Technological Revolutions

The Macbook Pro of its day

Going to England always gives me food for thought.

How was it possible that this little island came to rule a quarter of the planet and become for 200 years the technological, military, industrial and financial capital of the planet?

And, by the same token, what happend to them after that?

I found the answer to the first question (or at least a piece of it)  in a small shop in the Cotswold village of Filkins,  called Cotswold Woollen Weavers.

The vast majority of the store is devoted to selling stuff – blankets, jackets, hats… but buried in the corner in the back is a loom that dates from the 18th Century, and it is here, if you look carefully, you will see one of the key’s to the British Empire’s success.

The British were the first to both invent and embrace new technologies.  And they did it with a vengance that makes Japan look traditional and staid.

They married those technologies to existing industries and in doing so, effectively burned the old model (cottage businesses, medieval practices, hand weaving and manufacture) to the ground.

They were the first to industrialize, to build great factories in places like Manchester and to move their population from the farm and village to the relatively new concept of city.

By industrializing so completely and so quickly and with such fervor, British manufacturing was able to conquer the world and to take the British Empire to the very pinacle of financial, political and military might.  They were, for 200 years, the world’s only Superpower – a position we have held for about 20 minutes, so far.

The foundation of this remarkable transformation was  to a large extent, the industrializing of the textile industry.  Taking old hand looms and powering them up with water and later steam power and joining them together in one place.

One of those transitional looms, a hand loom regeared to power, was sitting on the stone floor in front of me.

But look carefully at the photo.  Becuase there is more here than meets the eye.

If you look at the bucket in front of the loom, you will see something that looks like a string of dominoes. Cards with holes punched into them.

These are called Jacquard Cards and the machine is a Jacquard Loom (yes, French!).

The cards had rows of holes punched into them, and they passed through the top of the loom, controlling the warp and the weft of the weaving as it took place.  The holes corresponded to patterns woven into the fabric.

This machine, the Jacquard Loom, was in a sense, the Macbook Pro of the 18th Century.  It is the first step toward automation and standardization of process, and it, married to water power and later steam, gave the British the ability to produce vast amounts of cloth at very low prices and so conquer the world’ markets.

Once you embrace a new technology, such as these looms, it also sets you on the inevitable path to embracing other technologies that follow in a rapid cascade.

The Jacquard cards were, in many ways, the predecessor to IBM punchcards used nearly 200 years later, to control the first mainframe computers.

The concept was fundamentally the same.

Now, what does this have to do with video, journalism, newspapers and TV?

Up until now, we have produced video very much in the same way that pre-industrial Britain produced woolen goods. Small crafts shops making each piece by hand.  Sometimes very lovely, but also very expensive and time-consuming.

Today, the world eats video the way the world of the 18th Century ate textiles – with a passion.

Conde Nast reported yesterday that on their website alone they were streaming 5 millon videos.  5 million. And that is just for Conde Nast.  Youtube now uploads 10 hours of video every minute.

The apetitie for content is explosive, and I think we are only at the very beginning of the demand cycle.

There is no way in the world that this insatiable apetite for content is going to be met by the agonizingly slow process of ‘hand crafting’ every piece of video by teams or crews. It just will not work.

However, for the person or company who can embrace an entirely new way of meeting demand that leverages off of new technologies (as opposed to marrying them to current work practices), an Empire of their own awaits.