The second car I ever owned was a used Chevy Vega. Despite it being a complete rust pile that broke down on a monthly basis, I loved that car. (Well, it did cure me of any later desire to become a gearhead; I like cars, but that thing really took the joy out of my tinkering with fixing engines.)

I'm not here to complain about the defective axles, self-incendiary tendencies, leaky engines, backfiring, etc. I want to talk about the single coolest feature of the Vega: the way it was shipped.

These days, we're used to cars being hauled down the road by semis, but in the 70s they were hauled on railway flatcars—the longer 85- and 89-footers. They could pack 15 cars onto those tri-level racks, but it didn't even come close to the maximum weight per flatcar.

The price to move a loaded railcar from the assembly plant to the Pacific coast was about $4,800. At more than $300 per car, Chevy wanted to push that price down quite a bit.

And Chevy ended up with a pretty novel solution: shipping them vertically, nose down. They designed a specialized rack for the Vega known as the Vert-A-Pac, allowing an 89-foot flatcar to hold as many as 30 cars.

Chevy still wanted to ship them all topped off with fluids, but any normal car would leak all over the railroad. Chevy designed the Vega specifically to prevent leaks during vertical shipping. This included innovative alterations like a special engine oil baffle, battery filler caps, and a windshield wiper bottle set at a 45-degree angle.

In 1970, after Chevy discontinued the Vega, they also discontinued the Vert-A-Pacs because they were exclusively designed for Vegas.

All scrapped—vehicle and its innovative shipment method, which was repurposed.

Yes, my bias here, though I think this was one of the rare events where the way a company shipped something was much better than the thing itself.

Stay with me on this one: yes, it begins on a pretty sour note…but I promise you there’s a happy ending.

Nineteenth century Chicago was plagued by, well, plagues. Epidemics of typhoid fever, dysentery, and cholera repeatedly hit the city. The 1854 cholera outbreak killed six percent of the entire city's population.

The reason for those diseases, and a common culprit throughout history: poor-to-nonexistent drainage. Standing water in a city makes a perfect breeding area for all sorts of nasty illness. In fact, disease historically was so bad that the majority of medieval cities experienced negative population growth—more people died of diseases than were born.

The only reason cities didn't depopulate was a near constant influx of immigration from the country. This changed steadily around the world when city infrastructure and medicine improved. Disease was still quite common in the 19th century, but Chicago's level of disease was quite unusual in an American city for the time.

In 1856, an engineer named Ellis S. Chesbrough developed a plan for a city-wide sewer system that would solve the problem. It was unusually ambitious: he wanted to raise the entire city six feet, then build sewers below the newly raised buildings.

Sounds insane, right? That's what I thought, too, except they actually did it—raising the first building in January 1858: a four-story, 70 foot long, 750-ton brick structure lifted on two hundred jackscrews to its new level, without the slightest damage. Engineers boosted more than 50 masonry buildings that year alone.

In 1860, a team of engineers actually managed to raise up half a city block in one go—an estimated 35,000 tons lifted nearly five feet into the air by 600 men using 6,000 jackscrews. They were so confident in the process that businesses didn't even close during the the five days it took to lift the whole thing.

On the last day of the process, before they began work on the new foundations, they allowed crowds to walk underneath the buildings, among the jacks. At another point, a six-story hotel was raised up without the guests even realizing it.

Only masonry buildings were considered worth raising; they placed wood-framed buildings on large rollers and moved them to the outskirts of town, usually without even bothering to empty out the furniture first.

This was so common that, for quite a few years, people considered looking out the window to see a building going past just another day of normal traffic.

Screws are a magnificent invention. I've talked about them plenty – think of them simply as ramps wrapped around an axle – so why wouldn't I be interested? They’re simple machines and they literally help batten down the hatches. I figure it’s time to unscrew the lid on their history.

Our old friend Archimedes probably invented the screw. Archimedes' screw is used to pump water uphill, usually for irrigation, through a tube with a metal screw inside: as you turn the screw, the threads scoop up water and push it to the top.

Archimedes' screw

Me, rummaging for my turnscrew.

Have you noticed a pretty major use that's missing here?

That's right: screws weren't used as fasteners. Instead, there were nails, welding, dowels and pins, etcetera, etcetera. This list of “alternatives” is substantial. In fact, we didn’t use screws as fasteners for nearly two millennia after Archimedes invented them.

What was missing? The screwdriver. (Fun fact: we used to call screwdrivers “turnscrews.”) We didn’t invent the screwdriver until the 1500s. Even then, we rarely tended to use screws as fasteners.

The final piece of the puzzle? The creation of machine tools necessary for manufacturing metal screws. Until that happened, they were just too much trouble to produce in large quantities.

Since we optimized that production angle, we haven't stopped turning them out.

______

Archimedes' screw gif by Silberwolf (size changed by: Jahobr), CC BY-SA 2.5, via Wikimedia Commons.

Let's say there's a traveling salesman trying to hit a certain group of towns during a week. (I know, I know: eCommerce is eclipsing the traveling salesman these days, but I’m Old School, so bear with me.) To save time, this traveling salesman wants to calculate the best possible route between all the cities—the route with the absolute shortest possible distance—before he returns to the starting city.

Sounds easy: just add up all the shortest distances between cities. Right?

Wrong.

In fact, if you tried the calculations on a home computer, the sun would have already devoured the Earth in its death-throes, billions of years in the future, by the time your computer finished the calculations. (The problem is actually what they call an NP-complete problem, and it’s really complicated, and it makes my head spin, and good luck.)

That's why Google Maps only optimizes routes with no more than ten waypoints in them because going beyond that just requires too much time and computing power. For those of us without the patience to wait billions of years, there are workarounds to the Traveling Salesman Problem.

A Solution to the Problem

One of the best ways is to use something called a genetic algorithm, which begins with a handful of random solutions to the problem…and usually ends up being terrible. So, it then tinkers slowly with each one, discarding all but the best solutions. Eventually, after enough cycles of this, the algorithm produces a route that, while not the absolute best, seems reasonable enough.

The practical applications of the Traveling Salesman problem should be obvious. To shipping companies alone, it represents a ton of time and money. Other industries that are concerned with it include semiconductor manufacturers and paper mills.

We also have a large number of variants in this challenge, including the appropriately named Traveling Politician Problem.