Tiny, Perfect Staircases Made by French Woodworkers
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One of my great grandfathers was a Compagnon (couvreur: slater). He made a table with a single piece of slate of 2m diameter and maybe 5cm thick, on top of a medieval column marquee (taken from a church that was being renovated). The table is in my garden, it's beautiful.
As for the society, there has never been anything "secret" about it --- maybe some specific rituals, I'm not sure, but the fact of being a member is very public: it's actually the whole point.
he's full of cool stories, and taught me quite a few cool tricks, like how to 'listen' to wood when taping it with the handle of a screwdriver to 'hear' if it's still green and/or has faults/cracks.
They offer four-year liberal art degrees in Architectural Carpentry, Architectural Stone, Classical Architecture, Forged Architectural Ironwork, General Education, Masonry, Plasterwork, and Timber Framing.
Compagnons in other professions don't have the luxury of having everyday objects that work well as a show of skill. Plumbers masterworks, for example, usually look like an intricate mess of pipes with no purpose. It doesn't speak much unless you know the trade.
Another thing to realize is that compagnons are not any workers, they are masters. Maybe few people want grand wooden stairs today, but some people do, and compagnons are the ones who are getting the job.
What a quote!
We have a hard time even imagining or, if it exists, celebrating those rare pieces of code.
A perfectly written little compiler or interpreter, a little database? Something like that?
Maybe these staircases were just the highly polished crud web app of their time.
This is narrower in scope than miniature staircases but it is a definite show of coding skills.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l8tSfy0KJks
He also has another video on a smaller boat which bit less intimidating and actually makes this sort of modelbuilding to look almost feasible.
Every example shown in the article is 2.5-4 feet in height...
The Second is a bit more than 11 inches tall.
The fourth is less than 13 inches.
The sixth is 19 inches.
And the last is 17 inches.
I agree this isn't "only a few inches in height", but most of them are less than 2 foot tall.
Man technology has advanced for the better. These things are brittle, require regular maintenance, they are tiny in width (try getting a fridge up a few floors), ... This actually used to be a pluspoint: when maintenance is lacking, specific portions will deteriorate : so walking upon them there will be a circular fault, which your leg will sink into (as opposed to the whole staircase collapsing entirely). The thing is, this happened to someone I knew on a yearly basis. It can only be fixed by replacing the whole thing.
And of course, these were actually put into houses sometimes 5 floors high. Exercise !
Spirals are a menace, but a spacer saver. In contrast geometric stairs were installed in the grandest homes, on huge scales and have often survived for a couple of centuries.
Most of the images here are a much grander form of stair that 'rotate' around a large stair well leaving a large open space in the middle, which makes it easy to move furniture up by overhanging the handrail or even winching up the middle. The well can be circular or elliptical at the turns, and often have straight flights between. Since building a set of geometric stairs is complex and time consuming it is unlikely that you will see them outside of grand hotels and stately homes. It is likely that the simplest ones built in a traditional way would cost well over $100k. I struggled to find a reference that explained the true complexity outside of this classic book
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Modern_Practical_Join...
Although here is a basic diagram here showing the curved strings and open well.
http://year3shopfitting.wikispaces.com/Geometric+stairs
Of course it is true to say that either type could have been made poorly and require maintenance, it is less likely that a common wood-butcher would attempt the second kind.
Disclosure: I can use the term wood-butcher as in a former life I was qualified in that area!
Sounds like our electronics these days. We made progress, then completely un-made it.
Absolutely terrifying — and fascinating — to watch being used. Nothing quite like a slightly hopped up version of a fireman’s ladder with hundreds or thousands of pounds of furniture one it. Or maybe just piled up with a bunch of random stuff that they don’t want to have to carry up or down stairs.
Been there, done that.
Examples: https://youtu.be/LQg8JCtNPtg and https://youtu.be/lnF0ETvdTXc