[Animats]

> When I was a kid I was amazed that people like Edison and Tesla had labs not filled with gear from some lab manufacturer, but stuff they built themselves from first principles.

Edison did not build his stuff himself. Edison had people building stuff for him. More people as his career progressed. His lead machinist was John Kreusi.[1] Kruesi personally built the first Edison light bulb and the first phonograph.

Kruesi started as a locksmith (which meant actually making locks in those days) and ended his career as the chief engineer at General Electric in Schenectady, the world's leading electrical works at the time. If you go to Greenfield Village in Detroit, you can see Edison's lab, moved from New Jersey and rebuilt. Ask which was Kruesi's bench.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kruesi

[schobi]

Both your points hold.

The distinction is rather that the device was made next door, from raw materials, with them possibly watching. Certainly acknowledging the craftsmanship, but still while understanding your tools.

Today, labs are filled with expensive machines and you are not able to peek inside. You need something? Only from a catalog, made in a mystical factory, without you knowing what's inside.

This abstraction speeds up your process (the tool you bought is fully qualified for what you plan to do) but also detaches you from the low level inner workings. Kids are fascinated if you take an everyday object apart with them (but maybe only if it was already broken)

[close04]

Taking apart modern day “advanced” objects is way less fulfilling than those from the past. Miniaturization/integration and the increased complexity puts things beyond what even an adult can easily and visually grasp, let alone a kid. It’s mostly “black box” chips now.

Those advanced lab tools were built by many very skilled people. We’re past the time where a single person could hold it all in their head. One man could build a modern lathe back when they were a new thing, one man can’t build a modern lithography machine today.

[fragmede]

One man could not make an ordinary #2 pencil. A modern lathe was already out of reach.

[close04]

I wanted to say that lathes have been around for over 2000 years and for most of that time a single well trained man could build one. In fact I’d wager that most lathes and indeed maybe even every part of that lathe up until the industrial revolution were built by a person working alone.

The advanced machines of today are no longer within reach for almost any single well trained man. Now it takes an army of people with non-overlapping skills and knowledge.

200 years ago a basic component was wire or a metal sheet, you’d get them “pre made”. Today the basic component is a chip with millions of transistors and thousands of lines of firmware code that do 99% of the job.

At least you can understand every part of a pencil even without having one in front of you, what it does, and a bit of experimentation would get you an absolutely terrible but technically functioning pencil. Make the tiny leap to a pen and you already lost everyone.

[fragmede]

Could build a lathe from parts they could purchase, but not from scratch. The simple ballpoint pen is an absolute marvel of precision engineering that we take utterly for granted. That ball in the tip? Not something you could knock out in a weekend by hand. Even wire itself as a basic component is freaking impossible to feasibly do from scratch compared to going down to the hardware store and spending $5 for a spool. That I can also get a microcontroller devkit that's impossible for me to recreate from a local store is mind-blowing, if we stop to think about it.

[close04]

2000 years ago the person who was capable enough to think of and build a lathe didn’t go to order the pieces. They modeled the raw materials (wood, metal, stone) into what they needed. But let me give you a less debatable example. Watch makers or even the people who built the Antikythera mechanism didn’t go to the cog and sprocket store to get the parts. They manufactured the components from the raw material or as close to it as possible. They probably built their own tools to for the longest time.

And when I said pen I meant fountain pen. It’s counterintuitive but probably more people today can draw a conceptual diagram of a ballpoint than a fountain pen. Ballpoints are a very simple design limited only by the very tight tolerances need to make them work.

But that was my whole point, complexity got so high that most things around us cannot be built without specialized tools, specialized building blocks, and specialized knowledge that takes years to gather. And this needs to be repeated for almost every object. Different tools, building blocks, and knowledge.

A highschooler today knows more chemistry than Mendeleev but that doesn’t help because the complexity in each field or product increases faster than one person’s ability to keep up with learning.

[bitcurious]

>Edison did not build his stuff himself.

Edison did not start his career as a successful businessman. He built things, he sold patents, and later in life he lead teams that did the same.

[markemer]

You’d be surprised how much that still happens. In my research clean room in grad school we used to have to build machines ourselves all the time. Not from first principles mind you, but we did have a machine shop and had to make all sorts of stuff. When it’s never been done before, you’re kinda on your own, machine wise.

[Animats]

In industry, you usually have professional machinists and toolmakers doing much of that. They're better at it than grad students.

I once worked at an R&D facility for heavy hydraulic equipment. It looked like a factory with an office section, but only made and tested prototypes. The production plants were elsewhere. About three quarters of the workforce were factory workers, good ones. Engineers did not operate lathes. That was prohibited by union rules.