Stewart Brand on How Progress Happens

In 1968, Stewart Brand, a young hippie who had studied biology at Stanford, co-created the Whole Earth Catalog, a “do-everything-yourself compendium” that became a touchstone for both Bay Area counterculture and, eventually, Silicon Valley technologists. “Maintenance: Of Everything,” his new book, is a kind of spiritual descendant of the Catalog—a celebration of the practice of learning how things work and how to fix them. In the book, the first in a planned series, Brand argues that maintenance should be seen not as an “unrewarding chore” but as an essential driver of technological and scientific progress. Not long ago, he joined us to discuss a few books that he drew on. His remarks have been edited and condensed.

The Perfectionists

by Simon Winchester

One of the things that made it so fun to research my book was the way that it kept leading me to interesting digressions. One of those digressions was the history of interchangeable parts, which I embarked upon when I was writing about vehicles, and specifically about Henry Ford’s Model T—an eminently maintainable car, whose manufacture depended on its parts being truly interchangeable.

It turns out that the story of interchangeable parts is tied up with military innovation. In the late eighteenth century, English and French engineers had invented new ways of casting cannons that made them more uniform and more accurate. Applying that technique to James Watt’s steam engines made them efficient for the first time. The Industrial Revolution took off from there. Then the French started to standardize their muskets. At that time, muskets were all made by gunsmiths, and the parts of one couldn’t fit another—if a soldier’s firearm broke on the battlefield, he couldn’t fix it himself. A French gunsmith named Honoré Blanc devised a way to make each part of a gun to a standard model. When Thomas Jefferson, who served as the minister to France after the Revolutionary War, saw the interchangeable parts being deployed there, he became a promoter of them. That went on to influence the way that manufactured products were made in the U.S., and helped the country take the lead in the Industrial Revolution.

Winchester’s book really shows how precision helps to drive progress. For Watt, a tolerance of one-tenth of an inch made his steam engines efficient. In Ford’s day, engineers and manufacturers could be precise at the level of a millionth of an inch. Today, chip fabricators have gotten things down to five nanometres. And, as the saying goes, a nanometre is to a tennis ball as a tennis ball is to the whole earth.

The Scottish Enlightenment

by Arthur Herman

At another point in my research for the book, I was looking at early versions of what might be called “manuals,” like Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which consists of hundreds of gorgeous illustrations and descriptions of how all the trades in France of that time worked. It’s a real display of the dignity of what we’d call blue-collar skills, and it shows how much was owed to them. Diderot was fierce about that, but with the end of the French Enlightenment, the Encyclopédie completely fell away.