I’m in the middle of reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s most recent book, Here I Am , on my morning commute (and no, I'm not reading and driving at the same time — I don't have a Level Three car yet). I came across the following passage and had to pause the recording to think about it. In it, the author describes a podcast (reference below) in which “the book” and “the novelty” are put in context. (Emphasis mine.) ...[In] the 1863 World Championship of Checkers… every game of the forty-game series ended in a draw and twenty-one of the games were identical, move for move… The term book refers to the sum history of all preceding games. A game is “in book” when the configuration of the board has occurred before. A game is “out of book” or “off book” when the configuration is unprecedented. The book for checkers is relatively small. The 1863 championship demonstrated that checkers had been, in essence, perfected, and its book memorized. So there was nothing left besides monotonous repetition, every game a draw. Chess, however, is almost infinitely complex… Access to the book has made whole portions of chess games checkers-like … the first sixteen to twenty moves can be hammered out simply by “reciting” the book. Still, in all but the rarest chess games, a “novelty” is reached—a configuration of pieces that has never been seen in the history of the universe. In the notation of a chess game, the next move is marked “out of book.” Both sides are now on their own, without history, no dead stars to navigate by. What am I talking about? Cars, of course. The History of Automobiles in a Few Short Lines In 1860, Belgian Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir first produced a gas-fired internal combustion engine, with cylinders, pistons, connecting rods, and flywheel, using gasoline as fuel. Dugald Clerk designed and patented the first two-stroke engine with in-cylinder compression in 1881. Karl Benz built and patented his four-stroke gas engine for automobiles, which were the first automobiles in production in 1886. The era of the automobile began. The 1900s brought adjustments to the basic design of the internal combustion engine every single year, adding hundreds of innovations to improve the safety, reliability, efficiency, and mass-marketability of the car. And yet, the basic design of the engine remained: cars contain an engine that generates power by burning fuel with air inside the engine, and the resulting hot gases drive pistons as they expand. This is a very complex machine with hundreds of moving parts that break down and become unreliable with every movement of every part. It uses expensive fuels, with complicated effects on the health and safety of the people and environment around it, and most cars have a usable lifetime of about ten years. And then came the 1990s on the heels of the energy crises of the 70s and 80s, and with the 90s came hybrid cars, using batteries to supplement the carbon-based fuels of the last 100 years. Still, many of the basic problems remained: the problem of the multitude of moving parts and the longevity of the machine, with the addition of new ones: a huge and heavy battery that not only had to be manufactured (itself an environmental nightmare), but also replaced (so expensive!) and then discarded (again, an environmental nightmare). Sure, the MPG was great, but at the cost of lots of other things. The Zap Heard Around the World The mass-market production of the electric car changed everything. Tesla presented their Roadster in 2008, followed by the Model S, the Model X, and finally the so-called “affordable” Model 3 (introduced in March 2016 and will start being delivered in bulk any minute now). In the meantime, Hyundai, Nissan, Renault, Mercedes, Chevrolet, (and probably others) have joined the electric car revolution. The revolution is not exactly about the end of the usage of fossil fuel, I think (though that's a big part of it). It’s actually this: that old internal combustion engine, with all its moving parts? It’s been replaced with a fast-charging battery and electric motors for each of the individual wheels. No more axels and failure-prone power distribution train. No more pistons or cranks or spark plugs or fuel injectors or transmissions or flywheels or valves or distributors or pumps or pulleys or belts or gears. This is a simple car, mechanically. We’re talking basically a battery on (luxury) wheels. And this, my friends, is the novelty. We have exhausted the “book” when it comes to the life cycle of the internal combustion engine, and are now off-book, into uncharted territory, with no dead stars to navigate by. ( Live stars, on the other hand… if you install solar panels on your home to re-charge your electric car… well, that’s just cool.) —Meera Stay tuned for more about how electric cars are changing more than just how we get places. References: Abumrad, Jad, and Robert Krulwich. Season 10, Episode 2, 2011. "Games: The Rules Can Set You Free". Podcast. Radiolab. http://www.radiolab.org/story/153809-rules-set-you-free/ . Carroll, L. and Tenniel, J. (n.d.). 1871. Through the looking-glass . Foer, Jonathan Safran. 2016. Here I Am. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.![]()
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