Sex, Bombs and Burgers (17 page)

The Silicon Valley companies ushered in a new way of doing technological research—and they added a business element to it. While many of their early efforts went to building computers, radar and other electronics for the military, the companies were civilian-run and profit-driven. They all had much bigger consumer markets in mind, which in the early seventies started attracting venture capitalists. Soon all the pieces for an electronics revolution were in place. With the nearby technologically minded Caltech and Stanford universities feeding them brainpower, venture capitalists pumping in funding, a healthy competitiveness and a burgeoning public appetite for electronic
gizmos, the valley-area companies quickly discovered that silicon was indeed just as good as gold. Technology firms sprouted up by the thousands, not just to build silicon chips but also to handle the various spinoff businesses these created. Foreign electronics companies such as Germany’s SAP and Japan’s Hitachi moved in, and when the internet started to take off, no one thought to locate themselves anywhere other than the valley.

Half a century after Shockley set up shop there, Silicon Valley is home to just about every major technology company in the world: Google (based in Shockley’s old stomping grounds of Mountain View), Apple, Intel, AMD, Sun Microsystems, Adobe, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Yahoo, Symantec, eBay and Facebook, just to name a few.

The transistor, meanwhile, is the father of the computer chips we know today. Many technologists consider it to be the greatest invention of the twentieth century. As one industry analyst puts it, “It has changed society. Look at transportation, computers, government, finance, manufacturing ... it’s affected them all. Look at the change in the productivity of the whole economy. It’s probably doubled from what it would have been without transistors.”
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It was and continues to be the lynchpin behind many electronics and has fuelled the success and growth of many companies. Indeed, Japanese inventor Masaru Ibuka was so impressed with the transistor when he visited Bell Labs in the early fifties that he asked his country’s government to help him pay the fee to license the technology. He brought the transistor back to Japan and used it to build a portable radio, which proved to be the first successful product for his small electronics firm. That company was Sony, and the rest, as they say, is history.

The scientific community recognized the impact the transistor would have soon after it was invented and honoured Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain with the Nobel Prize in physics in 1956. Shockley, never one to shy away from selfaggrandizement, said in his acceptance speech that the transistor was indeed the beginning of an entirely new way of thinking: “It seems highly probable that once the phenomena of surface states are thoroughly understood from a scientific point of view, many useful suggestions will arise as to how this knowledge may be employed to make better devices.”
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Like many other brilliant but eccentric inventors, Shockley did much to ruin his legacy. While Slinky inventor Richard James converted to a religious cult and Tupperware designer Earl Tupper became a hermit, Shockley kicked his disgrace into gear when he started airing his views on eugenics. In the sixties he began to share his theories that intelligence was an inherited trait and that lower reproduction rates among smarter people were effectively making humanity stupider. Shockley took his theory further by saying that unskilled blacks had the highest reproduction rates in the United States and that over time, the black population would become even less intelligent than it already was.

To those ends, he donated his sperm to a bank devoted to preserving humanity’s best genes and advocated paying people with IQs under a hundred to undergo voluntary sterilization. To say that Shockley’s views were shocking would be an understatement. During the latter years of his life, he was largely written off by the media as a racist and often called a Nazi and a Hitlerite. He was hardly able to make any public appearances without demonstrators showing up. It all caught up to him in 1989 when he died alone, accompanied only by
his wife, Emmy. His children found out about his death in the newspapers.

Still, it’s hard to forget that William Shockley was indirectly responsible for many of the toys and gadgets we love today; and without him Silicon Valley might not exist.

War Becomes “Freaking Cool”

For decades, sociologists and psychologists have argued that violent video games and war-related toys such as G.I. Joe (made possible through the Barbie miniaturization pioneered by Mattel) are a deliberate form of psychological brainwashing, designed by the military-industrial complex to give boys a favourable attitude toward the armed forces. Others have suggested that a child’s predilection toward war toys is hard-wired into the brain and develops from a sense of self-preservation where “instinctive animal play is practice for survival: the kitten’s ball of yarn is tomorrow’s mouse.”
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Playing with war toys, in other words, might prepare young children for the struggles they will face as they grow older. Still others have dismissed it simply as a “macho thing.”

Me? As a kid I just really liked running around the forest and getting dirty, and I thought G.I. Joe was the coolest toy around, slightly ahead of Transformers. As I got older and my taste in toys became more sophisticated, I was attracted to video games. Like millions of other kids (and adults), I found them to be a great form of interactive entertainment.

Historically, the toy and games market has provided a muchneeded creative, commercial and intellectual outlet for many military inventors and designers. Silly Putty and the Slinky, for example, were products of last-resort thinking, inventions
with no practical use that were repurposed into playthings that turned out to be commercial sensations. In Jack Ryan’s case, Mattel provided the promise of fame and fortune as well as the canvas on which he could practise his technical creativity, attractions that building missiles at Raytheon just didn’t offer. William Higinbotham, for his part, was driven to demonstrate that his work could not only destroy the world, but could also enlighten and perhaps even entertain it.

Recognition was also a main motivator for all of these inventors. Because of their military associations, they often had to conceal their work for security reasons. The Slinky and Tennis for Two were highly publicized, unlike the many other projects that Richard James and Higinbotham could not talk about. Scientists and engineers dream about toys and games because they are tangible examples of their work—products they can point to on a store shelf and show to their family or friends. As Ralph Baer says, “If you work at Sanders on a program for five years, it ends up as a box in an F7 fighter and nobody knows what you’re doing because it’s all classified. And even if you can show it off, it’s usually a grey box. Toys and games are an attractive place to be.”

The evolution of these toys has had a profound impact on how war is conducted. In its thirty-plus years of existence, the video-game market has mushroomed into an $18-billion industry; in 2007 it eclipsed the total revenue brought in by the movie business.
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The military, for its part, has steadily stepped up its use of video games in training. In 2010 a new video game unit of the U.S. Army, for example, will have $50 million to spend to watch trends in the industry and identify technology that can be used to train soldiers.
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Video games are also being used in recruitment, enticing potential soldiers with the allure of living out Xbox and Playstation war titles such as
Call of Duty
or
Ghost
Recon
in real life. In 2009 the Air Force rolled out a sleek new website featuring interactive video games that allowed visitors to re-enact an actual A-10 Thunderbolt mission in Afghanistan, fly a Reaper unmanned aerial vehicle in Iraq or even refuel a plane in mid-air.

The technological development has come full circle— while many toys and games began as offshoots of military technology, they are now influencing and changing that same technology. When soldiers using Foster-Miller bomb-disposal robots complained that the dual-knob control system was too complicated to learn, the company redesigned it to use an Xbox controller. The same went for iRobot’s PackBot, which now uses a PlayStation controller. During a visit to iRobot’s headquarters near Boston, I got to test-drive a PackBot, the company’s own bomb disposer. Having grown up on video games, I had the machine mastered within minutes; I couldn’t believe how easy it was to control.

The military knows its recruits today are video-game junkies, familiar not just with the technology but also with the violent themes, and it exploits this. “The Army will draw on a generation of mind-nimble (not necessarily literate), fingerquick youth and their years of experience as heroes and killers in violent, virtually real interactive videos,” says one military journal.
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Video games are now providing playtime training to future troops, and those future troops don’t even know it. This is dramatically changing new soldiers’ views toward fighting wars, and not necessarily in a good way. The sociologists and psychologists who have argued that violent video games are
desensitizing people to real-world violence may just be right, at least when it comes to the actual fighting of wars. As one young air force lieutenant described coordinating unmanned air strikes in Iraq, “It’s like a video game, the ability to kill. It’s like ... freaking cool.”
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The same intelligence is required to marshal an army in battle and to order a
good dinner. The first must be as formidable as possible, the second as pleasant as
possible, to the participants.
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—ROMAN GENERAL AEMILIUS PAULUS

Does smelly, fermented cabbage sound tasty to you? Better get used to it, because in a few years we could all be chowing down on South Korea’s national dish, kimchee.

The food, eaten by South Koreans with virtually every meal, made its debut on the International Space Station in 2008, much to the delight of the country’s first astronaut, Ko San. “When you’re working in space-like conditions and aren’t feeling too well, you miss Korean food,” he said.
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No kidding. To South Koreans, kimchee is comfort food and a cultural touchstone akin to pasta for Italians, apple pie for Americans or Spam for Pacific Islanders. Many South Koreans attribute their country’s dramatic economic rise over the past few decades to the invigorating powers of the cabbage dish. And while Westerners say “cheese” when posing for photos, South Koreans smile and shout, “kimcheeee!”
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Even we Canadians don’t get that excited about our poutine.

Traditionally, kimchee was prepared in early winter, when large clay pots filled with cabbage, seasonings and other vegetables were buried underground to ferment. Today the process is more advanced and kimchee can simply be bought at the grocery store,
then kept in a special refrigerator that regulates fermentation. South Koreans eat it by the truckload, about 1.6 million tonnes a year, or more than eighty kilograms per household.
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Few non-Asians have even heard of kimchee, let alone tried it, because it doesn’t travel well. The cabbage dish is full of microbes that help in the fermentation process, which means it has a short shelf life and is difficult to export. South Koreans abroad often find themselves missing their favourite food.

That looks to change with the work done by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute. Scientists there found they could expand kimchee’s shelf life by blasting it with radiation, which kills the bacteria after fermentation. The process also neutralizes some of the smell, which non-Koreans often find revolting. The result is “space kimchee,” a safer, longer-lasting and less-pungent version of the earthly dish, ideal for consumption up in orbit. More importantly, the new creation will also have terrestrial uses, food scientists say. “During our research, we found a way to slow down the fermentation of kimchee for a month so that it can be shipped around the world at less cost,” said Lee Ju-woon at the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute, which began working on the food for the space agency in 2003. “This will help globalize kimchee.”
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Eating Humble Pie

New-and-improved kimchee is the latest in a long line of food innovations to come out of various space programs. Exploring worlds beyond this one has meant overcoming a whole new set of technological obstacles, starting with launching humans out of the Earth’s atmosphere. As we’ve ventured deeper, and as we’ve asked our spacefarers to leave their home planet for longer,
the challenges of keeping them fed and healthy have become more complex. Space agencies have spent decades and millions of dollars in meeting these challenges, not just to keep astronauts and cosmonauts nourished, but also to provide them with a level of comfort so that they can concentrate on performing their scientific missions.

These investments, as is the hope with kimchee, have also paid dividends many times over back on Earth. In many instances, space agencies, particularly NASA, have transferred their technologies—whether new forms of packaging, processes or food chemistry—directly to consumer food companies, which in turn have used the advances to improve products. In some situations, food makers have developed their own intellectual property by working with the agencies, while in others whole new categories—such as, blech, camping food—have come straight out of space research. For much of the past fifty years, NASA and its kin have done as much to change the quality, cost and safety of food as the biggest terrestrial processors.