The 1751 Machine that Made Everything

when you see a graph that goes like this you think something very special happened right about here and something indeed did what makes this chart especially interesting is that it has to do with our material wealth pretty much all of it including everything you own and one of the very few things we can point to for setting off that huge boom is right here in a museum in Paris I want to show you a lathe today and that might not look or sound like something crazy awesome but stick with me here and see if you agree this is one of the most amazingly important machines ever and it applies to you and how you live your life there's also a story of a mechanical duck with unusual abilities but we'll get to that later I'm in the Museu the Arts at MIT da Museum of Arts and Crafts Paris is temple to science and learning in a way this is Paris's MIT that goes back to 1794 if you watch my first video in this series which you totally should you know how amazing and unique this institution is there's thousands of amazing machines here and I'll talk about some of them in future videos in that first video in this series I talked about VUCA song he's the guy who built the first fully automatic programmable loom essentially a weeding robot in the 1750s but all the glory went to another guy who made minor improvements on it this is another one of oku songs fantastic creations an all metal lathe he made in 1751 now this is not just any lathe but possibly the first all-metal lathe with dual V ways in a carriage and cross-slide ruin by screws with this simple looking machine it said that VUCA saw and defined the principles of the modern lathe as we know it today ok cool why should I care I hear you say because lathes are in my opinion the foundation of the greatest explosion of wealth you've ever seen and a big part of the story about why we're all not working in a field somewhere unless that's your thing which is totally cool if you're not familiar with lathes they spend the workpiece in a cutting tool held in a sliding carriage can shape them often to make them very accurately round to a specific diameter but also very smooth you need very round smooth parts for machinery but if you didn't have a lathe to make rampart to be practically impossible to do it by hand which is why lathes can give you precision parts very cheaply and quickly lathes have been around for shaping wood for hundreds or even thousands of years but because the early lathes were also made out of wood they're relatively flimsy and not suitable for very accurate work especially in metal which needs a very strong stiff machine to work it and the cutting tool is held by hand so there's little consistency there were already small all-metal lathes for clockmaking for a couple hundred years before this but they were for making small delicate parts not something you build industrial machines with which is the key difference here bukas ons lathe was ahead of its time by at least fifty years and set the pattern for lathes even as we see them today maybe not an overall appearance but definitely in function it's the first fully documented all-metal laid with a slide rest and I considered to be the first modern lathe there may have been others which had some or all these elements previously but they're lost to history so we can only speculate the carriage on this machine moves on to prismatic ways the inverted V shape put together with the cross slide that held the cutting tool that can move in and out very precisely we have very modern looking lathe there's even what looks like an early tool but insert when bucha saw was the inspector for silk factories in leo he realized he needed improved rollers for their mills the heavy copper rollers were used to crush the silk and give it the more a pattern that was popular at the time these rollers were made of copper and there was no way that wind lays the day could turn them accurately so invented this machine this lathe surely added another decimal place in precision at least and every time you can add another decimal place you can kick off huge changes let me show you what I mean back to the graph from the beginning this is a chart of worldwide per capita income from your zero until the 1800s the line is pre flat with almost no growth you can actually send that flat line back about in there five thousand years to the point where humans invented farming so for about seven thousand years income was about four hundred to five hundred dollars per person per year in constant nineteen ninety dollars worldwide even as the population grew there was no growth in income because the productivity of a person was offset by the cost to keep that person alive in times when there was economic surplus it was quickly consumed with more births no matter how much the population grew we were pretty much always running in place income wise your average person in 1600 was no better off economically than someone thousands of years earlier this is what is called the Malthusian trap and for seven thousand years it was inescapable no matter what we did until machine tools like this one changed everything if you look at where the uptick starts you see it's a bit later than the 1750 one of this lathe that's what his early machine tool started to have a cascading effect with tools like these and the other precise industrial machines they made suddenly one person could produce what used to take many people to do and for the first time we could make enough surplus that we could outpace births each time a new machine tool adds another decimal place of accuracy precision gets cheaper which makes new products and processes possible and far-reaching booms of economic growth kick off and VUCA saans laid represents one of those moments soon someone modified a laid that was used for boring cannons to instead make the smooth cylinder is needed for steam engines and then between the steam engines powering factories and steam locomotives moving raw material to factories and then goods to market the line starts to go nearly vertical in the greatest increase in wealth we've ever seen here's why it happened imagine you of a small town with only farms and then someone builds a factory in town which multiplies that workers efforts with machines some people will leave the farms to work in the factory others will leave the farms to do things like build the roads canals or railroads the factory needs the factory also needs carpenters blacksmiths and machinists power from coal and machinery from iron means miners now have lots of work the factory brings in money which is distributed to the workers via wages now they could do something new and exciting like buying things rather than making them for themselves which kicks off other entirely new industries which have nothing directly to do with the farmer factory but cater to this new class of people with money which creates other new people who could spend money which repeats this cycle of growth and that's why you don't work on a farm unless you do which is cool thank you this also meant there was a lot of money around but not enough workers which means workers wage started to go up remember the graph what about the few people left on the farms you bring automation from the factories to the farm to multiply the farmers labor this is why we have things like tractors and combines it's no accident the first tractors were giant lumbering steam engines that were basically the factory's steam locomotives with wheels and that's what blows my mind so much about this lathe it's a very tangible artefact that lit the fuse of probably the greatest boom and income and prosperity we've ever seen the very silk weaving machines this lathe was helping to make our some of the very first machines in a factory which stopped us from running in place and got us out of that Malthusian trap and this led to real change in people's lives but all this new wealth and machines created didn't solve all of our problems in fact it created new ones nor was the wealth evenly distributed this incredible period of rapid growth fascinates me as for the first time people could see the world changing around them old ways were falling away and something new was happening significant change within a person's lifetime these machines just didn't bring us new wealth they also completely changed how we think the very name for this channel machine thinking speaks to this exact period when that line in the chart just starts to turn upward noticeably it comes from a quote in Jonathan Hales excellent book the old way of seeing it reads in 1828 the Fouts legend obsessed artists and writers in dozens of works they told the story of the modern predicament and gain the power of Industry the was sacrificing in Seoul it was not the new machines themselves they feared they were not yet many it was machine thinking the name isn't about artificial intelligence or that I enjoyed thinking about how machines are put together well I do enjoy that too but rather how we make machines and how when those machines give us new abilities those machines in turn make us you introduce new technology whether it's computer in your pocket giving you instant access to the world's knowledge or a cheap car suddenly available to the masses which let people travel freely for the first time which changed everything the way you even think is changed by those machines just being there and you're a different person for it and of course how I think about machines themselves is important the things required to build that first lay that were lying around for centuries in various parts of the world but it took a new way of thinking about machines to put them to use in a special way which led to that huge boom in growth like the people mentioned in the quote we too can see waves of change coming and our reaction isn't always good we'll talk more about that another time so for me looking at this lathe it doesn't just represent the vast wealth and social changes that was to come but also a huge shift in how we think consider what we do with lathes today many are computer-controlled making parts in a highly automated way with all their functions carefully programmed I remember who made the first highly automated programmable machine VUCA saw it be almost no 200 years before we'd start to stick lathes together with that level of automation and would take additional efforts innovations of countless people the first programmable machine tools even used punch tape but now parts of products we use every day are made cheaply and quickly this way Lucas ons machine show clearly at an early point Industrial Revolution the French we're doing very well indeed but their version of machine thinking didn't allow for the mass adoption of industrial tools and processes like it soon did in England England is rightfully so most closely associate with Industrial Revolution and their contributions are innumerable and for a time their output was second to none but even the English version of machine thinking could not match that of what was yet to come the Americans we use machine tools in a way so unique that it bears our name the American system of manufacturing but now it's used the world over now that the idea was ours though again it was a Frenchman honoré LeBlanc who first had the idea but was unable to implement it in France but he told the American ambassador Thomas Jefferson about it who brought it back to the US where things went bananas in America where labor was relatively scarce putting the knowledge and precision into the machines rather than a highly skilled workforce made a ton of sense and took off like wildfire and her changeable parts division of labor assembly lines and more quickly made America an incredibly productive nation but these are all subjects for another time if you'll grant me that initial huge explosion of wealth is largely the result of machines and factories and those machines were built by machine tools and the foundation of machine tools as lathes and VUCA saans laid this considering one of the first truly industrial aids you can understand why it's so cool that we have it right here so for me this is why I consider Lucas on Slade to be the machine that made everything is it literally the machine that the entirety of our in modern industrial world comes from of course not there are plenty of other machine makers and innovators too especially in England but they came a little later and here's a case where France had the lead early on but because of what it did and that it did it so early and now we have it right here as proof if I do have to pick one machine to represent the machine they made everything I picked this one and that's why it's so cool it's just sitting here quietly in a Paris Museum you [Music] we saw in the first video of Lucas on 17:50 weaving machine that completely changed the textile industry and now his lathe which is an important part of early machine tool history which kicked off that explosive growth but amazingly that's not even what he's most famous for that would be a mechanical duck that could poop let me explain before he made the lathe or weeding machine he was renowned for making automata essentially mechanical clockwork robots reputed have amazing abilities automata like this musical elephant from the 1770s were all the rage with royalty and the wealthy and the wealthy paid huge sums for them and they would go on tours charging admission to be seen the more complicated novel or magical they were the greater the prestige and Bucca songs were some of the best and it made him very famous one was a life-sized Shepherd flute player which used bellows to blow air through the lips of the automata and could correctly finger the notes for 12 different songs another was a kind of drum player but the final and considered his masterpiece was the duck the duck reportedly would look around flap its wings made of four hundred parts each appear to eat and drink but that's not all after eating he would appear to digest the food and defecate onto a silver plate and that made the duck very famous indeed after seeing it the famous philosopher and writer Voltaire was moved to write perhaps wryly without VUCA songs duck you would have nothing to remind you of the glory of France it turns out to have been a ruse though years later when closely examined it was discovered this was a mechanical sleight of hand and the waste was coming from a separate compartment and not really being digested these photographs were reportedly found the archives the museum and may show the Ducks mechanism but there's debate if this is really a puka songs duck bukas aunt eventually tired of his machines and sold them and sadly they've all now been lost thankfully we still have many other things he made his weaving machine or lathe would have been enough to earn him a place in history but he did so much more he truly has earned this at you of him here or that the street in front of museum is named in his honor though he died before this institution was founded his collection of machinery would become one of the main initial seeds at this entire Museum thanks for watching I'll see you next time

Channel: Machine Thinking

Views: 3,160,809

Rating: 4.8311524 out of 5

Keywords: lathe, machine, mill, milling, wealth, vaucanson, DIY, history, documentary, paris, science, museum, home machining, model engineering, machine shop

Id: djB9oK6pkbA

Length: 14min 56sec (896 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 15 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/tlwhite0311]

The mother of all machines.

[u/ahcomochingas]

The invention that changed the world and history is Calculus. Before calculus we couldn't design a steam engine because its non linear. When Newton/Leibiniz discovered calculus, engineers discovered how to control a steam engine, and once we had the power source, inventions like the lathe where affordables. Before the steam engine, you needed wind or a river for getting power.

Today, the problem is still the power source. Cellphones, get more small and versatile as batteries get better, and cars are on the same path.

Steam made the industrial revolution possible.

[u/bad-alloc]

Let's say the environment of the 1750s allowed several inventions or concepts to be developed in parallel. These than boosted each other to the point where an exponential takeoff of productivity became possible. Mathematics allowed for precision engineering, which made mathematics more in demand. Machines could now be built which made it possible to build more precise machines, which lead to more engineering and so on. All this begot more productivity, which means more human, and in turn more people to work the machines. It's a huge multi-level feedback loop where the removal of one part might stall the entire process.