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Plausibility Denial or Truth is Stranger Than Fiction

Written by Gorg Huff

Predictions and Reality

Some years ago the barflies who frequent the 1632 Tech Manual, after much debate, came up with the number of computers in Mannington, West Virginia. Which was also the number of computers in Grantville. At the most recent 1632 con, we discovered that that estimate was off. As of the year 2000, there were more computers in Mannington than we thought.

Based in large part on library usage, we estimated the number of books in Mannington. Then we found out about a couple of large private libraries. Turns out there are more books in Mannington than we thought.

Estimates were made about the amount of heavy machinery. There was more heavy construction equipment than we thought.

Estimates were made about the precision with which the down-timers could produce products by hand. When checks were made about what they had actually done it turned out that: The down-timers were capable of more precision than we thought.

Is anyone starting to notice a pattern here? I haven't been involved in 1632 Tech from the beginning, but I have been around for a while. And one thing has shown itself to be amazingly consistent throughout: every learned estimate that has been checked against the facts on the ground—at least all those that I'm aware of—have been off, and all in the same direction. That direction is "less." Less equipment, less knowledge, less craftsmanship, less everything. Up-timer, down-timer, it doesn't matter. It's still always "less."

Thought Experiment

Let's take a break for a bit and try a thought experiment. To do this experiment, go to your local movie rental place and rent The African Queen. Now comes the hard part. Watch the movie, but try not to be distracted by the story or the excellent acting of Bogart and Hepburn. Instead, I want you to pay fairly close attention to the boat, and especially the little steam engine it uses for propulsion. Pause the tape, take notes, try to remember everything you've learned about steam engines from grade school on. Then, sit down and, using the movie and what you remember, try to design a small steam engine of comparable power.

Some of you will be able to do this, some won't. If one of ten of you can do so, then steam-powered barges on the Elbe and the lower Saale rivers will become fairly common, fairly quickly. Perhaps as important, small steam mills and shops will come into use in the towns around Grantville, to run things like lathes and small mills.

Now, in your minds eye, consult with some down-time craftsmen. Show them your drawings, tell them about how it's important that the steam be contained in the piston or pistons, then released at the right point in the stroke. Ask your pretend down-timer how he would go about making the pistons and cylinders, the rods, the valves, the crankshaft, and so on. Talk it over with friends from work, get their opinion. The percentage of those who can design a steam engine, compared to those that can't, goes up as errors get caught and concepts get added. One person doesn't have to be able to do it. Five, or six, or a dozen—each knowing different parts of how to do it—can get together and work it out.

Now, do the same thing with airframes, internal combustion engines, suspension systems, and so on. I think you'll be surprised at how often you come up with something that will actually work. It might not work really well, but it'll be an airplane that will fly or a suspension system that's better than they had on the stagecoaches of the old West. It has been said that all technology goes through three phases:

1 - Simple invention that doesn't work really well, like the first steam engine or the first screw on a ship.

2 - Gradual improvement and increasing complexity, like better carburetors, improved ignition systems, timing controls, gearing. In the case of screws/propellers improved tuning for speed, to avoid cavitation, reduce drag and a direct the greatest amount of water rearward. Here the increasing complexity is not in the screws themselves so much as in the design of the screws.

3 - Abandoning an invention for the next. Going from paddle wheels to screws is a good example of this one. Because even a pretty cruddy screw/propeller has one vast improvement over the best possible paddlewheel. Weight. Screws, even the most perfectly designed, are not nearly as efficient as a paddlewheel in direct terms. However, a paddlewheel weighs so much more than a screw that the improved performance is not worth the excess weight. Not even if it's a pretty crappy screw.

Cost Versus Benefit

In the simplest terms, the value of any product can be measured as the sum of material cost and production cost. The benefit in terms of industrial equipment can be measured in reduction of production cost. So the questions facing any person thinking of investing their time and money in a new production device are:

Will it work?

How much will it benefit us if it does?

In determining—well, guessing about—the answers to those two questions. the potential investor of the seventeenth century had to consider how much they were spending to produce the final product without the innovations. In the seventeenth century, before the Ring of Fire, that involved a couple of very basic problems for people who were considering, or willing to consider, investing in new production techniques. The first of those problems was, to great extent, that they did not really have a means of accurately measuring how much it cost them to make stuff without the new technique. And labor costs were dirt cheap. Together, those factors meant that they were buying a very expensive pig in a poke.

It is mentioned in 1632 that businesses are cropping up all over the place within only months of the Ring of Fire. By September of 1631, you cannot hire people without offering stock options, at least in the opinion of one of the people starting up the chemical plant. So why is that?

Not having so many people shooting at them might have had something to do with it. So did improved roads that meant that goods could be shipped by the wagon load rather than by mule load. The machines and electrical power that the up-timers brought with them must also have been a big help, both in making the production of production machines much cheaper and in facilitating the transport of goods.

However, to my mind the most important change was one of information. The question "will it work" changed to "can we make it work." And the answers, in general, became much more positive.

Cheap labor becomes less of a factor when you add in the amount of time labor takes. The craftsmen of the seventeenth century were often very skilled. They could produce products of exact measurements and fine quality, but doing so with the tools they had before the Ring of Fire took an incredible amount of time. And they had to be paid, at least a little bit, for all that time. If one semiskilled laborer and a machine could make the same number of products in a day as five highly skilled master craftsmen in a week, the savings are considerable, even when you include the cost of the machine. And with the spreadsheets and amortization calculations available, the estimations of those savings became a lot more solid.

How much time in inventing is spent inventing? What part of the years from first try to successful commercial production is spent actually figuring out how to make a product work? How much time does the inventor spend on the day job? How much time in interesting backers in the concept? More importantly, how much time is spent failing to interest backers in a particular product? In the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the amount of time spent on that last factor was measured in decades—and sometimes centuries. In large part, this was because the skills needed to invent something are not necessarily the same as the skills necessary to make a go of the company that will produce the product. And it can be really hard to tell whether a product failed because it just wasn't commercially viable or because the inventor was a lousy business person. Absent evidence to the contrary, the general assumption ...