How beer was instrumental in kick-starting the industrial revolution. How lessons learned then can assist in your latest Multi-Gbps Serial Channel Design

How beer was instrumental in kick-starting the industrial revolution. How lessons learned then can assist in your latest Multi-Gbps Serial Channel Design

Today most of us take mass-production and cheap rapid transport for granted.

In Europe at the start of the 17^th century none of this existed. Goods and raw materials were produced literally as a cottage industry.

In particular Iron was produced in small pans filled with iron ore, charcoal and limestone. Batch size was limited by the inability of the charcoal to resist crushing under the weight of the iron ore.

Alternate carbon fuels such as coal were tried but were insufficiently pure to be viable. Despite the inefficiencies in creating iron, its value was sufficiently high for whole forests to be cut down to be processed into charcoal.

The deforestation of England soon led to a major crisis: the shortage of wood threatened the beer brewing industry. Brewers tried substituting coal to boil the mash from which beer is brewed, but the sulfur laden smoke spoiled the flavor.

The crisis was solved in 1642 when it was remembered that way back in 1603 Sir Henry Platt suggested that coal might be cooked in ovens using a similar technique to that used to produce charcoal. The resulting coke is a hard glassy relatively pure form of carbon that burns cleanly – it was found to be ideal for brewing.

At the start of the 18^th century, an entrepreneur by the name of Abraham Darby enters our story. He was apprenticed in the breweries but had become involved in first brass and then iron casting. He was convinced that the techniques used to efficiently burn coke in the brewing industry could be adapted to iron production.

Around 1710 Darby developed the first coke consuming blast furnace in Shropshire, England. Coal and iron ore were plentiful there. The ability of coke to resist crushing allowed progressively larger and more efficient blast furnaces to be built. This eventually led to iron becoming cheap and plentiful.

Cheap, high quality iron was one of the necessary ingredients for the first industrial revolution: the transition from localized economies based on manual labor and draft animals to one based on machine based manufacturing and effective transportation by road, canal and eventually rail.

The first industrial revolution was the first step on the way to today’s high technology society: all thanks to beer!

 

Abraham Darby’s grandson (who bore the same name) inherited the family iron foundry and championed the use of iron in civil engineering. He invested in building of the worlds first iron bridge completed after just 3 months of construction on New Years Day 1780.

The design was extremely conservative, utilizing 379 tons of iron for a span of 100 feet rising to 60 feet over the river Severn in Shropshire. It was so well constructed that it still carries foot traffic today. Of particular note is that established woodworking techniques including wedged blind dovetail joints were incorporated into its design.

 

 

Unfortunately for Darby, the heavily over-designed bridge went vastly over budget and when he died he was still in debt from the project.

Subsequent iron bridges, such as those built by Thomas Telford were much more efficient in their use of iron. His 1796 bridge, upstream from the town of Ironbridge, used half the iron for a larger span.

Telford’s engineering and commercial success was due at least in part to his scientifically characterizing materials before creatively incorporating them into his designs. His designs, of over 20 bridges, were robust but not over-engineered.

 

The strategy applied by Telford in the 18^th century is clearly applicable today.  The greatest challenge in Signal Integrity engineering today is to meet complex electrical performance specifications while keeping development and material cost to a minimum.

In designing multi-Gbps serial channels this can only be done by developing an understanding of the way the physical properties of your design affect its electrical performance. With this knowledge you can creatively meet your design goals without un-necessary over-engineering.

 

I will be discussing the analysis techniques needed to quantify the effect of physical design elements on the electrical performance of multi-Gbps channels in the second webinar in my SERDES Design Solutions Series:

SERDES Design Solutions. Part Two: Case Studies
Thursday, September 17
2:00pm - 2:45pm US/Eastern

I hope you have a chance to attend!

 

Archived Webinars:

SERDES Design Solutions. Part One: Advanced Multi-GHz Analysis Features

 

White Paper:

Accurate, Multi-Gbps Serial Channel Design Solutions for the Entire Design Team

 

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