earthquake knocked out the whole power grid.  And that's where the backup generators are supposed to kick in.  But they were flooded out so they didn't.

And that meant that the water did not move.  And that meant that heat built up in the core.  And that resulted in a mini Three Mile Island.  Eventually the reactor cores melted down.  Only this time there was nothing anybody could do about it.  So the roofs literally blew off the reactor buildings and a substantial amount of radiation was spread around.

Fukushima turned out to be much worse than Three Mile Island.  This was because the earthquake/tsunami wiped out all the resources around Fukushima.  At Three Mile Island they never lost power from outside the plant.  Additional resources could be brought in promptly.  That allowed the damage to be contained.

At Fukushima the problem was not the triggering event.  It was that resources from outside the plant were literally unavailable.  And much of the plant was trashed, not just the reactor room.  It was what happened after the initial event that made the event so destructive.  Three Mile Island was an "inside the fence" event.  Fukushima was not.

And it is important to remember that at Fukushima there were no civilian casualties.  Some plant employees were exposed to massive amounts of radiation as they tried to manually get things under control while they worked in horrific conditions.  After a few days the damage was extensive and that made things much more difficult and much more dangerous.  I believe there have been fatalities but I actually don't know.

And, absent an aggressive anti-nuclear movement, the Fukushima power plants would have been replaced by new plants that did not contain the deficiencies that it only took a massive earthquake combined with a massive tsunami to bring to light.

Many tens of billions of dollars worth of damage was caused by the non-Fukushima part of the disaster.  More than 20,000 lives were lost in the non-Fukushima part of the disaster.  But all most people remember is what happened at the power plant.  Yet, measured either by the cost in dollars or the cost in lives, Fukushima was a small part of a much larger disaster.  

Fukushima lit a rocket under the anti-nuclear movement.  Nuclear power plants have been shut down all over the world.  Nuclear power is carbon free.  For the most part, carbon free nuclear power has been replaced by carbon heavy fossil fuel powered sources of electric power.  Carbon heavy power generation kills people.  We just choose to ignore that fact.

Wind and solar are coming on like gangbusters.  I'm all for that but they are both "intermittent".   Wind farms generate no electricity if the air is calm.  Solar generates no electricity if it's dark out.  There are ways to deal with this intermittency but we have talked about it a lot and done little.

Meanwhile, nuclear is just sitting there.  New designs are safer and more efficient.  But the anti-nuclear people have gotten very good over the decades at slowing things down and making them more expensive.  They are also very good at scaring the shit out of people and keeping them scared.  So the plans sit on the shelf.

These new designs do not suffer from the problems exposed by Three Mile Island and Fukushima.  We know to measure what's happening and not what's supposed to happen.  New designs are designed to be "passive".  Cooling is maintained even if there is no power available and even if the operators do nothing.  We ignore the many failings of fossil fuel power plants and obsess on the perceived failings of nuclear plants.

Nuclear is good at what wind and solar are bad at. It is perfect for "base load", needs that are always there whether the wind is blowing or not and whether the sun is shining or not.  It pairs very nicely with wind and solar.

But, instead of taking advantage of nuclear, we worry incessantly about theoretical fears that never materialize and focus on wildly exaggerated fears that we are told are based on actual events but aren't.  It is another example going with "gut instinct" then wondering why things are so screwed up.

What's up with Boeing?

 I you are like me, and grew up a while ago in Seattle, you were almost forced to become an amateur Boeing watcher.  Until Microsoft came along, Boeing was the big dog in this here town.  Seattle wasn't a company town, but it came very close.  Economically and culturally speaking, Boeing dominated the landscape.

Now, of course, Boeing is one among several companies, and not even the largest or the most important.  But it still retains significant importance.  And old habits are hard to break.  So, I continue to keep an eye on what it is up to.  Lately, Boeing has gone out of its way to find ways to demand our attention.

But, before we take a look at what's currently happening with the company, let's begin at the beginning.  And the beginning is 1909.  William E. "Bill" Boeing started out as a timber baron in the Midwest.  Like another timber baron, George Weyerhaeuser, he relocated to the Pacific Northwest because "that's where the trees are".  Weyerhaeuser stuck to trees.  Boeing didn't.

Building airplanes was one step up from a hobby business until World War I.  But airplane development bypassed the United States because we stayed out of the War until late in the game.  So, in 1915 it was still a game that any millionaire could dabble in, if he wanted to.  That's when Boeing decided he wanted to.

He went to Los Angeles to spend some time with Glenn Martin, one of the pioneers in American aeronautics, so that he could learn about airplanes.  Cutting to the chase, he ended up building and selling planes of his own design less than a year later.

The first Boeing airplane was the "B&W" seaplane.  Except at the time the company was called "Pacific Aero Products Company".  The name was soon changed to one that contained the word "Boeing".  Since then, the company has been renamed multiple times.  It has also gone through various incarnations and reorganizations.  But all of them have contained the word "Boeing" in their name.

For several years Boeing, as I will refer to all the various permutations, eked out a modest amount of success building a few of this model and a few of that model.  But the thing Boeing did differently in those early years was that it didn't restrict itself to just building the airplane.

It first branched out into what was initially an extremely modest mail and passenger service between Seattle and British Columbia, Canada.  Boeing later expanded to other mail and passenger routes using various models of Boeing designed and built planes.  It also managed to sell some fighter planes to the Army along the way.

Boeing was building a vertical monopoly.  It merged with other airlines and grew.  It merged with Pratt & Whitney, an engine maker, and grew.  It merged with other parts makers and grew.  Soon, it owned everything it needed to directly manufacture all the important pieces that went into an airplane.  Then it, in effect, sold the airplane to its airline subsidiary.  The airline subsidiary then flew mail and passengers from here to there using Boeing planes.

Even for the time Boeing was not a particularly large enterprise.  But in its niche it was a big dog.  In 1934 the Federal "Air Mail Act" was passed.  Among other things, it was aimed squarely at Boeing  Companies were prohibited from both building airplanes and running an airline.  Bill Boeing was disgusted by this, so he sold all his Boeing stock and had nothing further to do with the company.

Boeing ended up being split into three companies.  The airline part became United Airlines.  The component parts business that included Pratt & Whitney became United Aircraft, which later became United Technologies.  The airplane building part retained the Boeing name.  This much reduced Boeing built the "airframe".  It then attached Pratt & Whitney engines, and other parts, to create a finished airplane.

Boeing continued to develop commercial airliners.  It saw some success but the Douglass DC-2, and later DC-3, were far more successful.  Boeing did have some success with the "Flying Clipper", a machine that could fly long distances.  But it took off and landed in water.  So it also had boat-like qualities.  World War II got in the way of volume sales of the Flying Clipper.

After several fits and starts, Boeing developed the B-17 Heavy Bomber for the military.  My father thought that it was British money that made this possible but I have not seen anything to corroborate this.  The B-17 was the best heavy bomber during the early part of the War.  Crews liked it because it could take a lot of punishment.  More than one plane returned safely to base with more than a thousand holes in it.

The other Boeing success during the War was the B-29 Heavy Bomber.  It could fly higher, farther, and faster, than the B-17, or pretty much anything else.  It could also carry a much heavier bomb load.  Boeing pushed the state of the art to limit.  It made the plane finicky.  Ground crews had to know what they were doing.  But results spoke for themselves.  It came into its own in the Pacific theater where bombing runs were extremely long.  And, most famously, it was used to drop both atomic bombs on Japan.

Boeing came out of the War with a sterling reputation for building military bombers and a pile of cash.  The military had long since written Boeing off as a fighter plane maker.  The airlines had other places to go for top of the line airlines.  But Boeing managed to stay in the game by developing the B-36, B-47, and eventually the B-52 Heavy Bombers.  The B-36 was propeller driven.  The B-47 was a hybrid.  But the B-52 was 100% jet powered.

Boeing did with the B-52 what they had done with the B-29.  It pushed the state of the art, hard.  And it turned out that's what the air force wanted.  The basic parameters were hashed out on a napkin during a short negotiating session with the air force.  Fortunately for Boeing, they were able to produce an airplane that did everything the napkin promised.

Boeing did such a good job of designing and building the B-52 that they are still flying front line missions for the air force today.  The B-52 quickly went through a number of "variants" as Boeing made small, incremental improvements.  The final variant was the B-52 H, the model that is still flying.

I believe it is the only eight engine plane now in regular service.  Jet engines of the period had anemic "thrust", so it took eight to provide the power needed.  A single modern jet engine can provide more thrust than all eight combined.

In the immediate postwar period Boeing tried unsuccessfully to come up with a propeller driven airliner that was noticeably superior to designs from Douglass and other companies.  They were unsuccessful.

Meanwhile, the British were the first to be able to bring a jet powered airliner to market.  The plane was called the de Havilland Comet.  It looked like "game over" for Boeing in the market for commercial airplanes.  But an opportunity arose when Comets started falling out of the sky.

They had a fatal design error, not in the "new" jet engine part of the plane, but in the "old" airframe part of the plane.  All airplanes have airframes.  Since it didn't appear that de Havilland had done anything markedly different from older designs, nobody thought to look there.  But it turned out that de Havilland had done something slightly different.  And they had gotten it fatally wrong.

The first few Comets crashed into deep water so there was no plane to examine in order to figure out what the problem was.  Eventually, a plane crashed where it could be recovered.  This quickly led to the problem.  But by now the Comet had a very bad reputation.  And the problem was one of those that takes a long time to fix.  By the time de Haviland had a safe plane to sell, it was too late.

The other U. S. commercial airplane makers all had successful propeller planes they could sell.  That made them slightly reluctant to get into the jet business.  Boeing, with nothing to lose, moved more quickly.  The result was the 707.

Famously, a 707 test pilot performed an unauthorized barrel roll in public in front of 50,000 spectators.  And there were a bunch of airline executives scattered in amongst the 50,000.  Both spectators and airline executives concluded that the plane must be safe and that Boeing had tremendous confidence in the plane.  Otherwise, they never would have authorized the barrel roll.

If, right after the de Havilland Comet fiasco, Boeing was willing to take that kind of chance, then both airline executives and the public decided that they too were willing to take a chance.  Airlines bought the plane and passengers flocked to it.  And, most importantly, it did not fall out of the sky.

The success of the B-52 and the 707 led to the greatest period of Boeing success in the history of the company.  Boeing quickly developed the 727 and the 737.  Both were wildly successful.  This was followed by what was for a long time the largest commercial airplane in the sky, the 747.  Boeing was selling commercial airplanes as fast as they could pump them out.

Meanwhile, things were also going great on the government/military side.  Boeing had the contract for the Minuteman III Intercontinental Ballistic Missile.  It was building a Space Shuttle-like spaceship called the Dyna-Soar for the air force.  It was building a 707 derivative for the called the KC-135.  This was used for in-air refueling of B-52 Bombers so that they could fly all the way to Russia and back.

Boeing was building CH-47 "Chinook" helicopters for the Army.  It was building the Saturn-1C stage of the Saturn 5 rocket for NASA.  Boeing also was building the moon buggy for NASA to use on the moon as part of project Apollo.  It was even working on it's own SST - Supersonic Transport, a commercial airliner that, like the Concorde, would fly faster than the speed of sound.

Everything was going great until it wasn't.  The economy hit a speed bump and all of a sudden the airlines didn't need any more new planes.  They particularly didn't need the giant 747.  Full, it was a cash cow.  Empty, it was white elephant.

And all of a sudden there weren't enough people flying to consistently fill up a 747.  747 sales went to near zero.  Sales of the rest of Boeing's commercial product line also went into free fall.  And by now Douglass had it's own jet powered airliner, the DC-8.  So airlines could buy a jet airliner from somebody other than Boeing, if the wanted to.

That would have been manageable but everything fell off on the government/military side of the ledger too.  The air force decided it had enough B-52s and Minuteman IIIs and KC-135's so those contracts wrapped up.  By the late '60s NASA had all the hardware it needed to complete the Apollo program so orders dried up there too.  Pretty much whatever Boeing was selling, nobody was buying.

Famously, some wags bought a billboard that said "Will the last person leaving Seattle, please turn out the lights?"  At this point (1969) Boeing was the big dog when it came to the local economy.  So the whole area got sick when Boeing caught a cold.  Boeing caught triple pneumonia.  Company employment went from over 100,000 to under 40,000.

The metropolitan Seattle area has since seen its economy dip less than other parts of the country when there is some kind of slowdown.  But in '69 the Seattle area's economy fell way more than the rest of the country.  And it was all due to the Boeing effect.

I think this big boom then big bust psychologically damaged Boeing.  I believe Boeing lost confidence that it knew what it was doing, that it could trust its own judgement.  In the commercial airplane business you must make huge bets.  If you don't you end up behind the technology curve, the very place Boeing had been before the 707 debuted.

Before the '69 decline, Boeing's view of itself was encapsulated in the title of an authorized company biography that came out a few years earlier.  It was called "Vision:  The Story of Boeing".  Before, Boeing saw itself as a visionary company that prided itself on being able to "bet the company" and come out a winner.  After, while Boeing maintained the same external posture, I believe that internally, doubts had crept in.

I believe that it became important to find ways to hedge bets, to not "bet the company".  Was there some less risky path that would generate acceptable profits?  Small and incremental became the preferred approach.  Making risky bets on big technological leaps was just too dangerous.  It became a time of hedging bets and avoiding "going all in".  Henceforth, bets would be smaller, more measured, safer. 

And initially, that strategy paid off.  Boeing did survive the "bust" of the late '60s and early '70s.  Sales dropped from the stratospheric levels of the early and mid '60s.  But the 727, and especially the 737, soon started selling steadily.  And eventually the 747 became a big success.  Government/military business came back.  But it never returned to the levels seen before the bust.

So Boeing soldiered on.  The 727 was eventually retired.  But only after it sold enough planes to be immensely profitable.  And the 737 kept selling and selling and selling.  In the '80s Boeing rolled out the 757 to replace the 727 and the 767 to replace the 707.

Both were modest successes, but not at the level of the plane they replaced.  Boeing has since discontinued the 757 and essentially discontinued the 767.  The 707 and 727 were revolutionary planes.  The 757 and 767 were evolutionary planes.

And Boeing had lost whatever Midas touch it had had in the '50s and '60s, when it came to defense/government contracts.  It was a subcontractor on many projects.  But could never break through to become the prime contractor.

In spite of the success of the B-52, Boeing lost out on the B-2 that was supposed to replace it, and on the Stealth Bomber that was supposed to replace the B-2.  Boeing repeatedly bid on and lost on various fighter contracts.  The Space Shuttle went to another contractor.  And on and on.

In the '90s Boeing rolled out the 777.  To understand why you have to understand the structure of the commercial airliner market.  There are short haul flights, medium haul flights, and long haul flights.  There are small, medium, and large planes in terms of seating capacity.

You want to fill the plane.  As I mentioned above, the 747 is a very profitable plane to fly if it is full.  But it is expensive to buy, requires a large crew, and consumes a whole lot of fuel getting the plane off the ground and up to cruising altitude.

If you fill the plane up with passengers and fly them a long distance the "cost per seat mile" is very low, however.  Once they had been in service a few years, airlines started using 747s only on long international flights on popular routes.  Why?  Because the 747 had lots and lots of seats.  And once it reached cruising altitude, if you apportioned its operating cost across all those seats, it was very cheap to operate.  Of course, most of those seats needed to have paying customers in them.  That's why it had to be a high volume route.

The 737, on the other hand, was the best fit for the other end of the spectrum.  It was much cheaper to buy,  It used a far smaller crew.  It cost far less to get from the runway to cruising altitude.  It had far fewer seats.  But the "per seat mile" cost was much lower than flying a 747 (or pretty much any other plane) on the same route and with the same passenger load.  A 737 could be profitably flown on much shorter routes that featured far lower passenger volumes.

Airlines had short, medium, and long routes.  They had routes that had high, medium , and low passenger volumes.  They wanted the plane that would deliver the lowest seat mile cost at a particular route and traffic volume point.  There are nine combinations of the two parameters I have discussed.  But in actuality, there are more gradations.  And that required lots of models that could be optimized for various combinations of seating capacity and route length.

The 777 was supposed to fill the gap between the "medium" 767 and the "giant" 747 with a "large" plane.  It would be offered in various sub-models optimized for various route lengths.  In fact, variants featuring various amounts of seating and an the ability to fly routes of various lengths were offered up and down the product line.

As the decades rolled by Boeing was able to provide planes capable of flying longer and longer routes.  Early jets could fly further than their propeller driven predecessors.  But people like nonstop flights.  There were many city pairs that couldn't be joined by a single flight because they were just too far apart.  The holy grail was 13,000 miles.  With that capability you could fly nonstop from anywhere on earth to anywhere else on earth.

And Boeing did not have the market to itself.  Other airplane makers were trying to sell into the same market that was governed by the same rules.  They all strove to offer planes that could be efficiently slotted into all the various combinations of seating capacity and route length.  Eventually, the only other domestic airliner maker left standing was what was by then called McDonnell Douglass.  In 1997 Boeing acquired them.

This acquisition was the brainchild of then Boeing CEO Phil Condit.  Although technically an engineer, he thought like an accountant.  Most observers believed that Boeing substantially overpaid.  At the time McDonnell Douglas was heading for bankruptcy.  But Condit admired M-D CEO Harry Stonecipher.  The fact that Stonecipher had presided over M-D's decline apparently did not figure into Condit's calculations.

The thing that might have made the deal make sense was based on the fact that M-D was very good at securing military/government business.  If the M-D people Boeing acquired in the merger had been able to use their supposed skill and expertise to land lots of additional military/government business for Boeing, then that additional business might have justified the cost of the acquisition.  But post acquisition, Boeing never saw any substantial increase in their volume of military/government business.

Condit proceeded to remake Boeing in the image of M-D.  The results were predictable.  The decline was sped along when Condit was fired for moral turpitude and Stonecipher took over as CEO of Boeing for a while.  Boeing has never really recovered from the Condit/Stonecipher era.

The M-D acquisition was part of a larger buying binge.  When the "buy M-D for their ability to get military/government work" strategy failed, Boeing attempted to buy its way into the defense contracting business.  There have been no big successes resulting from this.  Boeing does have lots of pieces of lots of contracts.  But the total is just not all that impressive.

Boeing also engaged in the favorite tactic of modern CEOs.  It bought back billions of dollars of its own stock.  This has left the company with an inadequate amount of working capital.  Developing a new "rev" of an airplane, something Boeing has done a number of times with the 737, now costs billions of dollars.  Developing an entirely new plane like the 777, now costs tens of billions of dollars.

Boeing was able to scratch up the money to develop the 707 on its own.  It was able to roll the 707 profits into funding the development of the 727, 737, and 747.  All three of these latter planes were developed within a few years of each other.  The 747 did cause Boeing to become over extended when the market turned down.  But  a few years later the 747 turned into a very profitable plane for Boeing.

Since Boeing acquired McDonnell Douglass it has been hard pressed to fund the costs of new planes.  It has been forced to proceed cautiously even when it comes to "revs" of planes.  Boeing has been "rev"ing the 737 since the '60s.  It is long past time for them to build a new plane from scratch.  But money constraints keep driving them to "rev" the 737 yet again.

The only new plane Boeing has developed in the past couple of decades is the 787 Dreamliner.  It embodies the accounting mentality and cash shortage problems Boeing has stuck itself with.

In about 2000, somebody I had never heard of managed to catch the ear of the press.  His story was that there was some great technological advance in the offing that would completely change the commercial airliner market.  It took a couple of years to find out that what he was talking about was a "new and improved" jet engine.

The question was:  how should Boing take advantage of this advance, whatever it was.  Boeing decided that it should be used to make faster jetliners.  It turns out that jetliners had been flying at Mach 0.85 (85% of the speed of sound) since the 707 era.  That speed had for a long time been a good tradeoff point between speed and efficiency.  Slowing down didn't save much jet fuel.  Going much faster required a lot more jet fuel.

But if airliners flew lots faster, the thinking went, then an airline would squeeze in more flights per day per plane.  That would be worth money to them.  From a passenger point of view, what's not to like about getting where you are going much more quickly?

But it turned out that the speed difference (going Mach 0.98) was not worth all that much.  The new engine design made that possible for only a small increase in fuel consumption.  But the speed increase was worth so little to passengers and to airlines that the cost increase wasn't worth it, even though it was small.  So the "Sonic Cruiser", the nickname Boeing came up with, was a bust.  Boeing managed to waste about 18 months figuring this out.

Boeing eventually gave up and went with what ended up becoming the 787.  The priority now was fuel efficiency.  In pursuit of fuel efficiency Boeing decided to use carbon fiber rather than the traditional aluminum as the primary structural material.  That would make the plane significantly lighter.  In the airliner business, the lighter the plane is, the more fuel efficient it is.  That was a good choice.

But nobody had made a large airplane out of carbon fiber before.  It was going to take a lot of effort to pull a change of that magnitude off.  Boeing should have said "okay - one big change at a time" and gone with the traditional way for everything else.  But they were cash strapped and accounting oriented in their thought processes.  So they said to themselves "what else pencils out?"

Boeing's secret sauce is technology.  They know more than anybody else about how to design and build commercial airplanes.  This extended to manufacturing processes, airframe design, and particularly aerodynamics.  And most especially wings.  Boeing was held in high repute when it came to the details of wing design.  To everybody but an accountant, giving away your secret sauce seems like a bad idea.  But Boeing gave away their secret sauce.

Design and engineering costs a bloody fortune when it comes to a new plane.  So how about having someone else pay for it?  Sounds perfectly sensible, if you are an accountant.

Historically, Boeing had done all the design and engineering work.  They then farmed the result out to subcontractors who built it under careful Boeing oversight.  With the 787 Boeing put out "design build" contracts for large chunks of the plane.

That meant that Boeing no longer had to spend a lot of up front money on design and engineering.  Now that was the subcontractor's problem.  But it also meant that the subcontractor ended up learning a lot about how to build airliners.  And it also meant that Boeing lost control of the process.

And Boeing does a lot of business all over the world.  Usually this involves placing a certain amount of work in a country to grease the skids for sales of Boeing products into that country.  But the old method did not involve the country's industry learning a lot about how to build commercial airplanes.  Sure, they leaned out to make this or that part.  But they didn't get a look at the big picture.

Boeing went ahead and signed up subcontractors for large parts of the 787 that hailed from countries all over the world anyhow.  And some of those countries, Japan, for instance, harbored aspirations of developing a home grown commercial airplane industry.  Boeing just gave them a leg up for free.  It looked good on a spread sheet because Boeing was off the hook for all these design and engineering costs.

Boeing also decided to make another major change.  For all previous planes, with the exception of a few large complicated things like engines, Boeing had let subcontractors build only relatively small parts of the plane.  Boeing would then take this large number of parts made elsewhere and assemble them into the final plane.  This meant that the "final assembly" process was complex and expensive.

With the 787 Boeing decided to switch to an assembly method used widely in other industries like autos.  Subcontractors would supply large parts of the plane "pre stuffed" with all of the components.  That would leave only a few large subassemblies for Boeing to quickly "snap together" to complete the assembly of the plane.  Again, this moves lots of costs off of Boeing's books and onto the books of the subcontractors.

It didn't hurt that Boeing hated the union workers the assembled the planes.  This change would switch a lot of work from union employees of Boeing to nonunion (or so Boeing management secretly hoped) employees working for subcontractors.  Ignoring the antiunion component, for the moment, this might have been a good idea if Boeing wasn't simultaneously making all the other changes.

Finally, I judged Boeing management to be weak at this time.  But each and every change would increase the burden Boeing management would need to shoulder.  As a whole, the increased load on management would likely overstress even a top notch management team.  Of course, a top notch management team wouldn't have done something so stupid.

And, of course, the expected happened.  The development of the plane hit snag after snag after snag.  And all of the cost saving assumptions built into the spread sheets used to justify all these decisions turned out to be wrong.  So Boeing got none of the savings they planned on.  In fact, everything cost way more than planned.

Boeing had to send engineering teams to several subcontractors to help them do what they had never been asked to do before.  A Boeing subcontractor in South Carolina collapsed under the strain.  Boeing ended up buying them.  And the project was delayed.  And parts of it needed to be redone.  And on and on.

The standard accounting method used when building a new plane is that you assume that you will sell 400 of them.  Then you write off all of your design and engineering costs evenly over the entire run of 400.  The first few planes are fantastically expensive to build because you don't know what you are doing.  But as you gain experience things get straightened out, sped up, and made more efficient.

The hope is that the profit you make on the planes toward the end of the run of 400 cover the costs you incurred building the first few planes in the run.  If everything works out like it is supposed to, then all your up front costs are paid by the first 400 planes you build.  Once the startup costs have been taken care of, the profit margin on subsequent planes is fat.

Boeing was forced to change "400" to "1,200" due to the awesome cost overruns they managed to rack up on the the project.  That means that Boeing has to sell more than 1,200 878s before they have a chance of making a profit on the plane.  As of midyear 2020, Boeing has only built 981 787's.  So they are still a couple hundred short of the break even point.

Now imagine Boeing had the billions they have spent on stock buybacks.  Then they could have retained much tighter control of the 787.  They could have stuck with their traditional model of doing their own design and engineering.

This is something Boeing already knows how to do.  So there would have been fewer problems.  Subcontractors would have also done better because they would only been responsible for the "build" part and they would have had compete, well executed plans to work from.

The plane would likely have come in closer to on time and on budget.  Boeing management would have not been as severely overstressed.  And they would not have given so much secret sauce to companies in countries who have designs on becoming competitors to Boeing.

I'll just skip over the 878 "battery glitch" and other teething pains the 787 has gone through.  For the most part, it is now humming along reasonably well.  Instead, I want to refocus on the 737.

The 737 Boeing is currently building has a lot of new technology in it.  But the various "rev" upgrades have each had to take the plane as it was and make only those changes to it that could be made and still drag along a lot of the old plane.

This has now been done multiple times.  So the cumulative amount of change is substantial.  For instance, the engines have been upgrades multiple times.  This changes the balance and aerodynamics of the plane.  So a lot of things had to be changed to compensate for that.

But each new "rev" was still supposed to mostly fly like the old model.  At some point the 737 acquired cockpit screens, for instance.  But the first generation that included screens could be configured to mimic the old electromechanical controls that they replaced.  This was so that pilots who had been trained on the old model could fly the new model without having to first be retrained.

Over time, it has been possible to drop backward compatibility that stretched multiple generations back.  But this "backward compatibility" requirement, even if it extends back only one generation, still severely limits what changes can be introduced.

The priority for some time has been to reduce airline operating costs by, for instance, introducing new engines in a way that does not requiring pilots to be retrained.  Pretty much everything else, like safety improvements, that doesn't directly and obviously reduce the airline's costs has been let go by the way.

A few years ago Boeing felt that the needed to "refresh" the 737 in order to keep up with Airbus.  Their two options were a new plane and yet another "rev".  The fact that Boeing really didn't have the money to fund a new plane made the decision a no brainer.  The result was the 737 "MAX".

The priority was to increase operating efficiency as much as possible while keeping development costs low and also keeping transition costs, like pilot training, to a minimum.  That meant new engines because they were the primary driver of improved fuel efficiency.

But the new engines had a different weight, shape, etc., compared to the old ones.  That drove a bunch of other changes to the plane.  And all these changes would normally have changed the flying characteristics of the plane.  And that would have require a round of expensive pilot training.

Enter MCAS.  MCAS was a piece of software that was there to make the plane appear to fly the same way the old model did.  Initially, it was supposed to kick in only in a few specific situations.  But more and more situations were found where the MAX didn't handle like the "NG", the model the MAX was replacing.

The specs for MCAS kept getting modified every time a new example of this was discovered.  In the end, the MCAS was active a lot of the time rather than only rarely.  It was also making more "corrections" and being more aggressive about the "corrections" it was making than the original specification had called for.  But each individual change was judged to be small enough that no high level or in depth review was necessary.

The MCAS that was eventually implemented bore little resemblance to the initial version.  But the incremental nature of the change process resulted in no review of the "new and improved" MCAS ever being requested.  As a result, the initial version was the only version that was ever subjected to any kind of in depth analysis and review.

The driving force behind this wasn't malevolence.  It was an obsessive focus on the bottom line to the exclusion of everything else.  An accounting perspective rather than an engineering perspective.  Boeing repeated with the MAX the same sins that got it into trouble with the 787.  The difference was that the shortcomings of the 787 got no one killed.  The shortcomings of the MAX got hundreds killed.

Between them, the 787 and the 737 MAX have trashed Boeing's reputation.  It got trashed both with airlines and with the flying public.  And then COVID happened.  Air traffic has been growing robustly for years.  Over time, growth in air traffic turns into orders for lots of new jetliners.

Design improvements in engines, etc. has also driven increased efficiency.  That has driven the cost of flying down.  Not surprisingly, lots of people chose to take advantage of this.  That is, right up until COVID shut everything down.

It turns out that Boeing could have avoided all the problems with the MCAS by spending a few million more on software.  They probably could have implemented that better software without slowing down the schedule for the MAX.  No additional hardware would have been required.

BTW, better software would likely have allowed Boeing to get away with no MCAS oriented pilot training.  Here, I'm talking about what they could have gotten away with, not what they should have done.  They should have mandated pilot training on the MCAS.

The reason no additional hardware is required is because it turns out that the 737 already has two of everything.  The proximate cause of the MCAS going nuts was something called an AOA sensor.  The MAX has two but only uses one.

When that one AOA sensor goes nuts the MCAS goes nuts and the plane falls out of the sky.  It is theoretically possible for the pilots to recover from this.  But they have to act instantly.  If they don't act immediately then what they are supposed to do, turn a wheel, becomes impossible due to loads imposed on various control surfaces that are the result of commands that the MCAS has by now issued.

It also turns out that there are two computers that can run the MCAS software.  But only one is used.  The software fix is to have both computers active at all times.  One computer uses one AOA sensor.  The other computer uses the other AOA sensor.

They then regularly compare results.  If the results differ they let the pilot know  The pilot can then turn the MCAS off.  (BTW, there didn't used to be a way for the pilot to turn the MCAS off.  In fact, they didn't even know the MCAS existed.)

 If Boeing had invested the money to change how the two computers operated and, as a side effect, caused the plane to use both AOA sensors, then no MAX planes would have crashed and no one would have been the wiser.

But the design of the 737 NG only used one AOA sensor and only one computer.  So Boeing argued that this configuration should be "grandfathered" for the MAX and the FAA bought the argument.  And, of course, all of this "only use one" business would have been redone if Boeing had decided to build a new 737 from scratch rather than rev-ing the old 737.

And, if Boeing's mind set was "what safety and other improvements can we make while we are rev-ing the 737" then the changes Boeing has now been forced to make would have been implemented before the MAX was certified, let alone delivered to an airline.  But the mind set was "don't change anything you don't absolutely have to change".

And Boeing is back in trouble with the 787.  After the MAX fiasco, all Boeing jets have been subjected to heightened scrutiny by the public and by regulators.  So something that might have slipped by before won't now, and Boeing knows this.

It turns out that Boeing has had some quality control problems at its South Carolina plant.  (Yes -- it's the operation Boeing had to buy because it couldn't do what was required of it while the 787 was in its design phase.)  The details are not worth going into.  But, if a couple of unlikely things happen at the same time, the plane crashes.

Since the FAA has been blamed for not doing its job with respect to the MAX, it is in no mood to let anything safety related slide.  So Boeing knows it is on the hook to fix the problem.  Luckily, no one is flying much these days.  So there are lots of 787's already sitting on the ground that can be taken out of service, repaired, and put back in service, all without inconveniencing the airlines.

Not surprisingly, Boeing is seeing a lot of order cancellations, especially for the MAX, their bread and butter.  Meanwhile, things are not rosy over at Airbus.  But things are going a lot better there than they are for Boeing.  People think Airbus planes are designed and built with safety in mind.  They are no longer sure that mindset also applies to Boeing.  So, given a choice, they'd rather fly on an Airbus plane.

Boeing did all this to save a buck.  They have been forced to spend billions now because then they were too focused on the bottom line to authorize spending millions.  The ledger on the787 is not as one sided.  But there too, a short sighted (and incompetently implemented) attempt to save money in the short run ended up costing far more in the long run.

If you have a long term perspective, neither set of decisions makes sense from an accounting perspective, let alone an engineering perspective.  But Wall Street has demanded that companies like Boeing only have a short term perspective.  Boeing management has been only too happy to comply.

So what's ahead for Boeing?  Well, the next year does not look good.  The 373 MAX is still grounded, although it should be flying by next year.  The problems with the 787 are not fixed yet, but they should be by next year.  And COVID means that few people are flying, although they may be by next year.

And that means airlines are cancelling orders, not adding to them.  Finally, airlines are likely to place what few orders they do make with Airbus.  Boeing is, after all, damaged goods.  It will take more than a few months and a few commercials to do anything about that.

And what that means is that there is a good chance that Boeing will need to be bailed out by the U. S. government.  Boeing is the single largest exporter of U. S. made goods to the rest of the world.  It is the only U. S. manufacturer of commercial airliners.  That makes it too big to fail.

The difficulties Boeing is now facing are far more severe than they were in the Boeing Bust of '69.  Boeing's reputation was high at that time.  Sales dried up due to reasons that had nothing to do with anything Boeing had done.  And Boeing was well positioned to take advantage of the eventual recovery.  It just had to survive long enough for it to get underway.

This time around, Boeing was already in a lot of trouble when the COVID caused recession arrived.  You can't blame Boeing for COVID.  But you can blame Boeing for being in really bad shape when COVID did hit.  That has left Boeing weak when it needed to be strong in order to survive the COVID recession.

And this time around Boeing is poorly positioned to take an advantage of the recovery, whenever it eventually arrives.  That assumes, of course, that Boeing is still around by then.  It may not be without a lot of government help.

60 Years of Science - Part 20

 This post is the next in a series that dates back several years.  In fact, it's been going on for long enough that several posts ago I decided to upgrade from "50 Years of Science" to "60 Years of Science".  And, if we group them together, this is the twentieth main entry in the series.  You can go to https://sigma5.blogspot.com/2017/04/50-years-of-science-links.html for a post that contains links to all of the entries in the series.  I will update that post to include a link to this entry as soon as I have posted it.

I take Isaac Asimov's book "The Intelligent Man's Guide to the Physical Sciences" as my baseline for the state of science when he wrote the book (1959 - 60).  In this post I will review two sections. "Internal-combustion Engines" and "Radio" are both from the chapter titled "The Machine".

In "Internal-combustion Engines" Asimov starts out with an observation.  Electricity displaced petroleum when it came to illumination.  He doesn't mention it but the modern Oil industry started out by producing kerosene to fuel lamps.  Lamps could produce much more ight than candles could.  Before kerosene, however, "lamp oil" consisted of several different flammable liquids.

A common one was rendered from Whale blubber.  Other sources were similarly expensive and difficult to procure in large volumes.  Kerosene revolutionized all this.  Once the Oil drilling, refining, and transportation infrastructure got built up, kerosene lamps quickly displaced candles.  They also displaced other forms of lamp oil and made it possible for the first time for people of modest means to illuminate their homes after the sun went down.  The famous Rockefeller "Standard Oil Monopoly" was a kerosene monopoly, not a gasoline monopoly.

Electricity eventually displaced the kerosene lamp.  It also displaced synthetic natural gas, which was becoming available in medium to large cities at about the same time Edison invented a practical electric light bulb.  Seattle, the city I live in, has a long since shut down the "gas works" facility that produced synthetic natural gas (and large amounts of very toxic pollution) for decades.

Returning to Asimov, he notes that with transportation the change went the other way.  There, petroleum displaced the alternatives rather than the other way around.  Internal-combustion engines are the ideal match for petroleum.  The earliest internal-combustion engines, however, predate petroleum's wide availability.  Designs dating back to the beginning of the nineteenth century used turpentine vapors (a plant based product) or Hydrogen for fuel.

Otto, built the first "four-cycle" engine in 1876.  Then, as now, the first or "intake" cycle consists of pulling fuel and oxygen into the "cylinder", a cylindrical enclosed space, by means of a movable wall called the "piston".  During the "compression" cycle the piston is used to compress the fuel-air mixture.  The fuel then ignites to push the piston back down in the "stroke" cycle.  The final cycle "exhausts" the burned fuel/air by pushing it out of the cylinder.  The engine is now set up to do it all over again.

The up-and-down motion of the piston can be turned into rotary motion by the addition of the proper linkage and a "fly wheel" to even things out.  This is the basic design of the "one cylinder" internal-combustion engine.  It can be adapted to the "diesel" design (the fuel ignites on its own) or the design commonly used in gasoline engines where a "spark plug" is added to ignite the fuel at the right time.

Clerk almost immediately figured out that multiple cylinders, ganged together and organized so that each cylinder fired at a convenient time, would smooth things out.  Remember that only one of the four cycles produces any power.  Engines where the number of cylinders is a multiple of four are the easiest ones to optimize.  6 cylinder engines quickly became common, however, as engineers were soon able to come up with designs that worked surprisingly well.  In fact, any number of cylinders can be made to work if you are clever enough.

It took a while to figure out how to force the explosion at the right time.  But by 1823 electricity based designs became common.  A "storage battery" (see earlier posts for the details) could provide sufficient power.  The now common "lead - acid" design, still used for modern car batteries, was invented by Plate in 1859.  An "Induction coil", actually a specialized type of transformer (again, see earlier posts for details), boosted the modest amount of electric power needed to get the job done to a high voltage.

It is easy to make a spark when you have even a small amount of high voltage electricity available.  Spark plugs are sophisticated devices because they have to handle high voltages while simultaneously standing up in the harsh conditions produced when the fuel ignites inside the cylinder.

Once such an engine is running it will continue to run as long as fuel and air continue to be supplied to it.  But it doesn't "start", make the transition from not running to running, without help.  The first method employed to provide the necessary the initial impetus was to utilize the muscles of the operator.

Initially, a simple crank was provided to "turn the engine over".  If turned over vigorously enough the engine would take over and keep running on its own.  At the time the book came out, lawnmowers, outboard motors, and many other devices that incorporated small internal-combustion engines, relied on this "hand cranking" technique.  Now, they rarely do.

"Self starters", specialized electric motors powered by the same storage battery that was used to power the spark plugs, were soon invented but Asimov does not give a date.  Automobiles that came with a self starter as standard equipment became ubiquitous by the '30s.  The incorporation of a self starter has now spread to pretty much everywhere internal-combustion engines can be found.  The devices I listed above now usually come with a self starter as standard equipment.  The only exception I am familiar with is the chain saw.

In the case of cars, the whole "start your engine" process has now evolved to the point where it is now completely computer controlled.  You can't "hand crank" a car.  You can't even start one by manually operating the self starter.  With any make or model of new car, the driver pushes the Start/Stop button and the computer does the rest.  With hybrid cars the computer starts and stops the internal-combustion engine whenever it decides that action is appropriate.  It doesn't even consult the driver, let alone cede any control over any part of the process or its timing.

Widening our focus from the engine to the whole vehicle, Asimov notes that Daimler built the first practical "horseless carriage" in 1835.  But, to catch on, they had to be cheap.  And that required developing the capability to do "mass production", produce a large number of essentially identical devices inexpensively.

Whitney was the first person to figure out how to do this.  He is known primarily for his invention of the "cotton gin".  In this case "gin" was short for engine.  And at the time "engine" meant any complex mechanical device.  Whitney's "gin" was capable of inexpensively removing foreign matter like non-cotton parts of the cotton plant, from freshly picked cotton so that it could then be turned into thread. The hand process the "gin" replaced was slow and, therefore, expensive.

Asimov correctly observes that, significant though this invention was, working out what was necessary to move to mass productions was far more important.  The device Whitney cut his mass production teeth on was the musket.

Up to this time muskets were hand made one at a time by gunsmiths.  That meant that, if a part needed to be replaced, then the replacement part had to be hand made to fit that specific musket.  And muskets of the time frequently needed parts replaced.

Whitney hit on the idea of "interchangeable parts".  Make all the muskets in such a way that all the parts of each musket were essentially identical.  That would mean that the replacement for a part that had broken could be gotten by cannibalizing that part from another musket, one on which a different part had broken.

Alternatively, the quartermaster could stock a modest number of spare parts.  As long as he had a few of each part the musket used on hand, any broken musket could be quickly repaired.  Before interchangeable parts, he would have had to keep a duplicate of each musket in the unit in stock in order to guarantee that he had all the replacement parts that might be needed.

It turned out that parts needed to be manufactured to a very high precision.  Whitney figured out how to do that.  He also solved a myriad of other problems.  The U. S. Army was the first army to be supplied with muskets made from interchangeable parts.  The idea quickly caught on with other armies and later spread elsewhere.

Asimov skips over Benz, the first to mass produce cars.  But a Benz car of the period was quite expensive.  Ford was the first to successfully mass produce cars.  This required figuring out how to make a car out of interchangeable parts.  It also required figuring out how to do other things.

Ford and his crew eventually figured it all out but not the first time he tried.  He built his first car in 1892.  But it took him several tries to successfully produce a high quality, low cost car that could be mass produced using interchangeable parts.  He finally succeeded in 1909 with the "Model T".

He kept introducing successive innovations, all designed to drive down costs and drive up production rates.  He introduced the idea of specialization, a worker would perform only one small step in the overall process.  He introduced the "moving assembly line" so that a worker did not have to waste time by moving around.  He introduced "jigs", customized tools that made it quicker and easier for a specific task to be performed.

 By the '20s he was able to sell a Model T for less than $300 and still make a profit.  At that price point a car became cheaper to own and operate than a horse.  Others, in the auto industry and elsewhere, quickly followed suit.

Meanwhile, in 1892 Diesel introduced changes to the internal-combustion engine that made it simpler, which made it cheaper to make, and so that it could use a less expensive fuel, what we now call Diesel fuel.

There are disadvantages to the Diesel design.  But the durability and economy of using  Diesel engine in heavy duty applications has made it the preferred option for commercial vehicles.  That was true when Asimov wrote the book.  It is still true today.

The internal-combustion engine made heavier than air aircraft practical.  The first step was to understand how to fly.  The "glider" an unpowered craft was the first step.  The early pioneer in this area was Lilienthal.  But he died in a crash in 1896.  The next person to take up the mantle of the scientific investigation of flight was Langley, for a long time the head of the Smithsonian Museum. 

Langley was the first to try to extend what he learned from his glider work to the development of a powered airplane.  He failed in spite of receiving substantial funding and support.  We all know that the Wright brothers succeeded where Langley failed.  Asimov opines that Langley might have succeeded had he gotten additional funding.  But the Wrights found that some of his data was wrong.

Problems trying to use Langley's data eventually led the Wrights to redo much of his work.  Along the way they invented the wind tunnel and used it in various ingenious ways to advance the state of art in the area of aeronautical engineering.  One of the things this research turned up was the inadequacy of current internal-combustion engines.  Their power-to-weight ratio was inadequate.  So they designed and constructed their own engine which had a better power to weight ratio.

They also investigated how an airplane could be controlled.  The "Wright Flyer", the airplane that flew on December 17, 1903, was very difficult to fly.  Over subsequent years they developed many improvements that made later designs much easier to fly and maneuver.

All this was substantially in advance of what Langley had been able to achieve.  It turned out that he had been much farther from success than most people, then and now, assumed.  Frankly, the Wrights were much better scientists than Langley was.  And they were able to make their many scientific advances on a shoestring budget.

Others, but not Langley, were able to build on the work of the Wright brothers.  Curtis, a man with a motorcycle background, was able to build much better engines than the Wrights, for instance.  The Wrights were at the forefront of the design of control systems for airplanes until about 1910 but after than others surpassed their best efforts.

Part of the reason for this was that the Wrights held what they knew closely and were unwilling to cooperate with other people.  Their paranoia was justified to a considerable extent.  Curtis, for instance, was one of many who built on the work of the Wright brothers but did not want to pay them for the privilege.  But, in the end, this paranoia was one reason others were eventually able to surpass them.

The biggest impetus to the improvement of aircraft design, however, was World War I.  Governments quickly figured out that better airplanes were critical to their War efforts and threw previously unimaginable sums of money around. As a result, the airplane of 1919 was quite different from the airplane of five years earlier, at least in Europe.

America's late entry into the War sidelined American airplane companies, including the Wright's company, during this critical period.  That left them far behind their European counterparts.  In spite of its wartime success, the airplane was generally seen as the stuff of daydreams, or a military tool, or a toy for the idle rich.  That all changed when Lindbergh flew from New York to France in 1927.

The Atlantic has already been successfully crossed when he made his flight.  But Lindberg's flight was what caused caused ordinary people to think differently about flying.  This change in attitude enabled the introduction of airlines and scheduled commercial flights.  But it was still seen as the plaything of the rich and famous.

The innovation that eventually changed this was another wartime innovation.  During World War II the Germans were the first to develop a practical "jet" engine.  (The first "jet" engine was created in 1913 by Lorin but it was not practical to use it for anything.)  The jet powered ME-262 fighter could literally fly rings around anything else in the sky.  But the Germans were unable to produce enough of them to effect the outcome of the War.

Experimentation leading to innovation resulted in rapid improvements.  At the time of Asimov's book this had not translated into any significant penetration by jets of the market for commercial airlines.  The "queen of the skies" at the time of the book was an airliner that featured four propellers driven by piston engines.  Planes of this type were being manufactured by several different companies.

The first serious effort at a commercial jet powered airliner was the DE Haviland Comet.  The jet engines worked fine but the plane had a design flaw that caused it to literally crack open and fall from the sky.

In a bit of bad luck for DE Haviland, the first few crashes happened over deep water and the aircraft could not be recovered and examined.  So people knew the planes were crashing but not why.  Eventually a crashed plane was recovered and examined, and the flaw quickly identified.  But by then it was too late for DE Haviland and the Comet.

The company to first successfully crack the jet airliner puzzle was Boeing with its 707.  In an early public demonstration Boeing's chief test pilot put the plane though a complete barrel roll in front of 50,000 witnesses.

The maneuver was NOT authorized by senior management but quickly became the stuff of legend.  It convinced the public and airline executives that the plane was safe and sturdy.  In the wake of the Comet fiasco winning over both groups was critically important to the success of the plane.  And it was very successful.

Jet engines are simple.  That makes them reliable and easy to maintain.  Both keep costs down.  The engine is also much more fuel efficient than a piston driven propeller plane.  The jet allowed the airline industry to introduce the era of cheap air fares.  And, like the Model T, that put flying, either for business or pleasure, within the price range of average people and cost conscious companies.

Since the introduction of the 707 much has changed and much has stayed the same.  Current generation jet powered airliners fly at about the same speed the 707 flew.  (The Concorde flew much faster, at supersonic speed, but was never a commercial success.)

Jet engine design has evolved to substantially improve their efficiency.  Raising the operating temperature (see previous posts for details) increases efficiency.  "High bypass" designs have also improved efficiency in ways I admit to not really understanding.

A modern jet also looks very similar to a 707, a design that is now 60 years old.  The most obvious change is to add "winglets" to the tips of the wings.  These change the way air flows over the wings in ways that I again don't understand.  But again, they work.

The other change is in materials.  The main material used to make the 707 was aluminum.  "Carbon fiber" is slowly displacing aluminum as the material of choice .  It has a better strength to weight ratio and that keeps the overall weight of the plane down.  A lighter plane is a cheaper plane to operate.

Carbon fiber, however, is the material of the future, not the present.  Eventually it will be the main material used to construct commercial airplanes.  But right now most commercial airplanes currently in production use far more aluminum than carbon fiber.  Only a few reverse the ratio.  On to "Radio".

Asimov starts the chapter off with Hertz.  In 1888 he proved the existence of radio waves by transmitting a signal from one place to another and successfully detecting it.  The distance involved was modest and the equipment was extremely primitive.  But it proved that the equations Maxwell had published twenty years earlier described a real phenomenon.

Hertz was able to go beyond simple detection.  He was able to determine some of the characteristics of what we now call "radio waves".  (For a time they were called "Hertzian waves" for obvious reasons.)  He was able to determine that whatever it was had peaks and troughs like waves.  He could also measure the wavelength.  It turned out to be far larger than the wavelength of light.

In 1890 Branley used improved apparatus to transmit information over a distance of 150 yards.  Lodge was able to make more improvements.  He succeeded in transmitting Morse code using radio waves.

Marconi made further improvements and succeeded in transmitting Morse code.  First, he managed 9 miles in 1896.  He successfully sent a signal across the English Channel two years later.  Finally, he was able to transmit a message, which I believe consisted of a single letter, across the Atlantic in 1901.  All this explains why the British call it "wireless telegraphy".  They also call a radio receiver a "wireless".

Marconi was the first to work out how to confine a radio signal to a narrowly constrained "frequency".  (He got a Nobel in 1909 for this work.)  If you know the frequency, you can calculate the wavelength, and vice versa.  For historical reasons some parts of the world use "frequency" and other parts of the world use "wavelength" to denote the same thing, namely the place in the spectrum a particular signal resides.  Wavelength, the term generally preferred by scientists, is very slowly winning out over frequency.

Fessenden developed the equipment necessary to generate what we now call an AM (Amplitude Modulation) signal.  The signal is transmitted on a single fixed frequency and its amplitude, loudness, is modulated.  He used this equipment to broadcast both words and music on Christmas Eve in 1906.  This marked the first recognizably modern radio broadcast.

Asimov then goes on to describe the internal workings of "vacuum tubes".  Vacuum tubes were ubiquitous at the time of the book's publication.  They are now restricted to a few specialty uses.  They have generally been supplanted by various "solid state" technologies.  I am going to skip all this, other than to note that these developments were critical to making radio practical in those early days.

One critical capability vacuum tubes enabled was "amplification", making a weak signal louder without changing its other attributes.  Amplification is obviously important if you want to create a strong signal suitable for broadcast.  It is also critical for raising the extremely low level of the signal an antenna placed at a distance from the transmitter picks up.  It takes a substantial amount of amplification to turn this signal into something useful.

In a similar (but harder to explain) manner, vacuum tubes could be used to perform all of the other steps necessary to take the output of a phonograph, for instance, prepare it for broadcast by an AM radio station, and then broadcast it.

On the receiving end, the signal originating from a single radio station needs to be selected while the signals from all the other radio stations are rejected.  The "radio frequency" part of the signal must then be stripped off and the result amplified enough to be able to drive a speaker at sufficient intensity that we can clearly and easily hear and enjoy whatever is on the record the radio station is playing.

In the early days, pretty much all radios used AM.  It make the fewest demands in terms of the complexity and sophistication of the circuitry necessary to handle it.  That kept equipment simple and costs manageable.  The first widespread use of radio was by the various navies of the world during World War I.  For the first time in naval history it was possible to communicate with a ship at sea in real time.

At the time the equipment was expensive to make and difficult to use.  Only naval vessels could afford it.  But technology marches on.  Easy to use and relatively inexpensive equipment became available in the late '20s.  By the mid-30s costs had dropped enough that equipment was cheap enough that even depression ravaged households could afford it. 

The very popularity of radio soon exposed a weakness of AM radio.  It was not that good at providing a solid, noise free signal in many circumstances.  This led to the development of FM (Frequency Modulation).  With FM, signal strength stays constant.  The frequency the signal is broadcast on is varied instead.

This provided a much more robust method but it also required substantially more complex equipment.  That made the equipment more expensive and put it out of range for the average consumer.  It was not very popular at the time Asimov wrote the book.

That changed in the following decade.  FM equipment got better and the price dropped.  FM was able to provide a much clearer and realistic sound.  It was also quickly adapted so that shows could be broadcast in stereo.

At first it was only used by symphonies and other "high brow" entertainment where the better signal quality was important.  But aficionados soon found that rock and roll and other "low brow" music also sounded much better on FM that it did on AM.

Soon, all forms of popular entertainment migrated to FM and AM became a wasteland.  This resulted in "talk radio", where good sound quality was not very important but low operating costs were, to take over the AM band.

The advent of the Internet drove still another revolution.  Now many people never listen to the radio.  Everything that was available there is now available on the Internet and/or your smartphone.  Radio, both AM and FM, is still out there but nobody pays much attention to it.

After briefly mentioning FM Asimov moves on to television.  He notes that the first step was the "wire photo".  This was a technology that was used to transmit a picture from London to Paris in 1907.

A still picture was scanned line by line.  The variation in light and darkness underneath each line was transmitted over a telephone line or via radio.  On the other end a matching device would draw a line of varying intensity on a piece of photographic film.  When the result wad developed and printed it yielded something resembling the original picture.

The process was slow and expensive.  It might take a minute or two to transmit a single picture.  Initially it was used only by newspapers and law enforcement.  It was too inconvenient for anybody else to bother with.  But the process contained all the ideas necessary to do television.  It just needed to be speeded up by orders of magnitude.  And, of course, the cost needed to drop by orders of magnitude too.

The sound part of the process was essentially radio so it presented no new challenges.  It was the picture part that represented the challenge.  The the toughest "picture" component that needed to be developed was the television camera.  Zworykin patented an "iconoscope" that got the job done in 1938.

Since it is a fancy vacuum tube I am going to skip over the details of how it worked.  But it was able to duplicate the "scan a picture a line at a time" process discussed above.  And it could scan a complete picture in a small fraction of a second.  It worked fast enough to be "moving pictures" compatible.

The television equivalent of the radio receiver already existed.  It was, you guessed it, another kind of vacuum tube.  As with the TV camera, it was capable of building up a compete picture from a series of lines in a small fraction of a second.

The "picture tube" had a relatively flat front face with a phosphorescent coating on the back of it.  Hit with the appropriate stuff, lines would glow at varying intensities resulting in the picture being reproduced.

Lots of other equipment was necessary to connect all of it together.  But RCA, then a giant electronics company, now an infrequently used brand name, was able to demonstrate a complete end to end system at the 1939 Worlds Fair in New York City.  World War II diverted all high quality radio equipment to the War effort.  TV equipment definitely fell into that category.

But commercial TV broadcasting started up shortly after the War.  At the time TV was only capable of broadcasting in black and white.  Asimov make reference to the advent of color TV in the mid '50s.  But what was then available was more of a proof of concept than actual reality.  Color TV actually took off in a noticeable way in the mid-'60s.  And all of this was in what we would now call low-fi - low fidelity.

The TV pictures of the time, initially in black and white, later in color, were good enough to be usable.  You could see what was being shown.  But the picture was not very sharp and the  colors were not very well defined.  That was the limit of the equipment of the time.

We now talk of pixels and lines of resolution.  A first generation "IBM PC" home computer used a custom "display" that supported a screen resolution of 640x480.  This meant that the picture it displayed consisted of 480 lines, each of which had 640 pixels (separate dots of picture information) in it.  Theoretically, TV did better.  It featured 525 lines.  But this was a cheat.  The scan lines were "interleaved".

In one scan only the even lines were processed.  In the next scan only the odd lines were processed.  So each individual TV picture only had about 260 lines in it.  The "aspect ratio" was 4:3.  The picture was 4 units wide and three units high.  If we apply this same 4:3 ratio we get a line with about 350 pixels per line.  So think of a TV picture from this era as having a resolution of 350x260 and you get a more accurate idea of the true situation.

As a cross check, if we take 480 and multiply it by four then divide it by three we get 640.  So a 640x480 picture has the same 4:3 aspect ratio.  And this was by design.  PC makers wanted to reproduce what consumers were seeing when they looked at their TV.

Some early home computers did not require a custom made "display".  They could be hooked up to a standard, cheap, black and white TV set.  But the screens on these computers were not able to reproduce the 640x480 resolution the first generation IBM PC was capable of.

Of course, IBM made you buy a special display device that could handle a resolution of 640x480.  And I can tell you from personal experience that they cost significantly more than a black and white TV of similar size.  On the other hand, the display device connected to my IBM PC could easily show me 25 lines of text, each consisting of 80 characters.  On the other hand, the TV connected to the home computer could only display 40 characters on a line.  And the line count was significantly lower too.

A resolution of 640x480 represented the state of the art back then.  Things have gotten a lot better since.  Current PCs usually sport a screen resolution of 1080x1920.  If we do the appropriate math we find that the aspect ratio is 16:9.  That's the aspect ratio used by the HD (high definition) TV specification.   A side by side comparison of an actual TV from the '50s or early '60s with a modern screen would bear out the fact that we are comparing aa resolution of 350x260 to a resolution of 1920x1080.  We've come a long way, baby!

Asimov then goes on to discuss videotape.  This is an extension of the audio tape that was discussed in earlier posts.  The idea is the same.  We just need to improve things enough so that video tape can handle the information load TV puts on it.  At the time the book came out professional video tape machines were available for use by networks and TV stations.  Over time this changed.  The video tape cassette and VCR (Video Cassette Recorder) were introduced.

In their time they represented a massive change.  When Asimov wrote his book you could go to a movie theater, buy a ticket, and watch what was showing on the schedule the theater operator chose.  Or you could turn your home TV on and watch what one of the three or four TV stations then operating in your area was showing.  And you had to watch it on the schedule the station manager chose..

The idea of saying "I want to watch move X and I want to watch it now" was literally an impossibility.  The video cassette and the VCR changed all that.  Once you owned a VCR you could buy cassettes preloaded with a specific movie.  You could take it home and watch it any time you wanted to.  And you could watch it as many times as you wanted to without having to pay any additional money.  And, unlike TV, it was commercial free.

But wait!  There's more. You could also record a show off of TV then watch it at a later time.  This is what we now call "time shifting".  And you could re-watch it as many times as you wanted.  But wait!  There's still more.  Stores opened up that would rent you a video for a couple of bucks. Let's face it.  Most shows and movies are only worth a single viewing.  The rental was usually only good for a day or two.  But you could rent and watch any video the store had in stock.  And a typical store stocked many thousands of titles.

This put the consumer in charge for the first time.  They had much more freedom to watch what they wanted when they wanted.  Consumers were no longer chained to the schedule dictated by nearby movie theaters or TV stations, be they local or cable.  This change truly represented a revolution.

But wait!  There's porn.  Up to this period of time it was hard to make real money in the porn business.  All the access channels were successfully blocked by various religious and other organizations.  Most people's idea of "the worst of the worst" at the time was Playboy magazine.  Then things opened up a little and seedy theaters in medium to large cities started showing porno movies.  The money wasn't that good but it was much better than what had come before.  Video tape and the VCR changed all that.

The porn companies quickly shifted to releasing their product on video cassettes.  And the public snapped it up.  All of a sudden there was big money in porn.  Video tape rental stores quickly figured this out and added "porn" sections.  It was not long before they were making half their revenue from porn.  It turned out that there had been a giant untapped market for porn.

The big problem with VCRs and video cassettes was that their picture quality was terrible. In many cases it was poorer than broadcast TV.  That didn't matter in the early days.  The fact that people could now watch what they wanted when they wanted was such a powerful force that people forgave the poor picture quality.

Then DVDs came along.  I am not going to dive into how the technology works. For our purposes I am just going to note that DVDs delivered much better picture and sound quality.  The era of the high end TV system was born.  At first people thought that the fact that you couldn't record your own DVD (you can now but you couldn't then) would be a deal breaker.  But it turned out that most people found the process of recording things more trouble than it was worth.

It turned out that people were mostly interested in buying and renting and not much into recording stuff themselves.  So the "direct to consumer" movie (and porn and everything else - by now you could buy or rent  boxed sets of old TV shows) business continued to grow.

Everybody quickly switched from cassettes to DVDs.  The rental stores started with small DVD sections tucked into a corner.  Over the course of a few years they shifted to having large DVD sections.  It was the video cassette section that ended up tucked into a corner.  But that did not change the business in a significant way.

What did drive a big change was the Internet.  At first it did not affect video. It was too slow to handle it.  But that changed.  The speed of my first computer connection to the outside world was measured in hundreds of bits per second.  It quickly changed to thousands of bits per second then tens of thousands of bits per second.

The speed of my first "high speed" internet connection was measured in millions of bits per second.  At that point decent quality streaming video becomes possible.  I have had a one gigabit (billion bit) per second connection for a little more than a year now.  I may be foolish but I believe that will be as fast as I will ever need.

The widespread availability of high speed Internet has again revolutionized things.  If it's instantly available online why bother to own it or even rent it from a store?  Netflix and its competitors have turned us from people who buy or rent DVDs to people who stream from Netflix.

Again, in a certain sense, we have gone backwards.  If I own a DVD I can watch it forever whenever I want.  But many of the movies and TV shows on Netflix come and go.  They may be available for a couple of years but after that, they are gone.  Netflix may license them again at a later dare.  And then again, they may not.

But it turns out that if Netflix has something I want to watch now it doesn't matter to me (speaking as a typical customer) that they don't have exactly what I want.  Movie studios, and keep in mind they make most TV shows too, used to make good money from selling DVDs.  They even made good money providing rental stores with product.

But not any more.  There used to be tens of thousands of rental stores.  Now, only a few remain.  Some people still buy the odd movie or boxed set of a TV show.  But that market has also dropped away to almost nothing.

Streaming is booming.  In fact, it has gotten completely out of hand.  It used to be that you could count streaming services on the fingers of one hand.  Now there are so many of them you can hardly keep track.  And this has resulted in a fragmentation of content.  This service has a few shows you might be interested in but most shows are on another streaming service.

If you want to have access to it all you have to subscribe to perhaps twenty services.  And that will still leave gaps in what you have access to.  And even if you sign up to lots of streaming services, something that costs lots of money, it is a complete PITA to keep track of which show is in what streaming service. 

My best guess is that a lot of these services will go under.  They are all counting on other services going under leaving the field open for them to survive and thrive.  In reality, nobody knows how it is going to all shake out.

Back to Asimov.  He then tackles solid state electronics.  He goes into some detail about how transistors work.  His explanation is based on Germanium.  At the time Germanium seemed like the best material to make transistors out of.  But Silicon eventually won out as the material of choice.  (There are technical differences between Silicon and Germanium transistors.  But they aren't worth getting into.)

The book was written during the "discrete transistor" era, an era that ended up not lasting very long.  Asimov discusses how this type of vacuum tube can be replaced by that type of transistor.  For a while that's basically what happened.

But at the about the time the book was coming out the "integrated circuit" was being invented.  It's just a method for simultaneously creating multiple transistors on a single small piece of silicon.  Connections between the various transistors can be created as part of the same overall process.  And that means that you can skip the later "solder everything together" step.

A few years later, a single LSI (Large Scale Integration) chip might have contained the equivalent a thousand discrete transistors, all hooked together.  Now, the equivalent of tens of billions of transistors, complete with connections, are manufactured at once.  This is possible because the manufacture of an IC (Integrated Circuit) is essentially a photographic process.

Various "process steps" are needed.  But the important steps involved projecting a "mask", essentially the negative of a picture, onto the surface of the IC.  The light hitting the surface causes a chemical change to take place wherever the light is bright.  Using as many as 40 masks, carefully coating the surface with various chemicals at the right time and in the right sequence, and by taking other steps, a complex pattern consisting of various sub-patterns of materials with various properties is "etched" into the surface or near-surface area of the IC.

There is a pattern for where the "wire" material needs to be.  There is a pattern for where the insulator material needs to be.  There is a pattern for where each of the various components that go together to make a transistor "gate" need to be.  In the end there are many transistors connected by wires and insulated from other transistors and wires laid out on the surface of the IC.

What's important to know is that the cost of manufacturing a specific IC is not dependent on how many "features" there are on the surface of the IC.  The cost is in the number and type of "process steps" necessary.  If the manufacturing process for two different ICs follows the same recipe then an IC containing a million gates costs the same to make as an IC containing a billion gates.

As the component count goes up and as the "feature size" goes down the cost of building that "fab", the manufacturing facility capable of fabricating a particular family of ICs, might go up.  But hopefully you will be able to produce so many ICs using that fab that the cost of the fab itself ends up being a small part of the cost of producing any individual IC.

This "it costs the same to make an IC with a lot of components as it costs to make an IC with many fewer components" characteristic of IC manufacturing is the IC "secret sauce".  It explains why the price of IC based electronics doesn't go through the roof.  This is in spite of the fact that typically the new gadget contains much more complex ICs.  They enable the new model to do things the old model of a few years ago only dreamed of being able to do.

And that's where this particular installment comes to an end.