Sublime

The mycologist Lynne Boddy once made a scale model of Britain out of soil, placing blocks of fungus-colonised wood at the points of the major cities; the blocks were sized proportionately to the places they represented. Mycelial networks quickly grew between the blocks: the web they created reproduced the pattern of the UK’s motorways (‘You could s

continuous processing, the mechanization of unreliable hand processes, and John Hall’s style of reconceiving a process down through the finest-grained of production details. British visitors to American steel plants were astonished—not just at their scale and speed but by the “very conspicuous absence of labourers.”

The collection of manufacturing technologies developed by Hall, Blanchard, and, later, men like Thomas Warner and Cyrus Buckland at the Springfield Armory has been dubbed “Armory practice” by the historian David Hounshell, and was a key element in the American technologic gene pool. Merritt Roe Smith has traced the numerous skilled machinists who p