This locomotive, to pull trains in mines, was made by Plymouth Locomotive Works, where my dad, Tom Emig, worked in the late 1970's. The company went under in about 1983, but decades later, Plymouth locomotives are still working around the world. That's what they were known for, incredible reliability.
I write about a bunch of totally different things on this blog, from old school BMX freestyle stories to economics and our future. Quite a few people wonder why I keep writing about the recessions, the economics of the United States, and things I never went to school for. These are the blog posts that I've actually had my life and well being threatened over several times. Some people think I have no business writing about these subjects. Sorry. This is a huge area of interest for me, and I'm always looking to the future and where we're headed as a society. Why? Because I'm an engineer's son.
And that's where Plymouth Locomotives, like the one above, come in. I was about ages 10 to 13 when my dad worked at Plymouth Locomotive Works, in Plymouth, Ohio. The Industrial Age was still roaring, most people worked in factories, or in the office next to the factory, like my dad. This was the first plant I remember my dad taking me to as a kid, walking me through on a Saturday morning, as he went to check on something being built on overtime hours by the shop guys. It was in this factory that he taught me to always look away and shield my eyes when I saw someone welding, since that super bright glare can damage unshielded eyes.
It was around this time that my dad first explained how he designed things. I can't remember the actual situation, but I remember his outlook on how something should be designed. First, he had to design a machine. So, like this mining locomotive above, He had to make a machine a certain size, to fit certain sized rails, with all the parts needed to pull mine trains through tunnels in mines around the world. So he had a certain size locomotive, and he and the other engineers had to make the engine, drive train, hydraulics, and all the mechanical pieces fit into that machine. But that was only the start. My dad knew that people had to work on and inspect his machines, so he thought about how that would happen, and in the case of this locomotive, they painted the whole thing white, inside and out, to help inspectors and mechanics who would be working on these in low light years later. My dad would call the customer, and ask what the weather was like where the machine would be used. Did it have to deal with 120 degree heat or 40 below zero cold? That was taken into account.
My dad thought about how the machine, like this locomotive, would be shipped to the job site. Would it be partially taken apart, ride on a train, a ship, a truck, and then have to be reassembled? How could he design it to make that reassembly process happen better and without damage to the machine? Would the machine operate in a place with lots of dust? That was taken into account. Would the machine operate in high humidity where rust and mud and sludge would be an issue? He took that into account.
Then, once all those factors were thought out, my dad would go out into the shop floor, and he'd sit down on a pallet, over lunch, with the welders and machinists and assembly guys, he'd tell them what he was working on, and ask how he could design it to make the actual assembly process easier, more efficient, and smarter. My dad actually used to get in trouble at Plymouth because he would go out and have lunch with the shop guys, and sketch out a part on a napkin and give it to the machinists. Then he'd give the official design to the lower level draftsmen, who would make the actual drawing for a part (they actually drew on paper then). By the time the draftsmen took the official drawing out to the shop to have it built, the part was already sitting there, built perfectly, made from my dad's napkin sketch. That drove one of his bosses nuts.
At one point, my dad told me his process. He said he tried to sit there and envision the part he needed to design, how it interacted as a part of the larger machine. Then he pictured the entire life of that machine, going decades into the future, and he tried to design in every little thing he could to make that part or machine do its job properly, and last as long, and be as reliable as possible. He tried to anticipate every problem that might occur, and design the solution into the part. He knew there would always be things he wouldn't think of, or crazy circumstances that may happen. But he tried to design every machine in a way to alleviate nearly all possible problems that the machine would encounter in its whole working life.
Being my dad's son, I simply thought this was how everything was designed. I also looked far into the future at what was likely to happen. But I didn't, and still don't, have the mechanical genius my dad did. He truly was a genius at what he did. My area of interest is human society, and projecting what we're doing into the future, looking for the problems that will definitely occur, the problems that will likely occur, and other things that may happen. Then, like my dad and his locomotives and other machines, I look for the solutions that that will keep most of those problems from happening, or will lessen the bad effects.
We can't predict the future absolutely. But we can project what we're doing, and look at other major factors, prominent people, and forces in society, and get a good idea of possible problems. Once we do that, we can, if we truly desire, take actions that will head things in a better, all around more positive, direction. We can design our world to alleviate or lessen some of the problems will will undoubtedly face.
That's why I write about the next recession, future trends, and social issues. I'm thinking ahead, finding inevitable issues, and looking for ways to get a head start on dealing with those issues.
Now, there are a lot of powerful people and organizations and informal groups who have their own agendas, many of those agendas are not so good for the whole population. People with agendas, particularly devious ones, usually have to get a bit delusional to justify their acts. When you look at these agendas from a more objective point of view, you see they're full of problems and will result in bad consequences. In the intelligence community world, they even have a name for this, "blowback." I heard about that when a book of that title came out years ago.
Groups of people are continually making plans, and even conspiring to work their way into power by taking actions that do harm to lots of other people. Yet they almost always imagine their crazy plans will work, and there will be no reaction. As an example, since the Reagan era, there have been all kinds of political actions taken to allow certain groups of people to amass huge amounts of money, and the power that went with that money. Our American society has become horribly corrupt over these past 30-40 years, with CEO's getting $100 million incomes and huge golden parachutes, while the vast majority of people have seen their standard of living drop year after year for decades. The inevitable consequence of this long term corruption, and manipulation of the financial world, is that the majority of people are really pissed off. We have huge populist movements rising up, both on the political Right and the political Left. Yet the people who planned for years to transfer most of our country's wealth from the old American Middle Class to a small financial and political elite, seem completely surprised by the rise of Donald Trump and of Bernie Sanders in the last election.
This was inevitable. When you take money from 250 to 300 million people for 30-40 years, eventually they wise up and get pissed. These same people who engineered the American wealth transfer of the last 40 years also didn't see high tech changing the social and business world the way it has. They definitely didn't have Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and the Google duo in their master plan.
I try to look at as many major societal forces as possible, try to imagine how they will interact with each other, and then explain what the INEVITABLE consequences will be. I'm imagining the future of society at large the way my dad imagined the future of the locomotives he designed, some of which are still working decades after the company went out of business.
Maybe this will help some of you understand why I think about these big picture, long term, issues, and why I write about them. Because we don't HAVE to deal with all the consequences of the less honest people working in our world. We can do things today to build a better overall future. I just point out some of the areas we should take a more serious look at.
My dad, the engineering genius, a couple of years before his death in 2012.
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