Technology keeps changing, but the impulse remains the same

By BILL CHAISSON
Yesterday readers might have been surprised to see a photo of the inside of the International Space Station on the front page of the Eagle Times. With the advent of commercial development of space technology by entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Richard Branson, space travel has once again become interesting. The so-called Age of Discovery began in the 15th century when the Portuguese began making their way around Africa to south Asia and then Columbus set off for Asia across the Atlantic and bumped into the Americas. Given the technology of the day, those voyages were as risky and expensive as space travel is today.

This is part of the nature of technology; the implements and the challenges  thrown at them change, but the quest to somehow conquer nature remains the same through all of human history. And, if our interpretation of archaeological evidence is at all correct, it began well before the advent of our own species. Homo erectus was the first hominoid to leave Africa and trek into Asia. Scientists figured out H. erectus had dispersed because they found stone tools in Asia.

The successors of stone tools in the 19th century were the precision-made metal tools and machines that were built in places like Claremont, Springfield and other Connecticut valley towns. The Industrial Revolution that radiated out of England after the 18th century introduced advances like standardization, mass production, and new sources of power. The American Revolution was fought in part because of limits to industrialization placed by England onto all of their colonies. 

The landscape of New England had a role in technological advance too. In an era before widespread use of steam or electricity as a power source, factory equipment was directly driven by the power of falling water. Claremont is located at this juncture on the Sugar River and Springfield at its point on the Black River because that is where the rivers narrowed and fell appreciable vertical heights over relatively short distances. In a region filled with ridge after ridge of mountains — the products of repeated tectonic collisions — and abundant precipitation throughout the year, there are hundreds of rivers capable of producing power. 

Sullivan County is still the center of manufacturing in New Hampshire, but now power comes from a regional grid and the factories can be anywhere, so they are in relatively flat places (like West Claremont) where the floor space can be enormous and the interstate is closer.

Precision-made tools and machinery are no longer the leading edge of technological advance. The demand is still there, which is evident by the continued existence here of firms that create products for the aerospace industry and the building of bridge components. But computers, both hardware and software, long ago replaced purely mechanical devices at the thin end of the wedge.

The Black River Innovation Campus (BRIC) that is proposed for the old Park Street School in Springfield is being promoted explicitly as a vehicle that will reawaken the powers of innovation that made New England towns prosperous in the 19th and early 20th centuries and put them to work developing the au courant tech of the 21st century. BRIC has a strong supporter in Matt Dunne of the Center for Rural Innovation (CORI), which is focused on “orchestrating educational and development initiatives in Google’s data center communities across rural America.” In other words, CORI is trying to redirect the slumbering spirit of technical invention.

Red River in Claremont, which develops software and networks for a variety of industries, chose to renovate one of the old Monadnock Mills buildings and put hundreds of people to work in it again. That is some heavy-handed symbolism.

You have to have a black sense of humor to laugh at the fact that unregulated and irresponsible exploitation of the housing industry nearly deep-sixed the whole economy in 2008 and stopped cold the continued renovation of the old industrial buildings of Claremont and elsewhere. An economic phenomenon that produced exactly nothing brought to a halt the restoration of production in hundreds of small towns and cities across the country. 

Northern Heritage Mills (NHM), the nonprofit that is engaged in introducing young women to engineering and careers in space technology development, is nominally located in Claremont (although actually is in Acworth). According to their website, which was last edited in 2014, “NHM was founded in 2001 to promote the preservation of historical technologies and unique educational opportunities they provide. It is our hope to foster the imagination of students with these early innovations and modern technology as well as help prepare them for science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education.” Claremont has thus far not expressed a lot of interest in developing the NHM education center.

Like BRIC and CORI, NHM is trying to get post-industrial communities to move forward. Technology is technology, but it is like a river; you can never step into the same river twice. Places like Claremont and Springfield, Vermont do well to honor their pasts, of course, but they also need to push their boats out into the proverbial river again and resume their former positions on the bow wave of technology.

Yesterday was town meeting day in New Hampshire and there were a lot of school budgets to vote on. The promotion of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education is constant now. We had a cover story on Feb. 8 for an event at the American Precision Museum in Windsor, Vermont that hoped to bring women into engineering careers, a Feb. 23 cover story on a Sunapee middle/high school career-day fair heavy with STEM-based jobs, a 4H STEM event on our March 8 cover, and then the NHM cover story on March 12 about getting STEM-educated women into aerospace engineering by bringing them to the next SpaceX blast-off.

Educators are trying very hard to help students join the 21st century fields of technological innovation. I hope not too many of those school budgets got voted down.

 

Bill Chaisson is the editor of the Eagle Times.