This is Silicon Valley in California, the place where millions are made overnight from
the marvelous microchip, the place where computer software salesmen hire agents to negotiate
their not-insubstantial salaries.
And just down the road here, America's newest computer entrepreneur is about to strike it
rich with a new type of credit card.
It looks like any other credit card except for the shiny stripe running across it.
I think this is the most important invention of my life.
It remains to be seen how much money the company makes at it.
An entrepreneur in the technology area is usually trying to solve some problems and
the money comes, but it's not the principle thought as the products are evolving.
But that 12mm plastic stripe can hold enough information to fill a 100 page book.
That could be your entire medical or banking records, all in a size small enough to go
into your wallet.
The material used in the stripe is the same as in this optical disk used to store computer
data.
It's a highly reflective plastic with silver particles embedded in it.
A small laser is used to melt minute holes in the plastic.
Then the information's read back by a second laser in the playback machine.
The technique's similar to that used in video disk or the newer compact audio disk.
But until Jerome Drexler came along, no one had thought of putting that information on
a credit card.
You have to give him credit for that.
So what exactly is that stripe made of?
This is made a combination of silver particles in a gelatin layer on top of a polyester substrate.
And apart from that, the rest of the card is just a standard credit card like any other
you might have in your wallet.
Yes, that's correct.
So what sort of information could you store on a card on that narrow strip?
How much information first of all?
Well we could store about 400 pages of information on this stripe using what we call 5 micron
holes.
That's very small, isn't it?
Yes, yes it is.
This is the laser bit machine right here.
This is the means by which you push information on the card.
Yes, the card's inserted here.
We want to write, so I think you just push number 1 and now you write your message.
So what about anything I like?
Anything.
Okay, fine.
I think it may have to be a commercial.
How's that?
Now the message is being written.
If we could just now look at the apparatus for putting that information on the card step
by step.
Here again, the little laser in there.
That's correct, yes.
And this is the card.
This is a collimating lens which converts the divergent beam to a parallel beam and
then this is an objective lens which focuses the beam down to the 5 micron holes.
You do not need any of this apparatus for the actual operating equipment.
This is simply to enable someone to see what holes were recorded.
And this here is the microscope through which we can actually see the holes even though
they're very small.
Yes, that's correct.
Let's just play that back now towards 2000.
Well that's just four words we've placed on the card but don't forget we could put up
to 400 pages of information on that tiny little strip.
Just imagine it.
Your entire life's history on a strip 75 millimeters long by 12 millimeters wide and in a few years
we'll probably all have them.
354 years ago, the finest in Swedish shipbuilding technology sailed from that key over there
with bands playing, flags flying and the royal family waving from the balcony.
She went about two kilometers down the channel and just over there she sank.
It was the first gust of wind sweeping down from the cliffs that killed her.
She healed to port, recovered and then healed again.
She was inadequately ballasted and the gun ports were open to display her mighty cannon.
The water rushed in and she sank in a matter of moments taking most of her crew with her.
One of them crushed or trapped as the cannon broke loose.
At the subsequent inquiry, the shipwright, the admiral and even the king who it was claimed
had approved the revised plans were criticized.
Like most witch hunts, the inquiry went on for months and then petered out.
Twenty years later all 64 of the Vassar's cannon were salvaged using a primitive diving
belt like this one and the man who did it must have been either greedy or desperate
because it can't have been any fun at all working in the depths of Stockholm harbor
with only this and no protective gear at all.
Anyway after that salvage, memory of where the Vassar lay faded.
In a few years nobody even remembered where the wreck was.
But in 1956 she was found again and suggestions flowed in as to how to raise her.
One idea was to fill the hull with tennis balls and let it float to the surface.
Another to freeze the ship into a block of ice and watch it pop up and so on.
Eventually the job went to one of the most famous divers in the world.
His team of Swedish navy divers bored holes through the mud under the hull and passed
cables through them then attached them to two pontoons named after the Norse gods Odin
and Frigg.
The first lift a mere two meters from the bottom proved that the hull would hold.
With the boat in that position work began to remove some of the hundreds of tons of
mud that had settled inside the ship and to strengthen the hull and make it watertight.
Then in gentle stages the ship was lifted further and moved closer to the dock.
When finally she broke the surface a crowd of thousands including the Swedish king cheered.
Once she was up they began to remove the rest of the mud revealing a time capsule of treasures.
Apart from the hull itself they found 24,000 pieces of wood that had fallen off the ship
lying in the mud.
Each one was marked with a numbered metal stud and its location recorded on a master
plan as it was recovered.
Then they put the bits into tanks of preservative and left them there for two years.
Once they were sure that the wood wouldn't dissolve away on them they began work on the
biggest jigsaw puzzle in the world.
That was 20 years ago and as you can see they are still at it.
Of course some bits of the boat are too badly rotted to be identified but a lot of them
are surprisingly easy to recognise.
These for instance are parts of the gun carriages.
These are the wheels.
This quite clearly is a carpenter's mallet.
This is the block bit of a block and tackle, solid oak I may say, a beer jug for the lighter
moments and this is part of one of the four pumps that the Vasa had on board.
High technology for 1628, not that they had time to use it.
Even some of the sails were found, sails that had never been hoisted, sails that had never
felt the wind.
They were discovered as a tangled, pulpy mass in one of the sail lockers and it took literally
years to separate them.
All the work had to be done underwater because when the cloth's dry it's so fragile that
it almost crumbles to dust in your fingers.
Once they'd separated them they had to find a way of displaying them and eventually they
developed their own method of bonding the cloth onto fibreglass.
That's how they're seen now.
Preserving sails and mallets and pumps is one thing, preserving an entire hull the size
of this one is entirely another.
In fact this is the biggest conservation job ever undertaken on organic material.
The vital thing is to maintain constant temperature and humidity so that the wood doesn't either
rot or crack.
The Vasa survived her 333 years on the bottom of the ocean because the water of the Baltic
is relatively sweet and the marine borer which has destroyed so many other wooden ships dislikes
fresh water.
That preserved the wood but not the metal.
The technology of 1628 didn't run to stainless steel so the boat was held together with iron
bolts.
Naturally enough after 354 years under the sea they'd rusted entirely away and before
the hull could be lifted over 5,000 new bolts had to be put into it.
So the hull was held together but although the wood was in good condition it still had
to be dried and then preserved.
That work is still going on.
The wood is sprayed with a preserving solution which leaves it covered in a thick white gluey
coating.
Hot air blowers melt the surplus away and the wood is left shiny and greasy to the touch
but safe.
They even had to develop new kinds of paint.
The grey on the walls of the floating dock where the Vasa now lies isn't very attractive
but at least it helps soak up the moisture that the ship is still sweating out.
That paint is commercially available and it and tourism are just two of the ways in
which the ship is now contributing more to the Swedish economy than she could ever have
done as a fighting ship.
Soon the Vasa will have a new home.
A competition is being held to select the most suitable design.
Meanwhile the work of restoration continues.
They're particularly proud of the magnificent wood carvings which once painted and gilded
decorated almost every centimetre of the hull.
The glorious leaping line figurehead roars again and eventually the ship that never made
it to the war she was supposed to win will dazzle the crowds again just as she did on
the day she so disastrously set sail.
This Japanese house is about 350 years old.
It originally stood in the Shirakawa village area of central Japan but some years ago
it was torn down and re-erected here in Nagoya by the Yamazaki Corporation to serve as a
luncheon and entertainment facility for the hundreds of foreign visitors that have been
flocking to see what's inside this building next door.
To put it simply it's the most advanced machine tool manufacturing plant in the world.
When it opened about eight or nine months ago Time magazine described it as the closest
thing yet to the people this factory that futurologists predict will be the brave new
The first thing you notice is the absence of people.
working away by themselves.
The plant basically manufactures heavy industrial parts the rough castings of which are picked
up by one of two transporters from loading vays and delivered to a designated machine
which starts work on it with an enormous range of tools but what looks to be a fairly normal
automated factory scene is really quite revolutionary.
All of these machines are working quite independently from any direct human control.
They're working separately from each other and they're producing parts that are quite
different from those being made by their neighbouring machines and they're all being directed by
computers.
The computers which are actually American are of course programmed by humans and Yamasaki
put some 100,000 man hours into the development of the software program which keeps their
machines running smoothly.
Under normal operating conditions the computer room is staffed by only one operator per shift
for two shifts a day.
In the rest of the factory there are only five men per shift that's one in the tool
room and four other men working here on the loading station.
It's a total of six men per shift from the morning shift from 8am until 4 in the afternoon,
another six on the evening shift from 4 in the afternoon till midnight and then from
midnight till dawn there's nobody on duty, nobody at all except the night watchman who
comes around to check that nothing's been stolen.
So a total of 12 men who oversee machines that can produce as much as a conventional
factory with 215 men.
Yet Yamasaki hasn't laid off a single one of its thousands of workers.
The workforce has stayed the same but productivity has gone up.
They can produce in three days what in a conventional factory would take three months.
The company expects to recover its $18 million investment for the new plant in two years.
The factory machines are also producing parts to manufacture new machines just like themselves.
So they are in fact mother robots producing more mother robots like these two here in
the showroom which have the theoretical capacity to produce virtually all of the parts of which
they themselves are made.
They don't have to be to reproduce themselves they can be programmed to produce virtually
anything.
The showroom at Yamasaki is almost never empty.
In this instance it's other Japanese industrial executives seeing how it all works.
But since it opened more than a thousand foreign executives and technicians have toured the
facility and Yamasaki already has orders approaching $50 million to set up manufacturing systems
like this in different parts of the world.
As one visiting American executive said with some envy it's not that the Japanese are ahead
of us in the technology it's just that they seem to have the ability to apply it more quickly.
And if we take a brief look into the future the trend seems to be continuing.
At the beginning of this year the rough picture of worldwide usage of programmable industrial
robots was something like this.
14,000 in Japan, about 4,000 in the United States, a little over 2,000 in West Germany
and another 2,000 in the rest of the world.
And yet one Japanese corporation the Matsushita Electric Company has announced that by 1990
a little over 8 years away they alone will be operating 100,000 industrial robots in
their factories.
This enormous steel framework is part of one of the largest structures ever erected in
Australia.
It's called a jacket, part of the gas platform for the Northwest Shelf Undersea Gas Project.
From Japan where it was built it made the 6,000 kilometre journey to Western Australia
towed on a barge.
The journey was made in all weathers.
Then when it had arrived at its location it was launched.
23,000 tonnes of steel slid effortlessly into the water.
The jacket for the North Rankin platform now rests on the ocean floor in 125 metres of
water.
The piles which support it extend almost as far into the ocean floor as the platform extends
above it.
It's built to survive waves up to 23 metres high and winds of up to 215 kilometres an hour.
This is how the platform will look when it's finished, 214 metres high from the seabed
to the top of the derrick.
It will be almost twice the height of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
But while much work remains to be done to the gas platform the pipeline project is well advanced.
This is the ETPM 1601, one of the largest pipe laying vessels in the world.
To bring the gas ashore it's laying a pipeline 134 kilometres long from the platform to its
landfall in Wythnall Bay.
Up to 360 men work aboard this vessel brought from the shore by regular helicopter flights.
On board the ship the men work round the clock welding the pipe and laying it on the ocean
floor.
Up to 1.7 kilometres of pipe is laid every day.
The sections are first welded together in pairs using a submerged arc welding technique.
Then each double joint is welded onto the pipeline using an automatic welding process.
Each pipe has a massive 18 tonnes in weight but even so it's designed to bend as it leaves
the barge and enters the water.
There's 12,500 individual sections of pipeline just like that one.
They were all made in Japan because no Australian pipe rolling company could produce pipes of
that diameter and also in those sorts of quantities.
Every one of those pipes has got a concrete and iron ore cladding around in which more
than doubles the weight.
That produces negative buoyancy so that it actually sits on the ocean bed.
Otherwise believe it or not they'd almost float.
Down here at the stern of the vessel there's this long stinger protruding from the rear
of the ship and going actually beneath the surface of the water.
Now down the centre of that passes the pipeline which is then deposited on the sea bed.
Effectively every time the ship pulls itself forward on its anchor chains it's laying
24 metres of pipeline.
Just about everything connected with the North West Shelf Project tends to be on the generous
side including this.
This is the largest submarine plough ever built anywhere in the world.
It weighs some 400 tonnes and it's to be used to actually dig a trench in the ocean floor
into which the pipeline is dropped.
Now the actual area up there where the pipeline is to be laid is a cyclone area and on the
ocean floor that can produce eddies and currents which might dislodge the pipeline.
So if this plough picks up that pipeline, digs the trench, drops the pipeline into it
and then the whole thing is covered with rocks.
This is the business end of the plough.
It's the so-called shear tip.
This effectively gouges that trench in the ocean floor down to a depth of about 1.7 metres.
It's made of the very toughest steel.
In effect it really rather looks like a gigantic agricultural plough except with this we're
actually talking about thousands of tonnes of limestone.
I guess it's stating the obvious to say that the enormity of this project is just quite
stunning.
To think that in two years' time something like 60 million cubic feet of gas a day will
be passing through these pipes.
And all they've got to do then is dig a trench in the ocean floor into which the pipeline
is dropped.
And then they're going to dig a trench in the ocean floor into which the pipeline is
dropped.
And then they're going to dig a trench in the ocean floor into which the pipeline is