The Gizmoseum

”Men are grown mechanical in head

and in heart, as well as in hand,”

-Thomas Carlyle

            I dream of a Gizmoseum…a testament to our technology. 

            I know there are already plenty of museums devoted to it, but they are all about big tech with a big T…the loom, the plow, the steam engine, the computer.  I have a more modest dream in mind...tech in lower case; the daily gizmo, the stuff that makes us techuman at the local level.  Cool stuff, quirky stuff, oddities.

            My gizmoseum would include a Hall of Enginuity, those simple designs that we take for granted, that make more with less and seem so simple now that they have been invented.  Like the sail which turns a sheet of linen into an exploring machine or the bicycle that turns thighs into generators.  And of course the pencil would be there too, maybe on special display; it is democratic since any hand can use it, so elegant that it fits in the merest pinch of the fingers, and a universal device…word processor, imaging system, calculator, and fidget all in one.  With a built-in delete to boot.

            Down past the bathrooms you would find the Hall of Discards, those sad remnants of ideas gone lame: lonely old Betamax tape, the bizarre and amusing gas pistol, and the rambunctious mechanical television.  Have an old Kaypro word processor?  It will have an honored home here.

            The Hall of Fits and Starts would showcase the humble beginnings of great ideas.  Like Robert Goddard’s first liquid rocket in 1926 that flew to a height of 41 feet – you could throw a ball higher – but opened the imagination to space flight.  Or the Wright flyer that flew for 12 seconds in 1903 over a distance of just 120 feet – shorter than the wingspan of a modern jet – but that paved the way for flight.  Plus all the doohickies dismissed as mere toys at first like Carlson’s dry copier and Edison’s phonograph.

            One of my favorite Halls would be down near the gift shop and devoted to Remnants…scraps of old tech, evolutionary detritus, that stick around like vestigial organs.  Like the familiar QWERTY arrangement of letters on the keyboard.  That pattern became a standard by 1872 when Christopher Sholes, the inventor, came up with it.  No one knows exactly why he hit on QWERTY, but he was probably trying to strike a balance between the demands of the mechanism and of the typist.  The QWERTY arrangement made the most-used letters easier to reach while also separating them enough so their typebars would not jam.  Not perfect but perfectly familiar because once these scraps become embedded, it is hard to get beyond them.  Many studies have shown that the array is extremely inefficient too because it accommodates the machine more than the user and a competing layout called the Dvorak, named after its creator, was based on extensive ergonomic research.  Yet in tests, experienced typists working on a Dvorak could only type 10% faster.  Why only 10%?  Because of the power of habit and that is the basic thrust behind the Hall of Remnants.

            Also on display there would be a section of train track showing that the rails were precisely four feet eight and one half inches apart. This is known as Standard Railroad Gauge.  But how, you might ask, did anyone come up with such a specific measurement? It is another remnant.  

           US trains were based on English trains and that was the width used in England because the first rail lines in England were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways.  Why was that gauge width used for the tramways? Because the people who built the tramways used the same equipment, tools, and measuring devices that they used for building the wagons that came before the tramways and the wagon wheel spacing was based on that width.  The wagon builders in turn relied on the spacing of the well-worn ruts of the old roads in England at the time that Imperial Rome built for their great marching armies.  The ruts were formed by the Roman war chariots and any other vehicles, then and since, had to match the ruts or risk destroying their own wheels.  All Roman chariots, naturally, had the same standard wheel spacing of four feet and eight and a half inches.

            Why?  Because that measurement was just wide enough to accommodate the rear ends of two Roman war horses.  Sorry to put it this way but in this case, and maybe in many others too, it all comes down to a horse’s ass.

            The Gizmoseum would point stuff like that out.