Remember the last scene of Back to the Future when Doc Brown returns in his flying DeLorian to take Marty to the year 2015? As a 5 year old kid in 1985 I still remember being fascinated, not only because the car was flying, but because the new DeLorian was powered by garbage instead of plutonium. At the time I didn’t even know what plutonium was. But garbage fuel – now that was a cool concept.In 2008, people are finally starting to work on garbage-powered aviation. The Solena Group, a Washington DC company that builds and operates renewable energy power…
Author: Noah Graff
An old friend of mine at Columbia University business school recently returned from Dubai where he had traveled with his class for spring break. He told me that there were tons of chic restaurants and bars, but that the place had “no real culture.” Everyone on the street was from a different country and speaking English, every type of food was available much like one would find in any major city, and the nightlife scene reminded him of South Beach, Florida. The place exists for foreigners – business people and rich vacationers (primarily from Europe). My friend said that the…
Today, April 21, in 1878, the fire station pole was invented. Prior to the existence of fire station poles, firemen often used sliding shoots like those in playgrounds to quickly get down to the ground floor, as opposed to taking a slower staircase. Like so many inventions it was inspired by an accident. At Engine Company 21, a station of all black firemen in Chicago, fireman George Reid was in the hayloft on the station’s third floor (back then hay was needed for the horses which pulled the fire “engines”). A long binding pole used to secure the hay to…
In 1962, the French government created CTDEC, a research and training center primarily devoted to screw machining, in France’s Haute-Savoie region, located right across the border from Geneva, Switzerland. Comprised of 630 member companies, CTDEC has an annual budget of 6.3 million euros, and contains 6,600 square meters of laboratories and workshops. One of the most interesting resources at the CTDEC is its advanced diagnostic center used to identify part defects. It contains an extremely powerful microscope that can magnify objects tens of thousands of times. It has the strength to see inside an ant’s eye and can surpass that…
The first week of April, Noah Graff of TMW attended a press junket put on by the Arve-Industries Competitiveness Pole in the Haute-Savoie of France, a historic and current hotbed of machining close to Geneva Switzerland. The first day the journalists had a tour of the Musee de l’Horlogerie et du De`colletage, or, Museum of Clocks and Screw-Machining.
Jeff and Brad Ohlemacher, president and vice president of Elyria Manufacturing, talk about utilizing Verne Harnish’s Rockefeller habit of “the huddle” to unify their employees.
Today’s Machining World did an interview in the April issue with David Plitt, the foreman of the U of C machine shop. This video is an excerpt of the interview. He discusses several of the projects that the machine shop has assisted with, including a balloon designed to collect cosmic rays.
Machinery dealer Jim Graff just got back from a Delphi auction in Kettering Ohio. He reported that most machines there were selling very cheaply and that many were leaving the country. The two biggest buyers at the auction were from India and Peru, who primarily bought small production machines such as milling machines, Bridgeports, and Dennison Presses. Most of the Acme multi spindles and Acme repair parts were baught by dealers. Jim also observed that there was a strong presence of online bidders.
This day on March 18, 1662, the first bus service began in France. Blaise Pascal, most famous for his mathematics, physics and philosophical genius, conceived the idea. The system started with seven horse-drawn vehicles running along regular routes. Each coach could carry six or eight passengers. King Louis XIV granted a royal monopoly: Try to compete, and your horses and vehicles would be taken away. The fundamental problem of the bus service’s business model was that in the feudal society of seventeenth century France only the nobility and gentry were allowed to ride, which they did purely for amusement. The…
A recent story by Frank Langfitton on NPR’s “All Things Considered” reported that rising costs and shifts in Chinese government policy are actually forcing hundreds of smaller Chinese factories to close. According to the story, profit margins are disappearing as a result of the rising Chinese currency value, which has forced manufacturers to move their operations to lower cost countries such as Vietnam. The story reports that China’s government wants to encourage higher-tech manufacturing, so it is taking away the incentives it used to give to cheap goods manufacturers such as no taxes and cheap rent. China wants to follow…