A Whale-Oiled Machine
99percentinvisible.org
99percentinvisible.org
Fun fact: Clifford Ashley of Ashley's Book of Knots (ABOK) was also a painter. The museum has some of his work in their collection.
Also: if you have any interest in whaling and haven't read Moby Dick, you really ought to. People will complain that it's principally a book about whaling with a bit of story mixed in. That's true, but it turns out whaling is fascinating.
Imagine a world without whales. If JK Rowling had written a book about people sailing to the far side of the world to hunt sea creatures whose heads are full of substance that looks suspiciously like semen, nobody would have published it because it would be too unrealistic.
I'd recommend cutting that middle out if you just want to watch Avatar2. And then at a later date watch that hour as a in-world whaling doc.
The analogies are NOT subtle, but the CGI is so good we don't care.
It also lead to one of my geekier deep-dive commits: https://github.com/standardebooks/herman-melville_moby-dick/...
I have to admit, “very nice” here just means I haven’t noticed your work because it sits in the background and lets me enjoy the book. Lol. Such is the fate of a good front end developer as well.
> It is plain, then, that phrenologically the head of this Leviathan, in the creature's living intact state, is an entire delusion. (Moby Dick)
Melville's meditations on the anatomy of the whale are absolutely stunning, especially when you add layers of meaning to what "the whale" may represent (God, justice or injustice, morality, nature, etc etc...)
> The loss of sperm oil had a profound impact in the automotive industry, where for example, transmission failures rose from under 1 million in 1972 to over 8 million by 1975.
Even if you assume that it's a raw number and is also reflecting increased adoption of automatic transmission it's kind of hard to blame a huge 8x multiple on solely the oil without something else to corroborate it (like sales figures for wet clutch and brake friction parts used in industrial applications which would be subject to the same increased wear if the oil was sub-par).
Transmission fluid isn't special. It's basically just yet another variant of hydraulic fluid. The hydraulic parts of a transmission pretty much never have problems relative to the frequency with which the friction parts simply wear out. So other oil running clutches so see the same increase in failure rate over that time.
Assuming the number itself is accurate OEMs producing designs with additional gears and lockup converters with the bare minimum of refinement (ship now fix later type engineering) in response to the fuel crisis probably deserves some blame.
for example, solder from the few years after the British ban on production use of the leaded stuff is often very poor, but—contrary to what vested interests would have you believe—humans adapt. demand creates solutions
Fun fact: Spermaceti is actually a wax, not an oil.
If the difference was that stark aren't there old timers talking about how the old whale oil stuff was so good and why don't people find gallons of it saved here and there the same way you find lead paint or R12 refrigerant? Why isn't there some body of tribal knowledge saying that transmissions sucked in the 70s like we have for engines?
I don't doubt for a minute that the government would ham-fistedly ban something without a viable alternative and that the textbook engineer types would crunch numbers on the replacement and conclude that "it'll be fine with no changes to our hardware, run it" leading to a higher failure rate, but 8x failure (or even 5x failure rate, to account for increased number of automatic transmissions out there) rate? That's absurd.
I'd love to read the source for the claim but it's a paper version of a trade publication...
When I was wrenching on cars in the 80s there absolutely were! We're talking about 50 years ago so you might need to find some older old timers but this was totally a thing.
I remember older people talking about how much better it was. But like most times when people talk about how much better something used to be, I assume it was mostly not as good as they remember it.
Even in 1975 the problem cited was corrosion:
https://www.nytimes.com/1975/04/17/archives/transmission-pro...
"The fittings between the cooling unit and the radiator gave no trouble when whale oil was the fluid, but the substitute allowed the fittings to corrode. "
The resulting corrosion allowed mixing of oil and coolant. Causing issues in both, although the transmission is going to be the first to have problems.
I will also point at the idea that the lack of sperm oil caused this is....stupid. The way you avoid this entire problem is by using a device called an oil cooler. It's a separate finned radiator from the coolant radiator. If it leaks you get a little pinhole leak. Then you replace it & topoff the fluid. Automotive manufacturers insist on using combined units because they are being cheap and don't care about the long term practicality of a vehicle. So even if there was some amazing advantage to sperm oil, it neither prevented this specific problem nor did the ban on it cause it.
I think realistically it’s a limitation of the casting process, but it is to me the dumbest part of internal combustion engine design. Point the channels in two different directions on the casting, and only a cracked block should allow them to touch.
Plenty of vehicles with a standard gearbox just use the engine oil as the transmission lubricant. In motorcycles this is called "unit construction". I've heard of some older Saabs that did this as well.
Why is that unrelated?
When a passageway cracks in a cylinder head & engine oil becomes "milkshake" that is the mixing of engine oil and coolant. Two separate kinds of oil in different places.
An engine cylinder at a minimum must deal with: lubrication, fuel, and gasses. The exhaust manifold deals with half of the gases. I can’t recall if common rail injectors are still technically part of the head (I can find pictures where the CRI system sits on the head, with separate gaskets, but I’m not a mechanic).
With modern manufacturing would we not be better off splitting these tasks up so that only a cracked engine block can mix fluids. Not a torn gasket, not a warped head, not a thrown rod (though rods are going away too).
Edit: It was the solder.
https://www.hemmings.com/stories/2015/03/16/tech-101-automat...
They hint that the whale oil was relevant to the performance of friction modifiers. Friction modifiers are notoriously nasty so it doesn't surprise me that without the whale oil they had to use the "next best thing" which wasn't quite good enough at the margin.
https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/218915/do-the-japane...
These ^ guys allege to have done some research and stop just short of saying "gm was making excuses for problems they brought on themselves".
"because when combined with sulfur it made an excellent lubricant,"
Almost anything is a good lubricant when you add sulfur. The reason why sulfur isn't added anymore is environmental reasons. Newer diesel fuel isn't as good of a lubricant as the old fuel was because highway diesel has to be low sulfur now.
So if sperm oil was only a good lubricant when mixed with sulfur, then it's a pretty average lubricant.
Also the article says 5500 transmissions "failed prematurely" 1973-1975. In the US, 5550 transmissions might as well be zero. Even in 1975, most cars were already being sold with automatic transmissions. This whole thing sounds like GM was using sperm oil because it was available and known to work. Then the ban comes in & GM made some poor decisions, then blamed the whole thing on "conservationists".
If only whalers had managed to hunt all whales to extinction in the 19th century GM could have been saved the total embarassment of selling junk cars.
Yes wrote the song "Don't Kill the Whale:" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NO8h_uTkdU&pp=ygUYeWVzIGdvd...
They also were known to travel in separate private limousines in LA, which probably had whale oil transmissions.
I always think about them traveling to a vegetarian restaurant in LA in separate limos when I listen to that song.
https://www.loandiscount.store/product/Gm-1050081-1965-75-No... DESCRIPTION GM# 1050081 1965-75 NOS POSI LUBRICANT QNTY 2 QTS ALL GENERAL MOTORS REAR HYPOID GEAR POSI LUBE EARLY SUPERIOR MIX WITH WHALE SPERM CHANGED TO 1052271 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975
Fun fact: his source for whaling data was a book by Alexander Starbuck.
"Now, in modern drives, the heads fly at less than 10 nm, a feat that demands not only precise modelling of the air film and head dynamics but also the production of disk surfaces of extraordinary flatness, protected by a 15 nm coating of hard carbon and a lubricant layer only one nm (about 10 atoms) thick."
EDIT: I wasn't going to listen to a 40 minute podcast to hear that, so thanks.
The common mink whale is least-concern, and can be harvested more without danger to the species. Morally I see no difference between eating mink whale and a hunted moose, definitely better than factory farmed animals (including farmed fish) with all the suffering they endure before beeing eaten.
(But leave the endangered species alone).
What are you talking about. It's not being burned.
Certainly better than genociding the oceans. The article overall is very ambivalent to the anglo horror that was industrial whaling.
In the actual podcast they mention the company by name multiple times. I think including the company name just got missed in the edit