How America Made Machines Make Machines

A new section from Stewart Brand's Maintenance on Books in Progress

Stewart Brand writes in his newest section, this one on precision manufacturing:

SOME SUBJECTS helpful for thinking about maintenance don’t really work as chapters, but they can be rooted in a chapter. Call them “digressions.” This one looks at how something called “armory practice” eventually made it possible for Ford to fabricate the truly interchangeable parts that made 16.5 million Model T’s so cheap to produce and easy to repair. Achieving that level of uniformity took over a century of relentless obsession with precision in manufacturing.

Read the piece here. Collaborate here.