Stuff That I have Noticed #37 – The Grid (and the Legacy Of Apple)

Watching a recent TV news report on a DOJ document, I realized that I could go to my Mac or iPhone and find the thing itself in less than two minutes. (I rarely use my phone for that sort of thing being within reach of one of my three Macs – four if I count the iPad – most of the time.)

The first “smart phone” was actually released by IBM in 1994 ($1,100, about $2,000 today). After six months, it had sold over 50,000 units. But the most influential year for smartphone evolution was 2007. That was when Steve Jobs and the team at Macworld revealed the very first one for mass use, iPhone-1. The prices were $499 for the 4 Gb model and $599 for the 8 Gb model and Apple sold 6,124,000 of those puppies.

This was a mere thirteen years ago and the myriad and multifarious results of that invention have utterly changed our lives to the extent that we hardly realize the degree of their influence. (We humans are so infinitely variable that we tend to forget the “old days”.)

Before that world-changing invention we could still find things on line but one needed to be using a computer to do so. And for a long time it was very slow. (Remember dial-up? Those noises? Oy Veh!)

The advance in communication technology is increasingly rapid and trans-formative.

Until the mid 1980s when the internet was aborning any sort of serious research involved putting on clothing (including shoes) then going to the library to look stuff up. (Remember the Dewey Decimal System? Oy Veh!)

Being more than somewhat advanced in age I vividly recall my introduction to that efficient, yet now antiquated, methodology. Not sure what grade it was but well before high school we had to learn that system and, cumbersome as it was by today’s standards, it worked. You could, with some digging, find any books(s) the library contained by searching those little drawers and jotting down the numbers then going to the stacks.

A common sight in high school and college libraries was a student sitting at a table surrounded by a pile of books – some of which were open and others with colored strips of paper sticking out – diligently writing notes on a lined pad.

(Confession: As a lousy student I was rarely, if ever, to be found in such a situation.)

Anyhow that was the manner in which research was usually conducted at institutions of learning until the mid/late 1990s. Now? Fuggedaboutit! Two or three clicks and the knowledge of the world literally is at our fingertips and mostly for free!

As most of you know, I live in the most densely populated slab of earth and rock in the USA, Manhattan. With a remarkable degree of regularity I stand on my terrace at night overlooking the lower two-thirds of this small island and marvel at the miraculous manner of maintenance of our marvelous infrastructure.

My guesstimate is that I can see the homes (including New Jersey which is out of frame at the right and lined by tall apartment houses with Manhattan views) of over two hundred fifty thousand people. This is probably a conservative estimate. All these residents have electricity and water available at a touch. Some of the technology that provides such convenience is a century or more old (water) and much of the rest is almost as old as I. And 99.9% of the time it all works.

The Con Edison electric for Manhattan is connected to the nationwide electrical grid and has three massive generating turbines on the island itself. When the local generation system goes out, the grid connection automatically kicks in (or visa-versa) and we continue to have uninterrupted service. What happens when the entire system or a major part of it goes out?

The (most recent) 2003 blackout started with a sagging power line in Ohio that shorted out after touching a tree branch. A series of human errors and a computer problem plunged about fifty million people into darkness from New York City to Toronto and cost the United States economy about six billion dollars. That’s the third blackout I lived through and it, as well as the second one in the 1980s, was short lived and inconvenienced me personally very little. Not so with the first one.

In November of 1965 (what was until 2003) the biggest power failure in U.S. history occurred as all of New York state, parts of seven other states, and some of eastern Canada were plunged into darkness. The “Great Northeast Blackout” began at the height of rush hour, delaying millions of commuters, trapping 800,000 people in The City’s subways, and stranding thousands more in office buildings, elevators, and trains. This one was caused by the tripping of a 230-kilovolt transmission line near Ontario, Canada, at 5:16 p.m., which caused several other heavily loaded lines also to fail. That precipitated a surge of power that overwhelmed the transmission lines in western New York, causing a “cascading” tripping of additional lines, resulting in the eventual breakup of the entire Northeastern transmission network. All together, 30 million people in eight U.S. states and the Canadian provinces of Ontario and Quebec were affected.

Back in the ‘60s and ‘80s there was neither internet nor smart phones so the effect was negligible to our communication system. Regular telephones – now known as land lines – still worked. These days we live in a whole different world of communications (not to mention politics) and a loss of the electric grid would be catastrophic.

I don’t have a conclusion here except to advise that we all keep our electronic devices charged … just in case. If there’s no internet at least we will be able to read our iBooks, listen to music and access phone numbers we may not have anywhere else – in case the land lines still work.

Otherwise if (when?) the grid goes down again we’re screwed, blued and tattooed!

CODA: Andy Rooney died in 2011. A few years before he left 60 Minutes he closed his on air essay about reading newspapers on line by saying: “… but you can’t take your computer to the bathroom with you.” Andy died too soon.