Forgotten Weapons
Published May 6, 2024The MG08 was the German Army standard Maxim gun in World War One. The Germany Navy adopted the Maxim first in 1894, followed by the Army in 1899, then a new pattern in 1901, and finally the MG08 in 1908. This was actually a somewhat old-fashioned pattern of Maxim when it was adopted, as the Germans chose to use the 1889-style lock, which was neither headspace-adjustable nor field-strippable. Their decision was based on the idea that they could produce locked to perfect interchangeable headspace, and field stripping was not really necessary — and they were not wrong in these assumptions. MG08 guns were issued with two spare locks in each sled mount, and that handled any broken parts that might occasionally happen. During the war, about 106,000 MG08s were built by two main factories, the Spandau Arsenal and the DWM company. This remained the standard German Army heavy machine gun until the adoption of the MG34.
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August 21, 2024
MG08: The Devil’s Paintbrush
August 19, 2024
The US Navy’s mis-managed decline continues
Niccolo Soldo from his weekend wrap-up of various news articles that caught his eye:
Artist’s rendering of the US Navy’s FFG(X) Constellation-class guided missile frigate. Initial contract awarded 30 April, 2020, but delivery of the first ship is not expected until 2029 due to design changes and other issues.
US Navy image via Wikimedia Commons.
One data point that works in favour of American Declinism is the US Navy’s inability to not just keep up with the Chinese in terms of the production of ships, but to also maintain its own production output. Many lightly-armed littoral combat ships have been retired, for example, with nothing to replace them.
These production setbacks have been pointed out to me, with one mutual on Twitter/X reiterating the point so that I get it (I do!). This is an actual problem that requires solving, and fast. It is partially to blame for the Americans effectively ceding the Red Sea to the Houthis (for now).
AP has done a partial deep-dive (horrible language here, I apologize) on this issue:
The labor shortage is one of myriad challenges that have led to backlogs in ship production and maintenance at a time when the Navy faces expanding global threats. Combined with shifting defense priorities, last-minute design changes and cost overruns, it has put the U.S. behind China in the number of ships at its disposal — and the gap is widening.
Navy shipbuilding is currently in “a terrible state” — the worst in a quarter century, says Eric Labs, a longtime naval analyst at the Congressional Budget Office. “I feel alarmed,” he said. “I don’t see a fast, easy way to get out of this problem. It’s taken us a long time to get into it.”
Marinette Marine is under contract to build six guided-missile frigates — the Navy’s newest surface warships — with options to build four more. But it only has enough workers to produce one frigate a year, according to Labs.
A lot of the guys who know how to do this work are retiring or have already retired. Sound familiar?
One of the industry’s chief problems is the struggle to hire and retain laborers for the challenging work of building new ships as graying veterans retire, taking decades of experience with them.
Shipyards across the country have created training academies and partnered with technical colleges to provide workers with the skills they need to construct high-tech warships. Submarine builders and the Navy formed an alliance to promote manufacturing careers, and shipyards are offering perks to retain workers once they’re hired.
Andreini trained for his job at Marinette through a program at Northeast Wisconsin Technical College. Prior to that, he spent several years as a production line welder, making components for garbage trucks. He said some of his buddies are held back by the stigma that shipbuilding is a “crappy work environment, and it’s unsafe.”
The problem:
Much of the blame for U.S. shipbuilding’s current woes lies with the Navy, which frequently changes requirements, requests upgrades and tweaks designs after shipbuilders have begun construction.
That’s seen in cost overruns, technological challenges and delays in the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier, the USS Ford; the spiking of a gun system for a stealth destroyer program after its rocket-assisted projectiles became too costly; and the early retirement of some of the Navy’s lightly armored littoral combat ships, which were prone to breaking down.
The Navy vowed to learn from those past lessons with the new frigates they are building at Marinette Marine. The frigates are prized because they’re less costly to produce than larger destroyers but have similar weapon systems.
Now check this out:
The Navy chose a ship design already in use by navies in France and Italy instead of starting from scratch. The idea was that 15% of the vessel would be updated to meet U.S. Navy specifications, while 85% would remain unchanged, reducing costs and speeding construction.
Instead, the opposite happened: The Navy redesigned 85% of the ship, resulting in cost increases and construction delays, said Bryan Clark, an analyst at the Washington-based think tank Hudson Institute. Construction of the first-in-class Constellation warship, which began in August 2022, is now three years behind schedule, with delivery pushed back to 2029.
The final design still isn’t completed.
Shifting threats:
Throughout its history, the Navy has had to adapt to varying perils, whether it be the Cold War of past decades or current threats including war in the Middle East, growing competition from Chinese and Russian navies, piracy off the coast of Somalia and persistent attacks on commercial ships by Houthi rebels in Yemen.
And that’s not all. The consolidation of shipyards and funding uncertainties have disrupted the cadence of ship construction and stymied long-term investments and planning, says Matthew Paxton of the Shipbuilders Council of America, a national trade association.
“We’ve been dealing with inconsistent shipbuilding plans for years,” Paxton said. “When we finally start ramping up, the Navy is shocked that we lost members of our workforce.”
How is the US Navy supposed to protect Taiwan from a potential Chinese invasion?
August 9, 2024
Why Oil Paint Is So Expensive | So Expensive
Business Insider
Published Jul 13, 2019Oil paint is simple. At its most basic, it’s just a mixture of oil and pigment. But depending on the color and quality, a liter of this paint could cost you $285 to $1,100.
While the rise of oil paint is associated with the Renaissance, paintings using poppy-seed oil have been dated as far back as seventh-century Afghanistan. So what is it that makes this paint so special? And why is it so expensive?
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July 28, 2024
How America RUINED the world’s screws! (Robertson vs. Phillips)
Stumpy Nubs
Published Apr 17, 2024
July 25, 2024
M14: America’s Worst Service Rifle – What Went Wrong?
Forgotten Weapons
Published Apr 15, 2024While the US never adopted a significant variation of the M1 Garand (excluding sniper models), testing continued on new iterations and features throughout the war. By the time the war ended, the US military had some specific ideas about what it wanted in a new service rifle. That being, something lighter, capable of automatic fire, and to have one single platform replace the M1 Carbine, M3A1 Grease Gun, M1 Garand, and M1918A2 BAR. New rifles to meet these requirements were developed by Springfield, Remington, and Winchester, ultimately competing against the FN FAL for US service use. The Springfield T44E4 won out (barely) and was adopted on May 1, 1957 as the M14 rifle.
Production of the M14 was plagued by problems, largely due to quality control lapses. Early in production there were heat treatment problems that led to sheared looking lugs and broken receivers. Once those were addressed, the main problem became one of accuracy, with a shocking number of M14s failing to meet the 5.6 MOA minimum accuracy standard. Ultimately production ended in 1963 with 1.38 million M14s produced, and the M16 took over as the new American service rifle.
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June 2, 2024
THIS is how Plastic Model Kits are MADE! I spent a day at the UK Airfix Factory!
Model Minutes
Published Nov 26, 2022In November 2022 a press day was held at the UK factory which manufactures quickbuild and the NEW Supermarine Spitfire Mk.IXc in 1/24 scale from @OfficialAirfix. During the visit we were given presentations from Luke (researcher) and Chris (designer) on the various elements that go into creating the designs of the tooling.
Join me in this video where I take a look at how plastic model kits are actually manufactured, focusing on the physical creation of the kits through injection moulding and quality control at the Plastech factory in Newhaven.
I’d like to extend my thanks to Airfix and Plastech for putting on this event.
Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:48 Research & Design
01:36 Plastech Background
02:47 Tooling Prep
03:21 Injection Moulding
06:38 Quality Control
11:31 Boxes & Packaging
13:21 Packing a kit!
16:04 Conclusion
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May 20, 2024
The economic distortions of government subsidies
The Canadian federal and provincial governments are no strangers to the (political) attractions of picking winners and losers in the market by providing subsidies to some favoured companies at the expense not only of their competitors but almost always of the economy as a whole, because the subsidies almost never produce the kind of economic return promised. The current British government has also been seduced by the subsidies game, as Tim Congdon writes:
Former British Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in 1983. She was in office from May 1979 to November 1990.
Photo via Wikimedia Commons.
Why do so many economists support a free market? By the phrase they mean a market, or even an economy dominated by such markets, where the government leaves companies and industries alone, and does not try to interfere by “picking winners” and subsidising them. Two of the economists’ arguments deserve to be highlighted.
The first is about the good use — the productivity — of resources. To earn a decent profit, most companies have to achieve a certain level of output to attract enough customers and to secure high enough revenue per worker.
If the government decides to give money to a favoured group of companies, these companies can survive even if they produce less, and obtain lower revenue per worker, than the others. The subsidisation of a favoured group of companies therefore lowers aggregate productivity relative to a free market situation.
In this column last month I compared the economically successful 1979–97 Conservative government with the economically unsuccessful 2010–2024 Conservative government, which is now coming to an end. In the context it is worth mentioning that Margaret Thatcher and her economic ministers had a strong aversion to government subsidies of any kind.
According to Professor Colin Wren of Newcastle University’s 1996 study, Industrial Subsidies: the UK Experience, subsidies were slashed from £5 billion (in 1980 prices) in 1979 to £0.3 billion in 1990. (In today’s prices that is from £23 billion to under £1.5 billion.)
Thatcher is controversial, and she always will be. All the same, the improvement in manufacturing productivity in the 1980s was faster than before in the post-war period and much higher than it has been since 2010. Further, one of Thatcher’s beliefs was that if the private sector refuses to pursue a supposed commercial opportunity, the public sector most certainly should not try to do so.
Such schemes as HS2 and the Hinkley Point nuclear boondoggle could not have happened in the 1980s or 1990s. They will result in pure social loss into the tens of billions of pounds and will undoubtedly reduce the UK’s productivity.
But there is a second, and also persuasive, general argument against subsidies and government intervention in industry. An attractive feature of a free market policy is its political neutrality. Because market forces are to determine commercial outcomes, businessmen are wasting their time if they lobby ministers and parliamentarians for financial aid.
Honest and straightforward tax-paying companies with British shareholders are rightly furious if they see the government channelling revenues towards other companies who have access to the right politicians and friendly civil servants. By definition, the damage to the UK’s interests is greatest if the recipients of government largesse are foreign.
May 14, 2024
Tesla versus the German green activists
It’s not surprising that environmental activists would dislike a large factory, but this weekend’s attempted storming of Tesla’s Gigafactory in Germany must have raised a few eyebrows:
Tesla Gigafactory Berlin-Brandenburg, 28 July 2023.
Photo by Michael Wolf via Wikimedia Commons.
Grünheide is a small town in Brandenburg and the site of Europe’s only Tesla factory. It is a rare bright point in a German economy that is otherwise rapidly deindustrialising thanks to fruitless Green environmental policies, and so it has become a flashpoint for leftist activism. You might think that the German left would have no problem with Tesla, as e-vehicles are an important pillar of the energy transition, but here you would be very wrong. Happy fairy tales about the bright future of electromobility emanate primarily from the leftist political establishment; their activist militias have different ideas, often preferring broad crusades against everything related to industry, capitalism and profit.
The Grünheide factory employs 12,000 people and contributes millions of Euros every year in taxes, which is bad enough from the activists’ point of view. Still worse, production has caused some water pollution, and Tesla plans to expand the factory, which will entail cutting down some trees. A bunch of “water justice” advocates and forest saviours have therefore crawled out of their Berlin squats and made their way to Grünheide to defend humanity from the scourge of car production.
One of them is a 25 year-old named Luis, who we read “has been committed to climate protection since 2019” and who is “concerned about drinking water”. He also doesn’t like the fact that Brandenburg has moved heaven and earth to stimulate the local economy by incentivising Tesla to set up their factory:
Luis is bothered that many special permits were granted for the construction of the electric car factory. Tesla sometimes constructed its factory on the basis of premature approvals: “You can just tell how interested the state of Brandenburg was in having Tesla set up shop here.”
It is terrifying indeed, the extent to which regional politicians will go to attract industry and employment to their states. Somebody must put a stop to this.
Back in March, when we were all reading long think-pieces about the grave threat posed by the “extreme right” and hundreds of thousands of dim idiots were taking to the streets to denounce non-existent Nazis, a gaggle of arsonists (or, in media patois, “activists”) calling themselves the “Volcano Group” burned down an electricity pole, stopping production at the Grünheide facility for days and cutting off power to various nearby villages. Because the Volcano Group are on the left, this was not an example of escalating political violence or the fruit of brutalised social media discourse.
Yesterday, our activist heroes returned to further their bold stance against industrial production, which is something nobody has ever thought of doing before. Some of them hail from a group called “Turn off Tesla’s tap.” They have partnered with “Disrupt,” which the Süddeutsche Zeitung calls a “platform” but which appears to be little more than a Twitter account with 1,784 followers, which is so deeply reviled they have had to turn off comments on all of their posts.
April 29, 2024
Battle Rifles of World War Two: Overview
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jan 26, 2024Today we are going to take a look at the three main battle rifles of World War Two — the M1 Garand, the SVT-40, and the Gewehr 43. We will also consider the SVT-38, Gewehr 41(W), and Gewehr 41(M). The United States, Soviet Union, and Germany were the three countries that fielded large numbers of semiautomatic full-power rifles in combat in WW2; how did they differ in their approaches to infantry firepower?
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April 23, 2024
Debating the economic impact of the Raj on India
At The Daily Sceptic, Nigel Biggar looks at a few books making or refuting the narrative on how much or how little British rule in India extracted or contributed to the economic life of the subcontinent:
Beyond slave-trading and slavery, what were the economic effects of British imperial dominance? Can they be reduced to Britain’s leeching wealth from exploited subject peoples?
For over a century, that is what Indian nationalists have claimed. It is also what the politician Shashi Tharoor claims in his 2016 book, Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India. Against him, however, the Bengali-born, LSE-based economic historian Tirthankar Roy has declared of the nationalist critique that “generations of historians … have shown that it is not [true]”. Pace Tharoor, the statistic that India produced 25 per cent of world output in 1800 and 2–4 per cent in 1900 does not prove that India was once rich and became poor: “[i]t only tells that industrial productivity in the West increased four to six times during this period … The proposition that the Empire was at bottom a mechanism of surplus appropriation and transfer has not fared well in global history”.
On the contrary, the British Empire’s commitment to free trade gave Indian entrepreneurs new opportunities to grow. Some of them visited England in the late 19th Century, observed the workings of manufacturing industry, imported machinery and expertise to India, built factories employing Indians, and then outcompeted Manchester. This is exactly how the Tata Iron and Steel Company began in Bombay – the same company that now owns what remains of the British steel industry.
What is more, colonial governments often protected native producers against British business, in order to moderate economic and social disruption, partly because they genuinely cared for the welfare of native people and partly because they didn’t want to have to manage the political unrest that foreign commercial intrusion could excite. Famously, in 1910-11 colonial officials barred Lever Brothers from acquiring concessions in Nigeria on which to establish palm-oil processing mills with widespread hinterlands, since Africans were already producing for the world markets and generating tax revenue and because the alienation of large areas of land risked provoking native opposition.
Further still, the British were the leading exporters of capital from the mid-19th Century to at least 1929. Between 1876 and 1914, Britain invested over a third of its overseas capital in the Empire, over 19% of it in India. Of course, British investors often made a profit out of this. That’s the thing about investment: you tend to want to grow your money, not waste it. But if the British gained, so did colonial peoples. Take railways. By 1947, British India had 45,000 miles of railway track, most of it constructed with private capital, whereas five years later un-colonised China still had less than 18,000 miles. For sure, the railways served military purposes. But they also served commercial and economic ones: one estimate reckons that when the railway network reached the average district, real agricultural income rose by about 16%. And it served the welfare purpose of efficient famine relief, too.
A basic reason why the British sent their capital overseas to the Empire, enabling the growth of businesses and the building of infrastructure, was that colonial states provided sufficient political stability and legal certainty to make the risks of financial ventures worth taking. (Badenoch hints at this in her reference to the economic effects of the Glorious Revolution of 1688.) That explains why Australia’s economic growth compares so favourably with that of many Latin American countries, and why, between the 1860s and 1890s, Australia was the richest country on earth.
In sum, the considered judgement of the Swiss historian Rudolf von Albertini, whose work – according to the world’s “leading imperial economic historian”, David Fieldhouse – was based “on exhaustive examination of the literature on most parts of the colonial world to 1940”, was simply this: “colonial economics cannot be understood through concepts such as plunder economics and exploitation”.
April 16, 2024
April 4, 2024
Boeing and the ongoing competency crisis
Niccolo Soldo on the pitiful state of Boeing within the larger social issues of collapsing social trust and blatantly declining competence in almost everything:
“Boeing 521 427”by pmbell64 is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0
By now, most of you have heard of the increasingly popular concept known as “the competency crisis”. For those of you who haven’t, the competency crisis argues that the USA is headed towards a crisis in which critical infrastructure and important manufacturing will suffer a catastrophic decline in competency due to the fact that the people (almost all males) who know how to build/run these things are retiring, and there is no one available to fill these roles once they’re gone. The competency crisis is one of the major points brought up by people when they point out that America is in a state of decline.
As all of you are already aware, there is also a general collapse in trust in governing institutions in the USA (and all across the West). Cynicism is the order of the day, with people naturally assuming that they are being lied to constantly by the ruling elites, whether in media, government, the corporate world, and so on. A competency crisis paired with a collapse in trust in key institutions is a vicious one-two punch for any country to absorb. Nowhere is this one-two combo more evident than in one of America’s crown jewels: Boeing.
I’m certain that all of you are familiar with the “suicide” of John Barnett that happened almost a month ago. John Barnett was a Quality Control Manager working for Boeing in the Charleston, South Carolina operation. He was a “lifer”, in that he spent his entire career at Boeing. He was also a whistleblower. His “suicide” via a gunshot wound to the right temple happened on what was scheduled to be the third and last day of his deposition in his case against his former employer.
In more innocent and less cynical times, the suggestion that he was murdered would have had currency only in conspiratorial circles, serving as fodder for programs like the Art Bell Show. But we are in a different world now, and to suggest that Barnett might have been killed for turning whistleblower earns one replies like “could be”, “I’m pretty sure that’s the case”, and the most common one of all: “I wouldn’t doubt it”. No one believes that Jeffrey Epstein killed himself. Many people believe the same about John Barnett. The collapse in trust in ruling institutions has resulted in an environment where conspiratorial thinking naturally flourishes. Maureen Tkacik reports on Boeing’s downward turn, using Barnett’s case as a centre piece:
“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.
Please keep in mind that this report offers up only one side of the story.
A decaying institution:
But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.
“Prince Jim” — as some long-timers used to call him — repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes”, and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.
There is a new trend that blames many fumbles on DEI. Boeing is not one of those. Instead, the short-term profit maximization mindset that drives stock prices upward is the main reason for the decline in this corporate behemoth.
March 26, 2024
What Makes a Good Book
Lost Art Press
Published Nov 26, 2023✅ Read and subscribe to the Lost Art Press Blog: https://blog.lostartpress.com/
🏪 Visit Our Store: https://lostartpress.com
March 24, 2024
Gahendra: the Nepalese Not-A-Martini
Forgotten Weapons
Published Jul 8, 2018(This video has been updated from its original form to fix translation issues and to clarify that Nepal was not, in fact, a British colony. Originally published January 10, 2017.)
Long a mysterious unknown member of the Martini family, the Nepalese Gahendra rifles finally became available in the US and Europe after IMA purchased Nepal’s cache of historic arms. The Gahendra is a uniquely Nepalese design built to sidestep British reluctance to supply military arms to the country. Developed by a General Gahendra (who is also responsible for the Bira copy of the Gardner Gun), the rifle is not actually a Martini at all. Instead, it shares its mechanical features mostly with the earlier Peabody falling block rifles, using a hammer and flat mainspring (the Martini improvement replaces there with a striker and coil spring).
Gahendras are chambered for the standard British .577/.450 Martini cartridge, although their bore diameters vary substantially, and one should absolutely slug a specific rifle before loading ammunition for it. In fact, unless you are capable of proficiently assessing the safety of the Gahendra, it is wiser not to shoot them at all. These rifles were individually handmade well over a hundred years ago using steels of questionable metallurgy and hardening.
That said, the guns were actually much better made than most people assume, considering their non-interchangeable parts. Craftsmen built each rifle part by part, giving the factory an output of just four rifles per day. Production began in the 1880s, and according to the Nepalese government ended prior to 1899. Dates on the rifles, however, are commonly found as late as 1911. These dates are generally assumed to be inventory or refurbishment dates.
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March 10, 2024
Viking longships and textiles
Virginia Postrel reposts an article she originally wrote for the New York Times in 2021, discussing the importance of textiles in history:
The Sea Stallion from Glendalough is the world’s largest reconstruction of a Viking Age longship. The original ship was built at Dublin ca. 1042. It was used as a warship in Irish waters until 1060, when it ended its days as a naval barricade to protect the harbour of Roskilde, Denmark. This image shows Sea Stallion arriving in Dublin on 14 August, 2007.
Photo by William Murphy via Wikimedia Commons.
Popular feminist retellings like the History Channel’s fictional saga Vikings emphasize the role of women as warriors and chieftains. But they barely hint at how crucial women’s work was to the ships that carried these warriors to distant shores.
One of the central characters in Vikings is an ingenious shipbuilder. But his ships apparently get their sails off the rack. The fabric is just there, like the textiles we take for granted in our 21st-century lives. The women who prepared the wool, spun it into thread, wove the fabric and sewed the sails have vanished.
In reality, from start to finish, it took longer to make a Viking sail than to build a Viking ship. So precious was a sail that one of the Icelandic sagas records how a hero wept when his was stolen. Simply spinning wool into enough thread to weave a single sail required more than a year’s work, the equivalent of about 385 eight-hour days. King Canute, who ruled a North Sea empire in the 11th century, had a fleet comprising about a million square meters of sailcloth. For the spinning alone, those sails represented the equivalent of 10,000 work years.
Ignoring textiles writes women’s work out of history. And as the British archaeologist and historian Mary Harlow has warned, it blinds scholars to some of the most important economic, political and organizational challenges facing premodern societies. Textiles are vital to both private and public life. They’re clothes and home furnishings, tents and bandages, sacks and sails. Textiles were among the earliest goods traded over long distances. The Roman Army consumed tons of cloth. To keep their soldiers clothed, Chinese emperors required textiles as taxes.
“Building a fleet required longterm planning as woven sails required large amounts of raw material and time to produce,” Dr. Harlow wrote in a 2016 article. “The raw materials needed to be bred, pastured, shorn or grown, harvested and processed before they reached the spinners. Textile production for both domestic and wider needs demanded time and planning.” Spinning and weaving the wool for a single toga, she calculates, would have taken a Roman matron 1,000 to 1,200 hours.
Picturing historical women as producers requires a change of attitude. Even today, after decades of feminist influence, we too often assume that making important things is a male domain. Women stereotypically decorate and consume. They engage with people. They don’t manufacture essential goods.
Yet from the Renaissance until the 19th century, European art represented the idea of “industry” not with smokestacks but with spinning women. Everyone understood that their never-ending labor was essential. It took at least 20 spinners to keep a single loom supplied. “The spinners never stand still for want of work; they always have it if they please; but weavers are sometimes idle for want of yarn,” the agronomist and travel writer Arthur Young, who toured northern England in 1768, wrote.
Shortly thereafter, the spinning machines of the Industrial Revolution liberated women from their spindles and distaffs, beginning the centuries-long process that raised even the world’s poorest people to living standards our ancestors could not have imagined. But that “great enrichment” had an unfortunate side effect. Textile abundance erased our memories of women’s historic contributions to one of humanity’s most important endeavors. It turned industry into entertainment. “In the West,” Dr. Harlow wrote, “the production of textiles has moved from being a fundamental, indeed essential, part of the industrial economy to a predominantly female craft activity.”
