Economically speaking, it's been a grim year. Few industries have escaped the repercussions of the downturn, and ours—metal manufacturing—is among the hardest hit. It was under a heavy cloud of concern that a stressed, worried industry came together at the 2009 FABTECH® International & AWS Welding Show, including METALFORM earlier this week. Exhibitors wondered if attendees would come.

Would companies that are making drastic cutbacks spring for the cost of sending people to the show? Would those who came buy?

They came, they saw, and they bought. (TRUMPF sold four machines the first day.) FABTECH 2009 exceeded exhibitors'—and editors'—expectations.

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On a flight to a manufacturing event last week, I read an article in BusinessWeek that got me pretty down. The headline on the magazine cover screamed, "America's Manufacturing Crisis." The topic: Why stuff's invented stateside and sent abroad for manufacturing.

"While the Japanese, Koreans, Taiwanese, and Chinese plowed billions into megaplants to churn out commodity products, America steamed ahead in more lucrative pursuits, such as software, life sciences, and financial services," the article stated. "As for companies such as Dell and Apple, they could still reap high profits by focusing on marketing and design while letting offshore contractors handle the grunge work."

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I was browsing the news recently when an article about Dean Kamen jumped out at me. You might know him as the founder of FIRST, president of DEKA Research & Development, inventor of the Segway® PT , holder of numerous patents, or one of the keynote speakers at the 2008 FABTECH® Intl. & AWS Welding Show. FIRST (For Inspiration and Recognition of Science and Technology) is aimed at getting young people interested in acquiring 21st-century skills and knowledge; DEKA is a research and design firm that employs more than 200 engineers in various disciplines; and the inventions and patents are proof that he's the real McCoy. With a resume like that, you might think he's trying to save manufacturing singlehandedly. He seems to specialize in motion. In addition to the Segway personal transporter, he has developed an all-terrain wheelchair, continues work on an advanced prosthetic arm, and uses FIRST to promote the development of robots through FIRST Robotics Competitions. His latest invention is much more modest. It concerns plain old water.

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The financial wizards are at it again, and this time they're not betting whether you'll default on your mortgage. They're betting on your life.

The financial folks on Wall Street, as always, are looking for certainty and to curtail risk. At one point, mortgages seemed to be a sure thing. People need a roof over their heads, and home prices have always gone up at least somewhere in the country, so if you securitize—that is, package various mortgages for people of varying financial health and geography—you mitigate risk. We all know that logic didn't pan out.

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This country seems to be itching for the next big thing, those game-changing innovations that drag us out of our economic malaise. General Electric Co. CEO Jeffrey Immelt knows this, and it's why his company announced a $100 million investment in an R&D center 25 miles west of Detroit. As the AP reported over the weekend, the center will employ about 1,200 engineers and scientists.

It's been awhile since we've seen true game-changing innovations out there. The last real innovation came with the personal computer and the dot-com era that ensued. During the past decade we've had "financial innovations," and we all know where those led. I equate these complex financial instruments to fancy motor oil. You need oil for an engine to run, and good oil may make a good engine run even better. But if we have a poorly designed engine, it doesn't matter how good the oil is; the thing eventually just will fall apart.

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The R&D tax credit. Although it’s just a six-syllable phrase, it might strike more fear in the hearts of fabricators than any other phrase, including “the shipment is late” or “the customer is demanding a refund.” Heck, it’s probably worse than hearing a spouse say, “My mother is coming to visit.”

“Research and development” sounds like the domain of people with Ph.D.s, wearing white lab coats, developing new pharmaceuticals, or toiling away in clean rooms, working up fancy new computer chips. And then we have “tax credit.” You can’t get around the image that conjures up: the inescapable maze formally known as the U.S. tax code, written by Congress, deployed by the Internal Revenue Service, and reinforced by the long arm of the law if you don’t comply.

But it’s really not that bad.

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Journalists, economists, and pundits of all sorts have turned to cautious optimism. Sure, stocks are up from their lows earlier this year, and the numbers out there indicate we're past the recession's trough and on our way up. As just one example, the Institute for Supply Management's bellwether monthly report on manufacturing indicated that the organization’s New Orders Index rose in May for the first time since November 2007.

Last week The Economist even put together an 18-page report on why America may emerge from the slump better than other economies, despite our broken health care system and other faults. In fact, some of the greatest firms were born during economic doldrums, including Microsoft and Apple. Downturns in America, the article said, lead to healthy, though brutal, creative destruction. Weak firms have no choice but to lay off talent, who in turn are snapped up by stronger firms. If those firms can continue to sell products during bad times, when consumers are choosy, they will only grow stronger during booms.

Great—so everything's cool, right? Well, not so fast.

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In past posts, I've mentioned that I'm a tennis fan. The last few days have been quite exciting in the tennis world as No.-1 ranked, four-time French Open champ, Rafael Nadal, was defeated in the fourth round by No. 23-ranked Robin Soderling, a Swedish player who never won so much as a third-round match at a major tournament before beating Nadal. Soderling went on to thrash Nikolay Davydenko and is now in the semifinals.

I've watched these matches on the Tennis Channel (replays in the evening, Dan), which, like most channels, runs commercials. Many are for stores selling tennis apparel or exotic locales where you can play tennis to your heart's content. However, one commercial that declares "humans are smarter than apes" has captured my attention and made me laugh on more than one occasion. It also made me wonder how much smarter we really are, especially when I recently read about a relatively complex chimp-made toolkit.

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Scanning news releases yesterday, I quickly passed over those with headlines that reminded me that this is not the best of times economically—there was no shortage. Ditto for the political surveys predicting the unqualified success or the unmitigated failure of potential congressional actions. I simply was not up for gloom and doom or political hype from biased entities.

What finally caught my undivided attention was an item about Lockheed Martin's Advanced Technology Laboratories (ATL) and the latest in computer research and technology. If you were around when computers first were introduced, you might recall the fear that computers would replace humans in the workplace and possibly overtake mankind. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration, although HAL 9000 gave us food for thought.

It's true that computer technology has replaced some workers, but computers have a long way to go before they can truly mimic human reasoning—a necessary part of many successful endeavors—or do they?

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