Flat, Innit?

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Following on from yesterday's post on tools and toolmaking, this popped into my notifications this morning. It's a natural extension of the basic point I made in 'Sticks & Stones': all measurement and following that, all technology stems from some very basic principles. I recommend watching the video: it's a half-hour well spent.

Flatness, circular accuracy and following from them angular and dimensional accuracy;  are in turn derived from the very basics of grinding and turning materials, which are in turn derived from hitting and scraping things; both of which are the simplest and oldest hand processes we have. From these, simple machines can be derived to enhance the degree of accuracy that can be achieved by those fundamental processes, which leads to making devices with finer degrees of precision and so on.

All those subjects now considered so old-fashioned and somehow out of touch with the modern world; paling beneath the umbra of the classics and PPE, accountancy and commerce; and considered somehow rather vulgar and proletarian: trigonometry, mechanics, metrology and engineering: the very basics that got the bean-counters and the stock-market jockeys, the landed gentry and their entitled offspring into the position they believe to have been granted to them by God Almighty. Not so: standing on the shoulders of Giants is not equivalent to grinding the Not-You under foot and squeezing cash out of them. Push comes to shove, I'll stick with the person with dirty hands; a cut-glass accent and a second-rate degree will get you nowhere when the shit hits the fan. You can't eat money and there's no commerce without engineering.


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