The Chinese Robert E. Lee (see Jihad Times) is an intuitionist, a profession created by Anson Guthrie, chief of Fireball, then copied by other companies and also by governments. As such, he must be a sensitive intellectual with a grasp of:
modern science and technology;
history;
diagrammed structures;
analyzed dynamics;
individual human beings;
the High World;
the less developed cultures and subcultures.
On this basis, he develops models, writes programs, generates ideas, makes proposals, anticipates human results of changes and forestalls or mitigates undesirable results.
Guthrie points out that it should have been predicted that cars would replace horses in a single generation, leading to a major industry with subsidiary industries like oil and roads, that oil would become strategically important, that traffic would strangle and pollute cities, that properly utilized steam would have been preferable to internal combustion engines and that a company anticipating all this could have done good and made money. There is an alternative history.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And we do see S.M. Stirling hypothesizing in his Draka books the use of steam power for driving automobiles, instead of gasoline distilled from oil in his alternate 19th century. I fear hindsight will always be 20/20 in vision while FORESIGHT is far more likely to be near sighted and astigmatic!
Sean
Kaor, Pail, Sean, and other readers!
There were steam-powered cars, like the Stanley Steamer, but they lost out in competition with internal combustion engine cars; it takes time to build up a head of steam, which poses difficulties in some situations. For example, if you want to start your steam car in the morning, you have to build up a fire, and get the water boiling and turning a steam turbine first. Also, imagine that you’ve been driving at twenty miles per hour on local roads, but now you want to enter the highway, and quickly reach sixty miles per hour. With an IC engine, you can step on the gas pedal and and accomplish it. With a steam engine, giving the engine more fuel will take considerable time to raise the power output sufficiently. Perhaps, if you’re planning to drive on the highway, you can wait and build up the steam first, but that does delay you and complicate driving, especially for a non-professional, who wants convenient transportation without becoming the equivalent of a railroad engineer.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
Thanks for your interesting explanation on why steam powered cars lost out to internal combustion. IC was simply more PRACTICAL than steam. Which, in some ways, I rather regret.
Regards! Sean
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