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Specialist makers working hard to keep unique skills alive
- ilrwbwrkhv 4y agothis deep culture is fundamentally missing from the US. we must try to start them.
- WJW 4y agoBe the change you want to see mate. There is nothing stopping you from picking up one of these crafts in the US and offering your services to your community.
- Broken_Hippo 4y agoTime, money and space are all fine limiters and happens to be rife in the US, not to mention other places. Sometimes you can be without one of these (maybe something is cheap to start or needs little space), but you really need all three to do anything meaningful with these.
- pessimizer 4y agoAlso, training. There's a reason why this stuff is passed down through families: It's hard, it's hard to find a teacher, and the amount written in books about most specialized crafts is limited in quality and quantity.
- wcunning 4y agoWe have so many of these —- look at old steam and rail shows and clubs. There are so many weird old things that are kept up by hobbyists and re-enactors. Heck, look at historical villages like Greenfield Village at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI. Or look at Old Salem in North Carolina.
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoI don't think this is entirely fair. There are people in the United States who carry on skills that most people consider lost. One marvelously documented one is Dave Engel, wainright and wheelright in Joliot, MT. He has documented his skills in a weekly youtube video for years. There are many others. My wife is an expert in Scandinavian fiber techniques, and teaches weaving, spinning, dying and nalbinding (a Norwegian fiber technique that looks like knitting, but is in fact entirely different and much older). She can make you a sweater, or wool rya (thing the warmest bedcover you can even imagine) from raw wool, straight off the sheep (which she raises, and I shear) and the right pile of weeds (for dyes).
- matthoiland 4y agoAlso worth mentioning Roy Underhill [1], who for 35+ years has been on US public television teaching traditional woodworking. [1]:https://www.pbs.org/show/woodwrights-shop/ https://www.pbs.org/show/woodwrights-shop/
- skrbjc 4y agoDoes your wife sell things she makes? The rya sound so cool, I would love to get one.
- walnutclosefarm 4y agoSorry, she no longer makes pieces for sale, but concentrates her energy on teaching.
- mistrial9 4y agowhen I was a child in SF Bay Area, there were craftspeople, furniture, print making and litho, special castings, and among some heavy printing press, large scale painting. silver and gold smithing and more. That list is only things I saw with my own eyes. Post-2000 and especially post-covid I would be very surprised to see one percent of those, operating as a self-sustaining small business. Small business continues to close in a hundred categories.
- swagasaurus-rex 4y agoIn high cost of living countries, a business needs to make substantially more than its base costs to continue to operate. Paying living wages is a challenge every startup needs to consider if it wants to scale past a meager existence for its bootstrapped founder. Startups thrive in low cost of living areas. You see cycles of cheap land -> innovative businesses -> concentration of talent -> economic boom -> expensive land -> globally uncompetitive businesses -> whole industry collapses. This is what happened to the automotive industry in the mid-west.
- mistrial9 4y agoyou are right and I am seeing that -- however please consider the difference between England-style factory automation with economic booms, versus Florence Italy style high-skill, high value artisans. Near San Francisco and other places historically, the demand for very high value arts and crafts was closer to the latter. Land was never cheap here post-Spanish era.
- schnevets 4y agoWe see rent as a massive expense for this innovation, but that isn't an inevitability. Consolidated landlords cannot recognize certain advantages that "Ma and Pa" owners will recognize like consistent (albeit lower) payments, tenants who are respectful of the building and grounds, or the fun of supporting a cool business. Compare that to a place like Japan where the post-war distribution of land and smart zoning continues to cultivate a vibrant local economy, or venerable Italian cities where homes and businesses remain for centuries. I don't condone decommodification of real estate or other acts of heavy-handed socialism, but there are laws that play against the "little guy" that must be repealed. Admittedly, every approach (including the Japan and Italy examples) has pros and cons, but many of us forget that there are alternatives out there.
- gilrain 4y agoYou have but to look.
- showerst 4y agoI suspect youtube is helping to bring this back, I follow some living history channels (after finding Townsends) and a lot of maker channels, and there seems to be an explosion of interest in traditional making.
- dzink 4y agoThis exists in many fields, including software engineering (programming in Ada or Cobol, for example). In healthcare and surgery it is particularly relevant as some surgeons get a very rare and specialized types of cases that then allow them to develop new techniques and nobody but maybe at times 1-2 residents or fellows get to watch to even get a chance to learn. A combination of small/rare demand and limited distribution of the craft due to the apprenticeship nature of it.
- buchoo 4y agoIs Ada actually considered a legacy language in the same way COBOL is now? What languages have displaced it for new software in the safety-critical areas that it gained ascendancy in?
- brtkdotse 4y agoBanks in Sweden are making a big effort of recruiting, training and offering a viable career path for COBOL developers. A bunch of central systems still run like clockwork on IBM mainframes, why replace them? https://sebgroup.com/career/who-are-you/graduates-and-students/seb-cobol-academy https://sebgroup.com/career/who-are-you/graduates-and-studen...
- alex-nt 4y agoI keep hearing about these magical systems that work like clockwork, but I also work in a bank and the reality is very different. In a void, yes, those systems are amazing. Now add all the other systems that have to be linked with that and things start to turn into a nightmarish situation. All the new systems have to be contorted, twisted and designed in weird ways to accommodate the old ones. Everything works a bit worse just because there are a minority of systems that don't know UTF-8 for example, or can't send more than 16 bytes in a field. Banks are very bad at IT. If you don't work in the trading part of it you are seen as a necessary evil. These systems are still with us because banks are very risk averse and because decommissioning a system in a bank can take decades.
- JoeAltmaier 4y agoMy cousin makes prosthetic eyes! They've moved on from glass to special materials, but still hand-paint each eye bespoke. https://artificialeyes.net/ocularists/iowa/coralville-vbulgarelli/ https://artificialeyes.net/ocularists/iowa/coralville-vbulga...
- AndrewOMartin 4y agoI got unexpected amusement from reading that there used to be exactly three glass eye makers in the UK. I know that doesn't actually mean anything, but I couldn't help it.
- gonzo41 4y agoIt's kinda like making violins and such, it seems like a really satisfying job but it's ultra niche. Probably similar to trying to be a full time poet.
- ugjka 4y agoThose are not symmetrical. It is lot easier to be a full time poet than be a violin maker. But of course you are more likely be a broke full time poet
- gonzo41 4y agoI'm thinking more in market saturation terms. There arn't that many full time violin makers, similar to there not being many healthy poets being gainfully employed for their poems.
- bouvin 4y agoNeat! I have for the past 40 years had a new prosthesis made every second year or so by F.Ad. Müller Söhne [1] – it is always a wonder to see the ocularist work with miniature glass blowing equipment creating an eye fit just for you. [1] https://muellersoehne.com/home.html https://muellersoehne.com/home.html
- unwind 4y agoI expected Terry English [1] to be on that list, but he wasn't. Very cool anyway of course! I love the kind of thinking that makes someone switch into a job they know is extinct, from "the outside" (i.e. not being born into it), that is really taking a chance at doing something fun and worthwhile. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_English
- DicIfTEx 4y agoThe sievewright references it, but the Guardian haven't provided a link; the Heritage Crafts' Red List of Endangered Crafts is a fascinating resource. https://heritagecrafts.org.uk/redlist/ https://heritagecrafts.org.uk/redlist/
- throw0101a 4y agoFor a general overview of the topic, see also: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCA_Red_List_of_Endangered_Crafts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCA_Red_List_of_Endangered_Cra...
- WillAdams 4y agoInteresting that arrowsmithing is endangered, but bowyery isn't. What sort of arrows are not getting made? (cane, reed, bamboo, wood) using what techniques? Does this include the heads, or is that a separate specialty? (or does smithing mean that this is separate from blacksmithing? Really, any competent blacksmith can knock out any sort of point you want all day long) What do they use for fletching? (here in the U.S. it's turkey feathers) Knocks are mostly plastic these days, but a while back I remember seeing some bone knocks which I still regret not buying.
- throwawayvmw 4y agoMost trad archers who use wooden arrows end up fletching their own. These dont show up as arrowmakers, but they are. Wooden arrows have to be matched to the bow and the shooter. If youre not shooting a longbow, its easier and cheaper to shoot modern arrows which are mass produced and dont require the same level of tuning.
- giantg2 4y agoAnd the carbon arrows are much more durable, so you aren't tuning/creating them as often too.
- WillAdams 4y agoYes, but where are they sourcing the shafts? Of what material? (It's been a while since I saw Port Orford Cedar shafts in bulk in a sporting goods shop) Apparently the discussion here is limited to commercial viability of crafts? Is preservation of craft a concern when it has become widespread?
- acomjean 4y agoI wonder if they’re all worth saving. I got quite adept at Black and white photo processing and printing. It’s a skill, but better (though slightly different looking) results are yielded with a digital camera and computer. So I’ve kinda accepted that skill can go away and the world will be ok.
- dfxm12 4y agoEven though we have incendiary weapons, steel and building materials that work for us today, people still wonder about how to make things like Greek fire, Damascus/Wootz steel or Roman concrete. Even if we have better techniques, I do think it's a worthy academic endeavor to at least properly document stuff like this for posterity. If not, someone hundreds of years down the line will look at a painting of a sailboat and might go crazy trying to figure out how to make the sails or something. :) Also, knowing how to make a glass eye might somehow some way help in some other application where you have to make something out of glass in that particular shape. Or, it might just be fun to try your hand at it :)
- BizarroLand 4y agoAside from that, knowledge doesn't exist in silos. The silos are our creation to help us sort out the nigh-infinite breadth of knowledge available to us. There's no telling if sievemaking might incidentally tie into a currently undiscovered mathematical formula that relates to the internal structure of a helpful molecule. Nonchalantly allowing knowledge to die out universally simply because it doesn't benefit you directly now sets a dangerous precedent for the future and potentially closes doors to humanity's potential.
- Qem 4y ago> There's no telling if sievemaking might incidentally tie into a currently undiscovered mathematical formula that relates to the internal structure of a helpful molecule. That reminds me of reading somewhere that, during the Apollo program, the engineers couldn't come with a good design for the knee joint of the spacesuit themselves. So they ended copying the design of some preserved medieval armor made hundreds of years ago, and it worked fine.
- jetrink 4y agoFor anyone interested in this subject, the BBC produced a great miniseries called Victorian Farm in which three historians worked on (and lived at) a farm using authentic 19th century tools and techniques. The highlight of the show for me were the frequent artisans and skilled tradespeople who would visit the farm to demonstrate these types of skills. None of the people profiled in this article would be out of place among the guests they had.
- michaelbuckbee 4y agoThis was a really fun series, if anyone else is interested in watching it the whole series is on YouTube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccjyt7BQEVU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ccjyt7BQEVU
- amelius 4y agoThey probably should be making how-to videos at some point, and post them on YouTube.