In With the Old, In With the New

While cleaning my den recently I came across this old wood plane, purchased for a pittance on a tool auction years ago, and now used in my den as a decoration.  Looking at it, I wondered how many previous owners had also handled this tool?  How had they used it?  Had it also been a decoration for them, or was it a tool used every day?  Had it been used in a cabinetmaker’s shop?  In a coffin maker’s shop?  Had it been a trusted tool handed down from father to an apprenticing son?  Had it been replaced by a shiny new power tool?  If so, did technology trump artistic and aesthetic form?

This last question stuck in my head.  It seems that everything is now faster, more instant, electronic.  Everything now has powder coating, plastic handles, and power cords.  We don’t stop, though, at electric power alone.  Some tools now even come with lasers to aid in sighting the cut line.

Living in an analog world is now frowned upon.  We see it in so many ways.

For instance, my family is preparing several of my grandmother’s possessions for sale at auction, as she downsizes from a five bedroom home to a small apartment.  One of the numerous intriguing items I’ve come across is an old Victrola record player, which must be cranked before the music is played from the thick, waxy records.  As I look at it and the records, I wonder if any of these songs are available in my favorite online music store?  Will the next generation of music lovers ever know these songs or the somewhat tinny sound of the giant conical speaker when they plug in their “ear buds”?  With my mp3 player and the hundreds of songs it holds and plays at my demand, I wonder how high would a stack of old 45s be if I had all of those songs in that format?

Looking through a different lens, I’m a chemist by trade and training.  For over seven years I’ve had the privilege of working for a small company dedicated to preserving Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), an holistic system of medicine at risk of becoming a lost art, were it not for a few dedicated souls working diligently to preserve it, not the least of which is my boss.  We utilize high technology in our laboratory to determine the quality of our raw materials and finished products, and we also utilize arguably low-tech manufacturing practices, in order to replicate the traditional processing techniques used for generations in the Chinese medicine system.  All of this stands in stark contrast to our modern western system of medicine, where we typically seek instant relief of our symptoms but sometimes forget to treat the cause.  It all forms an interesting mix of centuries-old  tradition and appropriate technology, and the whole thing is run by a guy I like and respect.

Of course, nowhere is the change from manual to power, analog to digital, more evident than in the field of photography.  There are entire companies built on the digital photography industry, and entire companies shifting from film to digital.  Likewise, entire industries are now needing to retool if they are to survive this transition.  Kodachrome film, for instance, is being phased out, prompting many who celebrate film photography to remove their hat and pay their respects to a film widely recognized for its superiority, but soon to be a nostalgic touch point from a bygone era as we move to digital image acquisition, processing and display.  Even the image at the top of this post, my old wood plane, has never seen print, going directly from an electronic image sensor to solid state memory to a server and now to your monitor.

And speaking of that wood plane in the image, has it been replaced with a shiny new power tool?  How has woodworking changed?  In many ways it has changed greatly, and in other ways, not at all.  In the era of CNC lathes and power drills, there are still folks like Robby Pedersen, who runs a working museum that builds furniture using techniques from the 1800s.  My mother, a tour guide, told me about him after one of her contacts in the tourism industry presented her with some literature.  And then there is Roy Underhill, who just published a new book on woodworking, starting from the beginning, in the forest felling  a tree.  For more on planes, especially hand planes, made the old fashioned way, check out Philly Planes, a british maker of planes that seem more like art pieces than tools.

All of these examples demonstrate someone exerting a resistive force, standing up for something of value against a rising tide of change.  In most of these cases, we see a blending of new and old techniques, while many around us would urge abandoning the latter.  Do you know of something worth preserving, something worth standing up for against a rising tide of change?  Click the comments link, under the post title, to the right, and tell it!