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Strategies & Market Trends : Booms, Busts, and Recoveries -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: rolatzi who wrote (16836)	3/15/2002 6:25:38 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 74559

Disruptive technologies - first, Smeaton's vertical water-wheel, circa 1753, undershot, overshot, and low breast-wheel. Improved by making parts out of iron, which allowed wheels 15 ft in diameter by the end of the century. Improved by Rennie in 1780, as the high breast-wheel. Provided cheap transportation and cheap power (steam engines). This led to steam driven railway transportation, disruptive technology #2, circa 1840. Disruptive technology #3, steel. Henry Bessemer, 1854, developed the technique of converting pig iron to steel by bubbling air through it. 1879, Gilchrist and Thomas perfected the open hearth alkaline flux method. In 1850 the cheapest steel rails 60 pounds (I am looking at a British book by Andrew Tylecot - don't know the pound-dollar ratio then but it was around 4.5, so $250-$300 a ton ouch.) By the late 1850s Bessemer steel rails were $35 a ton. By 1879, a ton of steel rails cost 5 pounds, two shillings and sixpence a ton. Oh, here are some US prices. A ton of Bessemer rails were $106.75 in 1870, $48.25 in 1878, and $29.35 in 1879. Disruptive technology #4, electricity. First public electric railway constructed by Siemens and Halske in Germany in 1871. First power station for private consumers, London, 1872. Disruptive technology #5, principles of mass construction, called Fordism and Taylorism. However, it is an outgrowth of techniques developed in the textile industry, the first technology to make use of principles of mass construction, long before Ford or Taylor. The principle is that there is a market for uniform capital goods, just as there is a market for uniform consumer goods. Mass production requires interchangeable parts. Eli Whitney (1800) produced muskets with interchangeable parts. But it was not until the 1880s that steel production was skilled enough to produce uniform machine tools that would cut uniform parts out of steel. Taylor developed the technique of assigning semi-skilled workers to one tool each in an assembly line, smoothly moving the components in a chain of operations between them. Ford divided the factory into three components - design, manufacture, and information coordination (inventories, marketing, financial control, payroll) each with their own separate functions. Disruptive technology #5 - microelectronics. Tylecot's book, published in 1991, suggests that disruptive techlology #6 will be biotechnology. It only shows that historians are not so good at predicting the future. Have we had a really good disruptive technology since the transistor (1947), the integrated circuit (1961), and the microprocessor (1971)? One can argue that it would be the desktop computer (late 1970s) and the World Wide Web (early 1980s). But one could also argue that these are merely developments of the microprocessor revolution. We do seem to be having a time deciding whether the Internet makes production cheaper, easier, faster. It certainly makes consumption easier. I am the Queen of buying things on the Internet without leaving my chair. For example, yesterday I ordered a second nuc of bees from some very nice people in Bealeton, whom I never would have heard of but for the Internet. They were very happy for the business. BTW, Tylecot leaves out the internal combustion engine, which, as a suburban SUV driver, I would argue is a major breakthrough in technology.-g-