Fractals of Change

What My Robot Did This Weekend

Like watching TV, it now takes a nerd to vacuum.  I’m not sure we nerds come out ahead on this one.

Our new vacuum cleaner is a robot named Roomba.  Roomba comes to us from Sharper Image and there’s a rumor that he’s part Ionic Breeze although he certainly doesn’t look anything like the great air filter.  Since this is a family blog, I won’t describe how one determines the sex of a non-anthromorphic droid.   Roomba is about the size of a horseshoe crab and moves with the same gait.  Horseshoe crabs have eyes, though; Roomba navigates by belligerently bumping into things and then changing direction.

The direction-changing algorithm is clever and looks like it has some randomizing elements.  I have never managed to trap Roomba; he can get out of any space he blunders into.  Sometimes he does bump doors closed and locks himself into small rooms; but then he cleans those small rooms very thoroughly.  Roomba doesn’t get into loops, either.  Somehow his pattern changes so he blunders off to find new fields to clean.  He doesn’t topple down stairs.  He can be corralled into an area by two electronic beam fences which come with him (more available, of course).  He can also be kicked into changing direction but he is perverse about which direction he changes to.

When Roomba is running out of power, he often finds his way back to his docking station where he can recharge.  However, having gorged on electrons, he shuts himself down and sleeps in the dock and has to be prodded to go back to work.  You’d think, being all charged up, he’d just get back to work on his own. 

Sometime Roomba runs out of power in places too obscure for him to get back safely to his dock. If you don’t hear his final pathetic bleats as his battery dies, it can be hard to find him in whatever place he chose to swoon.

He isn’t really all that self-sufficient.  That’s why Roomba had to spend his first weekend here training us.  First, he is very strict on demanding that certain things like electric cords and hanging strings from blinds and drapes be taken off the floor.  Otherwise he winds them around his wheels and brushes and plays an annoying tune to say we’ve failed him again and he is shutting down to avoid damage to his precious self.  I’m sure there’ll soon be somewhere from which I can download new ringtones for him.

Second, Roomba needs to be emptied and have his brushes and filter cleaned.  This involves removing a number of parts which try to fall into the trash with the dirt and have to be replaced before Roomba can rumble again.  I’m tempted to file a patent application for a self-cleaning Roomba.  I used to have an electric train hopper car that did that.  The patent (for those of you familiar with patent-speak) would “teach a method whereby a version of floor-cleaning droid ascends a ramp and an electromagnetic force or other impulse is used to open a trap in its underside whereby accumulated debris would fall into a receptacle.  Alternatively, said droid positions itself over a pit containing said receptacle…”  Embellishments, also covered by my vapor patent, would include a detector to make sure said receptacle was actually in place before said droid relieves himself and a mechanism whereby said droid’s air flow and brushes reverse for more complete disgorgement of debris.

Now with hair from two dogs and peanut shells, our house is a bit of a vacuuming challenge.  Roomba’s immediate predecessor was a central vacuuming system whose tubes have become clogged with some combination of the above ingredients.  This is a hardware problem so a nerd like me can’t fix it.  Now you know why I ordered Roomba.

Is using Roomba easier than actually vacuuming?  That’s debatable given all the preclearing of obstacles, the emptying and brush-cleaning, and the need to restart him after he recharges when the cleaning is still undone.  But he is certainly more interesting than anything from Hoover or Oreck.

Roomba trying to trace the dog hair to its source. (note who is watching from the lower left)

Viagra and Cialis

News report:  Viagra and cialis may cause loss of visual acuity.

My diagnosis: It's a well known fact that erections cause a loss of visual acuity.

Morph of a Nerd CEO - The Power of Silence

Morph of a Nerd CEO - The Power of Silence

Mr. Oak (not his real name but he values his privacy) taught me to negotiate.  Needless to say, negotiation is an essential skill for CEOs and it is a valuable one for nerds or anyone else.

In the late 1960s Mr. Oak was the Director of MIS Operations or some such title for a large conglomerate and I was Manager of Systems Programming, my usual nerd job.  Like most big companies we used IBM mainframes.  But we had brought some Other Vendor equipment into our data center in New York both to try it out and to give us some leverage over Big Blue. Lesson #1: leverage is good.  Unfortunately the Other Vendor mainframe didn’t run most of the time and wasn’t serviced promptly when it failed.  I couldn’t get the attention of anyone but our hapless and powerless account rep at Other Vendor, Inc. and I told Mr. Oak about the problem.

Naturally, Mr. Oak didn’t pay the bill for the equipment that didn’t work.  Lesson #2: holding the money is a position of power.  It’s much weaker to ask for a refund.  High executives from Other Vendor, Inc. requested an urgent meeting and threatened unspecified legal action.  Mr. Oak ignored the threat, waved off all the dates they proposed, and suggested some dates of his own further in the future.  They agreed to one of them.  Lesson #3: start winning right away, even on modalities.  Demanding and conceding are habits.

Mr. Oak had me gather all instances of malfunction and shoddy, tardy service in preparation for our meeting.  He turned down my suggestion that we give them this data in advance because, he said, we weren’t having a debate over the past, we wanted what we wanted in concessions in the meeting.  Lesson #4: negotiation is not debate.  I had been a very good debater in school.  I was still a very green negotiator.

Also he was not interested in thinking through what they might argue about our occasional failures to call them promptly or to read the documentation or follow instructions.  We must concentrate on arguing our case; not theirs.  Lesson #5: never negotiate with yourself.

“By the way, what do we want from them?” I asked.

“Money, of course,” said Mr. Oak, amused at my naiveté.

“What about better service in the future?” I asked.

“They’ll promise that anyway,” said Mr. Oak, “and they’re more likely to deliver if they understand that it costs them not to.”

“How much?” I asked.

“We need to find out how much authority they have,” he said.  “If it’s too little, we’ll have to negotiate with someone higher.”  But he wouldn’t be more specific than this about his goal.  Lesson #6: Know what dimension you want to win in.  In this case it was money but it doesn’t have to be. Lesson #7:  Don’t limit your aspiration until you find out what is achievable.  Aim high.

When the executives of Other Vendor, Inc. came in for the meeting, they were shown to a waiting room and plied with diuretics like coffee and tea and made to wait.  You can figure out Lessons #8 and #9 easily enough.  Before we went into the meeting half an hour after the appointed time, Mr. Oak surprised me by reminding me to go to the men’s room; it had been a long time since even my mother had done that.  He also told me forcibly not to speak except when he asked me a question.  He knew I liked to talk.

“What if they ask me a direct question?” I asked.

“Either I’ll answer it or ask you to or not,” he said.

We didn’t apologize for keeping them waiting.  Mr. Oak didn’t ask how they were hitting them or about their wives and families.  He instructed me to read the list of offences which I did.  When I finished, they started to read the list of our offences which Mr. Oak hadn’t let me prepare for.

“That’s irrelevant,” Mr. Oak said.  On his desk under a plastic sheet he kept lists of words.  They were in columns of harsh, strong, and mild.  For example, “fight”, “argue”, “discuss”.  Lesson #10:  Choose your few words carefully.

“What?” one of them said.

Mr. Oak said nothing.   With difficulty, I said nothing.

“We are prepared,” one of them said, “to give you a credit for the actual time the machine was down.”

“We already told you,” said Mr. Oak, “that it was worse than useless to us.”

They waited but he didn’t say anything else.  Finally, the other, higher ranking of them said “We will credit your whole past bill.”

“Then take the machine out,” said Mr. Oak.  Lesson #11: Don’t counter explicitly until you have to.

“We will give you three months credit going forward.”

Silence from Mr. Oak.  They are beginning to squirm as both the silence and their full bladders make them increasingly uncomfortable.

“Five months.  Tom, don’t you think that is enough time to evaluate and see that our machine is superior to IBM?”  But I had my instructions.  More silence.

We settled at full past credit, nine months future credit, and permanent onsite technical support with almost another computer worth of spare parts.  They hurried out to the men’s room as soon as they decently could.

Lesson #12:  There’s nothing as powerful as silence.  This is the most important lesson I learned that day from Mr. Oak.

Other confessions of a nerd turned CEO are:

How to tell if you’re an entrepreneur;

Starting as a sole practitioner;

The first employees;

Sales 101.

Revenge of the Center

The extremists of the left and right got cocky and the center stole the show.  I like it.  It was a show, too.  The panic over possible changes to the oft-changed filibuster rule was as feigned as the outrage over the Democrats delaying votes on Republican nominees. Positioning the filibuster, which was used to delay civil rights legislation for decades, as a bulwark to protect minority rights is as fatuous as the claims by those who tried to drag the federal judiciary into the Terri Schiavo case that they stand for strict construction and an end to judicial activism.

Newton’s laws seem to apply to American politics.  Increased intolerance from the left induces increased intolerance from the right.  And vice versa.  This time my optimistic interpretation is that increased intolerance and irresponsibility from both the left and right wings provoked a successful reaction from a reasonable center.  Nice result.

What we really need is civil discourse.  While we’re at it, we should abandon the sound-bite simplification that all of us are points on a one dimensional political line and that all of our political and social views can be expressed with a single coordinate of how far to the left or right we are.

The other night I was at seated at dinner with some bright young Democrats.  Since they assumed otherwise, I was careful to identify myself as a republican (my use of capitalization in this case is deliberate but, of course, didn’t come across in conversation).  They were taken aback and wanted to know whether I had actually voted for George Bush AND how far to the right I am.  To their horror (because I think they sort of liked me) I affirmed the former.  But I refused to position myself in one dimension.  I tend to be a libertarian socially and have blogged on the need to legalize all drugs.  I’m a fiscal conservative but “conservative” Republicans aren’t.  I’m a foreign policy hawk.  I’m pro globalization.  I think our public education system sucks.  I’m for both nuclear power and a hydrogen economy.  Each of these is at least one dimension and none of us can or should be categorized by a single coordinate.

Of course, when we had real discussion on these issues we found that our relative positions were all over the map and couldn’t begin to be accurately described on a left-right scale.  Our values were more or less in alignment although our conclusions weren’t and we had very different opinions of our current leaders.

“Do you agree,” they asked me, “with Republicans becoming the mouthpiece for the religious right?”

“I don’t think I’m a mouthpiece for the religious right,” I said.  “Religious zealots of any kind scare the hell out of me.  Too often and too currently, religion has not only excused but demanded murder and war.  Besides I don’t like to have limits on what I’m allowed to think about and what conclusions I’m allowed to reach.”  My new friends nodded in agreement although perhaps not complete belief.

“Of course,” I continued, “political correctness has becomes as intolerant as any religion.  Secular intolerance is no more tolerable than religious intolerance.”  Both the left and the right - the people who actually define themselves in his single dimension – try to enforce an orthodoxy of thought and expression.  But I didn’t sell that to my new friends.

We also argued over whether it was worse to call someone unAmerican or a fascist.  They say “fascist” has lost its sting; it’s an OK label to stick on people to the right of you (back to the single political dimension).  I think of Hitler and Saddam Hussein and don’t agree.  But don’t think it’s very nice or, more important, very enlightening to call people unAmerican instead of arguing civilly with them.

To be historically accurate, political discourse in the US has never been particularly civil.  And, although Burr and Hamilton dueled with fatal results over words, usually we avoid killing each other over our disagreements.  This alone is an accomplishment.  Nevertheless, I’m glad to see the center pull the canvas out from the left and right just when they thought they were going to stage a good fight.

Morph of a Nerd CEO – The First Employees

Management is harder than doing everything yourself.  People are a lot harder to program than computers and they can’t be rebooted.  A request for a core dump is likely to be taken as an invasion of privacy.  Some people even have outside interests which get in the way of their programming.  We nerds call people like that “random” but they do exist and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll end up with some of them if you start hiring.

Have I convinced you to remain a sole practitioner yet?  If so, please go to tomorrow’s post (not yet available).  If you are determined to add employees to your sole programming practice, read on and I’ll try to save you from the worst of my mistakes when I first became the boss of people besides myself.

I had already been a manager in other people’s companies.  At one point I’d even had eight people working for me.  I hadn’t been a very good manager.  I set a good example of hard work and optimism, that’s the best that could be said for me.  I hated performance reviews so I didn’t do them on time if ever.  I didn’t like to criticize people so I didn’t until long after their performance deteriorated to intolerable.  Laying people off was so hard that once I procrastinated until my boss had to lay off someone who worked for me.  In short, I’d rather program.

But my one-man company, Solutions, was over-committed.  “We” had more consulting clients than we could handle.  Some consulting gigs turned into contract programming jobs when I convinced customers that it would be cheaper to have me rewrite crummy apps than keep paying me to patch them up.  Saying “no” is almost impossible when you have your own business; you’re afraid people will never ask again – particularly if you remember the panicky days when there was no business at all.

So go hire some folk to do some of the work.  I should have subcontracted at first but I had company-building visions.  A classified ad in the Vermont papers got plenty of responses; Vermont was a very in place to live but there weren’t jobs there.  Interviewing wasn’t (and isn’t) one of my strengths, too much like making small talk.  But interview I did.  Asked for references but never checked any of them.  Hired two men and a woman who seemed smart and that I thought I’d like to work with.  In sudden fear of not meeting payroll, I proposed and got two or three more programming jobs.

We had a 2780 remote job entry terminal so we could test on a mainframe in Baltimore, an 029 keypunch we took turns on, a WATS line which gave us unlimited US calling for just $600/month (for the 2780) and a modem the size of a breadbox so we could get a blazing 2000 baud.  That part was actually OK.

My lack of management skills aside, three was exactly the wrong number of people to hire.  Physics tells us that we can’t do an unquantum leap. Three direct reports require almost twenty hours a week to manage (not that I was doing that).  Moreover, if somebody is going to do programming besides just you, there’s got to be stuff like specs before programming can get done.  If you sold the job, then no one except you knows what the program is supposed to do (often not even the customer).  So now you have to spend time writing specs.  And then there’s quality assurance.  You used to do your own testing and you certainly weren’t perfect but you’re better your employees because you know the customer is the next tester.  So you either hire a QA person (right choice) or do it yourself (wrong decision I made).

You may think that if you add three new programmers to a staff of one that you will have four times the capacity.  Bad math.  The new programmers have lives.  Even if they turn out to be a competent programmers, they aren’t driven super-programming machines like you were before you decided to be a CEO.  A super-programmer is an order of magnitude more productive than a “good” programmer.  Moreover, there are inefficiencies including the need for specs, product reviews, meeting and so on when work is being done by more than one person.  And, of course there is no time for you to program given the load of selling, administration, management, testing and spec writing.  Solutions output with three new employees was considerably less than when I was working alone.

So of course we got behind on all our jobs.  So of course I started programming in order to catch up.  And when I started programming, I stopped managing.  When I stopped managing, productivity went down further and the chance of components actually working together when finished went to zero.  But, after an initial advance, we only got paid on deliverable milestones.  There goes cash flow.  So I had to go out and consult to earn the cash for payroll and the WATS line.

Eventually I had to wind down my first attempt at company building, lay off the people (no one to do it for me now), negotiate time to finish the jobs myself, bring the 2780, the 029, and the files of punch cards and binders of fan-fold paper to my house, and go back to being a sole practitioner with some part time administrative help. Stayed that way happily for quite a while.

With hindsight, I should have “outsourced” overflow to other sole practitioners who knew how to manage themselves.  Maybe today there is an alternative in Bangalore but there wasn’t then.  Once there was work enough to hire seven or eight EXCELLENT (not good) programmers AND an experienced manager, that would have been the time to take the chance at expansion because there would have been a real increase in capacity, not just in headcount.  That could have been a sustainable quantum leap.

If you want to be a CEO, you really have to force yourself to do all the “bullshit” things that come with management.  Objectives, performance reviews, early correction of mistakes, quick termination of poor performers, checking references – these are all unnatural acts for a nerd but the necessary acts of a manager and something a CEO must not only do but also force other people to do.  If you don’t want to do them, stay a sole practitioner (see yesterday’s post) – there’s a lot to be said for that.

I’ve blogged some hints for CEOs on managing programmers here, here, here, and here.

Just to evenhanded, I’ve also blogged on how programmers can manage technical and nontechnical CEOs.

Morph of a Nerd CEO – First Sole Practitioner

If you’re a nerd like me with executive office ambitions, quickly ask yourself why.  You won’t get to write more cool stuff because you’re the boss.  You’ll be too busy being the boss.  You won’t be able to take cool vacations whenever you want because there is no one to tell “I’m outta here; deal with it.”  For good reason nerds are generally held in higher esteem than CEOs and, on a day-to-day basis, are usually more useful.  Girls may prefer CEOs so that’s a plus but you’re likely to end up in real trouble if all the women you meet work for you.  (I’m not being sexist.  There are great woman nerds and great woman CEOs; I just don’t know what it’s like to be one.)  It’s also unlikely that you’ll become Bill Gates.

Maybe you just don’t like anyone else being boss.  That reason’s OK for starters but once you’re out on your own, you’ll find that bosses actually do more stuff than you think – and a lot of it may be stuff you don’t want to do and aren’t good at.  Sales, for example.

In 1969 I was nominally Systems Programming Manager (a nerd job if there ever was one) in a startup funded in the software bubble of the late 1960s.  Unfortunately, since we didn’t have any customers for our facilities management business, we didn’t have any computers for me to be the Systems Programming Manager of; and so I was being rented out as a consultant at $300/day.  Since all nerds can count, I realized that not all of this money was going to pay my $25,000/year salary.

So I quit and started my own consulting company - Solutions.  I had arranged funding through American Express – my green card.  I also had a Diners Club Card for backup.  I had a couple of weeks untaken vacation that I got paid for when I quit so that was my personal nest egg – and I was single, a good thing when you’re being irresponsible.  I did have one consulting assignment at McDonald’s subcontracted from a former boss who was doing management consulting and who was, fortunately, willing to pay me faster than he got paid.  I quit in order to be able to take what was at least two weeks’ work.

The gig at McDonald’s was fun.  The corporate headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois was the latest thing in office design – cubes!  They were brand new then.  Because no one had a private office, conference rooms could be booked so you could still carry on office politics and talk behind people’s backs.  There was real fear that the lack of privacy would drive people crazy so the architect included a think tank – a room with padded walls shaped like the inside of a flying saucer (or perhaps a hollow Big Mac), mood lighting, and surround sound – from records, of course. There were red and green lights outside that let you know if anyone was inside.

When executives used the think tank, they were suspected of either dalliance or incipient madness – so executives stopped using the think tank.  Non-executives were expected to be in their cubes during working hours.  So I slept in there a lot during the twenty-four hour days of getting the flawed new payroll system up and running.

Then, one day, the parallel runs succeeded; the job was done.  Learned a lot about how sacred “meeting payroll” is.  I thought about it with satisfaction on the flight back from Chicago to New York until I realized that I had no more work lined up.  Panic!

None of the other Systems Programming Managers and MIS executives that I knew from industry conferences wanted to engage me since my specialty was cleaning up what MIS screwed up.  Somehow I didn’t manage to pitch this as a benefit to them.  Maybe I didn’t even think of doing that.  OK.  Got to sell to the level above MIS.  Trouble is I didn’t know anyone with those jobs.  OK.  Make cold calls.  Once I got through to the CEO of a large utility.  My pitch was written out: in an audit of MIS which “we” would perform at no charge, we would identify huge cost savings opportunities which we would implement at no risk to them since we would only charge a share of the savings actually achieved.  Of course, there would have to be a small advance.  But I was so surprised to get through to the executive and so unprepared to make cold calls that I just hung up when he picked up the phone.

I still can’t do cold calls.

Luckily for me, my ex-boss got a new assignment from McDonald’s which again included me.  The company I’d quit gave me a small assignment.  An ex-customer of my fomer company became a customer of mine.  Yet another ex-boss got a job where MIS reported to him and did see the benefit of hiring me to straighten out a pretty shoddy operation.  Since MIS didn’t quite see things this way, I was forced to develop a modicum of tact in this assignment.

The lesson in all of this is networking, not that I would understand that until many more years went by.  I had left prior jobs on a friendly basis and that turned out to be crucial in making my new business work.  At this point I was a good nerd, not a good businessman.  I got repeat business because I did good nerd work for my clients.  I got new clients when individuals who were used to using me moved on to new companies and introduced me there.

Especially for nerds it’s good advice to be your own boss before you try to be anyone else’s.  Here’s where you find out whether you can sell and market or whether you’d rather “outsource” that to a boss.  Here you find out whether you’d really rather have a regular paycheck that someone else worries about than doing the worrying yourself.  And it’s easy to step back from here.

Also, happiness for you may be as a sole practitioner.

This post is now available as a podcast.

If you’ve decided to hire other people (or are thinking about it), please read this post.

And here are some negotiating hints and here something on selling.

I’ve blogged some hints for CEOs on managing programmers here, here, here, and here.

Just to evenhanded, I’ve also blogged on how programmers can manage technical and nontechnical CEOs.

Decompiling Programmer-Speak Now in Podcast

My post on decompiling programmer-speak is now available as a podcast courtesy of Von Radio.

Civic Duty

Mary and I have a friend who was a young naval officer on convoy duty in the North Atlantic during the Second World War.  An epiphany he had about civic duty one cold, wet night on the bridge while waiting for torpedoes and wondering why he was there both informs our view of the world and challenges us.

So there is our friend with a cold cup of muddy coffee and cold rain trickling down the back of his neck in the early hours of the morning when he suddenly does realize why he is there: the German people didn’t do their civic duty!  All over the world people are fighting and dying and suffering – not least among them the Germans – and to a large degree it is because the German people let Hitler come to power and tolerated him, supported him as their leader.

Our friend survived that trip and the rest of the war.  When he came back to his home town which was then run by a corrupt political machine, he marched into the headquarters of the tiny good-government reform movement and announced that he was volunteering.  Other people must have felt the same way; the good guys won and they cleaned up their city. Our friend did very well in insurance and investing; he also did a lot of good in politics.  He raised money prodigiously for people he believed in; he served on innumerable civic boards and committees; he is a philanthropist; and he remains a respected voice in his state.

The Iraqis didn’t do their civic duty either.  You can argue about whether the US should have gotten into the resulting mess but you can’t argue that Iraq was anything other than a disaster for its own people and a threat to at least its own neighborhood.  Yesterday I saw television coverage of an Iraqi blaming the US for pictures of Saddam Hussein in his skivvies.  “He was our President,” the Iraqi said.  “He should be shown respect.”  Get real!  The obscenity is the man, not his clothes.  What’s wrong is that Iraq has still not gotten its act together enough to try Saddam and patrol its own streets – although the high turnout for dangerous elections was a good sign.  It’s the terrorists that civic-minded Iraqis need not only to condemn but control.  Then the US troops can go home.

(Yes, the picture shouldn’t have been released.  Whoever did it should be punished.  But please don’t divert any investigators who could be hunting down terrorists.  This “crime” is pretty far down the list of important events.  It’s newsworthiness is considerably less than the Michael Jackson case and I would prefer to never hear about that again.)

Afghanis didn’t do their civic duty.  The result was the Taliban and Afghanistan becoming home base for al Qaeda.  Not much doubt that we had to get involved in cleaning out the rat’s nest that developed.  And not much doubt that most Afghanis have gained  by our intervention.  If we hadn’t had to intervene, there wouldn’t be interrogations at Guantanamo Bay.  Even if the story about mistreatment of the Koran were true,  it wouldn’t justify killing people in riots.  Newsweek didn’t kill those people;  American “behavior” didn’t kill those people.  Bloody-minded thugs did.  It is the terrorists – whether or not they claim to act in the name of the Koran – that civic-minded Afghanis need not only to condemn but control.  Then there won’t be US troops patrolling their streets.

A very hard case is North Korea.  Its people are starving as a result of “not doing their civic duty” and tolerating Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung.  Just as in Iraq and Afghanistan, a citizen’s uprising in North Korea against a ruthless despot would require many great acts of bravery and, in the short-term, intensify the suffering.  I wouldn’t begin to claim that I, for example, would be brave enough to be in the opposition.  But what’s the alternative?  A nation that just gets poorer and poorer?  A nation which extorts food from its neighbors with nuclear threats?  If that goes on long enough, someone – probably the US – will end up being the police force.

There is much less excuse for those of us who live in New Jersey not doing our civic duty than there is for people who live in places where they have to be heroes to do theirs.  We deserve the State government we have.  We have a responsibility to change it from the disgrace that it is.  I certainly haven’t done enough about that.

That’s the problem with our friend’s epiphany: it applies close to home as well as far away.

The Fair That Changed America

If Westinghouse hadn’t beaten General Electric in the competition for the contract to provide electricity to the Chicago World’s Fair, we might all be using direct rather than alternating current in our homes and businesses. Properly called The World’s Columbian Exposition, the Fair held in 1892 and 1893 was a nexus of accelerating technical change.  Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City is a great book about that fair and the people that made it happen.

But first we have to dispense with the “devil” part.  This non fiction book is also the story of an evil predator who murdered between ten and two hundred people in Chicago during the time the Fair was being built and visited.  Herman W Mudgett aka H. H. Holmes prayed on the stream of young women attracted to Chicago by the Fair, married some of them, killed even more of them in special killing chambers he’d built into his building and sold their skeletons to the skeleton-hungry medical profession.  His story is told well but I’m not sure why it’s in this book.  The story of the Fair, itself, doesn’t need this condiment.  The story of the murders keep popping up in the book like a Michael Jackson episode in the middle of the news of the world.

The parts of the book I like best are the stories of stubborn people who built the fair in less than two years against political, economic and natural odds.  Daniel H. Burnham was the Director of Works.  He was a prominent and well-connected Chicago architect who not only managed the huge egos of the New York architects he brought to “the second city” to help, the bruised egos of the Chicago architects who didn’t want help, and the poor health and imperious demands of Frederick Law Olmsted but was also the grand supervisor of the actual construction.  The gathering strength of labor unions was partially mitigated by growing unemployment which made men desperate for work.  Burnham had jobs to give when almost no one else did.

The previous World’s Fair was the Exposition Universelle in Paris.  It was for this fair that the Eiffel Tower was built.  Until late in the planning process,  Burnham got no plan from American engineers that could outEiffel Eiffel.  There was even some talk of hiring Eiffel himself to build a bigger tower.  After many fruitless tries, George Washington Gale Ferris sold Burnham on his wheel. 

I always assumed that first there were little Ferris Wheels, then medium size ones, and then the great one at the World’s Fair.  Not so.  This was Version 1.0.  “…this wheel would carry thirty-six cars, each about the size of a Pullman, each holding sixty people and equipped with its own lunch counter, and… when filled to capacity the wheel would propel 2,160 people at a time three hundred feet into the sky over Jackson park, a bit higher than the crown of the…(brand new) Statue of Liberty.”  All the math that indicated it would work was done, of course, by hand.  Mrs. Ferris was an Alpha tester; she went on the first revolution.  George apparently couldn’t be there.

Walt Disney’s father Elias helped build this Fair.  Memes or genes led to DisneyLand.

Thomas Edison lost the battle for direct current but he was everywhere in the Electricty Building.  His kinetoscope showed the first motion pictures and his sound recording devices were there as well.  Visitors also saw the first electric chair.

The classic columns of the Fair’s buildings still show up in banks, public buildings, and over-wrought homes around the country. 

Louis Sullivan worked on the Fair but was no admirer of it.  He said: “Thus architecture died in the land of the free and the home of the brave.”  The next generation of architects followed Sullivan in reviling Burnham.  This generation included Frank Lloyd Wright who had been fired by Sullivan for taking private commissions but later became his friend and ally.  But, according to this book, Wright may have been partially inspired by the Japanese Temple built on an island in the Fair’s largest lake.

Cracker Jacks, Juicy Fruit Gum, Shredded Wheat and Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix all come from the Fair.

This is the story of people who built a fair which reflected and accelerated the pace of change.  No wonder I like it.

New Podcast

Last week's post on whether Internet Bubble Two is going to be better than Internet Bubble One is now also available as a podcast from Von Radio.