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Friends, In my note to Karel, I was imprecise in my use of the terms casting and milling. I should have been more careful in my usage. We cast type (or did), we cut dies, and we mill many kinds of machine parts. We use dies and molds for casting, and we use jigs for milling. Imprecision aside, I hope the principles in my note are clear. The techniques and methods of industry changed over time. Some kinds of mass production or mass craft production go back thousands of years, and factories made those artifacts. The pin factory that Adam Smith describes in The Wealth of Nations represents division of labor in a way that leads to the logic of the assembly line. The modern Henry Ford assembly line represents a new kind of scale, just as the Rouge represented a new kind of scope. It led to the human ills that Charlie Chaplin represented in modern times, and it shaped the foundation of a new kind of world that brought good as well as bad. Ford's goal in life was to get people off the farm and to free them from the drudgery of life in the primary sector of the economy. The primary sector -- farming, fishing, forestry, basic minerals extraction -- employed over 90% of the developed world's workers at the end of the 1800s. Today, at the start of the 2100s, they employ fewer than 10% of the workers in OECD nations. There is good news here as well as bad, for anyone who ever worked on a farm in the era before industrialization. But that's a post for another day. What got people off the farm was the kind of technology that required interchangeable parts of mass-produced machinery. This only began in the 1800s. Many technologies began far earlier that we commonly realize. Robert Hooke provided the first technical description of a working telegraph in the 1680s. In the 1670s, Father Ferdinand Verbiest, a Belgian missionary in China, built a working steam-powered trolley and some sources suggest that he built a working steam-powered automobile. Hooke's telegraph was far removed from the modern telegraph with Edison's repeater that has now been replaced by still more advanced systems in the Internet and satellite era. Verbiest's automobile was to today's automobile what the 3-toed Eocene horse was to a modern horse. For that matter, early modern auto manufacturing was 3-toed compared with the Toyota Production System. These are the things I'm struggling with. But I want to say again that Karel's point was well taken -- all these issues evolve from human design activity over time, and none of these processes emerged full-blown in recent years. On the confusion of casting, cutting, milling, please forgive a post written swiftly while I think and work on something else. Yours, Ken -- Prof. Ken Friedman Institute for Communication, Culture, and Language Norwegian School of Management Oslo Center for Design Research Denmark's Design School Copenhagen +47 46.41.06.76 Tlf NSM +47 33.40.10.95 Tlf Privat email: [log in to unmask]