His father installed printing presses – he dismantles them | Hacker News Reader

His father installed printing presses – he dismantles them

cjr.org

44 pointssmacktoward12 comments

There's a whole class of these occupations that are in a sense foundational to modern society yet are going extinct. Scientific glassblowing is another that comes to mind: https://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-caltech-glassb...

I kind of wonder to what degree this is a failure of national planning vs a natural cycle of technical skills. Does anyone still mourn the plasterers and stonemasons that made so many decorative building flourishes before the modernists took over with their "clean lines" and "reduced labor costs"?

I read an article, I think on here, a few years ago talking about the reason brick buildings look so ugly so fast now is essentially that skilled bricklayers are no longer a thing.

That’s also a brick thing. After WW2, bricks were needed in vast quantities for various public works, and the quantities of cheap brick shifted production to the south. That basically put the whole rest of the business out of business.

Don't know about in the US, but here in the UK engineering brick mostly died out after WW2.

Pre-war lots of commercial buildings and housing were built with engineering brick. Iron hard and usually with a shiny face that's more like china. They were mostly impervious to water - enough to also be used as damp proofing - and chemical ingress. Only really used to restore and for a few industrial applications now.

Regular bricks can be damaged by frost, salt and pollutants surprisingly easily.

Did a building conservation course a few years back which covered damp proof courses and engineering bricks, showing pictures of how people had had to allow insurance company-approved damp-proof “experts” to drill a cavity into the face of each engineering brick, inject some treatment, and then seal it off. Ugly, expensive, and totally unnecessary.

Mourning doesn’t pay the bills, and obviously society doesn’t value these skills and occupations as much as they value other things. Not enough people want to pay the extra rent for a stonemason or plasterer and opt for the clean line look, so that’s what they get.

In this article’s case, people don’t want to spend $10 or $20 a month to keep newspaper lines running.

I didn't know I can get so emotional about printing presses until I watched "Farewell - ETAOIN SHRDLU" documentary. It is about the last NYTimes newspaper run on these magnificent machines.

https://vimeo.com/127605643

If you like that, be sure to watch Linotype: The Film, the makers of which digitized that documentary.

Just started watching and seems very interesting!

Boston Globe's: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuImfDYWvck

Stories like these are always sad to me, but in the end I remember that stuff like this is totally natural and part of the act of invention. We simply found a better way of communicating information, and the printing press will never be able to compete with it in terms of information density, convenience, etc...

On a different note, it’s oddly refreshing that the “dismantles” in the headline is literal and not attached to a video of someone yelling at political opponents.

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