that almost was....
When I was in college, I walked into the engineering library one day, and made a rather startling observation. One section of the library had bound periodicals, by year. One of these was some sort of journal on nuclear power.
I forget what year this journal started, but it was very early (1950 something) and the binding started out reasonably thick. In it were research articles, proposals for reactor designs, proposals for studies for commercial plants.
The bindings from the 60’s were very thick. In fact, the thickness of each binding increased with the years. These contained, sandwiched in between articles and papers, companies on top of companies advertising their products and services. Construction firms. Robotic waldo firms (complete with cheesy 60’s robot pictures). Waste handling firms. Automated controls firms. Engineering consultants. Processing plants. All with the intention of serving the booming industry which promised to provide clean abundant power from this new source of energy.
In 1970 the first Earth Day was hosted.
This is about where the bindings started shrinking.
In 1979, the China Syndrome came out. The three mile island incident also occurred that year. (Though the problem was handled just fine, no radioactives leaked, and the reactor still provides power today.)
This just about ended it. The resultant wave of regulation made sure that any future use of the technology would be too costly to be competitive. Over the course of the next few years, the types of advertisements in the books began to shift. The companies now advertised were risk mitigation firms, risk analysis firms, law firms offering to navigate the government requirements.
In the late 1980’s where the bindings became so thin that they only contained an issue or so, the only things being advertised were law firms offering protection from legal assault, and decommissioning firms offering to figure out how much it would cost to take down the reactors.
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While I doubt these publications will be made from dead trees much longer, I expect they will get "fatter" again, in KB anyway. I just wonder what language they'll be written in (French and Chinese come to mind).
In a similar way, for years the government statisticians (Bureau of Labor Statistics or whatever they call it now) would measure the thickness/size of help-wanted ads in newspapers.
A few years ago, with the advent of Monster, CareerBuilder, etc., employers started shifting away from print ads, and for a while it was messing up the unemployment and economic outlook stats!
Of course there's other kinds of measurements like this, and I wonder, for example, if there's still some aero plants here in the U.S. where you're not allowed to count cars in the parking lot ...
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