There's an urban legend, spread by the internet and an old The West Wing episode, with a moral about simplicity versus complexity.
Supposedly, in the 1960s, NASA realized they didn't have a pen that could write in zero gravity. So millions were spent to design a space pen for the Apollo astronauts.
The Soviets used pencils. Sadly, the real story is almost exactly the reverse.
Early Mercury astronauts did use pencils in orbit, as did the Russian cosmonauts. But bits of graphite broke off and floated around the confines of a cabin, and the graphite and pencils could burn - a serious concern after the deaths of three men in the Apollo 1 fire.
So an independently developed pen was purchased, for $2.39 per pen. Pricey, by 1960s standards, but not that bad.
And the Soviets? They signed a contract with the same American company a year later, and got the same bulk discount that NASA did.
The real story is far more fascinating, because it forces us to think about the complexities of a seemingly simple issue. I would not have imagined that a pencil could be a hazard on a space capsule, but if a speck of graphite shorted out a critical system, it could be lethal.
So score one for complexity and technological superiority.
Even the stories where cheap and simple really did beat high tech and expensive turn out to be complicated.
To return to the Russians, (masters of the brutally simple mechanism) they created a relatively brutish machine that confounded their enemies: the T-34 tank.
The T-34 was created just before Nazi Germany foolishly decided to invade Russia. Hitler, who loved high-powered tanks, supported projects like the Tiger and Panther, powerful tanks that could blow apart just about anything else on the battlefield.
If they weren't broken down, that is.
With their water-cooled engines and thousands of moving parts, the Tigers had a tendency to spend a lot of time under repair. The T-34s, on the other hand, were rugged and simple, designed so that a half-literate collective farm worker could figure out how to drive and repair one. Even more importantly, they were cheap to build. The Soviets followed the same credo as modern spam emailers: send a few thousand, some of them will get through.
But- in the early years of the war, German tanks killed a lot of Russian tanks. The Russian crews were badly trained. They had no radios. Stalin had spent a decade purging the Red Army, and as a side effect almost everyone in Russia who understood tank warfare had been shot, or starved to death in Siberia.
The Russians had a steep learning curve before their cheap, reliable tanks were actually useful.
We face these questions about complexity, simplicity and cost on a constant basis today, so there are lessons to be learned from both the space pen and the T-34.
If you're designing a public transportation system, do you want it to be high tech and appealing to drivers? Then you want a light rail or SkyTrain system. But what if you want to change the system's capacity rapidly, and build on the cheap? Then you want more buses. What about the F-35 fighter jets, versus unmanned drones?
Build a wider, tolled highway bridge, or subsidize high-speed internet so people can work from home.
Of course, each choice has its own problems and quirks that can't be found in the up front costs.
The simple alternative isn't always simpler, the best isn't always better, and the most expensive option might save in the long run.
Visit Matthew Claxton's blog at http: //tinyurl.com/ 7mwo2qj and www.langleyadvance.com.
