Blog: Looking Forward from the Past

Science and technology journalism has a relentless focus on the future—near, far, and every timescale in between. As a journalist and editor in chief of Mechanical Engineering, I’m always on the lookout for actual developments (as opposed to theoretical hypotheticals) that could have large implications down the road. If journalism is a first draft of history, technology journalism of this sort is more of a rough planning outline, subject to major revisions.

I’ve been thinking about my time here at ASME and Mechanical Engineering and some of my favorite articles over my nearly 23 years on staff. I’m particularly interested in some of the older articles to see how well they stand up.

For instance, the first feature article I wrote for ME was “Winding Up” in January 2003. It started off:

Jacob Stone drove up a gravel lane on his family’s farm in Madison, N.Y., with one buck already in the bed of his pickup. But on that chilly November afternoon, the snow-covered corn stubble of the Stone farm wasn’t just a hunting ground; it was also a power plant. Looming 220 feet overhead, seven wind turbines were spinning a dozen times a minute, making a gentle whir every time a blade passed by.

Times have been hard for farmers in upstate New York, and royalties from the electricity harvested by the turbines “weren’t making us millionaires,” Stone said. “But the money helps keep the farm going.”

This piece wound up being a snapshot of the earliest years of the wind power boom. The installed wind power for the United States was only 4,265 MW. Today, the installed capacity in the U.S. is 147,500 MW, and a single facility, the SunZia wind farm under construction in New Mexico, will have a capacity of 3,500 MW when it’s completed next year.

While the question of whether wind power would take off was still open in 2003, some things haven’t changed. For instance, experts complained about a sporadic public and political support for wind power as a factor hampering its development.

The crystal ball was a bit hazier when I wrote about plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles in July 2006. In the article, “Juiced Up” (and, uh, these headlines are not great), I talked with hobbyists who were converting their standard-issue Priuses to plug-ins by installing their own extra-sized battery packs, electronics, and a socket. The idea was that if standard electric vehicles weren’t going to catch on—and in 2006, there was no reason to believe they would—then plug-in hybrids would be the next best thing.

Some of the activities I reported on, such as doing a conversion in front of a crowd at the hobbyist Maker Faire, were stunts to raise awareness. But I thought the business case for plug-in hybrids was sound, which makes it odd to sit here in 2025 and see so many battery-only EVs for sale. The market impulse was to jump directly to electrics, though traditional, non-hybrid cars still make up most of the sales.

For a real miss, though, I have to go to my article on solar-thermal power. “The Sunshine Solution” in December 2008 covered the opening of a factory to build large, mirrored panels for Ausra, a company pioneering a thermal collector system using Fresnel reflectors rather than single-piece mirrors. The factory was in Las Vegas, which was fitting considering how scorching it was the July weekend I visited. 

The business case for Ausra was a supposed sure thing, unlike the wild gambles that Vegas is famous for: Photovoltaic materials are expensive, while corrugated steel and thin glass was cheap enough to cover the desert for square miles at a time. What’s more, the efficiency of heat engines at the time was higher than that of photovoltaic panels, so you could extract more power from the same incident sunlight. And there was no need for clean-room precision in the manufacturing:

As futuristic as the idea of solar energy may seem, there’s something reassuringly old-fashioned about the factory itself. Steel and glass are stacked along the walls. Forklifts hum over the poured concrete floor. Unlike so many places that make the bits and pieces of the “future”—biotech materials and silicon wafers and computer algorithms—everything was so solid and human-scale that a naive observer could understand how all the pieces were fitting together.

Ausra and other companies that bet on solar thermal power were anticipating that photovoltaics would stay expensive forever. No one could foresee that PVs would get so cheap, so quickly; one recent account I saw suggests farmers in some places are using PV panels for enclosures because they are nearly as inexpensive as traditional fence materials. Ausra itself was acquired by the French nuclear company Areva, and by 2014, the company was shut down entirely.

One story that has stuck with me over the years was “For Keeps,” which is less about a new technology and more about a new way of seeing the manufactured world. I had seen engineer and inventor Saul Griffith speak at a conference called Greener Gadgets 2009, and he was electric, explaining that one of the causes of our increasing energy consumption in manufacturing is the decreasing lifespan of manufactured products. 

“The business plan for the next century should be to take every object you sell,” he said, “and figure out how to give the service of that object to the consumer with one-tenth the power. It’s going to be challenging, but it’s the business model that’s going to win.”

Griffith’s talk explained how he reexamined his own life to see how he could not only cut out disposable goods and energy-wasting services (like international travel) but also purchase high-quality objects such as mechanical watches intended to last a lifetime and build furniture from sturdy boards that could be passed down eventually to his then-infant son. 

Griffith’s example inspired me: I built—from boards using only unpowered hand tools—the bed my daughter sleeps in to this day. But that moment, a time when it felt that there were responses to climate change that could make for deeper connections and a more meaningful material world, feels like a million miles away.

A few months later, in December 2009, I wrote another article that looked at technology abstractly. In “S Marks the Spot,” I spoke to NYU economist Melissa Schilling about her analysis of the performance of various electricity-producing technologies, specifically wind, solar, geothermal, and fossil fuels. Using a methodology other economists have employed to examine industries, Schilling analyzed the performance of electric power technologies against the amount of money invested in developing them and plotted the data on an S-shaped curve that could help suggest which technologies have the most potential for future growth. Wind and geothermal looked to provide the best return on additional investment, while fossil fuels seemed like a dead end. 

What I love about this story looking at it from 2025 is that it got many things right, but one thing very wrong. Wind has been getting cheaper, and the cost of coal and gas power is dominated almost entirely by the cost of fuel. But the big miss was in the analysis of solar power: It had progressed so slowly over the preceding 40 years that the S-curve analysis couldn’t support any hope of a breakthrough. But as I mentioned above, photovoltaics have progressed in leaps and bounds over the past 15 years and today provide the cheapest electricity almost everywhere. It’s a revolution that almost everyone missed.

Finally, I want to put the spotlight on a story about a boat:

A child can draw a sailboat. It’s pointy in front and rounded along the sides, with a mast that holds tight to a billowing sail. An adult might add some other features—additional sails, say, or lines that allow for hoisting and adjusting of the sheets—but the gist of the technology can be sketched out in crayon.

To push sail technology to the extremes of performance requires disregarding the child’s eye view of a sailboat. 

That’s how I began the August 2013 article, “Flying Boat,” about the fastest sailboat yet to be built, and the strange design that made it possible. The origin story of SailRocket II involves an obscure book written by a government weapons designer in 1963. To hear Malcolm Barnsley, the naval architect behind SailRocket, talk about the book made it feel as if it were something mystical. 

So, I had the New York Public Library order The 40-Knot Sailboat for me. And, yeah, it was an amazing vision. Author Bernard Smith sketched out a design for a sailboat where a wing on one end tries to lift the boat out of the water, while a reversed hydrofoil on the other end keeps the boat from taking flight. Barnsley was able to adapt that vision into a boat that raced to 78 miles per hour.

To my knowledge, nothing else like SailRocket has ever been built. But some of the concepts, such as wing sails and lifting the hull out of the water, are now standard features in world-class sailing, such as the America’s Cup. 

In the years ahead, I know that ASME.org and Mechanical Engineering will continue to provide incredible stories of an exciting future that’s ready to unfold. And maybe a few of those futures will actually come to pass.

Jeffrey Winters has been editor in chief of Mechanical Engineering since July 2020. He retires in August 2025.