Last week a stereo amplifier at my home was broken. So I called a service station of manufacturer but I was told by a man in charge of repair service that he could not fix it because transistors specially designed and made for the amplifier were not available. And he added that if it was a vacuum tube amplifier, he could restore it. Immediately I sent a vacuum tube amplifier via express mail which was broken about one year and a half ago and was kept untouched. He wanted to have enough time for fine tuning it. But he would be able to fix it before the end of year, he said.
| The broken amplifier looks like a brand new one as shown in the right picture. If it cannot be repaired, the only thing I can do is to dump it as a heavy garbage. As I used it for years, I have become attached to it. I called him again resulting in the same reply. |
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It became nothing more than a lump of iron weighing about 20 kilograms ( I did not measure it.) I think this is one of the proofs that high technology is tricky and has a pitfall. Meanwhile the fact that the vacuum tube amplifiers can be restored shows the merits of low technology. A GE refrigerator which I bought more than twenty years ago works very well even today. Last year, it had a trouble. But a service man from the manufacturer fixed it, replacing a small unit (I think he said it was a rotary switch.) When I told him this refrigerator was too old now, consuming much more power compared to the latest model, he said this was far better than the new products. As better heat insulating materials have become available these days, thickness of doors and walls has become thinner so that noise of refrigeration unit became big. The latest domestic model which I bought only a few years ago performed fairly well, but it has become noisy. I was impressed a service man from foreign manufacturers was carrying a unit for the products more than twenty years old.
The imbalance of technology between high tech big excavators and low tech civil cement grouting technology is one of the causes of tunnel accidents (Pieces of cement lump fell down inside tunnels)of Super Express Railway (Shinkansen). I think. The whole schedule of construction might have been made to follow the speed of big machines. The low tech cement grouting was forced to speed up over its capacity, I imagine.
The car is basically a product of low technology. Last 15 years, high technology has been adapted for controlling the fine operations. But these days high technology is infiltrating the basic constructions, bringing out such products as hy-brid, EV and fuel cell cars. Manufactures as well as governments(they are going to have a high tech incentive on motor vehicle registration tax) are hurrying too much to introduce high technology, I am afraid. With a good balance of high and low technology, they should serve the best convenience to customers, not repeating a tragedy of my high tech amplifier.
