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At long last, I'd like to announce my latest project. I've been commissioned by International Marine/McGraw-Hill to write a book about the evacuation of half a million people from Manhattan by boat on September 11, 2001. Within minutes after thick gray smoke started...
Call it what you will—reshoring, insourcing, repatriating, onshoring—the movement toward manufacturers expanding production on U.S. soil has established itself as a trend, according to a survey by MFG.com and Reuters. MOJO, the MFG.com blog, reported: Forty percent of...
On Monday, the Financial Times ran a story about the skills gap, provocatively titled "German Giant Says US Workers Lack Skills." Eric Spiegel, chief executive in the US for Siemens, the German engineering group, said the problem exposed weaknesses in education and...
At nine o'clock on Sunday morning, I was dashing down a hallway at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Home in Hyde Park, NY on my way to deliver a lecture for SUNY's Empire State College when a painting on the wall stopped me in my tracks. "Art of the New Deal" celebrates the...
Did you catch Howard Wial's recent piece in The Atlantic? In it he outlines "four things [beyond trade policy] federal and state governments should do to encourage more U.S. manufacturing that is innovative and provides good jobs for less educated workers." In...
Finally, some new attention paid to the crucial role that making things and hands-on work have played, and must continue to play, in a sustainable U.S. economy... On Friday, President Obama spoke from a G.E. plant in Schenectady, NY. “Our challenge,” he said, “is to...
My dad is a mechanic specializing in Porsches, and I grew up hearing him rave about the German car maker's fine craftsmanship and engineering. Could that be part of why I liked brooklynbadboy's Daily Kos post "America needs an industrial policy" so much? After a brief...
I wrote about the SS United States in a post a few months back. Today the stakes are higher than ever before. At this moment, scrappers are bidding for a chance to cut up the 1952 ocean liner. A decision may be handed down before the end of the month. ...
The intro and the music might be a little cheesy, but I do love this video, Elements in Action, about the uses of iron, carbon, nickel, and aluminum that was produced by the Metals Service Center Institute, a 100 year-old trade association supporting the North...
For an engineer on an old fireboat that came back to life after being sold for scrap, this Boston Globe story by David Filipov, about an aging fireboat that "has responded to thousands of distress calls in its half-century of service" and is now poised...