Technology for Luddites
Practical Action, a charity that uses simple and innovative technologies to tackle poverty in the developing world (previously), challenges gadget addicts to give up their favourite tech toys on No Tech Day, Saturday, March 27.
That’s today. Due to technical problems, I could not publish this earlier. Which means I was actually not allowed to publish this. And you should not be reading this. But you did not know.
I wrote about prison treadmills before. They were invented in England in 1817 by Sir William Cubit, who observed prisoners lying around in idleness and put himself to the task of “reforming offenders by teaching them habits of industry”.
Forty-four prisons in England adopted it as a form of hard labour that could also grind grain or pump water.
However, as it turns out, in at least one jail prisoners were only “grinding the wind”: they were walking a treadwheel that was connected to a giant fan built on the courtyard. By this apparatus the resistance necessary for rendering the tread-wheel hard labour was obtained.
The system is explained in “The criminal prisons of London and scenes of Prison Life” (1862), written by Henry Mayhew & John Binny. Starting on page 299, they describe the method of “hard labour”, and the technologies used for it: the treadwheel, crank labour & the shot drill. Great reading.
The embrace of a low-tech approach by Taliban-trained bombmakers – they are building improvised explosive devices out of fertilizer and diesel fuel – has stymied a $17 billion U.S. counteroffensive against the devices in Iraq and Afghanistan, military officials say. Electronic scanners or jammers, which were commonly deployed in Iraq, can detect only bombs with metal parts or circuitry. Read.
Vladimir Arkhipov’s “Home-Made” (Amazon link) presents objects made by ordinary Russians inspired by a lack of immediate access to manufactured goods during the collapse of the Soviet Union. Each of the more than 220 artifacts is accompanied by a photograph of the creator, their story of how the object came about, its function and the materials used to create it.
The book is expensive, but you can find some pictures and stories here, here, here, here and here. Related (but the Soviets obviously had better materials): Jailhouse Technology.
Forum
Arkhipov continues the reach of his project through his multilingual Folk Forum website where anyone is free to post examples of hand-made objects. The website is not very user-friendly (tip: start by manipulating the layers), but it hosts some great ideas and pictures (some of them below).
Thanks, Caroline!
Overview of endangered professions at the National Public Radio (via Obsoletos): “As computers and automated systems increasingly take the jobs humans once held, entire professions are now extinct”.
I would like to add to this: As fossil fuels run out, some of these professions might return. And then I want to become a River Driver. Previously: the panorama of professions and trades.
Engines of our ingenuity is an American radio program “about the machines that make our civilization
run, and the people whose ingenuity created them”. The program is written and hosted by John Lienhard and it has been running since 1988. Illustrated transcripts of the more than 2,500 episodes are available online, recent episodes are also available as a podcast.
