The Current Economy by Canay zden-Schilling;

Author:Canay zden-Schilling; [Неизв.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2021-10-28T21:00:00+00:00

World War II coupled the concern for logistics with an obsession with improved ballistics. The US government recruited civil scientists and engineers in droves to improve the accuracy of military pursuits, like predictions of enemy aircraft location (Galison 1994). What flourished was an agenda of matching under uncertain circumstances—from matching fired ammunition with moving targets to matching raw materials with production goals—in the meantime spooling out the institutions and disciplines in which optimization was to live and prosper, like the RAND Corporation or the discipline of operations research. A mainstay of this time, the RAND Corporation, was particularly instrumental in spinning wartime systems thinking into managerial techniques for organizations and businesses (Knafo et al. 2019). Optimization thus had a solid foray into problems that can be easily recognized as economic, like optimal budgeting across the divisions of a firm.

These military roots are well documented by historians of science (Bowker 1993; Galison 1994), but optimization also has a less often-told electric history that illuminates its forays into the everyday, outside of government purview. Some of the famed polymaths who would later pioneer cybernetics and operations research started out as electrical engineers in the early twentieth century, working on the practical problems of an increasingly interconnected North American electric grid. They were commissioned projects by industrialists, like General Electric, which wanted them to assess the feasibility of their long-distance high-voltage transmission line projects—whether a particular new line would end up destabilizing the entire system (Mindell 2004). The practical question facing these industrialists and their academic engineer allies was how to keep a growing system stable and functional as they experimented with adding and subtracting parts (Mindell 2004).

This question had become pressing in the early twentieth century—after the end of the “Battle of Currents” between Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC) and George Westinghouse’s alternating current (AC), when AC emerged victorious and gradually completely replaced DC (T. Hughes 1993). AC was replete with transient phenomena—short-lived changes in a circuit, like bursts or withdrawals of electricity—that demanded treatment by differential equations, which was “a bewildering topic” (Puchta 1996, 50) to an earlier generation of electrical engineers who knew only simple algebra (McMahon 1984). For a while, stopgap measures were invented, like the Steinmetz method, which generated steady-state versions of transient phenomena, rendering the complexity of AC grids imperfectly solvable with the tools of algebra. But long-distance, high-voltage AC systems were outrunning their makers’ abilities. Unprecedented amounts of current and levels of voltage could cause damage to manufacturers’ expensive equipment if not coordinated well across large distances. In the first half of the twentieth century, then, manufacturers sought a different, higher level of mathematical sophistication. By the same coin, well-educated mathematicians were now attracted to the problems posed by grid physics.

The emergent mutual attraction between mathematicians and engineers found itself a fertile breeding ground at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) during the interwar period. Critical to its growth was Vannevar Bush, now widely known for brokering a groundbreaking relationship of scientific collaboration between the US military and universities (Shurkin 1996, 101).

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.