Reading — 2026 May–Aug Recall Set 9

At the beginning of the 19th century, the port of London was the busiest in the world. Cargoes that had travelled thousands of miles and survived all the hazards of the sea were unloaded on the banks of the Thames, only for their owners to discover that the most frustrating portion of their journey lay ahead. Consignments intended for the southern parts of Britain had to be lifted onto horse carts, pulled through the docks and across London Bridge, built in the 12th century and as impractical as its early date implies. By 1820, London Bridge had become the centre of the world's largest traffic jam. It was an intolerable situation, and it was clear that if private enterprise could build another crossing closer to the docks, there would be good money to be made in tolls paid by users. Another bridge was out of the question, as this would deny sailing ships access to the city centre and ambitious men turned their thoughts to tunnelling beneath the Thames instead. This was not such an obvious idea as it might appear. Although increasing demand for coal had meant a great many tunnels had been dug in mines in Britain, working methods remained primitive. Tunnels were dug by men with simple tools, by candlelight. However, in 1807, a group of businessmen set themselves up as the Thames Archway Company. Their ambition was to tunnel below the Thames, but there was little to guide them as there had been no previous attempt to do this. Their chief engineer was Richard Trevithick, designer of the world's first high-pressure steam engine. His men made progress at the beginning, but then things began to go disastrously wrong, with muddy soil pouring into the tunnel. Eventually, the Thames Archway Company had had enough. Its funds were exhausted. Trevithick was sick from exposure to the river water, and its efforts had proved only that a passage under the river exceeded the limits of contemporary mining technology. At that time, the only machines used in mines were pumps. It took a man of genius to recognise that a different sort of machine was needed, a machine that could prevent the roof and walls of a tunnel from collapsing. This man was Marc Brunel, a Frenchman who had become one of the most prominent engineers in Britain. Not long after the failure of the Thames Archway Company, Brunel saw a rotten piece of wood lying on the riverbank. Examining the wood through a magnifying glass, he observed it was infested with something that looked like a worm. Brunel realised that as it tunnelled through the wood, it would push chewed wood into its mouth and digest it, then excrete a hard substance that lined the new tunnel. Brunel realised that the worm's digging technique could be adapted to produce a new way of tunnelling. His realisation led him to invent a device that has been used in one form or another in most major tunnels built since: the tunnelling shield. It consisted of a heavy iron frame that could be pushed forward a few inches at a time. The front of the frame was made up of a series of iron frames that could be folded back to allow miners to dig the ground ahead. Behind these frames was a wall consisting of a series of iron plates pressed against the tunnel face and supported on a set of horizontal wooden planks, that would prevent the face from collapsing. It was a complex and rather cumbersome machine and not easy to use, but it seemed that it would protect the miners from the worst of the river's water. Brunel's team carefully examined earth samples taken from beneath the riverbed, and subsequently decided to dig the tunnel close to the muddy river bottom, where he could expect to find clay. This would be a more solid and safe substance to dig through than the sand that was found deeper down. Brunel began work on his tunnel in 1825, but the problems of such an operation soon became apparent. Although the shield itself worked well, water began to drip into the tunnel. This was more of an annoyance than a danger while the pump was working, but this machine proved unreliable and sometimes failed altogether. When the pump broke down, work had to stop as the tunnel quickly flooded. There were occasions when the miners had to abandon their tools and flee for their lives. Even when Brunel's men were able to work, they had to run the constant risk of the pumps failing. They also complained of frequent headaches and dizziness, caused by the poor air quality. The air underground was dirty and stale, contaminated due to the lack of an adequate ventilation system. There were lighting problems too. Illuminating the tunnels by candlelight was a constant challenge. Lamps give off only a very weak glow, and there were a number of accidents because the miners could not see what they were doing. Lastly, a number of Brunel's miners walked off the job because they could not tolerate the excessive temperatures that developed in the cramped conditions underground. Despite all these setbacks, the tunnel finally emerged on the opposite river bank on August 12, 1841. Brunel's triumph, however, was only partial. The small payment per person made by the thousands of visitors who flocked to see the marvel hardly paid even a penny per foot of the tunnel's construction costs. Brunel had gone bankrupt long before the project was completed, and the government loan he had required to complete the project had to be paid back with interest. As a result, there was not enough funding to make it accessible to horse-drawn vehicles, as intended. Instead, the passageways were filled with souvenir sellers and entertainers. In the end, the tunnel was closed two years later, used at night, before it was finally closed entirely and fell into dereliction for decades. It was only when the underground railway came to London in the 1880s that the Thames Tunnel found and achieved a measure of real usefulness. It was bought in 1869 by the East London Railway, who found it to be in such excellent condition that it was immediately pressed into service as a route for passenger trains heading east. The tunnel became, and remains, part of the London Underground network.

In 1977 Irene Pepperberg, a recent graduate of Harvard University, did something very bold. At a time when animals still were considered automatons, she set out to find what was on another creature’s mind by talking to it. She brought a one-year-old African gray parrot she named Alex into her lab to teach him to reproduce the sounds of the English language. “I thought if he learned to communicate, I could ask him questions about how he sees the world.” When Pepperberg began her dialogue with Alex, who died last September at the age of 31, many scientists believed animals were incapable of any thought. They were simply machines, robots programmed to react to stimuli but lacking the ability to think or feel. Any pet owner would disagree. We see the love in our dogs’ eyes and know that, of course, they have thoughts and emotions. But such claims remain highly controversial. Gut instinct is not science, and it is all too easy to project human thoughts and feelings onto another creature. How, then, does a scientist prove that an animal is capable of thinking – that it is able to acquire information about the world and act on it? “That’s why I started my studies with Alex,” Pepperberg said. They were seated – she at her desk, he on top of his cage – in her lab, a windowless room about the size of a boxcar, at Brandeis University. Newspapers lined the floor; baskets of bright toys were stacked on the shelves. They were clearly a team – and because of their work, the notion that animals can think is no longer so fanciful. Certain skills are considered key signs of higher mental abilities: good memory, a grasp of grammar and symbols, self-awareness, understanding others’ motives, imitating others, and being creative. Bit by bit, in ingenious experiments, researchers have documented these talents in other species, gradually chipping away at what we thought made human beings distinctive while offering a glimpse of where our own abilities came from. Scrub jays know that other jays are thieves and that stashed food can spoil; sheep can recognize faces; chimpanzees use a variety of tools to probe termite mounds and even use weapons to hunt small mammals; dolphins can imitate human postures; the archerfish, which stuns insects with a sudden blast of water, can learn how to aim its squirt simply by watching an experienced fish perform the task. And Alex the parrot turned out to be a surprisingly good talker. Thirty years after the Alex studies began, Pepperberg and a changing collection of assistants were still giving him English lessons. The humans, along with two younger parrots, also served as Alex’s flock, providing the social input all parrots crave. Like any flock, this one – as small as it was – had its share of drama. Alex dominated his fellow parrots, acted huffy at times around Pepperberg, tolerated the other female humans, and fell to pieces over a male assistant who dropped by for a visit. Pepperberg bought Alex in a Chicago pet store where she let the store’s assistant pick him out because she didn’t want other scientists saying later that she’d particularly chosen an especially smart bird for her work. Given that Alex’s brain was the size of a shelled walnut, most researchers thought Pepperberg’s interspecies communication study would be futile. “Some people actually called me crazy for trying this,” she said. “Scientists thought that chimpanzees were better subjects, although, of course, chimps can’t speak.” Chimpanzees, bonobos, and gorillas have been taught to use sign language and symbols to communicate with us, often with impressive results. The bonobo Kanzi, for instance, carries his symbol-communication board with him so he can “talk” to his human researchers, and he has invented combinations of symbols to express his thoughts. Nevertheless, this is not the same thing as having an animal look up at you, open his mouth, and speak. Under Pepperberg’s patient tutelage, Alex learned how to use his vocal tract to imitate almost one hundred English words, including the sounds for various foods, although he calls an apple a “beanery.” “Apples taste a little bit like bananas to him, and they look a little bit like cherries, Alex made up that word for them,” Pepperberg said. It sounded a bit mad, the idea of a bird having lessons to practice, and willingly doing it. But after listening to and observing Alex, it was difficult to argue with Pepperberg’s explanation for his behaviors. She wasn’t handing him treats for the repetitious work or rapping him on the claws to make him say the sounds. “He has to hear the words over and over before he can correctly imitate them,” Pepperberg said, after pronouncing “seven” for Alex a good dozen times in a row. “I’m not trying to see if Alex can learn a human language,” she added. “That’s never been the point. My plan always was to use his imitative skills to get a better understanding of avian cognition.” In other words, because Alex was able to produce a close approximation of the sounds of some English words, Pepperberg could ask him questions about a bird’s basic understanding of the world. She couldn’t ask him what he was thinking about, but she could ask him about his knowledge of numbers, shapes, and colors. To demonstrate, Pepperberg carried Alex on her arm to a tall wooden perch in the middle of the room. She then retrieved a green key and a small green cup from a basket on a shelf. She held up the two items to Alex’s eye. “What’s same?” she asked. Without hesitation, Alex’s beak opened: “Color.” “What’s different?” Pepperberg asked. “Shape,” Alex said. His voice had the digitized sound of a cartoon character. Since parrots lack lips (another reason it was difficult for Alex to pronounce some sounds, such as ba), the words seemed to come from the air around him, as if a ventriloquist were speaking. But the words – and what can only be called the thoughts – were entirely his. For the next 20 minutes, Alex ran through his tests, distinguishing colors, shapes, sizes, and materials (wool versus wood versus metal). He did some simple arithmetic, such as counting the yellow toy blocks among a pile of mixed hues. And, then, as if to offer final proof of the mind inside his bird’s brain, Alex spoke up. “Talk clearly!” he commanded, when one of the younger birds Pepperberg was also teaching talked with wrong pronunciation. “Talk clearly!” “Don’t be a smart aleck,” Pepperberg said, shaking her head at him. “He knows all this, and he gets bored, so he interrupts the others, or he gives the wrong answer just to be obstinate. At this stage, he’s like a teenager; he’s moody, and I’m never sure what he’ll do.”

A Despite its obvious connection, mass production was not a corollary to the modern Industrial Revolution. Various mass production techniques had been practiced in ancient times, from ceramic production in the Orient to manufacturing in ancient Greece. The British were most likely the first modern economy to adapt water-powered, then steam-powered, machinery to industrial production methods, most notably in the textiles industry. Yet it is generally agreed that modern mass production techniques came into widespread use through the innovation of an assortment of Americans who substantially improved the ancient techniques. Indeed, this modern mass production was called the American System and its early successes are often attributed to Eli Whitney, who adapted mass production techniques and the interchangeability of parts to the manufacture of muskets for the U.S. government in the late 1790s. B In the late 18th century, French General Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval, promoted standardized weapons, which became known as the Systeme Gribeauval after it was issued as a royal order in 1765. (Its focus at the time was artillery more than muskets or handguns.) The crucial step toward interchangeability in metal parts was taken by Simeon North, working only a few miles from Eli Terry. North created one of the world's first true milling machines to do metal shaping that previously was done by hand with a file. Diana Muir believes that North's milling machine was online around 1816. While Whitney was certainly an innovator of the American System, others maintain that Whitney's parts were not truly interchangeable and that credit should more appropriately go to John Hall, the New England gunsmith who built Muskets with flintlock for the United States government at the Harper's Ferry armory. Flintlock, as it was implied meant people used it to trigger the gun. Hall, born in Maine in 1769, built many of the machine tools needed for precision manufacturing and instituted a system that employed accurate gauges for measuring every aspect and piece of work his factory produced. Consequently, he achieved a much higher level of interchangeability and precision than did Whitney. C Still others maintain that the credit for these modern innovations should go to a French gunsmith whose methods and results predated those of Whitney and Hall by at least a decade. In Britain, and somewhat simultaneously with Whitney, the Frenchman Marc Isambard Brunei adapted steam-driven machinery and assembly-line techniques to the production of 130,000 pulleys for the marine industry in just one year. Brunei's achievements were made possible by the design and manufacture of several machine tools by the noted British inventor, Henry Maudslay. D Maudslay's contribution to modern mass production was the invention of precision machine tools capable of producing the identical parts necessary for mass production techniques which made producing guns cheaper. It is generally conceded that the British machine tool industry was far more advanced than that of the Americans in these early stages of mass production development. Simultaneous with Whitney's innovations in the United States were those of Oliver Evans, whose many inventions in the flour milling process led to an automated mill that could be run by a single miller. E Samuel Colt and Elisha King Root were also very successful innovators in the development of industrial processes that could mass produce interchangeable parts for the assembly-line production of firearms. Colt and Root wished to advance the machining of parts so that even the most minute of tasks could be performed with the precision that they believed only machines could achieve. In these endeavors, Colt and Root were largely successful. F Eli Terry also adapted mass production methods to clockmaking in the early 1800s, and George Eastman made innovations to assembly-line techniques in the manufacture and the developing of photographic film later in the century. Credit for the development of large scale, assembly-line, mass production techniques is usually given to Henry Ford and his innovative Model T production methods. Henry Ford had his workers standing in one place while parts were brought by on conveyor belts, and the car itself moved past the workers on another conveyor belt. Bodies were built on one line and the chassis and drive train were built on another. When both were essentially complete, the body was lowered onto the chassis for final assembly. Around the same time, production of guns also entered into the assembly line. G Despite the fact that he was not the first, Ford can certainly be viewed as the most successful of these early innovators due to one simple fact — Ford envisioned and fostered mass consumption as a corollary to mass production. Ford's techniques lessened the time needed to build a Model T from about twelve and a half hours to an hour and a half; the price was reduced as well — from $850 for the first Model T in 1908, to only $290 in 1927 after assembly-line techniques were introduced in 1913. The automobile was no longer a luxury for the rich, the Model T fast became a necessity for nearly everyone. Indeed, Ford sold almost half of all of the automobiles bought worldwide from 1908 to 1927 — the years of Model T production. Apart from this, people showed different views over whether guns should be involved in mass production. The expense opposition to ammunition was the first one to trigger the debate. Other equipment involved in war or preparation for war was also against. Let alone all these required a lot of workforce to accomplish. H Assembly-line techniques also required that the manual skills necessary to build a product be altered. Previous to mass production techniques, as seen in the early manufacture of firearms, each workman was responsible for the complete manufacture and assembly of all of the component parts needed to build any single product. Mass production and parts interchangeability demanded that all parts be identical and the individual worker no longer be allowed the luxury of building a complete product based on his personal skills and inclinations. Machines came to dictate the production process, and each part — once created individually by hand— was now duplicated by a machine process that was merely guided by human control. The craft tradition, dominant in human endeavor for centuries, was abandoned in favor of a process that created parts by machine. Furthermore, assembly of these machine-made parts was divided into a series of small repetitive steps that required much less skill than traditional craftsmanship. Consequently, modern mass production techniques, while certainly increasing the efficiency of the manufacturing process and bringing industrial products within the reach of virtually all of humanity, apart from manufacturing ballpoint pens, making of gun is also part of it. But safety is also a factor to consider. People succeeded in restrain the production of guns resulting only 4 manufactures were permitted to produce guns in mass production.