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Edison's repeater that has now been replaced by still more advanced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
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