In this episode we explore the challenge of maintaining seemingly-outdated skills that we may need again
I spent part of last weekend down at the Lost Trades fair down in Bendigo, a few miles from here, wandering around all the stalls with artisans doing blacksmithing, armour, chairmaking, bookbinding, toolmaking, fabrics, guitars, all that kind of stuff, almost all of it all handmade. Fascinating; passionate; often strikingly beautiful.
And then I came across this:
It’s a buggy-whip. Literally, a whip for use whilst driving a horse-drawn buggy. That iconic item that was supposedly made redundant by the arrival of the Ford Model T in 1908, and, we’re told, lead to the elimination of an entire industry of buggy-whip makers who’d been committed to making them.
Except, as we can see above, that industry is not entirely gone; and the skills needed to make the buggy-whip are still alive. Sort-of, anyway: the glimmer of its existence is still there, at least.
But what about other skills that really are entirely gone? And what happens if we need to recreate those skills? In particular, what happens if we need to recreate them in a hurry, at large scale? There’s the potential for some interesting challenges there, quietly hiding away in the background…
I saw a real example of the first part of that challenge in action at the Lost Trades fair. There was a middle-aged couple who were doing a demonstration of some kind of horse-driven machinery. I didn’t take a photograph of it, unfortunately, but there were four long poles in a cross-layout around a central hub, each of the poles about ten or twelve feet long, set horizontally at around waist-height. At the base of the hub there was a pair of gears that drove a much longer pole, lying just above the ground, which turned a belt-drive that was then connected to whatever bit of machinery they wanted to drive - in this case, a small chaff-cutter, but it could have been any of the other small bits of farm-machinery they had lying around there. It sounds complicated, I suppose, but mechanically it was very simple: it’s actually just turning horizontal rotary motion in one place into faster vertical rotary motion in another place. And the power for that horizontal rotary motion came from a horse attached by a harness to one of those four horizontal poles; if you wanted more power, you could just attach more horses to the other poles.
By the look of it, it had been made around 1900 or so, perhaps a bit later, and would have been a standard piece of farm machinery even up until about eighty years ago, because it would have been cheap, simple, useful and easy to set up. It would have been great on some smaller farm that already had a horse or two and either couldn’t afford a gas-motor, or couldn’t get the fuel for one, or needed to set it up somewhere just too far away from where a motor and its fuel would have been feasible. (Here in Australia, ‘small farm’ is only a relative term, of course, and actual distances and areas can be big.)
The ‘lost skill’ bit was about handling the horses. As the demonstrators explained, horses like to go in a straight line - they’re not used to going round and round in small circles, which was what was needed here. If the horse did go off in a straight line, they would probably pull that central hub out of the ground, wrecking it; and the whole thing became a lot more complicated if you added more horses. So it took some careful handling to get the horses to do it right, and and keep on doing right for hours on end.
And that was a real skill that, as the demonstrators explained, they not only didn’t know how to do, at the start, but also couldn’t find anyone who could teach them how to it - because the skill had died out by then, in an all too literal sense. And whilst the machine had survived intact, the special harness for the horses hadn’t - and without that, it was hard to keep the horses in check, and keep them on the right track. So even though all of the skills and harnesses and more would have still been easily available perhaps as recently as just a generation ago, the demonstrators had instead had to work it all out for themselves, from scratch, through lots and lots of guesswork, trial and error. And it took them years to do it, and to get it right. Recreating lost skills can be really expensive, in a lot of different ways…
But why does this matter, you might ask? Who cares, other than those crazy historical re-enactor folks?
Well, just take a look around at just how much we take for granted now, in these days of easy automation and the like. And then take a careful think about how fragile the whole system is, and how easily some key parts of that system could break down, without warning, at any moment.
For example, consider a Carrington Event, a geomagnetic-storm from a solar flare: small ones occur quite often, and can cause a fair bit of damage even at that scale. But a big one, anything at or above the scale of the original Carrington Event back in 1859, could well wipe out almost all electronics in that region in a single day - and could hit us at literally any moment now, with very little warning at all.
Or, given that these days almost all high-quality electronics in the world comes from just one small region in one small country - Taiwan - consider all of the knock-on effects if anything were to go wrong there. Or think about all the machinery and solar-panels and everything else that’s being made in China these days, much of it no longer made anywhere else: consider what would happen if all shipping stopped from there, or became blocked in some more permanent way.
Consider, too, how so many skills have been lost to automation over the years, and how much we rely upon that automation now. Then note how easy it is to forget that that automation can still only handle the simpler parts of a system, and hence that we still need human skills to take over in the more complex parts of the system that the machines can’t address. Skills that have now often become lost because of our over-reliance on that automation.
And take a look around now at all the myriad of other ways in which some essential part of our everyday system could break down - and how fast it could break down, too.
So yeah, our everyday system is a lot more fragile than it looks…
Which brings us back to the second part of that challenge above. The first part was about what skills we would need to recreate, if the automation stopped working, if the electronics failed, or if almost any other part of that system broke down. That’s a hard enough challenge right there on its own.
But the second part is about doing all of that at scale, and fast - not just to replace all of those broken parts of the system, but do it fast enough, and at large enough scale, to keep us all alive. That’s where the real challenge lies…
And perhaps the best way to do that is to make sure that those skills don’t become lost in the first place. To make sure that no matter how redundant they might seem in the present, they’re properly identified, properly maintained, properly recorded and all that. Which is why events like the Lost Trades fair are so important, because they help to maintain the purpose, the principles, and above all the practice of those lost skills, and pass them on from one generation to the next, ready for the time when we will need them all again.
Tom, you mentioned " Oh well, we do what we can, yes?" this is a very important aspect, and the reason why your posts are so critical in getting these messages out.
Thank you for your efforts to raise awareness.
Hi Tom,
The re-integration of Taiwan into mainland China has the potential to become a disaster for the western world mobile and computer industries. Supply chains could potentially disappear overnight with devastating impact. We also now have the learn, unlearn, relearn fraternity who would like us to believe that anything that does not benefit their agenda should be erased from memory.
Replacing skills lost can potentially take decades and the ability to produce these skills at pace are being impacted by the retirement of baby-boomers who were the final bastion of these relative skills.
The American commercial machine will need to take responsibility for a large swathe of organizations demise to feed the capitalist agenda.
Trades will always be a major differentiator that remains resilient to this trend.