I was chatting with someone about Ern razors and mentioned seeing that he’d invented a better way to do hollow grinds. Found the link I remembered (Carl Friedrich Ern & family introduced the “Hexe” machine in 1893) but learned something new when I thought to look for one on Youtube: a current artisan (Ertan Süer) has acquired such a machine and is using it for some of his current production.
Ha ya, how did we manage? Especially amazing is pre-integrated-circuits, I fear few in the future will look back and marvel at the crazy machines that mixed analog electronics with clockwork, vacuum, pneumatic, hydraulic. Yet somehow it worked and there were cameras and airplanes!? Hopefully we left docs somewhere in case of EMP or w/e and we need to rediscover that stuff in a hurry…
Yep. They’re out there. I have no idea how we would find them without modern indexing and search technology, though. Reminds me to visit the Library of Congress again (largest public library in the US).