Dec 21 2014
Review of “Engineering the Revolution” by Ken Alder
This book will entertain and inform you if you have been struggling with issues like the proper role of government in the economy and in technology development, gaining acceptance for new technology in a society, the nature of the engineering profession and its social role, engineering education, or meritocracy in general. It is about events that happened between 200 and 300 years ago in France, but the technical, political and social challenges it describes are still with us today, worldwide.
Feb 23 2022
Standards, China, and the Industrial Revolution
As a general principle, in manufacturing, you need to do the work the same way every time if you want the output to be consistent. In some cases, like extracting metals from ores, you need to tweak processes to produce consistent output from raw materials of varying compositions. Then the tweaks themselves must be executed consistently so that the response to a particular variation in ore content is always the same.
Standards are an area where China had a 2,000-year headstart but neither the scientific nor the industrial revolutions occurred there.
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By Michel Baudin • Technology • 1 • Tags: interchangeable parts, Part standardization, Quality, Standards