As a teenager I worked at the end of a delivery conveyor belt for a supermarket. This was an unusual setup for a supermarket (but maybe for industrial or factory settings it's nothing special). The supermarket is located over a major highway. It's the Star Market over the Mass Pike/I90 outside of Boston (1). Customers had to take an escalator to the second floor, and after shopping and paying, 2-3 paper grocery bags were loaded into a small numbered cart. The customers were given plastic cards with the corresponding numbers.
The carts were swung onto the top level of a double-decker conveyer belt. It went down to the first floor (street level) and into a long, basement like room with a conveyer belt and a road paralleling it. Customers would drive their cars into this long room, pop the trunk, and hand me their cards. I would match up the bags, and place them in the trunk. The empty carts were placed on the bottom level of the conveyer belt, to be brought back to the Muzak-filled main level of the supermarket.
The room was filled with fumes and noise from the waiting cars and the interstate tunnel that was next to it. The incessant rattling and squeaking of thousands of metal rollers on the conveyer belts was irritating, although we got used to it (one thing I just realized -- upstairs where the customers were it was an actual belt, which was quiet, but down where we were it was those damn rollers, which were like 1950s-era metal roller skate wheels). We were paid $3.65/hour (minimum wage at the time). But the things that worried us from day to day was the cry of "mix" (human error, wrong bags placed in wrong car) or a spill.
Here's what happened with the spills. As the carts came from the 2f to 1f, they went through a series of turns, including at least one 90 degree turn and a full 180 at the bottom of a decline. This spot was where most of the spills took place. It was apparently unavoidable, owing to the layout of the store, the location of the slopes on the belt, the road and loading area, and the needs of the customers to get their cars loaded quickly. The nature of groceries (heavy/light loads, multiple packaging sizes, etc.) and the technology used at the time made it hard to find an easy fix to the problem. Watermelons rolling around the bottom of the carts were the worst.
I don't have any profound observations about this, other than spillage is a consideration for people who design and manage conveyer belts, and that the cost can be made manageable for both small and large systems. And these belts can be designed to last years or decades. The belt that we used in that market was in use for more than 20 years by the time I started working there in the 1980s, and it (or a similar system, using the same route) is still in use today, some 50 years after it was installed.
1. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Shaw's+Supermarket/@42.350...
I think that can be said for all of Bill Bryson's books.
Instantly I thought of the Star Market over the Mass Pike, before I read the next sentence. And I only lived in Boston for a few years!
The story is here:
> "On 15th September 2013, the ConveyorBeltGuide has been online for 10 years."
Wow, that is some serious dedication. Assuming there are no ulterior motives--and I don't see evidence of any--it's wonderful to see someone so dedicated to sharing such intricate knowledge with anyone who's interested. And it's not abandoned, either; the disclaimer page notes that all videos on the site have been updated to HTML 5.
Now our only source of knowledge is Wikipedia, which is great per se, but the vast amount of knowledge it collects is very shallow, there's no real depth and passion in it.
> Now our only source of knowledge is Wikipedia, which is great per se, but
> the vast amount of knowledge it collects is very shallow, there's no real
> depth and passion in it.
One area where the personally curated sites continues to thrive is the time-nuts folks. If you have the slightest interest in all things metrology you can lose hours reading about anything from time measurement gear and GPSDOs to policy decisions regarding deccoupling civil time from the earth's rotation. Definitely worth checking out if you have some spare time:
- http://www.leapSecond.com (Tom Van Baak)
- http://www.niceties.com/time.html (Doug Hogarth)
- http://prc68.com/I/timefreq.shtml (Brooke Clarke)
- http://www.febo.com/time-freq (John Ackermann)
- http://www.rt66.com/~shera (Brooks Shera)
- http://www.qsl.net/zl1bpu/PRECISION (Murry Greenman)
- http://www.thegleam.com/ke5fx (John Miles)
- http://www.ko4bb.com/Timing (Didier Juges)
Mostly because the Wikipedians won't even allow it (whether due to a lack of references or because it's not "relevant-" or "notable-enough") in the first place.
I think part of the reason for the shift is that forums have gotten much more advanced: most include a personal homepage, photo gallery, and provisions for making "uber/FAQ" threads that easily surpass the most meticulously curated Geocities sites.
When I first read that book, I thought it seemed like a lot of wasted space because of the amount of parallel lanes you would need to achieve highway speeds. Then I started driving and noticed how wide our highways already are.
These are without a doubt my favourite of Asimov's books :)
Earth has evolved to a point where the population lives in Cities (capitalisation is important!) -- massive, hundreds of square miles completely enclosed with no outside areas at all. They might as well be space stations.
Transit within these cities takes place on 'strips' for local transport -- think of them as 'lanes' on a freeway. The first strip you step on to is an acceleration strip (onramp), which gets you up to speed to then step onto faster strips.
There's also an "Expressway", which is basically a metro, which you step onto from the fastest strip (I think there is an acceleration strip too) which takes over when you want to go longer distances.
Then for even longer distances you have aircars (planes!).
It's a really good system, but only for highly, highly urbanised areas. I think there's only 2 or 3 cities on the planet at the moment truly dense enough. New York, and perhaps central London.
I don't recall the same setup in the I, Robot stories (but it's been a long time).
Then, of course, if your conveyor belt is pedestrian-based, you have exposure to the elements (also meaning limited long-distance travel due to slow speed) and switching between conveyors would be troublesome (particularly if you're inform or have baggage). If you instead ride in some sort of pod, you can up the speed and protect yourself from the elements, but you still need to get it on and off the conveyor belt smoothly; it's be something approaching the complexity of a car anyway. How also would you prioritise/speed up emergency vehicle traffic, which often has to go as quickly as possible?
It's certainly an interesting thought experiment, coming up with the pros and cons.
You assume that there was a call. Modern roads are just a long series of small, natural, incremental progressions on, essentially, a beaten path through the woods. Many of them are probably even in much the same places.
Cars are much the same. First, crude carts, then progressively bigger carts drawn by progressively bigger animals, then someone builds an "artificial animal", put it inside the car and so on.
There has been some non-continuous breaks, the most notable one is the railroad which present a new set of benefits and challenges. The biggest challenge is that railroads require exclusivity in usage (different kinds of road users can share the road, ultimately by temporarily stepping off the road) which is very difficult to allow without central planning. And central planning is really, really difficult.
It is amazing how long that is. My only experience with a belt was working at Walgreens on warehouse truck days. Even our 60 foot belt continually had product falling off of it. I wonder what kind of oversight is done to make sure the items stay on it.
And here's the end: https://goo.gl/maps/n0wvJ
(is there a way to get coordinates out of the new Maps?)
And while I'm at it, a direct link for the longest combined conveyer belt: https://goo.gl/maps/3kz4s
Pity, no streetview :p
Unfortunately, the default renderer doesn't know how to draw a line of "man_made=conveyor_belt"...
Incredibly there is good money to be made in conveyor belts designed specifically for film and television:
http://www.canningconveyor.co.uk/videos/c/4/tumbleator-video...
In the UK people of a certain age can remember the conveyor belt of 'The Generation Game', which always had a 'cuddly toy' on it, e.g.: http://youtu.be/pa4KoACYzyU?t=4m45s
Anyone have any info on this?