Modern-day Renaissance man Nick Szabo de-constructs the first phase of the Industrial Revolution which occurred roughly between 1750 and 1830. Szabo organizes his short essay around the theme of inventions improving trade routes and supply paths to mines and farms; along the way, he points out a couple analogies to the Internet age.
Horse-drawn carriages and wagons had been in use in north-western Europe since the Middle Ages. During the early years of the Industrial Revolution, this mode of transportation was optimized through improvements to wheels, tires, shock absorption, and roads. It then became economically feasible to build out canals and navigate rivers to haul the cargo long distances, with horses used most heavily for "the last mile", e.g. transport of materials and goods from mines and farms.
Efficient bulk transportation is needed all the way between the iron mine, the coal mine, and the smelter. Because the cost per mile of water transport was so much smaller than the costs of land transport, this “last few miles to the mine” problem usually played a dominant role in transportation economics, somewhat analogous to the “last mile” problem in modern cable networks.
"Metcalfe's Law" - the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users - also came into play, as inventions and improvements to land transportation spurred investment in sea transport, and vice versa.
Metcalfe noticed Szabo's essay.
Bob Metcalfe @BobMetcalfe
Nick Szabo on Metcalfe's Law (one of my favorites) and nothing less than the Industrial Revolution
The first paragraph of the essay contains several links to past essays Szabo has written on related subjects.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Wednesday October 22 2014, @07:44PM
If you visit just about any country in western Europe or the UK the sheer numbers of canals is amazing. You can find maps on line of these canals, but there are many more which some how don't make it to the maps. Some of these are still in use, mostly for recreation, some have been converted to irrigation use only.
The amount of barge traffic on the larger ones is still quite high. But the bulk of them seem to be used for recreational purposes these days. This site [european-waterways.eu] (among many others) allows you to drill down to local canals in most EU countries.
So back to the future, are we going to be left with any residual network infrastructure that can be re-purposed in the future? The price of copper is such that much of it disappears the minute it stops being used. But still there is bound to be a lot of abandoned lines left laying around.
Will unused bandwidth be ferreted out and used for hobbyists? What about the often talked about mesh networks that pretty much nobody uses?
(Everybody believes mesh actually works but in realistic terms nobody uses it in the real world, Even in Hong Kong it was knocked down the minute it was set up).
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by c0lo on Wednesday October 22 2014, @08:59PM
No way, when the time will come, I'll not let my remnants of fibre be used to move barges up and down, not even for fun.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:04PM
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by frojack on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:26PM
I don't recall making any reference to the last mile.
Look here for some examples of canals in the UK http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canals_of_the_United_Kingdom [wikipedia.org]
Many had horse paths, but in the modern age the horse paths have fared far less well than the canals themselves, some are overgrown to the point of invisibility, or eroded away, even when the canals themselves are still in use.
The question I posed revolves around the future re-use of today's infrastructure.
The only one I'm aware of is Rails to Trails [railstotrails.org] where old abandoned rail lines are converted to bike/hike trails.
In the digital world, one would think there would be many opportunities to re-purpose technology on a wide variety of systems.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 22 2014, @10:14PM
TFA overlooks the fact that horses really were end-to-end. Of course, not the same horses the whole distance, but they probably lasted longer as long as most inter-router fibre hops.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Blackmoore on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:20PM
It looks like Mesh is being touted (at least in the US) as a way to provide after a disaster; (which is curious since i'd expect the power would be out) or as a drop in for places that lack infrastructure to start with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesh_networking [wikipedia.org]
the http://project-byzantium.org/ [project-byzantium.org] project looks like it hasnt had an update in a year; and i dont have the time to check all of the others.
But anyway- the damn thing isnt going to be resilient to an actual attack to the network, be it through disruption of signal or some more sophisticated attack on the nodes - it wasn't designed to deal with that.
So; how to deal with it?
(Score: 4, Interesting) by frojack on Wednesday October 22 2014, @09:36PM
There is one app on the android market (serval by speak freely) that has a grand total of under 2000 downloads.
It purports to build a wifi network so that you can communicate with something up to 200 feet away. (which is about the maximum distance for wifi on a smartphone) So the density of users needed for this to work at all is rather large. Great for a Occupy movement, or maybe Burningman, but otherwise pretty useless.
Unless a LOT of people have this downloaded and configured and played with ahead of time it will be useless.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by nitehawk214 on Thursday October 23 2014, @04:20PM
"after a disaster" In this case the disaster is censorship and spying. Mesh networks could become a way around it.
"Don't you ever miss the days when you used to be nostalgic?" -Loiosh
(Score: 2) by Blackmoore on Thursday October 23 2014, @05:19PM
well I agree on that - and the "disaster" that is the availability of access in some areas that the monopolies don't provide coverage; or provide awful coverage.
but in either case the "backbone" or the network needs to be more resilient to attack, and encrypted in the transmission process. more options on connectivity would be good too since a single wifi channel could be blocked by fairly inexpensive means.
in the end that really means creating an available distribution - or addon package that will eventually go viral in popular use; or so damn solid that corporations start using it as the base OS in devices.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday October 23 2014, @11:25AM
Speaking as a Brit, I can confirm that UK is not in Western Europe
(Score: 3, Interesting) by khakipuce on Thursday October 23 2014, @09:08AM
Some of the first "industrial revolution" canals built in Britain went directly into mines, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worsley_Navigable_Levels. [wikipedia.org]
The whole basis of this essay seems flawed in that it fails to understand geology, coal and iron in Britain are not "randomly scattered". I think there is a strong argument that the industrial revolution occurred in Britain first because of the proximity of coal, iron, limestone and other key ingredients. Early iron smelting used charcoal from coppiced wood land but as demand increased techniques for smelting with coal were developed. But the coal was usually close to the iron and/or close to the coast (e.g. coal at Whitehaven, iron in Milom no canals needed).
Things like improvements to wheels, tires and suspension came about because of the availability of iron, not the other way round. Much transport was done by river and sea and again Britain has a lot of coast and so for example coal from South Wales could be easily transported to Cornwall for smelting and later to drive steam engines (and the development of the steam engine was a consequence of ever deepening mines).
It seems like a very long stretch to go from a canal system that grew organically over 100 to 200 years to an internet that was planned and implemented over a few decades.
(Score: 2) by Gaaark on Thursday October 23 2014, @04:36PM
This story reminds me of the BBC show "Connections": how one invention or discovery leads to another and another until you have Gin and Tonics or Huge Carrier Airplanes....
Love that show.
--- Please remind me if I haven't been civil to you: I'm channeling MDC. ---Gaaark 2.0 ---