Look ahead

Summary form only given, as follws. One hundred thousand men worked for twenty years in building the Great Pyramid. They quarried 2-1/2-ton blocks of stone on the east bank of the Nile, floated them across the river on logs, then tugged and grunted them up ramps to be set in place unaided by mechanical device or power. Today, we wonder that they could do so much with so little in the way of tools. And we wonder at the fantastic cost of the project in terms of human labor. Tomorrow, our children may wonder how we were able to do so much with our tools and methods. And they will wonder at our costs. For tomorrow cost and producibility barriers will be cracked at a rate that would have appeared incredible yesterday. Reason: Billions of dollars´ worth of research and development that offer new tools and new methods for attacking cost and producibility problems. Let us consider only one representative example. Until now, if we wanted to put a hole in metal, we drilled or punched it. Tomorrow we will have many choices: Ultrasonic waves, laser beams, electron beams, electrochemical erosion, electrical discharge machining, ceramic gun drilling, localized burning, controlled etching, hot machining, subzero cutting, plasma arcs, abrasive blasting, water bullets, to name only a few now known. Not all are ready for application. And the engineer or manager who commits himself to unproved tools or methods runs a certain risk. But he who turns his back on those new tools and methods faces a certain fate:failure in tomorrow´s business. The man who will be in the top spot tomorrow is the one who studies and evaluates the new technologies and adopts them when the time is right. He is the man who looks ahead.