¶ Tools: Craft Tools and Industrial Tools (2)
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RBF Definitions
“to relay information both in terms of overlapping lives and also travel, they began to consolidate all kinds of information. And we get then to the industrial tools that clearly fit my definition; for instance, the steamship ‘Queen Mary,’ obviously a tool that could not possibly have been produced by one man, or run by one man, or used by one man. The telephone system, a roadway system, great blast furnaces, and so forth–all these industrial tools are very extraordinary things that can accommodate you and me. They are the consequence of all the information from all the history of man about all resources everywhere, and their superiority over the craft tool is very, very great. They involve discovery in the scenery around us: whether in that rock there is something called beryllium and that beryllium can make you a coil spring that won’t fatigue or spout; or that there are such things as chrome and nickel, the addition of which to iron produces a steel with a tensile strength of a thousand times that of the tensile strength of iron alone. These are the kinds of things that man found. And because of discovering that you could do more with less and less, a given cross section could have greater and greater tensile strength.”
¶ Citations
- RBF in Franklin Address, Auburn, Ala, 1970
