Visited the old forge museum in Pittsburgh and saw something I can't stop thinking about.

They had a whole display of 19th century wagon wheel rims, and every single one had a different style of hammer weld seam. It made me realize how much personal technique shows in the old work. Do you think modern power tools have made our individual marks less visible?

4 comments

4 Comments

daniela851mo ago

Totally get what you mean about the personal technique. I saw the same thing with old hand-planed beams in a barn. Every carpenter had a slightly different stroke you could see in the wood grain. Now a machine just makes it all perfectly flat and identical.

henry_murray1mo ago

Yeah, that's exactly it, @daniela85. You can see the human hand in the old work. It's like a signature in the wood. The machine stuff is just clean and dead, no story to it.

the_wesley1mo ago

But does that make the new stuff bad, or just different?

colescott20d ago

It's like how everyone complains about modern music production being too clean and autotuned but then also wants their Spotify playlists to sound flawless. We've traded character for convenience across the board and just accepted it.