Category Archives: History

Two Hundred Years Ago Today …

… saw the first successful test of a Davy Lamp, a safety lamp for use in flammable atmospheres that consists of a wick lamp with the flame enclosed inside a mesh screen that acts as a flame arrestor. The idea is that air (and firedamp) can pass through the mesh freely enough to support combustion, but the holes are too fine to allow a flame to propagate through them and ignite any firedamp (like methane) outside of the lamp.

While this lamp, designed to decrease accidents by preventing explosions that would maim or kill miners when there was an abundance of methane or other combustible gasses, actually increased mine accidents (as miners believed it was now safe to work in parts of the mine that had previously been closed for safety reasons), successors did eventually increase mine safety and allow mines to be worked more safely (when the lamps, such as the Protector Garforth GR6S flame safety lamp, are properly used).

When the lamp was first released, miners believed they could work in sections of the mine that had unsafe levels of methane because the lamp would not ignite the methane. This was true only insofar as the lamp was not damaged, but, in the original design, the bare gauze was easily damaged and the lamp became unsafe as soon as a single wire broke or rusted. Plus, because the mine owners thought the safety lamps were enough, they did not install proper ventilation to keep methane levels down (which would have prevented methane explosions from slightly damaged lamps).

But, eventually, legal requirements for legal air quality and safety lamp improvements made mining safe, and the raw materials we all depend upon to create our products became easier to mine and supply became more predictable. While the Davy Lamp may have been a bump in the road, it was an important invention on the road to modern mining.

Seventy Five Years Ago Today

Disney released Fantasia, which contains The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Mickey Mouse’s designated comeback role at the time. (Yes, even the great Mickey Mouse once needed to make a comeback.)

A modern classic, which is the American Film Institute’s 58th greatest American film, it contains a classic story line that is very important to modern enterprise professionals, and procurement professionals in particular, everywhere.

Simply put:

You cannot successfully employ the tricks of the master until you gain mastery yourself.

And, furthermore:

Trying to automate a process you cannot control will simply flood you.

For those of you who haven’t seen The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, Mickey decides that the best way to accomplish his chores is by animating, and then replicating, a broomstick to gather the water from the pool, carry it to the castle, and clean the floors. He does the classic set-it-and-forget-it, takes a nap, and the unintelligent automatons keep going and going until the castle literally floods, putting Mickey in quite a pickle of a situation until the Sorcerer comes home to undo the mess Mickey created.

In the modern enterprise, even if you are overwhelmed by a task, you can’t simply install the first piece of technology that comes your way to automate the task and expect the situation to improve if you don’t first understand what is required, define the right process, and make sure the right process is implemented, a bad situation will quickly become worse, much worse. For example, instead of having ten thousand invoices that can’t be adequately processed, a poorly implemented e-Invoicing solution will give you ten thousand invoices that are queued waiting for manual review and validation before they can be exported to the payment system. Instead of not having time to process the invoices between payment, and overpaying by about 1.5% on average (due to duplicate invoices, overcharges, and payments for goods not delivered), the organization can’t pay the majority of suppliers at all, and supplier sentiment goes from amicable to full fledged animosity in just a few months. (And your SRM efforts go down the toilet.)

If you haven’t watched The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, the only segment of the original Film that was included in Fantasia 2000, find 8 minutes and do so. The power of today’s technology is terrific, but never let technology replace wisdom.

Three Hundred and Fifty Years Ago Today

The (London) Gazette, the oldest surviving journal (which is one of the official journals of record of the British Government), was founded. Considering that many publication these days don’t even survive three point five years, the fact that a journal has survived in continuous publication for three and a half centuries is astounding. It’s longevity is probably aided by the fact that certain statutory notices in the UK are required to be published in official journals, but one has to be honest here — if it were to disappear, the notices would just shift to other journals.

Imagine the pride that Henry Muddiman, a name not even well known by many of today’s journalist students would have felt to know that a publication he began is still thriving three-hundred and fifty years later. With the web came the ability for just about anyone to start a new media publication, but how many of the new media publications started twenty years ago, a mere five years after Tim Berners-Lee wrote the first internet-based hypertext system, are still around today? Very few. The easier publishing gets, the more fleeting it seems to become, and even traditional newspapers are now going the way of the dodo.

Will today’s Supply Management publications stand the test of time? Even Purchasing Magazine, the longest running magazine that chronicled the world’s second oldest (or is it the third oldest) profession ceased publication five years ago. Will Sourcing Innovation and Spend Matters survive beyond the doctor and the prophet, the driving forces behind them? Only time will tell. But it really makes you stop and think about the long history that led up to the print revolution the internet launched.

To aid with your contemplations, here is the link to Another Day by November 7.

One Hundred and Forty Five Years Ago Today

The first federal registration in response to the first federal trademark application was issued to the Averill Chemical Paint Company for a design with an eagle and a ribbon and the words, “Economical, Brilliant”.

This particular trademark may not be in use today, but trademarks can survive a long time. For example, the lodes U.S. trademark still in use was registered on May 27, 1884 — over 131 years ago. That’s a long time for a company to have exclusive rights to a mark, label, name, signature, or logo that exclusively identifies that companies products and/or services.

And given the importance of brand, societal damnation 39, this is an important legal advantage that cannot be overlooked.

Fifty Years Ago Today …

The 1964 New York World’s Fair comes to a close after a two-year run. More than 51 Million people attended the exposition designed to showcase mid-20th-century American culture and technology that is still inspiring some people today, as evidenced by its inclusion in Walt Disney Pictures recent epic film, Tomorrowland. While it was not sanctioned by the Bureau International des Expositions, it was the first time many of the attendees saw, and interacted with, mainframe computers, computer terminals with keyboards and CRT displays, and telephone modems when the few corporations that had computer equipment kept it in back offices.

Major exhibitors included General Motors, IBM, Bell Systems, Sinclair Oil, and Ford Motor Company — still big names in American Industry 50 years later. While it may have been a financial disaster, it’s legacy and remnants still live on today, with a handful of the pavilions being relocated to new homes around the country, including a ski lodge in western New York, a radio station in Wisconsin, a Hilton Hotel in Missouri, a Four Seasons Lodge in Missouri, a church in California, a science center in Seattle, and attractions at Disneyland.

These days there are conventions galore, but when was the last time there was a true international exposition that really tried to look ahead to what we could achieve with peace and prosperity instead of war mongering (and that people remember) ?