Stewart Brand on How Progress Happens

In 1968, Stewart Brand, a young hippie who had studied biology astatine Stanford, co-created the Whole Earth Catalog, a “do-everything-yourself compendium” that became a touchstone for some Bay Area counterculture and, eventually, Silicon Valley technologists. “Maintenance: Of Everything,” his caller book, is simply a benignant of spiritual descendant of the Catalog—a solemnisation of the signifier of learning however things enactment and however to hole them. In the book, the archetypal successful a planned series, Brand argues that attraction should beryllium seen not arsenic an “unrewarding chore” but arsenic an indispensable operator of technological and technological progress. Not agelong ago, helium joined america to sermon a fewer books that helium drew on. His remarks person been edited and condensed.

The Perfectionists

by Simon Winchester

One of the things that made it truthful amusive to probe my publication was the mode that it kept starring maine to absorbing digressions. One of those digressions was the past of interchangeable parts, which I embarked upon erstwhile I was penning astir vehicles, and specifically astir Henry Ford’s Model T—an eminently maintainable car, whose manufacture depended connected its parts being genuinely interchangeable.

It turns retired that the communicative of interchangeable parts is tied up with subject innovation. In the precocious eighteenth century, English and French engineers had invented caller ways of casting cannons that made them much azygous and much accurate. Applying that method to James Watt’s steam engines made them businesslike for the archetypal time. The Industrial Revolution took disconnected from there. Then the French started to standardize their muskets. At that time, muskets were each made by gunsmiths, and the parts of 1 couldn’t acceptable another—if a soldier’s firearm broke connected the battlefield, helium couldn’t hole it himself. A French gunsmith named Honoré Blanc devised a mode to marque each portion of a weapon to a modular model. When Thomas Jefferson, who served arsenic the curate to France aft the Revolutionary War, saw the interchangeable parts being deployed there, helium became a promoter of them. That went connected to power the mode that manufactured products were made successful the U.S., and helped the state instrumentality the pb successful the Industrial Revolution.

Winchester’s publication truly shows however precision helps to thrust progress. For Watt, a tolerance of one-tenth of an inch made his steam engines efficient. In Ford’s day, engineers and manufacturers could beryllium precise astatine the level of a millionth of an inch. Today, spot fabricators person gotten things down to 5 nanometres. And, arsenic the saying goes, a nanometre is to a tennis shot arsenic a tennis shot is to the full earth.

The Scottish Enlightenment

by Arthur Herman

At different constituent successful my probe for the book, I was looking astatine aboriginal versions of what mightiness beryllium called “manuals,” similar Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which consists of hundreds of gorgeous illustrations and descriptions of however each the trades successful France of that clip worked. It’s a existent show of the dignity of what we’d telephone blue-collar skills, and it shows however overmuch was owed to them. Diderot was fierce astir that, but with the extremity of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie wholly fell away.