Helium Is Hard to Replace

Helium Is Hard to Replace

Information and Technological Evolution

Information and Technological Evolution

The Age of the Amplifier As we’ve noted more than a few times before, for most of the 20th century AT&T’s Bell Labs was the premier industrial research lab in the US.

The Age of the Amplifier

How Much Computing Power is in a Data Center?

How Much Computing Power is in a Data Center?

The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home It’s long been believed the constantly rising costs of new home construction, and lackluster improvements in construction productivity more generally, are fundamentally a problem of production methods.

The Elusive Cost Savings of the Prefabricated Home

A History of Operation Breakthrough Many who look at the high and rising cost of housing see the problem as fundamentally one of production methods; more specifically, that homes could be built more cheaply if they were made using factories and industrialized processes, instead of assembling them on site using manual labor and hand-held tools.

A History of Operation Breakthrough

Is the Future “AWS for Everything”? A theme running through my book is the idea that efficiency improvements, and the various methods for making products cheaper over time, have historically been dependent on some degree of repetition, on running your production process over and over again.

Is the Future “AWS for Everything”?

Trends in US Construction Productivity (This is a chapter of a longer report I’m working on that summarizes and expands the last several years of my work on construction productivity.

Trends in US Construction Productivity

On Technologies vs. Commodities A theory that has gained traction in the renewable energy space is that renewable energy sources like wind and solar are based on manufactured “technologies”, while fossil fuel energy sources like oil, coal, and natural gas are based on extracted “commodities”.

On Technologies vs. Commodities

Reading List 01/24/26 Welcome to the reading list, a weekly list of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology.

Reading List 01/24/26

Do Commodities Get Cheaper Over Time? This American Enterprise Institute chart, which breaks down how price changes for different types of goods and services in the consumer price index, has by now become very widely known.

Do Commodities Get Cheaper Over Time?

The Surprisingly Long Life of the Vacuum Tube The last several decades of technological progress have, in large part, been about finding more and more things we can do with semiconductors and the technology for producing them.

The Surprisingly Long Life of the Vacuum Tube

How Did TVs Get So Cheap? You’ve probably seen this famous graph that breaks out various categories of inflation, showing labor-intensive services getting more expensive during the 21st century and manufactured goods getting less expensive.

How Did TVs Get So Cheap?

Should US homebuilders emulate Sweden? A common sentiment I see with folks interested in improving US homebuilding is that we should try and emulate Sweden.

Should US homebuilders emulate Sweden?

How Accurate Are Learning Curves? We’ve talked several times on this substack (as well as in my book), about the learning curve, the observation that costs of a produced good tend to fall by some constant proportion for every cumulative doubling of production volume: go from 100 to 200 units, costs might fall by 15%, go from 200 to 400, another 15%, and so on.

How Accurate Are Learning Curves?

How Bell Labs Won Its First Nobel Prize Bell Labs, as we’ve noted before, was for years America’s premier industrial research lab.

How Bell Labs Won Its First Nobel Prize

Stagnant Construction Productivity Is a Worldwide Problem We’ve spent a lot of time examining the problem of construction productivity in the US — the fact that, across a variety of different metrics, construction never seems to get any more efficient (in terms of how much output you get for a given amount of input), or any cheaper.

Stagnant Construction Productivity Is a Worldwide Problem

How a Government Think Tank Trained The First Generation of US Software Developers The US government had a hand in creating much of the early computer industry.

How a Government Think Tank Trained The First Generation of US Software Developers

How ASML Got EUV I am pleased to cross-post this piece with Factory Settings, the new Substack from IFP.

How ASML Got EUV

What Is A Production Process? Chapter 1 of my book “The Origins of Efficiency”

What Is A Production Process?

Strap Rail The early history of the United States runs along with the first years of the railroad.

Strap Rail

How the UK Lost Its Shipbuilding Industry From roughly the end of the US Civil War until the late 1950s, the United Kingdom was one of the biggest shipbuilders in the world.

How the UK Lost Its Shipbuilding Industry

More on US Pedestrian Deaths Last week I wrote about the unexplained rise in pedestrians killed by motor vehicles in the US.

More on US Pedestrian Deaths

My Book, The Origins of Efficiency, is Out Today My book, the Origins of Efficiency, is out today!

My Book, The Origins of Efficiency, is Out Today

Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US? It’s unfortunately not uncommon for pedestrians to be killed by cars in the US.

Why Are So Many Pedestrians Killed by Cars in the US?

How Common Is Accidental Invention? One of the most important inventions of the 19th century was mauve dye, the first synthetic aniline dye.

How Common Is Accidental Invention?

What’s Happening to Wholesale Electricity Prices? The last several years in the US have seen a dramatic increase in electricity prices.

What’s Happening to Wholesale Electricity Prices?

An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And most of us probably know that the bomb was built by some of the world’s best physicists, working under Robert Oppenheimer at Los Alamos in New Mexico. But the Manhattan Project was far more than just a science project: building the bombs required an enormous industrial effort of unprecedented scale and complexity. Enormous factory complexes were built using hundreds of millions of dollars worth of never-before-constructed equipment. Scores of new machines, analytical techniques, and methods of working with completely novel substances had to be invented. Materials which had never been produced at all, or only produced in tiny amounts, suddenly had to be manufactured in vast quantities.

An Engineering History of the Manhattan Project

I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption But there are also some issues with how the Berkeley Lab report is estimating it.

I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption

Ford and the Birth of the Model T Ford’s status as a large-volume car producer began with the predecessor to the Model T: the Model N, a four-cylinder, two-seater car initially priced at $500. At the time, the average car in the US cost more than $2,000, and it seemed nearly unimaginable that a car with the capabilities of the Model N could cost so littl

Ford and the Birth of the Model T