Hey all,
New here (avid L1N /Links With Friends listener). Might be the wrong category, didn’t know where to place it.
I remember an anecdotal story that supposedly happened in the distant past (1980s?) about a semicon(?) factory relocating an (elevated) highway to improve their manufacturing process or increase the size of their plant.
Does anybody know any actual details of this? The end goal is a source to reference but I’m happy to get any pointers to go onwards with my quest.
From memory it involved IBM and happened somewhere in the 1980s around New York but I could be way off. Tried searching for it but couldn’t find anything. I think I heard Wendell or Ryan reference it once or twice over the years in L1News but honestly, it’s all fuzzy, and going over years of footage for a possibility isn’t really feasible.
I think it was more recent than the 80s, maybe not though… It was at ibms research fab in Albany, the nanotech complex, I was there. They use part of what used to be the stretch of highway through their campus as a parking lot now.
It was the I-90 that ran straight through what is now indeed one of the NanoTech parking lots. Although if you visit somewhere in the future you might be surprised to see another IBM NanoFAB building, either being built or already there, partially where the large parking lot is/was. The highway rehabilitation was done in 2003 from what I can tell as the NanoTech building opened in 2004 and the difference can be neatly seen at andyarthur org/wms-map-northway-and-thruway-interchange-before-reconfiguration html
Anyway, all that for a small remark in a lecture on precision manufacturing that ASML here in The Netherlands have certain low frequency vibrations from the nearby highway that they’re either noticing or dealing with, even though we’re not running an actual fab. Then your story popped in my head that IBM would just move that highway all together! Turns out, kinda true
This reminds me of a story elsewhere: at one point early in the 1920’s the Dutch University town of Leiden was upgrading (expanding) the local tramway for electric traction. The proposed route was planned over a street called “Steenschuur”, not far from a laboratory of a certain Prof. Kamerlingh Onnes, who promptly protested as his research would be strongly affected by stray currents coming from the electric tramway. Kamerlingh Onnes is widely regarded as the Godfather of Superconductivity, culminating in the 1913 Nobel Price for Physics.
The tramway was subsequently rerouted to a new street, the “Korevaarstraat”, closing (bustituted) in 1961. The streets still remain, the lab has been expanded since opening in 1904, now carrying the name of its founder.
