I crashed my flashlight...

My dad recently bought some Techlite 200 high-intensity LED flashlights at Costco, and gave me two of them.  They are amazingly bright and well constructed, so they quickly became my favorite hand-held flashlights.  I was reading this extremely detailed review of them on Amazon, and learned that I could skip the somewhat jarring strobe mode when turning them off by just holding down the power button for a couple of seconds.  I tried it, and it works, but after doing it several times, my light would no longer turn on.  I had to remove the cap to disconnect the battery, causing a hard reset of whatever control circuitry they have in there.  I don't know exactly how they implemented the electronics, and I'm not willing to sacrifice this neat flashlight to find out, but I crashed my flashlight...

Attempts to reproduce the failure on the other Techlight 200 I have were unsuccessful, so it is apparently not an inherent design flaw, just an edge marginality.  Still, I crashed my flashlight!  There is some sort of cautionary story in here somewhere...

"Revolution" TV Show.

This entry is some thoughts about the new television series "Revolution."  This latest invention from the imagination of "Lost" creator J.J. Abrams premiered Monday, September 17th, on NBC.  The pilot episode was released early on Hulu, so I took a look at it.  I'll try to write this entry without spoilers, or at least without any more spoilers than the ads and website for the show provide.  Still, if you prefer to avoid even a hint of fore-knowledge, you may want to read this after you watch the pilot episode.

"Revolution" is set "fifteen years after the blackout."  In a video on the show's website, Abrams says, “The question the show asks is, 'What would happen if everything powered by electricity suddenly turned off?'” Because I'm interested in worst-case scenarios, disaster preparedness, and knowing what to do when the zombies come, I'm intrigued by ideas like this.  But this a problematic scenario...  People are really ingenious and given the proper motivation (say, the loss of civilization as we know it), they would come up with some pretty clever stuff.  Let's consider how...

While it's true that we use electricity for an enormous number of things, we can still do a lot without it, as we did in the past.  Energy can be harvested mechanically in the form of movement, with windmills and water wheels or water turbines. In 1890, George Westinghouse suggested that the energy of Niagara Falls would best be transmitted to Buffalo not as electricity generated on site, but as compressed air. Compressed air can also be used to store mechanical energy in high-pressure gas cylinders.

Furthermore, a lot of technologies that we think of as “electrical” don't have to be. In many cases, we use electricity to provide mechanical energy that could be provided by other sources. Refrigeration, for example, uses electricity to turn a motor to run a compressor. But there's no reason the compressor can't be turned by a water wheel or a windmill. Or a steam engine...

In the event of a “Revolution” scale blackout, the world would quickly see the return of the steam era. Boiler technology and steam engines would be the next big growth industry. Coal and wood fired steam railroads would quickly provide critical transportation links, first on a small scale as museum exhibits were pressed back into service, but then growing as fast as more equipment could be built. Central steam engines in factories could provide mechanical energy for all sorts of tasks, such as machining, cooling, cutting, building, and so on.

And if the “Revolution” world really just precludes electronics, it wouldn't be limited to steam engines. Diesel engines use the compression of the piston to ignite the fuel-air mixture, without any electrical spark plug. And they can be built to be started using only compressed air. It may take a lot of tedious pumping, but you could prime a compressed air system with a hand or foot pump. Then, once you've got the engine running, you could use it to drive a compressor to charge up the compressed air cylinder for the next time you need to start.  All without electricity. Virtually all large scale modern engines are highly dependent upon electronic engine control modules  (ECMs) to manage every aspect of their operation. But that's in order to make them as efficient as possible. You can trade away some of that efficiency for a much simpler, all mechanical control system. That's how they all used to be. And there would be enormous motivation for people to return to and advance these sorts of technologies.

Refrigeration also illustrates the case where the current state of the art is only one of many ways to achieve the desired goal, in this case of making things cold. Anyone with a propane fueled refrigerator in their camper knows that you can keep a fridge full of food or drinks cold just fine using a small flame to drive an absorption refrigeration cycle.

A permanent loss of electricity would limit the production of some materials. Aluminum, for example, is refined using an electrolytic process, without which, it is becomes a very precious metal. Fortunately, there is already a significant stock of metallic aluminum in the world that could be recycled almost endlessly. But anything that depends on an electrolytic manufacturing process could no longer be made.

Otherwise, I can think of only a few key technologies that would be impossible to at least approximate in a “Revolution” world: high-speed computing and high-speed, long-distance, and wireless communication. And even some level of both computation and communication can be done mechanically. Mechanical calculators existed for years before modern electronic logic circuits, and I'm sure the world would see new heights of sophisticated mechanical computers being built. It would be a steam-punk enthusiast's dream come true. I can also imagine a telegraph system based on mechanical modulation of something like a metal bar, in order to send messages significant distances at the speed of sound in metal, or around 13,000 miles per hour. Or perhaps we'd just see the return of other pre-electronic communication technologies.  Sure, neither of these are as good as what we have now, but they are still a major step above the pre-industrial, agrarian civilization portrayed in the show...