Transcript Technological discussions in iron and steel, 1871-1885

Technological discussions in iron and steel,
1871-1885
Carol Siri Johnson,
New Jersey Institute of Technology
Peter B. Meyer
Research Economist, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics*
SHOT conference, Las Vegas, Oct 13, 2006
*Views expressed here do not reflect official policies or measurements of the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Mid-19th Century Ironworks
Lukens Steel, circa 1895, just before being torn down
Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library
Late 19th Century Ironworks
Birmingham, Alabama.
Courtesy IA, Robert Gordon, the Smithsonian
20th Century Ironworks
Bethlehem Steel, 1931
Courtesy Hagley Museum and Library
Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers
(TAIME)
The American Institute of Mining Engineers
and the Engineering and Mining Journal
Knowledge Transfer, the Engineering and
Mining Journal and TAIME
Online Archive of PDFs at
http://techterms.net/ironwork/TAIME/
Vol. I
1871-1873
Vol. VIII
1879-1880
Vol. II
1873-1874
Vol. IX
1880-1881
Vol. III
1874-1875
Vol. X
1881-1882
Vol. IV
1875-1876
Vol. XI
1882-1883
Vol. V
1876-1877
Vol. XII
1883-1884
Vol. VI
1877-1878
Vol. XIII
1884-1885
Vol. VII
1878-1879
Vol. XIV
1885-1886
Data Exploration: Paper Length and Contents
Data Exploration: Author Data
Data Exploration: Author Biographies
Kuhn’s hypothesis
An established scientific paradigm has a specialized vocabulary
• Covering its esoteric theory and subject precisely (p. 206)
• Definitions are established and standard
As a paradigm is developing, communication involves translation (p. 203)
• And exploring alternative definitions (p. 200)
• (e.g.: “what I mean by steel is . . . “; also we see glossaries)
• “The price is often sentences of great length and complexity.” (p. 203)
Mass production steel was a developing technological paradigm in 1871-1885
Bessemer steel
Open-hearth steel
Big Steel – centralized, high volume, capital-intensive production
We look at how lengths of articles change in this developing literature.
Possibly, articles on a topic get shorter with time.
Expressions of Uncertainty
We attempted to use another set of definitions of articles relevant to steel. We count
the number of uses in each article of these iron- or steel-related phrases: "hot blast",
"Bessemer", "puddling", "open hearth", "Siemens", "Martin", "spiegel", and divide this
count by the total number of words in the article. This frequency is a proxy for the
iron-relevance of the article. We compute also the ratio of the use of the string
"uncert", representing relevance of literal uncertainty. These counts across the 712
articles have a correlation coefficient of .0071. So the articles with iron-related terms
are slightly more likely to use words with "uncert" with them than other articles are, by
this metric. We can also show that the word count of an article is slightly positively
correlated with the year the article was published (correlation of .033), so articles
tended to be a little longer in the later years. Interestingly the incidence of the ironrelated terms, and of the "uncert" terms, decreased slightly over time. (That is, the
correlation of the frequency of these terms with the year is slightly negative.) Ironrelated terms were declining in frequency in TAIME although the iron sector was
expanding as a fraction of the economy at large. We can speculate as to why.
Perhaps this was because with the rise of corporate research and development, more
of the iron texts were not published in open publications like TAIME.
Word Counts – Original List
?
ambiguity
answer (s, ed, ing)
argument (s)
ask (s, ed, ing)
belief (s)
certain (ty)
chance
confusion
criticism
definite
difficult
dispute (s, un)
doubt (s, ful,
fullness, less,
lessly)
error (s)
evidence
experiment (s, al,
ing)
if
inquire (d, ing)
inquiries
inquiry
investigate (s, ed,
ing)
know (un, n. ledge)
opinion (s)
perhaps
probability
problem (s)
query
question (s, ed, ing,
able)
resolve (s, d, ing)
right
risk (s, ed)
test
true
trust (dis, mis, s)
truth (s)
(un) certain (ty)
valid (ity)
whether
wrong
Word Counts – Final List
Expressions of Uncertainty
Scientific Expressions
Expressions of Uncertainty – Steel Articles
Scientific Expressions – Steel Articles
Layers of productive processes, advancing
Iron and steel, 1871-1884
Earlier,
more basic,
"upstream"
levels
Blast furnaces making pig iron
Materials science and solid state
physics
Bessemer and open hearth steel
production
Chip design and electrical
engineering
Iron and steel plants
Semiconductor memory and
microprocessor chips
Railroads (transportation)
Later,
“downstream"
levels
Production of information
technology goods, in recent decades
Business process of railroad
companies (cost accounting,
personnel departments, time
setting, timekeeping)
Microcomputers
Applications software (word processors,
spreadsheets, databases, chip design
software)
Net software and business process
(e-commerce, auctions, search engines)
In both cases there were feedback processes by which downstream
advances affected earlier stages of production