omenti

green flight

Two years ago the Environmental Protection Agency reported aviation accounted for about three percent of the nation's CO₂ emissions, or about twelve percent of transportation.  The international figure is about two point five percent.  These may not seem huge, but they've been growing steadily and, post pandemic, should continue their growth.  Making matters worse is the global warming contribution from the cloud-like contrails produced by the jet engines at altitude.   It's difficult to study, but indications are the contribution may double the global warming impact. 

 

A number of approaches have been suggested and are in various stages of testing.  Moving to bio-fuels isn't the greatest solution as growing and producing biofuels has issues and you're still producing contrails.  In the short term some airlines will move to it, but that may be part a PR and carbon credits game as much as anything. 

 

Electric airplanes exist and there are even a few (very) sort haul commercial flights.  The problem is the specific energy of the battery - how heavy is a battery per unit of energy storage.   Turbine fuel stores about eighty times as much energy as a safe lithium-ion battery of the same weight.  Airplanes frequently carry large amounts of fuel - the weight of fuel burned on a cross country trip is greater than that of the the passengers and crew.  The range of a battery powered airplane is severely limited even after accounting for the great efficiency of an electric motor.   We could get a lot closer with exotic batteries that aren't anywhere close to reality, but even then you're talking about a propeller driven (slower) aircraft. 

 

Hydrogen often comes up as the perfect clean fuel - the combustion product is just water.   Although it's the most common element in the universe and accounts for most of your body's atoms, we need hydrogen gas and that's extremely rare on Earth.  Hydrogen gas (H₂) must to be produced and it takes a lot of energy to create it - more than you can get out of it.  Most of it is produced from a petrochemical process that involves carbon emissions.  This is called black or grey hydrogen and, if you manage to capture most of the carbon emissions it's called blue hydrogen.  What you want is green hydrogen - hydrogen produced using electrolysis with electricity from wind, solar or nuclear power.  That seems like a nice use of excess intermittent power. 

 

It's important to think of hydrogen as an energy storage medium - a non-rechargeable battery of sorts.  It has a very low - essentially unusable energy density at atmospheric pressure.  You'd need impossibly large tanks (think about Hindenburg sized tanks) or you can compress it or liquify it and shrink your tanks to something more manageable.  In gas form at a very high but probably safe pressure it needs about five to ten times the volume of  jet fuel. Liquid hydrogen gets you down to about three and a half times the volume.  

 

Engineering is all about finding an optimal solution to several problems that generally interact.  You could convert a turboprop or turbofan to burn hydrogen and see where that takes you.  Turboprops seem to be workable on short haul routes (1,000 km or less) with small passenger loads (under 100 passengers).  They'd be slow and fly at lower altitudes than today's jets.  Turbofans present a number of problems - at altitude they're making contrails and the range and payload isn't great.  One needs to think a bit out of the box.   

 

You might use a hybrid jet fuel/hydrogen engine that climbs to cruising altitude on jet fuel as fuel consumption is much greater in that phase. Then the switch to hydrogen fuel is made when the engines are throttled back at cruise altitude.  You could also design a lifting body aircraft that has a lot of internal volume for liquid hydrogen fuel tanks without being too large for conventional airports.  Tricks might get you across the US with a few hundred passengers, but flights across the Atlantic or Pacific would require something more. 

 

The prop-driven airplanes present other opportunities. A fuel cell converts hydrogen to electricity and electric motors are more efficient that jet engines.  There are a number of little problems that can be overcome, but a fuel cell propeller airliner may just be a short to medium range solution.

 

Airbus is working on the problem - or at least they were before the pandemic.  I can believe the target date for the propeller aircraft, the lifting body is probably more than fifteen years out.

There may be a near term niche for hydrogen powered flying vehicles.  Agricultural and inspection drones are much larger than hobbyist drones.  They're limited to half hour flight times with batteries, but new fuel cell drones with small high pressure hydrogen tanks have appeared in Korea.  They can fly for hours and that may be the first practical opening for aerial hydrogen.

 

why you can watch I Love Lucy

A few days ago Om and I were talking about some technologies.  I mentioned I sort of predicted one with reasonable confidence about twenty years out.  It seemed a bit too scifi on the surface, but other people in research agreed it could happen if a lot of money was spent.  It seemed desirable, so why not?  There was only one major roadblock and that turned out not to be roadblock at all.  It needed a much better battery than anything we knew about.  A lithium-ion battery was in the ball park at the time, but we had no idea Sony was playing with the technology at the time. We were equally unaware of the fundamental work in university labs two decades before.  

 

It's interesting to think about areas of technology under rapid development and the importance of missing technologies. Television is a great example.

 

Television has been around for a long time.  Philo Farnsworth's all electronic television in the 20s was probably the most important breakthrough.   The lens of a camera focued an image on a photosensitive plate while an electron beam was scanned row by row across the imaged area.  A signal of strength that varied with the brightness of the region the beam was on would be transmitted as a radio signal to a television receiver.  The receiver had a cathode ray tube that, in lock-step with the beam in the camera,  scanned a piece of glass coated with a phosphor that would glow when the beam hit it with a brightness that changed as with the signal the camera was sending. All of this was done at about thirty frames a second - good enough that your mind perceives motion.

 

Television was such a great name - viewing a moving scene at a distance as it happened.  Shortly after WWII a few television networks sent their television signals between cities and then across the country.  Even though the receivers were expensive it quickly caught on and the networks were spending serious money on production. But there was this problem with time zone.  You put a program on at 6 PM in New York City and the television receivers in Los Angeles would display the image at 3 PM.  Not exactly good for creating the largest potential audiences.

 

Electronic recording would fix the problem, but wire and tape recorders were just getting good enough for audio and television signals had about a thousand times as much information.  It just wasn't possible.   The solution seems a bit crazy now - point a film camera at a television monitor and immediately develop the film. Eastern and Central time zones were live, Mountain and Pacific were delayed by two hours.

 

At first these kinescopes used  16mm film.  Once used most of the film was thrown away it degrades and is a fire hazard..  By 1954 television kinescope delayed broadcast became the largest consumer of movie film eclipsing Hollywood and the home movie markets combined. A bit before  I Love Lucy became a huge hit show.  Lucile Ball demanded higher quality so a switch was made to 35mm.    The larger format was so expensive and had to be stored in newly constructed fireproof facilities.  An archive began to emerge. 

 

A few years passed and Ampex came out with a video recorder able to handle the flood of information. - a monster that used two inch wide tape.  An expensive and initially temperamental monster that used two inch tape, but dirt cheap compared to the  kinescope process.  It quickly became the standard for time zone delay. The curious thing is that the television people didn't see tape as an archive medium.  For a few years none of the tape delayed shows remain as the expensive tapes were reused until they wore out.  No one thought long term storage was important.

 

The last part is interesting.  We don't think of television as remote viewing - rather it's a video stream that might be live, time delayed, manipulated,  archived, or all of these. 

 

Oh .. the prediction from 1993?   You will take a flat piece of glass out of your pocket and have a video conversation with a relative in India and the "call" won't cost anything.  We knew how to code video, mobile radio would easily have the bandwidth in 15 or 20 years, multi-touch screens were in the labs, lcd color screens and lcd cameras were only going to get better, the price of bandwidth was going to crater (our corporate management didn't like that message) ... Moore's law on everything but the battery.   Note:  I've made a few good predictions, but looking back at my old lab books can be an embarrassment - you tend to forget the dead ends.  

 

 

checking out your neighborhood

minipost and recommendation

The books you wore out when you were fourteen or fifteen are probably serious hints about your dreams and direction.  One of the two I wore out was a Norton's Star Atlas and Reference Handbook.   Beautiful, wonderful star charts to find your way around the night sky.  The graphical design was (and still is) stunning and it just works.  It cost a fortune in the day, but so wonderful.

 

Every now and again someone publishes a survey that claims only a small fraction of Americans under 30 or 35 have seen the Milky Way. That's a shame.  On a sufficiently clear dark night it's about as beautiful as anything I've seen in Nature.  Light pollution has largely taken it from us.

 

But even in suburban areas you can still see some stars and planets and the Fall in much of Europe and North America offers crisp clear skies.  Checking out our stellar neighborhood is much more inspiring than watching TV, but you need a guide to make any progress. Although I still love my Norton's (I've been through several editions), the better entryway is to use an app.  At least a dozen exist.  My clear favorite on iOS is Sky Safari at about three dollars on the App Store.  (they also have an Android version, but I haven't used it).  Go for the low-end version - currently Sky Safari 6 AR - the more expensive versions are used to drive computerized telescopes.

 

The beauty of apps like this is they know location and the time of day.  Then, using the phone or pad's compass and gyroscope, they calculate and display the section of sky you're pointed at.   Change the display magnification to roughly match the sky and it's sort of augmented reality. You can identify stars and planets as well as search for them and learn the constellations. Playing around with the settings is useful (particularly turning off the background music), but the defaults for star brightnesses displayed roughly matches the human eye in a semi-dark area.  You can also turn off the compass and gyros and explore the sky indoors.

 

If you get hooked the next thing would be a good pair of binoculars .. stay away from telescopes for awhile. 

 

 

 

in praise of techs

mini post

1874 saw the opening of the most important inventions of the 19^th century - The Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge.  Serious science began to take off in the 1850s in universities.  It was mostly applied and work aimed at solving the problems of the day - railroads and telegraph.  Cambridge was late to the game, but their approach was revolutionary.  Apparatus and expertise were concentrated at one location.  Research cultures emerged. Not only was this cost effective, it freed up researchers to explore new classes of problems - not only hypothesis based and applied work, but true exploration.  That turned out to be the fuel of scientific and technological change in the following century. 

 

The model spread and by the 1890s and areas of deep expertise began to appear.  A dramatic example is the race to zero - how experimentalists tried to achieve the lowest possible temperatures.  Three institutions were deep into the game, but success and failure came down to who had the best apparatus and laboratory technicians. The experiments had become so difficult that expert technicians who built, understood and modified the experimental apparatus made all the difference. 

 

The public often sees science as the quirky theorist standing at her slate board and, chalk in hand and on her shirt and pants,  having deep thoughts. In fact most of it is very careful labor that can consume a small army of people for years to get a result that something didn't exist (that's as important as finding something!)  The Nobels celebrate the principal scientists and praise is warranted, but it often misses the supporting staff. (I think the Nobels have their place as they tend to focus on the frontier rather than hypothesis driven work.  I wish they were more inclusive, but another story)

 

Here's a short video on a tech at EGO-Virgo - the gravity wave observatory near Pisa, Italy.  Three such instruments exist with a forth coming online in Japan soon and a fifth under construction in India.  Able to measure distortions more than ten thousand times smaller than the diameter of a proton, these are far and away the most precise instruments ever built.  The technicians responsible for various bits and running them made it all possible.  I've worked with people like this - they're among the greatest craftsmen and women in the world.

moving from noun to verb

About a week ago Apple announced its latest Watch.  While it isn't a major leap, Horace and Om wrote great pieces about something more significant - namely what it does.¹  The first few iterations were a bit muddled - now it has become a wearable assistive technology.  That's significant.

 

Assistive technology invokes images of wheelchairs, braces, crutches and so on..  adaptations to make life easier for those people with physical problems.  It's a mistake to think that way.  All of us use these technologies  (I'll ignore the distinction between assistive and adaptive) ..  utensils, chairs, shoes, door knobs, screw drivers - all of these count.  Many of us wear eye glasses - a technology that compensates for a deficiency that would be a serious handicap if not corrected.  Some people have artificial joints and pacemakers - implantable assistive technologies that are always worn.   It begs the question of who gets to be called normal and who makes the decision.  I've written about that, so back to the Apple Watch.

 

At the beginning of the nineteenth century town clocks were an adaptive technology that gave people in emerging industrial cities a sense of common time to allow for synchronized work.  Less expensive models for the home became a necessity for workers who could afford them.  People who couldn't employed a variety of other techniques including "knocker-uppers" - people you would pay to make sure you got up in time.  Towards the end of the century the need for standards and a more global time synchronization emerged - railroads were the first big driver.

 

Railroad time is to the time of the future. The Sun is no longer to boss the job. People—all 55,000,000 of them—must eat, sleep and work as well as travel by railroad time. It is a revolt, a rebellion. The sun will be requested to rise and set by railroad time. The planets must, in the future, make their circuits by such timetables as railroad magnates arrange. People will have to marry by railroad time, and die by railroad time. Ministers will be required to preach by railroad time—banks will open and close by railroad time—in fact, the Railroad Convention has taken charge of the time business, and the people may as well set about adjusting their affairs in accordance with its decree… . We presume the sun, moon and stars will make an attempt to ignore the orders of the Railroad Convention, but they, too, will have to give in at last.
—Indianapolis Sentinel, 21 November 1883

 

Synchronizing clocks turns out to be an interesting technical problem. A Swiss patent clerk named Albert Einstein specialized in clock synchronization patents by day while thinking about time more deeply after hours.  

 

With atomic clocks - some orbiting in GPS satellites - we now have very accurate time synchronization available anywhere on Earth.  It's available in your smartphone and your Apple Watch with much better accuracy than the display requires .. very accurate time is much more central to communication and location determination. 

 

So just how important is a watch as something you wear to tell you the time - the watch as a simple noun?

 

There are still synchronizations for connecting with people, transport, broadcasts and so on.  Some of that requires less synchronization.  Some of the most creative work is poorly synchronized much of the time.  Television has become streaming video at your convenience and much of radio has turned into podcasts and streaming audio.  So why wear a thick $400 piece of hardware on your wrist?

 

You wear it because it is becoming a verb.  It's stuffed full of sensors and watches you.  A growing list of health, exercise and motivation related functions.  Complex computations turn thousands of dollar of tech in a doctor's office or researcher's lab into a few one dollar sensors and software.  And all of this can be networked.  I'll mention Happy Bob - a Type 1 Diabetes app by one of you (Jutta Haaramo) that is making the lives of thousands of diabetics easier.   This is only the beginning.    The Watch overlaps a bit with the iPhone, but they mostly fill very different functions - wearable is a big deal.  It's important to note the Watch still has a lot of headroom for growth. 

 

We humans have been expanding and augmenting the basic human body for over ten thousand years and the process is accelerating.   It's exciting, but we should be thinking more deeply about what it means as well as who is normal and who decides.

__________

¹ Oxygen saturation wasn't difficult to add - it exists elsewhere.  What is important is the watch can keep a record.  A General Practitioner friend is currently testing one. If it takes good readings he's going to recommend it to patients who are in the at risk categories for Covid-19 - cheap insurance. 

That said I think the major improvement was the addition of an ultra-wideband chip. I wouldn't buy a device just for that as this is preliminary work for something that could be very big, but it's good to know new iPhones and Apple Watches have the capability now.

scribbler moon

Margaret Atwood

David Mitchell

Elif Shafak

Han Kang

Karl Ove Knausgaard

Ocean Vuong

 

Each of these authors has taken a walk through Nordmarka Forest in Norway to place a their manuscript in a special room in the Deichman Library.  Ninety four more will follow.  The authors are specially chosen for their imagination and the stories are to based on the themes of imagination and time.  No one other than the authors will see their words until 2114.   In that year someone who doesn't exist now will take each of the 100 manuscripts from their containers and prepare them for printing on paper made from 1,000 one hundred year old Norwegian spruces that were planted just before the Margret Atwood took the first walk through the forest. 

 

The Future Library project was created to stir the imagination and give hope.  A century is a good time period - just outside an average human lifespan, but not so long as to be unimaginable. What will be around? Will people care?  

Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors - Jonas Salk

 

We live with a number of legacies - a written language, medicine, science, religion, weapons, slavery, pollution. ... some good and some bad. Mostly we live in the present and don't think much about the leverage we have in creating future legacies. Some legacies happen by default.  Humans are one of the few species with a sense of the future.  Projects like the Future Library spark wonder and perhaps give us hope that maybe we can make a difference.  Perhaps a trick is to think about time scales and what we might accomplish.

 

You can do something for yourself on a smaller scale. Here's one of mine:   My thesis advisor gave me his favorite slide rule when I received my Ph.D. It had been given to him by his advisor when he received his.  It became my favorite.  I used it regularly and wondered about the legacy of calculations that were used to build conjectures and hypothesis through their careers.  Every now and again I wondered what I'd do with it.  About twenty years ago a very unusual Summer student came along.  Art and computer science, she ended up at an animation company.  In slide rule had been used for a certain type of story telling..  small corners of the fundamentals of Nature.  I gave it to her some time ago so I could enjoy the link between the past and the future.  One type of story telling changing into another.  She says it's very special to her and gets use for calculations used in making films that tell stories.  Wondering who she gives it to and what path and stories it might inspire gives me pleasure and hope.

 

In my work I have to think of a variety of time scales.  Some events at the subatomic level take place in a under a billionth of a billionth of a second.  At the scale of the Universe some things have been around for billions of years and will be around much much longer.  These times so foreign as to be abstract.  A few weeks ago one of you sent a note from the Grand Canyon that was filled with wonder inspired by that slow geological process that created it.  Wonderful experiences to stir the imagination.  We should seek out these experiences, but I find staying in human time scales and thinking about and building legacies lets me live in a slightly better future and gives me hope.    Set your mind some distance in the future and think of something good you'd like to see there or something bad you'd like to change.  With a target maybe you can imagine a path and help work towards it.  It gives us a way to not discount future people and their world.

 

Scribbler Moon?  That's the title of Margaret Atwood's book you won't read, but maybe your great great grandkid will..

 

normal?

About six months ago I found myself spending a lot of time thinking about finally returning to normal and if there would be a new normal.  That line of thinking evolved into the question of what normal is - what activities are considers normal, who can participate in them,  who is normal , and how society sorts out questions like that.  Some I had puzzled out before and had even worked on, but many new questions came up.

 

Normal populations of people are a fairly construction dating to the 1800s when people began to study people as groups using techniques taken from astronomy.   We tend to think of populations fitting in a bell shaped curve -  "normal" distributions.  Height is the usual example.   A few people are very short, most fall within certain boundaries of the bell curve and a few are very tall.  This shouldn't really matter, but the made world is not flexible enough and excludes populations at the tails.   Cars, bicycles, clothes, chairs, restrooms and so on aren't made for the very tall or very short.  A few readers happen to be very tall.   Nothing fits and resorting to custom manufacture is often necessary.  It's a tax on being too tall. Short people arguably pay a stiffer tax which is nothing like that those with physical and mental challenges bear.

 

In the 1950s aircraft design was evolving rapidly.  The US Air Force needed a standardized cockpit.  Well over 100 measurements were taken on over 4,000 pilots to determine what was average so a "golden cockpit" could be easily specified.  Unfortunately the data designed cockpit was a disaster.  Skilled pilots were making lethal errors.    A young analyst - Lt. Gilbert Douglas - cracked the problem by asking if it was possible "average" didn't exist.  Douglas looked at a midrange of pilot heights - something like 5'7 to 5'11 and created an average pilot for the ten most important cockpit measurements allowing for what seemed to be a reasonable 30% variation.  Then he went back to the measurements of the 4,000 real pilots looking at these ten measurements.  Not a single real pilot was average.   The golden cockpit was abandoned and new cockpit designs were created allowing for a broad range of adjustments.  

 

Mechanically simple, the new cockpit adjustments for everything important were just simple assistive technologies.  All of us use assistive and adaptive technologies.  Glasses, oven mitts, hammers, utensils, baseball bats -  I remember a physical anthropologist saying "the human animal is coextensive with its tools"  We are now adding electronic adaptations with varying degrees of success. 

 

Why is it we see adaptive technologies for those who doesn't fall into the normal classification in the same way we look at glasses or  running shoes?  Why are some people excluded from the made world?   Who makes the designs?  What questions does the design process ask as does it go deep enough?   Do the solutions have utility, significance and even desirability and beauty?

 

"Normal" is a privilege most of us inherit that blinds or biases us to those outside the bell curve.  The view from the tails of that curve tell us just how unfinished the world is. 

 

What interests me at the moment is the question of individuality and independence. Some people have a difficult to impossible time making it in the world without the help of others.  Some are forgotten and even warehoused.  How they are treated often depends on societal norms and often the wealth or lack of wealth of their families. Some designers work on these issues.  I'm not a designer, but have had a bit of first had experience.   Independence is often the end goal, but now I wonder if that's correct?  With the isolation many of us have been experiencing I have to wonder if the best designs might be hybrid.  Enough independence, but also enough real human interaction.   Dignity requires both. Having to deal with aging parents taught me how awful loneliness is for so many.  How can designs integrate dignity and shared humanity? 

 

 

how big is switzerland?

Rey-k-javík

The big test was would come at the end of May.  Sixth grade and we had to identify countries and their capitals on a world map.  That meant spelling everything correctly and adding some countries not on the list for extra credit.   I wasn't good at spelling then and it seems to have gone downhill since, but the unit was fun as our teacher had been around Europe and was a good story teller.  She also wanted to make the point that maps lie - that various projections color our impressions and even doing something simple like measuring an area on a Mercator projection was difficult.  A few weeks later the question came that I kept visiting for a few decades. 

 

How is the area of a country measured?  Is it considered a flat surface, or do you measure it on a sphere (I didn't know about the shape of the Earth then), or what about uneven ground?  What do you do about tides?  Shared lakes (like some of the Great Lakes)?  How do you measure a coastline? 

 

My parents tolerated this for awhile and then it was off to the library.  There wasn't much on this, but visits to libraries are never wasted. 

 

Over the years bits and pieces came when I wasn't looking. I first encountered fractals in Scientific American and followed up with Mandelbrot's paper . The measure of a coastline became finally became clear. There was an inherent fuzziness and you had to choose a scale.  And he had developed some beautiful mathematics that got at the heart of the matter - what is a fractional dimension?

 

A countries area is usually defined as the outline of the country projected onto the Earth's geoid or ellipsoid (there isn't standardization, but using the ellipsoid is probably good enough). In other words the so-of spherical nature of the Earth is used.  High tide marks boundaries, interior bodies of water are included in the area, but uneven terrain isn't accounted for.  The terrain bit made me want to see what the impact would be.   About ten years ago I found a dataset of terrain altitudes for the planet on a 100 meter grid. I used these with some detailed country outline data and looked at a few countries.  The Netherlands only gains a tiny bit of area.  The US grows by almost two percent, but Switzerland was slightly more than seven percent larger.  That's big enough to make Switzerland larger than Denmark and the Netherlands.   I didn't have good data for places like Nepal and Bhutan - they'd be spectacular.  And imagine looking at Manhattan with a one meter grid...  Its area would grow enormously.  

 

One of those questions a kid can wonder about that gets quite involved and requires standards be set. 

 

_________

 

Simple Summer Pasta and Tomatoes

For many of us this is peak tomato season.  In late August years ago I had a very simple tomato and pasta dish. The tomatoes were in chucks and not really cooked. It would only work if they were perfect so I gave it a try. Here is about what I did. This would be enough for two hungry people or four people if served as a side course.  It's more of a narration than a conventional recipe. 

Two really amazingly blimpishly ripe tomatoes that are going to have great flavor. If you can, go with heirloom tomatoes as the new ones have so much goodness bred out of them. My guess is I had maybe about one and a half pounds of tomato. Chop these into half inch pieces and scape them into a bowl making sure to recover some of the juice left on the cutting board.

Pour to glugs of a good extra virgin olive oil over the tomatoes.  Sprinkle on a good finishing salt (Malden is great) and freshly ground pepper before gently stirring to mix.  Set the bowl aside. 

Start some water boiling for the pasta and throw some salt in. Cheap salt of course

Now chop a strong red onion into slivers. Maybe about a quarter cup

Chop a handful of good arugula

Cook about a half pound of pasta (I like a quality thick spaghetti for this, but pick your favorite) and try to stay away from the marinating tomatoes

Layer the onions on top of the tomatoes and then make a layer of arugula choppings

Dump the cooked pasta onto the layered mixture in the bowl and give it two or three minutes to heat up a bit. To deal with the frustration grate some parmesan for a topping. (I prefer it cheeseless, but most people probably want it). The heat from the pasta is slightly cooking the ingredients beneath, just barely, but perfectly enough.

Gently mix and serve.

 

how to speak

minipost

Some of you are amazing speakers.  I'm not.  Thankfully I'm not teaching anything this year - Zoom lecturing was a disaster for me for a number of reasons.  Rather than a post mortem, here's something useful.

 

This is from the 'how to speak' course that Patrick Winston gave for years at MIT. Not all of it will be applicable, but you may find a few bits of useful information. 

companies that care

Recently a heard a podcast on what it means for a company, or employee, to be a steward.  It could be any number of things - relationships, society, the environment. All good, but not many large companies seem to exemplify this beyond PR efforts.  But some smaller organizations are good at this.  I'll mention one - you can probably think of a few on your own. 

 

I'm not athletic but enjoy rowing as an exercise.  In the early 90s I found myself with a used Concept 2 model B rowing ergometer. It had been abused and needed a serious clearing and a few replacement parts.  Calling the company I found myself talking to the product engineer responsible for its design.  He asked some questions and said he'd send a parts list.  A few days later a box arrived with very clear repair sheets and the parts.  The bill of sale said $0.00.  I started the repair, but one of the old parts was bent and I was afraid of damaging the unit.  Another call and he talked me through the repair.  I asked what the parts cost and was told that wasn't a big deal, he was just happy to see one of his old machines being used. 

 

The old model B still works well.  It was made in 1986 and has seen more or less daily use since the repair in  1995.  I've had to buy some parts for standard wear and tear over the years.  They aren't expensive and the company stocks parts for every machine they've made.  The phone support is always friendly and free. 

 

Their ergs work well and I've probably generated a half dozen sales - word of mouth and gym experience are their big referrals. They're the standard erg in college rowing programs and the sport of competitive erg rowing has grown organically within the user base.  They also make most of the oars used in Olympic class competitions.  A combination of design, execution, support and general friendliness makes them one of my favorite companies.   Here's a piece about them from twenty years ago.

 

(the image is of an ancient model B like mine - newer ones look different, but are functionally about the same)

 

Feel free to write about your favorite in the comments section.  Are there any that will be making people happy and the world a better place fifty years down the road?  How about any that are publicly traded?  Is there a size ceiling?