Craft Industry
My grandfather John William was a blacksmith, working in a small ironworks in Yorkshire, in the north of England. With his own hands he forged boilers that were exported all over the world, bringing steam power to drive ships and start industrial revolutions in remote places. He was not much concerned with science. He was a skilled craftsman, still working in the old tradition of craft industry that started the first industrial revolution in England a hundred years earlier. Meanwhile, his contemporary Andrew Carnegie moved from Scotland to Pittsburgh and built ironworks of a different kind. Big Steel supplanted craft workshops. By the time John William retired at the beginning of the 20th century, the old craft industries in the north of England were dying. In the next generation, young boys who wanted to get ahead did not become blacksmiths. Many of them, like my father, moved south and went to college.
And still, the human heritage that gave us tool-making hands and inquisitive brains did not die. In every human culture, the hand and brain work together to create the style that makes a civilization. In every civilization, the skilled artificer has an honored place beside the scribe and the shaman. Our own civilization is no exception. During the first half of the 20th century, as the young people of the next generation forgot the skills of my grandfather, they learned new skills and started new industries. They built radio transmitters and receivers, microscopes and telescopes, motor bicycles and flying machines. They bred hybrid corn and new varieties of flowers and fruit. Each of these industries grew out of small beginnings and flourished as a craft industry before evolving into large-scale organization and mass production. The early years of the century were the golden age of radio and of flying machines, when inventors could build with their own hands machines that would change the world.
As we moved into the second half of the...
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