The 1751 Machine that Made Everything

When you see a graph like this, you think something very special happened here and something really happened. What makes this chart especially interesting is that it has to do with our material wealth, almost all of it, including

everything

you own and one of your assets. The few things we can point to to trigger that big boom are right here, in a museum in Paris. I want to show you a lathe today and it may not look or sound like something incredibly amazing, but stay with me here and see if Okay, this is one of the most incredibly important

machine

s that has ever existed and it applies to you and how you live your life. .

There's also a story about a mechanical duck with unusual abilities, but we'll get to that later. I'm at the Museum of Arts at MIT da Museum of Arts and Crafts in Paris is the temple of science and learning. In a way, this is MIT Paris dating back to 1794. If you watch my first video in this series, you should know how amazing and unique this institution is. There are thousands. of amazing

machine

s here and I'll talk about some of them in future videos in that first video of this series I talked about the VUCA song, he's the guy who built the first fully automatic programmable loom, essentially a weeding robot in the 1750s, but all the glory.

I went to see another guy who

made

small improvements to it. This is another of Oku's fantastic song creations. An all-metal lathe that he

made

in

1751

. Now this is not just any lathe, but possibly the first all-metal lathe with two V tracks on a carriage. screw cross slide ruin with this simple looking machine said VUCA saw and defined the principles of the modern lathe as we know it today okay, cool, why should I care? I hear you say because, in my opinion, lathes are the basis of the greatest ones. explosion of wealth you've ever seen and a big piece of history about why we don't all work in a field somewhere unless that's your thing, which is totally cool if you're not familiar with lathes, spend the piece of work in a cut. the tool held on a sliding carriage can often shape them to make them round very precisely to a specific diameter but also very smooth, you need very round and smooth parts for the machinery, but if you didn't have a lathe to make the wall it would be practically impossible of doing. by hand, so lathes can provide precision parts very cheaply and quickly.

Lathes have been around for shaping wood for hundreds or even thousands of years, but since the first lathes were also made of wood, they are relatively flimsy and are not suitable for very precise work, especially in metal, which needs a rigid machine. very strong to work with and the cutting tool is hand held so there is little consistency. Small all-metal lathes for watchmaking had existed for a couple hundred years before, but they were for manufacturing. Small, delicate parts are not something industrial machines are built with, which is the key difference here. The bukas on lathe was ahead of its time by at least fifty years and set the standard for lathes even as we see them today, perhaps not in overall appearance, but definitely in function.

It is the first fully documented all-metal lathe with a sliding support and I consider it to be the first modern lathe. There may have been others that had some or all of these elements previously, but they have been lost to history, so we can only speculate about the car. This machine moves to prismatic shapes, the inverted V shape meets the cross carriage that held the cutting tool that can move in and out very precisely. We have a very modern looking lathe, there is even what looks like an old tool, but it is inserted when the Bucha saw was The inspector of the silk factories in Leo realized that he needed improved rollers for his mills.

Heavy copper rollers were used to grind the silk into a pattern more popular at the time. These rollers were made of copper and there was no way. that wind sets the day could turn them with precision, so I invented this machine, this lathe surely added another decimal in precision at least and every time you can add another decimal you can start big changes, let me show you what I mean, going back to the graph. From the beginning, this is a graph of world per capita income from zero to the 19th century. The line is pre-flat, with almost no growth.

You can actually send that flat line back about five thousand years to the point where humans invented agriculture. Approximately seven thousand years ago, income was between four hundred and five hundred dollars per person per year in constant nineteen hundred and ninety dollars around the world, even when the population grew, there was no growth in income because the productivity of a person was offset by the cost of keeping her alive. In times when there was an economic surplus, it was consumed quickly with more births, no matter how much the population grew, we were almost always in the same place income-wise, the average person in 1600 was no better off than someone thousands of years ago.

Before, this is what is called the Malthusian trap and for seven thousand years it was inescapable no matter what we did until machine tools like this changed

everything

. If you look at where the uptick starts, you'll see that it's a little bit later than the 1750s of this lathe, that's what its The early machine tools started to have a cascading effect with tools like these and other precise industrial machines they made, suddenly one person could produce what many people previously required and for the first time we were able to obtain enough surplus to exceed each birth. moment when a new machine tool adds another decimal of precision, precision becomes cheaper, making new products and processes possible and powerful economic growth booms begin, and VUCA saans placed represents one of those moments when soon someone modified a layout that was used for drilling.

Instead, cannons are needed to make the smooth cylinder for the steam engines and then, between the steam engines that power the factories and the steam locomotives that transport the raw materials to the factories and then the products to the market, the line begins to go almost vertical in the largest increase in wealth we have ever seen. I have seen here why it happened, imagine in a small town with only farms and then someone builds a factory in the city, which multiplies the efforts of the workers with the machines, some people will leave the farms to work in the factory, others will leave farms to do things like build. roads canals or railways the factory needs the factory also needs carpenters blacksmiths and machinists coal power and iron machinery means that the miners now have a lot of work the factory generates money that is distributed to the workers through wages they can now do something new and exciting like buying things instead of making them themselves, which starts other completely new industries that have nothing directly to do with factory farmers, but cater to this new class of people with money, which creates other new people who might spend money, repeating this cycle. of growth and that's why you don't work on a farm unless you do, which is great, thanks, this also meant that there was a lot of money but not enough workers, which means that workers' wages started to go up, remember the graph, what about the few?

People left on farms bring factory automation to farms to multiply farmers' labor. That's why we have things like tractors and combines. It's no coincidence that the first tractors were giant, heavy steam engines that were basically factory steam locomotives with wheels and That's what surprises me so much about this lathe: it's a very tangible artifact that lit the fuse of probably the greatest boom, income and prosperity we have ever seen. The same silk weaving machines that this lathe was helping to make were some of the first. machines in a factory that prevented us from functioning on site and got us out of that Malthusian trap and this led to real change in people's lives, but all this new wealth and machines created did not solve all our problems, in fact, they created new ones. nor was wealth distributed evenly.

This incredible period of rapid growth fascinates me because, for the first time, people were able to see the world changing around them. The old ways were disappearing and something new was happening. A significant change in a person's life. These machines simply did not produce. We, the new wealth, also completely changed the way we think, the very name of this automatic thought channel speaks of this exact period when that line on the chart begins to turn upwards noticeably. It comes from a quote from Jonathan Hales' excellent book, The Ancient Way of Seeing. In 1828, the legend of Fouts is read.

Obsessed artists and writers in dozens of works told the story of the modern situation and gained the power of the industry that was being sacrificed in Seoul. It was not the new machines they feared, there were not many yet, it was machine thinking that the name is not about artificial intelligence or that I enjoyed thinking about how machines are put together well. I enjoy it too, but rather in how we make machines and how, when those machines give us new skills, those machines in turn make us perform. new technology, whether it be a computer in your pocket that gives you instant access to the world's knowledge or a cheap car that is suddenly available to the masses and allows people to travel freely for the first time, which changed everything, the way What you think about is changed by the simple fact that those machines are there. and you are a different person because of that and, of course, what I think about the machines themselves is important, the things necessary to build that first arrangement that were for centuries in various parts of the world, but it took a new way of thinking about the machines. to use them in a special way that led to that huge boom in growth, like the people mentioned in the quote, we too can see waves of change coming and our reaction is not always good, we will talk more about that another time, So to me, looking at this lathe not only represents the great wealth and social changes that were to come, but also a great change in the way we think and consider what we do with lathes today, many of them are computer controlled and manufacture parts in a highly automated manner. with all its functions carefully programmed I remember who made the first highly automated programmable machine VUCA saw that it would not be almost 200 years before we would start putting together lathes with that level of automation and it would require additional efforts innovations from countless people the first programmable machine Machine tools They even used perforated tape, but now parts of the products we use every day are made cheaply and quickly.

In this way, Lucas' machine clearly shows the Industrial Revolution from an early point, we French are doing very well, but his version of automatic thinking is not. Not allowing mass adoption of industrial tools and processes as it soon did in England. England is rightly most closely associated with the Industrial Revolution and its contributions are innumerable and for a time its output was second to none, except even the English version of automatic thought. could not match what was to come, we Americans use machine tools in such a unique way that it bears our name, the American manufacturing system, but is now used all over the world now that the idea was ours, although again it was a Frenchman .

Honoré LeBlanc was the first to have the idea but he couldn't implement it in France, but he told it to the American ambassador Thomas Jefferson, who brought it back to the US, where things went crazy in the United States, where the Labor was relatively scarce, putting knowledge and precision into the process. machines instead of a highly skilled workforce made a lot of sense and took off like wildfire and its division of interchangeable parts on the assembly lines of work and more quickly turned America into an incredibly productive nation, but these are all issues for another time, if you grant me that.

The initial big explosion of wealth is largely the result of machines and factories, and those machines were built by machine tools and the basis of machine tools like lathes and VUCA saans established this considering one of the first truly industrial aids, you can understand why it's so cool that we have it here, so for me that's why I consider Lucas on Slade to be the machine that made everything, it's literally the machine that all of our stuff comes from.modern industrial world of course not, there are many other machine manufacturers and innovators too, especially in England, but they came a little later and here is a case where France had the lead from the beginning, but because of what what he did and because he did it so early, now we have it here as proof, if I have to choose. a machine to represent the machine, they did everything.

I chose this one and that's why it's so cool that it's here quietly in a museum in Paris. We saw it in the first video of Lucas on the weaving machine at 17:50 that completely changed the textile industry and now his lathe, which is an important part of the early history of machine tools, which started that explosive growth, but surprisingly that's not even what he's most famous for, it would be a mechanical duck that could poop, let me explain before he made the lathe or the weeding machine. He was famous for making essentially mechanical automatons, robots reputed to have amazing abilities.

Automata like this musical elephant from the 1770s were all the rage among royalty, and the rich paid huge sums for them and went on tours, charging admission to be seen. The more complicated the novels or magic were, the greater the prestige and Bucca's songs were some of the best and that made him very famous. One was a life-sized Shepherd piper who used bellows to blow air through the automata's lips and could play properly. the notes of 12 different songs another was a kind of drummer but the final and considered his masterpiece was the duck the duck supposedly looked around it flapped its wings made of four hundred parts each one seemed to eat and drink but that's not all after eating seemed to digest the food and defecate on a silver plate and that made the duck very famous, in fact after seeing it, the famous philosopher and writer Voltaire felt moved to write perhaps ironically without VUCA. duck songs, you wouldn't have nothing that reminds you of the glory of France, it turns out it was a ruse, although years later when examined closely it was discovered that it was a mechanical sleight of hand and that the waste came from a separate compartment and not really.

When digested, these photographs were supposedly found in the museum's archives and may show the mechanism of the ducks, but there is debate whether this is really a puka song, the duck's bukas aunt finally tired of his machines and the sold and, unfortunately, they are all now lost, fortunately still if many other things he did, his weaving machine or his wheel, would have been enough to earn him a place in history, but he did much more, he has really earned it because is here or because the street in front of the museum is named after him. honor although she died before this institution was founded her machinery collection would become one of the main initial seeds of this entire Museum thank you for looking See you next time