American History: Public Transport and the Automobile

This keeps coming up, so I'm writing it up here so I can link to it.

Public transport in America is significantly less pervasive than in Europe and many other parts of the world. People often imagine that this is because America is less advanced. But the history is almost the opposite: America adopted a new technology (specifically, the automobile) earlier and faster and more enthusiastically than other countries.

Many Americans believe that the automobile was invented here. It wasn't; but the automobile assembly line, and with it mass production of motor vehicles, was. During both world wars, American industry, which already had quite a bit of experience mass-producing vehicles, supplied the allies with large quantities of military vehicles. Everyone knows about the planes and ships and tanks, but the factories also cranked out large numbers of military trucks and jeeps, because transporting troops and supplies is essential to any war effort.

Americans are often shocked to learn that during WWII, Germany, widely regarded as having been an industrial powerhouse at the time, was heavily reliant on horses for military transport. That feels like an anachronism to Americans; we associate military use of horses, with medieval cavalry, or with our mid-nineteenth-century Civil War, in which most of the soldiers had single-shot muzzle-loading rifles. We don't think of military horses and machine guns as belonging to the same era. (There were both horses and gatling guns in the Spanish American war, but our history classes tend to gloss over that one in a rush to get to WWI and WWII, which are considered more important.) It's quite weird to us that an industrialized country with the ability to make things like airplanes, would use horses in the military.

After WWII, we had a major economic boom. Most of Europe largely missed out on this, because a lot of their infrastructure had been bombed into oblivion, and they were still recovering, rebuilding. America didn't have to rebuild, and with all the soldiers back in the country to work regular jobs, production and income both rose. Many women continued to work outside the home, for the first time (on any kind of large scale) in our history during peacetime, and as a result, families now had two incomes and could afford more stuff than before. The factories turned their production to civilian purposes, and most American families purchased a number of things for the first time in this era: cars, major appliances, cameras, radios, etc. (Many families' earliest family photos are taken in front of the family car, because both were new.)

With so many American households owning cars, public support for building better roads skyrocketed, resulting in, among other things, the Interstate highway system. People often blame the interstates for causing America's love affair with the car, but it's really the other way around. Yes, there were politicians who had other reasons for wanting to build them, but they were able to get popular support because all the new car owners wanted better roads to drive on. Meanwhile, passenger railroads started losing customers left and right, until after a few years they started going out of business like it was going out of style. Yes, America *used* to have fairly pervasive passenger rail service. I live in a city of ten thousand people (called Galion) in central Ohio, that *used* to have passenger rail service, but it was discontinued in the late sixties or early seventies, because people weren't using it any more. Other cities in our area, exactly the same thing happened. Now, the nearest passenger rail station is an hour and a half away by car.

America didn't fail to build a public transport network. We *had* one, and we abandoned it because we didn't need it any more. You talk to Americans about passenger trains, and we think the nineteenth century called and they want their technology back.

Does this mean that widespread use of cars is inherently better than widespread use of passenger rail? Not necessarily. But cars are what America collectively chose, and there were and are reasons for that choice. It doesn't mean we don't know how to build a passenger rail network. We had one, and we stopped using it, mostly on purpose.

ENABLE_EXTENDED_FLAGS undeclared

Ok, so I acquire an older-model computer (Pentium4, 2GB of RAM), and of course it comes with Windows XP installed. What's one of the first things I try to do with it?

What would a normal person try to do with it? Maybe watch some YouTube videos, or check Yahoo Mail, something like that? Facebook?

I tried to do this:

I my defense, I already have a computer, which in the first place is several years newer (multi-core, 8GB of RAM about to be increased to 16 next time I'm willing to reboot it) and, additionally, runs a much better operating system. So if I wanted to do just regular stuff on the computer, I could do it on my main system. I got this other, older system, and my thinking is, while it still has the default Windows install on it, is there anything I want to try doing in Windows? And in that context, this is the answer I came up with: Didn't somebody on IRC say that building NetHack4 on Windows is broken right now? Maybe I should try that.

What were "pocket protectors" anyway, and why are really old people always talking about them?

We've all been in this situation: you're talking with an old person, and through one circumstance or another the fact comes up that you know something about computers, or at least use them, or that you have studied a little math, or science, or accounting, or business, or pretty much any other subject that the old person doesn't know anything about.

Anyway, as soon as they find out that you know something about anything, they immediately make some kind of remark about "pocket protectors".

Huh? What does that mean? What's a pocket protector, and what does it have to do with the differential equations class I'm taking?

Having heard these "pocket protector" remarks all my life, a couple of years ago I did some research and found out what it's all about, so now I can share that knowledge with you. The short version is that what these remarks really mean is that the old person hasn't really caught on to the fact that they're old and the world has changed since they were in school. Okay, so you probably already knew that part. The details, however, are interesting...

As you are probably aware, technology is constantly improving. If the laptop that was so awesome you couldn't afford it last year is now selling used on ebay for approximately the same price as a discount ringtone, imagine how primitive computers must have been way back in the twentieth century! In fact, you probably can't imagine it, because any degree of primitiveness you can think up would still be a good deal more advanced than what they had back then. But that's okay, because you don't have to imagine: I'm going to actually tell you.

In your great-great grandfather's day, microchips and even transistors simply hadn't been invented yet. Instead they used something much more primitive (and larger) called a "vacuum tube". A single computer filled up an entire room. Several scientists were required to make it work, and it would take weeks or even months to complete a computation that your phone can do in under a second.

Speaking of phones, they had to be wired to the wall in order to work, and they didn't have screens, and you couldn't use them to send text messages or do anything else. All they could do was make phone calls, and that was *it*. Even for that you had to dial them, and I mean actually dial, not select a name from a list. If you wanted to send a text message back then, you had to write it on paper.

Cars in that era were made out of metal, and they didn't have cupholders or power windows, and to pay for your gas (petrol for British readers) you had to actually go INTO the gas station.

They didn't have "pay at the pump", because credit cards hadn't been invented yet. Back then, if you wanted to borrow money to buy something, you had to make an appointment and speak to a person at the bank called a "loan officer", and he would expect you to be able to show that you could afford the payments, or you wouldn't get to borrow the money.

You may already know (perhaps from watching something old with your grandparents) that movies were in black and white back then, and the special effects were really cheesy. What you may not realize is that people couldn't just watch movies whenever or wherever they wanted. If your great grandparents wanted to watch a movie, they had to go to a place called a "theatre", which was basically a dedicated building just for watching movies. (Well, sometimes a building; other times the theatre was outdoors in a sort of parking lot, and you'd watch the movie through the windshield of your parked car. Really.) Even small towns had a theatre (larger towns often had more than one), and people would come from all over town to sit in the theatre and watch a movie. There was only one screen for everybody, so they had to all watch the same thing. At the time, this didn't seem strange or restrictive to anyone, because movies were new and they just thought it was cool to get to watch one.

But it wasn't just the big-ticket technologies like phones and computers and cars and money and entertainment that were primitive. The little things were primitive too. Clothes, shoes, soft drinks, Jell-O (it didn't even come in blue), lunch boxes, and even such basic things as pencils and pens. That's right, pencils and pens were primitive, and that's why they had "pocket protectors". No fooling.

Today, with modern technology, we take for granted that we can just put a pen or a pencil in our shirt pocket and carry it there, and we don't expect anything bad to happen. However, this is only possible because we have modern pens. This is the really interesting part of the story.

You see, back in the dark ages, before a company called Walkman introduced the first rudimentary portable music players, the pens that they had were horrible barbaric medieval things called "fountain pens". Compared to modern ballpoint pens they were much harder to use. (Among other things, it actually mattered which direction the pen was rotated compared to the tilt of your hand against the paper.) Fountain pens were expensive, notoriously unreliable, and a hassle to use. The only reason people used them at all was because they were portable: you could carry them around anywhere. This was a new feature.

The pens people used before fountain pens wouldn't work if you took them away from the writing desk, because they relied on something called an "inkwell", which was built into the desk, to supply them with ink every few letters. The obvious solution to this was to put a supply of ink in the pen so you could carry it around, and that's what fountain pens were: pens that could carry a supply of ink around in them, so you could use them away from the writing desk and its inkwell.

You could use a fountain pen almost anywhere. This was such a useful feature that people wanted to carry the pens around everywhere, just like we do today. (It was even more important back then, because they didn't have portable computers or phones, so everything had to be written on paper.) The only problem was, the companies that made the pens hadn't really figured out how to do it right yet. The pens were unreliable, but the worse problem was that they leaked. Frequently. People wanted to carry them in their pockets, but they knew that if they did, they'd get pockets full of ink.

And that's why they needed pocket protectors. Anybody who wanted to carry a pen around in their pocket needed to protect the pocket from leaking ink. Scientists had recently developed a totally new kind of material called "plastic", and although it wasn't nearly as good as the plastic we have now, it was good enough to solve the problem. Somebody made little plastic pocket-shaped bags that wouldn't leak from the bottom and called them "pocket protectors".

People who wanted to carry a pen would put a pocket protector in their pocket and then carry the pen in the pocket protector. When the pen leaked, the ink would collect in the bottom of the pocket protector, and they could just pour it back into the inkwell built into the pen, and the shirt wouldn't be ruined.

That's a lot of trouble. If the pens leaked, why didn't they just use pencils? Well you see, back then pencils were made out of wood, and the point could not be retracted. If the tip broke off, you couldn't just click the eraser end a couple of times and extend the "lead". You had to actually sharpen the pencil using a device that cut away some of the wood to reveal more of the graphite "lead". Every time you did this, the pencil got shorter. Also, because the tip could not be retracted, and because the graphite "lead" was much thicker than on modern pencils, carrying a pencil in your pocket would often result in unsightly graphite stains, especially if you were wearing a thin or light-colored shirt. Then there's the possibility of poking yourself if the pencil was at all sharp. In short, the pencils were just as much of a pain as the pens.

So anybody who used pens and pencils on a regular basis (mathematicians, scientists, businessmen, teachers, students, doctors, nurses, ...) would wear a pocket protector all the time. People who didn't know how to write, or didn't have a job that required them to write, didn't need one.

So when old people ask you about your "pocket protector", all they're really implying is that you're not too dumb to write.