At 5 past 7 on the 25th day of an unknown month, my analog wristwatch, a heavy piece of precision machinery made of stainless steel and scratch proof cristal, had stopped working.
This simple story could have been absolutely irrelevant to most of the people I know. For me it represented a particularly significative event.
I work as a freelance Process Automation consultant and a trending topic of discussion in my field of work is the passage from a digital/analog based technology to a fully digital one.
For the people not related to this industry might be strange that a field of work with such a pompous name may still be facing this transition.
But in fact it’s a somewhat conservative industry, being its scope to keep controlled chemical and petrochemical plants that cost some millions of USD using complex and sophisticated systems that are worth between 5 and 10% of that number.
The idea behind Process Automation is, basically, to measure the value of a physical variable of a process (oil distillation, soybeans oil extraction, manufacturing of solvents, etc.) then, by transferring this value to a controller (a kind of specialized computer) using it to keep this variable under control to maintain the process in a stable working condition.Since there is a feedback that closes the relationship between the input signal and the output signal, this concept is called closed loop control.
Most of the devices employed to measure this variable and to control it, use a measurement and communication standard called 4-20 mA., which is in fact a design contemporary of my now defunct wristwatch.
In the Process Automation industry there is a slow migration from this analog technology to a digital model, with some people still attached to the analog model and others fully committed to the new one.
What is significant of my wristwatch story is that I didn’t realize in which month it had stopped working since, although it showed the number of the day, it didn’t show the corresponding month. I guess it happened this year though.
Evidently, at some moment during this year or maybe earlier, I just had stopped thinking about this wristwatch as the natural interface between me and the passage of time.
Nowadays the Information or data of what time it is, is available everywhere, in my mobile, in my tablet, in the PC I happen to be working on, in the TV…
So time Information has become pervasive in its nature. Its always right and has become part of a whole set of data that we acquire at a glance, together with weather info, latest trending topics of our interest and (most important) which of our contacts is online.
In this way, the wristwatch took its place in the heaven of “analog things that have become obsolete”.
Its there, alongside audio cassette tape players, cathode ray tube TV sets, dial up internet access, pocket film photo cameras, VCRs and Super 8 cameras.
We are experiencing an age of truly disruptive radical changes that we haven’t even become aware of some of its consequences.
I have the feeling that, just like the way my wristwatch moved into oblivion some not so far away in our future, plant maintenance guys will wake up and then realize that their 4-20 mA devices are no longer working properly, but they weren’t aware of this because newer fully digital instruments had been replacing them offering better functionality and a richer set of characteristics.
In fact these devices can inform their users when they are starting to have problems and may face a different destiny that my wristwatch, which has gone in the same silent way as the time that it measured.
Mirko Torrez Contreras is a freelance Process Automation consultant who likes electronic gadgets. But he still has a soft spot for traditional mechanical ones, they remind him of the fine artist of mechanical design.