How Infrastructure Works

Scientists and engineers have a concept of elegance, which is among the highest praise that can be given to a theory, a proof, or a device. It’s hard to explain exactly what it is, but it incorporates ideas of efficiency or parsimony—accomplishing something with a minimum of effort, energy, or materials. Elegance in engineering often encompasses the surprising and very particular use of the specific resources that are available.

in most of the U.S., blue is used for potable water, green for sewage and runoff, red for electricity, orange for communications, and yellow for natural gas, with hot pink used for temporary markings.

Infrastructural networks are enduring, and that endurance shapes the way that new systems build on top of—or underneath, or alongside—the older ones. Water mains and gas pipes run along and beneath roads. Train tracks often followed watercourses as a path of least resistance through the terrain, telegraph lines were sent alongside the rails, and then roads were built along the same path, and electrical wires strung, and telephone cables.

Decisions made decades or even centuries ago—how we treat wastewater, the use of alternating current instead of direct current for electricity grids, pipelines laid for fossil fuels—all of these shape not just the technologies and systems in use today but those that haven’t yet been built. That continuity means there’s a path dependence—that the kinds of systems we have today depend on the characteristics of the systems that came before—in addition to growth and accumulation, as these systems build on each other. We now live surrounded by technological systems of nearly unimaginable scale, extent, and complexity.

if you wish to drink a Bloody Mary and watch a movie as you fly somewhere for a vacation, first you must invent an unutterably and increasingly complex international system that’s not just technological but social and political and regulatory, in order to make an intercontinental flight safe and even mundane.

access to more resources leads so universally and predictably to an increase in artificial light that researchers have even used it as a proxy for economic growth, observing how nighttime satellite images of a particular region glow more brightly over time. Developed regions are brighter than comparable regions in less developed areas. South Korea, for example, blazes from coast to coast, with a clear shoreline. But after years of sanctions and scarcity, North Korea is nearly invisible in nighttime images except for a faint cobweb of light reaching out from the capital of Pyongyang.

In late nineteenth-century Boston, this public health argument—that their own families would be safer and healthier because fewer people around them would be sick—was what convinced the wealthier residents to use their taxes to pay for a municipal water system and, new for the time, a sewage system to take the polluted wastewater away. It’s also when the growing city began requiring all new housing developments to have water and sewage lines.

After the war ended, trade between the North and South increased and the hassle and cost of the break of gauge became increasingly untenable. In 1886, after months of planning and preparation, all of the broad gauge southern track was changed to standard gauge in just thirty-six hours: tens of thousands of workers pulled up one rail of the track, moved it a few inches closer to the other, and spiked it into its new position. Railcars got new undercarriages, and the two separate smaller networks became a single, fully interconnected, national network.

Metcalfe’s law, named after Robert Metcalfe, one of the inventors of the Ethernet communication protocol for computers. Metcalfe argued that the value of a network to its users—whether fax machines, phones, or computers—increased proportionately with the number of connections to each node. The more possible connections there are, the more valuable it is to each user.

The water doesn’t just flow downhill: the California Aqueduct, for example, goes up and over the Tehachapi Mountains, thanks to the Edmonston pumping station. Fourteen six-story-high pumps can push two million gallons of water per minute up two thousand feet at the highest single-lift plant in the world, helping to make the California State Water Project the single largest consumer of energy in the state.

Even the butter on my toast is governed by a standard: I wondered why butter in the UK and Europe tasted better than at home in the U.S. and learned that the minimum allowable milkfat percentage is higher.

wall outlets in the UK are at twice the North American voltage and deliver correspondingly higher power. I’m reminded of this every time I’m visiting and put an electric kettle on, because it comes to a boil startlingly faster than I’m used to.