![]() The solution Collins and his colleague Chris Kapsambelis came up with didn’t really do that, but it was fairly innovative in its own right. It was useful knowledge for Sylvania’s Applied Research Lab, which was looking for a project that would put the company’s mainframe computers to good use. A MIT graduate, Collins spent his undergraduate years working on the Pennsylvania Railroad, where he saw the challenges of tracking trains first-hand. Collins, then an employee for the General Telephone and Electronics (GTE) subsidiary Sylvania, was in a good position to solve the problem, because he was already aware of it. Basically, if it was a hot new technology, the rail industry was willing to consider it for this specific purpose.ĭavid J. Among them: a magnetic coding system that works akin to the head of a tape deck, a solution relying on a motion picture camera, and a system relying on microwave identification. patents during this era highlights numerous solutions that range from novel to game-changing. Railroads had already been trying to solve this problem since the late 19th century, but by the late 1950s, the technology was starting to catch up to the need-and vendors were lining up with ideas.Ī search of U.S. And because it had to go on so many train cars, it had to be cheap-no more than, say, a dollar per device. ![]() No stopping, either.Īnd because trains travel through all sorts of elements-rain, snow, wind, light, dark-that tracking has to work in basically any setting. Here was the hard part of this riddle: The industry needed a solution that worked while the train was moving, perhaps as fast as 60 miles per hour. But the needs of the railroad system meant that technology providers had a particularly unique and frustrating challenge in front of them. This is a place where technology could help, clearly. There was a code-based system in place for tracking these cars, but it is complex and incomprehensible to the average person. rail industry, due to its large size and the sheer amount of stuff being delivered on its tracks at all times, had a fundamental challenge: Tracking where an individual car was going was really hard, and cars would often get lost. ( Michael Hicks/Flickr) The annoying problem that KarTrak was trying to solve Ernie TediumĪ boxcar with KarTrak card on front of it. Today’s Tedium talks about KarTrak, the unsuccessful idea that laid the tracks for a far-more-successful idea. In the case of the railroad industry, it did not buy into KarTrak, alas. Collins is one of those unsung inventors who made everyone’s life a little easier-well, at least he did when people bought into the system. The reason I’m revisiting this piece is because this inventor, David Jarrett Collins, died back in March at the age of 86, and he deserves his flowers. It is the story of a technology that everyone uses (the barcode), developed by an inventor who played a key role in popularizing it, but in a primitive form that was a not-so-great fit. Today in Tedium: When you get to build a newsletter with hundreds of issues, it’s often hard to choose just one you might call your “favorite,” but the story of KarTrak is perhaps my absolute favorite. Hey all, Ernie here with a refreshed classic, updated in honor of an important, if unsung, creator who helped develop something you use daily.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |