Radial Tires

I had a slow leak in the driver's side rear tire on my car. I've had a new car for a little over a year, after having my last car for almost 15 years. I was not yet used to all the new technology since my last car was built, and since I waited so long between cars, it was as if I had skipped forward, like some kind of time traveller experiencing a mild case of future shock. There was a little orange warning light coming on intermittently on the dash, a circle with a smooshed flat bottom and an exclamation point in the middle. I had to look it up in the manual to learn that it was a low tire pressure warning light. I didn't know such a thing was possible. How do you put a sensor inside a rotating tire? How does it not get broken from the bumpy roads and all the spinning around and how does it send it's signal of collected data to the console? I still can't figure it out, but I trust that it is true, because I took the tire in and they found a screw or a nail embedded in the tire, patched it up and the light has gone away.

I was thinking about the fact that tire technology has certainly leapt forward in the last several years. I remember when you used to get real flat tires, where you would suddenly be struggling to keep control of the car and the tire was flopping around uselessly in the wheel well. Often, but the time you got pulled over to the side of the road, the tire was shredded to pieces. Now, you just get slow leaks. You often notice the tire is getting low by looking at it when you walk up to the car before you ever feel any difference in the handling of the car. I was thinking that we have radial tires, but I'm not sure why they are called that.

I found out that the radial tire was invented in 1946, but was not put into widespread use in cars until the 1960s. Before that there had been a time when tires were solid rubber, and there was a time when there was an inflatable inner tube in the tire. I knew that the pneumatic (air-filled) tire provided a great deal of shock absorbing. Even though the tire feels very hard and tough when you push on it when it's fully inflated, I have seen stop action photographs of a tire going over a curb or pothole and squeezing down almost to the point of touching the rim at the point of impact. I couldn't figure out what we called tires before they were radial tires, but found that there was a type of tire called a bias ply that was similar in construction to the radial, only didn't last as long or get as good gas mileage ratings. When I was little, I remember tire advertisements prominently mentioning that their tires were radial tires, expecting you to understand that you had the best tire money could buy. I remember feeling that the radial tire was a new thing, and an improvement over what we used before. Then I promptly forgot all about tires.

Technology is like that. You're busy with your life and not paying any attention, and then later you realize that some things changed, some new ideas were implemented, and you didn't even notice it happening. You don't notice it at the time, but over the years the changes pile up.

Dan Carlin's had an interesting idea in his recent Common Sense podcast of making great ideas happen by teaming up creative dreamers with no business sense with business savvy people without any spark of innovative ideas, or maybe even little understanding of science and engineering in general. His premise was that there would be a lot more innovation if nerds could dream and be creative, and money men would selflessly them realize their potential. It's a great idea in theory. I've always been a big fan of corporate and government sponsored R&D, because in my mind, there are almost limitless possibilities of new technologies waiting to be developed.

The problem that we face as a nation is that many of investors with large amounts of money are risk averse when it comes to technology. They also often show little understanding of how the technology could be used or its value to society. As with most investor and finance driven people they are rarely patient enough to spend the time necessary to develop a technology to maturity. That said, we as Americans do some of the best work in developing technology in the world. I just think we could do better. It's best to stay in front of this trend, like a surfer stays in front of a wave and it carries him along. If you don't, you get swamped.