It's easy to be nostalgic for past grandeur, but remember that the vast majority of 19th and 20th century engineers spend all their time working on mediocre sol

It's easy to be nostalgic for past grandeur, but remember that the vast majority of 19th and 20th century engineers spend all their time working on mediocre solutions to uninteresting problems, and being complacent about, then getting throughly bamboozled by Japan in the 80s. I can't remember where it's from, but there's a story about a firm procuring a shipment of widgets from a factory in Japan, with 5% defect rate. They received the shipment with a separate box with the 5% defect widgets and a confused letter of apology. That was also 20th century engineering. There is amazing stuff going on, and there is a lot of bland, forgettable stuff going on, and that's the way it's always been.