Perfect Mechanics

[David Casseres]

My next-door neighbor is an elderly gent (even more elderly than I) who
still gets paid by the likes of NASA, NOAA, and various aerospace firms to
create abd build, by hand, special one-off apparatus and instruments for
research purposes, often in space  or the outer atmosphere. He's shown me
some of the prototypes that he's kept for his personal collection. They are
typically one or two feet on a side, or less, with some parts made of
exotic metals or ceramics and others of wood or everyday plastic. Most of
them do something or other with electromagnetic radiation.

To the layman these gadgets are highly inscrutable, yet elegant in
appearance. much as Georgian and Victorian technology must have seemed to
the laymen of those days. It is pleasing to me that this tradition is still
alive just across my driveway.

He also collects slide-rules, a technology that most people find
inscrutable not because it's new and unfamiliar but because it has been
forgotten…

On Tue, Aug 11, 2015 at 6:57 AM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Perfect Mechanics: Instrument Makers at the Royal Society of London in
> the Eighteenth Century
>
> Richard Sorrenson
>
> Perfect Mechanics captures the excitement of Georgian “big science”
> and the starring roles played by London instrument makers in the
> scientific expeditions to measure the shape of the earth, to find and
> map unknown lands in the Pacific, and to explore the heavens.  Yet
> these indispensible practitioners of “mixed mathematics,” recognized
> and honored by the Royal Society through fellowship and the awarding
> of the Copley Medal, became increasingly marginalized by the
> gentlemanly FRS after 1800 and the essential tensions between commerce
> and science, mechanical and craft production, and social classes
> brought an abrupt halt to this dynamic and inventive period.
>
>
> http://docentpress.com/books/perfect-mechanics-instrument-makers-at-the-royal-society-of-london-in-the-eighteenth-century/
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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