Mind boggling numbers

[old man emu]

Do Australians lack the concept of the numbers that mass production involves? Does our small population in a non-industrial nation prevent us from understanding the volumes of product that industrialised nations produce?

 

Recently a TV show I watch went to a cotton mill museum in Manchester. The guide said that at the height of the industry there, 9000 looms were in action 14 hours per day, six days per week. Then I moved on to several documentaries about WWll aircraft, and the numbers of aircraft built by all combatants in the 1940 - 1945 period were incredible.  I learned that firearms of all types were produced in the hundreds of thousands. One company even produced 70,000 motorcycles and spares for 30,000 in the same time frame.

 

While the numbers of completed items are beyond fathoming, consider the number of individual components that had to be made to go together in one item. How many rivets would there be in a 4-engined bomber? How many buttons for a combatant's uniform. How many cartridge cases for use in firearms?

 

Even today, these industrialised countries are producing items in staggering numbers. Is it little wonder that manufacturing in Australia, despite our ability to produce high quality goods, has dwindled to almost the cottage industry level?

[willedoo]

I've always liked those photos of wartime aircraft production factories with the lines of partially completed planes and multitudes of workers. It's very hard to get your head around the sheer numbers involved, like the Ilushin Sturmovik, second only I think to the Cessna 172 in production. I have trouble visualizing 1,000 aircraft lined up, let alone 40,000 of the one type.

[Old Koreelah]

...and at the end of the war, acres of brand new and unused  P-51s, B-24s, etc. were bulldozed into heaps for scrap.

[Marty_d]

On 02/07/2020 at 11:53 AM, Old Koreelah said:

...and at the end of the war, acres of brand new and unused  P-51s, B-24s, etc. we're bulldozed into heaps for scrap.

Don't, OK... the very thought brings a tear to my eye.

[onetrack]

Let's sit back and have a good think about mass production. It was first perfected by Henry Ford to meet a worldwide insatiable demand for cheap and reliable motoring.

But even Ford couldn't make enough vehicles fast enough to meet the demand for many decades. 

 

WW2 was a unique mass production exercise. It was done purely to overwhelm a couple of particularly powerful and aggressive enemies.

But probably at least 80% of the industrial production of WW2 was designed specifically to carry out acts of War and to be destroyed in the process.

Vast amounts of equipment produced in WW2 was never even used, or used for only hours before it was destroyed - by bombing, being sunk, or being destroyed in retreats.

A sizeable percentage of WW2 production was just simply wasted - by poor handling, poor storage, poor useage habits, and by the elements.

 

In just the 3 years, 1942, 1943 and 1944, German U-boats sent 15,000,000 tons of American shipping to the bottom. The U-boats sank 2828 U.S. Merchant ships in that period.

That was all new unused, equipment on board - everything from rifles to artillery to aircraft engines, jeeps & trucks to Caterpillar tractors.

Just the ships themselves were a massive loss, let alone their cargoes. Oil supplies also made up a fair percentage of the shipping losses.

 

So in essence, the gut-busting industrial production of WW2 was largely wasted - what wasn't destroyed in War action  was destroyed by the weather, by poor storage, by bad logistics.

In 1943, the Americans landed US$9M worth of stores (1943 dollars) on an island near Vanuatu, in preparation for the arrival of U.S. forces.

But the U.S. forces bypassed the area with fast leap-frogging from island to island, and the stores, stacked in the open - because it arrived before any buildings were erected - started to rot.

It then became quicker and more efficient for the ships with new supplies, to bypass the island, and head for where the troops actually were.

The whole $9M stockpile of supplies was wasted, with corrosion, mould and mildew, theft, and inadequate protection from severe humidity and copious amounts of rain, leading to its loss.

 

Aircraft wastage in WW2 was phenomenal. Good, readily-repairable aircraft that crashed on landing and blocked the runway, were bulldozed into a pile to make way for incoming aircraft low on fuel. Almost new aircraft were ditched with a total loss because they ran out fuel, got lost, or suffered a minor mechanical failure, that couldnt be repaired in the air.

Aircraft were cannabilised due to parts supply shortages caused by errors in logistics. Once aircraft were cannabilised, they were unlikely to ever fly again.

 

Fast forward to the 21st century, and we are still wasting huge amounts of materials and human effort due to mass production.

Mass production struggles to cope with rapid changes in buyer desires, technological advances, and materials improvements.

Many a time, huge supplies of obsolete mass-produced products are dumped because they become unsaleable. Just look at incandescent lights for an example.

I go to auctions and see pallet after pallet of perfectly good 400W sodium vapour industrial lights being sold for pennies, because no-one wants them. They are 100% obsolete.

They have been superseded by LED's that use a fraction of the power, and the LED's now cost less to buy than SV lights.

 

Probably 80% of our purchases from Chinese mass production end up in landfill within 12 mths. The concept of mass production is basically flawed.

The principle behind MP consists of producing more and more of a particular item at a reducing or similar cost - along with reducing quality.

The mass-produced item MUST be rapidly destroyed or worn out, otherwise there's no market for the new items being produced.

 

I see a time (rapidly coming), when people will insist on more durable items with a longer life, that are repairable.

They are sick of the massive cost of landfills, and the struggle to find new landfill sites - even in Australia.

We must forever avoid wasting the Earths finite resources, by way of minerals, oil, energy supplies - and water - in the pursuit of the ever-increasing production of oodles of rubbishy goods.

Edited July 3, 2020 by onetrack

[Old Koreelah]

Sadly true, 1T, and we’re all part of it.

A glimmer of hope:

https://newsrnd.com/business/2019-10-01--repairability--eu-commission-fights-disposable-devices-.S121U-ZuH.html

[spacesailor]

My elder brother always said that in the future everything will be mass-produced.

I,ve always said, if the fat, rich industrialist. wanted something they would pay huge amounts of money for Hand Produced  goods !.

An English Artist travels the world finding Old Smelly rope to make "pictures" from, they are Visual, Oral, and touch defined, and cost $ Millions.

spacesailor