Blueprint

“ I had 'em printed but when the solar system was on 'em, you fellows drew schematic diagrams for a new coupler circuit. I put all kinds of radio circuits on them, and the gang drew plans for antenna arrays. I gave up and put pads of paper on each table, and the boys used them to make folded paper airplanes and they shot them all over the place. Why don't you guys grow up?"
"Cheer up, Joe. But if this tablecloth won't run through the blueprint machine, we'll squawk!" ”

“ He was faced by a vista of tables, workbenches with power tools, and diverse assemblies of testing apparatus, most of the latter dusty and presenting the appearance of gold-bergs knocked together for temporary use and then shoved aside until someone might need a part from one of them. By far the greater space, however, was occupied by shelves and crates and stacks of small cartons or loosely wrapped packages in which various gadgets seemed to be stored after plans of them had been transmitted to the field. Half a dozen large files for drawings and blueprints reached nearly to the ceiling. ”

“ By turning our environment over to the machine we have robbed the machine of the one promise it held out—that of enabling us to humanize more thoroughly the details of our existence.
III
To return to architecture. A further effect of the machine process on the internal economy of the modern building is that it lends itself to rapid production and quick turnover. This has been very well put by Mr. Bassett Jones, in an article in The American Architect, which is either a hymn of praise to the machine, or a cool parade of its defects, according to the position one may take. ”

“ We must now take notice of two theories or traditions which have been current for a long time as to some intervening stage between the art of block-printing and the art of printing with movable cast types. [39] One theory or tradition would have it that the inventor of printing, after the idea of single, individual, movable types had arisen in his mind, practised his new invention for some consider able time with wooden types, and that he came only gradually to the idea of movable types cast of metal. ”

“ In building after building, floor above floor, the sight is similar: the long rows of busy machines, the whirling network of shafts and belts above, the intent operatives, and the steady clicking of innumerable parts blended into a softened widespread sound. It seems absolutely endless; it is a matter of hours to go through the plant. Stop at one of the machines and see the speed and accuracy with which it turns out its product; then calculate the entire number of machines and you will begin to gain a little idea as to what the total output of this vast institution must be. ”

“ How will humankind deal with what has been termed, with some justification, "the last machine we need ever build?" How might people's lives be changed by a replicative universal constructor system capable of absorbing solar energy and raw dirt and manufacturing, as if by magic, a steady stream of finished building materials, television sets and cars, sheet metal, computer components, and more robots - with little or no human intervention required? ”

“ What, then, can be more interesting than to trace the history of the growth of this wonderful machine?—the greatest among the many great creations of one of God’s most beneficent gifts to man—the power of invention.
While following the records and traditions which relate to the steam-engine, I propose to call attention to the fact that its history illustrates the very important truth: Great inventions are never, and great discoveries are seldom, the [3] work of any one mind. Every great invention is really either an aggregation of minor inventions, or the final step of a progression. ”

“ Put alongside buildings in which the architect has glorified his own idiosyncrasy or pandered to the ritual of conspicuous waste, our industrial plants at least have honesty and sincerity and an inner harmony of form and function. There is nothing peculiar to machine-technology in these virtues, however, for the modern factory shares them with the old New England mill, the modern grain elevator with the Pennsylvania barn, the steamship with the clipper, and the airplane hangar with the castle. ”

“ Thus the plant's workers themselves took part in activities related to food distribution, production and delivery of raw materials, and even motion pictures, while individuals engaged in any number of productive activities were continually attracted by the possibilities of the technology available in the electronics plant, and continually came to the plant to design and build experimental devices. The plant's boundaries, the line between the plant's 'labor force' and the 'outside world,' became unclear. ”

“ How many realize that the blue-print is almost universally at the foundation of everything at the present time? Not only are products made from blue-prints but the machinery which makes the products is built from blue-prints. ”

“ We have here, however, a device used for the decoration of textile fabrics, and we must reserve our interest for the time when the design printed from the wood block, upon paper or any other suitable carrier of an impression, becomes the essential consideration.
The origin of the processes of reproduction is invariably utilitarian. Every advance, every new technical attainment, can be traced to the demand for devices which would lessen labor and save time. ”

“ There is gain, as we have seen, when an inventor takes a familiar process, like planing, and reverses it, so that instead of the plane moving across a board, the board is moved beneath a planer. Not seldom, too, profit has followed upon adopting a plan just the contrary of a time-honored practice, as when a Frenchman pierced a needle with an eye near its point instead of away from its point, taking a step that did much to make the sewing-machine a possibility. ”

“ At the outset this is prevented by bending the shelf to convexity on its upper surface. Then a heavy load no more than brings the shelf to straightness, so that the books remain in their places with both safety and sightliness. Here a principle is involved worth a moment’s pause. An inventor asks, What effect will a working load exert which it is desirable to lessen or withstand? He gives his structure a form opposite to that which will result from an imposed burden, so that when at work his structure, a shelf, a cylinder, a saw, will assume its most effective shape. ”

“ Given the constraints obtaining in the lunar environment, particularly in terms of the inventory of known kinds and quantities of naturally occurring raw materials and the existing repertoire of materials processing technologies, can all machine functions required both for production and for replication and growth be implemented? To attack the first of these problems - identification of necessary functions for practical machine replication - the team proposes a specific phased demonstration development scenario, described in section 5.3. ”

“ For the rapid reproduction of geographical maps in the field in order to meet the requirements of a general conducting a campaign, or of a political officer on a boundary mission, no better method has been evolved than the ferrotype process, by which blue prints can be secured in a few hours from a drawing of the original on tracing-cloth. The sensitized paper and printing-frame are far more portable than any photo-lithographic apparatus. ”

“ It’s like this: engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn’t go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that’ll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity... But these days, there’s not much traditional constraint. I’ve got the engineer’s most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I’ll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools. ”

“ I’m challenging myself, using found objects and making stuff that throws all this computational capacity at, you know, these trivial problems, like car-driving Elmo clusters and seashell toaster-robots. We have so much capacity that the trivia expands to fill it. And all that capacity is junk-capacity, it’s leftovers. There’s enough computational capacity in a junkyard to launch a space-program, and that’s by design. Remember the iPod? ”

“ Beautiful as are the combinations and contrivances in the block machinery, and highly deserving as the inventor may be of credit for originating such labour-saving machines for the production of ships’ blocks, there is a far higher claim to the admiration and gratitude of all constructors of machinery, and of all workers in metal. ”

“ Blue prints obtained from mining companies are acceptable for plans of mines or underground workings, but all unnecessary or irrelevant details on such plans must be canceled and all essential features retained, and every essential feature, especially any added data, must be clearly interpretable. Many such blue prints are so large and unwieldy that they must be greatly reduced by photography before they can be redrawn. If the lines are too weak to photograph, a tracing of the essential parts can be made and reduced to about twice publication size. ”

“ Experiment, as an educated passion for building on original lines. Then, in the mechanical field, we bestow a few glances at self-acting machines, at the simplicity of design which makes for economy not only in building, but in operation and maintenance. Either in designing a new machine, or in reaching a great truth, such as Universal Development, there is scope for Imagination upon [3] which we next pause for a moment. ”

“ WHY SPECIALLY-DESIGNED FORMS IMPROVE NATURAL STRUCTURES.—The reason for this is, primarily, that the inventor must design the article for its special work, and in doing so makes it better adapted to do that particular thing. The hands and fingers can do a multiplicity of things, but it cannot do any particular work with the facility or the degree of perfection that is possible with the machine made for that purpose. ”

“ We must manufacture millions of tiny probes and release these into space in a systematic fashion over many millions of cubic miles. Their design is quite simple. The laboratories and manufacturing centers of organizations like Starlight Enterprise, Nolan Mining Enterprise, and other companies can create these probes in vast quantities very quickly, using robotic techniques. ”

“ How shall a machine be constructed that shall most efficiently embody, and accord with, not only those scientific principles, but also all of those principles of engineering practice that so vitally affect the economical value of every machine? ”

“ If these things are so, may not the knowledge of this power of points be of use to mankind, in preserving houses, churches, ships, &c., from the stroke of lightning, by directing us to fix, on the highest parts of these edifices, upright rods of iron made sharp as a needle, and gilded to prevent rusting, and from the foot of those rods a wire down the outside of the building into the ground, or down round one of the shrouds of a ship, and down her side till it reaches the water? ”

“ Application on machine net became universal, and the prices decreasing, the workers lost heart, and gave up their good old patterns, taking to inventions out of their heads, and frequently down to the present time copying some frightful design from a wall paper!
Queen Adelaide, in answer to a petition sent up by the lace makers, ordered a dress made of Honiton sprigs on machine net, in which every flower was to be copied from nature. ”

“ On the occasion of a visit to the Kunstgewerbeschule of Berlin, I found him conducting a class for designers for printed decoration, in which the Japanese craft of block-printing was made the basis of their training. He held to the view that the primitive craft teaches the students the very economy and simplicity upon which the successful use of the great modern resources of colour-printing depend, yet which cannot be learnt except by recourse to simpler conditions and more narrow limitations before dealing with the greater scope of the machine. ”

“ The inventions in the class of mills have so multiplied in these latter days, that nearly every known article that needs to be cleaned and hulled, or ground, or cracked or pulverized, has its own specially designed machine. Wind and water as motive powers have been supplanted by steam and electricity. ”

“ Again, the object and the purpose of constructing the machine of framework in two distinct parts, supported separately, one by the runners and the other by the wheels, is expressed to be 'so that the rollers may rise and fall without disturbing the runners, or so that the runners may yield or move independently of the rollers.' The particular manner of connecting the parts, although described in the specification, is the subject of a separate patent. ”

“ In this amazing, impromptu, new, and hurried machine civilization which we have been piling up around us for a hundred years we have made machines out of everything, and our one consummate and glaring failure in the machines we have made is the machine we have made out of ourselves.
Mineral machines are made by putting comparatively dead, or at least dead-looking, matter together; vegetable machines or gardens, are made by studying little unconscious seeds that we can persuade to come up and to reproduce themselves. ”

“ For example, if you desire to improve your surface conveyances, we will supply you with data for building an optimum vehicle suitable for conditions on Earth and which is virtually indestructible. You will of course do your own manufacturing, but even there we can supply you with technology that will make the process seem miraculous by your present standards. ”