Last week: The Grocer on Elm Street

The aisles of brightly colored packaging, the six gradations of organic, the thirty different breakfast cereals, professional branding, trial by focus group, career food scientists - these are new inventions in the scheme of Human events. As recently as the 1870s, the food industry didn’t exist. Just 150 years ago, most industries didn’t exist… but the bud of mass-produced food was already starting to unfold.

To be clear, the blossom didn’t come out of nowhere. It had been maturing for some time, evidenced by the fact that the mechanization of the 1800s wasn’t just restricted to the food supply. The invention of machines that could do what had always been deemed as human work was a radical reimagination of the landscape of what seemed normal, even possible. 

The changes of the industrial revolution, the period from roughly 1770-1920 redefined “normal” more completely than any other century since the invention of agriculture nearly 10,000 years before. In a little more than 150, our civilization went from exclusively being based on craft production, to being on the inescapable path towards mass production. 

This transition, though still lamented by luddites and the back-to-nature crowd, was inevitable. For all its artisanal charm, craft production was an annoyingly cumbersome process. Each manufactured item was completely unique, even when it wasn’t meant to be. As a recent article about “highly worked” beads as currency  suggests, making money from shells was beautiful and functional - but painstakingly difficult. 

So it’s no wonder, then, that business owners - the people looking to expand their financial security, to perhaps meet a need they’ve observed in society, to give order to the chaotic winds that emanate from so many of us - were more than happy to replace craft production with something more efficient, something that could help lower costs while also increasing the level of production to meet the demand of a skyrocketing global population, maybe? 

Widespread implementation of the technologies that have created today’s wonder-bread and lean-ham-with-smoke-flavoring landscape can be directly related to a single event in the history of machine building - the invention of the screw-cutting lathe at the end of the 1700s. Prior to this moment, not only was every single piece of a machine custom made, so was every single nut and bolt. 

These circumstances create a cascading repair problem. If one piece broke, it was impossible to make a cheap replacement. An artisan would have to be hired, one who could produce a perfect replica of the broken piece. These new lathes though, produced something previously unheard of - something even the most capable artisan couldn’t really do - interchangeable screws. From there, it was a short jump to low-cost machines that could easily be maintained for the lifetime of a factory enterprise.

“With a machine tool, toolpaths that no human muscle could constrain can be constrained; and toolpaths that are technically possible with freehand methods, but would require tremendous time and skill to execute, can instead be executed quickly and easily, even by people with little freehand talent (because the machine takes care of it). The latter aspect of machine tools is often referred to by historians of technology as "building the skill into the tool", in contrast to the toolpath-constraining skill being in the person who wields the tool. As an example, it is physically possible to make interchangeable screws, bolts, and nuts entirely with freehand toolpaths. But it is economically practical to make them only with machine tools.”  

- Machine Tools

With the invention of machines capable of making more machines, the recursive process of modern production was set in motion. It didn’t take over immediately - that would take another few hundred years - but the screw-cutting lathe sealed our mass-made fate.

It’s important to note that the screw cutting lathe didn’t come out of nowhere. Humans have been making complex things for a long time - almost 4,300 years if you take the pyramids to be “complex,” ~2300 years if you take something like the cothons of Carthage, or 800 years if you prefer musical automata, like those described in Ismail al-Jazari’s Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices.

One highlight is an automaton clock that: 

“included a display of the zodiac and the solar and lunar paths, and a pointer in the shape of the crescent moon which travelled across the top of a gateway, moved by a hidden cart and causing automatic doors to open, each revealing a mannequin, every hour.[4][5] It was possible to re-program the length of day and night daily in order to account for the changing lengths of day and night throughout the year, and it also featured five robotic musicians who automatically play music when moved by levers operated by a hidden camshaft attached to a water wheel. Other components of the castle clock included a main reservoir with a float, a float chamber and flow regulator, plate and valve trough, two pulleys, crescent disc displaying the zodiac, and two falcon automata dropping balls into vases.”

- History of Clock Towers, Al-Jazari’s Tower

Credit where credit is due for design skills, but it’s worth noting that he only built one! Sure, he invented lots of other magnificent contraptions - ones that could be programmed to play different kinds of music, a lamp with a self trimming wick, a rube-goldberg Elephant clock - but each was a masterful one-off, a marvel of engineering and artistry - with no intent to scale to an assembly line, or to global distribution ASAP.

For some reason, it took almost 500 years for this kind of ingenuity to be instrumentalized into the kind of mass-capitalism that was born during the industrial revolution - and if the screw lathe opened the door for mass production, that’s just half of today’s mess. The other half is power. No, not the Marxist kind. The steam kind.

There is no I in Steam

Humans have been playing with steam since at least the time of Roman Egypt, when Hero of Alexandria first made record of the aeolipile, a copper whirligig that spun when the water inside got hot enough to steam. As far as we can tell now, though, it was just a curiosity, the Roman equivalent of an 80’s executive in a corner office writing rhapsodically about the Newton’s cradle they just picked up from the Sharper Image. 

It took until the 1700s for humans to invent the steam engine, the first contraption that could actually get steam to *do* something. 

The first steam engines were rickety, inefficient. Their rudimentary design used valves that had to be opened and closed manually, rather than automatic pistons, which meant they were hard to operate. Operator error could cause the tanks to rupture, which meant they killed everyone around them more often than they moved mountains. They were also coal powered, and very inefficient, which meant they couldn’t really be used anywhere outside of coal mines where fuel was abundant, etc.

Only when a method was invented for producing perfectly bored steam engine cylinders, ones in which a piston could create a tight seal, did the bloom of mass production really open. 

Sure, there were further adjustments that still needed to be made - rotary power had to be developed, assembly lines invented, factories built to house them - but the fate of the countryside, of labor, and of our food supply was sealed. Consider the following:

Sixty eight years after Watt’s steam engine went into service in Staffordshire, the first telegraph was sent. Ninety years after, the first communications cable was laid between the US and Europe. Ninety-three years after, the first transcontinental railroad was established in the US. One hundred years after, the internal combustion engine was invented; the first phone call was made. One hundred and one years after, the phonograph was invented. One hundred and three years after, electricity was harnessed to do work - the same year as the invention of the first automobile. 

It was an astonishing century of progress, rivaled only by our own - but the effects weren’t just relegated to the material world. The creation of machine tools and steam power, rudimentary as they were at the turn of the 1800s, also stoked the fires of liberation. When it became possible to dream of a world where most work was done by machines - still only a glimmer of possibility on the horizon - it became also possible to dream of the end of slavery.

Prior to the invention of machines, there wasn’t space for a serious conversation about the morality of slavery, as whole civilizations were built on the back of this constant stream of free labor. Occasional figures in history mentioned that maybe, maybe! it was a bad idea on a moral level to keep other humans in captivity and treat them in the most horrific ways imaginable, but there was a tendency to accept that nothing could be done about it - monuments had to be built, water boiled, wheat harvested. 

The industrial revolution, though, changed the calculus. Factories filled with machines powered by a central steam engine could do more work in less time. The productivity of farms also exploded - one person with a combine harvesters could do the work of 80 men with a scythe. Suddenly, and even as farms needed fewer people, the food supply exploded. The old ways of living, which included social perception of the tolerability of slavery, evaporated. With less work in the countryside, and less land to go around with each generation, the people abandoned what they knew and flowed into the cities. As they followed the winds of fortune, the titans of industry pressed on the gas pedal of progress. Britain abolished slavery in 1833, the United States followed in 1865. Around the turn of the last century, the year 1900, the word “slave” started to slowly fade from the cultural lexicon, just as the age of the worker begins.

Next Week: A Store is Born

Last week: The Grocer on Elm Street