I think that's a little overblown. It's true in the strict sense that general purpose manufacturing capacity was more common and the production of many goods was more distributed, but on the other hand that manufacturing capacity would have been very limited in capacity and scalability. I'm not convinced it would actually make a big difference in practice.
Actually I was thinking more about scale than about absolute impossibility: simple things like emergency hospital beds and the like, a modern city could still make them at artisanal scale, but not in volume like they could back then. All those amazing efficiency gains we have from flatpacks, automation and specialisation come at the cost of reduced flexibility.
There is still plenty of ability though. I have a table saw in my garage, If I'm needed to stop my computer job I can make a couple jigs and turn out bed rails, someone else in my town can turn out legs, (repeat for a lot of other parts), then the whole kit gets sent to other people with just a screwdriver.
Not for long. You could probably sustain that for a 3-5 weeks. I live in an area of upstate NY where this would be possible in 1918.
Today, no sawmills, no regional tool and supply manufacturers, no regional raw materials. Iron ore from the lake Champlain area could be smelted in the Albany area and made into nails in many places.
Today, you’re 100% dependent on diesel and open roads to Newark, the I-81 corridor and rail traffic from the west for food. 75% of the regional produce producers of gone. Most (50-70%) of whatever is left of dairy production will be driven into bankruptcy this year.
There is plenty of transport, and plenty of diesel fuel. Thus my city doesn't need to be self sufficient. I'd expect my beds to be exported to other nearby cities, while they work on making ventilator parts.
I'm not sure if it is needed though: there is probably more than enough lumber in the local lumber yards currently intended for local construction projects but when nobody is building/remodeling...
Actually I live in a manufacturing city so I'd expect we would be making ventilator parts, since I don't have machining experience I'd be repurposed to packing the parts into boxes. Any city has enough tablesaws to build beds, not every city has as many people who know how to run a lathe as mine.
How were hospital beds made in 1918? Basically by hand ("artisanal"), but with lots and lots of very cheap labour. Those conditions still exist, since training someone to cut and bend metal tubes, drill holes and screw them together is not hard.
This effeciency doesn't simply go away, so. In the worst case scenarios we are discussing here, the relevant products are only asmall portion of global trade and supply chains. You could, for example, completely ignore Apple's operations under this scenario.
These critical porducts, and the coresponding manufacturing base, will be part of the critical infrastructure to be kept running. Automation is a huge benefit for this, as these operations can be run with a very limited number of people. Distribution and transportation is the same, it can be kept up for the essentials with a very limited amount of people. Even internationally, container ships continued to sail from Chinese ports. Granted, sometimes they sailed empty, but that was due to the shut-down of Chinese manufacturing.
In a true worst case scenario, dedicated ports will be kept running. again wth close to no people involved.
Administration for all this can be done to a huge part from home. Feet on the ground are by no means as important anyore as they used to be.
a situation like this should be avoided at all cost so. Hence the measures currently being taken.
Could it? We often no longer have random factories waiting around, ready to be repurposed. Neither do we have well functioning internal supply chains for the needed raw materials. I don't think people truly understand just how dependent any given country is on global trade (and especially Chinese manufacturing).
yeah, but even in 1918 not every city had a refinery or blast furnace. And even back then, a lot of the basic stuff was imported (think opium, cocain (probably the top medicines back then...), rare metals...). On top of that, in 1918, a lot of the things you (and I) take for granted were not even found (for example antibiotica). And instead of random factories, each city (heck each small town) has like 10-15 CNC-machines ready to produce anything which was done in 1918 - a problem might be all things chemistry/mining related, but the real important stuff (which was known in 1918) also back then has been produced centrally (and still is)...
The hard part is the basics - things that get commoditised tend to get manufactured more efficiently, and at massive scale this tends towards centralisation.
As a concrete example, in the entire country of New Zealand, no one manufactures window glass. Every window, everywhere in every building, ultimately gets shipped into that country in a container.
We'd also miss shoes as there are no "real" factories locally anymore. I think we make nails but I can't tell if we can really make bolts. So I'm not talking about cars, computers or aircraft. No way. Windows. Shoes. Bolts.
So OK, we're missing commodities, most industrial chemical processes, feedstocks, experienced manufacturing labour and plant expertise, all of which went south when NZ was one of the first countries to drop its pants and remove import tariffs. OK. I don't have a dog in that fight, there are reasonable arguments to stop subsidising things you'll never be internationally competitive at.
That said if all imports stopped tomorrow for, let's say, 2 years, it's surprising what you can do without or improvise. The main thing I think we'd really miss is life sustaining medicine. A loss of exports would actually be more catastrophic since our farmers would a) have no reason to exist and b) not be able to keep the finance wheels turning.
We're unbelievably wealthy compared to people in 1918 and we have a lot more slack and fat in our systems than we really know.
> The main thing I think we'd really miss is life sustaining medicine.
Yes, we need flexible chemistry machines on the style of CNC mills. The good news is that they aren't that far away, at the next pandemics we will probably have them.
Uranium glass. Radium-dial watches. Gas-lantern mantles of urania and thoria. Lindane. In California, denatured alcohol. The meat of the heath hen or the baiji dolphin. Opium. Caribbean monk seal oil. Spermaceti. Ivory billiard balls. Low-radioactivity steel. Most patent medicines. Old-growth wood of some kinds of tree. Chemistry kits. The Revigator. Large sheets of monocrystalline mica.
It's probably going to be more difficult to find something that is still widely used and is manufactured, but cannot be manufactured in a particular city in 1918 but not 2020. It would require deep knowledge of the industries of a particular city or of a particular industry. For example, right now I think all three of the ruling engines in the US capable of cutting a research-grade diffraction grating into glass are in the single Richardson Gratings lab in Rochester, New York, but one of them was built at MIT before 1918. So perhaps Boston (or Cambridge at any rate) was capable of producing such artifacts in 1918, but not today; but, if that is true, rigorously establishing the truth of that claim would require considerable investigation.
Similarly, many US cities have many fewer watchmakers, compounding pharmacists, and piano tuners than they had in 1918; in some cases the number is indeed zero.
You can make soap at home, a factory anywhere can trivially make it. And face masks are paper plus string, again hardly difficult to manufacture in any city in 2020. (In the UK most paper was made centrally in 1918, I happen to know this because I live near the site of the former paper mills - https://www.thepapertrail.org.uk/).
Look, I have a lathe at home and can make an engine if I want to, thing is other people can't because they never were interested in that. And I used the simplest things possible as examples.
Realistically, where would you start with these in a typical deindustrialized town today? "A factory" is a poor answer, some towns have none really, and factories are not interchangeable anyway.
There are small factories - everything from workshops to industrial estates - all over the place. If anything it's much better now because CNC machines and lathes are cheap, widely available and very versatile.
face mask: some variation of paper cloth. Go to the local cellulose factory (I doubt every city had one back then, they were and still are near cheap energy/wood), specify the quality of the paper you want and get it (you have to pay for it, because today they are probably producing paper for $$$ bills). Some yarn: cotton/wool has always been imported in some locations, a local workshop will build a spinning machine @1918s quality in no time. The same for sewing machines (those things haven't changed a lot if you don't factor in automation (which even today noone bothers to pay for the existence of cheap slave labor in Bangladesh)).
Soap bar: we have a lot of animals around here and butcher them locally
giving you everything you need (https://www.essentialchemicalindustry.org/materials-and-appl...). You just have to find someone who is willing to do the necessary stuff 1918-style :)
I don't think that's true, case in point being the (eventual) Chinese response in Wuhan, which appears to be extremely effective (if you trust their figures). It's all about government determination, which is mostly missing now, just as it was then, based on the article.
> Or it is harder to force people into quarantine.
From the article:
> Harris believes that the rapid spread of Spanish flu in the fall of 1918 was at least partially to blame on public health officials unwilling to impose quarantines during wartime.
I think there's a quantity/quality difference between the cities of 1918 and today. Even if we have more people in cities today cities in 1918 had much, much worse health and cleanliness practices and allowed much more opportunity for disease to spread.
