American Pie: It's The Little Things In Life
...The push to make things smaller and smaller has not relented. Computers that once filled a good-sized room, now will fit in the palm of your hand. Mobile telephones that needed to be carried in a shoulder bag, today are almost invisible when clutched to the caller’s ear, giving the impression that the caller either has an earache or a painful tooth....
But there are anomalous and antiquated inefficiencies that linger on in the technological stampede towards miniaturisation, as John Merchant reveals.
To read lots more of John's incisive columns please click on American Pie in the menu on this page.
I suppose people have always been fascinated by miniatures – the Lord’s Prayer on a pin head, toy soldiers, doll houses, portraits etc. During the latter part of World War II, there was some rivalry between an American manufacturer of hypodermic needles and a British competitor, as to which company could make the smallest diameter needle. With a feeling of confident triumph, the British company shipped over a needle that was only slightly larger than a human hair. The US company shipped it back with another needle threaded inside it!
During the 1960’s, Honeywell, at that time Honeywell Brown, produced an annual calendar of cartoons that had an engineering or technological flavor. The cartoons were drawn by a talented ex-employee, and were much sought after. If anyone had saved them, today they would represent an interesting chronicle of a period when the pace of technological advance was accelerating rapidly; an increase that has not slowed since.
I remember two of the cartoons quite vividly. The first was a desert scene with an oil pipeline running from the foreground to the distant horizon. Two workers, who had started painting the pipe from opposite ends, had come to within ten feet of each other and one was using blue paint, the other green. The caption read “What change of specification?”
The other cartoon that I recall, pictured a laboratory with a white-coated engineer working on a very small object about the size of a thimble. At the side of him on the bench were several transformers ranging upwards in size from about a cubic inch to one the size of a suitcase. Each transformer was marked with the year of development, the years increasing as the size decreased. A colleague standing beside the engineer is remarking, “If you’re not careful you’ll miniaturize yourself out of a job.”
The push to make things smaller and smaller has not relented. Computers that once filled a good-sized room, now will fit in the palm of your hand. Mobile telephones that needed to be carried in a shoulder bag, today are almost invisible when clutched to the caller’s ear, giving the impression that the caller either has an earache or a painful tooth. Radios and recorded music players that required a sturdy sideboard to sit on, now can be carried in your pocket. Ironically, television sets have become both smaller and larger.
Just as the Honeywell engineer seemed in danger of causing his job to disappear, some objects and devices have become so small you would need a powerful microscope to see them. Transistors that used to be about the size of a pea, these days are packed in their thousands in an area equal to a postage stamp. Current transistor technology research is working on microbe-sized transistors, which are in fact living organisms.
Among some of the other miracles of man’s inventiveness are pumps so small they can be inserted in a vein to dispense medication; cameras for looking into the most inaccessible parts of your body, that are smaller than the eraser on a pencil; and of course the almost ubiquitous pacemaker that not only keeps your heart ticking rhythmically, but also records any cardiac “events” for later interpretation by a doctor.
But the midget to end all midgets is the nanotube. Note that word, because if you haven’t heard it already you will - again and again as time goes on. According to Wikipedia, “a nanotube is a one-atom thick sheet of graphite rolled up into a seamless cylinder with diameter of the order of a nanometer.”
A nanometer is about 50,000 times smaller than a human hair. These cylindrical carbon molecules have novel properties that make them potentially useful in a wide variety of applications in textiles, building materials, medicine, electronics, optics and other fields of materials science. They exhibit extraordinary strength and unique electrical properties, and are efficient conductors of heat. So there.
But if this frenzied spate of miniaturization has its miraculous side, it can also be a source of irritation – if you’re me that is. Most of the miniature things that have entered my life are in fact a huge deception. All the teeny-weeny gizmos I own are electrical or electronic: my cell phone, my laptop computer, my DVD player, my tape recorder. The same thing applies to some devices I might own, but have not yet got around to: an MP3 player, a personal organizer, a satellite radio and so on.
All require electricity otherwise you might just as well use them as doorstops, but not one of them can I plug into the electrical outlets in my house. They all require a power supply to convert house voltage and frequency to DC. So along with the gizmo, I have a power supply module that in some cases equals or exceeds the size and weight of the gizmo its self. Not only that, but each power supply is dedicated to its mate, and there is no interchangeability or universality.
One provides 7.5 volts, another 12 volts, and yet another, 5 volts. Two may produce identical voltages, but at different current ratings. And you know what? They all contain transformers. So it would seem that our cartoon development engineer of the 1960 didn’t get much further than the thimble-sized version, and for sure he didn’t miniaturize himself out of a job as his colleague predicted.
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