How Things Work

FOR MANY YEARS I worked on creating a computer program called Mathematica. Many other people worked on it too, but for several years, at the beginning, the Notebook user interface portion of it was mine and mine alone. I found great satisfaction in watching this creation of years come together. It was my life. (Literally: I had no other life, not even a date, for a decade.)

Even today I can see in my mind the structures inside this program, the internal logic, the chaos in a few places. I haven’t looked at the actual code in many years, but if I did, I’m sure I would find many old friends, along with new ones added by the programmers who have come after me.

I still use Mathematica nearly every day to do my work. Yes, sometimes I curse my former self for bugs I could have fixed or features I will never see because no one else will ever care enough to add them. It was my baby, but not anymore. And, like my kids who were once small but then grew up, I have to accept my baby for what it is, not resent it for what it might have been.

Making Mathematica shaped me for twenty-three years. It’s an important thing in the world, and I am proud of my work on it. But I’m also glad that when the chance presented itself to make something else, I took that road.

I got started collecting elements by accident, but have since spent a lot of time with them—I wrote a few books about them. Elements are good. Like kids, they are primal and raw, unique and universal. Everything is made of elements—everything we know and everything we are. And the kids, too, they are made of elements. The machines we call molecules are some of the most intricate and remarkable machines in existence. The machines called DNA and the machines called proteins are life itself to us. The time I spent with elements changed my life, and made me better. More interesting, I think.

I Grew Up with Things

SOFTWARE AND ELEMENTS are great, but this book is not about software or elements. It is about the certain and comfortable world of mechanical things. I made, played with, took apart, broke, and fixed a lot of things when I was young, and in the years since. I learned a lot from these things. Most of all I learned to love them. They changed me. They were there for me in good times and bad. They kept me going, and opened worlds for me. These things are now a part of my past, but other things are very much part of my present, and yours. I have gathered many interesting things for you to see and learn about in this book. I hope that in the pages that follow, you will see the beauty I do in the inanimate, yet very alive world of things.

Read about how I made this thing from scrap roof flashing on here.

This is what a calculator used to look like. I loved these things, and am just barely old enough to remember when a few of them were still actually being used. I’ve kept half a dozen of them. None of these work anymore, but I keep them anyway, and maybe someday I’ll try to bring them back to life.

Remember LP records? I hear they are making a comeback now. This is a briefcase I made specifically for carrying records to parties in case I was ever invited to one, which of course I wasn’t.

Read about this touch-keyboard here.

I made this thing. Then I dropped it.

This was one of the most secret military devices of its day: the Norton bombsight. My dad got one as surplus and I spent hours figuring out how to make its gyroscopes spin. It is a sophisticated mechanical computer designed to calculate the precise moment a bomb should be dropped given the airplane’s altitude and speed, and the wind speed and direction.

I made several animals that my parents kept, for which I am eternally grateful.

When I was seventeen I knitted a regulation Dr. Who scarf. Yes, they published the exact row count for each color of yarn. I was working on this scarf when my dad came into my room to tell me that my sister had just died. I thought I’d always remember the exact color band I was on, but I don’t. Just the sun in the window, the smell in the air, the sound of the door, and the feeling that has no name.

On Christmas break from college in Germany, I showed my grandfather Armin (see here) how to make detached rings on a small improvised wood lathe in his cabin high in the Swiss Alps. Don’t get the wrong idea: he was a professional inventor and his small cabin in the mountains had the most finely appointed personal machine shop I have ever seen, before or since. I got a real thrill when he praised my humble baby rattle–making skills. I still remember his exact words: “Ein rechtes Lehrlingsstück,” spoken in the Swiss dialect and meaning “a fine apprentice’s work.”

I invented this thing for listening to the vibrations of metal objects. It has a magnet mounted behind a fine wire coil, so nearby movement of anything metal will create a current in the coil, which can be picked up and amplified. It’s the same idea as electric guitar pickups, but generalized into a “mechanophone” that you can point at any vibrating mechanical thing. I never actually found a good use for it back then, but during the writing of this book it turned out to be the perfect thing for the sonic scale shown on here! Never throw away any machine or device you’ve made yourself.

The Mechanisms in This Book

IN THIS BOOK you will find chapters on things with clear cases, locks, clocks, scales, and the machines needed to make a potholder from scratch. These topics may seem random—and, OK, the chapter on clear things is indeed a bit random (but totally fun, I promise).

The other chapters, however, are anything but random. They represent ancient and foundational machines that helped us measure our world, secure our place in it, and guide us into the fearfully and wonderfully made world of today. No finite list of inventions can ever be complete, and there are many more I would have liked to write about, but these are a good start. By understanding these mechanisms, you can understand a big part of how the mechanical world works.

Writing this book was an absolute joy, and I hope you get a sense of the pleasure it was to encounter and learn about each and every one of the fine things on this page and the many pages that follow.

CLEAR THINGS: The chapter on clear things may have a lot of modern inventions, but it speaks to the ancient human desire to see inside, to understand, to reveal the inner workings of a thing in your hand. The first machines were simple things with all of the moving parts immediately visible. Clear cases help restore a bit of that old clarity to modern devices.

CLOCKS, the youngest category of devices in this book, are at least 3,500 years old. Of course, back then a clock was not much more than a stick in the ground: a sundial. In the centuries—stretching into millennia—since, clocks have evolved into a fantastic array of clever mechanical and electronic devices. And at a certain moment in 1954, they finally became more accurate than a sundial—more accurate, that is, than the earth itself. Clocks are a microcosm of all things mechanical: inventions of every age, from the wheel to the microchip, have found some application in a clock.

LOCKS as much as 4,000 years old have been found, making them even older than clocks. Apparently people have been trying to steal things since before there was a way to record what time the crime occurred. Secrecy is fundamental to locks. With enough information—the shape of the key, or the numbers of a combination—you can open any lock. This fact makes locks one of the first examples of information-processing equipment. They are tiny computers designed to test whether you are in possession of the secret needed to open them. In the modern age, locks have evaporated into pure information—PIN codes, computer passwords, and elaborate public-key cryptography that enables secure transactions on the internet.

SCALES: Older even than locks are weighing scales, which date to the time of the great pyramids of Egypt, 4,500 years ago. The first and still the most important time things are weighed is when they are sold. Weight is the primary way we define how much of something we have, and therefore how much it should cost. For commerce, scales need to be honest (hard to cheat) but not especially accurate: beyond a fraction of a penny on the dollar, who really cares? But for scientific uses, scales accurate to parts per billion are needed, leading to a series of ever more clever designs. In 2018 a milestone was reached: a scale was built that is able to weigh more accurately than we are able to preserve the weight of the most carefully preserved object in the world, the Standard Kilogram in Paris—which is now no longer the standard of weight.

THE MAKING OF CLOTH: Oldest of all, the tools and skills of weaving and spinning go back to a time before words. As you might expect of something as basic as the way we keep warm, every group of humans for as long as we can know has had some way of making thread or cloth. And when it came time for the great mechanical awakening of the industrial revolution, cloth—cotton in particular—played a central role in both the technology and the politics of the day. The making of cloth guided us into the modern world, and reaches deep into our birth as creatures of hand and eye—back to the time of our becoming not inhabitants but makers of our world.