Wednesday, March 4, 2009

Archimedes Claw and Corporate Feudalism

This assignment asked us to research a technology discovered before 1900 and analyze its effects on civilization. Please feel free to comment.

The great classical engineer Archimedes is credited with designing technologies and theories that revolutionized the word manpower. The claw that bears his namesake was actually an ancient boom crane, designed to utilize leverage and a block and tackle apparatus of his own design to motivate and maneuver a monstrous grappling hook. The boom’s fulcrum and pivot was the pinnacle of a four pointed, pyramidal structure that lent exceptional support to the claw and provided the base for the incredible amount of leverage needed to execute the claw’s intended purpose of capsizing attacking ships. Most notably during the second Punic war, when the enemy galleons attacked the walls of Syracuse with their massive rams, the booms would lower their claws into the sea and attempt to seize the longitudinal beams of the ships’ hulls. Upon the seizure, men would pull the rope connected to the effort of the boom lever, the claw would lift from the water and the ship would be capsized. This represents one early instances of man using machine to lift immense weights and deposit them elsewhere.

After major advances in the 1st through 3rd centuries A.D., and falling into disuse at the demise of the Western Roman Empire, the crane was resurrected in the 11th century to support maritime operations in the Netherlands and Prussia (Coulton, 7-19). The use of the crane to transport massive loads onto ships and sail them across the known world gave rise to the first ocean traders and not long after, pirates. By the end of the 17th century, the Dutch East India Corporation was the dominant trader, dealing in commodities ranging from coffee to slaves. The technology continued to evolve throughout the Age of Reason, giving rise to taller and taller structures, as well as more remote colonies. By 1931, the British Empire encircled the globe and the Empire State Building had been erected to a height of 1230 feet, becoming the world’s tallest building, and from the top, the tallest seat of power in existence. Having now constructed monoliths of such epic proportion that cranes had to be used to lift other cranes into place hundreds of feet over the city, man could now stand on solid ground one quarter of one mile from the streets of New York City. The ideas of immense mass and weight had become manageable as a result of the crane, completely tertiary to man's achievement of his vision.

The erection of these towering structures becomes symbolic in the coming decades, paralleling the rise of the American Capitalist. The New York skyline is the result of a major push in architecture in the late 19th century to achieve the biggest and tallest buildings in existence. Unlike traditional buildings at the time, skyscrapers utilized a skeleton structure of steel and iron beams that, in the case of the Home Insurance Building constitute approximately one third of the weight of similarly strong measures of concrete and masonry (Petersen). A towering crane was then, a necessary condition of skyscraper construction. As architects became more ambitious, so did the need for taller cranes. In the case of the Sears tower in Chicago, cranes were lifted to the tops of smaller buildings, where they were then used to complete secondary lifts of the materials necessary to complete the tower. In the age of skyscrapers, the pinnacle of success truly was the pinnacle of human civil engineering. This idea is espoused in Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, in which main characters Howard Roark and Dominique Francon spend the final scene of the book, after defeating the forces of immoral collectivism, speeding up the main column of a tower crane up the precipice to a new civilization (727). Never before had man been so equipped to execute his will and establish his place in the natural order.

Even today, the skyscraper and the Capitalist are inextricably intertwined. In his January, 2008 article, “Booms, Busts, and Cranes,” Doug French describes while, “standing on the 88th floor observation deck of the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai, any capitalist gets an exhilarating rush, looking down upon over 5,000 high-rise buildings (all built over the past two decades) in a teeming city of 18 million people.” This intrinsic sense of societal dominance has reshaped the way in which corporations function globally. As has been epitomized by the financial scandals and failures of the last three years, corporations and their executives have become increasingly apt to believe themselves untouchable under the rules of law and reason. We have an entirely new ruling class of humans that spend their professional lives looking down over civilization. In this new feudalism, fifes are defined by brands and companies do battle not with guns and steel, but with advertising and product launches. Serfs no longer toil in the fields, but spend their entire adult lives trapped at a desk, managing information and being managed by despotic office managers. Clothing of soiled rags have been replaced by bad, off the rack suits and cheap ties; and horses by the Smart car. For this, I do not mean to suggest that the Capitalist is to blame, necessarily. But the Capitalist built the tower, and the bureaucrat, like the cockroach, invariably followed.

Archimedes likely could not have foreseen the implications of giving man the power to lift thousands of times his own weight, to thousands of times his own height. The crane is the technology that contributed to the rapid expansion of the European colonial empires, the practice of nautical commerce, made the skyscraper possible, and thus changed the way we perceive business and governments. It elevated businessmen to positions of power in the stratosphere, and contributed to the fundamental disconnection between businesses and buyers, facilitated the creation of the consumer class. As a man that lived in the second century B.C., Archimedes is quoted as having said, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world.” (Pappus.) It appears, perhaps, he has.

Works Cited

Coulton, J.J. “Lifting in Early Greek Architecture.” The Journal of Helenic Studies. 94. pp 7-17.

French, Doug. “Booms, Busts, and Cranes.” January 7, 2008. February 28, 2009.

<http://www.lewrockwell.com/french/french69.html>.

Pappus of Alexandria. Synagoge: Book VIII. Direct quotation of Archimedes: c. BC 230- 212. Greek Text: Pappi Alexandrini Collectionis. c. AD 340.

Petersen, Ivars. “The First Skyscraper – New Theory that the Home Insurance Building was not the First.” The Science Times. April 5, 1986. February 27, 2009.

Postman, Niel. Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. New York: Vintage Books. 1993.

Rand, Ayn. The Fountainhead. New York: Plume. 1994.

1 comment:

wendi said...

as i was reading this response i was thinking in paragraph two... "has he read the fountainhead" one of my favorite books... and then you refrence it! ridiculous. Over a pretty solid answer. i think that it's interesting that you chose to answer the question by avoiding the literal opportunity it inherently provides you, and went with something a little more adbstract in feeling and notion...