Irreal

About a year ago, ESR wrote a post on consumer grade toasters and how, regardless of price, they are all essentially the same, suffer from identical problems, and are basically junk. It’s hard not to sympathize. Here at Irreal headquarters we gave up on toasters some time ago and replaced them with what amounts to a high end toaster oven. It can theoretically cook all sorts of things but I can’t remember ever using it for anything except toasting bread.

The other day, I saw a link to a video about a toaster from over 60 years ago that, the video claimed, is better than the toaster you’re using today. It’s the Sunbeam Radiant Control Toaster. I remember having one of those as a child and marveling at how all you had to do was put the bread in the toaster and everything else was automatic. There was no lever to push down and no timer to set. Just put the bread in.

Automatically lowering the bread is sort of nice, I guess, but it was the lack of a timer that was the killer feature. Modern toasters all have a timer—either implicit or explicit—to determine how long to heat your bread. The Sunbeam used a simple and ingenious mechanism to estimate how brown the bread was and to stop heating and raise the toasted bread when it reached the desired color.

Every bit of this was analog of course but what was really incredible was the mechanism for raising and lowering the bread. There was no motor or electromagnet as I had always assumed. Rather the mechanism depended on a series of levers and the thermal expansion of the heating coil.

The video is 18 minutes long and several of the commenters remarked that they couldn’t believe they’d just spent 18 minutes watching a video on toasters but they all seemed glad they had. Toasters aren’t in the normal Irreal purview, of course, but the site is for and by geeks and I can’t imagine any geek not loving this video.

In my The Times They Are A-changin’ post, I passed on the news that the last pager service in Japan was quitting operations. The BBC picked up the same news and decided to look at obsolete technology that is refusing to die.

First they looked at pagers and reported that although Japan has abandoned the technology, other countries still rely on them. As Johnathan Mantey suggested in a comment to my post, one of the largest users is the medical sector, especially hospitals. The BBC says that the UK’s National Health Service alone accounts for 10% of worldwide pager use and that 80 percent of UK hospitals still use them. Nevertheless, the NHS plans to phase them out by 2021.

Next up is checks. Although once ubiquitous, checks are mostly obsolete. The BBC says that the average US household (as of 2015) writes about 7 checks a month. That mirrors my own use almost exactly. Virtually every check we write is to one of two small shops that refuse to take credit cards. A number of countries have already done away with checks but they keep limping along in the US and UK.

Most surprising of all, tape cassettes for music not only haven’t died a well deserved death but are actually making a comeback. That’s surprising because their sound quality is terrible, they’re always breaking, and you need a dedicated device to play them. I blame their zombie-like refusal to die on hipsters and others who value trendiness over function.

Finally, there’s the fax machine. Ten years ago, Dilbert was already making fun of the idea of anyone using a fax machine but it’s another technology that refuses to die. Again, the UK’s NHS is a major enabler. They are the world’s largest buyer of fax machines and were recently prohibited from buying any more and told to phase them out by 2020. As hard as it is to believe, millions of faxes are sent everyday worldwide.

Take a look at the BBC article. It’s amusing and you’ll probably be surprised by all the technology that should be dead but just keeps lurching along.

In my What Happened at Boeing? post, I recounted some of the disturbing tales told by Matt Stoller of how a dysfunctional management team of Boeing succeeded in taking what was arguably the world’s foremost aircraft design and manufacturing company and turning it into a travesty of itself that produced a plane so flawed that it killed 346 people before it was grounded.

There’s a nice followup to Stoller’s post by Maureen Tkacik in The New Republic that provides a few more details on how bad that management was and how their decisions lead directly to the 737 MAX disaster. Whereas the old Boeing management all had aviation backgrounds and focused on building the best aircraft possible, the post-merger management were mostly finance people concerned solely with bean counting and politics.

A telling example of that was the McDonnell Douglas CEO at the time of the merger who, as Tkacik says, “…liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers.” Making the numbers was all the new management team cared about. Any management team has to care about fiscal matters, of course, but that shouldn’t be their sole concern, especially when lives are at stake.

Reading Tkacik’s account is a bit overwhelming as she goes over the myriad bad decisions made mostly to ensure that 737 pilots would not have to undergo simulator training to recertify for the 737 MAX. It’s daunting but well worth reading. Of course, engineers are already familiar with its lessons; it’s management that really needs to read her article.