Perpetually Laborious: Computing Electric Power Transmission Before The Electronic Computer

Abstract

Placing Thomas Edison at the beginning of a history on electric power transmission hardly needs justification. Thomas Edison's abundant supply of pictures of himself as an inventive genius – and America's pressing demand for a myth of an ingenious inventor – combined to bestow a “Eureka” moment upon Edison's pioneering Pearl Street (New York) Station electric lighting network. But the history of the laborious computations that took place at Menlo Park and the division-of-computing labor of which Edison took advantage suggests a different view of inventive genius. The story of the computational pyramid formed by the labors of Francis R. Upton, Charles L. Clarke, and Samuel D. Mott (1879–1880) can be reconstructed from the existing literature. In his reminiscences from Menlo Park, Edison's employee, Francis Jehl, detailed how Edison thought of constructing a miniaturized network to be used as a computer of the actual network. Knowing that constructing, maintaining, and using the miniature network required a considerable amount of skilled labor, Edison decided to hire an employee for it, Dr Herman Claudius. Edison enthusiastically welcomed Claudius to perform a type of computing work “requiring nerve and super abundance of patience and knowledge”. Jehl remembered that the labor of constructing a miniature network of conductors, “all in proportion, to show Mr Edison what he would have to install in New York City in connection with the Pearl Street Station” was “gigantic”. Following the pattern of the Pearl Street Station electric lighting network, several similar networks were built in the early 1880s. In response, Edison's labor pyramid was enlarged by giving Claudius an assistant, Hermann Lemp, who performed the monotonous task of constructing the new miniature networks, which Edison needed for computation. Inconvenient as it might be for those who assume that technological change is the product of inventive genius, electrification was, from the beginning, laboriously computed; it was not, like Athena, a deity that leapt from a godly head.

Habits Over Routines: Remarks on Control Room Practices and Control Room Studies

“…Slayton's (2013) "digital utopianism" would be expressed in the idea that digital technologies bypass the need for human action and maintenance of working habits. It is true that digital technologies have replaced some working practices -notably the need for constant calculations, historically significant in the management of the electricity supply (Tympas, 2003). But habits and the need to resume them in instances of doubt remain central in the manual correction of faults and coordination of maintenance -in other words, performing the infrastructure coherently.…”

Commentary: The Place of Labor in the History of Information-Technology Revolutions

“…Aristotle Tympas's insight into ''Computing Electric Power Transmission Before the Electronic Computer'' illustrates this dialectic by describing how complex, networked infrastructure systems of all sorts are necessarily underpinned by similarly complex information systems, both during their design and in the course of their functioning. 118 The human ''computors'' that Tympas discusses have been absent from recent information history, but are much on the minds of contemporary writers. In bringing them to our attention, Tympas effectively weaves the stories of three kinds of technologies: the electrical infrastructures normally conceptualized as solely the work of ''system builders''; the ad-hoc electromechanical tools such as ''network analyzers'' which were built explicitly to solve mathematical and physical problems of infrastructure construction and operation; and the individual laboring ''computors'' embedded in both of these technological webs, whose expertise in operating the analysis tools was both necessary and undervalued.…”

Transitions from Analog to Digital Computing in Electric Power Systems

“…Any individual purchasing decision may have been influenced by a lack of vision, concern about sunk costs, technology-related work challenges, or other local issues. 3 The evidence offers yet another conclusion. These users opted for machines that met the stated calculating and control objectives, but also offered intangible capabilities.…”