From flint scrapers to wrenches in space

Larry's knife

In the beginning, prehistoric humans each made their own tools. If you needed a flint scraper to clean a hide, you made it yourself, chipping the edge to make it sharp. And then you used it, after cornering that wildebeest and bringing it down. You created and used your own tools, furthering the chief goal of survival by obtaining food and maintaining shelter and defending the homeland.

But over time, it became clear that one member of the clan was better at making scrapers and knives than anyone else. Let’s call him Larry. As the clan grew into a tribe, the chief appointed Larry to make things. Relieved of hunting duties, Larry churned out the best flint scrapers and knives in the valley. He traded them for food – the hunters and gatherers fed him in exchange for his sharp, sturdy tools. 

As families grew to clans, clans to tribes, and tribes to states, specialization became necessary and common. Hunters hunted. Fishermen fished. Farmers farmed. Weavers wove. Toolmakers made. And traders traded.

The basis for human production and commerce had been established.

The Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany, chronicles this history of human activity in a wonderful series of exhibits. The evolution from early axes and bowed drills to steam powered lathes to the complex computer controlled milling machines of today is detailed. The exhibits make one thing clear – humans have excelled in learning how to make things with spectacular precision and in large quantities.

We have become exceedingly clever at removing material to achieve a desired result. This is what we are used to. It is called subtractive manufacturing. To make a wrench, we can start with a blank of steel, cut or drill out portions we don’t want, and finish the surfaces all to a precise plan. The wrench emerges from the block by the application of energy and human intelligence. In similar fashion, Larry’s scrapers emerged from chunks of flint. Michelangelo’s forms emerged from blocks of marble. And Toyota Camrys emerge from piles of raw materials.

The common thread in all this is the design, the plan, the vision, the details of the thing to be built.

We can extract out this essence of the thing, which describes it in precise detail, and represent it in a computer file. The dimensions, the angles, the faces, all precisely specified, the thing now exists, born from our imagination. All we need to do is manufacture it.

But instead of our historical approach of cutting and drilling and milling, we can now do something novel.

Three-dimensional (3D) printing is a technique for manufacturing things. Rather than subtractive, it is additive, with thin layers successively laid down in accordance with the plan, the 3D model, so that the thing slowly grows into existence. It seems like magic, but only because we are so accustomed to milling and drilling. But in a way, it is more natural. After all, cabbages and robins and human beings are all constructed according to a plan (their DNA) by addition, not subtraction, of materials.

While 3D printing is relatively new, it is rapidly gaining capability. Entrepreneurs at universities and start-ups are competing to develop improvements. An Australian company recently announced a new method they claim will be 25-100 times faster than existing technologies. This will be a race, and it will accelerate enormously in our lifetimes, driven by advancing computer power and materials science. It is human magic.

NASA is onboard.   In December, the agency emailed a wrench to the International Space Station. The design file of a ratchet wrench was transmitted to the station where it was downloaded to a 3D printer. Four hours later, the wrench emerged. Imagine the importance of this to a future moon base or Mars colony, where the delay of a resupply mission might be months or years.

NASA 3-D printed ratchet wrench

How about obtaining a replacement part for an old weed whacker that’s long out of production? No problem, Lowe’s Home Improvement has announced that they will soon install 3D printers in select stores. In addition to predefined design files, you will also be able to send your own computer models to Lowe’s for printing, and drop by later to pick up the finished product.

We are coming full circle. Soon we might each make our own stuff, if we so desire, unique to our individual wants and wishes. Larry would be pleased.  

Knowledge is Power

Huge 3D printers will build houses.

In the 1961 film “The Errand Boy”, Jerry Lewis plays the part of a mailroom clerk serving a sprawling Hollywood studio. The movie depicts Lewis and his band of fellows as they deliver mail and scripts and revisions and memos between hundreds of offices. In typical Lewis fashion, there are lots of laughs as items are misdelivered and paper flies everywhere.

The mailroom was a classic entry opportunity into the business world. Mail clerks, if assiduous, could learn the business, gain knowledge, and begin to rise within the organization. The mailroom was a common feature of many businesses as disparate as banks, grocery chains, manufacturers, and hospitals. They all had in common the need to distribute information between knowledge workers in a variety of departments, a function the mailroom was designed to fulfill.

But the number of mailroom jobs is quickly dwindling and the culprit is obviously the rise of digital technologies. Email and text messages and a variety of other technologies have sharply reduced the need for human clerks to move physical representations of information from place to place. We now increasingly move information as bits over the internet, not physical pages made of atoms. Bits don’t require clerks as atoms do.

This is only the tip of the iceberg. The federal Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the fastest growing and most rapidly declining occupations over the next ten years.  Not really surprising, health care, computer, and construction jobs are ascendant. Equally not a shock is that apparel manufacturing, federal postal work, and sugar and confectionary production are on the decline.  A combination of dietary evangelism, technological shifts, and globalization has created winners and losers in the job market.

There is yet another technological revolution on the horizon which may wreak havoc with skilled machinists and a number of other occupations – 3D printing.

Everyone is familiar with the concept of metal working, where milling machine or lathes are used to manufacture precision parts. These parts are then combined with others, screwed, bolted or glued together to create a final product or component such as an airplane wing or an artificial limb.

3D printing turns this time honored approach on its head. The thing to be produced is first represented, in its entirely, as a  highly detailed computer file. This information is then processed by a machine which miraculously turns the description of the thing into the thing itself.

The machine, a three dimensional “printer,” is called such because the basic mechanism is reminiscent of the old dot matrix printer.  A dot matrix computer printer utilizes a print head which moves left and right across a page and deposits tiny dots of ink to create letters and numbers and graphics; patterns of dots which finally become your recipe for tomato soup or a letter to mom.

Now imagine a “print head” that can move in three dimensions – vertically as well as two horizontal directions – and instead of ink, exudes bits of material which harden on contact. Processing the detailed design file, the 3D printer patiently “paints” the thing itself, building up layers as it sweeps back and forth. It can take many hours, but an actual object, such as a coffee cup or piece of jewelry, finally emerges.

Long a curiosity of hobbyists, 3D printers were little more than expensive toys. But continued refinement has vastly improved their capabilities. For instance, Boeing now uses 3D printers to create certain airplane parts. Medical researchers are printing human body parts, such as kidneys and livers, and while this is still in the experimental stage, the prognosis is good.

A University of Southern California team is building a huge 3D printer designed to create buildings. Exuding concrete, this machine will be capable of creating houses or other structures, complete, from the ground up.

This technology is truly amazing and will revolutionize how we humans create objects in our world. But what does all this mean on the job front?

Like other disruptive technologies, it will destroy some occupations but create many others. It is difficult to precisely predict the job skills demanded in this new world. But for our children, a solid education including language and computers and mathematics seems a good bet. The successful worker of tomorrow will need to be literate in many ways.

As we were all taught, knowledge is, indeed, power.