James L Adams—People and Products

The Forklift—A Good Product

 When I began my hobby of restoring old equipment, I realized I needed to lift heavy parts and sub assemblies.  So  40 years ago or so I restored a 1950’s Clark Yardlift 40 forklift, which was free to me, since it belonged to a farmer friend, was not in running condition, and no longer had the performance he wanted.  It is a relatively small machine (capable of lifting a load of 2000 pounds ten feet in the air, tilting its forks over a range of 15 degrees, traveling 9 miles per hour forward or backwards, and weighing about 6000 pounds plus load.  Although it has inflatable tires up front, it is unhappy on rough or soft ground, and the forks have no sideways motion)

 But of course, like most fork lifts, it is extremely maneuverable, and since it is only 42 inches wide and 11 feet long with forks attached, it is consistent with my yard and other spaces where I work. It also has the advantage of being fueled by Propane, so it does not mind being unused for long periods of time.  When I want to use it, it reliably starts and does its thing.

 What do I use it for?  More and more as my wife and I age.  The photograph (taken by a fascinated neighbor) shows my wife at low elevation and I attacking our front hedge.  We hide behind ten foot tall hedges, which are a pain to trim from ladders.  However, with my wife on the pallet, along with a small generator and an electric clipper (in her capable hands), no mere hedge can slow us down.  Similarly I can carry anything weighing up to two tons wherever the forklift can go, and I can’t remember ever being able to lift two tons myself.  In fact, I can probably do more aided by my forklift now than when I could leap tall buildings with a single bound, but was trying to live without a forklift.  And, of course, it has unlimited kid-entertaining potential (see next two photos.

 Unfortunately, forklifts are considered an industrial product and not designed for people messing around in their yard.  And perhaps there are not that many people doing so any more.  But I would think there would be a market for a cheaper, lighter, yard model, at least for those of us who are aging but still like to move heavy loads around, trim smaller trees, and work on second stories of houses.  Of course, there are many boom lifts (cherry pickers etc.) used by painters, tree trimmers, utility people, and other “professionals”.  But they are expensive, limited in load lifting ability, and one can get into trouble lifting large loads too far from the base.  And worse yet, for people like me, it is very difficult to find one that is free because it is broken. (I am under pressure go find one again, since my foot slipped on the clutch in our last hedge trimming session, almost dumping my wife in the hedge – cherry pickers are controlled by the person in the air)

  So I consider my forklift, even thought it is now 60 years old,  an outstanding product, which has become a friend that helps me live the life I choose.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Work Is About More Than Money

In the March 22 edition of the New York Times, there is an article entitled “Why Not Utopia”, by Mark Bittman . It is here. Much of the article is about the loss of jobs due to more and more work previously done by humans now being done by computers.  This is a message that has and is being made constantly these days.  Bittman goes further and hypothesizes that this adds to the increasing economic inequality that bothers us.  He finishes by suggesting we go to another economic system in which the robots work for “us” (by which he must mean those who are not wealthy).

 Granted, there are more employment problems coming, although probably more about the quality of work than the quantity, but while everyone seems to be worrying about the effects that the “information revolution” may have upon the economy, we seem to be forgetting that jobs are about more than money.  Jobs, are a chief source of satisfaction to many of us.  My wife and I have worked  to support ourselves  and our family, but in addition we have worked, and still do work for the satisfaction we get.  In fact much of the work we do now does not pay at all.

 There is still work in the world that is stultifying, and even painful.  Agricultural stoop labor is an example, especially for older people in hot weather.  Miners in many parts of the world must work bent over in dangerous conditions, and such work is an excellent opportunity for robots.  Some work requires constant repetition, and would drive one mad if done alone.  But I remember when I was young, oranges were packed for shipping by hand.  This involved a large space full of women grabbing the oranges from bins that were constantly being refilled, wrapping them with a couple flicks of the hands and fingers, and tucking them neatly into the shipping boxes. I used to watch them with awe, because of the speed with which they filled the boxes.  And they did it all day long, day after day.  One would think they would have gone crazy, but instead they seemed to be having a wonderful time telling bad jokes, gossiping, singing, whistling at me, and generally carrying on.  The packing had obviously become completely automatic, and the day became a large social gathering.

 I have held many jobs that contained elements of what might be called drudgery.  I grew up on a farm, and did the usual shoveling of dirt, hoeing of weeds, trimming of deadwood, smudging, and irrigating.  But it was necessary, and probably added to the pleasure of being surrounded by the growing crops.    

 When I was relatively young (probably 9 or 10), I had a job mowing the lawns in front of the orange packing house where my father worked and the fore mentioned women packed.  It happened to be on the main street of town. The mower was hand pushed, and the grass grew fast, so it was a fair amount of work, especially in the summer (no shade, Southern California) and took several hours.  The work was tedious and physically hard at my tender age, but I was fiercely proud of the results.  I would go out of my way to ride my bicycle past it and realize that those were “my” lawns looking beautiful for all the passers by.  Did I get paid?  I don’t even remember, but certainly not enough to be considered a fair wage —that was often the circumstance when I worked at something in which my Dad was involved. But later I have worked in oil fields and in machine shops, and built a barn and several additions to houses, and served a tour in the Air Force.  I found it all to be rewarding.

 I have also done hard mental work, as a student, an engineer, a professor, and a consultant and loved it.  Now that I am retired, I am still working on writing books and restoring antique heavy equipment.  The photo at the left is a classical McCormick horse drawn mower that is completely restored except for the pitman stick, which converts the circular motion of the crank wheel into the linear motion of the cutting teeth, and which I will build from scratch this weekend.  I began this project with an incomplete rusted, twisted wreck, and have done a lot of work straightening it out, making the missing parts, getting it to run, painting it, and so on.  I am not going to sell it, and even if I did I could not rationalize the time I have put into it from the profit.  But I very much enjoy the process and the result.  I am proud of having the skill it takes to do such things and enjoyed learning about McCormick, reapers, and related subjects. A hobby?  Maybe but it causes me to sweat a lot.

 My wife is fortunately also a fan of working.  After her Stanford career, she started a consulting company. She is now doing research and writing books on historic houses at Stanford and on her family.  She is also taking an enormous number of continuing education classes at Stanford, and doing all of the assigned work even though she is not taking them for credit.   I am also working on a couple of books, and if you think writing books is not work, try one.  She also does all of the work in her larger-than-necessary  garden  and I repair everything that breaks in our 100 year old house. We must love working, because we have enough money to hire help to do such things—of course they would not do as good a job as we do.

 So as to Mr. Bittman’s article, digital equipment will continue to take over work that has previously been done by humans, and I say good riddance to work that is not somehow satisfying, but I do not want digital equipment to do things for me that I enjoy, and challenging and stimulating work is one of them.  When all automobiles are autonomous, I will be proud of converting one to manual drive (myself) and being ticketed for driving it. Finally I will be able to be a curmudgeon.

 

Products and Engineering Education

Products and Engineering Education:

In an article in the June 15, 2015 edition of the New York Times, Frank Bruni, a columnist, wrote an article entitled “Accepted? Rejected? Relax"  It is here. The subtitle is "The obsession with elite colleges distorts reality, hurts kids, and perverts education”. I couldn’t agree more, even though I spent my teaching career at Stanford, which is one of them. I particularly think this is true in the case of engineering.

One thing that caught my eye was his mention in the article of the engineering school at Waterloo University, a public school in the province of Ontario, Canada, which is known for student and institutional innovation and the production of fine engineers, but not as an “elite” school. Last year I was a member of an advisory board to the government of Chile in conjunction with their “Engineering 2030 project”, which is an attempt to update their engineering schools and move them more toward work that will benefit Chile.  Waterloo was often mentioned as an example.  One of my sons is a long-term employee of Tesla Motors, a highly sought employer.  They are very high on Waterloo.  In Bruni’s article, he quotes Sam Altman, the president of Y Combinator, one of the best-known providers of seed money for technology start-ups.  When asked for the name of one school that stood out in terms of students and graduates whose ideas took off, he answered with Waterloo.  Since Altman attended Stanford, and since it has a high reputation for producing entrepreneurs, Bruni had expected him to come up with Stanford.  But Waterloo students had launched eight successful ventures with Y Combinator money.  “To my chagrin”, said Altman, “Stanford has not had a really great track record”  (of course Stanford students may make more use of other sources of funding, such as Kickstarter or venture capitalists)

 What is Waterloo doing right?  I think it is trying to produce engineers, not applied scientists, and perhaps not worrying as much about where it stands in the ratings of universities.   An example is their use of paid co-op programs to allow their students to learn in the context of industrial experience—a great help, since engineering schools tend to give an incomplete and somewhat misleading view of engineering. Another is their emphasis on design and creativity as well as analysis and theory—both central to engineering, but perhaps not as high in academic status.

 I was an undergraduate majoring in engineering at an elite school (Caltech), and probably would have changed schools had I not worked in a machine shop, and later as a junior engineer and finally as an engineer before I got my college degree. This was in a company at the time named Hunter Engineering, later to become Hunter Douglas, maker of upscale venetian blinds.  When I worked there, the engineering department consisted of a dozen people or so, all of whom had shop experience, and none of whom had a four year engineering degree ( The chief engineer had a degree from a two year college – I was called an engineer after my freshman  year) .  Yet during the time I was there, among other products, the company developed the machinery necessary to continuously cast, form, heat treat, and paint venetian blind stock at a very high rate.  This was an extremely difficult problem, which included a great deal of work to which the type of material stressed in engineering schools did not apply.  Schools teach material that is essential to an engineer, and add to one’s comfort with and understanding of mathematics, science, and engineering theory, but engineering also requires the sort of judgment and intuition resulting from experience.  Caltech emphasized math and science, rather than such things. The industrial experience I had allowed me to view my Caltech courses in context, as is probably the case with the co-op programs at Waterloo. 

 Science and engineering definitely overlap, but if you are interested in the differences, I discussed some of them in a book entitled entitled Flying Buttresses, Entropy and O-Rings published by Harvard Press in 1993.

 Engineering schools in many elite colleges had moved heavily to science, and maybe away from engineering, in the 1930’s, and then moved even more in that direction  after World War II.  The result has been a boon to engineering faculty members, who have been able to do research that attracts more money and is more prestigious to other academics, and in fact paves the way to new materials, processes, and approaches. But they often short such things as  the importance of cut-and-try approaches, testing, creativity and innovation, experience, and life in an engineering group.  The tie between academia and industry can be good in areas where the theory is more directly applicable, (Electrical Engineering, perhaps Chemical Engineering and Computer Science), but a gap remains in many fields such as mechanical and civil engineering.

 Engineering schools in the so-called elite universities are obsessed with breakthroughs and have gleefully accepted the academic value systems of applied scientists —theory, rigor, mathematics, increased emphasis on the Ph.D. degree — with faculty status determined heavily by refereed publications and visibility in their specialty. But during my years as a professional engineer (including my J.P.L. time) I never saw engineers that were involved in project work publishing in refereed journals, or even reading them. Professional engineers certainly tend to use theory when it works, but are usually forced to augment it with experience and testing, and tend to use theory with which they are comfortable.

 The swing back toward application in the elite engineering schools is underway, but it is very slow.  I was involved in attempts to cause this to happen by  the government and in the American Society of Engineering Education in the early 1960’s, and was hired onto the Stanford faculty in 1966 by Joe Pettit, a dean who cared deeply about education, and Fred Terman, the god of Stanford Engineering School, who had decided that the pendulum had swung dangerously far and a few people should be hired who had experience working as an engineer.  I was one of them.  But 30 years later, I was asked to spend a couple of years as “Associate Dean of Special Projects” and see what I could do to get Stanford’s Engineering School more involved in manufacturing, which was then a hot item in the U.S.,  and is in fact a central engineering activity.  I put an outstanding team together between the Graduate School of Business and the Engineering School, and we produced what I thought was an excellent plan.  But since industry knew much more about manufacturing than the School of Engineering, it included a co-op element.  Strangely enough, to us, that seemed to insult many of the influential members of the faculty, who apparently considered co-op programs, and perhaps even manufacturing, intellectually beneath them and beneath the engineering school.  R.I.P. good study, and hello China.

Life and the Distractions of Technology

In 2006, Matthew Crawford wrote an article in the New Atlantis magazine entitled “Shopcraft as Soulcraft”.  It is here.  My friends and I who are believers in the benefits, if not necessity, of working with the hands on tangible objects, loved it.  He followed with a book of the same title in 2008.  I have never met him, but think I should because I have been working on a similar book (working title Making, Fixing, and Tinkering) for several years. I am far from a full time writer— partly due to necessary hobbies involving working with my hands— so I don’t know when I will finish.  But I have suspected since I saw his original article in the New Atlantis that we think along similar lines.

 Now I am sure of it, because I just encountered an article he wrote in the Sunday Review Section of the March 8, 2015 edition of the New York Times entitled “The Cost of Paying Attention”.  The article was based on another book of his that is forthcoming entitled The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction.  The article from The New Atlantis is here.   I am excited about reading the book when it appears, and will comment on it in a future post.

 The article in the Times has to do with the constant distractions we have from such things as television, print, digital devices, and marketeers.  He uses the example of the difference in feelings and ability to think or focus on specific activities in the lounges associated with upper class flying, and the general waiting areas, which are papered with advertisements and filled with noise and other distractions.  His final short paragraph summarizes his thoughts: “I think we need to sharpen the conceptually murky right to privacy by supplementing it with a right not to be addressed.  This would apply not, of course, to those who address me face to face as individuals, but to those who never show their faces, and treat my mind as a resource to be harvested”

 To me, an example of distraction is social networking..  When I retired from active professoring in 1999, the internet and mobile phones and computers were not nearly as central to life on the campus.  But realizing that I was not yet dead two or three years ago, I figured that I had better catch up to our culture, and that social networking was a part of it.  So I joined Facebook, Twitter, and Linked in.  I linked to a few close friends, and was immediately overwhelmed.  I had not realized the capability of  these “services” to find people I knew in the world and harangue me about linking to them.  Neither did I realize the number of people I did not know in the world who wanted to link to me for reasons of possible employment, support for graduate study, a source of contacts, or simply to better brag about their number of “friends”. 

I enjoy writing posts to this blog, and sending it to a relatively small number of people by way of twitter and facebook, because it keeps me thinking about issues in which I am interested.  But I do an embarrassingly poor job of responding to comments, adding information to my sites,  accepting new “friends” and “contacts”, or otherwise following the etiquette of being linked to hundreds of thousands of people.  I am impressed with people who do so, although at some point it seems to require an assistant, if not a staff to keep up with all of this communication.  But I have more rewarding projects to do than I will ever finish, am constantly finding new activities that are rewarding, and I certainly don’t want an assistant or staff. Social networking, although seductive, I consider to be an attention pirate. And even e-mail has joined the list.  I seem to be spending more time making filters to trash information I don’t want than I do dealing with messages of value to me.

 Advertising is another evil.  There are of course the ads that interrupt TV programs, and the pop-up ads on the internet.  And I should apologize to the New York Times, because a couple of weeks ago I wrote a gentle rant against their “new” format for the Sunday magazine.  I could not stand it.  It was mostly advertisements for the usual luxury goods, and almost impossible to read because of out of control graphics —distractions.  To my amazement and delight, the very next issue had moved back toward its traditional format —back to a reasonable weight, articles whose continuation could be reasonably easy to find, graphics that did not disrupt the flow, and a reasonable amount of advertisement.  Perhaps the New York Times was simply making a quick chunk of money by selling ad space to the people who usually advertise in their ridiculously thick supplements on such things as Fashion and Travel, which consist most of ads.  Hopefully they were influenced by a large number of readers like my wife and I (and friends) who were thinking of canceling their subscription because of the issue that contained their “new” magazine format. 

 And what’s with grocery stores?  Next time you enter a “super market” pay careful attention to the advertisements.  The good news, is that your mind will soon refuse to do so.  The bad news is that if it did not, you would undoubtedly run into a shopping cart containing a couple of babies and being pushed by a shopper on their smart phone, either communicating with their spouse on what to buy or texting their friends, and end up in a hassle. 

 I am eagerly waiting for Matthew Crawford’s new book. Meanwhile I will re-think my interaction with social networking.

The Perfect Gift —An Old Rusty Tractor

The photograph  shows another project that will keep me from getting in trouble.  It is a model K 20 Cletrac tractor, probably manufactured about 1930.  It was given to me by the family of one of my best friends, Chuck Whitcher, described here,  who originally hooked me on the hobby of restoring old farm machinery, and who sadly recently died.  Chuck had wanted to give it to me but I resisted because my cup is overflowing with projects of this sort. 

However, I finally could not resist it, because it so perfectly fulfilled my requirements, such as:

1. I have had no hands-on experience with Cletracs, a very successful run of machines made by the Cleveland Tractor company.  I grew up around Caterpillar tractors, and my oldest son and I have several older models.  But Cletracs have fanatic and organized fans and fan clubs, and the owners of them delight in pointing out the advantages of them over Caterpillars of the same age. Obviously a chance to learn something here.
2. It is in my favorite condition – completely, but not terminally rusted, seemingly complete, and although not running, and probably not run for many many years, boasts an engine that with a large amount of effort, can be turned with the crank.
3. In its present state has low value (except to me), and therefore I can happily accept it as a gift.
4. It has that “Cletrac” look, from its Snoopy-doghouse engine compartment to its steering wheel (can you believe a steering wheel for a track layer?).  Also lots of track wheels, which will help make up for the local loss of Jacque Littlefield’s tank collection.
5.  In restoring it, I will meet large numbers of very likable people, who are not only owners and restorers of these machines, but know the way to replacement parts, if necessary.
6. It was owned by Chuck who was both a wonderful man and a mentor of mine.

The photograph to the left gives an indication of its present patina, and I plan to give the tractor special treatment to preserve it.  Ordinarily, I tend to de-rust old machines and paint them in original colors.  For this one, I will get it  running well, figure out how to smooth out the rust, and give it some kind of coating to retain it. I want it to be proud of its age, just as I hope Chuck was when he died at the age of 91.