Rue de l'Avenir | Hacker News Reader

Rue de l'Avenir

en.wikipedia.org

295 pointsbenbreen118 comments

Amazing feat. Yet it's not the first time that I've also felt bitterness pondering such past achievements.

I can't escape the feeling that we used to be so much bolder and unconstrained in setting goals for ourselves and actually pursuing them. I feel like 1900 people would have fixed global warming, unaffordable housing, universal healthcare etc.

People in 1900 effectively had two world wars that lead to a massive number of deaths, thinking it was some golden age of unlimited accomplishment without terrible costs would be a mistake.

Didn't say they were perfect, but when it comes to the speed of scientific and technological progress, nothing beats the late 19th- mid 20th century era.

This is kind of like saying that the first person harvesting an apple orchard is better than the people that come after because they get to pick the low hanging fruit.

If you dug them out of their graves and presented the scientific world as we have it now it's highly likely they'd see the predicaments we are in now and a whole lot of that technological progress would be different. Turned out running economies on leaded gas burns up atmospheres and brains. Turns out that physics didn't have unlimited secrets to divulge without ever increasing amounts of effort and energy being applied to discover them.

have a good point there: Einstein, Nikola Tesla, the Wright brothers, Edison, Ford (with his usage of mass production), Alexander Graham Bell, modern surgery techniques... and that's only after thinking for 20 seconds...

... although, "somewhat" agree with pixl97 that there was so much to learn and discover during that time period, that many ideas were discoverable by only one or two people (where as things like CRISPR took dozens of researchers decades of building off of each other work to invent reliable DNA editing).

> nothing beats the late 19th- mid 20th century era

That is why we have climate change in the first place.

If we combined 1900 attitudes toward health and safety and 2000 birth rates, we might fix global warming and ecological damage (by drastically reducing the number of us).

Genocide the poor masses to make room for the rich ultraconsumers? I'll grant that's a bold plan... if a touch supervillain. But where does one recruit minions in this fantasy?

Elon is making robots

However the 1900's attitude to global warming was "this will be wonderful, shame it will take a few centuries".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svante_Arrhenius

If anything, the fact that they could keep the economy and innovation going while a large portion of the population was fighting a war makes it even more impressive.

Were they? There was a lot of innovation related military aircraft, chemical weapons and tanks so maybe you're right. Not so sure about "keep the economy" going considering that aftermath of WW1...

You’re not the only one: https://patrickcollison.com/fast

I think this is accurate, a cynical comment mentioned the two wars, but more practically, those wars and pandemics killed a lot of people, ending design trends before they could take hold. people from all walks of life as both civilians and military patriots and conscripts, from so many countries across Europe all at once

cities that werent firebombed were on somebody’s list to firebomb. Vienna could have met the same fate as Dresden, Dresden could have the charm of a Vienna or Paris. when you put it in perspective there are plenty more trends that are just lost through that dark age.

there are a lot of things from the 1890s to 1910s that I think would be appreciated today if people knew of them.

My great grandparents fled Mussolini's Italy, despite the trains running on time. And I daresay, many if not all of our environmental problems are due to the bold and unconstrained development of technology.

Most of the trains did not run on time: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini#Railways

Weird grievance but okay

They were kindly letting you know that a commonly held misconception you had is actually not true, not airing a grievance.

This wiki article doesn't prove anything, just cities two dudes who claim that the trains didn't run on time. Excellent 'refutation'. It's like citing one random dude saying that Stalin was a cool guy and basing your whole argument around it.

Seems at least as credible as the people saying that all the trains were running on time?

If you actually bothered to read the linked wiki article you would know that even that article actually claims that the trains service _improved_, just disputes who would be responsible for it.

It also says "The improvement was also more apparent than real"

Exactly this claim was based on one dude who happened to be some random Italian railways employee at the time. Regular employee, a courier, not even someone who would have even limited knowledge, such as someone dispatching rail transport on some random rail station or something like that. It doesn't refer any official statistics, even fake ones. Just one random dude's opinion. Can it be more ridiculous than that?

Most of these problems are artificially created by governments via regulations and their support of corporations and their monopolies.

You would have corporations and their monopolies even without regulations. Probably even more.

> fixed global warming Sir, the correct term du jour is "climate emergency". "warming" is not to be used anymore since expected natural developments started to contradict the yearly proclamations made by Gore et al.

Huh? This is the hottest year so far.

Engineers in the 19th century would be amazed that we can build mechanisms with thousands of moving parts — functions, classes, packages — just by typing on a keyboard. Not only that but they also spin around in the order of millions to billions of times a second and every computer in the world can talk to any other computer. Most of these machines are the size of a bar of chocolate and a huge amount of the software is given away for free in an ecosystem of OSS, applications, and programming languages thriving on competition.

I see your point about a lack of modern day gumption in the physical world but I sleep at night knowing that what we do with software more than makes up for it.

And also the only way they could embed logic into objects was through some very convoluted physical mechanism.

Those physical mechanisms did have advantages, though. The signals on railways would physically interlock so you couldn't accidentally clear two trains to enter the same portion of track. Perhaps the electrical circuits on modern signalling systems have similar interlocks and it isn't all left up to software (at a minimum you wouldn't want to ever let the system go "all green", for example).

It is common for industrial safety relays to have mechanical interlocks internally.

https://literature.rockwellautomation.com/idc/groups/literat...

That’s still the case. My mom was Wire Chief at a railroad, and when something broke, everything failed safely and ground movement to a halt until she could get the problem fixed.

Failsafe systems are still common where safety or vast expense is at stake.

A bit surprising: nobody had override powers? Possibly sending someone over to flip the switch?

> Engineers in the 19th century would be amazed

Would they?

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/a-19th-century-vis...

This is somewhat still this way in China, as we can see in architecture and infrastructure projects that are often bold, ambitious, and which happen rather quickly once decided.

In Europe, especially, it is very difficult nowadays for good and bad reasons.

Note, though, that this was for a temporary exhibition so being bold and forward-looking, with a level of showing off, what the whole point.

"Was" the whole point, of course.

And all kinds of mayhem is being done in Paris these years, in the name of the next Olympic games. Also a show-off event as a pretext to accelerated large changes.

> unaffordable housing, universal healthcare etc.

They had a chance to (both were huge problems at the time), they decided to spend massive amounts of resources killing each other instead..

1940s and 50s people on the other hand had a fairly decent run at it.

i drive on the interstate highway system way more than i like, and i'm often struck with the thought that, if we didn't have our interstate highway system now, we wouldn't build one.

Rail network too. We should have high speed rail all over the country - instead, witness e.g. the molasses-speed design and construction of the California High Speed Rail project.

Well this is actually still very common in Paris! A number of subway stations have adopted them for long corridors connecting platforms of different lines within the same station. They move people at 4km/h on average, but the one in Montparnasse station goes up to 9km/h (used to be 11!). They’re mighty useful to hurried Parisian commuters.

https://fr.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trottoir_roulant_rapide

The 11km/h central lane was wicked fast. It was really exciting as a kid... But always broken.

Though you needed a good balance for the slowing/accelerating sections.

I was especially impressed to see that this was rolled out on an entire 3.5km-long loop, rather than some small localized attraction.

It's interesting not just because of the engineering that was done, but because it shows what 1900 people thought "the future" would be like. I'm guessing they expected moving sidewalks to become common around cities by now.

I suspect the scale was necessary because the mechanism only works as a loop, and only allows limited curvature unless you make it a perfect circle, in which case it's just a rotating platform.

> to become common around cities by now

Mass production of cars changed many things and directions.

Heinlein's "The Roads Must Roll" posits a network of very fast, very long moving walkways which could be used for mass transit (you'd ramp up speed on slower ones then hop over to a fast one). Wikipedia says that moving walkways had been in sf for decades by that point, but Heinlein also almost incidentally invents the Segway in the story -- just a little treat.

I love peoplemovers (like the Hong Kong Central-Mid Level escalators and the delightfully bouncy SFO walkways) and always wondered what would have to be different for us to get super-fast ones for transit.

In Boston, IMO they would be at least as good as the Green Line :)

> In Boston, IMO they would be at least as good as the Green Line :)

Yeah, but the E line down South Huntington would be downright perilous :-D

Asimov introduced me to this concept in I robot.

In his version there were multiple levels of speed for entry/exit of transit so the main highways were going really fast.

IIRC it required some dexterity to use and sounded a bit dangerous...

As long as there aren’t any gaps, I guess it is just the difference in the belt speeds that you care about. Also the wind.

You also have to consider what happens if a 60mph belt breaks/halts while people are on it.

Are you sure it wasn't The Caves of Steel?

I think you're right, I misremembered the source. Reading online it's called the "robot series" and Asimov says he borrowed it from Heinlein.

Requires dexterity and seems somewhat dangerous? Meet the Paternoster elevator:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paternoster_lift

Got to ride one of those in the Bat'a building in Zlin, Czech Republic. Supposedly that version had some sort of safety mechanism to keep you from crushing your arm off if you didn't have it tucked inside, but I didn't dare test it. We called it a "Mario elevator" due to the obvious similarities with the elevators in the original Super Mario Bros.

"Their overall rate of accidents is estimated as 30 times higher than conventional elevators. A representative of the Union of Technical Inspection Associations stated that Germany saw an average of one death per year due to paternosters..."

Wow - those were definitely different times in terms of acceptable risks in various aspects of life.

Modern times obviously improved a lot of it, but if you're at least a bit cynical, you also have to wonder how much, due to those measures, people are "prevented" from having to build out their awareness of surroundings, dexterity and overall "aptitude for life".

One death per year is literally nothing compared to cars.

I imagine if you compared the number of injuries to the distance travelled, or even trips taken, cars would come out way ahead.

In some instances (like suburbs) need for distance is increased by cars.

Sure, but that doesn’t really change the comparison of risks. Escalator rides, for example, are just plain old more dangerous than car rides regardless of why, just as car rides are just plain old more dangerous than train rides.

Of course someone had to bring up cars. You know how many people get striken by reckless cyclists?

More or less people than the ones that get striken by reckless car drivers?

Barely any relative to car accidents.

What is your point?

Feel free to show some comparable statistics.

It's like they took an obstacle from some Mega Man stage and implemented it in real life.

I used to regularly use these at the Uni of Leeds in the Roger Stevens lecture theatre building. Never saw an accident. Freshers were told that they turned upside down when going over the top but in fact they just slid sideways to the next shaft (we used to ride over the top sometimes to beat a queue going down) but they could apparently jam if too many people tried it so it was frowned upon by the porters.

Getting out and walking was frequently as good as the Green Line when I lived there...

Same for me just in October for some stretches

Mid level escalators have a very definite purpose as people wouldn't walk up that steep slope before.

Moving walkways along flat surfaces though? Its very hard to make them attractive. Most people like to walk a little, certainly we are built for it genetically and most people don't walk as much as they should in any case. In terms of mass transit nobody has ever got the safety and space issues to work. They only really have tended to work in airports where there are sometimes very large distances to traverse, and you need an (actually pretty slow moving for safety) solution for the elderly etc. who aren't as mobile. Even at an airport unless distances are massive and people have giant luggage most will prefer to walk, or only take the moving walkway for novelty value.

In airports I’ve been to, most people walk on the moving walkways. Twice as fast!

I've been taught that that's what walkways are for. To walk twice as fast!

I'd never heard of the mid-level escalators before. Apparently they're on a slope with an elevation gain of 135m over 800m, which is pretty serious for someone who's out to do some shopping: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central%E2%80%93Mid-Levels_e...

People would walk more if they could get to where they were going fast. If you could walk to the store as quickly as you could drive, why would you get in the car? No traffic jams on a sidewalk.

It’s certainly true in NYC. Even if it takes a touch longer than taking the subway, lots of folks walk. If the infrastructure supports it, people will use it.

To transport their just-bought stuff?

In dense cities? Yes. You don’t need a car to transport a load of groceries if there’s a grocery store on the 20 minute walk home from work. For larger trips, backpacks, rolling folding grocery carts, or even wagons do nearly everything a car can do. I used a car sharing service, as needed, for most of my adult life. Having moved to a city with shit for public transit, I miss the hell out of that.

I think the concept of not doing a months worth of grocery shopping for a family of four at a time is w what's foreign. going to the store for pasta and eggs and toast and nothing more is a waste of a grocery trip in some people's eyes. Those people love to shop at Costco and Sam's, and have a SUV's worth of groceries each time they do a trip. It's not a wrong way to live, but if that's how you live, not driving a vehicle with enough cargo space to hold a large body around means it doesn't make sense how you'd get any groceries. Doing that large a run is exhausting, so you don't do it very often, which means when you do go, you have to do a huge run which makes it suck. Smaller more frequent trips is shorter and mute frequent, which has its own, different problems.

Agreed. Even then, I used to take the subway to a regional big box wholesale club to grab stuff that made sense. If I lived nearer to a Costco, I’d take advantage of their fantastic sustainable fish program. Lot’s of good quality stuff has a totally worthwhile price point at those places. There’s a lot of room for different approaches, even in dense cities. Most people in cities don’t even have room to store that much stuff. I never did, and I didn’t miss it.

Moving walkways have a big power efficiency problem over a distance. While you can make a train track longer without decreasing the efficiency of the train, a moving walkway has to move that whole walkway. Can you imagine the friction on a 10 mile long moving walkway? You would need massive motors just to budge it.

Doesn't need to be one big continuous walkway.

The moving walkways in some airports, for example, have multiple moving sections and work just fine.

If, like in the design seen here, the slide movement and propulsion is decoupled, and motors add impulse to the platforms at constant intervals, doesn't sound like that would be a problem. These wood platforms must have weighed tons by the way.

Required power should essentially be a constant per unit length, can easily have 1 motor per kilometer or city-block.

And for my dumb idea of the day: 'just' use solar panels as the walking surface as use that to power the slidewalk.

Solar friggin sidewalks!

mmmm yes! let's make our cities even hotter

So, linked hoverboards as walkway segments with a solar cell surface controlled by a mesh network?

could hoover like a monorail?

I seem to recall this is also a thing in "the city and the stars" by Clarke (1956), including the fact that it's faster towards the middle. I imagined a river of asphalt and it was kinda cool.

In Heinlein's books, do the rolling roads come before or after the establishment of American theocracy ?

Asking for a friend.

Just from my rusty memory, the roads were after the Crazy Years and before the Prophet. So yes, before the theocracy. EDIT: I found a link to the chart.

http://templetongate.net/graphics/literature/fhchartlarge.gi...

There's a video at the bottom of the article apparently shot by Thomas Edison in August 1900.

YouTube has a couple more of them

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjpCVQgKZsc

Here's also an AI-upscaled/-colorized video which contains a bit of the boardwalk.

https://youtu.be/fo_eZuOTBNc?t=297

The video appears to show adult men punching children. I’m guessing the children were making a nuisance of themselves. Different times.

I don't understand why moving walkways aren't called slidewalks.

Pure genius.

I call them notscalators, but yours is better :p

Doesn't work for Brits with their pavements ;). Maybe "movements" then.

They are in some old SF. I like the term too.

I love the concept of moving walkways on large airports and always wondered why there are non with multiple speeds like this one. Is it a security aspect?

There is however an accelerating one at YYZ in Toronto [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_walkway#ThyssenKrupp_AC...

Accelerating escalators are both fascinating and absolutely terrifying to me.

I've walked on the ones at Toronto Pearson before. I was a bit surprised the first time that it wasn't moving at full speed like I expected when I stepped on, but after that the second time I knew what to expect and it worked well.

I actually found it better when disembarking because it gives a better transition to the stationary surface when stepping off.

there used to be a quicker (9 or 11 km/h depending on sources) walkway in Paris metro, but apparently too frequently broken https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trottoir_roulant_rapide

« Le TRR fonctionna d'abord à la vitesse de 11 km/h (3 m/s), mais en raison de fréquentes chutes de voyageurs et de divers accidents, la vitesse fut réduite à 9 km/h (2,5 m/s) »

From your Wikipedia page, it says it initially went at 11 km/h but was reduced to 9 km/h because of “frequent falls of passengers and various accidents”.

My dude, that is the coolest thing I have seen. The engineering and design required to make it reliable and safe. Thank you for sharing.

Alas, those have been drywalled over and closed for good at YYZ.

A real bummer, especially since it seems I have to traverse those passageways every time I return from the US or Europe.

Anybody here go through the DFW airport about 20 years ago? That airport has had moving walkways for 30+ years that I’m aware of.

In 200X, there was an IR sensor at the end of each walkway that would trigger a male voiceover warning about the end of the “moving walk”.

There was a Starbucks in one of the terminals, right at a dogleg where a section of the walk ended. I had to listen to that announcement fifty to 100 times in a dozen or so minutes, and between recording, playback, and audio compression quality, my partner and I both swore he was saying “the wooing walk”. Like a ventriloquist trying to not get caught subbing out consonants - and failing. The Wooing/Mooing Walk was a running joke the rest of our relationship.

Don't most large airports have moving walkways? I've seen them quite plentiful abroad.

Hubs for sure, and for quite some time. The ones in DFW in ‘94 seemed to have been there for some time. The inclined ones in Charles de Gaul are just bizarre.

All I recall from the first hub I remember, Denver (85?) was the water stains on the ceiling tiles. I feel like moving walks would have been novel to me but I have no memory of them.

Interesting that the exposition map[0] has the Eiffel Tower labeled as "Tour de 300 Métres." I wonder when it became known as the Eiffel Tower in common parlance?

[0]https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/be/P._Binet...

It was called the Eiffel Tower informally even before it was built: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eiffel_Tower#Artists'_protest

The Edison film at the end of the article is just fantastic.

So, this is a very long, slow-moving, open train.

Advantages I see:

- you can hop on and off wherever you want. That makes them useful for short trips

- no waiting time; you can hop on whenever you want. That likely makes up for lack of speed on short trips.

- if built at ground level, pedestrians can cross the line fairly easily wherever they want (hop on, hop off on the other side), so these wouldn’t split cities in half the way railways do, but only for pedestrians.

Disadvantages I see:

- slow for longer journeys

- power inefficient if there are few passengers (trains are, too, but this is a really, really long train. Imagine moving these 3km of track to move 10 persons). You can’t scale down capacity for less busy hours.

- all maintenance requires shutting down the system (in contrast, with trains, you take off the train and put another one on for most maintenance)

- ¿safety?

You can scale down for less busy hours by just turning it off.

Yes, but that’s an on/off switch. Trains and buses allow for a gradual shutdown by scaling down on number of rides per hour or on train/bus size.

That’s a big advantage because, if people can’t get home from a party at 3AM, they may choose to use their car to get at the party, and, having invested in a car, and getting used to using it, may stop using public transport.

That, in turn, can lead to further decrease in service, which leads to fewer people using public transport, etc.

Hazards to pets and sandals/Crocs wearers, perhaps.

Over a hundred years ago, and if built today it would still be impressive. Technological progress feels very fast and very slow at the same time.

I wonder how long it stayed in operation, how much it cost, and if it kept running for a while what parts of it broke most often.

I'm amazed at how large the Exposition was. And consequently, the moving sidewalk.

The Edison video is amazing

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